by Neil McKenna
Fanny and Stella thought they were in for a terrible beating – or even worse. They had heard about such things. It was common knowledge that some policemen liked to administer their punishments privately. It was common knowledge, too, that some policemen liked to take their pleasures privately. And sometimes they liked to do both at the same time.
Fanny and Stella stood in the dark and dingy little room shivering and trembling and imagining the worst when Dr Paul abruptly addressed Stella.
‘Step inside here,’ he said, pointing to the screen. ‘Unfasten your things and drop them down, please to step out of them,’ he ordered gruffly, clearing his throat. Stella started to undress: off came the dress and the petticoats, and lastly a curious arrangement: a pair of drawers with silk stockings sewn to them.
Dr Paul took a desk stool and pointed to it.
‘Put yourself over that stool,’ he said coldly.
‘Without saying a word he did so,’ Dr Paul said later when questioned in court. ‘I did not use my hand with any violence. The prisoners did not offer any opposition to my examining them.’
This was bending the truth. Stella had been reluctant, fearful until Chamberlain or Kerley, one or the other, had said that if she did not comply, ‘force would be used’.
Dr Paul claimed that he had been instructed by Inspector Thompson to examine Fanny and Stella to discover whether they were men or women. ‘I examined them for the purposes of ascertaining their sex,’ he declared baldly.
It was a lie, and not a very clever lie. There was no longer any possible doubt over Fanny and Stella’s gender. The whole world knew that Fanny and Stella were men – except, apparently, Dr Paul. Inspector Thompson already knew for a fact that Fanny and Stella were men. They had told him so in no uncertain terms the night before. Ditto Detective Sergeant Kerley and Detective Officer Chamberlain. (It was Chamberlain who had watched, fascinated, as Fanny and Stella slowly stripped off their feminine finery the night before to reveal the shivering, slender bodies of two frightened young men.) The mob that had filled Bow Street that morning knew that they were men, the mob that was still milling around outside the court while Dr Paul was waiting, the mob that had chanted and cheered and jeered, the mob that had screamed filthy and lewd suggestions at Fanny and Stella. Every person present that sunny morning in Mr Flowers’s courtroom knew that Fanny and Stella were men. The whole world knew that Fanny and Stella were men – except, apparently, Dr Paul. It was not the first lie that Dr Paul told, and it would not be the last.
When asked again, Dr Paul stuck to his guns.
‘I examined them for the purposes of ascertaining their sex,’ he answered, but this time adding one crucial qualification. ‘I examined them for the purposes of ascertaining their sex, but not that only. I wished to ascertain something more, that was of my own accord, and my own idea.’
S omething more. Dr Paul’s career as a surgeon had hardly been glittering. He was hard-working enough, a belt-and-braces, run-of-the-mill surgeon with a barely adequate private practice and just his police work to keep the creditors at bay.
What set Dr Paul apart from the legions of other middle-aged, middle-of-the-road surgeons was that Dr Paul had an unusual hobby. He was interested – very interested – in sodomy and in sodomites. Dr Paul had been interested in sodomy and sodomites ever since he was a student, twenty years ago, when he had been taught by Dr Alfred Swaine Taylor, the celebrated and sometimes controversial father of English forensic medicine.
In one of his lectures to students at Guy’s Hospital in 1850, Dr Taylor had spoken about a bizarre and disturbing case he had been involved in as a young doctor nearly twenty years earlier. It concerned the death of one Miss Eliza Edwards. On 23rd January 1833, Miss Eliza Edwards had roused her ‘sister’, seventeen-year-old Maria Edwards, who was sharing her bed, and complained of ‘a wheezing in the throat’. It was clear to Maria and to the landlady of the ‘house of doubtful repute’ in Westminster that Eliza was very poorly indeed.
‘Maria, I am dying,’ Eliza whispered, gasping for every breath. ‘It has pleased God to call me.’
