The Left’s Cafeteria
For decades, The Gay Hussar was the Labour Left’s integral Soho spot for organising, gossip, and goulash.
Victor Sassie and two waiters outside his restaurant, The Gay Hussar, in Soho, London, UK, 18th May 1970. (Photo by Evening Standard / Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
Nothing in the Gay Hussar’s long life was quite like the leaving of it. There we were, the bedraggled survivors of many a long lunch/dinner/afternoon under the table, some of us from the departing rear guard unit, the ‘Goulash Co-operative’, set up to save the famous restaurant from closure or, worse, being turned into some bijoux sandwich joint. At some point during that now blurred farewell evening, John Wrobel, the Gay Hussar’s irrepressible, conspiratorial manager, seized a saw and proceeded to cut a restaurant table in two. The game was up!
The Gay Hussar in Greek Street, Soho, home to hundreds of political plots and conspiracies, to journalists, left-wing politicians, poets, spies (Guy Burgess, the British diplomat and Soviet double agent, could sometimes be spotted dining at the Gay Hussar; those he was with would like this to remain a secret), even the odd tourist, was to shut its doors for the last time. Its Hungarian menu was ossified around the time of its compilation (sometime in the 1960s probably). Its wines were fair to middling, for those that knew about such things. Its indispensability to the gaiety of life when ‘gay’ had a rather different meaning was immeasurable (from time to time an American would venture in, guidebook in hand, believing it was part of the London scene).
Presiding over this doleful last supper was a framed black-and-white photograph of the restaurant’s founder, Victor Sassi, pictured in the galley kitchen downstairs with the long-serving, put-upon head chef, Lazlo. Victor claimed to be Hungarian. We thought that we knew that he had been born in Barrow-in-Furness, the son of an itinerant sailor. When the Gay Hussar closed, Charles Laurance, an old friend and a former swashbuckling foreign correspondent for The Sunday Telegraph, dropped me this line from his home in the Catskills, setting the record straight:
Dear Mark,
There never appeared to be any doubt that Victor was a fellow Cockney who had inveigled (my father-in-law) Denis Scammell into a scheme to sell army-issue condoms on the Naples black market, which seemed fair reward for surviving the vicious battles to reach the houses of ill-repute to be found there in the dying days of the war! A court martial had had them both sent eventually to Budapest (the timeline is not clear here) as a bodyguard to a Consul dispatched to maintain a British presence while Joe Stalin took possession. The two old boys told tales of how hard they partied in Budapest, often failing to return to ‘barracks’ until the trams were running in the morning, and how both had brought back Hungarian wives as war booty. My ex-mother-in-law was Margit Horvart. The story was that Victor had realised the entrepreneurial possibilities of his wife’s national cuisine and set up the Gay Hussar. I have no idea where the story of his being taught the cuisine in a cooking school before the war comes from!
Tribune and the Gay Hussar were conjoined at the latter’s birth. Sassi was there too. According to veterans like Geoffrey Goodman and Michael Foot, Victor was always solicitous, managing to be part of any plot and gossip long enough for it to surface in a Fleet Street diary column. I managed to keep that tradition alive, as in addition to me being paid next to nothing to edit Tribune, I devoted a day in the week to the better remunerated ‘Londoner’s Diary’ in the now departed London Evening Standard. Lunch and taxi expenses were paid for by Lord Rothermere. More of him later.
The Gay Hussar was home to the Tribunite wing of the Labour movement. Bevan, Crossman, Castle, the big union leaders, Jack Jones, and Hugh Scanlon were all regulars. The notoriously bibulous Foreign Secretary George Brown fell down drunk in the street outside the place. Tom Driberg had his fatal heart attack in a taxi shortly after leaving. (The actor Richard Harris had his heart attack while in the restaurant, waving to customers from his ambulance stretcher and telling them to ‘carry on’ as he was carried out). Driberg famously used the excuse of a lunch in the room we all named after him (the ‘Driberg Memorial Suite’) to try to persuade Mick Jagger to become a Labour MP (and help the anti–Vietnam War campaign), and in putting his hand on his thigh probably put paid to any hope of it happening. On this occasion or another, W. H. Auden turned to Marianne Faithfull and asked: ‘When you are smuggling drugs do you pack them up your arse?’ ‘Oh no, Wystan,’ replied Faithfull. ‘I stash them in my pussy.’
At this point, and since memory fades, I turn to my own faithful record: specifically, the chapter ‘A Voyage Around George Orwell’s Stapler’ from my book Standing for Something: Life in the Awkward Squad.
The Left’s Cafeteria
Barbara (Castle) would often remonstrate with me about Tribune not being tough enough on the government, summonsing me once to the upstairs Driberg Memorial Suite in the Gay Hussar, along with Ian Aitken, Terence Lancaster, Julia Langdon, and others. She instructed me to redesign the paper and told Ian Aitken (then political editor of The Guardian) that he had to start writing for it again, gratis. (He did.)
The Gay Hussar restaurant in Greek Street had been the traditional haunt of the Tribunite left since the 1950s — according to Leo Abse, it was cheaper than the White Tower restaurant (which also had a Central European flavour), and in any event Michael Foot and others didn’t have very good table manners. I had been taken there by Ian Aitken immediately prior to joining Tribune. He told me, under a cheery painting of a Genoese gent tucking into oysters, that I would do ‘a couple of years at the coal-face before getting some top-notch berth in Fleet Street’. (Fourteen years later that still hadn’t happened. It never did.)
