Fanny and Stella (13 page)

Facial hair was another headache. They could shave it, they could pluck it, or they could try to remove it permanently. Close shaving was effective but short-lived. However closely they shaved, a shadow of stubble would appear within hours, making kissing a little risky. This was a bigger problem for Fanny, who was more hirsute than Stella. Plucking was painful, time-consuming and likely to lead to irritation. Some men swore by a weak solution of arsenic for removing facial hair or by hydrogen peroxide to inhibit beard growth.

Make-up was a vexed question too. There were those who saw any kind of ‘paint’ as an affront to Society, and the first vicious step on the road to ruin. Women who wore paint were no better than actresses or whores. But the fashion for paint grew steadily in popularity and by 1871 a ladies’ magazine observed that ‘no one who goes much into Society can fail to notice how common the use of paints, powders and cosmetics has become of late years.’ Mrs H. R. Haweis was rather more forthright. ‘If a girl has the trial of a complexion so bad that the sight of it gives one a turn,’ she wrote in
The Art of Beauty
: 

it is a simple duty for her either not to go into Society at all, or, if she does, to conceal it, as she would not scruple to conceal lameness or leanness. You have no right to inflict your misfortune on everybody – it is an unpardonable offence against good taste. 

The liberal application of paint helped cover a multitude of sins. Nearly all the witnesses who queued up to testify against Fanny and Stella spoke of them being heavily painted, though much of their make-up must have been hastily thrown into Carlotta Gibbings’s carpet bag and spirited away from Wakefield Street. Detective Officer Chamberlain had only found a box of Bloom of Roses – liquid rouge made from the shell of the cochineal beetle – and four packs of violet powder. The writer and ‘Practical Artist in Hair’ Edwin Creer recommended violet powder as ‘one of the most innocent and best preparations for whitening the skin’ but warned against the plethora of ‘pernicious compounds done up in a packet and labelled “Violet Powder”’ which could be extremely injurious to health and sometimes cause death.

Among ladies, violet powder was widely used to dry out and deodorise the moister, more secret parts of the body – so much so that the
Pearl, a Monthly Journal of Facetiae and Voluptuous Reading
felt itself obliged to issue a ‘CAUTION TO LADIES’: 

A contributor wishes to remonstrate against the practice of a very nice young lady friend of his, who treats her quim as if it were a baby’s arse. He says, ‘a nice cunt is a delicious thing to suck, but damn the violet powder, which dries up all the natural juiciness’. 

Then there was the mysterious bottle of chloroform found in Wakefield Street. By 1870, chloroform was in common use as a general anaesthetic and as a way of relieving pain. It was famously administered to Queen Victoria during the birth of Prince Leopold in 1853, and again at the birth of Princess Beatrice in 1857, creating outrage among many in the medical establishment who believed that the pangs of childbirth were divinely ordained and a painful but necessary rite of passage.

Chloroform also induced euphoria. Like laudanum, it was readily available without prescription from chemists’ shops, and there were hundreds if not thousands of addicts who sought and found oblivion through inhalation of its sweet-smelling vapours. But it was highly addictive and too much could prove fatal.

Rather more alarmingly, chloroform was said to induce uncontrolled libidinous feelings. Mild inhalation had a strong aphrodisiac effect. When asleep under its influence both women and men reported dreams so vivid and so powerfully erotic that they felt as if they were real. There were in consequence many accusations of seduction and rape made by women against doctors and dentists who had administered the drug. Chloroform became inextricably bound up with the great moral panic over the white slave trade, stories of which had respectable young women travelling alone being waylaid, rendered unconscious, raped and then sold into sexual slavery in the far-flung corners of Empire.

Stella had been suffering for years from fistula, a painful abscess in the rectum, which by February 1869 had become so severe that surgery was the only solution. Chloroform was administered as an anaesthetic during this operation and Stella may well have been tempted to continue to use it as an effective analgesic. Chloroform vapours injected directly into the rectum were said to be highly efficacious for a variety of anal disorders.

Additionally, chloroform may have been a useful means of relieving pain and discomfort during anal sex, especially for Stella for whom it must have been a sore trial. Like amyl nitrite, which was discovered in 1844, chloroform dilated the blood vessels causing the involuntary muscles – especially the anal sphincter – to relax, making anal penetration much easier and rather less painful.

Chloroform’s combined qualities as analgesic, aphrodisiac and anal dilator rendered it the drug of choice for Fanny and Stella. It might rouse the dormant passions of hesitant or reluctant lovers into vigorous life, at the same time as its vapours loosened and widened the sodomitic passages. And if it was used for nothing else, chloroform was the remedy of last resort for drunken, difficult or violent punters. They could be swiftly knocked out cold and dumped comatose in a back street or alleyway to wake up with a sore head and only a hazy recollection of the erotic misadventures of the night before. 

10

A Dirty Business

Amenities of Leicester Square

Girl to Ponce: ‘Go along, you bloody Mary-Ann, and tighten your arsehole with alum.’

English Whore to French Woman: ‘Yah, you foreign bitches can only get a man by promising them a bottom-fuck!’

French Woman: ‘Yes, I do let the English gentlemen have my arsehole, but my cunt I do keep for my husband.’

The Pearl
, 1880

T 
he dramatic arrest at the Strand Theatre was not the first time that Stella had been in trouble with the police. In 1867, when she was just eighteen, Stella had been arrested on at least two occasions in the Haymarket, the London thoroughfare synonymous with the very worst excesses of prostitution.

On the first occasion, Stella and her friend Martin Luther Cumming were both in drag, almost certainly drunk and plainly soliciting men – much to the indignation of half a dozen battle-scarred female streetwalkers who, as the
Daily Telegraph
delicately phrased it, ‘considered they were interfering with their calling’.

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.’