by Neil McKenna
8
A Tale of Two Sisters
A SISTER’S LOVE : There is no holier feeling than a sister’s love – no affection purer and more enduring than hers.
The Family Treasury, 1854
W hat could she say about Fanny? That she was a formidable actress? That she was funny? That she was courageous? That she was loyal? That she drank too much, spoke too much and laughed too loudly? That she was wise beyond her years? That she looked older than her years? (And Stella was sure that she was not being unkind when she said this, as it was universally agreed that Fanny, with what might be called her ‘sterner features’, certainly did look older, very much older, than her years.) That she knew everything there was to know about Mary-Anns (as well as knowing every Mary-Ann on the pad in London)? That she was steeped, not to say pickled, in the ancient mysteries and rituals of drag? That she was generous, more than generous – generous to a fault, in fact – with her favours? That despite the disadvantages of person she laboured under, Fanny had, more often than not, snatched erotic victory from the jaws of defeat by a combination of charm, determination, guile and utter ruthlessness? That she was a true friend? That she was a loyal sister, if not by ties of consanguinity then by the most secret and the most sacred bonds of sorority and of sodomy?
Miss Fanny Winifred Park was one of those young ladies who had blossomed into womanhood early. By the age of sixteen, when most well brought-up girls had but a dim apprehension of distant marriage and motherhood, Miss Fanny Winifred Park was already well schooled in the dark arts of seduction and sodomy. She was certainly no stranger to those thronged thoroughfares around Coventry Street and the Haymarket where the gay ladies of London plied their trade so vigorously. Indeed, Miss Fanny Winifred Park had made her professional debut, so to speak, on this particular West End stage, not far short of her seventeenth birthday, and by dint of assiduous application and hard practice had risen rapidly through the ranks of her chosen profession.
It was a curious thing, but she soon discovered that she was considerably more successful in selling herself when she was in drag than when she was out of drag. While it was certainly true that there were some men to whom a painted and effeminate youth strongly appealed, there were a great many more who were interested in her when she was dressed as a woman.
Miss Fanny Winifred Park was nothing if not a realist. Nature had not endowed her with an abundance of personal advantages. In matters of face, figure, complexion, teeth and hair, Nature had been less than generous (if not downright stingy), and she was only too well aware that in the hierarchy of painted effeminate youths working the streets, she barely reached the middle rank. Though there were some who had left their youth far behind them and now relied on paint slapped on like stucco, equally there were plenty of other, prettier boys who skimmed off the choicest punters and steamers. Not that she was complaining. After all, they were all God’s creatures.
Fanny, however, when she was dressed in silk and suitably padded with a bustle and false bubbies, bewigged and with a generous application of paint, was transformed into what was generally termed a handsome woman. Not beautiful, certainly, but then not plain. Nor was there any of the blushing virgin nonsense about her. She was, she liked to think, very much a ‘Girl of the Period’, as the Saturday Review had so memorably phrased it: a fast girl, a girl who lived her life to the full, who drank and smoked, who went about and abroad and was curious about the world. A girl not trepidatious about life; a girl not startled by her own shadow; a girl not hidebound by convention and propriety and all those other suffocating corsets of the mind.
In her short span upon this mortal coil, Miss Fanny Winifred Park had certainly savoured life, and drunk deeply from the cup of Venus. She held her head high and was not ashamed to look men boldly in the eye and to give them what they wanted. Miss Fanny Winifred Park’s favours usually came at a price, but she could be soft-hearted and sentimental. There were occasions when she felt it her duty to do what she could to console lonely men, especially soldiers and sailors in the service of the Queen – for whom she felt a particular tendresse.
Whatever her faults and virtues, Miss Fanny Winifred Park understood men. Like the best whores, she knew instinctively what men needed. She had the knack of making them happy. She was a good sport. She would dance with them and drink with them. She would listen to them and make them feel wanted. She understood, only too well, the intensity of the erotic abyss men so constantly struggled against and yet so constantly sought. She was their guide. She would take their trembling hands in hers and lead them to the dark side of the moon to assuage the desires that raged like a torrent within them till the pale dawn came and they would be released.
