Soho's Ruthless Genius

Christopher Howse remembers his friend and drinking partner Jeffrey Bernard, who died 20 years ago this month, aged 65.

I spent more time with Jeffrey Bernard than Boswell did with Dr Johnson. But, in the Soho of the Eighties, it was difficult to remember what had happened the night before. In any case, Jeffrey was his own Boswell in the Low Life columns for the Spectator that gave a version of his life.

He spent most of the hours between periods of unconsciousness in conversation. He was good at it, and it served as a rehearsal for his columns, typed in the unreal, early hours of press day with seldom a correction.

The Coach & Horses was his rehearsal room. In that decade, it was one of a clutch of Soho conversation pubs where painters and poets gathered, with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud among them. Stagehands, actresses and shoplifters (down the other end, with the Italian gangsters) talked and shouted at each other, too. Its radical democracy admitted anyone but bores.

There was no music in the Coach and, in the evenings, swelled by students from St Martin’s School of Art, it was jammed like a rush-hour Underground train. The air was full of cigarette smoke and voices.

Jeffrey was best at the plateau of lunchtime. At 11am, he came into the pub by the door from Greek Street at the far end, the shallow end. Perhaps he’d take a paper napkin – from a bunch put out, folded in a glass, on the counter by the landlord Norman Balon’s mother, ready for the lunch trade – and blow his nose, dripping with the exertion in the fresh air of getting to the pub.

His hand shook. It was, he remembered being told by a medic, a benign tremor. His muscles were beginning to waste. And this was a man who’d fancied himself as a boxer.

‘I’m as weak as a kitten,’ he’d say, as he climbed on to the high stool at the bar. By the end of the decade, when he was in his late fifties, his knees were thicker than his thighs.