The “Cleveland Street” or “West End” Scandal is familiar territory for historians of sexuality. Throughout the fall of 1889 and into the spring of 1890, the newspaper-reading British public followed a series of accusations, counteraccusations, and trials involving the sexual liaisons of aristocrats and Post Office telegraph messengers at 19 Cleveland Street, a house of assignation just off Tottenham Court Road. The scandal has been the subject of two monographs, and its revelations form the substance of numerous case studies. The telegraph boys’ roles in the affair tends to be overshadowed by those of its more glamorous and notorious participants, yet telegraph boys were literally at the bottom of Cleveland Street’s revelations: an internal Post Office investigation at the Central Telegraph Office brought the Cleveland Street brothel to light, and while the scandal ultimately involved peers, politicians, and journalists, the initial discoveries made by London Post Office officials uncovered a small but effective network of telegraph boy rent emanating from within the department’s head office. Cleveland Street ensured telegraph messengers’ inclusion in scholarly discussions of urban male prostitution, but their specific relationship to London’s sexual subcultures remains largely unexplored.Footnote 1
To partially remedy this situation, I will consider London telegraph boys’ cultural significance as laboring subjects in what Patrick Joyce has termed the “self-regulating city” of modern liberal capitalism.Footnote 2 Recently, a number of scholars, including Joyce and Chris Otter, have posited that urban design, infrastructure, and the built environment of Victorian cities, from widened streets and drains to pedestrian crossings and gas lighting, were instrumental in producing the conditions for “liberal” rule in the mid- to late nineteenth century.Footnote 3 For these scholars, liberalism is not so much a set of political ideologies or affiliations as a flexible, somewhat amorphous term that deliberately evokes more conventional meanings in order to describe how notions of freedom are used strategically to actualize and monitor political subjects.Footnote 4 Key to their neomaterialist descriptions of liberal governmentality, or “the rule of freedom,” in the nineteenth century are newly minted patterns of unfettered movement—of goods, commerce, information, and people—and the Victorian city, with its civic improvements and technological innovations, showcases how the built environment and urban infrastructure “cultivated a certain sort of self, one that was reflexive and self-watching.”Footnote 5
Otter has expanded this line of reasoning to incorporate specific readings of urban liberal objectivity, that is, the “proliferating phalanx of technological artifacts which encouraged, stimulated and made possible forms of practice integral to liberal society.”Footnote 6 In conjunction with the railway and gas lighting, he notes that communications technology was a key development in the “networking” projects of Victorian London. For Otter, a network is a “physical system, which, along with its human operators, links points across reasonably large tracts of space.”Footnote 7 While networks, including the telegraph system, expanded and became more standardized and “self-correcting,” they also became “nodalized.” As Otter explains, “telegraph technology … was stratified and knotty, typified by points of concentration, junctions, and lines of interconnection, leaving vast swathes of space simply ignored.”Footnote 8 These technologies of freedom, then, were not universally accessible. Individuals, depending on wealth, education, and geography, were positioned quite differently to the emerging liberal material state. Even Victorian London, the undisputed hub of the telegraph network, was heavily stratified in terms of telegraph access and usage.
Unequal access is of course implied, and occasionally made explicit, in this type of urban history. Otter’s gaslights, for example, guide us down wide lit thoroughfares, around and away from newly covered meat markets and other sites of messy, noisy, smelly, violent, and sometimes illicit activity integral to the city’s maintenance.Footnote 9 Often in this literature, however, the people occupying these ordered urban landscapes of sidewalks, pipes, and wires fade into the background. The liberal subject, whose emergence this scholarship is devoted to, disappears in the wide expanse of an orderly street or gets buried in a mass of infrastructure. It is important to bring specific, historically situated social actors back into the picture to clearly iterate who the liberal subject could be in this context, who was excluded from this ordering, and who provided the means for liberal subjects to maintain their ability to govern themselves.
