Modern women on trial

Sexual transgression in the age of the flapper

Lucy Bland

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781847798954
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

Looks at several sensational trials involving drugs, murder, adultery, miscegenation and sexual perversion in the period 1918–24

1

The case of the ‘Cult of the Clitoris’: treachery, patriotism and English womanhood

‘A great battle is raging; armies are bleeding and dying; Paris is at stake; and for a week the interest of the British public has been almost entirely centred upon a trial for criminal libel.’¹ The New Statesman was referring in disbelief to a six-day trial of May–June 1918, reported extensively in all the British newspapers, and involving a criminal libel brought by the well known ‘barefoot’ dancer Maud Allan against the right-wing independent MP Noel Pemberton Billing, for his imputation of lesbianism. The successful German offensive of late March on the Western Front had been followed by further German victories in April and May, yet the British public’s attention now turned (for diversion presumably) to the Old Bailey. Here hundreds queued for hours in an attempt to secure a seat, although for most, if they gained entry at all, it was standing room only. ‘Not since the days of Crippen has any trial so excited the public’, declared the popular Sunday Pictorial.² What was its allure?

The libel suit had been prompted by a paragraph headed ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’ which in February 1918 had appeared in Billing’s paper The Vigilante:

To be a member of Maud Allen’s [sic] private performance in Oscar Wilde’s Salome one has to apply to Miss Valetta of 9 Duke St, Adelphi. If Scotland Yard were to seize the list of these members I have no doubt they would secure the names of several thousand of the first 47,000.³

Reference to the ‘47,000’ originally appeared three weeks earlier, when The Vigilante’s predecessor The Imperialist claimed a ‘Black Book’ was in the possession of the Germans naming 47,000 English men and women vulnerable to German blackmail because of their ‘sexual perversions’.⁴ Included were: ‘The names of Privy Councillors, youths of the chorus, wives of Cabinet ministers, dancing girls, even Cabinet Ministers themselves … In lesbian ecstasy the most sacred secrets of the state were betrayed.’⁵ During the trial the names of former Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, his wife Margot, Lord Haldane and even the presiding judge, Justice Darling, were among those mentioned as listed in the book.⁶ The play Salome, mentioned in the paragraph, was written by Oscar Wilde in 1891, first in French. Seen as sexually risqué, it had, to date, only been performed in Britain privately.⁷

With this brief summary we can begin to see why the trial must have been so fascinating at the time, for it involved a rich mix: a ‘decadent’ 1890s play (Salome), a notorious figure of those days (Oscar Wilde), a celebrated Edwardian dancer (Maud Allan), and a paranoid rumour about conspiracy, German infiltration and sexual vice in high places (the ‘Black Book’). Yet although the trial was famous in its time (referred to by military historian Michael Kettle as ‘the libel case of the century’), for many years it surprisingly disappeared almost completely from public view.⁸ In her 1948 reminiscences, novelist Marie Belloc Lowndes reflects: ‘How completely forgotten is the Pemberton Billing case, and yet in the early summer of 1918 little else was talked of in the world in which I lived.’⁹ It was as if it had been an odd blip of eccentricity thrown up by the war. Since the later 1990s, however, the trial has been ‘rediscovered’ and written about by a number of scholars, the complex intersection of sex and politics being a compelling draw. Thus unlike the other cases considered in this book, the terrain of this trial has been well covered.¹⁰

In his book-length study Salome’s Last Veil, Michael Kettle sees Maud Allan as a mere pawn in a wider picture of political conspiracy in which Billing worked with disgruntled British war Generals to overthrow the coalition government, and sabotage its secret peace talks.¹¹ Cultural critic Philip Hoare’s Wilde’s Last Stand adds to Kettle’s study through a far greater focus on the role of Wilde in the trial. Hoare stresses the way in which the Wilde ‘cult’ was blamed for Britain’s moral degeneracy and inability to win the war. Allan is here depicted as Wilde’s adjunct. Both books make important contributions to an understanding of the trial, but as literary critic Jodie Medd points out, both exclude the question of female sexuality.¹² One of the most interesting aspects of this case is that its multiple dimensions offer the potential for a range of competing readings, each laying claim to the trial’s wider cultural significance. Thus in contrast to Kettle and Hoare, a number of analyses of the trial have focused centrally on the libel of lesbianism. Literary critic Jennifer Travis, for example, claims that the trial was ‘the first time in England that lesbianism as a category of sexual identity was the subject of legal discourse’.¹³ But while lesbianism did of course feature in the trial, Laura Doan rightly cautions that the libel was primarily a political strategy with political aims rather than a direct attack on, or central portrayal of, female homosexuality.¹⁴ It is perhaps helpful to think of the trial as being simultaneously about what on the one hand was explicitly said in public, both in court and in the press (though these were not always the same), and on the other, what was unsaid but implicit.

