by Neil McKenna
Although they did not know it, Carlotta Gibbings had already rushed to Bow Street Police Station early that morning with a change of clothes, calculating that they would stand more chance of getting off with a caution or a small fine if they appeared as respectably dressed young men rather than as two young men dressed as ladies of the night. But the officers had curtly turned Carlotta away.
Somehow or another, with a great deal of grumbling and a great deal of ingenuity, Fanny and Stella managed to tidy themselves up and recreate some faint echo of last night’s finery. A handkerchief and some cold water from the ewer helped wipe away the dark tracks of their tears and the worst smudges of paint. Dressing themselves and repairing their toilette as best they could helped to lift their spirits. They looked very far from perfect but they were once again Mrs Fanny Graham and Miss Stella Boulton, stars of stage and street, and whatever the day might bring they hoped they would conduct themselves like ladies.
As Fanny and Stella waited in their cell, they could already hear the muffled hoots and yells of a mob swarming outside, and it took them some little time to realise that the mob was almost certainly assembled in their honour. They turned white with fear. When they left the police station, they would have to run the gauntlet as they crossed Bow Street to the courtroom opposite.
A loud roar went up as Fanny and Stella, followed by Hugh Mundell a few steps behind, came out of Bow Street Police Station flanked by half a dozen uniformed policemen. The diamanté star in Fanny’s hair glinted in the thin April sunshine. Fanny and Stella seemed dazzled by the light and dazed by the mob of several hundred which milled and swirled around them trying to catch a glimpse of ‘the Funny He-She Ladies’.
There were hoots, hisses, catcalls, whistles and a few ragged cheers. Where had they all come from? Fanny and Stella had been arrested at around eleven o’clock the night before, too late for the morning papers to carry the story. Who were these people? How had they found out? And why were they here? They heard their names, ‘Fanny’, ‘Stella’, shouted out in thin, raucous voices that seemed to float momentarily above the roar of the crowd. Voices that sounded familiar. Turning round they caught a few blurred glimpses of the smiling faces of friends and acquaintances frantically waving. They were not entirely friendless.
It took five minutes or more for the police to clear a path. Fanny and Stella were pushed and shoved and pinched and propelled forwards, backwards, sideways. Greedy, greasy fingers grabbed at their dresses and tried to touch and pull their hair. At first Fanny and Stella faltered, stumbled and almost fell. But they went on. And as they went on, they grew visibly taller, visibly stronger, more dignified. By the time they had crossed the road they were carrying themselves like a pair of duchesses attending a ball. They mounted the steps to the court, paused and turned to face the crowd, which had for a moment fallen silent. Fanny and Stella smiled gravely and – with the merest ghost of a curtsey – turned smartly on their heels and swept inside. The jeers and catcalls broke out again. But this time they were drowned out by a fusillade of cheers and whistles.
Mr James Flowers, Stipendiary Magistrate at Bow Street, had a reputation as one of the kindest men on the Bench. The tiny courtroom measured just thirty feet by twenty feet and ‘was crowded with people eager to hear the charge’, the Illustrated Police News reported; ‘crammed to suffocation’ was the verdict of the Evening News. All eyes were on Fanny and Stella as they stepped into the wooden dock, followed by a rather sheepish Hugh Mundell, ‘and great surprise was manifested at the admirable manner in which Boulton and Park had “made up” ’. Fanny and Stella stood impassively, almost proudly, in the dock, as they surveyed the scene. Hugh Mundell looked anxious and fidgety as he stood alongside them.
Had this been a theatre rather than a court of law, a stage rather than a dock, Fanny and Stella would have been only too delighted to tread its hallowed boards. They liked nothing better than a house full to bursting and a rumbustious, restless and expectant audience ready to be quelled, ready to be charmed, ready to be dazzled by their performance. They could so easily have been appearing in Retained for the Defence, or one of the dozen or so other comediettas and one-act melodramas they had performed so often, together and separately, in which the beautiful and wronged young woman – invariably more convincingly played by Stella than by Fanny – would stand up before a jury of her peers and by the sheer power of her beauty and by the sheer force and passion of her rhetoric be declared innocent by acclamation. And even though Bow Street was a court and not a stage, Fanny and Stella felt a little of the familiar theatrical glamour stealing over them. They were dressed and they were ready. All they had to do now was to give the performance of their lives.
