Another myth exploded: Queen Victoria and the lesbians

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The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 outlawed "gross indecency" between but made no mention of relations between women.

There's a story that Queen Victoria insisted that a provision about women was taken out of the act after parliament had passed it because "women could not do such things". But the story is obvious nonsense.

British monarchs have never been able to go through laws passed by parliament and strike out anything they don't like. In theory they have the power to refuse to sign a whole act, but no monarch has done that since Queen Anne.

There's another version of the story which holds that the Queen has to be consulted before a bill starts to go through parliament and no minister could face broaching the subject of lesbianism with her.

We know the Crown is consulted on new laws even today, but I doubt this version too. If the government wanted to pass a law against lesbianism, surely the minister would have talked to one of Victoria's advisers man to man and left it to him to talk to her about it. Besides, there is no evidence of such a wish on the government's part.

At the heart of this myth lies the strange picture we have of Victorian Britain. Not only were the Victorians less Victorian than we imagine, Victoria was too.

When I thought of writing this post, I remembered a story from a television documentary long ago. Victoria was opening a new wing of an art gallery or something like that, and on the way to cut the ribbon she had to pass through a gallery hung with nudes. The gallery officials tried to hurry her through it, but she stopped and said "No, I like paintings like this."

I didn't find that, but I did come across this in the Guardian (22 May 2019):

"Queen Victoria is sometimes remembered as prudish, buttoned-up and disapproving, but a new display reveals a woman well in touch with the more sensuous side of her nature.

Romantic and risqué gifts exchanged between Victoria and Prince Albert are to go on display at Osborne House, the couple’s grand seaside retreat on the Isle of Wight, which is stuffed with art and fabulous objects that the couple bought for each other.

"There is an abundance of naked flesh here at Osborne in both two and three dimensions," said Michael Hunter, an English Heritage curator.

Helped by the ITV drama Victoria, many myths about the queen have been exploded but the image of her "as an older lady dressed in black and rather miserable" persists.

The birthday gifts show a very different side. "She was open to nudity and the sensuous – more open than Albert, who perhaps surprisingly was the more prudish of the pair."

So I'm sure Victoria could have, as it were, taken lesbianism in her stride.

For other myths about the Victorians see this Liberal England post:

The Victorians didn't cover piano legs out of prudishness: that was a joke they told at the expense of straitlaced Americans. 

They didn't pose their dead relatives in family photographs and there was no such thing as Brown Windsor soup.

I've just come across another example of spurious 19th-century history: the Frozen Charlotte doll.

Don't mention the Isle of Wight Separatists' 1950s terror campaign

If it weren't for Lord Bonkers, I should have taken this as a charming portrait of an English backwater 70 years ago.

In reality, 1956 saw the height of the Isle of Wight Separatists' terror campaign and the film was made in an attempt to assure potential visitors that all was well there despite the headlines.

Nowhere in this film do we see the internment camps for suspected Separatist sympathisers, the occupying British Army or the desperate poverty caused by the collapse of the island's major industry of producing tourist souvenirs that incorporate several different colours of sand.

Yet is was not the British government that saw off the Separatists, but their own error in attempting to raise money for arms by muscling in on some of Violent Bonham Carter's legitimate business interests in the East End of London. It was Violent's manor and the were out of order – indeed getting lairy – as they were soon shown.

The Joy of Six 1396

"Opportunities to object are limited. Roadblocks and checkpoints have been established at either end of the only lane in and out of the village. Cars are searched with sniffer dogs and ID demanded. All footpaths have been closed off, and unless you live here you stand no chance of getting in. Secret Service agents keep a watchful eye on the hordes of police who are doing their bidding. In short, we’ve been completely sealed off from the outside world." An anonymous contributor to The Oxford Clarion describes life in the Cotswold village of Dean during JD Vance's visit.

Shaun Thompson was wrongly identified as a criminal by new police cameras. He explains why, if this technology is rolled out across the country, or is used at this year’s Notting Hill Carnival, as planned, such injustices will disproportionately affect Black people.

"Climate action does not just need good policy, it also needs good psychology. Understanding and addressing how people perceive climate measures is essential to avoid backlash and build lasting public consent." Wouter Poortinga looks at the psychology of winning public support for climate policies.

"The conference circuit, once lively with questioning and dialogue, now contends with a new problem: the 'ghost academic'. These are scholars whose names appear in conference programmes and proceedings, whose abstracts are listed, yet who never turn up to deliver their presentations. They accrue the CV line, but never share the substance." Anne Tierney and Doug Specht say the obsession with metrics in academia is imperilling the tradition open intellectual exchange that was the hallmark of scholarly life.

JacquiWine on Rose Macaulay's The World My Wilderness. Here is Macaulay's description of a London bombsite: "They climbed out through the window, and made their way about the ruined, jungled waste, walking along broken lines of wall, diving into the cellars and caves of the underground city, where opulent merchants had once stored their wine, where gaily tiled rooms opened into one another and burrowed under great eaves of overhanging earth, where fosses and ditches ran, bright with marigolds and choked with thistles, through one-time halls of commerce, and yellow ragwort waved its gaudy banners over the ruins of defeated businessmen."

Patrick Glen looks back to the Isle of Wight Festival of 1970: "The lineup included the Who, Miles Davis, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, the Moody Blues, Jethro Tull, Sly and the Family Stone and Gilberto Gil; Jimi Hendrix played one of his last performances before his death."

There's nothing unique about the tradition that you don't reveal whodunnit in The Mousetrap

Much is made of Mousetrap omerta - the taboo against revealing the identity of the murderer in Agatha Christie's record-breaking play. But it never used to be a unique tradition.

