The groundbreaking real women who inspired TV series hailed ‘next Peaky Blinders’
Dope Girls premieres on the BBC tonight!
After spending years stepping up into the roles left vacant when men went to war, many women had no desire to become homemakers again after 1918.
Instead, many pushed back – fighting for their rights to continue to work. While some managed to keep hold of ‘respectable’ careers, others turned their attention to more salacious pursuits.
It is the women who owned, ran and worked in the illegal nightclubs of London’s Soho (and those that tried to stop them) that sparked the inspiration for the BBC’s upcoming period drama Dope Girls.
The six-part series, which has been described as a ‘spiritual successor to Peaky Blinders’ depicts in ‘visceral delicious detail the birth of the modern nightlife industry guided and gilded by hard fought female endeavour’.
Based on the 1992 non-fiction book Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground by Marek Kohn, the story centres on Kate Galloway (Julianne Nicholson), a single mother who establishes her own nightclub to provide for her daughter after a devastating family tragedy.
Although her story has many similarities with a real-life figure, the BBC has said the show is ‘inspired by a forgotten time in history, and all its events and characters are fictional’.
However, parallels can be drawn between the characters and women who lived through ‘the hedonistic uproar of post-World War One London’.
Julianne Nicholson as Kate Galloway Inspired by Kate Meyrick Dope Girls stars Julianne Nicholson as Kate Galloway (Picture: BBC/ Bad Wolf/ Sony Pictures Television/ Kevin Baker)Living in a small English village at the start of the series, Kate goes from a seemingly charmed life in the country to being widowed, turfed out of her home and travelling to London with her teenage daughter to try and make ends meet.
She eventually decides to try her luck opening a nightclub, a decision that changes her life, not unlike the story of the real-life Kate Meyrick.
Born in Ireland, Meyrick suffered the loss of both of her parents at a young age, eventually marrying a doctor in Dublin before they moved to England and settled in Hampshire.
For 15 years she helped run nursing homes for psychiatric patients with her husband whilst also raising eight children.
She opens a nightclub in Soho after becoming a widow and needing to support her daughter (Picture: BBC/ Bad Wolf/ Sony Pictures Television/ Kevin Baker)But they eventually split in 1918 when Meyrick was 43.
Faced with having to provide for her family with a weekly allowance of less than £1 a week, she responded to an advertisement asking for help to run tea dances and eventually opened the club Dalton’s in Leicester Square alongside Harry Dalton.
The venue was described as a ‘rendezvous for members of the theatrical and variety professions and their friends’ however in 1920 it was struck off the register and the pair were fined for operating what a prosecutor described as a ‘dancing hell and a sink of iniquity’.
Kate Meyrick was called ‘Queen of the Night Clubs’ (Picture: Daily Mail/ Rex/ Shutterstock) She ran several venues including the 43 Club in Soho (Picture: Alamy Stock Photo) Meyrick faced several prison sentences and fines throughout her career (Picture: Historica Graphica Collection/ Heritage Images/ Getty Images)At the time the sale of alcohol in the country was subject to strict licensing rules but Meyrick’s approach to dodging the law was to open another venue each time one was shut down for breaching the law.
Her most famous was the 43 Club at 43 Gerrard Street in Soho, which remained open until 6am and offered meals to patrons, as well as illicit alcohol.
It attracted highflyers, including actors Rudolph Valentino and Tallulah Bankhead, jazz musician Harry Gold, and authors J. B. Priestley, Evelyn Waugh and Joseph Conrad.
After a raid by police in 1922 she reopened the venue as Procter’s Club the following year, as well as establishing Folies Bergères in Fitzrovia.
She earnt £30,000 in her first year of business (Picture: Daily Mail/ Rex/ Shutterstock)Regularly facing raids and fines, the force of the law didn’t deter Meyrick, who was once quoted as saying: ‘Fines don’t worry me… I’m getting quite accustomed to them now. I suppose they’ll keep on fining me! Well, it can’t be helped – you can’t run night clubs unless you are prepared for this sort of thing.’
She eventually picked up the nickname of ‘Queen of the Night Clubs’ and it was said she earnt £30,000 in her first year running clubs, allowing her children to be educated at top private schools.
Three of her daughters even eventually married into the British nobility.
By the end of her 13-year career, Meyrick estimated she’d earnt around £500,000.
