5
In 1881 London was the largest metropolis the world had ever seen. More people resided in its central boroughs than even today, with great contrasts between the lives and lifestyles of the poor and the wealthy. The city was enjoying the spoils of the British Empire, leading to a boom in consumer culture. Anything could be bought, if you had the money, but for those who did not, there were only miserable choices: the workhouse, crime, and the concomitant risks of prison, transportation, and death. Victorian London has been described as the beating heart of the empire, that pumped capital, troops, and power around the world; it might just as well be described as the drain of empire, into which the material and human wealth of the colonies flowed.
One of those humans was a young Irish immigrant who, were it not for his immense boldness, may well have passed into history unnamed and unremembered. We meet him first in the introduction to a book he wrote allegedly at the tender age of twenty-three, putting his life to date on paper. The gentleman introducing the book describes their first encounter, which is well worth quoting at length:
The writer of these notes was walking through Leicester Square one sunny afternoon last November, when his attention was particularly taken by an effeminate, but very good-looking young fellow, who was walking in front of him, looking in shop-windows from time to time, and now and then looking round as if to attract my attention.
Dressed in tight-fitting clothes, which set off his Adonis-like figure to the best advantage, especially about what snobs call the fork of his trousers where evidently he was favoured by nature by a very extraordinary development of the male appendages; he had small and elegant feet, set off by pretty patent leather boots, a fresh looking beardless face, with almost feminine features, auburn hair, and sparkling blue eyes, which spoke as plainly as possible to my senses, and told me that the handsome youth must indeed be one of the ‘Mary- Ann’s’ of London, who I had heard were often to be seen sauntering in the neighbourhood of Regent Street, or the Haymarket, on fine afternoons or evenings.
Presently the object of my curiosity almost halted and stood facing the writer as he took off his hat, and wiped his face with a beautiful white silk handkerchief. That lump in his trousers had quite a fascinating effect upon me. Was it natural or made up by some artificial means? If real, what a size when excited; how I should like to handle such a manly jewel, etc. All this ran through my mind, and determined me to make his acquaintance, in order to unravel the real and naked truth; also, if possible, to glean what I could of his antecedents and mode of life, which I felt sure must be extraordinarily interesting.1
The introduction ends, after a little mutual masturbation into an open fire, with the writer suggesting to the young man that he write down the history of his sexual experiences. What follows is an eye-watering pornographic memoir of sodomy, oral sex, and prostitution. Some regard the book, titled The Sins of the Cities of the Plain (a reference to the Old Testament story of Sodom and Gomorrah, the two cities supposedly destroyed by God in punishment for their practicing of anal sex, from where we get the word ‘sodomy’), as fiction, and perhaps the first entirely homosexual erotic fiction, but the subject of the memoir, Jack Saul, was a very real person. He was born into a working-class Catholic Irish family in Dublin in 1857, only five years after the Great Hunger, a devastating famine caused by potato blight and which British colonizers orchestrated into widespread death and dispossession. It is thought that a quarter of the country’s population either died or emigrated during the Great Hunger, and it followed on an earlier famine in 1841 in which the country’s population had already fallen by 20 percent. His parents and grandparents were one of the many people from the rural population that were forced from their ancestral homes, and had moved to the south of the city from County Wicklow; many millions more migrated overseas, especially to North America.2
It seems fairly certain that Saul’s early life was a tough one, living in cramped tenements on Duke Street, surrounded by a large extended family. His father drove a horse-drawn cab around the city, which was not a hugely profitable endeavour. His mother was illiterate, and like most working-class people of the time, he lost brothers and sisters early in childhood.3 Opportunities were hard to come by, and you had to make your own luck.
