DID THE PRINCE FIND LOVE IN THE VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED?
Nellie Clifden Prince Albert
“IT WAS almost dusk when our carriage stopped close to a patch of furze on the desolate plain of the Curragh, and we saw our first wren — not a bird but a woman.” These were the words of a reporter from the Pall Mall Gazette in September 1867.
James Greenwood was investigating reports of a brothel village where women existed in a cult-like world living underground in holes like nests near the biggest British Army camp in Ireland, temporary home for 12,000 men.
The women would dress up in petticoats and stockings and take soldiers into dense bush or back to their dug outs in the earth where they couldn’t stand up and had to crouch to get in.
One was Nellie Clifden, who was reported to have bedded the 19-year-old Prince of Wales, Albert, later to become King Edward VII.
The women were damned in the local towns and likened to wrens … birds living in damp undergrowth with a tendency to share nests.
Greenwood wrote: “The mist hung over little mounds of earth that stretched as far as the eye could see. I counted ten nests near me. My driver said they were the homes of prostitutes, mostly aged between 15 and 25 and some of them had been there for up to nine years.
“Many were orphans of the Potato Famine. Others came from the poor of London and Liverpool. They had scratched out tiny shelters in the soil, roofed by the thick furze bushes which grow abundantly on the Curragh plain.”
The reporter had been sent on his mission after his editor was told that women were being used and abused by common soldiery, commissioned officers, the landed gentry and even royalty.
It was said that the Prince of Wales, a timid sexual novice at the time, enjoyed erotic visits, when serving with the Grenadier Guards, although the stories were quickly covered up and denied.
What Greenwood discovered about the women’s lives, led to an invasion of the English Press and stories of the wrens’ plight being syndicated all over the world, although he never mentioned the prince.
He wrote: “Each nest under a mound and clump of furze, was known by a number like houses, and was only just over four feet high over a cave around nine feet by seven cut out of sods and gorse. The floor was earth and there were wooden shelves holding teapots and crockery.
“You crouched into them, as beasts crouch into cover … no standing upright until you crawled out again.”
Each nest had a large box in which the women kept their few possessions. Upturned saucepans were used as stools, and the straw for bedding was pushed to one side during the day.
“Death was a frequent caller,” said Greenwood. “Women and babies died alone on the straw without medical care. All they had was home-made medicine. If they were caught in the towns, local men and priests ripped off their clothes; cut off their hair and whipped them through the streets.
Greenwood, who went on to write a book about the wrens and their life, added: “In the evenings when the younger women went to meet the soldiers, in the uninhabited gorse patches, the older women remained behind to mind the children and prepare food. A diet of potatoes, bread and milk was purchased on the few days the women were allowed in the army camp.”
Nellie became a well-known name at the gentlemen’s’ clubs and mansion balls across Ireland area for having a sexual encounter with the Prince at the Curragh Camp in 1861. The liaison was covered up by officers.
Their tryst allegedly happened while the prince was stationed there just before his parents were pushing for his marriage. Nellie was smuggled into his room at the camp several times.
In his diary were three separate entries referring to NC. But it was believed he saw he saw her many more times and was infatuated. They were reported to have met in London. Victoria had visited to see her son on parade that year.
After Albert’s death in December 1861, Victoria blamed Bertie for his father’s passing, holding him responsible for the stress that contributed to it. Nellie, she believed was part of that. Albert had lost faith in him.
References to her at the time have disappeared from most official records and she disappeared not long after the rumours. Did the Royal family pay her off, or was it all a malicious lie? No one knows what happened to her. The prince married Princess Alexandra of Denmark in 1863.
DID YOU KNOW?
That soccer icon and fitness fanatic Stanley Matthews advertised Craven ‘A’ cigarettes in newspaper advertisements, from 1952 to 1954. Fans would give him their packets to autograph. Trouble was, he never smoked. What a player.
SAUCY BOYS STELLA AND FANNY MAKE
HEADLINES IN UNDIE WORLD TRIAL
Stella, left and Fanny
STELLA Boulton was a pretty baby with blue-violet eyes, large as saucers in a pale face, with dark hair cascading down in curls.
At the age of six, in 1853, she loved dressing up as a parlour maid and once served her unknowing grandmother at the dinner table. When Stella left the room, her grandmother turned to her mother and said: “I wonder, having sons, that you have so flippant a girl about you.”
