The Nymphs of the Pavement E-Book

Richard Gurnham

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 244

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

In 1842 the mayor lamented, 'There is more debauchery in Lincoln than in any other town of its size in the kingdom.' Lincoln Races was a magnet for vice: by 1828, one newspaper reported up to 500 'thieves, prostitutes and gamblers' on the course. But as the century progressed, market towns such as Louth, Horncastle and the ports of Boston and Grimsby began to report growing numbers of 'fallen women' from the neighbouring villages, where poverty ran rife. This book explores an extraordinary underworld of 'unfortunates' and bon vivants, all held in the thrall of the brothel-keepers – most of whom were female. Informative, tragic, compassionate and surprising, it reveals some incredible truths about life in Victorian Lincolnshire.

Leseprobe

To David, Hannah and Gene

Acknowledgements

In writing even a small book like this I find I have accumulated a number of debts. The idea for the book, which is rather different to anything I have written before, came from a conversation with an old friend and former pupil of mine, the historian Tom Green, who had already unearthed a surprising amount of information on this subject regarding the little town of Louth, where we both live. Tom’s work on local nineteenth-century newspaper reports of police court hearings led me to attempt the same, but for Lincoln and Boston, and this book is the result.

I would also like to acknowledge and thank the staff at the Lincoln, Boston, Grimsby and Louth libraries. In all four libraries I have found only a cheerful and courteous willingness to be as helpful as possible. I must also thank Neil Wright for four of the illustrations (10–13) and for giving up his time to allow me to ‘pick his brains’ on numerous questions, particularly regarding Victorian Boston; and also Ms Julie Bush of the Collection (the Lincoln Museum and Art Gallery) for letting me reproduce, as illustrations for the book, Peter de Wint’s painting, Lincoln Cathedral From Drury Lane and W. Callow’s painting High Street (illustrations 3 and 7). Most of the other pictures which I have used to illustrate this book come from my own collection, but for permission to use the extract from Thomas Espin’s North-west View of the Town of Louth (illustration 1) I have to thank Ruth Gattenby, who found it for me, and the trustees of Louth Museum.

I am also grateful to Ruth Boyes of The History Press who has been responsible for converting my typescript into this finished work, and to Cate Ludlow, the Commissioning Editor for Local History, for her enthusiasm about the book and her support. Finally, as always, thanks are due to my family, for their support and encouragement, for reading the first drafts and for their advice, and special thanks to Jeannie, my wife, for not only putting up with yet another book but also taking two of the pictures I have used as illustrations (5 and 16).

Richard Gurnham, 2014

Contents

Title

Dedication

Acknowledgements

LINCOLN

1 Introduction: ‘More debauchery in Lincoln …’

2 The Castle Dykings

3 The Steep Hill–Michaelgate Area

4 The Waterside

5 The High Street and The Park

BOSTON

6 Introduction: ‘More vice and immorality than ever’

7 Wormgate and Witham Place

8 The Market Place and Wide Bargate

9 The Lincoln Lane–West Street Area

HOMESFORPENITENTFEMALESANDFALLENWOMEN

10 The Lincoln and Lincolnshire Penitent Females’ Home

11 The Boston Diocesan Home for Fallen Women

Bibliography

Copyright

LINCOLN

1

Introduction

‘More debauchery in Lincoln …’

Talking to his fellow magistrates in April 1842, the Mayor of Lincoln reportedly said that, in his view, ‘There is more debauchery in Lincoln than in any other town of its size in the kingdom’. This concern and alarm was shared by the editor of the Stamford Mercury and many others across the city wholeheartedly concurred. The number of brothels and prostitutes on the streets of the city was certainly growing and formed part of a national trend across early Victorian England. Even in rural Lincolnshire, small market towns such as Louth and Horncastle, and the little ports of Boston and Grimsby, reported growing numbers of prostitutes who had come from neighbouring villages where there was little work to be had for growing families and where many faced conditions of severe poverty and malnutrition. For the new Victorians, whether in London, Manchester or Lincoln, this was yet another major social and moral challenge thrown up by the enormous growth in towns and cities which they were witnessing.1

Prostitution and Georgian Lincoln

Prostitution was, of course, not new in Lincoln. It is often called ‘the oldest profession’ and we can be confident that prostitutes were among those who followed the first Roman legionaries to Lincoln in about AD 47. According to one of Lincoln’s first historians, Adam Stark, writing in 1810, there were numerous brothels in the city at the end of the eighteenth century. He believed that by the time he was writing they were becoming less common but later evidence suggests he was being rather optimistic. Some lodging houses were particularly notorious as ‘houses of ill fame’ but a number of the city’s inns and gin shops were also infamous as places where one could always expect to find one or two prostitutes. The Mason’s Arms on Guildhall Street, for instance, was said to be a particularly popular haunt for prostitutes and their clients during the Lincoln Races.2