As a port city that also contained a very large British garrison, Dublin was home to one of Europe’s largest red-light districts at the time, known as ‘Monto’, after Montgomery Street. According to a local legend, the future British king, Edward VI, even lost his virginity in the neighbourhood, and later took his son and heir, Prince Albert Victor, to the district in disguise. Prostitution and brothels were an intrinsic part of most Victorian cities; while not respectable, they were at least very visible, and the coalition of the state and moral reformers had not yet coalesced, as it would in the 1870s and ‘80s, to shut down prostitution, cruising, and other sex cultures as ‘vice’.4
While Monto offered a large population of female sex workers, the presence of the barracks meant there were many poorly paid working-class young soldiers who boosted their income through selling sex. The idea that the British army contained a culture of sex work might surprise a modern reader, but well into the twentieth-century London’s Wellington Barracks, home to the Foot Guards and conveniently located near a number of large parks, was a site where men could pick up working-class soldiers for sex.5
Certainly, the working-class Jack, still a teen, would have been more than aware of the presence not just of sex workers, but also clients. When he was seventeen he met a soldier named Martin Kirwan, a well-off member of the Irish Protestant gentry whose family had prospered during the Protestant ascendancy. Kirwan was twenty-eight, and, like Saul, raised in the city, enough a part of the daily fabric of life that, amongst the homosexual community, he was known as ‘Lizzie’.6 They began an affair, and Kirwan was the key to a door that opened up Dublin’s well-to-do queer community. Through him Saul met Gustavus Cornwall, secretary of the General Post Office, an older, well-respected British official who lived in a large house at 17 Harcourt Street, just off St Stephen’s Green. Whether he was well respected within Dublin’s homosexual demi-monde is another question; it’s hard to tell the degree to which his nickname, ‘The Duchess’, was a term of affection or mockery.
Jack began attending the parties held by this well-off coterie, where, according to both the tastes and norms of the age, younger working-class men, soldiers, and police recruits attended alongside men from the richer colonial class. Jack began to make friends with fellow rent boys at these parties, as well as with other men of standing, such as James Ellis French, a senior detective with the Royal Irish Constabulary, part of the British administration that worked out of Dublin Castle.
With such important new friends, Jack could see a way out of poverty, if only they could find him a job. It was probably The Duchess who helped him get a job on the same street he lived on, at 82 Harcourt Street, as servant to a young Catholic medical doctor, Dr John Joseph Cranny.7 Yet Jack remained friends with his old rent boy colleagues, especially with one called Bill Clarke, and probably still moonlighted in sex work. It was with Clarke that Jack was arrested in October of 1878, in mysterious circumstances that looked like the theft of a coat from Dr Cranny’s house. Although the two were sent to a remand prison awaiting trial, they were ultimately acquitted as it became unclear whose coat had been stolen in the first place.8
Still, unsurprisingly, Saul lost his job and decided to emigrate to London. There was not much chance of domestic service there, not without a reference and with an Irish accent, and so he took to prostitution again, working the streets around Piccadilly, where homosexual men cruised for sex. For a while he lived with another man, Charles Hammond, and his wife, with Hammond acting as a sort of pimp. He returned to Dublin for a few months following his father’s death in 1880, but was soon back in London, living in Soho at 36 Lisle Street, barely a minute’s walk from Leicester Square. It was 1881, and it is at this moment that the young man, still in his early twenties, begins to write his memoirs.
While The Sins of the Cities of the Plains is (still) a remarkable and effective piece of pornography, it should be read with a pinch of salt. For a start, Saul’s account of his early life is entirely different from reality, turning him from a working-class Dubliner to a well-to-do young man from Suffolk. However, that might be expected, for there were numerous reasons why a young sex worker in Victorian England might wish to disguise his identity a little. And even if many of the sex scenes had been accentuated for dramatic effect, perhaps even written by a different hand (it seems likely that the publisher, William Lazenby, at the very least helped shape the work), they still offer interesting insights into the Victorian homosexual underworld, insights supported by other sources.
For example, the descriptions of the trafficking of children for sexual exploitation matched those offered just four years later by the provocative campaigning journalist W. T. Stead in his four-part special, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,’ written for the Pall Mall Gazette.9 Stead’s work, part investigative journalism, part moral panic and part plausibly deniable pornography, became part of a wider campaign of public outrage by early feminists and anti-vice campaigners for a change in the law regarding sexual offences.
Much of the action of The Sins of the Cities of the Plains describes real-life places that are barely disguised with new names, but would be instantly recognisable to the urbane London gentlemen who were, presumably, the audience for the book. For example, the shop the author names ‘Cygnet and Ego’ is very clearly a stand-in for an actual high-end drapery named ‘Swan and Edgar’ that sat in Piccadilly Circus, on the corners of Regent Street and Piccadilly. It is after Saul (or ‘Saul’) is fired from Cygnet and Ego that he becomes more acquainted with London’s homosexual life thanks to a high-end sex club, and through which we learn of his supposed encounter with two notorious queer figures of Victorian life, Thomas Boulton and Frederick Park.
