Queens of Bohemia E-Book

Darren Coffield

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 650

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Our story begins in 1920s London, at a time when women's rights were surging after the long battle for suffrage and nightclubs emerged as spaces where single women could socialise unchaperoned. This was the age of the dance craze and the gender-bending 'Flapper', who inspired the creation of the Gargoyle club, a nocturnal hunting ground for Femmes Fatales. Meanwhile, London's Bohemia was ruled by the 'Queen of Clubs', Kate Meyrick; the taboo-breaking 'Tiger Woman', Betty May; the original 'Chelsea Girl', Viva King; the artist, Nina Hamnett; the 'Euston Road Venus', Sonia Orwell; and Isabel Rawsthorne, artist, spy, pornographer, model and muse … to name but a few. Using previously unpublished memoirs and interviews, Queens of Bohemia creates a soundscape of voices that gives the reader a taste of their world, so exotic and yet often wracked with despair. It offers a unique insight into a generation of women for whom ideals of duty and self-sacrifice had been debunked by the horrors of war and whose morality resided in being true to one's self, as they took their struggle for freedom into the wider world and learned to value their individuality along the way.

Leseprobe

Also by Darren Coffield

Factual Nonsense: The Art and Death of Joshua Compston

Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia

Photographers of the Colony Room Club

For the women in my life

First published 2024

This paperback edition first published 2025

The History Press

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© Darren Coffield, 2024, 2025

The right of Darren Coffield to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

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ISBN 978 1 80399 575 5

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A Note on Subject Matter

This book is a distillation of complex events in which many famous men do not appear, as they held little or no importance in these women’s lives.

Warning

This book does not impose current attitudes on mid-twentieth-century values and contains language that some may find offensive along with descriptions of child abuse, abortion, miscarriage, child killing, domestic violence, drug addiction, gender dysphoria, incest, misogyny, mental abuse, paedophilia, racism, rape and sodomy.

Fitzrovia: North Bohemia

Soho: South Bohemia

The Chelsea Set

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Act I: Queendom Come

1    Fitzrovian Femmes

2    Femmes Fatales

3    Sladies

4    Viva la Vie Bohème

5    Let’s Blitz Bohemia

6    The Lost Girls

7    Café Society

Act II: Bohemia Redux

8    Ripping Yarns

9    The Gluepot Gang

10  Sisterhood of Sin

11  The Coach & Divorces

12  Pond Life

13  Acid Queens

14  Lost Horizon

Act III: Death Becomes Thee

15  The Monster Club

16  Get Smart

17  Dangerous Muse

18  Queen of Heaven

19  From Beijing to Bohemia

20  Absolute Hell

21  Quashed Queens

22  Queen and Country

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Credits

Biography of Contributors

Notes

Bibliography

Forewordby Marianne Faithfull

What the hell happened to bohemia? It took a hundred years for poets, painters and talented layabouts to create and just twenty years for slick pseudo-hipsters to fuck it all up. It’s the curse of hollow tinsel bohemia! Everybody’s cool and nobody knows what the hell it means. It’s just prêt-à-porter bohemia … consumer cool … I was happier back in the old bohemia. Art was more intense, purer. Sex was hotter too – more repressed! And there was a genuine intellectual bohemia instead of this hipster-lite culture we have today. It was much smaller, much more authentic.

I need a time machine to take me back to when Caroline Blackwood was a dear friend – an inspiration, mentor and role model of the oddest sort. She defied reality, housekeeping and common sense with such hilarious results; but what really held her friends and lovers under her spell was her stinging wit and nihilistic take on life. Her novels are dark fables, and her life was just as extravagant, magical and filled with black humour … she was clearly an instrument of the sacred god of chaos!

Then there was Henrietta Moraes – the epitome of that bohemian life that’s now gone. Her reckless intensity of spirit magnetically attracted people to her. Henrietta had friends from the gutter to the aristocracy whom she both terrorised and enchanted. I thought she was so beautiful – to the point where the ‘Gypsy Faerie Queen’ in my song is Henrietta, stomping about with a stick. She was blessed with a thirst for ecstasy and oblivion, a bold eye for a promising sexual encounter and uncanny antennae for alcohol and drugs. She inhabited a sort of enchanted space where the oddest, most unlikely things happened. She was the perfect muse for Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon – who painted her many times. She’d often quote Francis Bacon. He was an incredibly important person in her life. She travelled on her own loopy groove, avoiding the straight world entirely. Henrietta was very kind to me when I needed someone to be kind to me. When I was really in a bad way and in deep shit on heroin, Hen would come over and look after me. She loved me.

Francis Bacon became an important person in my life too. Whenever I bumped into him, he treated me as a long-lost friend. I don’t know why – maybe he saw a kindred spirit? The people who crossed my path when I was a junkie were all gay men. I was really bad at being a junkie – it was a degrading experience – but apparently not degrading enough! The Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher explained to me that the problem with my life story becoming the basis for a feature film was that it wasn’t bad enough. I thought I’d degraded myself plenty, but apparently not. I guess I wasn’t thinking of the movie rights … take me back to the old bohemia!

Tallulah’s on the warpath. (Author’s collection)

Introduction

Who Were the Bohemians?

Bohemian was a term used for those who lived unconventional lives. When the first Romani gypsies appeared in sixteenth-century France they were labelled bohemian, and their nonconformist lifestyle and dress caught the popular imagination. By the twentieth century, a new generation of British women began rejecting the protection of the traditional family hierarchy and fashioned themselves a new identity through the arts, and in doing so turned the idea of Victorian respectability on its head by becoming the new bohemians.

Current scientific theory suggests that the universe is held together by some underlying force that we do not recognise called dark matter. While finishing my biography, Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia, I realised that women were the dark matter holding bohemia together and keeping its stars in their orbit. The women appear in numerous biographies and texts as individuals, but no one has attempted to write a book that shows how they existed as contemporaries of one another – telling their stories, side by side. So, I decided to compile an account of these extraordinary women, to explain how these stars gravitated together. Some shone so brightly they burnt everyone around them, a few fell into decaying orbits … whilst others simply imploded.

