Betty May

Betty May was a British singer, dancer, and model, who worked primarily in London's West End. 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, and sat for Augustus John and Jacob Epstein. She became known as the "Tiger Woman". She adopted the name Betty May early in life, for reasons that are unclear.

Early life

Bessie Golding was born in Tidal Basin, Canning Town, London, in August 1894. She was the second of five children born to George Golding and Ellen Theresa Golding. She was born into poverty. 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. The family had little furniture and no bed, so they slept on bundles of rags at night. May identified her mother as being half French and described her as good-looking, with an olive complexion and dark eyes, features May claimed to have inherited. May described her grandmother, who lived nearby, as a formidable character who influenced her life.
According to May, when the struggle of supporting four children became overwhelming, her mother sent May and her brother George to live with their father. It was the first time May had ever seen him. He was an engineer by profession, but was living a life of idleness, drink and violence in a brothel run by his girlfriend in Limehouse. May wrote that she and her brother left the house after her father was arrested by his father, an inspector of police, and later jailed. She first stayed with her paternal grandmother and then with her aunt and uncle on a barge, where she was washed frequently, taught the Lord's Prayer, and had her hair brushed more than she thought necessary but was otherwise ignored. She described herself as a "little brown-faced marmoset... and the only quick thing in this very slow world." Her aunt described her as "a regular little savage". May earned pennies singing and dancing for sailors on passing vessels. Some time later she was sent to live with another aunt who had a farm in Somerset where May attended the village school.

Coster roots, gypsy style

In her autobiography, May described her "coster" roots as being inherited from her grandmother, saying "I am a true coster in my flamboyance and my love of colour, in my violence of feeling and its immediate response in speech and action. 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. I adored the swagger and the showiness of it all."
May was small, green-eyed, and dressed like a gypsy. She stated in her autobiography that soon after she arrived in London she "could only afford one outfit, but every item of it was a different colour. Neither red nor green nor blue nor yellow nor purple was forgotten, for I loved them all equally, and if I was not rich enough to wear them separately... I would wear them, like Joseph in the Bible, all at once! Colours to me are like children to a loving mother."
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." 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. She also sang "Sigh No More Ladies", "Bonnie Earl O'Murray" and "There Lived a Girl in Amsterdam".

Café Royal set

Around 1910, May travelled to London where she quickly became familiar with the pubs and clubs of the West End. She became a regular at the Endell Street Club and the Café Royal which before World War I was a much different place from the later Café Royal. May described it as a real café with sawdust on the floor, cheap drinks and gilded decorations "as gaudy and as bright as possible" where you could get a plate of chips for sixpence. May said, "The lights, the mirrors, the red plush seats, the eccentrically dressed people, the coffee served in glasses, the pale cloudy absinthe... felt as if I had strayed by accident into some miraculous Arabian palace" continuing "No duck ever took to water, no man to drink, as I to the Café Royal".
She met the painter Augustus John and the sculptor Jacob Epstein. It was Epstein in particular who introduced her to other members of the Bohemian set, 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.
At the Café and other central London venues, penniless models networked for work among London's artists. Those who could, like Betty May, also performed in order to make a living and in many cases women occupied a grey area between professional model and prostitute. The lives of many of May's contemporaries ended tragically. Among them were Lilian Shelley, also known as "The Bug" or "The Pocket Edition", who later killed herself; the suffragette Laura Grey, who overdosed on veronal in 1914; Sunita Devi who was reported to have been poisoned; Bobby Channing; and Lilian Browning. 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. Other models May knew included Euphemia Lamb, wife of the painter Henry Lamb.
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. According to May, when not entertaining, she was educated in taste by a distinguished older man she christened "the Cherub", with whom her relationship was strictly platonic.

"Tiger Woman"

May gave her version of how she came to be known as the "Tiger Woman" in her 1929 autobiography of the same name. 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. May wrote that she went with him to Paris and after arriving at the gang's lair was immediately set upon by the Panther's girl Hortense who saw May as a rival. May wrote of the moments after the Panther broke up the fight, "I must say that I was in a frightful passion... when White Panther dragged me by the hair to my feet, In an instant my teeth had met in his wrist... "Tigre" he muttered" and in this way May claimed to have earned the nickname "Tiger Woman".
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. May herself, in the 1934 Crowley libel case, implied that the name had been made up specifically for her 1929 autobiography, Tiger Woman: My Story, saying: "I am rather feline in looks. I thought perhaps it was rather a good name for me."

Return to London

By 1914, May was in London. 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. The Crab Tree was particularly informal with customers making their own entertainment and helping themselves to food. May recalled that there was a pole from the floor to the ceiling which she often had to scamper up if she had played a trick on someone.
May writes in Tiger Woman that she was friendly with a young man called Richard who became ill and died after a canoeing accident while they were out together. She also wrote that she was later engaged to a barrister named Dick and while staying with his family in the country, she went for a stroll with a young farmer who claimed he loved her. According to May, he stumbled, and shot himself fatally in the head when his gun fired accidentally. There is no independent verification of either death however. May wrote in Tiger Woman that she returned to London almost immediately, her engagement to Dick was broken and quickly replaced by a new engagement to a former suitor, Miles Linzee Atkinson, who May knew as Bunny. Atkinson was a Cambridge University graduate and university blue who May had met prior to her visit to Paris. They were married at the Marylebone Registry Office in the third quarter of 1914.

Drug use

According to May, Atkinson was a cocaine user. A trainee doctor at a London hospital, he had access to as much cocaine as he wanted and May quickly began to use the drug herself. She would later comment that "I learnt one new thing on my honeymoon – to take drugs." May wrote that on their honeymoon they were thrown out of their hotel when the management became suspicious. On their return to London they became part of the unorthodox household of Stewart Gray in Ormonde Terrace, Primrose Hill. The house was occupied by a constantly changing group of artists and models, usually penniless. It was furnished in the most basic way possible in accordance with Gray's philosophy and was without utilities, even water.
May wrote that she and her husband attended dope parties where "all forms of drug-taking used to be indulged in". They became part of the circle of Billie Carleton and Ada Song Ping You, a Scotswoman who had married a Chinese man from whom she learned to use opium. After the war, Carleton was found dead, apparently of an overdose, and Ada Song Ping You was sentenced to five months in jail with hard labour for preparing opium for smoking and supplying it to Carleton.
Atkinson joined the Army in 1914 following the outbreak of the First World War, originally in the Motor Machine Gun Service. According to May, they took a house in Bisley, Surrey while he was training and later May rented a flat in Richmond where she got a job in a shop which she left in a panic after handling Chinese hair-nets which she had read in the newspaper had given a woman leprosy. She moved back to London. According to May, Atkinson demanded a divorce, but died in action in France before it came through though marriage records appear to show her remarrying at the end of 1916 to a man by the name of Waldron.
May's drug use escalated. By her own account, soon she was taking 100 grains of cocaine per day, and morphia too. Her cocaine habit increased to 150 grains, causing her to become paranoid. She recalled that on one occasion a "waiter brought me white coffee instead of black. Immediately I concluded that the whole world was against me."