Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Dark History of London’s Drug World

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

Travel back to post-WW1 London, when sex, drugs and music was exploding in Soho... causing a national moral panic.The drugs of choice? Cocaine and morphine. Still used by doctors for questionable medicinal reasons (cough syrup anyone?!) but now also taken in nightclubs and opium dens by socialites around Soho.This week, Kate is Betwixt the Sheets with Professor Toby Seddon to talk about the history of drugs, the people who were selling and taking them, and how the government attempted to crack down.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.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. How are you doing? Have you got your glad rags on? Are you ready to listen to more? But before we can go any further together,

I have to tell you. This is an adult podcast broken by adults to other adults about adulty things and an adulty way covering away. You know the drill by now. If you're sensitive, don't listen. For the rest of you, let's crack on. It's a typical night down in the 43 Club

on Gerard Street in the heart of London's Soho. The lights are low, the music is loud, and despite the glitz and glamour of the 1920s flapper dresses and sharply cut suits, there is a sinister edge bubbling away underneath. Don't get me wrong, I'm having a blast, but you don't have to look too hard to see there is a dark underbelly to all of this.

Club owners and restaurateurs such as Kate Merrick and the sublimely named Brilliant Chang are fueling this vibrant nightlife with cocaine and morphine. supplied to their customers through a network of dealers. As you'll find out, it was a dangerous world where sex, drugs and rock and roll, well, actually jazz, are all mixed up, and people pay for the thrills with their livelihoods.

Occasionally, even their lives. I think I'll give the morphine and cocaine a swerve, but I would like another cocktail. Right, let's get to know this world a little bit better. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect carpents.

whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing the fun. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I feel for them. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. There's nothing like enduring a horrifically long war to make you want to kick back and enjoy life, right? Well, the 1920s were a boom of decadence and hedonism, and Soho was at the heart of it, lined with hidden clubs, bars and opium dens, if you knew where to look.

If you listen to last week's episode with Dan Snow, you'll know that we've been inspired by the BBC's new show, Dope Girls, to explore this world where women ran clubs and a roaring drug trade. Be sure to scroll back and listen to that one if you haven't, and do check out the show Dope Girls on BBC IPlayer and watch their take on this fascinating era. Joining me today to help me find out more about the rampant drugs culture that ran through this underworld is Dope.

Toby Seddon, Professor of Social Science at University College London. Who are the central figures in this dark and mysterious world? What really went on below street level and how much has really changed? But without further ado, let's crack on. Today we are in 1920s London, specifically in Soho, the naughty, illicit, tantalising area of London that is associated with jazz dens and opium and cocaine. fiends. Today it's associated with fast food restaurants and the theatre. But in the 1920s,

it was all about walking on the wild side. I want you to think Great Gatsby, flapper girls, I want you to think gin in stockings that you pull out and you're swigging on your weight of the nightclub. George V is on the throne. David Lloyd George is Prime Minister, the only Welsh Prime Minister that we have ever had. And joining me a day to help us get right under the skin of Sordid Soho. is none of the than Professor Toby Seddon. Thank you so much for joining me today. Very welcome. And your title, you research the history of drugs?

Yeah, really the history of drug policy. So how as societies we've tried different ways of managing these strange substances and what people do with them. How did you get into this research? Well, I started off studying law, which was quite boring. and not for me. Great for other people, but not for me. And decided, though, that I quite like studying. I love reading and finding things out. So I did a postgraduate degree in criminology. And after that, was looking for a job. And the first job that I got was working for a drugs charity that no longer exists, has long since gone bankrupt on a project looking at drug interventions within the criminal justice system. So drug use. who got arrested or in court or under a probation order and doing research and evaluation around these various different interventions and have never looked back since. Wow. It's a fascinating line of work. And just when you were saying there about interventions

for people with addictions and drug services, that's so ubiquitous in our culture now. We're all aware of addiction and rehab and programs and that the press can run with these stories. Have we always as a culture, been aware of drugs in the same way? Not really. So I think one of the things around the 1920s and probably really from the 1890s was the first creation, certainly in British culture, of a drug culture. So that idea of a small group or groups who self-consciously took drugs for recreational purposes and as part of being in the group.

So that sort of idea of a drug culture or subculture, which didn't really exist before. Because if you go back to the 19th century, things like opium, which were not illegal at that time, were just part and parcel of how people managed aches and pains and illnesses and troubles of life in general. So there wasn't this fascination. And in fact, even the word drug at that time, so before the late 19th century, just meant medicine. So it didn't have this other meaning, which now we think of as a kind of natural, timeless meaning of the word. But that didn't really exist until last few decades of the 19th century. So around just before the time we're talking about today.