Despite being relegated to the role of bit actors by many art historians, these women occupied and often ruled London’s bohemia: a hard territory to place (yet familiar to its inhabitants) where friendship could mean more than family and diversity was accepted. Bohemia combined the districts of Fitzrovia and Soho, the last two remaining villages in London’s West End. Always the centre of immigrant life, bohemia saw wave after wave of newcomers making it an area steeped in social and cultural diversity. It provided an escape from oppressive uniformity, where exotic items and contraband could be sourced. Here women felt free from the narrow confines of a patriarchal society; everyone from cross-dressers to unmarried mothers were accepted on their own merit. Bohemia was a giant jigsaw puzzle where a mass of Miss-fits and other odd pieces that didn’t fit into wider society would gather. Here you could live the life of a mistress, muse, hostess, wife, mother, author, free spirit, worker, artist, entertainer, etc. Some of the roles were already in existence but, in bohemia, all of the boundaries blurred and that was part of its appeal.

Bohemia has had a long association with artists, and it was the eighteenth-century painter and co-founder of the Royal Academy of Arts, Angelica Kaufmann, who helped kick off the trend. Bohemia offered women recognition as individuals at a time when they were controlled by men. Women couldn’t open a bank account or obtain a passport without a man agreeing to act as guarantor. However, many bohemian women could afford to flout social conventions because they belonged to the wealthy landowning gentry. At the bottom of the social order were the female labourers and prostitutes, who worked hard for others. Above them was an intermediate layer of women: artists, models, actresses, singers and dancers whose professions placed them at the edge of polite society.

Although barriers of sex, class and gender clearly defined daily life, they fell away for the exceptionally talented and successful. For these women, bohemia offered social mobility and a chance to move up the ladder. This motivated many working-class girls to take up modelling for artists such as Augustus John and Jacob Epstein, who both seduced and betrayed them – since what was fun for a male artist often proved ruinous for a poor girl in search of her Prince Charming.

At the time, men were considered serious creatives and women merely muses who only came down from their pedestals to do the housework. This stereotype began in 1894 with George du Maurier’s best-selling novel, Trilby, about a working-class model, Trilby O’Ferrall, who falls in love with a posh bohemian painter called ‘Little Billee’ and declares, ‘There is no place like the gutter for getting a clear view of the stars’. The tear-jerking story of their doomed romance caught the popular imagination and affected the habits of many young women, who began to call themselves ‘bachelor girls’:

‘I had long yearned for the sort of studio life described in Trilby … I would gaze up at the large windows and see myself among crowds of artists and musicians.’

VIVA KING

Queens of Bohemia and Other Miss-fits begins in the 1920s, when the suffragettes had fought hard for equality and nightclubs became the new social spaces where women could socialise unchaperoned. Kate Meyrick’s ‘43’ club on Gerrard Street scandalised society and inspired the creation of The Gargoyle Club, a hunting ground for Femmes Fatales and film stars. This was the age of the ‘Dance Craze’ and the arrival of the gender-bending ‘flapper’ – a flat-chested androgynous-looking female with boyish cropped hair who caused outrage by drinking, smoking and partying. Until then, a woman’s pleasure was to be found in everyday banalities such as running the household and making a virtue from the acceptance of a woman’s lot.

In 1928, women obtained the right to vote and began making inroads towards equality for the next decade. Then, during the Second World War, women began taking over jobs and professions previously seen as male-only – from factories and hospitals to the armed services. The languages some learnt at finishing school made them ideal contacts for secret agents, working with resistance groups whilst other women broadcasted propaganda and produced literature, entertainment and even pornography as part of the war effort. Le Petit Club Français, which opened in 1940, was run by Olwen Vaughan, who fed the French Resistance and supported Soho’s film industry with her groundbreaking ‘Documentary Boys’. After the war, the Colony Room Club became Muriel Belcher’s kingdom and, with her cheery catchphrase of ‘Hello Cunty’, she inadvertently altered the course of British art by becoming a guru to a group of painters nicknamed Muriel’s Boys: Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews.

Alongside the clubs were the numerous pubs run by women, each with its own collection of eccentrics; Annie Allchild’s Fitzroy Tavern was where the bohemian enclave of Fitzrovia derived its name, and a little further down the road was the Wheatsheaf run by Mona Glendenning. Across Oxford Street, into Soho proper, was Victorienne and Victor Berlemont’s French pub (the York Minster) and Annie Balon’s Coach & Horses. These landladies presided over their establishments like circus trainers, uncertain of what the wild beasts in their domain might do next: women such as the Tiger Woman; Betty May, known for her taboo-breaking ways; and the artist Nina Hamnett, nicknamed the Queen of Bohemia, whose patron, Princess Violette, ran an opium den in a decommissioned submarine. Then there was Sonia Orwell, nicknamed the ‘Euston Road Venus’, who became the model for the heroine, Julia, in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and her friend, Isabel Rawsthorne, artist, spy, pornographer, model and muse for some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, including Picasso, whom she considered ‘not a man any woman in her right mind could care for’. Other women turned their homes into social spaces: the artist Elinor Bellingham Smith’s ‘155 Salon’ became the social fulcrum for the post-war art crowd, where you’d find the prototype rock ’n’ roll wild child, Henrietta Moraes, much loved and painted by Francis Bacon.

For those who preferred sobriety, a simultaneous café society coexisted. There one could find Miss-fits such as the Countess, who ruled the bins of Bond Street; The Mighty Mannequin, Joan Rhodes, who developed a strongwoman act bending iron bars; and their effeminate gender-bending friend, Quentin Crisp. As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, the traditional bohemian world was absorbed by the espresso bar explosion, an invasion of coffee shops where youths gathered and British rock ’n’ roll was born. Bohemia became youth culture, musicians replaced artists and muses inspired music:

‘People say that’s what the sixties were: mass bohemia … overnight everybody wanted to be a bohemian.’

MARIANNE FAITHFULL

Some of the Queens of Bohemia identified with the cross-dressed heroines of Elizabethan literature. Adopting the appearance of a girl as a survival strategy, they blended the roles of boy and girl, man and woman, king and queen. Bohemian women and gay men had an affinity; women’s rights and gay liberation became entwined since they were fighting for similar freedoms. Making love could lead to a criminal conviction since abortion and homosexuality were both illegal. For a homosexual to admit their sexuality was career suicide, and for a creative woman to entertain having children was to potentially consign oneself to a female ‘ghetto’. Although the contraceptive pill became available in the 1960s, it would take many more years for abortion and homosexuality to be decriminalised. Female fear of sex and a horror of their own bodies was best summed up by the pop artist Pauline Boty who said she had an ‘ugly cunt’.

