The Story of the Raven and of the Kat

Chris Robert

Once upon a time, when the lights shone bright at a crossing point of the Ravensbourne river, two girls shared a room above an alley off Catford Broadway. Due to an administrative error on the council’s part, the alley was also called Catford Broadway and, if you strained your neck from the top deck of the 47, you could still just catch sight of it. 

Like countless others, the pair were lured by the exotic excitements of Catford’s cinemas, theatres and film studios. One of the girls, it was said, had fled a life of destitution, prostitution and an institution. The other, it was claimed, was a foreign princess whose whole family was murdered by revolutionaries. One of them was called Katherine Ford and the other Raven Bjorn. One was dark, one blonde, both were tall, fierce, troubled and beautiful. They never spoke publicly of their lives before Catford. It was as if they’d just appeared like magic from nowhere. They had found each other and grown together, working in the theatres on SE6’s Great White Way.

Their tales were traced in the memoirs of old thespians, collections of playbills and adverts in local papers. They knocked them dead at the local playhouse and rapidly advanced from the back of the stage to leading roles. Their performances were proclaimed in the Catford Journal, The Stage and South London Gazette. Their film debuts in the early horror picture, Feast of Blood, drew more fans even though the film itself was lost when the studio buildings were bombed in 1940.

Raven Bjorn played the wicked sidekick of the film’s leading man, Varney the Vampire, and Katherine Ford was the plucky heroine. The film gained them a particular following among the young women of London, the notorious “gut girls” of Deptford, who by day slaughtered animals at Convoy Wharf, but at night adopted the style and sophisticated manners of the woman they referred to as The Raven.

Success lured Raven to Hollywood and Katherine, who always wanted proper speaking roles, to the West End. Their exodus from Catford, and the film studio’s move to Walthamstow, marked the end of “flapper Catford” and some of the lights on the Broadway were forever dimmed. 

Katherine became a huge star, specialising in lovable rogues and bad girls turned good, before she exchanged one form of theatre for another and joined her husband, a Bermondsey doctor, in bringing medical relief to the poor of South London. The local people loved her. To them, she was a true cockney sparrer who had turned her back on fame to help the needy. She brought up her own daughter, Helena, near the Angel pub on the SE16 waterfront.

Helena is my connection to the story. She used to joke with me that one of the two friends got the Queen Mary but her mum got the number 47. It’s my bus to work too but I only take it when it’s raining heavily or for funerals. Today it is Helena’s funeral. That just leaves me to tell the tale.

Imagine getting to know people, scripting their lives, learning about their times and, through a combination of knowledge, skill and research, bringing back magic and recognition, only to see it all vanish again. That’s what I do at a lottery-funded project called Breadcrumbs of The Mind – BoTM, or Bottom to staff and our naughtier clients. It’s a simple enough concept based on the idea of following a trail of breadcrumbs back home. We encourage older people to block together memories, places and other associations. These are the pathways that, should they succumb to dementia, they, or their loved ones, can use to navigate their way back home. In a sense it’s scripting their own life and, given my theatrical background, it suits me. 

Objects can be enough to trigger memory and the BoTM project encourages people to engage all the senses – smell, taste, touch and sound as well as sight. One woman I worked with recovered much of her memory after I brought in a space hopper, having seen an old picture of her playing with one. My role is to discover the right key, that elusive shimmer in the grass, a glint in the eye, a half-open door or shining path. Helena, pronounced He lain ah, was a very special shining path, so much so that I sometimes called her the Lady Helena, which seemed to delight and frighten her. I wonder if it helped force a memory.

Helena was elegant, fine boned and funny but also intensely serious. She once showed me a box that, she insisted, was to be buried with her. Inside it was an intricate gold statue of a dancing figure, underneath which was inscribed, in what she assured me was Russian, “To my darling Katerina”.

When she showed it to me, I imagined the Raven handing it to the Kat before leaving for Hollywood, an heirloom she’d had engraved as a monument to the friendship between two young actresses determined to succeed. I had fallen a little in love with both Helena and the magic of her mother’s relationship with Raven so in my head I quickly projected a parting scene, with variations and costume changes.

I found some information about the Raven and the Kat in old newspapers and uploaded recordings, as well from chatting to Helena. Even though Kat had an accessible back story media-wise, it still pays to dig around and, besides, the incidental stories are brilliant. For example, I’d never heard of the gut girls, a fierce fashion-conscious tribe of women with their own style, a decent wage for a bloody job and a fondness for drinking. For at least one generation of them, Raven and Kat were heroes, style icons and fashion guides. Once, when Raven cut off her hair for a theatre performance, thirty gut girls arrived in the opening week and hurled their own recently shorn locks onto the stage as tribute.

