The private world of public urinals: London 1918-57

London Journal

Volumn 25, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 64-70

  Houlbrook, Matt ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

PUBLIC SPACE; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR;

ENGLAND(LONDON); UNITED KINGDOM;

EID: 0033944561     PISSN: 03058034     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1179/ldn.2000.25.1.52     Document Type: Article

References (122)

1. I would like to thank Pam Cox, Geoff Crossick, Ken Plummer, Chris Waters and the anonymous referees of the London Journal, for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.
2. D.J. West, Homosexuality: A Frank and Practical Guide to the Social and Medical Aspects of Male Homosexuality (Harmondsworth, 1955), 154. '
3. J. Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (1977);
4. P. Higgins, Heterosexual Dictatorship: Male Homosexuality in Post War Britain (1996);
5. S. Jeffery-Poulter, Queers, Peers and Commons: The Struggle for Gay Law Reform from 1950 to the Present (1991).
6. F. Mort, 'Mapping Sexual London: The Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution: 1954-7', New Formations, 37 (1999), 92-114;
7. L.J. Moran, The Homosexual(ity) of Law (1996).
8. Mort, 'Mapping Sexual London', 94-5.
9. Mort draws upon debates in postmodern geography. See for example E. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989).
10. The historical development of the laws regulating homosexual conduct is described in Weeks, Coming Out, passim.
11. I use the term homosexual to denote all men seeking sexual encounters with other men, not to describe a distinct community organised around a common sexual identity. Homosexual desire and encounters in public conveniences were understood and organised in widely divergent ways. See M. Houlbrook, 'For Whose Convenience? Gay Guides, Cognitive Maps and the Construction of Homosexual London: 1917-C.1967', in S. Gunn
12. and R.J. Morris (eds.), Boundaries, Identities and Urban Space: 1700-2000 (Forthcoming). The contemporary legal situation is discussed in, L. Radzinowicz, Sexual Offences: A Report of the Cambridge Department of Criminal Science (1957).
13. Adopting a spatial approach to the study of homosexual experience has been a powerful feature of the geographical wing of queer theory. T. Brent Ingram, A.M. Bouthillette and Y. Retter, 'Lost in Space: Queer Theory and Community Activism at the Fin de Millénaire', in Ingram, Bouthillette and Retter (eds.), Queers in Space: Communities/Public Places/Sites of Resistance (Seattle Washington, 1997), 4.
14. P. Wildeblood, Against the Law (1955), 9.
15. Against the Law, Ibid. 37.
16. P. Wildeblood, A Way of Life (1956).
17. Trevor Thomas: An Academic Life'.J. Weeks and K Porter (eds.), Between the Acts: Lives of Homosexual Men: 1885-1967 (1998), 62.
18. This use of London's public lavatories as sites for the expression of homosexual desire has a long history. Randolph Trumbach records cases from the boghouses of Lincoln's Inn Fields and Covent Garden in the eighteenth century. Trumbach, 'London', D. Higgs (ed.), Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories Since 1600 (1999). The opportunities for this kind of sexual encounter rose from the 1820s with a growing revulsion towards urination and defecation in public streets, the development of municipal sanitation and the increasing provision of public urinals.
19. See M.J.D. Roberts, 'Public and Private in Early Nineteenth Century London: The Vagrant Act of 1822 and its Enforcement', Social History, 13 (3) (1988),
20. 273-294 for a discussion of shifting public attitudes. S. Pennybacker, A Vision for London: Labour, Everyday Life and the LCCExperiment, 1896-1914 (1996), 192,
21. deals with the provision of municipal services. Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries 1870-1930 (1997), 194 cites cases from the new urinals in Farringdon Road and Hyde Park, in 1848 and 1870 respectively.
22. The importance of'passing' in the negotiation of heterosexist space has been emphasised in contemporary gay and lesbian studies. See G. Valentine, 'Desperately Seeking Susan: A Geography of Lesbian Friendships', Area, 25 (2) (1993), 109-116.
23. Public Record Office, Central Criminal Court Depositions, GRIM 1 1041. Statement of witness, P.C. 144 C Frank Medhurst, 15.9.39. Medhurst was keeping observation on a man marked out by the fact that he was wearing rouge and lipstick.
