Glenn Chandler - The Sins of Jack Saul (): The True Story of Dublin Jack and The Cleveland Street Scandal

Glenn Chandler is best known as the creator and writer of Taggart , which became the longest running television detective series in the world. He has also written true crime television dramas, notably those on William Palmer the poisoner, George Joseph Smith the Brides in the Bath killer, and John George Haigh, the acid bath murderer. His books include Burning Poison , a true account of a Georgian Liverpool murder mystery, and two fictional novels about Brighton detective Steve Madden, Savage Tide and Dead Sight . He is also an award-winning theatre writer, producer and director.

The reader interested in keeping up with research about Jack Saul and the Cleveland Street scandal, the subjects of this book, can log on to www.jacksaul.co.uk

The second edition of this book has afforded me the opportunity to add much more material on the Dublin scandals, the clients of 19 Cleveland Street, and Jacks later life. I have also taken the opportunity to make one or two corrections. Since publication, The Sins of Jack Saul The Musical , based on this book, was performed at the Above The Stag Theatre in London 11 May 12 June 2016. During the run, an audience member tweeted that Jack Saul was the patron saint of rent boys the world over. It is a sentiment Jack could not have imagined in his wildest dreams.

For Peter Bull, Robert Love and Diana Tyler.

I first encountered Jack Saul when I was writing a stage show called Cleveland Street The Musical. It was a satirical romp based on the notorious homosexual scandal which centred on a male brothel in Victorian London, one that rocked the British establishment in 1889. I produced it at the Above The Stag Theatre, Londons only LGBT space, then in Victoria but now carrying on its sterling work at new premises in Vauxhall, south of the river. (1)

All theatre production is a risk, financially and artistically, but thankfully the show was a sell-out. Audiences were keen to see how we would present a story of sodomy and sex-for-sale in Victorian back streets with songs and, yes, an upbeat and happy ending. In fact, the musical format complimented the true story very well indeed, allowing us to escape from the grim reality of the subject which had we gone down that route would have necessitated a very serious and worthy drama and concentrate instead on what was essentially a story of conspiracy and hypocrisy, truly appalling Victorian values, and larger-than-life, colourful characters.

The clients of the brothel at 19 Cleveland Street included Members of Parliament and the House of Lords, wealthy bankers, high-ranking figures in the military, and very possibly the grandson of Queen Victoria and Heir Presumptive to the throne, Prince Albert Victor Edward, Duke of Clarence. Prince Eddys role was never proven, but the merest hint of the involvement of the son of the Prince of Wales and heir to the throne elevated the affair into the major sex scandal of Victorias reign.

The other factor, which made the brothel infamous, was that telegraph messenger boys from the General Post Office were recruited to sell their bodies to supplement their wages. One of the lads was only fifteen. The house was managed by Charles Hammond, who had been a male whore or professional sodomite himself, and his French wife Caroline. They appear to have enjoyed a good few years running it with impunity. John Saul, otherwise known as Jack Saul or Dublin Jack, lived and worked there for a time and was intimately associated with the Hammonds. He was a rent boy (or renter as they were known then), a little past his sell-by-date but nevertheless still actively pursuing clients around Piccadilly and the Haymarket, even as the police gathered evidence to be used in prosecutions.

Jack Saul we shall call him that from now on was the most notorious male prostitute in Victorian London. He is, for that and many other reasons, the most intriguing character of the whole affair. He has long been an enigma. Students of gay history, and particularly that of the late nineteenth century, have speculated on his identity.

Why should he be so fascinating? Because if we are to believe everything that is written, and that which he wrote himself, he was involved in not just one, but three major gay scandals in the space of two decades without anyone knowing where he came from, what happened to him afterwards, or if indeed John or Jack Saul was his real name.

Jack intrigues for another reason. He is the central character in a controversial and autobiographical work of Victorian pornography called The Sins of the Cities of the Plain. This was clandestinely and anonymously published in 1881, years before his involvement with the Cleveland Street brothel, giving weight to the theory that the name was originally a pseudonym. For who on earth would put their real name to a book which provides, in highly explicit detail, a long and relentless list of their sexual acts which, if proven, could earn the author a long period of imprisonment?

Not only did Jack Saul contribute his name, but also the street where he lived, so that anyone might look for him.

Jack was the first person in literature, if one dares call it that, to give a personal account of meeting Ernest Boulton and Frederick William Park, the two transvestites otherwise known as Fanny and Stella, who shocked Victorian society eleven years earlier by going around the West End of London dressed as women, picking up men for sex and having a high old time with a succession of male lovers.

That case was the first in a twenty-five year period of Victorias reign, which culminated in the trial of Oscar Wilde and his imprisonment in Reading Gaol. Between them, in the course of that quarter century, lay the so-called Dublin felonies, during which a number of men had their lives laid bare and ruined, and the grandfather of them all, the Cleveland Street affair. Had Jack Saul been connected only with the writing of Sins , and his recollections of Boulton and Park, his name would be forgotten today, consigned to an ancient book locked away in the forbidden books section of the British Library.

But he wasnt. Like a tarnished penny, he rolls out from between its pages and through the next two decades, turning up in Dublin to give evidence against a soldier with whom he had enjoyed a sexual relationship, and finally at the Old Bailey, to stand up in court, at great risk to himself, on behalf of a man he had never met, in one of the three trials that followed on from the discovery of Charles Hammonds boy brothel.

The two previous books on Cleveland Street were both written in 1976 when the files on the case were finally opened to researchers after a period of eighty-five years. There is a sense that the authors were competing with each other to get them on the bookshelves. The Cleveland Street Scandal by H. Montgomery Hyde largely concentrates on the legal manoeuvring in high places to bring an appalling business concerning brothels, buggery and boys to a swift conclusion. It was diligently researched and Montgomery Hyde was well placed, being gay himself and a Belfast-born barrister.

The Cleveland Street Affair by Colin Simpson, Lewis Chester and David Leitch is the more rollicking of the two and more fun, devoting a whole chapter to Jack Sauls colourful world of dormitory shenanigans in boarding schools and goings-on in the boudoirs of the aristocracy. Both books take as their starting point the moment when the brothel at 19 Cleveland Street is discovered, at which point the more low-life participants are soon dispatched so the authors can concentrate on the machinations of government to keep Prince Eddy out of the scandal.