by Theo Aronson
All three boys were very anxious to make clear to PC Hanks that they had been wearing their own clothes at the time of their visits to Cleveland Street. In this way they hoped to prove that, neither literally nor figuratively, had they defiled the uniform of the Royal Mail. Even in the basement lavatory, claimed one of them, he had not actually been wearing his uniform: he had taken off his jacket and his trousers had been round his ankles.
Armed with the statements from the three boys (and there were to be three more), PC Hanks sent for their procurer, Newlove. Newlove admitted everything. All four boys were suspended from duty and sent home. When, the following morning, the affair was reported to the Postmaster General, he immediately contacted the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. The Commissioner, in turn, instructed Chief Inspector Frederick Abberline of the CID to take charge of the case. Abberline applied for warrants for the arrest of the proprietor Hammond and his accomplice Newlove on the charge of inciting and procuring ‘divers persons to commit the abominable crime of buggery against the peace of Her Majesty the Queen’.
When Inspector Abberline arrived at 19 Cleveland Street the following morning to arrest Charles Hammond, he found the house empty. Hammond, having been warned the day before by Newlove, had lost no time in packing ‘a black portmanteau’ and clearing out. His parting advice to Newlove was ‘to stoutly deny everything’. With Hammond had gone a man dressed as a clergyman. This was his partner, George Veck, who always passed himself off as the Reverend G.D. Veck. Veck was another of that apparently inexhaustible fund of Post Office employees. He had been dismissed from the service for ‘improper conduct’ with telegraph messengers and was at present living with a seventeen-year-old lad whom he passed off as his son.
Foiled by Hammond’s escape, Inspector Abberline hurried round to Newlove’s mother’s house in Camden Town. Here he arrested Newlove.
‘I think it is hard that I should get into trouble while men in high positions are allowed to walk about free,’ grumbled Newlove to Abberline as they made their way to the police station.
‘What do you mean?’ asked the detective.
‘Why,’ explained Newlove, ‘Lord Arthur Somerset goes regularly to the house in Cleveland Street, so does the Earl of Euston and Colonel Jervois.’5
With this piece of information, the entire complexion of the enquiry changed. Abberline realized that he had uncovered a potentially explosive scandal. Both the Earl of Euston and Colonel Jervois were prominent figures, while Lord Arthur Somerset was a very important person indeed. The third son of the 8th Duke of Beaufort, he was not only a major in the Royal Horse Guards (The Blues) but also Superintendent of the Stables and Extra Equerry to the Prince of Wales. Thirty-seven years old, ‘Podge’ Somerset was generally regarded as the very epitome of virile masculinity: an accomplished sportsman, an experienced soldier, an authority on horses and a member of the Prince of Wales’s intimate circle. He was, read his pen-portrait in Vanity Fair, ‘very favourably regarded by the fair sex’.6 This favourable regard was not, it was now realized, reciprocated.
Indeed, Lord Arthur Somerset’s patronage of the Cleveland Street homosexual brothel was to reopen to view a world which the authorities had naïvely imagined they had only just legislated out of existence.
Almost thirty years before, in 1861, the death penalty for buggery had been abolished. It had been in force for over three centuries, having been introduced in 1533, during the reign of King Henry VIII. As the Buggery Act had been largely symbolic – a means by which Henry VIII was able to establish the supremacy of the secular over the ecclesiastical courts – it had seldom been enforced. Nor had it applied only to one man sodomizing another: it had encompassed also the buggering of women or animals. In the main, sodomy was regarded as a sin rather than a crime, and the enforcement of the law varied in accordance with the moral climate of each period. Sexual acts between men, in an age when the poor were often obliged to share beds or when a master felt he had the right to bugger his servant, were common. Sodomy was seen more as a sign of debauchery or, in a gentleman, of a jaded sexual appetite, than as one of homosexuality.
