The Sexual History of London (36 page)

Despite the experience of homophobia, London's homosexual scene was not so much an underworld as a flourishing alternative universe, and it even had its own language, ‘Polari', derived from Romany and thieves' slang. ‘Heterosexual people didn't know what we were talking about,' one man recalled. ‘We didn't want people to know.' Instead of saying ‘there's a copper coming into the bar', one man would tip off another with ‘there's a sharping omi'; if a pretty boy was spotted, he was referred to as ‘bona', meaning attractive.
⁸

And, just as in Roman times, the bath houses flourished, in the form of Turkish baths, and municipal bath houses, the latter built in the Victorian era for London's poor to wash their clothes and their bodies, but soon an irresistible attraction for homosexual men. Robert Hutton celebrated the Armistice in the Turkish baths, ‘which came as near to killing me as the war ever had…I slept for a week in a Turkish bath, which meant, virtually, that I did not sleep at all.'
⁹
When the writer Christopher Isherwood was pursuing the young composer Benjamin Britten he took him to the Savoy Turkish baths in Jermyn Street, notorious for the amount of cruising and sexual activity which went on. Whether or not anything happened, the experience seemed to make Britten more comfortable with his emerging sexuality.

Extending outwards from Piccadilly, like the spokes on a wheel, were London's other venues for homosexual encounters, the clubs of Soho, the bohemia of Fitzrovia, the pubs of Earl's Court and everywhere, throughout London, the network of meeting points in the public conveniences and the parks.

Whilst lesbians had experienced a reasonable degree of tolerance, due partially to Queen Victoria's refusal to believe in their existence, and received liberation of a kind during the First World War, sexual tolerance towards homosexual women was severely tested by the publication of
The Well of Loneliness
in 1928. This novel was a
cri de coeur
from Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943), concerning the lonely and masculine Stephen Gordon, a lesbian who eventually finds happiness and acceptance with a female partner after years of misery. Hall had decided to ‘put my pen at the service of some of the most misunderstood people in the world', citing the theories of the sexologist Havelock Ellis that ‘inverts' were ‘a part of Nature, made that way by God, and then punished by a cruel and uncomprehending world. Their suffering cried out for redress and an end to persecution.'
¹⁰

Sir Chartres Biron, the chief magistrate at Bow Street, would have preferred ‘inverts' and their kind to remain silent and ruled that the novel was an ‘obscene libel' and all copies should be destroyed. Hall's publisher, Jonathan Cape, immediately launched an appeal, while E. M. Forster mobilized eminent supporters including Leonard and Virginia Woolf to defend the book on aesthetic grounds. Unfortunately, Leonard claimed that the book ‘failed completely as a work of art', while Virginia found it unreadable. Cape's attempt to defend the book was doomed, since the judge had already formulated his views on what constituted obscenity and was not prepared to listen to London's literati queuing up to defend it.

In a desperate bid to ban the book on health grounds, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Archibald Bodkin, wrote to several doctors asking for a clinical analysis of what he called ‘homo-sexualists'. Sir Archibald was worried that women would be inspired to practise lesbianism after reading the book: ‘a large amount of curiosity had been excited among women, and I am afraid in many cases curiosity may lead to imitation and indulgence in practices which are believed to be somewhat extensive having regard to the very large excess in numbers of women over men,' he wrote to Dr J. A. Hadfield of Harley Street.
¹¹
Sir William Henry Willcox, consulting medical adviser to the Home Office and physician at St Mary's Hospital in London, gave Sir Archibald the evidence he needed, declaring that lesbianism ‘is well known to have a debasing effect on those practising it, which is mental, moral and physical in character. It leads to gross mental illness, nervous instability, and in some cases to suicide in addicts to this vice. It is a vice which, if widespread, becomes a danger to the well-being of a nation.' Publication of the book, he said, would risk its being read ‘by a large number of innocent persons, who might out of pure curiosity be led to discuss openly and possibly practise the form of vice described'.
¹²

It is doubtful whether
The Well of Loneliness
sparked a Sapphic recruitment drive. The protagonists' sexual activities get no more explicit than the statement ‘she kissed her full on the lips like a lover', and an observation that ‘that night, they were not divided', implying that two women shared a bed. Despite the comments from the judiciary that the book featured ‘two women making beasts of themselves', any reader looking for hot lesbian action would be deeply disappointed. But it was to be almost twenty years before
The Well of Loneliness
was eventually published in Britain, in 1949. By then Hall was dead and buried in Highgate cemetery, secure in a tomb in the Lebanon Circle with her lover Mabel Batten.

