Fanny and Stella (15 page)

All these letters had to be read (and in some cases deciphered), understood, digested and acted upon – or not, as the case may be. New enquiries had to be initiated: leads followed, journeys undertaken, witnesses interviewed, statements taken, records kept. Almost every day there was a new development, and often more than one. Almost every day the net seemed to widen and another young man – and sometimes more than one – was implicated.

And then there were the personal callers at Bow Street Police Station: a steady stream of men and women from all stations and conditions of life, hesitant, apologetic, indignant, apoplectic, who had something to say or something to tell and felt compelled to do so in person. It really was no wonder that Inspector Thompson and the six officers helping him were beginning to feel the strain of such a long and complex investigation which seemed to be growing daily ever larger.

Most of those who called at Bow Street in person could add very little to the substance of the investigation. They were there because they wanted to call the attention of the police to supposed sightings of Fanny or Stella going back years; to reported cases of importuning by gay ladies who were, in the indignant opinion of the importuned, not ladies at all, but men; and to every kind of suspicious behaviour by young men, including some direct and not so direct allegations of effeminacy, sodomy and other dark crimes, not to be named among Christians.

Most could be safely ignored. Some might provide useful intelligence. A few were more promising. And one or two were crucial. One of the most important witnesses to come forward was Mr John Reeve, Staff Supervisor at the Royal Alhambra Palace in Leicester Square. And then there was Mr George Smith, Beadle of the Burlington Arcade, who was an entirely different kettle of fish.

Mr John Reeve was a tall, well-made man in his middle years. He was a man of few words, and what words he spoke were spoken gravely and chosen with great care. Reeve had been most reluctant to put pen to paper, as he was more than a little ashamed of his sprawling and ill-formed – almost childish – handwriting, and he would go to any lengths to avoid writing letters. He much preferred to call in person at Bow Street and tell Inspector Thompson what he knew about this dirty business.

In the five years and five months he had been at the Alhambra, Reeve said, he had fought a running battle with these painted young men who, no matter how many times they were turned out, forbidden to return or threatened with the police, nevertheless fetched up again and again like a bagful of bad pennies. Boulton and Park were two of the worst offenders; two of the most persistent, two of the most badly behaved.

‘I have known Park three years, and Boulton nearly as long, upwards of two,’ Reeve told the court in Bow Street. 

I have seen them at the Alhambra many, many times – at least twenty times. My attention was first called to them about two years ago. I saw them walking about as women, looking over their shoulders at men as if enticing them. I went to them and desired them to leave. 

Fanny and Stella would not give up. They were soon back, this time dressed as men, though, as Reeve reported, it was a very strange form of male attire. ‘They were walking about together, their faces painted up, their necks powdered, their shirt collars much lower than they are now, and their waistcoats were very open.’ They were openly flirting with gentlemen, John Reeve spluttered. ‘They looked at people as they passed and their mannerisms were more feminine than masculine. People round them were saying they are two women dressed in men’s clothes. I had observed them looking at a gentleman in a manner that I thought highly improper.’

In fact, Fanny and Stella had been at the Alhambra within the last six weeks. ‘They were in a Private Box, and dressed as men. They were painted up. They wore pink coloured flowers and hung their pink gloves over the box.’   

I saw the people looking up at the box they were in and rising from their seats to get a better view of them. I saw that they were playing all sorts of frivolous games with each other: they were looking down in front of the box, handing cigarettes backwards and forwards to each other and lighting them by the gaslight. I went to the box and told them they must leave. 

Fanny and Stella were decidedly the worse for wear.

‘They asked to have more soda and brandy,’ John Reeve remembered. ‘“No,” I said, “I’ve told you to keep out of the place many times,” and I marched them out. I told the Box Keeper to be very particular about admitting them again.’

