A mini-series in which historian Tracey Gregory talks with Naomi Clifford about the inhabitants of Loughborough Road in Brixton, South London.

Tracey’s blog, Loughborough Road Stories blog, explores the people and buildings of Loughborough Road and surrounding streets over the past 180 years.

This is a collaborative project between Morley Radio and The Door history podcast.

Bella Burge aka Ella Lane, Bell Lloyd and Bella of Blackfriars, lived at Glenwood House in Loughborough Road South (where all the houses have been replaced by the Loughborough Estate).

As a young woman she performed on the music-hall stage but went on to become the first female boxing promoter. Born in New York in 1877 to English parents Leah Belle (Bella) Orchard came to London with her mother and older sister in 1882, following the death of her father.

Bella first appeared on stage at the age of 11 as Ella Lane. It wasn’t long before (B)Ella met the famous music-hall star Marie Lloyd who, only 18 herself, unofficially adopted her.

Ella worked as Marie Lloyd’s dresser and performed with Marie’s sister Rosie as The Sisters Lloyd. Bella’s friendship and the Lloyd sisters endured throughout their lives. In the mid 1890s Bella moved with Marie to Glenwood House on Loughborough Road. They travelled round Britain and to South Africa together. 

In 1901, at the age of 24, Bella married boxer Dick Burge at Brixton Registry Office. However, three weeks later, Dick was arrested for forging cheques and served time. After Dick was released seven years later Bella suggested he build a career as a boxing promoter. They identified an octagonal former chapel on Blackfriars Road as a venue for their enterprise.

The Ring opened in May 1910 and successfully attracted a new audience of working-class people, including women. Dick served in the First World War but died of pneumonia in 1918. Bella ran The Ring alone, becoming the first female boxing promoter. 

The building was destroyed by an enemy bomb in The Blitz. Bella retired and lived out her life in a flat on the Finchley Road in north-west London. She died in 1962 at the age of 85.

A mini-series in which historian Tracey Gregory talks with Naomi Clifford about the inhabitants of Loughborough Road in Brixton, South London.

Tracey’s blog, Loughborough Road Stories blog, explores the people and buildings of Loughborough Road and surrounding streets over the past 180 years.

This is a collaborative project between Morley Radio and The Door history podcast.

In the summer of 1869, 16-year-old Jeanette Tassie Cowen, the daughter of a travelling salesman and musician, was subjected to a sexual assault which left her pregnant. Her father Robert decided that the baby – John – should be adopted and after answering an advertisement in Lloyd’s Weekly, arranged to pay Margaret Waters a one-off fee of £4 for the baby’s care.

The Cowen family were at that time living at 1 Langholme Villas, Loughborough Road.

John was handed into the care of sisters Margaret Waters and her sister Sarah Ellis, who were ‘baby-farmers’, in other words they were paid foster-carers catering particularly to ‘illegitimate’ children. When police raided the premises, which had been under surveillance after a number of babies were found dead in the area, they discovered John and a number of other children in a terrible condition. He died two weeks later.

His death was central to the conviction of Margaret Waters, who was hanged at Horsemonger Gaol on 11 October 1870.

Although the social stigma of ‘illegitimate’ birth was huge at this time, the Cowen family weathered the storm. Jessie married John Coward, a textiles warehouse worker, in 1874 and had six children. She died in Streatham in 1921 and is buried alongside her husband in West Norwood Cemetery.

Note: In the recording, Margaret Waters has been mistakenly given as Mary Waters.

A mini-series in which historian Tracey Gregory talks with Naomi Clifford about the inhabitants of Loughborough Road in Brixton, South London.

Tracey’s blog, Loughborough Road Stories blog, explores the people and buildings of Loughborough Road and surrounding streets over the past 180 years.

This is a collaborative project between Morley Radio and The Door history podcast.