Convictions were difficult to obtain, particularly after 1781 when penetration and the ‘emission of seed’ had to be proved. Indeed, in the curious belief that this somehow made the act less reprehensible, defendants were always anxious to deny that there had been any emission. ‘He forcibly entered my Body about an Inch, as near as I can guess,’ testified one earnest witness, ‘but in struggling, I threw him off once more, before he had made an Emission, and having thus forced him to withdraw, he emitted in his own Hand, and clapping it on the Tail of my Shirt, said Now you have it!’7 Sentences for acts of buggery, or attempted buggery, ranged from hanging to fines, imprisonment or a spell in the pillory.
The abolition of the death penalty for buggery in 1861 was replaced by penal servitude of between ten years and life. However, this abolition did not introduce a more enlightened attitude towards what were described as ‘unnatural practices’ – a term covering all sexual acts between men, and not only buggery. For the 1861 act happened to be followed by a spectacular growth of Victorian middle-class puritanism. A powerful religious revival, laying stress on such things as the sanctity of family life, the virtues of conventional behaviour, the repression of sins of the flesh, even the upholding of Britain’s imperial mission, created a climate increasingly hostile to all manifestations of sexual and social unorthodoxy, especially homosexuality.
These attitudes were reinforced by a parallel growth of what the horrified middle classes regarded as upper-class debauchery. That personification of middle-class morality, Queen Victoria, was constantly railing against the depravity of the aristocracy. ‘The frivolity, the love of pleasure, self-indulgence and idleness of the Higher Classes’ were deplorable, she exclaimed.8 Prostitution, of all sorts, flourished. To the moral crusaders it was male lust – whether manifesting itself in sex with prostitutes or with other men – that was the prime cause of this lowering of standards. Indeed, to them, homosexuality was synonymous with prostitution: both were products of man’s selfish search for sexual gratification.
A series of scandals served to illustrate, only too vividly, the spread of this unbridled sexuality. In 1871 two transvestites, Ernest Boulton and Frederick Parke, always known as Stella and Fanny, were tried on the vague charge of ‘conspiracy to commit a felony’. They had been arrested – Stella in a low-cut dress of scarlet satin and Fanny in dark blue trimmed with black lace – outside the Strand Theatre. Their case received enormous publicity. The public was able to be gratifyingly shocked by details of their shameless way of life. There were Stella’s love letters to Lord Arthur Pelham Clinton, third son of the Duke of Newcastle, to which Fanny would add messages signed ‘your affectionate sister-in-law’. There were the photograph albums of Mr John Stafford Fiske, the American Consul in Edinburgh, in which were pasted photographs of Stella in lavish dresses, including one in which ‘she’ was posed ‘in an attitude of prayer’.9 The public was able to hear about their dresses, petticoats, hats, chignons, stockings, curling-irons, gloves, boxes of powder and bottles of scent; and about their visits, in full drag on the arms of assorted aristocratic admirers, to theatres, restaurants, race-meetings and even the Oxford and Cambridge boat race.
The fact that their acquittal was greeted by loud cheers (Stella fainted away on hearing it) did nothing to reassure those who saw the case as yet another symptom of society’s rapid disintegration.
By the early 1880s, such evidences of moral decay were coming thick and fast. In 1884 Mrs Jeffries, a notorious supplier of prepubescent girls who was proud to number, among her many illustrious clients, King Leopold II of the Belgians, was tried and acquitted. In that same year Dublin Castle, seat of the British Government in Ireland, was the scene of a major homosexual scandal. A homosexual ring which ‘for its extent and atrocity, almost staggered belief’ was uncovered. ‘It included men of all ranks, classes, professions and outlawries, from aristoc
rats of the highest fashion to outcasts in the most loathsome dens.’10 The three principal aristocrats were all senior members of the British administration. Together with no less than seven other defendants, they were arrested and tried. Evidence of their ‘felonies’ – some of it given by unemployed labourers and illiterate navvies – included visits to a male brothel in Golden Lane, near the River Liffey. Sentences varied from acquittal to twenty years’ imprisonment. One Dublin wit afterwards suggested that Queen Victoria award the Lord Lieutenant, Earl Spencer, a new title – ‘Duke of Sodom and Gomorrah’.