Many did not feel comfortable with their biology. George Jamieson gravitated to bohemia and hung out at the Fitzroy Tavern before transitioning to April Ashley, one of the first Britons to undergo sex reassignment surgery. Bohemian women posed political, moral and existential challenges to authority and gave rise to a new way of living. Many were trail-blazers, part of a dramatic wider shift in society. In this book we explore the complex dynamics of creative lives and concentrate on the gaps, the silences – extrapolating and triangulating some poorly documented lives. By revising unsound judgements and refreshing the areas of art history that academia alone cannot reach, I am attempting to establish not the fact, but the truth of what happened:

‘The facts! … They will sort you out. Beware of the facts, because they aren’t the same thing as the truth. Not at all. Not at all.’

ISABEL RAWSTHORNE

Since ancient history, women have had a difficult time being listened to – the Sphinx talked in riddles, Cassandra was fated to see the truth and not be believed and Saint Paul told the Corinthians that women should not speak in church. William Shakespeare wrote that a soft gentle voice was ‘an excellent thing in a woman’ but except for Queen Elizabeth I, public voices of women in his day were non-existent. Elizabethan women who tried to speak up for themselves were often gagged with an iron muzzle, and in our ‘enlightened’ era, a woman with a gag has become a staple of hardcore pornography. But there is more than one way to rob a woman of her voice. The problem with writing such a wide-ranging historical account is that women often take their husbands’ surnames and if a woman marries many times her various surnames obscure her identity, making her life difficult to follow. To solve this problem and make sure their story is clear and comprehensible I have generally stuck to the one name they are best known by.

Using a technique sometimes known as ‘oral history’, I have used previously unpublished memoirs and eyewitness interviews to fill the gaps of historical vision and a montage of quotes and fragments of published biographies to create a soundscape of voices, as if one were in a room listening to them talk. It also gives the reader a flavour of what it was like to be part of their bohemia, so exotic and yet occasionally rank with urine, dampness and despair.

Queens of Bohemia and Other Miss-fits is an affectionate rescue of many remarkable women from virtual obscurity. Taking personalities time has unfairly dismissed and bringing a fresh perspective on things past sometimes meant including obscure figures at the expense of conventionally important ones. To capture the essence of the female experience of bohemia, their individual portraits merge into vignettes and bleed out into broad historical vistas.

So let us go back over 100 years to the early twentieth century, to a Britain where ideas of duty, sacrifice and the greater good had been debunked by the horrors of the First World War. To a new ‘flapper generation’ of women whose morality resided in being true to oneself and not to a cause, as they took the struggle for freedom into their personal lives and learned to value their individuality along the way …

ACT I

Queendom Come1922–1942

1

Fitzrovian Femmes

Queens of the Backstreet Shebeens

DARREN COFFIELD: The 1920s was a period of great turmoil. In the aftermath of the First World War came the Great Depression, mass unemployment and strikes. Social revolution was in the air as some rebellious women sought social mobility and freedom through the arts. The artist Nina Hamnett had returned from living in Paris and found a studio by London’s Fitzroy Square, in a house once inhabited by the author of Vanity Fair, William Thackeray.

Nina had known the area from her student days. When her father refused to pay her art school fees, she took the most ‘unladylike’ job of facilitating the models for the life class and moved to Fitzrovia to be close to the two leading lights of the London art world, Walter Sickert and Roger Fry. Nina posed nude for Fry and he, in turn, posed nude for Nina. But it was not considered acceptable for a female artist to exhibit male nudes and no ‘respectable’ gallery would show them. So, Nina worked at Fry’s Omega Workshop on Fitzroy Square, painting and decorating shoddy furniture and objets d’art a few days a week. As she toiled away, fellow artist Vanessa Bell grew tired of listening to Nina’s ‘appallingly sordid stories’ and dismissed her as a lesbian.

Central to this bohemian community was the fabled Fitzroy Tavern. Everybody knew the ‘Fitzroy’ at the corner of Charlotte Street and Windmill Street as the famous haunt of artists and writers. Here the ‘Queen of Bohemia’, Nina Hamnett, and her consort, the painter Augustus John, could be seen knocking back double brandies with the model Betty May. They were served by Sally Fiber’s mother, Annie, who had dreamed of going to college and being a fine lady but ended up working in a pub …

SALLY FIBER: The area was acquiring a cosmopolitan flavour from the foreigners living there … struggling artists and immigrants came looking for cheap lodgings. Studios were plentiful and the narrow streets were full of pubs and restaurants where they could meet, talk, laugh, borrow money, and get drunk. These then made up the first Fitzrovians, a motley but interesting collection of people. They were writers, poets, sculptors and composers as well as artists, and cultivated an unconventional bohemian style of values … A special Fitzrovian atmosphere grew – a heady bohemian mix in contrast to the smarter, more sophisticated Bloomsbury set on the other side of Tottenham Court Road … The leading light of this artistic community was Nina Hamnett … Not surprisingly Nina found London quite dull after her ostentatious life in Paris.

JACK LINDSAY: She was an odd indomitable character: a bohemian snob who collected names. Not that it mattered to her whether the significance of your name lay in a title, a boxing championship, a criminal record or skill in training fleas, an abnormal beer-capacity or high achievement in art. Her aquiline blunt-tipped nose, her brow sloping a little back and her chin slightly retreating, suggested accurately enough her eager appetite for persons and places, as if her childhood had been spent with that prominent nose pressed against windowpanes …

BETTY MAY: Nina Hamnett … was the only girl I had ever seen then with short hair. She had a lovely boyish figure and she always had her own crowd of friends round her, as she was a very amusing talker and quite one of the most attractive personalities …

CELINE HISPICHE: The life of a bohemian was first described by Henri Mürger, whose Parisian scenes were used for Puccini’s opera, La Bohème. Practically every Fitzrovian had spent a period in Paris enjoying its pleasures. On her first evening there, Nina was accosted by the painter Modigliani and bought a drawing.

NINA HAMNETT: Picasso and the really good artists thought him very talented and bought his works, but the majority of the people in the Quarter thought of him only as a perfect nuisance and told me that I was wasting my money.

DARREN COFFIELD: Nina drank absinthe with Picasso, helped the sculptor Jacob Epstein pull the tarpaulin off Oscar Wilde’s tomb and entered the orbit of Gertrude Stein’s salon. Nina’s Parisian address book outflanked that of any other British artist but unfortunately her funds were never as grand as her circle of friends. She lived on a nomadic knife-edge and eventually returned to London penniless.

MICHAEL LUKE: To avoid the threatening boredom of London, Nina was determined to rediscover the kind of carefree, spontaneous life … that she had known in Paris. But there was no equivalent of the French cafe … The pub, therefore, would have to play the part of cafe in her life – a casual meeting-place of no commitment, but lively and inviting to the unexpected.