Australian-born Eva Milway Sellen (1865–1958) lived with her husband Herbert Tear, a photographer, at 22 Loughborough Road at some time between 1900 and 1906. They had three children.

The couple had a strained relationship. In 1905, when she was living apart from Herbert, Eva was found drunk in Atlantic Road, Brixton and charged at Lambeth Court as an ‘habitual drunkard’. She received a sentence of three years in a reformatory. The 1898 Inebriates Act allowed non-criminal inebriates to be held for up to three years. 

The reformatory records show that Eva started drinking brandy and claret at the suggestion of a doctor at a time when she may have been suffering from postnatal depression. She told the staff that she had been caused great unhappiness by her husband. Nevertheless, at the end of her sentence, she was released into his care.

Unsurprisingly the marriage ended, and Eva moved to her own place in Perivale in West London, before going to live with her son Frank in Southend, Essex. 

Herbert and Eva divorced in 1914 and Eva acquired a new partner, William James, who was cited in the divorce case. She outlived both Herbert and William by some 20 years, dying in Chichester, Sussex, at the age of 92.

A mini-series in which historian Tracey Gregory talks with Naomi Clifford about the inhabitants of Loughborough Road in Brixton, South London.

Tracey’s blog, Loughborough Road Stories blog, explores the people and buildings of Loughborough Road and surrounding streets over the past 180 years.

This is a collaborative project between Morley Radio and The Door history podcast.

Born Augusta Rose (more commonly known as Rose or Rosaline) Noeldechen in 1857 in Berlin, Mademoiselle or Madame Alphonsine also used the stage names La Belle Rose, Marie Rose and Rose Celeste.

Rose built her career balancing on a large ball about 2ft (60cm) in circumference which she ‘walked’ up and down a large spiral 40ft high (12m) on a track just 16in (40cm) wide.

By the early 1880s she was performing her spiral ascension in the US. Here she met Canadian John Wingfield, who had an act of performing dogs.

Rose and John moved to Blackpool in 1914, but Brixton in south London was their home for more than 20 years.

Rosa suffered a number of serious falls during her career, including in 1889 at The Canterbury Theatre of Varieties near Waterloo. Later she became a promoter for Elliman’s Embrocation, a cream for easing aches and pains. Her endorsement was used widely in newspaper adverts for the ointment.

By her late 30s Rosa had largely abandoned the spiral and, while standing on top of the ball, performed while waving her skirt and scarves in a style known as skirt dancing. She was appearing into her 60s, albeit latterly with her feet on the ground.

Rosa died in Blackpool in 1947, aged 91. John passed away 18 years earlier.

A mini-series in which historian Tracey Gregory talks with Naomi Clifford about the inhabitants of Loughborough Road in Brixton, South London.

Tracey’s blog, Loughborough Road Stories, explores the people and buildings of Loughborough Road and surrounding streets over the past 180 years.

This is a collaborative project between Morley Radio and The Door history podcast.

As a young girl, Irene Eades started performing in music-hall, no doubt inspired by the numerous artistes who were her neighbours in Camberwell and Brixton.

In later life, Irene told her family that she had known famous music-hall star Marie Lloyd, who herself lived briefly on Loughborough Road in the early 1890s.

In 1907, aged 18, Irene married hairdresser George Pye and her career as a performer came to an end. In 1915 George joined up to fight in the First World War. By the time he returned, Irene was running a fish shop on Robsart Street, Brixton. They opened another fish shop on Loughborough Road in 1921.

The mother of six children, Irene accommodated her large extended family, and also rented rooms to non-family members.

A mini-series in which historian Tracey Gregory talks with Naomi Clifford about the inhabitants of Loughborough Road in Brixton, South London.

Tracey’s blog, Loughborough Road Stories, explores the people and buildings of Loughborough Road and surrounding streets over the past 180 years.

This is a collaborative project between Morley Radio and The Door history podcast.

