by Theo Aronson
Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underworld
Theo Aronson
Copyright © 2013, Theo Aronson
All Rights Reserved
This edition published in 2013 by:
Thistle Publishing
36 Great Smith Street
London
SW1P 3BU
For
Aedwyn Darroll
Contents
Copyright
Illustrations
Author’s Note
Prologue:
The Mystery Prince
Part One:
CITY OF THE PLAIN
1. ‘The lad that’s lettered GPO’
2. ‘Apples of Sodom’
Part Two:
BORN TO BE KING
3. Motherdear’s Boy
4. ‘A carefully brought-up boy’
5. The Student Prince
6. The Chocolate Soldier
Part Three:
JACK THE RIPPER
7. Royal Jack
8. Ripping for the Prince
9. Kings and Queens
Part Four:
THE SCANDAL
10. ‘My Lord Gomorrah’
11. ‘The whole terrible affair’
12. ‘I never mentioned the boy’s name’
Part Five:
DUKE OF CLARENCE
13. ‘The greatest position there is’
14. The Death and the Legend
Epilogue:
The Warrior’s Tomb
Notes
Illustrations
1. Prince Albert Victor (Eddy), Duke of Clarence and Avondale
2. Three of the boys involved in the homosexual brothel case
3. The Cleveland Street brothel
4. Charles Hammond, the brothel-keeper
5. Lord Arthur Somerset
6. A male prostitute, in drag
7. The Prince and Princess of Wales with Prince Eddy and Prince George dressed as girls
8. Prince Eddy and Prince George during their visit to Australia
9. The Prince of Wales
10. Alexandra, Princess of Wales
11. The Wales family in the early 1880s
12. Prince Eddy during his first year at Cambridge
13. Jim Stephen, the Prince’s Cambridge mentor
14. Prince Eddy at the time of the Jack the Ripper murders
15. The Prince during his tour of India
16. A policeman taking statements from the telegraph boys
17. An artist’s impression of a pimp at the time of the Cleveland Street Scandal
18. Five of the boys involved in the brothel case
19. The newly created Duke of Clarence and Avondale
20. Princess Hélène d’Orléans
21. Princess May of Teck
22. An artist’s depiction of ‘a nation’s calamity’
23. Sir Alfred Gilbert’s monument to Prince Eddy at Windsor
Plates 1, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 19, 21, 22 and 23, Author’s Collection; 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 16, 17 and 18, The Illustrated Police News; 7, The Royal Archives © Her Majesty the Queen; 13, from J.K. Stephen, Lapsus Calami; 15, J.D. Reese, The Duke of Clarence and Avondale in Southern India; 20, Hugo Vickers.
Author’s Note
I have not set out to write a conventional biography of Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale. The destruction of all his papers (for reasons which will become apparent on reading this book) would, in any case, have made this impossible. Rather, I have explored the central mystery of his life: his sexual orientation. For the Prince’s name has been linked to one of the greatest sexual scandals of the period. The uncovering of a homosexual brothel in London’s Cleveland Street led, in turn, to an extraordinary cover-up on the part of the government; a cover-up which is explicable only in the light of the Prince’s involvement in the scandal.
At the same time, and in order to put the affair into perspective, I have painted a picture of the active and colourful homosexual underworld during the last decades of the reign of the Prince’s grandmother, Queen Victoria.
