Fanny and Stella

by Neil McKenna

  Stella, in turn, was flattered, flirtatious and on flamboyant form.

  ‘Oh you City birds have good fun in your offices’, Stella said in a tone of mock complaint, ‘and you have champagne!’

  The Captain rose gallantly to the bait.

  ‘You had better come over and see,’ he replied meaningfully, and that very afternoon a radiant Stella and a less than effervescent Lord Arthur Clinton turned up at 1 Gresham’s Buildings, being the Captain’s flashy rented offices.

  ‘My partner arrived whilst we were there and we had champagne,’ Captain Cox continued. Lord Arthur’s nose was clearly out of joint. After all, he and Stella were living together as man and wife, and he had not long since ordered – but not yet paid for – engraved cards bearing the legend ‘Lady Arthur Clinton’. Of course, Arthur knew that Stella frequently went out on the pad to sell herself to men for much-needed cash to keep them afloat. Though he was not exactly happy about this arrangement, he could see the advantages. What he did not care for, not one jot, was being made to play the cuckold in public. And after one particularly loaded exchange between Stella and this man Cox, he left the room and slammed the door, and went for a walk to cool his heels and cool his head while the flirtation continued apace.

  ‘I treated Boulton as a fascinating woman,’ Cox said later.

  ‘Have you had a large experience in fascinating women?’ asked the sarcastic Mr Straight. Captain Cox objected to this question, very strongly. But Mr Straight was not to be deflected. ‘Have you had a large experience in fascinating women?’ he repeated.

  ‘I have known a great many women in my time,’ was the guarded reply.

  ‘Were you in the habit of making advances of this sort on your first acquaintance?’

  ‘It would always depend whether there was an advance made,’ the Captain answered.

  ‘Do you state that there was an advance made by him?’

  ‘I do. Boulton went on in a flirting manner with me, and I kissed him, she or it, at the time believing he was a woman.’

  There. He had said it. He had kissed Ernest Boulton.

  Captain Cox’s confession brought forth gasps and giggles from the public gallery.

  ‘But you don’t mean to say Boulton kissed you?’

  ‘Well, he did something very like it,’ Captain Cox replied.

  ‘You anyhow kissed him?’

  ‘I certainly did.’ (Laughter.) ‘Shortly after that Boulton complained of being chilly. My partner whipped the cloth off the table, put him in an armchair, and wrapped up his feet in the cloth.’

  A few days later, Lord Arthur and Stella attended one of the Captain’s auction sales at the Roebuck Tavern in Turnham Green. Lord Arthur’s spirits seemed entirely restored and a jolly time was had by all. There was a piano in the public bar and Stella sat down and sang divinely, later taking the opportunity to slyly slip the handsome Captain a photograph of herself in men’s clothes.

  As in all the best romances, the dashing Captain Cox had sealed his love with a kiss and it was left to the imagination of the gentle reader, or, in this case, the minds of the coarse-grained, foul-mouthed chorus that comprised the public gallery of Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, to determine if the love affair between Captain Cox and Stella was ever consummated. And if the raucous laughter, squints, leers and half-mumbled lewd comments emanating from that quarter were anything to go by, the public gallery had already reached its unanimous verdict.

  There was an unhappy coda to the romance. Somehow or other Captain Cox got wind of Stella’s true gender.

  ‘I afterwards heard something about Boulton’s sex,’ Captain Cox told the court, carefully avoiding naming who it was who had tipped him off, though the odds were on the dubious Mr Roberts who was simultaneously trying to prevent Lord Arthur from being cuckolded and the Captain from being cruelly duped. When he found out, Captain Cox was incandescent with rage.

  ‘After this I went to Evans’s. I saw Boulton there. Park and Lord Arthur Clinton were with him. I went up to the table where Boulton, Park and Lord Arthur were sitting, and used abusive language. “You — infernal scoundrels,” I said. “You ought to be kicked out of the place.” I said more to the same purport, and kept walking up and down by the table. I afterwards promised not to create a disturbance, and left.’

