by Theo Aronson
A youth named George Brown was furious at being offered only £10 by his rich client. ‘I could wipe my arse on that!’ he protested. ‘I mean to have a cool hundred; as I know it’s nothing to you, who can swindle more than that any day in the City. Shall I call at your Cornhill Office for it on Monday, or will you give me an IOU?’ Although the terrified client scribbled out an IOU, Brown demanded his rings as security until he collected the money the following day.29
Others employed even more threatening methods. A renter called Clifton would take clients back to his room ‘where by arrangement two or three men are secreted under his bed, and just as they are performing, the men suddenly come out and bounce money out of him by threats.’30
From here it was a short step to blackmail. Not without good reason was the Criminal Law Amendment Bill known as the Blackmailer’s Charter. Before its passing, social stigma was the worst thing to be feared by those accused of homosexual offences other than buggery; now they faced criminal prosecution. Two particularly successful blackmailers of the time were James Burton and Frederick Atkins. They operated as a team, with the older Burton claiming the teenaged Atkins as his nephew. They were known as Uncle Burton and Freddy.
The back of the circle of the Alhambra Theatre was Freddy’s beat. Having made contact with some prosperous-looking, dress-suited gentleman, he would take him back to his rooms in Buckingham Palace Road or, better still, to a hotel room where clients were less likely to make a fuss. Here Freddy and his gentleman friend would be discovered in flagrante delicto by Freddy’s ostensibly shocked uncle. Uncle Burton would demand a substantial sum of money in exchange for his silence and, having obtained the terrified client’s address, would call at his place of work to extort further payment. Once an address was known, blackmail could continue indefinitely.
Even in remote Falmouth in Cornwall, then no more than a small town, a mother and her adolescent son conducted a successful blackmailing business. The boy would pass on the names and addresses of his lovers to his mother who would then arrive at their homes to demand payment for her silence. Her extortions apparently led to at least two suicides and only when one victim was brave enough to take her to court was a stop put to her distasteful practices. But the action ruined the poor victim.
One of London’s most notorious prostitutes of the period was Jack Saul. His memoirs, clandestinely printed in a limited subscription edition, were entitled The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, or the Recollections of a Mary-Anne. Even allowing for some exaggeration, they give a vivid picture of the Victorian homosexual underworld. The book of memoirs was introduced and edited by a man calling himself ‘Mr Cambon’. Cambon had first met Jack Saul, in 1874, in Leicester Square.
‘He was dressed in tight-fitting clothes, which set off his Adonis-like figure to the best advantage, especially about what snobs call the fork of his trousers, where evidently he was endowed by nature with a very extraordinary development of male appendage,’ wrote Cambon. ‘He had small and elegant feet, set off by pretty patent leather boots, a fresh-looking beardless face, with almost feminine features, auburn hair, and sparkling blue eyes which told me that the handsome youth must indeed be one of the Mary-Annes of London …
‘That lump in his trousers had quite a fascinating effect upon me. Was it natural or made up by some artificial means? If real, what a size when excited; how I should like to handle such a manly jewel …’
Having approached this young Adonis, Cambon suggested that they take a cab to his chambers in Cornwall Mansions, near Baker Street station.
‘I see you are evidently a fast young chap and can put me up to a thing or two,’ said Cambon.
‘Put your thing up, I suppose you mean,’ answered Saul, who apparently excelled at this sort of camp double entendre.
Emboldened by two bottles of champagne ‘of an extra sec brand’ and a couple of ‘good warm glasses of brandy hot’, Cambon suggested that as his guest seemed ‘so evidently well hung’ he would like to satisfy his curiosity about it. ‘Is it real or made up for show?’
‘As real as my face, Sir, and a good deal prettier,’ quipped Saul, taking out ‘a tremendous prick’. ‘Did you ever see such a fine tosser in your life?’
Cambon had not. ‘He had a priapus nearly ten inches long, very thick, and underhung by a most glorious pair of balls which were surrounded and set off by quite a profusion of light auburn curls. I hate to see balls hang loosely down, or even a fine prick with small or scarcely any stones to it – these half and half tools are an abomination … “By Jove,” I exclaimed.
