Fanny and Stella (28 page)

No, Carlotta’s ball was going to be held in a proper ballroom, on the second floor of Haxell’s Hotel, which, if not the biggest ballroom in London, was one of the most elegantly appointed. There was to be a small orchestra. There was to be champagne and a proper supper served at the stroke of midnight. And there were to be at least two dressing rooms for the ladies and a smoking room for the gentlemen. And between the dances, there were to be musical interludes and singing. Everything, absolutely everything, was to be, as Fanny said at least a dozen times a day,
comme il faut
.

Best of all, Stella had been prevailed upon to return from her exile in Edinburgh and grace the proceedings with some songs. She was to come a few days early and stay in Haxell’s Hotel as Carlotta’s guest. It would be the first time Fanny had seen her sister for six months and there was a great deal of catching up to do.

Fanny was in a whirl of excitement and expectation. She was in her element, advising her dearest Carlotta on every aspect of the ball. They had planned it together, down to the last detail, and it was to be all perfection. By rights, of course, it should have been Carlotta’s Mamma who organised this ball to launch her daughter upon an unsuspecting world, but her Mamma was in Clifton, Carlotta had explained, and was dour and sour and rather too fond of going to Mr Charlesworth’s church. So Fanny had stepped in and become Carlotta’s trusted and truest friend; her wisest counsel; an older sister and a maiden aunt rolled into one.
Tante Fanny
. She rather liked the sound of that.

Carlotta was Fanny’s newest and, with the exception of Stella, her most intimate friend. They had met quite recently, just before Christmas, at a
bal masqué
at Highbury Barn, one of the few places where young men dressed as young ladies were welcome and where they had formed quite a little society of friends.

Fanny and Carlotta had hit it off immediately and had become more or less inseparable. Almost like sisters. They had much in common. Like Fanny, Carlotta had been dragging up since she was fourteen or fifteen years old. ‘I have known the slang term “drag” about five months,’ Carlotta later proclaimed in court to gasps and giggles. ‘I have gone about dressed as a woman but I
never
went out so dressed with the intention of walking in the street.’

Which was, perhaps, just as well, Fanny mused to herself charitably, for her sweet-natured Carlotta was no oil painting. In fact, she was decidedly plain, labouring under the multiple disadvantages of an overly long neck, broad and most unwomanly shoulders and a complete absence – a perfect desert – of chin which, to be frank, made her look a little simple.

Fanny could sympathise. She, too, had once laboured – and indeed laboured still – under some disadvantages of the person, and yet she had turned these disadvantages to triumphs, winning many victories in the endless battle of love. Personality counted for much, but there was a great deal she could teach her dear Carlotta about the dark arts of dressing well, of painting herself, of arranging her coiffure, and generally making a little go a very long way. Every pot has its lid, thought Fanny, and properly dressed and properly lit – the dimmer the better, dare she say it! – even Carlotta might appear to advantage and prove irresistible to the gentlemen at her ball.

D 
rag balls were a regular feature of life in London, though few aspired to – or indeed, achieved – the brilliance and opulence of Miss Carlotta Westropp Gibbings’s ball. There was a clear distinction to be made between public and private drag balls. Many advertised themselves publicly as masquerade balls, as fancy dress balls, or, like the entertainments at Highbury Barn, as
bals masqués
and were open to all comers.

In April 1864, the diarist Arthur Munby ‘chanced to see an advertisement of a masked ball at some pleasure gardens in Camberwell: admission
one shilling
’. Munby was intrigued. ‘Who would be attracted by such a ball?’ he asked himself and decided to find out. He was hoping, perhaps, to strike a rich new vein of the working-class women he loved to encounter and to write about obsessively in his diaries. ‘Only about fifty or sixty people were present,’ Mundy recorded, ‘most of them in fancy dress of a tawdry kind.’ The ball was held in a large wooden shed.

Several of the girls were drest in men’s clothing, as sailors and so on: one, as a volunteer in uniform, I took for a man until someone called her Jenny.