In the best traditions of burlesque there was not a little confusion and much laughter from the audience over the use of the personal pronoun. Were Fanny and Stella ‘he’s’ or ‘she’s’? It was a vexed question. Clearly they were men dressed up as women and should, by rights, be referred to as ‘he’, but somehow it came more naturally to call them ‘she’. The clerks who recorded the proceedings got into a terrible muddle, littering their transcripts with crossings-out and corrections, turning ‘he’s’ into ‘she’s’ – and vice versa. The witnesses were equally confused, stumbling and tying themselves in linguistic knots, usually ending up calling Fanny and Stella both ‘she’ and ‘he’ in the same sentence. Reporters for the Daily Telegraph and the Illustrated London News explained delicately to their readers that, though the defendants were emphatically young men, for the purposes of reporting the proceedings they had adopted the preponderant pronoun used in court – in this case ‘she’. And Mr Flowers, the magistrate, got round the problem by referring to Fanny and Stella as ‘these two women, as I may call them’.
The charges were read out by the Clerk of the Court to loud gasps from the crowded courtroom. Ernest Boulton and Frederick William Park were charged that they ‘did with each and one another feloniously commit the abominable crime of buggery’:
further that they did unlawfully conspire together, and with divers other persons, feloniously, to commit the said crimes
further that they did unlawfully conspire together, and with divers other persons to induce and incite other persons feloniously with them to commit the said crime
and further that they being men, did unlawfully conspire together, and with divers others, to disguise themselves as women and to frequent places of public resort, so disguised, and to thereby openly and scandalously outrage public decency and corrupt public morals.
It was an extraordinary set of charges. Fanny and Stella paled and visibly trembled as they were read out. Only the last charge, that of disguising themselves as women and frequenting public places with the intention of outraging public decency and corrupting public morals, held any water. Although there was no statute in English law which specifically made it a criminal offence for men to dress up as women, by dressing up as women and behaving in an undeniably and extremely lewd manner at the Strand Theatre, Fanny and Stella had outraged public decency. On the substance of that charge and that charge alone, they were incontrovertibly guilty. It was a fair cop.
Crimes were divided into two categories: misdemeanours – less serious crimes usually dealt with by the stipendiary magistrates – and felonies, which were much more serious and were tried before a judge and a jury. Outraging public decency was a misdemeanour. If this were the only charge, Fanny and Stella would be well advised to plead guilty, throw themselves upon the mercy of the court and hope they could escape with a hefty fine and a good talking-to from Mr Flowers.
But the charge of buggery was much, much more serious. Until 1861, only nine years earlier, buggery had carried the death penalty. As it was, buggery still carried a prison sentence of penal servitude for life. Penal servitude meant, for murderers, rapists and sodomites, long hours of hard labour picking oakum, walking the treadmill, or working the dreaded crank, back-breaking work turning a handle to push a paddle through a vat of san
d. No wonder Fanny and Stella turned pale.
Not only were they charged with buggery, they were charged with a catch-all conspiracy to commit buggery. In other words, the police were saying that not only had Fanny buggered Stella, and Stella buggered Fanny, but both of them had also buggered and been buggered by any number of ‘divers persons’. Furthermore, they had each conspired with the other, and with any number of unknown, unnamed others ‘to induce and incite’ yet more men to commit buggery. It all conjured up an image of a vast, ever-spreading sodomitical spider’s web with Fanny and Stella at its dark heart, controlling and directing, combining and confederating, to entrap and ensnare any and all men.
Seen through the prism of this conspiracy charge, Fanny and Stella’s drunken double act in their box at the Strand Theatre, their ogling, tongue-waggling, chirruping invitations to the gentlemen in the stalls, took on an altogether darker and more menacing aspect. It could quite easily be construed as a conspiracy to incite and induce men to feloniously commit ‘the abominable crime of buggery’.