Most, if not all, of her customers laboured under the illusion that Miss Fanny Winifred Park was a woman, and why should they think otherwise? With her generous embonpoint, tweezered eyebrows, painted face and luxurious curls, she looked every inch the successful gay lady. Those gentlemen fortunate enough to enjoy her favours were generally more than satisfied with their purchase and left satiated and entirely unaware that she was not quite what she seemed. And for the most part, the few who were entrusted with her secret, far from running away from her, seemed all the more excited by the idea. There would always be one or two who would recoil in horror, lash out with their fists or threaten her with the police. It was an occupational hazard, and Fanny was far from blind to the risks (look at her poor brother Harry, exiled to the wilds of Scotland). But she knew she could not live her life in any other way. She was young, she was strong and she was resourceful. She was more than a match for those who would try to do her harm.
Miss Fanny Winifred Park was all things to all men, switching in the twinkling of an eye from the commonest of common whores to the grandest of grandes dames. One minute she could wallow and rejoice in filthy talk like a streetwalker, and the next she could delight and charm with small talk which would not disgrace the most refined London drawing rooms. She was welcoming, warm and funny, but when the occasion demanded it, could wither with one fell look. Though she still harboured hopes of a life in the theatre, fame and fortune on the London stage had so far eluded her. She had notched up some considerable successes in the provinces, playing principally dowagers, and her performance as Agatha De Windsor, a wronged woman of a certain age in Retained for the Defence, had astonished and delighted the audience in Chelmsford at a benefit for the Infirmary. It had been the high-water mark of her stage career. Never before (and sadly never since) had she experienced such storms of applause; never before (and sadly never since) had she so scaled the heights of Histronia; and never before (and sadly never since) had she been the recipient of one or two admiring letters and bouquets from gentlemen.
Not infrequently Fanny would sally forth dressed in the most impenetrable black with a stricken look upon her face. On such occasions she would be Mrs Fanny Winifred Graham (née Park). From the weeds she wore and the expression upon her face, it was assumed by her friends and acquaintances that Mrs Fanny Winifred Graham (née Park) was the worthy and dutiful relict of Mr Graham. But none of them could be certain. It was the one subject – in truth, the only subject – upon which Fanny never spoke. Her lips were sealed and if anyone was sufficiently unwise or unfeeling to attempt to resurrect – Lazarus-like – the memory of Mr Graham, Fanny’s face would assume a tender expression. Dabbing a handkerchief to her eyes and clearing her throat noisily, she would beg her interrogator’s pardon and swiftly change the subject to the latest fashions from Paris, the shocking price of bombazine, or the scandalous antics of the new French girls in Coventry Street.
There were those in Fanny’s circle of candid friends, needless to say, who pooh-poohed the very idea of Mr Graham, who said that he was a figment of Fanny Park’s fevered imagination, amiably remarking that she had never yet managed to keep a man for more than a night, let alone for long enough to lead him to the altar. These friends were further of the opinion that if Fanny Park really had got herself m
arried, then the gentleman in question must have been very much advanced in years. He was probably senile, quite possibly blind, perhaps even crippled, or a combination of all three. There were many other such pleasantries. Through all these slings and arrows, Fanny would sail serenely on, tightly clasping the truth about the mysterious Mr Graham to her ample and womanly bosom.
‘A Tale of Two Sisters’. It might have formed the plot of a burlesque melodrama; or been a story in an illustrated penny magazine; or even a front-page report in one of the more sensational weekly newspapers: by a terrible twist of Fate two sisters are separated at birth and grow to womanhood, each unaware of the existence of the other. Both sisters are sweet, kind and beautiful, and both of them are the object of many handsome and rich beaux. But both sisters are inexplicably sad; they feel a curious sense of being incomplete, of being one half of a whole; they sense a lack, an absence, a void in their lives. Something is missing, or is it someone?
