by Theo Aronson
Obligingly, the Duchess of Beaufort turned a blind eye to the Duke’s amorous activities in his bachelor rooms in London. But on at least one occasion his interests intruded on her more decorous way of life at Badminton. The Duke was away at the time and just as the Duchess was about to lead a party of guests into lunch, the butler announced that a large picture had arrived from London. Where, he wanted to know, should he hang it? Together with her guests, the Duchess went into the hall to inspect the painting. It was a portrait of a pretty girl whom everyone present knew to be the Duke’s latest mistress. With characteristic aplomb, the Duchess announced the picture to be ‘charming’. His Grace, she imagined, would prefer to have it in his own rooms. The butler had better arrange to have it hung there. It would come as such a pleasant surprise to the Duke on his return.
The sexual tastes of the Beauforts’ eldest son, the Marquess of Worcester, seem to have caused no scandal, but those of the second son, Lord Henry Somerset, always known as ‘Penna’, were highly unconventional. After five years of marriage Lord Henry’s wife, Isabella, left him because of what she described as a crime mentioned only in the Bible: his infatuation for a seventeen-year-old boy named Henry Smith. With her, she took their only daughter. ‘We have nothing whatsoever to say in defence of Penna,’ wrote the Duchess to her daughter-in-law, ‘and, unless he is mad, cannot understand his behaviour.’ The Duke, while admitting to his son that ‘a man may get tired of his wife’, condemned his conduct in what he considered to be the strongest possible terms: it was not that ‘of a gentleman’.1 After a much publicized divorce case, the wife was given custody of their daughter. But such were the social conventions of the period that, instead of winning sympathy, Lady Isabella was ostracized by society for violating the code whereby a woman never made a public display of her marital difficulties. She devoted the rest of her life to good works, particularly to the celebrated nineteenth-century crusade of Temperance.
Temperance, of any sort, played very little part in Lord Henry Somerset’s subsequent life. He retired first to Monaco and then to that haven for expatriate homosexuals, Florence. In the very year of the Cleveland Street scandal he published a book of poems, inspired by his love for Henry Smith. As Smith had, by then, left him, these lovelorn poems were entitled Songs of Adieu. Reviewing them in the Pall Mall Gazette, Oscar Wilde ended his piece with the words ‘He has nothing to say, and he says it.’2 Lord Henry made a more lasting reputation as a composer of sentimental ballads, the most famous of which had the not inappropriate title of ‘All through the Night’.
So one can appreciate why the third son, Lord Arthur Somerset, should be so anxious for the news of his visits to the Cleveland Street homosexual brothel to be kept from his mother. For a while, it seemed as though it might be: for there was – so it appeared to many of the policemen concerned with the case – a curious reluctance on the part of those in authority to take any action against Somerset. The excuse was that he had not been sufficiently identified.
This was nonsense. For one thing, the thirty-seven-year-old Lord Arthur Somerset was unmistakable. He was a big man, well over six feet tall, his bald head compensated for by his luxuriant gingery moustache and whiskers. He had a pronounced Roman nose and his bearing was upright, confident, military. He looked every inch of what he was – a much-decorated major in the Royal Horse Guards (The Blues) who had seen service in various campaigns in Egypt during the 1880s.
As soon as Newlove, that tireless procurer of his fellow telegraph employees, had told Inspector Abberline who was in charge of the case, that Lord Arthur Somerset had frequently visited the Cleveland Street brothel, a watch was put on the house. Although the police knew that the proprietor, Charles Hammond, had by now fled to France, it was only too obvious that his clients did not. In the course of the next few days dozens of men, reported a watching policeman, called at the maison de passe. They ranged from men ‘of superior bearing and apparently good position’ to soldiers and young boys. Twice a man resembling Lord Arthur Somerset arrived; on each occasion he was met by a corporal of the 2nd Battalion Life Guards. They had clearly arranged to meet there. Their knocking not being answered, the two men walked off together in the direction of Oxford Street.
