Cosmopolitan Club (London)

Transcription

>> Dr. Caroline Bressey: Thank you very much. So I'm going to be talking about some new research that I've been working on with my colleague, Gemma Romaine, who's here, that we started in January. It's all a bit new. So I am going to be reading my notes, but if there's things that you're not clear about or I'm talking too quickly or whatever it might be, please put up your hand, and I will try and deal with any comments, but I've planned it so there'll be time for questions at the end. So that's the plan for today. On the 12th of September 1926, Maria Davis sat down at her home at 12 [inaudible] building in Hobin, not far from here, to write a letter. Her letter is a relatively short piece of fan mail addressed to one of the most popular entertainers of the age, the African American actress and singer Florence Mills. "A Negro Anthology", edited by Nancy Cunard and published in London in 1934, carried a profile of Mills written by her husband, the comedian U.S. Thompson under the section "Negro Stars". And although no recordings of Florence Mills' performances survive, she's considered one of the leading performers of the jazz age and the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920's. So according to her husband's profile, Mills, who appears in the picture on the right, was born in Washington, D.C. on the 25th of January 1895 and was performing in theaters from the age of 4 but forced to leave the stage in order to attend school. Her family later moved to New York where they formed an act, she formed an act with her sisters, but she also performed on stage alone in theaters in and around New York. She worked hard, given this is, you know, a segregated time, she worked hard to become a performer, but her major role, her first major role came when she acted as a replacement lead in the hit musical "Shuffle Away". That was in 1921. In 1923, she came to London for the first time with a show called "Dover Street Dixie", and it had a successful run, but it was her starring role in "Blackbirds", first performed in Harlem but with long runs in Paris and London together for 11 months in 1926 that made her a massive star in Britain. Mills was a celebrity performer, but she was also an outspoken advocate of African American and black people's civil rights. Growing up in the United States, she was, not surprisingly, regularly a victim of racial prejudice and the politics of white supremacy, but these were also problems that she faced in Britain. The news that an all-black cast was going to be performing in London in 1923 outraged the entertainment unions, who complained to the London County Council and the press, and the compromise that the authorities settled on reflects the hardening racial prejudice of the color bar that was operating in Britain at the time. Mills and her colleagues did perform, but the unions successfully insisted that an all-white British cast performed in the first half with the show Mills and the rest of her African American colleagues cast in the second. When Mills returned with the "Blackbirds" in 1926, the protests continued. The unions' stance was criticized now in some parts of the press, and one reporter pointed out that it was not an issue of nationality that the unions had a problem with. There was no opposition to German or Austrian artists or American artists if they were from the United States if they were white. As the reporter observed, "The objection, therefore, must have its roots in the performers' color. What has really happened is that the VAF, which was the Variety Actors' Federation, has got black fever and got it badly. The Negro, because he is a Negro, must be banned. This certainly does not come very well from the country that was the first to abolish Negro slavery. But with the "Blackbirds" show, "Blackbirds" mania griped London. "Blackbirds" parties were held, and the performers were invited to socialize with high society. It was said that the Prince of Wales had seen the show more than 20 times. But the idea that Britain should not be a place that did not succumb to racial prejudice because of its history of abolition, although it wasn't the first to abolish slavery, that's a different story, it wasn't an argument that was won. Evelyn [Inaudible], for one, was certainly resentful of the fashionable success and popularity of the "Blackbirds". As Bill Egan has pointed out in his work on Florence Mills, the writer Antony Powell record that when issuing an invitation for guests, Warwich remind them that, "This isn't a party. There won't be a black man." So given the pressures from fellow white actors on her right to perform, it is unsurprising that Mills had a key to [inaudible] of the social problems of life in London and that she spoke out on racial issues, promoting the work of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored Peoples, better known as the NAACP during her time here. But Mills also held a deep concern about the poor and the marginalized. During her time in London, when she performed along with the "Blackbirds" cast in special performances for wounded servicemen, which is where the newspaper clipping on the left comes from, and donated her time for charity performances generating funds for the Children's