Maud Allan: The Salome Dancer, Her Hidden Life and the Trial That Ruined Her
In 1908 Maud Allan was the most talked-about woman in London. She danced barefoot in little more than pearls and gauze, finished her act with a severed head and earned more than almost anyone else in music hall. Ten years later she was standing in the Old Bailey, effectively on trial for being a lesbian, while a right-wing MP told the court she was part of a plot to help Germany win the war.
And somewhere in the middle of it all, the country found out the secret she'd spent 23 years running from. Her big brother had been hanged for murdering two young women inside a San Francisco church.
Quick Answers
Who was Maud Allan? A Canadian-born dancer, born in Toronto in 1873, who became a star in Edwardian London with her Vision of Salome.
What was the Maud Allan trial? A 1918 criminal libel case she brought against the MP Noel Pemberton Billing after his paper linked her to a 'cult' of lesbians. She lost.
Was Maud Allan a lesbian? She denied it in court, but she later lived for years with her secretary and lover, Verna Aldrich.
Who was her brother? Theodore Durrant, hanged at San Quentin in 1898 for murdering two young women in a San Francisco church.
When did she die? On 7 October 1956, in a Los Angeles nursing home, aged 83.
From Toronto to San Francisco
Maud Allan wasn't born Maud Allan. She came into the world as Ulah Maude Durrant in Toronto on 27 August 1873, and you'll see her first name spelled half a dozen ways depending on who's telling the story. When she was about six, the family upped sticks to San Francisco.
Money was always tight. Dance Collection Danse, the Toronto archive that holds her papers, describes her father as a shoemaker who couldn't find much work and her mother, Isabella, as an eccentric woman who was convinced Maud's talent at the piano would one day make the whole family rich and famous.
The person Maud was closest to was her older brother, Theo. He was a bright, churchgoing medical student at Cooper Medical College, the sort of young man mothers in the congregation pointed out to their daughters. In 1895 Maud left for Berlin to study piano, fully expecting to come home a concert star.
The Demon of the Belfry
She'd been gone less than two months when Theo was arrested. In April 1895 two young women from his church, Blanche Lamont and Minnie Williams, were found dead inside Emanuel Baptist Church in San Francisco. Both had been sexually assaulted. One body was discovered stuffed into a cupboard, and the other was found up in the church belfry.
Theo was the last person seen with both of them. The papers called it the Crime of the Century and gave him the nickname that's stuck ever since, the Demon of the Belfry. The case against him was circumstantial but crushing, and Executed Today notes that the jury reportedly took about five minutes to find him guilty.
His mother didn't help. Isabella ran a string of media campaigns to raise money for his defence, which mostly just kept the family name on the front pages. She even put her name to a newspaper piece in 1897 explaining why she'd be attending her own son's execution. After three reprieves, Theo was hanged at San Quentin on 7 January 1898.
Maud never believed he did it. But her family told her not to come home, and she didn't. She changed her name, cut herself off from the American friends she'd made in Berlin and carried the whole thing around in silence. Her diaries from 1895 to 1897 survive in Toronto, and they're about as close as anyone will get to what those years did to her.
Swapping the Piano for Dance
Berlin should've been her big break. She was studying under the composer Ferruccio Busoni, one of the great musical names of the age. But after Theo's execution she gave up the piano altogether, and for a while she scraped by on whatever came along. She illustrated a women's encyclopedia, co-founded a corset business and, around 1900, provided illustrations for a sex manual aimed at women. Remember that last one. It'll come back.
By her late twenties she'd turned to dance. She made her debut in Vienna in 1903, drawing on German expressionism and the barefoot, free-flowing style that was all the rage at the time. Over her career The Canadian Encyclopedia credits her with more than 50 dances, but there was only ever one that people talked about.
The Vision of Salome premiered in Vienna in 1906. It was loosely based on Oscar Wilde's play about the biblical princess who demands the head of John the Baptist, and Allan designed the costume herself. Funnily enough, she wasn't the first to try it. Mata Hari was reportedly doing her own version of the dance around the same time.
