EU-British Child Sex Industry circa 1885
Andrew Lamb
shipped as regularly as cattle to the state-regulated brothels of
Brussels and Antwerp. A world-wide trade was geared to please specific
buyers: Glasgow brothels had been alerted because Herr Ragedorn of
Frankfurt craved a thirteen-year-old Scottish redhead. Before shipment,
recalcitrant girls were doped, then ferried in nailed-down coffins
vented with airholes. Sometimes a victim awoke during the voyage, to die
in terror clawing at unyielding wood.
What [Pall Mall Gazette Editor] Stead and the [Salvation]Army were
plumbing between them was the vilest side of a traffic netting £8
million a year. From a Hanbury Street cottage, Florence fed them telling
statistics: out of one hundred consecutive cases she had handled, a
third had been seduced, often through incest, before they were sixteen.
London alone held 80,000 prostitutes; the tight square mile around
Charing Cross harboured over 2,000 pimps. One in every fifty
Englishwomen was a street-walker.
Each night as Stead's four-wheeler rattled through gas-lit streets, he
saw sights to pierce the heart: in Islington High Street, called "The
Devil's Mile," in Regent Street and the Haymarket, pathetic hordes of
painted teenagers wearing pork-pie hats with battered blue or red
feathers patrolled as regularly as policemen on a beat. Most were
country girls; few set a higher price than ten shillings on their
bodies.
These were the cast-offs of the trade. In the quiet curtained chambers
of St. John's Wood and Maida Vale, the brothel madams were frank with
Stead: the real profit came from virgins, in trade parlance "fresh
girls." To seduce a virgin, a roué might pay up to £100: The signal was
a guarded note to his club, announcing "a new importation from the
country." Often money minded prostitutes became deliberately pregnant;
at thirteen a daughter commanded a market-value of £40. Most common bait
for virgins was the method that came close to trapping Annie Swan:
advertisements seeking country girls for London domestic service.
Charwomen were good enticers; they had unique chances to tell glowing
tales of better billets to young maidservants. Nursemaids, well-paid for
their treachery, toured Hyde Park as early as eight a.m., seeking lonely
girls who were swift to trust. Irish girls arriving at Liverpool were
ready prey for sweet-faced women dressed as nuns: the prospect of help
from a kindly Mother Superior was too tempting to resist.
Decoy systems varied - but never the girl's ultimate fate. Pressed to a
harmless glass of beer or gin, she shortly slumped to the floor,
stupefied by a knockout dose of snuff or laudanum. Once a brothel
manservant had callously raped her, the die was cast. The girl's trunk
was seized and the doors bolted day and night - while her debt for board
and lodging mounted daily. If she held out she was turned penniless into
the world - whose rigid moral code decreed that all except virgins were
"bad girls" fit only for the gutter.
Not all got off so lightly. To some clients the shrieks of a virgin
being raped or flogged were the essence of delight. Behind locked doors
and windows secured by heavy shutters, they took their pleasure
unchecked, even in fashionable Half Moon Street, a stone's throw from
Piccadilly. A girl who fought off her attackers was bound down with
padded straps. But once violation was accomplished, the victim's sobs
proved galling. "Child," one roué rebuffed a weeping fourteen-year-old,
"don't dirty my shirtsleeves."
These were not chance customers but professional libertines. One
clergyman overtly visited brothels to distribute tracts; here he could
pay up to £20 for the girls he coveted. A Harley Street physician
despoiled one hundred virgins a year, at a cost of £7 a girl. Another
lecher boasted proudly that he had ruined 2,000 women.
Nor were they confined to London alone. Anna Rosenberg's in Liverpool
did a trade as thriving as "The Infant School" in Hull, the bulk of
whose inmates were twelve years old. The house was closed up only for
selling liquor without a licence. But most brothels styled themselves
"temperance hotels" to escape police supervision - or paid the piper.
One famous East London house doled out £500 a year in bribes, with free
quarters for detectives and constables.
pages 112-114
The General Next to God, The Story of William Booth and the Salvation
Army
by Richard Collier, Fontana 1965
As far back as 1882, a Select Committee of the House of Lords had issued
an alarming report: juvenile prostitutes were increasing every year.
Only then was the age of consent raised reluctantly from twelve to
thirteen years, but a new bill unifying the committee's proposals -
among them, fixing the age at sixteen - was rejected out of hand. Days
earlier, on the 20th of May [1885], the House of Commons had thrown out
this Criminal Law Amendment Bill for the third contemptuous time. It was
the eve of the Whitsun recess; only twenty hostile M.P.s had even
bothered to attend.
"Oh my God, are we come to this?" raged Catherine Booth when she heard.
"I did not think we were as low as this! One member suggested that it
should be reduced to ten, and oh my God, that it was hard for a man
having a charge brought against him not to be able to plead the consent
of a child like that."
But Bramwell was less surprised. Ten days before the bill came up, he
and Stead had witnessed a travesty of justice; the cynical hushing-up of
the case against Mary Jeffries. A handsome widow in her forties, she was
proven owner of twelve brothels - including four in Church Street,
Chelsea, a Hampstead cottage for flagellants, and a house for perverts
in Holborn's Gray's Inn Road. But her clients were men in high places:
not only Members of Parliament but Queen Victoria's cousin, the King of
the Belgians, who spent £1,800 a year debauching English girls. Playing
the cards her solicitor dealt her, Mrs. Jeffries rode to court in a
brougham and demurely pleaded guilty. She paid her £200 fine in cash and
left the court still in business.
Since 1865, the year Booth declared Salvation war, twenty such
procurers had been known to the police and all of them had gone
scot-free.
Even now Stead could scarcely credit it. He sought independent
confirmation from his old friend, Howard Vincent. As a former Director
of Scotland Yard's Criminal Investigation Department, Vincent had two
years earlier testified before the House of Lords Committee: as the law
now stood, girls over thirteen lacked any protection. Even younger girls
could be drawn into the vicious racket; without a writ of Habeas Corpus,
no policeman could enter a brothel to search for them. And writs took
time to procure; a drugged and helpless girl could be spirited
elsewhere. Nor was an abduction an offence unless the girl was in her
father's custody at the time. A profligate who seduced a
fourteen-year-old could laugh in the face of the law - and the police
knew it.
ibid. pages 110,111
In seventeen non-stop days of protest meetings Booth's soldiers netted
an unprecedented 393,000 signatures to a petition for raising the age of
consent - a monster scroll, which, unfolded, measured two and a half
miles. On Thursday, 30th July, a grim-faced legion of Salvation soldiers
marched out from Clapton's Congress Hall to lay their petition before
parliament . . .
Within days, a five man committee whose members included the Archbishop
of Canterbury, Cardinal Manning and the Bishop of London, after
carefully cross-checking Stead's findings, reported them "substantially
true." The Government could do nothing but act. . . . Both Stead and
Bramwell [Booth] spent long hours with the Home Secretary, Sir Richard
Cross, making proposals to strengthen the Bill - paramount among them
the police's right to raid suspected brothels, the stamping out of the
inter-continental traffic in girls. By Friday, 14th August, the Bill,
carried by 179 votes to 71, became law. From that time on the age of
consent has remained sixteen.
ibid. pages 123,124
Johpa
Message-id: <375FA5...@mercy.ucaqld.com.au>
>........Not all got off so lightly. To some clients the shrieks of a virgin
>being raped or flogged were the essence of delight.....
I believe it is still called "the English disease" practiced by many an
english politician to this day.
Johpa