Fanny and Stella Read online

  Fanny and Stella

  The Young Men

  Who Shocked

  Victorian England

  NEIL MCKENNA

  For

  Dede Smith

  companion-in-arms

  Contents

  List of Plates

  Acknowledgements

  1 Leading Ladies

  2 The Hapless Swain

  3 The Slap-Bum Polka

  4 In the Dock

  5 Foreign Bodies

  6 Wives and Daughters

  7 Becoming Fanny

  8 A Tale of Two Sisters

  9 Monstrous Erections

  10 A Dirty Business

  11 Getting Up Evidence

  12 A Victorian Romance

  13 Lord Arthur’s Wife

  14 The Toast of the Town

  15 ‘Yr Affectionate Fanny’

  16 The Dragon of Davies Street

  17 ‘Come Love’

  18 Un Souvenir d’Amour

  19 The Battle of the Bottoms

  20 He, She or It

  21 A Bitches’ Ball

  22 The Wheels of Justice

  23 Dead or Disappeared

  24 This Slippery Sod

  25 ‘Pestiferous and Pestilential’

  26 The Ship of State

  27 The Most Sensational Event

  28 A Rout

  29 ‘This Terrible Drama of Vice’

  30 Clouds and Sunshine

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Index

  Plates

  1 Fanny and Stella being led away, The Days’ Doings

  2 ‘Men in Women’s Clothes: The Dressing Room’, The Illustrated Police News

  3 Stella Boulton, Scarborough, 1868 © Oliver Sarony/Laurence Senelick Collection

  4 Stella Boulton dressed as a man © Oliver Sarony/Laurence Senelick Collection

  5 Fanny Park in white dress © Frederick Spalding/Essex Record Office

  6 Fanny Park with unknown gentleman © Chelmsford, 1868, Frederick Spalding/Essex Record Office

  7 Fanny Park © Frederick Spalding/Essex Record Office

  8 Fanny Park, Stella Boulton and Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton © Frederick Spalding/Essex Record Office

  9 Fanny and Stella © Frederick Spalding/Essex Record Office

  10 Charles Pavitt and Stella Boulton © Frederick Spalding/Essex Record Office

  11 ‘The Female Personators’, The Illustrated Police News

  12 The Comical Countess and Carlotta Gibbings, The Illustrated Police News

  13 Stella Boulton © Napoleon Sarony/Laurence Senelick Collection

  14 Stella Boulton © Mrs Williams of Northampton/Laurence Senelick Collection

  15 Fanny Park and Stella Boulton © Frederick Spalding/Essex Record Office

  Acknowledgements

  This book could not have been written without consulting the materials on Fanny and Stella held by the National Archives in Kew, who were unfailingly helpful. I am also grateful to the British Library and the British Newspaper Library; to the Metropolitan Police Service Archive in London; to the National Archives of Scotland; to the Parliamentary Archives; to the Wellcome Institute Library; to the library of Imperial College, London; to the libraries of the Royal College of Surgeons in London and the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh; to the Flintshire Record Office who hold the Hawarden MSS; to the Library of Nottingham University who hold the Newcastle Clumber MSS; to the Post Office Museum and Archive in London; to the Essex Record Office; to Michael Hussey of the National Archives and Records Administration in the United States; to Paul Stevens, librarian and archivist at Repton School; to Elizabeth Boardman, archivist at Brasenose College, Oxford; to Rob Petre, archivist at Oriel College, Oxford; to Robin Freeman, archivist at Hampshire Archives and Local Studies; to Andrew Dowsey, archivist at Fife Council; to the Hamilton Advertiser and the Hampshire Chronicle; to Lesmahagow Central Library; to Hamilton Central Library; and to the National Railway Museum in York.

