The Sinner's Grand Tour

by Tony Perrottet

I ordered some drinks and we settled into a booth to absorb the rich historical atmosphere. Maybe the Smuggler’s Inn wouldn’t be so bad.

  Then we heard a series of thuds from the direction of the tight spiral staircase.

  “Will you look at that,” I heard one of the drunks from the bar downstairs. “That kid fell all the way down the stairs.”

  I dashed down to find Sam waddling around the bar as if nothing had happened. Luckily, the steps were covered with the thickest, and the dirtiest, shag pile carpet in Britain. But the fall had upset the drinkers, and they continued to murmur over their pints grimly, making me feel as paternally responsible as Homer Simpson.

  Back upstairs, we wedged Sam into the booth and tried to stay cheerful. Random squawks of feedback emitted from the karaoke machine for another hour or so, until the technician gave up and had a drink.

  If a traveler had managed to peep through a keyhole at an actual Beggar’s Benison meeting here 275 years ago, he or she would have witnessed a disconcerting pageant, the likes of which Masterpiece Theatre has so far been in no hurry to depict.

  Thanks to the survival of the minutes, we can reconstruct the club meeting that took place on the night of November 30, 1737—St. Andrew’s Day. In miserable weather (the minutes read: “Tempest”—which must have been quite something to have been worth noting in Scotland), twenty-four members, all male, gathered in the firelit room. They represented a cross-section of educated provincial society, from landed gentlemen, doctors, and lawyers to humble customs clerks, and included older men and young, single men and married. Everyone was wearing olive green silk sashes and a string of club medals. On a table in the center of the room, a pair of pink-cheeked posture molls hired from the local village (“aged 18 and 19”) struck acrobatic poses in the nude, while members inspected the “Secrets of Nature” with a clinical eye. Touching the talent was strictly forbidden; if anyone was overcome by desire or booze and broke this club rule, he would be thrown outside into the rainy alley. (Sometimes the girls themselves caused a ruckus, as happened at a 1734 meeting. One Betty Wilson, age fifteen, turned out to be “a bad model and very unpleasant,” and had to be escorted from the inn.)

  First came the initiation rites. A club official produced a large pewter plate, called the Test Platter, placed it on an altar, and folded a white napkin upon it. At the blowing of a horn, three new members were led in from a small room where they had been sequestered, trousers down. Perhaps due to sheer anticipation, combined with glimpses of the naked posture girls, these initiates had already achieved a priapic frenzy. Or perhaps, like modern sperm clinics, the waiting room was conveniently supplied with the club’s erotic literature. In any case, the trio advanced to the platter and went to work with enthusiasm until they produced “a horned spoonful.” The three flushed initiates were then presented with a special club diploma decorated with the naked figures of Adam and Eve, and handed phallic-shaped drinking vessels, called prick glasses, charged with fine port wine. A toast was offered to “Firm Erection, fine Insertion, Excellent distillation, no Contamination.” The prick glasses turned out to be jokes; when the new members tried to drink, port spurted down their chins and shirts.

  The club sovereign then reverently produced the most legendary of the Benison props—a wig that was supposedly made from the pubic hairs of King Charles II’s many mistresses, and would imbue the wearer with sexual potency. He put this astonishing item on his head to raucous toasts and cheering. He then ordered the other members to relieve their tensions in the Test Platter. (“All frigged,” observe the minutes.)

  As the waves lashed the castle ruins and rain hammered the dark tavern windows, festivities continued. An extract from Fanny Hill, a pornographic novel then circulating in manuscript, was read. A doctor lectured on the latest research in gynecology. New club rules were submitted for a vote. And there was much, much drinking.

  “Broke up at 3 o’clock a.m.,” conclude the minutes.

  Surely someone at the Smuggler’s Inn knew about all this? I realized with a shudder that I would have to interview some of the characters in the public bar. By nightfall, the boozing had escalated, with drunks howling outside in the lane, slurred arguments and doors slamming within. After a dinner of fried potato scallops, I tucked the boys into bed, gave Les some earplugs, and crept downstairs.

  The same half dozen boozers were still there. But instead of staring at the countertop, they now had their eyes fixed on the barmaid—a local student whose ample figure was squeezed into tight jeans and low-necked blouse, a serving wench Boswell would have fallen for.

