How crossdresser was accepted in Victorian Edinburgh

WITH petticoats swishing the ground, blonde tresses artfully curled beneath a bonnet and a small bustle giving the fashionable figure of the day, Stella Boulton’s appearance on Princes Street turned heads.

But not all the gasps and curious stares were perhaps for the reasons hoped. For Stella was in fact Ernest, a young man who had dedicated his life to become a female impersonator both on the stage and in Victorian drawing rooms. And the six months he spent in the Scottish capital had the place agog with speculation and rumour.

Not only that, Boulton’s time in the city saw him have affairs which would ultimately end the promising careers of the then US consul and a senior manager of the Post Office, by entangling them in the infamous trial in which both Boulton and his friend Frederick “Fanny” Park were charged with acts of indecency.

Their story has been a footnote to other historical sex scandals of the Victorian era – particularly that of Oscar Wilde – but now author Neil McKenna has put them centre stage with his new book Fanny & Stella, which for the first time tells how they not only scandalised London, but also the grimly Presbyterian Edinburgh of the late 1860s.

Yet it also paints a picture of how the pair were generally kindly accepted as oddities by a society which refused to believe that homosexuals existed in Britain – it was apparently “a continental practice” – until their trial began.

“Edinburgh in the 1860s and 70s was a very dour place, very Presbyterian, and so an exotic creature like Stella certainly got people talking,” laughs McKenna. “Ernest as Stella was very beautiful. He could easily pass for being a woman, but obviously there would be things which gave him away, and that’s what made him an object of curiosity. Nothing like him had been seen in Edinburgh before.”

According to McKenna, Boulton had come to Edinburgh to recuperate after a rather delicate operation, at the behest of an admirer, Louis Hurt, who had met him while he was working for the Post Office in London.

“Stella thought Louis was a very dull person. He didn’t really like the dressing in drag, and he wanted her to grow a moustache and generally appear more manly, but Stella never gave in to that. However she did agree to come to Edinburgh in late 1869 when Louis was stationed there.

“Louis was in quite a senior position and did a lot of travelling around Scotland inspecting post offices, and Stella went with him some of the time, even as far as Wick and Thurso – but always dressed as a man then.

“I think Stella was expecting Edinburgh to be pretty boring, but in fact it was quite the opposite. My research for the book has shown that despite the Victorian veneer of society, be it London or Edinburgh, there were always sub-cultures and people would find each other if they wanted to. In fact the only problem was that Louis’ landlady Mrs Dickson had asked that the weekday tunes not be played on the piano on a Sunday.”

According to McKenna’s book there was “no shortage of gentleman callers” for Stella while she stayed in Hurt’s lodgings in Princes Street. “There was that roguish rough 
diamond John Jameson Jim... plain and honest Jack from Musselburgh... and the charming and helpful young man behind the counter at Messers Kensington and Jenners.”

And then there was John Safford Fiske, the US consul to Edinburgh and Leith. Fiske, who was acquainted with Louis Hurt, was living in George Street and his life apparently consisted of attending social events and arranging a marriage to an American heiress who was travelling to Edinburgh to meet him.

But, says McKenna, scratch beneath the surface and a different story emerges. “He seemed to have an attitude to marriage based on the ancient Greeks,” he says. “It was a duty and he would do it but his passion was for men. From the moment he arrived in Edinburgh he had sought out ‘adventures’ and had got together with brothers Donald and Robbie Sinclair – until Stella swept in.

“Fiske had never met anyone like her. He found her fascinating and compelling. He fell in love, and it was like a kind of madness. During the later trial there was correspondence from him to Stella which showed just how head over heels he was.”

Stella’s visit to Edinburgh might have been brief, but it left a trail of debts – mostly to Jenners – and also a record of affairs which would be brought out during Boulton’s trial.

Indeed when both Boulton and Park were finally arrested in London and charged with “conspiring and inciting persons to commit unnatural acts”, the long arm of the law reached all the way back to Edinburgh.

Fiske burned all Stella’s letters in his possession but unfortunately his to Stella were in the hands of the police. The last, a florid declaration of love, had been posted just 12 days before the arrest and included the boast that he had 11 photographs of Stella and four notes sealed in a packet.

Despite his protestations that the letter was just “foolishness” and the hope that his position as Consul would protect him, Inspector James Thompson of the Metropolitan Police who had arrested Boulton and Park finally asked Detective Officer Roderick Gollan of the Edinburgh City Police to search Fiske’s home.

McKenna says: “Gollan found three letters and two telegrams from Louis Hurt and in a hatbox were hidden photos of young men, but when he asked if there was anything else, for some reason, rather than just saying ‘no’, Fiske produced a box with photographs. Later that day he was taken into custody and eventually imprisoned.”

As for Louis Hurt, on the arrest of Stella, he asked for and was granted a leave of absence from the Edinburgh Post Office – though he was requested by the Post Master General to provide a full written explanation of “his relations with the young men in women’s clothes”.

McKenna says: “As the papers were full of further police arrests of those connected with Stella and Fanny he feared the worst.

“He knew compromising letters would be found and that he might be arrested too. So he decided to be proactive and went to London to find out what was really happening. And of course he was arrested there.”

However, despite the notoriety of Boulton and Park and the case against them, all four men were acquitted – largely on the basis that the legal profession could not believe the acts of which they were accused could take place on British soil.