S2 E3: The Butchers of Germany

Published Oct 18, 2022, 4:01 AM

Evelyn Oatley dreams of becoming a stage star in London's glamorous theaterland. It's a world away from her grim provincial upbringing. The daughter of a German immigrant, her troubled home life was compounded by a wave of anti-German rioting that broke out during World War One.    

Tiring of both her job at a textile mill and her relationship with a local farmer, Evelyn ran off to London and transformed herself into budding starlet "Lita Ward". But she found neither fame nor fortune there... only danger.  

Sources:

Andrews, Maggie and Lomas, Janis. The Home Front in Britain: Images, Myths and Forgotten Experiences since 1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Arthur, Sue. ‘Blackpool Goes All-Talkie: Cinema and Society at the Seaside in Thirties Britain’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 29, No. 1, March 2019.

Denness, Zoe. ‘“A Question which Affects our Prestige as a Nation”: The History of British Civilian Internment’, PhD Thesis, University of Birmingham, October 2012.

Denness, Zoe. “Gender and Germanophobia: The Forgotten Experiences of German Women in Britain, 1914–1919’ in: Panayi, Panikos (Ed.). Germans as Minorities during the First World War: A Global Comparative Perspective (Farnham, Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014).

Eyles, Allan. ‘Cinemas and Cinemagoing: The Rise of Cinemas’, BFI Screenonline, 2014.

Higginbotham, Peter. ‘Boarding Out (Fostering)’, Children’s Homes.

Hill, Hector. ‘Russell Street Picturehouse’, Cinema Treasures.

Lassandro, Sebastian. Pride of Our Alley: The Life of Dame Gracie Fields Volume 1: 1898 - 1939 (Albany: BearManor Media, 2019).

Mazierska, Ema (Ed.). Blackpool in Film and Popular Music (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Mort, Frank. ‘Striptease: The Erotic Female Body and Live Sexual Entertainment in Mid-Twentiety-Century London’, Social History, Vol. 32, No. 1, February 2007.

Panayi, Panikos. ‘Germans as Minorities during the First World War: Global Comparative Perspectives’, in: Panayi, Panikos (Ed.). Germans as Minorities during the First World War: A Global Comparative Perspective (Farnham, Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014).

Panayi, Panikos. Immigration, Ethnicity, and Racism in Britain, 1815 - 1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994).

Stone, Peter. ‘The German Community in London during the 19th Century’, History London.

Waddington, Keir. ‘“We Don’t Want Any German Sausages Here!”: Food, Fear and the German Nation in Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 52, No. 4, October 2013.

Walkowitz, Judith R. Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012).

Walton, John K. ‘The Seaside Resort: A British Cultural Export’, History in Focus, Issue 9, Autumn 2005.