Both sisters live useful, busy and fashionable lives in London, filling their time with society, shopping and good works. As they go about their daily business and as their paths inevitably cross (London society is, after all is said and done, not much more than a large, gossipy village), they sometimes have the strangest feeling of having met before. Fanny, the elder of the sisters, who speaks perfect French, uses the phrase déjà vu. Stella, who is musical, feels something similar, like a heard, familiar melody from the dim and distant past that she cannot quite place. After many vicissitudes, hair-raising escapades and improbable adventures, after some songs and dances and a few comic interludes, the scales fall from their eyes and a benignant Fate reunites the two sisters who fall weeping upon each other’s necks and vow never again to be parted on Earth or in Heaven.
So it was for the sistering of Fanny and Stella. The heavenly spheres were aligned, and Fanny and Stella had come together as sisters. Fate had brought them together, two halves of a whole, now united, now conjoined in joy. And having found each other, Fanny and Stella were loath to be parted.
By night and by day they did everything together and went everywhere together. To the theatre, to the halls; to the Boat Race, to Bond Street and to the Burlington Arcade; to parks and pleasure gardens; to dives and divans; to balls and cheap dances. Up and down, and down and up, they promenaded and paraded the streets of London, sometimes in drag and sometimes out of drag (and sometimes half-in and half-out, which confused and confounded everybody and meant that no one could be quite sure who or what they were). They hunted and searched and scoured the streets looking for men for love or for money, sometimes finding neither and sometimes finding both.
They wore the same clothes, the same paint and the same coiffures. They stood in the same way, their slender feet neatly pointing outwards like a ballet dancer’s, their heads slightly thrown back, their gloved hands invariably holding a cigarette or a glass of champagne or a bumper of sherry. They walked arm-in-arm and alike: adopting a rapid, tittuping walk, with their noses stuck in the air, when they wished to have no truck with the world (‘your mincing and theatrical walk’, Louis Hurt, another of Stella’s ardent swains, had once disparagingly and despairingly called it); or a slow, bottom-rolling, leering and lascivious royal progress which caused everyone – foes and friends alike – to stop and stare with a look of horror or delight, or a mixture of the two, upon their faces. Many, if not most, of those who encountered them thought they were either whores or actresses, or both, as – in the minds of most people – the two professions were indivisible. Their life was a performance. London was their stage. The world was their audience. They were exotic, extraordinary and quite magnificent.
‘They always said the same thing,’ was the hapless Hugh Mundell’s attempt to explain the extraordinary manner in which Fanny and Stella spoke in concert. They said the same things at the same time. One would begin and the other would finish. Fanny would echo Stella, and Stella would echo Fanny. And when they spoke, they spoke with the same inflections, intonations and affectations. They used the same gestures, the same mannerisms and the same facial expressions. They laughed in the same way at the same jokes, and the same things displeased them, their brows contracting darkly in the same way. And though they spoke the Queen’s English in loud and well-bred tones of command, they were also masters – or rather, mistresses – of common slang, of the argot of whores and the backslang of thieves and trampers and gypsies.
Above and beyond that, they had their own special language, a language into which only they and their confederates – the sodomites, the hermaphrodites and the God-only-knows-what-else-ites – had been initiated. It was called ‘the Female Dialect’ (or so Fanny, the fount of all wisdom on matters sodomitical, had informed Stella), and it was as old as time, or nearly so. It was a strange and secret language; an upside-down, inside-out sort of dialect where ‘she’ meant ‘he’, and ‘he’ meant ‘she’; where men were called by women’s names, where Frederick was Fanny, Ernest was Stella, Amos was Carlotta, and Cecil was Cecilia, or Sissy for short. Most of the men styled themselves just plain Miss and Mistress, but there was no shortage of those who liked to call themselves Lady This, the Countess of That or the Dowager Duchess of So and So. There was a positive glut of Princesses, and more Queens in the few square miles of London than there were kingdoms in the wide world for them to rule over.
