City of the Beast, page 18
Not least of the women Crowley knew in Pimlico was Bertha ‘Bill’ Busch, the eighth of the official Scarlet Women. Having moved to London with him, they had drifted apart but she had stayed. In 1935 Crowley told Gerald Yorke that she was living with a boxer he knew, who forced her into prostitution and beat her face black and blue, but this is a typical Crowley retrospect on the unlucky fate of former friends and may not be true; he also alleged Mathers had put his wife Moina on the street.
Towards the end of the 1930s she was living at 82 Warwick Way, and then in 1939 at 3 Cornwall Street (a demolished street at the back of Dolphin Square, now under Pimlico Academy sports area) with an older man, retired Royal Artillery captain Harry Frowd St. George Caulfield. She was described as a saleswoman of household machinery (possibly sewing machines or vacuum cleaners). She knew Crowley's then girlfriend Margot Cripps, and she still had sex with him occasionally, a couple of works being dedicated to the success of an invention he was trying to patent, his ‘Memodial’ for phone numbers.
At the beginning of the war Bertha was judged not to need internment, and opted not to be repatriated. But then, bizarrely, in September 1944 she was sent back to Germany (it is hard even to imagine how civilians were safely conveyed to Germany, only a couple of months after the D-Day landings; possibly it took Red Cross help, and might have been on compassionate grounds). It was the worst possible moment to go home, with Germany falling and Russian invasion imminent, and the rest of her story is presently unknown.6
1 ‘Mental Torture From Cheque Frauds: Relief To Be Arrested’, The Times, 29 August 1939 p.6.
2 Oddly Caine's book figures in Vladimir Nabokov's novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which has saved it from oblivion.
3 The location is now Russell House, a large red-brick apartment block at the Lupus Street end of Alderney Street.
4 46 Lillington Street is long gone, now under the Lillington Gardens Estate, but the flats of Ethel Donley and Peggy Young are still there. When I went to see them there was a bit of Harry Potter merchandising on a windowsill, a faux-vintage wooden box proclaiming “English wand makers”. You don't know the half of it, I thought.
5 (John Long, 1934). John Long was a downmarket publisher of sensationalistic books who also published Rollo Ahmed's The Black Art (1936). Lady Owen followed Flaming Sex with The Sleepless Underworld (John Long, 1935), a spectacularly unconvincing memoir of her time as “queen of the Paris underworld”.
6 If anyone with access to German records cares enough to look into it further, she was born Bertha or Berta Kruger on 6 March 1895 in Crussow, north-east of Berlin, and at some point married a Herr Busch (she was divorced). Her middle initials appear in adult life as E.A., and she also used the name Anna.
75
HASKER STREET, CHELSEA: LIFE WITH PEGGY
Most accidents happen at home
In May 1938 a man called John Jameson wrote to Crowley, and they had lunch. He was a young actor who suffered from stage fright, and Crowley took him on as a student. Jameson had money, and Crowley saw him as a possible financial backer for various projects including rejuvenation pills and a stage production of Mortadello. In the summer of 1938 he went on tour and sublet his flat at number 6 Hasker Street to Crowley, precipitating a discreet flit from Manor Place.
Crowley had bad dreams at Hasker Street, and blamed them on the Book of Abramelin: “Two or three really bad nightmares. I am a fool to sleep with Abramelin in the room, as I have for some 4 or 5 days.” The following night was no better: “Another terrific nightmare. Removed Abramelin. (This was a ‘double-decker’ dream: i.e. one in which one dreams that one wakes & checks up on the dream, & finds it true!)” 1
Frieda brought Sir Percy here to meet Crowley and talk about politics, and Pearl was still visiting as a friend, but meanwhile Crowley had met a new woman, housekeeper Peggy Wetton, who became his primary partner and moved in with him. This had all fallen apart in drink, madness and jealousy by the time they moved out. It was like Pearl all over again (and it was the same horrible formula, living with a highly strung woman who drinks and then making her jealous).
“Kempinski A.1 wild duck with Louis Wilkinson; back to 6 [Hasker Street] to enjoy 1827 Brandy & Peggy's ravings”
“Peggy hopelessly drunk again”
“Peggy raving all P.M.”
