Bohemian Like Her.

The bohemian London scene of the 1920s through to the 1960s was a long time ago now. Things were different then. It was an age, as some like to say, of dinosaurs and by that they don't mean the diplodocus or the triceratops. They mean the men of the age, the chauvinists. You may think that in the countercultural milieu of the time, attitudes to gender equality may have been more enlightened.

In most case they weren't. In many cases, they were far worse. Artist and author Darren Coffield has written a book about the women of that time, Queens of Bohemia And Other Miss-Fits (with a foreword by the recently departed Marianne Faithfull and no less than one hundred and forty-five contributors) and I was at The Wheatsheaf in Fitzrovia to hear him in conversation with art curator and fashion designer Clive Jennings for the ever reliable Sohemian Society.

It was a talk that took in many of Soho and Fitzrovia's pubs and clubs. Darren's even running a pub crawl around some of them this Saturday starting at The Fitzroy Tavern - soon to be the new home of the Sohemians as The Wheatsheaf is being converted into a gastropub (as if we need any more of them). The Fitzroy Tavern, The Coach and Horses, and The Wheatsheaf itself were, during the period up for debate, all run by women and those women, when they weren't watching GIs over for the war fighting among themselves, were party to all sorts of knowledge about what was going on at the time.

Many of them, sadly and predictably, have since been sidelined and all but lost to history. Often when they do appear they're minor characters on the periphery of the lives of great men and supposedly great men like Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Jacob Epstein. Darren Coffield became interested in telling these women's stories but he met with no small amount of resistance. In one instance he was told there was no point writing about them as they contributed absolutely nothing.

Old habits die hard for some, it seems. Thankfully, for us, he wasn't deterred and in fact found so much material that he had enough for two volumes (the second, covering the period from 1960 onwards, will appear at a future date) and he was generous with his time and with his stories as he looked back at these women's fascinating, and often tragic, lives.

Sonia Brownell was born in Calcutta in 1908 but after moving to Fitzrovia fell in love with the bohemian lifestyle, dated the abstract artist Victor Pasmore, and eventually married George Orwell (just three months before he died) - becoming the inspiration for Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four. All of which ignores the fact that she was an impressive and talented person in her own right and her nickname 'the Euston Road Venus' was earned due to her pretty much keeping Cyril Connolly's literary magazine Horizon running.

Much of the bohemian scene in those days revolved around the Gargoyle Club on the corner of Dean Street and Meard Street. The decor was designed by Henri Matisse, Edwin Lutyens, and Augustus John (more about him later) and, according to Coffield - and this is one occasion when I wasn't quite sure, women there would dance with more abandon due to the advent of less restrictive, less Victorian, underwear!

It was a time of women getting the vote, a time of the American actress Tallulah Bankhead arriving in London (sample quote from Tallulah:- "cocaine isn't habit forming and I know because I've been taking it for years"), and a time of women becoming equally, sometimes more, promiscuous than the men in their circle. The Gargoyle Club was sort of place you could find these 'femme fatales' watching Dylan Thomas drink wine from a shoe. A shoe, it turned out, with a hole in the bottom causing the wine to run all down his shirt.

Another hub was The Fitzroy itself (a pub I have wasted/not wasted many an evening in). When the bohemian set moved pretty much wholesale from Chelsea to what was then called North Soho they needed a sort of base and The Fitzroy was that base. So much that the pub's name soon gave birth to the idea of Fitzrovia as a separate place, divided from Soho by Oxford Street. In the 90s, developers tried to rename it Noho but that never really caught on. Too New York for London tastes.

As well as the likes of Orwell, Augustus John, Nina Hamnett, Epstein, and Dylan Thomas, the Fitzroy would attract lots of students from the nearby Slade School of Art. Among them many crop haired young women and many bisexual young women. It became such a curious place that members of the upper classes would have their chauffers drive them to the pub so they could gawp at the 'freaks' within. Not dissimilar to those who would visit Bedlam hospital for cruel entertainment.

In Soho, The French House, then known as the York Minster, had been owned by a German named Christian Schmitt but he fled, understandably, when World War I broke out and eventually it fell into the hands of Belgian couple Victor and Victoria Berlemont where it became, during World War II, the drinking venue of choice for both French Resistance fighters based in London and Soho film industry types.

Due, primarily, to the respect (and fear) they had for members of the French Resistance, the police rarely bothered to enforce licensing laws at The French House (they had bigger fish to fry anyway) and the pub is said to have kept French cinema alive during the Nazi occupation of France. Nazis, famously, are not fans of culture. Dylan Thomas, of course, could often be found slumped by the bar.