Pushkin. There's no one else on Montague Place. When plumber Harold Bachelor and his sixteen year old assistant William Baldwin set off for their first job of the day, the sun has only just risen on this cold February morning. The pair pass three brick built air raid shelters, ugly, squat and dank that have been hastily erected amid the neighborhood's grand Georgian townhouses. Something glinting on the ground catches their gaze, something classy and reflective. William reaches down to pick it up. It's the end of a broken flashlight, and that's when he sees her. Two feet protrude from one shelter's entrance look at the the feet of a woman. Harold ventures In then hurriedly goes to fetch the police inside. The woman lies on her back, her head turned to one side, her scarf loosely covering her face. Her clothing and underwear had been ripped open, exposing her chest and abdomen. Her legs are stained with blood, her face and neck are dark with bruises. She has been strangled. Evelyn Hamilton's gold watch stopped at one a m. But When it's removed from the pharmacist's cold wrist, it begins to tick once more as its hands sweep the dial. The police set about trying to identify the presumed sexual pervert who murdered its owner. But Evelyn Hamilton's killer is wasting no time either. He's already seeking out his next victim. Tonight he will meet an aspiring stage starlet coincidentally another Evelyn, Evelyn Oatley, and he'll follow her up the stairs to her tiny Soho apartment. This is the seldom told story of women in World War Two who were killed not by the enemy, but by husbands, lovers, and strangers wearing the uniform of their own side. It's also the tale of a particular string of murder victims that history has swept from view. I'm Hallie Rubbinhold and I'm Alice Fines, and you're listening to Bad Women the Blackout Ripper. Exactly what brought Evelyn's mother, Rosina Magdalena Weber, from the high mountains, dark forests, and fairy tale castles of southern Germany to the lead mines and textile mills of Earbey is a mystery. So is the story of how she fell in with her volatile, even violent English lover Walter Judd. In the nineteenth century, economic turmoil and political persecution had seen many thousands of Germans migrate to Britain, and they came from also social ranks, from wealthy businessmen and bankers to the impoverished political refugee Karl Marx. Most were economic migrants. According to one German author, Britain had a reputation for abundance money lies on the street. He said that his compatriots would arrive on British soil with little money and little to no knowledge of English. They'd spend a few days in a hotel before looking for a more permanent home, and many found prosperity. German migrants were merchants and shop owners, but they also worked in the textile industry, tailoring, and shoemaking. They entered the food and catering trades too, as waiters, hoteliers and butchers. New arrivals took lowly positions in German owned enterprises, hoping to save enough money to strike out on their own success. Wealth and social mobility seemed easier to attain in Britain than back home, and perhaps Razina Weber had heard tell of the bounty enjoyed by her fellow countrymen over But while she trod a well worn path of migration, her circumstances were unusual. She appears to have moved to Britain alone, without any of her family at her side, and undertaking more common among German Men than women, and one that must have taken considerable courage. Sometimes pimps placed disingenuous job adverts in German newspapers to lure women to Britain and ensnare them in the sex trade. Rosina may well have noticed one such announcement and migrated in hope of obtaining a new position, perhaps in domestic service. Equally, she may have been encouraged by a friend or relative who'd already emigrated, Or she may simply have stopped off en route to the United States but ended up staying. While London attracted many immigrats, German communities thrived in other cities too. Bradford, a center of textile production in the north, boasted a Little Germany district with chapels, warehouses, and factories, bilt with the wealth generated by the newcomers. Maybe Rosina stopped off in Little Germany for somehow she met Walter Judd, the son of a shop owner from Eyrbe, a small rural parish nestled amid the rolling hills and windswept moors northwest of Bradford. When the couple married in nineteen oh five, Rosina was already pregnant with a son, Hermann, in April nineteen oh eight, a daughter, little Evelyn, followed. But if Rasina had hoped for a life of domestic peace in England's rural north, she'd be swiftly and bitterly disappointed. Walter jumped between jobs, taking whatever work he could. It's unlikely therefore, that the family were ever of comfortable means. At one point he was listed as a master greengrocer, selling vegetables as his father had, But at another time he was a weaver at a local mill. That is until he left the looms of the factory floor and joined a walkout over wages and working conditions, with some describing him as the ringleader of the strike action. As the dispute rumbled on, Walter even led a throng of at least two hundred furious weavers to the house of