The club is located just off Portland Place, and cost 100 guineas to join: a colossal sum at the time, almost a year’s wage for a skilled tradesman.10 Arriving there, another young rent boy regales Saul with stories of gang-bangs with clergymen and his time as a soldier, and ‘considerably opened my eyes as to how the sin of Sodom was regularly practised in the Modern Babylon’. The rent boy then prepares him for his first fucking in the club, by dressing him in ‘a charming female costume. He acted as lady’s maid, fitted my bust with a pair of false bubbies, frizzed my hair with curling irons, and fixed me up by adding a profusion of false plaits behind.’11
The club’s owner, the fortuitously named ‘Mr Inslip’, then takes them to a room with ten men and eight other ‘women’. Saul is assigned to an elderly man who, as the night progresses, plies him with booze before reaching under his dress to fondle his cock. Then, at 2 a.m., the lights are extinguished, and the action begins, with the old man ‘lifting up my skirts behind he knelt down and kissed my bottom, buggering me with his tongue till the hole was well moistened; then getting up, I felt a fine prick brought up to the charge. It hurt me a little; but he was soon in, then passing his hands round my buttocks he frigged me most deliciously as he worked furiously in my bum.’12 And so it continues, with the partners swapping multiple times, until the sun rises.
Saul recounts that such sex parties became regular occur-rences for him. He was even, he claims, at a party with actors Thomas Boulton and Frederick Park, and Lord Arthur Clinton at Haxell’s Hotel on the Strand. The story of Boulton and Park is a fascinating one that sheds much light onto contemporary Victorian attitudes towards homosexuality and gender, but it throws doubt on the veracity of Saul’s ‘memoir’, as Lord Arthur Clinton, an important player in the story, had died (possibly at his own hand) in June of 1870, when the historical Jack Saul had not even reached his teens.
The author describes how, at the party, Boulton and Lord Clinton retreated to a private room, and Saul kneeled to watch through the keyhole as they exchanged blow jobs, before Clinton rimmed Boulton then fucked him. The sight, he recalls, excited him, and through his friendship with the two he is granted access to the highest echelons of society, resulting in him, still dressed in women’s attire, getting a blow job at a party hosted by the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII). While it’s impossible that Saul could have been involved in such circles, it’s not impossible that someone – the potential author or co-author of the book – was, not least because those were the circles that Lord Arthur Clinton, MP for Newark and brother of the Prince of Wales’s mistress, did indeed move in.
Thomas Boulton and Frederick Park had been raised in reasonably well-off circumstances. Unlike Saul’s account of his own period of crossdressing, it doesn’t seem that they took up crossdressing as an accessory to prostitution, but for their own personal reasons, and they did not just dress in what was regarded as ‘women’s attire’ for sex alone, but dressed in their day-to-day life, attending public events such as boat races and the theatre. As with homosexual history, it’s extremely difficult to retroactively assign to them a specific transgender identity as we might understand it today. But by the same token, it’s very clear that they lived lives where their identities as Stella and Fanny, as they were addressed, were meaningful parts of their lives, and that in living those identities they transgressed the understood boundaries of sex and gender in the society they lived in, despite the significant danger were they to be ‘uncovered’.
They took a room in Mrs Stacey’s ‘house of accommodation’ in Wakefield Street.13 Most establishments that fell under that title were little more that flop-houses where sex workers who worked the streets could take a john, but Mrs Stacey’s was quite different, and was a place where men like Boulton and Park could change into women’s clothing. More importantly, they could store their clothing, wigs, and makeup there, a necessity considering that many, like Boulton, still lived with their parents.14
Although still in their early twenties, they had maintained this way of life for many years, both in the street and onstage, where as actors they performed women’s roles.
