The Petticoat Men

by Barbara Ewing

  Mr Flowers said, ‘You say that you are entirely innocent of the charge?’

  And this new, wild, pale prisoner Mr Park said: ‘Of any thought of committing such a gross crime!’

  Ernest Boulton simply swayed.

  Mr Flowers was still standing at his bench, ready to leave, papers in his hand.

  ‘The prisoners are to be taken to Newgate Prison to await their trial,’ he said blankly, as if for the last five or six weeks they had not been on trial at all.

  There was an uproar of rage in the court. Frederick Park seemed to be crying. Ernest Boulton stood unbelieving: no fluttering eyes, no bows or waves or smiles. The court was cleared by policemen; the van was waiting outside. The news spread; crowds of people pushed and crowded round the van like a big sea. There were lots of calls of SHAME! but it was not clear if it was directed at the verdict, or at the two prisoners.

  Mrs Stacey and her daughter were buffeted about in the crowd, as indeed were many people. They waited, silent, as first Frederick Park climbed up into the van. He suddenly turned, bent down to speak briefly and urgently to a gentleman, clasped his hand for a moment and was then gone. Ernest Boulton then climbed up into the van; at the doorway he too turned. He gave a small wave to the crowd and then disappeared inside. The driver whipped the horses, people banged on the van – in support, perhaps, or disgust – and they were being driven away to be locked up in Newgate Prison. Everyone knew stories of Newgate Prison; it was whispered that it was like going to hell.

  Just as the van was moving away a group of men suddenly threw rocks, big rocks, as if they’d had them ready. They yelled ‘FILTH! SODOMITES!’ and their faces were twisted with something like hate; a rock hit one of the horses and it reared up and cried out; for a moment it looked as if the van might overturn and voices shouted in alarm, and then somehow the van righted itself and continued its journey, rattling in an ominous manner.

  ‘FILTH!’ yelled the same men still. ‘SODOMITES! DIRTY BASTARDS!’

  Then the van was too far away and the rocks fell short and on to the street and the shouting men laughed and Mattie Stacey thought of how it would be at Newgate where there would be lots of ugly-faced men like that. Suddenly she ran and punched one of the rock-throwers and screamed at them all, ‘DIRTY BASTARDS YOURSELVES!’ and she managed to scratch one face with a sharp stone that she took from her pocket before they knocked her over and shouted, ‘CRIPPLED WHORE! CRIPPLED WHORE!’ And then a policeman and her mother were running towards her and the ugly men quickly disappeared and the excitement was over.

  ‘All right, miss?’ asked the policeman quite politely, and Mrs Stacey wrapped her shawl quickly about her daughter’s arm, which was covered in blood, and brushed at her skirt. One of the noble ladies said, ‘Well done!’ and shook Mattie’s hand even though it was bleeding. Little groups of people stared at the two women quietly as they left.

  The mother and the daughter walked, arm in arm, slowly.

  ‘I must’ve misunderstood Mr Park,’ was all Mattie said, in a flat voice.

  The streets stank that late afternoon, the heat making them worse than usual; fish and piss and burnt onions. And still Mrs Stacey stopped at an old lady beggar, spoke to her for a moment and gave her a penny. The main streets near Wakefield-street were crowded and stinking also, full of evening people, and there was a lot of singing and drinking and laughing, and two shabby men were rolling with beer and singing Champagne Charlie is my name, and a slither of a summer moon came into the sky, even though it was not yet dark.

  22

  WHAT A HORRIBLE Sunday the next Sunday was.

  We used to love Sundays.

  It started with us all shouting at each other, we weren’t usually like that.

  ‘We dont have to read the bleeding newspapers every blooming Sunday like ghouls, we were there for God’s sake!’ yelled Ma when Billy came in with all the newspapers as usual and I tried to grab them. ‘What can they tell us that we aint seen with our own eyes? And no doubt they’ll embroider it with fancy rudeness! We’re going to go and visit old Mrs Portmanteau again!’ shouting at Billy as much as at me – for bringing the papers home I suppose, she never usually shouts at Billy, and hardly ever at me – and there she was, ruffling and shouting and bustling about and getting ready, banging things, looking for her cloak behind the door, and I just jumped up and screamed at her and Billy: ‘I want to read the papers! I want to see what they are saying about our friends – you two go and visit old Mrs Portmanteau again for all I care, we only saw her the other week! I’m going to read Reynolds News and The Times and any other paper that has writ, I’ll go and buy my own copies, you cant stop me, I might have made myself foolish about Freddie, well I’m finished with that, but they are still our friends and they’re in prison!’ and I actually snatched the Reynolds News from Billy and if I hadn’t had a big bandaged-up arm from the fight outside the court, and my rotten leg, I’d have locked myself in my room before they could catch me, I was so wild and angry and sad.