  I would also like to thank the many people who have helped in ways large and small: Dawn Ades, Val Allam, Nuria Alvarez Vazquez, Carole Angier, Hans Arnold, Diane Bennett, Mark Booth, Jamie Buxton, Michelle Carriger, Alan Clark, Sally Cline, Hope Cooke, Ania Corless, Jim Davies, Moris Farhi, Peter Farrer, Edward Fenton, Paul Forbes, Simon Garfield, Nick Gilbert, Christopher Golding, Terry Heath, Charles Hurt, Maggie Iverson, Agnes Jones, Ellen Jones, Liane Jones, Peter Jones, Sian Jones, Marina Leopardi, Jules Lubbock, Vicky Manthorpe, Naomi May, Donald Mead, Naomi Narod, Rictor Norton, Robert Palmer, Patricia Pelham-Clinton-Hope, Carl Philpott, Jonathan Pimm, Gilly Poole, Monica Porter, Keith Raffan, Eleanor Rees, George Robb, Susan Ronald, Caroline Ross Pirie, Diane Samuels, Jane Scruton, Anne Sebba, Michael Seeney, Carole Seymour-Jones, Melanie Smith, David Souden, Diana Souhami, Linda Stratmann, Ben Summerskill, Sandy Suffield, Alex Sutherland, Matthew Sweet, Simon Watney, Caspar Wintermans.

  I would particularly like to thank Jonathan Ned Katz for generously sharing his research on John Safford Fiske; Peter Swaab for his insights on Fanny and Stella; Anna Swan for her many helpful suggestions; Julie Wheelwright for her continuous support; Dr Stuart Flanagan for his medical knowledge; Professor Laurence Senelick for so generously allowing me to reproduce photographs of Fanny and Stella from his collection; Sue Fox for her inspired research in the US archives; Rina Gill for her enduring friendship and encouragement; and Will Atkinson for his generosity of spirit.

  Dede Smith, to whom this book is dedicated, has been a tireless researcher and an enthusiastic advocate of Fanny and Stella, reading and re-reading the manuscript and suggesting countless improvements. I am very grateful for his friendship and for his wisdom.

  I would like to express my very sincere thanks to my agent, Andrew Lownie, and to Julian Loose and Kate Murray-Browne, my editors at Faber, who have been everything that editors ought to be, and more besides.

  Lastly, I would like to express my profound gratitude to Robert Jones without whose love and friendship this book could not have been written.

  There was an old person of Sark

  Who buggered a pig in the dark;

  The swine in surprise

  Murmured: ‘God blast your eyes,

  Do you take me for Boulton and Park?’

  The Pearl, 1879

  1

  Leading Ladies

  Thursday 28th April 1870

  When they were seated in the stalls,

  With their low-neck’d dresses and flowing shawls,

  They were admired by one and all,

  This pair of He-She ladies.

  The gents at them would take a peep,

  And say they are Duchesses at least,

  Lor! what a fascinating pair,

  Especially she with the curly hair.

  ‘The Funny He-She Ladies’

  H eads turned as the two strikingly handsome women swept imperiously into the pale-green and gilded foyer of the Strand Theatre and made their way to the private box, booked under the name of Mrs Fanny Graham, where two young men – Mr Hugh Mundell and Mr Cecil Thomas were the names they had given to the boxkeeper – were already waiting for them.

  In the flurry of excitement, nobody noticed the three ordinary-looking, moustachioed men who had slipped quietly into the theatre on the heels of the two women and then quickly melted away into the darker recesses of the stalls and promenade.

  The boxkeeper was excited. He thought that he recognised one of these two divinities as none other than the Duchess of Manchester, the great society beauty whom the Prime Minister, Mr Gladstone, just five days earlier at a state banquet, had praised as among ‘the very fairest of our land’.

  But the male members of the audience at the Strand Theatre were not so easily fooled. ‘The general opinion throug
hout the house,’ one observer reported, ‘was that they were two fresh stars in the firmament of the demi-monde, and that their beauty, their fascination, and their paid-for smiles would, before the London season expired, cause many a poor dupe to curse the hour in which he had been born.’

  The recently rebuilt Strand Theatre was one of London’s largest, and seated over a thousand people. It was famous for three things: for the quality of its air, for its burlesque productions, and for its reputation as a place of successful sexual assignations. Air quality was a prime consideration. Most theatres and music halls reeked of unwashed humanity, a hot and heady mixture of sweat, body odour, pipe and cigar smoke, cheap scent and alcohol. When it was rebuilt in 1865 the Strand was the first theatre with a purposely designed ventilation system and the first to install an industrial-sized Rimmel’s Vaporiser, invented by the parfumier Eugene Rimmel, which released clouds of perfumed steam to sanitise and deodorise the air.