NINA HAMNETT: We chose the ‘Fitzroy Tavern’ … It became a meeting place and not only did one meet people but one did a lot of business there also.

MICHAEL LUKE: The term ‘Fitzrovia’ … did not derive, as might be expected, from either the square or the street of that name, but rather from the pub with the high bar-stool near the door, which Nina decided to make her own.

SALLY FIBER: Nina had an enormous following whom she introduced to the Fitzroy. Sitting erect on her bar stool, she ruled supreme as ‘Queen of Bohemia’ … Her only acknowledged rival for this crown was Sylvia Gough, but Sylvia was a pale shadow of her former glory. A millionaire’s daughter and once a stunning beauty, she had danced with the Ziegfeld Follies in New York and had been a model for Augustus John. But by now Sylvia was almost penniless, frail and ‘skeletal’ …

DARREN COFFIELD: … her Achilles heel was the young men who bled her dry. Nina’s friend, Augustus John, had been cited as a co-respondent in one of Sylvia’s divorces and her sons, whom she never saw, went to Eton. Bohemia was a breeding ground for bad habits; however, Sylvia maintained her hygiene and would spend her last sixpence on a bath. Her opening line was, ‘Darling, I haven’t eaten for three days. Buy me a gin’. Sylvia and Nina had an understanding that they wouldn’t poach on each other’s territory. Nina was supposed to illustrate a history of the Fitzroy Tavern but the project never got past the synopsis …

CELINE HISPICHE: … which went something like this: Annie’s parents, Judah and Jane Kleinfeld were poor Jewish emigrés who had come to Britain to escape the oppression of Tsarist Russia. After a successful career as a tailor, Judah took over a local pub known as The Hundred Marks (in 1919), renamed it the Fitzroy Tavern and a legend was born. Annie had won a scholarship to college but her dreams of a career were curtailed when her father asked her to help him run the pub. His grasp of written English was not good, so Annie did all the paperwork and kept the pub running.

SALLY FIBER: Annie made friends with many of the artistic patrons of the Fitzroy, particularly Nina … A great empathy developed between them in the early days. Nina watched with great interest as Annie matured from a teenager to a fine young woman and always remembered her birthday by giving her signed photos of herself to mark the occasion. One such dedication was ‘To Miss Kleinfeld in admiration of her amazing intellectual progress …’

DARREN COFFIELD: On a Derby Day outing with her father, Annie was very taken with their coach driver, Charles Allchild. Love blossomed, and they eventually married. By law Judah could not pass the business on to his daughter, as women had few legal rights and could not be the sole licensee of a public house, so Annie and Charles Allchild became the joint licensees and tenants.

MICHAEL LUKE: Nina padded daily through the sawdust on the floor of the Fitzroy and hitched herself up to perch at the bar, head cocked, long legs crossed, drinking beer in lieu of the unobtainable absinthe. She passed the word to Augustus John … that she had now established herself at a watering hole … Soon they were joined by Nina’s new friend, Constant Lambert …

DARREN COFFIELD: Nina had been a student of Constant’s father, George Lambert. As well as being a composer and musician, Constant was also a first-class mimic who would entertain everyone at the bar with his collection of false noses and beards. Nina encouraged Constant to fasten money to a dart and throw it at the Fitzroy’s ceiling. The idea came from the loser of a darts match who threw his dart in the air. When it lodged in the ceiling, someone remarked: ‘That would be a good way to raise money for charity.’ It soon became a popular game among the customers and the ceiling became known as the ‘Pennies from Heaven’.

Fitzrovian femmes: Nina Hamnett, Annie Allchild and Betty May. (Courtesy of Jon Fiber)

SALLY FIBER: Annie and her father also introduced a loan club. To meet the costs of Christmas, customers were encouraged to save. Monday night was loan night and people would pay in anything from sixpence per week. A procession of old ladies in shawls and bonnets, old men – some with walrus moustaches – and a few younger folk lined up in the saloon bar to hand in their contributions to Annie … Nina would sit in the corner of the bar and sketch people as they queued to hand in their money. Annie was fascinated by the speed and deftness with which Nina worked … Though not her best, the results were still good enough for the front of each of the deluxe editions of her successful autobiography, The Laughing Torso … The ‘torso’ was Nina’s; as a young art student she was described as having ‘one of the most beautiful bodies in London’ by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. This talented but ill-fated artist became one of her many lovers and admirers and immortalised her in his statue Torso of Nina … It now stands in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

DARREN COFFIELD: Whenever Annie introduced Nina to someone new, Nina would say, ‘You know me, m’dear – I’m in the V&A with me left tit knocked off!’ As a child, Nina had rebelled against her family’s military background, where girls counted for nothing. Her father despaired of Nina’s bohemian behaviour and told Nina that her ‘relatives wanted to know how she really earned her living’. For them, being a female artist was akin to being a prostitute, and her parents made no secret of the fact that they’d have preferred a boy, which probably helped Nina stretch the boundaries of being a girl.

SALLY FIBER: If Nina was Queen, then the great portrait painter, Augustus John, had to be the Prince of Bohemia … he was the bohemian artist par excellence. Conspicuous with bright-red beard and tousled mane of hair under a broad-brimmed hat, he would step into the Fitzroy, his gold earrings flashing and his black cloak swirling around him.

CELINE HISPICHE: Nina and Augustus both came from Tenby, in Wales and were schooled by the same teachers. Augustus was the male equivalent of Nina, living the bohemian life to the full. His swashbuckling gypsy look was combined with a personal magnetism. At that time he was the highest-paid painter in Britain and considered a heroic genius.

DARREN COFFIELD: Augustus and Nina had numerous lovers but the bohemian notion of ‘free love’ was more problematical for a woman. Augustus’ philandering was seen as masculine prowess, whereas Nina’s promiscuity was portrayed as prostitution. Men could break social protocols – have sex outside of marriage and live a dissolute lifestyle – but women lacked legal rights to behave independently. Nina’s lover, Roger Fry, complained about her promiscuity, declaring: ‘You are the most fascinating, exciting, tantalizing, elusive, capricious, impulsive, beautiful, exasperating creature in the world.’

NINA HAMNETT: I know you are interested in art history so I’ll tell you a thing … the difference between Roger [Fry] and Sickert, was this: Sickert always knew I was a bitch. Roger, bless his heart, never guessed.

