Prostitution in Victorian Colchester: Controlling the Uncontrollable

By Jane Pearson and Maria Rayner

The decision to build a new army camp in the small market town of Colchester in 1856 was well received and helped to stimulate the local economy after a prolonged period of economic stagnation. Before long the Colchester garrison was one of the largest in the country and the town experienced an economic upturn as well as benefiting from the many social events organized by officers. But there was a downside: some of the soldiers' behavior was highly disruptive and, since very few private soldiers were allowed to marry, prostitution flourished. Having compiled a database of nearly 350 of Colchester's nineteenth-century prostitutes, the authors examine how they lived and operated and who their customers were.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Essex Publications
• Release date: Mar 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781912260041

Book preview

D’Alton.

Introduction

There are still few histories of the working poor and even fewer in which they have names and faces and stories to tell.¹

This is a local history of the town of Colchester in the second half of the nineteenth century. The focus of the study is the town’s attempt to control prostitution, which flourished in the town following the arrival of a large army garrison in 1856. When we began our research in 2011 we were surprised and fascinated by the amount and quality of the information we discovered on Colchester’s nineteenth-century prostitutes, but it soon became evident that these women were part of a much bigger story and that their lives made sense only when considered in the context of both the developing town and nineteenth-century class and gender relations.

The ‘ancient town and borough’

Maps drawn early in the nineteenth century show Colchester as a town full of green spaces within its Roman walls, surrounded by fields and common land, market gardens and orchards. The river Colne flowed around its northern and eastern side through beautiful riverside meadows, providing power for several water mills. There was also a port at the Hythe, although its importance waned after the railway arrived in the 1840s. The wool-weaving trade of the eighteenth century had been replaced to some extent by several silk-spinning factories and large tailoring firms, all employing predominantly girls and women, who worked for long hours and erratic pay. By the nineteenth century Colchester was a market town providing diverse opportunities for its residents and visitors, including business venues, professional services, small productive industries, shopping and entertainment. The High Street had several well-established inns, such as the Cups, the White Hart, the George and the Red Lion, as well as the sites of monthly assemblies, meeting places for official business and a variety of societies and public meetings. Until the 1860s the High Street was, in addition, the location of the market, a significant event for business and sociability. But it also caused considerable congestion in the High Street, already reduced in width by a Middle Row and St Runwald’s church. Middle Row and St Runwald’s were demolished and the market moved to another site by 1880. The market brought business into town and some of Colchester’s traders responded with the provision of places of refreshment, including beerhouse brothels. From the 1870s the town began to acquire, in Andrew Phillips’ words, a significant industrial base.²

Figure 1. Colchester High Street, 1858, showing market pens and St Runwald’s church. Twenty years later the church was demolished and the market removed to Middleborough.

There was a nebulous geographical dimension to prostitution in nineteenth-century Colchester that was related to the economy of the town rather than to prostitution itself, which was not restricted to any particular area of town. While prostitutes tended to live in the poorer streets in town, where lodgings were cheap, such as Magdalen Street, Osborne Street and Vineyard Street, which were near both the garrison and one of the silk factories, many lived elsewhere. Their cheap lodgings were crammed in among the overcrowded insanitary dwellings and ramshackle premises that made up the streets outside the Roman walls. Their neighbours were shoemakers, tailors, bricklayers, carpenters, tailoresses, silk throwers, laundresses and charwomen. Except for the ragged school in Stanwell Street, this area was not a site of much interest to the middle classes and it was not where the elite of the town lived. They favoured Head Street and the top of East Hill until the Lexden Road was developed with an impressive array of large houses and terraces. This might suggest that there was little obvious overlapping of urban space. But Colchester was too small a town to be able to demarcate its streets with any social exactitude. There were a few large businesses in this south-east quadrant run by men whose business success earned them a place among the elite or, at the very least, ensured that the elite had some first-hand knowledge of the quarter. And prostitutes lived and worked all over, picked pockets in the High Street, shoplifted in Crouch Street, ran brothels on North Hill. Respectable women walking to church passed public houses where prostitutes drank with soldiers. The police responded to trouble when it arose, but there is little evidence that they policed the area in the thorough manner that Lee claims they did in Kent in the same period.³

