Queens of Bohemia (eBook)

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’:

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:

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...