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James Roose-Evans on the diaries of Fred Bason

Sam Pepys from Walworth

It was the second-hand book-dealer Malcolm Applin, whose catalogue I find always opens doors and windows, who first introduced me to the Cockney bookseller and writer Fred Bason. Fred had been encouraged to keep a diary by James Agate who told him, ‘Keep a diary and one day it will keep you.’ It was, however, his friend and mentor, Arnold Bennett, who gave him the most valuable advice when he told the young Fred, ‘Talk it, then write it. If you say “ain’t” or “Cor, luv a duck!” then put it down just as you do in ordinary conversation. And that will be your style.’

Fred was born in 1907 and at the age of 16, without any education or help of any kind, he set out to become a bookseller, wheeling his barrow daily from Walworth to Bermondsey. He also began collecting autographs of the famous, building up a collection of over 12,000 signatures. Clearly there was something out of the ordinary about this young autograph-hunter which caught the fancy of such writers as Arnold Bennett, James Agate, John Drinkwater, Stephen Graham, Walter de la Mare, L. A. G. Strong and many others.

It was in this way that he met and was befriended by the writer and illustrator Nicolas Bentley who, learning that Fred had kept a diary since he was 14, asked if he could make a book out of it for him. In his introduction Bentley wrote, ‘Against all odds, and by sheer force of ambition . . . Fred chose to be a second-hand bookseller, to which trade he has obstinately stuck through all hazards. His diary is a record of hope triumphing over poverty, hunger and unemployment.’ When the first volume was published in 1951, it was hailed in the Spectator as ‘a vernacular classic’. It went into two editions and sold over 10,000 copies.

The following year a second selection was published, edited and introduced by L. A. G. Strong, who described Fred as ‘a born writer’ although, like Bentley, he had had to struggle with endless scraps of paper, notes scr

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It was the second-hand book-dealer Malcolm Applin, whose catalogue I find always opens doors and windows, who first introduced me to the Cockney bookseller and writer Fred Bason. Fred had been encouraged to keep a diary by James Agate who told him, ‘Keep a diary and one day it will keep you.’ It was, however, his friend and mentor, Arnold Bennett, who gave him the most valuable advice when he told the young Fred, ‘Talk it, then write it. If you say “ain’t” or “Cor, luv a duck!” then put it down just as you do in ordinary conversation. And that will be your style.’

Fred was born in 1907 and at the age of 16, without any education or help of any kind, he set out to become a bookseller, wheeling his barrow daily from Walworth to Bermondsey. He also began collecting autographs of the famous, building up a collection of over 12,000 signatures. Clearly there was something out of the ordinary about this young autograph-hunter which caught the fancy of such writers as Arnold Bennett, James Agate, John Drinkwater, Stephen Graham, Walter de la Mare, L. A. G. Strong and many others. It was in this way that he met and was befriended by the writer and illustrator Nicolas Bentley who, learning that Fred had kept a diary since he was 14, asked if he could make a book out of it for him. In his introduction Bentley wrote, ‘Against all odds, and by sheer force of ambition . . . Fred chose to be a second-hand bookseller, to which trade he has obstinately stuck through all hazards. His diary is a record of hope triumphing over poverty, hunger and unemployment.’ When the first volume was published in 1951, it was hailed in the Spectator as ‘a vernacular classic’. It went into two editions and sold over 10,000 copies. The following year a second selection was published, edited and introduced by L. A. G. Strong, who described Fred as ‘a born writer’ although, like Bentley, he had had to struggle with endless scraps of paper, notes scribbled on the backs of posters, menus and letters, and in old exercise books. The third selection, published in 1955, was edited and introduced by yet another ‘name’, the novelist Michael Sadleir, who wrote of Fred: ‘He has the appealing pertness in his writing of a cock sparrow, flipping about London at all hours, at once cheeky and forlorn, at once gregarious and absolutely lonely, especially lonely, for he has never had anyone to help him.’ The fourth and last volume, entitled The Last Bassoon, was edited and introduced by Noël Coward who, like the others, had taken a shine to Fred. When he was 19 Fred wrote to Somerset Maugham, after seeing one of his plays, pointing out what he thought was wrong with it. Maugham, intrigued, wrote back, asking for a snapshot of him and arranging to meet when he was next in London. It was Fred who took Maugham to the greyhound track, to the local music hall at the Elephant and Castle, and who regularly invited him back to tea with his parents in Walworth. From time to time Maugham would send him small gifts of money, shoes for his father, tickets for his plays. At some point it is clear that Maugham must also have made a pass at the boy for, as Selina Hastings reveals in The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham, there is one letter of Maugham’s to Fred, accompanying some extravagant gifts, across which Fred has written, ‘We Cockneys try to repay. But not in the way he really wants – that, Never, Never!’ All went well, however, until Fred overstepped the mark. In one of his many desperate straits, he sold to American dealers, at inflated prices, first editions of books by Maugham which Fred had got him to sign personally. It was at this point that Maugham broke off their association. What Maugham could not understand was that Fred was always on the breadline, even when he became ‘famous’. As he writes in his diary for 1947, when he was 37:

Since last November I have written 51 articles and I have received over 3,000 letters, but am still pushing my barrow-load of second-hand books up to Bermondsey and standing beside it to sell comics at one penny each, and all other books at three pence and six pence.

