Getting Carter

Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir

Nick Triplow

• Publisher: No Exit Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781843448822
• eBook ISBN:
  9781843448839
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

The story of Ted Lewis carries historical and cultural resonances for our own troubled times

Ted Lewis is one of the most important writers you've never heard of. Born in Manchester in 1940, he grew up in the tough environs of post-war Humberside, attending Hull College of Arts and Crafts before heading for London. His life described a cycle of obscurity to glamour and back to obscurity, followed by death at only 42. He sampled the bright temptations of sixties London while working in advertising, TV and films and he encountered excitement and danger in Soho drinking dens, rubbing shoulders with the 'East End boys' in gangland haunts. He wrote for Z Cars and had some nine books published. Alas, unable to repeat the commercial success of Get Carter, Lewis's life fell apart, his marriage ended and he returned to Humberside and an all too early demise.

Getting Carter is a meticulously researched and riveting account of the career of a doomed genius. Long-time admirer Nick Triplow has fashioned a thorough, sympathetic and unsparing narrative. Required reading for noirists, this book will enthral and move anyone who finds irresistible the old cocktail of rags to riches to rags.

1

Heartache

1940–1951

Ted Lewis had a sense that something had been missing. Born on 15 January 1940 in Stretford, Manchester, among his imperfect and chaotic wartime recollections it was his father’s absence that resonated. A space which, for the first five years of his life, was dominated by his mother, Bertha, and his maternal grandmother’s matriarchal presence. In this his experiences were no different to those of countless other wartime babies and young children, their consciousness formed in an uncertain and austere time of absent fathers, air-raid warnings, rationing, bomb-damaged streets and the filtered realities of war reported each evening on the BBC news. A rare family snapshot from the period, taken while his father, Harry, was home on leave from the Royal Air Force, shows father and son together. Harry Lewis is on his haunches, tanned and healthy in the uniform of an RAF Corporal. His broad hands encircle his young son’s waist. Perhaps a little more than a year old, Edward is pale, blond and chubby-cheeked, smiling and alert in the sunshine.

By the time Harry returned home from active service for the final time in 1945, his son, christened Alfred Edward, but always known as Edward to his parents, was a fit and energetic five-year-old. Readjusting to home and family life after the war proved difficult. For a short time, Harry went back to work at the Manchester Ship Canal Company where he’d been employed as a shipbroker’s clerk before the war, but his experience had equipped him for greater responsibility. When the opportunity of a management position arose at one of the company’s subsidiary concerns across the country in Lincolnshire, he accepted.

In early September 1946, the Lewis family migrated 100 miles west to east from Manchester to North Lincolnshire. Harry Lewis took out a mortgage on 118 West Acridge, Barton-upon-Humber, a modest three-bedroom semi-detached in one of the town’s most established streets. The family moved in and Harry took up the post of manager at Elsham Quarry some ten miles away, one of several similar works peppering the landscape south of Barton which provided raw materials for building, engineering and railway industries.

The Barton that welcomed the Lewises was a small, insular market town on the south bank of the River Humber, some 25 miles from the fishing port of Grimsby to the east and 20 miles from the steel town of Scunthorpe to the west. They knew no one and the town’s few thousand inhabitants were, in the main, families which could trace their local heritage back generations. The town had built up around two distinct geographical locales: the Waterside area close to Barton Haven, a busy inlet from the River Humber, where once a ferry had connected to Hessle on the opposite bank of the river a mile and a quarter away; and Top Town, which centred on two mediaeval churches – Saint Peter’s with its Saxon tower and nearby Saint Mary’s. A few local shops and half a dozen pubs led up to the town square, home to the weekly market. Beyond its own boundaries, the town had made its name through Hopper’s bicycle factory whose machines were exported around the world; Hall’s Barton Ropery which made ropes for the Royal Navy and the Empire for 150 years; and for the manufacture of bricks and tiles – there were a number of traditional works dotted along the river’s south bank making use of Humber clay.

