Fanny and Stella

by Neil McKenna

  He was there, in theory at least, to confirm the very worst suspicions about ‘Miss Stella’ and ‘Mrs Fanny’, as he insisted on calling them. He was there to state in no uncertain terms how Miss Stella and Mrs Fanny, sometimes dressed as women and sometimes as men, had by ‘painting their faces’ and ‘powdering their necks’, by their ‘studied air of effeminacy’ and by their ‘amatory airs and gestures’ conspired to induce and inveigle him to fondle and toy with them, conspired to dupe and deceive him into committing sodomy. In theory at least.

  But Hugh Mundell turned out to be a witness for the defence. Miss Stella and Mrs Fanny had, he said, for the avoidance of doubt, informed him repeatedly, verbally and in writing, that they were men dressed as women, but he had wilfully refused to believe them. And far from inducing and inveigling him to fondle and toy with them, when, unprompted and with no encouragement, he had attempted to take indecent liberties with Miss Stella, she had most firmly rebuffed him.

  From the way his eyes shone when he spoke, it was apparent to everybody that Mr Hugh Mundell was still more than half in love with Miss Stella and would not hear a word said against her, let alone speak ill of her himself. It was a dismal, not to say disastrous, beginning to the case for the prosecution, and it was universally agreed that Sir Robert Collier would have to work very hard if he was to save his ship from crashing onto the rocks.

  There was a surprising number of new witnesses, among them some eminent medical gentlemen and a positive phalanx of new witnesses from Scotland, including Mrs Agnes Dickson, Louis Hurt’s landlady, and Detective Officer Roderick Gollan of the Edinburgh City Police, who had discovered the cache of compromising photographs and cartes de visite hidden in the chambers of Mr John Safford Fiske.

  There was Police Constable Thomas Shillingford who, in 1867, had arrested – or more properly, rescued – the young and very beautiful Miss Stella Boulton and her companion, the young and not-at-all-beautiful Martin Luther Cumming, from a mob of battle-scarred and very angry whores in the Haymarket. Both Stella and the Comical Countess were in drag and had aroused the rightful ire of the Haymarket whores by daring to trespass on their hallowed pads and patches.

  Mrs Jane Cox, the widow of Mr Francis Kegan Cox, the gentleman who had so unadvisedly and so passionately kissed Ernest Boulton full on the lips in his office in the City, had bravely agreed to stand in her shamed spouse’s shoes, and her dignity in the witness box as she listened with a stricken face to her late husband’s deposition elicited many fitting murmurs of sympathy.

  Miss Eleanor Colton, a most ladylike attendant at the Lyceum Theatre, told how Stella, dressed in mauve satin, had used the convenience in the Ladies’ Retiring Room to relieve herself while Fanny stood guard at the door. Miss Colton’s testimony aroused feelings of righteous indignation and utter revulsion. It was one thing to dress up as a woman and dupe and deceive unsuspecting men, but to violate and pollute so sacred a sanctum as the Ladies’ Retiring Room made the blood of every true Englishman boil over with anger. ‘If every roué can by assuming feminine garb enforce his way with impunity into the chambers set apart for our countrywomen,’ one editorialist declared, ‘then we call upon Law and Justice to aid us in exposing these outrages on decency.’

  Mr William Kay, of the long-established firm of Outfitters and Dressmakers that bore his name in Russell Square, was called to give his expert opinion on the costumes confiscated at Wakefield Street. A number of portmanteaux, baskets and boxes were brought into court and disgorged a dazzling array of feminine attire. There were no fewer than seventeen dresses and gowns; quantities of skirts and petticoats; bodices and blouses; cloaks and shawls; shoes and boots and gloves; a bewildering assortment of ladies’ unmentionables; a single muff; seven chignons, two long curls, ten plaits and – sitting rather oddly like a cuckoo in this nest of femininity – that artificial grey beard.

