NUMBER 35 DOVER Street in London’s Mayfair houses an art gallery on its ground and first floors. The hallway, where a concierge sits behind a desk has four old stained-glass windows, each of them depicting a lady. They look like Pre-Raphaelite images. The marble floor of the lift is inlaid with brass letters, spelling the word ‘Empress’.
Between 1898 and 1955, number 35 Dover Street was the clubhouse of a women’s club, the Empress Club, which was founded in 1897. It was not the only women’s club in the area (Albemarle Street, Dover Street and Grafton Street), which because of the presence of several clubs for women was known popularly as ‘Petticoat Alley’. A website about the lost clubs of London (https://clubland.substack.com/p/lost-clubs-the-empress-club-1897) has a page detailing the history of the Empress Club. In late Victorian and Edwardian times, it was Mayfair’s leading women’s social club. Its members were mostly from aristocratic families. The feminist activist Princess Sophia Duleep Singh was a member.
The Empress Club began to decline slowly after WW1. During WW2, its members raised money and collected goods for the troops. In 1941, the club was badly damaged during the Blitz. Although attempts were made to revive the club in 1949, it could only stagger on unsteadily. It became a centre for illegal gambling, and was subject to a police raid in 1955. The website noted:
“In 1955, the Club was raided under the Betting Act, and nine men were arrested for illegal gambling on the premises, including popular comedian Tommy Knox of the ‘Crazy Gang’, who was remanded in custody. Knox was bound over to keep the peace, and the Club’s owners, Empress (Berkeley Square) Hotels, were fined £75. In the aftermath of the raid, and a wave of negative publicity portraying the Club in a seedy light, it dissolved later that year, and the building was sold off.”
In 2022, the building, which was designed by the architects John Thomas Wimperis & William Henry Arber, who were best known for building theatres, was completely refurbished. The people responsible for the refurbishment were architectural interior designer Maison Arabella and Orbit Architects. The gallery, which is housed within it is Lévy Gorvy Dayan, which is currently showing an excellent exhibition about which I will write soon.
MARY EDITH DURHAM (1863-1944), usually known as ‘Edith Durham’, who is well-known to many Albanians but little-known amongst British people, was a remarkable woman. Trained at Bedford College and the Royal College of Art, she was an accomplished artist, a prolific writer, a skilled anthropologist, and a formidable political lobbyist. On the evening of 14 March 2025, the Embassy of Kosovo in London hosted an event to celebrate the life and achievements of this lady, whose work was of great importance in the Balkans, especially in what is now Albania and Kosovo. It was organised by the Anglo Albanian Association led by its Chairman Stephen Nash and members of the association’s committee. Several speakers gave interesting talks about different aspects of Edith’s life. Between the speakers, the actress and presenter Joanna Lumley read short excerpts from some of the books written by Edith Durham.
In 1900, Edith’s medical advisor suggested that for the good of her health, she should take a break from her busy life in England. She travelled to Montenegro, and thus began her many years of arduous travelling around the Western Balkans, learning about the people who lived there, their traditions and ways of life, their problems, and the complex political situation in the region. The Oxford historian Noel Malcolm was the first speaker. Briefly and succinctly, he gave a comprehensive outline of the complex political situation prevailing in the Balkans when Edith worked there. In a nutshell, the region was the epicentre of the struggle to determine how the Balkan territory was to be divided up as the Ottoman Empire was suffering its death throes. The translator (of Albanian novels including those of Ismail Kadare, who died in 2024) John Hodgson gave a fascinating talk about his first visits to Kosovo in the early 1980s when many country people were still living the way that they were when Edith Durham visited them before WW1, and then wrote about them in her books.
