Welcome to Gin and Whores

This blog is the official online home of the Venerable Gin and Whores Society of Victorian Prostitute Re-enactors. If you would like to join our degenerate but rather well dressed band then email your name to madame@versailles.org.uk and you will be added to our list of SHAME. It won’t even cost a sixpence.

Membership of the Society has few advantages other than being invited to all future GIN AND WHORES events (where you basically dress as one in order to drink the other), first dibs on whatever lovely fripperies and merchandise we come up with, a link to your blog or site on this blog and, most importantly, the right to refer to yourself as a bone fide Victorian Prostitute Re-enactor.

Be warned though, referring to oneself as a Victorian Prostitute Re-enactor can lead to all sorts of excitement and may also attract BOHEMIAN DEGENERATES to you like moths to a particularly lovely absinthe scented flame.

At some point, I’ll be designing T shirts, badges and also a very fetching card for you to flash around should the mood take you, but I’ve been caught rather on the hop, darlings. All in good time though!

Actual posts on this blog will be made up from relevant cross postings from my Madame Guillotine blog account, some extra titbits just for you and SOCIETY BUSINESS.

Don’t forget to say hello if you pass by.

 

Madame G. x

 

Bonne anniversaire Oscar Wilde!

Like a lot of mawkish teenage girls with a bent towards the GOTHIC, I had a bit of a crush on Oscar Wilde in the nineties. It started when I was doing my GCSEs when an unusually sympathetic teacher joined my school and introduced me to the world of The Importance of Being Earnest. The rest of the class begrudgingly bought cheap editions of the play but, already hooked, I remember forking out in Waterstones for a big red bound collection of all his plays and works, which I treasure still many years on.

Next of course, there came the Richard Ellmann biography, which I read dozens of times as a teenager and then as a melancholy undergraduate, soaking up the richness of Wilde’s prose, the evident love of the biographer for his subject and the horrible turmoil then tragedy of Wilde’s personal life.

Another favourite book at this time was The Last Will and Testament of Oscar Wilde by Peter Ackroyd, which I first read, mostly uncomprehendingly, at fourteen but again reread several times over the years, adoring the language and imagery.

My love of Oscar Wilde was such that I even made him the subject of my GCSE Art exam when I spent it painstakingly designing a memorial statue for him based on the portrait above, which I painted in watercolour from all angles and wept profusely over. I totally failed GCSE Art, but I didn’t hold Oscar responsible for this, preferring instead to blame the ugly aesthetic principles of the ignorant, dullard examiners, which is what I felt Oscar himself would have done had he been in my shoes.

Also, in what I felt was true Wildean style, I refused to paint or draw anything ever again after this low point in my creative career, preferring instead to pursue Art History as a form of rebellion against those who were clearly trying to oppress my artistic genius.

Later on, as an undergraduate I paid my one and only visit to Père Lachaise, pausing to buy a single white lily at the gates then tramping across the cemetery to Wilde’s rather ugly yet stately grave at the far end, where I reverently placed it, admiring the patina of fading rosy lipsticked kisses that covered the front of the marble tomb but demuring to add my own.

Sadly, my enthusiasm dimmed as every day life took over and I had less time to read and daydream and obsess about poets and revolutionaries, but there remained a special place in my heart for Oscar all the same, as evidenced most latterly by my naming my youngest son in his honour : Oscar Sebastian after Oscar Wilde and Sebastian Melmoth, the name he assumed during the early years of his exile after being released from prison.

Poor Oscar. I don’t think his latter day birthdays were very happy but I think it may have cheered him up a great deal to know how much he continues to be loved now. Of course it would probably have cheered him up a lot more if each of his admirers was able to time travel back to Paris and buy him some absinthe and cake, but hey ho, you can’t have everything.

Drink More Gin

I got my anniversary present today! Can you guess what it was? No?

Knowing my love of all things GIN and thanks to a timely post about Jack the Ripper inspired finds on the fabulous Beyond Pale blog, Dave bought me this fantastically appropriate print from A Two Pint Problem on Etsy, which he then framed for me. It looks brilliant and how ‘me’ is this?!

I love this one as well – ‘In victory, you need champagne. In defeat, you need it‘ . I think I may well have to buy one for the kitchen. Champagne isn’t really my drink but I definitely agree with the sentiment!

