Somehow, late-40's Soho (and adjoining Fitzrovia, or North Soho) managed to acquire the flavour and feel of a legend, which will no doubt be inflated and dramatised further by social historians yet unborn.
The ingredients are not hard to identify. The eternal charm of London's Italian quarter, with its discreet gangsterism and fresh coffee. The appeal of 'Stateless Soho' where rules never seemed to apply. Refuge from recent memories of war, now overlaid with new threats from the Bomb. Reaction against the cultural conformity of the 40's. And a licentious atmosphere of forbidden all-day drinking with a non-stop supply of mysterious women with cigarette-holders, flawed and fascinating.
It was meant to carry the air of a writers' and artists' club. But apart from Dylan Thomas and Francis Bacon, these were well below the First Division (though none the worse for that). So for example, there was Julian Maclaren-Ross, married to Virginia Woolf's niece, striding in with his silver-topped cane, forever about to achieve glory, just as soon as he'd had another drink. Rather like today's minicab drivers, these people were always just about to change the world...
At heart, these were a lot of bourgeois pretending not to be, just wanting to go home and say they'd met a real gangster, so there was a certain rottenness in the spirit of it all. Meanwhile we enjoy some retrospective quips, probably better than the ones they were exchanging at the time. "It had to be obscene to be believed" says Quentin Crisp. "Bad behaviour accepted, almost expected" says George Melly. Many a true word spoken in jest, as they say. For one of the most malicious characters in the story, photographer John Deakin, met his death in a macabre way indeed, grabbing a wine-bottle from the bar and taking a slug, not realising that it was full of cleaning fluid.
One Hour of Bohemia, as presented in this film, might be all you can cope with.
