Box Turtle Bulletin

Today In History, 1889: First Arrests In the “Cleveland Street Scandal”

Thomas Swinscow

The London Central Telegraph Office had two problems. The first one was that a number of its delivery boys had been found having sex with each other in the basement toilets of its central office. Not only that, but those same boys used their mobility engage in commercial sexual enterprises with gentlemen clients in a loosely organized prostitution ring. For that, the General Post Office had created its own investigative force in 1887 to crack down on prostitution and other crimes being committed in the postal service. In 1889, the Central Telegraph Office had another problem: cash had gone missing from its tills. Naturally, suspicion fell on those same messengers boys, one in particular: Thomas Swinscow, who was discovered to have had 18 shillings on him. That’s about £90 today, a sum which no messenger boy would be expected to have jangling around in his pocket. Swinscow explained that he didn’t steal it, but earned it fair and square. Well, not quite. After police pressed him further, he revealed that he had been paid “from going to bed with gentlemen” at the home of Charles Hammond, 35, of 19 Cleveland Street. He got four shillings to allow clients to “have a go between my legs” and “put their persons into me.” He only admitted to having done so twice in total. But never mind where the remaining ten shillings came from, because Swinscow gave up the names of three other telegraph messenger boys who Swinscow claimed to have worked for Hammond: Algernon Allies, Charles Thickbroom, and Henry Newlove — no, I’m not making that name up — who Swinscow claimed had introduced him to Hammond.

On July 6, 1889, Police went to 19 Cleveland Street to arrest Hammond and Newlove. But when they got there, they discovered that Hammond and Newlove were nowhere to be found. Later that afternoon, they found Newlove hiding in his mother’s home, but Hammond had already fled the country. Police charged the eighteen-year-old Newlove with “unlawfully, wickedly, and corruptly conspire, combine, confederate and agree to” procure young men “to commit the abominable crime of buggery.” And they pressed Newlove, Swinscow and the other messenger boys to cough up more names of men they had serviced. This is where things got tricky because the names implicated were big ones: Henry Fitzroy, Earl of Euston and Lord Arthur Somerset, an equerry to the Prince of Wales. More names were produced, including, most prominently, Prince Albert Victor, the eldest son of the Prince of Wales and grandson to Queen Victoria, and therefore the second in line to the throne.

L-R: Charles Hammond; Henry Fitzroy, Earl of Houston; and Lord Arthur Somerset.

There was never any proof of Prince Albert’s involvement, but even without it, the whole affair involved enough prominent people that it’s handling called for a certain delicacy. Not only was Hammond tipped off, but someone also warned Somerset, who fled first to Germany, then the South of France where he spent the rest of his life with a male companion. Hammond, meanwhile, fled to France, which expelled him to Belgium under British pressure. He then emigrated to the U.S., with Somerset paying for Hammond’s passage. Interestingly, neither man was ever extradited back to Britain, despite treaties being in place allowing Britain to do so. Instead, their cases were quietly dropped.

The same wasn’t quite so true for the messenger boys. Newlove was convicted in September of gross indecency and procuring. But in a surprising turn, he was sentenced to only four months hard labor. Gross indecency alone would get you two years at hard labor. The remaining less cooperative youths were sentenced to nine months of hard labor.

The whole story stayed out of the press, partly because police actions against houses of prostitutions were common enough to be boring, and partly because the police kept things very quiet. But Ernest Parke, a journalist for a tiny radical political weekly, The North London Press, found it odd that the boys had been given such light sentences. When he learned about Hammond’s escape, he poked around some more and discovered that the boys had fingered, so to speak, some rather prominent aristocrats.

On September 28, Parke broke the story in The North London Press, but without naming specific names. Two weeks later, he published a follow-up story naming Fitzroy in “an indescribably loathsome scandal in Cleveland Street.” He also said that both Lord Somerset and the Earl of Euston were allowed to escape to Peru to protect someone higher up. When reading between the lines, many readers came to understand that the higher-up was Prince Albert Victor.

Euston was, in fact, still in England, and filed suit against Parke for libel. That trial only ensured that the whole scandal would dominate the papers for weeks to come. But when the trial started, Parke refused to reveal his sources, and with no witnesses willing to come forward to back him up, Parke was found guilty for libel and sentenced to twelve months in prison. But another trial in December brought the case before the public’s attention, when Newlove’s defense attorney was charged with obstructing justice by warning Hammond of his imminent arrest, and thus allowing Hammond to flee the country. The attorney was convicted and sentenced to six weeks in prison.

MP Henry Labouchère

Member of Parliament Henry Labouchère, demanded an investigation of Parke’s allegations of a cover-up. Four years earlier, he successfully campaigned to add “gross indecency” to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1855. His amendment doing so was known as the “Labouchère Amendment.” Labouchère was convinced that the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, the Lord Chancellor of England and the Attorney-General impeded the investigation and allowed Somerset and Hammond to escape. He pressed this allegations so harshly that he was suspended from Parliament for a week. His proposal to form an investigative committee was rejected, 204-66.

The scandal faded, but the newspaper coverage had reinforced generally negative attitudes towards gay men by reinforcing the perception that the telegraph messenger boys had been corrupted and exploited by a homosexual upper class. (In fact, the boys had already played around with each other in the Telegraph Office’s restrooms long before they were introduced to Hammond.) When Oscar Wilde alluded to the scandal in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), one reviewer called it suitable for “none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys.” When Wilde was put on trial for gross indecency in 1895, prosecutors questioned the West End erudite dandy about his associations with young working men. As for Prince Albert Victor, society gossip swirled around his sex life right up until his death in 1892, and it continued long after.