However, she’d also served five prison sentences and died from influenza aged 57 in 1933. It was said her health had ‘undoubtedly been weakened by her several periods of imprisonment’.
Despite her regular brushes with the law, Meyrick left an indelible legacy. She was the inspiration for the character Ma Mayfield in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited and on the day of her funeral, West End theatres and clubs dimmed their lights as a mark of respect for the trailblazer.
Umi Myers as Billie Cassidy Inspired by Billie Carleton Umi Myers plays dancer Billie Cassidy in the series (Picture: Buzz Editorial)In Dope Girls, Billie is a ‘dazzling bohemian dancer, whose life is irrevocably changed by Kate’s arrival’.
In real-life Billie Carleton was a musical comedy actress who started her stage career aged just 15.
She received her big break from when C.B. Cochran promoted her from the chorus to a role in his 1914 revue Watch Your Step.
However, when he was informed she’d been attending opium parties during the show’s run, Cochran fired Carleton.
Actress Billie Carleton’s death was investigated in 1918 (Picture: ANL/ Rex/ Shutterstock)She then went on to appear in shows including Some More Samples, The Boy, Fair and Warmer and The Freedom, briefly becoming the youngest leading lady in the West End.
However, her life came to a tragic end aged just 22 in 1918. After attending the Victory Ball at the Royal Albert Hall, she was found dead in bed in her Savoy Hotel suite from an apparent cocaine overdose.
Her death was then the subject of a highly published trial, which saw Reginald de Veulle charged with manslaughter and conspiracy to supply a prohibited drug. He was eventually sentenced to eight months behind bars.
However, in the Dope Girls book, Kohn claimed Carleton died from legal depressants that were taken to deal with her cocaine hangover.
Michael Duke as Eddie Cobb Inspired by Edgar Manning Michael Duke stars as musician and performer Eddie Cobb (Picture: BBC/ Bad Wolf/ Sony Pictures Television/ Kevin Baker)In the TV series, Eddie is a queer ‘bohemian, traveller, creative and artist’ who works in the Soho nightclubs as a band leader and performer alongside his close friend Billie.
In real life Edgar (Eddie) Manning was a Jamaican jazz musician and criminal who became known as the ‘dope-king’ of 1920s London.
In 1922 The Times reported that Scotland Yard called him an ‘important drug trafficker in the West-End’ while News of the World said he was a ‘drug vice chief’.
A handful of deaths through drugs were also linked to him and he was sentenced to prison several times for drug possession.
Eliza Scanlen as Violet Davies Inspired by the first female MET officers Eliza Scanlen’s character is one of the first female officers to be accepted into the Met (Picture: BBC/ Bad Wolf/ Sony Pictures Television/ Kevin Baker)Although Violet is a fictional character, she was inspired by the women who made history as part of the Metropolitan police’s first female recruits.
Before 1829 the capital city didn’t have a professional police force and volunteers instead took on the responsibility of patrolling the streets.
But when the force was established, only men were allowed – and they had to be under-35, taller than five foot five and physically fit.
It was in 1915 that Britain’s first female police officer with the power of arrest (Edith Smith) was hired in Lincolnshire. Three years later women were permitted to join the Met, with the first seen on the streets of London in 1919.
However, they still faced an uphill battle and weren’t even allowed to make arrests until 1923. Married women were only allowed to sign up after 1946.
Speaking about her character, Eliza explained how she pursues a career in the force to ‘escape her disadvantage at home and start a new life and one of security’.
‘When she gets into the police force, she goes undercover as a sex worker to try and get women off the streets, and things start to go a bit pear shaped when she finds herself identifying with the unconventional family of women she has gotten to know. It becomes this moral conflict for her,’ she said.
Women were allowed to join the Met for the first time in 1919 (Picture: Keystone/ Hulton Archive/ Getty Images)‘Whether to choose this unconventional family she has become close with or choose the status and power that comes with the police force.’
Speaking to the BBC, Dope Girls’ executive producer Jane Tranter said the show was a ‘revisionist look at what it was like to live in London in 1918’.
‘One of the main themes of Dope Girls is what it was like for women in 1918 London and how women can find their voice,’ she said.
‘In the first episode alone, we see our four main characters being metaphorically or literally silenced by the men and the culture around them and one of the things that happens over the 6 episodes of Dope Girls is we see the women’s fight to find their voices and be heard.’
Dope Girls starts tonight at 9.15pm on BBC One.
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