frame 55 July 2024
Queens of Bohemia: And Other Miss-Fits
Darren Coffield
Darren Coffield was born in London in 1969. He studied at Goldsmiths College, Camberwell School of Art and the Slade School of Art in London, where he received his Bachelor of Fine Art in 1993.
He has exhibited widely in the company of many leading artists, and in 2014, Darren Coffield was specially selected by the jurors of 100 Painters of Tomorrow as an artist who has made a significant contribution to the painting scene today.
He is the author of two cult books, Factual Nonsense: The Art and Death of Joshua Compston (Troubador, 2013) and Tales from the Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia (Unbound, 2020).
For those who preferred sobriety, a simultaneous café society co-existed. 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.
Bohemian women posed political, moral and existential challenges to authority and gave rise to a new way of living. Many were trailblazers, part of a dramatic wider shift in society. In this book we explore the complex dynamics of these creative lives and concentrate on the gaps, the silences – extrapolating and triangulating some poorly documented lives. 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.
Queens of Bohemia and other Miss-fits is an affectionate rescue of many remarkable women from virtual obscurity. Using a technique sometimes known as ‘oral history’, I have used previously unpublished memoirs and eyewitness accounts to fill the gaps of historical vision and a montage of quotes and fragments of published biographies to create a soundscape of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.
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 one’s self 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…
An extract of Marianne Faithfull’s foreword to Queens of Bohemia
‘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 … 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 … take me back to the old bohemia!’
Marianne Faithfull
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.
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. 1940 saw the opening of Le Petit Club Francais run by Olwen Vaughan, who fed the French Resistance and supported Soho’s film industry with her ground-breaking ‘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, 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 Violet, 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.
Three Studies Isabel Rawsthorne, 1967
Queens of Bohemia: And Other Miss-Fits by Darren Coffield was published by The History Press in May 2024. Signed hardback editions are available to purchase HERE.