FAMOUS TAVERN IN NEW HANDS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLII, Issue 20610, 26 December 1936, Page 4

FAMOUS TAVERN IN NEW HANDS

LINK WITH WAR-TIME POPULAR WITH MANY CELEBRITIES LONDON. December 5. The Railway Tavern, the famous “Charlie Brown’s” of the West India Dock Road, has passed into other hands. The shelves which bore Charlie Brown's collection of curios, valued at £40,000, stand bare. The visitors’ book, which contained even Royal signatures —King Alfonso wrote his name there—has gone. Charlie Brown’s daughter, Mrs E. J. Chandler, and her husband, have given the place up and gone into temporary retirement. The only link left with the centre of the pre-war and war-time East End, with its dancing and its singing and its lights, is the Blue Posts, over the road, run by Charlie Brown’s son, which still houses part of the curio collection.

Mr and Mrs Chandler have moved into a small house in one of the East London suburbs. In its dining-room and drawing-room stand the best of the curios. The rest are in store. One small room is full of treasures frdta the East. Glazed Buddhas perch on the window ledges. A huge carved ebony cabinet almost fills one wall. A tall bronze figure takes up one corner, and an ivory temple another. Treasured in the house is the visitor’s book in which celebrities from all over the world signed their names. None of these things has ever been insured, in spite of their value. It was said that no crook in all the East End would touch any of Charlie Brown’s things. None ever did. “I have lived in the old Railway Tavern for forty-one years—l was there as a little girl—and all that time my father was collecting his treisures,” said Mrs Chandler. “He had agents all over the world who let him know if they had anything good; if he liked it, he bought it.” Mrs Chandler went on to recollect some of the scenes she had witnessed in “Charlie Brown’s” at the height of its fame. Film stars, diplomats, celebrities of every sort, and even Royalty he has seen there, she said, and hundreds of tourists, who came dow’ every night to look at the collection. Seamen wandered in from all over the world, often carrying with them some curiosity they had picked up in far away ports.

During the war the licensing hours were amazingly long and singing and dancing w’eilt on at “Charlie’s Brown’s” at almost any hour of the day. The reason, Mrs Chandler told me, was that the Secret Service knew if a man they wanted had come into the London Docks he was sure to turn up at "Charlie Brown’s” before very long. So they stayed open. “The East End doesn’t seem the same to me now.” she continued, "and it won’t to a good many other people. There will never be another house like the old Railway Tavern.”