‘ “It’s my only fortune, sir,” Saul replied. “But it really provides for all I want.” ’
It was not, in fact, Saul’s only fortune. His skill, and his preference, was for fellatio and before long he was demonstrating it on Cambon by the light of the blazing coal-fire. Cambon’s reaction can only be described as ecstatic.
‘After resting awhile, and taking a little more stimulant,’ continued Cambon, ‘I asked him how he had come to acquire such a decided taste for gamahuching to do it so deliciously as he did.
‘ “That would be too long a tale to go into now,” he replied. “Some other day, if you will make it worth my while, I will give you my whole history.”
‘ “Could you write it out, or give me an outline so that I might put it into the shape of a tale?”
‘ “Certainly, but it would take me so much time that you would have to make me a present of at least twenty pounds. It would take me three or four weeks several hours a day.”
‘ “I don’t mind a fiver a week if you give me a fair lot, say thirty or forty pages of note-paper a week, tolerably well written,” I replied.’31
So, in the course of the next few weeks Saul provided Cambon with the story of his life as a Mary-Anne; from his schooldays when ‘it was sometimes necessary to go in for a general suck all round to give our bottoms a rest’, to his adventures among the aristocracy.32 He once proved to a certain Lord H. that he was not ‘too shy or mock-modest’ by fellating him in a rocky arbour in the grounds of ‘a noble mansion on the banks of the Thames’ during the course of a garden party. On another occasion, dressed as a midshipman, he was presented to the Prince of Wales. In the Prince’s retinue that day was a member of a German royal family who assured Saul that his fortune would be made if he would consent to visit Berlin and Vienna, where he would be introduced to ‘many of the highest personages in Germany’.33 Dressed in ‘charming female costume’ he would attend soirées in elegant town houses. He was once sodomized while sitting on the lap of a gentleman playing the piano and singing, ‘Don’t You Remember Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt’.34
Reading Saul’s memoirs, one can well believe his assertion that ‘the extent to which pederasty is carried on in London between gentlemen and young fellows is little dreamed of by the outside public.’35
Many male prostitutes, whether part-time or professional, could take their clients to a so-called maison de passe. This was a house which not only supplied sexual partners but in which a client could arrange to meet someone or to which he could bring a casual pick-up. Charles Hammond’s house, at 19 Cleveland Street, was a maison de passe. There were usually two or three professionals working there but – much to their annoyance – Hammond would often recruit complete amateurs, such as the ring of telegraph boys which was uncovered in the summer of 1889. The client would pay his sovereign direct to one of the boys, who would then hand it over to Hammond. Hammond would give him four shillings and keep sixteen for himself. As £1 in the 1880s was equal to £35 today, these were not inconsiderable sums. In half an hour of not unpleasurable activity, a boy could earn at least twice the equivalent of a week’s wages. On a good night, prostitutes like Saul could make £8: almost £300 today.
Lord Arthur Somerset – whom Newlove, that diligent seducer and procurer of his fellow Post Office employees, revealed as a frequent visitor to the Cleveland Street house – appears to have made full use of all its facilities. He had sex
with telegraph boys and he would arrange to meet chance pick-ups, such as soldiers, at the address. Within a couple of days of Newlove’s accusation, Lord Arthur Somerset was seen meeting a soldier outside the now empty house – Hammond and the self-styled Reverend Veck having fled – and a few days after this he was again positively identified by a couple of the telegraph boys.
And yet, to the mystification of the police, no warrant was issued for Somerset’s arrest. Not even when the authorities finally decided that proceedings should be instituted against him, was any move made. There seemed to be an inexplicable reluctance on the part of certain government departments to act.
What was the reason for this delay? Were the authorities giving Somerset time to get out of the country? And, if so, why? The answer was to be found in a claim made by Lord Arthur’s solicitor – the young Arthur Newton. Newton warned Hamilton Cuffe, the Assistant Public Prosecutor, who hurriedly passed the warning on to his chief, Sir Augustus Stephenson, that if Lord Arthur Somerset were prosecuted, ‘a very distinguished person’ would become involved.36 In his report to his chief, Cuffe used the initials of this person only but they were enough to cause consternation in the upper echelons of the administration. To hold Cuffe’s letter, with its heavy scoring beside the initials, in one’s hands today, is to appreciate the alarm with which it was passed, in strictest confidence, from one departmental head to another until it reached the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, himself.
