The Cleveland Street Scandal

by H. Montgomery Hyde

Slight wear. Boards are quaterbound accross the spine in Blue with adjoining red paper boards. Gilt lettering with in blind initials at front board. Plastic protective cover to DJ. Pages are clean. Binding is tight.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

266 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Harford Montgomery Hyde was born on 14 August 1907 in Belfast, the son of James Johnstone Hyde and Isobel Greenfield (née Montgomery). He was educated at Sedbergh School; Queen's University, Belfast (where he gained a first class History degree); then at Magdalen College Oxford (where he gained a second class law degree). He was called to the bar in 1934. From 1935-1939, Hyde was librarian and Private Secretary to the 7th Marquess of Londonderry. In 1939 he married Dorothy Mabel Brayshaw Crofts (divorced 1952).

During World War II, Hyde held several positions. He served as an Assistant Censor in Gibraltar (1940) and was commissioned in the intelligence corps and engaged in counter-espionage work in the United States under Sir William Stephenson, Director of British Security Co-ordination in the Western Hemisphere (whose life Hyde published as "The Quiet Canadian" in 1962). He was also Military Liaison and Security Officer, Bermuda (1940-41); Assistant Passport Control Officer, New York (1941-2); with British Army Staff, USA (1942-4); attached to the Supreme HQ Allied Expeditionary Force (1944) and then to the Allied Commission for Austria (1944-5).

Hyde was the Assistant Editor of the Law Reports (1946-7), then Legal Adviser to the British Lion Film Corporation Ltd (1947-9). From 1950-59 he was a Unionist MP for East Belfast and was the UK Delegate to the Council of Europe Consultative Assembly in Strasbourg (1952-5). From 1958-61 Hyde was an Honorary Colonel of the Intelligence Corps (Territorial Army), Northern Ireland. After losing his parliamentary seat, Hyde was Professor of History and Political Science at the University of the Punjab in Lahore (1959-61).

In 1955, Hyde married his second wife Mary Eleanor Fischer. The marriage was dissolved in 1966 and he married Rosalind Roberts Dimond. He died on August 10 1989.

Hyde wrote a great many books on a wide variety of subjects including "The Rise of Castlereagh" (1933); "The Quiet Canadian" (1962); "Cynthia" (1962) and "Secret Intelligence Agent" (1982).

The held at Churchill Archives Centre chiefly consist of the papers and letters Montgomery Hyde collected and generated in the course of writing three of his books: "The Quiet Canadian" (a biography of Sir William Stephenson, Director of British Security Co-ordination in the Western Hemisphere, 1940-46); "Cynthia" (a biography of the British agent Elizabeth (Pack) Brousse); and "Secret Intelligence Agent" (which included descriptions of his own wartime experiences). The collection also includes papers and letters relating to Hyde's work in Censorship and Security in Gibraltar, Bermuda and the USA during the Second World War; and in the legal division of the Allied Control Commission in Austria.

Reviews

[Edmund Marlowe · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wave of growing moral panic over sexual exploitation of the young sweeps over Britain, resulting in broader and tougher legislation to combat it. A few years later, there are sensational revelations about secret trysts in a homosexual brothel between teenage rent boys and some members of very high society. Claims are made in Parliament and the press that the establishment knew all about it from the police but colluded in hushing it up and helping the guilty escape justice. If all this sounds uncannily topical, that is because the Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889 does bear a bizarre resemblance to current affairs. Far though from riding the tide of today's hysteria over sex involving boys, this history was written in 1976, when attitudes to pederasty were about as calm as they have ever been in modern Britain, and by a man who had forfeited, rather than sought to fortify, his career in Parliament through involvement in sexual politics (in his case homosexual emancipation).

I should for balance point out some of the more serious differences between this Victorian scandal and today's. The only casualties of the uproar about Cleveland Street were two obviously guilty men suffering very brief imprisonment for "gross indecency" and procurement, a third for libel, and another two driven into exile. Even if one blames it for darkening the atmosphere for Oscar Wilde and others soon to follow, that is a far cry from today's maelstrom. Then as now, British attitudes were more repressive than continental ones (Charles Hammond, the brothel-keeper, could not be extradited from France because his rentboys were willing and over 13, then the age of consent there), but they were not so vindictive or unjust as to investigate unprovable goings-on of half a century earlier. Far from being so credulous as to believe almost any allegation, the Victorians were outraged by aspersions cast without evidence, especially on those of high repute; it would have been unthinkable, for example, to destroy the reputation of a bemedalled Field Marshal in his nineties by raiding his home on the basis of an anonymous accusation and splashing it over the news (as has just been done). Rather than demanding salacious details of sexual misdeeds, everyone concerned with the Cleveland Street scandal seemed concerned to protect public morality by saying as little about it as possible.