a fellow worker, who would knock down tools and join their strike. Walter Judd appeared at Skipton Police Court on Saturday, charged with throwing a stone through the window of a man named Tattersall. He was convicted of the crime. Walter seems to have been an erratic man and a rabble rouser who at his worst was also violent. We cannot know how Rosina responded to her husband's involvement in these clashes of a heavy fine levied on him, as punishment would surely have been difficult for the young family to bear. More trouble followed in nineteen o nine, when Evelyn was just a year old. Her father again attracted the attention of the courts. Walter was out of work and had been drinking for several days straight when he entered a local inn and demanded more beer. Get Walter, discovering that the landlord's wife was alone, he surprised her by unsheathing a number of sharp knives and spreading them across a table. You will look well if I cut your throw for you, he was said to have growled. One newspaper reported that he followed the frightened landlady into a back room, uttering abusive and violent language. Only the arrival of a local Butcher, perhaps with Cleaver in hand, convinced Walter to leave. In court, Walter claimed he was so drunk he hardly knew what he was doing and offered a humble apology for his sinister and threatening behavior. But a criminal record with eight previous convictions raises questions about what home life would have been like for Rosie and the children. Walter certainly abused alcohol regularly. Was he temperamental and violent at home? Two? Another court case, this time brought by Rosina herself, answers some of those questions. It paints a portrait of abject domestic misery. In the summer of nineteen ten, Walter had been released from another local jail and, between bouts of drinking, had found work as a laborer. One morning, he slipped out of the family home and did not return. According to Rosina, to finance this adventure, he'd sold a truck that didn't belong to him and took his hook with the money. With the family breadwin had gone, and desperate for an income, Rosina said she had to sell their home simply to be able to feed four year old Herman and two year old Evelyn. When Walter resurfaced five weeks later, he asked his wife to bring their children and move back in with him, but Rosina refused. He had no home to take them to, and besides, she had a different plan. She would send her children to live with foster parents and go into domestic service to earn her own living. The prospect of parting from her tiny children was no doubt heartbreaking, but Rosina was adamant. There was no other way. She was willing to work night and day, she said, but she could not tolerate Walter any longer. Life with my husband is not worth living. Walter did not attend the court hearing to answer the charge of desertion, and the magistrates made an order of judicial separation. The couple remained married, but Rosina was to have custody of the children, and Walter would pay seven shillings per week towards their maintenance. Better than nothing, perhaps, but still a pittance on which survival would be a struggle. When the household census was taken the following year, Walter and Rosina were still living apart. Rosina, it seems, had been compelled by her circumstances to go through with her plan, surrendering Evelyn and Hermann to foster parents. This arrangement was probably organized through the local boarding out committee. The foster couple, who lived in the nearby town of Keighley, would have received a weekly payment to cover the children's basic needs. They would have pledged to provide Evelyn and Hermann with proper food, lodging, and washing, and who endeavor to train them in the habits of truthfulness, obedience, personal cleanliness, and industry, as well as to take care that they attended school. Members of the boarding out committee might come and inspect the foster home at any time. Proponents a boarding out touted it as a system by which children born in unfortunate circumstances could form ties among persons of their own class and become self reliant, independent citizens. Even so, this transition to a new home must have been painfully disorientating for young Evelyn. Rosina stayed close to her offspring, taking a job as a general servant just a few streets away, scrubbing and cooking in the home of a German butcher. She would have lived with the family above their shop, and this shop stood alone a German island in an area said to be thickly populated with Irish men and women. But in this community, Rosina and her children had still not found safe harbor, and they would soon be exposed to yet more peril, violence, bad women. The blackout Ripper will be back in just a moment. Rosina's new employer, the butcher Carl Andrassy, had previously been in trouble with the authorities for putting diseased offul into his meetples a tubercular cowslung, to be precise, and they'd find him for his malepractice. The court finds the defendant guilty. He must pay a fine of three pounds and costs. He'd been in caught again for letting a wait for the shop scales become chipped and worn, thus short changing his customers. Both of these matters were considered