The writer Leslie Thomas died at his home in Lymington near Salisbury on 6 May 2014, aged 83.
He wrote over 30 books including an autobiography, ‘In My Wildest Dreams’, (1984). His books always show his great sense of humour.
In the 1950s he lived in Willesden and his Dangerous Davies books are set here.
Leslie was born in Newport on 22 March 1931 and had a happy, but poor childhood. In March 1943 his father, who was serving in the Merchant Navy, was a fireman on the SS Empire Whale. It was part of a convoy when it was torpedoed by the German submarine U662 in the South Atlantic. His father aged 52, was one of the 47 people who died, there were only 10 survivors.
In October the same year his mother died of cancer, and Leslie aged 12 and his nine-year old brother Roy, were sent as orphans to Dr Barnardo’s Homes, first in Devon and then to Kingston in South London.
When he was leaving the Superintendent of the orphanage asked him what he wanted to do. Leslie said: ‘Sir, I want to be a writer’. No one had ever said this before, and the ‘Gaffer’ who was slightly deaf said, ‘Good, well done. I’ll see you are a waiter in a good restaurant’.
Leslie got a job as a reporter with a company in Wanstead which printed 25 local newspapers. For short time he worked for the Woodford Times in east London before he was called up for National Service in 1949. After basic training, in December he was posted to Singapore. On the last night before he sailed, 18-year old Leslie met a girl in Slough near the transit camp who worked in the local Mars Factory. After the dance and a kiss and a cuddle, she said she wanted to give him something to remember her by. An excited Leslie, who thought that he was about to loose his virginity, was stunned when she gave him a Mars Bar!
Leslie worked in the Royal Army Pay Corps but he saw some active service against the Communists in Malaya.
The Willesden Citizen
When he was demobbed he got a job on the Willesden Citizen in the winter of 1951. The paper began as a left-wing weekly in 1901 and changed its name to the Willesden Mercury in 1965. It was absorbed into the Willesden and Brent Chronicle in 1975. The office was previously in the Harrow Road near Kensal Rise, until 1939 when it moved to 201c High Street Harlesden. This was the office near Tubbs Road and Willesden Junction Station, where Thomas worked from 1951 to 1954.
In his autobiography he describes the Willesden Citizen office which was in a shop.
‘There was a narrow shop, with a cobbler’s premise on one side and a car sales pitch, occupying a space cleared by a wartime bomb, on the other. The front of the shop was taken up with a counter for the important business of receiving small advertisements. The two ladies who handled this matter, as well as the general accounting and the making of tea, being accommodated in a cosy cubicle between the counter and the dark back room which housed the reporting staff. The squalor of this place would be hard to exaggerate. Linoleum on the floor was rotting and, when lifted revealed not boards but bare clay. There was a single table and four chairs, a bench with a telephone and ragged piles of iodine-coloured past issues’.
One of the four staff was Paula, ‘a sweet red-haired from an upper-middle class background, who used to cry when she was sent to funerals or when she was admonished by Mr Cyril, the editor’. ‘It is not the way he tells me off’ she pleaded, ‘it’s the light shining through his ears, I can’t take my eyes off those ears!’
Living in Willesden
Thomas found a small, but clean, room at the top of a house in 49 Harlesden Gardens, with breakfast and evening meal for one pound, fifteen shillings a week. The landlady was Mrs Dyer, the widow of the manager of the local Odeon who had passed on not long before, leaving her with the house and a black dog called ‘Deon’ after the cinema.
With current research I found that in fact, Mr Dyer was still alive and presumably they had separated. He managed the Harlesden Odeon, in Craven Park Road. Cliff Wadsworth’s book on ‘Cinemas of Willesden’ says it opened in 1937 and closed as a regular cinema in 1972. It was briefly called the Liberty Cinema showing Bollywood films before becoming a rock venue, the Roxy Theatre which was a popular venue for bands like The Clash who played there in 1978. Lastly, it was an Irish nightclub called the Tara which had closed by 1986. It was demolished in 1989 and a block of flats fittingly called Odeon Court was built on the site.
Leslie said that Mrs Dyer was a genteel person with careful manners. He only saw her lose her temper once and that was with him. A staunch Tory, she was outraged when he brashly suggested that Winston Churchill was a warmonger and she promptly hit him on the head with a saucepan.