It was in a touring theatre production that they met Lord Clinton, and Stella Boulton soon became his lover. The two spent most of their time together, regarding themselves as sisters, consistently using female pronouns or titles (something, as we saw in Dublin, that cisgender gay men also did). However, considering how provocative it would be were they to be uncovered, unlike the majority of cisgender gay men their public persona was clearly deviating from the established gender and sex norms. Considering that the two were both indiscreet in their behaviour and reckless in the paper trail they left behind, including letters and photographs of themselves as Fanny and Stella, it seemed inevitable they would end up in trouble.15
Sometime around 1869 a policeman named Detective Officer Chamberlain had begun a year-long surveillance of the pair, gathering evidence of whatever crimes he could in order to prosecute them. In April of 1870 the two decided to visit the theatre with two gentlemen, not knowing their house on Wakefield Street had been under close surveillance for the past two weeks.16 Inside the theatre, and drunk, the two behaved rather badly, making lewd gestures at other theatregoers from their private box, and causing a scene in the public bar.17 As they were leaving the theatre, they were seized by police officers, and hauled off to Bow Street police station. There they were subject to a humiliating inspection by the police, and the next morning, still in their crinoline dresses, although with makeup rather dishevelled, they were dragged through a cruel and baying mob of observers to attend their remand hearing.
They were charged with sodomy, conspiracy to commit sodomy, and outraging public decency, and held in prison, following another degrading physical inspection by a quack doctor who regarded their rectums to have been permanently dilated by anal sex; their penises were also deemed unusually long. Asked to explain why, the doctor replied that ‘traction might produce elongation of the penis and testicles’.18 Nonsense of course, as other doctors later testified, but a symptom of the deep body horror that sodomy induced in many respectable figures at the time.
Lord Arthur Clinton died of scarlet fever before the court case, although police suspected that he had actually faked his own death, escaping to the continent or the United States. It was not the first time, nor the last, that an aristocrat implicated, accused, or even convicted in this damnable sin did a runner; even Oscar Wilde, when he was eventually freed from Reading Gaol, escaped to France, where the laws and social attitudes were considerably less strict.
If Clinton had faked his own death, he need not have bothered. Despite the odds being stacked against them in terms of social attitudes, the prosecution fluffed its case, and Fanny and Stella were acquitted as actually proving that sodomy took place was a difficult task. They dropped their ‘not guilty’ pleas on the morals charges, allowing them to be ‘bound over’ for two years: essentially, they were to agree not to get into any more trouble. They both left the country for the United States, where they continued to perform. Boulton lived until the first decade of the twentieth century, dying in England, while Park died just a decade later, around the time that the historic Saul arrived in London.
The Boulton and Park case is remarkable as it landed just as the concept of a homosexual identity and subculture was emerging both between the new discipline of sexologists and in wider society, both in the UK and in Germany and the rest of continental Europe, and as moral panics about this new type of man started to grow, tied to worries about prostitution and immorality. It also happened in a strange interlude between two periods where the state had tough tools with which to discipline same-sex activity. The increased suppression of same-sex activity and gender variance during these moral panics played a significant role in growing public awareness of sexually deviant behaviour.
Anal sex had been outlawed by the Buggery Act of 1533, but that did not specify sex between two men, merely non-productive sex, and was used to prosecute same-sex and opposite-sex offences, often non-consensual. The law, therefore, was an attempt to prosecute criminal acts rather than to define a criminal type of person, and this was the only law on the books that pertained to men who had sex with men. The crime, however, was a capital offence, and men were executed for consensual anal sex right up until the 1830s.
There was an attempt to reform the law in 1841, undertaken by Lord John Russell, which failed due to a lack of parliamentary backing, but increasingly judges were refusing to enact the death sentence as was required. A compromise had to be reached; for legal sentences not to be carried out made a mockery of the law. In 1861 Parliament passed the Offences Against the Person Act, making the penalty for buggery a minimum of ten years of hard labour: for many, in Victorian prisons equipped with the punishing treadmill, a virtual death sentence anyway.
Yet as the nineteenth century progressed, cases like Boulton and Park opened the eyes to a homosexual subculture that was identified in the popular mind with male prostitution, which put new pressures on authorities to crack down. Historian Jeffrey Weeks suggests that, during the trial, there was significant uncertainty as to what the actual crime consisted of, and that various doctors on the case could come to no agreement as to what physical proof of sodomy might look like: they simply had not seen enough cases. He writes that ‘as late as 1871, concepts of homosexuality were extremely underdeveloped, both in the Metropolitan Police and in high medical and legal circles, suggesting the absence of any clear notion of a homosexual category or of any social awareness of what a homosexual identity might consist of’. Even if there was a general awareness that a subculture around male prostitution existed, in court, married men were less likely to be found guilty of buggery than unmarried men.19
To put it simply, the authorities knew what Boulton and Park were up to was wrong, even if they did not know exactly what that consisted of. They were clearly transgressing certain gender and sexual boundaries, however, and something had to be done.
