Anyone who happened to glance at the name Kate Meyrick in the 1921 Census would have little cause to look twice.
The 46-year-old’s profession is listed as ‘confectioner’ – a respectable enough occupation for a former doctor’s wife and middle-class mother of eight, even if it was a rather elastic interpretation of her real job.
For in fact ‘Ma Meyrick’, as she was more informally known in the London of the Roaring Twenties, was a nightclub impresario and the beating heart of the capital’s booming nocturnal economy.
Her glamorous nightspots were legendary, a byword for hedonism where everyone from millionaires and film stars to gangsters and prostitutes mingled against a backdrop of Charlestons, champagne and recreational drugs – not to mention raids by police determined to stop their fun.
Most famous of all the joints under Ma Meyrick’s ownership was The 43 Club, a favoured haunt of Hollywood legend Tallulah Bankhead, who frequently took what she called her ‘early breakfasts’ (in reality her evening meal) there.
So renowned were Meyrick’s clubs and her repeated, defiant law-breaking – which saw her serve five separate prison sentences – that she became the inspiration for Ma Mayfield, who presides over the rackety ‘Old Hundredth’ club of Evelyn Waugh’s 1934 novel A Handful of Dust and later Brideshead Revisited.
Now, 90 years after her death, the colourful world she inhabited has been brought to life on the small screen, in a BBC series hailed as a ‘spiritual successor’ to cult drama Peaky Blinders.
Dope Girls, a six-part drama which hit screens last month, follows the lives of a ‘newly empowered generation of women’ reluctant to give up the freedom they enjoyed during the First World War and return to humdrum domesticity. Instead, they make Soho’s expanding illicit underground clubland scene into their playground.
‘Ma Meyrick’, as she was more informally known in the London of the Roaring Twenties, was a nightclub impresario and the beating heart of the capital’s booming nocturnal economy
In the BBC’s Dope Girls, the character Kate Galloway (played by Julianne Nicholson) – a single mother who establishes a nightclub – bears no little resemblance to Meyrick
While the BBC is anxious not to draw a direct line between any of the show’s female leads and historical figures, the character Kate Galloway (played by Julianne Nicholson) – a single mother who establishes a nightclub and ’embraces a life of criminal activities’ to be able to provide for her daughter – bears no little resemblance to the diminutive, God-fearing Meyrick.
Born in 1875 in Dunleary, a suburban coastal town in Dublin formerly known as Kingstown, Kate Nason, as she was then, was raised in an upper middle-class Irish family.
Her father John was a doctor, and following his death from meningitis, her mother Sarah married local clergyman Edwin Jackson.
Sarah died when Kate was seven, after which she and her older sister Ethel were largely brought up by their grandmother Isabella and educated by governesses.
At 16, Kate was sent to the prestigious Dublin boarding school Alexandra College, and initially harboured plans of becoming a doctor.
Instead, she married one. His name was Ferdinand Merrick – for reasons unknown he later changed this to Meyrick – a blond, good-looking specialist in psychiatric medicine.
Kate married him in 1899 at the age of 24, and after a short stint in Dublin, the couple moved to England where they settled in Southsea.
The marriage was not a happy one: national archive records show Kate, by then a mother of five, first filed for divorce in 1910, accusing Ferdinand of ‘cruelty and adultery’.
Her petition was rejected and two further attempts to divorce followed before the couple – now parents to three more children – separated permanently in 1918 and Kate moved to London.
It was here that, the year after her divorce, Kate spotted an advert for a partner to go into business running ‘tea dances.’
Kate Meyrick spending the first night out of prison, after serving 15 months at Holloway, at the 43 Club
Billie Cassidy (Umi Myers), Violet Davies (Eliza Scanlen), Kate Galloway (Julianne Nicholson), Evie Galloway (Eilidh Fisher) in Dope Girls
Armed with a small legacy from an aunt, a share portfolio and rental income from properties in Ireland, Kate had the funds. Later that year, together with local entrepreneur Henry Dalton, she opened Dalton’s nightclub in Leicester Square.
‘Separating from her husband was the impetus for her going into business,’ explains National Archive exhibitions manager Hannah Fleming, who last year oversaw an exhibition into 1920s night-time London. ‘It was survival – she had to provide for her children, but she also talks about herself in her memoirs as someone who likes people.’
Kate’s timing was certainly impeccable. The end of the Great War had created no shortage of social unrest and protests, but it had also sparked a desire to forget, and the capital’s nightlife scene was burgeoning.
As the Roaring Twenties dawned, London’s toes had started to tap to the new sound of jazz, and nightspots were springing up all over the city’s West End.
Dalton’s was one such club, described on opening as a ‘rendezvous for members of the theatrical and variety professions and their friends’.
It also entertained some other clientele, however, and in January 1920 Meyrick was fined £25 for ‘knowingly’ permitting it to be ‘used by reputed prostitutes’.
The prosecutor in the case described the club as a ‘dancing hell and a sink of iniquity’, and Meyrick was ordered to close it with immediate effect.
Undeterred, she opened other clubs instead, among them the 1943, which first threw open its doors at 43 Gerrard Street in early 1921.
The 43’s clientele was as diverse as it was plentiful: showgirls, military men, aristocrats, drug dealers and royalty all passed through the front door at which Meyrick – described as ‘a tiny wisp of a woman’ – would herself often stand to welcoming arrivals.
Prince Christopher of Greece and then Prince Carol of Romania were guests here, as too was Billy Leeds, dubbed ‘the World’s Richest Boy’ by the Press. One evening the actor Rudolph Valentino was mistaken for a waiter while carrying a tray of cocktails from the bar, while renowned millionaire Jimmy White arrived one evening with six Daimlers in his wake, the cars disgorging 25 chorus girls and White supplying the club’s patrons with champagne all evening.
