Piccadilly Circus and 'an absolute sink of iniquity'
Research for Blackmail In Bloomsbury
Where in the centre of London can you find a statue of Eros? Trick question, and one that led me down a research rabbit hole when I was writing Blackmail In Bloomsbury.
As any Londoner knows, Piccadilly Circus is home to the statue of ‘Eros’ (Anteros, actually*). It’s an iconic monument, erected to commemorate the charitable works of Lord Shaftesbury, whose eponymous avenue is one of the streets converging at this point.
Eros is a convenient meeting point, once surrounded by flower sellers like Eliza Doolittle from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. So when I was writing about a clandestine meeting at Piccadilly Circus in October 1922, it was natural to refer to Eros.
I’d better check, I thought, that it was referred to as Eros in the 1920s. So I Googled it. At which point I was informed that ‘Eros’ had been removed from Piccadilly Circus at the start of 1922 while the Piccadilly underground station was being built.
Bother, I thought. I re-wrote the scene, laboriously referring to the hoardings put up around the works for the underground. Later, I was looking at contemporary photographs of Piccadilly Circus in an old newspaper, trying to work out where the entrance to a restaurant was. I noticed that Eros seemed very much in place.
I eventually tracked down a primary source in the Pall Mall Gazette, which reported on final permission for the work on the underground station and the future plans for Eros. The date? July 1923. I went back to my clandestine meeting scene and re-wrote it again, reinstating the God of Love.
All of which goes to show that primary sources are best. Also, that you can lose days of your life tracking down tiny details.
Piccadilly Circus is a frequent reference point for Londoners, with its illuminated advertisements, very new in the 1920s. Saying that somewhere is ‘like Piccadilly Circus’ is instantly known to mean that it’s very busy. The centrality of the junction in the West End of London meant my characters in Blackmail In Bloomsbury were constantly crossing it or going to night spots nearby.
My character Hugh, the charming but troubled artist and Slade School of Art tutor, was likely to be one of the regular crowd at the Café Royal, which I’d read about in Pat Barker’s Life Class. In her novel, the Café Royal on Regent Street was a regular haunt of the Slade artists.
I discovered the Italian Roof Gardens at the Criterion restaurant on Piccadilly Circus through the always-entertaining Jazz Age Club website. This, I decided, would be where my sleuth Marjorie would get her entrée into smart society, on the trail of a potential murderer. It sounds so lovely and I wish the Criterion, or something like it, still existed today.
Piccadilly was smart, but you didn’t have to go far to find the shadier Soho alleys and the back-street clubs where the demi-monde partied. London is still like that; great wealth and poverty existing side by side. Street lighting was not universal in London in the 1920s, so you could quickly find yourself in trouble – as Marjorie did on her first venture into Soho.
One real-life club I took inspiration from was The Caravan Club, which became the not-very-disguised Caravanserai in Blackmail In Bloomsbury. In reality, Caravan was a little later in the interwar years, and in Endell Street rather than Ham Bone Yard, where I moved it for convenience.
Caravan was what we would now call a gay club, although that terminology wasn’t much used in the 1920s/30s. It was a private club where men went to meet other men, and (albeit less so) women to meet women. I discovered Caravan in the National Archives online blog. The blog described how local rate-payers had denounced the club to the police, describing it as ‘an absolute sink of iniquity… frequented by sexual perverts, lesbians and sodomites’.
The police duly raided in August 1934 and Detective Inspector Campion of Scotland Yard noted: ‘The small dance floor was crowded and the number was too large to allow dancing properly. Men were dancing with men and women with women, a number of couples were simply standing still, and I saw couples wriggling their posteriors.’ Shocking. I wonder how he’d view twerking.
Next time: Bright Young Things.
Tip of the week
Don’t believe everything you read on Wikipedia! It can be a good starting point, but follow up the references and go to original sources (like newspapers from the British Newspaper Archive) to check.
Favourite research moments
Discovering this wonderful act of defiance from one of the Caravan Club members on the night of the raid. Regular patron Cyril de Leon told DI Campion: ‘‘Well I don’t mind this beastly raid, but I would like to know if you can let me have one of your nice boys to come home with.’
*Learning that the statue of Eros actually represents his brother Anteros, the ‘God of Selfless Love’, which sculptor Alfred Gilbert thought appropriate to celebrate the charitable works of the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. Piccadilly’s colourful history may mean Eros is a more suitable deity for the location, however.
Doing a West End Crime walking tour with the Footprints of London company, and learning that Vine Street (which I’d hitherto known only from the Monopoly board) once housed the main police station for the district - which is why it’s grouped on the board with Bow Street, the more famous home of the West End police.