24. PRO, GRIM 1 758. Statement of witness, P.C. 405 C John McErlane, 5.3.35. Statement of witness, Henry H. 5.3.35. It was the ill fortune of both men that the court accepted police testimony that the urinal was not big enough for two men to simultaneously urinate.
25. 'Barry: An Exile's Life', Weeks and Porter, Between the Acts, 159. Born in 1913, Barry was cottaging from the 1930s onwards.
26. PRO, Metropolitan Police Papers, MEPOL 3 992. Statement of Frederick Ivermee, Inspector C, 30.4.35.
27. PRO, Home Office Papers, HO 345 12. Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution 1954-7 [CHP]/TRANS/8, testimony of P.C. Butcher, C Division, Metropolitan Police, 7.12.54, Q635, 7.
28. PRO, GRIM 1 906. Statement of witness, P.S. 106 S John Lawlor, 14.12.37.
29. H. Montgomery Hyde, The Other Love: An Historical and Contemporary Survey of Homosexuality (1970), 206.
30. PRO, MEPOL 3 390. Assistant Divisional Inspector G. Pierson to Superintendent M Division, 30.8.33.
31. London Metropolitan Archive, Public Morality Council Papers, A/PMC/43. Patrolling Officer's Report, 29.8.49.
32. PRO, MEPOL 2 9367. Report of Chief Inspector C. Walters, 'Prostitution, Homosexuals, Pornography and Rowdyism in the West End', 30.10.52. This contains a timetable of where homosexuals can be found throughout the day starting at 6.00am. The urinals mentioned are mostly frequented in 'late evening'.
33. PRO, HO 345 7. CHP/14, memorandum submitted by Geoffrey Rose, chief magistrate, Lambeth. Rose dates his observation to the start of the Second World War.
34. PRO, HO 345 12. CHP/TRANS/8, testimony of P.C. Butcher, Q635, 7.
35. S. Humphries, A Secret World of Sex: Forbidden Fruit: The British Experience 1900-1950 (1988), 195.
36. Ibid. 194.
37. PRO, MEPOL 3 990. D.S. G. Trucker to Divisional Detective Inspector, 25.8.33.
38. T. Driberg, Ruling Passions: The Autobiography of Tom Driberg (1977), 147.
39. Humphries, A Secret World, 194-5.
40. PRO, HO 345 7. CHP/5, memorandum submitted by Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, Sir Laurence Dunne.
41. Hall Carpenter Archives/Gay Men's Oral History Group, Walking after Midnight: Gay Men's Life Stories (1989), 34, [emphasis added].
42. For Desart, 'the possibility of any space is latent... a queer space is an activated zone made proprietary by the occupant'. J.U. Desart, 'Queer Space', Ingram, Bouthillette and Retter, Queers In Space, 21.
43. develop this argument in Houlbrook, 'For Whose Convenience?' While the experience of cottaging allowed some men to imagine themselves in relation to a wider reference group, the nature of this imagined community and its relationship to the experiences of cottaging men varied immensely.
44. John: A Remodelled Life', Weeks and Porter, Between the Acts, 175.
45. HCA/GMOHG, Walking After Midnight, 97.
46. PRO, HO 345 7. CHP/12, memorandum submitted by Lord Chief Justice Goddard.
47. PRO, MEPOL 3 989. Persons frequenting urinals apparently for improper purposes. Suggested amendments to the Instruction Book, 18.8.37-23.1.39. C Division suggestions, 18.8.37. The direction inserted into General Orders in 1872 was as follows, 'persons frequenting urinals supposedly for an improper purpose are to be cautioned and if they continue the practice, and there is evidence to justify their apprehension, they may be apprehended and charged'.
48. PRO, MEPOL 2 9367. All but two of the locations identified as sites of male importuning are urinals.
49. PRO, MEPOL 3 990. C.C.G.R.A. memo, 31.8.33. ,
50. PRO, MEPOL 3 405. Confidential, Street Offences Committee, Sub-Committee. Transcript of proceedings at the fifth meeting on 5.1.28, Q183-4.
51. Mort, .'Mapping Sexual London', 100.
52. That apparently identical physical locations can be inscribed with radically different meanings is developed in David Bell and Gill Valentine's notion of 'vernacular' erotic geographies or 'cognitive maps'. In the maps of public urinals provided by the Metropolitan Police and imagined by homosexual men the city is constructed as sexed and sexualised. Yet the interpretation of this landscape as an opportunity by homosexual men is in very real contrast to its interpretation as a social problem by the police. D. Bell and G. Valentine, 'Introduction: Orientations', Bell and Valentine (eds.), Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexuality (1995), 1.
