Fanny and Stella (5 page)

And for a modest charge of a few shillings a week she looked after the frocks, the wigs, the pots of paint, the unmentionables, the what-have-yous, the thingamajigs – and all the rest of the paraphernalia – and my goodness me there was enough of it; enough to open a shop nearly; enough to fill two rooms at Wakefield Street so tight you could barely squeeze your arse in. And for a few shillings more she wasn’t averse to doing the odd bit of laundry if Frances was there to help her out. But now the police were involved and what a to-do it had all turned out to be. It was all ruined and spoilt and if she was not very careful, she would find herself in hot water, very hot water, and no mistake.

After twenty minutes or so of waiting, the stomping, thumping and banging from the room below stopped. Carlotta and the Comical Countess heard Chamberlain’s muffled voice and then the thud of the front door shutting. He was gone and there was silence. Cautiously, Carlotta crept downstairs. Old Mrs Stacey and Martha were staring at the door of Fanny and Stella’s room. They were plainly terrified. Chamberlain had locked it and he was coming back – and soon – with reinforcements.

Miss Carlotta Gibbings did not hesitate. Despite her ‘very effeminate appearance’ and her girlish lisp, Carlotta was determined and resourceful. She was the only person present not completely paralysed by fear. She guessed that Chamberlain had found plenty of material that would incriminate Fanny and Stella and might perhaps incriminate them all. But if there was anything that Chamberlain hadn’t already grabbed, anything that he’d missed, anything that he’d overlooked, now was the time to remove it out of harm’s way. She put her shoulder to the door and pushed hard; the lock burst open, and with a girlish shriek of surprise, Carlotta almost fell into the room.

It was a mess. Carlotta and the Comical Countess worked furiously. They could not be sure how long it would take Chamberlain to return. He might be back in an hour or two, as he had threatened; equally, he could be back in fifteen minutes or less with a couple of police constables requisitioned from the beat. Where should they start? Letters, papers, photographs, money and any jewellery of any value that Chamberlain hadn’t already squeezed into his capacious pockets – anything that could incriminate them, anything that might incriminate others. It was all stuffed furiously into a carpet bag and a small portmanteau, together with two or three of Carlotta’s ‘handsomest frocks’, some chignons, a bit of slap and two pairs of her favourite stays. And then they were gone, as if the devil himself were at their heels, the door left swinging open. 

4

In the Dock

When first before the magistrate

Oh, what a crowd did them await,

It was a lark and no mistake,

To look at them He-She ladies.

Lor! how the people did go on,

With, ‘I say I’ll have your fine chignon,’

Another cried out, ‘Stella dear,

Pull off those togs, and breeches wear.’

‘The Funny He-She Ladies’

A 
night in the cells had done little to improve Fanny and Stella’s bedraggled appearance. They had barely slept in the freezing cold, and spent most of the night crying and whimpering. They were very frightened, weak with hunger, and their heads ached with exhaustion and the effects of the numerous brandies and sherries they had knocked back the night before. A tin mug of weak tea and a hunk of cheap black bread made them feel only a little better.

Their dresses were returned to them at first light and they were gruffly instructed to make themselves decent, ready for their appearance before the beak. Fanny and Stella looked at each other in dismay. They had hoped and prayed that somehow or other a suit of men’s clothes might be procured for them, that they would not have to appear in court wearing last night’s frocks.

Although they did not know it, Carlotta Gibbings had already rushed to Bow Street Police Station early that morning with a change of clothes, calculating that they would stand more chance of getting off with a caution or a small fine if they appeared as respectably dressed young men rather than as two young men dressed as ladies of the night. But the officers had curtly turned Carlotta away.

Somehow or another, with a great deal of grumbling and a great deal of ingenuity, Fanny and Stella managed to tidy themselves up and recreate some faint echo of last night’s finery. A handkerchief and some cold water from the ewer helped wipe away the dark tracks of their tears and the worst smudges of paint. Dressing themselves and repairing their toilette as best they could helped to lift their spirits. They looked very far from perfect but they were once again Mrs Fanny Graham and Miss Stella Boulton, stars of stage and street, and whatever the day might bring they hoped they would conduct themselves like ladies.