For the initials – PAV – stood for Prince Albert Victor who, as Queen Victoria’s grandson and the eldest son of the Prince of Wales, was Heir Presumptive to the British throne. True or not, the rumour that a future King had been a visitor to the Cleveland Street house would mean a scandal of monumental proportions.
To understand how the name of Prince Albert Victor could possibly have been mentioned in connection with a homosexual brothel, one needs to go back and follow – from the time of his birth twenty-five years before – the curious career of this young Prince.
PART TWO
Born to be King
CHAPTER THREE
Motherdear’s Boy
If, as one theory suggests, the first-or last-born son of a preoccupied father and a possessive mother is very likely to be born homosexual, then Prince Albert Victor could serve as a classic example. Born on 8 January 1864, he was the eldest son of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales who, in turn, was Queen Victoria’s eldest son and Heir Apparent to the British throne. His mother was Princess Alexandra, daughter of King Christian IX of Denmark.
Seldom can two parents have fulfilled the prerequisites of the theory so comprehensively. The Prince of Wales was one of the most preoccupied men of the age, his chief preoccupation being the pursuit of pleasure. Restless, easily bored, lacking in application, denied any meaningful employment by Queen Victoria, the Prince of Wales lived in what his despairing mother called ‘a whirl of amusements’.1 The high-minded if heavy-handed efforts of the Queen and Prince Albert to mould their eldest son into an intellectual and moral paragon had been completely wasted. The Prince of Wales emerged from his years of force-fed education as an unashamed hedonist. Even before his marriage, at the early age of twenty-one, he showed signs of the unremitting search for distraction that was to characterize his entire life.
Of all these distractions, the one to which the Prince of Wales applied himself with the most zest was fornication. Indeed, it was in the hope that his budding sexuality might be curbed that his marriage had been hurried on. The Prince’s affair with an actress had so shocked his upright father, Prince Albert, that it had led, in Queen Victoria’s distraught imagination, directly to her husband’s premature death. Having been told ‘the disgusting details’ of her son’s ‘fall’, the widowed Queen admitted to her eldest daughter Victoria, Crown Princess of Prussia, that ‘I never can or shall look at him without a shudder.’2 An early marriage was essential to halt her son’s drift into debauchery.
‘Marry early he must …’ agreed the serious-minded Crown Princess in a letter to her mother. ‘The chances are, if he married a nice wife that he likes, she will keep him straight; and, as he is too weak to keep from sin for virtue’s sake, he will only keep out of it from other motives, and surely a wife will be the strongest.’3
It was a vain hope. Denied enough time for the sowing of his wild oats before marriage, the Prince of Wales simply sowed them after. His brief honeymoon over, he plunged himself, with even more enthusiasm, not only into his frenetic social activities but also into the gratification of his sexual appetite.
That his eighteen-year-old bride should be affected by all this was inevitable. Princess Alexandra of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg had been raised in relative obscurity and simplicity. Her outstanding beauty rather than her dynastic importance had been the chief reason for her choice as a suitable wife for the future King of Great Britain. In spite of her bandbox elegance, Princess Alexandra retained something of the domesticity and provincialism of the Danish court. Home and family would always be at the centre of her world. Although ready enough, in the early days of her marriage, to accompany her husband on his social round, she could never really keep up with him. She was simply not sophisticated enough for his worldly milieu. By no stretch of the imagination an intellectual, the Prince of Wales nevertheless enjoyed the company of quick-witted women. His wife soon proved herself to be too artless and childlike for his taste.
Drawing them still further apart was her increasing deafness. From her mother, Queen Louise of Denmark, the Princess had inherited a form of deafness known as otosclerosis. It was to be inherited, in turn, by her eldest son. As the years went by, so the Princess found it more and more difficult to follow conversation. This not only cut her off from the sparkling company in which her husband delighted but from her husband himself.
