The Ace of Spades - by Lu Hersey

When my father died earlier this year, he left behind a lifetime of accumulated stuff to sort through. After a lot of heartache and effort, I managed to narrow this mountain down to two boxes of photos (very big boxes), two files of letters, a sword, some Spanish pottery, quite a lot of books and a bag of ashes (still at the funeral parlour right now, but I'm collecting them soon). I was quite proud of myself. 

However he'd also kept a lot of his parents' stuff (he'd filled most of the dining room with it) and I needed to reduce that mountain as much as possible too. I ended up with even more photos, postcards and letters - and a HUGE scrapbook of press cuttings about my grandfather's former business. 

Back in the 1930s, my grandfather and his brother ran a road house (a sort of country club on a road out of London), called the Ace of Spades. I always liked the goth sound of this place, which was sadly nearly defunct by the time I was born. The letter-headed paper alone was so very deco and stylish... but my grandfather died when I was very young, so apart from the odd passing mention of the business from my father, I knew very little about it. Basically, I thought it was simply a restaurant with a petrol station.

So the scrapbook felt like the most dispensable thing - very big, heavy, and about a business that no longer existed. But someone had taken a lot of trouble to compile it, so I stuck it in the boot of my car at the last minute. It stayed there for months. Finally getting round to bringing it indoors, I had a quick look through to see if there was anything interesting in it, before I put it in the recycling box. 

(Lucie was her usual helpful self during this process....)

But studying the scrapbook, a whole unexplored world of 1930s society living opened up before me. I had no idea my grandfather's business was so interesting, mostly because my father so rarely spoke of it. Perhaps my grandfather was a man who never talked about work at home?

Or more likely, my father wasn't interested. He generally disapproved of anything remotely wild or fun (he was a conservative man in almost every respect), so I'd always assumed my grandfather must have been the same. 

Turns out I was wrong. Looking through the scrapbook, I discovered The Ace of Spades had been a hotbed of celebrity gossip, nightclub entertainment, fashion shows, occasional criminal goings-on, and raucous all night pool parties. A place to be 'seen' in the 1930s, with guests including the Duke of Windsor, Douglas Bader, Baron Rothschild and Agatha Christie (and much later, Doris Day)

Unfortunately my grandfather died when I was too young to ask questions about it, and of course I can no longer ask my father. Googling my way down an Ace of Spades rabbit hole, I found a couple of Pathé news reels all about the club, filmed in the 1930s :-

And oddly, I also came across a facebook group entirely devoted to the Ace of Spades building and archives. The group has opened up a world of people who knew a lot more about the roadhouse than I did. 

And so now we've started pooling knowledge (which is how I learnt about all the celebrity guests). I've made new contacts via the page, including the administrator, who's offered to take me to the Ace of Spades site (with a bottle of champagne) when I'm in London. In this very niche corner of the world, I'm almost a celebrity.

So what's this got to do with writing? 

Basically, our options as writers are constantly narrowing. Children's publishing supports very few writers long term these days. Generally publishers prefer to take on an occasional sparkly debut, and a sea of celebrities. There's not much room left for the majority of us (unless you want to be a ghost writer for a celebrity).

The recent Raynor Winn press coverage has demonstrated how dangerous memoir writing can be, especially if you've glossed over anything dodgy in your past. Seems the 'truth' can have many different angles. Interestingly, even the journalist who uncovered the so-called 'scandal' in the Observer was once fired by the bbc for inaccurate reporting... 

So while all my unpublished children's fiction sulks in the archives of my laptop, and I start polishing up an adult novel for a change, I'm considering compiling a very niche local history book as a background project. 

There's a group of about 250 people on facebook that might even read it.

Lu Hersey

web: Lu Hersey 

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