Kate Evelyn Meyrick was not your typical nightclub impresario nor your typical criminal. Born into an upper middle class Irish family, she made a respectable marriage to a doctor and bore him eight children only for their marriage to break down leaving her to forge a new life in London in support of her family. Answering an advertisement for a partner to go into business running ‘tea dances’ she opened her first nightclub, Dalton’s, in Leicester Square in 1919. Despite a distinguished guest list, including the King of Denmark, a few months later, it would be raided on the grounds that a number of women present were ‘known to police’ (a euphemism for sex workers).
At the court hearing, much to Meyrick’s indignation, a judge declared her establishment a ‘hell of iniquity’. Undaunted, she opened more clubs including the ‘43’ in 1921, which immediately attracted an array of celebrity customers from the artistic Café Royal crowd to European royalty; Prince Christopher of Greece, Augustus John, Joseph Conrad, Prince Carol of Romania, Billy Leeds (dubbed ‘The World’s Richest Boy’ by the press), celebrated jockey Steve Donoghue, ‘Loughie’, Lord Loughborough, and the dukes of Manchester, Leeds and Norfolk. Millionaire Jimmy White arrived one evening with six Daimlers in his wake, the cars disgorging twenty-five chorus girls and White supplying the club’s patrons with champagne all evening to the tune of £400. Rudolph Valentino, once carrying a tray of cocktails back from the bar, was mistaken for a waiter. Over in Regent Street, The Silver Slipper boasted an illuminated glass dance floor upon which, Prince Nicholas of Romania and Tallulah Bankhead once danced with such enthusiasm they cracked a pane. Regulars included the debonair stage idol Jack Buchanan, Norman Hartnell, ‘scrutinising the dresses with the eye of a connoisseur’ and Lady Louis Mountbatten with ‘her arms covered in diamond bracelets’. Later, when the Silver Slipper had metamorphised into the Slippin Club, it welcomed a ‘gay and fashionable crowd’ including Rose Bingham and Margaret Whigham, the future Countess of Warwick and Duchess of Argyll respectively.