Hollywood legend Tallulah Bankhead frequently took what she called her ‘early breakfasts’ (in reality her evening meal) at the 45 Club
There was no shortage of excess at Meyrick’s other clubs either: over in Regent Street, The Silver Slipper boasted an illuminated glass dancefloor upon which Tallulah Bankhead – also an enthusiastic regular at The 43, where she was renowned for her prodigious consumption of cigarettes and gin – once danced with such enthusiasm she cracked a pane.
Other regulars at the Slipper included Lady Louise Mountbatten, her ‘arms covered in diamond bracelets’, according to one breathless gossip columnist, debonair stage idol Jack Buchanan and designer Norman Hartnell, who was said to scrutinise the dresses of all the female guests ‘with the eye of a connoisseur’.
Aside from dedication to drink, dancing and carefree fun, all the venues shared another common theme in the form of a loose interpretation of the strict licensing hours set down in the updated Licensing Act of 1921, which forbade the sale of alcohol after 11pm.
There was also an abundance of free-flowing recreational drugs like cocaine and heroin, an abundance that all-too often went hand in hand with tragedy. In 1922, a young dancer called Freda Kempton, who had danced in Meyrick’s clubs, was found dead from a cocaine overdose at her rooming house in west London. Her boyfriend at the time was Brilliant ‘Billy’ Chang, a Chinese restaurateur known as one of the period’s biggest drug dealers, and was featured in Peaky Blinders.
Determined to crack down on what they saw as the dangerous lawlessness and deaths that followed underground drinking and drugs use, police raids aiming to catch those flouting the law became an occupational hazard for club owners, and Meyrick was no exception.
By February 1922, the 43’s riotous reputation had secured its first raid – and the first of many attempts by Meyrick to wriggle out of being prosecuted: according to police records from the time, when asked if she had a licence for selling liquor, she replied, ‘I don’t sell it, I give it away’.
The same police record also suggested that the ‘dance instructresses’ employed by Meyrick were in fact known prostitutes, an accusation she vigorously denied.
‘She maintained that these were girls of good character who were being tipped for their services,’ says Hannah Fleming. ‘But anything beyond that was a) out of her hands and b) she didn’t really believe it.’
On this occasion she received another fine, but again, this was not to stop her. ‘Kate Meyrick’s clubs were repeatedly raided,’ says Fleming. ‘She was fined, she was imprisoned, but she just kept going’.
After all, as Meyrick herself admitted, she was well and truly bitten by the nightlife bug.
‘It is at night that people become alive and real to me,’ she once remarked.
She would not escape with a fine and a rap on the hand for much longer, however. By 1924, the UK had a new home secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, a Conservative politician for whom the issue of licensing laws had become something of a personal moral crusade.
Meyrick’s second daughter, Dorothy, married the 26th Baron de Clifford
After another night-time raid of the 43 the same year, Meyrick was sent to prison for six months. More short prison sentences followed – along with more punitive fines – until, in 1928, several months passed by in which, despite more police raids on her clubs, no alcohol could be found.
Had Ma Meyrick turned over a new leaf? Not likely. In fact, she had been bribing a local police officer, one Sergeant George Goddard, to let her known when a raid was due so that she could squirrel her illicit produce away.
Who knows how long she might have got away with it, were it not for the fact that Goddard’s newly lavish lifestyle – far beyond that afforded by a police sergeant’s salary – had not attracted attention.
In May 1928, a raid was conducted without his knowledge, uncovering the conspiracy and leading to both Goddard and Meyrick’s downfall.
Goddard was subsequently dismissed from the force and jailed the following year, while Meyrick was also jailed, sentenced to 15 months of hard labour at Holloway, her defence that she was being blackmailed by Goddard having been roundly dismissed.
Horrified by the length of her punishment, her children appealed directly to the home secretary, and her sentence was subsequently commuted to a year.
She finally emerged from Holloway Prison, two stone lighter and visibly frailer, to be greeted by a group of revellers wearing evening dress.
By then, news that Meyrick had spent her time behind bars writing her memoir had sent tremors of panic through society.
In fact, despite its inflammatory title, ‘Secrets of the 43’ proved surprisingly tame, with little scandal of any note contained between its covers.
Its author, meanwhile, was soon back up to her old tricks, sentenced yet again in 1930 for breaking licensing laws. It would be her last stint behind bars: just over two years later, in January 1933, she died of pneumonia at the relatively young age of 57. On the day of her funeral, all the lights in the West End were briefly dimmed in her honour.
Meyrick died a rich woman, thought to have made £500,000 (£17million in today’s money) in her lifetime, profits healthy enough for her to privately educate her children, who attended the exclusive boarding schools Roedean and Harrow.
Nor had her lawlessness apparently done any harm to her social standing; Meyrick’s eldest daughter, Mary, wed the 14th Earl of Kinnoull, while her second daughter, Dorothy, married the 26th Baron de Clifford.
It gave her a respectable legacy, although it is for her role at the heart of Jazz Age London that Meyrick will be remembered. Reflecting on her experience in 1929, she called night club management ‘a wonderfully colourful and attractive existence’, but acknowledged it was ‘a hazardous occupation’ too.
Her cumulative three years behind bars and the hundreds she paid out in fines were testament to that, although Hannah Fleming believes that for all her law-breaking there is much to admire about Meyrick.
‘You could argue straightforwardly that she was a criminal,’ she says. ‘But I think what was admirable about her is that she was a woman living by herself in the Twenties and making her own way in life, and was utterly defiant.’