Prostitution, together with drunkenness, gambling and petty crime, had long been a feature of the Lincoln Races which were held in late February or March for steeple chases and in September or October for flat races. In October 1828 one newspaper reported that at the recent Lincoln Races there had been about 500 ‘thieves, prostitutes and gamblers’ on the course. Riotous behaviour, sexual liaisons with prostitutes and drunken fights were common occurrences, both at the racecourse and in the numerous inns that the racegoers and prostitutes patronised in the city in the evenings. It was principally to combat these problems that the corporation had sponsored a new Lighting, Paving and Watching Act that year. Under this a new police force could be established for the city, and it was hoped that this would prove more effective than the city’s previous reliance on the part-time watchmen appointed by the separate parishes.3

The year before, at the mayor’s feast, Richard Mason, the town clerk, said that he hoped the new mayor would have more success than his predecessors in tackling and discouraging the ‘disgraceful tumults and dangerous disorders’ which were such a particular feature of the race weeks. The ancient city of Lincoln was, he said, ‘half a century behind other cities in point of good order and civilization’. He hoped that the creation of a new police force might have the desired effect, and that the prosecution of one or two of Lincoln’s many brothel-keepers might also help diminish what he saw as ‘a terrible nuisance’. Disorderly houses, as brothels were usually termed, and ‘the nymphs of the pave’, as prostitutes were sometimes called by the editor of the Mercury, were both numerous, although no one was quite sure how many of either there were. The brothel-keepers carried on their business, said Mason, ‘with impunity and bravado and outrageous indecency’.

The new police force was an improvement, but Mason’s hopes were not fulfilled. In 1831 there were again reports of very large numbers of thieves, pickpockets and prostitutes at the Lincoln Races, and on this occasion there was also considerable violence. Riots broke out when local people, enraged by the cheating of the professional gamblers (known as thimble-riggers), attacked them and began overthrowing their thimble-tables and seizing back their money. The gamblers defended themselves by using the legs of their thimble-tables as weapons, and for a while held their own. The assault was soon reinforced, however, by about fifty gentlemen and fox-hunting farmers, and the gamblers fled for their lives, battered and bruised, while their booths were destroyed and their carriages set on fire.4

Drink, Prostitution and the Growth of the City in the 1830s

Prostitution might not have been a new phenomenon in the 1820s and 1830s but the perception was that it was growing rapidly, just as the city itself was. It was one of the new social problems associated with the growth of towns, along with overcrowded and insanitary housing, a great increase in petty crime and increasing incidents of drunkenness. Lincoln was still a relatively small city at the end of the 1830s, with a population of a little under 14,000, but it had doubled in size since the beginning of the century. Some of the poorest parishes, where the greatest problems were to be found, had almost tripled in size and the speed of the city’s growth was quickening. In the 1830s alone the city grew by almost a quarter, twice the rate achieved in the previous decade. For hundreds of years the old city had barely grown at all, or even shrunk, and it had long been a mere shadow of the great medieval wool town of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Even the Roman city of the third and fourth centuries had been larger than the Lincoln of the eighteenth century.5

For many in the city, and especially Dissenters and Evangelicals, drink and prostitution were twin evils that had to be tackled quickly. In 1830 proposals were drawn up to establish a charitable society which could work towards the reformation of prostitutes, but at first little seems to have been achieved, and it would not be until the following decade, when concerns about the moral state of the city were greater than ever, that a successful initiative along these lines would be undertaken. More successful, however, were attempts to establish a temperance society. When this was set up in 1833, it was hailed by the Mercury as one of the most important movements of the time.6

With its large fairs and numerous important markets, Lincoln had a great many public houses but, as the municipal commissioners found when they arrived in the city to investigate the work of the Lincoln councillors, there was considerable laxity – if not downright corruption – in the magistrates’ control of licenced premises. Of the sixty-two or so licenced houses in the city in the early 1830s, at least nine belonged to members of the corporation and two to a magistrate. In these cases there was very good reason for their tenants to believe that their licences would be renewed whatever happened on their premises. The tenant of one of the houses owned by the magistrate had, on a number of occasions, been prosecuted and fined for keeping a disorderly house, patronised by thieves and prostitutes, but his licence had always been renewed. The other house was actually occupied by the magistrate himself, and this had also kept its licence although there had been complaints that this too was a disorderly house, much frequented by women of ‘bad character’. The indulgence of the Bench to one of their own fellow magistrates inevitably undermined any attempts to pursue a firm line when making licensing decisions generally. This can only have encouraged tenants of licenced houses to turn a blind eye to the presence of prostitutes on their premises, or even to have encouraged them if it was thought that they might attract more customers.7

