Women Sailors & Sailors' Women (3 page)

Mrs. Grafton, who lived near Union Stairs in Wapping, let it be known that “her chief and best customers are sea officers, who she particularly likes, as they do not stay long at home, and always return fraught with love and presents.”
¹³
She was described as a comely woman of forty who could give more pleasure than a dozen raw girls. She had acquired twenty years' experience working as a prostitute in Portsmouth before settling in London. Her price was 5 shillings, an attractive price for most naval officers, as a day's pay for the most senior captains in this period was 20 shillings.

Harris's List
makes frequent use of nautical expressions in describing the physical accomplishments of some of the women. The most conspicuous example of this occurs in the description of Miss Devonshire of Queen Anne Street. After a description of her fair complexion, her cerulean eyes, her fine teeth, and her good figure, the reader is informed that “many a
man of war
hath been her willing prisoner, and paid a proper ransom; her port is said to be well guarded by a light brown
chevaux-de-freize,
and parted from
bumbay
by a very small pleasant isthmus. The entry is rather straight; but when once in there is very good
riding . . .
she is so brave, that she is ever ready for an engagement, cares not how soon she comes to
close quarters,
and loves to fight
yard arm
and
yard arm,
and be briskly
boarded.
”
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By the 1840s and 1850s, the cheerful, noisy atmosphere of the East End taverns and bawdy houses noted by Ward and pictured by Rowlandson had been replaced by a darker, more sinister area of slum dwellings, seedy dance halls, and down-at-the-heel brothels. The increase in the number of prostitutes and the dreadful conditions in which most of them worked led to a number of studies and investigations. In 1857, William Acton, a surgeon who specialized in female venereal diseases, published a book entitled
Prostitution, Considered in Its Moral, Social, and Sanitary Aspects in London and Other Large Cities.
This was based on information derived partly from his own observations and partly from figures supplied by the police. He reckoned that there were 2,825 brothels within the Metropolitan Police District and some 8,600 prostitutes. According to his figures, more than one-third of the brothels were situated in the East End of London, with the heaviest concentration in the area around the Ratcliffe Highway.

The cold statistics produced by Acton and other observers were brought to life by the descriptions of men like Bracebridge Hemyng, who interviewed the unhappy China Emma. Hemyng was aided in his investigations by a local police sergeant who knew his way around the brothels and drinking dens of the sailors' district. In one particularly sleazy and tumbledown hovel, they entered a room where a lascar was living with his woman. The East Indian sailor had been smoking opium and was lying on a straw mattress on the floor covered by two tattered blankets. He was stupefied by the opium and the room was filled with its sickly smell. The only piece of furniture was a table. The woman who crouched by his bedside looked like an animated bundle of rags. Her face was grimy and unwashed “and her hands so black and filthy that mustard-and-cress might have been sown successfully upon them.”
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Other lodging houses were more respectable, and Hemyng found the rooms to be larger than he expected. They were sometimes furnished with four-poster beds hung with faded chintz curtains. On the mantelpiece there would be some cheap crockery with a gilt or rosewood mirror hanging above. The sailors did not seem in the least concerned by the sudden appearance of the police sergeant and his companion and never showed any hostility.

The two men also visited a dance hall on the Ratcliffe Highway. This was on the upper floor of a public house and was a long room illuminated by gas lighting. There were benches along the walls and in the far corner a raised dais for the orchestra. Sitting behind a wooden ledge on which they placed their music sheets were four bearded and shaggy-looking musicians. Their instruments consisted of a trumpet, two flutes, and a fiddle, and with these they filled the room with a shrill, exhilarating sound that provoked the dancers to waltz around the room at great speed. Hemyng was astonished by the grace of the dancers, particularly the foreign sailors, who danced the waltzes and polkas with polished ease. The women were not such expert dancers but were self-possessed and decorous: “They did not look as if they had come here for pleasure exactly, they appeared too business-like for that; but they did seem as if they would like, and intended, to unite the two, business and pleasure, and enjoy themselves as much as the circumstances would allow.”
¹⁶
He noted that the women did not change into their ball dresses in the dance hall but dressed at home and then walked through the streets in all their finery but without their bonnets.