The contours of technological innovation depend on the type of labor available to produce the intended outcome. In the telegraph’s case, the much admired scientists and engineers of the later nineteenth century who designed the British Telegraph system and debated, among other things, whether to string telegraph wires over or under London in order to best maintain the free, efficient flow of electrical communication, also constructed a system dependent on the availability of specifically gendered, and affordable, workers. It is in this context that telegraph boys, as part of the human infrastructure comprising the telegraph network, provide a fascinating window into the labor that produced the late Victorian liberal city. They embodied both the technological ordering of time, space, and information in the metropolis and those more uncontrollable forces that modernizing agents wished to curtail. Their deliveries ensured the efficient flow of information to the wealthy and predominantly male consumers of the telegraph, and their concentrated presence in certain enclaves of London reinscribed financial, state, and imperial might.Footnote 10 And yet, as the Cleveland Street Scandal made abundantly clear, some telegraph boys were also workers in the underground male sex trade. What is more, previously overlooked archival sources at the British Postal Heritage Museum and Archive reveal that Cleveland Street, instead of being a singular revelation of the intersection of sexual culture, class, and urban technology, was only the most public display of a long-standing problem for the London General Post Office (GPO) administration. An earlier series of events, culminating in the spring of 1877, left a trail of memoranda, letters, and a forty four page report that offers grounds for an evaluation of the key role that telegraph boys’ sexual (mis)conduct played in the reordering of London’s late Victorian communications system.
Surprisingly enough, by following the Post Office Executive’s reaction to the exploits of London telegraph boys in the 1870s, a picture begins to emerge of the odd centrality of homosexual practices to late Victorian urban communications regulation. Vague rumors of sinful behavior in telegraph boy kitchens spawned a full-scale investigation, run by the Missing Letter Branch and the Metropolitan Police, which uncovered widespread “immorality.” The GPO agent in charge of the investigation, Thomas Jeffery, produced an exhaustive list of causes for “the evil” of prostitution among the GPO’s young male workforce. The categories employed by Jeffery to make sense of these revelations relied heavily on Victorian tropes of spatial order and danger. They also incorporated long-standing GPO understandings of “inside” and “outside,” of an idealized insular workplace and a dangerously unstable outer urban world, which already heavily informed GPO labor policy. The report’s findings and recommendations, along with the letters, memoranda, and legal documents attached to the investigation and its outcome, reveal how the telegraph boy’s troubling stance as both “modern mercury” of the capital and readily available rent boy was interwoven in the practices and policies of the urban telegraph service.
London’s “unnameable” homosexual subcultures and its proudly touted communications systems were intimately networked, and the young telegraph/rent boys who exploited the possibilities of London’s sexual subcultures while embodying state order, efficiency, and prescribed mobility ultimately acted in their capacity as a unique type of modern laborer. Nineteenth-century information technology, before the rise of the telephone and wireless, depended on face-to-face human contact. The presence of telegraph boys in this period was a transformative moment of modern interactions with space and time, when strangers still had to ritually confront each other in order to pass on the latest information. London telegraph messengers’ duty to cross boundaries and be party to secrets, to deliver the confidences and desires of their wealthy customers, made them strangely transgressive symbols of modern order.
In some ways, telegraph boys occupied a similar place in the city as guardsmen. Their uniformed presence on the London streets radiated both the most reified and the most troubling versions of late Victorian masculinity. Yet telegraph boys were encompassed within a set of practices and discourses concerning urban youth that made their contribution to urban rent distinct. As Matt Houlbrook has compellingly argued, the guardsman’s exalted status as the “ideal man” formed normative and queer productions of national manhood, and the soldier hero/rent boy, by “existing in a constant tension,” produced “an instability of meaning that made the guardsman central to the imagined landscapes of British masculinities.”Footnote 11 Telegraph boys were in no way exalted—at most they were soldier heroes in training. The GPO’s glamor at this point emanated from its electric wires and transatlantic cables, not from its workforce. The postman was iconic of benign, orderly, and utterly unexciting state business—the days of adventurous King’s Messengers were long over—and while the telegraph boy was incorporated into the exoticism of high-speed communications technology, his cultural resonance had more to do with the promises and anxieties encompassing youth than with the multiple valences of masculine prestige. Boyhood inflected the gendering of this laboring body quite differently.