Hospital in Hackney, and she was also chief attraction at a charity concert in aid of North London Jewish schools. And according to a newspaper report of that event, her rendering of the famous Jewish chant "Eli, Eli" was said by a rabbi present to be the most wonderful and expressive he had ever heard. And after her death, it became known that after her performances, once the theater was closed, Mills would be driven by her chauffeur to the East End, visiting several hospitals and giving away gifts, after which the car would head back west to the Embankment to enable her driver to distribute money to those sleeping rough by the river. Mills' stance on racial issues made her a great asset to black communities living in Britain, be they poor working people, students, or her fellow celebrity friends from the arts. In 1919, a new club, the Quotery of Friends, was started by a small group of students with the object of creating a social space where to quote serious-minded people of color could frequently meet, debate, discuss, and socialize. Although dormant for the 12 months where the program at the bottom comes from, which is an event in May 1923 because of a number of their core members had left London, they still claim to credit for having given some of the foremost functions for the Negro world in London as they saw it. The group's original members who founded the club in the spring of 1919, perhaps as a personal response to the violent race riots that were erupting around the world and across Britain that year, were all men. Edmund Thorton Jenkins, the Charleston-born musician who had studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music from 1920 to '21 but was also no stranger to jazz. Harold Piper, born in Montserrat, a member of the pharmaceutical society. Dr. Felix Herum, Harry Lekum, as he was known, a Trinidadian doctor, and then Randall H. Lockhard from Martinique, who was in London to study law. For the relaunch party, which this program is for, held on the 13th of May 1923, Florence Mills topped the list of guests of honor along with James P. Johnson and his orchestra, who would be taking charge of the music, as well as members of the West Indian cricket team. When the "Blackbirds" went on tour after playing many of the major cities in Britain, the strenuous schedule took a heavy toll on Mills. By now, she'd been performing constantly for five years, never missing a performance, and although she went to Germany to try and recuperate, she seemed to have got worse and had to return to the United States. She undertook an operation, which didn't help her get better. In fact, it proved fatal, and on the first of November 1927, aged only 31 she died. Her funeral is remembered as one of the most spectacular in Harlem. Over 5,000 people attended her funeral in the heart of black America, and it saw up to 100,000 people lined the surrounding streets. And well known for her political support for black and working-class communities, Mills' time in London became an inspiring cultural memory. When the feminist and Caribbean activist Amy Ashwood Garley and her partner, the playwright Sam Manning, he served in the British West Indies during the first World War. When the pair of them opened a club in London during the 1930's, they called it the Florence Mills Club, specializing in Caribbean food and music as Manning was a well-known Calypso and jazz musician. The club became a new coterie of friends, a gathering place for African and West Indian activists and students, although exactly where it was, we're not yet sure. So Maria Davis' letter to Mills, written in Hobin in 1926, which I will come back to, is now housed in the archives of the Schomburg Institute in Harlem, a branch of the New York Public Library vital to the research of the African Diaspora where Gemma and I visited earlier this year, and this is Gemma, who Gemma Romaine, who's my colleague on the project with me, in the archives in the Schomburg. And Florence Mills will probably be a major character in our HRC funded research project, "Drawing Over the Color Line", which examines the art world in the context of the making of cosmopolitan identities in London between the wars. And although her, Florence Mills, that is her story is clearly unique and exceptional, her time in London does illustrate a number of our project's themes. The Harlem Renaissance in New York, I'm sure many of you will have heard about. It's a time when African Americans created a revolution in music, art, and literature not only in Harlem, in New York, but across the United States, and it's a well-established subject of critical analysis for many interested in cultural politics, the evolution of music, literature of the arts, and the general history of the United States. These themes have been joined by historical examinations of the black presence in Paris, particularly in the 1920's, but also now increasingly by research across Europe such as Amsterdam, where an examination of new art movements in the city was beautifully illustrated in an exhibition held in Amsterdam in 2008 called "Black is Beautiful", and the image on the left was shown as part of that during the exhibition. But although like New York and Paris, [inaudible] London played host to the meetings of many intellectual