“An admirable dinner: my prawns now perfect. Peggy raving & weeping most of P.M.”
Peggy was unlucky with accidents. One evening in November, Crowley asked her to fetch the Evening Standard so he could find the time of the news on the wireless, and she went out only to smell something burning. Opening the stove, it exploded into a fat fire, and as she got the dish out with a wet cloth she was badly burned on her right arm and hand (and, Crowley noted, “utterly heroic and unselfish”).
After a Dr Cosgrove said they should wait 24 hours and see how it developed, she was taken into Charing Cross Hospital for what turned out to be ten days; she made a violent scene about being kept in. “The day was curiously peaceful,” Crowley noted that Saturday at Hasker Street: “One must not have women about.” After ten days she was discharged, but then admitted a couple of days later to St. Lukes, Muswell Hill; this was a psychiatric hospital (“a positive paradise for Peggy”) where Charing Cross may have recommended assessment.
Meanwhile Crowley was involved with several other women, including a Norah Knott (“She has a complex or fixation, but is as nymphomaniac as Peggy”) who did some secretarial work for him. This is almost certainly the Norah Knott who had been secretary to the Reverend Harold Davidson, disgraced for his relations with prostitutes, who ended up as a circus performer and met his end after being mauled by a lion. Like Crowley he was an extrovert public figure (in his performances he acted out being roasted on a spit by the devil) and he had recently died, in June 1937.
Crowley also had a couple of works with Pat Harvey and, most notably, on the day Peggy went into hospital, a woman called Josephine Blackley (more about her shortly): this was “Wunderschon!” [wonderful] and it was done with the intention of healing Peggy's arm, to which end he put some elixir (mingled fluids) on the right arm of Peggy's dressing gown.
There has been a widely noted ‘psychologization’ of twentieth-century magic, which Crowley spearheaded with ‘The Initiated Interpretation of Ceremonial Magic’ back in 1904. In it, he argues that when an old magical grimoire talks of evoking a demon who finds money, this really means stimulating the part of the brain that governs business ability. In line with this, much of his sex-magical activity (for his own health, or for a creative endeavour, or for giving a good talk) is within the realm of motivation, confidence, and inspiration, along with more nebulously causal but still partly self-determined areas such as ‘luck’ or ‘prosperity’ or success with another woman. But, like his works with Maisie to bring on the Second World War, his opus with Josephine Blackley and the arm of Peggy's dressing gown is notable not only for its generosity – although it might not be a generosity Peggy would have appreciated – but for its fully supernatural expectations.
There was more love interest during the Hasker Street period with Marie-Louise Draghici, a sometime dressmaker (at one point she had or was involved with a lingerie business at 77 Baker Street) who lived at 48 Chepstow Villas, not far from Phyllis Wakeford: Crowley performed a couple of works with Maisie Clarke intended to “get” Marie-Louise,2 but their relationship petered out in social engagements and lunches, including lunch with Peggy, who fell down the steps at number 48 as they were leaving.
Crowley was well dug in at Hasker Street for about eight months, and he had a letterhead printed there with “666”. But eventually young Jameson wanted his flat back. In February 1939 he wanted Crowley and Peggy out, and it came to conflict:
John Jameson shows heroic rage
Against sick men of thrice his age.
Against sick women in his care,
Nothing John Jameson does not dare
Yet opposition soon dries up
The frenzy of the Pansy Pup.
Frieda Harris helped Crowley look for new lodgings, and in the last week of February 1939 he moved out.
1 This was not his Abramelin notebook of talismans, as I would have imagined, but the published Watkins edition of 1898; he had a more relaxed attitude to the notebook. I am indebted to William Breeze for this information.
2 Similarly, he performed works with Maisie, Jessie Moran and Rose Wilson all dedicated to success with an Angela Considine, or Constadine, (although when he finally succeeded he found he didn't like her – “quite unthinkably stupid. Simply not there to any intelligent remark.” – and was keen to get rid of her in the morning).
76
WEST HAMPSTEAD
Love in Hampstead
In June 1937 Crowley wrote what might have been “If able, live in Hampstead” in his diary. The original diary is no longer extant, surviving only in slightly unreliable Chinese-whisper transcriptions, and the transcription is unequivocally “If able, love in Hampstead”. If he really did write that, then it is certainly more aphoristic.
