Speaker 1: Pushkin. The other residents of nine Gosfield Street are growing
Speaker 1: accustomed to crushes and cries in the dead of night.
Speaker 1: Commotion can be heard at Margaret Lowe's flat quite regularly.
Speaker 1: This particular altercation has spilled out into the street. The
Speaker 1: man who smashed through Margaret's door thinks better of lingering
Speaker 1: and flees into the night. She puts up a spirited pursuit.
Speaker 1: HeLa helay look at this. The next morning, when a bruised,
Speaker 1: embattered Margaret shows neighbors for shattered door and bransacked apartment,
Speaker 1: look at it the lamp broken. She explains that a
Speaker 1: young Canadian soldier, Plead Stranger, was responsible for the braaken
Speaker 1: Look at my war? Would she report the peculiar home
Speaker 1: invasion to the police. Her neighbors asked, what's the good
Speaker 1: of that? Margaret is a refined and rather proud woman.
Speaker 1: The other residents don't know her well, but they note
Speaker 1: she keeps rather odd hours, staying out late. When she
Speaker 1: does return home, she is often accompanied by men, some
Speaker 1: of whom turn violent. Another man will soon visit. Though
Speaker 1: he won't make enough noise to disturb the neighbors, he
Speaker 1: will subject Margaret to a truly horrifying ordeal. This is
Speaker 1: the seldom told story of women in World War Two
Speaker 1: who were killed not by the enemy but my husband, lovers,
Speaker 1: and strangers, wearing the uniform of their own side. It's
Speaker 1: also the tale of a particular string of murder victims
Speaker 1: that history has swept from view. I'm Hallie Rubinhold, and
Speaker 1: I'm Alice Fines, and you're listening to bad women. The
Speaker 1: Blackout River. The ship rolled and pitched in the school.
Speaker 1: Howling winds sang through the masts, and angry, white crested
Speaker 1: waves lashed at the railings far below. Decked huddled passengers
Speaker 1: hung on as cups and plates slid from tables and
Speaker 1: crashed the floor. The children wailed, and the adults whispered.
Speaker 1: Prayers and blessed is the food of boy. Will Jesus,
Speaker 1: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for amen. But next
Speaker 1: morning the skies clear, and in the distance a welcome
Speaker 1: sight the rocky coastline of Africa's southern tip. Soon they
Speaker 1: would be docking at Cape Town to refuel, and then
Speaker 1: traveling on east alone. On the wide ocean. They might
Speaker 1: by day glimpse whales breaching the water's surface. By night
Speaker 1: the stars of the Southern Cross would guide their progress,
Speaker 1: glittering in the inky heavens. It would have been on
Speaker 1: a voyage like this one that Margaret Florence Campbell Burchett
Speaker 1: traveled to New Zealand as a toddler. By one account,
Speaker 1: she was born in Britain in eighteen ninety nine and
Speaker 1: her family emigrated soon afterwards. New Zealand had seen a
Speaker 1: great migration in the eighteen seventies. The authorities there gave
Speaker 1: away free tickets and heavily subsidized assisted passage to certain
Speaker 1: types of workers, encouraging over a quarter of a million
Speaker 1: people to flock to the remote land, three quarters of
Speaker 1: whom came from the United Kingdom. This enthusiasm, however, was
Speaker 1: dampened when the new arrivals began writing home about tough
Speaker 1: winters and other hardships. New Zealand wasn't quite the paradise
Speaker 1: many had hoped for. But by the early nineteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: when Margaret's family were said to have made this epic journey,
Speaker 1: interest in the colony had been rekindled. The new marvel
Speaker 1: of refrigeration meant that meat and dairy could now be
Speaker 1: transported over vast distances New Zealand butter and lamb would
Speaker 1: become staples on British dining tables. Trade boomed, and there
Speaker 1: were plenty of jobs to go round, so New Zealand
Speaker 1: once again offered assisted passage to tempt migrants who might
Speaker 1: fill these gaps. Experienced farm hands, shepherds and men to
Speaker 1: build the new roads and railways that would fuel growth.
Speaker 1: The other side of the world now seemed closer than ever,
Speaker 1: thanks to new technologies that seemed to compress space and time.
Speaker 1: The telegraph and telephone have made the Earth such a
Speaker 1: very little place, used one journalist this morning. As we write,
Speaker 1: we know what happened this afternoon on the Adelaide cricket
Speaker 1: craft wonderful, indeed, but hardly more wonderful than the fact
Speaker 1: that the egg you consumed at breakfast really came from
Speaker 1: an Australian poultry yard. The antipodies also seemed to offer
Speaker 1: a different kind of life in the old world. New
Speaker 1: Zealand enjoyed a reputation as a kind of utopia. Here,
Speaker 1: the rigid and unpopular class distinctions so entrenched in Europe
Speaker 1: were deemed antiquated and alien, and servants were said to
Speaker 1: converse with their superiors in an easy and familiar manner.
Speaker 1: New Zealand had also been the first country in the
Speaker 1: world to grant women the vote in eighteen ninety three.