The difficulties faced by the magistrates, police and parish officials in maintaining good order were made much greater, however, by the decision of the Duke of Wellington’s government in 1830 to introduce a free trade in beer shops and beer. It was hoped that this measure – the Sale of Beer Act – would create new opportunities for the poor to augment their meagre incomes by becoming beerhouse keepers, while at the same time doing something to wean the working man and woman off the harmful effects of spirits, and especially gin, to which vast numbers were apparently addicted. Wellington was immensely pleased with his measure and thought it one of his finest achievements. He and his supporters claimed that it would improve the living standards of the poor, partly by making the workingman’s beer cheaper, while at the same time improving public health by reducing the sales of spirits, and also promoting the sale of hops and malt, to the great benefit of British agriculture.8

In the event, the results for Lincoln were little short of disastrous. The number of wine and spirit merchants and the number of dram shops, which specialised in the sale of spirits and were particularly popular with many prostitutes, both continued to grow, but whereas before 1830 there had been no beerhouses, by 1842 there were thirty-nine in the city, and the number of inns and taverns had also increased. In 1826, when the first of William White’s trade directories for the city was published, there had been sixty-six, but by 1842 the number had risen to seventy-three. The number of persons prosecuted for being drunk and disorderly was rising and there was no discernible decline in the consumption of spirits.

Reports of prostitutes being arrested and fined for being drunk and disorderly, and for other drink-related offences, became extremely common in the Lincoln newspapers in the second half of the century, but they make their first regular appearances in the 1830s and 1840s. One early example was that of Elizabeth Jevons, a prostitute who in September 1836 was charged with ‘being drunk and using obscene language in the streets’. By the late 1840s and 1850s, when the magistrates were becoming increasingly alarmed by the growing number of such incidents, offences such as this could often lead to at least a heavy fine or a short spell in the gaol on New Road, ‘with hard labour’, but at this stage the magistrates tended to still take a more relaxed approach. When Elizabeth Jevons appeared before the mayor she was given a severe reprimand, told to amend her wicked ways and discharged.9

The 1840s: Increasing Concern

By the 1840s, the twin evils of drunkenness and prostitution were coming to be seen not so much as occasional matters, rearing their ugly heads particularly during the race weeks and, to a lesser extent, during the various fairs held every year in the city, but rather as permanent and widespread problems. The outburst of the mayor in April 1842, with which this chapter began, marks the beginning of this new phase of concern. In reporting the words of the mayor, the Mercury also told its readers that the city’s magistrates had given directions for the indictment of a number of brothel-keepers and that:

A really determined effort is to be made for stemming the torrent of vice and crime which the keepers of these infamous dens pour upon the city.

It was debateable how much of the crime in the city could really be traced to the brothels but there seems little doubt that the number of brothels and the problems associated with prostitution were increasing. More and more young women were being drawn into this largely vicious trade which, as the Mercury noted in typically lurid terms, quickly destroyed them and caused enormous misery:

Girls just emerging from childhood are lured into the loathsome evils of those monsters attired in fine dresses, at so much a week; and when their charms fail to attract and bring in money, or they are overtaken by disease, they are kicked out of doors to seek refuge in some still more dreadful den, or to wear out the remnant of their lives in penance in the Union.10

A number of brothels were closed but with little effect. As soon as one was closed another would open, and many of the women working in the city were working alone on the streets, and not in a brothel. At the end of April 1842, with the annual Hiring Fair about to begin, the Chronicle told its readers that both prostitutes and pickpockets ‘swarm in all directions’. The new police would certainly have their work cut out.