There must have been people that got addicted to drugs. Because you were saying there about drugs are ubiquitous, and you do get the most insane ingredients turning up in the most random places in the 19th century, like children's cough syrups with opiates in it. Yeah. So that's an example, I would say, of how things like opium were just part of normal life. So you've got seven children and you're living in poverty and trying to get them to sleep, some kind of drops with opium in that help. That would help. Great. That sounds like something that people would want to do and indeed did do. I think the ubiquity, the continuity is around the desire for intoxication.

So as far as we can tell, this is something that human beings have always done. It must be right. So obviously there's evidence as far back as the written word. But even before that in deep time, so pre-written word, if we look at archaeological evidence and so on, It seems like human beings take different things to get intoxicated as much as they have that desire for and drive to eat, drink, have sex. You know, it's one of those fundamental things about human beings. So although the drug culture thing and that fascination is a modern phenomenon, the idea of intoxication is something that's sort of very deeply rooted in the human condition, I think. I think so too. I mean, there must have even been cavemen who they were looking at each other going,

I can't handle his fermented berries. Yeah, there are cave paintings where obviously these are a question of interpretation, the meaning you apply. And some people argue, you know, it's not that you're just projecting something onto it. But there seems to be good evidence from cave paintings of all kinds of things, including taking of hallucinogenic mushrooms, you know, all kinds of things. Yeah. But you don't get this sense of a drug culture until the 1920s. That's fascinating because there must have been addicts. We can't be giving opium and laudanum to babies and have no repercussions. But was it just that they just flew under the radar that nobody came? I mean, I know De Quincey wrote confessions of an opium eater, which sort of suggests an addiction. So, of course, people have got intoxicated forever for as long as human beings have been on the planet. And some people have got into difficulty. with the things they've got intoxicated with probably forever as well. We haven't always called it addiction or had a sense of, I mean, as you were saying,

I think now people have a really strong sense of what addiction is and all the various facets of it and what it means and, you know, there are all various tropes that go along with that idea of addiction. So that hasn't always existed. But of course, people have had problems. I mean, one of the things in the 19th century that there was, was concern about. And remember this is a time when the idea of public health was being created and local government was being created was, oh, there seemed to be quite a lot of babies and infants dying. Obviously, that's for lots of reasons because of disease and poverty and so on,

but one of the reasons was, as they called it, infant doping. So that was a problem. So it's not that there haven't been problems, but there are problems with lots of things in life. It was just one of the things that happened. So what happened in the 20th century to create this concept of A, an addict and B, a drug culture? Because it seems that we've gone for thousands of years

with people getting off their face and some of them doing some daft things, but that's never happened before. What changes? That's a great question. I don't know if we have a kind of clear definitive answer, but I think there are a number of strands to that, to what's going on.

So if we take addiction, first of all, so the concept of addiction actually was starting to be assembled a bit earlier, so maybe late 18th century, but interestingly was applied really to alcohol primarily. So addiction is a really. originally an alcohol concept, not a drug concept. And it was only in the sort of late, mid to late 19th century, when it starts to be attached to things like people taking too much opium or morphine.

And that's when the addiction concept sort of broadens in scope and then goes on to continue to develop and become what it is today. So I think in the British context, it really starts to happen in the, late 1880s, 1890s. And originally, so in the 1890s, it was around cannabis smoking and smoking of opium primarily. And it was artists, musicians, poets, the bohemians, aristocrats. Of course it was. And it was not many people.

And it was mainly in London and Paris and some other places. So in Paris there are a lot of poets and artists who were smoking opium and hashish, etc. So it starts as a very small thing. It becomes a bit more democratised in the sense of more people. Actually, during the First World War, so there was a panic in 1916 about soldiers on leave, taking cocaine. I mean, you would, wouldn't you? If you had to go to the sun, you'd be like, dope me up. Well, if you can imagine soldiers on leave, coming back on mass, wanting to,

led off a bit of steam. Yeah, I can completely understand that. Quite stressed, probably. Not that it would have been recognised at that time. But not in a great place. Inevitably people in places like London would lay on clubs and so on for people to go to. That makes sense. And so there was this panic about sex workers providing cocaine to soldiers on leave.