  Billy stopped me of course, but gentle, as he always is.

  Finally Ma said, ‘All right, Mattie, all right.’ She sighed and looked at Billy again, blaming him. ‘But first we’ll all settle down like we always do and we’ll have a glass of port.’

  ‘That wont make no difference to the words!’

  ‘No, Mattie, but it might make a difference to how we hear them,’ said Ma firmly as she filled our glasses – she sloshed some over on to the rug and she didn’t even seem to notice which was so unlike her, you dont run a nice place like ours by not noticing port sloshing on the floor.

  On some days rays of sunshine came into our little back parlour, and they did today, June rays of sunshine trying to cheer us, catching Pa’s old Joshua tree, the leaves were shining because Ma and I looked after it so well. They shone and gleamed, green in the sun.

  And so finally we settled as we always did.

  ‘Read everything,’ I instructed Billy, but you dont instruct my brother, he just looked at me without saying anything. Course he’d been funny too, Billy, lately, worried about his position of course because he loves working in Parliament so much, so I shut up. And he finally started to read to us as usual. Reynolds News seemed to have given the case much more coverage than a war or the Queen or a triple murder.

  ‘THE HERMAPHRODITE CLIQUE,’ he read.

  ‘What’s a hermaphrodite?’ It was hard to say, it was a word I’d never heard before.

  ‘It’s just a word to get people’s attention.’

  ‘Yes but what does it mean?’

  ‘A hermaphrodite is half a man and half a woman.’

  I just looked at him.

  ‘Mattie,’ said Ma, quite quiet. ‘Do you remember Aggie? He did the wigs at Drury Lane? Do you remember him from when you were little?’

  Well, everyone knew Aggie. Aggie was – he was just as he was, well – well he had a man’s arms and legs – and – and, well you know, the other stuff men have stuck on their bodies, but well – well he was a woman too – but in a different way from Ernest because Aggie – it was a bit strange – he had a real bosom, quite large, not a stuffed one like Freddie and Ernest, and long lady’s hair that he done up in a chignon. He dressed in sort of men’s clothes for his bottom half and ladies’ clothes at the top, he was fussy and fidgety and wore ribbons – he used to give me ribbons to play with and talked a bit funny and fluting and ladylike. Aggie wore floating coloured scarves and curled his own long hair at the same time as he was doing the wigs, just pinned it up like women did. So that was a hermaphrodite then. Ernest and Freddie weren’t anything like Aggie. I took a deep, deep breath.

  ‘Keep reading,’ I said.

  THE HERMAPHRODITE CLIQUE

  The moral sense of the nation has of late been receiving severe shocks.

  Nearly a century ago, the poet Cowper gave a graphic description of the evils engendered in ‘proud, gay, and gain-devoted cities’:

  Rank abundance breeds

&nbs
p; In gross and pampered cities, sloth and lust,

  And wantonness and glutinous excess.

  What would the poet say if he lived in the present day?

  ‘Well he’d be able to catch a train to pampered cities these days,’ said Ma calmly, drinking port. ‘And if he had an operation in the hospital he could be chloroformed.’

  ‘I dont think Cowper would approve of the railway system,’ said Billy dryly.

  ‘Keep reading,’ I said.

  How would he be affected by the glaring infamies and the grave ‘freaks’ perpetuated by the aristocratic orders and by people ‘highly connected’? So deep would be his sentiment of disgust, that no language could adequately express it.

  Boulton and Park obviously had influence and interest at their back. It is interesting that there was no lack of friends to engage counsel for their defence even when before a magistrate. The public will await with interest the forthcoming trial of the prisoners. But should the evidence against the prisoners be such that the jury will bring a verdict of ‘Guilty’, what then? Why, the impression will be conveyed thereby that this London of ours is as foul a sink of iniquity as were certain Jewish cities of old which, for their flagrant wickedness, met with retributive destruction by fire from heaven.

  ‘Oh for heaven’s sake!’ said Ma, ‘do we have to endure all this rubbish! That’s enough, Billy! Mattie, what is the point in listening to this?’