Colchester was a borough, electing its own MPs and organising its own concerns under a series of charters. It had a complex hierarchy of freemen, aldermen and councillors who, between them, organised most aspects of public life in the town through the raising and spending of rates, tolls, fines, licences and rents and the management of common lands and fisheries. The town council’s watch committee ran the borough police force from 1835.⁴ Colchester had its own bench of magistrates who met regularly at Petty and Quarter Sessions, using a borough jail and house of correction, erected in Ipswich Road in the 1830s, to punish petty criminals. The mayor, who chaired the bench of borough magistrates, was chosen annually from an exclusive group of aldermen, known as the Select Body, most of whom were employers, traders and doctors. Arthur Brown said it became so exclusive that

in 1834 it consisted of 48 Tories and only 2 Whigs, all 50 being Anglican in denomination. Because of the Corporation’s ludicrous oligarchic constitution, no reversal of this situation was possible …. Consequently the Select Body never hesitated to act in an unashamedly partisan and sectarian manner.⁵

These were the men responsible for the provision of social welfare and policing in the town, both of which involved dealing with prostitutes and their families.

Another controlling institution was the Anglican church. Colchester had 16 Anglican parishes and almost as many independent nonconformist chapels. Both had a firm grip on the education of the poor (such as it was) throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and were at the forefront of social reform to improve the town’s moral imperfections.⁶ Parishes also retained some civic responsibilities. Although the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 relieved the Anglican parish of the duty of organising social welfare, a responsibility which then passed to the Board of Guardians (some of whom were church officers), it retained the parish responsibility of reporting disorderly houses and brothels to the borough court so that those responsible could be disciplined and the premises shut down.

In 1850 the social elite of Colchester were predominantly landowners, traders or professional men who, in addition to paying rates and serving on municipal committees, were also expected to make some kind of personal social contribution, either in money or in time. An individual might be a wealthy employer paying mere subsistence wages, but at the same time he was a rate payer and was also expected to support charitable contributions and subscriptions and to serve his turn as Union Guardian or churchwarden while his wife and daughters helped out in charitable ventures that improved the lives of poor women and abandoned children or fed the poor from soup kitchens during severe winter weather. Under this system poverty was generally relieved but not addressed.

As Brown has pointed out, Colchester’s political elite controlled the poor in three ways: punishments under the law, giving time and money to charitable concerns and encouraging a spirit of self-help.⁷ The first relates to sentences handed out in the borough Petty and Quarter Session courts. The second and third were intended to encourage the poor to fend for themselves without recourse to the poor law. The poor law was supposed to provide no more than the bare necessities within the Union workhouse and this was seen by many of the poor to be a stigmatising and demeaning form of support to be avoided if possible. Outdoor relief was paid to the deserving poor at home but the undeserving, which included sick prostitutes and their children, were supported in extremis with indoor relief in the workhouse. The Essex Standard reported several cases of deaths outside the workhouse apparently due to lack of food and care in this period. It also reported a number of inquests into suicides apparently occasioned by an individual’s dread of incarceration in the workhouse. Most of these deaths involved disabled and elderly people.

Before 1880, when education was made mandatory for all children, only some of Colchester’s working-class girls would have encountered middle-class individuals and their culture in school and Sunday school. Once they became employees such encounters were often mediated by a factory supervisor or domestic housekeeper. Some would have worked long hours in the factory, the back-street shop or the kitchen basement, more or less oblivious of the nature of middle-class culture unless they were churchgoers. Ideally, from the employer’s point of view, they lived parallel lives, serving the needs of their wealthier neighbours respectfully and decorously. Strangely, it was prostitution, or the fear of it, that acted as a mediator. Various reforming initiatives collected some working-class girls into benign groups organised by middle-class ladies who laboured to raise money for their benefit and to spend time with them, diverting them from the low life of the beerhouse and encouraging them with Christian rhetoric and song to raise their expectations and to experience self-worth.

Several distinguished local historians have described the town’s political and social development, drawing attention to the malign influence of party, patriarchy and class in this period. This book investigates how the top-down political system dealt with prostitution in the context of significant socio-political changes. Up to the 1840s the town had an independent quasi-eighteenth-century air where men managed their own concerns with little intervention by the state, where a small group of influential men made decisions affecting a largely disenfranchised population, where the concept of public health was in its infancy and where fighting or other kinds of redress, rather than the expensive legal system, were often chosen as the means of righting wrongs. Poor health and living standards were, like poverty, generally accepted and endured as facts of life, and provided the motive for working to maintain one’s independence, which was itself a source of pride. Loss of independence was supported but also punished through the social welfare system and the Union workhouse.

