On 17 September 1937, still in his Paddington Green days, Crowley struck up a relationship with Phyllis Wakeford. She lived in a respectable boarding house run by a Lucy Whitby at 35 Chepstow Villas, in what was meanwhile becoming the run-down area of “Rotting Hill”: an area of large Victorian houses subsiding into bedsitters, furnished rooms, and cheap lettings generally, soon to be associated with serial murderer Christie and notorious landlord Rachman.
Phyllis Wakeford was Anglo-Indian, born in Bengal, where her father had a responsible job with the Bengal Nagpur Railway, and in Britain she had a family connection with the Delhi Indian restaurant at 117 Tottenham Court Road, where her mother Amy Wakeford lived.
Crowley had sex with Phyllis on the 17th and 19th, and again a couple of times the following month, before subjecting her to jaw-dropping insults. He writes with a rather arch unkindness in his diary, “Educated… Phyllis. The poor zebu has been choked with lies: quite upset when I pointed out that her chief charm was her musky nigger stench.” (A zebu is a type of humped cattle; he also refers to her as a Brahmin cow, a related type of cattle but punning on the Indian caste). Nevertheless their relationship continued on and off, including drinks and meals, until on 31 October he writes “Phyllis has disappeared!” 1
John Symonds asserts that Phyllis Wakeford is the woman Charles Cammell later remembers in Richmond: a woman who comes through Cammell's slightly cringe-inducing description as a rather charming person (or at least one with a smiling disposition). He writes that he visited Crowley in Richmond, and there in the hallway, “The girl who stood before me, smiling with big red lips and the whitest of teeth, was black! Ah, what a girl was that! A real fuzzy-wuzzy with a shock of sable curls, with eyes of jet and diamond, and a figure as light and lithe as a gazelle's and much more undulating… there were gold rings about her round, almost-ebony arms…”
Aside from the fact that this woman doesn't sound Anglo-Indian, the main problem is that the Richmond flat is a couple of years later. I believe this woman is an embroidered caricature of Beryl Drayton, from the Caribbean,2 whom Crowley picked up in Hyde Park in September 1939; Cammell writes discreetly that in addition to having a very sweet voice, she “bore the name of a jewel that has magical attributes”. As well as being a sexual partner she acted as housekeeper for a couple of weeks while he was living in Petersham Road, before they fell out.
It is noticeable how many of the women Crowley consorts with are black or other ethnic minority; and this is before large-scale Caribbean migration began with Windrush in 1948. Along with Phyllis and Beryl, the list includes a “coloured girl” in Windmill Street, “Marie Johnson 11 St. Peter's Sq. Hammersmith. Mulatto”, and the slightly mysterious “black-bumbed Blowzabella”, at 5 Florence Court Maida Vale W9.
Florence Court was a fairly recent inter-wars apartment block with porterage, redolent – like all such blocks – of discreet vice, and Blowzabella refers to an 18thC song, where a man and a prostitute are arguing about money in alternate verses (“Blowzabella I'd have you to know, / Though you fancy my Stock is so low, / I've more Rhino3 than always I show”). There is a further mystery because this was the address of an unpleasant man with a history of violence, supposedly living there alone; he may instead have been a pimp.
Black women had been ‘over-represented’ in British prostitution since at least the 18thC, compared to the percentage of black women in the population as a whole. Along with what must often have been disadvantaged starts in life, with a high incidence of illegitimacy, children's homes, and the stigma of being “half-caste”, they must also have appealed to an ‘exotic’ taste in clients. This was certainly true in Crowley's case. After a 1933 gathering in Trafalgar Square to demonstrate against the Scottsboro Boys verdict (which he attended through his friendship with Nancy Cunard) he reports “turned to African Rally 8 P.M… I danced with many whores – all colours.” On another occasion he had a dream of a “superb young jet-black nigger whore”, and in his Magical Record of Ankh-F-N-Khonsu, a 1929 diary, he resolves in harmony with his I Ching to “Fuck negress, or other very low woman.”
The year 1939 started with “Began by kissing nigger, hoping for the best. Took home alleged Maisie Wilson 15 Buckingham Gate???”. She is one of several Maisies and Wilsons, and seems to be a different woman to Mary Wilson, also in the Victoria area, a little later in the year: “Mary Wilson – no, no! VIC0628 80 Belgrave Road. Beautiful, voluptuous, vicious – I think touch of black blood. Refrained…”