Fanny and Stella (38 page)

28

A Rout

The conception of criminal justice which the atmosphere of Scotland Yard fosters is pretty much the same as that which has existed for countless ages in the empire of China. If a crime has been discovered, the majesty of the law must be vindicated by the punishment of somebody. But it is a minor consideration who that somebody shall be. The police have in a great measure lost the faculty of seeing things as they are, and not as they wish them to be.

The Times
, 25th July 1871

T 
he Attorney-General knew that his last and best hope of a conviction in this case was the evidence of the two medical men: Dr Richard Barwell and Dr James Paul. Never mind that five of the six doctors who had so minutely examined the parts of Boulton and Park in Newgate Gaol were of the opinion that there were no signs of sodomy present. Those five doctors had examined the young men only after they had been in custody for almost six weeks, six long weeks during which the worst of their sodomitic injuries, if the Attorney-General could so phrase it, would have had the opportunity to heal and fade from view.

But Dr Barwell had treated Frederick Park for chancre of the anus at Charing Cross Hospital when that young man had come in using a false name and disguised as a respectable clerk from the poorer classes. He had seen him week in and week out over a period of three months and he could and would speak authoritatively to the extraordinary state of sodomitic disease that obtained in this young man’s posterior parts.

Dr Paul was the police doctor who had examined Fanny and Stella in a dingy room at the back of Bow Street Magistrates’ Court on the morning after their arrest. He had been shocked and horrified – indeed he had been turned quite pale – by the gaping anuses and the deformed and elongated penises of these young men, signs and symptoms which, according to the texts on the subject, could only have been caused by persistent sodomitic indulgence on a scale which beggared belief.

Both these medical gentlemen had seen the signs and symptoms of sodomy written in scarlet upon the bodies of these two young men in exceptional and in intimate detail. Surely a jury of twelve Englishmen good and true would be obliged to give credence to the testimony of Dr Paul and Dr Barwell over that of five doctors who had examined Boulton and Park only long after their sodomitic crimes had been forcibly ceased?

For his part, Dr Barwell was indignant. Indignant still, a year on, that he had been forced, under threat of a summons, to testify in this case against his wishes and against what he considered to be his professional duty of confidence to his patients, even patients like the three young sodomites who had attended his clinic in as many weeks. And newly indignant that his word as to the identity of the young man he had treated for the syphilitic affliction of the anus was now being so heavily challenged by counsel for the defence. Those legal gentlemen thought themselves very clever, so very clever (and no doubt they were) in the way they sowed their seeds of confusion and uncertainty in the minds of the Jurymen; so very clever in the way they tried to trip him up; so very clever in the way they tried to make out that
he
was confused, mistaken or misled – if not actually lying under oath. And he was well aware that the more indignant and the more insistent he became, the less credible he appeared. But
he
knew, beyond any doubt, that the young man Park standing in the dock – though stouter now, better dressed and sporting manly whiskers – was the same young man who had stood trembling before him in his room at Charing Cross Hospital with an affliction of the anus and mutely pleading for help.

When his turn came, Dr Paul stood up in Westminster Hall manfully and repeated his shocking findings as to the state of the orifices of evacuation and the organs of generation of Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park. There was no denying that his account was clear, concise and compelling. He had been the first doctor to examine these youths just hours after they were taken from the streets and it was clear that they had both recently engaged in sodomitical activities. So far Dr Paul was proving to be a strong witness, perhaps the strongest witness for the prosecution, and the Attorney-General was well pleased.

‘What is that book in your pocket?’ demanded Mr Digby Seymour. It was a curious and abrupt way to open a cross-examination.

‘This?’ replied Dr Paul, pulling the book from his coat pocket and feeling surprised and not a little flustered by the question. ‘This is a work of Tardieu’s.’