Speaker 1: In large numbers, they availed themselves of their new power
Speaker 1: and privilege, and no revolution has occurred as yet, nor
Speaker 1: dreadful consequences seemed to be impending in other nations, one
Speaker 1: seething with social unrest. There was great interest in how
Speaker 1: this radical political experiment would unfold, and contrary to the
Speaker 1: fears of some, it did not prove to be a
Speaker 1: grave mistake. They had conducted themselves with the utmost propriety
Speaker 1: and are doing the washing, cooking, and rocking the cradle
Speaker 1: the same as before. There were welfare payments like pensions
Speaker 1: for the elderly, and legislation to protect workers for the
Speaker 1: white settlers. At least, New Zealand was a place of
Speaker 1: optimism and equity, and had attracted not just those who
Speaker 1: wanted a fair paying job, but also people who rejected
Speaker 1: the obscene inequalities of the old country. This nation, said
Speaker 1: its admirers, suffered neither from restive strikers nor from exploitative millionaires.
Speaker 1: Perhaps this was what drew Margaret's parents to New Zealand,
Speaker 1: and perhaps they also instilled in their daughter this yearning
Speaker 1: for more, this sense of her own worth and dignity.
Speaker 1: The steamship cruised towards Wellington Harbor, the site of the
Speaker 1: capital city. Buildings clustered around the bay with their backdrop
Speaker 1: of steep green hills, must surely have been a relea
Speaker 1: leaf to the weary travelers. It's so green. I never
Speaker 1: knew it could be so green. Young Margaret and her
Speaker 1: family disembarked and joined the human traffic on key. Her father, William,
Speaker 1: was soon working as a farmer for Goodland was plentiful,
Speaker 1: but at knockdown prices from the island's original settlers, the
Speaker 1: Maori people. Margaret grew up and was educated two hundred
Speaker 1: miles from Wellington in Hawke's Bay. Schooling for European children
Speaker 1: was improving, with free places allowing even working class children
Speaker 1: to stay on for high school, though in practice girls
Speaker 1: were still likely to be removed by poorer parents. At
Speaker 1: the earliest opportunity, she would have studied the basics of mathematics,
Speaker 1: reading and writing, and received instruction in good manners, cooking,
Speaker 1: and in preparation for domestic service or to one day
Speaker 1: run a household of her own. At least this was
Speaker 1: the immigrant story that Margaret told about herself, the one
Speaker 1: she wanted everyone to know. In truth, the early part
Speaker 1: of her life is a mystery. Scores of Margaret Florence's,
Speaker 1: Margaret Campbell's and Margaret Burchett's were born in England and
Speaker 1: New Zealand around the turn of the century, but no
Speaker 1: one with the full name of Margaret Florence Campbell Burchard
Speaker 1: appears in New Zealand's historical records or on the British census.
Speaker 1: We've been working with expert genealogist Kate Healey on this series,
Speaker 1: who's been helping us piece together the women's lives. It's
Speaker 1: very exciting when you start researching a new person because
Speaker 1: you really never know where it's going to take you,
Speaker 1: what you're going to find. Kate has over thirty years
Speaker 1: of experience with this kind of historical detective work, but
Speaker 1: Margaret's life still presented challengers, gaps she simply couldn't fill.
Speaker 1: Women's lives are often harder to trace than those of men,
Speaker 1: the discrimination they faced, meaning they are frequently ignored and
Speaker 1: archival documents. After all, if you're denied the vote, you
Speaker 1: won't feature on the electoral rules. But with Margaret, this
Speaker 1: problem is compounded since she also seems to have deliberately
Speaker 1: concealed her identity. Obviously, in Margaret's case, it was fairly
Speaker 1: disappointing that we couldn't find more about her. Particularly with
Speaker 1: a name Margaret Florence Campbell Burchett, you would think that
Speaker 1: that would be quite easy to find, and had she
Speaker 1: actually recorded herself as that throughout, she would probably be
Speaker 1: the only one that shows up in search results on
Speaker 1: the documents we can link her to. She uses different
Speaker 1: variations of her name and different ages, muddying the waters
Speaker 1: and making it impossible for us to be sure about
Speaker 1: her birth and parentage. Such changes aren't necessarily sinister, though,
Speaker 1: thinks Kate. It's certainly not uncommon for people to be
Speaker 1: less than truthful on documents, particularly on marriage certificates. Women
Speaker 1: would often be economical with the truth with their age
Speaker 1: might either make themselves younger or older to be closer
Speaker 1: in age to their intended spouse. Also, if they are
Speaker 1: giving the details of their father, they might make his
Speaker 1: profession a bit more interesting than what it actually is.
Speaker 1: So in Margaret's case, she put her father as a farmer,
Speaker 1: where he could have actually just been an agricultural laborer. Occasionally, though,
Speaker 1: people overwrote their own histories because they found themselves in
Speaker 1: unfortunate circumstances. Sometimes they falsified records to escape stigma, such
Speaker 1: as the onerous burden of being labeled a prostitute. In
Speaker 1: another instance, radical socialist Grace Oakshot sailed to New Zealand
Speaker 1: under a false name, Joan Reeve, so that she could
Speaker 1: end her marriage and begin a new life without being
Speaker 1: known as a divorcee and denounced as a fallen woman.
Speaker 1: New Zealand was remote, which made it the perfect place
Speaker 1: for such reinvention. Whether you truly journeyed to the other
Speaker 1: side of the world or simply claimed you had, it
Speaker 1: was often too much trouble for anyone to check your story.
Speaker 1: The world was smaller, yes, but it wasn't yet that small.