  When I mentioned that I was researching eighteenth-century history in Anstruther, she shrugged with indifference.

  “I do medieval,” she said. “Not interested in anything later than ninth century.”

  “Actually, I’m researching a masturbation club that met in this pub in the 1700s.…” I asked if she’d ever heard of the Beggar’s Benison.

  “No, mate—but you’ve got my attention.”

  As I proceeded to describe the Benison’s colorful rites, two figures at the bar unexpectedly creaked to life. It turned out that one of them had found an old book about the club at a flea market. (It seemed to be the same 1892 volume, “Solely Intended for Antiquaries,” I’d seen in New York.) And the other had been interested enough to buy an academic treatise on Scotland’s Enlightenment societies. They even went on to lament that most of the young folks in Anstruther had forgotten their rich cultural heritage.

  “A couple of years ago, some young lads started a rock band here in town called the Beggar’s Benison,” one remembered fondly. “They had heard about it, and knew it was sort of naughty-sexy, maybe a bit shocking to get some attention. They put up posters for their first gig all over. Then I tipped them off as to what the club was really about. They ran around all red-faced, tearing down their posters. Wasn’t exactly the image the poor bastards were after, being associated with a bunch of wankers.”

  “Still,” the other mused, “at least those Benison buggers had some peace. They had somewhere to go with their mates.” He reminisced about how his father used to disappear to the pub for hours every Friday night, until his wife would fetch him.

  “Always a bit embarrassing,” he sighed. “To get fetched.”

  The barmaid leaned forward to pour another round of beer, revealing her majestic décolletage. Conversation froze as everyone admired the Secrets of Nature. Talk picked up again when she turned away. This happened over and again, like clockwork. It seemed to encourage the pace of drinking.

  As the classic Beggar’s Benison stories were recounted, I detected a perverse Scottish pride in the club. Wankers though they were, the Anstruther members were also true rebels. They were against the Kirk, or Church of Scotland, which repressed every whisper of sexual freedom and forced, for example, adulterers and fornicators to stand in sackcloth and be publicly pilloried. (Several radical ministers were actually active members of the club over the years, including one Bishop Daniel Low—although he became ashamed of his role in the self-abuse rites and asked in his dotage for his name to be removed from the records. This required, apparently, fifty deletions.) They were against the English, especially their taxes, and many were involved in smuggling. (Scotland’s parliament had been dissolved in 1707, surrendering ultimate power to Westminster.) Even the club’s ritual masturbation was an act of defiance against the anti-onanism texts coming out of London, which argued that self-abuse was a grave medical danger that could lead to blindness and consumption in the young.

  Why, they were Scottish nationalist heroes, in their way. Chapters of the Benison were reported wherever Scottish men went—in London, New York, Canada, even India and outback Australia. It was one of the country’s greatest exports.

  As the night drew on, the Scottish accents grew thicker, and I realized that I’d understood about five words in the last two hours. Worse, the Benison fans clearly weren’t going to let me leave. They even threatened to start buying m
e drinks—an all but unheard-of event in Scotland. True, the Smuggler’s Inn was probably as close as I would ever get to the legendary taverns of the eighteenth century, but enough was enough. All this male bonding, with braying laughs and spraying spittle, was just too much for me.

  I was about to lie down on the floor and pretend I’d passed out when I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Tone. Ah … Tone.”

  Eureka! It was Les.

  “Sorry, but I think you’d better come upstairs,” she muttered. “The boys are freaking out.” Apparently the creaking floors, slamming doors, and sound of the gales outside were the stuff of nightmares—not to mention the terrors of the shared bathroom.

  I drained my glass and feigned resignation.

  “You bin fetched, mate!” one of my new pals roared with triumph.

  “Yeah, he’s bin fetched, he’s bin fetched!” the others laughed.

  “It’s true,” I muttered, as I bowed out of the pub. Just as well. This Hellfire research was getting to be hell on the liver.

  The next morning, with the beer still sloshing around inside me, I slunk downstairs to face a “full Scottish breakfast,” of fried eggs, fried potatoes, fried bacon, and fried sausages.