  M r Pollard, the most senior solicitor at the Treasury, had been very sympathetic and understanding. With scrupulous politeness he had called him Captain at every possible opportunity, tut-tutted over his treatment at the hands of the Civil Service Club and listened to stories of his army life and his Antipodean adventures with every appearance of animated interest.

  It was with the greatest delicacy and the greatest difficulty that Mr Pollard brought the conversation round to the vexed topic of his giving evidence. Captain Cox shuddered and shivered. He was understandably reluctant to appear as a witness and admit to kissing – if that was all it was – a woman dressed as a man who turned out to be a man after all. He was a former officer and still some sort of gentleman.

  Mr Pollard urged and persuaded. In cases like this, he said, cases of interest and importance to the Crown, cases which reflected on the national character and the national honour, there would of course be expenses. Generous expenses. Mr Pollard underlined the word ‘generous’. A man like Captain Cox could hardly be expected to neglect or abandon his important business to help secure the conviction of two pernicious sodomites without some adequate disbursement from the Crown for his time and his trouble. And so it had been agreed. A dusty Treasury ledger records the receipt of ‘a letter from Captain Cox applying for his expenses as a witness’.

  Sadly, Captain Cox did not live to collect his disbursement from the Treasury, though his widow and his children were no doubt very grateful. The gallant Captain died two weeks to the day after he gave his evidence in Bow Street, of smallpox, the death certificate stated, and also quite possibly of shame.

  21

  A Bitches’ Ball

  I have heard of ‘a bitches’ ball’. It might mean two things. It might be a ball for prostitutes, and it might be a ball for men prostitutes. I have taken part in a ball for male prostitutes at my father’s house about two years ago.

  Malcolm Johnston,

  The Maid of Athens, 1884

  Miss Carlotta Westropp Gibbings requests the pleasure of your company at a Ball at Haxell’s Hotel, West Strand on Friday, 7th April at 9 o’clock.

  T here was the greatest excitement about Carlotta’s ball. It went without saying that it was to be the most perfect and the most dazzling ball ever given. A brilliant ball to launch a brilliant season, the most brilliant season they had ever known – and by the end of it none of the young men who liked to dress as young ladies expected anything less than to be engaged to be married to a peer of the realm or a prince from foreign parts.

  It would most emphatically not be one of those poky, secretive, sad little balls they sometimes attended, in a room above a public house or in a low tavern in some out-of-the-way place no one had ever heard of, with a solitary pianist picking out ancient waltzes on a rickety piano and the air thick with cheap tobacco smoke, beer and sweat. And there was to be no riff-raff, only the crème de la crème of gentlemen and the choicest ladies from their circle. Certainly no trollops off the streets (though, strictly speaking, this meant that many, if not most, of their friends would face disqualification).

  No, Carlotta’s ball was going to be held in a proper ballroom, on the second floor of Haxell’s Hotel, which, if not the biggest ballroom in London, was one of the most elegantly appointed. There was to be a small orchestra. There was to be champagne and a proper supper served at the stroke of midnight. And there were to be at least two dressing rooms for the ladies and a smoking room for the gentlemen. And between the dances, there were to be musical interludes and singing. Everything, absolutely everything, was to be, as Fanny said at least a dozen times a day, comme il faut.

  Best of all, Stella had been prevailed upon to r
eturn from her exile in Edinburgh and grace the proceedings with some songs. She was to come a few days early and stay in Haxell’s Hotel as Carlotta’s guest. It would be the first time Fanny had seen her sister for six months and there was a great deal of catching up to do.

  Fanny was in a whirl of excitement and expectation. She was in her element, advising her dearest Carlotta on every aspect of the ball. They had planned it together, down to the last detail, and it was to be all perfection. By rights, of course, it should have been Carlotta’s Mamma who organised this ball to launch her daughter upon an unsuspecting world, but her Mamma was in Clifton, Carlotta had explained, and was dour and sour and rather too fond of going to Mr Charlesworth’s church. So Fanny had stepped in and become Carlotta’s trusted and truest friend; her wisest counsel; an older sister and a maiden aunt rolled into one. Tante Fanny. She rather liked the sound of that.