Salomania Grips London
Her big break came at Marienbad in 1907, where she danced Salome for King Edward VII. He loved it, and that royal seal of approval was enough for Alfred Butt, manager of the Palace Theatre, to bring her to London.
She opened in 1908 and London went mad for her. The costume was a pair of jewelled breastplates, ropes of pearls around the hips and a skirt of see-through black ninon, and one reviewer for The Times wrote that it served "as ambient air wherein she floats." Her Salome wasn't a striptease of seven veils but a kind of dream sequence, and it ended with her and the prophet's severed head.
The numbers were staggering. She topped the bill for two years, earned £250 a week and broke every box office record the Palace had, while shareholders enjoyed profits of over 30 per cent. And it wasn't just men queuing up. The Daily Chronicle reckoned at least 90 per cent of her audience were women.
The craze even got its own name, Salomania. Copycat Salomes popped up all over the place, female impersonators borrowed her name for their acts and at least one society lady upset the King with a cheeky imitation of her own. Not everyone was charmed, mind. In June 1908 the New York Times reported that Allan had been barred from the stage in Manchester.
She rode the wave for years. She published an autobiography, My Life and Dancing, in 1908, played Carnegie Hall in 1910 and starred in a silent film, The Rug Maker's Daughter, in 1915. Long before Josephine Baker turned dancing into a ticket to fame and notoriety, Maud Allan was showing how much trouble a woman on stage could cause.
Margot Asquith and the Whispers
Her most important fan was Margot Asquith, the sharp-tongued wife of Herbert Asquith, who became Prime Minister in 1908. By 1910 the papers were already hinting that the two women were a bit too close.
Nobody has ever proved anything sexual went on between them, but Margot's support was very real. The National Archives notes that Margot paid for Allan's flat overlooking Regent's Park right up until Herbert's death in 1928. And Allan didn't live there alone. She shared it with Verna Aldrich, her secretary and her lover.
In peacetime that sort of gossip was the stuff of drawing rooms. In the middle of a world war it became something much more dangerous.
The Cult of the Clitoris
By early 1918 Britain was exhausted, the war was going badly and plenty of people wanted someone to blame. Noel Pemberton Billing was happy to oblige. He was an aviator, inventor and independent MP who ran a group called the Vigilante Society and a newspaper to go with it, first called The Imperialist and later The Vigilante.
In January 1918 his paper claimed the Germans had a Black Book listing 47,000 British men and women whose sexual secrets left them open to blackmail. Politicians, wives of politicians, judges, the lot. Nobody ever produced this book, before or after the trial, but that didn't stop it doing enormous damage.
Then the impresario J.T. Grein announced he was staging two private performances of Wilde's Salome, with Maud Allan in the title role. Wilde's play was still banned in England, so Grein got round the Lord Chamberlain by making it subscription only.
On 16 February 1918 The Vigilante ran a short paragraph under the headline "The Cult of the Clitoris". It strongly hinted that anyone buying a ticket was likely to be in the Black Book and that Allan herself was part of a network of women who loved women. Allan and Grein sued for criminal libel.
Six Days at the Old Bailey
The case opened at the Old Bailey in May 1918 in front of Mr Justice Darling. Billing defended himself, and he treated the courtroom like a stage.
His central argument was mad but clever. He said clitoris was such an obscure medical word that no decent woman would know what it meant, so the very fact that Allan understood the headline proved she was the kind of woman it described. Allan refused to explain the term in court. When she was asked about Wilde, she defended him as "a great artiste" while admitting she didn't actually know much about the play.
Then the witnesses started. Billing's star turn was Eileen Villiers-Stuart, who also happened to be his mistress. She swore she'd been shown the Black Book by two politicians who'd since been killed in the war, and that it named Herbert and Margot Asquith and the former war minister Lord Haldane. When Darling tried to get her out of the witness box, she announced that his name was in it too.
Next up was Harold Spencer, who'd had a hand in Billing's campaign, and who told the court the cult was all about gathering to watch a diseased, mad girl. And then came the surprise guest, Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde's former lover and the man who'd helped translate Salome. He'd turned on Wilde completely and called him "the greatest force for evil" Europe had seen in three and a half centuries.
