Coke en Stock(well)

Don't explain the joke, you idiot.

I thought I’d elaborate a little on a small adventure that happened on the way back from the Carnival, as described in the last entry, for ’twas quite the strangest thing that happened that day. Well, not quite the strangest. Probably in the top ten. Or twenty. It was certainly strange.

You see, the problem with being very drunk and very tired and altogether in quite a state is that it can be quite difficult to stay awake. And the problem with getting from Bayswater to Colliers Wood is that it’s quite a complicated route by night bus. End result was that I kept ending up in completely the wrong place by virtue of falling asleep on the bus. Eventually, when I ended up in Vauxhall, I decided to give it up as a bad job and walk as far as I could.

Now, it took me quite a while to figure out that Vauxhall is close to Stockwell, and a night bus to Colliers Wood goes that way. It is a testament to how very mashed up I was that it took me this long – I’ve worked in Stockwell and Waterloo, and several times I’ve walked from one to the other by way of Vauxhall.

Nevertheless, after much trial and error, I arrived in Stockwell. All in all, I was feeling pretty invincible. Which is good, because as places go, Stockwell sucks.

[PARENTHESIS: I've noticed something odd about London. My decadent and sinful lifestyle takes me through many different parts of the city. Yet in places like Hackney, Elephant & Castle, Battersea, Brixton, Tooting, Feltham and Stockwell, I rarely have any trouble. Meanwhile, in supposedly affluent, middle-class places like Richmond, Kingston and Wimbledon, I've had far more trouble with lairy drunks trying to start fights - to the extent that I actually try to avoid Kingston and Wimbledon late on a Friday or Saturday.]

Stockwell is famous mostly for the notorious case of the Stockwell Strangler back in 1986 and in 2005, for the shooting by police of Jean Charles de Menezes during the 7/7 attacks. Apparently it’s on the up these days due to the fact that it is literally within walking distance of Central London. At the moment, though, it’s still pretty sketchy. This I mused upon as I waited for the good old N155.

At this point, a couple of gentlemen approached me. Well, I didn’t initially think they were approaching me – after all, it’s a bus stop, one of the things about public transport is that it’s for the public (though you wouldn’t think that judging by some of the people you mumble mumble mumble).

But then one of them spoke up. “I like your…” he began, and ran into difficulties. My scuffed jeans, chocolate-smeared T-shirt and worn out shoes didn’t exactly give him much to work with, and so he settled on “…glasses.”

“Thanks,” I said, uncertain how best to react. I mean, I like my glasses too. They stop me from being blind. They are, I must emphasise, nothing special. Fairly discreet with black wire frames. Basically, I use them to see with.

“You having a good night?” asked the fellow.

“Yeah, you know, long night, good night, complicated, going home now, bed,” I said incomprehensibly. All of which was true.  At this stage it was half past four and the fun part of being drunk was well and truly over. I just wanted to get home.

“Oh hey, that’s great,” said the chap. “Do you like Charlie?”

I was confused. Charlie? Was that his friend? Was I being propositioned? Solicited, even?

“Sorry?”

“Do you like Charlie?”

“Er?”

“Charlie?” He opened his bag and pulled out a couple of bags of white powder. “Charlie?” he repeared.

Ah yes, Charlie. Cocaine. Blow. Peruvian Lady. Bolivian marching powder. Aunt Nora. Witch and Zip. Foo-foo dust. The White Stuff. Alas, cocaine is not among my many vices, and I explained as much.

“Not at all?” asked the man, with palpable disappointment.

“Afraid not. I’m more of a booze man myself.”

“Not even to try?”

“Sorry. It’s just very late at night, I don’t want a buzz, I just want to go to bed.”

“Oh,” said the man sadly, and he and his friend trudged off.