  “Fancy some fried bread with that, love?” the housekeeper asked.

  I realized I still hadn’t had any luck finding the fabled relics. When I cornered the pub’s owner, he confirmed that he had no secret cupboard of self-abuse props.

  So if they weren’t in Anstruther, where were they?

  The mystery began to clear when I finally got a call through to historian David Stevenson, who, apart from many other talents, must qualify as the world’s leading expert on Scottish masturbation cults. Professor emeritus in Scottish history at the University of St. Andrews and author of the seminal work, The Beggar’s Benison: Sex Clubs of Enlightenment Scotland and Their Rituals, he had recently retired and fallen off the academic grid. But once I had tracked him down, he was only too happy to share his arcane knowledge and suggested I drop over to his house by the Firth of Forth.

  Mrs. Stevenson was waiting for me at the front door.

  “So you’re one of those strange people interested in the Beggar’s Benison, are you?” she asked immediately, with disapproval.

  “I am,” I confessed sheepishly. And reminded her that her husband was the world authority.

  “Well, I hope that’s not what they write in his obituary,” she said. What about his work on the Scottish Covenanters, the Scottish Counter-Revolution or the Scottish Freemasons? All overshadowed by the bloody Benison. She gave an ironic, seen-it-all-before sigh. “Now you’re on to ‘men’s business.’ I’ll leave you alone.”

  Settling into the plaid sofa, I eagerly plunged into sex club lore.

  “I first heard of the Benison forty years ago, when I was a student in Edinburgh,” said Stevenson, a soft-spoken, grandfatherly figure with a silver beard, wearing the increasingly rare combination of socks and sandals. “One or two scholars had touched on it, but they didn’t want to get their fingers dirty. It was all very hush-hush, so I started making some inquiries beneath the covers.”

  After the Beggar’s Benison was disbanded in 1836—the year Queen Victoria ascended to the throne, symbolically enough—its obscene memorabilia had been inherited by its last surviving member in Anstruther, Matthew F. Connolly. (That was where the 1860 travel guide book author, Henry Fairnie, had seen them.) In 1865, Connolly gave the relics to, of all people, a Glasgow church minister, who valiantly rejected periodic suggestions that they be burned. In fact, he cooperated in letting many of them be photographed for the 1892 volume on the club. In 1897, they were given to a curator at the Kelvingrove Museum, but they were too volatile to become part of the collection.

  “It’s a miracle they survived at all,” Stevenson said. “I’m sure there were many more clubs of this nature, but their relics were destroyed, so we know nothing about them.”

  Finally, we have to thank a retired Scottish army officer, Colonel Robert Maxwell Canch Kavanagh, whose twin passions in life were military camouflage and self-abuse clubs, for salvaging them from the dustbin of history. In 1921, Kavanagh purchased the cache directly from the elderly curator, for an undisclosed sum, and it became part of his private collection. He also tracked down the prize piece of club regalia, King Charles II’s pubic hair wig. A true devotee, Kavanagh then tried to revive the Benison in Edinburgh, without success. “Male bonding rituals had rather changed,” Stevenson said.

  But had the fabled trove stayed in Scotland? I asked urgently. I had read one wild report that they had ended up in the United States in the 1980s—a plausible enough notion, given that so many offbeat European curios, such as Napoléon’s severed penis and Beethoven’s ear bones, had found loving homes on American shores.

  “Oh, the Benison items never left these bonny shores,” Stevenson assured me. “In fact, they’re only a few miles away. I’ll get you an appointment.”

  GENTLEMEN, CHARGE YOUR

  INDECENT DRINKING VESSELS

  History is a polite business at St. Andrews. Golf fans flock here to stay in lace-curtained B and Bs and try their luck on Scotland’s most venerable course; even the town ruins are manicured like putting greens. At the hallowed University of St. Andrews, the guardians of the Benison items dilly-dallied on my appointment for a couple of days. (“Of course, every request to see the Club Collection has to be approved,” one college staff member told me. “We have to be careful. We don’t want the media to announce, ‘University where Prince William went to college has rooms full of porn!’ ”) By the time everything was confirmed, the heavens were shining on my mission. At 10:00 a.m., I dashed through the flower-filled cloisters (yes, the same ones that Prince William once dashed through!), under the medieval arches to the university museum repository—a tragically stark modern building opposite the police station. A receptionist showed me to an anonymous room, painted a clinical white, as if I were about to give evidence or be strip-searched. But the door opened and two young female curators entered carrying heavy cardboard boxes, marked BBWCC, Beggar’s Benison and Wig Club Collection.

