Posts on this blog usually feature ‘Club Queens’; women who owned, managed, worked or performed in nightclubs.  There is always a connection to Kate Meyrick, London’s nightclub matriarch between the wars,  who is always at the centre of my research. However, as much as I am fascinated by the long-forgotten women who propelled the jazz age, I am also interested in those women who were incidental onlookers, like Laura Veal.

On Dec 21st, 1921 seventy-five year old Laura Veal folded a letter and pushed it into an envelope. With a steady, if somewhat exasperated hand, she addressed it to “The Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis.” It arrived on Sir William Horwood’s desk the following day.

The letter survives in the National Archives. Fragile and with deeply ragged edges it plunges sentence ends into guesswork. The letter reads as follows:

“Dear Sir, 

I am appealing to you for assistance with regard to the house next door to me, 43 Gerrard Street, which is used as a night dancing club from 10pm until 3.30am and later. We have lived in this house for 30 years (my late husband being in business here for 25 years). The frequenters are all the worse for drink by closing although the premises are not….

They likewise have a room in Gerrard Street right opposite which …….as a canteen.. The noise of a jazz band and the cries of the persons present prevent any sleep until they have left the premises. Frequently there is fighting in the street afterwards.

Surgeon Dr……. general dispensary who has also been disturbed….. and is quite willing to endorse all I have stated.

Trusting you can assist me

I am yours faithfully

Laura Veal

It was the first written complaint received about the Forty Three Club.

The Veal family arrived in London prior to 1871. Laura’s husband Philip Veal was a heraldic engraver and his father had been a ‘printer and pressman’. Laura and Phillip had married in Southampton in 1865. By 1871 they already had two sons, Frank and Harry. Their daughter Emily would arrive that summer. 

In the decade between the censuses of 1871 and 1881, Laura and Phillip lost two children, a boy and a girl. In the midst of their grief, they also welcomed their last child into the world, Isabelle. Of the six children born to Laura Veal, four survived into adulthood.

By 1900 the Veal’s were well acquainted with Gerrard Street. Aside from a brief spell in Fulham, they had already occupied numbers 4 and 7 before finally settling at number 44 which had recently been rebuilt.

No doubt they entered their new home with the thrill of a fresh start. Perhaps it was all mod-cons? The previous house on the site of 44 Gerrard Street, dating from 1691, had been reduced to dust, along with its fascinating history.  Previous residents had included Benjamin Charlewood, apothecary to George 3rd and James Atkinson, who became one of Regency London’s most famous perfumers. Atkinson is fabled to have journeyed from Cumberland to London with a live bear on a chain! (please see James Bennet’s excellent research on James Atkinson.) Atkinson was most famous for his ‘Bear’s grease, scented with Otto of Roses’ and it is possible that he kept a bear chained to his shop at No. 44 Gerrard Street. Today the Atkinson’s firm still exists, retailing through department stores and selling a scent called ‘44 Gerrard St’. 

Before James Atkinson, however, No. 44 had housed an even more celebrated individual – the poet John Dryden, although there has been much confusion over the exact house that he inhabited. In 1921 when Mrs. Meyrick viewed No. 43 Gerrard Street for her new nightclub venture she said “it was one of those buildings which one feels instinctively redolent of history……it was here that John Dryden lived the last years of his life.” To be fair to Mrs. Meyrick, the plaque already affixed to no. 43 encouraged this notion, but more recent investigations suggest that Dryden had most probably lived next door at number 44, where in 1901 the Veal family were inhabiting their new home.

When the census took place, in 1901, the Veal’s neighbours in Gerrard St were occupied in trades such as tailors, dressmakers and milliners; hotel waiters, wool merchants, theatrical dressers, licensed victuallers, silver finishers and even a judge. They hailed from Germany, Belgium, Holland, Italy, France and Russia. This diversity would increase exponentially as the century marched on.

At the age of 68,  Laura Veal became a widow.  When the 1911 census was taken it shows Laura living in Gerrard Street with her last child, Isabelle. It was customary for the 1911 census to be written in the hand of the head of the household and we know Laura completed the form as the handwriting matches that of the letter of complaint regarding the Forty-Three. Although it was later crossed out, Laura had included the number of ‘children still living’ and ‘children who have died’. Her widowhood was so recent, she had completed the form without realising that she no longer needed to include the particulars of her marriage. Thankfully her error has given us a more detailed picture of her life, in particular those children that she must have mourned. 

A decade later, in 1921, Laura Veal and her 45 year old daughter Isabelle, were still living at 44 Gerrard Street. Isabelle was working as a milliner in nearby Compton Street and a boarder, Millie, aged 26, supplemented the Veal’s household income. The 43 club had just opened and the roar of the twenties had begun, right on Laura’s doorstep.

There is no record of Laura Veal ever receiving a response to her letter regarding the club next door. However it is the first recorded complaint regarding the ‘43 Club’ and was considered important enough to be retained in police records, enabling its survival for over a century. It alerted police, not necessarily to the club itself – Sergeant Goddard’s sharp eyes would have had this marked from the moment it opened – but to the impact it was having on the local community and its ordinary, respectable residents such as Laura Veal. 

The letter marks the change from a street that once housed watchmakers, tailors and even farmers, to one which housed film companies, hairdressers, the 1917 Club, The Nonsuch Press, variety agents and restaurants. This would be superseded by ‘black clubs’, ‘queer clubs’, ‘jazz clubs’ and clubs influenced by bondage and psychedelia in the 1960’s before morphing yet further into what today is considered to be ‘Chinatown’.

In 2025 as I write this, Number 43 Gerrard Street is the Loon Fung Supermarket. On a recent visit where I took some photographs from the street, employees of the supermarket seemed curious about my purpose. ‘This used to be a very famous nightclub’ I remarked to a man resting against a pallet of goods. He looked disbelieving, which encouraged me to qualify “In the basement!” He laughs at me and says in his second language “It’s just rice and sugar down there now.” His colleague appears and together they begin to rehome the next load of rice and sugar.

While from a safe distance, we might romanticise these jazz age dens, the truth of it is that living in close proximity to one would have been hellish. Distinguished though some of Mrs. Meyrick’s guests might have been, the effects of alcohol on the human body is one thing that has not changed in the last century and certainly does not depend on one’s class!

Countless external police observations report men and women shouting, fighting, vomiting and urinating in the street and letters from the public scattered across files in the National Archives bear this out. Women complained of their husbands spending their entire wages in one night and forcing them to go without basic necessities. The correlation between alcohol and violence against women also cannot be denied and evidence shows violence towards women taking place both inside and directly outside the clubs.  Kate Meyrick herself was beaten and kicked on the pavements of Leicester Square when she refused entry to local gangsters.

Laura Veal died in the spring of 1930 at eighty-four years old. Kate Meyrick would follow her three years later, aged just fifty seven. 

Laura Veal’s story is important because it reflects the changes taking place in one London street. It is the experience of a woman straddling two worlds with one foot firmly in the Victorian age, yet facing the fury and frenzy of a post-war world. It also serves as a reminder to resist reductive ideas of the glamourous roaring twenties. It is so easy to be beguiled by the idea of an age which we did not experience.

Sources used:

The National Archives – Metropolitain Police Files relating to 43 Gerrard Street

Ancestry.com for various documents including census, births, marriages and deaths

If you have any additional information about the lives of those mentioned in this post, please do leave a comment.

If there are any corrections or suspected copyright issues, please do not hesitate to get in touch.