I immediately fell in love with the place and decided that it would be the venue for our regular Tribune dinners and sundry plotting meetings. Among our guests was Mo Mowlam, then Northern Ireland secretary, who proceeded to put her napkin on her head when Tribune’s fearless political editor, Hugh MacPherson, began castigating her over Blair and New Labour and refused to remove it. Despite warnings from the manager, John Wrobel, about the chillies on the table ‘being for decoration and nothing else’, Mo made a bracelet out of some of them and then touched her eye. She then spent the rest of the evening in the ladies’ dabbing her eyes and fending off excited American tourists.
The late Lord Vere Rothermere, fabled newspaper proprietor, came to dinner in 1997. I had invited him following a lengthy correspondence resulting from Cassandra’s attack on him in Tribune (he had in fact paid Martin Rowson for his cartoon depicting the press baron as a dog pissing on a prominent Mail journalist, Dave Wilson, who was bravely trying — ultimately successfully — to overturn the de-recognition of the National Union of Journalists at Associated Newspapers). When asked by Rowson if he had ever fired any of his editors, he replied: ‘I have the power in theory. Up to a point, Lord Copper,’ to which an exasperated Rowson countered: ‘But you are Lord Copper!’
As if by magic, a slightly tired and emotional Observer columnist, Nick Cohen, staggered — uninvited — into the room and up to Rothermere and planted a kiss on his cheek. (This was before Cohen became, as Tariq Ali, another Gay Hussar regular, describes in his autobiography, ‘Christopher Hitchens’ testicles’.)
Rothermere insisted upon driving Michael Foot back to the Ritz in his Bentley for a nightcap — but didn’t extend the invitation to Ken Livingstone.
My friendship with Lord Rothermere blossomed. He would invite me to lunch in his top-floor suite above the Daily Mail offices, where I challenged him to allow the unions back into his papers. We discovered a shared interest in Tibet: I had been there and Rothermere pronounced himself a Buddhist. Having finally concluded that Rothermere was another Beaverbrook — that is, generous to a fault to left-wing journalists and journals fallen on hard times — I decided to ask him for some money for Tribune. Sadly, on the day I prepared to book our next lunch, it was announced that he had died.
Ken Clarke came to dinner and pronounced that he was amazed that Gordon Brown was keeping to Tory spending plans for the first two years of the Labour government. ‘We all thought he was saying it just to get through the election,’ he said. ‘In any event, I wouldn’t have stuck to them myself.’ Clarke couldn’t believe how disputatious we all were — in other words, why wouldn’t we hang on his every word in respectful silence? ‘Do you people spend all of your time arguing with each other?’
John Wrobel tells a wonderful story involving the trousers of the late Lord Longford. As the years advanced, Frank, as he was known to all of us, stopped using his knife and fork and began using his hands. On one occasion Wrobel became rather concerned since Frank had managed to drop his potatoes back into his goulash so many times that he had spattered his trousers. Seizing his opportunity as Lord Longford staggered to the exit and into Greek Street, the manager of the Gay Hussar bent down and began to brush his trousers — at which point they gave way and fell to the ground. A passing cabbie added to the chaos of the situation by shouting at Wrobel: ‘You dirty bastard!’
On the day I read that Longford had passed away, I went to the Gay Hussar and said to Wrobel: ‘Trousers at half-mast! Sad news. Lord Longford is no longer with us!’ At which point, an elderly man in the corner of the restaurant emitted an involuntary sob. ‘Shhh,’ said John. ‘He was Frank’s private secretary and they were supposed to have lunch today.’
The restaurant is deservedly known as the Left’s cafeteria, and for some years it was my second home. It is living testament to a truth not well known that there was and still is, just, a British left that is as Rabelaisian as it is rebellious. The hand-drawn portraits of many of the good and bad of British left-wing politics and journalism grace the Gay Hussar’s walls, courtesy of Martin Rowson. I suspect that he may have done himself some liver damage over the years in drawing this remarkable collection, but I bet that it has been worth it.
In Memoriam
That collection has now found its home in the National Portrait Gallery, having been tracked down by me to a lock-up on an industrial unit in Bletchley. Another story of course. But a happier ending for the Gay Hussar, now thriving as Noble Rot and well worth a visit. The food and wine are much better, and every now and then tears well up as from the corner of my eye I seem to glimpse some of the ghosts of yesteryear. Martin Rowson remains convinced that he might have been one of the first to have been struck by Covid as he painted the triptychs of the old and new iterations of this venerable venue on the walls of the first-floor dining room.
I asked John Wrobel if he would share the Hungarian goulash recipe, but he refused. ‘The goulash, alas, cannot be recreated — no Gay Hussar, no Gay Hussar goulash. Anyway, would we want to murder a young cow?’
However, many moons ago, he was kind enough to share with me my favourite, which is the crispy roast duck dish, which he has probably forgotten doing.
So, in memory of the great Gay Hussar, its unforgettable, unsurpassable clientele, for its lasting influence on left-wing politics and livers in this country, and to Tribune readers past and present, here it is, for your delectation.
Crispy Roast Duck
Gressingham waxed and so called ‘dry duck’, preferably 1.8–2 kg
- Cut off wings.
- Rub coarse sea salt into the duck, place it on the wings, breast down.
- Roast at 180 °C for 40 min, then turn over, allowing the juices from the duck to run into the tray, and roast for another 40 min. Remove from the oven, and let it rest.
- Portion the duck into two breasts and two legs.
- Before serving, place the portions under grill to heat up, melt excess fat, and crisp up the skin.
Hungarian Style Potatoes
- Cut peeled potatoes into quarters and cook in stock, caraway seeds, and smoked pork, with salt and pepper to taste, until soft, but not overcooked. Finish by mixing in roux to thicken.
Serve with red cabbage and apple sauce, according to individual preference.
courtesy of John Wrobel