53. 'John: A Remodelled Life', Weeks and Porter, Between the Acts, 175.
54. For the administrative and procedural orientation of policing towards public urban space see, V.A.C. Gatrell, 'Crime, Authority and the Policeman State', F.M.L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain: 1750-1950: Volume 3: Social Agencies and Institutions (Cambridge, 1993), 271.
55. PRO, HO 345 8. CHP/51, memorandum submitted by Peter Wildeblood.
56. H. Daley, This Small Cloud: A Personal Memoir (1986), 156.
57. PRO, GRIM 1 2487. Statement of witness, D.C. 472 Ion Martin, 2.10.54.
58. PRO, HO 345 1. Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences.and Prostitution, (London, HMSO, 1957).
59. PRO, MEPOL 3 990. Wontner and Sons solicitors to police, 5.8.33.
60. See for example, Driberg, Ruling Passions, 147-8.
61. Joyson-Hicks personally asked the Barrister HP Macmillan, Chairman of the Street Offences Committee, to form this sub-committee together with Jowitt and Priestley, 'two of your lawyer colleagues'. They were to investigate 'certain recent cases in which ... the suggestion has been made and freely canvassed that the police acted wrongfully under existing law and practice'. The cases of Champain and that of Major Graham Bell Murray - an incident in Hyde Park-were referred to them specifically. Macmillan was informed of his task, 'to consider these cases and advise ... whether there was any failure of duty or irregularity on the part of any of the police officers concerned in these cases'. PRO, HO 45 12633. 192237: Appointment of Commission to consider the law and practice in relation to soliciting etc. Minute 85, 18.10.27.
62. The best account of this case in legal terms is contained in the newspaper reports of the trial. See for example, 'Double Blue's Lapse', News of the World, 28.8.27 and, 'Another Case Dismissed on Appeal: Schoolmasters Honour: Complete Vindication of Character', Birmingham Daily Mail, 21.9.27. Mr Cecil Whitely, the Recorder of London also directed that the defendant's costs should be allowed. A copy of the short hand notes of the evidence was sent to the Commissioner of Police - in effect initiating the controversy.
63. PRO, MEPOL 3 405. Attachment 4a, Letter from Mr J. Chester, 48 Surrey Street, Brighton, 27.9.27.
64. PRO, MEPOL 3 405. Transcript of proceedings at the fifth meeting, 5.1.28, Q117-8.
65. Ibid. Ql 84.
66. Ibid. Q295.
67. PRO, MEPOL 3 405. Attachment 35a, Confidential: Street Offences Committee, Report of the Subcommittee, 28.1.28.
68. PRO, MEPOL 3 405. Transcript of proceedings at the fifth meeting, 5.1.28. Q359-60.
69. Ibid. Q633.
70. PRO, MEPOL 3 405. Attachment 35a, Report of the Subcommittee, 28.1.28.
71. PRO, MEPOL 3 992. Statement of witness, Inspector C. Frederick Ivermee, 30.4.35.
72. PRO, GRIM 1 617. Statement of witness, P.C. 432 L Archibald Halliday, 13.9.32.
73. PRO, GRIM 1 1589. Statement of witness, P.C. 246 B John Duncan, 20-4-44.
74. PRO, GRIM 1 1198. Statement of witness, P.C. 34 D John Cockburn, 25-6-40.
75. PRO, GRIM 1 2487. Statement of witness, P.C. 552 H Mortimer Ramskill, 12.10.54. Statement of the accused.
76. PRO, MEPOL 3 405. Attachment 35a, Report of the Subcommittee, 28.1.28. Champain's medical testimony could have got him into more trouble. Commenting on the case in a memorandum to the Under Secretary of State at the Home Office, Sir William Harwood, Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis, expressed surprise that Dr Mason was not cross examined on his testimony concerning an enlarged prostate gland. 'I believe it is common knowledge that this condition i.e. an enlarged prostate gland, especially when accentuated by alcohol is known to produce abnormal desires and abnormal conduct'. PRO, MEPOL 3 405. Minute lOa, Harwood to Under Secretary of State, 29.10.27. This kind of comment demonstrates the extreme incoherence of contemporary medical discourses of homosexuality.
