The Sexual History of London (32 page)

It emerged that a Mr Cox had flirted with Boulton in a City pub, mistaking him for a woman, and had even invited him back to his office to drink champagne. Thinking that he had pulled, Mr Cox admitted that ‘I kissed him, she, or it, believing at the time it was a woman.'
¹⁷
This did not prevent Mr Cox from setting up another meeting, but at some point he realized that Boulton, who called himself ‘Stella', was not all he seemed. Bumping into Boulton and his companion Lord Arthur Clinton in a pub in Covent Garden, he exclaimed: ‘You damned set of infernal scoundrels, you ought to be kicked out of this place!'
¹⁸

Boulton, meanwhile, had been living with Lord Arthur at his house in Berkeley Square, and they had exchanged many explicit letters, which were read out by the prosecution for the delectation of the court. One typical example, written following a separation, read: ‘I am consoling myself in your absence by getting screwed.' Frederick Park played the role of peacemaker during such lovers' tiffs, and tried to mediate between the couple. Sounding like an old mother hen, he protested in one letter that he wanted to come over to see the couple but he needed an umbrella ‘as the weather has turned so showery that I can't get out without a dread of my back hair coming out of curl'. Other more explicit letters must have titillated the court with their explicit references to homosexual activities: ‘I have as usual left a few little things behind, such as the glycerine, &c, but I cannot find those filthy photos, I do hope they are not lying about your room!'
¹⁹

As well as hanging around theatres and music halls, Boulton and Lord Arthur enjoyed parading up and down the Burlington Arcade alongside the high-class whores. According to George Smith, the beadle (security guard), Boulton had been cruising Burlington Arcade for about two years, face covered very thickly with rouge and every type of cosmetic. Boulton always created such a commotion when he entered the arcade that it was impossible to miss him. He would wink and pucker up at the men, and even referred to the beadle himself as ‘you sweet little dear!'

The pair never made any secret of their shenanigans. During the trial, a large chest was brought into court. When it was opened, a gasp of amazement went up from the spectators as it contained sixteen silk dresses, twenty wigs and a variety of boots.

Alexander Mundell, who appeared as a witness at the trial of Boulton and Park, first met the couple at the Surrey Theatre during a performance of a play called
Clam
. On that occasion, they were wearing male attire but appeared so effeminate that Mundell believed they were women dressed as men. Completely taken in, Mundell even tried to give them instruction on how to be convincing ‘drag kings', suggesting that they would seem more masculine if they were to swing their arms. Mundell arranged to meet them again, whereupon they turned up dressed as women.

Boulton told Mundell that they were really men, but Mundell treated this as a fine joke, and invited ‘Stella' Boulton and ‘Mrs Jane Graham' (as Park liked to call himself) out to dinner at the Globe, near the Haymarket. But time was running out for the pair. On 28 April 1870, they were followed by another detective, William Chamberlain, to the Strand Theatre, where they had arrived dressed as ladies. Park even visited the ladies' room during the interval to have some lace pinned up on his dress. As they got into a cab outside the theatre, Chamberlain pounced. They were arrested and taken to Bow Street.

Following their arrest, Boulton and Park were examined by the magistrate and the police surgeon, James Paul. Dr Paul ordered Boulton, who was wearing knickers and silk stockings, to strip, then examined his anus for signs of buggery, noting ‘extreme dilation of the posterior' and relaxed muscles, which he took to be evidence of anal intercourse. Dr Paul then examined Park and found what he told the court were ‘the same symptoms in these men as I should expect to find in men that had committed unnatural crimes', although he admitted that he had no experience in the field of unnatural vice.
²⁰
Dr Paul's cavalier attitude towards the prisoners irritated the judge, who called for an independent medical examination. Conducted by J. R. Gibson, surgeon to Newgate gaol, this found no evidence of buggery and concluded that the anal dilation could have been the result of natural causes. Boulton and Park went one further, and had another examination by Le Gros Clark, of the Royal College of Surgeons, who gave them a clean bill of health.

