After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Death at the Savoy Mansions: Post-War London's Drug Underworld

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

During the victory celebrations of World War One, a rising star is found dead in her bed after a suspected overdose.22-year-old Billie Carlton’s death caused shockwaves across the nation, adding fuel to a growing moral panic about sex, scandal and drugs.Anthony and Maddy are joined by Virginia Berridge, Professor of History and Health Policy at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, to explore the path to drug criminalisation in postwar London following the death of Billie Carlton. Together, they uncover the extraordinary history of drugs in Soho - London’s most notorious neighbourhood in the 1920s.Historic Soho has been brought to life in the new BBC show Dope Girls, which tells the story of Soho when female gangs ran the nightclubs after the First World War. You can watch it on BBC iPlayer now. All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

Hi, we're your hosts, Anthony Delaney and Maddie Pelling. And if you would like after dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. It's Wednesday the 27th of November 1918 in the Royal Albert Hall in London. The venue, influenced by designs of ancient Roman amphitheaters with its iconic domed roof and eye-catching red brick has hosted some of the nation's most important and impressive events since its opening a few decades ago.

In recent years there's been more of a charitable focus, from a titanic band memorial concert in 1912 to countless fundraising events for the war effort. But tonight, the creme de la creme of society, celebrities from the political, entertainment, and military worlds, are rubbing shoulders for a much more jubilant reason. They're celebrating the end of the Great War. The armistice signed just 16 days ago. The war to end all wars.

Everyone knew someone who didn't make it. The crowd partying at the ball are not the same people they were just a few years earlier. Among the attendees is 22-year-old West End star Billie Carlton. Billie is causing a stir in the theater world, and her star is rapidly on the rise. She's with her friend Reggie DeVoy, the fashion designer who created the extravagant black

dress she's wearing tonight. Together, they talk fast and excitedly, chatting to old friends and new, and the party will continue long into the small hours. The next morning, at the Savoy Court mansions located just behind the luxury hotel, a maid heads to Billy's apartment to serve breakfast and start her daily chores. Hearing an unusual silence after entering the flat, she heads to the bedroom. As she opens the door, she sees Billy's lifeless body on the bed. Billy Carlton is dead, and it wasn't long until the rest of the world would find out. INTRO MUSIC

Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Anthony. And I'm Maddie. And today we are listening to and hearing a history that I was not very aware of. So it's actually quite exciting to be discovering this brand new. We're talking about the death, as Maddie was describing there, of a West End star. And it is a death that shocked the nation at the time, made headlines. Billy Carlton. So this is the person we're going to be talking about today. And it opens up a history about the industry that was happening around cocaine and around morphine, nightlife, of course, and then the London underground.

We're in the 1920s, changes in the air, hemlines are rising. You need to think flapper dresses at this time, if you're not sure what the 1920s were like and trauma, I suppose, trauma that has come in the wake of World War I. So this is quite widespread in English society or European society at this point. This is all linking in to a brand new series on the BBC called Dope Girls, which Maddie and I have had a quick look at and are so excited. The 1920s, with the exception maybe of Peaky Blinders, we haven't really seen it on screen.

I mean, I love a good Jane Austen on repeat, preferably, but it's so exciting to see the early 20th century on screen. I love it. And you will know that Maddie and I are not experts in the early 20th century. We'd be far more comfortable in the 18th century. So today, our guest is going to help us guide through all of these themes. And the story of Billy Carden, of course, is Professor Virginia Berridge. And Professor Berridge is a professor of history and health policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks. We are so excited to have you, Virginia, and to step into this world that, as we say, we don't know that much about. I know it's very glamorous. I know it's, I suppose, has a dark edge because of the trauma of the First World War just being finished. But before we get into it, I am going to ask Anthony, at the top of this episode, we usually do

this about halfway through, don't we? But I'm going to make you do it upfront. I'm going to make you describe an image because this is an incredible photo. Tell us what we're looking at. It's very simple in many ways. It is a black and white image of a woman dressed in almost fairy-like costume, I would say. She's holding up, I guess what's giving me the fairy-like imagery is she's holding up the sides of the dress into what looks like wings almost, and she's just holding those at her side. She's corseted slightly, although not obviously an older corset, it's a looser corset. Her arms are bare. She has

a bit of a plunging neckline, I suppose. So this is probably a risqué stage outfit, I'm imagining. Loads of layers to... Great shoes as well. Yeah, some great character shoes that are laced up around her ankles. And she's very commanding. She's not looking directly at us. It looks as if she's looking off to her left hand side and just working out my rights and lefts there on the spot. We get the basics. Yeah. On this podcast.