WALTER SICKERT: Nina Hamnett had the luck to be born with the two complementary gifts that are needed for the equipment of the complete artist. She draws like a born sculptor and paints like a born painter. Either gift is rare, and the chances against the coincidence are enormous.

DARREN COFFIELD: Sickert had painted a portrait of Nina and Roald Kristian whom she married and bore a child by, but neither the child nor the marriage lasted long. Having experienced the restrictions of married life, Nina never went back. A hedonist in bright yellow stockings, she loved singing bawdy songs with saucy lyrics and once appeared on stage in the chorus of Proud Maisie.

CELINE HISPICHE: I call that era the ‘Belle Epoch of London’ because it’s when the starch collar of Victorian Society is being loosened in the face of modernity. Nina would dance on tables, pull up her top and shout, ‘Modigliani said I have the best tits in Europe’. She had a punk attitude long before punk.

DARREN COFFIELD: Another largely forgotten Queen of Bohemia was Nina’s protégé, Viva King, who’d grown up in genteel poverty. Viva had met Nina through her bohemian father, who sexually abused her. Viva never forgot Nina’s kindness and eventually became part of her circle. She shared Nina’s ‘plucky’ spirit and, being a natural mimic, could reduce people to fits of laughter. She studied art at Chelsea, before falling into the orbit of another famous Fitzrovian artist, Jacob Epstein, a tempestuous and controversial character …

SALLY FIBER: … and his models were even more so! One was Dolores, a fine subject for any artist with her black hair, splendid profile and white face, which contrasted vividly with the black dress she almost always wore. Nina would take her home and do several sketches … They would work for four to five hours and then visit the Fitzroy for much needed refreshment. Dolores would argue and sometimes come to blows with Epstein’s other model, the redoubtable Betty May.

JACOB EPSTEIN: The notion that I worked from models of this kind was severely commented on in the newspapers, and one of my exhibitions was characterised … as nothing more than an exhibition of ‘semi-oriental’ sluts.

CELINE HISPICHE: Artists’ models were the pop stars of their day. The combination of sexual allure and artistic life fascinated people. The phenomenon grew from George du Maurier’s best-selling novel Trilby, a love story in which three young Englishmen go to Paris in search of bohemia. The story caught the popular imagination. It had all the ingredients: the misunderstood artist’s model and heroine, Trilby, who dies a tragic death and the ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ Svengali character who seduces her. All to the backdrop of a bohemian artist’s studio.

DARREN COFFIELD: It spawned a thousand wannabe bohemians. Viva King yearned for the artistic life described in Trilby, although the reality was not so romantic for Betty May. One model Betty walked home after a party and turned up in the newspapers the next day when her body was fished out of the Thames and a buck-toothed one, nicknamed Bunny, was strangled to death.

BETTY MAY: Among the models, beside Lilian Shelley, ‘The Bug’ … and myself, were Euphemia Lamb … Bobby Channing, Lilian Browning, a girl called ‘The Limpet,’ who fell in love about once a week, the blonde Jessica, Valda, the ballet dancer, and Eileen, another John model, who was shot by her lover in a fit of jealousy.

CELINE HISPICHE: Betty had grown up in an East End slum with her mother and slept on rags before being sent to live with her father, in a Limehouse brothel. She was so beautiful and wild – the rock ’n’ roll figure of her day, who ran away from home to go clubbing. Her life inspired David Garnett’s novel, Dope Darling: A story of Cocaine.

DAVID GARNETT: She was always asked to all the parties in the flashy bohemian world in which she moved. No dance, gambling party or secret doping orgy was complete without her. Under the effect of cocaine, which she took more and more recklessly, she became inspired with a wild frenzy …

SALLY FIBER: Betty was nicknamed ‘Tiger Woman’, on account of her wild-cat temperament. She was tiny but her angelic appearance belied her violent nature. Those green eyes could blaze with savage ferocity and woe betide the victim of her wrath. She dressed like a gypsy and delighted in shocking people. Her favourite cabaret act at the Fitzroy was to squat on all fours and drink from a saucer, to the hilarity of all … she had an enormous male fan club. Men were obsessed with her ‘pantherine’ movements and flashing eyes. One such slave was the young Oxford graduate Raoul Loveday, who Betty married. He died tragically in bizarre circumstances after being initiated into occultism. Interest in the occult was another ingredient in the spicy bohemian Fitzrovian stew. The high priest of Satanism was Aleister Crowley. Though he was a customer at the Fitzroy, his presence was not encouraged by Annie, as he was a dangerous man.

IAIN CRAWFORD: He was involved in shady necromancy, drug peddling, blasphemy, fraud, high treason and nauseating cruelty to animals in his sacrificial rites, yet ‘The Great Beast’, as he loved to call himself, was never called to account for any of his crimes. He was a liar, a swindler, a poseur and, oddly enough, a poet of ability and a daring and accomplished mountaineer.

DARREN COFFIELD: Crowley inherited his religious mania from his father who travelled far and wide preaching the Imminence of Death before dying of cancer of the tongue and leaving little Crowley with his evangelical mother who labelled her son the ‘Beast of Revelation’. So, he took her at her word and became a Satanist.

IAIN CRAWFORD: He picked up bits and pieces from a score of mystical rites and a dozen different languages and founded his own cult … Apart from the feeble-minded, most of Crowley’s disciples – who were given such attractive titles as ‘The Whore of the Stars’ and ‘The Scarlet Woman’ – were drug addicts …

CELINE HISPICHE: … who did Crowley’s bidding such as defecating on him and sexually abusing their own children. One even let him sodomise her young son. Crowley introduced people to drugs and collected them in clubs. Betty did not share her husband’s enthusiasm and considered Crowley a dangerous trickster. But her husband, Raoul, was completely under Crowley’s spell and wanted to go to his abbey in Sicily.

BETTY MAY: … I went over to speak to the Epsteins to say goodbye … I half hoped that he would be able to extricate me from my position. Surely he would be able to suggest some way out that I had not thought of. But even Epstein could only say, ‘Don’t go, Betty. If you do, one of you will never come back again.’

NINA HAMNETT: … I urged them not to go … I told Raoul that if he went, he would die, and really felt a horrible feeling of gloom when I said ‘Goodbye’ to them. After five months I had a postcard from Betty on which was written, ‘My husband died last Friday …’

DARREN COFFIELD: The young man’s death, said to be the result of a Satanic sacrifice, unleashed a newspaper attack on The Great Beast, with the hysterical headlines: ‘THE MAN WE’D LIKE TO HANG’ and ‘THE KING OF DEPRAVITY.’ The Sunday Express printed a series of interviews with Betty May, which made avid reading for the Fitzrovians since all the people in these sensational accounts were well known to them. In the Fitzroy, Betty announced she was a witch herself and would kill Crowley. And in the pub, The Great Beast undoubtedly had a presence, with his high-domed forehead and wide, magnetic eyes. Whenever he went to the bar, no one was quite sure if he was going to order something mundane or insist on a pint of virgin’s blood.