Worst of all for Allan, Billing dragged her family into it. Theo's crimes, the thing she'd buried since 1895, came out in open court and the press lapped it up. Darling, meanwhile, seemed more bothered about whether Salome should've been staged at all, and he was pretty scathing about Allan's costume. As the National Archives puts it, she may have been the one suing, but she was the one really on trial.
The whole thing was so baffling to some that Lord Albemarle reportedly asked an acquaintance who this Greek chap Clitoris was supposed to be.
On 4 June 1918 the jury found Billing not guilty on all counts. The public gallery leapt to its feet, men waved their hats, women waved their handkerchiefs and the crowd outside threw flowers in his path.
Five years later the Old Bailey would host another media circus, when Marguerite Alibert stood trial for shooting her husband at the Savoy.
What the Files Reveal
Government files at the National Archives show just how far the case reached. The indictment, dated 23 April 1918, describes Wilde in about the bluntest terms the law could manage. A Home Office file holds a letter from the Reverend Francis Knight begging magistrates to drop the case for the sake of Britain and its allies, along with a note that Billing's own wife was of part-German descent. The case even turned up in Cabinet papers.
As for the Black Book, Villiers-Stuart later admitted she'd made the whole lot up and that Billing and Spencer had coached her. By then, of course, the damage was done.
The fallout went well beyond Allan. In 1921 the House of Commons passed a clause that would've made gross indecency between women a criminal offence, just as it already was between men. The Lords threw it out, partly because they worried that criminalising lesbianism would only tell women it existed. Men weren't so lucky, as the story of Alan Turing shows only too well.
So Was Maud Allan a Lesbian?
She never said so publicly, and in 1918 she denied it under oath. But the evidence of how she actually lived points pretty clearly one way. Her long relationship with Verna Aldrich was romantic rather than just professional. The Regent's Park flat they shared was very much a home.
Whether she was a lesbian or bisexual, and whether anything happened with Margot Asquith, is something historians still argue over, and it probably always will be. What's not in doubt is the cruelty of how it was used against her. The trial had very little to do with her private life and everything to do with wartime paranoia, a hunt for traitors and an MP who wanted headlines.
That's why the case now sits at the heart of British LGBTQ+ history. It was the moment lesbian sexuality was dragged into a courtroom and treated as a threat to national security, much as Eve Adams found out across the Atlantic just a few years later.
Poverty, the Blitz and a Lonely End
Allan's career never recovered. The scandal had made her box office poison, and her dancing days on the public stage were effectively over. Billing, for what it's worth, didn't do much better. He quit Parliament in 1921.
She spent the next twenty years or so in comparative poverty, living with Aldrich in part of the west wing of a big house on Regent's Park. When the Blitz damaged the building, she packed up and went back to America.
Maud Allan died in a Los Angeles nursing home on 7 October 1956, aged 83, more or less forgotten by the city that had once queued round the block to see her. She'd spent her life trying to outrun one scandal, only to be swallowed by another one she didn't even start. Like Evelyn Nesbit on the other side of the Atlantic, she found that a single trial could swallow the rest of a life.
Suggested Reading
Want to dig deeper into Maud Allan and the Billing trial? These are the books to start with.
Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy and the First World War by Philip Hoare. A gripping account of the Billing trial and the wartime panic that fuelled it, packed with courtroom detail.
The Salome Dancer: The Life and Times of Maud Allan by Felix Cherniavsky. The full biography, written by a member of the family that knew her, and the first to piece together her life after the trial.
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Sources
LGBTQ+ history: Maud Allan and 'unnatural practices among women', The National Archives
Crime of the Century: Darkest Secrets Revealed, Dance Collection Danse
Maud Allan, The Canadian Encyclopedia
The Vision of Salome: Cosmopolitanism and Erotic Dancing in Central London, 1908-1918, History Cooperative
Maud Allan and the Cult of the Clitoris, London Walking Tours
1898: Theodore Durrant, the Demon of the Belfry, Executed Today
Beulah Maude Durrant (Maud Allan), Aleister Crowley Timeline