Dave also tells me that A Two Pipe Problem were fantastically helpful about his order and really did everything they could to get his rather last minute order out promptly so thank you so much to them for that!

 

Whitechapel – episode one

So, what did you all think of last night’s first episode of Whitechapel? I found that it really stood up well to a repeat viewing (haha, how smug am I?!) and was just as gloomy, gruesome but shoot through with humanity and humour as I recalled. I love the relationship between DI Chandler (Rupert Penry-Jones) and DS Miles (Phil Davis) as their sympathy, admiration and understanding of each other continues to grow.

It was gory though wasn’t it? I must admit to having a limited knowledge of the Krays and had, in my naivety, imagined that they just roughed people up a bit. I mean, why else would every second person in the area (including an uncle – by marriage, I hasten to add) be so keen to claim that they knew them in some way? I had no idea that their behaviour was quite so vicious and unbalanced and it made for really uncomfortable viewing at times.

I may not totally understand it, but you can sort of see why people are so eager to be connected to them in some way as, horrible though they undoubtedly were (except to their mum as we are so often reminded), they are steeped in legend, a rather seedy sort of glamour and are also absolutely intertwined with the history of the East End. And it is the threads of all of this that Whitechapel skillfully pulls together to create a sinister, paranoid world of murder, corruption and menace.

Rupert Penry-Jones has his own take on the Kray’s popularity: ‘I was fascinated by the Krays and what I found so fascinating is that they were minor celebrities and it became cool to hang out with them.  Having said that, most people were scared of the Krays, so they would try and make them their friends rather than have them as enemies.’ Which is, of course, totally understandable!

Detective Superintendant Leonard ‘Nipper’ Read, who eventually brought the real Kray twins to justice also points out that ‘East End people were very reluctant to say anything as they saw the Krays as part of their lives but also one of the reasons they didn’t talk is because they didn’t trust the police’. He also says that the people of the area believed that the local streets were safer because of the Krays and the tight hold they had on the underworld of the East End.

‘People would be introduced to them and never believe what they were.  They were an exception and didn’t give a particularly bad impression.  They were well presented and dressed and lived in two very different worlds and enjoyed both.’

‘However they could turn on a sixpence and even their own gang members were afraid of them.’

The references to ‘the legend of the Krays’ may strike one as rather silly at first, but then you recall sitting next to old men in Whitechapel boozers, all keen to tell their tales of the time they bumped into Ronnie or one of their friends drove a car for Reggie or they were in the Blind Beggar on the night that George Cornell got shot and you realise that this is how legends are born.

One of the things that I like best about Whitechapel is the use of location to add to both authenticity and also atmosphere. Although the heart was bombed out of the Spitalfields area during the Blitz, I don’t think there are many more evocative areas in London and this must surely be a gift for the production team because as Sally Woodward Gentle points out: ‘Once again the streets of Whitechapel yield an extraordinary story‘.

For me, the streets of Whitechapel are as much the stars of the show as the actors and plot so I am always looking out for the familiar alleyways, cobbled streets and quirky backstreet pubs that I know and love so much.

The filming of Whitechapel looks to have been a huge and complex undertaking, with the crew shooting in over 80 locations over the course of 39 days. They dealt with this by having a main ‘hero’ location and then moving briefly out for odd little quick segments.

Filming locations used for the production included the Repton Boxing Club where the original twins used to spar, Pellici’s Cafe where they liked to have breakfast and, of course, the Blind Beggar on Whitechapel Road. As Rupert Penry-Jones explains: ‘We are using Whitechapel in a similar manner to the way we used it before, the difference is now we are using locations that echo the 1960s, rather than echoing the Victorian era. You’ve got all these fabulous buildings and we filmed as much as possible in locations that were frequented by Ronnie and Reggie.’

Anyway, having affectively spoilered myself for episodes two and three, I can assure you all that the rest of the series is really fantastic and there are rocky, troubling, disturbing times still to come for Chandler and his team as they delve deeper into the myths of the Krays and Whitechapel.

Whitechapel is on again next Monday on ITV1 from 9pm.

 

If you fancy watching a great video of the premiere that I attended last week then step this way! See if you can spot me in the audience!