CELINE HISPICHE: There are rumours of Nina going to Sicily and painting occult murals for Crowley’s abbey. When Crowley’s book, The Diary of a Drug Fiend was published he portrayed Nina’s friend, Mary Butts as ‘a fat, bold, red-headed slut’, when in fact she was an eccentric writer who hid drug dealers in her wardrobe and carpeted her apartment with her underwear. She and her boyfriend (Cecil Maitland) both shared an interest in the occult. So, Nina introduced them to Crowley and the pair went to his Abbey.

DARREN COFFIELD: Sex with animals is prevalent in ancient folklore and The Great Beast practised bestiality. Crowley sought to elevate himself through the sexual degradation of women and animals. He persuaded Mary to take part in the rite of the goat’s copulation during which Crowley cut the animal’s throat and it bled to death over Mary’s back. After this Mary and Cecil fled the abbey, where she’d developed a heroin habit. On their return they met Nina, who said, ‘they looked like two white ghosts’. Neither of them discussed their experiences, and whenever Mary was asked, ‘What happened about the goat?’, she always changed the subject.

SALLY FIBER: Nina Hamnett in her book Laughing Torso mentioned that Crowley practised black magic … and that one day a baby vanished mysteriously. Crowley, against advice, started libel proceedings against Nina [who’d been a member of Crowley’s cult, the Silver Star] … The trial before Mr Justice Swift was a cause célèbre which was manna to the avid press. Crowley lost the case, of course, but Betty May was called as defence witness and under cross-examination she admitted that much of Nina’s autobiography was fabrication … Naturally after this the friendship between Nina and Betty cooled considerably!

DARREN COFFIELD: The trial generated a lot of publicity for Nina, whose bohemian lifestyle scandalised the press, and she became a celebrity in the gossip columns. Ever since Nina arrived at the London School of Art in 1910, she had lived the life of a bohemian, a lifestyle that paradoxically works against the creation of art. She threw herself into the heavy drinking and party set, stifling those raw emotions that would have been better channelled into her painting.

CELINE HISPICHE: There was another court case, involving Betty May and Sylvia Gough. A book reviewer, Douglas Burton, had met Betty at the Fitzroy and became obsessed with her feline ways. Sylvia Gough was living with her young boyfriend, Douglas Bose, a black magic disciple of Crowley’s. Although he beat and abused her, Sylvia said Bose’s ‘hypnotic powers’ made her stay with him. When Douglas Burton saw Sylvia sporting a black eye at the Fitzroy, he sheltered her from Bose for a few days. They attended a dinner party at the studio of an artist friend, when Bose unexpectedly turned up. Burton leapt at him with the first object to hand, a sculptor’s hammer, and killed him. The trial judge found Burton insane and called it a ‘squalid and unpleasant case’ but Betty turned the tragedy to her advantage by selling her story to the newspapers and the public enjoyed reading the lurid details.

RUTHVEN TODD: One morning … I bought one of the less restrained morning papers and … I went to the Fitzroy. Nina was ahead of me, sitting by the fire with a drink in her hand. I sat on a stool by the bar and sipped at my half of bitter while I glanced at the paper. On the third page there was a dingy photo, but my eye caught … the caption: ‘Miss Nina Hamnett, the artist and author of Laughing Torso, takes a walk in the Park with a friend’. I looked more closely at the not too clear … reproduction and started to chortle. ‘Nina,’ I called out, ‘You MUST see this. It’s damn funny’. She came over … and concentrated on the figure. It was unmistakably of Betty May with an unidentified man. ‘Have you half a crown you can lend for an hour or so, m’dear?’ … obediently, I produced the needed coin. ‘And can I borrow your paper?’ I passed that over too. Nina left the Fitzroy with her erect but odd bustling walk and, looking out after her, I saw her grab a taxi. I don’t think she was gone more than three-quarters of an hour. ‘Here’s your half-crown and paper back, m’dear’. I looked at her with expression of surprise … ‘I went to Fleet Street, m’dear, and told them, they’d libelled me. They settled for twenty-five quid, m’dear … Drink up, m’dear, and have a better drink’.

SALLY FIBER: Annie, who was behind the bar, was delighted for Nina’s good fortune, as twenty-five pounds in those days was a lot of money, and so was everyone in the bar when Nina announced, ‘The drinks are on me’. But Annie’s glee soon turned to worry when Betty May stalked in. ‘Trouble’, thought Annie, ‘there’ll be fireworks’. But to Betty’s astonishment Nina handed her the double whisky she herself had just ordered. When Betty realised the score, she also borrowed Ruthven Todd’s half crown and grabbed his paper. She ran out of the bar, shouting, ‘I’ve been libelled too’. She also returned triumphant and told how the beleaguered paper had coughed up another twenty-five quid.

CELINE HISPICHE: It’s a mistake to think of Annie standing behind the bar of the Fitzroy being rather strait-laced. In her own way, she was just as much of a thrill seeker as Betty and Nina. A number of pilots used to come into the Fitzroy from Alan Cobham’s ‘Flying Circus’. One of whom persuaded Annie to go flying with them. She loved the exhilaration of going up in those primitive biplanes and got a certificate for looping the loop.

DARREN COFFIELD: Of course, many viewed Nina and Betty’s bohemian lifestyles as self-indulgent folly. Only the poor could be truly bohemian, and the squalor associated with bohemianism seemed audacious. The abandonment of middle-class aspirations of tidiness and hygiene was revolutionary. Nina’s friend, the author Rebecca West, denounced housework as ‘rat poison’ and defended the right of women to desist from doing it. Filth meant freedom. Nina starved and shivered for her art and even Betty May was reduced to eating roast mouse on toast.

NINA HAMNETT: She offered to come to my place … and catch a dozen and have a luncheon party with mice as a savoury.