Montgomery Hyde tells the story well with satisfyingly extensive quotation of his original sources, which are mostly court records, letters and speeches. There is no discernible bias and his opening sentence lamenting Victorian prostitution is his sole judgmental remark. He used documents recently released from the Director of Public Prosecutions, and he was a barrister. Unsurprisingly therefore, his grasp of the legal and political wrangling that was the scandal's hard core is sharp and his account of it authoritative. Disappointingly though, Hyde largely limits himself to such wranglings and one is left mostly in the dark both as to what was going on behind them and to what the scandal meant to anyone in broader terms.

I am not always sure if Hyde is displaying reticence or ignorance. When he says, for example, that "nothing more is known of Veck, Newlove, Allies and the telegraph boys", it is clear he means simply that further information on such humble folk was not available from published biographical sources and he did not bother to find out more from the obvious unpublished records. But what of Lord Arthur Somerset, who, as the only establishment figure finally acted against, is the nearest to being the main protagonist? His sexual behaviour is at the heart of the story, but besides the legal evidence, the nearest Hyde comes to revealing anything about it is two citations which together hint vaguely that he liked boys, but not sodomising them. Much more bizarre is Hyde's failure to reveal the pederasty of the influential Reggie Brett, whom he introduces as Somerset's close friend from their Eton schooldays. How can this not fail to mislead, when Brett is a pivotal character throughout the story and his letters a major source for it? His own tastes can hardly not have increased his sympathy and understanding of those who ran into trouble and his efforts to help them. Yet Hyde cannot be ignorant of Brett's passion for boys, since the same letters furnish abundant evidence of it, and it had been well known even in Brett's own day: his wooing of boys on frequent visits to Eton was sufficiently well known in high society for boys' mothers to warn their sons against being alone with him.

Just as limiting is Hyde's failure to shed light on what anyone thought of the scandal beyond brief expressions of conventional outrage by those concerned in handling it. How shocked were most people and exactly why? He describes how the puritanical journalist W. T. Stead was more responsible than any other individual for the legislation which made the goings-on in Cleveland Street prosecutable, but omits his comment a few years later that "if all persons guilty of Oscar Wilde's offences were to be clapped in gaol, there would be a very surprising exodus from Eton and Harrow, Rugby and Winchester, to Pentonville and Holloway." And what, on the other extreme, did men like Wilde make of it all? Here we are left entirely in the dark and I at least was left unsatisfied.

Edmund Marlowe, author of Alexander’s Choice, a story of homosexual love at Eton, https://www.amazon.com/dp/191457107X

[Jules]

Ich trage das Buch bei goodreads bei gelesen ein, weil es das eigentliche Buch nicht auf Goodreads gibt.

[Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this in a used book store in Kamloops and didn't know what I had. It describes the beginning of all the homosexual horrors and you see their beginning in the wording of Section 11 where acts "in public or in private" are equally illegal and punishable. It created a situation where anyone involved could be blackmailed. What I do not understand is why reasonably well educated and well to do men should go to 'houses of ill repute' and put themselves at the mercy of the people there. I felt sorry for the telegraph boys who were lured into prostitution in one of these houses and lost their jobs as a result. They seemed naive and ignorant and easily persuaded. The idea that they could be shipped off to America or Australia without consulting their parents was offensive, too. The police seemed to get the wrong end of the stick, too, for once. This was a fascinating and disturbing narrative by a prolific writer of legal biographies and historic cases. I was going to BookCross it but a friend is wanting it to replace his copy which appears to have walked. Since his library is a very full and important one I shall let him have it and I'll look out some others by the same author. (He even has a full Who's Who at the end of the book.)

[Roy A. Hughes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes there is confusion due to some over use of pronouns, but the revelations and apparent cover-ups keep one riveted. An intriguing and relaxing bedtime read.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barely a year after the Jack the Ripper murders rocked London, a dramatic scandal rocked London. When teenage telegraph boys were found to have unusually large amounts of money on them, an investigation by the police - including Frederick Abberline who had worked on the Ripper investigation - led to a homosexual brothel that catered to a wealthy, and often titled clientele. Efforts to suppress the story kept it from the papers for several months, but eventually the scandal reached the press and resulted in arrests and a number of trials for gross indecency and criminal conspiracy.
Thoroughly researched by H.M Hyde, author of many biographies (including on London's subsequent scandal involving Oscar Wilde,) and "The Other Love," a study of homosexuality in Great Britain, the book lays out a little known sensational episode in London's history in thorough and highly readable detail, and without the material being overly salacious.
The scandal was source material for several novels (I won't mention titles, so as not to spoil)
The book was published in the mid 70s and may be hard to find, but if you come across a used copy at a library book sale or used book store, and you are a fan of Victorian "hidden history", you will want to buy it.