trivial, but suspicions about Andrassy and his business practices festered in the neighborhood, fueled by prejudice, xenophobia, and war, all of which would soon flare into an explosion of hatred. Germanophobia was noticeably increasing. There was a general and persistent undercurrent of antiimmigrant sentiment among locals, but now a particular dislike of Germany was on the rise. Germany was a nation growing in confidence and global clout, a nation challenging the interests and dominance of Britain. In the of the British, German migrants were associated with one industry, in particular, twelve hundred German butchers sold to the public. Because food can be a potent symbol of national identity, Germanophobia focused itself on these butchers, and the quality of their wares was hissed that German meets were putrid, gangrenous. Scandalized newspapers had long fermented this alarm the intellect of man staggers before the problem of what a German sausage may contain. Germanophobia reached fever pitch at the outbreak of the First World War in nineteen fourteen. That summer, the press proposed a conspiracy theory ordinary Germans in Britain were in fact spies reporting secrets back to the Fatherland. And then came lurid reports from the fighting in Belgium that invading German troops had committed unspeakable atrocities there, raping young girls, mutilating children, and shooting nuns. Accounts of how the trouble began ary. Some said the attitude of the Drassies since the outbreak of the war had annoyed the neighborhood. The butcher had seemed to celebrate German victories against British troops, supposedly dancing and laughing in front of his customers. Finally, an Irishman, Kelly, entered the shop at the head of a crowd and asked for a pound of German sausage, laying the emphasis on the German. Others claimed that he had requested a pie without any poison in it. Andrassy reportedly responded to this insult by cursing and then striking Kelly on the nose. Some said they heard Kelly yells, that's due to the Germans, what they are doing to the Belgian. The round setting of the shop that ensued was said to be of unprecedented ferocity. Huge crowds gathered outside, and scores of stones crashed through the downstairs windows, as well as those of the apartment above. The Lucina may wealth have been cowering. Police constables who intervened were pelted with rocks and bottle. A police inspector was struck on the head and left with a bloody gash, while other officers were said to be bleeding profusely too. You are worse than the Germans for protecting them, shouted the mob. A priest, Father Russell, finally succeeded where the authorities had not and dispersed the crowd, telling them that if they really wanted to fight the Germans, they should head to the army recruiting office. But the following day the violence resurged and spread. More German shops were wrecked and looted, and the windows at the police station where the Rassi family was sheltering was smashed. Evelyn would have been six years old, very young, but still old enough to understand that people in her town were angry and old enough to feel afraid. That wave of violence in Keighley and in towns across the land marked out something important about the character of the First World War, something that a government minister underlined in a speech the following year. This was not a conflict between armies, but between nations, he said. Every individual, whether civilian or not, has got to throw his weight into the scale. The British people took up that challenge with vigor. There were more anti German riots over the next four years, and German women and children were targets of this violence too. German immigrants were also affected by government policy. Some lost their jobs, and enemy aliens were required to register with their local police stations. Their freedom of movement was restricted, and some were even repatriated back to Germany. Rosina and her children may well have known Germans who suffered desperately under these measures, but they themselves would likely have been spared the very worst of this treatment. Residing with our foster parents. Evelyn's heritage may not have been widely known, and for her part, Rosina had ceased to be a German national an alien upon her marriage to Walter. Although they had separated, they were still married, and Walter enlisted and fought the Germans for king and country. Rosina often also went by a name that sounded unquestionably English, Rose Judd. Still, there was a troubling strand of public discourse that did implicate Rosina, Hermann and Evelyn. Journalists and politicians invoked the racialized language of bad blood when they spoke about British children of German parentage m I five. The British Security Service described such children as enemy painted and matrilineal. German kinship was a particular cause for concern. Those born to German mothers were more likely to be seen as potential future threats. British citizenship, on paper was no match for British German bloodstock. You can't mutralize an unnatural beast, a human abortion, a Hellish freak, but you can exterminate it, fumed one nationalistic magazine editor. For young Evelyn, the world must surely have seemed to be filled