And yeah, she's very commanding. She's very poised. It's almost balletic. I would know instinctively that this is a performer, but she's quite a striking, striking person. She looks like a character doesn't she? Now we are going to talk about who this person is and her background, but let's get a little bit of context. Now, Virginia, the 1920s in London, we've got a lot going on. There's

a lot of social change, isn't there? Can you give us a lay of the land? What's happening in terms of those changes? Who's the prime minister at the time? What's the political landscape like? What's going on? What would it feel like to step back into that moment? Well, straight after the war, the prime Prime Minister was Lloyd George who was really the last Liberal Prime Minister that we had, you know the great wartime Prime Minister, but it was really the end of the Liberal Party as a political force in the way which it had been in the 19th century. So he was representing kind of an older version of politics in a way. I think society was very, people were very uncertain about the world after the war.

Everything had changed. There'd been a very definite way in which society was organized before the war. After the war, things were much more fluid. Dresses were shorter, much, much shorter. A lot of concern about the role of women, I think, and women's independence, the new bachelor girl that people talked a lot about.

So a bit like the debts we had concern about a few years back as well. Yeah, I suppose the silhouette of women is changing, isn't it? As we said, the hemlines are rising, the hair is getting shorter and shorter in the 20s as well. And I suppose that we could tie that in to a certain extent with the suffragette movement that's still ongoing at the early 1920s, isn't it? Yeah, and of course, people, women have just got the votes in, or some women have gotten them in. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So things are changing. This feels like an electric and exciting time coming out of this trauma of the first war. And of course, lots of people are bringing that trauma with them. We heard in the opening narrative that there were military people

socializing in this party at the beginning. Was that a normal sight post-war in the 20s, to see people in uniform out and about? Were they marked by their presence in London? Yeah, a lot of people were still in the armed forces or people coming back. People didn't come back immediately, so they were gradually coming back into society. Yeah. Yes. Right. So now that we've established a bit of the context, I had described an individual woman at the start of this episode, Virginia, and that was Billy Carlton. Can you tell us a little bit more about her? Yeah, Billy was, she was only 22, but she was already a rising star. She'd been in various things,

including just recently a play at the Haymarket Theatre in London. So she was, and I think she was one of Charles Cochran's young girls in the theatre. So she was definitely somebody that was becoming known. She was an attractive personality. She appealed to a lot of people. And this is the period when also you've got the popular press becoming much more important, papers like the Daily Mail and Daily Express and so on.

And so they're promoting those people who are personalities much more than had been the case before the war. And of course they're going to promote them them but I suppose also tear them down in true tabloid form. We know, Virginia, that Billy attended opium parties. Now what is an opium party in the 1920s? Well there had been a tradition for a long while of kind of middle-class people going down to the East End of London to Limehouse to smoke opium amongst the Chinese community down there. But what seems to have happened during the war and also immediately afterwards was for people associated with that world down in Limehouse to come up to the West End and to

bring opium with them. And so there would be a kind of communal opium smoking. So there was a lot of talk during the Billy Carlton case, which occurred after her death, about opium smoking parties off Piccadilly and in other areas of the West End. And somebody called Ada Ping Yu, who was the Scottish wife of a Chinese seaman down in Limehouse, would come up from Limehouse with the opium, distribute it to people who were in a flat. The reporting in the popular press said they would all divest themselves of their clothing and put on pajamas, which doesn't sound exactly exotic to us nowadays,

