by Neil McKenna
A t thirty-five, Inspector James Thompson was one of the youngest and shrewdest senior police officers in London. Unlike many of his colleagues, he was an educated man, working as a clerk before joining the Metropolitan Police ten years earlier and rising quickly through the ranks to become Inspector of ‘E’ Division, one of the largest sections of the force, covering Holborn and the West End. Inspector Thompson’s 195 police officers patrolled an exact total of forty miles and 869 yards of streets and roads and arrested around eight thousand people every year, a thousand or so of them prostitutes plying their trade on the busy thoroughfares of the West End.
Inspector Thompson had made his own way back from the Strand Theatre after giving the signal to Detective Sergeant Kerley and Detective Officer Chamberlain to arrest the two young men in women’s clothes. Fanny and Stella were of course oblivious to the fact that this rather grave dark-haired policeman had been shadowing them all evening.
Under the flaring gas jets of Bow Street Police Station, they looked a pathetic pair. Stella’s make-up was stained with tears, and the pearl powder that she and Fanny had so liberally applied to their décolletages had been shot through with sweat, revealing rather less lustrous skin beneath. Both Fanny’s flaxen curls and Stella’s Grecian plaits were starting to come away from the complex artificial architecture of their hair, giving them a faintly tipsy look. Inspector Thompson could see that their crinolines were long past their best, the antique lace borders grimy and torn. The flounces of their petticoats peeping out from under the crinolines were stained and decidedly grubby. He noticed that their hands were a shade too large, and their feet, encased in white kid boots, looked a shade too masculine. And beneath the peeling make-up, was that the merest shadow of a beard?
‘Your name and address?’ Inspector Thompson asked, looking at Stella severely. There was no reply. ‘Your name and address?’ he repeated.
‘My name is Cecil Graham,’ mumbled Stella, ‘and I live at number 2 Bruton Crescent.’ There was silence as Thompson wrote this down, the sound of his metal nib scraping the paper.
Stella suddenly decided that there was no point in lying to the police.
‘Actually,’ she interrupted quickly, ‘my name is Ernest Boulton. I’m the son of a stockbroker and I live with my father at 23 Shirland Road, Maida Vale.’ Thompson calmly scratched out ‘Cecil Graham’.
‘And I’ve just come back from Edinburgh,’ Stella added lamely by way of an afterthought.
Inspector Thompson turned quizzically to Fanny.
‘My name is Frederick William Park,’ said Fanny wretchedly. ‘I’m a law student and I lodge at number 13 Bruton Street, Berkeley Square.’
There was a long silence as Inspector Thompson slowly surveyed the pair, taking in every detail of their appearance.
‘It seems a very extraordinary thing to me,’ Thompson said quietly and deliberately, ‘and I don’t quite understand it. Will you give me some explanation for appearing in this dress?’
Fanny and Stella shifted about uncomfortably.
‘We are men,’ they mumbled miserably in unison. It had all been just ‘a lark’, ‘a spree’ that had got out of hand.
‘And we are very, very sorry.’
A few minutes later Fanny and Stella found themselves in one of the chilly outdoor cells in the yard behind Bow Street. Detective Officer Chamberlain had ordered them to strip in the glare of the gas jets. The nightmare had started to unfold. They undressed slowly, reluctantly and awkwardly as Chamberlain and a crowd of other policemen watched with fascination and horror. There were jeers, whistles and sneers, followed by gasps as Fanny and Stella’s crinolines fell to the floor revealing their undergarments.
‘There were flannel petticoats,’ Chamberlain testified later, ‘and I believe calico petticoats; there were stays, a short white skirt, very short under the stays’, and both of them had bosoms padded with wadding to make them appear ‘very full’.
There was some confusion over whether or not Stella was wearing any drawers. Chamberlain was sure that she was not, a fact that he could only have ascertained by making Stella strip until she was completely naked and revealed as a slender young man with the face of a beautiful young woman.
Mr Hugh Mundell was not under arrest but he had insisted upon coming to the station. ‘One of the police said he did not want me, that I could go,’ Mundell said later. ‘I said I had done nothing wrong.’ He felt compelled, he said, to accompany Fanny and Stella to Bow Street. ‘I did not want to desert them,’ he said nobly. ‘I wished to go and get bail for them. I thought they had been out on a lark, and that I might get bail for them.’