It is unsurprising there was not much understanding of homosexuality as a distinct sexual identity amongst society’s higher echelons. The word ‘homosexual’ had only been coined in 1869, and even then in a limited-run pamphlet published anonymously, and in German, by the Austrian writer Karl-Maria Kertbeny. The Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft- Ebing documented homosexuality extensively in his 1886 book on sexual paraphilias, Psychopathia Sexualis, but it was not until the very end of the century, 1897, that the first English book on the subject, Henry Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion, was published.
The idea of ‘Sexual inversion’ – that a homosexual had inverted the ‘normal’ sexual characteristics, and the idea that these attributes were congenital – was not developed on the psychiatrist’s couch or in the medical lab alone. These were already concepts that were swimming round the social circles of some upper-class men, including poets. Indeed, Havelock Ellis’s co-author of Sexual Inversion was the poet and literary critic John Addington Symonds, who had earlier published A Problem in Greek Ethics in 1873. Symonds’s book, partially inspired by the homoerotic poetry of American poet Walt Whitman, examined the role of pederasty and homosexual desire in ancient Greece, a model which had been used to justify and explain sex between men since the time of Hadrian.
Others adopted the same approach. This model of inversion, positing that homosexual men were female souls ‘trapped’ in male bodies through accident of birth, and the notion that pederastic relationships was a worthy tradition inherited from classical civilization were also taken up by the ‘Uranian Poets’, a loose group of poets and writers working in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. This third sex, many believed, offered a noble form of love between equals, and found further expression in the work of Edward Carpenter, Oscar Wilde, and his wretched boyfriend, Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde takes this approach in his testimony for his trial in 1895, stating:
‘The Love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the ‘Love that dare not speak its name’, and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.20
This figure of the invert, a literary and spiritual ‘third sex’ that existed within the social elites and medical establishment, was joined by the complementary figure of the pervert, as it was coming to be understood by the legal system. Perverts had no innate problem that drove them to sex with other men; they simply lacked the moral framework to resist the opportunity of a quick fuck. The division was explicitly class-based, and interlinked with the fear of prostitution, as the offer of money, for a working-class young man, was a surefire road to corruption and perversion.21 It’s not for nothing that even today, working-class men who do not ‘present’ as homosexual, yet are still open for sexual encounters with upper-and middle-class men, are, whether or not money is actually exchanged, often known as ‘trade’, a usage that came to be in the 1870s.22 While inverts were a subject for treatment, sympathy, and even poetry, perverts could expect little more than for the long arm of the law to feel them up.
This link was already emerging at the conclusion of the Boulton and Park trial, and there was concern that current laws weren’t sufficient to deal with this rising moral threat to the empire’s youth. In his summing up, Lord Chief Justice Cockburn lamented the lack of legal tools he had as a judge to deal with the problem, saying,
It is one of those instances to which the provisions of a most useful act for the prevention of public indecency might be extended. If the law cannot reach it as it is, it ought to be made the subject of such legislation, and a punishment of two or three months’ imprisonment, with the treadmill attached to it, with, in case of repetition of the offence, a little wholesome corporal discipline, would, I think, be effective, not only in such cases, but in all cases of outrage against public decency.23
Cockburn got his way, but not until 1885, when the public outcry following W. T. Stead’s exposé on child sex trafficking forced the government to act. The government’s response was to expedite the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, which had been languishing in the doldrums of the committee stages for the past few years. The new act was primarily focused on the subject of Stead’s exposé, addressing prostitution and child trafficking.
But Stead also contacted the Liberal MP Henry Labouchère, a theatre owner, drawing his attention to the phenomenon of homosexuality, and Labouchère introduced an amendment to the bill that would criminalise all acts of ‘gross indecency’ between two men. The crime of buggery, as was clear from the Boulton and Park case, was extremely hard to prove, and the horrific sentence made prosecutions rare. Gross indecency, however, was never defined in law, which meant that the lower sentencing provisions, although still horrific (up to two years, with or without hard labour), could encourage more prosecutions.
It certainly did. Although the amendment was discussed for mere minutes, tens of thousands of men would be prosecuted for consensual sex acts with other adult men over the next eighty-two years that it remained law in England, and longer still in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Those convicted included Oscar Wilde himself, as well as Alan Turing. It invested a huge amount of power in the hands of law enforcement and the judiciary, with very little clarity as to what constituted either ‘gross indecency’ or ‘procuring’ sex.