  By the time everything was unpacked and laid out for the consideration of the Jurymen, the court resembled nothing so much as a fripperer’s shop in one of the less salubrious parts of the city. After their long incarceration in those assorted portmanteaux, baskets and boxes, the clothes showed ‘the crush and spoil of age’, as Mr Digby Seymour, defending counsel for Stella, most poetically put it. They were fusty and frowsy, and there was that decidedly unpleasant smell that always pervades shops dealing in second-, third- and fourth-hand clothing, a smell of unwashed bodies and unwashed linen, of dirt and want and overcrowding, of cheap scent and cheap sex, of unfulfilled dreams, disappointments and death.

  Mr Kay had, he said, ‘thoroughly’ examined each and every item of clothing and declared them ‘very much tumbled about’ and ‘not as clean as they might have been’ (which was a polite way of saying they were filthy). In consequence, they were of little or no value. ‘I wouldn’t have them as a gift,’ he declared contemptuously.

  A cheap and theatrical stunt it may have been, but this display of tawdry feminine finery did its work well. ‘A thrill of horror ran through the jury box,’ reported the Daily Telegraph, as the clothes were unpacked and displayed. To be told that Fanny and Stella had dressed as women and walked the streets was one thing. To see the very clothes they had worn while so promenading was quite another. All the letters of love and longing in the world could not state the case so concisely and so compellingly as these tumbled-about women’s clothes had done.

  Then there were those witnesses who had already appeared at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court and who were now obliged to stand again in the witness box, like Slow Eliza from Norfolk and Sharp-eyed Maria, the bickering housemaids of 36 Southampton Street, where Lord Arthur and Stella had lived as man and wife. Mr John Reeve, the taciturn and gloomy staff supervisor at the Royal Alhambra Palace, spoke to the scandalous and shocking behaviour of Fanny and Stella and of the accompanying gaggle of other like-minded painted and powdered young gentlemen when they regularly descended upon the Alhambra and wreaked moral havoc with their oglings and their chirrupings and their tongue-wagglings.

  And then there was Miss Martha Stacey who, in company with her elderly mother, ran the infamous house of accommodation in Wakefield Street where Fanny and Stella and Carlotta and Sissy had lodged and dressed, and where, it was strongly suspected, they ‘entertained’ – for want of a better word – ‘gentlemen’ – again for want of a better word – even though nobody could prove it. If Miss Martha Stacey knew of the gentlemen callers at her establishment, she was most certainly not saying so. She was not saying very much at all, and her frequent glances towards Mr George Lewis sitting inconspicuously at the bar might have suggested – to a suspicious mind – that that gentleman had coached her in what and what not to say.

  Martha Stacey exemplified a curious feature of this trial. To the very evident frustration of the Attorney-General, the testimony of several witnesses for the prosecution seemed to have changed subtly. What had been established facts and adamantine certainties at Bow Street a year earlier were now something less than established, something less than adamantine. A small and almost imperceptible degree of doubt had crept into the testimonies of Miss Martha Stacey, Mrs Louisa Peck (the chatelaine of Southampton Street) and Mr Arthur Gladwell, the occupier of the second-floor front in Southampton Street (and now the proud husband of Mrs Peck’s sister, Sarah Jane). None of them had done anything as obvious as retract or change their evidence, but now they seemed fractionally more hesitant, more ready to believe in the possibility that they may have been mistaken in their observations. It was enough to unsettle and undermine the case for the prosecution and to lead to the unworthy thought that the £5,000 so generously put up for Fanny and Stella’s defence (reputedly by the wealthy Miss Carlotta Westropp Gibbings) had been well spent by Mr George Lewis on bribes.

  There was, however, no such hesitation, no such doubt on the part of the formidable Miss Ann Empson. Back by popular demand, Miss Empson delighted her audience by reprising her role as the fearsome and fire-breathing Dragon of Davies Street. She fumed and smouldered wit
h indignation, she scowled and snorted with rage, and she so frequently spat out small balls of fire and brimstone in the general direction of Fanny and Stella that those two young gentlemen must surely have felt themselves fortunate not to go up in flames like the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah. When Miss Empson turned her eye upon any particular gentleman in the courtroom, he was seen to step back and stumble, and even the Lord Chief Justice himself appeared to recoil from Miss Empson’s Gorgon-like gaze.

