Betty May
She was a member of the London Bohemian set of the inter-war years, claimed to have joined a criminal gang in Paris, was associated with occultist Aleister Crowley,[4] and sat for Augustus John and Jacob Epstein.
The only known account of her early life is her autobiography Tiger Woman, in which May writes that her father left the family when she was very young, leaving her mother to raise four children on the ten shillings a week she earned working long hours.
Even now I am often caught with a sudden longing regret for the streets of Limehouse as I knew them, for the girls with their gaudy shawls and heads of ostrich feathers, like clouds in a wind, and the men in their caps, silk neckerchiefs and bright yellow pointed boots in which they took such pride.
"[16] After she became involved with the London Bohemian set which included Augustus John, who also affected a gypsy style, Anthony Powell said: "her hair tied up in a coloured handkerchief, she would not have looked out of place telling fortunes at a fair.
"[17] Indeed, May's most popular song as an entertainer was "The Raggle-Taggle Gypsies" which she was said to have performed at Wally's, a subterranean club in Fitzroy Street, while removing her skirt and twirling it in front of her.
[22] May said, "The lights, the mirrors, the red plush seats, the eccentrically dressed people, the coffee served in glasses, the pale cloudy absinthe ... [I] felt as if I had strayed by accident into some miraculous Arabian palace"[21] continuing "No duck ever took to water, no man to drink, as I to the Café Royal".
It was Epstein in particular who introduced her to other members of the Bohemian set,[23] which including the "Queen of Bohemia" Nina Hamnett, prankster Horace de Vere Cole, heiress Nancy Cunard, painter William Orpen, Anna Wickham, Iris Tree and poet Ezra Pound, many of whom May knew.
Others are identified only by first names or pseudonyms: "The Limpet", who was always falling in love; Eileen, who modelled for Augustus John and was shot by her lover; and Bunny, who received a six-month sentence for bigamy and was later strangled by a man in Brixton.
[29] Apart from the Café, May sang and danced at the Cabaret Theatre Club, which later became the Cave of the Golden Calf under the ownership of Madame Strindberg and featured frescoes by Epstein.
There is no independent confirmation of the story, but according to May, soon after meeting the Cherub, and before the outbreak of World War I in 1914, she became involved with a criminal known as the White Panther, a member of L'Apache Gang, whom she met in a bar.
[31] Other sources, however, attribute the name to a tiger skin coat or outfit she wore or a party trick that involved crawling on all fours and drinking from a saucer like a cat.
According to Nina Hamnett, May and Lilian Shelley were the "principal supports" of the Crab Tree Club on Greek Street founded by Augustus John that year.
According to May, Atkinson demanded a divorce, but died in action in France (1917) before it came through[46][47] though marriage records appear to show her remarrying at the end of 1916 to a man by the name of Waldron.
"[42] In 1919, "Bunny" Garnett, writing as Leda Burke, published a sensational novel titled Dope-Darling: A Story of Cocaine[49] whose central female character "Claire" was loosely based on Betty May whom he knew well.
There he is enraptured by the singer, a sexually experienced young woman who had arrived in London aged sixteen just two years earlier, was duped into taking drugs and then into a life of prostitution.
William Roberts remembered in his posthumously published (1990) memoirs the Harlequin's female customers "whose vocal talents turned the place at times into a sort of Café Chantant, when the dark-skinned Helene sang the 'Raggle-Taggle Gypsies, O!'
[59] Although Crowley thought the marriage a mistake, he praised May, describing her as a "charming child, tender and simple of soul" but suffering from the consequences of a childhood accident that had "damaged her brain permanently so that its functions were discontinuous" and saying that she had not helped matters by taking to cocaine at age 20.
[59] Crowley saw his offer of a job to Loveday as a way out of their precarious existence in London which he described as "one filthy room in Fitzroy Street, a foul, frowsty, verminous den ...
)[8] May confirmed in testimony at Crowley's 1934 libel trial that she was supporting them both at the time by sitting as a model for £1 per day and that they were living in one furnished back room.
"[59] In his Confessions, Crowley described, in typically censorious terms, May at work at the Harlequin Club just before she left for Italy: "In a corner was his wife, three parts drunk, on the knees of a dirty-faced loafer, pawed by a swarm of lewd hogs, breathless with lust.
[70] According to May, after her return to England, she married for the fourth time, a journalist she nicknamed Carol whose real name was Noel Mostyn Sedgwick (1902 - 1970).
[78] The first verse, in the male voice, ran: No Austin-Seven at my door love's chariot was, but jolting trams with butts and spittle on the floor conveyed your peerless hams[79] In 1929 May, Rickword and two friends were arrested on a weekend trip to Dieppe in northern France after discovering that they did not have enough money to pay their hotel bill.
[81] By the 1930s, the bohemian crowd who once frequented the Café had largely decamped to North Soho, or Fitzrovia as it was beginning to be called, where they were centered on The Fitzroy, and to a lesser extent The Wheatsheaf in Rathbone Place.
Dylan Thomas, a regular at both, wrote to his friend Bert Trick in 1934 that "Betty May, is as you probably know, an artist's model – who posed, though that is not perhaps the most correct word, for John, Epstein and the rest of the racketeers".
Soon after, May and her former lover Edgell Rickword took the couple to "Kleinfled's" (The Fitzroy Tavern), The Marquis of Granby and The Plough, and finally to Smokey Joe's, "a non-alcoholic speakeasy-cum-lesbian pub".
During the 1934 Crowley stolen letters trial, May admitted that the book had been written by someone else, based partly on articles she had supplied to the newspapers, though she didn't say who the author was.
[89] In 1934 Betty May was the principal witness in the suit brought by Aleister Crowley against Nina Hamnett for libel in her book Laughing Torso which had alleged that a child had disappeared at the Abbey.
[91] During the cross-examination, counsel for Crowley tried to impugn May's character, asking her if she thought it fraudulent to publish Tiger Woman as her own work when she now admitted that she was not the author.
[73] Around the same time, a popular newspaper printed a photograph with the caption "Miss Nina Hamnett, the artist and author of Laughing Torso, takes a walk in the Park with a friend".
"[93] Further evidence was given of Burton's disordered mental state over a length of time and of relations which he and his twin brother both had with a Belgian woman they had met on ship as they travelled to Britain.