And that led to some emergency legislation. So one of the things that started. all of this was in the First World War there was a piece of legislation called Defence of the Realm Act, which was an umbrella mechanism for introducing all kinds of things, some sort of seemingly trivial about when lights should go off and so on. Or for the war effort, so like, is it good for the war? But there was, one of them was around pub opening hours and one was about cocaine and opium because these were the two things that they were concerned. about in relation to soldiers. And it's interesting that if you read the Home Office papers at the time, the officials explicitly say, we would struggle to get this legislation through not as emergency war

legislation. So we should do it under the Defence of the Realm Act. Wow. So in 1916, you get Regulation 40B of the Defence of the Realm Act 1916, which criminalises for the first time cocaine and opium possession. So this is, if you like, the origin point of drug prohibition. It's only those two things. So it isn't morphine.

It's not heroin. It's just cocaine and opium. The licensing laws took a long time to sod off, didn't they? The classic example is pub opening hours. So one of the parts of that was requiring pubs to close in the afternoon because they didn't want people sitting in pubs all day, you know, not being productive or whatever. that I don't think went until 1988. I remember as a student it had just gone and being delighted with this great liberalisation

that pubs were open in the afternoon. I can remember when pubs had to close at 11. Yeah, so all of that didn't exist before. That's from the defence of the Realm Act, but stayed a long, long time. And I suppose you could argue that maybe the drug thing has stayed a long time. And partly, although there are lots of other things going on. So I think the other thing that changes it is actually really quite different but significant. So what happened after 1916, the next piece of legislation is the Dangerous Drugs Act, 1920.

And it's often described as response to things like the cocaine panic in 1916 and the emerging dope girls phenomenon in the 1920s. that this legislation was really about that and there were some follow-up regulations in 1923 that increased the punishments and so on. And that's partly true. But actually, there was a whole other thing going on which was in terms of international issues. So the reason that we created the Dangerous Drugs Act

is because all parties to the Versailles Treaty, peace treaty at the end of the First World War, were required to create legislation to satisfy the requirements of an international agreement that had been agreed in 1912, the Hague Opium Convention, which was the product of a whole series of international meetings that had started in 1909 in Shanghai, and was really about China and the desire of the Chinese to not continue to have open. forced on them as had happened in the 19th century with the opium wars, etc. I'll be back with Toby after this short break. So we've now got this situation where the drugs are illegal, but before that they have been available to the point where you could just nip down the corner shop and get these drugs.

Are they still being prescribed medicinally? Because that's a loophole. Yeah, so that's an interesting point because these things have all, always, almost always, continued to be used medically. So if I give one example, so cocaine at the beginning of the 20th century was used a lot as a local anesthetic, particularly by eye doctors, ophthalmologists, but also dentists. It's a good local anesthetic. So if you're injecting people's gums, it was quite widely used in that way.

It's still used today by some ear-nows and throat doctors because it's quite good as a local anaesthetic. It was eventually in dentistry, it was sort of overtaken by Novakane, which has then been overtaken by other things. So it's not used in dentistry. But all of these things have been, I mean, morphine is still used as a painkiller. Yes, yeah, of course. Heroin is. Yeah. They will call it dimorphine, of course, but that's used because it's a really, you know,

effective painkiller and I'm sure you'll be familiar with all the stuff around medical cannabis and the debate around that. So one way of thinking about the poll prohibition thing is that it's an attempt to demarcate lines between medical use, which is legitimate, and non-medical recreational use, which is illegitimate, use of the very same things. Of course, there's then alcohol and tobacco which are not used medically at this time, although have been in the past, but as constructed as the legitimate recreational substances, but only those. But this dividing line between this sort of use is okay, this is part of what Prohibition is trying to do.

And you might also think of this as driven partly by the rise of the medical profession, So doctors becoming more important. You know, some people talk about the 1920s as the sort of one decade where what would become the welfare state is starting to be assembled, the different components. And the rise of doctors as a profession of significance really accelerates then. We should probably talk about the Billy Carlton case. Because that seemed to really grab public attention about drug use, particularly young women. been using drugs in Soho. Yeah.

So Billy Carlton was a fairly well-known actress in the West End, quite successful, mixed in the circles that successful West End actresses do. I wouldn't know personally. But she was well-known social person in that scene in London. And part of that scene in London involved going to parties where you smoked opium and took cocaine. Those were the two main things, particularly cocaine. So remember this is 1918. So cocaine is criminalised under the defence of the Realm Act,

but we still don't have dangerous drugs acts. So the penalties are not enormous, but it's still a sort of underground activity, but not necessarily terribly underground. And she went to a party in November 1918, a victory ball at the Royal Albert Hall to mark the end of the First World War, took some cocaine, and the following day at some point,

was discovered dead in a hotel room. And this was reported as a terrible scandal. You can kind of imagine, you know, West End actress, cocaine. She's only 22 as well, which is really young. Found dead in a hotel room. You know, this is meat and drink to newspapers and to the public. You know, it's a kind of titillating story that people want to read about. People have argued that actually probably the cause of death was sleeping pills.

