Undressed to impress A history of striptease in Bristol
Inspired (if that’s the right word) by recent controversy over lap-dancing clubs in Bristol, Jonathan Rowe takes a look back to previous times when various performers came to take their clothes off in public
O NMarch 31, 1941, Phyllis Dixey, billed as “The Girl The Lord Chamberlain Banned”, first appeared in Bristol at The Empire, Old Market in the show Step Out With Phyllis.
My Mum and her sister-in-law to-be, my Auntie Mary, were in the audience one night during the show’s week-long run. Mary loved to do things to shock her parents, and often inveigled my Mum into joining her. My Dad, a lifetime feminist, wouldn’t have been seen dead watching Phyllis Dixey!
From what I can recall, Mum said the act was pretty tame in comparison to what can be seen today, as Phyllis Dixey promoted her act as “artistic and refined”.
Often referred to as Britain’s “Queen of Striptease” she toured her revues around the provinces until the late 1950s, but left the stage bankrupt in 1958. She spent her last years as a cook at Loosely Park, Guilford and died in 1964 aged 50. In 2011, a blue plaque on her former home in Surbiton was turned down by residents who disliked the word ‘striptease’ in the wording of the plaque. Phyllis’s nephew Oliver Dixey, of Pill, Bristol said the family would have preferred the term “fan dancer”.
Reviewing Dixey’s 1941 visit to Bristol, a Western Daily Press journalist enthused: “Phyllis Dixey, who has charm and beauty … gives several model scenes, one being ‘The Confessions of a Fan Dancer.’”
She was to make six appearances at The Empire over the years, the last being in July 1953, a year before it closed, when she was in her late 30s. In March 1944, a reporter for the Bristol Evening World wrote: “The more I see of Phyllis Dixey – no cancel that! The more times I see Phyllis Dixey, the more I wonder at the simple artistry which has raised her act to such stardom in the theatre that there’s scarcely a soul in England who doesn’t know her name. One of the curious things about this shapely blonde with the teasing, smiling face, is that women go to see her and like her act, as much as the men. That’s so in Bristol at any rate.”
It is claimed the origins of modern striptease lie in Oscar Wilde’s play Salome (1893) where Salome performs the Dance of the Seven Veils for King Herod. This erotic routine became standard fare for dancers in the following decades. The most famous exponent was Maud Allan (1873-1956), a Canadian dancer who gave a private performance of her version, first seen in Vienna in 1906, for Edward VII in 1907. She toured England in 1908-09 giving more than 250 performances but her risqué act, which was also considered by many to be blasphemous, was banned in many cities. She was due to appear at The Victoria Rooms in Bristol in April 1909 but was banned when the directors discovered she was to be the star attraction.
Thirteen years later she finally performed at the Bristol Hippodrome at the age of 49.
The Western Daily Press (January 13, 1922) reported: “Miss Maud Allan, the celebrated dancer, provides the piece de resistance at the popular Bristol house this week … Her dancing last night showed that in point of grace and lissomness her movements have lost none of the poetry that characterised her dancing when she blazed into popularity some years ago.”
Her dancing to The Blue Danube and Ballet égyptien was “a revelation in terpsichorean expression … At times her dancing with amazing fervour and abandon … was … Something suggestive, almost of the diabolical”. Her performance was greeted by “a hurricane of applause”. She returned to the Hippodrome the following year.
Probably the earliest nearly (but not quite) nude variety act to appear in Bristol was in June 1898 when Miss Diane de Fontenoy made her first appearance in England at The Empire which had opened only five years earlier.
She was reputedly being paid the huge sum of £100 a week for an act specializing in “poses plastiques”, apparently nude, but actually wearing a body stocking, plastered to look like marble in clever stage lighting.
Billed as “A Grand Mythological, Classical and Romantic Statuary Act”, the Bristol Mercury said “Miss Fontenoy has a splendid physique and a strikingly handsome personality”. She presented “artistic pictures” including “Favourites of the Harem” and “The Birth of Venus”.
On June 16, 1913, Bristol Times and Mirror reported another exotic visitor to The Empire, “Arvi” who was reported as “The Human Form Divine in all its Beauty, appears and disappears in a most mysterious manner. Some of the most Beautiful Living women are introduced in the flesh in this Gorgeous Grecian Temple of Mystery.”