Speaker 1: When she reached school leaving age, Margaret could easily have
Speaker 1: entered domestic service. There was a dearth of servants in
Speaker 1: New Zealand. Just like male migrants with farming skills, young
Speaker 1: British women suitable to serve as domestics were courted by
Speaker 1: the authorities. The government promised to reimburse women for their
Speaker 1: steamship fairs, and pledged that a government matron would accompany
Speaker 1: and protect them during the voyage. Relations between household staff
Speaker 1: and their employers may indeed have been more cordial and
Speaker 1: equitable in New Zealand. Even so, it seems that cooking
Speaker 1: and cleaning at the beck and call of a master
Speaker 1: and mistress were not for Margaret. She appears to have
Speaker 1: wanted more. It's terribly paid work, it's really long hours.
Speaker 1: Here's Professor Julia lat a historian. There's also a huge
Speaker 1: risk of sexual harassment and abuse within these workplaces, which
Speaker 1: are often private homes. There's no freedom, and so women
Speaker 1: are leaving that occupation in droves. Margaret chose broader horizons
Speaker 1: and a passage across the oceans from the furthest reaches
Speaker 1: of the British Empire back to its beating heart. By
Speaker 1: her own account, she made this trip in her late
Speaker 1: teens during the First World War. This would have been
Speaker 1: a hazardous undertaking, with the threat of German warships and
Speaker 1: submarines compounding the danger of storms, but it wasn't unheard of.
Speaker 1: If money was tight, she may have crowded into the
Speaker 1: cramped her class space below the main deck, subsisting on
Speaker 1: porridge and potatoes and dirt crusted jackets. Margaret claimed to
Speaker 1: have been accompanied on this journey by a twin brother, Sydney,
Speaker 1: but no record of his existence can be found. After
Speaker 1: weeks on board and over ten thousand nautical miles, the
Speaker 1: ship would likely have berthed at Tilbury Dock on London's
Speaker 1: eastern fringes. Margaret may have felt apprehension in this unfamiliar
Speaker 1: land that turned the seasons on their head. May have
Speaker 1: experienced a chill as she gazed at the gray homes
Speaker 1: and tangle of industry stretching west to the distant, smoky capital.
Speaker 1: But if she yearned for the wooden houses and green
Speaker 1: hills of New Zealand, well looks too late to turn back. Now.
Speaker 1: Margaret would have joined the surging mass of itinerant souls
Speaker 1: on the keyside, among them soldiers returning from the war
Speaker 1: across the English Channel. Someone leave others wounded and maimed,
Speaker 1: and the fighting with her head no doubt held high.
Speaker 1: She plowed on through this crowd, heading along the River
Speaker 1: Thames to the heart of the capitol and a new life,
Speaker 1: but perhaps not one she'd imagined. Name please Peggy Burkett.
Speaker 1: The police constable who arrested Margaret in nineteen twenty had
Speaker 1: probably seen her approaching men on the streets before and
Speaker 1: scrawled her name down in his notebook. The young woman,
Speaker 1: perhaps aged just twenty one, was taken to Mulborough Street
Speaker 1: Police Court in Soho. She gave the alias Peggy Burkett,
Speaker 1: but it did not matter. The authorities knew that this
Speaker 1: was the same woman they had prosecuted the previous summer
Speaker 1: for soliciting prostitution. Only then she had called herself Peggy Campbell.
Speaker 1: They may have been certain about her identity because they
Speaker 1: had her fingerprints on record. This practice had been applied
Speaker 1: to women convicted of prostitution offenses since nineteen seventeen. Those
Speaker 1: in the sex trade often moved around and changed their
Speaker 1: names to avoid a criminal record, so the police embraced
Speaker 1: any tool that might help them definitively fix the identities
Speaker 1: of these indecent and unrespectable women. How do you plead,
Speaker 1: the magistrate would have asked Margaret guilty, She likely replied
Speaker 1: from the dock. For most women pleaded guilty, though there
Speaker 1: were occasional sentences of hard labor the punishment was usually
Speaker 1: a fine of forty shillings. It was preferable to swallow
Speaker 1: this punishment rather than fight the charges and risk aggravating
Speaker 1: the police. Further, if Margaret had the money on her
Speaker 1: or could enlist a friend to bring the sum to
Speaker 1: the police court, she would be free to go. If not,
Speaker 1: she would go to a cell. One way or another,
Speaker 1: Margaret was permitted to leave. She crossed the mosaic floor
Speaker 1: of the courthouse entrance hall and passed through its heavy
Speaker 1: wooden doors back out into the district of Soho. It's
Speaker 1: unclear how she escaped the endless cycle of arrest and
Speaker 1: release that ensnared so many women, a vicious circle of
Speaker 1: fines and then working to recoup the money lost through fines,
Speaker 1: But somehow, nine months later she was living in Southend
Speaker 1: on Sea, coastal town close to London. Here she called
Speaker 1: herself Margaret F. Campbell, and she boarded at the house
Speaker 1: of George Gallop, a warehouseman, and his wife Ellen, a
Speaker 1: homemaker attractive of East Coast resorts. This London by the
Speaker 1: Sea in winter as well as summer, is one of
Speaker 1: the greatest ornaments of the country. South end the newspapers
Speaker 1: said was booming. Just as Blackpool attracted Northern workers on vacation,
Speaker 1: South End, with its waterfront promenade, bandstands, theaters and vast
Speaker 1: ball rooms, was a magnet for Londoners. Margaret appears to
Speaker 1: have answered an advert for a respectable young lady wanted
Speaker 1: to assist customers at the Beach Bazaar, a fancy goods
Speaker 1: emporium by Southend Pier. Since the nineteenth century, it had
Speaker 1: become customary for trips to the seaside to include the
Speaker 1: purchase of trinkets or souvenirs, small mementos of a person's visit,
Speaker 1: such as boxes, cameos, engraved shells, and china figurines, which
Speaker 1: were often given to friends and loved ones, an indicator
Speaker 1: that a middle or working class person had a bit
Speaker 1: of disposable income. Fancy goods shops like the Beach Bazaar
Speaker 1: sprang up along promenades and piers and did a roaring
Speaker 1: trade during the tourist season. As a shop girl, Margaret
Speaker 1: would have been expected to comport herself in a genteel
Speaker 1: fashion under compliment, even be an extension of the charming
Speaker 1: objects she was selling. Envelopes Thanka jeeves, great bargains to
Speaker 1: be had. Margaret would have concealed her past in her
Speaker 1: day to day work, such a fuge that probably came
Speaker 1: easy to her by now. She was quite used to
Speaker 1: altering the details of her identity, and besides, her naturally
Speaker 1: polished and refined bearing would have made shop work a
Speaker 1: comfortable fit. Frederick George Lowe, a widower, owned the Beach
Speaker 1: Bazaar in Margaret, a self possessed and dignified young woman,
Speaker 1: thirty nine year old Frederick perhaps saw an opportunity for
Speaker 1: a fresh start. Within months, the pair had quietly married
Speaker 1: at a local register office. No family was present, and curiously,
Speaker 1: Frederick's brother William wasn't certain that the pair actually had wed.