The worst part of it, Reeve said, was that they came in company with a great gaggle, a great tribe of similar young men. ‘I have seen about twenty young men at the Alhambra with their faces powdered in company with Boulton and Park.’ Painted and powdered and perfumed young men, with shrieking voices and tweezered eyebrows and curled hair. It was bewildering and confusing, and John Reeve did not mind admitting it. Sometimes they came dressed as women, and sometimes they were dressed as men, or rather as young women might look if they had dressed themselves as men.

‘I could not tell whether they were men or women,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I thought they were women, and sometimes I thought they were men.’

The very thought of what these young men had in mind for the gentlemen they ogled and chirruped at turned his stomach. Despite his best endeavours, these young men continued to plague the Alhambra, seemingly in greater numbers and with more perseverance than any other music hall or theatre that he knew of. Nothing seemed to deter them. They were more than a nuisance. They were a veritable plague. He had made ‘frequent complaints to the Police about these men’. Nobody had seemed interested. Nothing was done. And then, to his very great surprise, there in the newspapers, were the two worst offenders, caught red-handed in wickedness.

He had of course gone to see Inspector Thompson at Bow Street as soon as he found out about the arrest of Park and Boulton, as he discovered they were called. He had only ever heard them referred to by foolish girls’ names – Jane and Fanny and Stella and a whole host of other pretty names. Inspector Thompson was very interested. He told him he was to go and quietly observe them in the Magistrates’ Court in Bow Street to confirm that they were the very same young men who had so plagued the Alhambra. If they were indeed one and the same then John Reeve was to go straight away to Whitehall, to the offices of the Treasury Solicitor who, since 1661, had been in charge of all serious public prosecutions, and tell Mr John Greenwood himself everything he knew.

W 
hether Inspector Thompson was always strictly truthful about what went on behind the scenes of the investigation into the Young Men in Women’s Clothes was thrown into some doubt by the testimony of Mr George Smith, the genial and beaming Beadle of the Burlington Arcade. A former constable with eight years of more or less unblemished service in the Metropolitan Police, Mr George Smith had, according to Thompson, been most eager to offer every assistance to the police.

Mr George Smith knew a great deal about Fanny and Stella and about the Mary-Anns that walked the Burlington Arcade, the hollow-eyed, hungry young and not-so-young men with their tawdry, gaudy, cheap clothes and their oh-so-tight trousers, marching and mincing up and down the Arcade and glaring and staring at every man who walked by. Some of them were painted like women, and some of them were even dressed like women.

One of the worst offenders was, according to Mr George Smith, the youth called Boulton. A pretty fellow, to be sure, in every sense of the word. Sometimes he was dressed as a man (or rather how a lady might look dressed as a man), and at other times he would be dressed as a gay lady, looking every inch the part, from the wig on his head to the kid boots on his feet. Mr George Smith had kept a particular and close eye on this one, who would come on his own or in company with one or two others. ‘I noticed his face,’ Smith declared in Bow Street Magistrates’ Court. 

It was painted very thickly with rouge and everything else on. He always caused such a commotion when he came into the Arcade. Everybody was looking at him . . . I saw him
wink
at a gentleman and turn his head in a sly manner. He winked his eye and put his face on one side, and did like
that
, the same as a lady would do, the same as a woman would do. 

And here George Smith paused and, to much laughter, made a passable stab at contorting his manly visage into the lascivious come-hither nods and winks he had witnessed. He was rather less successful when it came to attempting to reproduce chirruping, that particular and peculiar sound made by the most depraved and desperate of streetwalkers and common prostitutes when they were enticing passing gentlemen to buy their jaded wares.

‘I dare say I do not do it so well as they can,’ was his rueful verdict.

Mr George Smith could speak to one infamous afternoon, in 1868 or thereabouts, when Boulton had come up close to him, so close that he could see the paint thickly caked upon his phiz, and actually tried it on with him.

‘Oh, you sweet little dear!’ said Boulton, leaning forward and lisping and whispering in his ear. ‘Oh, you nice little dear!’