John Binney, another contributor to Mayhew's
London Labour and the London Poor,
noted that within the category of sailors' women there were two classes. The lower class were little more than thieves. They would take a sailor into a coffeehouse or tavern, spike his drink with a drug such as laudanum, and then rob him. Or they would pick up a drunken sailor on the highway, lure him into a dark street with the promise of sex, and then steal his money and valuables. But there was also a better class of prostitute who did not resort to stealing and who did not work for male pimps.

They dress tolerably well, in silk and merino gowns with crinolines, and bonnets gaily attired with flowers and ribbons. Many of them have velvet stripes across the breast and back of their gowns, and large brooches with the portrait of a sailor encased in them. They generally lay their hair back in front in the French style.
¹⁷

Most of them lived in Albert Square, Palmer's Folly, Seven Star Alley, and the other streets around the Ratcliffe Highway. Binney reckoned the best-looking girls were Irish cockneys, but there were also a number of Dutch and German prostitutes, some of whom he thought were good-looking and others not. The foreign women spoke English pretty well, and one of the German women explained to an interviewer how she saw herself as a wife to visiting sailors. She was currently living with an English sailor whose ship was in the docks. She had known him for a year and a half and he always lived with her when he came ashore.

He is a nice man and give me all his money when he land always. I take all his money while he with me, and not spend it quick as some of your English women do. If I not to care, he would spend all in one week. Sailor boy always spend money like rainwater; he throw it in the street and not care to pick it up again.
¹⁸

She said that she was honest with him and he trusted her. If he had £24 when he left his ship and he stayed six weeks with her, they would spend £15 or £20 together and he would let her keep whatever was left over when it was time for him to go. She knew that if he kept his money himself he would fall into bad hands. He would order clothes at a slop-seller who would overcharge him and ruin him. She was frank about her relations with other sailors: “I know very many sailors—six, eight, ten, oh! more than that. They are my husbands. I am not married, of course not, but they think me their wife while they are on shore.” However, she admitted that she did not care much for any of them and that she had a lover of her own who was a waiter in a coffeehouse. He was German and came from Berlin, where she herself had been born.

It seems to have been a common practice for sailors to seek out the same woman when they came ashore. Sergeant Prior of the Metropolitan Police told Hemyng that when sailors landed in the docks they would draw their wages and go to live with the women they had been with previously. They would give the women their money and considered themselves married to them for the time being. The women usually treated them honorably, and when the money ran out, the men went off to sea to earn some more.

I
T IS INTERESTING
to compare the sailors' district of London with that of New York. Between 1800 and 1820, New York's population had more than doubled, to around 123,000, and it had become the leading port of North America. Sailing vessels of all sizes clustered along the city's wharves, their masts forming a dense forest of weathered pine, tarred rigging, and salt-stained sails stretching the length of South Street. Today an elevated highway sweeps overhead toward the gleaming skyscrapers of Wall Street, but in the early part of the nineteenth century, the waterfront was a miscellaneous collection of warehouses, sail lofts, timber yards, fish markets, taverns, ships' chandlers, and the houses of merchants and sea captains. Dozens of horses and carts threaded their way among the throngs of seamen and dockworkers. As with the waterfront alongside the Pool of London, the potent smells of fish and tar and horse manure mixed with the more pleasant aromas from cargoes of grain and tea and spices being unloaded from the ships.

Behind the buildings on the waterfront was an assortment of fine brick mansions, shops, seedy boardinghouses, bars, and dancing saloons. The area particularly frequented by sailors was centered around Water Street, and this is where the sailors' women were to be found. In 1853, there were reported to be thirty-eight houses of prostitution on Water Street alone and 138 young women working in them.
¹⁹
According to Matthew Hale Smith, the women there were the lowest and most debased of their class. They were flashy, untidy, and covered with tinsel and brass jewelry: “Their dresses are short, arms and necks bare, and their appearance as disgusting as can be conceived.”
²⁰
Equally notorious for vice and crime were Cherry Street, Fulton Street, and the waterfront adjoining Corlears Hook. The latter area is generally credited with giving rise to the term “hooker” and certainly had its fair share of rough characters, male and female. One observer thought the women there were bloated with rum, rotten with disease, drugged on opium, and victims of brutality and every kind of excess.

