My Father and the Silver King…………… Gail Holst-Warhaft

He ran away from home in the East End of London when he was seven years old. He lived on the streets, joining a gang of child pickpockets and at nine went to sea as a ‘ship’s boy.’ After a grueling trip around Cape Horn, he returned to London and found a job in a bicycle shop. When one of the first motor cars in London was brought in for repair, he fell in love with it. By the time he was a teenager, he had become a chauffeur and driving instructor for coachmen and butlers whose employers wanted to own a car, often driving customers to the Music Halls and theaters. A favorite melodrama of his day was The Silver King, a play in which the wronged hero is redeemed after he makes a fortune in a silver mine in South America. When he saw it, my father made up his mind to become ‘The Silver King.’
One of my father’s regular customers was a doctor who took him to Australia as his chauffeur. The doctor, who had relatives in Australia, traveled there to bet on the 1905 Melbourne Cup. My father saw there were only three cars at the race-course. He realized that if he could buy a car he could make money from it. He told the doctor that if he stayed in Australia he thought he could become “a gentleman.” His employer released him and he looked for a way to make money quickly. He was told that cutting sugar cane in Queensland was dangerous and dirty work, but paid well. After a season cutting cane my father returned to Melbourne and borrowed enough money to buy a car. A year later he had set up a successful hire-car business.
My father and his friends had learned to skate in London, tying iron blades on their shoes. In Melbourne he went skating at the brand-new ice rink where he soon became a champion figure-skater. It was there, at the ‘Glaciarium’, that he met his future wife, Gretchen. They soon married and had two children.
One day my father saw a sign on a small shed advertising a business for sale for fifty pounds. The owner, a Frenchwoman called Madame Gouge, told my father that her late husband had started something new in Australia called “dry cleaning.” My father bought the business and traveled to Europe to learn all he could about dry cleaning. He decided to keep the name of the owner and called his company Gouge Dry Cleaning. It became a great success, expanding throughout the state until there were over a hundred branches in Victorian towns. Over the next decades he realized his dream of being ‘The Silver King.’ He built a mansion in a fashionable suburb of Melbourne, and his children went to private schools. Later they became prominent members of Melbourne’s social scene. While my father was away on a business trip to Europe, my father’s first wife, Gretchen, died. Soon afterwards, he began courting his wife’s niece, Marion, seventeen years his junior, who would become my mother. They married in 1937 and had a son, Antony. When the Americans entered the Pacific Theatre in World War II, officers sent their uniforms to be cleaned there. I was born during the war.
When my father retired, he bought a poultry farm in Eltham. He made no money from it but we enjoyed living in the country and becoming part of an unusual community of artists. My father had dreamed of showing me the London he had told me so much about, and when I graduated from the university we traveled to Europe. He was disappointed in London and complained that there was nothing left of his colorful East End. Only at Billingsgate fish market did he catch a glimpse of the cockney world that had formed him and which he had raised his children on.
I was living in Greece when my father died. He had visited me there and impressed the Greeks by dancing in a taverna. I often wonder how much of my interest in the Greek music of the 1920s and 30s I owed to my father and to the Music Hall songs he sang to me as a child. His life was, of course, a rags-to-riches story not so uncommon in his day, but writing his story I came to see what an unusual and daring man he had been. One of the most intelligent things he did, perhaps, was to marry my studious, bookish mother, a marriage that turned out to be as successful as any of his other ventures.