Bobby Henrey, his parents and wartime London

The Soho Bites podcast bills itself as 'a show about movies set in Soho, the beating heart of bohemian, cosmopolitan London". But its latest episode is about a film that isn't set in Soho but had its genesis there: Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol.

I've written before about this film, which contains one of the great child performances. The actor, Bobby Henrey, now a retired accountant and hospital chaplain, spoke about the experience of making the film in a video I posted on here a few years ago.

But the podcast talks first about his life before the film, and touches on some fascinating social history. As a child in London he lived in a flat in Mayfair, not because his parents were rich but because they were short of money. The rich had fled central London because of the Blitz, so the rents for such properties had collapsed. 

And he talks about the books his parents published on London life under the shared pseudonym 'Mrs Robert Henrey'. It was seeing Bobby's photo on the jacket of his parents' A Village in Piccadilly that led the people making The Fallen Idol to offer him an audition.

Roger Greaves, Soho Bites tells us. is writing a study of the Mrs Robert Henrey books. By the sound of them, they contain a lot of interesting social history. I did once quote one of them about London just after the war:

There is, perhaps, no better example than Chesham Mews of the way the well-to-do, unable any longer to keep establishments worthy of their station, have descended upon the accommodation which their forebears allotted to the groom and to the coachman. 

The clerks and typists of the Ministry of Education filled the noble rooms of the former aristocratic mansions in the Square, while the aristocrats slept in hay-lofts over their cars for which, in another month, they would no longer be given any basic allowance of petrol.

And for this podcast, Bobby Henrey - except he has always been Robert Henrey as an adult - was interviewed on his eighty-fourth birthday about something he did when he was eight. Child stardom is a strange phenomenon.