Gin, no whores and the Whitechapel premiere

I feel rather unwell today. Am not hung over, just tired, you understand.

Anyway, as I MAY have mentioned on my blog last week, I got put on the guestlist for the premiere of the ITV crime drama series Whitechapel, which is due to start screening on ITV1 on Monday at 9pm and full of excitement and clutching my fabulous new Iron Fist Werewolf bag to my bosom, I headed off yesterday to attend!

My friend Simon and I started off the evening in the White Hart on Whitechapel High Street, where we enjoyed a gin before walking down Mile End Road to the Genesis Cinema where a winding queue of people proclaimed that something exciting was afoot.

On being ushered in and then excitingly waved past the queue due to being An Important Blogger (I’m not really an important blogger, I just wrote that to see what it is like) we then walked past a fake crime scene complete with white suited forensics person, body bag and all manner of gruesome apparatus to find ourselves in a room full of people milling around a probably authentic looking crime desk and with an attending female policewoman to direct us.

Clutching our drinks, Simon and I headed into the cinema where they had thoughtfully provided free popcorn for us all and there we waited, while images of Whitechapel, the Krays and premiere attendees were shown on the screen and a rather cool looking DJ played 60s hits by, I am informed, people like The Kinks.

There was some fun when I was checking Twitter and saw the lovely WaterAndInk on my timeline say ‘Think I’ve just spotted you at the premiere’ which led to much excitement and waving!

We then settled down when a Krays expert came onstage to give a brief talk about the Krays, his book about them and his upcoming auction of Krays memorabilia. After which the executive producer Sally Woodward Gentle came up to introduce the snippet we were about to see, which was a special one and a half hour long edit of the start of the series.

It started off with the same melancholic music as Whitechapel and slick opening credits with hints of blue and sepia before opening on a police award ceremony at which it soon becomes clear that things are not exactly rosy for DI Chandler (yummy Rupert Penry-Jones) and his team.

Peter Serafinowicz is in this series playing a rival DI with hidden, dark depths. He really was exceptionally good and really chilling in places, provoking genuine shock in one scene in particular. I actually Tweeted him from the premiere to tell him that we were watching and how great he was and got what I think was a pleased reply, which was nice to find on my phone in the morning when I er awoke from my perfectly sober slumbers.

Whitechapel itself was enormous fun, extremely droll in places, grotesque in others but always supremely entertaining. The script was fast paced, the acting intense and the overall ambience dark, threatening and suspenseful.

I don’t know much about the Krays (they’re a bit after ‘my’ period) but I suspect that the crime scenes were pretty authentic and suitably grotesque. I would say that it was slightly less gory than its predecessor series about a Jack the Ripper copycat, but there was blood and gore aplenty, if you like that sort of thing.

Without giving anything away, I wasn’t sure about the theme of the plot and it wasn’t always totally convincing but suspension of belief aside, it was astutely dealt with and the air of menace and paranoia was skillfully heightened throughout until the chilling and genuinely Edge Of Seat climax, which left me desperately wanting to know what happened next!

Steve Pemberton deserves a mention for his repeat portrayal of crime enthusiast and Ripperologist Buchan. His documentary about the Kray murders is genuinely hilarious and he once again turns in a performance that is both amusing and also oddly touching. Rupert Penry-Jones was fabulous too – reprising the quiet, precise almost neurotic character of Chandler but this time revealing a hint of dangerous steel beneath his well mannered, public school boy exterior.

In summary, this series of Whitechapel has at its heart the same aesthetics, themes and sinister brooding atmosphere of the original but at the same time it is very different as it evokes a real sense of the murderous paranoia of sixties London rather than the squalid Victoriana of last time. It’s definitely a must see on Monday evening.

I’d really love it if they made a third series – I passed on a suggestion to the production team that they could maybe base it on the Ratcliff Highway Murders of 1811, which I think would make for a really chilling and gripping series. We’ll have to wait and see though!

Sadly, I didn’t get to annoy Rupert Penry-Jones, although we spotted him in the cinema, as he is filming at the moment and had to rush back but we chatted to a few people after the lights came up and larked around the crime scene. I was asked to briefly review the opener on camera, but am suspecting that my performance won’t see the light of day!