Even when that generation grew up they still followed Raven in Hollywood and eventually it transpired that she was not a fairy-tale princess but a real Russian one who had been hiding her true identity. In 1932, when her car careened off Route One and into the Pacific Ocean, Soviet agents were blamed and in retribution the gut girls burned down the New Cross Communist Party offices. At the Rotherhithe branch, a huge cordon of men, many related to the protesting women, held back the angry mob who had to be satisfied with redecorating the front of the building with blood and guts from the slaughter houses they worked in. 

Afterwards, people spoke of Raven as a people’s princess. Kat Ford, meanwhile, slipped from the public eye. There is footage on YouTube of a middle-aged Katherine, alongside a young Helena, being interviewed about health in South London. Katherine speaks very clearly in clipped BBC tones. An earlier video features a youthful cockney Kat Ford belting out the music hall classic, “Knockin ‘em Dead on the Barrars of the Walworth Road”. 

Helena once described her mother and Raven as being like Garbo and Barbara Windsor. Gabby cockney versus reserved foreign ingénue. Sometimes she called them Posh and Bexley. As with many of our clients, she occasionally appeared to be confused so when she talked about her mum in the abstract and mixed up the two friends, I put it down to the mental frailty of age. 

She once told me, “Kat was the better actress, she loved the role of the doomed princess; but Raven was good at accents and just wanted to be normal.” 

I thought a lot about this and next time I saw her I questioned her about it and about Raven’s gift to her mum of the figurine. Helena looked puzzled and said,

“No, it was always mum’s. It’s something from our family. Nash, as they say in Russian.”

It occurred to me that I’d missed something and maybe Helena was actually Raven’s daughter, or thought she was. I looked into it and checked some key dates, and I realised that this was impossible. 

An alternative was that dementia and confusion had taken hold in Helena’s mind. But the rest of her behaviour did not suggest this. At the project we have guidelines about leading people down memory paths or promoting particular versions of events, as the underlying ethos is for people to rediscover and take ownership of their own past and stories. We might nudge them away from delusions that could lead to self-harm, or prompt them to return using the “breadcrumbs” but too blatant a steer is considered counterproductive. 

For a few months the talk switched to Helena’s own career as a book editor, for a long time at Penguin books on the Strand but also for other companies based around Fleet Street. Many of the breadcrumbs trails I helped devise for her involved the smell of new books and newsprint, and the sounds and sights of routes along the river. We recreated some of her walks to work along the Thames and it was one of these routes that triggered another revelation about her mother. 

Helena mostly walked to work from Bermondsey over Tower Bridge and along the north bank but returned home over Southwark Bridge. These areas have changed a great deal since then and the docks have closed but one evening Helena told me something I didn’t know. She said that Russian treasures, gold and silver, had once been stored on Tooley Street. The tsarists had originally used the vaults but the Bolsheviks claimed their contents when they came to power. Helena became agitated as she was telling the tale but said that knowing the past enabled her to imagine a different future. 

I shouldn’t have intervened but I did, asking, “A different future for Raven you mean?”

She stopped and said, “A different future for mum but yes, poor Raven as well. I wish I’d met her, such a brave woman, so full of life. Mum adored her and she never betrayed us, even at the end when she knew the Reds were coming for her.”

Helena paused and remembered something. 

“Mum got a telegram. I’ve got it here somewhere, a final farewell just days before the crash.”

Helena fumbled in a drawer and pulled out a yellowing piece of paper that had been carefully covered in plastic to protect it.

It read. “My darling Raven. I’ve not much time. I don’t regret my dreams or reaching for them and shall never forget the part you played in realising them. I send you all my love and hope your dreams remain intact and beautiful and, most of all, that you are safe.” 

It was signed “your Kat”. 

Suddenly a new scene appeared in my mind-cinema – a flashback, if you like, from the start of the film. In it two shivering teenagers in a badly lit, draughty room south of the Thames shared the secrets of the different dangers they were hiding from. I really felt as if I was there, watching and, even though it was the silent era, hearing the conversation that had “Katherine Ford” saying to Raven: 

“Well, why don’t you take the name I was going to take? Common old Kat Ford? And,” she added with a swish and a flourish, “I can be the mysterious Raven Bjorn. I always wanted to be a princess.”

To which came the reply: “I always wanted a normal life. And my real name is Katerina.”

Thus the girls switched roles for life. The statue had been Kat’s all along, the only thing that remained from her Russian childhood. 

There were not so very many people at Helena’s funeral at Camberwell New Cemetery, just some friends, neighbours and a few theatrical history types. I was the only one there, though, who knew this was the passing of the very last of the Romanovs, my friend the Lady Helena. As I stood in the drizzle of the South London graveyard I thought of another grave, one where one of the best actresses and bravest women of her generation lies. A cockney girl from an orphanage, buried as a foreign starlet and “princess” under a borrowed name in the sun of California.