  B ut ‘the most sensational event of the day’, according to the Daily Telegraph, ‘was the cross-examination of the ex-beadle of the Burlington Arcade’. It was a barnstorming tour de force by the policeman-turned-beadle-turned-loafer, a man who had begun his career with high and manly ideals and who, over the years, had progressively sunk to his present unfortunate state, a slave to the demon drink, living off the largesse of his mother-in-law at best, and at worst, off the immoral earnings of prostitutes.

  His performance melded tragedy and comedy in equal measure and was full of self-delusion and self-pity. One minute he was the cock of the walk, a braggart and a blusterer, his chest puffed out like a pigeon’s with manly self-importance; the next, his voice was choking with emotion, and tears were running down his reddened cheeks as he was made to confront the depth and depravity of the abyss he had fallen into.

  Mr George Smith was a liar. An habitual liar. He lied, and he lied, and he lied again. He lied to cover up his lies. He lied so much that he forgot what he was lying about, and then would accidentally reveal the startling truth his lies were designed to conceal. There were ‘roars of laughter’ as he was caught out – again and again and again – in deceit and dishonesty, as ‘one damaging confession after another was wrung out of him’ in cross-examination.

  It seemed that Mr George Smith had taken money in the form of tips and bribes from almost everyone: from the gay ladies in the Burlington Arcade he was supposed to keep out; from the wealthy gentlemen he introduced to those selfsame gay ladies; from the shopkeepers in the Burlington Arcade who tipped him to encourage those gay ladies and their gentlemen followers to patronise their establishments; from his mother-in-law and from his friends; from Inspector Thompson; from the Treasury Solicitor; and from anyone else who was prepared to pay him. Indeed, the only persons that Smith had not taken money from were Fanny and Stella, or so he said.

  It was left to the Lord Chief Justice to bring Mr George Smith’s devastating cross-examination to an end. ‘Do you think it is possible’, he asked Mr Sergeant Parry with withering irony, ‘to prove this witness to be less credible than you have shown him to be already?’

  It was a disaster, there was no other word for it, a downright disaster. Even if Smith was telling the truth about the haunting of the Burlington Arcade by Fanny and Stella, by Sissy Thomas and the Comical Countess, and by all the other painted and powdered young men looking for wealthy gentlemen, no one would believe him, no one could believe him.

  The case for the prosecution was in tatters. Apart from the coup de théâtre of producing Fanny and Stella’s extensive wardrobe of feminine finery in court, the Attorney-General had yet to make any sort of a case against them or the other six defendants, present, absconded or dead. His star witness, the hapless Hugh Mundell, had effectively been a witness for the defence. Martha Stacey, Louisa Peck and others had cleverly sown seeds of doubt about their own testimony, and George Smith had, quite literally, been laughed out of court.

  It was clear that the tide was beginning to turn. When Fanny and Stella emerged from Westminster Hall at the end of the second day’s proceedings, the large waiting crowd in Palace Yard cheered and clapped them, drowning out the feeble chorus of boos and hisses.

  After spending the day observing the trial, it was not surprising that Simeon Solomon was in no doubt about the outcome. ‘Of course they will be acquitted,’ he told Swinburne.

  As Fanny and Stella were whirled away in their cab, Stella, wreathed in smiles and looking radiant, blew kisses to all and sundry.

  28

  A Rout

  The conception of criminal justice which the atmosphere of Scotland Yard fosters is pretty much the same as that which has existed for countless ages in the empire of China. If a crime has been discovered, the majesty of the law must be vindicated by the punishment of somebody. But it is a minor consideration who that somebody shall be. The police have in a great measure lost the faculty of seeing things as they are, and not as they wish them to be.

  The Times, 25th July 1871

  T he Attorney-General knew that his last and best hope of a conviction in this case was the evidence of the two medical men: Dr Richard Barwell and Dr James Paul. Never mind that five of the six doctors who had so minutely examined the parts of Boulton and Park in Newgate Gaol were of the opinion that there were no signs of sodomy present. Those five doctors had examined the young men only after they had been in custody for almost six weeks, six long weeks during which the worst of their sodomitic injuries, if the Attorney-General could so phrase it, would have had the opportunity to heal and fade from view.

