Daniel looked at her with such immense relief that she almost laughed. “Well, is that dinner invitation still open?”
He grinned. “It certainly is! Do you have any preferences?”
“Oscar’s,” said Poppy. “I feel like dancing.”
THE WORLD OF POPPY DENBY: A HISTORICAL NOTE
The Jazz Files is set in the summer of 1920. It is less than two years since the armistice that ended the Great War, resulting in the death of seventeen million people, and only eighteen months since the height of the Spanish flu that wiped out a further seventy million. Poppy, who is just starting out on a career in journalism, is full of hope – but sorrow is never far away in The Jazz Files. While some characters are living the high life, others are in misery. And so it was with society as a whole. The 1920s – alternatively known as the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age and the decade of the Bright Young People – is characterized by a generation desperate to leave the horror of war behind them and to create a “bright new world”. Little did they know, the world they were so blithely building would crash into economic darkness within nine years, and be at war, once again, by the time Poppy turns forty.
But in the summer of 1920 they did not know this and they danced to new jazzy music from America and wore skimpy dresses and cropped or “shingled” hair that scandalized their Edwardian mothers. Everything was new, daring and very self-consciously turning its back on the past. I have tried to stick as closely as possible to the fashion trends in clothing, music and dance of the period, but was frustrated at times that the more iconic styles that we now readily associate with the 1920s only came to the fore later in the decade. The Charleston, for instance, was first danced in London clubs in 1924, so even though readers might assume Delilah was dancing the Charleston with her twirling arms and legs, I do not actually call it this. Likewise, the jazz music associated with the period only became common in London clubs a few years later, but I have taken some liberties in assuming that Oscars’ Jazz Club might have been ahead of its time. However, the specific jazz songs and tunes that are mentioned in the book had been released in America by 1920 and it might be assumed that they had made their way to British shores via phonographic recordings. I have no evidence however that they were played live in clubs in London so soon after their release.
Charlie Chaplin’s film The Kid was only released in 1921, and that’s when he actually visited London to promote it; but I have brought it forward a year to 1920, because Delilah told me she was desperate to meet him – and who can say no to Delilah? Generally though, I have not played fast and loose with the historical timeline and have only changed things when I felt the story would be poorer if I did not. This is after all a novel and not a social history text.
I originally conceived of Poppy as a suffragette reporter sleuth, but in the early planning stages, did not feel comfortable in the 1905–1913 period. So I decided to move the story forward to 1920 and have Poppy be the niece of a suffragette. As a result, the fabulous world of 1920s fashion, music and “jazz journalism” opened up to me. But more than that, I felt that I could now emotionally empathize with Poppy. I was born in the early 1970s and grew up with stories of the brave women of the 1960s and 1970s who made such strides forward for equal rights for women. So by the time I went to university in 1989 there were almost no courses or careers closed to me. I owe a great debt to these women, just as Poppy does to her aunt and the brave men and women who fought tirelessly for equality between the sexes. The Chelsea Six are a fictional group of people, but the Women’s Suffrage and Political Union did actually exist. It was founded by Emmeline Pankhurst and her family. For more on the work of the WSPU please see some of the books I have listed below or visit www.poppydenby.com where you will find links to lots of online material.
The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act Lord Dorchester so controversially supports was passed in 1919, not early 1920 as suggested in The Jazz Files; I changed the date so that Bert Isaacs could still be working on the story when Poppy first meets him. As there was no equivalent groundbreaking legislation in the summer of 1920, I felt this was a necessary anachronism. Marjorie Reynolds, the MP, is also a fictional character, and the Act was actually shepherded through parliament by the real-life MP Nancy Astor.
Marie Curie did visit New York in 1921 to raise money to finance her research at the Radium Institute in Paris, but the notion that she was so hard up before that as to justify being involved in a shady blackmail plot is pure conjecture on my part. Besides, Sophie Blackburn has already told you that it was she who did it, not Marie – and that’s the story I’m sticking to!
In 1920, there was a real newspaper in London called The London Globe, but it merged with the Pall Mall Gazette in 1921. The Daily Globe is not based on this newspaper and is born purely of my imagination. I have though read many tabloid newspapers of the period in the archives of the British Library, including The Daily Mail, and have drawn my ideas for The Globe from all of them. The Courier that is the rival of The Globe in The Jazz Files, is also a fictional newspaper. Any similarities to tabloids still in print today is purely coincidental.
FOR FURTHER READING:
Visit www.poppydenby.com for more historical information on the period, gorgeous pictures of 1920s fashion and décor, audio and video links to 1920s music and news clips, a link to the author’s website, as well as news about upcoming titles in the Poppy Denby Investigates series.
Housego, Molly and Neil R. Storey, The Women’s Suffrage Movement, Shire Library, Shire Publications, Oxford, 2013.
Marr, Andrew, My Trade: a short history of British Journalism, Pan Macmillan, London, 2005.
Pankhurst, Christabel, Unshackled, Cresset Women’s Voices, London, 1987.
Shepherd, Janet and John Shepherd, 1920s Britain, Shire Living Histories, Shire Publications, Oxford, 2010.
Shrimpton, Jayne, Fashion in the 1920s, Shire Publications, Oxford, 2013.
Taylor, D.J., Bright Young People: the rise and fall of a generation 1918–1940, Vintage, Random House, London, 2008.
Waugh, Evelyn, Vile Bodies, Chapman and Hall, London, 1930.
Waugh, Evelyn, Scoop, (1938) Penguin Classics, Penguin, London, 2000.
For more information and fun photos about Poppy and her world go to: www.poppydenby.com
The Jazz Files Page 28