The Dublin trial was followed, the next year, by that of W.T. Stead for criminal abduction. William Thomas Stead was one of the great crusading journalists of the late Victorian age. Bushily bearded and burning-eyed, this son of a Congregational minister brought to his journalism a powerful blend of moral indignation and sensationalism. One of his most celebrated journalistic exposés was the series of astounding articles entitled ‘The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon’ which he wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette in 1885. In it he attacked the evils of child prostitution. Girls as young as eight or nine were readily available, and with virgins (or what were passed off as virgins) being highly prized, these young girls were in great demand. The widely held belief that the taking of a girl’s virginity could cure venereal disease made them even more sought-after.
Determined to expose this evil, Stead bought a thirteen-year-old girl. His accounts of this transaction, and of the sordid world in which this trade flourished, ran for weeks in the Pall Mall Gazette. But instead of being generally applauded, Stead’s investigative journalism was deplored by many middle-class puritans. They were apparently far more shocked by the publishing of the articles than by the circumstances which had led to their being written. On the grounds that Stead had not secured the consent of the girl’s father when buying her (and regardless of the fact that the incident had been stage-managed and that Stead had no intention of having sex with the girl) he was charged with criminal abduction and sent to jail for two months.
But in circles where it mattered, Stead’s crusade had its desired effect. It was welcomed by the agitators for social purity for its attack both on the elderly aristocratic rakes and on the precocious working-class girls whom they patronized. ‘On the whole’, decided the Reverend Randall Davidson, ‘the good outweighs the evil. The wave of moral wrath and indignation which has been evoked will sweep things before it.’11Indeed, at a huge demonstration in Hyde Park against these various homosexual and prostitution scandals, speaker after speaker expressed the hope that public figures would set an example in moral purity. These various agitations led, in turn, to the passing of the famous Criminal Law Amendment Bill of 1885.
This Criminal Law Amendment Bill was originally designed ‘to make further provision for the protection of women and girls, the suppression of brothels and other purposes’.12 But after the bill had been given an unopposed second reading, an amendment was introduced by a Radical Member of Parliament, Henry Labouchere. In it he proposed that the issue of homosexuality be addressed as well: that all homosexual acts and not only sodomy – whether in private or in public – be made an offence.
Henry Labouchere, who was to play a prominent part in the Cleveland Street scandal, was a maverick figure. Although, like Stead, he was a tireless campaigner against government abuses and injustices, Labouchere had none of Stead’s humourless Nonconformist altruism. His touch was altogether lighter, wittier, more satirical. A slightly built man, with ‘the graces of a dancing master’,13 rich and well-educated, Labouchere had enjoyed a colourful career. He was never happier than when making mischief; his weekly journal, Truth, was forever being sued for libel.
Whether introduced in a provocative spirit or because of a deep-rooted dislike of homosexuality, Labouchere’s amendment – the eleventh clause of the Criminal Law Amendment Act – was adopted. It has been argued that because the amendment was adopted, without due consideration, at the end of a long night’s sitting, its full implications were not appreciated. True or not, the bill provided that
any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof shall be liable at the discretion of the court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour.14
In other words, the amendment criminalized all homosexual acts, leaving Britain as one of the few European countries in which even mutual masturbation by adult men in the privacy of their own homes was illegal. France, for instance, had decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adults almost a century earlier.
The Labouchere amendment, sometimes known as the ‘Blackmailer’s Charter’, led to the growth of hostility towards homosexuals and an increase in prosecutions. It remained on the statute books until 1967. One of the first, and most famous, of these prosecutions concerned the male brothel in Cleveland Street.
CHAPTER TWO
‘Apples of Sodom’
Although the Labouchere amendment of 1885 had made all homosexual acts illegal, it could not, of course, put an end to all homosexual activity; no amount of legislation could do that. But it did encourage the establishment of a more definite homosexual identity. The difference between homosexual acts – casual sex among men, some of whom might be regarded as heterosexual – and a consciously homosexual type, became more pronounced. By coincidence the word homosexual, which had not been coined until 1869 by a Hungarian named Benkert, came into general use in Britain during the 1880s. But it was not the only word to be used. The period saw a rash of bizarre, quasi-scientific descriptions of this newly conscious identity: homogenic love, contrasexuality, similisexualism, Uranism, even the third sex.
