Fanny and Stella (43 page)

Stella loved them all. And she was kind to them all. What else could she do? How else could she be? She must be tender. She must give them comfort and she must give them love. She must tend to their bruised and broken hearts. She must fledge them and make them strong. She must teach them courage and she must teach them to endure against all hazard and against all hardship, just as she herself had learned these bitter lessons.

She must give them hope, even when hope could hardly be imagined, let alone grasped. Most of all she must transmit to them the strange and secret joy that was special to their kind and to their commonwealth. The same strange and secret joy that poor dear Fanny had found. The small, flickering flame of joy that must be painfully and carefully nursed from feeble, sickly ignition into clear and vigorous combustion.

It was her mission and her purpose. Stella knew that the path stretched out endlessly before her. Not in her lifetime, certainly. Nor in the lifetimes of those that followed. But perhaps in the lifetimes of their children’s children, the first glimmerings of this burgeoning flame of joy would pierce the dark and cruel night, like the breaking of a rosy dawn on a summer’s morn.

Hope’s fairy promise,

Charms to betray,

All that is earthly,

Fadeth away . . .

S 
tella had seen in the new century and she had outlived the old Queen. In the autumn of 1903, she fell ill, seriously ill, with an affliction of the brain. The doctors said it was a cerebral neoplasm, a growth in the brain, and most probably a consequence of syphilis. It was a long illness, bravely born. After a life of quite extraordinary incident, Stella passed away peacefully a year later, aged fifty-four, with Gerard by her side.

There was just enough money to bury Stella, but not enough to raise a headstone to mark her grave. Only a handful of mourners were there to witness her passing.

But there’s a land,

Where nought shall decay,

Where there’s no sorrow,

No fading away!

T 
he sky was bright with heavenly light as they gathered above Stella’s unmarked grave. All of them. A great celestial host of bougers, bowgards and buggers, of catamites and Ganymedes, of ingles, pathics and poofs, of Mollies, Margeries and Mary-Anns. All the sad young men and all the sad old men. All the he-she’s and the she-he’s; all the effeminate men and all the masculine women; all the young men in women’s clothes and all the young women in men’s clothes. All the androgynes and the hermaphrodites and the in-betweens. All the generations of numberless and nameless sodomites, of martyrs, outcasts and outlaws, of the lost, the lonely and the unloved. All of them, in serried ranks, gathered together, a great and joyful host, there to raise her up, to throne her and to coronate her, with gladsome laudings and praisings, as Stella, Queen of Queens, Star of the Heavens.

Epilogue

On Wednesday 15th June 1870, the
Echo
reported a sighting of Martin Luther Cumming.

Mr. Cumming, against whom a warrant has been issued in connection with the charge of personating women, went to Brussels immediately after the arrest of Park and Boulton, and put up at one of the best hotels. As, however, he had no papers, and could not give evidence as to his means of existence, he was requested to leave the country. When he was called upon he had his hair in curl papers, and portraits in which he and a friend were represented in women’s clothes were found in his rooms.

And that was the last time that anyone saw or heard of the Comical Countess.

Dr James Paul, who had squirmed with shame and embarrassment at the Lord Chief Justice’s stern and stinging criticisms of his conduct in the case, continued to be gainfully employed as Surgeon to ‘E’ Division of the Metropolitan Police until his premature death in 1877.

Malcolm Johnston, the Maid of Athens, was arrested in Dublin in 1884 after the exposure of a sodomitic scandal in Dublin Castle, the seat of English rule in Ireland. He was tried and sent to prison for sodomy and was never heard of again. 

Jack Saul, the infamous male prostitute, was also caught up in the Dublin Castle Scandal of 1884 but managed to avoid prison. In August 1890, Jack was interviewed by Inspector Abberline of the Metropolitan Police in connection with the Cleveland Street Scandal. ‘I am still a professional Mary-Ann,’ he told Inspector Abberline. ‘I have lost my character and cannot get otherwise.’ Later that year, Jack Saul testified in court that he had been picked up in the street by no less a personage than the Earl of Euston and gone back with him to the male brothel at 19 Cleveland Street. ‘Lord Euston was not an actual sodomite,’ Jack deposed. ‘He likes to play with you and “spend” on your belly.’

