Remembering Anthony Dickins (01-xi-1914 25-xi-1987)

[John Upham]

The more I delved into Anthony Stewart Mackay Dickin's past the more interesting he became...


Quite a bohemian

We need more information about the members of Mandrake Social and Chess Club


Remembering Anthony Dickins (01-xi-1914 25-xi-1987)

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[Gerard Killoran]

https://www.gettyimages.dk/detail/video ... 1226486239


From https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/ne ... -years-ago


19. Inside The Mandrake Club, 4 Meard Street. Co-owned by Teddy Turner and Boris Protopopov (“a huge, taciturn unkempt Bulgarian”, according to author Barry Miles). The bar cashed cheques, but half the amount had to be spent behind the bar – the perfect service for regulars like Julian Maclaren-Ross, who did not have a bank account.

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https://www.trebuchet-magazine.com/lond ... oho-pt-ii/

When I first came across Iris Orton I was watching a 1959 newsreel, part of the Look at Life series by Rank, advertising the delights of Soho’s nightlife. After a panning shot that takes in the neon signs and foot traffic, the camera enters the Mandrake Club on Meard Street.

The Mandrake began as a chess club in the 1940s. By 1953 it was advertising itself as ‘London’s only Bohemian rendezvous’. Once inside, the camera takes up its restless roving, allowing the viewer to eavesdrop on earnest discussions of politics and suicide. At the bar, the camera stops in its tracks. A young woman in a dramatically over-sized cloak is reciting poetry above the din of drinkers.

“The grave’s great dark is fed on thoughts alone.” I wondered who this voice in the wilderness was, just standing there unheeded reading from bundles of paper. There was no mention of her name or who she was but I was captivated by her air of portent and spitfire delivery.

I described the girl with the brainy forehead and staring eyes to Laura Del Rivo, who said, “Oh, that’s Iris, the poet. I used to see her around a lot.”

[Gerard Killoran]

From Soho in the fifties
by Daniel Farson
Page -113-

The Mandrake was probably the most popular of all, a downstairs club in Meard Street, opposite the Colony, where we lingered the afternoon over a cup of coffee or waited for the metal shutters to rise with a screech of relief, hoisted by the barmaid Ruth after she unlocked the grille. Always cheerful behind her bar, Soho’s version of the barmaid at the Folies Bergére, Ruth appeared in a new hair-style every day and became someone to wave to as she scooted through the streets on her Lambretta. Boris Watson, the owner, a large, unkempt man with swivelling, suspicious eyes, had started the club specifically for chess enthusiasts and could be found crouched over the board on most afternoons, but the underground atmosphere proved so popular that he began to advertise it as ‘London’s Only Bohemian Rendezvous’. The Mandrake continued after 11.00 p.m. with music, but | never felt wholly at ease there, suspecting that the members tried too hard to live up to their Bohemian billing.

[John Clarke]

Jazz singer and writer George Melly was a habitué during the early 1950s:

"In the afternoons we used to drink in “The Mandrake”. It had started as a chess club, but gradually it had absorbed cellar after cellar under the pavement of Meard Street. A good club is its members. The two bosses, Boris, huge and taciturn, and Teddy Turner, volatile and Jewish, accepted jazzmen as contributory. In the evenings, after the pubs were shut, we were encouraged to sit in, but it was the afternoons I liked. Under today’s regulations there are far fewer afternoon drinking clubs. This deprives people of a keen anti-social pleasure; the knowledge that you are drinking and getting drunk when everybody else is working. I enjoyed the slow idiotic and repetitive conversations or arguments. The barmaids turning into goddesses, the feeling that time was not a member."
Owning Up p72

Melly himself, though, had no affinity for chess:

“Tom and Felix got on moderately well. Both were keen on chess and would play together up in the chart-room whilst I, whose mind has always found it difficult to remember the moves, let alone plan strategy, read or wrote.”
Rum, Bum And Concertina p120

[Gerard Killoran]

Two of the funniest books I've read.