students and workers in the realms of anti-colonial nationalists in Pan African politics. So then just a few examples. A similar interrogation of the relationships between art, political thought, literature, and identity in London has yet to be undertaken, and that's what we hope to be doing. Our project has come out of a pilot project that Gemma undertook, while uncompleted, in 2008, and she was asked to look in the UCL Slade archives, the Slade School of Fine Art here at UCL, and to see what kind of representations of black and minority ethnic people and its broadest sense or broadest understanding could be found in it, and some of you might have picked up some postcards of some of the images that came out of that research. Her work went back right to the beginning of the collection, which includes sort of very old prints, but also some of the thousands of pieces of artwork that the collection has. Although I think we'd admit that it was very much a kind of scratching of the surface, the collections that are there, and that's kind of what our project has grown upon, but although I'm going to be focusing today mostly on people of African descent, I wanted to emphasize our project is also interested in people from the Asian Diaspora, and we'll be particularly trying to [inaudible] clearly in this picture. This is a picture of Slade students here at UCL from 1938, and among them are five Indian students that we know were studying here at the time. They seem to be particularly interested in stage design and sculpture. Those are the models that particularly taking, although I doubt they were called models then. But we're trying to find out more about them, and particularly trying to locate the work they produced. So if any chance you might know who they are, do please let us know. But reflecting back on the material that Gemma had pulled out from the Slade collection, it seemed clear to us that a greater diversity of models were being used more often by the Slade during the 1920's and 1930's. Was this an influence of the Harlem Renaissance manifest in London, and if so, would we be able to use the works of art by students to recover the lives of African and Asian diasporas, people of the Diaspora living in London? We had a sense that looking at artists' models would provide us with an opportunity to examine the lives of more ordinary people, people who were working as studio live models probably to supplement their incomes in other kind of ordinary jobs. So these are two of the images from the UCL collection. Of course, UCL isn't the only art school in London. So perhaps it would be possible to replicate this across the other art schools. So in addition to examining the archives of the UCL Slade School of Fine Art, we're hoping to look at the [Inaudible] College of Arts, St. John's Wood Art School, and many of the London County Council Authority run the schools, and here are just some examples of people that we know that studied in some of those institutions. Of course, we realize that we're not going, well, we realize now that we're not going to be able to get to all these places this time, and certainly not in the depth that we would like. So I think this is probably going to be a project that gets built up. Because, of course, we're also particularly interested in people who didn't necessarily go to formal classes, people who might have been part of working class institutes, people who might have done one of courses just for their own sort of pleasure, not necessarily people who were in formal education, and quite how we're going to reach into those archives we still need to figure that out. And even something like the Slade archive, which is sort of so brilliantly put together, has its limitations. So the Slade collection of paintings, as we might call it generally, is actually a collection of prize-winning art. So people or students who did exceptionally good work, then won prizes were asked to donate their work and keep it in the college collection, which, amazingly, many of them did and still do. So there's this amazing sort of realm of art, but it's very particular, it's fine art. There's not much photography, for example. So we're trying to think about how we might access some photographic archives and places where people might have, be thinking about photography more as an art form at this time. But, of course, this being studio portraits of students working in the Slade archive remind us that aside from prize-winning students, there were lots of other people painting in a studio at the same time. So one of the things we're hoping to do is maybe find ways of uncovering other people's representations considered not as good as their prize-winning colleagues that might be in personal archives still because, of course, not all of the people here are students here or at other colleges become famous. For all sorts of reasons, people's artwork might not be known in the public domain. So we're trying to think about how we can bring some of those images back to life. But our project is not just for the recovery of artworks or for biographical recovery. So in this case as, you know, here are these two men. Where were they from? Where did they live? What did they do when they weren't sitting in front of art