After all this excitement, there was only one thing to do and that was head to the Blind Beggar, which we had just seen on screen as the scene of one of the Krays’ most notorious killings. I’d never been there before and really liked it – there’s a nice beer garden at the side, where we drank gin and chatted to people.

We then headed up the alleyway where Martha Tabram was discovered murdered in 1888 and went to the Princess Alice, my favourite pub, which has had another make over. Here we drank yet more gin and discussed huge and exciting plans for Gin and Whores. After this, things became a bit hazy but the Ten Bells, a curry house and the site of Millers Court were all visited as well.

I like to tell people that getting drunk on gin then wandering around Whitechapel at night is a very important part of the research for my book and to be honest, that is pretty much true. Yes, I see you looking disbelieving but I find the area itself hugely inspiring and it never fails to trigger all sorts of intriguing possibilities for my writing. It helps of course that I have a close personal link to the area thanks to my great grandfather being involved in the Cable Street Battle and so on.

Sadly, I forgot to take a note of the house on Commercial Street that my Jack the Ripper chasing great great great grandfather, David Lee lived in when he was an 1888 precursor to Whitechapel’s DI Chandler but will make sure I look for it next time!

Anyway, thanks so much to the publicity team for Whitechapel for letting me go to their fabulous premiere, the team behind Whitechapel for making such a great show, Simon for being, once again, the host with the er most and also the lovely people and Twitterers that I met last night. Not that we Twitterers aren’t people too, but you know what I mean.

You can find out more about Whitechapel here. It starts on Monday night at 9pm and is really rather good!

Downton Abbey

Ah, how fabulous is Downton Abbey, which is currently airing on ITV1 on Sunday nights? It’s perfect comfort viewing for these wet, cold Autumn evenings – in fact I can think of few things nicer than snuggling down on the sofa to watch it while the rain lashes against the window panes.

It’s not ground breaking cutting edge drama so don’t expect anything shocking to occur (although I really winced and had to hide behind a cushion when they showed a medical procedure tonight) but who cares, when the acting and backdrop are as fantastic as this and the dialogue sparkles with humanity and wit? The plot too is churning with passion, intrigue and a delicious wry humour as we see the aristocratic family politely battling above stairs while below stairs the servants mercilessly dissect them and their doings.

If you’re thinking that it is all a bit like Upstairs, Downstairs and, more recently, Gosford Park then you’d be totally right but that’s not a bad thing – there’s a reason why we continue to be fascinated by the lifestyle of the idle rich at the turn of the century after all.

One of the most amazing things about Downton Abbey is the clothes, with the black beaded evening gowns worn by the ladies above stairs being particularly gorgeous! I thought it might be fun to put together a Downton Abbey look for you all!

Gorgeous tulle dress from the Topshop Kate Moss collection.

Greta square toe shoes from Topshop.

Chandelier earrings from Topshop.

Jet style necklace from Oasis.

Stack of cameo rings from Oasis.

Lace and facet earrings from Topshop.

Long black satin gloves from Accessorize.

Metal shell clutch bag from Accessorize.

Sequinned, veiled top hat from Accessorize.

Feathered and sequinned hair clip.

A feathered fan from Accessorize.

Hope you enjoyed that! Definitely tune in and watch Downton Abbey if you aren’t already watching it as it is a real treat and really superb. Tonight’s episode saw the debut of Dan Stevens as the awkward prospective heir to the title in a rather Heyeresque turn as the relatively middle class (or upper middle class as his mother corrects him) outsider who arrives to disrupt the aristocratic family’s life. I feel a bit bad actually as I passed on a question to Dan on Twitter earlier on, asking if he’d gone all LA, which he very much denied.

Anyway, Dan Stevens, if you ever read this (unlikely!): I’m sorry, you were fab and long may you continue to put the wind up them all, as it were.

The Double Event, 30th September 1888

On the night of the 29th September 1888, Elisabeth Stride, a slight woman with grey eyes and curling brown hair walked the streets of Whitechapel in search of clients. Unlike the flashy Victorian prostitutes of popular imagining, she was dressed soberly and rather shabbily in a black jacket and skirt and black crepe bonnet, accessorized with a posy of red roses and ferns.

