After spending years stepping up into the roles left vacant when men went to war, many women had no desire to become homemakers again after 1918. Instead, many pushed back – fighting for their rights to continue to work. While some managed to keep hold of ‘respectable’ careers, others turned their attention to more salacious pursuits.
![[BBC show being hailed ?the next Peaky Blinders? contender for best TV of 2025 Dope Girls BBC/Bad Wolf/Sony Pictures Television/Kevin Baker]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/SEI_235545148-d2eb.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
It is the women who owned, ran and worked in the illegal nightclubs of London’s Soho (and those that tried to stop them) that sparked the inspiration for the BBC’s upcoming period drama Dope Girls. The six-part series, which has been described as a ‘spiritual successor to Peaky Blinders’ depicts in ‘visceral delicious detail the birth of the modern nightlife industry guided and gilded by hard fought female endeavour’.
![[BBC show being hailed ?the next Peaky Blinders? contender for best TV of 2025 Dope Girls BBC/Bad Wolf/Sony Pictures Television/Kevin Baker]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/SEI_235545144-6c4a.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
Based on the 1992 non-fiction book Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground by Marek Kohn, the story centres on Kate Galloway (Julianne Nicholson), a single mother who establishes her own nightclub to provide for her daughter after a devastating family tragedy.
![[Mandatory Credit: Photo by Daily Mail/REX/Shutterstock (1863400a) Mrs Kate Meyrick. Mrs Kate Meyrick.]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/SEI_240677715-75a8.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
Although her story has many similarities with a real-life figure, the BBC has said the show is ‘inspired by a forgotten time in history, and all its events and characters are fictional’. However, parallels can be drawn between the characters and women who lived through ‘the hedonistic uproar of post-World War One London’.
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Living in a small English village at the start of the series, Kate goes from a seemingly charmed life in the country to being widowed, turfed out of her home and travelling to London with her teenage daughter to try and make ends meet. She eventually decides to try her luck opening a nightclub, a decision that changes her life, not unlike the story of the real-life Kate Meyrick.
![[Members on the dance floor at Murray's Club, Soho, London, c1920s(?). Founded in 1913, Murray's Club was formerly the old Blanchard's restaurant, a famous coaching house. (Photo by Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images/Getty Images)]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/SEI_240678221-df6d.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
Born in Ireland, Meyrick suffered the loss of both of her parents at a young age, eventually marrying a doctor in Dublin before they moved to England and settled in Hampshire. For 15 years she helped run nursing homes for psychiatric patients with her husband whilst also raising eight children.
![[Mandatory Credit: Photo by Daily Mail/REX/Shutterstock (1863399a) Mrs Kate Meyrick Receives A Basket To Welcome Her Home From Prison Her Daughter Lady Kinnoull And Son Are Pictured. Mrs Kate Meyrick Receives A Basket To Welcome Her Home From Prison Her Daughter Lady Kinnoull And Son Are Pictured.]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/SEI_238533688-d977.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
But they eventually split in 1918 when Meyrick was 43. Faced with having to provide for her family with a weekly allowance of less than £1 a week, she responded to an advertisement asking for help to run tea dances and eventually opened the club Dalton’s in Leicester Square alongside Harry Dalton.
![[BBC show being hailed ?the next Peaky Blinders? contender for best TV of 2025 Dope Girls BBC/Bad Wolf/Sony Pictures Television/Kevin Baker]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/SEI_235545338-2f3b.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
The venue was described as a ‘rendezvous for members of the theatrical and variety professions and their friends’ however in 1920 it was struck off the register and the pair were fined for operating what a prosecutor described as a ‘dancing hell and a sink of iniquity’.
![[Mandatory Credit: Photo by ANL/REX/Shutterstock (4073046a) Chemist Thomas Wooldridge Giving Evidence At The Inquest Into The Death Of Actress Billie Carleton. Chemist Thomas Wooldridge Giving Evidence At The Inquest Into The Death Of Actress Billie Carleton.]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/SEI_240677713-c58d.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
At the time the sale of alcohol in the country was subject to strict licensing rules but Meyrick’s approach to dodging the law was to open another venue each time one was shut down for breaching the law. Her most famous was the 43 Club at 43 Gerrard Street in Soho, which remained open until 6am and offered meals to patrons, as well as illicit alcohol.
![[BBC show being hailed ?the next Peaky Blinders? contender for best TV of 2025 Dope Girls BBC/Bad Wolf/Sony Pictures Television/Kevin Baker]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/SEI_235545168-8eb3.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
It attracted highflyers, including actors Rudolph Valentino and Tallulah Bankhead, jazz musician Harry Gold, and authors J. B. Priestley, Evelyn Waugh and Joseph Conrad. After a raid by police in 1922 she reopened the venue as Procter’s Club the following year, as well as establishing Folies Bergères in Fitzrovia.
![[BBC show being hailed ?the next Peaky Blinders? contender for best TV of 2025 Dope Girls BBC/Bad Wolf/Sony Pictures Television/Kevin Baker]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/SEI_235545157-fe62.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
Regularly facing raids and fines, the force of the law didn’t deter Meyrick, who was once quoted as saying: ‘Fines don’t worry me… I’m getting quite accustomed to them now. I suppose they’ll keep on fining me! Well, it can’t be helped – you can’t run night clubs unless you are prepared for this sort of thing.’.
![[The Metropolitan Police's first female mounted police officers, WPC Margaret Goodacre (left) and Ann McPherson, outside the Ministry Of Defence Main Building, Whitehall, London, 16th June 1970. (Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/SEI_240678100-dbb9.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
She eventually picked up the nickname of ‘Queen of the Night Clubs’ and it was said she earnt £30,000 in her first year running clubs, allowing her children to be educated at top private schools. Three of her daughters even eventually married into the British nobility.
By the end of her 13-year career, Meyrick estimated she’d earnt around £500,000. However, she’d also served five prison sentences and died from influenza aged 57 in 1933. It was said her health had ‘undoubtedly been weakened by her several periods of imprisonment’.
Despite her regular brushes with the law, Meyrick left an indelible legacy. She was the inspiration for the character Ma Mayfield in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Brideshead Revisited and on the day of her funeral, West End theatres and clubs dimmed their lights as a mark of respect for the trailblazer.
In Dope Girls, Billie is a ‘dazzling bohemian dancer, whose life is irrevocably changed by Kate’s arrival’. In real-life Billie Carleton was a musical comedy actress who started her stage career aged just 15. She received her big break from when C.B. Cochran promoted her from the chorus to a role in his 1914 revue Watch Your Step.
However, when he was informed she’d been attending opium parties during the show’s run, Cochran fired Carleton. She then went on to appear in shows including Some More Samples, The Boy, Fair and Warmer and The Freedom, briefly becoming the youngest leading lady in the West End.