  With a cheery greeting, they snapped on white latex gloves and began to lay the treasured contents on the table, carefully unwrapping each item from archival paper and acid-free bubble wrap.

  This was it, I marveled—the strangest fragments of British history, which after a century’s use and abuse at the Smuggler’s Inn in Anstruther, had ended up here.

  “These pieces are a bit notorious here at the museum,” confessed Jessica, the more senior of the two curators, who was wearing a crisp white blouse. It wasn’t hard to see why. One phallus after another, fashioned from glass and metal, was carefully revealed. These were followed by a colorful array of sashes, bowls, platters, and medals engraved with lewd, vaguely hallucinogenic images, like lighthouses modeled on penises and roosters with penis heads. Some were engraved with shapes known as “vulviform,” but the male organ certainly got top billing.

  I picked up the Test Platter, the receptacle for the Benison members’ seed, and read the inscription, THE WAY OF A MAN WITH A MAID. There was a clumsy engraving of an erection with a purse hanging from it and the date, 1732.

  It looked as though it had been carefully washed.

  There were two of the so-called prick glasses, each about nine inches long. They were made from blown glass and had seen rough handling; each had a cracked gonad. Perhaps their fragility was what inspired the other, longer version of the phallic drinking cups, crafted from metal. There was also the silver horn used to summon initiates in Anstruther, engraved with the phrase “My breath is strange,” from the Book of Job. (The full quote is “My breath is strange to my wife,” from Job 19:17.) And a rather nice porcelain punch bowl.

  The “Test Platter,” focus of the Beggar’s Benison’s self-abuse rituals. (Reproduced courtesy of the University of St. Andrews.)

  “It’s an accident that the university has ended up with this collection
,” said Jessica. “If it were offered to the museum today, we wouldn’t accept it. The items really have nothing to do with our mission, which is to chronicle the history of the university. But now we have them, we have to look after them!”

  The university doesn’t exactly celebrate its sexy stash; in fact, the Beggar’s Benison and Wig Club Collection relics have never been publicly displayed.

  “St. Andrews is a family tourist spot,” said the assistant curator, Amy, who was wearing pink earrings and pigtails. “There was some thought of exhibiting a few of the tamer items, but it was vetoed. I mean, how do you explain what they were used for in a G-rated way?”

  Beggar’s Benison “prick glass,” used in ribald club toasts. (Reproduced courtesy of the University of St. Andrews.)

  But what of the fabled wig, the notorious club mascot, supposedly woven from the pubic hairs of King Charles II’s mistresses?

  They revealed a wooden wig box. Like a game-show host, Amy creaked open its door to reveal the wig stand, a wooden head with a protruding chin and nose. Someone had painted on eyes, unfortunately crossed. The effect was ghoulish.

  But the wig itself was missing.

  “At some stage, the wig went astray,” Amy said mournfully. “When the museum received the club relics, there was no trace of it.”

  The adventures of the wig turned out to be the most extraordinary part of this twisted Scottish epic. According to club lore, its provenance can be traced back to 1651, when hedonistic Charles II visited Fife and was treated to riotous drinking parties. After his return to London, he sent the wig of pubic hairs as a gift to his dissolute friends, its significant size making it a symbol of royal virility. (Practical details of the souvenir’s creation—woven? glued?—are lost in the mists of time.) In 1732, the headpiece was presented to the Beggar’s Benison in Anstruther and for decades worn in club ceremonies to tap into its talismanic power. Then, in 1775, a tragic schism struck the Scottish club world. Lord Moray, a descendent of the wig’s original keeper, ran off with the prize and started his own breakaway society in Edinburgh—the Wig Club. Instead of ritual self-abuse, initiates to the new club were obliged to kiss the pubic relic and contribute hair from their own mistresses’ nether regions to embellish its thinning mane.