She was far from home, having been born Elisabeth Gustafsdotter in November 1843 near Gothenburg in Sweden. As a teenager she had worked in domestic service before becoming a prostitute in her early twenties.

In 1866, she moved to London in order to escape her past and start afresh and after a period as a maid Elisabeth married a ship’s carpenter called John Thomas Stride, who was thirteen years her senior. For a while the couple ran a coffee shop in Poplar before separating in 1877, whereupon Elisabeth entered the local workhouse. The couple had an off/on relationship after this but had finally ended their marriage by 1881 and by 1885, she was living with a labourer called Michael Kidney with whom she had a very unstable and occasionally violent relationship, fuelled by her alcoholism which led to several appearances in the dock for drunken and disorderly behaviour.

Her husband died of TB in October 1884, but it seems that Elisabeth had been in the habit of telling people that he and two of their fictitious nine children had been drowned in 1878 in the sinking of the Princess Alice into the Thames.

On the evening of the 29th September, Elisabeth left her mean lodgings on the notoriously dreadful Flower and Dean Street and went in search of clients. A witness later claimed to see her at 11pm near Berner Street with a man in a bowler hat and then she was spotted again forty five minutes later with another man, this time wearing a peaked cap. Then at 12.35, a PC William Smith saw her on Berner’s Street, standing opposite a working men’s club with a man in a felt hard hat.

Where would Ripperology be without the various types of Victorian male headgear?

Less than half an hour after this last sighting, at around 1am,  Elisabeth’s body was discovered by the steward of the men’s club in the next door Dutfield’s Yard when he led his horse and trap inside and almost tripped over her as she lay, her throat cut, on the cobbles.

Later, a witness, Israel Schwartz would come forward to say that he saw Elisabeth being attacked at the yard’s entrance by a man who threw her roughly to the ground. Clearly she had had a busy night but no money was found on her body, which adds to the possibility that the unfortunate Elisabeth was not actually murdered by Jack the Ripper but by someone else, who escaped justice thanks to the hysteria and panic surrounding the Ripper case in 1888.

At 8.30pm on the 29th September 1888, Catherine Eddowes, a short auburn haired woman who was known for her hot temper and loud, ready laughter was discovered lying drunk on Aldgate High Street by PC Louis Robinson, who arrested her and took her to Bishopsgate Police Station where she was held until 1am, when she was considered sober enough to be released onto the streets again, just as not far away, Elisabeth Stride’s body was being discovered.

Like all of the Ripper’s victims, Catherine had had a chequered past having been born in Wolverhampton in April 1842 then moving to London as an infant before going back up north again as a teenager to work as a tin plate stamper. This job doesn’t seem to have lasted long before Eddowes was sacked and moved in with an ex soldier Thomas Conway, with whom she had three children after they moved down to London together.

In what is now becoming a familiar tale, Eddowes became an alcoholic and she and Conway split up in 1880. Catherine left the family home while her ex boyfriend changed his and the children’s surname so that she wouldn’t be able to find them. Within a year she was living with a new man, John Kelly at a lodging house on Flower and Dean Street, just down the road from Elisabeth Stride and here she made a living of sorts from prostitution and whatever she could find.

In the summer of 1888, she and John Kelly left London to spend the hot months hop picking in the Kent countryside but didn’t manage to hang on to their wages for very long so that on the 29th September, they were forced to literally split their last sixpence and go their separate ways until things improved. Catherine had two pence, enough for her lodging for the night but had presumably spent the evening working so that she had enough money to be sufficiently drunk to be drunk and disorderly on Aldgate High Street.

When Eddowes was released from Bishopsgate Police Station in the early hours of the next morning she gave her name as Mary Ann Kelly and disappeared into the night, choosing not to return to Flower and Dean Street but instead return to Aldgate, possibly in search either of more booze or a few more clients for the night.

She was last seen alive at 1.35am by three men who were leaving a club together on Duke Street and saw her standing at the entrance to Church Passage, which led from Duke Street down to Mitre Square. Her horribly mutilated body was discovered ten minutes later at around 1.45am by the beat police officer, PC Edward Watkins who had walked through the square at 1.33am and seen nothing meaning that the unfortunate woman had been killed in the space of just ten minutes before the killer made his escape…