When Hugh Mundell joined them in the cell a little later, arrested for refusing to give his name and address, he found them very ‘downspirited’ and tried ‘to keep them up’. It was hard work. Fanny and Stella were shivering and crying, their hair awry, their painted faces smudged with tears. They had been allowed to keep their underwear and were desperately trying to dress themselves and rearrange the wadding in their bosoms into some semblance of normality.
Oh, was it not a cruel sell,
That night they must remember well,
When they had to pig in Bow Street cell,
What a change for them he-she ladies.
It was the first of many public and not-so-public humiliations that Fanny and Stella would have to endure, and even the hard-nosed and even harder-hearted Detective Officer Chamberlain had to concede that Fanny and Stella were being ‘so brave’.
2
The Hapless Swain
These young men appear to be very unfortunate, for whenever they dressed in men’s clothes they were always taken for women, and when they were attired in the dress of the fair sex they were always taken for men. Under such unfortunate circumstances what were they to do?
Extraordinary Revelations, 1870
M r Hugh Alexander Mundell was the ardent, if hapless, swain of Fanny and Stella, but his devotion had only recently been minted. He had met them just six days earlier, having made his way to the Surrey Theatre, of low repute, in the Blackfriars Road, in the hope of finding some female company. It was a regular haunt of his and, for just a shilling’s entrance, he could pass a pleasant evening in the companionable fug of humanity that thronged the theatre.
Though it aspired to be ‘the nightly resort of all the Rank and Fashion in London’, the Surrey’s fortunes had been in decline for the last fifteen years and now its clientele was a motley assemblage of working people from Lambeth and Kennington sprinkled, according to Charles Dickens, with ‘a few pilgrims from the West End’. It was a rowdy, blowsy, familiar sort of place, where the noise made by the audience frequently drowned out the performance. It could be decidedly rough both in and around the theatre.
Hugh Mundell was by his own reckoning exactly ‘23 years and a half old’. He was a remarkably naive, not to say gauche, young man, who later confessed in court that he had had ‘very little experience’ when it came to the ladies. He had never even corresponded with a lady, he admitted with a stammer and a blush. He described himself as a gentleman, but this was stretching the truth. He had no occupation and lived with his widowed father, a barrister of modest means, in Pimlico, a far from salubrious area. By his own admission he was leading an ‘idle’ sort of a life.
At the Surrey, Hugh Mundell wandered aimlessly around for an hour or so, then gravitated to the saloon bar, a glittering gilded temple of glass and mirrors. He was lounging against the long bar drinking a bumper of sherry with the theatre manager, a Mr Shelly, when he saw two extremely effeminate young men enter the saloon bar with perfect self-possession. They looked about the same age as himself, perhaps even a little younger. Their hair was rather longer than was usual and had the appearance of having been frizzed and teased into a mass of tight curls, perched upon which at a jaunty angle were tiny top hats of the sort fine ladies wore when riding to hounds. Both were clean-shaven, in an age when the absence of whiskers, moustaches and beards gave rise
to the most terrible suspicions.
Their smooth skins seemed to shine and shimmer in the flaring gaslight of the buffet and Hugh Mundell wondered if they were wearing paint. Their jackets had astonishingly exaggerated revers and looked to have been specially nipped in to accentuate the smallness of their waists. Both young men wore large and exquisite flowers in their buttonholes and had small feet which seemed perfectly suited to the tiny, tottering, sashaying steps they took. They seemed to sway and ripple like reeds in the wind. And as they walked they talked in loud, affected, brittle voices and waved their beautifully manicured hands in elaborate gestures.
Hugh Mundell could hardly take his eyes off them.
Mr Shelly nudged him sharply. ‘Those two are women dressed as men,’ he said with a knowing wink and a leer, ‘two gay women dressed up in men’s clothes.’ Hugh Mundell could well believe it. They were certainly unlike any men he had ever encountered. They had to be women. Women dressed as men. They walked like women and they talked like women. Their gestures were dainty and womanish. Their hair was curled like women’s hair and surely only women wore paint.