In some circles the word ‘earnest’ was a synonym for homosexual. ‘Is he earnest?’ became a familiar question. This gave the title of Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest not only a double, but a treble, meaning. To the initiated it had all the appeal of an in-joke.
As one in every twenty men is reckoned to be fully homosexual, there were homosexuals of every type in all levels of late Victorian society. Some were serious-minded pioneers in the crusade for an acceptance of their sexual orientation. Inspired by the poetry of the American, Walt Whitman, men like John Addington Symonds, with his dreams of manly companionship, and Edward Carpenter, with his theories of a socialist brotherhood, went so far as to proclaim the higher moral possibilities of homosexuality. More inhibited were literary figures such as the critic and essayist Edmund Gosse and that celebrated apostle of aestheticism, Walter Pater. Other writers, like Oscar Wilde and a clutch of so-called Uranian poets, reflected an altogether lusher, more exotic world. Poems and articles, written anonymously and published in privately printed magazines, hinted at the ecstasies of illicit love. ‘He loves strange sins avidly,’ runs the prose translation of one turgid outpouring, in Latin, from a member of this group; ‘he gathers strange flowers, fierce with beauty. The more dark his spirit the more radiant his face, false but splendid! The apples of Sodom are here and the very heart of vice and sweet sins …’1 Painters who followed the cult ranged from the fashionable Sir Frederick Leighton with his homo-erotic studies of Greek youths to Henry Scott Tuke with his paintings of naked fisherboys splashing in the Cornish seas.
In marked contrast to these quasi-Bohemian personalities were several leading imperial figures. For it was a curious fact that – in an age when the sanctity of family life was claimed to be allied to the civilizing mission of the British Empire, and when homosexuality was regarded as a manifestation of the decadence which had destroyed previous empires – many of the foremost imperialists were not only unmarried but also covert homosexuals. Cecil John Rhodes, the greatest empire builder of the day, was in love with, and willed his immense fortune to, a hearty young man named Neville Pickering. When Pickering die
d, Rhodes surrounded himself with a court of equally hearty young men. General Gordon, the period’s most romantic soldier-martyr, was happiest in the company of boys. That other great military figure, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, moved in a circle of handsome young officers whom he described as his ‘happy band of boys’. He had a couple of favourites – first Frank Maxwell, whom he always called ‘the Brat’, and then Oswald FitzGerald, his aide-de-camp who, according to Kitchener’s official biographer, ‘established himself so securely in the affections of his chief that Kitchener never looked elsewhere’.2
Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scout movement, had a favourite in Kenneth McLaren whom he referred to as ‘the Boy’ and when, relatively late in life, Baden-Powell felt obliged to get married, it was he, and not his wife, who suffered the headaches whenever sex was being contemplated. Even that great proconsul, Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, whose suspect boyhood friendship with a master at Eton had led to the master’s dismissal, developed the sort of violent antipathy towards homosexuality that is invariably the sign of a repressed homosexual.
As homosexuality was to be found in every section of society – in roistering aristocrats and furtive bank clerks, in tortured clergymen and cheerful navvies, in inhibited schoolteachers and shameless male prostitutes – it was difficult to categorize. Indeed, the great majority of men brought before the courts for homosexual offences in the nineteenth century were husbands and fathers.3 As a result, and to a degree unusual in Victorian Britain, there was a considerable intermingling of the classes. The idealistic Edward Carpenter fondly imagined that love between men would lead to a breakdown of class divisions. J.A. Symonds cloaked his lust for strapping guardsmen and muscular peasants in a great deal of high-flown talk about a universal brotherhood. ‘The blending of Social Strata in masculine love’, he declared, ‘abolishes class distinctions … it would do very much to further the advent of the right kind of socialism.’4