Miss Carlotta Westropp Gibbings took up with Louis Munro, Stella’s short-lived leading man, and together they scraped a precarious living touring the South Coast with ‘A Drawing-Room Entertainment’ almost identical to that offered to the public by Stella. In 1873, Carlotta and Louis were arrested and charged with ‘uttering a fictitious cheque’ for a watch they later pawned. By a miracle they were acquitted. Penniless and friendless, Carlotta had no choice but to return to Cheltenham and live with her forbidding Mamma. Carlotta died in 1890, aged forty-one, from ‘congestion of the lungs’.

The dogged and determined Inspector Thompson continued to serve in ‘E’ Division of the Metropolitan Police until his retirement in 1890. He died seven years later, aged sixty-two. 

Both Detective Sergeant Frederick Kerley and Detective Officer William Chamberlain retired early from the Metropolitan Police and became private detectives. In 1895, Kerley put his knowledge and experience of London’s sodomitic underworld to good use when he was employed, alongside the famous Inspector Littlechild, by the Marquis of Queensberry to find male prostitutes willing to testify against Oscar Wilde.

George Lewis’s career continued to prosper. In 1895, he was employed to defend Queensberry against a charge of criminal libel brought by Wilde. Lewis worked tirelessly for reform of the divorce laws and he was instrumental in the creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal. He was knighted in 1893 and died in 1911 at the age of seventy-eight.

Two years after attending Fanny and Stella’s trial in Westminster Hall, the young Pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon was arrested with George Roberts, a sixty-year-old stableman, in a public lavatory in Oxford Street. They were charged with attempting to commit sodomy. Roberts was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment with hard labour, while Solomon’s sentence of eighteen months’ imprisonment with light labour was reduced on appeal to a term of police supervision. A year later, Solomon was arrested with another man in a
pissoir
in Paris and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment.

‘Cecil Graham’, the false name given by Stella to Inspector Thompson on the night she was arrested, reappeared in 1892 as the name of a character in Oscar Wilde’s first society comedy,
Lady Windermere’s Fan
. Wilde’s Cecil Graham is a sharp, brittle and witty man about town who easily mixes in high – and in low – society. Wilde insisted that Cecil Graham wear a green carnation on stage on the first night. Although Wilde later claimed that the mystic green carnation was his own idea – ‘I invented that magnificent flower,’ he said – he had, in fact, merely borrowed the idea from the sodomites and cross-dressers of Paris who wore the green carnation as a badge of their sexuality. Was Wilde’s fey and effeminate Cecil Graham a secret homage to Stella Boulton? Wilde certainly knew of Fanny and Stella, having read the explicit account of some of their sexual exploits in Jack Saul’s
The
Sins of the Cities of the Plain
(1881). But had they met? Wilde lived in London between 1878 and 1895, years in which Stella and Gerard regularly performed in the capital, and it is entirely possible that the famous Oscar Wilde encountered the infamous Miss Stella Boulton in London’s sodomitic underworld and listened with rapt attention and shining eyes to Stella’s account of her scandalous life and extraordinary trials.

Hugh Mundell, Stella’s Hapless Swain, renounced the world together with all its snares and temptations and became a chiropodist instead. He was still practising this useful profession in 1901, at the age of fifty-four, in the parish of St George’s, Hanover Square. He never married.

Miss Ann Empson, the Dragon of Davies Street, remained true to her Vestal Vows and never married. A year after the trial of Fanny and Stella, she retired to Croydon to keep house for her half-brother, Mr Alexander Sidebottom, where she died, aged sixty.

Cecil ‘Sissy’ Thomas became an underwriter at Lloyd’s. He never married and lived for most of his life with his sister in circumstances of the utmost respectability.

John Reeve left the Alhambra and became the landlord of the Union Flag, a public house on the Lambeth Road. The Union Flag also became a theatrical boarding house, accommodating music-hall turns as diverse as a French trapeze artiste, a low comedian and a pantomime dame.