Speaker 1: She was introduced to me as his wife, and I
Speaker 1: was told her name was Peggy. Margaret did tell William
Speaker 1: of a bohemian past in London. I have heard Peggy
Speaker 1: talk about having been in the chorus at the Gayety
Speaker 1: Theater prior to her supposed marriage to my brother. Was
Speaker 1: this just another story, an attempt perhaps to explain her
Speaker 1: time in London and disguise her work in the sex trade.
Speaker 1: Or had Margaret really been on the stage. Had she
Speaker 1: told anyone the truth about her past. Julia Late has
Speaker 1: studied the married lives of women who, like Margaret, left
Speaker 1: the sex trade. There is a narrative about fallen women
Speaker 1: in this period and in fact in any period, that
Speaker 1: once they fall into a life of prostitution, that's it.
Speaker 1: They're quote on quote ruined, no man will have them,
Speaker 1: and that absolutely doesn't bear out. They definitely marry, they
Speaker 1: definitely go on to have children and full lives, just
Speaker 1: like anybody else. But I think the other question is
Speaker 1: whether Frederick knew people kept a lot of secrets. Of
Speaker 1: course at this period, in any period, but it was
Speaker 1: easier to keep secrets in this period. On the one hand,
Speaker 1: there were a lot of women who were very, very
Speaker 1: willing to say, I want to live this life in London,
Speaker 1: this is my decision. But we mustn't discount the amount
Speaker 1: of shame and stigma that surrounded selling sex at this time.
Speaker 1: So I think there would be real reasons why Margaret
Speaker 1: would have kept it from Frederick, but it would have
Speaker 1: been fairly easy for her to do that. Margaret and
Speaker 1: Frederick lived together in the terraced house they owned on
Speaker 1: Surbiton Road in South End. They went on excursions in
Speaker 1: their motor car from time to time, calling on William.
Speaker 1: Life was comfortable. In nineteen twenty seven, the couple adopted
Speaker 1: a one year old baby girl, Red Joan Lowe, perhaps
Speaker 1: after trying and failing to conceive a child together. Adoption
Speaker 1: had only been legally possible for a year. Many countries
Speaker 1: past adoption laws in the wake of World War One
Speaker 1: to allow the war orphans to be adopted into good families.
Speaker 1: Doctor Gingerfrost is a research professor of history at Stamford University.
Speaker 1: And largely, I would say probably eighty percent of adopted children,
Speaker 1: maybe more or illegitimate, as most people will keep a
Speaker 1: child if they're married. There had long been concerns that
Speaker 1: formal legal adoption would encourage bad women to have babies
Speaker 1: out of wedlock and invite the working classes to shirk
Speaker 1: their parental responsibilities, something they were only too ready to do.
Speaker 1: The middle class is suspected it's like they were afraid
Speaker 1: that the minute you don't treat illegitimate children poorly, the
Speaker 1: floodgates for vice will open and everyone will have orgies
Speaker 1: in the street. And in fact that's not the reason.
Speaker 1: Children or illegitimate most of the time it's usually interrupted courtship.