As Fanny and Stella waited in their cell, they could already hear the muffled hoots and yells of a mob swarming outside, and it took them some little time to realise that the mob was almost certainly assembled in their honour. They turned white with fear. When they left the police station, they would have to run the gauntlet as they crossed Bow Street to the courtroom opposite.

A loud roar went up as Fanny and Stella, followed by Hugh Mundell a few steps behind, came out of Bow Street Police Station flanked by half a dozen uniformed policemen. The diamanté star in Fanny’s hair glinted in the thin April sunshine. Fanny and Stella seemed dazzled by the light and dazed by the mob of several hundred which milled and swirled around them trying to catch a glimpse of  ‘the Funny He-She Ladies’.

There were hoots, hisses, catcalls, whistles and a few ragged cheers. Where had they all come from? Fanny and Stella had been arrested at around eleven o’clock the night before, too late for the morning papers to carry the story. Who were these people? How had they found out? And why were they here? They heard their names, ‘Fanny’, ‘Stella’, shouted out in thin, raucous voices that seemed to float momentarily above the roar of the crowd. Voices that sounded familiar. Turning round they caught a few blurred glimpses of the smiling faces of friends and acquaintances frantically waving. They were not entirely friendless.

It took five minutes or more for the police to clear a path. Fanny and Stella were pushed and shoved and pinched and propelled forwards, backwards, sideways. Greedy, greasy fingers grabbed at their dresses and tried to touch and pull their hair. At first Fanny and Stella faltered, stumbled and almost fell. But they went on. And as they went on, they grew visibly taller, visibly stronger, more dignified. By the time they had crossed the road they were carrying themselves like a pair of duchesses attending a ball. They mounted the steps to the court, paused and turned to face the crowd, which had for a moment fallen silent. Fanny and Stella smiled gravely and – with the merest ghost of a curtsey – turned smartly on their heels and swept inside. The jeers and catcalls broke out again. But this time they were drowned out by a fusillade of cheers and whistles.

Mr James Flowers, Stipendiary Magistrate at Bow Street, had a reputation as one of the kindest men on the Bench. The tiny courtroom measured just thirty feet by twenty feet and ‘was crowded with people eager to hear the charge’, the
Illustrated Police News
reported; ‘crammed to suffocation’ was the verdict of the
Evening News
. All eyes were on Fanny and Stella as they stepped into the wooden dock, followed by a rather sheepish Hugh Mundell, ‘and great surprise was manifested at the admirable manner in which Boulton and Park had “made up” ’. Fanny and Stella stood impassively, almost proudly, in the dock, as they surveyed the scene. Hugh Mundell looked anxious and fidgety as he stood alongside them.

Had this been a theatre rather than a court of law, a stage rather than a dock, Fanny and Stella would have been only too delighted to tread its hallowed boards. They liked nothing better than a house full to bursting and a rumbustious, restless and expectant audience ready to be quelled, ready to be charmed, ready to be dazzled by their performance. They could so easily have been appearing in
Retained for the Defence
, or one of the dozen or so other comediettas and one-act melodramas they had performed so often, together and separately, in which the beautiful and wronged young woman – invariably more convincingly played by Stella than by Fanny – would stand up before a jury of her peers and by the sheer power of her beauty and by the sheer force and passion of her rhetoric be declared innocent by acclamation. And even though Bow Street was a court and not a stage, Fanny and Stella felt a little of the familiar theatrical glamour stealing over them. They were dressed and they were ready. All they had to do now was to give the performance of their lives.