James Hickson, who is the grand nephew of Edith Durham, gave a fascinating talk about Edith’s family: her parents and her eight siblings, many of whom, like Edith, went on to do remarkable things. Edith was the oldest child, and after her father died, she was left to care for some of the family as well as continuing her work as a successful artist. It was the stress of this overworking that caused her to become so unwell that her doctor recommended she took the holiday, which led to her involvement with the Balkans and the Albanian people, in particular. Wherever she travelled in the Balkans, Edith was welcomed by local people. While staying with them, she observed their customs and all aspects of their daily lives. She was given and purchased many items (clothing, domestic tools, fabrics, and much more), which she brought back to England. Many of these precious mementoes of her trips are housed in two museums: one in the Bankfield Museum in Halifax (Yorkshire), and the other, the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill (London). Rachel Terry of the Bankfield and Peronel Craddock of the Horniman both spoke, and explained how their museums obtained the exhibits collected by Edith Durham, and what items their collections house. Hearing them has made me want to revisit the Horniman, and to pay a first visit to the Bankfield.
Elizabeth Gowing, who has written a very personal account of her ‘discovery’ of Edith Durham after she first visited Kosovo in 2006, also spoke (via a Zoom link from Prishtina) briefly about Edith and how she came across this extraordinary woman. Another speaker was David Oakley-Hill, whose father Dayrell R. Oakley-Hill (1898-1985) played a leading role in running the Gendarmerie of Albania during the reign of King Zog. He lived and worked in the country between 1929 and 1938. His son related that his father and Edith Durham communicated with each other. David is currently completing a book about another formidable English woman, who worked in Albania: Margaret Hasluck (1885-1948). Edith and Margaret wrote letters to each other, and David will be including some of them in his forthcoming book.
I wrote earlier that Edith is far from well-known in Britain. Brian Ferris, another speaker, is valiantly trying to remedy this situation by attempting to get a commemorative plaque attached to a house where Edith lived in London (36 Glenloch Road in Belsize Park). He related the frustrating difficulties that he is facing in trying to achieve this. I have discovered that she also lived, albeit briefly, at two other addresses around Belsize Park (see: https://historywiki.therai.org.uk/index.php?title=Mary_Edith_Durham).
Joanna Lumley read extracts from some of Edith’s books in between the various speakers’ presentations. Most of them came from “High Albania” (first published in 1909), which is, so far, one of the best books that has been written about Albania in English. Before reading the first extract of the evening, she explained that after her first brief visit to Albania, she fell in love with the country. With her readings and the excellent presentations by the various speakers, all introduced by Stephen Nash, the event hosted by His Excellency the Ambassador of Kosova, Ilir Kapiti, was both enjoyable and highly informative. It was a fine appreciation of the woman whose empathy with the Albanians, observations, and political lobbying saved what is now the country of Albania from being carved up by the countries around it and becoming incorporated into them.
PHOTOGRAPHY HAS LONG been an artistic medium for expressing protest. This is well exemplified by photographic images on display at the excellent “Women in Revolt” exhibition, which is on at London’s Tate Britain until the 7th of April 2024, and is well worth seeing. Running concurrently with this. is an exhibition at the South London Gallery (in Peckham) – “Acts of resistance: photography, feminisms and the art of protest”, which is on until the 9th of June 2024.
As its title suggests, the show at Peckham consists mainly of exhibits that make use of photography. There are also several digital items. The subject matter deals with matters that concern feminists (and ought to concern everyone) including rape, abortion, genital mutilation, other forms of violence against women, and so on. Unlike the exhibition at Tate Britain, which deals mainly with feminist activities in Britain during the 1960s to 1980s, this show was to coin a phrase ‘art sans frontières”, and bang up to date. The exhibition has as its inspiration the words that the artist Barbara Kruger used in 1989:
“Your body is a battleground”.
Incidentally, there is an exciting exhibition of Kruger’s work at the Serpentine South Gallery (in Kensington Gardens) until the 17th of March.
The exhibition at Peckham (to quote the gallery’s website):
“… explores feminism and activism from an international and contemporary perspective. Looking at different approaches to feminism from the past 10 years, the show highlights shared concerns including intersectionality, transnational solidarity, and the use of social media and digital technology as a tool for change.”
It includes works by at least 20 artists, some of them working as collaborators. Their creations are displayed well both in the gallery and its annexe nearby in a disused fire station. Put simply, the works on display at Peckham have a far more visceral impact than those being shown at Tate Britain, which in many cases appeal more to the brain than to the heart. Even if you ignore the messaging conveyed by the artists in the works at Peckham – and this is not easy to do – their visual impact is magnificent. They are works of art as well as being tools of protest. This is an exhibition well worth making the trek out to Peckham!