Shows of female nudes began in Britain in 1932 at the Windmill Theatre, London, under the direction of theatre director, Vivian Van Damm and theatre owner Laura Henderson. The law prohibited naked women moving so they had to pose in stationary “tableaux vivants”. The fan dance, where a performer moved her fans, but not her body, was permitted. The ruling appears to be “If you stand still it’s art, if you move, it’s rude!”
The Windmill became famous for its nude shows, which continued until 1964. The wartime motto “We Never Closed” was modified for The Windmill as “We Never Clothed”. The story of The Windmill Theatre was filmed as Mrs Henderson Presents in 2005.
Phyllis Dixey was the first of these “tasteful” nude performers to appear in Bristol, but another act which captured the nation’s wartime hearts, was the Daily Mirror’s “Jane” aka Chrystabel LeightonPorter, (1913-2000) who first appeared at The Empire in July 1941.
“Jane” was a comic strip character who appeared in the Mirror from 1932 to 1959 and had the habit of frequently (often inadvertently) shedding her clothes.
Created by cartoonist Norman Pett, the original model for Jane was his wife. but Leighton-Porter, a life model and former Miss England took over in 1940, becoming a popular morale-booster in wartime Britain. Winston Churchill called her “Britain’s secret weapon” and in 1944 when Jane appeared completely nude for the first time in the cartoon she was credited with inspiring the 36th Division to advance six miles into Burma!
Born in Hampshire, Chrystabel Leighton-Porter toured the country with her variety act appearing at army bases and variety halls but was never asked to perform near the front line. “I think they felt my act was a little too risqué to put on in a theatre full of lusty troops,” she said later.
Chrystabel met Sir Terence Porter, then Lord Chamberlain – whose job it was to observe any overstepping of the mark as regards public decency on stage.
“What is it you do in your act ?” he asked.
She said: “Well, at one stage I turn my back to the audience, take off my bra and then cover my breasts with my hands as I turn round.”
There was a pause before he replied, “You must have very large hands.”
After her first appearance in Bristol in 1941, a Bristol Evening World reporter enthused: “Jane, the national daily strip cartoon girl, lives up to her name and is presented in various colourful postures. What she wears could be put in a match box – plus the matches!”
The same paper noted in 1944 that Jane was “probably the only
woman in the land who does not mind the clothes rationing system!”
Jane made nine appearances at The Empire, her last being in 1953, the year before it closed, but her final appearance in Bristol was at the Hippodrome in 1958.
In the 1940s and 50s The Empire was the Bristol home of strip tease and nude shows, usually billed as “saucy”, “revealing” or “naughty” and, more often than not, French (well you can’t get more rude than
that!) as in the October 1941 revue Soir De Paris which featured “Living French Postcards”.
In November 1941 Mlle Claudia Loty was billed as “The Famous Parisenne Nude” in Naughty Girls of 1941. In June 1945, the revue Eve Connait ses Pommes (“Eve Knows Her Apples”) tempted many potential Bristol Adams to view “8 International Nudes … in tableaux based on Europe’s great paintings.’ Well, if it was art, that wasn’t rude was it?
The first night of C’est Si Bon on July 17 1950 attracted virtually all the entire Sussex county cricket team who were in Bristol to play against Gloucestershire , all eager to feast their eyes on “Gay Everidge in Nude Pictures”.
Probably the most famous of all strip tease artistes was the American Gypsy Rose Lee (1911-1970), born Rose Louise Hovick into a stage family. Immortalised in the 1959 musical Gypsy, which was filmed in 1962, she began her strip career aged 16 in about 1928.
On July 30, 1951, she made her European debut at the Bristol Hippodrome but the show was a disaster. Her nervousness, overdone flattering of the audience, and impenetrable American wit, together with poor staging and inadequate rehearsal, was met with a polite but muted reaction. Those expecting titillation were left disappointed as the great Gypsy Rose Lee did not shed a single garment. Critics in the audience saved their praise for a comic double act on the bill that no one had ever heard of – Morecambe and Wise.