In summing up this curious case the judge, Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, was left with a dilemma. With no witnesses to give evidence of anal penetration, the offence of buggery could not be proved. The police surgeon had behaved in a crass and improper manner by subjecting Boulton and Park to a medical examination. George Smith, the beadle of Burlington Arcade, had admitted to taking bribes from shopkeepers to let whores into the arcade and had clearly turned a blind eye to the antics of Boulton and Park. There was no evidence that the pair had attempted to rob or blackmail their male admirers. They had been flagrantly open about their cross-dressing activities, but Park's landlady testified to the effect that there had been no evidence of immorality.

So what was left? A couple of drag queens who enjoyed roaming the West End ‘for a bit of a lark'.
²¹
Although in his summing-up the judge felt compelled to condemn the young men's ‘frolic' as ‘an outrage not only of public morality but also of decency, which would offend a member of either sex and ought not to be tolerated', the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Boulton and Park sank back into relative obscurity, although their case lived on in popular culture as illustrated by this limerick:

Two years later, in 1873, London was rocked by another homosexual scandal, but this had none of the bizarre cross-dressing comedy of Boulton and Park. Instead, it was the tragic tale of Simeon Solomon, a gifted painter, who paid a high price for coming out of the closet – if indeed it could be said that he was ever in the closet in the first place.

Simeon Solomon, born in 1841, was the younger brother of the respectable Royal Academician Abraham Solomon. His father, an importer of hats, had been the first Jewish freeman of the City of London, and his friends included the Oxford don Walter Pater and the Pre-Raphaelite painter Burne-Jones. According to the poet Algernon Swinburne, Solomon's paintings displayed ‘the latent relations of pain and pleasure, the subtle conspiracies of good with evil, of attraction and abhorrence'.
²²
By his own admission, Solomon was homosexual and an enthusiastic sado-masochist, confiding that ‘I will at once candidly unbosom to my readers, my affections are divided between the boy and the birch.'
²³

Solomon's life consisted of a tragic decline from respectability, fame and financial security, to disgrace, infamy and poverty. He was the darling of the Pre-Raphaelites until 1873, when, on 11 February, he was arrested in a public urinal at Stratford Place Mews, off Oxford Street, for having sex with a sixty-year-old stableman, George Roberts. Both men were charged with indecent exposure and attempting to commit sodomy. They were both fined £100 and sentenced to eighteen months in prison, but Solomon's wealthy cousin Mary intervened and his sentence was reduced to police supervision. Roberts, however, was not so fortunate and went to jail. Solomon headed for Paris, but was arrested there a year later on similar charges, although this time his companion was a nineteen-year-old. Sentenced to three months in prison, Solomon returned to find that he had been ostracized from polite society and his career was in ruins. Former patrons, galleries and friends shunned him, and the deaths of several family members followed in quick succession. Solomon became increasingly depressed and began to drink heavily. He even lost the support of Swinburne, having become, in the poet's words, ‘a thing unmentionable alike by men and women, as equally abhorrent to either, nay, to the very beasts',
²⁴
on the grounds that, heading for financial ruin, he had sold the letters Swinburne had written to him. This was an embarrassment for Swinburne as they contained ‘much foolish burlesque and now regrettable nonsense never meant for any stranger's eye'.
²⁵

Solomon continued to paint, however, until the mid-1890s, although his later works express feelings of hopelessness, alienation and despair, as indicated by the titles:
Love at the Waters of Oblivion
(1891),
Tormented Soul
(1894),
Death Awaiting Sleep
(1896) and
Twilight and Sleep
(1897). Suffering from bronchitis and alcoholism, Solomon was admitted to St Giles's Workhouse in Covent Garden as ‘a broken-down artist', and died penniless in 1905, after collapsing in High Holborn. Solomon had flouted Victorian morality and had been punished for it, in the most Victorian of ways: he had faced financial ruin and loss of social status and, as a result, he died an outcast.

Victorian homosexuals faced further persecution with the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1885. Designed to protect under-age girls, this Act had the further effect of outlawing consensual homosexual acts between men. The purity campaigners who had forced this legislation through regarded homosexuality as one variety of male lust run amok.