SURVEYING THE REPRESENTATION of women by artists in a single exhibition might seem a daunting task, if not impossible. Yet, this is what the exhibition “Visible/Invisible” achieves successfully. Curated by Kamini Sawhney, Arnika Ahldag, Vaishnavi Kambadur, Riya Kumar and Arshad Hakim, this magnificent display of artworks can be viewed at the recently opened (in late February 2023) Museum of Art and Photography (‘MAP’) on Kasturba Road in Bangalore (Bengaluru). The exhibition, which is displayed in most of the rooms on one floor of MAP confines itself to works created by artists, both male and female, from the Indian subcontinent and its diaspora. However, this did not hinder the curators’ aim of demonstrating the female in art over the centuries.
The 130 artworks on show range in date of creation from the 10th century AD to the present. MAP’s website reveals that the various artworks: “… are interwoven into four key sections based on narratives and counter-narratives: Goddess and Mortal, Sexuality and Desire, Power and Violence, and Struggle and Resistance. Each section presents how women’s lives have been portrayed, the spaces that they occupy and challenges that women have faced in the Indian subcontinent. The themes and ideas explored in Visible/Invisible hopes to encourage audience awareness of the history and role of women and gender in art.” And the exhibition successfully raised my awareness of the multiple ways in which the lives of women have been portrayed by artists of both genders over the centuries,
The artworks include sculptures, paintings, photographs, film posters, textiles (some created by female artists and others woven in traditional patterns by craftswomen), and prints. Almost every exhibit was a joy to behold, What was particularly interesting were examples of artworks created within the last few decades that demonstrate how Indian women artist have taken control of the way they portray women and their lives, What the viewer sees is how women see themselves, which is a contrast to what has happened in earlier times when women have often been shown in the way that men have viewed their lives.
All in all, this exciting exhibition is compelling both visually and conceptually. The curators have expressed their ideas beautifully and powerfully, but not without considerable subtlety.
SERAMPORE NEAR CALCUTTA was a Danish colony, or at least under Danish administration, between 1755 and 1845. It was then known as ‘Frederiknagore’. When we visited the place briefly in 2019, we were struck by the similarity of the type of design of its Church of St Olave (built 1806) and that of the far better-known St Martin-in-the-Fields (built 1721-26) on the east side of London’s Trafalgar Square. Although there are similarities between the two churches, there are also many differences. One of them is that the interior of St Olave’s is far plainer that that of St Martin’s. Even though many thousands of miles apart, there is a tiny aspect of Asia in the church on Trafalgar Square.
In the southwest corner of St Martin’s, I spotted a memorial, which aroused my curiosity. It is a simple green cloth-covered square notice board surrounded by a wooden frame in which various things are carved. These include the words “Requests for prayer”; carved plant motifs; Chinese pictograms; and the words “Praise God for his servant Florence Li Tim-Oi DD. 1907-1992. The first woman ordained in the Anglican Communion 25 January 1944”. There were several notices and a couple of plastic drinking cups pinned on the board.
Florence was born in Aberdeen, Hong Kong during a time that most Chinese parents favoured male children. However, her parents were unusual in that they challenged the then current prejudice against girls. As a student, she joined the Anglican church, probably after hearing a preacher (in Hong Kong) asking for women to dedicate their lives to working for the Christian ministry. At her baptism, she chose her English name, Florence, to honour the late Florence Nightingale. After studying at the Canton Theological College, she was eventually, in 1941, ordained as a deaconess. At that time, she was sent to the then Portuguese colony of Macau to help refugees fleeing there from war-torn China.
When the Japanese occupied Hong Kong, it became impossible for ordained Anglican priests to reach Macau. Although she was not yet ordained, Florence had to perform all the functions normally carried out by an ordained priest. In January 1944, she met Hong Kong’s Bishop Raymond Hall in an unoccupied part of China. There, the bishop, realising that there was no Anglican priest in Macau and that Florence had the ‘gift of priestly ministry’, ordained her as an Anglican priest. In so doing, on the 25th of January 1944, Florence made history by becoming the first woman to be ordained as an Anglican priest. This was 30 years before the ordination of women was permitted by the Anglican Church in the rest of the world. So, her ordination was frowned upon by some leaders of the Anglican Church.