students, although I have to say these two particular photographs were taken rather later than the work that we're doing. But what we want to try and examine is the space of the art studio. So spaces like this as a place of cultural exchange. So we're trying to think about how the art studio, cafes, other places of education were places where people were black and white and brown as we might want to call it, came together for perhaps as a cultural exchange but also things that may have then turned into personal relationships and particularly interesting to us political relationships. So these places include places like the Slade studios but also meeting places in Soho such as the Florence Mills Club opened by Amy Ashwood Garley and Sam Manning, and also the Shimsham Club, which was opened in Soho in 1935 on 37 Waldorf Street. And we know that the Shimsham Club, the undercover policemen watched and reported on the cosmopolitan crowds that visited there, black and white, gay and straight. They listened to black musicians who played with and learned from American and Caribbean musicians and who made friends with the Jewish radicals who visited the club. And our project is aiming to map not only the black and brown people and who were part of a political cosmopolitan movement, but, of course, the white radicals, be they Jewish radicals, anti-fascists, Communists, or ordinary working-class people who were also part of this cosmopolitan moment, if we can call it that, in London at the time. So on the 14th of May 1923, a man, somewhere in Blighty as he called it, wrote another of those thousands of fan mail letters that Florence Mills received over her career. Among the many letters that she received from fans in the United States and Europe are ones from British men and women that give us, we would argue, unique insight into individual reflections of race and performance and desire here in Britain during the 1920's. Mills received an extraordinary range of letters. Some were simple requests or letters of thanks for her participation in charity performances, such as the one in the aid of London Jewish schools or the receipt, as you saw earlier, for the Children's Hospital, but also I think interesting a number of the letters reflect a sense of ownership or imagined intimacy with celebrities that we tend to associate with current popular culture. So, for example, one gentleman who had previously lived in Africa, which where he added he had been very happy, he wrote to Mills asking in a manner which he hoped would not be considered too presumptive, if she would care to be shown some of England's pretty and historical places from the sidecar of his motorcycle. In another perhaps unlikely request came from Irene Castle, who cabled Mills at the Pavilion Theater, which is where the "Blackbirds" performance played, to ask if she could borrow the costume Mills had worn in her first time on a London stage because Castle wanted it for a fancy dress party. She was planning to impersonate Mills at a party being held by Lady Cunard, presumably Nancy Cunard, later that night. But the man who wrote to Mills on the 14th of May 1923 before the "Blackbird" mania from somewhere in Blighty did not make a request of Mills for her time or for an item of clothing. He wrote simply to express his admiration. He believed that all of London would be brought to heel with "Dover Street Dixie", which was the first show she came with. Alongside his accurate prediction of her success, he offered his own advice, warning that she must try not to let success develop her pride for pride would hide her natural charm. He implored her to be earnest and true to herself, for then he argued you will reach the hearts of the real white men. Through all keeping natural and being as good as you can, in fact, be a woman, and you will be the master of man. He did not assume that Mills would read his letter and reflected that he would probably think I'm strange in the head. I don't suppose we will ever meet, he mused, not even in Good Old Dover Street, but I will dream of you my Photo Dixie. He wished her luck when she returned a millionaire to Dixie and signed off as sincere admirer, a white poor man. And just on the side, this picture of Mills is by the Indian artist Mukul Dey. And although produced in 1923, Day exhibited the portrait in 1927 from his studio in Knightsbridge, and at the time, the "Times" argued that, "As a rule, for obvious reasons, studio exhibitions have to be ignored, but in the case of Mr. Mukul Dey, the rule can be stretched." Partly it was because of the style of engraving that he used that was rather unusual, partly because he was relatively famous. He had done some frescos for the British Museum, but they also highlighted that as an engraver with the dry point, Mr. Mukul Dey retains his interest in quote Native subjects. So this picture that he did of Florence Mills is for us a representation of the key moment of cultural exchange between two artists and political activists, and we're hoping to explore it in rather more detail as the project goes on. The date of Millicent Briggs' letter to Florence Mills is not recorded, but in it she refers to Mills as my dear bluebird. It seems likely that she sent it during Mills' second stint in London during the "Blackbird" revue. One of the songs Mills sang on stage went, "Never had no happiness, Never felt no one's cares, I'm just a lonesome bit of humanity born on a Friday I guess. If the sun forgets no one, why don't it shine on me? I'm a little blackbird looking for a bluebird, too." "I'm a Little Blackbird Looking for a Bluebird," was Mills' signature song, and the listener was picking up on this in her letter. Briggs' letter was one of thanks, for Mills had just about crowned Briggs' happiness by sending her a photograph. Now an important personal possession, Briggs had been forced to part with the photograph for a fortnight so it could be copied and colored. Briggs reveals to us later readers of the letter that she and Mills had never actually met, for she hadn't been near enough to see Mills exactly to know her flesh intimately, but she remained confident that she had got her instructions to the colorist right, but she declared, "If I don't get the coloring right, I'll let you shoot me." Briggs adored Mills and argued that it was not simply because she was famous. Sure that, "If I had seen you walking along the street and didn't know who you were, I'd have fell for you just the same." In this opportunity to discuss emotions, she had perhaps never revealed to anyone else, Briggs confessed that, "I've got it bad. I've actually fallen in love with another woman." She had to wait until Saturday before she saw Mills again, perhaps at a performance or in her return photograph reflecting that, "I wish I could be your shade, then you'd never be out of my sight." But perhaps realizing she was starting to sound slightly obsessive, Briggs brought her letter to a close in case she went off the deep end. Wishing Mills something better than fame, happiness, she remained always your slave, Millicent Briggs. The racial and class lines present in the sincere admirer's description of himself as a white poor man and the reversal of racial history contained in Briggs' declaration to remain always Mills' slave is also present in Maria Davis' letter, written to Mills from Hobin, which I mentioned at the start of this talk. Unlike her fellow poor white man, Davis had not only seen Mills in a photograph, she had seen her in the flesh, in real life, and was moved to write to Mills the day after she had seen the "Blackbirds" performance. She explained to Mills in 1926 while watching the "Blackbirds" show the night before, she felt that none among the audience never there could be a heart prouder than mine. Maria greatly admired Mills as an artist. Her "Blackbird" singing was like a nightingale. Her dancing was also divine, but the pride Maria Davis felt was the race pride of seeing a woman of color successfully performing on stage. As a black woman, or as Maria put it a color woman like yourself, she wrote to thank Mills and the entire company for being able to show the white people who think we are nobody because we are color that we can stand side by side and beat them at their own game. Before signing off, Maria evoked the evolving ideas of the African Diaspora, in praising Mills once more, this time as a daughter of the motherland. See these three letters from an unnamed poor white man, a women unpacking her first experiences of lesbian desire, and Maria Davis finding a way to challenge white racism, are all heartfelt and personal, but although short and intimate, all drew out a number of the broader themes that "Drawing Over the Color Line" intends to address. The hardening of racism or the color line in Britain between the Wars, the importance of the arts, particularly popular culture in the formation of black identities and challenges to racism, the developing formation of ideas around the African Diaspora, and the intersection of race, sexuality, and desire, and the important role of black cultural expression in the making of popular culture in its broadest sense in Britain in the 1920's and 1930's. Florence Mills directly links individuals, black and white, to the Harlem Renaissance, but there are similar stories to be recovered and reconsidered which were made much closer to home. See these are two portraits of Helen Yelen, a woman who performed in the Harlequin Cafe on Leek Street in Soho, and the picture on the left is set in that cafe. Remembered for her jazz renditions of English songs during the 1930's, she also visited Antwerp with the Austrian novelist and journalist Hilda Speel. Speel recalled her as Egyptian in her memoirs, and in William Roberts' beautiful portrait of her, which I think is at the moment still my favorite that we've found with the project so far, but in this portrait she's known as Creole. Where she is from is still unclear, and we're hoping to find out more about her. If she was born in Britain and how her life intersected with other black people in London. But by picturing her in the Harlequin Club, we see another place which, like the Shimsham, provided spaces for non-conformists' lifestyles. In visiting these places and rethinking about the relationships made and sustained within them is one of the key things we hope to do with this project. So in doing so, we clearly hope to map the biographies of men and women who experienced these cosmopolitan spaces in London, be it through photographs of celebrities, their