by Neil McKenna
A brawl quickly broke out between Stella and Cumming and the formidable old whores into whose tramp, or territory, they had dared to trespass. The altercation began with name-calling and threats and quickly escalated into violence. Stella and Cumming were promptly arrested by Police Constable Thomas Shillingford, as much for their own safety as for the offence of soliciting men.
Stella had met Martin Luther Cumming a year earlier, in June 1866, when she was invited to Oxford to perform in drag with ‘The Shooting Stars’, the university amateur theatrical troupe, in a burlesque double bill, The Comical Countess and Lalla Rookh. Though he was a little on the stout side, Cumming made an engagingly comic dowager, and The Times praised his ‘admirable’ performance as the Countess.
Stella and the Comical Countess became firm friends. They made a slightly ridiculous drag duet: Stella, beautiful, slender, soulful and, above all, a convincing girl; and Cumming the Comical Countess, plump and well-bred, comically camp, and quite clearly a man dressed in women’s clothes.
In their drunken forays into the Haymarket, Stella would have stood more chance of getting away with soliciting had she been alone, though the whores of the Haymarket were notoriously protective of their patches and it was not uncommon for new girls to be badly beaten up, scratched and bitten, and sometimes scarred for life when they tried to muscle in on the best tramps. But the Comical Countess was so obviously a drunken toff in comic drag, that the whores straight away spotted him and Stella as a pair of interlopers.
Quite apart from the attempted trespass onto their hallowed tramps, the whores considered Stella and the Comical Countess unfair competition. It was one thing to compete against all the other girls on the street. The whores were used to that. They were even used to gaggles of Mary-Anns waggling their scrawny arses up and down the street. They didn’t mind that so much because the steamers, or punters, that went with the Mary-Anns would hardly want a real woman. It stood to reason. But when it came to Mary-Anns dressed as women, and one of them properly beautiful, that was too much. It was downright deceitful. It wasn’t right; it wasn’t proper and it wasn’t fair. It was taking the bread out of their mouths.
Though it hardly mattered to the Comical Countess, the money to be earned from whoring was no small matter for Stella. She needed it. She had just a pound a week for pocket money – and even that was not always assured, as Papa seemed to be forever in difficulties. She needed more than a paltry pound a week. She needed a wardrobe of silk and satins, of day gowns and evening gowns. She needed wigs and chignons. She needed stockings and shoes and boots and slippers. She needed powder and paint, muffs and capes, and hats and gloves and handkerchiefs. And more – much more – besides.
Stella could never remember if – let alone when – she had decided that going with men for money was the solution to her problems. It had somehow just happened. It had crept up on her. It had taken her from behind, you might almost say. Little and not-so-little gifts; half-a-sovereign here and a sovereign there; money pressed upon her whether she had asked for it or not; money baldly offered for sex; and money boldly taken for sex. Easy money. The easiest money. And she could take her pick. They were queuing up for her. It was a pleasure. Leastways, most of the time.
A few weeks after the incident with the Comical Countess, Stella was arrested in drag in the Haymarket again, this time in the company of a man named Campbell, better known as Lady Jane Grey, a notorious male prostitute in drag who was ‘well-known to the police’. This time the case ended up in Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court, and Stella and Lady Jane Grey were fined and had their knuckles firmly rapped.
The courts dealt with a surprisingly large number of men who were arrested dressed as women. Usually they were charged with a breach of the Queen’s peace, with creating a public nuisance, or with being drunk and disorderly, and let off with a small fine and a good talking-to. It was only if there was compelling evidence of some ‘unlawful purpose’ – of sodomy or prostitution, or both – that matters were treated more seriously.
Twenty years earlier, in the early hours of Saturday, 21st September 1850, Mr Bennett Martin, a clerk to a glass works, was on his way home from a party when he was accosted by a young woman dressed in a light cotton gown with stripes and wearing a straw bonnet and a veil.