  London was in the grip of a new theatrical craze for burlesques and burlettas, for light operas, comedies, farces, melodramas and pantomimes where women dressed as men and men dressed as women. The pursuit of love with all its thorny and tangled turnings, all its comic and tragi-comic complications, was the proper subject of burlesque. That young women dressed as men fell in love with young men, and young men dressed as women fell in love with young women, far from confusing the audience, seemed to add a delightful frisson of sexual excitement to the proceedings. And the Strand Theatre was the very epicentre of burlesque mania, mounting a never-ending succession of ‘Grand Burlesque Extravaganzas’ which guaranteed full houses night after night.

  Above and beyond its technical marvels and its burlesque extravaganzas, the Strand was notorious as a place where men could meet women for sex, and had been patronised on many occasions by no less a personage than the Prince of Wales. It was, as the cartoonist Alfred Bryan slyly insinuated, one of London’s ‘Noted Shops for Tarts’, and a crude but popular limerick made explicit reference to the Strand’s erotic reputation:

  There was a young man of St Paul’s

  Possessed of the most useless of balls,

  Till at last, at the Strand,

  He managed a stand,

  And tossed himself off in the stalls.

  If there was any lingering doubt that the two strikingly handsome women in Mrs Fanny Graham’s box were expensively dressed whores, their behaviour soon put paid to such notions. They nonchalantly leaned over their box, waved their fans, twirled their handkerchiefs and ‘lasciviously ogled the male occupants of the stalls’. They smoked, they giggled, they nodded and they winked as they waggled their tongues at men in such a way as to leave absolutely no doubt of their sexual intentions.

  And they chirruped – so loudly that at one point some members of the audience complained that it quite drowned out the performance. Chirruping was a sucking noise, made with fluttering lips and usually reserved for babies and kittens, but used by whores and their punters alike to signal sexual desire. Sometimes chirrupers were arrested for causing a public nuisance. One persistent chirruper taken up by the police excused himself at the Lambeth Police Court by claiming ‘he thought there was no harm in it’.

  After half an hour or so Mrs Fanny Graham and her companion, Miss Stella Boulton, stood up, smiled and curtseyed to the gentlemen of the stalls and left their box to go to the theatre’s refreshment bar, squired by Mr Mundell and Mr Thomas. Again, nobody paid the least attention to the three moustachioed men who had so unobtrusively followed them into the theatre and who now reappeared in the Strand’s saloon bar looking for all the world as if they were fixtures there.

  It was clear that Mrs Graham and Miss Boulton had already been drinking quite heavily, and they now proceeded to consume brandies and sherries at breakneck speed. They were immediately besieged by a gang of curious and admiring swells and gallants and some dubious and not-so-dubious gentlemen eager to sample the charms of these two dazzling demi-mondaines.

  Miss Stella Boulton was seemingly the younger of the pair and was resplendent in a brilliant scarlet silk evening dress trimmed with white lace and draped with a white muslin shawl. She was more than just pretty. In the glittering, flattering, faceted lights of the Strand’s saloon bar she was quite beautiful. She was tall and slender, with a narrow waist and a magnificent bosom, her finely shaped head topped by raven hair fashionably dressed in the Grecian style with coils of plaited hair held in place by a crosshatch of black velvet. Her pale face was captivating, with large liquid violet-blue eyes, just a becoming blush to her cheeks, perfect full ruby lips and pearly white teeth. She seemed to scintillate and shine like a star, and the men could hardly take their eyes off her. If she was indeed a whore, she was an exceptional whore. A veritable queen among whores.

  By way of contrast, Mrs Fanny Graham was (and this was putting it charitably) on the plain side and was possessed of what the Evening Standard called, diplomatically, ‘sterner features’. She seemed older, matronly and more worldly-wise, and her cascading flaxen curls seemed to sit oddly with her dark skin and dark eyes. She wore a rather unbecoming dark-green satin crinoline trimmed with black lace and a black lace mantilla. Her eyes were a little too small and closely set together, her nose a little too large, her brows a shade too heavy, and her cheeks more than a little jowly.