On one occasion, having been ill for three months – he was very slight and his health seems always to have been precarious – he was so broke that he was forced to sell his one remaining treasure, a first edition of Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale. He knew he could get £12 in cash for it but also that he would get more if he could get the author to sign it – which he did. The next day he sold it for £16 ‘and spent £3 on food, a hot bath and a shave, a pair of shoes, and by two o’clock I had 200 respectable books to put on my barrow, 5,000 children’s comics, and 300 magazines. I had food, stock, and cash in hand.’ Nearly three-quarters of Fred’s fan mail came from women. One wrote from Edinburgh to say how much she admired his writing (he was a regular contributor to Leonard Russell’s The Saturday Book) and longed to love him, but added, ‘I am paralysed down one side so sex is out of the question, but I DO make lovely cakes!’ Especially moving is his entry for New Year’s Eve 1951:

My favourite ambition is to own a bathroom of my own and a real bath. I do not feel that I shall have arrived anywhere in the literary world until I own a real bath where I can lay and soak. There are no baths in Walworth and somehow it don’t seem right that a well-known author should scrub up as far as possible, and down as far as possible, in a tin bowl, or queue for a long time in the local Council Baths.

To this he adds, rather plaintively, his hope that ‘some day I shall have a nice, amiable wife who will scrub my back and share my pleasant life’. Sadly, he never found one.

As a writer he has a Dickensian eye and ear for detail. He provides an invaluable record of street markets, customs and children’s games in the poorer parts of London during the 1950s. Once, seeing a young boy seated on top of a wall, shouting ‘Buzz! Buzz!’ he stops to ask what he is playing.

‘I’m an atom bomb!’

‘What are these other boys then?’

‘Oh, they’re the victims. You see, if I jump down suddenly and touch one of them, he’s dead – real dead! And the game goes on until all three are dead, and then we swop places.’

He describes the level of noise where he lives – the voices of children, people shouting goodnight as the pubs close, neighbours’ radios on at full blast, dogs howling all night, cats screaming, cocks crowing at four in the morning, pigeons overhead, and a girl playing ‘Butterflies in the Rain’ on the piano, badly, over and over again, night after night.

While the earlier diaries provide a day-to-day record of happenings, the later diaries, as he gains confidence as a writer, contain more set pieces, vignettes of characters and polished anecdotes. He evokes most movingly the local cinema which he attended as a boy, run by a Mr Jenkins who, for fourpence, would allow local women into the matinée for an afternoon of peace and quiet. Some would bring potatoes to peel or peas to pod for the evening meal, while others would take a nap. At four o’clock Mr Jenkins would wake them gently with a cup of tea. ‘I salute his memory,’ writes Fred, ‘who made thousands of folk in Walworth happy thirty years ago.’

One of the most poignant of his diary entries, possibly his very first, comes from 1921, when, at the age of 14, he wrote:

I got Marie Lloyd this night. She was a real sport and nice. It was at the Camberwell Palace. Waited half an hour. Up she come, walking. I felt awkward. I stuttered. She said, ‘What are you frightened of, sonny? I won’t bite you!’

I say, ‘I’m shabby, like, and I thought . . .’

She said, ‘Gawd bless you, ducks, I don’t care how you’re dressed,’ and she said ‘Gawd’ just like that. She said, ‘You want me to sign your little book? Come along with me and I’ll do it in my dressing room.’

And she also gave him a photo of herself signed: ‘To a little gent. Marie Lloyd.’

At one point Fred Bason wrote: ‘All I want to do is to become a modest Samuel Pepys.’ Let us hope that one day some enterprising publisher will edit these four diaries into one volume and bring him back into print so that he too can delight future generations.

 

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 31 © James Roose-Evans 2011


About the contributor

James Roose-Evans has adapted and directed Helene Hanff ’s 84 Charing Cross Road in the West End and on Broadway, and edited Darling Ma, the letters of Joyce Grenfell to her mother, as well as her wartime journals. His own memoir, Opening Doors and Windows, is now available in paperback.

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