but it was very exotic in the terms of the time. And they would smoke opium communally. So that's an opium smoking party. Yeah, I mean, it certainly sounds odd to Aria's today, doesn't it? Is this something where part of the enjoyment of it is to be seen at these parties in amongst this fashionable crowd or is it the taking of the opium itself and the state that that would then open up to you that is the desirable effect? Yeah, I don't think there were huge, I don't think it was a party with huge numbers of

people, it was a fairly small group. But the idea was the sort of altering of consciousness, the opium stupor that people might have had after smoking. And is it the same? This might be a silly question. Is it the same opium that people are using in the 19th century? Because I know we're going to get into a link between morphine and cocaine here so is there a change in the substance or is it just they're known as opium parties but there's different substances being used well the opium they're using is opium which is the raw drug yeah which is put

at the end of an opium pipe and twizzled around over a flame. But what was also around were called alkaloids, the active principle of opium. One of those is morphine, which comes into the Billy Carleton story. Another one is heroin, which doesn't come in, but which was discovered in the 1890s, I think, which wasn't very widely used at this time. So, Virginia, give us an idea then of how popular or usual recreational drug use was during the 1920s. I don't think it was very popular or usual at all. I think what was being talked up was really a quite limited drug scene, probably focused on the West End of London in certain theatrical cinema. One of

people involved was a cinema actor. So those sorts of circles and possibly some people still going down to Limehouse to smoke opium as a kind of, you know, rather daring thing to do. But really, recreational use was quite limited and when the Roleston committee later on took evidence about this, most of the people they found who were taking drugs on a long-term basis were people who were taking, not for really recreational reasons, but because they've been prescribed it a long while before and had continued to take it. It does show, doesn't it, like that in the 100 year period, let's say, that we've traversed

since, there's probably not very many households now that haven't in some way been touched by drug use or influenced by drug use or damaged or in many different ways. Whereas it really does sound like it's a very, very unusual thing in the 1920s. But remember, everyone probably would have had an opium-based medicine in their medicine cabinet. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a kind of medical use which could have shifted into something more, but that

went under the radar, really. So how prevalent was opium usage? I'm looking at my notes here and it says before the First World War Britain actually signed the International Opium Convention at The Hague in 1912. So is this seen as an acceptable thing in society? Is it a growing problem? How was it perceived? Going back into the 19th century, opium had been very widely available up to around about the 1860s because people could access it completely without any controls at all. So it had been very widespread use because it was a common sort of pick-me-up self-medication when people didn't have access to orthodox medicine, they would take some kind of over-the-counter opium preparation.

Laudanum, for example, which is opium and alcohol combined. So opiate use had been very, very widespread. Some controls were introduced in the 1860s under the Pharmacy Acts. So opium products over a certain strength had to be sold by a qualified pharmacist. You couldn't just go down to the corner shop and buy what you wanted. And those pharmacy acts had been altered, made somewhat more stringent throughout the 19th century. But basically when you get to the First World War, it's the pharmacy acts which are still controlling drugs in the UK. So there is some control.

Yeah, there's some control. But you know, people are very used to those sort of over-the-counter medicines and they were also used for children as well. Things like golpris cordial, colisbrans chloridine, which you may have heard of, it's been around, I think it's still around in the present, was one of those opiate-based patent medicines. So, I mean, it seems remarkable to us, doesn't it, today, that children would be taking this, but I know that as well as the sort of shock of children taking it, that in the First World War, there was concern about troops taking some of these drugs, that soldiers going off

to fight in the First World War had this in their systems. I wonder why they might be concerned that troops had opium. I believe today you are kicked out of the army if you do not pass a drugs test. So I think there are higher standards today. But I mean, how prevalent was this as an issue in the military? What you're starting to get from about the early years of the 20th century is a concern about people using drugs for more recreational purposes. So the use back in the 19th century hadn't really been that

recreational, there were occasional periods of concern about recreational use. But there's a big gulf kind of opening up between ordinary everyday use and use to change consciousness deliberately or for non-medical reasons really. Yeah, during the First World War there began to be concern. There was concern about smuggling of morphine and cocaine during the war because they were needed. They were drugs, particularly morphine, which was needed as a painkiller for the war effort. And there was also concern that troops were starting to use drugs. And this focused particularly on Canadian troops who were billeted in Folkestone.