I am indebted to three main original sources for my material. They are the files of the Director of Public Prosecutions at the Public Record Office, Chancery Lane; the Home Office files at the Public Record Office, Kew; and the Esher papers held at the Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge. I have also been able to consult those two privately printed and circulated studies of the Victorian homosexual underworld held in the British Library: The Sins of the Cities of the Plain by Jack Saul and The Intersexes by Edward I. Stevenson, writing as ‘Xavier Mayne’. For help, to a greater or lesser extent, I must thank, in alphabetical order, Myrtle V. Cooper of the Archives Department, Metropolitan Police Service; Aedwyn Darroll; Alex Hooper of the Falmouth Art Gallery; R.R. Milne, Sub-Librarian of Trinity College Library, Cambridge; Stephen Mitchell; S.G. Roberts of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts; Barry Rose of the Criminologist; Martin Taylor of the Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge; Hugo Vickers; A. Williams of the Public Record Office; Colin Wilson. I am grateful to the staffs of the Public Record Office at Chancery Lane and Kew, the British Library and the Newspaper Library at Colindale, the Bristol Reference Library, the Bath Reference Library and, most particularly, the Frome Library. Two books that have proved useful are The Cleveland Street Affair by Lewis Chester, David Leitch and Colin Simpson, and The Cleveland Street Scandal by H. Montgomery Hyde.
As always, my greatest debt is to Brian Roberts for his unfailing interest and support.
PROLOGUE
The Mystery Prince
In November 1970 an article in a relatively obscure British journal unleashed a flood of international speculation. The article concerned the notorious Victorian mass-murderer, ‘Jack the Ripper’. Writing in the Criminologist, a Dr T.E.A. Stowell claimed to know the Ripper’s identity. Although there has never been any shortage of Ripper suspects, what made Stowell’s claim especially remarkable was the status of his subject. Without actually giving a name, he supplied enough information to make his candidate’s identity abundantly clear. It was none other than Queen Victoria’s grandson, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale. As Heir Presumptive to the British throne and future King-Emperor, the Prince had been destined to occupy what the Queen blandly described as ‘the greatest position there is’.1
The eighty-five-year-old Dr Stowell had been convinced of Prince Albert Victor’s guilt for over half a century. He had kept the evidence to himself, he said, ‘for fear of involving, as witnesses, some close friends who had still been alive’.2 But ten years before, in 1960, Stowell had discussed his theory with the writer, Colin Wilson. The two had met, on Stowell’s suggestion, after Wilson had written a series of articles on Jack the Ripper. Over lunch, Stowell had told Colin Wilson that he was convinced that Prince Albert Victor – always known in the royal family as Eddy – had been the Ripper. The murders had been committed during fits of insanity brought on by the Prince’s syphilis; indeed his death, at the age of twenty-eight in 1892, had been due not, as was generally believed, to pneumonia but to a syphilitic ‘softening of the brain’. This information came, Stowell assured Wilson, from his reading of the private papers of Queen Victoria’s physician, Sir William Gull.
In his twelve-page article ‘Jack the Ripper – A Solution?’, published in the Criminologist in November 1970, Dr Stowell was less frank than he had been with Colin Wilson. Instead of referring to Prince Albert Victor by name, he called his suspect ‘S’. Although Stowell is wrong on several minor points, there can be no doubt that ‘S’ was Prince Albert Victor.
Stowell’s sensational insinuat
ion – that Jack the Ripper had been Queen Victoria’s grandson, the great-uncle of Queen Elizabeth II – was eagerly taken up by press, radio and television. But at this point Stowell began to back-track. Interviewed on television, he refused to confirm or deny that the Prince had been the Ripper. On 4 November an entry in The Times Diary claimed that Buckingham Palace regarded this ‘mischievous calumny’ as ‘too ridiculous for comment’. It went on to quote evidence from ‘a loyalist on the staff of Buckingham Palace’ which proved that the Prince had been in Scotland at the time of two of the murders.3
Apparently taking fright, Stowell promptly wrote to The Times to deny that he had ever implied that Prince Albert Victor was the mass-murderer. He signed his letter as ‘a loyalist and a royalist’.4
And then, on 8 November 1970 – by one of life’s extraordinary twists – Dr Stowell suddenly died. Just over a week had passed since the publication of his theory. Stowell’s son, Dr T. Eldon Stowell, interviewed by a clutch of reporters, claimed that all the papers on which his late father had based his extraordinary story had been destroyed immediately after his death. ‘I read just enough to make certain that there was nothing of importance,’ said Dr Stowell Jr. ‘My family decided that this was the right thing to do. I am not prepared to discuss our grounds for doing so.’5
By then, however, the story had been taken up by the world’s press. It has been estimated that over 3,000 newspapers and magazines carried reports of Stowell’s dramatic unmasking of Prince Albert Victor. Suddenly photographs and descriptions of this long-forgotten figure appeared across the globe. The Prince certainly looked suspicious. With his hooded eyes, waxed moustache, elongated face and immaculate clothes, he exuded an odd, mysterious, faintly sinister air. Even allowing for the limitations of late Victorian photography, he had a curiously inanimate look; his gaze was impenetrable.