In some ways the dancing saloons, lodging houses, and brothels were similar to their equivalents in London's East End. The dancing saloons had three-piece bands that played noisy and energetic music on the violin, the banjo, and the tambourine. The bars were packed with weather-beaten sailors who were carefree and generous with their wages. “A sailor with cash in his pocket has a decided antipathy to drinking alone,” wrote William Sanger, “and generally invites everyone in the room, male and female, to partake with him.”
²¹
But there does seem to have been a difference between London and New York in the level of violence and in the way the prostitutes and their customers flaunted themselves on the streets. In Wapping and Stepney and Limehouse, most of the crime and vice went on behind closed doors or in dark alleys. In New York, it often took place in full view of respectable residents and shocked neighbors.

In 1839, a watchman arrested Edward Hogan and Catharine Riley for shamelessly copulating on the front steps of a house on Oliver Street. Ellen Robinson said it was impossible to live in her Water Street tenement because prostitutes were in the habit of sitting half-naked on the front stoop. In March 1847, the
National Police Gazette
reported the trial of George Beach on a charge of keeping a disorderly house.
²²
Beach lived at 304 Water Street and faced an onslaught from hostile neighbors. John Robinson, who lived at number 309, complained that Beach's house was one of the worst in the city. It was a place of riot and drunkenness where men and women of the most infamous character gathered and used obscene and profane language. Robert Legget, who lived on Cherry Street, confirmed that it had been a riotous house for years and that he had seen thieves and prostitutes on the premises as late as one o'clock in the morning. But the most graphic account came from Charles Devlin, who was described as the principal complainant. He lived opposite, at number 318, with his wife and young daughters, and said that he had observed girls dancing naked in the house, and on Saturday nights “girls on Beach's steps take down men's pantaloons, which is a common practice.” But his most damning charge was that Beach had girls as young as eleven years of age in the house and that he had cohabited with a girl of thirteen.

Child prostitution was rife in the city by the 1840s, and much of it went on in brothels run by women. In the same month that Beach was arrested, a woman named Jane White, alias Horn, alias Cook, was brought before the magistrates for conducting a system of juvenile prostitution from her house on Reade Street. A dozen young girls were sent out by their parents to sell fruit and candy in the local bars, offices, and stores. They would be befriended by unscrupulous men with perverted tastes and taken to White's house “to consummate their degradation by actual prostitution.”
²³
The girls received $2 or $3 a day from prostitution and were expected to give most of this to White. In May of the same year, Mary Ann Sterling was arrested for keeping a den of infamy at 27 Roosevelt Street. Six girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen were living in a miserable state of prostitution on her premises.
²⁴
William Bell, a police officer, reported that a small fifteen-year-old girl who worked in a junk shop by the docks on Front Street was in the habit of going aboard coal boats in that vicinity and prostituting herself.
²⁵

Not all such girls were victims, and one of the surprising features of prostitution in New York is the number of women who retained control over their lives. Lucy Ann Brady, for instance, was a prostitute on an occasional basis. She was born in the city around 1820 and came from a poor family. As a teenager she used to attend the theater and began having sex with the men she met there. Her parents sent her to the House of Refuge, an institution for juvenile delinquents, but she ran away and for a year lived a life of casual promiscuity. She spent three nights with a steamboat captain. Another man paid her $5 for a night spent in a brothel on Orange Street. On another occasion she met a girlfriend in an oyster saloon, and they picked up two men and took them to another Orange Street brothel. Once she was arrested by the authorities and kept off the street for a while, but on being released she resumed her old life. Most of the time she worked as a servant but resorted to prostitution when she needed more money.
²⁶