The real dope girl
Historian Lucinda Gosling reveals the notorious true story behind Dope Girls’ tale of clubs and criminality in London after the First World War
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November 1918. Four long years of war are over and London is in the grip of a dance craze. “London has gone dancing mad,” reports one newspaper. “Dancing establishments in London are crowded morning, noon and night.” The syncopated sounds of ragtime and jazz are all the rage and, powered by this, nightclubs are mushrooming around the West End at a dramatic rate.
War-weary veterans want to forget, and bright young things want to have fun. Both can be achieved through drink, dancing… and drugs. And there are opportunities to make money for those brave enough to take the plunge. From the smart clubs of Piccadilly and Mayfair – the Lotus, the Four Hundred or the Kit-Kat – to bohemian haunts such as the Hambone Club or the Cave of Harmony, there are clubs that cater to every taste and budget in London.
But being a nightclub proprietor isn’t for the faint-hearted. It’s a competitive, cut-throat world requiring wit, grit and determination. Cocaine use is widespread, sex is for sale, licensing laws are made to be broken. There are gangs on the prowl demanding protection money, and the long arm of the law is ready to close down any club bending the rules. It’s tough. It’s dangerous. It’s no job for a woman. Or so you might think.
Eliza Scanlen as a young police officer sent under cover to size up Soho's clubs. BBC
It’s against this nefarious backdrop that the BBC1 drama Dope Girls is set. Kate Galloway is down on her luck after her husband leaves their business in ruins and Kate and her daughter out on the streets. With nowhere else to go, she’s drawn into the seedy underworld of London’s nightlife and establishes a club of her own with dangerously ill-gotten gains.
Dope Girls is the latest in a number of recent dramas to place women criminals front and centre stage, all inspired by real-life stories. Sophie Turner starred as an amateur jewel thief turned criminal mastermind in the 1980s-set drama Joan, based on the memoirs of Joan Hannington, who was known as “the Godmother”. A Cruel Love will soon re-examine the life and death of Ruth Ellis, the 1950s nightclub manager who was the last woman hanged in Britain for the murder of her lover. Elsewhere, the Forty Elephants, a notorious female gang based on a real crime syndicate based in London’s Elephant and Castle area, feature prominently in Disney+’s A Thousand Blows.
Dope Girls is loosely based on Mrs Kate Meyrick, whose notoriety and celebrity as owner of a string of clubs during the 1920s earned her the soubriquet Queen of the Nightclubs. “Ma” Meyrick’s origins were incongruously respectable. Born Kate Evelyn Nason in 1875, she was the daughter of a Dublin physician and enjoyed a typical middle-class upbringing. She married a doctor, Ferdinand Meyrick, bore him eight children, and for some years helped him at a hospital they ran for “nerve” patients in Hampshire. So far, so respectable.
Kate "Ma" Meyrick (far right of women) ran a host of clubs in the 1920s Alamy
The Meyricks were comfortably well off and able to provide Harrow and Roedean educations for their sons and daughters. But in 1919 they separated (though never divorced), with Kate taking the children with her, determined to start a new life. She answered an advertisement for a partner to run tea dances at a London club called Dalton’s in Leicester Square. It was a baptism of fire, with Dalton’s soon struck off and closed down. The prosecutor at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court called it “a dancing hell and a sink of iniquity”.
But Mrs Meyrick was undaunted. She took over the premises of 43 Gerrard Street in what is now Chinatown, naming it simply “The 43”. Meyrick’s subsequent clubs included the Folies Bergères in Newman Street, Brett’s, the Little Club in Golden Square, the Manhattan in Denman Street, the Riviera in fashionable Maidenhead and the Silver Slipper, which opened in Regent Street in 1927 and boasted a state-of- the-art illuminated dancefloor. There was even a spell in Paris, where she opened the Gaiety Club.
The 43, the flagship of her empire, was a magnet for pleasure-seekers of all types; millionaires, movie idols, European royals and Soho gangsters. They came for the sound of Teddy Brown’s band, to foxtrot with the pretty hostesses, quaff champagne into the small hours and, if still standing, enjoy a bacon sandwich as the sun came up. Seated near the entrance, chatting to members as they signed in, was Mrs Meyrick; small, neat, polite, well-spoken and adept at diffusing drunken confrontations (those years spent nursing mental health patients had equipped her with useful transferable skills). She paid little heed to licensing laws, often claiming that all clubs flouted them and the only way to compete was to do likewise.
Mrs Meyrick frequently found herself in the dock
London’s thriving nightclub scene had a formidable foe, however, in the shape of William Joynson-Hicks, appointed Home Secretary in 1924. Nicknamed “Jix” by the press, he was censorious, puritanical and convinced that nightclubs were responsible for the erosion of the nation’s moral fibre. Police raids became an occupational hazard for most club owners but the focus of Jix’s moral crusade was the diminutive Mrs Meyrick, who frequently found herself in the dock for contravening licensing laws.
These hearings were punctuated with sundry accusations about the dissolute atmosphere in her clubs. The Times reported on one raid in May 1922: “The Forty-Three Club was frequented by women of loose character, there was drunkenness and scenes of disorder and indecency both inside and outside the premises. There was an indecent proposal from one woman, indecent sing-songs… some of the dancers went away singing and shouting and there were heated altercations and a fight.”
The police reports on nightclub raids, preserved in the National Archives, though clearly biased, make for lurid reading. So if you think the hedonism seen in Dope Girls is exaggerated, think again. And the series is faithful to many other aspects of Kate Meyrick’s world.
The cast of Dope Girls. BBC
The vicious Salucci family mirror the real-life Sabini Gang, which ruled areas of London’s West End during the 1920s and controlled horseracing tracks. Young undercover officer Violet Davies represents a number of women who blazed a trail for others in the Metropolitan Police, while black musicians were in demand to provide jazz sounds during these years. And it seems more than coincidence that dancer Billie Cassidy in the series shares the same forename as Billie Carleton, an up-and-coming actress who in November 1918 was found dead from a drug overdose the morning after attending the Victory Ball.
Meanwhile, Mrs Meyrick continued her cat-and-mouse game with the authorities, paying fines, closing clubs and opening again under different names. Repeated offences brought harsher penalties; she served the first of five prison sentences in 1924. Each time she was released from Holloway Prison, she posed for photographers with armfuls of flowers from well-wishers and her children by her side, an insolent public display that must have had Jix fuming over his bedtime cocoa. The fact that her four daughters all married into high society, three to peers of the realm, proved that her lawlessness did little harm to her social standing.
In 1929, after a suspicious lull in raids, it was discovered that Mrs Meyrick had been bribing a police sergeant in the vice squad. The case made headline news. She was sentenced to 15 months’ hard labour, serving 12, emerging markedly thin and frail. Two more prison terms weakened her further and in 1933, aged just 57, she died of pneumonia at her home in Regent’s Park. On the night of her funeral, the lights in London’s West End were dimmed in her honour, a fitting tribute to the Nightclub Queen.
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Lucinda Gosling is the author of Great War Britain: the First World War at Home (History Press)
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