Fanny and Stella (6 page)

But everything changed when Detective Officer Chamberlain started to give his evidence.

‘Last evening, about twenty minutes past eight, I saw the two prisoners dressed in female attire at 13, Wakefield-street, Regent-square.’

‘You had followed them?’ the Clerk of the Court asked.

‘Yes,’ Chamberlain replied simply.

Fanny and Stella looked at each other uneasily. This was a complete shock. Until now, they had assumed, perhaps naturally, that they had been arrested almost by accident, that the manager or some other dull functionary at the Strand Theatre had summoned the police when he saw what he suspected were two men dressed as women behaving obscenely and ‘lasciviously ogling’ the male occupants of the stalls.

Chamberlain’s evidence changed everything. Neither Fanny nor Stella had breathed a word about 13 Wakefield Street to anyone. Not to Hugh Mundell, and certainly not to the police. Fanny had given her address as Bruton Street, and Stella had given the address of her mother and father in Maida Vale. Wakefield Street was a secret, their secret. So how did the police know about it? How was it that Chamberlain had been there last night, outside, watching for them, waiting for them, following them?

Chamberlain’s next piece of evidence was even more alarming.

‘I have been to 13, Wakefield Street, Regent-square this morning, and searched the parlours occupied by the prisoners Boulton and Park, and some other gentlemen,’ he announced.

Fanny and Stella listened with increasing horror. Not only did Chamberlain know about their secret place, he had entered it, penetrated it, violated it. Their secret place, their place of safety.

‘I found the photographs in the front parlour,’ Chamberlain continued, using both hands to pass a tottering pile of photographs to the Clerk, who in turn handed them to Mr Flowers. ‘They represent the two prisoners both in male and female attire.’

‘Do you detect a likeness with either of the two prisoners in female attire now, dressed both as male and female?’ Mr Flowers asked.

Chamberlain squinted almost leeringly at Fanny and Stella in the dock.

‘I do, Your Worship,’ he said.

Chamberlain went on to reveal that he had been watching Fanny and Stella ‘for a year past’. A whole year. And Police Constable Charles Walker, the fourth and last policeman from ‘E’ Division to give evidence that day, testified that he had been on constant surveillance duty outside Wakefield Street for the past fortnight and ‘had seen both the prisoners go in and out at all hours of the night, repeatedly’. The neighbours, he said, had started to complain.

Fanny and Stella were in a state of shock. Their arrest, far from being almost accidental, far from being a bit of bad luck, now looked much more sinister. It had clearly been planned down to the last detail. Both by day and by night they had been watched, they had been followed, and their comings and goings recorded by a phalanx of policemen. And it had been going on for more than a year. Their sanctum in Wakefield Street had been discovered and turned over. Their photographs had already been produced in court, and they knew that there was more, much more, to come.

For a start there were the letters. Stella, in particular, wished that she could remember exactly which letters she had so carelessly strewn around Wakefield Street, and wished that she had been a little more careful, a little more discreet. Some of the letters – in truth, most of the letters – were in one way or another compromising, certainly to her, and more than likely to her friends. Those letters told the story of her life, and now that story was in the hands of the police.

Mr Abrams, the solicitor hired by Carlotta Gibbings to speak for Fanny and Stella in court, did his best, but he was clearly out of his depth. He was under the impression that he was to plead for two young men who had been caught out in a lark, a frolic, a call-it-what-you-will, but now he was confronted by something far more serious.

‘Much of the evidence brought forward has taken me somewhat by surprise,’ he told Mr Flowers, quite truthfully. ‘But, so far as it goes, I respectfully submit that unless it can be clearly shown that these two persons were engaged on this evening in some unlawful purpose, no offence against the statute has been committed.’

It was a brave try but Mr Flowers was having none of it. ‘The onus is rather thrown on them to allow that there was no unlawful purpose,’ he retorted.

‘I am not going to uphold their act, but I submit that it was . . .’ and here Mr Abrams faltered, ‘ . . . that it was an act of folly.’