In the best traditions of burlesque there was not a little confusion and much laughter from the audience over the use of the personal pronoun. Were Fanny and Stella ‘he’s’ or ‘she’s’? It was a vexed question. Clearly they were men dressed up as women and should, by rights, be referred to as ‘he’, but somehow it came more naturally to call them ‘she’. The clerks who recorded the proceedings got into a terrible muddle, littering their transcripts with crossings-out and corrections, turning ‘he’s’ into ‘she’s’ – and vice versa. The witnesses were equally confused, stumbling and tying themselves in linguistic knots, usually ending up calling Fanny and Stella both ‘she’ and ‘he’ in the same sentence. Reporters for the
Daily Telegraph
and the
Illustrated London News
explained delicately to their readers that, though the defendants were emphatically young men, for the purposes of reporting the proceedings they had adopted the preponderant pronoun used in court – in this case ‘she’. And Mr Flowers, the magistrate, got round the problem by referring to Fanny and Stella as ‘these two women, as I may call them’.

The charges were read out by the Clerk of the Court to loud gasps from the crowded courtroom. Ernest Boulton and Frederick William Park were charged that they ‘did with each and one another feloniously commit the abominable crime of buggery’: 

further that they did unlawfully conspire together, and with divers other persons, feloniously, to commit the said crimes

further that they did unlawfully conspire together, and with divers other persons to induce and incite other persons feloniously with them to commit the said crime

and further that they being men, did unlawfully conspire together, and with divers others, to disguise themselves as women and to frequent places of public resort, so disguised, and to thereby openly and scandalously outrage public decency and corrupt public morals. 

It was an extraordinary set of charges. Fanny and Stella paled and visibly trembled as they were read out. Only the last charge, that of disguising themselves as women and frequenting public places with the intention of outraging public decency and corrupting public morals, held any water. Although there was no statute in English law which specifically made it a criminal offence for men to dress up as women, by dressing up as women and behaving in an undeniably and extremely lewd manner at the Strand Theatre, Fanny and Stella had outraged public decency. On the substance of that charge and that charge alone, they were incontrovertibly guilty. It was a fair cop.

Crimes were divided into two categories: misdemeanours – less serious crimes usually dealt with by the stipendiary magistrates – and felonies, which were much more serious and were tried before a judge and a jury. Outraging public decency was a misdemeanour. If this were the only charge, Fanny and Stella would be well advised to plead guilty, throw themselves upon the mercy of the court and hope they could escape with a hefty fine and a good talking-to from Mr Flowers.

But the charge of buggery was much, much more serious. Until 1861, only nine years earlier, buggery had carried the death penalty. As it was, buggery still carried a prison sentence of penal servitude for life. Penal servitude meant, for murderers, rapists and sodomites, long hours of hard labour picking oakum, walking the treadmill, or working the dreaded crank, back-breaking work turning a handle to push a paddle through a vat of sand. No wonder Fanny and Stella turned pale.

Not only were they charged with buggery, they were charged with a catch-all
conspiracy
to commit buggery. In other words, the police were saying that not only had Fanny buggered Stella, and Stella buggered Fanny, but both of them had also buggered and been buggered by any number of ‘divers persons’. Furthermore, they had each conspired with the other, and with any number of unknown, unnamed others ‘to induce and incite’ yet more men to commit buggery. It all conjured up an image of a vast, ever-spreading sodomitical spider’s web with Fanny and Stella at its dark heart, controlling and directing, combining and confederating, to entrap and ensnare any and all men.

Seen through the prism of this conspiracy charge, Fanny and Stella’s drunken double act in their box at the Strand Theatre, their ogling, tongue-waggling, chirruping invitations to the gentlemen in the stalls, took on an altogether darker and more menacing aspect. It could quite easily be construed as a conspiracy to incite and induce men to feloniously commit ‘the abominable crime of buggery’.

T 
here were only four witnesses produced for this preliminary hearing – all of them policemen. The evidence of Inspector Thompson and the evidence of Sergeant Kerley merely rehashed the events of the night before. Fanny and Stella listened, even smiled occasionally, but seemed largely uninterested in what they had to say. ‘Both conducted themselves decorously,’ the
Daily Telegraph
reported. ‘While listening to the evidence, Boulton rested her head on her right hand but did not pay very particular attention.’