Nor was Princess Alexandra, for all her grace and beauty, sensual or voluptuous enough for the Prince of Wales. Lady Antrim, who knew her well, suspected that she was sexually cold. The Prince might have been a more faithful husband if the Princess had been a more loving wife, Lady Antrim once claimed. The Prince’s infidelities (‘I often think her lot is no easy one,’ wrote Queen Victoria in the year after the couple’s marriage, for although the Princess was fond of her husband, she was ‘not blind’4) had the effect of narrowing Princess Alexandra’s horizons yet further. She began to cling, ever more tenaciously, to those whom she knew best: a small circle of companions, her warm-hearted Danish family and above all, her children. She clung, most tenaciously of all, to her first-born son, Prince Albert Victor.
There is only one recorded occasion on which Prince Albert Victor, notorious for his dilatoriness, was not merely on time but actually early: this was for his birth. Due to be born in March 1864, a year after his parents’ marriage, he arrived two months premature, on 8 January.
During the first few months of the marriage, Queen Victoria had despaired of the couple ever having a child. In her opinion, the rackety life which the Prince of Wales was forcing his wife to lead was seriously undermining her health. ‘I fear Bertie [the Prince of Wales] and she will soon be nothing but two puppets running about for show all day and night,’5 complained the Queen; Alix [the Princess of Wales] was ‘looking so sallow and losing her fraîcheur’.6
‘We are all seriously alarmed about her,’ she confided to the Crown Princess of Prussia in June 1863, ‘for although Bertie writes and says he is so anxious to take care of her, he goes on going out every night till she will become a skeleton.’ Hopes of her becoming a mother, sighed the Queen, ‘there cannot be!!’7
Within a few weeks of writing this letter, the Queen was proved wrong. By the end of June the Princess was pregnant. According to one witness who saw Princess Alexandra that summer, she ‘showed her condition very little … she seems perfectly well, has not an ailment of any kind or sort to complain of and has a very good fresh colour.’8
But all was not as well as it appeared. Throughout her pregnancy, the Princess of Wale
s was in a highly emotional state. The reasons for this were political. Prussia, setting out on its road of national aggrandizement, laid claim to the Danish duchies of Schleswig-Holstein. In December 1863, the sixth month of the Princess’s pregnancy, war broke out between Prussia and Denmark. The Princess, whose view of politics was always intensely personal, was appalled by the Prussian threat to her father’s kingdom. It was a threat which ended, a few months later, by the loss of half his territory to Prussia. Nor were Princess Alexandra’s feelings of anguish helped by the fact that the sympathies of her husband’s family – the German-related British royal family – were almost entirely on the Prussian side. The Crown Princess of Prussia was her husband’s sister. The Prince of Wales was supportive but nothing could alleviate Princess Alexandra’s feelings of insecurity and isolation. This all had a significant effect on her pregnancy.
Christmas 1863 was spent with Queen Victoria at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. The occasion was anything but convivial. ‘Christmas was as sad as possible,’ reported the Queen to the Crown Princess. The death of the Prince Consort, two years before, ‘has left your old home desolate and wretched and broken your mother’s heart and health’.9 Matters were not helped by the fact that, try as they might, the Queen and Princess Alexandra could not quite hide their opposing political sympathies in the Prusso-Danish conflict. Alix, reported the Queen, ‘is very unhappy about her poor father and cries much’.10
One can appreciate why the Prince and Princess of Wales were so delighted to get away from Osborne to Frogmore House at Windsor. Here, free from the Queen’s lamenting presence, Princess Alexandra could enjoy the sort of unsophisticated entertainments she preferred: giving a children’s party, listening to the brass band, watching the skaters playing ice-hockey on the frozen lake.
On 8 January 1864 she insisted on being driven, wrapped in sables and seated in a sledge-chair, to nearby Virginia Water to join the Prince’s skating party for lunch. She did not return to Frogmore until dusk. Within half an hour of her arrival home her labour pains started. Her lady-in-waiting, Lady Macclesfield, having given birth to no less than thirteen children of her own, remained understandably calm. With no royal doctors within reach, she sent for Dr Brown, the local Windsor doctor (this happy accident earned him a knighthood), to Caleys, the local draper, for some flannel, and raided a jewellery box for some wadding. ‘As long as I see your face,’ the Princess assured the competent Lady Macclesfield, ‘I am happy.’11