  Carlotta was Fanny’s newest and, with the exception of Stella, her most intimate friend. They had met quite recently, just before Christmas, at a bal masqué at Highbury Barn, one of the few places where young men dressed as young ladies were welcome and where they had formed quite a little society of friends.

  Fanny and Carlotta had hit it off immediately and had become more or less inseparable. Almost like sisters. They had much in common. Like Fanny, Carlotta had been dragging up since she was fourteen or fifteen years old. ‘I have known the slang term “drag” about five months,’ Carlotta later proclaimed in court to gasps and giggles. ‘I have gone about dressed as a woman but I never went out so dressed with the intention of walking in the street.’

  Which was, perhaps, just as well, Fanny mused to herself charitably, for her sweet-natured Carlotta was no oil painting. In fact, she was decidedly plain, labouring under the multiple disadvantages of an overly long neck, broad and most unwomanly shoulders and a complete absence – a perfect desert – of chin which, to be frank, made her look a little simple.

  Fanny could sympathise. She, too, had once laboured – and indeed laboured still – under some disadvantages of the person, and yet she had turned these disadvantages to triumphs, winning many victories in the endless battle of love. Personality counted for much, but there was a great deal she could teach her dear Carlotta about the dark arts of dressing well, of painting herself, of arranging her coiffure, and generally making a little go a very long way. Every pot has its lid, thought Fanny, and properly dressed and properly lit – the dimmer the better, dare she say it! – even Carlotta might appear to advantage and prove irresistible to the gentlemen at her ball.

  D rag balls were a regular feature of life in London, though few aspired to – or indeed, achieved – the brilliance and opulence of Miss Carlotta Westropp Gibbings’s ball. There was a clear distinction to be made between public and private drag balls. Many advertised themselves publicly as masquerade balls, as fancy dress balls, or, like the entertainments at Highbury Barn, as bals masqués and were open to all comers.

  In April 1864, the diarist Arthur Munby ‘chanced to see an advertisement of a masked ball at some pleasure gardens in Camberwell: admission one shilling’. Munby was intrigued. ‘Who would be attracted by such a ball?’ he asked himself and decided to find out. He was hoping, perhaps, to strike a rich new vein of the working-class women he loved to encounter and to write about obsessively in his diaries. ‘Only about fifty or sixty people were present,’ Mundy recorded, ‘most of them in fancy dress of a tawdry kind.’ The ball was held in a large wooden shed.

  Several of the girls were drest in men’s clothing, as sailors and so on: one, as a volunteer in uniform, I took for a man until someone called her Jenny.

  Moreover, not a few of the youths were elaborately disguised as women of various kinds; some so well, that only their voices showed they were not girls – and pretty girls.

  ‘This is a thing new to me,’ Munby wrote censoriously, ‘and is simply disgusting.’

  Private drag balls were a very different kettle of fish. They were strictly by invitation, and entry was usually by password only. They were often small, hole-in-the-wall affairs, with not more than a dozen or so dancers, and held in an odd assortment of venues: in rooms above taverns; in out-of-the-way halls and assembly rooms; in cellars, stables and barns; and sometimes in private houses.

  Drag balls were held regularly at the Druids’ Hall in Turnagain Place in the City of London. Even though the hall was unlicensed for drinking and dancing, the police seemed happy to turn a blind eye until the summer of 1854 when two men were arrested in full drag. John Challis, aged sixty, was ‘dressed in the pastoral garb of a shepherdess of the golden age’, while his companion George Campbell was ‘completely equipped in the female attire of the present day’, a court heard. ‘There were about a hundred persons present,’ Inspector Teague told the magistrate, Sir Robert Carden, ‘and from eight to ten men were dressed as females.’ Challis and Campbell had, he said, ‘rendered themselves very conspicuous by their disgusting and filthy conduct’. Challis in particular was ‘behaving with two men as if he were a common prostitute’.