Five minutes later Eliza Edwards was dead. She was just twenty-four, and the probable cause of death was consumption, though some were convinced that it was syphilis. For many years Eliza Edwards had made a name for herself as an actress of some repute, specialising in playing tragic young heroines. But the parts had dried up and, for the past three years, Eliza and Maria had been forced to work as prostitutes.
At an inquest held two days later no one claimed Eliza’s body and the corpse was, in consequence, sold to Guy’s Hospital for dissection. The dissection was to be carried out by Dr Alfred Swaine Taylor and was expected to be a routine affair, but when Eliza’s nightclothes were removed, Dr Taylor discovered to his shock and amazement that the body of this young woman was in fact the body of a young man with a normal set of male organs strapped up with a bandage tied around the abdomen.
Outwardly, Eliza Edwards looked like a young woman.
‘There was no appearance of a beard or whiskers,’ Dr Taylor reported. ‘The hairs on the face seemed to have been plucked out with tweezers. The hair was upwards of two feet in length, of a soft glossy texture. The features were of a feminine character.’
No one had suspected that Eliza was a man: not Maria, Eliza’s supposed sister, who had lived with her since she was seven and who had worked with her as a prostitute; not Dr Somerville and not Dr Clutterbuck, both of whom had attended Eliza during her last illness; not the proprietress of the brothel in which Eliza and Maria lived and worked; and not, most of all, the succession of gentlemen callers who came, and came again, to pass an hour or so with the beautiful and talented Miss Edwards.
Pressing on with his examination, Dr Taylor noted that Eliza Edwards’s anus was deformed. ‘The state of the rectum left no doubt of the abominable practices to which this individual had been addicted,’ he wrote. ‘It was noticed by all present that the aperture of the anus was much wider and larger than natural.’ Dr Taylor was also shocked to discover that ‘the rugae or folds of skin which give the puckered appearance to the anal aperture had quite disappeared’ – so much so, indeed, ‘that this part resembled the labia of the female organs’.
Not only had Eliza Edwards dressed as a woman, acted as a woman, passed as a woman, she had, by the mysterious alchemy of sodomy, effectively become a woman.
This strange story of Eliza Edwards had fired the imagination of the young student doctor James Thomas Paul, and he had maintained an interest – verging on the obsessional – in sodomy and sodomites ever since. There was, he found, precious little information on the topic, but what there was Dr Paul had read. There was Dr Taylor’s cautious and short section on the forensic aspects of sodomy in his book The Principles and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence. Then there was George Drysdale’s hugely popular The Elements of Social Science, or Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion, first published in 1854 and running to no fewer than thirty-five editions, which was remarkably frank about the extent of sodomy in England, its causes and its cures.
Dr Paul’s most recent and highly prized acquisition was a copy of Professor Ambroise Tardieu’s Étude médico-légale sur les attentats aux mœurs, first published in Paris in 1857 and running into many editions. It was an astonishing work of urban anthropology, a physiological and psychological primer in sodomy. It professed to be a textbook telling the police, the medical profession and the legislature everything they had ever wanted to know about sodomy and sodomites, and much more besides. In it, Tardieu made a series of sensational claims about how the signs of sodomy were forensically written upon the body, indelibly inscribed, especially upon the anus and upon the penis.
Now, for the first time in his career, Dr Paul was about to examine two real-life sodomites. Dr Paul did not know what – if anything – he would find. Perhaps there would be nothing. The anuses of these two young men might prove to be no different from the hundreds, nay thousands, he had examined duri
ng his medical career. And in all these thousands of anuses never once had he seen any signs of sodomy – though it was, it must be said, not for the want of looking.
It was true that on a few occasions – several occasions, in fact – he had examined the anuses of women who had been buggered or ‘abused by men’, as he carefully and cautiously phrased it, and he had even given evidence in some of these cases. Dr Paul knew very well, as did every doctor worthy of the name, that buggery between men and women was much more common than most people dared to imagine.