In the room next door was an Irishman called Jimmie who worked on a car assembly plant. At the evening meal in the lodging house he would suddenly put down his knife and fork and grin as though remembering something from long ago in Sligo. ‘Those bhoys, they did it again today, they did. Welded my hammer to the metal bench and, God help me, ever time I fall for it! When I try to pick it up they all laugh and I think to myself, Jesu, they’ve done it again, and there’s me falling for it, well… well…’
After Mrs Dyer had hit him with the saucepan they both decided, with no hard feelings, it was better that he found other accommodation. He moved about half a mile to Mrs Bayley’s house at 58 Franklyn Road which overlooked Willesden New Cemetery. She insisted on ‘feeding him up for his wedding’ and shovelled heaps of fried food onto his plate. But she was not a good cook, and the piles of chips looked like a burnt-out log cabin. She would say, ‘You won’t notice it under this gunge’, as she covered it with HP sauce. It was a two-roomed flat with the bathroom doubling as the kitchen as there was a small gas cooking range sitting on top of the toilet cistern.
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He could drink a cup of tea and look out his window at the comings and goings in the cemetery where the funerals were a constant source of interest. One day the chapel caught fire during a service and everybody ran out into the open air, and the undertakers rushed through the flames to rescue the coffin and its occupant. Leslie would go to Roundwood Park on the other side of the cemetery and dribble a football round the trees and practice passing to non-existing team mates.
He was returning home through the cemetery when he accidentally kicked the ball towards a funeral procession and it became entangled in the feet of the pall bearers. After nearly dropping the coffin, it was flicked into the open grave. Thomas was deeply embarrassed when one of the gravediggers had to jump into the grave and retrieve his football. ‘The final terrible, farcical moment came when my football suddenly shot out of the open ground like a shell discharged from a mortar and bounced away between the tombstones with me following’.
In 1955 Leslie married local girl Maureen Crane in Willesden, and a week later he got a job with the Exchange Telegraph, a news agency in Cannon Street. He was getting closer to his dream of working in Fleet Street, which was only half a mile away. One day while looking out the office window, Leslie saw a gang of children digging in the ground and carrying off old clay pots. One boy about 12 years old ran off with the stone arm of a statue. Leslie knew that an ancient site had been found there and he telephoned Professor Grimes who was in charge of the excavations. At first he did not believe him but then said, ‘For God’s sake stop them and call the police’. This was the Temple of Mithras, the most complete Roman shrine ever found in London. The story was a scoop for Thomas.
The Evening News
Even with the increased salary of £40 a month, Leslie and Maureen were still broke. They had moved to flat at 104 Byron Road North Wembley, when their daughter Lois was born in 1956. He began submitting items to newspapers and the Evening News printed many of them in a series called ‘The World’s Strangest Stories’ which he researched in the Guildhall Library and the British Newspaper Library in Hendon. In 1958, the additional twenty guineas per story allowed them to move to a house in Ruslip at 5 Garth Close. They stayed there till at least 1962.
From his stories Leslie managed to get a job as a staff reporter on the Evening News – he had finally arrived in Fleet Street. With a new job, the family moved to Carpenders Park, near Watford.
Leslie’s work with the Evening News sometimes took him overseas. In Jerusalem he reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann and he was stunned by the icy coldness of the man as he was shown horrific images from the death camps. In 1963 he travelled as a reporter with the Queen on her visits to Australia and Germany, and he covered Churchill’s funeral. When he left the paper in 1965 he was still only earning £42 and 10 shillings a week.
Leslie was always writing in his spare time and his story of life in Barnardo’s was published as ‘This Time Next Week’ in 1964. It later became required reading for social workers and also a set book for O-level.
The Virgin Soldiers
His second and most famous book was published in 1966. While he was in Malaya during his National Service, one of the young soldiers had said to him, ‘I hope I don’t get a bullet before I get a shag’. This is when the idea for The Virgin Soldiers was born.
The manuscript was with his publisher and was going to be called ‘The Little Soldiers’ when Leslie met a friend who was the fiction editor of the Evening News. He said, ‘I don’t like that title, it sounds too much like a children’s book. I think Virgin has a much better ring to it’, so the title was changed to ‘The Virgin Soldiers’.
At the time, no one had written a book about National Service. Leslie said, ‘I truly believe that it was a beginner’s book that arrived at the right moment’. There was also a piece of good luck. On publication day Leslie was interviewed by Michael Aspel for a TV magazine programme that went out just after the 6.00 news. The BBC officials decided that a book with the word Virgin in the title was not suitable for the early evening slot. Rather than scrapping the whole interview, Michael Aspel was asked to record a warning rider. So after giving details of the book he said in sombre tones, ‘Don’t leave it around where the children can pick it up’. The book sold out by the next day and became a best seller.