The true problem was poverty and the lack of alternative employment. The city was growing more rapidly than ever in the 1840s and among those coming into the city were many young women still in their teens or early twenties for whom there were few other choices. Many found work as domestic servants but this hardly appealed to all. It often meant a life of great drudgery, very little independence and very low wages. It is perhaps not surprising that some found the prospect of the higher earnings to be made through prostitution and the dream of being able to wear fine dresses more appealing.11

The economic causes of prostitution were barely recognised, however, by those who felt it to be their Christian mission to try to rescue young women from their wretched and degraded lives. The issue was almost always seen in religious and moral terms. Prostitutes were described, somewhat romantically, as young women who had ‘strayed from the path of righteousness’ (to quote one popular phrase). A woman who became a prostitute was committing a sin, for which she would need to repent if she was to be saved. Moreover, she was also very clearly demonstrating the moral weakness of her sex. Women were generally seen as inferior to men in almost every respect, and so prone to vanity that some might choose to be prostitutes in the hope of wearing fine clothes which they could not otherwise afford. Very few of those who worked so earnestly to establish the Penitent Females’ Home in the city in 1847 had any real understanding of the true nature of the lives of the women who became prostitutes. Although some of these women may have initially dreamed of fine dresses, for the majority who ended up selling sex on the streets of Lincoln it was not dresses and finery they craved but rather the money to buy food and drink and to pay their rent.12

Prostitution and the Growth of Victorian Lincoln

During the nineteenth century the population of the city increased sevenfold, from 7,205 in 1801 to 48,784 at the beginning of the twentieth century. The most rapid growth came in the second half of the century, and especially in the 1870s, when it expanded by almost 40 per cent in ten years, and at the end of the century it was still rising rapidly. The arrival of the railways in the 1840s – rather late compared with many other towns – made possible the development of large-scale engineering, located at first mainly along the south bank of the Witham. The great engineering works established by Nathaniel Clayton and Joseph Shuttleworth near Stamp End Lock in the 1840s began the transformation of the city from a quiet little cathedral market town into a rapidly expanding centre for engineering, specialising in providing the new steam-powered machinery needed for modern farming. Other entrepreneurs soon followed Clayton and Shuttleworth’s lead and the city’s population grew as workers moved to the city to find employment in this new industry.13

Most of the newcomers were young people who had not yet married and started a family, and many were young women from desperately poor rural backgrounds, with few skills and no education, but anxious to find any work they could. The new influx both created a demand for the town’s sex industry and provided the women and girls who would supply it. And as the city grew during the nineteenth century so also grew the number of inns and beerhouses, dram shops and brothels.

It is difficult to say much about the men who were the prostitutes’ clients. Usually they are only mentioned in court cases where the man is claiming that a prostitute has robbed him, or where the man is charged with assaulting a prostitute, which was not an uncommon event. This does not give us a representative sample but the evidence we have certainly suggests that the great majority were either farmers or farm servants who had come in to the city for the various markets and fairs, or local workingmen, very often young unmarried men who were drinking too much and looking for some sexual excitement.

Only in a minority of cases can the women’s backgrounds be traced, sometimes through census records and sometimes in the details that emerge at inquests, when a woman had been found dead at a brothel or, in at least one case, where her corpse had been found floating in the Brayford Pool. It will be seen, however, that most of the women who became prostitutes in Lincoln in these years probably came from very poor families, very often from villages many miles from the city. Moreover, although the newspapers do occasionally remark on how well dressed a prostitute might be, this is invariably the exception, and always worthy of comment. The great majority of the women who became prostitutes lived out their lives in the most miserable poverty, relieved only by spells of heavy drinking, which all too often lead in turn to a rather longer spell in the city prison.

A few prostitutes may have been able to make enough to put money aside for the future but the great majority earned very little, and their income could be measured in pennies and shillings. On some days they would earn nothing at all and could quickly get into debt. Streetwalking was a highly casual and seasonal occupation, dependent on the day of the week and the time of the year. They had to adjust their charges accordingly and some could not always make a living from it and had to resort in slack times to other forms of casual employment, such as needlework or laundering, or even to the workhouse. Many of the women who became prostitutes may not have appreciated just how dangerous and precarious an occupation they had chosen. Streetwalking could offer a certain degree of autonomy but it did not liberate women from a life of poverty and insecurity.

Moreover, young women from poor families could expect very little help from their parents if, that is, they had any. Poor parents could not afford to keep grown-up daughters at home if they were not in work. Young working-class women had always been expected to support themselves and contribute to the family income. Declining employment opportunities for women in the countryside meant that these single women were increasingly required to seek work outside the home, and sometimes to migrate to nearby urban areas to find alternative employment. When young women from Lincolnshire villages arrived in Lincoln looking for work they were expected to fend for themselves and not burden their family with pleas for support.