In the context of this book’s interest in considering some of the key ways in which femininity and female sexual deviancy were debated and contested within and beyond the courtroom, this is clearly a pivotal trial. We must not forget that the libel – and the trial – involved an attack on the reputation of a particular woman, however marginal and beside the point she may ultimately have been in the libellers’ scheme of things. During the war, as mentioned in this book’s introduction, women in Britain had been subjected to surveillance on an unprecedented scale, but the Billing libel trial was the British war years’ most visible attack on the morality of a lone woman. Many aspects of the trial have been considered by previous scholars, such as the debates over sexual perversity, homosexuality, sexology, treachery and patriotism. Yet what has been largely ignored is the role of a second woman, also effectively on trial, namely Margot Asquith. I would suggest that Maud and Margot were together held up as examples of undesirable femininity, exhibiting attributes seen as diametrically opposed to that of a new, refashioned ideal English womanhood, in which patriotic, ‘responsible’ and moral deployment of the suffrage was now heralded as the crucial aspect of female citizenship of the future. In February 1918, the very month that the ‘cult of the clitoris’ paragraph was published, most women over thirty gained the vote. Before considering what this new ideal English womanhood entailed, a wider sense of what (else) the trial involved is needed, starting with the obvious questions about the key protagonists: who were Billing and Maud Allan, why had the MP published the offending article and why had he singled out the dancer?

Pemberton Billing as libeller

Noel Pemberton Billing was trained as a barrister, had been an actor, was an aviator and inventor, and since 1916 had represented East Hertfordshire as an independent MP. The following year he had formed the Vigilante Society to promote ‘purity in public life’ and to root out the ‘mysterious influence’ (the German fifth column) responsible for Britain’s inability to win the war. His organisation fought a series of by-elections with the alliterating slogans: ‘Hinder the Huns, Paralyse Profiteers, Purify Politics, Win the War’. Billing and his proto-fascist colleagues, such as Henry Beamish and Arnold White, were explicitly anti-Semitic, claiming that the British war effort was being undermined by the ‘hidden hand’ of German Jews and sympathisers operating in Britain.¹⁵ What Billing carefully concealed from the court was that his wife was half-German.¹⁶ His assistant editor was a young North American called Captain Harold Spencer, who had been discharged from the British Army for insanity, something else which was not established in the trial, despite Allan’s counsel’s best attempts.¹⁷ It was Spencer who had written the ‘first 47,000’ article. Shortly afterwards Billing had received a letter from the romance writer Marie Corelli who had seen a notice in The Sunday Times advertising the forthcoming private production of Salome starring Allan. Corelli suggested: ‘it would be well to secure the list of subscribers to this new “upholding” of the Wilde “cult” among the 47,000’.¹⁸ Spencer then wrote the ‘Cult of the Clitoris’ paragraph, hoping to raise a libel case and thereby get publicity for their claims of German infiltration and corruption in high places. Billing saw his libelling as a public service:

I am a libeller … I have libelled public men for the last two and a half years … and if you think I am going to keep quiet as a public man while men are being killed at the rate of nine a minute to make a Sodomite holiday, I am not.¹⁹

When...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The case of the ‘Cult of the Clitoris’: treachery, patriotism and English womanhood
• 2 Butterfly women, ‘Chinamen’, dope fiends and metropolitan allure
• 3 The tribulations of Edith Thompson: sexual incitement as a capital crime
• 4 Mme Fahmy’s vindication: Orientalism, miscegenation fears and female fantasy
• 5 ‘Hunnish scenes’ and a ‘Virgin birth’: the contested marriage and motherhood of a curious modern woman
• Afterlives
• Bibliography
• Index
• Backcover