Well, if it’s 28 April, it must be the 153rd anniversary of a somewhat eventful trip to the theatre for young ladies Miss Stella Boulton and Mrs Fanny Graham — starting, as it did, with jolly nice seats in a box, and ending with their arrest.
Whatever had gone wrong? Well… they were frequenting the Strand Theatre, which had at the time, in the words of Neil McKenna, author of Fanny & Stella, a reputation “as a place where men could meet women for sex” — as immortalised in this charming limerick of the time:
They were guests in the box of Hugh Mundell and Cecil Thomas, and had, apparently, used this elevated position to flirt outrageously with the men in the stalls. It is also said that they were somewhat intoxicated and became steadily more so as the evening wore on.
None of this could explain their predicament on its own, however. It was as they all got into their carriage at the end of the night that the reason revealed itself. All of a sudden, a man in dark clothes leapt into the vehicle with the words…
According to McKenna, Fanny’s immediate response was a valiant attempt to style it out with the words “How *dare* you address a Lady in that manner, Sir”, before (going by the account in Morris Kaplan’s Sodom on the Thames), rather changing tack:
Officer Frederick Kelly, who accompanied Boulton, Park, and Mundell in the van, gave a somewhat different picture of their attitude after the arrest. He testified that Park had said to him: “Look here, old fellow, it will do you no good to take us to the station, and if you will let us go, we will give you anything you may want.” To which Boulton added: “Anything you require you may have. Only let us go.” The stalwart Kelly was not deterred from his duty: “I said I would do nothing of the sort and took them to the station.”
By the time they got to Bow Street, their only option was clear. Stella gave her name as Ernest Boulton, and Fanny hers as Frederick William Park. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, they were in court the next day, on
This was, of course, not the sort of thing that would go unnoticed by the press and pamphleteers:
Fanny/Frederick was the child of a judge — although her family wasn’t unknown to the wrong side of the law, what with her beloved brother Harry having been exiled to Scotland after his arrest for the ‘attempted indecent assault’ of a police officer in 1862
Stella came from a more modest background, and had previous for soliciting. It transpired that the police had been watching the pair for a while — and, next time they appeared at Bow Street, things were rather more serious.
Nine years earlier, that would have meant a death sentence, but the later Victorians limited themselves to bestowing a lengthy prison sentence with hard labour — which tended to kill you. Luckily for Boulton and Park, the prosecution made a bollocks of it.
One of their witnesses was George Smith, a beadle at the Burlington Arcade, who tried to testify about Boulton’s salacious behaviour in that precinct, but something about his appearance and manner prompted the defence to ask “Have you been drinking today?”
He had, and perhaps it was that which caused him to let slip the telling words: “I have been getting up evidence for the police in this little affair”. He was not an impressive witness. Investigations continued, however, bringing in more suspects.
One of them, Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton, godson of William Gladstone, had recently been MP for Newark. He was dead by June, officially of scarlet fever, but probably by his own hand — despite unlikely rumours that he lived on overseas.
At a full trial in 1871, the prosecution was led by the Attorney General himself… and they still fucked it up. George Smith was a witness again, and was at least as unimpressive as he had been the first time. Another problem was the charge.
If you were to accuse someone of being a ‘sodomite’, you ideally needed the evidence of a doctor that ‘sodomy’ had taken place. If one doctor says that’s what he saw, and “no fewer than eight doctors called for the defence … testified to the contrary”, well…
There was also the issue of Hugh Mundell, who had been arrested with them (Cecil Thomas had gallantly pushed past the policeman who jumped into the carriage and bravely run away). Hugh testified that:
He had been with them at various times while they were dressed in conventionally male and female clothing, but according to his deposition, even after they told him in a letter “that they were men,” he remained unconvinced. “I told them I did not believe it; they then said it is quite true, we are men. I believed that they had written the letter in a joke, and I believed they were women.” His conviction persisted even when Mundell saw them in typically male attire and decided they were “two women in men’s clothes,” telling them that to be more convincing “when they walked they had better swing their arms about a little more”.
So, they hadn’t been attempting to deceive. Crucially, Mundell also “described making advances toward Stella that he insists were resisted”, which didn’t help the prosecution’s case that Fanny and Stella were prostitutes — and Mundell had been called as a prosecution witness.
The star turn for the defence was Stella’s mother, Mary. When Boulton’s barrister said his client had “showed extreme fondness for appearing in female Dress … as early as ten or eleven years of age”, Mary Ann corrected him
The defence basically argued that she was respectable and middle class, and knew all about, and (touchingly) accepted, how her child lived.
Mary Boulton’s morality vouched for that of her son and all the other defendants in the case.
The jury deliberated for a full 53 minutes before returning a not guilty verdict, and Fanny and Stella resumed their previous lives in touring theatricals. The public reached their own verdict, of course, hence the popular limerick of the time:
The trial’s cultural effects were many, varied, and lasting. In the reading out of Fanny’s letters, it introduced the world to the word ‘camp’ — or at least (from Rictor Norton’s exhaustive archive of gay history)…
…and no less an authority that the Oxford English Dictionary records a report in Reynolds’s Newspaper, 29 May 1870, (again quoting a letter read in court) as the first appearance in print of the word ‘drag’ used to mean “Feminine attire worn by a man”.
But it also gave us Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 — the Labouchere Amendment, which made ‘gross indecency’ a crime, making it possible to get a conviction even where there was ambiguity about what the accused had actually done. And that, of course, was what did for Oscar Wilde, Alan Turing, and many, many others.
You can more about Fanny and Stella at any of the links above, and…
…and they’ve got a(n unofficial) blue plaque now:
In separate but not entirely unconnected news, 28 April is also the 61st anniversary of the day Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell’s flat was raided after they… ‘decorated’ those library books.