Sex, gay and straight, thrived in London during the interwar years, despite all the best efforts of the authorities. The upper classes, particularly the men who had survived the trenches, became notorious partygoers, dubbed ‘the bright young things' by the newspapers and enjoying an elite social scene of debutantes' balls, cocktail parties, nightclubs and country house weekends. Some individuals found these bright young things completely insufferable. The iconic screen star Louise Brooks visited London in 1925 as a seventeen-year-old, before her career took off. Employed as a dancer at the Café de Paris in Coventry Street, Piccadilly, where she became the first person to dance the Charleston in London, Brooks had plenty of opportunity to meet the ‘fast set' and was not impressed; indeed, Brooks dismissed them as ‘a dreadful, moribund lot', adding that Evelyn Waugh must have been a genius to make them seem so fascinating in
Vile Bodies
.
¹³

But this was a minority view. After the tedium and danger of the war, hitherto respectable young women were busy reinventing themselves as ‘flappers', shingling their hair, smoking cigarettes and painting their faces, in unconscious imitation of the genuine whores. They drank cocktails (an American development, derived from the fact that the illegal alcohol circulating during Prohibition tasted so disgusting that it had to be ‘cut' with other substances such as fruit juice or soda) and danced until dawn. This early example of binge-drinking among young women led, inevitably, to a certain amount of sexual experimentation. While married women began to have access to affordable birth control, in the form of diaphragms and condoms, thanks to the pioneering Marie Stopes (1880–1958), who opened her first clinic in London in 1921, female promiscuity still brought with it the unavoidable risk of unwanted pregnancy. The novelist Rosamond Lehmann presented a realistic account of an abortion in
The Weather in the Streets
(1936) in which the protagonist, Olivia Curtis, undergoes an illegal termination. Lehmann's account of events is not shocking in the visceral sense; it is tastefully written up without melodramatic descriptions of knitting needles or haemorrhages. The abortionist who sets things in motion is presented as an avuncular figure who makes enough from the miscarriage trade to send his son to Harrow, while the doctor who attends Olivia after the subsequent miscarriage is gruffly efficient, warning her not to ‘monkey about with herself' if she wants to have children in future. The shock for modern readers consists of the subterfuge Olivia has to resort to in order to get an abortion: she poses as a married woman, then sells her lover's emerald ring (for less than its actual value) to cover the £100 cost of the operation (£2,500 in today's money). When the second doctor is called out, Olivia's male friend passes himself off as her husband to avoid awkward questions from the physician or the prospect of criminal proceedings. The book was considered outrageous at the time of publication; as an account of a disastrous affair with a married man, it was years ahead of its time.
¹⁴

Marie Stopes, birth control pioneer and author of
Married Love,
one of the first sex manuals (1919).

Despite the panic to raise funds for her abortion, Olivia Curtis and her friends were relatively affluent compared with other Londoners. Britain in the 1930s was blighted by the Depression, an economic downturn which saw millions of people out of work and starving; it would take another war before the safety net of the welfare state was in place. One response to this financial crisis was that more women than ever before resorted to prostitution, and the sex trade flourished in London, where conditions for prostitutes were better than at any time within living memory. Inspector Sharpe of the Flying Squad recalled that the majority of girls worked for about four hours a night (or day) receiving fifteen to twenty clients for between 10 shillings to £1 (£25 at today's prices) per customer. A working girl's weekly income of around £80 to £100 compared well with the average shopgirl's wage of just £2 a week. Inspector Sharpe, counting around sixty-seven streetwalkers standing along Piccadilly, observed that this was seen as an acceptable way to get on in life. ‘If they had gone straight they must have contented themselves with a seventy-shillings-a-week husband and a semi-detached house in the suburbs. They would have had to pinch for their cheap finery and within a few years a brood of squalling children would have surrounded them. On the streets they make five times what a husband could have brought them, and three quarters of their talk is of the money.' One woman in her thirties whom the inspector often met in Piccadilly looked like a little servant girl, with her pug-face and severe taffeta frock. ‘Before she went on the game she was married to a fifty-shillings-a-week railwayman and had five children. Now, she had a five-pound-a-week flat and a maid.'
¹⁵

There were inevitably less fortunate women. The writer George Orwell noted down-and-out prostitutes in Trafalgar Square selling themselves for sixpence a time, although towards morning they would settle for a cigarette and a cup of tea. For these women, Trafalgar Square had become the twentieth-century equivalent of Gropecunt Lane. Nevertheless, the appeal of prostitution to working-class women had never been stronger. In Simon Blumenfeld's novel
Jew Boy
(1935) a young woman who has given up work as a domestic servant to become a whore in the West End tells the protagonist: ‘It's not so terrible. Really, I'm lots better off than I was before. When I was in service, the master would always be after me, or if it wasn't the master, there was sure to be a son…And they expected all that thrown in buckshee, with scrubbing the house, and clearing out the slops. And I couldn't say anything, or I'd lose my job. Now if I have to do that, I get paid for it, and at least I get SOME time for myself.'
¹⁶

The streetwalkers were notable for their camaraderie. One WPC remarked that ‘they are a friendly lot, ready to help one another, exchanging clothes with each other, and even loaning small sums to a rival down on her luck and out of business for the time being'.
¹⁷

Meanwhile, in the upper echelons a new development was under way: the emergence of the call-girl. These women operated out of houses and flats in the fashionable parts of London, servicing clients who sought discretion and comfort. One such operation was run by a dress designer in Grosvenor Square. Men would telephone and ask for a girl, and the designer would fix them up with one; she had 52 young women on her books, and a client list of over 154. The girls tended to be young, and avoided looking like prostitutes; the objective was to be classy and sophisticated, so that they would not attract attention in a Knightsbridge restaurant or a Mayfair hotel, on the arm of their powerful older clients. Special tastes were catered for: a raid on a house near the BBC headquarters at Langham Place revealed pornography, three flagellation canes, one of which had tin tacks secured to the end, a birch and two whips. Prosecutions were rare as the police had to rely on evidence from the neighbours or underworld rivals before they could raid a house.
¹⁸