‘This act of folly has been going on for a long time,’ said Mr Flowers severely, and proceeded to remand Fanny and Stella in custody for seven days.

Fanny gave a start and Stella swayed a little. They both gripped the rail of the dock to support themselves. Stella looked as if she might faint. They were numb with shock. There seemed to be no end to the charges against them, nothing the police did not already know. The curtain had fallen on their first appearance and now there was a veil of darkness between them and the world they had once so joyously inhabited.

With their elbows firmly gripped by the court gaoler, they were forced to put one foot in front of the other and stagger out of the dock on their way to heaven-knows-where.

A prison or a scaffold. At that precise moment it was all the same to Fanny and Stella. 

5

Foreign Bodies

EXAMINATION OF PEDERASTS: Place the suspect in a well-lit room and bend him forwards in such a way until his head is almost touching the floor. Part his buttocks with your hands and note the appearance of the anus. Then slowly insert a finger into the orifice to test fully the resistance of the sphincter.

Charles Vibert,
Précis de médicine légale
, 1893

D 
r Paul never was able to give a convincing explanation as to why he was loitering in the street immediately outside Bow Street Magistrates’ Court just as the hearing inside was coming to an end. It was almost exactly one o’clock and he looked as if he were waiting for someone or something.

Though he later tried to suggest that it was a mere coincidence that he happened to be in Bow Street on that particular day, at that particular time – that he just happened to be passing – Dr Paul did not seem in the least surprised when a police constable touched him on the arm. In fact, he seemed almost to be expecting it: ‘I was in the street,’ Dr Paul said, ‘and the policeman came and told me that Inspector Thompson wanted me.’

Dr James Thomas Paul was Divisional Surgeon to ‘E’ Division of the Metropolitan Police. He had been appointed in January 1864, and the salary the job afforded was a useful addition to the meagre income he earned from his practice as a surgeon. The work was repetitive rather than onerous. His job was to look after any and all of the medical needs of the 195 police officers of ‘E’ Division: their aches and pains, their cuts and bruises, their coughs and sneezes and wheezes, Dr Paul dealt with them all. If they were injured, he patched them up; if they were ill, he physicked them; and if they had the clap – and many of them did – he tried to cure them.

It was Dr Paul’s job, too, to do what he could for the eight thousand or so dregs of humanity who washed up on the shores of Bow Street Police Station every year: the drunks and the whores; the thieves and the pickpockets; the mendicants and the mendacious; the mad, the sad and the bad. There were cuts and contusions to attend to, split lips and split heads to join together, the odd fracture, and all the accumulated and interacting diseases of poverty, overcrowding, poor air and even poorer diet. Dr Paul was not a bad man, and he did what little he could.

The constable guided Dr Paul through a warren of stairs and corridors to a small bare room at the back of the court building, lit only by a grimy skylight. It was a forlorn, out-of-the-way place, and it looked as if it had not been used for many a year. It smelt musty and stale. There was a desk, a stool and a tall screen. Inspector Thompson and two of his detectives, Chamberlain and Kerley, were waiting for him.

The door opened and Fanny and Stella were ushered in by the court gaoler. That they were badly frightened was only too evident from their chalk-white faces and the uncontrolled trembling of their bodies. It was barely ten minutes since Mr Flowers had remanded them in custody for seven days. Instead of being taken to the Black Maria to be transported to the House of Detention, they had been herded along corridors and up and down stairs and now found themselves in this bleak place where the three policemen from the night before and an unknown fourth man were waiting for them, looking very grave.

Fanny and Stella thought they were in for a terrible beating – or even worse. They had heard about such things. It was common knowledge that some policemen liked to administer their punishments privately. It was common knowledge, too, that some policemen liked to take their pleasures privately. And sometimes they liked to do both at the same time.

Fanny and Stella stood in the dark and dingy little room shivering and trembling and imagining the worst when Dr Paul abruptly addressed Stella.

‘Step inside here,’ he said, pointing to the screen. ‘Unfasten your things and drop them down, please to step out of them,’ he ordered gruffly, clearing his throat. Stella started to undress: off came the dress and the petticoats, and lastly a curious arrangement: a pair of drawers with silk stockings sewn to them.

