How the Police News reported the homosexual scandal of Cleveland Street in 1889
PO TELEGRAPH BOYS DELIVERED SEX FOR ARISTOCRATS AND THE PRINCE IN LINE FOR THE THRONE
IT WAS one of the biggest Government cover-ups in British history … the Cleveland Street Scandal. And the Press had trouble reporting it after battling a wall of silence.
For in 1889 the pay was so poor for General Post Office boy messengers that they did shifts elsewhere as rent boys for royalty and the aristocracy, including one alleged customer, Queen Victoria’s grandson, Prince Albert Victor, second in line to the throne.
The breeches-dropping story that shocked readers began on July 4, that year. Police Constable Luke Hanks, who was attached to the Post Office in London, was interviewing 15-year-old telegraph messenger Charles Thomas Swinscow about 18 shillings found in his pocket.
The money had been stolen from the Receiver-General’s Department and suspicion fell on the lad who was paid only a few shillings a week.
Swinscow claimed he and other boys had earned it by private work for a gentleman called Hammond who lived at 19 Cleveland Street, situated between the Middlesex Hospital and Tottenham Court Road.
Pressed about the nature of this lucrative part-time employment the boy finally admitted: “I will tell you the truth. I got it by going to bed with gentlemen at his house.”
His words opened a Pandora’s box of rampant sex involving up to 20 boys under 15 and the aristocracy, including lawyers and judges, and it was a scandal that was reported worldwide.
The Cleveland Street brothel keeper, Charles Hammond fled to America with a fortune after a tip-off as the young messengers were rounded up. It was rumoured that on the advice of the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, no extradition proceedings for the brothel keeper were attempted, and his case was quietly dropped. Silence prevailed.
The authorities also successfully delayed the investigation until many important men could flee the country, including the Keeper of the House, and Lord Arthur Somerset.
Hammond ran the brothel with Britain’s most notorious boy prostitute Jack Saul who openly bragged about his work with dukes and earls. Police never prosecuted him. It is said he knew too much about Prince Albert’s sexual antics in Cleveland Street and would have told the court.
Life was made difficult for the Press. One journalist, Ernest Parke, the editor of The North London Press, was imprisoned for libel for his reporting of the scandal.
He began to ask why the young boys involved had received such light sentences as the penalty for gross indecency was two years. He discovered that boys had named leading members of the aristocracy as their patrons but these weren’t named in court.
On November 16 however he named Henry James Fitzroy, Earl of Euston as being part of the “Incredibly loathsome scandal of Cleveland Street”.
Parke also alleged that Euston may have fled to Peru to avoid prosecution and had been permitted to escape by the authorities to conceal the involvement of a more highly placed personage — Prince Albert. The Press in Europe and America had already got hold of the rumour and the newspaper reports were an embarrassment to the Palace and the British Government.
The Earl, meanwhile, successfully sued Parke for libel, and the Editor was sentenced to 12 months in prison. Euston, on oath, claimed that he had visited Cleveland Street only under the mistaken impression that he would see female striptease shows there, and he had not fled to Peru as Parke falsely alleged.
Following representations by other journalists on his behalf to the Home Secretary Henry Matthews, Parke was released from prison on July 7, 1890, having served half his sentence.
PINT-SIZED COMEDIAN CHARLIE
WASN’T EVERYBODY’S DARLING
BORN into poverty he became one of Britain’s top comedians with a stage and TV career that earned him millions. But Charlie Drake’s life took him on a helter-skelter ride to ruin, and he died alone and penniless.
“Hello My Darlings” was his catchphrase because his 5ft 1in height took his eyes to around the level of a woman’s breasts and the audience roared with laughter when he spoke to their boobs in the days before Woke. He was of the Benny Hill school of smuttiness.
He looked like a cherub: tiny, mischievous and golden-haired but he wrecked everything in sight on stage like an imp. And sometimes he wrecked himself too.
On several occasions he was carried to hospital from a theatre or TV studio after knocking himself unconscious in his display of acrobatic slapstick skills no longer seen in British comedy.
At the height of his fame — from around 1955 to 1975 — he was among Britain’s top millionaire comedians with a string of 14 racehorses; a Surrey mansion, fast cars and a yacht. But his gambling and womanising caught up with him.
He was born Charles Springall in the Elephant and Castle, London, the youngest of six children. They were so poor, his mother, Violet, pawned the sheets and pillowcases on a Monday and retrieved them on the Friday, so they had bed linen for the weekend.
Charlie helped the household’s income by working in the mornings as a paper boy and in the evenings as a cat-meat seller on the streets, a big trade at the time.
He got his first taste of showbusiness at eight, when he was employed at the old South London Palace as part of the chorus and was paid half-a-crown (12.5p). He was now on the road to stardom, and the high spot of his career years later was an ITV series called The Worker.
Each week, we saw Charlie report to the Labour Exchange to be greeted by long-suffering counter clerk actor Henry McGee as Mr Pugh.
“Good morning, Mr Poo,” Charlie would trill.
“The name is Pugh,” McGee always responded. “P-U-G-H.”
