page_title: Betty May
section_title: Model and muse
hierarchical_section_title: Betty May / Model and muse
caption_attribution_description: English: Bust of Betty May by Jacob Epstein.
context_page_description: Betty May was a British singer, dancer, and model, who worked primarily in London's West End. She was a member of the London Bohemian set of the inter-war years, claimed to have joined a criminal gang in Paris, was associated with occultist Aleister Crowley, and sat for Augustus John and Jacob Epstein. She became known as the "Tiger Woman". She adopted the name Betty May early in life, for reasons that are unclear.
context_section_description: May became the model for Augustus John, and the sculptors Jacob Kramer and Jacob Epstein. She was drawn by Gerald Reitlinger and Michael Sevier. She had a rival by the name of Dolores who was also of striking appearance and it was not unusual for there to be friction, and even blows, between the two. Dolores died of cancer in 1934.
  About July 1928, May had a brief affair with married Australian writer Jack Lindsay, who was also seeing Elza de Locre. They were together in the Fitzroy Tavern one evening and chanced to see poet Edgell Rickword. Lindsay recalled: "I remember going over to Betty, who did not know him, and saying, 'It's Edgell Rickword, the person I most wanted to meet in England'." May soon left Lindsay for Rickword, though the two men became friends. Rickword wrote the poem "The Lousy Astrologer's Present to his Sweetheart", where the speakers are Rickword and May, which was published in the literary magazine London Aphrodite. The first verse, in the male voice, ran:
  No Austin-Seven at my door
  love's chariot was, but jolting trams
  with butts and spittle on the floor
  conveyed your peerless hams
  In 1929 May, Rickword and two friends were arrested on a weekend trip to Dieppe in northern France after discovering that they did not have enough money to pay their hotel bill. They were all deported back to England. The hotel was next door to the local police station.
  Poet, translator and cryptic crossword compiler for The Observer ("Torquemada") Edward Powys Mathers also wrote verse for Betty May, titling one work "Oh, That We Two Were Betty Maying".
  In 1928 the Café Royal was renovated and its gilt and mirrors were replaced with a jazz age theme that caused it to lose some of its former atmosphere. By the 1930s, the bohemian crowd who once frequented the Café had largely decamped to North Soho, or Fitzrovia as it was beginning to be called, where they were centered on The Fitzroy, and to a lesser extent The Wheatsheaf in Rathbone Place. Dylan Thomas, a regular at both, wrote to his friend Bert Trick in 1934 that "Betty May, is as you probably know, an artist's model – who posed, though that is not perhaps the most correct word, for John, Epstein and the rest of the racketeers". He told Trick that he planned to write an article in May's name, sell it to the News of the World and then ask her to pay him with her body.
  In 1933, May was living with Hugh Sykes Davis at South Hill Park Gardens in Hampstead, London. The couple entertained Malcolm Lowry and Jan Gabrial there in the autumn that year. Soon after, May and her former lover Edgell Rickword took the couple to "Kleinfled's" (The Fitzroy Tavern), The Marquis of Granby and The Plough, and finally to Smokey Joe's, "a non-alcoholic speakeasy-cum-lesbian pub".
caption: Bust of Betty May by Jacob Epstein.
exif: {"Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "160", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4055"}