The Theatre Girls’ Cub\u00a0 was set up during the First World War to\u00a0 offer a safe living space for young actresses, dancers, singers and variety artistes.\u00a0 It lasted until 1973, when the radical change in traditional attitudes to\u00a0 sexual morality, which had begun slowly after WW2\u00a0 gathered unstoppable speed with\u00a0 the arrival of Women’s Lib and\u00a0 made safe living spaces for young women appear obsolete\u00a0 and offensive.<\/p>\n
The Theatre Girls’ Club\u00a0 came out of\u00a0 the\u00a0 Girls Club movement, pioneered by the Hon Maude Stanley (an aunt of Bertrand Russell), but its originality came from its\u00a0 founder, the actress Virginia Compton. The daughter of the American theatre empresarios, H.L. and Sydney Bateman, who made Henry Irving into late Victorian England’s theatrical super\u00a0 star. Virginia was the sister of two\u00a0 other leading actresses, Kate and Isabel Bateman and she\u00a0 married into another acting family; the Comptons.\u00a0 Virginia was the mother of the film actress Fay Compton and the novelist and film writer Sir Compton Mackenzie. (Whisky Galore)\u00a0 In her youth Virginia had been a friend of Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor,\u00a0 in her older years, she became a committed Anglo-Catholic; and until\u00a0 the Second World War, the Theatre Girls Club had\u00a0 two chapels, where\u00a0 services were conducted on high days and holidays. Yet it was often full to the brim of high kickin’ Tiller Girls. And just outside, Greek Street teemed with prostitutes, pimps and strip clubs.<\/p>\n
The death of Virginia during the\u00a0 Second World War saw the fade-out of religion, yet while the world\u00a0 moved towards the sexual revolution , the Tiller Girls still came, now mixing with students at RADA and encountering other ideas about what theatre was about.<\/p>\n
Researching and writing the Theatre Girls Club, is a joint\u00a0 project with Catherine Howe,\u00a0 who like Deborah was living at The Theatre Girls Club in 1968. A seminal year of student sit-ins and riots, an almost<\/em> revolution\u00a0 in France, huge world wide demonstrations against the Vietnam War, were the backdrop to the ending of theatre censorship and our need to get Equity cards and make sense of the world.<\/p>\n There have been hundreds of Theatre Girls, the\u00a0 House of Commons speaker, Betty Bothroyd is perhaps the most famous.\u00a0 She hated the place, while another Theatre Girl, the actress Amanda Barrie loved it.<\/p>\n If prior to 1973,\u00a0 you ever lived at the Theatre Girls Club, or if you had a Theatre Girl in the family, please get in touch<\/p>\n\n
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