  A few years after Fanny and Stella’s arrest, no fewer than forty-seven men were arrested when police burst in on a private drag ball at the Temperance Hall in Hulme, a desperately poor district of Manchester. The organisers had gone to considerable lengths to keep out prying eyes, fastening lengths of black crepe over the windows and employing a blind accordionist as the only musician. But Detective Sergeant Jerome Caminada had been tipped off, and he and his officers had climbed onto the roof of an adjacent building in order to spy on the proceedings. What they saw amazed them. Half the men were in drag and the other half in a variety of exotic costumes. The men in drag were performing, Caminada testified, ‘a sort of dance to very quick time, which my experience has taught me is called the “Can-Can”’.

  Admission to the ball was by password only but Detective Sergeant Caminada had somehow found it out. Knocking on the door of the Temperance Hall, he uttered the word ‘Sister’ in a mincing voice and the door opened to reveal a man dressed as a nun. Then there was panic as policemen and local volunteers rushed in to round up the revellers.

  T hings had got off to a less than perfect start, Carlotta thought irritably. She had always intended that her ball should be small and select, with no more than a dozen couple at most. The whole thing was to be an austerely beautiful and romantic affair, untainted by the sort of brutish behaviour which characterised so many low drag balls.

  She had to confess that she was very far from pleased to discover that Fanny had been dispensing invitations broadcast to the ragtag and bobtail of her acquaintance and then had the nerve to tell her that this one and that one simply had to attend, or that she had already promised so-and-so that they could come. The upshot was that there were now forty-eight guests, quite double the original number. She was sure that she did not know half of them, and equally sure that she would not wish to know them.

  Mr Edward Haxell, the jovial proprietor of Haxell’s Hotel, was in his element. Young Mr Gibbings’s ball was going swimmingly and all the young men and the young men dressed as ladies seemed to be enjoying themselves enormously. ‘They changed partners for the dances,’ he recalled later, ‘and there was nothing wrong in any way during the whole night.

  ‘There was no impropriety of attitude that I saw in the room, not a vestige,’ he insisted. ‘I heard the observation made about how well the young men were acting.’ It was true that some of the young men – the young men dressed as young men, that is – had danced with each other, which was a little odd when you first saw it, but after a while it seemed perfectly natural, indeed, rather charming, and Mr Haxell wondered idly to himself why this did not happen more often in situations where there was a dearth of ladies.

  He had counted thirteen young men dressed as ladies, though there might of course have been more. It was sometimes hard to tell the real thing from the fake. Miss Gibbings, Miss Boulton and Mrs Graham of course he knew well. And he had been previously introd
uced to Miss Cumming and Miss Thomas. Miss Peel he knew by reputation only as Mr Percival Peel, rumoured to be nephew to the late Sir Robert Peel, the former Prime Minister.

  Miss Stella Boulton – or Lady Stella Clinton, as he had heard her referred to more than once – made an utterly convincing young lady. When she had first arrived at Haxell’s a few days before the ball, Miss Gibbings introduced her as ‘the best amateur actress off the boards’, and Mr Haxell could well believe it. She seemed to light up even the dullest room from the moment she entered. She was, in the truest sense, enchanting. No wonder everyone seemed to fall instantly under her spell. He was even a little in love with her himself.

  ‘I heard Boulton sing his popular song “Fainting Away”, I think three times, with great éclat,’ he said later in court. (Or was it ‘Fading Away’? He could not be sure.) ‘I spoke to the Master of the Band about Boulton’s singing, and when he sang a second time, he went straight up to him and said, “It is the most perfect man’s soprano voice that I ever heard!” ’

  Of course, when the police started nosing around and asking questions, everyone was falling over themselves to say how Carlotta’s ball had all gone off so perfectly, with so much propriety, with so much sweetness and light. Everyone, that is, apart from Jack Saul, whose bawdy recollections of that night were closer to the bone, in every sense.

  On the surface, he said, everything about the ball seemed to be above board. Both the gentlemen and the ladies conducted themselves, for the first hour or two at least, with the greatest propriety. But as the evening wore on, and more and more champagne was consumed, the ball started to turn into a bacchanal, and the ballroom became a brothel.

  ‘There seems to be,’ Jack Saul mused with some relish, ‘such a peculiar fascination to gentlemen in the idea of having a beautiful creature, such as an ordinary observer would take for a beautiful lady, to dance and flirt with, knowing all the while that his inamorata is a youthful man in disguise.’