Queens of Bohemia with Darren Coffield FREE TALK

Roll up for a FREE talk on Friday 12 July at Westminster Arts Library by Darren Coffield who wrote a great book about London's legendary Colony Room. His latest book is Queens of Bohemia chronicling the women who took Soho and Fitzrovia by storm in the previous century including Isabel Rawsthorne, Betty May, Sonia Orwell and Nina Hamnett who has featured on this blog.

Book for this fascinating talk on Eventbrite here. 

The Visitors' Book

Jon Lys Turner The Visitors’ Book, In Francis Bacon’s Shadow: The Lives of Richard Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller (2016).  After a shaky start the book gains momentum and I found it very interesting, but then I would, as it features the usual  Soho and Fitzrovia suspects - many mentioned in these posts - such as John Minton,  Nina Hamnett (a good friend of Wirth-Miller) and the Two Roberts, who  frequently stayed with them.  Jankel Adler’s name keeps cropping up in many of the biographies I’ve read recently – he seems to have been influential on many of the London artists of this period and his reputation may be in need of resuscitation.   His influence on the Two Roberts, for example, is clear.  See here and here.

Wirth-Miller was from a very humble background and suffered in early life for his German ancestry – the book hints that his artistic influence on Francis Bacon may have been greater than previously recognised, the two certainly worked together in the Wivenhoe studio.  Lucian Freud hated him (he referred to him as ‘Worth Nothing’) see here.  Nevertheless, Wirth-Miller and Chopping mixed in highly privileged circles and had influential friends and acquaintances (not least Ian Fleming in Chopping’s case), one of whom was avid social climber and interior designer David Hicks, who included Wirth-Miller’s art in his designs - financially useful, but this made him perilously tied to fashion, that inevitably changed.

There is an entertaining account of Hicks’ wedding to Lord Mountbatten’s daughter Pamela:  the weather was freezing blizzards – fortunately for the many guests, they had the use of a private Pullman train back to London.  Chopping narrowly saved one of the guests from being run over by a skidding bus – it turned out to be Noel Coward, who became a friend.  Hicks and his wife had a honeymoon cruise on the QE2, the only passengers apparently, which seems incredible.  Winston Churchill’s son Randolph comes across as a truly horrible individual and as with many wealthy people expected the artists to produce work for him for nothing.

Wirth-Miller was probably Bacon’s best and most loyal friend.  There is a terrible episode where WM has an exhibition in a local gallery - Bacon arrives drunk and proceeds to go round savagely criticising every picture.  This had such an effect on WM that he gave up painting from that point.  The book says that this traumatic incident didn’t affect their friendship, which again is hard to believe.  In later life WM seems to have been a drunken monster and the kind of foul-mouthed outspoken boor you would avoid sitting close to in a restaurant or pub.   His artistic reputation is not high these days.  Looking at the auction prices for his paintings, they are not valuable and are almost in my price bracket.  Despite some strange neologisms (infirmed?) and misspellings (tenor Peter Piers?) the writing carries you along and I enjoyed reading it.

Postscript:  I've since visited the Queer British Art 1861-1967 show at Tate Britain and one of the exhibits is mentioned in the book: Wirth Miller and Chopping's tin where they kept a button from the uniform of every member of the armed forces with whom they had a sexual liaison - it's a very full tin, with almost two hundred buttons.

Is She a Lady?

Nina Hamnett wrote a second volume of autobiography Is She a Lady?  (1955) which picks up her story from 1926 when she returned from France to Fitzrovia.  Compiled might be a better word, as the book is really just a string of anecdotes, many rather inconsequential, probably of the kind with which she would regale a visitor to the Fitzroy or Wheatsheaf after asking them to 'Buy me a drink deah'.  It does, however, cover the period when I believe my drawing was made and the book sheds more light on her interest in boxing – another way of socializing and meeting young men and staving off the boredom of Sundays.

On Premierland, a boxing venue in East London (see here) ‘by far the most amusing and entertaining show in London.  The hall held about two thousand people and a battle nearly always raged near the ringside.  The audience never ceases to scream out insults and vulgar jokes at the unfortunate boxers who are unpopular from opening to closing time.  The payment is terrible.  There is any amount of talent to be discovered, but, as they all have to work, they never have sufficient time to train unless, by some extraordinary stroke of luck, someone pays for their training.’(p.51)  She mentions making drawings on many occasions.