By the end of the century, poor women with nothing to sell but their bodies could be found in almost every part of the city. The rich, the poor and the ‘middling classes’ necessarily lived close together, and behind many of the cities’ main roads, lined with the well-built houses of the better-off or with rows of highly respectable shops, one might find a little court or passageway into which the smallest and cheapest housing had been squeezed by some speculative builder or landlord, hoping to make a good profit on his investment and a steady income. It was down these dark and smelly passages, where few of the well-to-do would ever venture, that the great majority of the city’s prostitutes and brothels were to be found. Most of the town’s brothels were tiny, unhealthy and overcrowded cottages standing in a row of half a dozen or more similar cottages, all of which shared one or two privies and an ash-bin, both of which might be rarely emptied. More salubrious ‘houses of ill-fame’ might have existed in the city but there is no evidence of them until the end of the century. The brothel-keepers were sometimes single women and sometimes a couple, although not always married, and almost invariably the female brothel-keeper was herself either a former prostitute or a current one. A house became a brothel if the tenant chose to let a room or, more often, a share of a room to another prostitute, and few such brothels were large enough to ever have more than three or four women staying in them. Some of the city’s inns and beerhouses were also in reality brothels, with some of the women employed as servants also expected to work as prostitutes.

There is no evidence of any criminal organisation controlling or supplying the industry. This could be found in some of the country’s larger cities and ports, where gangs would sometimes be found organising the import of foreign prostitutes for the brothels. In Lincoln, however, the women who turned to prostitution appear to have done so without any coercion other than the twin necessities of finding employment of some sort and somewhere to live. It was said, probably quite truly, that young women arriving in the city looking for work were often quickly recruited into the trade. Brothel-keepers were constantly on the lookout for new recruits, particularly in some of the more notorious inns, dram shops and beerhouses, and they would expect their friends and contacts in these places to recommend them to any young woman arriving in the city looking for work. Some women also came to the city specifically to find work as a prostitute, and needed no encouragement; some were simply following their mothers or older sisters into the profession.

Most of the city’s brothel-keepers were themselves poor women struggling to make ends meet. They were small-scale lodging housekeepers and most did not employ the young women who lodged with them. Their lodgers usually kept their own earnings and paid for their rent from what they earned, and thus enjoyed some independence. Only if they fell into debt and owed rent to the brothel-keeper did they become financially dependent. When this happened some landladies would keep some of their lodgers’ clothes as a security to ensure they did not leave the brothel before they had paid off their debts, and this sometimes led to conflict between the brothel-keeper and prostitute. The brothel-keepers’ attitude to their young lodgers was inevitably somewhat mercenary. They needed them to go out on the streets and into the bars and beerhouses to seek clients and earn money. Not surprisingly, the impression gained from some of the court cases are of hard women who had had a hard life, but the brothel-keeper could also take a motherly interest in ‘their girls’ and help them out when they were down on their luck by waiving the rent or lending items of clothing.

Generally speaking, prostitution in Lincoln was a trade organised by women rather than by men. There are very few references in newspaper reports of either pimps or bullies. Even in those cases where a brothel was being run by a couple it was usually the woman who was principally responsible for it, and the man would have other employment.

In early Victorian Lincoln, one area in particular was identified by the local press and the police as ‘a den of infamy’. This was the so-called Castle Dykings, a small area comprising some thirty houses recently built along Westgate and Union Road, in the north-western corner of the castle ditch. In August 1844, a Mr Ward, who owned property nearby, complained to the magistrates that the value of houses in the area was suffering because of the large number of brothels in the vicinity. He claimed that as a result he could not let two of his houses to decent folk and was losing around £15 a year. This then prompted the rather embarrassing revelation that some of those who owned the houses which were being used as brothels were themselves members of the town council, and thus, in the words of the Mercury, ‘derive profit from the awful prostitution and crime of this filthy locality’. Not surprisingly, the area had already attracted the attention of the police, and the superintendent was able to give the magistrates a complete list of the prostitutes, brothel-keepers and landlords to be found there. Brothels, it was noted, were an attractive investment, as the Mercury explained: ‘The occupiers pay better rents and more readily than other people.’14

In January 1846, further concerns about the number of brothels in the Dykings prompted the grand jury at the city quarter sessions to call for the indictment of the brothel-keepers. This ‘sink of iniquity’ was said to be ‘propagating vice and crime throughout the city’, but the law only allowed action to be taken by the magistrates if there were sufficient complaints from neighbouring householders. The city council could not initiate proceedings but it joined in the condemnation. The police were urged to keep a close watch on the area and bring offenders to justice, and any member of the public who brought an indictment was promised that they would have their costs awarded by the court.

As the Mercury lamented, the Castle Dykings area had, until very recently, been a most salubrious part of the city, where families had enjoyed a pleasant stroll, with fine views to the west. Now, it claimed, one could not walk in the area without being accosted by a prostitute. In about 1784, when the area had been almost entirely open countryside, artist Samuel Grimm had chosen to sketch the cathedral and castle from near here.15