Why particularly the Canadians? Well, this came to the fore. I think probably because there was potentially more of that sort of usage in North America. So it only became obvious when there was troop movement during the war, Canadians were billeted on the South Coast, and people were coming to the camp and selling cocaine and morphine, and there was not very much that could be done

under the existing pharmacy acts to control that. See, it's fascinating to me that you say about, they're doing this when they're in camp. They're not necessarily doing this when they're deployed to the continent to fight in the First World War. This is potentially recreational outside of work hours, even if it is on a military camp. But when you put there about morphine being a painkiller used certainly in medical procedures in the field in the arena of war. But this is something else altogether. This is just for fun. This is quite shocking. Yes. Although there was another side to this because in, I think it was in 1916, Harrods and Savory

and Moore, the chemists, had been marketing little kits with ampoules of morphine and cocaine under the headline, the byline of a useful present to send to friends at the front. Oh, wow. Wow. And this was, you know, a bit like sending a packet of cigarettes out, maybe. And they were prosecuted because that didn't conform to the Pharmacy Acts. But it did happen. You know, it was something that you could just go and buy something and send it to. We've talked a bit about the opium and the morphine side of things.

Let's just quickly, for people who might not be aware, look at the cocaine side of things. So what exactly is cocaine? And you talked there about how readily available it might have been, but there are so many other readily available uses of cocaine at this time too, like Coca-Cola, I'm thinking. But just give us a bit of a kind of a the backstory of cocaine. Cocaine is the alkaloid, the active principle of the South American drug, coca. Coca was not something that was widely available in the UK, and its alkaloid was discovered later than morphine.

But coca became quite the rage in the 1870s, 1880s, a lot of medical men discovered its use as something that could aid hard work, which of course it had always been used for many years in South American countries. And so there was a lot in the medical journals at that time about how people were going on walks in the highlands and taking Coca, chewing Coca as they went and that enabled them to do much longer treks than they did usually. And then of course cocaine came on the scene, the alkaloid, and that had quite widespread usage but particularly as an anaesthetic. So it's quite widely used as a dental anaesthetic in particular

where other drugs didn't work. It's really fascinating, isn't it, that line between recreational and medical, and they're often overlapping actually. So we have morphine, opium in its various forms, and then we've got cocaine. And this is all combining in the area around Soho in the 1920s towards the West End. This is presumably all appearing not for medical purposes but almost exclusively for social reasons. Part of the concern about the troops was that some of the troops were coming up to the West End and buying drugs around the Piccadilly Circus area, which of course has been a long-standing area where drugs are bought and sold. I mean, it was the same sort of area in the 1960s.

And there was very little that could be done. The Army Council, which was in charge of the Army during the war, used a decoy to try and get people prosecuted for what they were doing. That didn't work very well. And so there was a lot of concern about what this might do to the war effort, undermining the war effort and so on. And so in 1917, a regulation, regulation 40B, was passed under the Defense of the Realm

Act, which was a kind of catch-all act that enabled regulations to be passed very quickly under wartime conditions. And that required morphine and cocaine to be issued on prescription only, and the prescription could only be issued once. Much more control. It's interesting that you're describing these elements of control that are coming in. And then we have, as you were kind of saying, the backdrop of Soho, where that control seems to unravel slightly, and it seems to be a little bit more hedonistic. I mean, people throw that word around probably quite liberally, but there's- I think you could say Soho in the 1920s

probably was that. A little bit more hedonistic than the regulation that we're talking about there. And, you know, we're talking about the real growth of night clubs. There is cocaine and morphine presence there recreationally and in private settings as well. And then one of the most famous clubs

and that links to this story is the 43 Club. So I think that's one of the places that we're gonna be talking about as we come into this. But we wanna shift focus slightly now and talk about Billy's court case, the actress that we heard about from the start of the episode. So we have an inquest,