As Colchester developed from the 1840s such attitudes changed, responding to national and local demands for more civilised urban living. Initially this meant attention to drains, roads and street lighting, muck heaps and offal and gas and water supplies, but before long it also meant policing how and where the poor lived and how they behaved in the tidier public streets. Drunkenness and swearing were particularly targeted; as poor men gained the vote their behaviour had to be managed.⁸ Colchester’s oligarchs would have preferred to draw a veil over prostitution in the town, but they were increasingly unable to do so. Prostitutes existed in such large numbers that they would not, and could not, be ignored or tidied away into backstreet brothels in a discreet red light district. They behaved in unacceptable ways in public, they gave the police considerable trouble, they endangered public house licences, venereal disease hospitalised too many of the garrison’s soldiers and their way of life drew attention to the execrable living conditions endured by so many poor families and children. But through the 1850s and 1860s the rationale was routinely made in the borough court that, as the law stood, nothing could be done.

In 1851 Colchester was a small market town with a population of 19,443. There were eight towns in Essex with a higher population at that date but only two or three of these, according to Kim, had more inmates in their Union workhouses. In Colchester around 70 per cent of inhabitants were working-class and 54 per cent were female.⁹ Since the end of the Napoleonic wars, 35 years before, the town had endured a prolonged period of economic stagnation. The decision to build a new army camp was warmly received and helped to stimulate the town’s businesses. Before long Colchester’s camp became one of the four largest garrisons in the nation, not only providing lucrative provisioning, building and other contracts but also producing a constant ebb and flow of military personnel into and out of the town with money to spend and a programme of sporting and other entertaining events, organised by the officers, to which the town’s inhabitants were invited. It also manifested empire in the town, as soldiers departed for and arrived back from extended tours of duty in countries such as South Africa, New Zealand and India. Colchester thus experienced an economic upturn, allowing it to spend money on some public health improvements, and its population increased steadily. The 1861 census showed that the garrison’s men had equalised the previous gender imbalance in the town. But there was a downside to the garrison’s presence. Firstly, some of the soldiers behaved in unacceptable ways: damaging property, fighting and thieving, obstructing the police and taking up prison allocations. Secondly, since the army did not allow many of its private soldiers to marry, a roaring trade developed in prostitution, with the inevitable consequence of escalating rates of venereal disease, something the army could not ignore. It might be thought that prostitution would be concealed and dealt with behind the scenes in the Victorian period. But, as we will see, this was not how it happened in Colchester.

Historiography

There is a substantial literature on the subject of Victorian prostitution and, for our purposes, it falls into three parts. One part was written by men and women living in the nineteenth century and interested in a variety of aspects of prostitution that affected, or helped them to think about, their own lives and work. A second part was written by historians in the past 40 years, using attitudes to prostitution as a point of entry into Victorian culture to help explain attitudes to sexuality and gender relations. A third, much smaller, set of studies investigates the local history of Victorian prostitution. We have consulted all of these genres, even though prostitution in nineteenth-century Colchester is no more than a footnote in any of them. Where a debated topic is of direct relevance to Colchester’s history of prostitution we deal with it in the relevant chapter. Here we will pick up some themes which are of a more general nature.

The first group of studies includes the work of men such as Henry Mayhew and William Acton. Their research was the foundation of a national debate by politicians, medics and campaigners. Acton was a member of the Royal College of Surgeons and had a private practice. He wrote as a medic and intended his work to be read by laymen as well as doctors. He distinguished two kinds of unchaste women, in which the first was ‘reduced to prostitution for support’ because she could not find a more honest livelihood. He saw this as something of a sanitary issue caused by overcrowded and underfunded living conditions and separate from the second – ‘a woman who gives for money that which she ought to give only for love; who ministers to passion and lust alone …’. This distinction between a passive and an active version of prostitution was widely accepted. Acton was not inclined to investigate the demand side of prostitution, but he felt that women were to blame for some of the demand, as they enabled man’s ‘natural instinct’ to be indulged, creating a ‘want … suggesting, arousing, stimulating evil thoughts and unhallowed passions’.¹⁰ Acton has been heavily criticised by historians both for his unscientific method and for his misogynistic approach, but others have appreciated his humane contribution to the debate and have used his work as a means of exploring preconceived ideas on Victorian sexuality.¹¹

