Delphine Day’s nightclub adds a little Chinoiserie Spice to Mr Selfridge

Series 2 of Mr Selfridge is now on TV (in the UK anyway) and this season we have the marvellous character of Delphine Day, a woman of (as they say) questionable morals who runs a Soho nightclub of the most louche type. I wouldn’t be so silly as to offer any spoilers here but Delphine’s is an interesting place and probably modelled on Austrian Frida Strindberg’s (divorced from the Swedish playwright) Cave of the Golden Calf, a basement club on Heddon Street, just off Regent Street that operated around the same time (just pre-WW1). The Cave of the Golden Calf loved Chinoiserie (Katherine Mansfield introduced the acts in Chinese robes) and Delphine’s has some rather Chinois furniture, paintings and wallpaper too. More on the Cave of the Golden Calf in plenty of books including Anne Witchard’s Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie and Peter Brooker’s Bohemia in London. The Cave also featured, in thinly veiled form, in several of Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu novels. Can’t find any pictures from the show that highlight the Chinoiserie of Delphine’s, but here’s a peek….

and the real thing…

From the Daily Mirror, July 1912