‘Are you good-natured, dear?’ she enquired. It was the traditional opening gambit of London’s whores. Mr Martin noticed that her voice was unusually husky and she had a strange sing-song accent which for the life of him he was unable to place. But he was certainly very willing for a bit of slap and tickle, for a thrupenny stand-up, as it was called.
‘I of course thought she was a woman,’ Martin recalled. ‘She certainly had a most feminine appearance and we walked together.’
But when the woman lifted her veil, Martin received two shocks. ‘I observed to my utter astonishment that the face was that of a person of colour,’ he said, ‘and I soon suspected, from the growth of the beard, that I was speaking to a man.’
Martin seized hold of this ‘woman’ and dragged her along the street looking for a policeman.
An intimate examination at the police station confirmed that the woman, who gave her name as Eliza Scott, was in fact a man. In court, Eliza – or Elijah – Scott, speaking ‘in a very mincing effeminate tone of voice’, told the extraordinary story of her life. She claimed she had been sold by her aunt for a slave, escaped and, after many adventures, fetched up in the West Indies where she ‘got her living by washing, ironing and cleaning, and attending people who are ill, more particularly those afflicted with rheumatism’, whom she cured with the application of Indian herbs.
Many, if not most, arrests were accidental. When the routine nightly quotas of streetwalkers were rounded up, every so often one of them would turn out to be a man dressed as a woman. The police were at a loss as to how to deal with these strange apparitions. More often than not they were released with a caution. Willy Somerville, one of Stella’s many admirers, wrote to her anxiously in 1868: ‘Did you see a fellow had been taken up for being in drag but he was let off?’ he enquired. ‘Did you know him by name?’
Though politicians and preachers were quick to angrily deny its existence, male prostitution, especially among boys and young men, was widespread, not to say rife in London. ‘There is a considerable amount of sodomy practised in London,’ Howard Vincent, Director of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police, told a Select Committee of the House of Lords in 1881. ‘It is a fact, and it is an indisputable fact, there are boys and youths soliciting in the streets.’
‘A great many brothel keepers lure young boys to their establishments,’ Mr Talbot, Secretary of the London Society for the Prevention of Juvenile Prostitution, told the French socialist Flora Tristan. ‘I believe I am correct in estimating that 2,000 out of 5,000 brothels encourage the prostitution of young boys.’
There was a veritable ‘army’ of male prostitutes in London, according to another observer. There were, he said,
thousands of boys of precocious debauchery, either in the pay of mature male procurers and patrons, or ‘working’ by themselves, idle and corrupt youths in their late teens, young men in their twenties and thirties, older types (often of repulsive maturity), catamites of all ages, complexions, physiques, grades of cleanliness and decency.
And not only in London. When Inspector Silas Anniss of the Metropolitan Police raided brothels and bawdy houses in 1868 in the naval town of Devonport, he ‘found seven or eight notorious houses specially the resort of boys and girls, from 12 to 17’. In just one house he found twenty-five boys available for sex. Different houses specialised in different sorts of boys. ‘One house was frequented by butcher boys and errand boys; another by sailor boys; and another by drummer boys.’
Prostitution in drag was far less common but was still to be found on the streets of London. According to one observer, ‘such types haunt the parks, public thoroughfares and so on, after nightfall’, or could commonly
be met with at the lowest cafés, bars and ballrooms.
A young man could make enormous sums of money, sometimes as much as £10, for sex with a man. But a sovereign or less, much less, sometimes as little as a shilling or two, was more usual. When the young male prostitute Jack Saul first came to London from Dublin in 1879 he was earning ‘oftentimes as much as £8 and £9 a week’ from selling himself. The work was easy and the punters plentiful.
Despite drunken disputes and brawls, relations between women on the game and the Mary-Anns, the men on the game, were usually cordial, often very cordial. After all, they were all in the same line of business. They were all in it together. Sometimes they fell in love and lived together and even got married. A male prostitute nicknamed Fair Eliza kept a ‘fancy woman’ in Westminster who did ‘not scruple to live upon the fruits of his monstrous avocation’. Another ‘notorious and shameless poof’, known only as Betsey H—, married and fathered two sons, both of whom followed their father into male prostitution.
