On the Margins

Cheapjack, first published in 1934, is Philip Allingham’s account of the years he spent travelling around markets and fairgrounds in England. One day in 1928, at the age of twenty-one, he gazed out of the window of the office room he was renting in London’s Coventry Street and decided that he wanted to be a professional fortune-teller. He had done poorly at school and failed in his attempts to get into Oxford; he was also unsuccessful in the several jobs he’d tried since then, as well as in his current occupation freelancing in marketing and publicity. Little work was coming his way, and money was scarce. So, after trying his luck telling fortunes in West End pubs, where he had some modest success, he bought a cheap tent for his pitch, packed his top hat and tails, and left London, taking to the road.

The itinerant lifestyle suited him; Allingham developed his skills and made new friends, including palmists, show people, gypsies, cheapjacks, travelling boxers, and ‘windbag’ men who sold sealed envelopes that might contain a watch, a bauble, or nothing at all. The fairgrounds and markets tolerated dodgy and disreputable characters, and this was also true of Allingham, who appears never to have judged his companions; he knew they were selling fun and escapism, and that serious deception or swindling was seldom involved. He seems to have been accepted by both fellow workers and punters, perhaps because it was obvious that he was a ‘toff’ on short commons who was trying to earn a crust, and he never pretended otherwise. He made the effort to learn fairground argot, a mixture of Cockney rhyming slang, Yiddish, and a few words of Romany, which must have helped. The book includes a glossary of terms and phrases that Allingham didn’t know before he worked at the fairs, and it is interesting that many of them - ‘bevvy’, ‘clobber’, ’flash’, and so forth - are still used in contemporary English.

Allingham’s escapades are described with charm and good humour, traits that do much to explain how he managed to get on so well on the margins of the ‘respectable’ society and culture in which he had been brought up. Doubtless, however, much was left unsaid, and his relentless optimism may have disguised the truth that life on the road was hard, albeit somewhat easier for him than for others, if only because it was a personal choice. Although he alludes to the Depression and the effects it had on business, poverty is not often mentioned and never dwelt on, with the exception of the description of a discussion that took place when he asked her parents’ permission to employ Sally, a fourteen-year-old girl, to travel with him to help sell cheap hair-wavers. All went smoothly with the arrangement, and at the end of the book Allingham rather sadly takes Sally home and sets out to London, where, to his admitted relief, a full-time job awaited him. Nevertheless, he never quite established himself in conventional ways, and apart from a few short spells of other employment, he and his wife, Francesca Esposito, made their living as settled fortune-tellers. ‘Once a grafter, always a grafter’, as the Fair people used to say.

While Philip Allingham’s unorthodox lifestyle was a matter of preference, Jack Neave, who also plied his trade at markets and fairs in the 1920s and 1930s, lived on the margins out of necessity. Born in Australia, he moved to England as a child with his mother and was brought up in relative poverty by his grandmother; he then spent some time at a reformatory and ran away with gypsies. Many years later, while having his portrait painted, he dictated his diverting memoirs, which he called The Surrender of Silence, eventually leaving the typescript with the young Colin Wilson, who had recently published the classic The Outsider, in the hope that it would some day meet with similar success. ‘Ironfoot Jack’, as he came to be known, was by then a celebrated Soho character, readily identifiable by his favourite outfit of cloak, cravat, and wide-brimmed hat. The nickname was a reference to the metal device on his boot that compensated for a short right leg, a physical anomaly for which he gave various explanations: it was caused by a shark bite while pearl-diving, an avalanche in Tibet, a shot suffered while smuggling, and being hit by a car when rescuing a child. He preferred, however, to call himself the ‘King of the Bohemians’.

Ironfoot Jack, never short of imagination and self-belief, regularly reinvented himself. Over the years he was an escapologist, fairground strongman, astrologer and numerologist, cheapjack, nightclub owner, teacher of the occult, and the founder of a new religion. All these occupations were intended to ‘solve the problem of existence’, as he described the process of earning a living, and many of them quickly went askew. Like those of most of his friends and comrades — gypsies, travellers, show people, buskers, fairground workers, market traders, artists — his was a hand-to-mouth existence; ’we worked to live, not lived to work’, he said, considering this to be the essence of Bohemianism. Neave also had a genuine interest in spirituality and the occult, and he liked to present himself as a mystic or guru, a ‘professor of the arcane’, but he knew less about them than he believed, for as an early biographer acidly remarked, ‘his ignorance never failed him on any subject’.

Allingham made no claims for his entertaining autobiography, an outsider’s story, but Neave told Colin Wilson, with typical exaggeration, that The Surrender of Silence was ‘the greatest book ever written on Bohemians in Europe’. His bragging, however, can become tiresome, and there are periods and episodes in his life about which he reveals next to nothing. The memoirs say little, for instance, about his spells in prison, or about the Caravan Club scandal of 1934, when he and others were arrested and jailed, charged with running a ‘disorderly house’. The Caravan Club may have been excessively tolerant of low-level criminality and sexual deviance, but this was of no consequence to Neave, who advertised it as ‘London’s Greatest Bohemian Rendezvous, said to be the most unconventional spot in town’. Following conviction, he was sentenced to twenty months of hard labour.

Ironfoot Jack eventually realised that his way of life was coming to an end.‘The last World War shattered everything: Bohemian cafés, five shilling a week basements and cellars, camping out on London Commons. Those days are over now… and I do not think that situation will develop again’, he said. Perhaps one of the few advantages of postwar social developments, at least from the Bohemians’ point of view, was that the Welfare State kept them from penury.

For further exploration:

Philip Allingham: https://golden-duck.co.uk/philip-allingham

Ironfoot Jack: http://www.soho-tree.com/blog/ironfoot-jack-the-trickster-of-soho

Fairground life in England: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/nfca/researchandarticles/fairgrounds

Bohemian life in London: https://www.trebuchet-magazine.com/londons-lost-bohemia-and-the-three-graces-of-soho/

Ironfoot Jack