Crowley's comings and goings in Hampstead – leafy, prosperous, supposedly intellectual, historically quite Jewish, famously pleasant – and north London generally, are slightly mysterious. He had chess business up there, and book business,1 and he had a few friends and acquaintances such as Noel Fitzgerald (Boundary Road), Louis Fox (Belsize Park Gardens) and “Campbell and Rhona”, a boxer and his girlfriend who lived at 100c Abbey Road. This was Selvin Campbell, born in Belize, who became Jamaican welterweight champion and moved to Britain in 1936; he fought as Lefty ‘Satan’ Flynn, “His Satanic Majesty”. Crowley also notes an Adele Brand, who lived on Priory Road, and he had an “A1” sexual encounter with a woman called Julia at 37 Broadhurst Gardens.
Hampstead grows less expensive going west, shading across West Hampstead into the historically more down-at-heel Kilburn. In the spring of 1938 Crowley was ecstatic to meet a woman in her early thirties called Sally Pace, who was staying at number 55 Iverson Road, Kilburn, just by the railway bridge on the line to Kilburn station.
This was Sarah “Sally” Pace, aged 32, from Shrewsbury in Shropshire (where she was married to a considerably older publican who ran a pub called the Craven Arms; she may have run it with him). Crowley only had sex with her twice, in March and April, but he was very taken with her and she inspired some of his most enthused poetry since the days of ‘Leah Sublime’:
Sally is a darlin’ little bitch
Slim and tall and wonderful, a witch.
Her cunt is hot and slimy—
She is ready to defy me
To satisfy her everlasting itch.
But I swear to God I'll put the matter right
If I have to lick the bloody thing all night
In an ecstasy of bliss
Till she chokes me with her piss
And a golden mess of hotly-scented shite.
After that he lowers the tone, and the second half is less suitable for quotation in a family book.
Sally probably didn't have a telephone, because Crowley also went up there (travelling by bus on a straight line up what is now the A5, along Edgware Road and Maida Vale) and didn't find her in. On the bus back he struck up an acquaintance with another woman, a Stella Hilling, who was in her late twenties and gave her address as 43 the Broadway, Cricklewood (a grocers, which she was either living above or working in). She later came to visit at Manor Place, but she was no Sally Pace. He asked his I Ching to divine the relative characters of Stella and Sally and, as he interpreted it, it came up with “idiot” and “hot stuff” respectively.
1 e.g. with a bookbinders on Canonbury Road named Key and Whiting, and with W.L. Hershant at 236 Archway Road, who was involved in distributing Magick.
77
BLACKFRIARS ROAD, WATERLOO
Cath Falconer
One night in December 1938, during the Hasker Street period with Peggy and failing to get any further with Norah Knott (“futile”), Crowley went out and spent what seemed to be “two hours’ futile hunt” looking for a pick-up in Hyde Park. At last he struck gold with a woman named Cath: not only would she be his main sexual partner through 1939, but it didn't end badly and she became a friend.
This was Katherine or Cathrine M. Falconer who lived on Blackfriars Rd, within the ambit of Waterloo rail terminus. This influenced the character of the area; George Burchett, the famous tattooist, was also nearby on Waterloo Road to cater for servicemen passing through. That same autumn Crowley had also visited a prostitute called Emmy Butler several times; she was even closer to the station on Lower Marsh, in Florence Davis's “Private Hotel” at number 141, next door to the Dover Castle pub (now the Walrus pub and hostel). Just across the road at number 9 Lower Marsh (demolished and now the site of a health centre; number 11 is still there) was the house where a few years earlier Maria Teresa de Miramar alleged to Gerald Yorke that she had been imprisoned for three months by “tres mauvais” Italians; the suggestion is that she was held captive by ‘white slavers’, until “enfin je me suis escape” [sic].