Although, for a variety of reasons, Stowell’s theory was subsequently dismissed, rumours about the intriguing figure of Prince Albert Victor continued to spread. Indeed, they became progressively wilder. He was said to have been slow-witted to the point of imbecility. He had led an exceptionally dissipated life, having indulged in unmentionable vices. He had been homosexual. Secretly married, the Prince had fathered an illegitimate child. If he had not actually been Jack the Ripper, he had been closely connected with the murders. Kept for years under close supervision, Prince Albert Victor had died, not at Sandringham, but in a private mental home, from syphilis. He had been poisoned; his fingers and toes had turned suspiciously black after his death. Some claimed that he had not died in 1892 at all but had lived on, locked away in a castle like some latter-day Man in the Iron Mask, until 1933. The fact that all documentation about his life has been destroyed – that, in the discreet phraseology of the Royal Archives, ‘his file has not survived’6 – merely adds weight to these theories. It renders him even more enigmatic.
Out of this welter of rumour, conjecture, claim and counter-claim about the life of Prince Albert Victor, there emerges one accusation that cannot be dismissed. There is one story that remains unchallenged; one mystery that is left unsolved. This is the Prince’s alleged involvement, not in the Ripper murders, but in another Victorian cause célèbre – the notorious homosexual brothel case known as the Cleveland Street scandal.
PART ONE
CITY OF THE PLAIN
CHAPTER ONE
‘The lad that’s lettered GPO’
The Victorians were enthusiastic senders of telegrams: it was such a wonderfully quick and easy way of communicating. ‘Telegraphed from lunch till teatime,’ reported the ebullient Duchess of Teck, mother of the future Queen Mary, one day in 1880.1 When Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee, it was suggested that each of her 372 million subjects should send her a telegram of congratulation. Fortunately, the suggestion was never taken up.
Telegraphing was particularly popular among certain homosexuals. This popularity had nothing to do with speed or convenience; it was in the messenger rather than in the message that they were interested. To them, telegraph boys proved a source of irresistible attraction. These cheeky lads in their tight blue uniforms and jauntily angled caps were welcomed – quite literally in some cases – with open arms. To one besotted writer they were ‘the aristocracy of the messenger world’; to another, they were ‘young modern Mercuries’2. Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s companion, was involved with a telegraph boy at Oxford. His namesake, Sholto Douglas, co-translator of a collection of poems on boy-love, coveted a telegraph boy named George Browning. John Gambril Nicholson, one of the leading ‘Uranian’ poets of the period, claimed that chief among the many ‘smart-looking lads’ that he admired was ‘the lad that’s lettered GPO’.3
The boys themselves never seemed to mind the frequency with which they were obliged to deliver yet another unnecessary telegram from one gentleman to another. ‘For one week the numbers of telegraph and messenger boys who came to the door was simply scandalous,’ wrote the well-known illustrator Aubrey Beardsley to a friend.4 The lads were apparently quite ready to subject themselves to what they called ‘spooning’ with some heavily bewhiskered ‘toff’ in his study. This could range from having one’s hair ruffled to being masturbated or fellated. There were harder ways, in Victorian London, of earning a couple of shillings.