The astonishing acrobat and high wire performer known as Ella Zuila was born Catherine Isabella Webber in Sydney, Australia in 1854, to English parents. She first performed on the ‘high-rope’ and trapeze after she met her future husband, George Loyal, in 1871.

Ella’s tricks included wheeling a large cannon across the wire, sitting at a table drinking a glass of wine, carrying George across the wire on her back, walking across the wire with baskets on her feet.

They travelled the world with their act – in which their daughter Lulu also participated. When very tiny she was taken across the high wire in a small wheelbarrow, and when older joined her mother on the back of an adapted bicycle or stood on her mother’s shoulders.

On a tour of the US in the late 1870s George was fired from a canon – Ella’s job was to catch him, so he vies for the position of first person fired from a canon with another amazing female performer, Zazel.

But despite this stunning and dangerous display it was Ella who started to eclipse George as the star of the show. She was the headline act on many of the bills of Forepaughs Circus and she started to be referred to as the female Blondin, the wire walker famous for his feats high above Niagara Falls in 1859.

Ella and her family settled in Lambeth, living at No. 32 Loughborough on and off from the 1880s into the 20th century.

Listen to the episode for more details of this astonishing woman, who once enjoyed widespread fame and is now scarcely remembered.

What is historical fiction? How does it help us understand history?

Lena Augustinson and Naomi Clifford talk about historical fiction and why Naomi has chosen this genre for her latest work: the story of the death of Madame Riel in 1872 in the kitchen of a house in Park Lane, Mayfair, at the hands of her domestic cook, Marguerite Diblanc. They discuss the work of Dickens, Hilary Mantel, Sarah Waters and others.

You can learn more about Naomi Clifford’s work on this story at Substack (free subscription).

Lena Augustinson talks to Naomi Clifford about her research into the work of Mrs Meredith, a pioneer in the rehabilitation of women convicts, and about how criminal women were viewed in the 19th century.

Listen to the episode on trailblazing maternity doctor Annie McCall, who is mentioned in this podcast about Mrs Meredith.

You can read about the life of Mrs Meredith in Out of the Shadows: Essays on 18th and 19th Century Women, published by Caret Press.

Lena Augustinson talks to Naomi Clifford about the affection Louise Michel, a veteran of the Paris Commune, held for London, and the significance of her tour of Lambeth Workhouse at the invitation of one of the Poor Law Guardians.

Louise Michel, feminist, anarchist, poet, ex-convict, playwright and journalist, survived the bloody end of the 1871 Paris Commune and subsequent exile to New Caledonia. She loved London and visited several times. But why was she invited in 1883 to give her opinion on the Lambeth Workhouse? 

Featured image: ‘La Barricade’, from Les Communeux, 1871: Types, caractères, costumes (1880), illustrated by Bertall (1820-1882). Paris: E. Plon (Paris). Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, 4-OA-128 (D). Women of the Commune were depicted as angry, ugly, working-class arsonists who deliberately destroyed Paris with fire at the fall of the Commune

Fenella Gatehouse tells Lena Augustinson and Naomi Clifford about her mother June Spencer, a driver for the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service in Chelsea during the Second World War and the subject of Naomi’s book Under Fire.

June Spencer was a debutante, dressmaker and artist with a vibrant and busy social life. She attended many serious bomb incidents. Her diaries, which contains some vivid descriptions of the destruction, is also a valuable source of information about daily life in the Blitz. June was extremely well-connected, and knew novelists Patrick O’Brian and Mary Wesley, poet, sailor and MP A.P. Herbert, artists Tom Dugdale and Augustus John. She lived at 97 Lindsey House on Cheyne Walk, then owned by Richard Stewart-Jones, the antiquarian who was the driving force behind the reconstruction of Chelsea Old Church after it was destroyed by bombing in April 1941.

June Spencer’s wartime diary is the subject of Naomi’s latest book Under Fire, published by Caret Press, available to order through bookshops and from Amazon. Ebooks and Kindle are also available.