Moreover, not a few of the youths were elaborately disguised as
women
of various kinds; some so well, that only their voices showed they were not girls – and pretty girls.

‘This is a thing new to me,’ Munby wrote censoriously, ‘and is simply disgusting.’

Private drag balls were a very different kettle of fish. They were strictly by invitation, and entry was usually by password only. They were often small, hole-in-the-wall affairs, with not more than a dozen or so dancers, and held in an odd assortment of venues: in rooms above taverns; in out-of-the-way halls and assembly rooms; in cellars, stables and barns; and sometimes in private houses.

Drag balls were held regularly at the Druids’ Hall in Turnagain Place in the City of London. Even though the hall was unlicensed for drinking and dancing, the police seemed happy to turn a blind eye until the summer of 1854 when two men were arrested in full drag. John Challis, aged sixty, was ‘dressed in the pastoral garb of a shepherdess of the golden age’, while his companion George Campbell was ‘completely equipped in the female attire of the present day’, a court heard. ‘There were about a hundred persons present,’ Inspector Teague told the magistrate, Sir Robert Carden, ‘and from eight to ten men were dressed as females.’ Challis and Campbell had, he said, ‘rendered themselves very conspicuous by their disgusting and filthy conduct’. Challis in particular was ‘behaving with two men as if he were a common prostitute’.

A few years after Fanny and Stella’s arrest, no fewer than forty-seven men were arrested when police burst in on a private drag ball at the Temperance Hall in Hulme, a desperately poor district of Manchester. The organisers had gone to considerable lengths to keep out prying eyes, fastening lengths of black crepe over the windows and employing a blind accordionist as the only musician. But Detective Sergeant Jerome Caminada had been tipped off, and he and his officers had climbed onto the roof of an adjacent building in order to spy on the proceedings. What they saw amazed them. Half the men were in drag and the other half in a variety of exotic costumes. The men in drag were performing, Caminada testified, ‘a sort of dance to very quick time, which my experience has taught me is called the “Can-Can”’.

Admission to the ball was by password only but Detective Sergeant Caminada had somehow found it out. Knocking on the door of the Temperance Hall, he uttered the word ‘Sister’ in a mincing voice and the door opened to reveal a man dressed as a nun. Then there was panic as policemen and local volunteers rushed in to round up the revellers.

T 
hings had got off to a less than perfect start, Carlotta thought irritably. She had always intended that her ball should be small and select, with no more than a dozen couple at most. The whole thing was to be an austerely beautiful and romantic affair, untainted by the sort of brutish behaviour which characterised so many low drag balls.

She had to confess that she was very far from pleased to discover that Fanny had been dispensing invitations broadcast to the ragtag and bobtail of her acquaintance and then had the nerve to tell
her
that this one and that one simply had to attend, or that she had already promised so-and-so that they could come. The upshot was that there were now forty-eight guests, quite double the original number. She was sure that she did not know half of them, and equally sure that she would not
wish
to know them.

Mr Edward Haxell, the jovial proprietor of Haxell’s Hotel, was in his element. Young Mr Gibbings’s ball was going swimmingly and all the young men and the young men dressed as ladies seemed to be enjoying themselves enormously. ‘They changed partners for the dances,’ he recalled later, ‘and there was nothing wrong in any way during the whole night.

‘There was no impropriety of attitude that I saw in the room, not a
vestige
,’ he insisted. ‘I heard the observation made about how well the young men were acting.’ It was true that some of the young men – the young men dressed as young men, that is – had danced with each other, which was a little odd when you first saw it, but after a while it seemed perfectly natural, indeed, rather charming, and Mr Haxell wondered idly to himself why this did not happen more often in situations where there was a dearth of ladies.

He had counted thirteen young men dressed as ladies, though there might of course have been more. It was sometimes hard to tell the real thing from the fake. Miss Gibbings, Miss Boulton and Mrs Graham of course he knew well. And he had been previously introduced to Miss Cumming and Miss Thomas. Miss Peel he knew by reputation only as Mr Percival Peel, rumoured to be nephew to the late Sir Robert Peel, the former Prime Minister.