tell us a little bit about what happens there. What are the findings of the inquest? I think the original finding was that she died from an overdose of cocaine and then her dress designer friend Reggie de Ville, who'd been at these opium smoking parties, had apparently supplied her with the drug. So he was put on trial for manslaughter and a lot of evidence was produced about what had gone on in Lily's circle during that court case. I suppose that's the sort of dark side of this, isn't it? That we have drugs being used outside of those parameters of the law in this space that is incredibly social, all these different types of people are coming together. We've got Western stars, we've got soldiers, ex-soldiers, we've got people who've come up, as you say, from Limehouse to socialise,

but also potentially to sell and to deal in the drugs. And you have all these different lives and these different perspectives converging and everyone sort of letting go of their control, you know, within these environments. Was there a feeling at the moment and thinking particularly about, you know, Billy Carlton being this big star on the rise and that she is someone who is admired and looked up to and she's starting to appear in the popular press and everyone kind of has a sense of who she is and who she's going to go on to be. Was there then a feeling of darkness associated with this, that the 1920s coming out of this period of trauma and war, I suppose everyone wants there to be lightness and happiness and fun and jovial good times all around. Is there a sense that this is laced with something

a bit darker when she dies? Does her story take on those proportions and sort of challenge the changes that are taking place in terms of society and drug use? Yeah, I think people will, certainly the way in which it was written up in the popular press is very much, you know, there's a kind of epidemic of drug taking which is over, potentially undermining everything. And there was lots of stories which read really strangely to us now like Cocaine Eye and Morphine Twitch and so on and often those stories were tied up with these bachelor girls who were potentially taking to drugs and to all sorts of, you know, alternative ways of living. Virginia, you mentioned that a bachelor girl, so what is a bachelor girl and why are they

considered to be dangerous or threatening to society? Well, a bachelor girl is an unmarried girl, not somebody who's waiting around in the hope that she'll get married, but somebody who might choose to be unmarried in her lifestyle and her life. And that was seen as threatening because it was undermining what people saw as the point of being a woman, which was to get married and have children and that kind of norm has been undermined a bit by the war.

I suppose Carleton really falls into that category doesn't she? She's not waiting around for a man, she's gone and got her life, she's on the West End, she's this rising star, she's this exciting new celebrity and I suppose her independence is a problem for people isn't it? I guess so although I suppose people in the theatrical world were always a bit different. And the idea of the bachelor girl too was somebody who might be studious and study and get qualifications and so move on into a different kind of life too. That's interesting. There is nothing more dangerous than a lady who's studying.

Smart single lady. Watch out. There's something interesting there, isn't there, about women in particular taking these drugs and we've heard about how it's prevalent amongst men in the military. Is there a different moral standard that's applied to women at the time? Is it shocking that she's died potentially from an overdose because she's a woman? Potentially, yes, that was the case. And also because of the connection with Reggie, people didn't talk about homosexuality in the way which you might do in the present,

but he was always referred to as somebody who had these rather queer mannerisms and was a rather alternative sort of person. So it was connected with that idea too, of I think shifting sexual roles within society. You talked about the press coverage and you talked about some of the racist elements that were coming in there. And earlier on you'd spoken about the Chinese community that had been linked to some of

these parties in the domestic spaces. I'm just wondering how prevalent it was that they were brought up during this press coverage. Were they targeted specifically? Was this something that they really wanted to hone in on? Or was it just a sideline feature to the bigger names like Billy? Or was it really part of the story? Yeah, it was an element because people had been writing about the Chinese and opium smoking in the East End of London since the 1870s, 1880s really. I mean, Dickens and Oscar Wilde,

portrait of Dorian Gray. But I think there's an added element to it after the war, much more kind of racial tension, lack of racial harmony and so on. And so the idea of people are somehow different from mainstream society comes a lot more to the fore, I think. And tell me this, were any individuals from that community singled out during this time, or was it just a blanket community issue that was being presented in the press? Well, there was a lot of talk about Ada Ada Ping Yu who was the wife of the Chinese person in in Leimhout. So I guess if anyone was singled out it was her which was strange really because she was Scottish. But the idea of kind of sexual

