The Hulme Fancy Dress Ball was the scandal of 1880s Britain. Here’s the story of the Victorian Stonewall, and our history.
By Patrick Cash
Jerome Caminada was known as Manchester’s Sherlock Holmes. He was on a crusade to rid his city of moral vice. In the early hours of 25th September 1880, as the industrial smog crept through the streets and his breath crystallised in the cold air, he was perched on a rooftop. Music drifted faintly into his ears – energetic, musical, flamboyant – and his eyes were focussed grimly on a sliver of light emitting from the black crepe-papered windows of Temperance Hall.
Inside, a drag ball raged. Liquor flowed, lights glowed, and laughter cackled to the rafters as the beautiful and damned danced. Every person in the hall was a man. Half of them were dressed as fabulous, fantastic, fairy-tale creatures, and the other half, in frilly skirts and corsets, were dressed as women.
Caminada swore to himself and smoked tobacco quicker, as he recognised a deviant tune and before his startled eyes high kicking began amongst the revellers, as the women-men showed off their ladies’ undergarments. He would later attest in court he had witnessed ‘a sort of dance to a very quick time, which my experience has taught me is called the “can-can”.’
Suddenly, he’d seen enough. Throwing away his cigarette, he summoned his force of police officers, and they marched in, the drumming of boots echoing down the staircase and out over to the Hall. Having spied upon these balls of debauchery before, Caminada knew all about the secret entrance and its knock.
He knocked on a hidden-away side door.
It creaked open by a slanted crack, and the sound of the devil’s ball became more alive. Behind the door was a man dressed in the holy habit of a convent.
‘Password?’ growled the big, muscular nun.
Caminada shuddered inside as he forced himself to affect a high, feminine voice.
‘Sister!’ he piped in an operatic falsetto.
The door swung open fully, and in a prophetic echo of New York’s 1969 Stonewall raid, in poured the full force of the Manchester City Police to the cross-dressing ball.
‘It was the largest raid ever on an LGBT venue by any police force in the UK,’ says Richard Brady, one of the writers behind A Very Victorian Scandal, a recent play based on the events. ‘The pictures in the Illustrated Police News of 9th October 1880 show dancers fighting back against the police.
‘There was massive public interest in the story. Newspapers picked the story up; with some papers issuing special illustrated supplements and the reporting even reached America. It was a national scandal and a line can reasonably be drawn from these men’s trials to the Oscar Wilde trial in 1895.’
The play was performed in three separate pieces as part of LGBT History Month, to great acclaim. Brady believes it was important to present this story in this context.
‘By denying a person their history, you are denying them their identity. The Hulme Fancy Dress Ball shows that there was a vibrant community in the North of England, made up of ordinary people. The majority of the Victorian LGBT history known by the public is about people from the upper classes.
‘Very little is known of ordinary gay people and we felt the LGBT communities in Manchester deserved to learn more about their history. The story of how the police, the press and the public interacted with each other is also a remarkably modern story. It shows the same dilemmas that we’re still grappling with today with the phone hacking scandal.’
Each piece of A Very Victorian Scandal was full to capacity, and so the writers are now looking to turn it into a full-length show. Due to the ambition of the project, with its large cast and period costumes and props, they’re still in the planning stages and can’t yet announce dates but we’ll be sure to keep you updated. Because our history is a part of our identities, and it reminds us that homosexuality did exist before 1969.
And did those forty-seven men get charged with ‘soliciting indecency’, as Jerome Caminada wanted? Well, we’ll leave that story to be told by the show…
Photos © 2015 Nicolas Chinardet