Before, anal sex resulting in ejaculation was prohibited; now, everything that manifested desire between men was pulled into the remit of the law, including flirting, propositioning, and kissing. It was the first law to explicitly target sex between men, rather than merely the act of anal sex, regardless of gender, and it was also incorporated into penal codes across the British Empire. Indeed, even today, the provision remains in penal codes across the world, from Section 377A of the Penal Code of Singapore to Section 165 of the Kenyan Penal Code, in almost identical wording to the Labouchere Amendment, testament to the long and brutal relationship between colonialism and the moral fear of homosexual behaviour.
These laws resulting from the moral panic around emergent homosexual identities and prostitution had a powerful effect upon Jack Saul’s life. In 1884, just before the Criminal Law Amendment Act went through Parliament, Jack was called by police to return to Dublin. Back in Ireland two prominent British officials had been accused of sodomy in the newspaper United Ireland by its publisher, William O’Brien. United Ireland had been established by the Irish nationalist political party the Irish National League, founded by Charles Stewart Parnell. The accusations were clearly politically motivated: accusations of sodomy served as ways for both the Brits and the Irish to attempt to discredit the agents of the opposition, as we shall see again in later chapters. The potency of such allegations with the public were such that men were frequently blackmailed for fear that their secrets might be leaked, often by the lower-class young men they had sex with, and sometimes paid for. Yet it was allegations from within the same social class that could cause the most damage.
United Ireland’s rumours were not unfounded, given that the two men accused were Gustavus ‘The Duchess’ Cornwall, secretary of the General Post Office, and James Ellis French, the Royal Irish Constabulary detective, both of whom were well known amongst the homosexual underground social scenes of Dublin. French and Cornwall both decided to sue their accuser. But they were ill-advised to do so, because a libel trial is likely to raise all sorts of stories about your sex life, most of them true. The jury found in favour of O’Brien, and again, as the trial of Oscar Wilde revealed, the stories raised in the civil court made a criminal trial almost inevitable. Politically speaking, the libel trial had been serious news: not only was the British soldier Martin Kirwan bought up as a witness, but numerous other soldiers were implicated in the sex parties and general debauchery.24
Jack had avoided giving a deposition in the libel trial, although private investigators had almost certainly sought one from him. At the second trial, however, Martin Kirwan was also to face justice, alongside others, including the chairman of the Dublin Stock Exchange, policemen, merchants, and soldiers.25 Saul’s close relationship with Kirwan meant he was bound to be called at some point. As in many of these cases, the implication of the police was clear: testify against your clients of higher social standing, or face the same, or even worse, fate. Yet, despite giving a deposition, the prosecution never called Saul, presumably because too much time had passed between the crime and the trial. Kirwan and Cornwall were both acquitted because the Crown could not prove its case – always a tricky task when it was one man’s word against the other – but their lives and reputations were destroyed. Jack, however, could return to London and his job.
Scandal, however, seemed to follow Saul. Back in London, he made contact again with his old friend and erstwhile pimp, Charles Hammond. In 1887 he moved into a house that Hammond ran at 19 Cleveland Street.26 The house was tall and thin, and, facing the Middlesex Hospital which dominated the area of north Soho, abutted a house for young nurses. Hammond ran an unusual establishment. Not only did the house function as a brothel for male sex workers, rare enough for the time, but it was extremely tastefully decorated, making it the ideal place for a well-heeled gentleman of a certain persuasion with a taste for younger men, rough trade, or soldiers, but who did not wish to spend his evening kneeling in the mud and dark at Hyde Park.
The services offered made this discrete venue a popular place for upper-class men, and for a few years it operated largely under the radar of the authorities. That state of affairs did not last for long, thanks to an incident across the city, at the Central Telegraph Office just behind St Paul’s Cathedral.