I spoke the next day to Hurricane Jack and Succubusface, who opined that the guy was either not a very good drug dealer or the cocaine he had was fake, as discretion should really be your watchword when you’re out selling illegal substances in public. Indeed, it’s my own personal experience that normally when someone approaches you with the intent of selling drugs, what you get is a muttered “Skunk?” as they pass you. At least, I think that guy was selling skunk, it was fair to say that I’d woken up in the wrong part of London and not showered that morning.

And so I think we all learned an important lesson.

Brilliant, Chang!

More than once on this blog, I’ve talked about real-life people upon whom fictional characters have been based. Today we’re going to go in the other direction – a real-life individual who was, in a manner of speaking, based on a fictional character. Sort of.

In the first half of the twentieth century, starting in 1912, there was a series of books by a gentleman named Sax Rohmer about a Chinese character called Fu Manchu. You may well have heard of him. The character was a supervillain of sorts, using elaborate deathtraps and exotic henchmen to commit terrible and dastardly acts of criminality from his East End base. He was, in short, the archetypal “Yellow Peril.” Not the first such character, nor the last by a long shot, but the best-known and most influential.

The stories, as you might have already guessed, are incredibly racist. Not only is Fu Manchu a negative stereotype, but there’s a simple way of telling whether a character is evil in a Fu Manchu novel. Are they Chinese? Then they’re evil. A mixed-race priest in the second book is described as being “not entirely innocent of Asian blood,” which I think says it all. Oh yes, and the priest turns out to be evil.  Rohmer himself argued that the books weren’t racist, because it was well known that the Chinese were a bunch of criminals anyway. Cough.

So when a real life Chinese criminal mastermind appeared in London, the newspapers thought it was Christmas. The gentleman in question is pictured on the right and went by the name of Brilliant Chang. Born Chan Nan, he came to the attention of the media in the early 1920s. He operated a restaurant on Regent Street, meanwhile selling drugs from a room upstairs. Newspapers of the day tend to mysteriously talk about “vices of the Orient” and suchlike, but cocaine seems to have been the main moneyspinner, bringing in over a million pounds over the years.

Apparently he was also something of a ladies’ man, with a gentlemanly way about him. The papers took this, of course, as a sign that he was hypnotising innocent flowers of English girlhood with some sort of sleazy Oriental magic. The World Pictorial News, for example, described him as essentially buying women with drugs, and when he did “the flame of passion burned more brightly within and he hugged himself with unholy glee.” I’m surprised they didn’t go the whole hog and have him twirl his moustache as well. Of course, the papers didn’t miss the opportunity to take a pop at women as well. The Daily Mail, for instance – that bastion of progressive thinking – noted that “Men do not as a rule take to drugs, unless there is a hereditary influence, but women are more temperamentally inclined.” Chang would later be directly accused of “corrupting the womanhood of this country.”

In 1924 he moved to Limehouse, which in those days (that being the Docklands) was Chinatown. The present-day West End Chinatown only appeared in the 1970s. He opened a new restaurant and, of course, started selling his more lucrative treats round the back. Unfortunately, a bust later that year would result in his arrest. Apparently there was a strong female presence at his trial – probably because they’d been corrupted by drugs or Chineseness or something. After being imprisoned for eighteen months, Chang was deported.

He was arrested again for the same crime in 1927 in Paris, but jumped bail and went missing. Thereafter, it’s not clear what became of him. Some stories have him ending his days in poverty and others have him becoming a secret drug trafficking mastermind. The former seems unlikely for a wealthy and resourceful gent such as Brilliant, but the latter, too, sounds like a sensationalist Fu Manchu-style bit of journalistic fun. Guess we’ll never know now.

I’m not entirely clear why, but drug crimes seem to have been inherently linked with race in the public mind during the twentieth century. You didn’t get people claiming that the razor gangs of the 1930s were the result of some deficiency in the Italian mind, or that prostitution was a curiously Maltese vice in the 1950s. Yet just about every report on drug dealing in the first half of the twentieth century seems to throw in something about the evil Chinese  or the monstrous West Indian and, as like as not, they’ll throw in something about how they’re seducing white women. Says a lot about society, really.