It was made into a very successful film in 1969 starring Hywell Bennett, Lynn Redgrave and Nigel Davenport. Interestingly, David Bowie appears on screen very briefly.
‘Juicy Lucy’ was the name Thomas gave to a prostitute in The Virgin Soldiers. It was in fact the nickname of a Chinese airline stewardess he met in Hong Kong. After the book came out it was used as the name of a British blues band. Juicy Lucy was also the name of a jazz track by the Horace Silver’s Quintet in 1959.
On a June day in 1966, Leslie was on the Metropolitan Line train going to see a cricket match at Lords (cricket was his lifelong passion). He was recognised by a young woman and they got into a conversation which lasted for almost 50 years. He married Diana Miles in 1970 after his divorce from Maureen.
Tropic of Ruislip
In 1974 Leslie wrote ‘Tropic of Ruislip’. This was based on his time in Carpenders Park, which he called Plummers Park in the book. Here the residents lived on streets with exotic names such as; Upmeadow, Cowacre, Sheep-Dip, the Sluice, and Bucket Way. The houses had preposterous names such as Khartoum, Dobermann Lodge, and High Sierra.
The people of the Plummers Park are collectively known as ‘Flat-Roof Man’. The protagonist of the novel is Andrew Maiby (pronounced Maybe), who is as indecisive as his name implies. Like Thomas, he lives with his wife Audrey and he is a reporter for a small newspaper in Watford. His news covers a geriatric shoplifter, an eccentric artist, adulterous trysts between neighbours, a black body stocking, a scandal at the local golf course, and a nimble flasher who haunts the Plummers Park Estates. Not surprisingly, the novel caused uproar in Carpenders Park.
Dangerous Davies
In 1976, one afternoon while sitting by the log fire in his home, Leslie decided to try his hand at writing a detective story. By bedtime he had a framework and some of the characters for ‘Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective’. Between 1976 and 1998, Thomas wrote four Dangerous Davies books with his philosophical friend, Mod.
Dangerous, whose gentle and old-fashioned methods make him the butt of office jokes, is something of a misfit at the small police station in Willesden. Dangerous, the last detective his Inspector wanted to send on a case, was an amalgam of the policemen Thomas knew when he worked in Willesden. He used the first house he lived in, 49 Harlesden Gardens, as the home of Dangerous, which was called ‘Bali Hi’ Furtman Gardens, in the books.
‘The lodgings he inhabited, one tight room at the top of a house, had a blackened fireplace where two would be IRA members had ham-handedly tried to make a bomb’.
In the ITV 1981 film version, Bernard Cribbins played Dangerous and Bill Maynard was the elderly muttering Mod. In the TV series first shown from 2003 to 2007, Thomas said that Peter Davison, ‘captures the difficult character perfectly’. Mod has been transformed from an old Welshman to a young Irishman, Sean Hughes, which worked very successfully.
Thomas remembers the film version well. ‘It was great. Diana and I dug the video out of the garage the other day; it was fun, but this new series is classy. That old film was more knockabout. This is poignant. Peter Davison fits my idea of the character perfectly, he is marvellous, he looks so vulnerable. You can see in a flick of his eyes what he’s thinking. They’ve got some lovely casts, and I think Richard Harris, the writer, has done a fantastic job adapting my stories. I’ve written him a congratulatory letter’.
Sadly, the wonderful Sean Hughes died in October 2017.
Salisbury
Leslie said that he and his second wife Diana have lived in 26 houses. When they lived in the Close of Salisbury Cathedral, their neighbour was former Prime Minister Edward Heath. To mark Heath’s 80th birthday the BBC sent a film crew to Salisbury. To his surprise, the producer asked Leslie bluntly, ‘Is Edward Heath gay?’ ‘No,’ he replied immediately, ‘He’s bloody miserable’. In reality, he was not miserable and Thomas got on well with him. He even attended a Foyle’s literary lunch for Thomas which because Edward Heath was there, attracted an illustrious top table. His armed bodyguards in Salisbury often had coffee in Leslie and Diana’s kitchen, parking a sub-machine gun on the table. After ten years in Salisbury, in 2001 they moved to Lymington on the Hampshire coast opposite the Isle of Wight.
Leslie was Vice-president of Barnardo’s for many years and said he particularly enjoyed meeting the Presidents, who were Princess Diana and Cherie Blair. He was awarded an OBE by the Queen in the New Years Honours List in 2005.
The excellent ‘Last Detective’ series with lots of exterior scenes of Willesden is currently being repeated on TV.
A Funny Thing Happened on the way to Willesden is on YouTube.
An earlier version of this article appeared in the Willesden Local History Society magazine in 2015.
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