That was more likely. What probably happened was she was out and about all night, taking cocaine, eventually, tired, wanted to go to sleep, took too many sleeping bills and died because of that. So why did I think it was cocaine then? Well, at the time the body was discovered, I mean, she was being supplied cocaine by a doctor who she was friends with. and there's some indications that some of the things that were there at the scene of death he took. Oh, paraphernalia. Yeah, it was all a bit people wanting to make sure they weren't going to be in the firing line for in some tricky thing where somebody died after all.

And cocaine was the exciting thing to talk about. You know, somebody who took too many sleeping pills isn't quite the same story, is it? And we don't know. Maybe it was the cocaine, but that was the story. And so this was not only widely reported, but also was a story that certainly for a number of years to come, although it's pretty much forgotten now, for a period was the story that people would always refer back to. So when anything similar happened, it would be remember Billy Carlton. Right. So it became quite a key story and obviously very very.

tragic one. So I think one of the interesting things about this period is the prominence of women. So Billy Carlton as a woman. You don't get dope boys, do you? It's dope girls. Yeah, it's dope girls. And this is interesting, isn't it? Why? Why girls? Yeah, why should this be the case? And it's a really key feature of it. So there have been a kind of precursor to Carlton, which was in 1901, I think, two sisters, the Yellen sisters. had died of a cocaine overdose, and that had been reported as a mini scandal, and then later on was Frida Kempton and so on. It was women. So why might this be the case? Well, one thing that people have argued is that in the 1920s, in the aftermath of the First World War, the place of women in society was really changing an inner state of flux because you had a whole generation

of men had died, so weren't coming back. Some who came back were not in, you know, shell shock and PTSD, as we would call it now, were not in a good place. And during the war, women had stepped up and started doing things that previously they'd not been allowed to do, or that hadn't been seen as their role. And so you arrive in the 1920s, the suffragette movement is happening. So there's a big change and a lot of social anxiety about this massive change in gender. relations and some have argued that the creation of these kind of moral panics and media stories is a way of concentrating social anxieties in these stories and so that's one of the reasons why women are so prominent in it because the place of women and girls in society

was seen as what's going on things are changing this is scary so it's a kind of social In the Second World War, there became a real focus on the cult of the housewife immediately afterwards in a kind of like a, you have to go back now, you have to go back. So it's kind of like the women have gone to work for the first time in the First World War. They've earned reasonable money for the first time and had independence. How did you tell them to go back to the kitchen? Yeah, and they don't want to go back. They don't want to go back. I'm going to take heroin.

I want to do jobs. And so it's a big social change. So as often happens with wars, it kind of accelerates things that were probably going to happen. at some point anyway, but they become these big events that really accelerate social change. How does it get linked to the Chinese community in London, apart from blatant racism? So I think there are two ways of talking about that. So one is that, so you have the cocaine scene, which is really a West End scene, and it has quite a contemporary ring to it when you read some of the accounts in that

sniffing some cocaine becomes a sort of adjunct to a normal night out so people go out to parties and yeah we'll take some cocaine and that's just part of what you do when you go out and that obviously has a sort of contemporary ring to it but there's an east end scene in places like limehouse which is really much more about smoking opium and that becomes associated with particularly Chinese men, partly for racist reasons, but partly because it was something that people did. So that's one part of it is that opium in particular was associated with Chinese men. Gender, I think, is important here. The other sort of longer scene that is going on here is that the 1920s is still an era when eugenic thinking is prominent. And there's this kind of

concern about, you know, the weakening of the national stock and particularly an anxiety, I think, sharpened by the First World War when a lot of young men have been lost in war, this concern about what's going to happen to the British stock if we've lost lots of young men, but also we've got Chinese men and people from Jamaica coming and having relations with white women, this is something that, again, is a social anxiety. So the other feature, well, it's dope girls. The men in the stories are non-white. So there's brilliant Chang, so most famous Chinese man

who's involved in drug selling at the time. There's also somebody called Edgar Manning, who's from Jamaica originally. He was quite a key figure and featured in a lot of the stories. stories. And this is significant, I think, that it's women are very prominent, white women, and the men are non-white men. And that's, again, this idea of drugs as a sort of concentration of the social anxieties of the time. And so that becomes the discourse around it, is that it's white women being corrupted by drugs, imposed on them by aliens, basically. That's the sort of tenor of the story, I think.