77. PRO, MEPOL 3 990. Statement of witness, P.C. 528 M George Cooper, 25.8.33.
78. PRO, GRIM 1 547. Statement of witness, P.C. 208 C Albert McKechnie, 11.3.31. Harold R. broke several other commandments: he was seen going into the urinal at Leicester Square then coming out and immediately walking to Piccadilly Circus. He smiled at several men and also brushed against one.
79. PRO, GRIM 1 617. Statement of witness, P.C. 660 L Cyril Knight, 13.9.32.
80. PRO, GRIM 1 2187. Statement of witness, P.C. 258 C Victor Renshaw, 13.11.51.
81. PRO, GRIM 1 758. Statement of witness, P.C. 405 CJohn McErlane, 5.3.35.
82. PRO, HO 345 7. CHP/14, memorandum submitted by Geoffrey Rose.
83. PRO, HO 345 7. CHP/10, memorandum submitted by Sir John Nott-Bower, Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis. The Metropolitan Police and London County Council had one unexpected ally in their efforts to close down the urinals - the German Luftwaffe. 'The blitz ... precipitated the total disappearance of these exciting landmarks altogether'. Anonymous informant, quoted in Hyde, The Oilier Love, 212.
84. LMA, A/PMC/43. Patrolling Officer's Report- 30.7.50: un-attributed news clipping, 20.7.50.
85. PRO, HO 345 12. CHP/TRANS/7, testimony of Sir John Nott-Bower, 7.12.54, Q604, 14.
86. G. Westwood, A Minority: A Report on the Life of the Male Homosexual in Great Britain (1960), 80-1.
87. PRO, HO 345 12. CHP/TRANS/10, testimony of Paul Bennett, Metropolitan Magistrate, Marlborough Street, 5.1.55, Q793, 14.
88. PRO, HO 345 12. CHP/TRANS/12, testimony of P.C. Butcher, Q635, 7.
89. Hyde, The Other Love, 207.
90. E. Carter, J. Donald andj. Squires, Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location (1993), xiv.
91. There are parallels between the cottage and the experiences of middle class women in the 1880s and 1890s as claimed a legitimate and respectable presence in the public sphere. SeeJ. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (1995). Lynda Nead analyses the debates over the regulation of obscenity in mid nineteenth-century London in similar terms. Discussing the relationship between the House of Lords, Central Criminal Court and the pornographers of Holywell Street she argues that 'obscenity drew these three elements into a struggle over the legitimate and illegitimate functions of urban space'. Nead,
92. 'From Alleys to Courts: Obscenity and the Mapping of Mid Victorian London', New Formations, 37 (1999), 35.
93. PRO, HO 345 12. CHP/TRANS/8, testimony of P.C. Butcher, Q635, 7. In the film Prick Up Your Ears based on the life of the playwright Joe Orton, there is a scene in a cottage in which Orton is helped by other men to remove the light bulbs, casting the place into darkness.
94. PRO, HO 345 7. CHP/10, memorandum submitted by Sir John Nott-Bower.
95. The ability of homosexual men to act from a position of marginalisation to maintain a claim on the use of public space connects to the experience of other marginalised social groups. Shirley Ardener notes that 'the fact that [women] do not control physical or social space directly does not necessarily preclude them from being determinants of or mediators in the allocation of space'. Ardener, 'Ground Rules and Social Maps for Women: An Introduction', Ardener (ed.), Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps (1981), 17.
96. E.P. Thompson, 'Crimes of Anonymity', and Thompson, 'The Patricians and the Plebs', Thompson, Customs in Common (1991). For a more general discussion of such forms of resistance see J.C. Scott, Domination and tlieArts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990).
97. This accords with Chris Waters' account of the trial of Peter Wildeblood, Michael Pitt-Rivers and Lord Montagu of Beaulieu in 1953. The tabloid press in this case 'tried to map the essential character of the homosexual not by referring to specific acts but by offering an image of the type of person who was likely to commit them ... essentially ... projected an image of the three defendants as decadent, effete and effeminate. That image was also cultivated by the prosecution of the trial in order to secure conviction'. Waters, 'Disorders of the Mind, Disorders of the Body Social: Peter Wildeblood and the Making of the Modern Homosexual', B. Conekin, F. Mort and C. Waters (eds.), Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain 1945-1964 (1999), 145.
