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Meandering around distant memories in the hope of escaping the current outbreak of deranged theories concerning the comings and goings of political leaders, the bonfire vanity of a texting public servant and the unravelling of honesty among many of those determined to sink a referendum, I settled upon the recollection of a wonderful little pub and restaurant in far-away Soho, London, called The French House.
I took lunch at The French House with one of my daughters quite some years ago, having been alerted to its existence by a mate who was living in London at the time.
The French House pub in Soho, London, was a well-known haunt of artists and writers.Credit: Alamy
And there I discovered the most compelling reasons for wishing to return, even vicariously, and for it to lodge in the memory and the imagination as a special destination when the need for escape descended.
Marvellously, at this small outpost of an almost lost bohemia, guests will hear no background music of any kind. Unfettered conversation, free-range ideas and furious argument have long ruled at “The French”.
Even more marvellously, the use of mobile phones is frowned upon to the point you’d be shunned if you produced such an implement. Drinkers in the downstairs bar thus chatter with no need to compete with amplified air pollution or the braying of egos on their phones. Even brain-dead influencers posing for selfies are rare.
Upstairs, where there are no more than a dozen little tables, diners murmur away entire afternoons over oysters and perhaps a pork chop and a nice bottle of something from Burgundy.
The French House [is] the survivor of a period when soon-to-be-famous artists and writers staggered from pub to club in Soho’s streets.
There are none of those designer sharp edges and hard, flat surfaces so common in modern eating places that intensify every sound to painful levels and render conversation exhausting or impossible.
There are, surely, eating places a lot closer to home than London that exist without background music and even some where mobile phones are considered the work of the devil.
None of them, however, can offer the giddily turbulent sense of history that comes with The French House, the survivor of a period when soon-to-be-famous artists and writers staggered from pub to club in Soho’s cramped streets, and remade the future all the way to today.
For most of its existence, appropriately for its clientele’s refusal to play by accepted rules, it wasn’t even called The French House, at least not formally.
Charles de Gaulle is supposed to have written a speech at the Soho venue to rally the French Resistance.Credit: The Age archives
Its regulars took to calling it “the French” in World War II, when it was a hangout for Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Forces while Hitler’s Nazis occupied Paris. De Gaulle himself is supposed to have written his most famous speech there, rallying his people to resist.
Thereafter, it became the haunt of writers, artists, musicians, alcoholic journalists and photographers who made the Soho of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s a seething, seedy fulcrum of the creative world.
Mick Jagger, discussing a few days ago his band’s first new body of music in 20 years, recalled that the first press conference he and Keith Richards had held was “in a pub in Denmark Street (Soho) and there were two journalists … We bought them a pint of beer and said ‘here’s our album’.”
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
It was 1964, the album was The Rolling Stones, and a revolution in the arts that resonates still was under way.
The French House, however, a block or two from the old rehearsing and recording ground of The Stones (and The Who, The Kinks, The Yardbirds, Jimi Hendrix and many more) has been around for more than a century-and-a-quarter.
The pursuits of the artists who came through its doors ranged far beyond rock music.
Welsh poet Dylan Thomas lost a first, handwritten draft of his masterpiece, Under Milk Wood, after leaving it under a chair at The French House.
Or perhaps it was another pub nearby, for Thomas could never be sure, having set out on one of his epic drinking episodes that day.
Did Dylan Thomas lose a first draft in The French House?
The Irish rebel, poet and playwright, Brendan Behan, wrote in the early 1950s most of his first play, The Quare Fellow, in the bar of the French.
The painters, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, their separate chaotic love lives and feuds happily scandalising Britain for decades, and their works later commanding prices in the tens of millions of dollars, were regulars.
So was the disorderly, charming, witty and regularly drunk journalist, Jeffrey Bernard, who wrote for many years a column in The Spectator called “Low Life”, chronicling the eccentric lives of the habitues of Soho’s pubs and clubs as a counter to the “High Life” column of the wealthy socialite, Taki Theodoracopulos.
Writer Jeffrey Bernard in 1989.
Bernard, who once reflected that “journalism is the only thinkable alternative to working”, was famed for failing to file columns while in the grip of a hangover or a bender.
The Spectator’s editors simply inserted the explanatory words “Jeffrey Bernard is unwell” on such occasions.
The line gained almost as much fame as his actual columns. Indeed, another of London’s great journalists and bon vivants, Keith Waterhouse, wrote a highly successful play called Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, first performed in 1989.
Waterhouse knew much about lunching at places like The French House (his sole hobby listed in Who’s Who was “lunch”), and wrote the immensely amusing The Theory and Practice of Lunch.
The real wonder of it is The French House is still there.
For those seeking escape from the wearisome doings of the ignorant and the divisive, you could do worse than pay a visit, if only in the imagination.
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