I'll be back with Toby after this short break. I have heard both Brilliant Chang and Eddie Manning called the Dope Kings of London. I'm not sure how they both managed to be kings at the same time, but did you tell us a little bit about who they were? And if those titles were actually deserved, or if it was more media sensation than accurate? Yeah, so interesting question. So I think it's certainly true that in the 1920s, there was a lot of what we would call gang activity.

So economic crime with associated violence and collectivities of people doing it, not just in London, in multiple cities. Birmingham. I've seen picky blinders. Exactly. So there was a lot of that going on. But most of that wasn't about drugs. The Sabini's, for example, who are quite well-known, a group, a family. were very prominent, but we're not particularly involved in drugs. And I think the reason for this is that actually the drug trade at this time, in contrast to now, was quite exclusive. So it was not a sort of general population phenomenon.

It was a genuine underground. So it was small groups. So it was the chorus girls and actresses and musicians and a few aristocrats, few officer class people, but it wasn't lots of people. And therefore, the economic reality is that you can make some money there, but you're not going to make enormous amounts of money because it's not enough people. The market isn't big enough. So I think most of the gang type activity was non-drug-related.

It was more to do with things like gambling and counterfeit goods and stolen goods. So the dope kings, so brilliant Chang, Edgar Manning, they became notorious in the press, but were probably quite, in reality, quite low level in terms of the amount of activity that they were actually doing, even though some of it had a kind of spectacular dimension. So the most spectacular example would be Edgar Manning, who at one point shot three people, effectively kneecaps them, shot them in the legs, in broad daylight on Shaftsbury Avenue. Shit. So that, of course, is a great story in the press and he went to prison for a bit.

Amazingly, only for about 18 months. It had facets of what we would think of as kind of gang activity, but I think was actually relatively small scale. So they were, you know, to answer your question, I think they were dope kings to a great extent as a media creation, which is not to say they will have had to have had networks of people to sell things and obtain things. So it's not that they didn't have a collectivity or that there wasn't violence involved because economic crime and violence. You know, violence is a resource for doing business if you can't take people to court.

You know, it sort of goes hand in hand with economic crime. So that did exist, but I think there was quite a lot of media confection to it. So the 1920s, it sounds like drugs are quite freely available, even though laws are coming in an attempt to squash it. But if you know where to go, they're ridiculously easy to get hold of. How did the government, the police, go about trying to stamp this? I mean, I know that they weren't entirely successful because drugs are still quite popular today. Indeed. But we don't still have opium dens in Soho.

Actually, don't we might. I don't know. I'm just saying that. I don't know. We might. There might be. I don't know that. I'm unaware of there being opium dens insert. There'll be people listening to this going

but how did the police go about clearing this up of the 1920s? Well, I don't think I would put it in terms of clearing up because I think going back to one of the things I said earlier, we should remember it wasn't that many people. Yeah. So I think although opium in the 19th century was easy to get, there had been a sort of progressive regulatory tightening up which then became a criminalised tightening up

and they became less available. And I think actually what happens is from the 1920s up until the 1960s, which we might think of as the most recent emerging drug scene, actually there wasn't a lot of drug use in the UK. There really wasn't between the 20s and the 60s. The numbers were pretty small and there wasn't a drug problem.

in contrast to the US, but there wasn't really a British drug problem again until the 1960s. And people have said, well, this was because the policy was so great, it really works. Others have said the phrase somebody used was masterly inactivity in the face of a non-existing problem. So there just wasn't a lot of drug taking in those periods. So I would be a bit reluctant to give lots of credit for, solving the problem. There wasn't a big problem. It was concentrated in small groups. I mean, if you're living in Yorkshire at the time or Lancashire or Surrey, then what West End actresses were getting up to was kind of interesting, but not really part of most people's existence. So it was

very much a drug underground that was exclusive in the sense of small. in scale and we don't really get kind of more mass drug taking until the 1960s, but not really properly mass until the 80s and 90s when things like ecstasy in the 90s really take off, I would say. Toby, you have been fascinating to talk to. Thank you so much for coming to join us today. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? They can find me at www.tobiecedon.com, and that's the best place to start.

Should we go and find an opium, Dan? Go on, man. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Toby for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like review and follow along whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hi, you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. Coming up, we've got the first episode in a new series on the wives of dictators,

as well as an episode of female executioners, all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by Stuart Beckwith, the senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.