with bidder enmity. Not only was her home life troubled, her neighbors had also revealed that at any moment they could turn violently on anyone they considered different. But there were bright spots amid the gloom, glittering distractions from grim reality. Keithley had a thriving theatrical and entertainment scene, boasting several theater a Picture Palace with five hundred seats, and the Cozy Corner Picture House, which projected all the world's finest synodromas three times daily at popular prices. Pill tickets for the unwelcome missus hatch please cheap and comfortable. The cinema was an immensely popular form of escapism for the working classes. You considered the front for top and sabne chairs further back of sentipence booking ahead was it necessary. The auditoriums were warm, and the darkness also afforded cinemagoers some privacy. These diseased a love. Florence Turner films would be projected onto a whitewashed screen on the back wall of the auditorium, and because they lacked sync sound, they were often accompanied by a piano or other instruments. Sometimes there were sound effects too, like the tapping of coconut shells to simulate the clip clop of horses hoofs. Evelyn may well have sat in one of the dark and packed out Keighley Picture Houses on a Saturday evening, the air thick with cigarette smoke, gazing up at all and wonder as the grainy moving images flickered across the screen age. Military discipline and the experience of war failed to mellow Walter Judd during his service. He was charged with insubordination and received twenty eight days detention. He'd also been wounded, and the gunshot had left him permanently disabled. At war's end, a pension was awarded to make civilian life with such an injury a little easier Evelyn was listed as a dependent. Walter and Rosina appeared to have briefly reconciled. In nineteen nineteen, they were living together and Keighley, but this arrangement did not last. By nineteen twenty one, he was once more residing with his mother and siblings back in the village of Eyrbe, working as a casual laborer. Walter would never again lived with his wife and children, and he would end his days in a lodging house for the homeless. Perhaps Evelyn and Hermann felt abandoned by their father, or perhaps by this point they were simply accustomed to his absence. These upheavals seemed not to have soured Evelyn, for she grew into a warm, kind hearted young woman with a jolly disposition. By now a teenager, she attended school and work part time at a local mill. She would later confide that as a young woman, she gave birth to a baby out of wedlock. Sex education was almost non existent at this time, and abortion, still illegal, wouldn't have been a safe or straightforward option either. Apparently, the child was adopted by a couple and the family moved to Canada. There's no corresponding birth certificate in the archives, but it's still possible that this story is true. Evelyn might have given birth and a local mother and baby home, many of them run by rather strict religious organizations. The job would just being taken for adoption without consulting the mother. Historian Pat Vane is an expert on social history. In the twentieth century, women who don't have support from their families or any other sort of easy support are often forced into adoption, and that was really quite common. Evelyn would have been well aware that as a young single mother life would be a grinding struggle and attracts societal hostility. Still, having her baby wrenched away from her would have been a scarring traumatic experience. Life moved on. Evelyn, who was said to be enthralled with show business, probably punctuated the everyday, repetitive drudgery of working at the local mill with trips to the nearby coastal town of Blackpool. Seaside resorts, which had boomed during the nineteenth century, were designed to inspire, awe and overwhelm the census. As spaces devoted to pleasure. They offered a break from the workaday routine of the shop floor, factory bench, or kitchen sink. Blackpool boasted piers, promenades, and pavilions. The town was also decked out in colored lights, the annual illuminations, which when switched on each autumn, attracted a hundred thousand visitors, and its palatial all weather winter Gardens complex included one of the largest ball rooms in the world, the Empress. The resort positively brimmed with entertainment, music, theater, circus, performances and burlesque shows. Blackpool's audiences are reputed to possess highly developed critical powers that London producers so often present their plays in Blackpool before emitting them to London. The town attracted big named stars, and it congratulated itself on hosting previews of shows before they hit London's West End. If Blackpool likes it, any other place on Earth will love it. It was here in Blackpool, perhaps promenading by the seafront after watching a stage musical or catching a film screening in tremendous natural color the Hippodrome that Evelyn met Harold Oatley. She was around twenty four years old, Harold around twenty eight. The pair struck up a relationship. They had things in common Harold too, had boarded out with a couple as a child after his mother passed away, and