Charles Hammond, the lover and pimp of Jack Saul, lived very happily with a whore called Emily Barker for nearly three years before he met and married Madame Caroline, a buxom French whore with whom he set up a male brothel in Cleveland Street. Hammond was, by all accounts, a loving and considerate husband, though his affection for Madame Caroline did not prevent him taking one Frank Hewitt to his bed as his ‘spooney boy’.
Lots of whores were quite happy to procure boys for men who occasionally fancied a bit of the other. ‘Walter’, the pseudonymous author of the autobiographical My Secret Life, recounts how a whore called Betsy Johnston easily procured an ageing and enthusiastic sodomite for his pleasure. Many years later, another of his favourite whores, Sarah, agreed to procure a boy for him. ‘One man’s prick stands and spends much like another, play with your own,’ she had told him gruffly when he first mooted the idea. ‘But if you want, I can get one easily enough, and I’ll let him come here for you.’ Sarah kept her promise and procured a young house decorator who had not been in employment for two months, who was desperate for money and prepared to have sex with a gentleman for a golden sovereign.
Relations between the police and the Mary-Anns were fraught with dangers – and sometimes with possibilities. On the night of their arrest outside the Strand Theatre, Fanny and Stella had arched their eyebrows and stared suggestively at Detective Sergeant Frederick Kerley and Detective Officer William Chamberlain. ‘If you’ll let us go we’ll give you anything you want. Anything,’ they had said, like a Greek chorus. ‘Anything you like to mention. Anything you like to mention, you can have.’ Money or sex or both.
Fanny and Stella were acting exactly as they had acted dozens of times before, as every whore – male or female – had acted countless times before. Whores would be arrested and, nine times out of ten, would be released after favours, financial or physical – or both – were forthcoming. As Fanny and Stella knew from experience, lots of policemen wanted to be gamahuched, to have their cocks sucked, while they were out on the beat, and they were never too particular about who did the sucking. Some of them wanted a bottom-fuck as well.
‘I have been in the hands of the police (don’t be frightened) or rather the other way round, the police have been in my hands so many times lately that my lily white hands have been trembling, and I am utterly fucked out,’ wrote Malcolm Johnston joyously to his ‘Pa’ in Dublin. It was, he said, ‘Such Camp!’
Malcolm Johnston was a Mary-Ann, who also liked to drag up. He was known to his friends and fellow Mary-Anns as ‘The Maid of Athens’. Johnston was visiting London in the late 1870s and was making hay while the sun shone. ‘Nearly all the police about here have been up in the evenings,’ he confided to his Pa. ‘Some I have done, others I have only kissed, a kissing one was up last night, and a fucking one two nights previous.’
After his arrest, Johnston helpfully amplified the meaning of certain phrases in his letter. ‘Camp means amusement,’ he explained to the police who were puzzled by the word. ‘It might mean proper amusement or it might mean improper amusement,’ he told them. ‘The meaning of “some that I have done” is frigged off.’
But there was a darker side to this erotic moon. As Johnston’s injunction – ‘don’t be frightened’ – to his Pa suggested, there were some decidedly less ‘camp’ sides to relations between the Mary-Anns and the police. For the past twenty years the police had been arresting a steadily increasing quota of men for having sex with other men. Many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, were arrested and charged every year. The charges, most of them falling short of sodomy, were haphazardly and euphemistically reported as ‘abominable offences’, ‘unnatural crimes’, ‘uncleanness’ or ‘unspeakable conduct’ in the myriad local and national newspapers.
Some arrests resulted from tip-offs, others from complaints from men claiming they had been indecently assaulted by other men. Often these complaints were a ploy in the growing trade in blackmail and extortion. It was good business. Men who had sex with other men were usually too terrified to go to the police if they were being blackmailed. They reasoned, probably rightly, that once the police got wind of their proclivities, they themselves would be charged with a sexual offence. It was better to pay, and pay again and again and again, rather than face prosecution, prison and social ignominy.