98. PRO, GRIM 1 2424. Criminal Records Office pro forma, 30.4.54.
99. Ibid. List of Exhibits sent from Marlborough Street to the Central Criminal Court, 30-454. Jean Genet's account of the reaction of the Spanish police to a tube of Vaseline found in his possession, during a raid and taken as a signifier of his homosexuality is comparable. Quoted in D. Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1991), 1-2.
100. PRO, MEPOL 3 405. Attachment 35a, Report of the Sub Committee, 25.1.28.
101. PRO, GRIM 1 433. Statement of witness, Divisional Surgeon Rees Phillips, 1.6.28. In another case two men were examined by the local doctor at Brixton Police Station for evidence of semen in their foreskin and on their clothes. PRO, GRIM 1 617. Statement of witness, John Dixon Stubs, 13.9.32.
102. For example: PRO, GRIM 1 617. List of Exhibits, 13.9.32 contains six black and white prints of the urinal at Popes Road Brixton. PRO, GRIM 1 1589. List of Exhibits, 20.4.44 includes a plan drawn by a Metropolitan Police draughtsman of the public convenience in South Kensington underground station.
103. See S. Maynard, 'Through a Hole in the Lavatory Wall: Homosexual Subcultures, Police Surveillance and the Dialectics of Discovery: Toronto, 1890-1930', Journal of the History of Sexuality, 5 (2) (1994), 226. Maynard argues that such tactics 'drew on the already well established evidentiary status of the photograph to reveal the reality or truth of sex between men through a representation not of actual sexual activity but of the scene of a sexual crime'. For such an epistemological connection to be made there is also an a priori need for the urinal to be associated with homosexual encounters. It must already be defined as a problematic aspect of urban space.
104. As Lee Edelman argues, the urinal is a 'site at which the zones of public and private cross with a distinctive psychic charge'. It became 'a battleground in the campaign to shore up masculinity by policing the border at which sexual difference is defmitionally produced, the borders at which inside and outside, same and other, self and different are the psychic stakes at risk'. Edelman, 'Tearooms and Sympathy: or the Epistemology of the Water Closet', Edelman, Homograpliesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (1994), 158-9.
105. LMA, Bow Street Police Court Registers, PS/BOW/A1/64-69. The overwhelming proportion of homosexual incidents detected in public urinals continued into the 1950s. The figure for 1957 was 80 per cent LMA; PS/BOW/A1/297-305, PS/BOW/A2/074-078.
106. Recent debates in human geography around the relationship between urban space and social action have reconceptualised space not as a neutral location for practice but as implicated in a complex, dialectical relationship with human agency. Ardener, 'Ground Rules and Social Maps', 13.
107. PRO, HO 345 7. CHP/11, memorandum submitted by Harold Sturge, Metropolitan Magistrate, Old Street
108. PRO, HO 345 12. CHP/TRANS/10, testimony of Paul Bennett, 14, [emphasis added].
109. PRO, HO 345 12. CHP/TRANS/8, testimony of P.C. Butcher: Q633, 3.
110. PRO, HO 345 7. CHP/5, memorandum submitted by Sir Laurence Dunne.
111. D. Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West (1995) 9-10.
112. Maynard's analysis of Toronto argues that the urinals were a 'highly charged signifier' in the debates around slum conditions, particularly of the Jewish district known as the Ward. He fails to make the connection between the negative discourses around the urinal and those around the homosexual, when his own evidence shows them to be identical. Maynard, 'Through a Hole', 214.
113. G. Gorer, The English Character, (1955). 296.
114. Daley, This Small Cloud, 213.
115. PRO, MEPOL 3 990. W.M. Kissfus, 6.9.33. Nott-Bower refers to this duty in 1954 as, 'unpleasant and unpopular'. PRO, HO 345 12. CHP/TRANS/7, memorandum submitted by Sir John Nott-Bower.
116. PRO, MEPOL 3 405. Transcript of proceedings at the fifth meeting, 5.1.27. Q188, Q199.
117. PRO, MEPOL 3 990. Wontner and Sons solicitors to police, 5.8.33.
118. Gregory: A Respectable Life', Porter and Weeks, Between the Acts, 47.
119. 'John: A Remodelled Life', Porter and Weeks, Between the Acts, 175.
120. HCA/GMOHG, Walking after Midnight, 98.
121. Westwood, A Minority, 74.
122. Q. Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant (1968), 145.