Prof Newton’s Academy of Boxing 241 Marylebone Road: 'I went down one Sunday to see the boys training and to meet the great Professor.  Sunday morning is the best time, as most of them have to work during the week, many as navvies.  Nipper Pat Daly was then in his prime.  He was a funny little boy of fifteen and a half, and a very fine boxer.  If ever there should have been a champion it ought to have been Nipper.’ (p.49)  One of the book’s illustrations is a signed photo of Daly, who was a bit of a local celebrity at the time, a photo of Daly with the Professor and more information here.

She also mentions staying at the Hotel l'Etoile: (p.12) ‘I invited people to lunch and dine with me at my hotel, not worrying much about the future, as I had been paid for the drawings in Seymour’s book   [Seymour Leslie The Silent Amen (Jonathan Cape 1927]. '  Perhaps the list of names on the back of the drawing are those she entertained there.  She also illustrated The People's Album of London Statues - with droll commentary from Osbert Sitwell, it is the source, as I discovered, of his description of William Huskisson's statue in Pimlico as 'boredom rising from the bath'.  Illustrations of both books above.

Many characters acquainted with Aleister Crowley pop up in the book including Nancy Cunard, Lord Tredegar and that strange individual William Seabrook.  She produced a portrait of the speedboat racer 'Joe' Carstairs , who I'd never heard of before, but seems interesting (can't trace the picture).

In conclusion on Hamnett I should also direct those interested to the always excellent Strange Flowers resource.  A film was made about her starring Siobhan Fahey out of Bananarama.

Nina's Friends

It turns out that the drawing mentioned in the post below was made on the reverse side of notepaper from the Hotel et Restaurant de l'Etoile where Nina was staying.  On the side with the hotel's address she has written a list of notable literary and artistic figures of the time - with the intention of inviting them to a dinner or party?  Possibly - if this event ever took place, one would certainly have met an interesting group of people.  The list is below.  I've inserted the full names that I assume are intended, going by friends and acquaintances mentioned in her biography and in Laughing Torso; I'm pretty confident that most of them are correct.  ODNB indicated that they appear in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

'Davies'   W H Davies (1871-1940), poet and writer, ODNB; NH painted his portrait.

'Strachey'  (Giles) Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), biographer and literary reviewer, ODNB, NH drawing of him c1917.

'Sickert'    Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942), painter, ODNB, painted NH and her husband Roald Kristian in 1915-16 (now in the Tate, see here and above).

'Edith S'   Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell (1887-1964), poet and biographer, ODNB; sat for NH on at least three occasions.

'Osbert S'   Sir (Francis) Osbert Sacheverell Sitwell, fifth baronet (1892-1969), writer, ODNB, portrait by NH c.1918 above.

'Leonard Merrick'   (1864-1939), novelist, almost forgotten today, ODNB

'Frank Harris' (crossed out)   James Thomas [Frank] Harris (1856?-1931), journalist and rogue, ODNB - see my Decadent London book.

'Clive Bell'   (Arthur) Clive Heward Bell (1881-1964). art critic and writer, ODNB

'Goossens'   Sir Eugene Aynsley Goossens [?] (1893-1962), composer and conductor, ODNB, and see here.  Although mostly based in the USA in the late 1920s, he regularly returned to London for conducting engagements.

'Nancy'   Nancy Cunard [?]  (1896-1965), poet and political activist, ODNB

'Iris'   Iris Tree [?] real name Iris Winifred Reine Daphne Beerbohm-Tree, married name Moffat, Ledebur (1897-1968), poet and actress, ODNB, lived for a time in Fitzroy Square.

'Dorothy' nee Millar, wife of Sir Eugene Goossens, divorced in 1928, friend of NH

Nina Hamnett and Boxing

Just before Christmas I bought another addition to the Art Collection, a drawing of a boxing match by Nina Hamnett, a Bohemian artist, born in Wales, who thrived in the Twenties and went into a slow alcoholic decline from the Thirties onward, culminating in a nasty death in 1956 - probably suicide, although not proven.  I've been reading my copy of Denise Hooker's Nina Hamnett Queen of Bohemia (which I've only just noticed has been inscribed by the author).  It's well written and illustrated and tells you all you need to know.  Portrait by Roger Fry (one of her many lovers) above.