Cath Falconer lived at 83 Blackfriars Road in Harry Levy's “Women's Common Lodging House”,1 a few doors down from the Railway Tavern on the corner (now The Ring, opposite Southwark underground station). Crowley found Cath to be “a lady & intelligent”, and the operations (the first for “health”) were “very first class” from the start. The only problem was Peggy, who was understandably jealous, and was expected to socialise with Cath. Crowley expected all his women friends around this time – Peggy, and Pearl, and Frieda, and Pat, and Ruby Melvill2 – to get on under the same roof, and it didn't often work: “Cath back. Peggy insulted her all day”, he writes in his diary, while on another occasion Pearl laid into Pat, “calling her trollop, harlot, whore, and slut in the course of a spate of venomous abuse.” Cath was also jealous.
About a week into their relationship at Hasker Street, Cath was using a knife to cut up a tea cloth and accidentally stabbed Crowley deep in the face: he lost a good deal of blood and had to call Dr Cosgrove out again. After Peggy's earlier kitchen fire, it is almost surprising Crowley doesn't blame having Abramelin in the house for the accidents at Hasker.
Crowley invented a dish in Cath's honour3 and took her to restaurants including the White Tower. Sex continued through 1939 and into 1940, overlapping with his later partner Alice, with Crowley praising Cath and her “cunt prehensile as ever”.
Finally they stopped having sex but remained on cordial terms. A couple of years later Crowley was sorry to meet her again in a reduced state (“Ill-dressed, old, dirty, skin discoloured, smile and pawky speech quite gone”)4 and by then she had also been arrested for shoplifting, but they kept in touch. During the war she worked at the Royal Ordnance munitions factory at Swynnerton, Staffordshire, then joined the Women's Royal Naval Service (the WRNS or Wrens) and finally seems to have emigrated to Australia. She remains one of Crowley's happier relationships.
1 ‘Common Lodging House’ was a recognised, almost legalistic, term with the ‘common’ meaning communal eating and often sleeping. Jack the Ripper's victims relied on Common Lodging Houses. The nearest modern equivalent would be a hostel for the homeless.
2 Ruby Melvill (1887-1939) was a former socialite and society beauty, painted by William Orpen, who travelled and wrote. She was also addicted to heroin. Crowley saw her on an almost daily basis for a couple of months in 1936 without it developing into a relationship.
3 The transcript (“Foudee Falconer”) seems botched but it may be Fondue Falconer or Fondre Falconer (‘Falconer melt’). It was fried mushrooms, cut small, with powdered chili, cooked in parmesan or preferably Cheshire cheese, then boiled up with the addition of cream, and eaten with fried French bread.
4 “Pawky” – a Scots word for playful, witty, drily humorous.
78
SOHO: JOSEPHINE BLACKLEY
The women of Soho
One night in October 1938 Crowley was out on an almost fruitless hunt when shortly before midnight he found a magnificent woman: “The most marvellous woman I have struck in years. But really too fat and ugly.” This was Josephine Blackley, who lived at 256 Newport Buildings, a long-gone tenement – densely occupied, with a large proportion of Italians – almost at the junction of Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue. He returned to her from time to time.
Inevitably Crowley met other women in the Soho area. Suggestive names and addresses in his 1930s diaries include “Lilian 40 Dean St top floor”; “Coloured girl 22 Windmill St.”; “Dora Williams, 42 Rupert St”; “Betty Russell, 3 Brewer St.”; “Jeanette, 72 Shaftesbury Avenue”; and “Gladys GER4602”.1
It was probably the pursuit of women that led him to join the ‘Social Dance Club’ at 12 Little Newport Street (now, but not in Crowley's day, part of Chinatown, and where he had membership as A. Crowley Esq., valid until 22/6/1934) and to have dealings with the Colonial Club at 14 Bateman Street; he noted the club in his diary in 1938, and a few years earlier a girl named Millie Sharp had already given him the club's phone as her number: GER1441.
Josephine Blackley's story took a spectacular turn during the war. In the small hours of 17 April 1941, just before 3.30am, Newport Buildings was hit by a massive 1000kg parachute bomb (2,2000lbs: a “landmine”, as they were known) and completely destroyed,2 leaving her under the rubble.
But she survived. Crowley was astonished to run into her again and learn what had happened: “Jo Blackley! disinterred after 2 hours under Newport Buildings!!! Now at 8 Marshall St.” 3