Across the river, accessible only by ferry from New Holland, a short train journey from Barton, or a lengthy detour inland by road, the lights of the city of Kingston upon Hull represented a distant world. The house in West Acridge gave Lewis a clear view of the river and the city beyond. After Trafford Park’s industrial grime, Barton was an idyllic setting for the Lewises. Nestling in the hillside as the landscape scoops from the outer edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds to the wooded fringes and pebbled beaches of the Humber foreshore, it would have felt clean, its broad outlook offering an uncluttered panorama of the wide river, its air unpolluted. It was a free and safe playground for the young Lewis. In his first novel, the autobiographical All the Way Home and All the Night Through, Lewis wrote his observations of Barton, describing the easy pace of living and the ordinariness of the town, concluding that although the youth complains about the claustrophobia of life, ‘hardly anyone leaves the place’.

In 1947, Lewis was enrolled at Barton County Primary School on Castledyke. Although he felt some affection for his headmaster, a quiet man called Jack Taylor, the bulk of the teaching staff were, according to childhood friend and classmate, Nick Turner, ‘formidable old spinsters’. The most draconian was Miss Crawford, a strict disciplinarian who inflicted liberal doses of corporal punishment on her young charges. Children were terrified of her. Turner remembers the consequences if Miss Crawford suspected someone had broken wind. ‘She would walk round smelling our backsides until she found the culprit and then slipper them in front of the class.’ Miss Crawford’s comeuppance came while attempting to teach the children to bunny-jump during a PE lesson when she fell on her back and had to be carried out. After the comfort of home, the sensitive Lewis was unsettled by the severity of Miss Crawford and the other teachers. They upset the sense of fairness he had come to depend on with his mother and grandmother and he withdrew, quietly shielding himself from the school’s worst excesses.

Lewis’s days at Barton County were curtailed abruptly when, in 1948, he contracted rheumatic fever. In pre-antibiotic, late-1940s Britain, cases were still fairly common, particularly among children. The disease was a major cause of death until around 1960. It would attack the heart’s mitral valve, causing it to leak, often leaving the sufferer with chronic heart problems. In addition to its effect on the heart, it was a highly debilitating illness – we know from friends that Lewis suffered severe pain in his joints. In extreme cases, rheumatic fever could lead to brain damage. Recovery was primarily dependent on the ability of the patient’s immune system to fight back and it was generally accepted that, if the sufferer kept to a minimum any potential strain on the heart, the disease would be less likely to cause lasting harm. Whilst the exact severity of Lewis’s bout of rheumatic fever isn’t known, it was certainly a grave cause for concern, serious enough for Bertha to ensure her son received complete bed rest for many months. Throughout the latter part of 1948 and into the spring of 1949, he remained at home, convalescing.

When it was suggested to John Dickinson, whose parents had become good friends of the Lewises, that he visit this young chap who was ill in bed, he found a pale boy a couple of years younger than himself, quite shy, and with a mop of blond hair, his bed littered with comic books and a pencil and paper constantly to hand. Dickinson recalls ‘he would draw all the time, always these figures of people’.

With recurrences of rheumatic fever as common as the disease itself, particularly in the years immediately after the first incidence, Harry and Bertha would have been told that another episode could cause lasting and serious, possibly fatal, damage to their son’s heart. But, as Lewis’s ninth birthday approached, Bertha dared to hope the worst was over. Thinking a birthday party would raise his spirits, she made a cake, iced with the family’s saved sugar rations. The boys who sat on the edge of the bed at his party have a clear recollection of Edward Lewis, sitting up in bed and ‘holding court’. It was as if the illness had conferred a degree of celebrity.

The friends drawn to Lewis around this time called themselves the Riverbank Boys. Barton was no different to many towns where discrete areas became territories for loosely associated groups of friends. The Riverbank Boys were hardly a gang in any contemporary sense, more a bunch of lads who played together, shared interests and made a point of looking after each other. Lewis was welcomed on board. Along with Nick Turner and Alan Dickinson, he was one of the youngest of the group that included Martin Turner, John Dickinson, Mike Shucksmith and Neil Ashley. They were Barton born and bred and came from similarly respectable families. Here, for the first time, Edward Lewis of 118 West Acridge became Ted Lewis of the Riverbank Boys after Nick and Martin Turner’s father, Arthur, decided Edward was too effeminate a name. Ted was ‘more manly’. Lewis’s friends called him Ed or Eddy. Bertha would make sandwiches for the boys and they’d sit around in her son’s room, talking, drawing, reading comics, usually with Lewis as the centre of attention. Sometimes Harry set up a hand-cranked film projector, plugged into the light socket with a bulb behind it for the boys to watch cartoon films screened against the blank wall at the foot of the bed.

