Queens of Bohemia and other Miss-fits
Current scientific theory suggests that the universe is held together by some underlying force that we do not recognise called Dark Matter. While completing my previous book, Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia, I realised that a group of talented women were the Dark Matter holding bohemian London together and keeping its stars up in their orbits. These bohemian women appear in various biographies and texts as individuals, but until now no one has written a book that shows how they existed as contemporaries of one another – telling their stories, side by side. Queens of Bohemia and Other Miss-fits is an account of these extraordinary women and tells how these stars gravitated together – some shone so brightly they burnt all those around them, a few fell into decaying orbits whilst others simply imploded.
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. Despite being relegated to the role of bit part actors by many cultural historians, these women occupied and often ruled Bohemia. A hard territory to place (but familiar to its inhabitants) where friendship could mean more than family, and diversity was not only accepted but celebrated. Bohemia provided women with an escape from the oppressive uniformity of a wider patriarchal society.
Spanning four decades, Queens of Bohemia and Other Miss-fits begins in the 1920s, at a time when Suffragettes had fought hard for equality and nightclubs became the new social spaces where single women and men could socialise unchaperoned. Kate Meyrick’s ’43’ club on Gerrard Street scandalised society and inspired the creation of the Gargoyle club, a nocturnal hunting ground for Femmes Fatales. This was the age of the dance craze and the gender-bending ‘Flapper’ – a flat-chested androgynous-looking female with boyish cropped hair who caused outrage by drinking, smoking and partying.
Alongside the nightclubs 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 whilst further down the road was the Wheatsheaf run by Mona Glendenning. Then across Oxford Street, into Soho proper, was Victorienne and Victor Berlemont’s French pub and Annie Balon’s, Coach & Horses. These Landladies presided over their establishments like circus trainers, uncertain of what the wild women in their domain might do next. These include the ‘Tiger Woman’, Betty May, known for her taboo breaking ways and the artist, Nina Hamnett; nicknamed the Queen of Bohemia, whose patron Princess Violet, ran an opium den in a decommissioned submarine. Then there was Sonia Orwell, known as 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 20th Century (including Picasso) as well as the prototype Rock’n’Roll wild child, Henrietta Moraes, much loved and painted by Francis Bacon.
The book’s unique selling point is the first-hand accounts of the women themselves and the people who knew them. Too often these voices have not been heard in the correct context. Using a technique sometimes known as ‘oral history’, I have used previously unpublished memoirs and interviews to fill historical gaps – a montage of quotes and fragments of published biographies also help 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 dampness and despair.
So let us go back over 100 years to the early 20th 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 one’s self, not to a cause, as they took the struggle for freedom into their personal lives and learned to value their individuality along the way…