MICHAEL LUKE: The ground floor studio opposite Nina’s in Thackeray House was occupied by [the artist] Adrian Daintry, and their relationship was marked, at least on Daintry’s side, by a certain reserve. ‘Nina’ [he told me], ‘made it her practice to wander into my bedroom in the mornings ostensibly to give me a resume of her previous night’s activities. Her first action was always to look at the ledge of my chimney-piece to see if there was any loose change hanging about. “M’deah”, she announced one morning, “I’ve just met this fellah. He’s got a bowlah and an umbrellah. He’s an Etonah and he gave me a fiveah”.’ (It should be explained that Nina affected an exaggerated upper-class accent.) This ‘fellah’ turned out to be Anthony Powell.

PETER QUENNELL: Nina was Anthony Powell’s first grown-up love affair. He was rather pleased with it at the time. She satisfactorily deprived him of his innocence, which is a thing people were anxious to get rid of in those days. He built her up as a romantic, femme de trente ans, a bohemian mistress.

DARREN COFFIELD: The Eton-educated Powell was a prime example of the rich kid playing the bohemian. Almost twice his age, Nina had met him whilst working with Osbert Sitwell on The People’s Album of London Statues and introduced Powell to the racy bohemian set which would feed his ‘comic masterpiece’, Dance to the Music of Time. Nina enchanted him with her chutzpah. The combination of her reckless personal life and her professional discipline fascinated him. As the Queen of Bohemia showed him around her kingdom, they strolled down Howland Street and she pointed out where the poet Arthur Rimbaud had once lived and she had lost her virginity: ‘Do you think that they will put up a blue plaque on the house for me or one for Rimbaud?’ she asked.

Nina was a great facilitator – when the Australian poet Jack Lindsay arrived at the Fitzroy in search of bohemia, she took him to a party at Augustus’ studio and introduced him to everyone. But despite all her help, Lindsay was less than grateful. Dismissing Nina’s ‘mediocre mind’, he dumped her for the poet Elza de Locre, a cult figure within a small literary circle. Lindsay published Elza’s poetry and was madly in love with his new muse until he bumped into Betty May …

BETTY MAY: I have never tried to be ordinary and to fit in with other people. I have not cared what the world thought about me, and as a result I am afraid what it thought has often not been very kind.

JACK LINDSAY: No doubt I idealised her … as a femme fatale (but without any glorying in tragic roles). She dominated me by making no effort whatever to dominate. She was quite ‘unfeminine’ in the usual meanings of that word; she hardly made up, she dressed neatly but carelessly; she had not the least touch of coyness, of fluttering invitation; she never laid herself out to attract … taking what she wanted instead of being taken, resolute mistress of herself instead of being a victim.

DARREN COFFIELD: Betty told Jack Lindsay many stories of her sexual exploits including one about a travelling salesman who mistook her for a prostitute, so she led him into several undignified situations before dropping him from a great height. One day Betty pointed out to Lindsay a large bed for sale in a shop window by the British Museum: ‘I spent last Wednesday night in that. “X” had the keys to the shop and we pulled the blinds down.’

CELINE HISPICHE: Betty had just left her fourth husband and was miserably poor. Living in a tiny Soho attic, she had only one dress, which she used to wash and put on wet. Betty’s affair with Jack Lindsay did not last long. He wasn’t much of a meal for the Tiger Woman, who chewed him up. Then, Nina used her influence to get Anthony Powell’s boss to publish Betty’s sensational autobiography, Tiger Woman.

DARREN COFFIELD: Yes, and in Powell’s first novel, Afternoon Men, the character of Naomi is based on Nina, whose idea of a good night out would start at the Fitzroy before moving on to her favourite restaurant …

CRESSIDA CONNOLLY: The Eiffel Tower at 1 Percy Street was the prototype for the kind of selective hospitality and inebriation which would later solidify into Soho legend in places like the Colony Room and the French Pub of the 1940s … it was run by Rudolf Stulik, an Austrian restaurateur of the old school, and a character. He entertained royalty, but also befriended many penniless artists, whom he would feed, clothe and shelter at his own expense.

AUGUSTUS JOHN: The ‘Tower’ became under his management a favourite resort of poets, painters, actors, sculptors, authors, musicians and magicians; not to speak of the members of the fashionable and political world. Stulik’s Livre d’Or, in course of time, included a highly decorative collection of autographs, ranging from top to bottom of the social and cultural scale.

VIVA KING: Stulik lived up to his character: he would sit at one’s table and entertain us with stories of his past life, all related in that thick Jewish Austrian voice. He would seize my glass and, turning it round, say ‘I drink where your lips have wetted’. The drinks were often on him, and soon he was owed thousands of pounds by customers who had no conscience about taking advantage of his generosity …

DARREN COFFIELD: Stulik charged customers in proportion to their wealth. Augustus John’s bill was always astronomical and Nina’s non-existent. The restaurant was an L-shaped room with eight tables each sporting a white tablecloth and a red lampshade. The walls were covered with bric-a-brac and pictures by artists such as Nina, who preferred to dine in one of the private rooms upstairs, decorated by the vorticist painter, Percy Wyndham Lewis. The restaurant also doubled up as a small hotel where Wyndham Lewis’ lover, Nancy Cunard, often stayed.

Like Anthony Powell, the wealthy Nancy Cunard visited Fitzrovia in a similar manner to those Victorians who toured Bedlam mental hospital for entertainment. In a class-ridden and racially divided Britain, Nancy Cunard and Viva King both acquired a racy reputation for sleeping with black men. When the prime minister’s wife, Margot Asquith, dropped by for tea with Nancy’s mother, she enquired: ‘How’s Nancy? What is it now – drink, drugs or niggers?’ Nancy enjoyed the notoriety and always dined at the corner-table with Nina, Viva King and Lady Dean Paul – a composer and pianist who smoked long cigars but is now chiefly remembered for her drug-addled daughter, Brenda Dean Paul.

With its dim red lighting, the Eiffel Tower behaved more like a club than a restaurant as people came and went via the hotel entrance. Drinking freely after hours, things occasionally got out of hand. Nina was once asked to leave three times, only to reappear again at the door and an exasperated Stulik ordered one of his waiters to escort her home. By now the Café Royal was considered passé, so after Stulik’s everyone decamped to the Gargoyle Club, whose mirrored dance floor had witnessed the knickers of every Femme Fatale in London …

Queen of the Gargoyle, Hermione Baddeley. (Author’s collection)

2

Femmes Fatales

Horses Sweat, Men Perspire but Ladies Glow

DARREN COFFIELD: The Gargoyle had opened in 1925 and although nightclubs were not for ‘respectable’ women, it became the favoured nocturnal hunting ground for a group of Femmes Fatales whose sexual allure gave them an almost supernatural power over men. They included Nancy Cunard, the poet Iris Tree and the actress Tallulah Bankhead. Together they represented the ‘New Woman’ who smoked and drank in public, wore trousers and went out unchaperoned. Many were former Slade School of Art students who’d sat for and slept with Augustus John.