Henry Mayhew’s investigative journalism into prostitution in London was at pains to distinguish a bewildering typology of prostitution. This included various ‘classes’ of professional prostitute, beginning with ‘seclusives’ who lived in private houses and apartments and ending with ‘park women’ who frequented parks and other secluded places. Some of this classification system seems to depend on the prostitute’s accommodation, but Mayhew also includes soldiers’ and sailors’ prostitutes, ‘thieves’ women’ and particular feminine types such as the ‘happy prostitute’ and the ‘weak-minded, affectionate girl’. In addition, he identified ‘clandestine prostitutes’ and ‘ladies of intrigue’. Perhaps identifying so many different situations of the ‘fallen’ state and including venues, personality and military men in the typology served to take the attention of the reader away from the male customer. The customer is not absent in Mayhew’s account, but he appears in the prostitutes’ descriptions of how they were seduced, which serves to dilute male responsibility for prostitution a good deal. Mayhew also said prostitution was a system of ‘blind and willful toleration’, a reference to one of the reasons for the general lack of effective control.¹²

But it was the moral discourse around prostitution that caught the attention and was of more interest to feminists, who were struggling to make sense of the unequal power relations that existed between men and women in law and the variety of ways these were expressed in Victorian culture and domesticity. For them, the body and soul of the prostitute became a symbol of the powerlessness of all women in a society where their comparative bodily weakness was compounded by their undoubted educational, economic and legal disadvantage. Some Victorian feminists held the extreme view that marriage was a controlling institution for the wife akin to slavery. They were interested in discussing alternatives to marriage and to investigating male attitudes to prostitution as an aspect of control. Some concluded that men’s attitudes to wives and to prostitutes were similar, as both female types existed to gratify male sexual desires.¹³ Such views were not calculated to win widespread male support. In any case, in Colchester a proportion of prostitutes were also wives or left prostitution in order to marry, evidence which calls into question such hard-and-fast attitudes to prostitution and to men’s behaviour. As Jane Rendall points out, working-class marriage did not conform to Victorian ideals.¹⁴ One reason for this was that the manual worker’s wage was not sufficient to raise a large family and the wife had to find a way of supplementing the family income at least until some of her children could earn, whereas, in the Victorian ideal, the wife’s role was to provide domestic comfort in exchange for her keep.¹⁵

More recently published studies encompass many of the aspects of prostitution we felt were significant in the Colchester story. Although this is a book about prostitution it is also about women’s lives, and we investigated the family life and upbringing of working-class girls, the kind of work they were expected to do and working-class marriage. Many of these studies suggested that, within marriage, male sexual tyranny ruled, at least in law, and that the contemporary discourse around sex was led by physicians who were also held to have authoritarian attitudes to women and sexuality. This encouraged us to look critically at the statements of Colchester’s medics, some of whom were magistrates, on subjects to do with sexual health and prostitution and to scrutinise accounts detailing the breakdown of working-class marriages and family life. There are also many fascinating studies on the influence of gender and class on reforming initiatives and the feminist response to the Contagious Diseases Acts (CDAs). These acts, which were passed in the 1860s, ordered prostitutes working in specified ports and garrison towns to undergo regular medical checks and to be imprisoned in a lock hospital if found to be displaying symptoms of venereal disease. For feminists trying to challenge the hegemony of men these acts were a splendid opportunity for an effective crusade against what was judged to be a legal and physical outrage against women and an advance in the social acceptance of prostitution backed up by law.¹⁶ Colchester scarcely entered this debate despite its extensive experience in the field and the presence of its lock hospital. When campaigners attempted to bring the debate to the 1871 by-election they were roughly handled by antagonistic men and their candidate failed to win the seat. Some studies of prostitution use the contemporary research to concentrate on the woman, her reasons for working the streets and the effects on her life and health of selling her body for another’s sexual gratification. These often include in-depth studies of life in the brothel and discussions of how reformers went about providing moral education and retraining in specialist institutions.¹⁷

In his book Prostitution and the Victorians Trevor Fisher made the point that attitudes to prostitution in the nineteenth century went through three distinct phases:

lethargic indifference coupled with puritan outrage in the first half of the century, an attempt at legalization from the 1850s to the 1870s, and a final successful moral puritan onslaught in the 1880s which left repression triumphant at the end of the century.¹⁸