‘I took them to be women, and so did everyone else who was there,’ Hugh Mundell said lamely. ‘I was led blindfolded on. I was led away.’
Hugh Mundell could be forgiven for being so led away. It was not unusual for spirited young women to dress as fashionable young men about town and go on a spree. It gave them a thrill to penetrate the stag resorts, the traditional preserves of male privilege like the gentlemen’s clubs and cigar divans, or go slumming to low taverns, to attend dog fights and cock fights, and bet on bare-knuckle pugilists.
After parading grandly around the saloon, the two young men swept out, announcing in loud and braying tones that they were going to a nearby public house. The dazzled Hugh Mundell felt himself compelled to follow, and in the pub he stared at them fixedly for twenty minutes, until they blushed.
‘We think you’re following us,’ one of the young men observed ‘in a joking manner’.
‘I – I think I am,’ Mundell managed to stammer and blush in reply.
The ice had been broken, and Hugh Mundell found himself talking to two of the most delightful people he had ever encountered. There was more than a little confusion about names. The young men introduced themselves as ‘Ernest’ and ‘Frederick’ but within minutes were addressing each other as ‘Stella’ and ‘Fanny’. Hugh Mundell was thoroughly bewildered and gallantly started to call them ‘Miss Stella’ and ‘Mrs Fanny’, after Fanny announced that she was a married lady, a fact confirmed by the gold wedding band she wore.
Fanny and Stella clearly liked Hugh Mundell. He was tall and dark and moderately handsome. He was a puppy, to be sure, but a likeable puppy nevertheless. And, when he was not blushing and stammering with embarrassment, he was well-mannered and charming in a shy, spaniel-like way. Fanny and Stella had assumed that he was one of the many ‘so’ young men who hung around the theatres and music halls in the hopes of picking up other ‘so’ young men to have sex with. And his dogging of their footsteps and staring them out of countenance only strengthened their conviction that he was in hot – if mute – pursuit.
The problem of men looking for other men to have sex with had reached almost monstrous proportions in some London theatres. According to the pseudonymous author of The Yokel’s Preceptor, a guide to the sexual pitfalls of London, ‘these monsters in the shape of men, commonly designated Margeries, Pooffs, &c . . . flock to the Saloons and boxes of the theatres’. It was a particular problem in theatres like the Surrey, the Strand and the Lyceum which embraced burlesque and where every night ‘so’ young men could experience the erotic frisson of watching young men on stage apparently falling head over heels in love with each other and making passionate love to each other.
The evening passed in a kind of dream for Hugh Mundell. Before the show was over there were more drinks, more slow and stately promenades around the dress circle, and more intoxicating badinage. Everyone seemed to be looking wonderingly at this extraordinary pair of young men, and Mundell swelled with pride that he, beyond all others, was the object of their kindest attentions. As they left the Surrey Theatre, he gave an arm each to Fanny and Stella and escorted them to Waterloo Bridge, still convinced they were women.
‘I talked to them as women,’ Mundell recalled. ‘I chaffed them in a quiet way about being women dressed in men’s clothes. I did not carry it very far, though. I told them, when they walked, they ought to swing their arms a little more, like men when they walk.’
They parted on the friendliest of terms. Fanny and Stella extracted a promise that Hugh Mundell would meet them again at the Surrey on the following Tuesday evening so that they could watch the performance from beginning to end. ‘I shall only be too happy,’ he replied. And he meant it.
Hugh Mundell was walking on air as he made his way home to Pimlico. He had fallen suddenly and spectacularly in love with the beautiful and beguiling Miss Stella. And, amazingly, the beautiful and beguiling Miss Stella had accepted his advances, even going so far as to encourage them. But she had behaved that first evening with absolute propriety. ‘There was never anything improper in her conduct,’ he maintained stoutly. ‘I thought her conduct was natural. I thought it was womanly.’
The next four days passed in an agony of anticipation for Hugh Mundell. He got to the Surrey Theatre early and had to wait over an hour, pacing up and down the dress circle, before the ladies arrived. He was clutching two red roses – one for Miss Stella and one for Mrs Fanny. This time they were dressed as women, resplendent in their finest crinolines, their hair elaborately coiffured, and dripping in glittering gaudy jewellery. They were quite dazzling. Pleasantries were exchanged.