Whodunnits were one of the staples of weekly repertory theatre, and it was common for such plays to end with one of the cast saying something like:

"We hope you enjoyed the play and will tell your neighbours about it - but please don't tell them who the killer is."

An example of this comes in one of the funnier anecdotes in David Hemmings' memoirs.

The summer of 1960 saw him in rep at Ryde on the Isle of Wight. This doesn't sound like the top of the tree for a young actor, but he was 18 and wanted to be with his first wife Jenny Lewes. This newspaper cutting comes from that summer. 

To make the sometimes very ordinary plays more fun, the cast had evolved a game where they had to pass an apple to each other without altering an action of the play. So if you had the apple, passing a letter to another actor would present a perfect opportunity for getting rid of it. And the actor left with the apple at the end of the play had to buy the first round of drinks.

In one performance of a whodunnit, Hemmings was the detective. Alone on the stage with the victim's corpse, which was under a sheet, he was giving the final speech, explaining how the murder had been done. As the corpse had the apple, he reckoned he was safe.

Suddenly, the corpse reared up, dragged itself across the stage issuing horrible guttural noises, passed the apple to Hemmings under cover of the sheet and then died again at his feet.

After that, says Hemmings, it didn't seem worth asking the audience not to reveal the ending of the play - it would never end that way again.

If you do want to know the murderer in The Mousetrap, there's Wikipedia. Or you can listen to Tom Holland blurt it out in one of the better editions of The Rest is History.

On being a member of the Four Tops in an insane place

There was a headline on Sky News the other day:

Four Tops star says hospital put him in straitjacket and ordered psychological examination after not believing he was famous singer

I thought it too serious for my Headline of the Day Award, though 'funny' headlines often stop being funny if you think about them for more than a moment.

But this story did make me think of several things.

The first was a description of Shelton Hospital, Shrewsbury, in the 1960s:

The hospital consumed 865 pints of milk per day. The grounds were infested with feral cats, which were a source of ringworm. There was a single post box, by the front door, for patients, staff and the hospital itself, which was often full to overflowing, meaning that letters often went missing. Nurses smoked constantly, in part to block out Shelton all-pervading smell: of a house locked up for years, in which stray animals had occasionally come to piss. The kitchen had a butcher with an attitude problem and the laundry sometimes went wrong, meaning that patients were forced to wear socks shrunk to half their normal size.

That comes from Sam Knight's book The Premonitions Bureau, which I still heartily recommend, and I first quoted it in a column I wrote for the the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy.

Yes, mental hospitals are strange and intimidating places, particularly the old county asylums like Shelton. 

I once went to meet a psychologist at Queen's Park Hospital, Blackburn, in the course of my old day job. The signage for the clinical psychology department ran out before I got there, so I had to ask someone the way. 

I had visions of the conversation going: "I'm from the British Psychological Society." "Of course you are, dear. Come with me." (When I told this story back at the office, my colleagues kindly said they would have denied all knowledge of me if the hospital had rung them up.)

So how do you show you are sane in such a strange place? Alexander Morris, who is the lead singer of the current incarnation of the Four Tops, struggled to do it and I think I would have too.

But don't just take our word for it. Here is the beginning of the abstract of a famous paper on the subject - the second thing the headline made me think of:

It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals. The hospital itself imposes a special environment in which the meanings of behavior can easily be misunderstood. The consequences to patients hospitalized in such an environment - the powerlessness, depersonalization, segregation, mortification, and self-labeling - seem undoubtedly countertherapeutic.

That paper is On Being Sane in Insane Places by David l. Rosenhan, which was published in Science in 1973.

The paper itself is behind a paywall, but you can read a more lay account of the experiment it describes by Rosenham on The Wayback Machine. And that experiment has its own Wikipedia entry - Rosenhan experiment:

In the first part, psychiatrically sane people said they heard hallucinations, to get admitted to a psychiatric ward. This was done to test how the psychiatric hospitals would react. The second part was the reverse. Rosenhan told the hospitals, he would send fake patients. But he did not send any fake patients.

The results of the study were very controversial. When Rosenhan sent the people, the hospitals were unable to detect them. On the other hand, when he told them he had sent some patients, but really did not, the hospitals recognised a large number of fake patients. The study said that it was impossible to tell a difference between the sane and the insane.

And the third thing the headline made me think of was a story about a therapeutic poetry study group in a hospital on the Isle of Wight where an elderly patient rightly declared that, years before, he had written one of the poems they were studying.

I found it in a piece by a hero of this blog, Iain Sinclair:

[David] Gascoyne's rescue, his return to life in the suburban house on the Isle of Wight, was brokered by two remarkable people. Judy Lewis, a vet's estranged wife, who read his "September Sun: 1947" to a depressed group at Whitecroft Hospital, provoked the previously mute writer to speech. "I am the poet." "Yes, dear. I'm sure you are." But it was true. He was the poet and it was always 1947. He became a living quotation recovered from a midden of fragments: "All our trash to cinders bring." There was to be a notable late flowering for the willowy and disconsolate figure in the bow tie, the time traveller from the 30s. Gascoyne married Judy. He had found his loving companion and chauffeur.

You can read more about David Gascoyne in his Wikipedia entry.

As I said, Alexander Morris is the current lead singer with the Four Tops, but I've gone back to the band's glory years for my choice of video above.

I'm not sure his predecessor would have faired any better though:

"We've got a patient here who says he's Levi Stubbs." 

"Sure, and I'm Sam Cooke."