“That’s right,” said Charlie. “P-U-G-H. Poo.”
Mr Pugh (or Poo) despairingly sent Drake off to wildly unsuitable jobs and the result was inevitable — the demolition of a house, or a car, or a social occasion. He left behind everything in a shambles.
Charlie even made some hit records — Splish, Splash (1958) and My Boomerang Won’t Come Back (1961), which went to the top of the charts — and moved into films which weren’t a success and his career dipped.
He was married twice, first to Heather Barnes from 1953 until 1971, and they had three sons. In 1976, he married his second wife, Elaine Bird, but the marriage was dissolved in 1984
He was the subject of This Is Your Life TV show on two occasions: in December 1961, and in November 1995.
But always cocksure and confident, when he appeared in panto at the London Palladium, he insisted on the star dressing room and demanded that it be redecorated and furnished to his own taste. He threw his weight around and made powerful enemies in the theatre world.
When his TV work started to falter a few years later, Drake went back to what was left of the vaudeville and pantomime circuit. There was trouble at the Bradford Alhambra when he attempted to bring a local woman, not a member of Equity, into the show.
After several rows the union complained to the Provincial Managers’ Association, and Drake was fined £760 at a hearing for putting the production in jeopardy. He refused to pay, and Equity suspended him from all provincial theatres. The door was closed on him, and it never properly opened again.
He continued to work where he could but in 1995, he suffered his first stroke and retired. He died of heart problems in his sleep on December 23, 2006, at the age of 81, in a nursing home for retired entertainers in Twickenham, London. Goodbye our darling Charlie.
OLD NEWS IN BRIEF
Oops! Wrong gun M’lud.
IN June 1871, a prominent Ohio defence attorney Clement Vallandigham accidentally shot himself while representing a client in a murder trial, The Columbus Dispatch reported.
To prove that the murdered man Thomas Myers, accidentally shot himself in the stomach while pulling his pistol from his pocket during a brawl, the lawyer demonstrated the act by pulling a gun he believed was unloaded from his pocket and shot himself dead.
WHAT A SHATTERING THOUGHT…
Flicking through some historical websites and press cuttings looking for something else entirely, I was intrigued to read that Medieval French King Charles VI suffered from a medical condition known as “glass delusion”.
He believed he was made of glass and could shatter if not careful. He would refuse to be touched by anyone for fear of breaking into thousands of pieces.
Servants put iron rods in his clothes to protect him from falling and smashing. On one occasion, he was even reported to have wrapped himself in blankets to prevent his buttocks from cracking in a frost. The condition was not uncommon in Europe between the 15th and 17th centuries, said the JSTOR Daily.
LAST DAYS OF LONELY SUNDANCE
MISSING HIS TAMWORTH SIDEKICK
The Tamworth Two enjoy freedom
(don’t ask who’s who — Pic Ed Chrissie Dookanivitch)
THEY were Britain’s most wanted runaways — the Tamworth Two.
The pair of pigs won the nation’s heart when they escaped the butcher’s chopper while being unloaded from a lorry at an abattoir in Malmesbury in January 1988.
Nicknamed Butch and Sundance after the Western movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, they made front page news after they ran for it and no one could find them for over a week.
Whatever happened to them?
Butch and Sundance escaped by squeezing through a fence and swimming across the River Avon, escaping into nearby gardens.
The two pigs spent most of their week of freedom in a dense thicket near Tetbury Hill. The Pighunt began and the world was watching. They were even talked about in parliament
Butch was trapped in a pen on January 15, and Sundance was cornered and caught the following day. The abattoir beckoned – but the public outcry was huge.
The Guardian reported: “It may have seemed like a fun animal story, but it was deadly serious. It was the most important story of the week at the time, by far.”
Radio 4’s Thought for the Day made them the topic and The Independent’s Editor, Andrew Marr, wrote about them in his letter to its readers. They even featured in editorials across the country.
Finally, the Daily Mail stepped in to save them and officially bought the brave porkies from their owner in exchange for exclusive rights to their story. It even funded their relocation to the Rare Breeds Centre in Woodchurch, Kent, where the two pigs lived out the rest of their lives.
Butch died, aged 13 on 8 October 2010, euthanised after becoming seriously ill. Davy McColm, manager of the centre’s farm, put Butch’s demise down to old age.
He said: “Sundance seems to be quite happy with life. He’s got a bit more space in the bed at night. He will be missing her. They were litter brother and sister and had been together all their lives.
“He’s an old fellow, a little bit arthritic and a bit slower than he used to be, thank goodness, but he’s still pottering along.”
Seven months later, Sundance, aged 14, suffering from arthritis, and ‘much quieter’ after his sister’s death, was euthanised on May 23, 2011.
Nikki Sara from the Rare Breeds Centre said: “He was getting old and was having trouble getting in and out of his bed. He was on the maximum dosage of pain killers and the farm manager decided that it wasn’t fair on him.
“They been a great attraction here for the last 13 years, a real draw. We still get people coming in asking where they are.”
TERRY MANNERS
13 July 2026