T here were only four witnesses produced for this preliminary hearing – all of them policemen. The evidence of Inspector Thompson and the evidence of Sergeant Kerley merely rehashed the events of the night before. Fanny and Stella listened, even smiled occasionally, but seemed largely uninterested in what they had to say. ‘Both conducted themselves decorously,’ the Daily Telegraph reported. ‘While listening to the evidence, Boulton rested her head on her right hand but did not pay very particular attention.’
But everything changed when Detective Officer Chamberlain started to give his evidence.
‘Last evening, about twenty minutes past eight, I saw the two prisoners dressed in female attire at 13, Wakefield-street, Regent-square.’
‘You had followed them?’ the Clerk of the Court asked.
‘Yes,’ Chamberlain replied simply.
Fanny and Stella looked at each other uneasily. This was a complete shock. Until now, they had assumed, perhaps naturally, that they had been arrested almost by accident, that the manager or some other dull functionary at the Strand Theatre had summoned the police when he saw what he suspected were two men dressed as women behaving obscenely and ‘lasciviously ogling’ the male occupants of the stalls.
Chamberlain’s evidence changed everything. Neither Fanny nor Stella had breathed a word about 13 Wakefield Street to anyone. Not to Hugh Mundell, and certainly not to the police. Fanny had given her address as Bruton Street, and Stella had given the address of her mother and father in Maida Vale. Wakefield Street was a secret, their secret. So how did the police know about it? How was it that Chamberlain had been there last night, outside, watching for them, waiting for them, following them?
Chamberlain’s next piece of evidence was even more alarming.
‘I have been to 13, Wakefield Street, Regent-square this morning, and searched the parlours occupied by the prisoners Boulton and Park, and some other gentlemen,’ he announced.
Fanny and Stella listened with increasing horror. Not only did Chamberlain know about their secret place, he had entered it, penetrated it, violated it. Their secret place, their place of safety.
‘I found the photographs in the front parlour,’ Chamberlain continued, using both hands to pass a tottering pile of photographs to the Clerk, who in turn handed them to Mr Flowers. ‘They represent the two prisoners both in male and female attire.’
‘Do you detect a likeness with either of the two prisoners in female attire now, dressed both as male and female?’ Mr Flowers asked.
Chamberlain squinted almost leeringly at Fanny and Stella in the dock.
‘I do, Your Worship,’ he said.
Chamberlain went on to reveal that he had been watching Fanny and Stella ‘for a year past’. A whole year. And Police Constable Charles Walker, the fourth and last policeman from ‘E’ Division to give evidence that day, testified that he had been on constant surveillance duty outside Wakefield Street for the past fortnight and ‘had seen both the prisoners go in and out at all hours of the night, repeatedly’. The neighbours, he said, had started to complain.
Fanny and Stella were in a state of shock. Their arrest, far from being almost accidental, far from being a bit of bad luck, now looked much more sinister. It had clearly been planned down to the last detail. Both by day and by night they had been watched, they had been followed, and their comings and goings recorded by a phalanx of policemen. And it had been going on for more than a year. Their sanctum in Wakefield Street had been discovered and turned over. Their photographs had already been produced in court, and they knew that there was more, much more, to come.
For a start there were the letters. Stella, in particular, wished that she could remember exactly which letters she had so carelessly strewn around Wakefield Street, and wished that she had been a little more careful, a little more discreet. Some of the letters – in truth, most of the letters – were in one way or another compromising, certainly to her, and more than likely to her friends. Those letters told the story of her life, and now that story was in the hands of the police.
Mr Abrams, the solicitor hired by Carlotta Gibbings to speak for Fanny and Stella in court, did his best, but he was clearly out of his depth. He was under the impression that he was to plead for two young men who had been caught out in a lark, a frolic, a call-it-what-you-will, but now he was confronted by something far more serious.
