29 May — 105th anniversary of the start of a libel trial which centred around allegations of a ‘Cult of the Clitoris’ involving Margot Asquith, wife of the Prime Minister, and of the Germans being about to win WWI by blackmailing 47,000 known homosexuals. Obviously.
The plaintiff was a dancer called Maud Allan, who merely wanted to bring an innocent Bible story to the London stage. Well, she wanted to do Oscar Wilde’s Salome, anyway, and dance before Herod with the head of John the Baptist’s severed head on a silver plate.
She would also be kissing the severed head and doing a “seductive interpretation of the famous Dance of the Seven Veils, for which she made her own revealing costumes” So, all right, it was a bit saucy. And it was by Oscar Wilde, of course.
The defendant, who’d printed the innuendo about Maud, was an appalling man called Noel Pemberton Billing, an independent MP — a status which can often be a bad sign, and which in this case means too racist, unhinged and conspiracy-obsessed for any mainstream party.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes him as a “highly cantankerous patriot”, which is certainly one way of putting ‘homophobic and antisemitic loon who established a newspaper “in the interest of purity in public life”’.
Basically, Mr P-B took one look at the adverts for private performances of Salome and wanted to Ban This Sick Filth Now. So, he took to the pages of The Vigilante to imply (and not entirely without reason, to be fair) that Maud was a lesbian. He went further, though, also suggesting that she was in a relationship with Margot Asquith.
Mind you, Margot was paying the rent on Maud’s not especially modest apartment overlooking Regent’s Park. But Pemberton-Billing could surely not have known that.
There was more, though. He also said the audiences for this production of Salome would include some of the 47,000 “highly placed British perverts” whose names appeared in a black book owned by Wilhelm, Prince of Albania, which Pemberton-Billing claimed to have seen.
Prince Wilhelm had a second cousin also called Wilhelm — the German Emperor. Pemberton-Billing said the German government were blackmailing these 47,000 people to undermine the war effort — and in early 1918, Britain wasn’t doing well.
So, the whole story sounds preposterous, but, as Philip Hoare puts it:
wartime jingoism looked suspiciously on any work of art that might be regarded as modern, foreign or decadent.
In other words, Pemberton-Billing had the zeitgeist on his side (not that he would have used such a disgusting word, derived as it was from the beastly Hun).
Anyway, Maud sued, and the trial turned into a re-run of the doing-over of Oscar Wilde, with some of the same witnesses. Lord Alfred Douglas took the stand on 3 June 1918, for example, to call his former lover
the greatest force for evil in Europe in the past 350 years.
Pemberton-Billing made the whole thing a show by defending himself, claiming at one point that he didn’t know what the phrase ‘cult of the clitoris’ meant, despite having put it in his own newspaper, and said that if Maud did, it was an indication of her guilt.
Amazingly, one of his witnesses also said the judge, who went by the almost too perfect name of Mr Justice Darling, was in the black book of perverts, and this didn’t go badly for Pemberton-Billing. Darling was far more appalled by the fact that the play had been staged.
He was also disgusted by Maud’s costume, which Hoare says amounted to “strings of beads, a diaphanous skirt and little else”. The judge said it was “in fact… worse than nothing” (which leads one to speculate whether he kept any of the photo evidence. But I digress.)
Pemberton-Billing even brought up the fact that Maud’s brother had been convicted of a double murder in San Francisco in 1899. It was nothing to do with her, of course, but it caused gasps in the courtroom, and linked her to a known criminal.
And this extraordinarily dishonest flourish (which Pemberton-Billing may have known about because Alfred Douglas’ brother was in San Francisco when it happened) seemed to do the trick — along with all the other salacious scandal-mongering and innuendo, of course.
The jury found in Pemberton-Billing’s favour, and Maud went back to America for a few years. In 1921, the Commons passed a bill to make “gross indecency between females a criminal offence”.
Still, at least rich, awful people can’t get away with saying any old shit they like about people with less money than them and getting away with it any more, can they?