Every man, no matter who he was, was potentially the target of blackmail and extortion. One fine Sunday evening in June 1868, Anthony Daly, a retired and highly respectable grocer from Walthamstow, went into the urinal at Mansion House Place to relieve himself. It was just after six o’clock in the evening and the only other person there was a snappily dressed youth, James Kean, who was just sixteen years old.
According to Daly, Kean behaved ‘in a very extraordinary manner’, attempting to touch his private parts. As they left the urinal, Kean asked Daly for sixpence and threatened him with an accusation of indecent assault if he did not pay up. But Anthony Daly was not going to allow himself to be blackmailed by a young male prostitute. He saw a police constable on the other side of the road and summoned him. After a chase, James Kean was arrested and it emerged that other gentlemen had made complaints about both his disgusting behaviour and his attempts at blackmail.
Anthony Daly was either very brave or very foolhardy. Mud stuck and many men in similar situations simply paid up. As the magistrate observed at Kean’s trial, a charge of indecent assault was ‘a charge which it was most difficult to rebut’. A few pence, a few shillings, a few pounds were nothing to the spectre of public ruin if the case came to court.
Increasingly, men were being arrested and charged as a direct consequence of police surveillance. By the 1860s, London’s urinals and public water closets had become magnets for men who wanted to meet other men for sex. They had also become a target for the police. It was already an established and increasingly common practice to use policemen – sometimes in uniform and sometimes not – to keep watch in public lavatories for men loitering with sexual intent or for men actually committing indecent acts in the lavatory.
When a twenty-two-year-old carpenter, Benjamin Kersey, was charged with indecent exposure in a urinal in Hyde Park on 1st March 1871, the evidence was provided by Police Constable Farrier, A 289, who testified that he had ‘been specially employed for the purpose of checking indecent practices in urinals’ for the past eighteen months. After remarking on the frequency of such unpleasant cases, and on the difficulty of dealing with them, Mr Tyrwhitt, the magistrate, addressed some stern observations on the practice of using dedicated police constables to spy on men in public lavatories. ‘The system is injurious to the public interest,’ he said, ‘and bad for the constables themselves, as after a time their minds become, as it were, diseased by being bent on the same point.’
But the practice continued unabated. Men who wanted to have sex with other men, men who loitered in parks and lavatories, were easy prey. They were usually too scared or too ashamed to resist arrest, most of them pleading guilty in the hope of l
anding a lighter sentence.
There were acquittals but many men charged with unnatural crimes or abominable offences were convicted. Sentences varied wildly, ranging from three months with hard labour to fifteen years’ penal servitude. Some men chose to commit suicide rather than face the shame and ignominy of a conviction for a sexual offence with another man.
There was another side to relations between the police and men who wanted to have sex with men. It was a common practice for police constables on the beat to invite men to gamahuche them or to offer to bottom-fuck them down a dark alley. Once the deed was done, the constable would demand money. If it was not forthcoming – and even when it was – the constable would arrest the man and charge him with attempting to indecently assault a police officer.
The practice had become so common that learned tomes on medical jurisprudence urged caution.
There cannot be the slightest doubt that false charges of this crime are more numerous than those of rape, and that this is too often a very successful mode of extortion. This is rather a legal than a medical question, but it is especially deserving of attention that these accusations are most frequently made by soldiers and policemen.
Fanny and Stella were only too well acquainted with this particular trick. Eight years earlier, in 1862, Fanny’s older brother Harry had been arrested and charged with attempting to indecently assault Police Constable George White down a dark alleyway in the early hours of April Fool’s Day. Harry appeared before the magistrate the next morning. As the eldest son of the respected and respectable Judge Alexander Park, Harry was granted bail set at a hefty £600, a small fortune. But once released from police custody, he disappeared for eight long years until, by a cruel twist of fate, Fanny and Stella’s arrest would bring him face to face with Police Constable George White once again.