But, like many an exposé of attitudes to prostitution, Fisher’s depends for its evidence on the national press and debates held by commentators on the national stage. This book investigates how the process of cultural change identified by Fisher was worked out on the streets of Colchester. It explores what Fisher described as ‘the quiet but intransigent opposition of the male élite’ to anti-vice campaigns and agrees with his view that male hypocrisy is too easy an explanation. As with any negative, it is difficult to prove ‘quiet opposition’. The men who chose to complain about aspects of prostitution in the local newspapers generally did so anonymously, using soubriquets such as ‘Retributio’ or ‘Morality’, and their letters were infrequent. The town’s professional men – solicitors, clergy and doctors – did not unite to condemn prostitution and were rarely reported airing intolerant attitudes. Working men were occasionally described in the local press taking direct action, gathering in crowds to harass a drunken prostitute or supporting conservative opposition to the repeal of the CDAs during the 1871 Colchester by-election. The overwhelming message emanating from the borough court was live and let live, which in some lights appears hypocritical but in others seems genuinely tolerant, even compassionate.

Most men in Colchester seem to have been unconcerned – even tolerant – of prostitution, whether or not they personally engaged in the trade. Colchester’s positive attitude was to do with factors such as the garrison’s overall beneficial contribution to the town and an approval of women who earned for their own independence rather than claiming welfare benefits. To quote a modern study, ‘the women and girls were integrated into the economic development of urban areas’.¹⁹ Men who spoke or wrote about prostitution in negative terms were unprepared for the most part to do more than talk and subscribe funds, preferring to encourage their wives to engage in reforming work. This gendered division of labour is perhaps not unexpected in a culture where men held political power and women were expected to oversee domestic morality and comfort. Some men may have feared retribution such as ridicule or broken windows if they interfered or made complaints. If any felt uneasy at condoning such a trade, they hid it behind empty words and charitable gestures, at least until a national movement to reduce prostitution began to make progress in the 1880s.

Figure 2. Portion of Thomas Dobson’s letter to the Essex Standard, 11 December 1857, deploring the increase of immorality in Colchester. Very few men chose to have such views published. Occasionally the newspaper’s editor wrote a piece in this vein.

Local history studies of prostitution feature throughout this book and were very helpful in our assessment of the elements of Colchester’s story that were unique. They focus on nineteenth-century prostitution in localities such as Kent, York, Plymouth and Southampton.²⁰ This, however, is the first to study Colchester’s vice trade in depth. Colchester is fortunate to have several fine histories, from Philip Morant’s of 1748 and Thomas Cromwell’s of 1825 to those produced by the Victoria County History, Geoffrey Martin, Arthur Brown and Andrew Phillips.²¹ None of these has much, if anything, to say about women’s contribution or significance to the life of the town. The University of Essex also has a collection of theses on various subjects to do with Victorian Colchester.²² But few consider working-class women – or prostitution – or suggest the involvement of prostitution in social change in the town. The group of middle-class women in Colchester who sought to improve the lives of working-class girls and divert or rescue them from prostitution has also sunk into undeserved obscurity.

Why was it difficult to control prostitution?

In the first place, prostitution was not illegal. Provided sexual congress was in private between consenting adults over the age of consent, no crime was committed. The authorities encountered some intractable difficulties in their attempts to reduce the impact of prostitution and, in the absence of effective laws, they employed a variety of alternative approaches without much success. Then, under pressure from the army, parliament passed a series of Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1860s that were intended to identify and imprison prostitutes affected with venereal symptoms in garrison towns and ports. The army saw this as the only practical solution to the soaring numbers of soldiers hospitalised with venereal disease, but Christian moralists were repelled by the idea of subjecting women to intimate medical examinations and to returning healthy prostitutes back into society to continue what was judged to be their immoral and destructive way of life. To the moralists the CDAs represented state licensing of sinful practices and they orchestrated an energetic and successful political campaign which brought about the repeal of the acts in 1889. Only then did parliament pass an act that permitted the police to summon brothel keepers. Prior to this it had been the responsibility of the parish vestry – minister and churchwardens – to identify brothels, report them and pay the legal expenses for hearing the case. Most vestries, knowing that brothels sprang up and disappeared like mushrooms, preferred to spend their income on helping the deserving poor in their congregations.

The army’s focus on prostitution as a medical problem illustrates the simplistic response to prostitution that