Section 11 of the Act reads:

There is no reference to homosexual acts between women, allegedly because when it was pointed out to Queen Victoria that women were not mentioned in this legislation, she replied, ‘No woman would do that.'
²⁶

Given the prevalence of homosexuality in public schools and at universities, a public perception developed that homosexuality was almost exclusively an aristocratic vice practised at the expense of honest working-class young boys who were corrupted by their rich patrons. The next scandal illustrates how this idea gained credibility.

 

In September 1889, a modest north London weekly broke the news that a peer of the realm was a regular customer at a male brothel which had been shut down by Scotland Yard in July. A follow-up story in November even hinted that the scandal could reach all the way to His Royal Highness Prince Eddy (Albert Victor, son of the Prince of Wales), and that the matter was being covered up by palace officials to protect the Prince's reputation.

This sensational story had begun two months earlier, on 6 July 1889, when Inspector Frederick Abberline, who had previously been assigned to the Jack the Ripper case in Whitechapel, arrived at a house at 19 Cleveland Street, near Fitzroy Square, with a warrant for the arrest of thirty-five-year-old Charles Hammond. The warrant stated that Hammond and his eighteen-year-old accomplice Henry Newlove ‘did unlawfully, wickedly, and corruptly conspire, combine, confederate and agree' to procure rent boys ‘to commit the abominable crime of buggery'. But he was too late: the house was locked and empty, and Hammond had fled to France. Inspector Abberline had more success with Newlove, however. He found him at his mother's house at 1.30 p.m. and escorted him to the police station.

The Cleveland Street brothel had been discovered by pure chance after the police had been summoned to investigate the theft of cash at the Central Telegraph Office. During this routine investigation, it was found that a telegraph delivery boy was carrying 18 shillings on his person. Telegraph boys were forbidden to carry any cash of their own, in case it became mixed up with telegraph money; and this was a considerable sum, too, the equivalent of several weeks' wages. When questioned, the boy, Thomas Swinscow, answered that he had earned the money working for a man named Hammond. When pressed to describe the kind of work he had carried out for Hammond, the boy hesitated for a moment and then blurted out the truth: ‘I got the money from going to bed with gentlemen at his house.' According to Swinscow, another telegraph boy, Henry Newlove, had introduced him to Hammond. At Hammond's house, he had sex with one man, and in exchange received 4 shillings. He only admitted to servicing two clients, but he named two other boys who he claimed worked for Hammond more often.

Under police questioning Newlove, Swinscow and the other boys named names. Newlove himself implicated Lord Arthur Somerset, head of the Prince of Wales's stables, and two other prominent men, Henry Fitzroy, the Earl of Euston, and a British army colonel. As the investigation continued, the telegraph boys confirmed that Lord Somerset was a regular and hinted that Prince Eddy was involved too. Newlove was rewarded for his cooperation. When he and another accomplice were sentenced for gross indecency and procuring, Newlove received four months' hard labour, while his more reticent colleague served nine. As for Lord Somerset, he had time to flee to a comfortable exile in Bad Homburg, a spa town in Germany.

At first, the story attracted no interest from the press. But then Ernest Parke, editor of the
North London Press
, picked up the story. The
North London Press
was a small radical weekly which usually covered council meetings and campaigned for better pay for the working man. But Parke was a first-class investigative journalist with a nose for a good story. He became intrigued when one of his reporters handed him a story about Newlove's conviction in September, and he wondered why Newlove and his associate had escaped so lightly, when, just months previously, a clergyman from Hackney had been sentenced to prison for life for similar offences. This was clearly a case of one law for the rich and one for the poor. And how, Parke asked, did Hammond know that the police were coming in time to make good his escape? This had all the hallmarks of a conspiracy, and no mistake. Using his contacts in the Metropolitan Police, Parke discovered that the telegraph boys had named prominent aristocrats among their clients. On 28 September, Parke ran a story to the effect that ‘the heir to a duke and the younger son of a duke' were involved in the scandal; on 16 November, he ran a follow-up naming the Earl of Euston and Lord Arthur Somerset, younger son of the Duke of Beaufort, and alleging that they had been allowed to leave the country to conceal the involvement of a personage even more ‘distinguished and more highly placed'.