Mr George Smith was, he was quite ready to admit, quite taken aback. He was surprised and he was shocked. Such a thing had never happened to him before, and he was obliged to stop and pause. It had been quite a facer for him, and no mistake. Of course, the youth was drunk or deranged, or both. By the time Mr George Smith had recovered himself and found out Constable Holden, Boulton was nowhere to be seen. He had scarpered.

A few days, or even a few weeks, later, Boulton was back in the Burlington Arcade in company with a plump and florid youth prone to fits of giggling. ‘I saw Boulton turn his head to two gentleman, smile at them, and again make a noise with his mouth, the same as a woman would for enticement.’

Mr George Smith did not hesitate. He marched straight up to them and said, ‘I’ve received several complaints about you, and you remember what you said to me a week or two ago. I’ve seen enough of your conduct to consider you to be an improper person to be in the Arcade. You must leave at once.’

‘Take no notice of that fellow,’ Boulton told his companion, in ‘a feminine manner’. The pair of them tried to push past the solid and majestic bulk of Mr George Smith. But that gentleman was having none of it. He took hold of Boulton and frogmarched him to the gates at the Piccadilly end. ‘You’re as bad as the other,’ he told him, ‘you leave the Arcade at once,’ before grabbing him and flinging him down on the pavement outside.

Just three days after this episode, Boulton was back, this time with a flint-faced Mary-Ann called Park with whom Smith was already acquainted, having seen him a dozen or so times before, alone and in company with various other Mary-Anns. ‘They used to walk the Arcade arm-in-arm with such an effeminate walk that it used to cause the notice of everyone,’ Smith recalled. ‘On seeing me they directly walked into a hosier’s shop kept by Mr Lord.’

Mr George Smith waited outside Mr Lord’s hosiery shop. And he waited and he waited, for an hour or more, until at last the pair of them emerged with their noses stuck in the air as if they were fine ladies out for an afternoon’s shopping.

‘I’ve cautioned you not to come here,’ he said to Boulton. ‘You’ll leave the Arcade at once.’

‘I shall go where I like,’ Boulton haughtily replied.

‘You’ll do nothing of the sort. You’ll go out.’ They tried to walk on, but Mr George Smith seized the pair of them by the scruffs of their necks and violently ejected them onto the pavement.

And so the skirmishing went on. There was no rhyme or reason to this siege of the Burlington Arcade. Sometimes they were there, and sometimes there was no sign of them. A week or a month might pass and Mr George Smith would not see a Mary-Ann from one day’s end or one week’s end to the next. But on other days, in other weeks, they were ever present, an army of angry, buzzing flies. Swat as many as he liked (and Mr George Smith did like), it made no difference. They came back, again and again and again. They would try and catch him off his guard, watching and waiting for him to go off for his dinner or for a refresher in the tavern next door. Then they would sail in, bold as brass, and when he got back he would have to chase them out all over again.

This happy state of antagonism might have continued indefinitely had it not been brought to an end by Mr George Smith’s abrupt dismissal for the trivial offence of accepting tips from some of the gay ladies who patronised the Arcade.

Out on his ear and out on his arse. No warning, no notice, nothing. Nothing but his wages to date and barely the price of a glass of beer in his pocket. As Beadle, he received a wage of a guinea a week, but that was nothing compared to the tips he collected. In a good week he could easily expect to make £5, and he had been known, on high days and holy days, to pocket that much in a day if business was brisk.

‘I don’t think it a disgrace to have taken money for drink,’ Smith declared. ‘Everyone does it. I am not ashamed of it. If a lady offered you half-a-crown, wouldn’t you take it?’

Stripped of his Beadle’s rank and denuded of his Beadle’s blue frogged greatcoat and shiny top hat, Mr George Smith made a less than impressive witness for the prosecution when he went into the box at Bow Street. Matters were not at all helped by the fact that it was obvious to everyone that he had been drinking and it was not yet even noon.

‘Have you been drinking today?’ counsel for the defence demanded.