The hub of this telegraphic activity was the Central Telegraph Office situated in the General Post Office West, an imposing, red-brick, Victorian-Gothic pile in St Martin’s-le-Grand in the City of London. So it was altogether appropriate that it should have been here that one of the greatest homosexual scandals of the period had its origins. It all started with the questioning of a fifteen-year-old telegraph messenger boy named Charles Swinscow. On 4 July 1889, young Swinscow was summoned to the office of a senior Post Office official. Here he was questioned by Police Constable Luke Hanks, a retired policeman now attached to the Post Office. There had recently been a theft of a sum of money from the Receiver General’s Department, said Hanks; could Swinscow explain how he had been seen with as much as eighteen shillings in his possession? For a boy who earned only a few shillings a week, this was a considerable sum.
‘I did not have so much as that,’ said the boy, ‘but I had fourteen shillings.’
‘Where did you get it?’ asked Hanks.
‘I got it from doing some private work away from the office.’
‘For whom?’
‘For a gentleman named Hammond.’
‘Where does he live?’
‘19 Cleveland Street.’
‘What did you do for him?’
‘Will I get into trouble if I tell you?’ asked the lad.
‘I cannot say.’
‘Must I tell you?’
‘Certainly.’
‘I will tell you the truth,’ said Swinscow. ‘I got the money from Mr Hammond for going to bed with gentlemen at his house.’
At this point PC Hanks lost all interest in the theft of money and switched his attention to the far more interesting story which Swinscow had to tell.
Not long after Swinscow had joined the Post Office service he had been approached by a fellow employee, a boy with the appropriate name of Henry Newlove. Newlove had persuaded Swinscow to accompany him into a cubicle in the basement lavatory. The boys had then, as PC Hanks noted in his painstaking police phraseology, ‘behaved indecently together’. This indecent behaviour had taken place on several more occasions during the course of the next few days and, at the end of a week, Newlove asked Swinscow if he would like to earn four shillings by going to bed with a gentleman in a house in Cleveland Street. Initially hesitant, Swinscow was talked round and the two boys went to 19 Cleveland Street.
Here the proprietor – the balding, heavily moustached and businesslike Charles Hammond – assured young Swinscow that he was delighted that he had been able to come and immediately introduced him to a waiting ‘gentleman’. The boy was then taken by the man into the back parlour where there was a bed. ‘We both undressed and being
quite naked got into bed. He put his person between my legs and an emission took place.’ After half an hour they got up and the man gave Swinscow a sovereign. This he handed over to Hammond who gave him back four shillings. Swinscow subsequently visited the house again where he had sex with ‘another gentleman’.
Pressed by PC Hanks, Swinscow admitted that he knew of at least two more postal employees who had visited the Cleveland Street house. Hanks sent for the first of these, a seventeen-year-old youth named George Wright. Wright, too, had been recruited by the diligent Newlove. As before, Newlove had inveigled Wright into the basement lavatory where ‘more than once, Newlove put his person into me, that is to say behind, only a little way, and something came from him’.
Having been thus satisfactorily broken in, Wright was taken by Newlove to Cleveland Street. Here, he explained to the doggedly recording PC Hanks, ‘another gentleman came in whom I should know again, I think a rather foreign-looking chap. I went with the latter into a bedroom, on the same floor and we both undressed and we got into the bed quite naked. He told me to suck him. I did so. He then had a go between my legs and that was all. He gave me half a sovereign which I gave to the landlord who gave me four shillings.’
The industrious Newlove then asked Wright if he knew of ‘another nice little boy’, younger and shorter than himself, who might be interested in earning four shillings. Wright did indeed. He suggested a friend with another of those wonderfully apposite names, Charles Thickbroom. Thickbroom, too, became a willing partner in Newlove’s tireless excursions to the basement lavatory although, as Newlove ruefully admitted to Wright, his attempts to get his ‘person into Thickbroom’s hinderparts’ proved unsuccessful, no matter how hard or how often he tried. Nevertheless, Thickbroom was duly taken to Cleveland Street. Here, luckily, there was no putting in of persons by the gentlemen; merely ‘playing with each other’.