Many men thought that having anal sex with a woman protected them in some way from syphilis and gonorrhoea – contagions and contaminations indissolubly associated with the spasms and miasmas of the vagina and its secretions. And there was a persistent folk belief that buggery with a woman would even effect a cure for clap, any sort of clap. Anal intercourse with a woman might be considered by some a ‘special continental vice’, an imported speciality of the swarms of decadent French whores who had flooded into London in the past twenty years, but in reality it was a widespread practice – not just a convenient form of birth control, but also a pleasurable end in itself.
Of course, as Dr Paul knew only too well, buggering a woman was – on paper at least – a serious crime: ‘unnatural connexion with a woman’ was the way the charge was usually, euphemistically, phrased. But was it not woman’s ordained role in nature to be penetrated, to be a receptacle, for man? Anal sex was an unspoken part of that ordained role, unless, of course, there were special circumstances, like anal rape, which brought the crime to the attention of the police. Buggering a woman might be illegal, but the law more often than not turned a blind eye. Buggering a woman might be unnatural, but at least it was naturally unnatural – utterly unlike a man buggering another man or, God forbid, allowing himself to be buggered by a man. That was quite another order of crime, an unnaturally unnatural connexion, a crime, an outrage upon Nature and an affront to God, an inversion, a blaspheming of the divinely ordained order of things.
Male and female created He them.
O nly when he came to sum up his findings did Dr Paul betray the least emotion.
‘I had never seen anything like it before,’ he said in a shocked tone of voice. ‘I have been in practice sixteen years, seven years out of that at the St Pancras General Dispensary, and I have on very many occasions examined the anuses of persons. I do not in my practice ever remember to have seen such an appearance of the anus, as those of the prisoners presented.
‘I examined Boulton, and found him to be a man,’ Dr Paul testified. ‘The anus was dilated, and more dilatable, and the muscles surrounding the anus easily opened.’
Then it was Fanny’s turn.
‘Boulton was then removed, and the prisoner Park came behind the screen,’ Dr Paul deposed. ‘I said to him the same I had said to Boulton.’
Fanny stripped herself naked and bent herself over the same desk stool.
‘The anus was very much dilated,’ Dr Paul recounted almost by rote in court, ‘and dilatable to a very great extent. The rectum was large, and there was some discoloration around the edge of the anus, caused probably by sores.’
The small puckering folds of skin around Fanny’s anus – the rugae – he noticed were abnormal: ‘I found them loose, and not in their normal state. I should say they were rough.’
There could, he said, be one – and only one – explanation for the slackness of Fanny and Stella’s bottoms. ‘The insertion of a foreign body numerous times would account for those appearances,’ he said.
Dr Paul was pressed as to exactly what he meant by ‘the insertion of a foreign body numerous times’.
‘The insertion of a man’s person would cause the appearances I have described,’ he replied. A ‘man’s person’, a man’s penis, or rather, men’s penises – lots of men’s penises – were the cause of the extraordinary state of Fanny and Stella’s bottoms. They had, in Dr Paul’s opinion, been so repeatedly sodomised by men that the anus had lost much if not most of its natural elasticity.
There was more. Dr Paul also examined Fanny and Stella’s penises. Again he was shocked by what he found. Stella’s penis and scrotum were ‘of an inordinate length’ and Fanny’s ‘private parts were elongated’. What, he was asked, might cause such an elongation of the penis?
‘Traction,’ Dr Paul replied solemnly. ‘Traction might produce elongation of the penis and the testicles.’
It was an alarming comment, conjuring up an image of Fanny and Stella’s penises physically distorted and elongated by the rigours of anal penetration. One of Dr Paul’s treasured authorities on sodomy claimed that very often ‘the dimensions of the penis of active pederasts were excessive in one way or another’, that they were ‘pointed and moulded to the funnel shape of the passive anus’. And sometimes they were ‘twisted’ – a consequence of ‘the corkscrew motion required during anal sex’.