‘Much of the evidence brought forward has taken me somewhat by surprise,’ he told Mr Flowers, quite truthfully. ‘But, so far as it goes, I respectfully submit that unless it can be clearly shown that these two persons were engaged on this evening in some unlawful purpose, no offence against the statute has been committed.’
It was a brave try but Mr Flowers was having none of it. ‘The onus is rather thrown on them to allow that there was no unlawful purpose,’ he retorted.
‘I am not going to uphold their act, but I submit that it was . . .’ and here Mr Abrams faltered, ‘ . . . that it was an act of folly.’
‘This act of folly has been going on for a long time,’ said Mr Flowers severely, and proceeded to remand Fanny and Stella in custody for seven days.
Fanny gave a start and Stella swayed a little. They both gripped the rail of the dock to support themselves. Stella looked as if she might faint. They were numb with shock. There seemed to be no end to the charges against them, nothing the police did not already know. The curtain had fallen on their first appearance and now there was a veil of darkness between them and the world they had once so joyously inhabited.
With their elbows firmly gripped by the court gaoler, they were forced to put one foot in front of the other and stagger out of the dock on their way to heaven-knows-where.
A prison or a scaffold. At that precise moment it was all the same to Fanny and Stella.
5
Foreign Bodies
EXAMINATION OF PEDERASTS: Place the suspect in a well-lit room and bend him forwards in such a way until his head is almost touching the floor. Part his buttocks with your hands and note the appearance of the anus. Then slowly insert a finger into the orifice to test fully the resistance of the sphincter.
Charles Vibert, Précis de médicine légale, 1893
D r Paul never was able to give a convincing explanation as to why he was loitering in the street immediately outside Bow Street Magistrates’ Court just as the hearing inside was coming to an end. It was almost exactly one o’clock and he looked as if he were waiting for someone or something.
Though he later tried to suggest that it was a mere coincidence that he happened to be in Bow Street on that particular day, at that particular time – that he just happened to be passing – Dr Paul did not seem in the least surprised when a police constable touched him on the arm. In fact, he seemed almost to be expecting it: ‘I was in the street,’ Dr Paul said, ‘and the policeman came and told me that Inspector Thompson wanted me.’
Dr James Thomas Paul was Divisional Surgeon to ‘E’ Division of the M
etropolitan Police. He had been appointed in January 1864, and the salary the job afforded was a useful addition to the meagre income he earned from his practice as a surgeon. The work was repetitive rather than onerous. His job was to look after any and all of the medical needs of the 195 police officers of ‘E’ Division: their aches and pains, their cuts and bruises, their coughs and sneezes and wheezes, Dr Paul dealt with them all. If they were injured, he patched them up; if they were ill, he physicked them; and if they had the clap – and many of them did – he tried to cure them.
It was Dr Paul’s job, too, to do what he could for the eight thousand or so dregs of humanity who washed up on the shores of Bow Street Police Station every year: the drunks and the whores; the thieves and the pickpockets; the mendicants and the mendacious; the mad, the sad and the bad. There were cuts and contusions to attend to, split lips and split heads to join together, the odd fracture, and all the accumulated and interacting diseases of poverty, overcrowding, poor air and even poorer diet. Dr Paul was not a bad man, and he did what little he could.
The constable guided Dr Paul through a warren of stairs and corridors to a small bare room at the back of the court building, lit only by a grimy skylight. It was a forlorn, out-of-the-way place, and it looked as if it had not been used for many a year. It smelt musty and stale. There was a desk, a stool and a tall screen. Inspector Thompson and two of his detectives, Chamberlain and Kerley, were waiting for him.
The door opened and Fanny and Stella were ushered in by the court gaoler. That they were badly frightened was only too evident from their chalk-white faces and the uncontrolled trembling of their bodies. It was barely ten minutes since Mr Flowers had remanded them in custody for seven days. Instead of being taken to the Black Maria to be transported to the House of Detention, they had been herded along corridors and up and down stairs and now found themselves in this bleak place where the three policemen from the night before and an unknown fourth man were waiting for them, looking very grave.