had then been adopted. Both shaped by turbulent childhoods and fractured family life, they may well have understood each other, and yet while they shared common ground, Harold and Evelyn were also very different. Harold's was the humdrum life of a roo ural poultry farmer in the nearby village of Thornton. Evelyn, on the other hand, seems to have dreamt of one day treading the boards herself, possibly inspired by the West End idols she saw in Blackpool. It wasn't such an absurd dream. Wildly successful singer and actor Gracie Fields came from the Northwest and was utterly unashamed of her provincial working class roots. She'd worked part time at a local mill and had a Lancashire accent, just like Evelyn, and so while Harold stayed up north tending to his birds, Evelyn, like her mother before her, looked for new opportunities elsewhere. She set her sights on the epicenter of showbiz and took lodgings in the heart of London's West End. But, as is so often true with glittering dreams of fame. The reality would be somewhat bleaker, bad women. The Blackout Ripper will be back shortly. In the nineteen thirties, The Windmill Theater was a somewhat odd new addition to London's theater land. A converted five story cinema, the balconies and turrets of its facade were squashed into a tiny frontage that peeked out between the neighboring buildings, slightly set back from the main drag of rival theaters in a narrow side street. The Windmill sat in a cosmopolitan quarter, continental grocers and restaurants, interspersed the shops of Italian tailors, artists, and theatrical costumers, Physically at the boundary between slightly seedy Soho an upscale Piccadilly. The Windmill occupied in entertainment Borderland two, poised on a knife edge between licit and illicit pleasure. Perhaps this combination of bohemianism and racy countercultural nightlife fueled Evelyn's enduring fascination with the venue in its environs. Settling in Soho, Evelyn picked a fitting alias for herself, a starlet's name. Here she was no longer. Evelyn Judd but leta ward, and she told Harold she'd obtained a situation at the famous Windmill Theater with continuous daily performances of singing and dancing. It promised the snappiest shows in town, and according to the writer Elizabeth Bowen, the venue was so intimate that windmill girls would perform practically in your lap. The theater would eventually become famous for its nude show girls, with a prudish government censor only tolerated if they stood stock still. It was deemed these girls functioned as a national safety valve, satisfying unruly male sexuality in the contained setting of the theater auditorium. I never seen a wolfe. Evelyn was said to have worked at the Windmill before full nudity was allowed, and Harold believed she was a dancer in the chorus. In the nineteen thirties, chorus girls were chosen for their raw singing, acting, and dancing abilities. Their training was short, and for the most part, their performance skills tended to be rudimentary, so it needn't have posed a problem if Evelyn lacked formal training in these arts. As a Windmill girl, she would have been subject to a makeover that observed a precise notion of femininity, with carefully plucked eyebrows, good teeth, red lips, and permed hair, or even a platinum blonde wiggin out the way. On stage, she would have sung tap Downstone, high kicked. It was a thrilling ride that the hours were long and the pay was poor, equivalent to a shot girl's salary. The archetypal Windmill girl was intended to be remarkable for her freshness and beauty, and while men were expected to sit in the stalls and ogle her, she herself was to be docile, passive, and innocent of sexual knowledge, or at least to appear so. Theatrical historians have said Evelyn's name does not appear on any of the programs or show bills for the Windmill Theater over the years, and nor does her alias lead award casting doubt over the claim that she performed here. However, for historian or prostitution and nightlife expert Professor Julia Lade, this isn't conclusive. Chorus girls are so hard to find in the historical record. There's actually very little record in general about theater and the casts, but chorus girls are particularly poorly documented, and in her own research for her book The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey, Julia found that chorus girls sometimes deliberately concealed themselves through multiple aleases. That's one thing I learned about pseudonyms in my research for my book is that people very rarely only have one. So perhaps Evelyn had another name altogether and used this at the Windmill. On the other hand, she was already much older than the typical Windmill recruit, who was usually only eighteen or nineteen, So another possibility is that Evelyn worked at the Windmill, not as an official dancer, but in another capacity, such as welcoming spectators to the venue. She could have been a hostess who sometimes went up on stage when one of the other women were not available. She could have worked clearing glasses. She could have worked behind the bar, and again longed to be on stage potentially and was quite happy for people to assume she was. Whatever, the truth that Evelyn wished to be