Those who have read Until the Real Thing Comes Along and When Summer is Gone sometimes ask about Charlie Brown’s pub, which is heavily featured in both novels. Was it real? If so, is it still there? The simple answers are - yes, it was real but it is unfortunately no more.
‘Charlie Brown’s’ was the popular nickname for the Railway Tavern which stood on the corner of Garford Street and the West India Dock Road, close to the main gate into the West India Docks. It lay in the shadow of a bridge carrying the old London Blackwall Railway through the docks - it now carries the Docklands Light Railway.
A former sailor and boxer, Charlie Brown became landlord in 1893 and began collecting the antiquities for which the pub became famous. A discerning and tasteful collector, he attended auctions and had agents looking out for items of interest in Britain and abroad. Journalist and travel writer H V Morton recounts Charlie speaking before they had dinner at the pub: “Everything nice I see I go after!” says Mr Brown as he wanders round the room, fingering his treasures with the loving fingers of a born collector. [‘Nights of London’ 1926]’
There are tales of less tasteful and more macabre curios - shrunken heads, a freakish pickled lamb, skulls - and they are mostly true. His truly prized possessions, the Ming dynasty artefacts for example, were kept safely in a room upstairs, but Charlie’s collection had been supplemented by items brought as gifts from all over the world. These are the items that festooned the downstairs bars.
It looks like a junior branch of the South Kensington Natural History Museum. Queer stuffed creatures presented to Charlie Brown by the mercantile marine of every nation hang from the walls, crown the eminence of cupboards and repose dustily on the top of cabinets. Prominent among them is an unfortunately born calf, with three times the normal allowance of legs. There are snakes in bottles (and I’m sure some one’s appendix), Chinese gods, Japanese ivories, African assegais, French bronzes, and, hanging from the ceiling, a long, dusty pipe which, sooner or later, some one will tell you “is the pipe Billie Carleton used to smoke round the corner in the Causeway." [‘Nights of London’ 1926 - Billie Carleton was a musical comedy actress who died after the armistice celebrations in November 1918, aged 22. She was known to smoke opium.]
The pub became a meeting place for all kinds of people from all over - dockers, sailors of all races and creeds, and as it was in the heart of what was then London’s Chinatown, many from the local Chinese community. Pubs and alcohol are often criticised as the cause of many evils, overlooking the fact that at their best they can bring people together and provide a haven for those who, for whatever reason, cannot relax anywhere else.
Charlie was a great benefactor to many local businesses and devoted time and money to charity, particularly for the London Hospital. He became a well-known public figure, dubbed 'The Uncrowned King of Limehouse’.
‘Now suppose you were a stoker in Shanghai and you said, “I know Mr Baldwin and Mr Winston Churchill,” no one would realise what you were driving at, but if you said, “I know old Charlie Brown,” some one would at once stand you a drink - which would be the highest compliment one man could, in such circumstances, pay to another. Wherever ships go over the seas, in whatever harbours they rest, you will find some one who knows Charlie Brown. [‘Nights of London’ 1926]’
Arguably June 1932 when Charlie Brown died, marked the beginning of the pub’s long decline. The East End went into mourning and over 16,000 people lined the streets between the West India Docks and the cemetery in Bow to watch his funeral cortege pass by. The treasures he had accumulated were divided – some remained in the Railway Tavern, which was taken on by his daughter Ethel, while the others crossed the road to the Blue Posts, which was run by his son. Charlie Brown junior moved to South Woodford in 1938 to run another pub, The Roundabout. That was demolished in 1972 when the traffic roundabout was enlarged, while both the Railway Tavern and the Blue Posts still stood. All that remains today is the name Charlie Brown’s Roundabout, on the North Circular Road.
The 1936 Emlyn Williams film version of Broken Blossoms, a story from 1916’s Limehouse Nights by Thomas Burke, features a scene based on Charlie Brown's, in which tourists are shown curiosities as part of a tour of the ‘horrors’ of the East End. I cannot recommend the film. It’s hard for a modern audience to watch because of the racial stereotyping of Burke’s story, and the unedifying sight of a white man playing Chinese. Photographer Bill Brandt took a series of atmospheric photographs inside the pub in 1945 and there is a Pathe News film on YouTube of the V.J. Day celebrations at the pub, a great testimony to how cosmopolitan it could be.
The Railway Tavern was still standing and open when I first moved to London and it survived in one form or another until it’s demolition for construction of the Limehouse Link in the mid-1980s. I never visited Charlie Browns, and that is a great regret.
I have written a summary of locations used in Until the Real Thing Comes Along answering the same questions - are they real and do they still exist? Some do, some don't and some never did!
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