relationships across racial boundaries was also something that was alluded to. And I suppose the fact that it is a young white woman who's died as well, presumably that's picked up in the press. And there's a sense of, I suppose, predator behavior in that drug dealers are selling to these women who are seen as, especially in the case of Billy Carlton, you know, sort of rising stars and someone put on a literal pedestal on a stage and admired for her sort of vitality and to have that taken away. Is that an element, the sort of sexual politics between men and women? Yes, that definitely comes into it. Almost inevitably it feels like there's going to be a crackdown in the wake of Billy's death

and based on all the headlines that have happened. Can you give us an overview of the legal actions that kind of come afterwards? Well, the legal actions that came afterwards actually started well before the Carlton case. So I probably need to go back to the early years of the 20th century and really back to China itself because the Americans who were seeking to expand their influence in China saw the Indo-Chinese opium trade as a kind of barrier to expanding American trade in China. So they started a whole process of attempted regulation or ending of that trade, starting at something called the Shanghai Opium Commission in 1909. And that gradually expanded over the next few years to take on board morphine and cocaine

as well. And an international treaty had been signed at the Hague just before the First World War. Now, it was only the Americans who were keen to expand this to be a global system. The British weren't at all keen, mainly because the Indochinese opium trade was coming to an end anyway. So they didn't see the need for all this international regulation.

So that treaty was on the international statute books before the First World War broke out, but only the Americans had done anything to put any regulation into place, and they passed the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914, which led to a kind of prohibition system in America. British hadn't done very much at all. They'd done a bit of talking about what might happen. And the idea was that they would just basically continue something rather like the existing Pharmacy Acts. And it would probably be regulated by a government agency called the Privy Council Office, which

overlooked the Pharmacy Acts. regulated by a government agency called the Privy Council Office which overlooked the Pharmacy Acts. But the war and the Carlton case I think helped to change all that. The Hague Convention became part of the peace settlement in 1919 so it became part of the Treaty of Versailles and it meant that the British government had to do something. Just a few years before that, into the scene had stepped the Home Office, the Justice Department, and a civil servant called Sir Malcolm de Lavin. Sir Malcolm de Lavin was very determined that there was going to be much more penal system and the Home Office was going to be in charge of it. And so he became a really important

figure in international drug control right up until 1930s, 1940s. So this case has a really long impact then. It really just changed the way that drugs are perceived, certainly in the press, in the public, but also in terms of legislation. What did that mean for the drug dealers themselves? I'm thinking about, I have, in my notes here, there was a drug dealer called Brilliant Chang and he feels the force of these new legislations doesn't he? Yes that was the death of Frieda Kempton who was a nightclub dancer and she died of an overdose of cocaine I think it was in 1922, 1923 and it led to another court case not not as high profile as the Billy Carlton one, but Brilliant

Chang came into that as somebody who'd supplied the drug and he ran a restaurant in Regent Street. So again, there was a similar kind of, you know, mixture of race and sex coming into press and a dangerous drugs act had been passed in 1920 which Britain had to do in line with her international obligations and this led to us tightening up of legislation in 1923 with dangerous drugs amendment act and that led to a lot more regulation and oversight. So Virginia with that regulation it occurs to me that there probably was some form of public debate, or was there a form of public debate at this time around usage of opiates

and cocaine or whatever. Was that part of the conversation at the time, or am I putting too modern a spin on that? There was a lot of popular press debate but how much public debate is debatable really because often when the when the laws were passed there was no political debate they really passed almost without discussion just something that had to be done because you know this was Britain's obligation. The only debate that started up and this was quite significant, was amongst doctors and pharmacists because doctors felt that, or some doctors felt, that these

regulations were unnecessary. They were closing down what the medical profession could do and they didn't like the fact that the Home Office was in control because they felt that the newly established Ministry of Health, which had only been set up in 1919, just after of Health, which had only been set up in 1919, just after the war, really should have been in control of drug control, but they weren't. And they still aren't. It's still a home office issue. And so doctors started to be quite vigorously opposed to this continual restriction of drugs. So the Ministry of Health appointed a committee in 1924 called the Rolleston Committee. It was chaired by Sir Humphrey Rolleston,

