Fanny and Stella (24 page)

Henry James Johnson, a former surgeon at the London Lock Hospital, which specialised in treating venereal diseases in female prostitutes and among the poor, had come across a very severe case of chancre of the anus in a man which strongly suggested that it was a consequence of anal sex. ‘I saw one case which I did not doubt must have been a case of that description,’ he testified at Fanny and Stella’s trial. The state of this man’s anus could, he said, admit of no other explanation but that he had been ‘repeatedly’ sodomised. ‘At the time we were perfectly convinced of it.’

D 
esperate circumstances called for desperate measures. Miss Fanny Winifred Park was by now all but certain that she had contracted the pox. She still hoped for the best, at the same time fearing the worst. It was just conceivable that it might yet turn out to be some kind of local irritation, an ulcerating pile, perhaps, or something akin to Stella’s fistula. But Fanny had an awful feeling that it was syphilis. The pain from the sore was excruciating; she could not sit and she could not sleep. That she needed to see a doctor, and sharpish, was not in dispute. But which doctor?

She had heard from friends that sometimes the doctors in the hospitals and the dispensaries asked fewer questions when confronted by young men with problems in their bottoms. Getting the required letter of recommendation from a subscriber to the hospital’s charitable fund was the easy part. That was not difficult to obtain if you mixed in the right society and made up a story about some respectable young man of your acquaintance who had fallen upon hard times and could not afford to see a doctor.

Armed with her ticket-of-admission letter, Fanny would transform herself into that respectable young man. She would dress herself up in appropriate clothing, not her own well-cut suits from her Papa’s tailor, but the sort of clothes that would have come from a fripperer’s shop; second-, or third- or fourth-hand; frayed and worn and cheap, and probably none too clean. It was like dragging up, Fanny thought to herself, only in reverse.

Renowned as she was for playing ‘principally dowagers’ on the amateur and semi-professional stage, Fanny was convinced that she could give this particular role her all. After all, she had had plenty of experience of young men from the lower strata of society. Like her older brother Harry, she had a decided and definite penchant for the working men of London; a fascination, a reverence for their animal instincts, for their strangely hesitant and yet passionate approach to the business of fucking which so exactly coincided with her own needs. She knew them inside-out. She knew what clothes they wore, down to their undergarments; she knew how they spoke, how they acted, how they smelt. She would give the performance of her life.

She would become that shy young man, a mercer’s clerk, perhaps, who had unaccountably got this sore on his bottom. If the doctor asked point-blank how she – or rather, he – had acquired it he/she would blush and hang his/her head in shame and say that he/she had been drunk and could remember nothing at all. If there was any funny business, if there was the least sign of the police being called, she could leg it. All the hospital would have was a false name and a description of a shabbily dressed young man who might have been a clerk.

Fanny turned up at Charing Cross Hospital one afternoon in mid-February dressed in an old cutaway coat and ‘wearing a pair of shabby plaid trousers’. As part of her disguise she had not shaved for two or three days. The hospital was very busy, and clearly she would have to wait for a long time. She paced up and down, down and up the long stone corridor waiting to be called. She could not sit still on the hard wooden benches that lined both sides of the corridor, partly because of the pain of the sore on her bottom, and partly because of nerves. She was always nervous before a performance.

‘He was walking backwards and forwards in the passages,’ the hospital hall porter, George Layton, recalled, ‘which is contrary to the rules of the hospital and I asked him to take a seat.’ Fanny was on the point of issuing the sharpest of sharp retorts, but recollecting where she was and why she was there, bit her lip and duly took a seat on a wooden bench.

S 
omething very strange had happened this year. Not one, not two, but
three
young men – three in almost as many weeks – had presented themselves in Dr Richard Barwell’s consulting room at Charing Cross Hospital with afflictions of the rectum. Was it a coincidence, or was there something more singular going on – something more sinister? He had dealt with the first case summarily. The young man – a rather common specimen and gaudily dressed – had turned up one afternoon in early February complaining of a sore on his bottom. Dr Barwell’s suspicions were aroused by the young man’s rather affected, effeminate way of speaking. Naturally he had enquired of this young man how long he had had this sore and how it might have come about. Was it some sort of injury? The young man hesitated. In a manner of speaking, yes, he said, it was a sort of injury. He smiled a confiding sort of smile. And then he admitted everything.

‘He confessed to the act of sodomy,’ Dr Barwell recounted indignantly in court. ‘He confessed how he had got this sore, so cynically – almost
boastfully
, or
jauntily
, I should rather have said – that I would have nothing to do with him. I drove him away.’

Dr Barwell rarely lost his temper, but on this occasion with this young man, he had lost his temper badly, very badly indeed. He had, quite literally, driven this young sodomite away, pushing the frightened youth out of his consulting room and propelling him down the corridor while people looked curiously on. He had thought about it many times since and always with revulsion. It was not so much the affliction that he objected to. He had seen dozens of cases of syphilis of the anus before, invariably in women, and he had shrugged his shoulders and treated them. Such things went on, and he would not sit in judgement. Even the fact that this was a case of syphilis of the anus in a young man, revolting as that was, rare as that was – for he had never seen another case – even that fact was not the cause of his loss of control. Nor was it simply the absence of any remorse, any sense of shame, on the part of the young man, shocking as that was. No, what had made him lose his reason, what had driven him over the edge, was this young man’s evident
pleasure
– pleasure which seemed to be commingled with
pride
– pride in the act of sodomy; a pleasure that he had the temerity to boast about; a pleasure that he assumed, that he presumed, others would understand and somehow share. That was what had made Dr Barwell see such violent red.