The truth was that Stella was one of those sons. She was really Thomas Boulton who became one of England’s most famous cross-dressers. And with his cross-dressing friend, Frederick Park, known as Fanny Graham, were later at the centre of a sodomy scandal that shocked England, headlined The Great Petticoat Fiasco.
Their trial became a public spectacle with every detail of their lives, including their relationships with men and women; theatre performances, letters, clothes and underwear, being scrutinised by a jury.
The case was followed by hundreds of newspapers throughout the country, led by The Times, and the public was fascinated. At this time, male homosexual acts were illegal. But lawyers had a problem: How were they to prove that Fanny and Stella had performed them?
To store their dresses, cosmetics and other items, as well as a base, the couple rented a small flat at 13 Wakefield Street, off Regent Square.
Fanny and Stella, who was described as beautiful, were anything but shy and retiring. They paraded the streets dressed as women, shopped for the latest styles in London’s fashionable Burlington Arcade and rented boxes at theatres where they got drunk, and made lewd suggestions to men in the stalls below.
They even put on theatrical performances of their own, always starring in female parts; went to the best balls; stayed at the best hotels and had the best seats at sporting events. Stella even became the ‘wife’ of a peer of the realm.
In the late 1860s they were joined on a theatrical tour by Lord Arthur Clinton, Liberal Party MP for Newark, who was a homosexual. He fell madly in love with Stella, who went around calling herself his wife, and even had cards printed as Lady Arthur Clinton.
They gave private shows as women at country homes and appeared on stage in Chelmsford, Brentwood and Southend as well as going north to the Spa Rooms in Scarborough.
Lord Clinton meanwhile began to appear in the male roles. He and Stella played husband and wife on the stage and shared a kiss which raised no complaints from the local press. But by now they had come under the attention of police and been under surveillance for a year.
On the evening of April 28, 1870, Fanny and Stella, both in drag, went to a box at the Strand Theatre, accompanied by two male friends. When the group left to order a cab, the pair were arrested. As officers were unsure whether they were male or female they were ordered to undress and expose themselves at the station, in front of all the smirking policemen on duty.
The following morning, they were taken to a packed Bow Street Magistrates Court still wearing their dresses and not allowed to shave. Their arrest had been too late to appear in the morning papers. It was a mystery who leaked it.
They were charged with “the abominable crime of buggery” and ordered to have their anuses inspected which resulted in a doctor reporting: “There were symptoms as I should expect to find in men who had committed unnatural crimes.”
He also noted that both Fanny and Stella had large penises and Stella had “a scrotum of inordinate length as a result of their sodomy.”
And so, the circus began.
In June 1870, Fanny and Stella stood trial at Bow Street (later at Westminster Hall), with six other men, including Lord Clinton, who never appeared. The Nottingham Guardian reported that he was somewhere in America.
The pair wore a different woman’s outfit every day. On one appearance Stella was dressed in fashionable crimson silk, trimmed with white lace. She wore a flaxen wig, with plaited chignon and her arms and neck were bare, except for bracelets, and a white lace shawl round her shoulders.
Fanny wore a green satin dress, with flaxen wig curled, white kid gloves, bracelets, and black lace shawl over the shoulders.
Every day there were queues to get into the court, and even lawyers and the judge shared the humour of the case, with corsets, knickers and stockings being passed to the jury; the quips of Stella and Fanny in the dock and tales of police officers spying on them through hotel key holes. Many newspapers sold out, including The Times and Evening Standard.
But the Standard editor James Johnstone, wrote: “Since the first appearance of this unpleasant case in newspapers, not one word of the defence of these two young men has been heard, and the bitterness of public opinion, fed by the most ridiculous exaggeration, is daily increasing against them.”
At the end of the six-day trial it took less than an hour for the jury to find them not guilty after the prosecution failed to establish, they had anal sex. The judge was highly critical of the police and the treatment of the men by their surgeon. There were cheers in the court.
Stella and Fanny admitted to appearing in public dressed as women, “an offence against public morals and common decency”. They were bound over for two years.
Stella died on September 30, 1904, aged 33, from a brain tumour. Fanny, 34, died of syphilis in 1881. Lord Clinton had already died of scarlet fever on June, 18, 1870. But police believe it was suicide.
TERRY MANNERS
25 August 2025