Dr Paul took a desk stool and pointed to it.

‘Put yourself over that stool,’ he said coldly.

‘Without saying a word he did so,’ Dr Paul said later when questioned in court. ‘I did not use my hand with any violence. The prisoners did not offer any opposition to my examining them.’

This was bending the truth. Stella had been reluctant, fearful until Chamberlain or Kerley, one or the other, had said that if she did not comply, ‘force would be used’.

Dr Paul claimed that he had been instructed by Inspector Thompson to examine Fanny and Stella to discover whether they were men or women. ‘I examined them for the purposes of ascertaining their sex,’ he declared baldly.

It was a lie, and not a very clever lie. There was no longer any possible doubt over Fanny and Stella’s gender. The whole world knew that Fanny and Stella were men – except, apparently, Dr Paul. Inspector Thompson already knew for a fact that Fanny and Stella were men. They had told him so in no uncertain terms the night before. Ditto Detective Sergeant Kerley and Detective Officer Chamberlain. (It was Chamberlain who had watched, fascinated, as Fanny and Stella slowly stripped off their feminine finery the night before to reveal the shivering, slender bodies of two frightened young men.) The mob that had filled Bow Street that morning knew that they were men, the mob that was still milling around outside the court while Dr Paul was waiting, the mob that had chanted and cheered and jeered, the mob that had screamed filthy and lewd suggestions at Fanny and Stella. Every person present that sunny morning in Mr Flowers’s courtroom knew that Fanny and Stella were men. The whole world knew that Fanny and Stella were men – except, apparently, Dr Paul. It was not the first lie that Dr Paul told, and it would not be the last.

When asked again, Dr Paul stuck to his guns.

‘I examined them for the purposes of ascertaining their sex,’ he answered, but this time adding one crucial qualification. ‘I examined them for the purposes of ascertaining their sex, but not that only. I wished to ascertain something more, that was of my own accord, and my own idea.’

S 
omething more
. Dr Paul’s career as a surgeon had hardly been glittering. He was hard-working enough, a belt-and-braces, run-of-the-mill surgeon with a barely adequate private practice and just his police work to keep the creditors at bay.

What set Dr Paul apart from the legions of other middle-aged, middle-of-the-road surgeons was that Dr Paul had an unusual hobby. He was interested – very interested – in sodomy and in sodomites. Dr Paul had been interested in sodomy and sodomites ever since he was a student, twenty years ago, when he had been taught by Dr Alfred Swaine Taylor, the celebrated and sometimes controversial father of English forensic medicine.

In one of his lectures to students at Guy’s Hospital in 1850, Dr Taylor had spoken about a bizarre and disturbing case he had been involved in as a young doctor nearly twenty years earlier. It concerned the death of one Miss Eliza Edwards. On 23rd January 1833, Miss Eliza Edwards had roused her ‘sister’, seventeen-year-old Maria Edwards, who was sharing her bed, and complained of ‘a wheezing in the throat’. It was clear to Maria and to the landlady of the ‘house of doubtful repute’ in Westminster that Eliza was very poorly indeed.

‘Maria, I am dying,’ Eliza whispered, gasping for every breath. ‘It has pleased God to call me.’

Five minutes later Eliza Edwards was dead. She was just twenty-four, and the probable cause of death was consumption, though some were convinced that it was syphilis. For many years Eliza Edwards had made a name for herself as an actress of some repute, specialising in playing tragic young heroines. But the parts had dried up and, for the past three years, Eliza and Maria had been forced to work as prostitutes.

At an inquest held two days later no one claimed Eliza’s body and the corpse was, in consequence, sold to Guy’s Hospital for dissection. The dissection was to be carried out by Dr Alfred Swaine Taylor and was expected to be a routine affair, but when Eliza’s nightclothes were removed, Dr Taylor discovered to his shock and amazement that the body of this young woman was in fact the body of a young man with a normal set of male organs strapped up with a bandage tied around the abdomen.