Miss Stella Boulton – or Lady Stella Clinton, as he had heard her referred to more than once – made an utterly convincing young lady. When she had first arrived at Haxell’s a few days before the ball, Miss Gibbings introduced her as ‘the best amateur actress off the boards’, and Mr Haxell could well believe it. She seemed to light up even the dullest room from the moment she entered. She was, in the truest sense, enchanting. No wonder everyone seemed to fall instantly under her spell. He was even a little in love with her himself.

‘I heard Boulton sing his popular song “Fainting Away”, I think three times, with great
éclat
,’ he said later in court. (Or was it ‘Fading Away’? He could not be sure.) ‘I spoke to the Master of the Band about Boulton’s singing, and when he sang a second time, he went straight up to him and said, “It is the most perfect man’s soprano voice that I
ever
heard!” ’

Of course, when the police started nosing around and asking questions, everyone was falling over themselves to say how Carlotta’s ball had all gone off so perfectly, with so much propriety, with so much sweetness and light. Everyone, that is, apart from Jack Saul, whose bawdy recollections of that night were closer to the bone, in every sense.  

On the surface, he said, everything about the ball seemed to be above board. Both the gentlemen and the ladies conducted themselves, for the first hour or two at least, with the greatest propriety. But as the evening wore on, and more and more champagne was consumed, the ball started to turn into a bacchanal, and the ballroom became a brothel.

‘There seems to be,’ Jack Saul mused with some relish, ‘such a peculiar fascination to gentlemen in the idea of having a beautiful creature, such as an ordinary observer would take for a beautiful lady, to dance and flirt with, knowing all the while that his inamorata is a youthful man in disguise.’

The gentlemen could hardly contain themselves at the sight of so many young-men-dressed-as-ladies and even those who were long past the first flush of youth, those with sterner features, like Fanny Park, or those with stouter builds were positively chased around the ballroom. Jack Saul noticed Mr Haxell nodding and smiling and encouraging his guests to enjoy themselves, seemingly unaware of what was going on under his very nose. ‘No doubt the proprietor was quite innocent of any idea of what our fun really was,’ Saul wrote, ‘but there were two or three dressing rooms into which the company could retire at pleasure.’

These dressing rooms which Carlotta had insisted upon were supposed to be intimate retreats for the young men dressed as ladies to refresh themselves and to repair their toilette. But in reality they resembled nothing so much as dimly lit bordellos where drunken guests fumbled and frolicked with each other.

Tiring of drinking and dancing, Jack Saul recalled, ‘I sat for a while on a sofa by myself, watching the dancers and taking notice of all the little freedoms they so constantly exchanged with one another.’

Both Fanny and Stella caught his eye. Fanny was ‘dancing with a gentleman from the City, a very handsome Greek merchant’, while Stella was enjoying the attentions of Lord Arthur Clinton who, Jack Saul observed, ‘was very spooney upon her’.

During the evening I noticed them slip away together, and made my mind up to try and get a peep at their little game. So I followed them as quietly as possible, and saw them pass down a corridor to another apartment, not one of the dressing rooms which I knew had been provided for the use of the party, but one which I suppose his Lordship had secured for his own personal use.

I was close enough behind them to hear the key turned in the lock. Foiled thus for a moment, I turned the handle of the next door, which admitted me to an unoccupied room, and to my great delight a beam of bright light streamed from the keyhole of the door of communication between that and the one in which my birds had taken refuge.

Jack Saul knelt down and put his eye to the keyhole. He could see and hear everything. ‘Lord Arthur and Boulton were standing before a large mirror,’ he recalled. Stella was busy unbuttoning Lord Arthur’s trousers. ‘Soon she let out a beautiful specimen of the
arbor vitae
, at least nine inches long and very thick. It was in glorious condition, with a great, glowing red head.’