Jane Davis
asked:
The club that all the women end up in is a central setting in your book. Why did you choose this place as a focal point for the novel and what parts of life at the time do you think it allowed you to explore?
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At the Stroke of Nine O'Clock,
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Jane Davis
Ruth’s sister Muriel Jakubait wrote a book about her sister’s life. In it is a list of members of the club that Ruth managed. One of Ruth’s later biographers, Tony Van Den Bergh, appears. Also featured were royalty including King Hussein of Jordan, King Farouk of Egypt, King Feisal of Iraq, socialites such as the Duchess of Argyll and Lady Docker, film stars such as Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Victor Mature, Burt Lancaster and Diana Dors, stars of the racing fraternity such as Donald Campbell and Stirling Moss, photographers Anthony Armstrong Jones (who later married Princess Margaret) and Anthony Beauchamp (who was married to Sarah Churchill), and Stephen Ward (who, ten years later, was a central player in the Profumo Affair), as well as notorious London landlord, Peter Rachman, and ‘Dandy’ Kim Caborn-Waterfield, described by Jakubait as a ‘better class of criminal’. But London’s drinking clubs were also places of refuge for ex-servicemen and travelling salesmen. They were places where blind eyes were turned (homosexual acts were still illegal in the UK, London’s black market economy was booming), the kind of places a duchess and an actress could meet without having to worry that they were attracting attention. The setting also provided a direct window into Ruth Ellis’s life and much of what that entailed.
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