By the end of the 50s, the days of both variety and the old fashioned nude shows were more or less over. Paul Raymond (1925-2000), dubbed “The King of Soho”, opened his private members’ strip club, the Raymond Revuebar in Soho in 1958, the first of its kind in the country, where patrons could see nude (and moving) girls.
On July 28, 1958, Paul Raymond’s Festival of Striptease, featuring “Jane of The Daily Mirror” and the “Striporama Girls” appeared at the Bristol Hippodrome, followed in September by Follies Frou Frou – La Grande Parade des Strip – Teeze.
By 1966, Bristol had its very own strip clubs, Lester’s at 72 Worrall Road, Clifton, and Globetrotters at 16a Whiteladies Road. A Post advert of 1968 for Globetrotters proclaimed “Ramona – direct from her tour of Sweden and Finland … 3 shows a night” and “Glamour Films” – all for a five shilling membership fee for visitors. Also appearing was “Jenny Bourne, one of Britain’s finest striptease artists”.
So the way was paved for the strip and lap dancing clubs we see today, though in recent times attitudes to female strip tease and “sexual entertainment venues” have changed. Iceland banned strip tease in 2010, the country’s Prime Minister stat
ing: “The Nordic countries are leading the way on women’s equality, recognising women as equal citizens, rather than commodities for sale.” Regular Post readers will also know of the ongoing local controversy over lap-dancing clubs in Bristol.
Male striptease is a relatively modern phenomenon. The Chippendales, the first touring male strip troupe, formed in the USA in 1979, with their British equivalents The Dreamboys formed in 1987, being the first male group to go fully nude on stage. Both groups made their debut in Bristol at the Hippodrome in May and April, respectively of 1991.
It is believed the first male strippers to be seen in Bristol appeared at the gay Oasis Club, 14-16 Park Row, about 1976/77 but the origins of audiences viewing the (nearly) nude male form go back much earlier to the ‘artistic’ posing acts of the late Victorian and Edwardian era.
These would involve athletic, attractive women and well-muscled men, posing, often in ‘light boxes,’ showing off their physiques, the men sometimes covering their bodies in white powder to give the effect of marble statues. A male and female double act, “Atlas” and “Miss Vulcana” appeared at The Empire in December 1898, offering “Athletic Living Pictures”.
“Atlas” was described as “The World’s Most Marvellous Athlete”, while “Miss Vulcana” was described as “the most beautiful, symmetrical, and physically perfect woman extant”. The duo was obviously popular with Bristol audiences as they returned four times to The Empire from 1906 to 1918, and once at The People’s Palace, Baldwin Street in May 1902.
The notices for the act in Bristol in 1907 claimed they were “The cause of the new posing craze”, but this is untrue. The credit must go to the German-Russian body builder and showman, Eugen Sandow (18671925), the father of modern bodybuilding.
Sandow first appeared in London in 1889 and toured the world for 35 years displaying his bulging muscles and performing feats of strength. Although not, strictly speaking, a male stripper, he was the earliest act to display the male physique for paying audiences, and had a sideline in accepting money from women who wanted to feel his muscles … So he could perhaps be called the father of the hen night male stripper!
He held after-show parties in his dressing room, and these were sometimes all-male affairs, where he could be viewed totally naked.
Sandow never appeared in Bristol but in 1898 “The Sandow Prize Competition” was held at Anderson’s Bristol Rubber Company of 9-10 High Street. Prizes of 1,000 guineas were awarded to “the man who is judged to be the most perfectly developed”.
A pupil of Sandow, JA Collard gave exhibitions of athletic body building posing and the Sandow School of Physical Culture (one of Bristol’s earliest gyms) opened in 1901 on the corner of St Mary Le Port Street and High Street, where large audiences watched demonstrations of the “renowned Sandow poses” by Sandow’s body builder pupil, G.F. Eagleton.
Over 120 years Bristol has seen “artistic” semi-nude female and male posing, the “naughty but refined” fan dancer artists of the 1940s and 50s, right up to totally nude strippers of both sexes, and the lap-dancing clubs of more recent times.
Is it art? Is it rude? Is it demeaning to both sexes? That, dear reader, you must decide for yourself.