Speaker 1: In many cases, adoption was extremely successful. The people right
Speaker 1: back to these agencies and they would say, it's like
Speaker 1: she's ours, or I couldn't love her more if I'd
Speaker 1: give them birth. These kinds of statements where it became
Speaker 1: obvious that the love and care that you give to
Speaker 1: a child, you're going to love that child. That's just
Speaker 1: how it works. But turned out that the nurture part
Speaker 1: of it mattered more than the nature part in the end,
Speaker 1: and people who want babies badly enough to go through adoption,
Speaker 1: they want that child. It seems that the Lows raised
Speaker 1: their child to think that she had been born to them,
Speaker 1: and Margaret clearly adored her daughter. Even acquaintances remarked that
Speaker 1: she would talk about Barbara often. For a time, life
Speaker 1: was uneventful and the family appeared to be content, but
Speaker 1: a change in Fourtunes was coming. In nineteen thirty two,
Speaker 1: when Barbara was five, the Lows downsized from their terraced
Speaker 1: house to a small or apartment. Frederick's business was apparently
Speaker 1: in trouble. A heart condition also rendered him increasingly breathless,
Speaker 1: weak and gasping for air. Then one day he was
Speaker 1: seized by palpitations, lost consciousness and died. He was fifty one. Margaret,
Speaker 1: still in her early thirties, was now destitute. My mother
Speaker 1: did not receive any financial assistance, as my father was
Speaker 1: made a bankrupt just prior to his death. Barbara explained
Speaker 1: the business was sold, along with the car and the
Speaker 1: household furniture. The trappings of Margaret's middle class life, a
Speaker 1: world away from police courts in the streets of Piccadilly,
Speaker 1: were now gone. She took a post as a housekeeper
Speaker 1: in a home above a Penny Arcade, but this lasted
Speaker 1: a mere two weeks. The drudgery of service was still
Speaker 1: not for Margaret, and it was surely even harder to
Speaker 1: bear working a mere stones throw away from her old,
Speaker 1: more comfortable life. She and her five year old daughter
Speaker 1: moved around for a time. Her brother in law thought
Speaker 1: that she leased an apartment and took in boarders for
Speaker 1: the summer season, but relations between Margaret and William grew frosty,
Speaker 1: and after nineteen thirty four they had no further direct communication.
Speaker 1: Peggy dealt with all my brother's affairs and resented me
Speaker 1: writing to her about them. He also suspected that Margaret
Speaker 1: had returned to sex work. My only reason for thinking
Speaker 1: this was because she often came to London alone. I've
Speaker 1: been told by people who knew her by sight. William,
Speaker 1: like so many others, were suspicious of a woman who
Speaker 1: went out in the city on her own, But in
Speaker 1: this case his suspicions may have been accurate. Margaret decided
Speaker 1: to move back to London. Here she jumped between different addresses, rooms,
Speaker 1: flats and friends apartments too. Barbara, meanwhile, had been placed
Speaker 1: in a small boarding school in South End. It must
Speaker 1: have been painful to part with her beloved daughter, but
Speaker 1: Margaret would have known that the school would make for
Speaker 1: a more stable and peaceful home than she was able
Speaker 1: to provide, and also that a good education would be
Speaker 1: key to her daughter's prospects. Barbara thought her mother was
Speaker 1: working as a receptionist at an establishment called the Burlington Club.
Speaker 1: Others believed it was named the Burlington Lounge or the
Speaker 1: Burlington Garden Club. None of these seemed to have existed.
Speaker 1: Was this another story spun by Margaret in an effort
Speaker 1: to hide her true occupation. In nineteen thirty eight, she
Speaker 1: was again arrested for soliciting prostitution, and she found herself
Speaker 1: back at Marlborough Street Police Court, eighteen years after her
Speaker 1: last arrest, Margaret once again stood before the magistrate in
Speaker 1: a wood paneled chamber and accepted the punishment of a fine.
Speaker 1: Must have been with a heavy heart that she again
Speaker 1: crossed the mosaic floor of the courthouse and went out
Speaker 1: into the street. This time, no job selling fancy goods
Speaker 1: awaited Margaret. No new life in a bustling seaside town,
Speaker 1: no quiet evenings with Frederick ahead. There was only disappointment,
Speaker 1: danger and violence. The residence of one eighteen Cavendish Street
Speaker 1: had had enough of their new neighbor, enough of the
Speaker 1: frequent and unsettling comings and goings at Margaret Lowe's flat.
Speaker 1: They complained that she brought strange men at night to
Speaker 1: her rooms. Said her landlord. I was surprised at this.
Speaker 1: I thought missus Lowe was a decent type of woman.
Speaker 1: He was perplexed. Missus Lowe's demeanor suggested respectability, and he
Speaker 1: noted that her nice young daughter would visit her too,
Speaker 1: But he evicted Margaret all the same, All right, sweet
Speaker 1: are so clad? Hello, Darlie. Margaret distanced herself from other
Speaker 1: women in the sex trade Kathleen Clark didn't know her name,
Speaker 1: but certainly knew her by sight. For years, she had
Speaker 1: seen her again and again, trudging the same soliciting route,
Speaker 1: continually moving to reduce the chance for rest. Often drunk,
Speaker 1: Margaret would walk along, singing to herself, and she seemed
Speaker 1: to Kathleen to be a gentle soul. Record her the
Speaker 1: lady because she seemed very refined. I'm really drawn to
Speaker 1: the fact that other people refer to her as the
Speaker 1: lady Julia Late again, because in one way it denotes,
Speaker 1: but it's also a kind of commentary that she didn't
Speaker 1: really fit in and that potentially other women around her
Speaker 1: thought that she thought she was better than them. Margaret
Speaker 1: seems to have chosen to be closest to women outside
Speaker 1: the sex trait, but even these friends only ever saw
Speaker 1: one of her various faces. Mabel Jones, who got to
Speaker 1: know Margaret as a neighbor and would go to the
Speaker 1: pub with her, and soho believed she was a receptionist
Speaker 1: and had previously been a nurse. She knew that her
Speaker 1: husband had died and that I used to sell souvenirs
Speaker 1: from her small shop on the seafront. Rachel Barkeley and
Speaker 1: embroiderous at a factory. Also thought that Margaret was a receptionist,
Speaker 1: but at two different clubs, neither friend knew that Margaret
Speaker 1: sold sex. It must have been with great effort and
Speaker 1: intention that Margaret marshaled these different identities, and it was
Speaker 1: surely lonely to keep secrets and be so very guarded.