associated with this iconic site of West End entertainment is important a central plank in the mythology she was building around the character of lta ward for women working and living in that space. The windmill would have been seen as a coup, as an interesting, exciting place to work, as having made it as a review artist, so I can see why she may herself have allowed that story to circulate. But show business was not lead towards soul occupation. The testimony of close friends suggests that Evelyn also earned her living in Soho by selling sex, and it may well have been through the world of the theater that she entered this trade. These theater spaces were contiguous with the spaces where commercial sex would have been bought and sold, and so women working in those spaces would have been exposed to it. The other thing about working as a chorus girl a theater is that it paid incredibly poorly, and women were often compelled to supplement their earnings with other work, be that licit or illicit work. The contracts at these theaters were also notoriously bad, but you'd be signing a contract essentially saying we can terminate you whenever we want, and we can withhold pay and all of those things. And so that's another way in which those two industries were linked through their precarity. Hostesses and dances working in these spaces will also encouraged to sell the illusion of sexual availability at work, So the women working there, even if they weren't explicitly selling sex, were expected to act available and to trade on that kind of sex appeal to get men to buy drinks, to get men to come in, and also of course for tips. So if you're working at the coach check, for example, for tips. And so there's lots of ways in which these worlds are entangled. Theater provided multiple entry points and in no way saying that every woman who was involved in theater was also sex, but there's definitely an overlap. Evelyn continued in this way for a time, seeing clients and enjoying the drinking, dancing and music of Soho's exhilarating nightlife with her friends, but in summer nineteen thirty six, something happened to make her change her course. Aged twenty eight, she packed her belongings, returned north and agreed to marry Harold. When they wed at the district register office, it was by license, rather than having band thread out in the local area. A license was a more discreet and fast, swifter way to marry. But if Evelyn was in a rush because of a pregnancy, she must have lost the baby, for it seems that no child was ever born to the couple. The pair lived together at Harold's quaint Thornton Bungalow, river Meade, but there were strings attached to this union. Before the wedding ceremony, Evelyn had compelled Harold to submit to a particular proviso, and my wife insisted that if she should ever tire of her life with me, that I would allow her her freedom so that she could come back to London to live. Maybe Harold had hoped that the new Missus Oakley would be satisfied with domestic routine, that London was well and truly out of her system, and she wouldn't ask him to make good on his promise. But the pull of the West End would prove too great to resist, and before long Evelyn was once more yearning for the bright lights of Piccadilly, for the vibrant chaos and commotion of Soho's criss crossing thoroughfares, and maybe quite simply for the close, supportive and fun friendships she'd formed there. Evelyn Oakley, convivial, kind and a dreamer, could not have known that with each trip back to London, and with each new friend she made, she was moving ever close to another person with an alter ego, though one more sinister and more sadistic. Are you? Soon she would meet an airman who pretended to be an influential and wealthy aristocrat, an airman with sharp features and piercing eyes, Bad women. The Blackout Ripper is hosted by me Hallie rubin Hold and me Alice Fines. It was written and produced by Alice Fines and Ryan Dilley, with additional support from Courtney Guerino and Offa Gomperts. Kate Healy of Oakwood Family Trees aided us with genealogical research. Pascal Wise Sound designed and mixed the show and composed all the original music. The show was recorded at Woodoor Studios by David Smith and Tom Berry. You also heard the voice talents of Ben Crow, David Glover, Melanie Gutridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. Much of the music was performed by Edgarchan, Ross Hughes, Christian Miller and Marcus Penrose. They were recorded by Nick Taylor at Porcupine Studios. Pushkin's Ben Toliday mixed the tracks and you heard additional piano playing by the great Berry Wise Hi Berry. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano, Eric Sandler, and Daniella Lukhan. We'd also like to thank Michael Buchanan Dunn of the Murder Mile podcast, Lizzie McCarroll, Katherine Walker at the Royal Pharmaceutical Society and the Earbe Historical Society. Bad Women is a production of Pushkin Industries. Please rate and review the show and spread the word about what we do, and thanks for listening.

Bad Women: The Blackout Ripper

The streets of wartime London are pitch black and the darkness offers cover to a murderer every bit  
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