A week or so later, the same policeman took two of the suspended telegraph boys, Swinscow and Thickbroom, to a spot opposite a club in Piccadilly. When Somerset emerged from the club, he was immediately identified by the boys. All three followed him to Hyde Park Barracks, where his regiment was headquartered. After he had gone in, Somerset was again identified, this time by a sergeant. The accompanying policeman, who had at first been suspicious of the telegraph boys, was eventually won over by their unworldliness. They were just simple lads, quite different from the usual homosexual prostitutes. Accustomed to ‘playing with each other’, they were quite unaware of the seriousness of their ‘crimes’. ‘It is not likely’, added the policeman, ‘that they would have identified Lord Arthur Somerset unless they honestly believed that he was the man who had tempted them.’
A still more positive identification came on 19 August when a warrant was issued for the arrest of Hammond’s accomplice – the self-styled Reverend G.D. Veck. When the police arrived at Veck’s new lodgings at seven in the morning they found that he was away. In his bed, however, was a seventeen-year-old boy who described himself as Veck’s ‘private secretary’. The Reverend Veck had just left for Portsmouth, explained the boy; he would be back later that day. Veck was arrested at Waterloo station on his return.
In Veck’s pockets the police discovered letters from someone called Algernon Allies; in them Allies mentioned a ‘Mr Brown’ who had apparently been giving him money. Allies, who had once lodged with Hammond at 19 Cleveland Street, was now living with his parents in Sudbury, Suffolk. Inspector Abberline immediately sent the dependable PC Hanks – the policeman responsible for unearthing the Cleveland Street brothel in the first place – to interview Allies at his parents’ home in Sudbury.
Here Hanks found a good-looking, curly-haired, nineteen-year-old youth. On being questioned about the mysterious ‘Mr Brown’ who had been giving him money, Allies admitted that, as the result of an anonymous tip-off the previous day, he had destroyed all ‘Mr Brown’s’ letters. On being pressed, he confessed that ‘Mr Brown’ was really Lord Arthur Somerset. Somerset had been supplying Allies with money ‘for services rendered’. This was confirmed when Hanks visited the local post office and tracked down three postal orders sent by Somerset and cashed by Allies.
Allies then told Hanks the whole story. He had met Lord Arthur Somerset the year before, when he had been employed as a ‘house boy’ – a waiter – at the Marlborough Club: the club established by the Prince of Wales and patronized by many of the Prince’s circle. Allies had very soon caught Somerset’s eye and a sexual relationship had developed. When the boy was found to have stolen money from the club’s premises, he appealed to Lord Arthur for help. Although Somerset could not save his job, he was able to prevent him from going to prison. As Allies had lost his accommodation in the club as well as his job, Somerset arranged for him to go and live in Hammond’s house in Cleveland Street. To his trusting mother, Allies explained that he was employed by Hammond as a waiter; Mr Hammond, she unblinkingly assured Inspector Abberline, used to entertain a great many guests. In spite of being able to earn his keep as one of Hammond’s male prostitutes, Allies continued to pester Somerset for money. Even after he left Cleveland Street, just ahead of Hammond and Veck, Allies was sent money by Somerset.
But not even in the face of this irrefutable evidence was a move made against Lord Arthur Somerset. In spite of the fact that he had been interviewed twice at the Hyde Park Barracks by the police (Somerset denied all knowledge of the Cleveland Street brothel), no proceedings were taken against him. Responsibility was simply shuffled from one government department to another. Even when the Home Secretary eventually decided that the case should be dealt with by the Director of Public Prosecutions which, bewild
eringly, really meant the Treasury, the matter was treated with the utmost discretion. In fact, it was considered so delicate that in the document drawn up by the Treasury Solicitor’s office, pieces of paper were pasted over Lord Arthur Somerset’s name. Apparently the idea of an aristocrat, a royal equerry and a major in The Blues being arraigned was too appalling to contemplate.
Not one of the authorities involved – Scotland Yard, the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Home Secretary, the Attorney General, even the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury himself – was ready to grasp the nettle. Any proposal to go ahead was immediately countermanded or, if not actually countermanded, delayed. The excuse that Somerset had not been ‘properly identified’ was now replaced by one to the effect that there was not ‘enough evidence’. Towards the end of August, Somerset, who seems to have been kept well informed on these matters, quietly obtained four months’ leave of absence from his still unsuspecting regiment and slipped off to the Continent. The Treasury Solicitor, Sir Augustus Stephenson, who was now in charge of the case, was not sorry to hear the news of Somerset’s disappearance.
