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Betty May: The Tiger Woman of Canning Town

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As part of Newham Heritage Month, earlier in the year, I took part in researching women’s stories in Newham. Being born in the borough this was of particular interest to me, and I was excited to hear about Betty May -  a woman nicknamed ‘Tiger Woman’ who had lived in the first half of the 20th century and whose story had “thrilled and appalled the public”. She sounded like my kind of woman!

‘Betty May’

Much of what we know about Betty May is self-reported in an autobiography written originally to be serialised in a weekly newspaper. The story starts with Betty May, born Elizabeth Golding, in the Tidal Basin area of Canning Town in 1894. She grew up in a single-parent home with 3 siblings; her father having left when she was very young. The family lived in a single room, with their only furniture being a table and chairs – sleeping on rags in place of a bed. Her mother supported the family by working 12 hours a day at a local chocolate factory. Betty remembers,“Sometimes, but not often, she was able to bring us back some chocolate from the factory. Oh! The delight of that chocolate! It was almost being half-starved to enjoy it as we did”.

Street traders in London.

Betty regularly visited the local market (possibly Rathbone Market, which would have then been situated on Rathbone St) with her grandmother, who she says was a coster, someone who earned their living from mobile street selling. Betty and her brother were sent to live with their father, who lived at a brothel. He was abusive and violent to the children, but was arrested shortly after they came to live there. The children were taken to live with an aunt and uncle who were travelling people, living and working on the London river network. It was here that Betty’s love of performance developed, as she began dancing and singing for pennies to entertain sailors on ships from the deck of the barge.

As a teenager, she was sent to live with another aunt in Somerset where she lived happily until she formed a relationship with a school-master and was thrown out of the house. When she returned again to London she found a place to live on Commercial Road. She began to frequent pubs and bars in central London, such as the Endell Street Club and the Café Royal. She became friends with the artists and writers who also attended these venues, naming Augustus John, Jacob Epstein, Roger Fry, and David Bomberg among her friends, even sitting for some of them as a life model. Betty also worked as a performer in the club ‘The Cave of the Golden Calf’. Her most well loved song was “The Raggle Taggle Gypsies”.

Her autobiography then describes a period of her life, in which she went on a whim with a man to Bordeaux, was almost raped, but managed to escape and earn her fare to Paris. There she was coopted into the Apaches, a gang of violent criminals, who gave her the name of ‘Tigre’ or Tiger Woman (it is an interesting aside that a 1930’s dance craze was named after this gang, with moves based on a dramatic fight). After one of the men Betty robbed gave the gang away to the police, she returned to London. It is impossible to tell exactly whether some parts of Betty’s autobiography are partly, or entirely fiction. She herself admitted that a chunk in the middle of the book was untrue, and to me, this part seems the most like something she might have made up to shock newspaper readers and is probably the more difficult to prove.

‘The Café Royal, London (William Orpen, 1912)’

Once back in London, Betty returned to performing in The Café Royal and the Crabtree Club. There, she rekindled a romance with the man who was to become her first husband in 1914, Miles L. Atkinson known as ‘Bunny’. Once married, Betty discovered Bunny was addicted to cocaine (not illegal in the UK until 1916), and she soon became so too. When the First World War started, and Bunny enlisted, Betty worked for a short time as a sales assistant. Becoming ever more dependent on drugs with her husband at war and living alone, Betty met and began a relationship with an Australian called Roy who was in the middle of assisting her in getting a divorce, when Bunny was killed in action. She married George Dibbs King Waldron  ‘Roy’ and he ‘assisted’ her out of her addiction by severely beating her with a belt; despite the domestic violence Betty does credit him in supporting her to get clean from her drug dependency. Upon discovering that he was also having a relationship with another woman, Betty also divorced Roy and returned to her life in the cafes and bars of London and as an artist model. 

‘Bust of Betty May, Jacob Epstein’

It was at this point that the famous Jacob Epstein sculpture of Betty was created, formally titled ‘The Savage’. Betty then met and married her third husband, Raoul Loveday, who was an Egyptologist. Raoul became a member of the Thelema, a cult founded by Aleister Crowley which was based on Ancient Egyptian religious practices, and he and Betty went to live at the cult’s premises in Sicily. Whilst there, Betty witnessed a ceremony where a cat was killed, and found a trunk of men’s ties covered in dried blood, which Crowley told her had belonged to and been given to him by Jack the Ripper. Raoul became ill from drinking polluted water from a stream and died, so Betty returned again to her circle of friends in London. Being unable to make any money as a performer or life model, she lived in poverty in Soho until she was approached by a newspaper journalist to sell her serialised life story (in the form which later became her autobiography). Through this, she met Princess Waletka, who performed as a mind-reader, and went on tour with her around the USA. Becoming homesick, Betty returned to London where she was married for the fourth time, to Noel Mostyn Sedgwick, ‘Carol’ who worked as an editor for the Shooting Times and Country Magazine. Carol feel ill after eating a rook pie, but his mother accused Betty of poisoning him at which point Betty left again for London and the autobiography ends. 

Betty seems to have continued living a life full of event, as she was referred to in a murder case, when a possibly mentally ill Douglas Burton murdered a friend. It was said he had believed he was about to get married to Betty but had become extremely agitated when she didn’t turn up.

In her later life, it seems that Betty moved to Kent, possibly married for a fifth time, and possibly died in the 1950’s.




I loved reading this autobiography and was really rooting for Betty all through her adventures. Working class girls growing up in Betty’s situation at the time must have had so few opportunities to experience anything other than their local communities, in terms of work, travel or society, so this shows how special Betty really must have been. In a society still very conservative and patriarchal, it seems Betty really held her own with the men in her life, and was able to take what she needed from her relationships and leave when they were not working for her. I’d certainly like to be more ‘Tiger Woman’!

Author

This post was written by Charlotte Elliston. Charlotte is a co-director of Sweet 'Art, a visual arts organisation operating from an intersectional feminist standpoint/ interested in outreach and oral history.