Fanny and Stella (14 page)

‘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 landing 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. 

11

Getting Up Evidence

That if any witness or witnesses who shall be examined by or before any justice or justices or otherwise, upon oath, shall wilfully and corruptly give false evidence, he, she, or they so giving false evidence shall be subject to the same punishment as if convicted of wilful and corrupt perjury.

A Compendious Abstract
, 1823

I 
nspector Thompson was struggling to keep his head above water amidst the deluge of information about the two young men in women’s clothes that had quickly started to flood in after the arrest of Fanny and Stella and showed no sign of abatement. The police had been ‘literally inundated with communication regarding this case from all parts of the country’,
Reynolds’s Newspaper
revealed.

‘I have had a great deal of hard working on this case, and six other officers with me,’ Thompson remarked feelingly towards the end of May, a month to the day after the sensational arrest of Fanny and Stella. ‘I have had fifty or sixty letters sent to me about this case,’ he continued. ‘I have also had many letters, not only affecting these prisoners, but other persons as well.’

It was a tidal wave of letters: letters of all shapes and sizes; letters written in all hands from the most elegant to the barely decipherable; misspelt, fulminating, incoherent, menacing, damning, defending, and dark; letters expressing indignation, outrage and horror; letters demanding severe – indeed, the severest – penalties to be inflicted; aimless, rambling, ranting letters on every subject from sodomy to prostitution to private theatricals; letters lamenting the sad decline in the standards of behaviour of young persons; letters with reported sightings of Fanny and Stella from the four corners of the world; letters enclosing smudgy clippings from newspapers with accounts of concerts and performances given by Fanny or Stella, in places as far apart as Chelmsford, Scarborough and Edinburgh; letters – many of them anonymous – voicing dark suspicions about alleged confederates of Fanny and Stella; and letters of accusation about countless other young men given over to this vice.