Speaker 1: She was drinking hea around this time, perhaps as a
Speaker 1: salve for her isolation. The local store owners saw her
Speaker 1: as regular as clockwise how can I help you to die,
Speaker 1: buying in her supply of Hamilton's oatmeal stout and bringing
Speaker 1: back the empties. Over the years, Margaret may have had
Speaker 1: romantic attachments. At one point she lived with a driver
Speaker 1: named Cecil Casewell, and she kept a picture of an
Speaker 1: airman on the mantelpiece in her living room. Her daughter
Speaker 1: Barbara knew him as Jimmy Smith and thought that he
Speaker 1: rescued her mother one evening in his car when she
Speaker 1: was stranded. It seems unlikely that Margaret would hold on
Speaker 1: to his photograph after a single chance encounter, but if
Speaker 1: it was a romantic relationship, it appears not to have lasted.
Speaker 1: In nineteen forty, Margaret tried again to turn her life around.
Speaker 1: She'd saved enough money to lise a house near South End,
Speaker 1: to make a living by renting out rooms, and to
Speaker 1: have her daughter lived with her once more. Her friend
Speaker 1: Mabel Jones, who now worked helping to save lives during
Speaker 1: air raids, visited Margaret's new home. She showed me snapshots
Speaker 1: of herself and her husband. Margaret appears to have been
Speaker 1: nostalgic for her former life, and perhaps she wistfully hoped
Speaker 1: to regain something that resembled it. But the boarding house failed.
Speaker 1: It would have been with great reluctance that she returned
Speaker 1: to blacked out London and selling sex because the trade
Speaker 1: was becoming ever more unsafe. The war had brought a
Speaker 1: churning flow of soldiers into the capitol looking for sex.
Speaker 1: It was riskier to deal with this clientele than with
Speaker 1: a circle of trusted regulus. Compounding these greater risks, police
Speaker 1: action to close brothels had robbed women of the relative
Speaker 1: safety such establishments provided, says Late. Women tried to mitigate
Speaker 1: that as best they could by trying to work together,
Speaker 1: by keeping an eye out for each other, even informally
Speaker 1: by hiring maids. But as more and more criminalization takes hold.
Speaker 1: As police are put under more and more pressure to
Speaker 1: push women off the streets and out of these brothels
Speaker 1: where they could work alongside other women, women start turning
Speaker 1: to what the police call furnished drums or flats. You're
Speaker 1: living on your own, You're often living with a population
Speaker 1: of people who are moving all the time, so they
Speaker 1: don't necessarily get to know you, and they're just incredibly
Speaker 1: isolated working alone. Women kept makeshift weapons with an easy reach,
Speaker 1: rolling pins and pouches of pepper in their handbags, so
Speaker 1: I think probably the most common form of violence would
Speaker 1: have been from dodgy clients. This is a time when
Speaker 1: women are probably not seeing as many regular clients as
Speaker 1: they would ordinarily do because there's so many new faces
Speaker 1: in London, and so clients aren't as vetted as they
Speaker 1: would have been in earlier periods. So there's a lot
Speaker 1: of just random violence, punching, hitting, kicking. There's also a
Speaker 1: lot of experiences of rape and other kinds of sexual assault.
Speaker 1: At a time when the police and pretty much all
Speaker 1: of society maintain that women who sell sex cannot be raped,
Speaker 1: there were definitely women experiencing that being forced to do
Speaker 1: things that they hadn't agreed to being forced to do
Speaker 1: things and then not being paid. That happened a lot. Obviously,
Speaker 1: They're going with a lot of drunk clients. They're going
Speaker 1: with a lot of soldiers who have been inculcated into
Speaker 1: a culture of violence and trauma, who are going to
Speaker 1: be more likely to be violent towards women. As While
Speaker 1: Margaret shunned other sex workers, so lacked the meager protection
Speaker 1: such friendships could bring the whispered warnings, perhaps about a
Speaker 1: client's ill temper. From late nineteen forty one, shortly after
Speaker 1: she'd moved alone into a flat on Gossfield Street, she
Speaker 1: faced a string of assaults, all witnessed by her new neighbors.
Speaker 1: Margaret told the Gosfield Street residence that she had a
Speaker 1: relief job, perhaps referring to the kind of nighttime work
Speaker 1: her friend Mabel Jones did helping the victims of air raids. This,
Speaker 1: she said, was why she would return home in the
Speaker 1: early hours, but other goings on in her flat were
Speaker 1: harder to explain away. Taylor Maurice Wiseman grew accustomed to
Speaker 1: hearing his neighbor's screams pierced the night air Fellow resident
Speaker 1: Ralph Stevens recalled another incident. At about one o'clock in
Speaker 1: the morning, I heard sounds of a fight. I picked
Speaker 1: up a stick and went outside to see what it
Speaker 1: was all about. I saw a woman lying on the stairs.
Speaker 1: She was conscious and kept crying, get him, get him.
Speaker 1: At the same time I saw a man in soldier's
Speaker 1: uniform running through the street door. Ralph chased after the soldier,
Speaker 1: and the police eventually took charge of the situation. When
Speaker 1: Ralph returned to the apartment building, Margaret was apparently drunk,
Speaker 1: told him, I am glad you got him. He was
Speaker 1: trying to do me in. Another terrifying ordeal occurred in
Speaker 1: January nineteen forty two. I was in bed and I
Speaker 1: heard debut boots going up the stairs, and then I
Speaker 1: heard a sound like the breaking of a door cleaner.