At the centre of the glittering Gargoyle was the star of stage and screen, Hermione Baddeley. Once a household name, but now largely forgotten, Hermione was the daughter of the composer, William Clinton-Baddeley, and his stage-struck wife Louise – a resourceful and determined woman – who, spotting the artistic potential of her daughters, abandoned her husband and took them to London. At seventeen, Hermione became a star in the hit play The Likes of ’Er. But her mother wouldn’t let her attend parties until an invitation arrived from the society hostess, Syrie Maugham, wife of the author Somerset Maugham. Viva King described Maugham’s parties as grand; ‘everyone’ was there, including the Prince of Wales. So, Hermione was allowed to go on the condition she returned home by midnight.

HERMIONE BADDELEY: Twelve o’clock came all too soon … the hour when, like Cinderella, I must leave the party and climb into the hired car waiting for me. I said my goodbyes then dashed to the staircase leading down to the hall. I was halfway down when there was a loud ringing of the front doorbell. The butler opened it and a very tall imperious looking young man walked in. He looked up to me, our eyes met, and my hand came to an abrupt halt on the balustrade. There stood the most handsome man I had ever seen … To me he looked like a Greek god. His dark hair was waved back from his forehead, his jaw was strong and resolute. There was an air of such masculinity about him. He was coming up the stairs towards me. He actually barred my way down. ‘You can’t go yet,’ he said with superb confidence. ‘We haven’t had a dance.’ … David Tennant knew who I was. He’d recognized me standing on the stairs. Some time before he had taken his aunt, Margot Asquith, the wife of the Liberal prime minister, to see my play, The Likes of ’Er. ‘What an odious child,’ she’d exclaimed after the performance … David had not agreed. ‘I find her rather endearing,’ he’d said.

DARREN COFFIELD: Handsome, rich and clever, David Tennant had it all. But his mother, Lady Grey, did not approve of his new girlfriend as actresses were associated with loose morals. Hermione was different from the aristocratic women who usually made eyes at David, though: she had her own independence, wealth and status. ‘Cochran’s Young Ladies’ were then considered the most beautiful girls in the world, an Edwardian chorus line that creamed off the best talent. Hermione had a three-year contract rising to £200 a week, an absolute fortune in the 1920s. She appeared in On with The Dance, where her big number was the Noël Coward song, ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’. It became her theme tune and was played whenever she entered a club. The play was about a wild child whose life had become a heady mixture of drinks, drugs and men. There were many such girls in their social circle and Hermione knew them all by name.

HERMIONE BADDELEY: The idea of owning your own club … all started out, as so many things do, as a sort of joke, really. Because … there was not enough room for us to do our wonderful dancing … David used to lift me off my feet and whirl me around. It took up a lot of room and not everybody liked it. They didn’t want a sharp, high heel suddenly full in the face. So, David said the only thing to do was open our own place where we could dance the heads off our feet. That was the Gargoyle’s first moment of conception.

DARREN COFFIELD: With the arrival of the film industry, Soho began to move upmarket. Nightclubs were the new spaces where men and women could socialise for the first time to new music and new dances. The idea for the Gargoyle was inspired by Kate Meyrick’s club, the ‘43’, on Soho’s Gerrard Street.

KATE MEYRICK: It was a huge, rambling place of six storeys … To turn that dismal place into a palace of gaiety was to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear with a vengeance, yet somehow we did it … many well-known artists … came to have a look … Augustus John … Mr. and Mrs. Epstein, Betty May, Dolores … and a whole throng of other celebrities of the artistic world used to come regularly to the ‘43’.

DARREN COFFIELD: Detective Fabian of Scotland Yard described Kate Meyrick as a stern little woman always dressed in blacks or dark greys. She presided over the ‘43’ from her little desk by the entrance. Kate never permitted any nonsense from anybody. ‘Fun is fun,’ she would say firmly, ‘but vulgarity is vulgarity. Out you go, my boy!’ However, cocaine could easily be sourced on the premises and Kate’s club was often raided.

KATE MEYRICK: … when we were unlucky to suffer a raid … there was never the slightest sign of panic. The girls used to take their cue from the men, and that meant that they, too, were perfectly cool about the whole business … The truth is, there are only two kinds of people when a raid takes place on a London night club – the very wise and the very foolish.

DETECTIVE FABIAN: The raiding parties never discovered about the back exit, which led through a courtyard beyond the outside toilets, and through an unlocked door of an adjoining shop’s backyard, into the freedom of Newport Market. Many a patron – often very important names that might have caused a national scandal had they been caught in Kate’s Club on a police raid, took advantage of the ‘exit’.

KATE MEYRICK: I was first and foremost a businesswoman, but I was also a woman thrown on the world with eight children to be given a decent start in life … I had to keep my attention constantly fixed upon the financial aspect of my clubs, that was not the side of the matter which made the chief appeal to me. The love of life was always deeply implanted in my nature. Nothing fascinates me more …

CELINE HISPECHE: Kate became known as The Queen of Nightclubs; she also ran the Kit Kat club and the Silver Slipper which had an illuminated glass dance floor decades before disco. Despite the negative press and serving five prison sentences, Kate’s daughters all married into the British aristocracy, but by the time the Gargoyle opened Kate was back in prison.

DARREN COFFIELD: Hermione and David’s Gargoyle Club was situated on the site of the house of Nell Gwynne, the former actress and royal mistress, on the corner of Dean Street, Soho. When shown around the derelict premises, Hermione thought, ‘Poor old Nell, couldn’t King Charles have done better for you?’ Hermione’s brother-in-law, Hugh Gee, a gifted theatre designer, worked on his concept for the club, and the son-in-law to Henri Matisse, Georges Duthuit, was recruited to help. That’s how David Tennant met the great painter and explained that he was having the club’s ceiling covered in gold leaf.

MICHAEL LUKE: An excellent complement, Matisse suggested, would be to have the walls entirely covered with a mosaic of mirrored tiles. He knew of an eighteenth-century château whose contents were about to be sold. Included were some immensely tall looking-glasses. Doubtless these could be bought very cheaply. When cut into thousands of small squares and set into the walls, these tiles of subtly imperfect glass would produce un effet éclatant. David was so elated by this inspired concept … that he made Matisse an honorary member on the spot.

DARREN COFFIELD: