The story of George Berry, London's first black licensee from the Windrush generation

Back in the 1990s/2000s, a British musician was one of the most visible jazz faces in the USA. For 15 years, saxophonist Ralph Moore, a Londoner, was seen nightly on television in the house band on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show. With a list of credits including Horace Silver, Roy Haynes, Dizzy Gillespie and Freddie Hubbard, Moore was a seasoned professional, but his career began in a very different setting.

Moore grew up in Brixton, South London, with his mother, Josie Woods – a black Eastender, and one of Britain’s first jitterbug dancers. His first instrument was the trumpet but when he switched to saxophone, his Guyanese teacher, Allan Briggs, introduced him to Caribbean community events. At 14, he joined the band of Jamaican guitarist Roy ‘Chubby’ Mullings, a popular local musician. Mullings made his name in the 1950s at a Brixton club called the Mango, following a spell with trumpeter Leslie ‘Jiver’ Hutchinson. His confident singing style and mixture of jazz, R&B and calypso went down well with fellow settlers, and playing pubs and Town Hall dances with him helped Moore learn his craft. Josie, however, had other ideas. She thought her son would do better in California and when he reached 16, sent him to his American father.

One of Mullings’ pubs was The Coach and Horses at 443 Coldharbour Lane in the heart of Brixton market. Jamaican George Berry was the landlord, celebrated as ‘London’s First Coloured Licensee’, and sufficiently newsworthy for press coverage of the opening in June 1965.

Today, in a period when the much-loved British pub is in decline, the numbers of African Caribbean and Desi (the Indian sub-continent and its diaspora) landlords stepping forward to transform failing houses into thriving restaurant/bars can only be positive. But while the arrival of these entrepreneurs is to be applauded, it is worth noting that the presence of people of colour behind the bar is nothing new, as I will show.

The Coach & Horses circa 1979/80

I was reminded of all this when my correspondent Danny Fitzgerald sent me a copy of London’s Friendly Inns and Taverns, a charming little publication from the mid-1960s. Inclusion in such a guide was usually dependent on paid advertising, so it came as a surprise to find a glowing review of The Coach and Horses, with an invitation to dine in its upstairs private restaurant (Calalou soup, Caribbean cake, French and Belgian specialities), and a full-page advertisement illustrated with Berry’s photograph.

Danny’s gift brought back memories of visits to the Coach around 1977 in the company of photographer Chris Steele-Perkins. Chris lived just yards away on Rushcroft Road, where, I was to discover later, people of colour were already ensconced in the 1920s. I was familiar with the other ‘black’ Brixton pubs: the Atlantic, where the Jazz Warriors generation played with older musicians and re-discovered their roots; and the Prince of Wales, a rambling corner spot, opposite what is now Windrush Square.

But the Coach was different. A small pub, neat and well-kept, with good beer and a friendly atmosphere, it had none of the urban sprawl of the others.

Ralph Moore aged 14 and his teacher, Allan Briggs (tenor sax) with guitarist Roy Mullings and band, Brixton 1971

I remember a conversation with Berry, as a band set up in the corner, but Chris and I had business to discuss and did not stay to listen to the music. Had we done so, we might have been in for a treat, but no musicians were in evidence when I went there on subsequent occasions.

What had I missed? It was left to another photographer to paint me a picture. In 1972, not long after arriving from Liverpool, Mike Abrahams was studying at the Regent Street Polytechnic when he was taken to the Coach and Horses. He found “a wonderful pub” with a racially diverse crowd and an atmosphere reminiscent of home: “There were West Indians, characters, guys, prostitutes”.

He reported music and dancing mainly to reggae, but sometimes to a steelband, and although living north of the river, he adopted the Coach as his local. He got to know Berry and some of his “weird and wonderful customers,” among them an ex-Chief Inspector who claimed friendship with Dylan Thomas and membership of Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad. One day a gang of skinheads crashed in, intent on trouble. They were routed by a friend of Mike’s, cementing his relationship with Berry and receiving invitations to many a lock-in.

George Berry called himself London’s first black licensee and can certainly claim to be the first such of the Windrush generation. But it would be incorrect to describe him as the first ever, given a tradition of African-American boxers turning landlord that dates back to the 18th century.

Bill Richmond (1763-1829), was one of these. The first black man to attain prominence in British boxing circles, he arrived in England shortly before the American Revolution and was befriended by Lord Byron. He lived off the Haymarket and around 1810, during a lull in his boxing career, opened a sporting house, The Horse and Dolphin, in St Martin’s Lane. Other black boxers turned landlord were Bob Travers, ‘The Black Wonder’, a bare-knuckle fighter active in the 1850s; and Frank Craig (c. 1867-1942), ‘The Harlem Coffee Cooler’, a well-known Soho figure with a son who played drums: Alf Craig’s credits include Benny Carter, Garland Wilson and Django Reinhardt.

Elsewhere in the country, Charles Dickens visited a black pub in nineteenth century Liverpool where his health was drunk and a violinist played. In more recent times, the father of heavyweight boxer Joe Erskine had a pub in the Bute-town area of Cardiff .

And, by the time I drank my first pint at The Coach & Horses, I had already sunk several at The Seven Stars in Brick Lane, East London, run by a Sikh in a turban.

A serious fire at the Coach and Horses, around 1973, was attributed to the [far-right political party] National Front. Berry was photographed standing in the burnt-out lounge, but nothing was ever proved and now, there are disputes concerning the date.

Dramatic changes were to come to the local pub scene, however, most notably in 1981 when The George, with its notoriously racist landlord, was burned down in the Brixton riots. The Windsor Castle in Leeson Road, was another to go, both losses in reaction to the colour bar that plagued so many lives.

By 1992 Berry was no longer at the Coach and Horses. It became The Market House around 2000, and is now a pub-cum-curry house, catering for youngsters. The Atlantic, always regarded as ‘the’ Jamaican pub in Brixton, was, until October, The Dogstar, a now-shuttered trendy media place; while The Canterbury Arms, and others that welcomed black customers, have disappeared. The Prince of Wales, where I once spent an instructive afternoon in the 1970s, drinking with Ralph Moore’s mother and a friend, is now a shadow of its former self.

Mike Abrahams probably saw Ralph at the Coach but I missed seeing him in his formative years, because he had already left for the USA by the time I got to know the pub where he played.

As for Oliver George Berry, who died in 2004, people have been trying to unravel his history, to no avail. It was generally believed that he came to Britain in 1944 with the West Indies RAF contingent but, with a claimed age of 75 at his death, he would have been too young to enlist. Even had he raised his age to do so, this seems unlikely.

He may have put his age back in subsequent years – people do – but an alternative scenario was provided by Wendie Grey, married to a Jamaican and well-connected with Berry’s generation. Wendie, an old friend of Ronnie Scott, was a jazz lover from her teens. In her later years, she became my confidante and told me that Berry told her that he came here as a stowaway.

Thanks to Mike Abrahams, Danny Fitzgerald, Clayton Goodwin, Tim Gopsill, Wendie Grey, Ralph Moore, Howard Rye and Chris Steele-Perkins.