Speaker 1: Florence Bartolini lived in the basement of the building. She
Speaker 1: knew its creaks and groans and was familiar with the
Speaker 1: rhythm of its inhabitants. Margaret Lowe lived just above her.
Speaker 1: That night, along with smashing glass, she also heard a
Speaker 1: man's voice. Then I heard the sound of a second
Speaker 1: door being broken. A struggle was going on, and I
Speaker 1: heard a woman scream in place murder el. No one
Speaker 1: came when Margaret called for aid, and so she rushed
Speaker 1: to the window, but her attacker caught up with her
Speaker 1: and struck her on the head. The next morning, missus Lowe,
Speaker 1: who had purple bruises on her chest and jaw, was
Speaker 1: explaining these events. A Canadian soldier broke into my flat
Speaker 1: last night and almost murdered me. She insisted that he
Speaker 1: was a complete stranger. Florence Bartolini peered into Margaret's apartment
Speaker 1: and saw the damage he had wrought. It was in
Speaker 1: complete disorder in the front room. The standard lamp was
Speaker 1: broken and the lock of the inner door was forced.
Speaker 1: Missus Lowe said that he had bowed the connecting tube
Speaker 1: from the gas fire and left the gas escape in.
Speaker 1: Margaret paid for the repairs and didn't involve the police.
Speaker 1: This was the norm. The law wasn't there to protect
Speaker 1: women like Margaret, says Julia Late In terms of the
Speaker 1: exceptionally quoteedion violence that they experienced from clients on a
Speaker 1: day to day basis, they would never call the carps.
Speaker 1: In not least because the vast majority of women who
Speaker 1: are selling sex full time in London have warrants out
Speaker 1: for their arrest because they were soliciting and didn't pay
Speaker 1: the fine, or they were soliciting and charged it, but
Speaker 1: they never showed up to court, so they're not going
Speaker 1: to willingly walk into a police station. Margaret had said,
Speaker 1: what's the good in that when it was suggested she
Speaker 1: seek to have one of her attackers a serviceman charged,
Speaker 1: it would indeed probably have done a little good. The
Speaker 1: police tended to wash their hands of the whole situation
Speaker 1: because they did not want to be in a position
Speaker 1: where they were arresting soldiers That never tended to work
Speaker 1: out well for the beat cop getting in the way
Speaker 1: of a soldier's good time, and so they mostly wanted
Speaker 1: to just kind of lass a fair situation. After one attack,
Speaker 1: Margaret spelled out why she hadn't pressed for a prosecution.
Speaker 1: I wasn't able to charge him for my daughter's sake,
Speaker 1: and I am a respectable married woman. I think it
Speaker 1: speaks to the fact that she knew that if she
Speaker 1: went and reported this, that the police would automatically presume
Speaker 1: she was a prostitute, that they would pursue the case
Speaker 1: as an assault against a prostitute, and that if it
Speaker 1: got to the press, or if it got out, that
Speaker 1: her daughter would know and that she'd lose her respectability.
Speaker 1: So it's that stigma again. Women wouldn't go to the police,
Speaker 1: either because they knew that the police wouldn't take them seriously,
Speaker 1: or because they knew that if the police did take
Speaker 1: them seriously, that they'd be outed. Barbara visited Margaret every
Speaker 1: few weekends, and Margaret would have been keen that she
Speaker 1: and her teenage daughter didn't attract the attention of the authorities.
Speaker 1: From the eighteen eighties on, there'd been various ways in
Speaker 1: which the courts could take a child from a mother
Speaker 1: who was found to be selling sex, and it's very
Speaker 1: likely that Margaret knew that and wanted to protect Barbara
Speaker 1: from that. The law applied to all children, but there
Speaker 1: absolutely would have been more concern and therefore more potential
Speaker 1: legal attention paid to an adolescent girl living with a
Speaker 1: woman who was suspected of selling sex, because there was
Speaker 1: a very strong idea that she would be encouraged to
Speaker 1: selsax herself. On Tuesday, February tenth, nineteen forty two, Margaret
Speaker 1: Lowe was preparing for the arrival of her daughter, Barbara
Speaker 1: who would visit that weekend. She called in at the
Speaker 1: butcher's shop on a neighboring street and asked the woman
Speaker 1: behind the counter to keep some bones and fat back,
Speaker 1: telling her that she wanted to cook Barbara a special meal.
Speaker 1: When she arrived, it was late morning. A couple of
Speaker 1: hours previously, the mutilated body of Evelyn Oatley had been
Speaker 1: discovered in the darkened room of her Soho apartment, just
Speaker 1: a short walk from Margaret's own home. Margaret seems to
Speaker 1: have gone about her usual business that day, and that
Speaker 1: night she went out soliciting, dressed in a belted black
Speaker 1: cloth coat and a dark hat. She was also likely
Speaker 1: to be in pain. To add to her woes. The
Speaker 1: forty three year old was suffering from a large uterine tumor,
Speaker 1: and she may well have moved slowly when the lines
Speaker 1: and the flackrane shadows. So at about half past midnight,
Speaker 1: Kathleen Clark saw the lady coming down Shaftesbury Avenue towards
Speaker 1: Piccadilly Circus. You'll go with a captain, but not with
Speaker 1: an ordinary soldier. I see her. A pair of soldiers,
Speaker 1: Scott's guardsman Kathleen was talking to, had turned nasty. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't go with you anyway, who knows what you got.
Speaker 1: And as Margaret passed, she offered some words of encouragement
Speaker 1: to her fellow sex worker, telling her to stick up
Speaker 1: for herself against the torrent of abuse. I a poks ridden.
Speaker 1: So Kathleen watched her go, a lone figure slipping down
Speaker 1: one of the dark thoroughfairs behind Regent Street. She didn't
Speaker 1: stop and talk to anyone else, but at some point
Speaker 1: Margaret must have crossed path with an airman. Must have
Speaker 1: looked into his pale eyes, scrutinized his sharp features, noted
Speaker 1: his upper class accent. I have plenty of, and decided
Speaker 1: to take him home with her. When Florence Bartolini was
Speaker 1: woken from slumber that night, it was two sets of
Speaker 1: footsteps she heard through the ceiling, one heavier than the other.
Speaker 1: She switched on her flashlight and shot it at the
Speaker 1: clock one fifteen am. The building was quiet, and she
Speaker 1: rolled over and dozed back off to sleep. Sometime later,
Speaker 1: Florence was again disturbed by those heavy footsteps, A man's,
Speaker 1: she thought, coming down the steps from the direction of
Speaker 1: missus Lowe's landing. I heared him open and closed the
Speaker 1: door of the common entrance and walk away, and then
Speaker 1: all was quiet and still once more. On Wednesday morning,
Speaker 1: when Maurice Wiseman left Gosfield Street, he noticed a brown
Speaker 1: paper parcel of groceries on missus Lowe's doorstep. It was
Speaker 1: there the following day when Florence Bartolini returned from her
Speaker 1: job as a cleaner, and it was still there on
Speaker 1: Friday afternoon, when fifteen year old Barbara Lowe arrived from
Speaker 1: school to spend the weekend with her mother. Barbara, not
Speaker 1: receiving no answer, she went to search for Margaret in
Speaker 1: the local market. Her mother was expecting her, after all,
Speaker 1: and she wouldn't have gone far when she bumped into
Speaker 1: Maurice Wiseman, who was worried about his neighbor and had
Speaker 1: already summoned two police officers. The teenager must have felt
Speaker 1: a cold wave of alarm. No one had seen or
Speaker 1: heard from her mother for three days. The police unlocked
Speaker 1: Margaret's flat. Inside, the windows were blacked out and it
Speaker 1: was dark. The bedroom door was locked too, with no
Speaker 1: key in sight. The officers forced it open and switched
Speaker 1: on the electric light. There in the bed, with Margaret
Speaker 1: Lowe's cold body a quilt drawn carefully up to her chin.
Speaker 1: The sheets were stained with blood, and stockings had been
Speaker 1: tied tightly about her neck. Behind closed doors. The killer
Speaker 1: had spent time abusing and violating her body, using any
Speaker 1: objects he could find around the house. He seemed to
Speaker 1: have broken a metal fire poker in the process, and
Speaker 1: when he finally left, he took with him a trophy,
Speaker 1: Margaret's small silver cigarette case. The police report of this
Speaker 1: crime scene includes a strikingly callous line the position in
Speaker 1: which the body lay is a position which a woman
Speaker 1: of Lowe's type would assume in the horse of her calling.
Speaker 1: Margaret Lowe was attacked several times in the weeks leading
Speaker 1: up to her murder, belittled and bludgeoned by men who
Speaker 1: believed she deserved little in the way of respect and
Speaker 1: rightly surmised that their violence would go unchallenged and unpunished.
Speaker 1: Her neighbors complained about the nighttime callers and the loud
Speaker 1: gramophone music she played during their visits. They grumbled about
Speaker 1: the occasional violent altercations, but with the exception of Ralph Stephens,
Speaker 1: none of them ever intervened when they heard her crying
Speaker 1: out for help. Women like Margaret, had been made easy
Speaker 1: targets for violent men, and as one a cadet had discovered,
Speaker 1: you could pick them up, torment them, and murder them
Speaker 1: at your leisure, and then walk off into the night
Speaker 1: to hunt for your next victim. Bad Women. The Blackout
Speaker 1: Ripper is hosted by me Hallie Rubinhold and me Alice Fines.
Speaker 1: It was written and produced by Alice Fines and Ryan Dilley,
Speaker 1: with additional support from Courtney Guerino and Arthur Gomperts. Kate
Speaker 1: Heay of Oakwood Family Trees aided us with geneological research.
Speaker 1: Pascal Wise Sound designed and mixed the show and composed
Speaker 1: all the original music. The show was recorded at Wardoor
Speaker 1: Studios by David Smith and Tom Berry. You also heard
Speaker 1: the voice talents of Ben Crow, David Glover, Melanie Gutridge,
Speaker 1: Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. Much of the
Speaker 1: music You Had was performed by Edgarchan, Ross Hughes, Christian
Speaker 1: Miller and Marcus Penrose. They were recorded by Nick Taylor
Speaker 1: at Porcupine Studios. Pushkin's Ben Tolliday mixed the tracks and
Speaker 1: you heard additional piano playing by the Great Berry Wise
Speaker 1: Hi Berry. The show also wouldn't have been possible without
Speaker 1: the work of Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor,
Speaker 1: Nicole Morano, Eric Sandler, and Daniella Lucan. We'd also like
Speaker 1: to thank Michael Buchanan Dunn of the Murder Mile podcast,
Speaker 1: Lizzie McCarroll, Catherine Walker at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and
Speaker 1: the Earb Historical Society. Bad Women is a production of
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries. Please rate and review the show and spread
Speaker 1: the word about what we do, and thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: M