After WW2 was over, Florence lived and ministered in China. In Maoist China, churches were closed (from 1958 to 1974), and during the so-called Cultural Revolution, Florence led a miserable life, as did many other Chinese people. She was sent to a farm to work with chickens and her home was raided several times. After a long time, she was allowed to retire from the farm and was given permission to leave China. In 1983, she was taken to Canada, where she assisted in the religious activities of a church in Toronto. By then, the Anglican Church in Canada had approved of the ordination of women. On the 40th anniversary of her ordination in China, she was reinstated as a priest. In later life, Florence served at the Anglican Cathedral in Toronto, where she lived the rest of her life.
I do not know when the memorial noticeboard commemorating Florence was installed in St Martin-in-the-Fields. However, on the 25th of January 2014, a service was held in the church to mark the 70th anniversary of her ordination as the first female Anglican priest. I am pleased that I spotted the somewhat unobtrusive notice board because if I had missed seeing it, I might never have known about this remarkable woman of faith.
CAMBRIDGE IS A CITY which I have visited often since I was a child. My first recollection of the place was visiting Gonville and Caius College to meet my father’s long-term collaborator, the Hungarian born economist Peter Bauer (1915-2002). Later, after 1965, during my childhood and adolescence, we used to visit Cambridge to spend time with my father’s friend from his student days in Cape Town (South Africa), the social scientist Cyril Sofer (died 1974) and his wife Elaine. At first, I used to visit them with my family and when I was in my teens, I used to stay with them in their large Victorian house near Selwyn College. It was Elaine, who first introduced me to the joys of the drink known as ‘Bloody Mary’.Further travels to Cambridge followed when a childhood friend of mine attended Clare College to study for his bachelor’s degree. Through him, I met his good friend, now a well-known writer, Matthew Parris.
Many more visits to Cambridge followed my graduation at University College London in 1973. Although I remained in London to study for a higher degree, some of those who had graduated with me moved to Cambridge to pursue further studies. Three out of the nine of us, who graduated in physiology in 1973, embarked on doctoral theses in the city’s university. One of these was Lopa, who is now my wife. While she was at Cambridge, we were still ‘just good friends’, as the saying goes.
On one of my visits to see Lopa, I stayed in a house in Owlstone Road, which is south of the historic centre of Cambridge. A mattress was set up for me in a ground floor room with a street facing window. The room had been recently occupied by a female student, who had moved elsewhere. This sojourn in the city was during the time when the so-called Cambridge Rapist was assaulting young women, always within their homes, at an alarming rate. He carried out his attacks between October 1974 and April the following year.
Apparently, he followed potential victims to their homes and noted down their addresses in a notebook.The rapist carried out his first rape on the 18th of October 1974. Then another on the first of November, and yet again on the 13th of that month (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Samuel_Cook). The latter was carried out within Homerton College, now a part of Cambridge University. He struck again on the 13th of February 1975, and then, unsuccessfully, on the 5th of May.
I slept soundly at Owlstone Road when I was staying there for a night or two. One morning, I woke up and saw police vehicles out in the road. It was the 8th of December 1974 and the rapist had raped a woman in the house next door to where I was staying, having broken into its ground floor room, which mirrored that in which I was sleeping. What none of us knew until after the perpetrator, Peter Samuel Cook, was eventually caught during his attack on Owlstone Croft’s nurses’ hostel in June 1975, was that the villain had listed the house in which Lopa was living with some other young ladies in his notebook of potential targets. The young lady who had occupied the room where I spent a couple of nights was in the rapist’s list of future victims.
Cook, who had knifed at least one of his victims, was a violent person and might have been awfully annoyed with me had he broken into the room where I was sleeping and found me, a man, instead of one of his intended female targets. Subsequent visits to the wonderful city of Cambridge have not, I am pleased to relate, been so potentially hazardous. Cook was jailed for life and died in Winchester Prison in 2004.
yamey 