‘It is quite possible (in my judgement it is probable), that he will not return,’ he wrote. ‘It may be the best thing that could happen.’3
On 18 September 1889, two and a half months after PC Hanks had first uncovered the activities at 19 Cleveland Street, two of the accused were brought to trial. They were Veck and Newlove, who had been indicted on thirteen counts of procuring six boys ‘to commit divers acts of gross indecency with another person’.4 The brothel-keeper, Charles Hammond, who had been indicted with them, was nowhere to be seen. Having fled, first to France and then to Belgium, he was arranging to put himself even further beyond the reach of the British police. On 5 October, with money supplied by Lord Arthur Somerset’s solicitor, he set sail for the United States.
But Hammond, who imagined himself to be in constant danger of arrest, need not have worried. No less a person than the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, had come to his aid. Lord Salisbury was generally regarded as the very embodiment of the Establishment: patrician and urbane, he was always ready to look the other way when it came to preserving the status quo. In this instance, the Prime Minister had let the Home Secretary know that he did not ‘consider this to be a case in which any official application could justifiably be made’ to extradite the escaped Hammond.5 In other words, it would be better if Hammond were not brought to trial. The Home Secretary had taken the hint and had passed it on: the Cleveland Street enquiry need not be pursued too vigorously.
In his hurry to get away from 19 Cleveland Street in early July, Charles Hammond had apparently left behind one very valuable possession. This was the book in which a prostitute named Emily Baker, who had lodged with Hammond in Cleveland Street for several years, had kept a careful record of ‘all the gents who used the house’, together with the dates of their appointments. The book had been appropriated by the police, after which it mysteriously and conveniently ‘disappeared with certain other papers which passed between police headquarters and the Treasury’.6
Then, on the very morning that Veck and Newlove were to be tried, a deal was struck between the defence and the prosecution. If the accused pleaded guilty of indecency, the more serious charges of conspiracy and procuring would not be pressed. In this way the case could be speedily dealt with and, more important, no names be mentioned. To this bargain, the Attorney General wired his immediate sanction. Except for the clearing, by the outraged judge, of a lone woman from the court, the case went like clockwork. Newlove’s solicitor pleaded for leniency on the grounds that the telegraph boys whom he had recruited ‘had all indulged in indecent practices’ before he had approached them, even if only with each other and not grown men.7
‘The whole thing was hustled through in half an hour,’ reported one observer. Veck was given nine months’ hard labour and Newlove four. These sentences were considered to be ‘ridiculously light’.8 (A minister of religion, found guilty of a similar offence a few months before, had been condemned to life imprisonment.) The Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions, Hamilton Cuffe, described the trial as a ‘travesty of justice’, but its brevity did allow him, he was glad to say, to catch his 6.15 train from Waterloo.9
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And still nothing was being done about Lord Arthur Somerset. Documents concerning the case were simply passed from one department to another. The whole business developed into a saga of inexplicable delays, wrong addresses, shifted responsibilities and, as this was September and most of the lordships concerned were on holiday, of telegrams having to be delivered over rough country tracks, by hand. A letter from the Home Secretary to the Prime Minister, to the effect that the Attorney General agreed with the Director of Public Prosecutions that ‘the case against Lord Arthur Somerset is complete’ and that ‘there is no doubt whatever as to his identity’, was shuffled off by the Prime Minister to the Lord Chancellor.10 The Lord Chancellor, unfortunately, was in Scotland shooting grouse. He was in no mood to put his mind to the embarrassing business.
Not even the return of Lord Arthur Somerset to England could stir the authorities into action. To the increasing exasperation of the police, nothing seemed able to ruffle the aristocratic insouciance of their superiors.