  Billy stopped. Even I didn’t have the heart to hear any more. Ma poured the most port I’d ever seen her pour, spilling it on the rug again and I understood that she was upset too. I wondered if people read Reynolds News in Newgate Prison, and I thought of all the ugly men throwing rocks and I wondered what was happening inside Newgate to poor Ernest and Freddie, maybe they were having rocks thrown at them there too and I closed my eyes, trying not to think about it.

  All of a sudden Billy, who was now reading a different part of the paper, started to laugh. It was so unlikely, and so unlike him, I dont mean Billy doesn’t laugh, but he was now looking at the very same newspaper with tears of laughter in his eyes, almost right after reading all those stupid paragraphs.

  ‘Listen,’ he said.

  However there is another matter relating to this case which we cannot let pass without notice. The Times in a leading article of its Tuesday impression says ‘the existence of such a scandal is a social misfortune. The charges made by the prosecution are such as are seldom made in this country, except against the lowest, the most ignorant and the most degraded.’ Of course the writer here implies that the most abominable offence attributed to the prisoners, is confined to the humbler orders of society. We have no hesitation in saying this assertion is a foul calumny. We do not hesitate to say that if called upon to give an opinion as to the particular grade of society most given to the perpetration of unnatural offences, we should at once point to the episcopacy. Only a few years back the Right Reverend Bishop of Clayher was caught in the act of committing an abominable crime with a private soldier. Within the last twelvemonth two more right reverend fathers in God, Dr Twells, a Colonial bishop, and the other a Scots prelate, have been detected in abominations of a similar kind. These facts alone give lie to the assertion that the humbler classes are more addicted to the commission of these execrable offences, which at all events, seem prevalent amongst the prelacy.

  And Billy laughed even as he read. Billy has always hated religious men since that one told him God knew better than us and was taking Pa to a finer place, when we’d been so happy in the place we were already in.

  A few days later the same rude, horrible policeman came again to Wakefield-street early in the morning and told me the proper trial was going to begin soon, at the Old Bailey, and that I must ‘hold myself ready’ to give evidence. Hold myself ready. Like pull myself together. Funny things we’re supposed to do to ourselves.

  ‘So it’s going ahead after all,’ was all I said to Ma.

  Billy got hold of a copy of the new indictments against other people in the case. He brought it home, late, we’d eaten without him and left his dinner warming on the stove. I was washing some dishes and pots. Ma gave Billy his dinner, he gave her the paper with the indictment writ on.

  ‘You read it,’ he said.

  Ma had magnifying spectacles. She read it out, sitting at the table with Billy.

  Ernest Boulton and Frederick William Park are charged with buggery; also with committing buggery with Arthur Pelham Clinton, commonly called Lord Arthur Pelham Clinton; with conspiring to solicit other persons to commit to the crime and with conspiring with Clinton, Marin Luther Cumming, John Salford Fiske, Louis Clark Hirst and C. H. Thomas to attend places of resort in the disguise of women, thereby outraging public decency and offending against public morals.

  ‘How did you get this?’ she asked Billy.

  Billy looked at her. ‘Inside help,’ he said, sarcastic. ‘Elijah gave it to me in his little private cubby in the Central Lobby to copy. He said “because you are an interested party”. You’d be surprised what’s delivered to Honourable Members in the evenings.’

  ‘So they’ve decided to arrest Lord Arthur Clinton at last,’ Ma said. ‘That’ll cause bleeding bedlam, mark my words. And in your workplace too, Billy.’

  ‘Why’s there suddenly all these new people?’ I asked Billy.

  He shrugged. ‘They’re people who wrote letters to Ernest mostly. And it all starts again tomorrow.’

  ‘Right.’ Ma’s voice was suddenly very cold and businesslike. ‘This is the real trial with a judge and jury and all that palaver. You cant go in before you’re called to give evidence, Mattie. Billy, you’re obviously in real danger now of losing your work now that it’s a proper trial, and no doubt our name and address plastered all over the newspapers again. Our home is already called a brothel and we’ve lost some of our regulars. We might find ourselves with hardly any income at all. So I’ll go to the Old Bailey tomorrow to find out the worst.’ She sounded scary, not like our Ma at all.

  Billy said, ‘Everyone’s now looking at me out of the corner of their eye, that’s true. But dont worry, Ma. If I do lose my position I’m going to get it back.’