  But Mrs Fanny Graham was withal a fine figure of a woman with an expression of great good humour and animation. She was handsome in a mannish sort of way. Her dark eyes sparkled when she spoke to her companion, whom she addressed variously as ‘Stella’, ‘Stell’, ‘Sister’ and ‘Dear’ in a loud theatrical voice which seemed to ricochet around the refreshment bar. Stella’s voice, by contrast, was sweet and musical, though equally theatrical. She called her companion ‘Fanny’ and ‘Sister dear’.

  So Fanny and Stella were, it seemed, sisters both by birth and by profession, and if the men crowding around them had paused for thought, they might have reached some bracing conclusions about the cruelty of a bestowing fate which had endowed the one sister with such beauty and the other with such decided plainness. Both women were ‘painted’, Stella quite subtly and effectively, Fanny with considerably more artistic licence. And both wore rather a great deal of jewellery: necklaces, lockets, rings, earrings and bracelets.

  Fanny and Stella were hard to fathom. They had behaved with such lewdness in their box in the stalls as to leave not the faintest shred of doubt in even the most disinterested observer that they were a pair of hardened and shameless whores. And yet, close up, Stella was revealed as a beautiful, almost aristocratic, young woman who showed flashes of an innate, and most decidedly un-whorelike, dignity and grace. One newspaper said later that she was ‘charming as a star’, another christened her ‘Stella, Star of the Strand’. And despite all the opprobrium that would later be heaped upon her, despite all the mud that would be slung at her and all the mud that would stick to her, she never lost the mysterious aura of a great and stellar beauty.

  Mrs Fanny Graham, too, was clearly a woman of some education and breeding, and was certainly very far removed from your common-or-garden whore. Here in the saloon bar, it seemed harder to reconcile their obvious quality with the ogling, tongue-waggling, chirruping lasciviousness of the stalls.

  They spent half an hour or so in the refreshment bar. Before they left, Mrs Fanny Graham, unaware that she was being watched, betook herself to the Ladies’ Retiring Room and asked the attendant there to pin the lace back to the hem of her crinoline where she had trodden on it. At a quarter past ten, Mr Hugh Mundell had been despatched in ringing tones by Mrs Graham to go and call for her carriage and soon afterwards the remainder of the party made a leisurely progress to the foyer and pushed their way through the noise and confusion of an emptying theatre to the waiting conveyance.

  Just as the carriage was about to depart, one of the men who had been shadowing them all that evening jumped up and swung himself in through the door.

  ‘I’m a police officer from Bow Street
,’ he said, producing his warrant card, ‘and I have every reason to believe that you are men in female attire and you will have to come to Bow Street with me now.’

  There was a moment’s pause.

  ‘How dare you address a Lady in that manner, Sir,’ Mrs Fanny Graham demanded with frigid hauteur. For a second it seemed as if she might slap his face as a reward for such impudence.

  Then all hell broke loose as Mr Cecil Thomas frantically struggled past the policeman, leapt out of the carriage and ran for dear life, elbowing his way through the bewildered crowds. Fanny and Stella were also contemplating flight and were already quietly edging themselves towards the opposite door of the carriage. Quite how fast they could run and quite how far they imagined they would get in their crinolines was anybody’s guess. But their exit was firmly blocked by another burly policeman in plain clothes who appeared seemingly from nowhere. With a smart tap on the roof, the carriage set off at a rattle and a clatter away eastwards down the Strand.

  The two women sat in shocked silence for a few moments. Stella looked as if she might be about to cry. Clearing her throat noisily, Fanny spoke, only this time her voice and demeanour had changed, miraculously transmuted into the voice of a well-bred young man about town.

  ‘Look here, old fellow,’ she said, ‘it’ll do you no good to take us to the station and if you’ll let us go we’ll give you anything you want.

  ‘Anything,’ she repeated with a knowing look.

  ‘Anything you like to mention,’ Stella echoed meaningfully, staring directly at the two policemen, and arching her eyebrows. ‘Anything you like to mention, you can have.’

  ‘I’ll do nothing of the sort,’ said Detective Sergeant Frederick Kerley, gruffly. ‘I must take you to the station.’ Detective Officer William Chamberlain sat there in impenetrable silence.

  It took rather less than five minutes to drive to Bow Street where Fanny and Stella were marched firmly into the police station and placed in a wooden dock to be formally questioned.