In hindsight, Lewis’s rheumatic fever and the enforced period of recuperation and reading which followed, gave him a degree of knowledge and insight beyond his years. Temporarily released from the constraints of formal education, in its place, encouraged and supported by Bertha, his natural artistic ability was given licence to flourish. In the dull rhythms of convalescent days, he discovered an inner world of imagination, invention and story. Escape from the everyday came first through the wireless, particularly radio thriller serials like Dick Barton – Special Agent. Lewis was an avid listener.

He was also a keen reader of comics. While British comics of the time were, for the most part, limited to the traditional – Beano, Dandy – and boy’s own titles like Hotspur or Eagle, increasingly Lewis’s older friends were attracted to glossier American titles from the Entertaining Comics (EC) stable of crime, horror and science fiction. Crime Patrol, War Against Crime!, Vault of Horror, Tales From the Crypt, Weird Fantasy and The Haunt of Fear were captivating reads, particularly for lads raised on a diet of Desperate Dan, Biffo the Bear and old-fashioned heroes and villains of Empire. EC comics were no ordinary adventures. These were stories of violent revenge, punishment, guilt and retribution. Death’s Double Cross, Under Cover and Snapshot of Death and countless stories like them delivered a jolt to Lewis’s pre-teenage imagination. He was enthusiastic about the vivid colours and graphic narratives, the more horrific the better. The byline of his and Nick Turner’s favourite comic featured a gleefully sadistic character hunting roadkill in dark city streets spouting the mantra: ‘Blood and guts all over the street, and me without a spoon to eat.’

Retrospectively viewed as a highpoint in pop culture in the period before concerns about juvenile delinquency in the United States prompted senate hearings to neuter their alleged impact on American youth, early EC comics have a parallel in the pre-censorship film industry of the early 1930s. Eventually, they would be codified and sanitised. They were bold, entertaining and featured tough heroes, deviant victims, good stories, sharp dialogue and eye-catching artwork. Some stories, like those of artist Johnny Craig, were naturalistic and had moral undertones. Others were gratuitously violent or overtly sexual. Lewis was enthralled by torture scenes, double-crosses in shadowy alleyways, gangsters in fedoras and hard-bitten detectives. They also began to influence the way he wrote, finding expression in the pages of his drawings. His comic strips and fictional characters were more colourful and they now had speech balloons.

An American comic in Barton in the early 1950s would have seemed a wildly exotic item and a prized possession. Although Bertha enthusiastically provided her son with whatever he needed to keep him happy and occupied, it is unlikely she would have been able to find, or would necessarily have approved of, the comics had she been aware of their content. Buying comics was a challenge for Lewis and the other boys. Often they were handed on by the older members of the Riverbank Boys, those with pocket money, part-time jobs or paper rounds. It was said they could be bought from sailors who came through the docks at Hull and Immingham. Martin Turner remembers buying them from a novelty shop in Cleethorpes – a thriving holiday resort and popular destination for daytrippers an hour or so from Barton on the train.

Lewis was absent from school for several months. Illness had left him physically fragile. It had also deepened the already close bond between mother and son. In later years, he told one friend of a game they played in which Bertha would ask, ‘Who are you going to marry?’ To which he would answer, ‘You, mummy’. Bertha was determined he should be back to full health before returning to school. On warm afternoons, she set a chair in front of the house and allowed him to sit outside. Friends remember passing on their way home from school, stopping to talk to the boy swathed in blankets. He became something of a curiosity, the illness marking him out as different. When they asked why he wasn’t at school he told them he had ‘heartache’.

A school class photo, taken in the summer of 1949, shows a group of children, smart, but perhaps a little dowdy in hand-me-downs or the best that clothing coupons could buy. Lewis sits at the front, distinct, with his longish blond fringe swept across his forehead. He looks healthy, smiling. By the time he left Barton County in the summer of 1951, a promisingly bright boy, perhaps a little more fragile than most and extremely shy, the strict regimen of schooldays had sown the seeds of a quiet rebellion. As he regained strength, Lewis spent more time with friends, exploring the landscape and absorbing his surroundings: the River Humber, its windswept shores, rolling grey-brown tides, hidden nooks, disused tile and brickworks, jetties, broad bays and river-borne traffic were fertile grounds for the ...

Table of contents

• GETTING CARTER
• About the author
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• 8
• 9
• 10
• Illustrations
• Copyright