Retro columnist Monica Dyson recalls 1950s Sheffield coffee bars

People are obsessed by coffee and it was rare to find an empty coffee bar, a year or so ago at least!

However, like everything else, Covid-19 has affected one of our best-loved British traditions and the news that Costa Coffee was cutting over 1,600 jobs nationwide was greeted with dismay.

Working from home through the pandemic has meant that no longer could you see vast numbers of office workers walking with polystyrene coffee cup glued to hand in office-dense and transport hub locations. Now they were having to put the kettle on at home!

There was also the economics of buying coffee when people started to become more cautious about spending on things not thought necessary.

However in the early 1950s, coffee bars were looked upon as ‘dens of iniquity’ by our parents when some appeared in the centre of Sheffield, although by the 1960s they were just considered part of the ‘swinging 60s’

The first coffee bar in London’s Soho called Moka was opened in 1953 by the film star Gina Lollobrigida. From then on as they snowballed, young people had somewhere to hang out and socialise.

With London becoming the world’s most hippy city, within a decade they attracted young people from music, fashion, film, photography and the criminal underworld, even though they were completely unlicensed. Avant garde London had arrived, and it was drinking coffee! And it was a great way to get out of the grey air of post-war depression that was still around.

In Britain then, tea was very much still the most popular drink, with tea urns standing side by side with the newly-innovative Gaggia espresso coffee makers, but not for long when it became ‘cool’ to drink coffee and only coffee.

After all, it was something different as the only coffee that our parents ever drank was the strange-tasting Camp Coffee which was packaged in a bottle showing a Gordon Highlander soldier being served a cup of coffee on a tray by a Sikh soldier and with the slogan ‘Ready, aye, ready!’

Are the best things in life free?

The label was changed in the early 2000s, with the tray removed to erase the imperialist connotations of the Raj and the Sikh as servant, and to show him as an equal.

The new coffee bars were stylish and colourful with glass counters, red vinyl stools, new Pyrex see-through cups and saucers and large shiny jukeboxes emitting exciting sounds like Elvis Presley and That’s All Right Mama, Bill Haley with Rock Around the Clock and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers with Why Do Fools Fall in Love.

In fact it was around the time of the first coffee bars that the term ‘teenagers’ was first coined.

One of the most popular and famous coffee bars in London for those to see and be seen was the 2is in Compton Street, Soho. A failing coffee bar at first until skiffle hit Britain, it soon became where talent spotters like Larry Parnes and Jack Good first approached would-be stars like Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard and Billy Fury.

One of my early memories from the 1950s is sitting in Marsden’s Teenage Tavern on Pinstone Street. It was a place of great innocence but my parents disapproved.

Had it been the El Mambo on Norfolk Street I might have been able to understand it. My father told me that he knew what happened to girls who frequented the place, and I’m still waiting to find out!

The El Mambo probably didn’t deserve its bad reputation. It was really just a place for teenagers to meet up.

Are the best things in life free?

It was situated at the back of the beautiful Cambridge Arcade where many young men looked in the window of Barney Goodman’s tailors and wished they could afford one of his stylish suits, but settled for Colvin’s or Winston’s, and which piece of architecture, like the Empire Theatre and Palace Union Street, fell victim to early demolition plans.

The El Mambo had both an early espresso machine, and what was reputed to be the first jukebox in the UK, imported from America.

The coffee bar was situated in two cellars, decorated in a Heaven or Hell theme. It cost 9d to go downstairs and you could redeem the money against a coffee or soft drink.

Many of the male clientele wore drainpipe trousers, drape coats, beetle-crusher shoes and sported DA hairstyles, with the ladies ‘dressed to kill’ in smart frocks, or pencil skirts, stockings, high-heeled shoes and beehive hairdos. Besides the teddy boys there were reputed to be, by the so-called respectable citizens, ladies of the night, criminals and immigrants. I’m not sure who was supposed to be most disreputable!

Having said that, it was the haunt of a number of young and respectable Arab men who had been recruited from Aden to work in the Sheffield steelworks and who found it a safe and unprejudiced place to meet. However, many 1950s Sheffielders were most disapproving of the concept of white women mixing with foreigners, especially those with dark skins.

Singer Jim Dale, who was appearing at the Empire Theatre across the road from the El Mambo and who popped in from time to time, gave an impromptu concert. That was at a time when it cost 9d a seat in the ‘gods’ at the Empire.

The front of the El Mambo was blown off during the early 1960s, it never reopened, and a little bit of Sheffield history disappeared together with the Cambridge Arcade.

New coffee bar chains opened over the years but they were never quite as exciting!

Thank you to all who support local journalism with a digital or print subscription to The Star. The events of 2020 mean trusted, local journalism is more reliant than ever on your support. We couldn't do it without you. Subscribe here www.thestar.co.uk/subscriptions so we can keep campaigning on your behalf. Stay safe.