At that time large amounts of money were sent by post, and the post office employed a veritable squadron of teenage boys as messengers, carrying mail and telegraphs around the City of London. The post office reported a theft from its building, and Police Constable Luke Hanks was tasked with investigating this not-uncommon offence. He suspected a fifteen-year-old telegraph messenger, Charles Swinscow. He found fourteen shillings on Swinscow, and was sure he had nabbed his offender, whose weekly pay was only a couple of shillings.27 However, pressed on how he got the money, the boy admitted he had earned it himself from one Mr Charles Hammond of 19 Cleveland Street, saying, ‘I will tell you the truth. I got the money for going to bed with gentlemen at his house.’ Not only this, but Swinscow told the police that another messenger boy named Henry Newlove was also working there. This passing admission proved explosive.
Not only was the running of a male brothel a serious offence, but the fact that post office employees were implicated was even more worrying. Hanks passed the case up his chain of command until it reached the Metropolitan Police commissioner, who himself assigned Detective Frank Abberline to the case, an indication of just how seriously they took it: just two years earlier Abberline had been the detective in charge of the investigation into the serial murderer Jack the Ripper. Abberline obtained a warrant to search the Cleveland Street house and arrest Hammond, but Hammond had been tipped off and left the country. Newlove protested to the police that he was facing prosecution while ‘men in high positions are allowed to walk about free’, and named a series of important figures as clients of Cleveland Street, including Lord Arthur Somerset and the Earl of Euston.28
This made the case a sensitive political issue. Lord Arthur Somerset was no minor aristocrat. His father was the former Conservative MP turned peer and privy councillor, the Duke of Beaufort, and Arthur himself managed the stables of the Prince of Wales. Lord Somerset was, it seems, ‘allowed’ to slip out of the country before a trial could commence, but he paid for a lawyer to represent Newlove and another of Hammond’s men. The Met commissioner was keen to see Somerset charged, but upon his return to England no less a figure than the Lord Chancellor vetoed him.
But why was Somerset allowed to go free when it was quite clear, as in Dublin, that the British state was prepared to crack down on sodomy? Perhaps the answer is in a letter the assistant public prosecutor, whose responsibility it was to draw up charges, wrote to his boss, saying, ‘I am told that Newton [the defendant’s lawyer] has boasted that if we go on a very distinguished person will be involved (PAV). I don’t mean to say that I for one instant credit it – but in such circumstances as this one never knows what may be said, be concocted or be true.’29
Some historians, including the venerable historian of gay life in Britain H. Montgomery Hyde, suggest that ‘PAV’ stands (rather convincingly) for ‘Prince Albert Victor’, the son of the Prince of Wales and second in line to the British throne, known to friends and family as ‘Eddy’. Indeed, while abroad, Lord Somerset would write to a friend:
I cannot see what good it would do Prince Eddy if I went into court. I might do him harm because if I was asked if I ever heard anything against him – whom from? – has any person mentioned with whom he went there etc? – the question would be very awkward. I have never mentioned the boy’s name (PAV) except to (Sir Dighton) Probyn, (Oliver) Montagu and (Francis) Knollys. Had they been wise, hearing what I knew and therefore what others knew, they ought to have hushed the matter up, instead of stirring it up as they did with all the authorities.30
You might recall that the Prince of Wales had once allegedly taken his son Eddy to the Monto in Dublin, presumably to shore up his heterosexuality and give him a taste of the world: the thought of his son and heir being publicly implicated in a homosexual scandal would have been beyond appalling to the British Royal family. Eddy’s brother, who became George V (Eddy died before his father became king) and Elizabeth II’s grandfather, once remarked on the case of another outed homosexual aristocrat, some fifty years later, ‘I thought men like that shot themselves.’ Yet the attempt at a discreet coverup collapsed when Ernest Parke, of the radical North London Press, was tipped off. He named the Earl of Euston as party to the affair, and wrote, ‘These men have been allowed to leave the country, and thus defeat the ends of justice, because their prosecution would disclose the fact that a far more distinguished and more highly placed personage than themselves was inculpated in these disgusting crimes.’31
The Earl had not, in fact, left the country, and he started libel proceedings against Parke. It was at this trial that Jack Saul appeared as a witness for the defence. It was here that he provided the testimony that shocked Victorian London. His testimony was frank and open, including descriptions of the Earl’s sexual habits, including his taste for ejaculating onto boys’ stomachs. He described picking him up on Piccadilly before taking a cab with him to Cleveland Street, the warning the Earl gave him not to talk to him if he saw him on the street, and the Earl’s return visits to Cleveland Street – although not to see Saul.32