  ‘How?’

  He was silent for a moment. ‘I’ve said over and over: Mr Gladstone wasn’t just shocked in an ordinary way when he heard about Lord Arthur Clinton.’ His face was set like it gets sometimes. ‘There’s something odd, something else. I dont mind what his secrets are, that’s his business, but I’m going to find out about him and Lord Arthur Clinton if I get dismissed and he doesn’t, and I’m going to ask him to help me.’

  That was the end of that conversation. Billy ate his dinner, silent, but I saw he ate hardly any. I washed pots. I wondered if I could make more hats by working later at night, earlier in the morning. We heard the clang of the letter flap on the front door and Ma went upstairs.

  Billy ate.

  I washed pots.

  Ma came back with a letter she’d already opened. She put it on the table for us to read without saying anything. It was from Mr Connolly, one of our cotton salesmen, saying he felt it necessary from now on to find other ‘more suitable’ lodgings in London. He was the third of our regulars to decide not to use our rooms any more.

  Outside some cats were screaming. When we first came to Wakefield-street I couldn’t tell the difference between cats screaming and people screaming, but I can now.

  23

  Billy escorted me at dawn to the Central Criminal Court in his suit and his top hat, hoping I might somehow get inside. Both of us not saying much, well we didn’t need to. This was a dark hour for us, and all for letting a room to Freddie and Ernest.

  ‘I hope you’ll keep your position, son,’ I said to Billy by the corner of the Old Bailey. Billy is a most undemonstrative person but he gave me a little kiss on the cheek. ‘See you tonight, Ma,’ he said, ‘we’ll be all right somehow, I promise,’ and then my Billy was gone on towards Westminster, to his own troubles at the Parliament.


  It was a blooming circus outside the Old Bailey even at that hour, crowds and crowds of people even though it was only just getting properly light, all pushing and waiting for this big proper trial with Judges and Juries and more excitement. There was a man with a placard:

  THOU SHALT NOT LIE WITH MANKIND

  AS WITH WOMANKIND

  IT IS AN ABOMINATION.

  LEVITICUS 18:26

  and all the usual clerks, and street-girls offering “just a quick one, before the trial” and men in top hats and women carrying babies, pie-sellers of course, footmen holding places for their Masters.

  But the ones in charge were having none of it, not this time – nobody allowed into the Old Bailey without permission – they actually shoved people away with their police sticks! Those noisy press reporters were pushing and waving passes, but there were strict rules, only the people with the right to be there were let in. I understood I would not likely be one of them and I just stood there for a few moments, in the middle of all the people, just thinking of many things and the twists and turns of our lives till now, and then a tap on the shoulder, bloody hell, one of the policemen – was I going to be blooming shoved about too? – but it was Algie Thornton of all people, his pa done building work at Drury Lane so course Algie knew me.

  ‘Auntie Ma!’ he said, there outside the court, as if he was a small boy still, and we both laughed. ‘Heard you and Mattie was involved,’ he said. He gave me a wink, escorted me away from the crowds and took me to a side door to wait, and when the court doors finally slowly opened Algie actually escorted me in, one of the first! He was always a good boy, I looked after him sometimes, years ago, when his mother was having another, and he heard Billy and Mattie call me Ma, so he called me Auntie Ma.

  I sat as near to the front as I could and hoped I’d hear it mostly. Although I was scared in a way, I made myself think positive. We still had some of our other regular salesmen from the North, cotton people, they still came to us all this last month, they knew Freddie and Ernest in a casual way, knew about the case, didn’t seem to care tuppence. Just so long as they all didn’t stop coming like Mr Connolly and some of the others… I told myself we’d manage somehow. But if Billy lost his job… I couldn’t help it, there was a strange, tight, pressing feeling round my heart, God, I’m not having a bleeding heart attack in here! I said to myself. Then I got a tap on the arm: Emma Goodrich, she was an actress I knew from the Haymarket, sitting nearby and wearing a fine gown and cloak, very elegant. She moved to sit beside me, whispered to me very loudly several times, told me she had a “barrister gentleman friend” who’d got her in, she was a pretty Celia in As You Like It but years ago now. So here we sat, me and Emma and noble ladies in big hats and gentlemen with their hats removed and ministers in their church collars. There seemed to be a large amount of lawyers with their wigs on, from nearby courts I s’pose – all wanting a look at Ernest and Freddie no doubt.