There was no doubt in Dr Paul’s mind that the bodies of the two young men he had just examined bore all the hallmarks of sodomy. They might protest their innocence until they were blue in the face, but their sins were engraved in scarlet upon their flesh. It was proof, indisputable and unarguable scientific proof, of the charges against them that they ‘did with each and one another and with divers other persons feloniously commit the abominable crime of buggery’.
6
Wives and Daughters
Say, Stella, was Prometheus blind,
And, forming you, mistook your kind?
No; ’twas for you alone he stole
The fire that forms a manly soul;
Then, to complete it every way,
He moulded it with female clay:
To that you owe the nobler flame,
To this the beauty of your frame.
Jonathan Swift,
‘To Stella, Visiting Me in My Sickness’, 1720
M rs Mary Ann Boulton was a devoted wife and an indulgent mother and she did not mind who knew it. Whatever adversity and misfortune they had as a family experienced (and, really, they had endured more than their fair share of adversity and misfortune), they were, she always maintained, a happy family. A very happy family.
Whatever sneers and snide asides there might be from those ignorant souls who looked down upon them because Mr Boulton was engaged in trade, she knew that she was every inch a lady. Her Papa had been a gentleman of ‘independent means’ and when they were in Dalston Terrace they had lived in quite some style. They were respected and respectable.
And her Papa had not ceased to be a gentleman just because the family had fallen on difficult times and had gone into manufacturing in a small way. Just as she had not ceased to be a lady because she had sought suitable employment as a governess, though she had never ‘lived in’. She had been quite emphatic on that point. It was very hard for governesses who lived in not to be made to feel like servants.
Whatever people said about Tottenham, she had always found it most genteel. Indeed, it was her decided opinion that Tottenham, at one remove from the noise and the bustle of the metropolis, with its hedgerows and quaint cottages, was rather more genteel, more truly genteel, than many other parts of London famed for their gentility.
It was in Tottenham that she had been introduced to Mr Boulton. He was handsome, kindly and worldly-wise and six years older than herself – a perfect gap, she maintained. And he was called Thomas, which was her Uncle’s name, and the coincidence had struck her as propitious. There seemed to be so many coincidences, so many good omens and portents: Thomas’s Papa was a gentleman living in reduced circumstances (though perhaps not quite as gentlemanly as her own Papa), and Thomas, like herself, had cheerfully adapted to his altered condition and was making his way in the world. She knew little about stockbroking, but Thomas had assured her that it was a gentlemanly sort of occupation and that the prospects were excellent.
Thomas Boulton had paid his attentions to her very properly. They had quickly fallen in love, and when he proposed marriage
she had accepted with alacrity. He had been undeterred by the absence of any fortune on her part, which, she must confess, had been something of a stumbling block on the road to matrimony. There had been times when she almost despaired of meeting a suitable husband. So on that blessed day when her Papa walked her down the aisle, she had been filled with an overwhelming sense of joy, not unmingled with relief.
Ernest was such a delicate boy from the very start. He was born in the bitterly cold December of 1848 and she worried that her baby, so small and pale and delicate and perfect, would not survive. He had a cough that would not go away, and she would lie awake at night, her heart in her mouth, listening out for him. There was consumption in Thomas’s family and he had lost three brothers to it. So she fretted and nursed and prayed and coddled her darling baby boy, and by some miracle he survived that first harsh winter and she was grateful.
She remained grateful, even when her second baby son was called to God just days after he was born. She still had Ernest, her darling Ernest, and he was a joy and a comfort. He was such a lovely little boy, so pretty with his blue-violet eyes, large as saucers in his pale face, and his dark hair cascading in baby curls. People often mistook him for a baby girl.
By the time Gerard was born, when Ernest was four, Mr Boulton had left the stockbroking business and entered the wine trade, which was, by all accounts, a most gentlemanly profession and one in which he was bound to prosper, as it stood to reason that people would always want to drink wine. Mr B did indeed prosper – at least at first – and they moved to Greenwich, to a house in Queen Elizabeth Row.