The Petticoat Parade: Madam Monnier and the Roe Street Brothels

The Petticoat Parade, a true crime biography and social history of Josie de Bray’s life is the latest book from award-winning author, Leigh Straw.

Josie de Bray, aka Madam Monnier, aka Marie Louise Monnier, was a brothel madam who owned most of Roe Street, Perth from WWI up to the 1940s. A returned soldier tried to shoot her dead in her brothel in 1917 and her ‘bungalow’ was at the centre of underworld violence in the 1920s.

She returned to France before WWII to visit family and was bombed repeatedly out of homes there and captured by the Germans. She was a prisoner of war and one story has her in a concentration camp. She survived, returned to Perth in 1947 and took up business again in Roe Street, having made a fortune from the rent collected from her brothels while she was a prisoner of war, up until her death in 1953.