‘Will you come into our private box, Mr Mundell?’ said Fanny, smilingly.
‘Yes, I should be delighted,’ he replied with a short bow, presenting each lady with a rose before rushing to get pins from the box attendant.
‘While they were pinning the flowers, Miss Stella gave me a letter,’ Mundell remembered. It was quite short and to the point. ‘Dear Mr Mundell,’ it began:
You were telling us some stories the other night about a man dressing up as a woman. We are men, and we have put on women’s dresses now to see what you think of our get up!
Hugh Mundell smiled to himself. ‘It’s a good joke,’ he told them, ‘but I don’t for an instant believe it!’
‘But it’s quite true. We are men!’ Fanny and Stella exclaimed in unison.
Mundell laughed. ‘It’s a good joke,’ he repeated. ‘A very good joke!’
Fanny and Stella shrugged. They had done their best. Their lovesick puppy was convinced they were women. Try as hard as they might to persuade him that they were in truth men, their adoring swain could not countenance it. It was a joke, it was a lark. Nothing more.
To almost everyone in the auditorium that night, it was clear that Fanny and Stella were, to put it bluntly, a pair of beautiful and dangerous young whores. But to the love-struck Hugh Mundell they represented something rather more complex, a strange and contradictory amalgam of the sacred and the profane; of pure love and impure lust.
Later in court, Mundell was asked about his behaviour towards Miss Stella on that evening.
‘In what way did you treat her,’ counsel for the prosecution demanded, ‘as a lady or as a woman of the town?’
Mundell hesitated. He did not know how to answer. The truth was that he had treated Miss Stella as both a lady and as a whore. He was in love with her and in lust with her.
‘Stella kept me from making any advances,’ he mumbled at last, flushing scarlet. ‘Whenever I made any advances, she kept me off. She resisted.’
‘Describe what kind of advances you made to her,’ counsel demanded.
‘I put my arm round her neck once.’ Mundell’s reply was drowned out by laughter in the court, most loudly from Stella and Fanny. ‘I might have gone further,’ he said, provoking even more laughter. ‘But we were not al
one. A gentleman coming into the box stopped me.’
The evening ended with an invitation – almost an instruction – to call upon Fanny and Stella the day after next. Fanny handed him a card with the name of ‘Frederick Park, 13 Bruton Street, Mayfair’ engraved upon it.
‘I shall ask for Mrs Park then,’ Mundell said doubtfully to Fanny.
‘You will not be let in if you do,’ replied Fanny tartly.
‘Well, if that’s the case, I’ll ask for Mr Park,’ Mundell answered, and they all laughed.
Stella’s feelings towards Hugh Mundell were, like his for her, a curious amalgam of lust and love. She wanted Hugh Mundell. She wanted to be loved by him, she wanted to be desired by him. She wanted to charm him and channel his love and his lust for her until he became her devoted slave, and she his coy, mercurial mistress. He was good-looking in a coltish sort of way, and his boyish naïveté and enthusiasm made a charming change from the usual run of men who fell in love with her.
There was, of course, the obvious hurdle that Stella was in truth a man. But that was a small matter and could usually be managed. Stella had, over the years, become very adept – an expert, in fact – at managing it. The trick was to make Hugh Mundell fall so deeply in love with her, so deeply in lust with her, to key him up to such a pitch of sexual desire that her surrender – when it finally came – was so looked for and so longed for that her gender became merely a matter of geography. Of course, when she was drunk and whoring, which was frequently, her drunken and whoring punters rarely noticed the difference. After all, most whores hardly ever took their clothes off, instead pulling up their skirts and using strategic slits in their drawers to allow entry.
And even on those rare occasions when the punters suspected she was a man dressed as a woman, or – even more rarely – when she had told them on a whim, or out of caprice, or from a desire to shock, that she was a man, when it came down to it, down to the nitty-gritty, down to the bump and grind of it, the offer of ‘a bit of brown’ or some ‘back-door work’, as it was called, was rarely refused and, truth be told, more often eagerly claimed as a prize beyond rubies and pearls.
