Norman Balon, notoriously rude landlord of the Coach and Horses in Soho

Norman Balon, the former landlord of the Coach and Horses in Greek Street, Soho, who has died aged 99, described himself in his autobiography You’re Barred, You Bastards (1991) as “London’s rudest landlord”; few patrons, regular or otherwise, would have disagreed with him.

The title of the book did not do full justice to Balon’s unique approach to customer relations, for his usual mode of address to those he took against was very much more robust: “F--- off, you c---!” Those destined to experience his abrasive approach included Northerners (“they will insist on finishing their drinks”); “vile young people drinking out of bottles”; foreign tourists “with their f---ing two glasses of lemonade and three straws” and brewery executives: “One came in once and started putting up shelf strips. I slung him out by his collar and the seat of his pants.”

No one was entirely immune from Balon’s spleen. When Neil Kinnock turned up one day, Balon told him: “I don’t talk to has-beens.”

“Are you being served?” he asked a female customer. “I’d like a pint of bitter and a gin and tonic,” came the reply. “I didn’t f------ ask you what you wanted. I asked you if you were being served.” One journalist reported that he had in his notebook a Balon sentence consisting of nine words of which only the first three — “​You are a…” — were quotable. “I just can’t be bothered with bores,” Balon confessed. “If I say to you ‘Shut up’ and you don’t, then I sling you out.”

Around 80 per cent of Balon’s customers were said to be regulars — quite an achievement in the shifting sands of Theatreland. Given the quality of the food and service on offer, it is probable that the reason that the pub began to be crowded was the proximity of the Coach and Horses to the offices of the satirical magaz​ine Private Eye.

The pub was frequented by the magazine’s staff from the early 1970s, and scribes and celebrities were invited to dish the dirt on their friends at fortnightly lunches held in the upstairs room, formerly his family dining room, with terrible wallpaper.​

As a family home it was an odd, rambling, echoing, dark building, with its steepl​y turning stairs, windowless passages, random cubby-holes, bare floorboards and an upper floor that was eventually abandoned to mice and the occasional pigeon that somehow got in under the eaves. Later, Balon allowed the painter Rupert Shrive to use a third-floor room as a studio.

Even after the family moved out of the pub, Norman’s mother would sit in the morning near the gas fire near the lavatory folding napkins, polishing cutlery and making remarks like: ‘It’s terribly cold, isn’t it?’ As the years went on she developed a habit of secreting forks in her handbag and Norman would instigate a search of the bag and the pockets of her fur coat before she went home.

Tall and stoop-shouldered, with a menacing grin and brilliantined hair (“like Walter Matthau’s younger brother”), Balon was immortalised in the Eye’s pages in Michael Heath’s cartoon, “The Regulars”, and by Jeffrey Bernard in his Low Life columns in The Spectator (“His egomania and what passes for his wit has all but emptied the pub,” complained Bernard in one column).

By the mid-1980s he would cry, ‘I’m famous! I’m famous!’ with innocent pride as he came into the pub waving a copy of the Standard diary column with his name in. Eventually he even painted a corner of wall outside, above the advertisement for ‘Fine ales and wines’ with the word ‘NORMAN’S’ in large capitals. No one ever called it that. It was always the Coach.

Keith Waterhouse’s play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell (1989), starring Peter O’Toole, featured Bernard locked in to the pub overnight, awaiting Balon’s rescue.

Norman and Jeffrey probably loved each other, if Jeffrey ever loved anyone. They certainly had rows – “You’re barred, and don’t come back” – but he did.

Bernard, it seems, was one who brought out his nicer side. “When he died, I said he was the nicest sh-- in the world, but he was still a sh--,” Balon recalled. “ I remember him passing out in here about 15 years ago. I said, ‘You’ll never get another drink in here,’ and then I thought about it and realised that it was better that he got drunk in here rather than somewhere people didn’t care about him.”

Another favourite was the campaigning journalist Paul Foot (“a lovely man”), although Balon recalled in Foot’s disfavour that when Private Eye was nearly bankrupt due to libel costs and asked for cheaper lunches, “He was the only one who wanted to keep smoked salmon on the menu.”

Norman was a bad loser at chess, at which Conan Nicholas (the man who invented cat-racing) was often eager to issue a challenge, since he was the stronger player. But even as a chess-player, even if he swept the pieces off the board when he lost, Norman was not utterly despicable.

Nor did he like good manners in others. When the actor Tom Baker was overheard apologising after treading on someone’s foot, Balon barked ‘Oi, stop being so bloody polite!’ He never minded his customers being abusive: “Call me what you like – as long as you spend money.”

Norman Balon was born in Ilford in on January 13 1927 into an atheist Jewish family and brought up in Bournemouth, where his family owned two hotels.

After one of the two hotels was bombed, the family moved to London and Norman’s father acquired the tenancy of The Coach and Horses on February 3 1943. Norman, aged 16, left school that day and started working behind the bar.

He soon became a hardened drinker, putting away a bottle of Scotch a night.

Once he overdid things at a charity ball at Grosvenor House and had to be smuggled out through the kitchens in a trunk. A short stint running a high-class restaurant was a failure and he soon returned to the seedy familiarity of the family pub. Later, when his father became a fire inspector, he took over as landlord. He also became teetotal.

During the war the pub’s clientele mainly consisted of British-born Italians, American servicemen and Maltese gangsters who ran the Soho sex trade. Balon recalled flying bombs blowing in the pubs windows, and an occasion in 1945 when a black ​American GI came in with a white woman, and all the other American soldiers drew guns.

After the war, the pub became a haunt of a shifting crowd of poets, painters, prostitutes, bohemians and crooks – “Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, Francis Bacon,” Balon reminisced. They rubbed shoulders with low-life characters such as French Vera, No-Knickers Joyce, Sid the Swimmer and Iron-Foot Jack.

But when London began to “swing” in the 1960s, Soho was invaded by a melange of new wave actors, directors, composers and pop stars, many with provincial accents. Balon never really accustomed himself to the change. When a road manager brought The Beatles in he refused to take their cheque because he did not recognise them.

Nor did Balon approve of attempts to “clean up” the area: “Soho in the old days was a bank manager’s day out, a place where people came for a touch of naughtiness,” he reminisced. “Soho should exist on prostitutes, artists, homosexuals and lesbians, but Westminster Council has sanitised the area, which has caused huge damage… Also I quite firmly believe that when the one-way system was introduced it sounded the death knell of Soho as I knew it.”

The Blair government’s controversial new Licensing Act was the last straw, and in 2005, after 62 years’ splenetic service behind the bar, Balon announced his intention to sell up and retire.

With regard to affairs of the heart, Balon’s credo was that love is a very overrated emotion, but he never quite managed to live up to his own principles. A well dressed 6ft 4in, and the beneficiary of a weekly haircut, he was never happier than when escorting a lady to a first night. He prided himself on being a world expert on mint chocolates.

He married Suzanne in 1962; they had two daughters. One day, regulars came into the pub and found Norman sitting at the table near the lavatory with a heap of matchboxes, scratching away at the labels. He had had them printed with his name and that of his wife Suzanne. Now that they had parted he was scraping her name off each one.

From 1985 he lived with Grazia Weiner, an Italian translator whom he referred to as his “Venetian virago”.​ They eventually married.

Norman Balon, born January 13 1927, died May 31 2026

[Source: Daily Telegraph]