Back in Fitzrovia, the likes of George and Sonia Orwell, composer and conductor Constant Lambert, and composer Elizabeth Lutyens (Edward's daughter) formed a small group known as the Gluepot Gang who could usually be found either in the BBC making radio or in one of the many pubs within walking distance from the BBC. A common joke was they never went home and instead just walked backwards and forwards from the BBC to and from the nearby boozers.

Elsewhere you might find Joan Rhodes. Known as The Mighty Mannequin. She was abandoned by her parents, ran away from the aunt she lived with after getting bored of being told she was big and ugly, and was kicked out of an orphanage for pulling a nun's hair. She found her calling as a kind of circus strong woman who could bend six inch nails and steel bars with her bare hands and pioneered the party trick of tearing telephone directories in half. Much to the annoyance of British Telecom.

There was Princess Violet who ran a drugs den from a decommissioned submarine, there was Hedli Anderson who had trained in cabaret in Germany in the 1930s and became the best paid cabaret artist in England (as well as appearing in productions by Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden), there was the Dutch-Javanese model Toto Koopman - a bisexual Vogue model who had spent time in a concentration camp and had had her birthday party crashed by Francis Bacon before becoming a gallerist and buying multiple villas in Sicily, and there was Henrietta Moraes - a model and memoirist who was born in Simla in India, married three times, drank coffee with Spanish Republicans and became close friend with Eric Burdon of The Animals and War.

The South African born sculptor Hetta Empson had to leave the country of her birth because she had agitated so hard for black rights (she was white) and settled in Hampstead, became a model, lived for five years in China during the culmination of Mao's Communist Revolution, and rented her house to fellow sculptor Henry Moore.

Despite all of this, though, it wasn't always the jolly non-stop party/orgy it might appear. There was incest, there were men forcing women into prostitution, and there was rape. Many of the leading protagonists died early deaths and the children they had, at a time when abortion was illegal and contraception was not as widespread as it is now, were often poorly looked after. If they were looked after at all.

Many of them were covered in lice, some were locked inside houses as the parents went out partying, and others were simply put into care. Backstreet abortionists ensured there weren't as many children as there may have been but often damaged women's bodies irreparably and many of the most prominent, and celebrated, artists were, to be blatantly honest, horrendous bastards.

Augustus John used to freely fondle any woman's breasts that he fancied. He'd pat every single child in Fitzrovia on the head just in case it was one of his.(tellingly his own actual children rebelled against him by becoming, in turns, a priest, a sea lord, and a championship boxer) and Lucian Freud was a serial philanderer who, like Augustus John, rode a horse around bareback. Unlike Augustus John, Freud didn't rape his own daughters.

Freud did, however, once refuse to attend a wedding because he had slept with the bride, the groom, and the groom's mother. Cyril Connolly owned two pet lemurs who would routinely, and - no doubt - hilariously, defecate on guests at dinner parties. Freud owned a hawk which he would take on the tube but he neglected to feed it properly and the poor bird ultimately died of malnutrition.

While some of the females in this group were as tough and as worldly wise as the men, there were others who were young, naive, and often from very poor backgrounds. Some were terrified of sex and horrified by the changes there bodies were going through. One, on visiting a doctor, was shocked to discover the existence of a thing called a clitoris and had never heard of an orgasm. A doctor with a bedside manner that would surely see him struck off these days inspected her and remarked "I see you've got a man in your boat".

As surely as there was sex, there was also violence. A character known as 'Drunken Waistcoat' threatened to kill Dylan Thomas and his wife Caitlin with first a machine gun and then a hand grenade. When the case came to court the judge all but sympathised with Drunken Waistcoat so infuriating was the behaviour of Dylan and Caitlin Thomas. The artist, writer, and expert on sea shanties Nina Hamnett died at the age of sixty-five after falling out of an apartment window. Nobody was sure if it was a terrible accident or suicide but some suggested she was killed by the ghost of Aleister Crowley.

All of this, of course, sounds like the last days of Rome and, in a sense, this era was slowly coming to an end. The sixties meant the bohemians would now drink coffee and listen to rock music. It was the age of the teenager and muses would now be celebrated in song rather than in paint. 

Darren Coffield's second book will pick up the story and if it's half as interesting, and - in places - shocking, as this one (and I didn't even include the mentions for Picasso, Lee Miller, Quentin Crisp, Julian McLaren-Ross (whose son, Alex, I was sat next to), Jeffrey Bernard, John Heartfield, Alexei Sayle, Maggi Hambling, and the rather unexpected bohemian outpost of Cairo) it will be a story well worth hearing. Thanks to Alex and Cathi for their company and thanks to The Sohemian Society, The Wheatsheaf pub, Clive Jennings, and Darren Coffield for an enlightening evening even if I never did find out the real name of the man who used to perform at The Pink Lounge under the Ritz hotel as "the bugger's Vera Lynn".