The book in question was Professor Ambroise Tardieu’s
Étude médico-légale sur les attentats aux mœurs
, a famous work of scientific observation upon the ways and wiles of sodomites in Paris, a manual intended for doctors, especially police doctors like Dr Paul, on how to read the unmistakable signs of sodomy which the good professor believed were forensically engraved upon the bodies of sodomites.

‘Have you been studying Tardieu lately?’ Mr Seymour enquired, with an ever so slight and sarcastic emphasis on the word ‘studying’.

‘I have read it today,’ Dr Paul replied, reddening. ‘I have had it fifteen months.’

Fifteen months? Indeed? Mr Seymour seized on this like a ferret. ‘That would be about the time you bought it with reference to this case?’ he suggested.

Dr Paul opened his mouth to reply but no words came forth.

‘Not so long ago as fifteen months,’ he said after an embarrassingly long pause. ‘I never heard of it until I had given evidence in this case.’

‘Who told you of it?’

‘An – an anonymous letter that I received,’ he stuttered out after another pause.

It was clear to all that Dr Paul was lying. But why had he lied under oath, on such a subject, and lied so palpably, and so badly? And why had he come up with the barely credible story that an anonymous admirer had written to alert him to the existence of the book? Surely the date when he actually read the book was of little or no moment? February or May 1870. Two months before the arrest of Fanny or Stella. Or two months afterwards. Did it really matter all that much?

It mattered a great deal. If Dr Paul’s first answer was true – if indeed he had acquired his copy of Tardieu in February 1870, a full two months before the arrest of Fanny and Stella – then it meant that something was amiss. It meant that there was more to the arrest of Fanny and Stella than met the eye. It meant that Dr Paul had, in short, been priming himself and preparing himself for the day when he would examine Fanny and Stella for signs of sodomy.

There was more.

Mr Sergeant Parry, defending Fanny Park, dragged from a very reluctant Dr Paul the curious admission that he had met with Inspector Thompson on the Sunday
before
the arrest of Fanny and Stella.

‘Just attend to me,’ Mr Sergeant Parry instructed Dr Paul, whose attention appeared to be wandering. ‘You say Inspector Thompson called on you on the Sunday before. This is before these young men were apprehended?’

‘Exactly,’ Dr Paul replied with a certainty he clearly did not feel.

‘Did he tell you he was on the watch for them?’

‘Certainly not.’ Dr Paul’s reply was just a little too emphatic, a little too shrill, to be convincing.

‘He did not communicate with you on that subject?’ Mr Sergeant Parry enquired with a note of evident surprise.

‘Not in the least.’

‘Then he called to pay you a
friendly
visit?’ Mr Sergeant Parry’s sarcasm was undisguised.

‘No, it was something about the attendance on some man,’ Dr Paul replied falteringly, conveniently forgetting that he had just said he saw Inspector Thompson every day – or almost every day – at Bow Street and that it was as unlikely as it was inconvenient that Inspector Thompson would journey halfway across London on a Sunday to discuss Dr Paul’s attendance on ‘some man’.

‘It was not in reference to this case at all?’ persisted Mr Sergeant Parry.

‘Not in the least,’ Dr Paul answered with as much certainty as he could muster.

It was again clear to everyone present that Dr Paul was lying, and that Inspector Thompson’s highly unusual house call was in some unfathomable way connected with the arrest four days later of the Young Men in Women’s Clothes.

And was it really a coincidence, Mr Sergeant Parry wanted to know, a mere accident, as Dr Paul tried to suggest, that he just happened to be passing, just happened to be loitering without intent, outside the entrance to Bow Street Magistrates’ Court at exactly one o’clock in the afternoon on Friday, 29th April, the day after Fanny and Stella’s arrest, at precisely the same time as Fanny and Stella were leaving Mr Flowers’s courtroom? And again, was it really a coincidence that, at that very moment, he was spotted by an unnamed and lowly police constable who just happened to have been sent by Inspector Thompson to see if he could find Dr Paul to ask him to come and examine the Funny He-She Ladies?