Hamnett wrote two volumes of autobiography, the most celebrated of which is Laughing Torso (Constable, 1932), which became the subject of a widely publicised libel case courtesy of our old friend Aleister Crowley, who hoped to make some money out of it.  Hamnett had included a section on the Abbey of Thelema at Cefalu in Sicily (I took some exterior photos there a few years ago, see earlier post) where she says, 'He was supposed to practice Black Magic there, and one day a baby was  said to have disappeared mysteriously.  There was also a goat there.'  Crowley claimed that he only performed White Magic.  During the course of the trial Crowley used a suitable analogy, in terms of this post, when describing different forms of magic: 'In boxing you can fight according to Queensberry rules or you can do the other thing.'  'Does that mean', counsel for Constable interposed, 'that his definition of Black Magic is the same as all-in wrestling?'  The judge eventually delivered a damning verdict on the Great Beast: 'I have never heard such dreadful and horrible, blasphemous and abominable stuff as that which has been produced by a man who describes himself as the greatest living poet.'  Crowley lost.

Learning that a friend had arranged  an exhibition at the Claridge Gallery in Brook Street, opening on 13 April 1926, Hamnett returned from an extended period in Paris to live in the very heart of Fitzrovia.  'Nina stayed in the cheap and friendly Hotel de l’Etoile in [30] Charlotte Street, where there were three or four bedrooms above the restaurant, and the French atmosphere and petit dejeuner softened the blow of returning to England.’ (Hooker p.173).  The restaurant remains a renowned dining destination.

Hamnett became interested in boxing in the second half of the Twenties, which makes me think that this drawing dates from the period 1926-30.  Her entrance to this new world was gained after meeting a young boxer called Vernon Campbell at the Fitzroy Tavern.  He took her to a bout at the Comrade's Hall in Camden Town where she was delighted by the 'atmosphere of crude good humour and bawdy repartee'.

Hooker p.190: 'The promoter Johnny Hughes, an ex-flyweight champion, gave Nina a free pass and she took to going to Camden Town every week to draw, relieved to have found a way of killing the boredom of dreary Sunday afternoons, which always held a special horror for her.  Nina quickly got to know the other regulars and when Campbell boxed she joined in the crowd of supporters cheering and shouting "Come on Vernon!"  Sometimes Nina and Campbell went to the big fights at Premierland Olympia and the Albert Hall.  He also took her to Professor Newton's famous Academy of Boxing, off the Edgware Road, where she met the young boxers and drew them while they trained.  The professor took a great liking to Nina and obligingly demonstrated the complexities of right hooks and upper cuts along with the rest of the boxing repertoire so that she became something of an expert on the finer points of the sport.  Nina liked to air her knowledge to her friends and took large parties of up to fifteen people, which often included the poet Roy Campbell, to the Comrade's Hall, "basking in their clamour as if she were the entrepreneur of the event".  After the matches at Camden Town - and later at the Charlton [sic] Ring, Euston - Nina and her friends would bring the heroes of the afternoon back to her room, where they drank tea and beer until the pubs opened.  Nina did many drawings at the matches, some of which were included in the deluxe edition of Laughing Torso [I'll have to track this down] and she also persuaded some of the boxers to pose for her at home.'

My drawing must have been done at one of these bouts.  As it was the major London boxing venue, there's a good deal of information about The Ring in Blackfriars Road (over the Thames in Southwark, bombed in the Blitz, commemorated by a pub today).  Hamnett produced a number of works depicting fights there including The Ring at Blackfriars (watercolour) - sold by Sotheby's in 2002 see here (reproduced above).  There's very little information online about the the Comrade's Hall and the Drill Hall in Camden Town and Chalton Ring (the correct spelling) in Somers Town.  Chalton Street is a long road that runs pretty much the central length of Somers Town, at that time it was a predominantly working class district - suffering extensive damage in World War Two thanks to the three major main line stations close by - and was massively rebuilt in the 1960s and 1970s, mostly with council flats.

The reverse of the work is also of interest and the next post will be about that.