They were sisters. Side by side and shoulder to shoulder. Sisters for better or for worse. Sisters in sickness and in health. Sisters in drag and sisters out of drag. They made a formidable and fearless pair. London stood before them, waiting to be conquered, ready to fall at their feet in a swoon.
9
Monstrous Erections
At Wakefield Street, near Regent Square,
There lived this rummy he-she pair,
And such a stock of togs was there,
To suit those he-she ladies.
There was bonnets & shawls, & pork pie hats,
Chignons and paints, and Jenny Lind caps.
False calves and drawers, to come out slap,
To tog them out, it is a fact.
‘The Funny He-She Ladies’
A week to the day after their first appearance in Bow Street, Fanny and Stella were due in court again. ‘The crowd outside was immense,’ Reynolds’s Newspaper reported, and ‘completely blockaded the thoroughfares.’ The police struggled to control the excited mob of a thousand or more who had come to gawp, to jeer and to cheer. Every window that commanded a view of the court was crowded with spectators, and dozens of people clung precariously to the roofs of cabs to try and catch a glimpse of these extraordinary men-women. Inspector Thompson and several detachments of his officers were hard-pressed to clear a way through the noisy, seething mass to allow the prison van to make its slow progress to the entrance of the court.
If the mob had expected Fanny and Stella to appear in all their feminine finery, they were disappointed. Instead of the gaudy, painted creatures they had hoped to see, two neatly dressed, clean-shaven young men stepped out nervously, evidently bewildered by the size and the noise of this largely good-natured crowd. Without paint and after a grim week on remand in the House of Detention in Coldbath Fields, they looked pale, frail and fragile. Even though they were out of drag, their plucked and tweezered eyebrows and their tightly fitting suits with nipped-in waists and exaggerated revers gave them a decidedly arch and feminine air.
The arrest of ‘the Young Men Personating Women’, ‘the Hermaphrodite Gang’, ‘the Funny He-She Ladies’, as they were called variously by the newspapers, had caused an unparalleled sensation. Every aspect of Fanny and Stella’s lives – their arrest, their appearance, their clothes, their backgrounds – had been lovingly and lasciviously dilated upon and speculated over and, where facts were in short supply, cheerfully invented. ‘It is suspected,’ the Daily Telegraph breathlessly reported, ‘that there are others, besides those in custody, who have for some time past been personating females in London. In fact it is stated that an association exi
sts which numbers nearly thirty of these foolish young men.’
The Illustrated Police News went further and stated as a fact that a number of ‘these foolish if not unnatural young men’ had recently given a drag ball ‘at a well-known hotel in the Strand, at which twelve of the party represented females and twenty of their companions the opposite sex’. There were rumblings and rumours too of important people – politicians and peers of the realm – who were implicated in the growing scandal, and heavy hints that mass arrests were imminent.
Every newspaper in the country had carried the story, and it would soon be making headlines in Europe and in the United States. An enterprising publisher had already rushed out a penny pamphlet – The Lives of Boulton and Park: Extraordinary Revelations – which told the story so far, rehashing the testimony of Hugh Mundell and expressing many pious disapprovals of Fanny and Stella.
Of all the crimes Fanny and Stella were purported to have committed, by far the most heinous was Fanny’s ‘violation’ of the Ladies’ Retiring Room at the Strand Theatre on the night they were arrested. ‘Nothing’, the anonymous author of the penny pamphlet declared, more plainly showed ‘the base and prurient natures which these misguided youths possess’ than the ‘unblushing impudence’ of Fanny’s application to the female attendant to pin up the gathers of her skirt which had become unfastened.