In just a matter of days, another man had fetched up in his consulting room. Dr Barwell had asked what the matter was, and after some hesitation the man said he thought he was suffering from ‘a gonorrhoeal discharge, as he himself called it, from the anus’. Dr Barwell was taken aback. The man was nondescript; neither young nor old, not obviously effeminate, and he clearly had some education. Most of Dr Barwell’s patients would never even have heard of the word ‘gonorrhoea’, let alone use the word in front of him. The man was civil and had the grace to look somewhat ashamed of himself. Dr Barwell decided that he would treat him.

Dr Barwell could not now believe that yet a third man had turned up with a venereal affliction of the rectum. The young man sitting nervously in front of him was dressed in ‘rather common clothing’ which was a little too tight upon his slim frame. He had a sore bottom, he explained, or rather, a sore upon his bottom that would not heal or go away. Dr Barwell looked at him sharply. The young man seemed reluctant to meet his eyes and hung his head as if he were ashamed of himself. How had this sore originated, he asked, and for how long had he had it? The young man hesitated. About three or four weeks, he thought. And he had no idea how he came by it. Dr Barwell could tell he was lying but said nothing.

S 
o far, so good, thought Fanny to herself. The rather stern-looking doctor had given her one or two very penetrating glances before asking her to bend over and drop her trousers. That, at least, was something she was well practised in. She wanted to giggle but repressed herself sternly. At least he was examining her and would, presumably, treat her. It was all going according to plan. She winced with pain as the doctor parted her buttocks.

‘I examined him and found a syphilitic sore upon the anus, a primary sore,’ Dr Barwell recalled. ‘It was an open sore, called a chancre, and the anus gaped sufficiently to show the mucous membrane, and the sore upon it. The sore was at the back part of the anus, on the edge of the margin of the mucous membrane.’

There was no doubt in Dr Barwell’s mind that this young man’s chancre ‘would have been communicated by a person who had the disease, and not by slight or mere contact’. While he could not be absolutely certain that this young man had been sodomised (though the gaping anus strongly suggested that he had), at the very least there had been direct and prolonged sexual contact between a syphilitic penis and this young man’s anus.

The sore was not the worst he had ever seen, but nor was it slight either. ‘With energetic treatment such a sore would be healed in two months or ten weeks, sometimes much sooner,’ Dr Barwell said. He gave Fanny a battery of medicines: iodide of mercury, bichloride of mercury, iodide of potash and a weak solution of carbolic acid as a mild disinfectant.

Twice a week, every week, as winter turned into spring, Fanny put on the same old cutaway coat and the same shabby plaid trousers and attended Dr Barwell’s surgery at Charing Cross Hospital in character as a poor but respectable clerk. Dr Barwell remained stern and aloof, and Fanny knew better than to engage him in conversation. Sometimes he would examine her bottom and sometimes merely take her own account. Mercifully, the sore was healing, and Fanny learnt to recognise the little grunt of approval Dr Barwell made when things were progressing well.

In April 1870, after almost two months of treatment, Fanny’s visits to the hospital abruptly ceased. Dr Barwell was mildly surprised, as this person had been assiduous in keeping his appointments. But it was common for attendance to fall off once the sore had healed. This young man was almost cured, though not quite, and Dr Barwell would have liked to have continued seeing him for a few more weeks yet.

But before he knew it there were two policemen standing on the doorstep of his house on a Saturday morning in the middle of May. A young man had been arrested upon suspicion of sodomy, they said, and they ‘insisted upon his accompanying them to see if he could identify his patient’. Dr Barwell refused. He was a doctor, not a policeman, and he would have no part in these proceedings if he could help it. He had strong professional obligations of confidentiality, even to avowed or suspected sodomites, and he was, he said, ‘most unwilling to be mixed up in such an unpleasant business’. But the policemen would not take no for an answer. If Dr Barwell refused, they would apply to Mr Flowers for a summons, forcing him to make the identification. And if he refused to answer that summons, he would be in contempt of court and they would arrest him. He had no choice in the matter.

‘And so,’ as the
Lancet
reported, ‘ Dr Barwell was thus most unwillingly made a witness for the Crown.’

19

The Battle of the Bottoms

An Awkward Question

‘Mamma dear,’ said the youth, ‘what is the meaning of the word bugger?’

‘Bugger, my child? Why do you ask?’

‘Because I heard my tutor call the coachman a damn bugger.’

‘Well, my child,’ replied the Marchioness, ‘a bugger is a person who does his fellow an injury behind his back.’ Cough.

The Pearl
, 1880

T 
he consulting room at Newgate Gaol had rarely been so crowded. Crammed inside along with Fanny and Stella, there were no fewer than six doctors, four prison warders, three detectives, two medical orderlies, Mr Abrams the solicitor and a gentleman from the Treasury who was there to represent the public interest. There was barely room to swing a cat.

That afternoon in early June was especially fine and warm, which was all very well outside in God’s fresh air, but in the dank and airless confines of Newgate, with its unmistakable and pervasive smell of prison rot – a rank combination of unwashed bodies, disease, sewage, despair and hopelessness – the stench and the heat were overwhelming. Several of the gentlemen in attendance felt decidedly faint, and only the strong odour of carbolic in the consulting room prevented them from actually keeling over.

F 
anny and Stella had been transferred to Newgate at the end of May. As the web of conspiracy seemed to grow ever larger, and the case against them assumed greater and greater seriousness, the House of Detention in Coldbath Fields was deemed inadequate to contain such dangerous prisoners.

In Newgate they could be held ‘in close prison’, or solitary confinement, so that the contagion of sodomy and effeminacy which they both carried within their bodies would not taint the other prisoners. ‘We are of the opinion that there is much danger of contamination among younger prisoners,’ a Report by the Departmental Committee on Prisons had concluded when considering this very subject. ‘They are of an age when curiosity stimulates the inherited or acquired depravity which is so often found in young criminals.’