In the meantime, Somerset was doing his best to get rid of the evidence against him. As Hammond was about to be safely shipped off to the United States, the most damaging evidence now took the shape of Algernon Allies, the one-time waiter at the Marlborough Club to whom Somerset had been sending postal orders. The boy had been under police protection for over a month and was at present lodging in the Rose Coffee House in Houndsditch. Somerset’s instructions to his solicitor, Arthur Newton, were that he ‘must look sharp and get Algernon Allies away’.11
This was why, on the afternoon of 25 September, young Allies had a caller. By now an authority on the way gentlemen dressed, or indeed undressed, Allies was later able to describe his caller’s clothes in considerable detail. This well-dressed gentleman, who was tall and fair and about twenty-five, had a proposition to put to Allies. If the boy agreed to go to America, he would be supplied with whatever clothing he needed plus the sum of £15 on his arrival in the United States. To this Allies agreed. There and then he listed his requirements: he would need ‘underlinen, two suits, a pair of boots and a hat’. The gentleman duly noted these down. He had come, he explained in answer to Allies’s query, from the solicitor, Mr Newton. ‘The reason we wanted to get you away is that you should not give your evidence against you know who.’12
The two agreed to meet again that evening outside the A1 public house in Tottenham Court Road; by then the gentleman would have made arrangements for Allies to set sail from Liverpool the very next day. Allies, a past-master at getting money out of gentlemen callers, touched this particular caller for enough to buy himself a shirt, a collar and a tie. No sooner had his visitor left than Allies went straight to Inspector Abberline to tell him the whole story. A trap was set.
At nine that evening, watched at a discreet distance by Inspector Abberline and the indispensable PC Hanks, Allies kept his appointment in the Tottenham Court Road. The young man then hailed a cab and he and Allies set off, closely followed in another cab by Abberline and Hanks. The first cab stopped outside the Marlborough Head public house where the two policemen moved in on the young man. He admitted that his name was Taylorson and that he was the managing clerk to the solicitor Arthur Newton. But he would answer no other questions. Allies was taken back under police protection, while Taylorson hurried off to warn Newton of the failure of the scheme. He also told the solicitor that a warrant was about to be issued for Somerset’s arrest. Newton lost no time in warning Somerset to get out of the country. Lord Arthur returned to France the very next day.
But no warrant was issued. The documentation on this recent turn of events was duly sent off to the Lord Chancellor in Scotland where it was added to the pile of documents already gathering dust on his lordship’s d
esk. While the pile remained there, unattended, every other department head felt absolved of the responsibility for doing anything.
Reassured by this lack of activity, Somerset returned to England on 30 September 1889. A few days after he had slipped back, his grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Beaufort, died and he went to Badminton for her funeral. Also attending was a police officer, poised to arrest him. But still no warrant was forthcoming. Returning to London, Somerset visited the Turf and Marlborough clubs where he was given a gratifyingly warm welcome by his fellow members. Not one of them, apparently, was prepared to believe the ‘disgusting rumours’ about him. ‘My Lord Gomorrah’, as one newspaper later dubbed him, seemed to be getting away with it.13
But Lord Arthur Somerset’s relief was short-lived. As he had all along feared, the affair was about to take on another, royal, dimension.
When the Prince of Wales first heard of Lord Arthur Somerset’s involvement in the Cleveland Street brothel case he refused to believe it. For the forty-seven-year-old Prince of Wales, much of whose time was given over to the pursuit of beautiful women, the idea of any man preferring sex with boys was incomprehensible. Nor could he credit that ‘Podge’ Somerset – his hearty, soldierly, sports-loving equerry, the Superintendent of his Stables – could possibly be such a man. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he exclaimed, ‘I won’t believe it any more than I would if they had accused the Archbishop of Canterbury.’ The Prince had not chosen an altogether appropriate example. The current Archbishop of Canterbury was Edward White Benson who, when at Cambridge, had been taken under the wing of a middle-aged bachelor, Francis Martin, bursar of Trinity College, who had paid all his expenses. One of the Archbishop’s sons always claimed that Martin had had a romantic affection for young Benson. The Archbishop’s wife, who was almost certainly a lesbian, left him to go and live with another woman. His sons, A.C. Benson, E.F. Benson and R.E. Benson, all seem to have been homosexual.