The court was shocked to hear Saul’s ungilded descriptions of male prostitution in London. The judge was shocked to discover that Saul had already divulged this information, including the names of prominent clients like the MP and Judge Advocate General George Cavendish-Bentinck, and no action had been taken. Everybody was shocked by his claim that the police ‘shut their eyes’ not just to his behaviour, as a lifelong male sex worker, but to much more of the same.33 In the end, the judge was inclined towards the Earl, to nobody’s surprise, describing Saul to the jury as a ‘revolting creature’ whose testimony was not to be believed.34
Parke was convicted and sentenced to twelve months hard labour, and Saul’s name was dragged through the mud by the press, many of whom called for him to be tried, either for sodomy or perjury. Other newspapers, such as Reynold’s News, might have thought Saul ‘a filthy, loathsome, detestable beast’, but pointed out that while the Earl’s account of how he ended up at Cleveland Street just once, accidentally, was uncorroborated, many others had witnessed him there several times. Why were they to be disbelieved, just because they were ‘persons in a very low grade in life. Surely he did not expect that the Archbishop of Canterbury would appear in the box and testify to having met the Earl coming to or from that den of infamy.’35
Newspapers also criticised the injustice of the young men being prosecuted while aristocrats escaped, highlighting the contemporary discourses of homosexuality that associated it with the perversion of the working class by middle-and upper-class inverts generally, and prostitution more specifically. ‘What, then, is the conclusion to come to?’ asked Reynold’s News the following week. ‘Why, that the authorities are more anxious to conceal the names of those who patronised the horrible den of vice, than punish the principal patrons of the hideous place? … Why were the wretched telegraph boys taken to the Old Bailey … while Lord Arthur Somerset, being duly warned of what had occurred, duly made his escape, and is now living in clover abroad?’36
One MP did address this clearly unjust situation in Parliament, going as far as to implicate the young Prince Eddy and his father, the Prince of Wales, although not going so far as to mention them by name. He accused the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, and his cabinet, of having attempted to cover up the activities of ‘a gentleman of very high position’ at Cleveland Street. He stated that
it is the common talk in the workshops of this country respecting the case that the law is not fairly administered as between the rich man and the poor man, that justice is not fairly meted out between man and man, regardless of rank and social position, and thus great harm has been done by the course which has been adopted. We have heard a good deal lately about criminal conspiracy. What is this case but a criminal conspiracy by the very guardians of public morality and law, with the Prime Minister at their head, to defeat the ends of justice?37
That MP was Henry Labouchère, whose amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act five years earlier had created the offence of gross indecency which was at the heart of the case. There’s a certain irony at play here, and not just that he was the creator of the sloppy law he now felt was unfairly applied. While he was concerned with equality in the eyes of the law, and the unfair way in which working-class homosexuals were treated in comparison with the wealthy, as when England partially decriminalised homosexual acts in the Sexual Offences Act in 1967, that commitment to equality wasn’t reflected in the law itself, which required that if men do have sex, it occurred in a private dwelling in which they were alone – a situation which brings with it certain class restrictions for those who did not own or rent a private house.
As late as 1998, consenting men in the UK were being prosecuted for having sex in the presence of other consenting adults, as this violated this clause of the Sexual Offences Act. Indeed, the 1957 Wolfenden Report, which led to the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, was a publication of the findings of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, its conclusions indicating that the link between prostitution and homosexuality was still firmly in the minds of the public and lawmakers. It was the treatment of the well-off friends of Lord Montagu, and especially the testimony of his Oxford University colleague Peter Wildeblood, who was jailed in 1954 for having had gay sex two years before on Lord Montagu’s estate, that was integral in convincing the committee that the law should be changed. Like the Labouchere Amendment, the 1967 Act was an attempt to reform the law but not necessarily to improve the lives of homosexual men; it even failed to reduce sentences, as after its passage prosecutions of gay men rose considerably, just as, post- 1885, tens of thousands of men were prosecuted, and countless more became subject to blackmail.
All this was too late for Jack Saul, anyway. Unlike the aristocrats, there was nobody to document the life of an old Irish working-class queer. He took a job at the Marlborough Hotel at number 23, Villiers Street, just by Charing Cross railway station.38 A few years later he moved back to Dublin, and there are a few traces of him in the census at addresses like Poolbeg Street and Luke Street, before his death was recorded at Our Lady’s Hospice on 28 August 1904, from tuberculosis.39