  But Dr Barwell had treated Frederick Park for chancre of the anus at Charing Cross Hospital when that young man had come in using a false name and disguised as a respectable clerk from the poorer classes. He had seen him week in and week out over a period of three months and he could and would speak authoritatively to the extraordinary state of sodomitic disease that obtained in this young man’s posterior parts.

  Dr Paul was the police doctor who had examined Fanny and Stella in a dingy room at the back of Bow Street Magistrates’ Court on the morning after their arrest. He had been shocked and horrified – indeed he had been turned quite pale – by the gaping anuses and the deformed and elongated penises of these young men, signs and symptoms which, according to the texts on the subject, could only have been caused by persistent sodomitic indulgence on a scale which beggared belief.

  Both these medical gentlemen had seen the signs and symptoms of sodomy written in scarlet upon the bodies of these two young men in exceptional and in intimate detail. Surely a jury of twelve Englishmen good and true would be obliged to give credence to the testimony of Dr Paul and Dr Barwell over that of five doctors who had examined Boulton and Park only long after their sodomitic crimes had been forcibly ceased?

  For his part, Dr Barwell was indignant. Indignant still, a year on, that he had been forced, under threat of a summons, to testify in this case against his wishes and against what he considered to be his professional duty of confidence to his patients, even patients like the three young sodomites who had attended his clinic in as many weeks. And newly indignant that his word as to the identity of the young man he had treated for the syphilitic affliction of the anus was now being so heavily challenged by counsel for the defence. Those legal gentlemen thought themselves very clever, so very clever (and no doubt they were) in the way they sowed their seeds of confusion and uncertainty in the minds of the Jurymen; so very clever in the way they tried to trip him up; so very clever in the way they tried to make out that he was confused, mistaken or misled – if not actually lying under oath. And he was well aware that the more indignant and the more insistent he became, the less credible he appeared. But he knew, beyond any doubt, that the young man Park standing in the dock – though stouter now, better dressed and sporting manly whiskers – was the same young man who had stood trembling before him in his room at Charing Cross Hospital with an affliction of the anus and mutely pleading for help.

  When his turn came, Dr Paul stood up in Westminster Hall manfully and repeated his shocking findings as to the state of the orifices of evacuation and the organs of generation of Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park. There was no denying that his account was clear, concise and compelling. He had been the first doctor to examine these youths just hours after they were taken from the streets and it was clear that they had both recently engaged in sodomitical activities. So far Dr Paul was proving to be a strong witness, perhaps the strongest witness for the pros
ecution, and the Attorney-General was well pleased.

  ‘What is that book in your pocket?’ demanded Mr Digby Seymour. It was a curious and abrupt way to open a cross-examination.

  ‘This?’ replied Dr Paul, pulling the book from his coat pocket and feeling surprised and not a little flustered by the question. ‘This is a work of Tardieu’s.’

  The book in question was Professor Ambroise Tardieu’s Étude médico-légale sur les attentats aux mœurs, a famous work of scientific observation upon the ways and wiles of sodomites in Paris, a manual intended for doctors, especially police doctors like Dr Paul, on how to read the unmistakable signs of sodomy which the good professor believed were forensically engraved upon the bodies of sodomites.

  ‘Have you been studying Tardieu lately?’ Mr Seymour enquired, with an ever so slight and sarcastic emphasis on the word ‘studying’.

  ‘I have read it today,’ Dr Paul replied, reddening. ‘I have had it fifteen months.’

  Fifteen months? Indeed? Mr Seymour seized on this like a ferret. ‘That would be about the time you bought it with reference to this case?’ he suggested.

  Dr Paul opened his mouth to reply but no words came forth.

  ‘Not so long ago as fifteen months,’ he said after an embarrassingly long pause. ‘I never heard of it until I had given evidence in this case.’

  ‘Who told you of it?’

  ‘An – an anonymous letter that I received,’ he stuttered out after another pause.

  It was clear to all that Dr Paul was lying. But why had he lied under oath, on such a subject, and lied so palpably, and so badly? And why had he come up with the barely credible story that an anonymous admirer had written to alert him to the existence of the book? Surely the date when he actually read the book was of little or no moment? February or May 1870. Two months before the arrest of Fanny or Stella. Or two months afterwards. Did it really matter all that much?