who was a very eminent leading doctor of the day, and that took some evidence about drug use and prosecutions, what was going on in the drug field and so on, and it brought out its report in 1926. And this was a very significant report, again, something that was not noticed at all at the time, which said that if you needed drugs for a medical purpose, if you were, maybe if you were addicted, but you needed to take drugs on a long-term basis

under the supervision of your doctor, then that should be something that was allowable. And that continued something which became known as the British system of drug prescription, drug taking. It seems to me, Virginia, there's a lot of echoes of this moment in the 1920s in terms of this changing legislation, the changing attitudes. How different is it now? Where are we in terms of our cultural debate around the use of drugs and the possibilities as well as the problems that it rises? Well, I guess the kind of knee-jerk reaction that you had in the 19, Randall Billy Carlton

case with these very hysterical press headlines. I think that's probably unlikely to happen nowadays. It did go on being the case for quite a long while, well into the 60s, 70s and 80s. And politicians in particular would in no way be associated with any change in the drug laws. It was kind of political death to be seen to be that sort of advocate. I guess that's changed. I guess there's more considered reporting, informed reporting in the media now. And of course, many more people take drugs now than was the case back in the period when we're talking about. So I guess there is a change in balance in society. The prevalence of drugs in the 1920s was largely, or at least in part, let's say, due to the

popular press and the sort of glamorising of it. Because of course, you know, we've spoken here about people taking drugs recreationally, they are still to a certain extent in control of the drug that they're taking, the amount that they're taking. Of course, they're not quite necessarily in control of where it's come from or how much they're being given, but it is their choice. And the darker side of this, of course, is addiction and very serious health problems, societal problems that arise from that. Do you think the popular press was interested in those problems in the 1920s as it is today? Or do you think there was a glamorization that led to people like Billy losing their lives?

I think they were only interested in addiction in so far, you know, the idea that once you started taking something you were almost inevitably addicted and it was a downhill track, a downhill spiral. I don't think they were interested in the kind of medical side of addiction, addiction treatment or anything like that. The sort of addicts that doctors were trying to defend really, the medical addicts or the people who were taking it because they'd been given it on a prescription and then continued to take it really didn't enter into the public discussion at all. Whereas I think nowadays we have much more discussion about those sorts of people, don't we?

I suppose a good place to finish would be to link back to where we started. And the inspiration for us doing this episode was Dope Girls TV series. And I would be interested to know what your take is on where women, particularly at this moment in time, fit into these conversations. We've heard of kind of male drug dealers. Is there anything to go on that tells us that women played a part in the traffic of these substances? Or is it very much a story of the fact that women have overdosed and they're dying? Well, some of the Piccadilly Circus dealings, and I think some down in Folkestone as well, they were using prostitutes as a kind of intermediary to pass the drug on to people who wanted to

buy. So there's again, it's women in this kind of sexually exploited kind of scenario, not women as kind of independent people who are selling drugs. So I think it's always women who are exploited by men in some ways. Well, I think that's all we have time for. Thank you so much for being our guest today. It's a fascinating world and I can't wait to watch more of Dope Girls and to dive into this multi-layered time in history. If you've enjoyed this episode on the 1920s, we do have other episodes. We've got the Edith and Percy Thompson triangle. If you've enjoyed this episode on the 1920s, we do have other episodes. We've got the Edith and Percy Thompson triangle. Do you remember that? Oh, Anthony

never remembers a single episode we do. The alien abduction people. No, they're the love triangle murder situation. Oh, I love that one. Yeah, that's really good. And Freddie Bywaters was the other person from that. Yeah, he's the other element of that triangle. Oh, yes. It's a fantastic episode. So we had a lot of fun.

We did, you might not remember it. No, no, I remember it. I like that one. Yeah, if you have suggestions for any other topics from the 1920s or any other era of history, then you can get in touch with us. It's after dark at historyhit.com. Watch Dope Girls on BBC iPlayer now.