own workers' models, their own artistic practice or political, sexual, and other convivial relationships, and many examples of the artworks that reflect these histories are the way that we hope to get into these spaces, but many of them are still to be found. So Gemma has been in touch with one of Helen's descendents, and we know that there was at least one more portrait of Helen somewhere, but we've no idea at the moment where it is. So, we're hoping that people might be able to help us find them, and on the 20th of October, we're having a project which is part of the Bloomsbury Festival to encourage people to have a look in their attics and see if they can find some of these lost items. So if you remember back earlier there was a picture of Florence Mills in a peach dress, we know that existed, but we don't know where the original is. That picture's of it from a magazine. So perhaps you have a former art student in your family, your grandmother or your great-grandmother or your mother, maybe you can ask them if they have something in their attic that might be relevant to our project. We're interested in the very ordinary, the very simple from sculpture to photography to just sketches if that's all we have, and, of course, we're very interested in arts of work created by African and Asian artists as well, and really too item is too small. If an item is very big, then I guess we can arrange to come and see it, but please do get in touch with us if you have something that you think might be relevant. If not, and if you can't come along next week, then do please keep in touch with the project via our blog and via the Equiano Center website and Twitter, where we'll be putting up updates on the project and hopefully eventually about some time next year, this time next year we'll be launching a database of all the items that we've recovered which people will be able to use in their own research. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Thank you, Caroline, for a really thought-provoking and exciting and important project for UCL. We've got a few minutes for questions. I don't know if anyone would like put a question to our speaker today. Have one at the back. Just hold. Here comes the mic. >> Hello. I just wanted to know if there was any link between the Equiano Center in UCL and the Equiano Society that's been around for quite a while. >> Dr. Caroline Bressey: Caroline: Yes. So Arthur Tarington, he runs the Equiano Society, is I guess a friend and colleague of mine. So, yes. We know each other. There's no direct link, and the reason it's called the Equiano Center here is, well, for lots of reasons. Obviously, people know Equiano really well, but there's a very, very distant connection with the UCL and that part of the UCL campus is on the site of somewhere that he used to live. The original house isn't there, but it was a link. When we were setting it up, we wanted a name that people which connect easily with the project. So [inaudible]. [ Pause ] >> I just wanted to double check the tragic information that I think you said that there's no recordings of any kind of - >> Dr. Caroline Bressey: Caroline: No. Not that we know of at the moment. I guess partly it's quite early, and partly I guess those things aren't recorded. I mean, she's becoming more popular, and I think people, obviously people are very interested in jazz, and, you know, the interaction of jazz and people have done a lot of work on that, and I think people are always looking out for things. Certainly there's nothing of her performances in the U.K., sound recordings that we know of, and as, yeah, I still don't think we've found anything in the States, but that's not to say there isn't anything to be found. Maybe someone in their attic somewhere has something. That would be great. [ Pause ] >> OK. Any other questions? If I can maybe squeeze one in of my own. I mean, the Slade archive is quite an extraordinary thing to that amount of material going back through department in the Bartlett. You know, it's something that we talk about all the time. We're very envious of it. Is this project going to branch out into other bits of UCL, or in the Soho? >> Dr. Caroline Bressey: Well, kind of hopefully, Ann Welch and I are also work on a very small scoping project called the World of UCL before 1948 where we're trying to look at the diversity of students here at UCL, and at the moment, that's particularly looking at law and medicine. So we're working on trying to do that, and I think there's certainly stuff, though, we certainly we know about African and particularly Indian students were here studying law and medicine in the 19th century. So hopefully if we can illustrate that there's stuff there, that would be something, a sort of way to think about UCL. We always talk about this, you know, that UCL was the first university to admit people, you know, without regard to race and class and so on, but actually the history of that isn't particularly well known within college. So it would be great to be able to do some more work on that across the board. >> Well, that sounds, that's really wonderful. I wish you all the best of luck with that, and just before we go, if we could just one more round of applause for our speaker. Thank you very much for coming.