Charles Pavitt spent most of the rest of his working life writing comic songs for music halls. Among his most popular were ‘The Gretna Green Galop’ and the ever so slightly
risqué
‘I’ve Got a Peep-Show’, the refrain of which ran:

For I’ve got a Peep-Show, a Peep-Show, a Peep-Show,

I’ve got a Peep-Show, a penny for a peep.

Mr Edward Nelson Haxell, the jovial hotel keeper, built himself a castellated gothic fantasy of a house in the pretty rural village of Kingsbury on the outskirts of London. He died in 1899, at the age of seventy-nine. In the 1920s, Haxell’s Hotel, the scene of Carlotta’s famous drag ball, became part of what is now the Strand Palace Hotel.

Dr Richard Barwell’s career prospered and he continued to work until he was nearly seventy. In his retirement he was an enthusiastic skater and remained hale and hearty into his late eighties. He died in Norfolk, the county of his birth, in December 1916, aged eighty-nine.

Maria George (
née
Duffin) married and buried two husbands. In 1911, she was a widow and living in Hampstead with her younger sister, Hannah, a council lavatory attendant. Maria died in 1931 aged eighty.

Mrs Mary Ann Boulton, Mother of Mothers, died peacefully on a summer’s day in 1889 aged sixty-seven. To the very end she continued to assiduously collect every playbill, every newspaper clipping and every photograph of her darling boys, and she would boast about them and their career on the stage to anyone and everyone who would listen. Mrs Mary Ann Boulton died in the sure and certain knowledge that she had done her duty by her sons and never, as she had so proudly proclaimed in court, ‘allowed any cloud to fall upon my children’. And when the time came, Stella was laid to rest beside her.

John Safford Fiske took himself off to Europe where he spent most of the rest of his life painting, writing and cultivating his ‘large and beautiful garden’ in Alassio, in north-west Italy, ‘where the rose blooms the whole winter’. In 1905 he wrote, ‘I think I may claim that, in an unpretending way, I have shaped for myself a life that is agreeable enough in the living.’ He died in 1907, aged fifty-seven. He left his carefully catalogued library of four thousand volumes, including Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray
and an edition of Walt Whitman’s poems, to Hobart College in New York State. His carefully concealed photographs of Stella (and one or two of Fanny, as well), which were unearthed by Detective Officer Roderick Gollan of the Edinburgh City Police on the morning of 9th June 1870, were taken into custody and pasted into the Linlithgowshire Rogues’ Gallery, where they can still be seen today in Edinburgh City Archives.

Dear, dull Louis Hurt left London immediately after his acquittal and spent the next five years wandering Europe, visiting Paris, St Petersburg and Rome before eventually settling in Vienna in 1876. He was appointed Professor of English at the Wiener Handelsakademie and also taught at the Theresianum, a semi-military school for royalty and aristocrats where, according to his obituary in the
Wirksworth Parish Magazine
, the last Khedive of Egypt, Abbas Hilmi Pasha II, and Ferdinand of Coburg, later King of Bulgaria, ‘passed through his hands’. He died in Vienna in 1936, at the remarkable age of ninety-one.

After a flurry of real and imagined sightings of Lord Arthur Clinton in the 1870s, nothing was heard of him ever again. Was he dead? Or had he, like Louis Hurt and John Safford Fiske, taken himself off to the kindlier climes of Europe? In the will of Henry, seventh Duke of Newcastle, drawn up in 1927, there is a curious and beguiling reference to ‘my uncle, Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton (a person reputed to be dead and as to the proof of whose death some question might arise)’.
Some question might arise
. Was this cryptic legalese the closest that the family would ever come to admitting that Lord Arthur had not died of scarlet fever in 1870, but had been helped to escape the ends of justice? The clause in the seventh Duke’s will effectively disinherits Lord Arthur – and (improbably) ‘any of his male issue’ – ‘as if the said Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton had died in my lifetime’. Either Lord Arthur had died in the seventh Duke’s lifetime, or he had not. If he was still alive in 1927, as the seventh Duke’s will seems to hint that he was, he would have been eighty-seven.