And what of the examination itself? On this thorny subject the wretched Dr Paul was subjected to a devastating catechism and chastisement at the hands of Mr Digby Seymour, who questioned the legitimacy, and indeed the legality, of such an examination.

‘Had you received any Magistrate’s order or any authority to make this examination?’ Mr Digby Seymour enquired.

‘I was in the street and the policeman came and told me that Inspector Thompson wanted me,’ Dr Paul answered shakily. ‘When I got there Inspector Thompson said, “Sir Thomas Henry has ordered that you are to examine these men.”’ Sir Thomas Henry was the senior Stipendiary Magistrate at Bow Street.

‘Have you ever stated before that there was any order from Sir Thomas Henry?’ asked Mr Digby Seymour. ‘Have you not always said that you acted upon your own responsibility?’

Dr Paul mumbled a confused reply to the effect that he had never been allowed to explain himself properly.

‘Did it occur to you’, Mr Digby Seymour concluded, ‘that it would be a matter of simple fairness to have a medical man representing Boulton present when this examination was going on?’

There was another long and unfortunate pause.

‘No,’ Dr Paul replied in a stricken voice.

It was left to the Lord Chief Justice to destroy what little credibility remained to Dr Paul. ‘You should be more careful in future or you may find yourself involved in very unpleasant consequences,’ he warned Dr Paul sternly. ‘I am not aware that the mere fact of your being Surgeon to the Police Force entitles you to send a man behind a screen and examine him for any purpose you may think necessary. You had no more authority to call upon these young men to undergo this revolting examination,’ he continued, ‘than if you had sought a man in the street and asked him to unbutton his breeches.’

S 
omething very curious was happening. As one conspiracy seemed to melt away like the morning mist, a new and very different conspiracy was emerging from the shadows. The steady stream of damaging revelations and admissions from other prosecution witnesses, taken together with Dr Paul’s transparent lies, strongly suggested that the police, the politicians and the powers that be in the Treasury had conspired together in preparing the arrest and prosecution of Fanny and Stella.

Mr George Smith, the ex-Beadle of the Burlington Arcade, had boastfully claimed that he had been ‘getting up evidence for the police in this little affair’, a most unfortunate choice of words. And he had admitted to meeting with Inspector Thompson fully four days
before
the arrest of Fanny and Stella, which to a suspicious mind might suggest that the arrest was planned and premeditated.

More damaging still was Smith’s claim that Inspector Thompson had promised to ‘pay him for his trouble’. That and the fact that he received the sum of fourteen shillings from Mr William Pollard, the Assistant Treasury Solicitor, who had so energetically and assiduously interviewed all the witnesses in this case before they appeared in court (which was in itself a highly unusual proceeding). To make matters worse (if they could be made any worse), the loquacious Mr Smith had hinted that some sort of promise had been held out to him of ‘a situation at the Treasury’, a prospect which Smith declared he would most certainly ‘not object to’.

Then there were the admissions from certain police officers of ‘E’ Division that Fanny and Stella had been under continuous and extensive police surveillance. ‘I have watched them for a year past,’ Detective Officer Chamberlain had asserted. ‘I have seen them at the Casino in Holborn, and I have seen them in Brunswick Square, and in Southampton Row.’ Stella’s return from Edinburgh, three weeks before the arrest, had triggered day-and-night surveillance of Martha Stacey’s house of accommodation in Wakefield Street by Police Constable Charles Walker, who said he had watched the house for a marathon twenty days and twenty nights.

Surveillance by plain-clothes officers was a new weapon in the armoury of the police. Sir Richard Mayne, the zealous and authoritarian Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, had established an unofficial special branch in the 1860s to engage in spying and surveillance. Plain-clothes detective officers were sent all over London to report back to the Commissioner on those considered a threat to the nation’s security, threats which ranged from the serious to the faintly ridiculous.