Male juvenile street culture was a perennial cause for concern in Victorian London.Footnote 12 By the 1890s, anxieties about the degenerating effects of working-class youth leisure practices had taken on an overtly imperial, racialized tone, but even in the 1870s, moralists fretted about the lack of character-building resources available to boys after they left board schools and entered the youth labor market. With a little money to spend as they wished, these young workers could get up to all sorts of activities contrary to the proper development of citizenship. And there was the tricky matter of youthful character itself—to what degree were boys responsible for their actions? How could this uncertainty undermine productivity? Class anxieties dovetailed with broader understandings of the transition from childhood to maturity. For those overseeing the telegraph system, boyhood labor was a mixed expediency. On the one hand, telegraph boys were an extension of the state’s new investment in childhood education. They were being trained for permanent careers in the civil service, complete with pensions and benefits. On the other hand, telegraph boys were risky investments. Their youthful volatility was not always easy to channel.
Moving beyond the GPO, telegraph boys added a new dimension to pederastic traditions still running strong in the capital. Some of these messengers incorporated the knowledge, accessibility, and look required for their sanctioned jobs into sexual labor that complemented their miniscule earnings. What the telegraph boys themselves made of their official and sexual work is unknown. Lacking sources that articulate the boys’ own thoughts, their motivations and desires remain elusive. This particular period in British history, and London history in particular, has for almost forty years compelled scholars to delve into the elusive motivations and desires of the men who, among other pursuits, created the demand for telegraph boy sex workers. Ever since Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality called out late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European governing forms as the crucible from which the modern homosexual emerged as a “species” of medico-moral discourse, historians have argued about how accurate this claim was and to what extent it applied to their region/time period/subject of expertise.Footnote 13 In the process of admiring, denouncing, refining, and refuting Foucault’s insight, there is arguably no period more scrutinized in terms of male homosexual subjectivity than the late nineteenth century. Excellent studies of this period, along with shifting contemporary priorities about identity and history, have freed up scholars to build off this research and ask slightly different questions about homoerotic cultures.Footnote 14 Rather than aligning with a particular pro-, anti-, or reformed Foucauldian “sexual subjectivity” school when it comes to telegraph boys, I am interested in what happens when we focus on a telegraphic and sexual workforce in relation to recent urban scholarship that grapples with technology and Foucault’s more general insights on liberal governmentality.Footnote 15 As historians have endeavored to push beyond binary thinking about culture and technology and return to probing Victorian infrastructural and civic projects with new questions about British imperialist order, citizenship, and selfhood, it seems timely to bring labor back into the discussion. The body—and bodies—of workers of the late nineteenth century were foundational to the design of public utilities, at least when it came to communications technology. London telegraph boys produced the possibility of “liberal subjecthood” for telegraph consumers; their own positioning to this concept of modern selfhood, given the nature of their work, was more tenuous.
The readiness and ease with which many London telegraph boys transitioned between sex work and postal work while out on delivery and even in the heart of offices was part of what made the liberal city tick. Ironically, this unfettered movement was the result of these boys remaining providers of others’ needs and desires. This paradoxical relationship between urban movement and lack of social power materializes in the language and treatment of the messengers who ended up in court. Their sexual acts rearticulated as criminal evidence in the Home Office archive were understood by the prosecution to be valuable precisely because, as youths, their actions and desires were not their own but the product of a more powerful subject’s imaginings, and therefore testament to what had been done to them, not what they had done themselves.
Responses to telegraph boys’ daily and nightly routines, along with the justice system’s paternalism, highlight aspects of Victorian order that reveal a not quite so self-regulating city, one that relied on coercion and limited access to the perks of modernizing life. Telegraph boys were liminal subjects who did the dirty work of crossing urban boundaries to supply the city’s important citizens with all the information and pleasures they could pay for. Their multiple roles in producing discordant visions of late Victorian London were demonstrated by how the GPO discovered and interacted with an organized homosexual market. Administrators had to grapple with an unanticipated supply and demand cycle created out of the gap between wires and consumers. Their response was anything but liberal.
The London Telegraph Boy
The British Telegraph Service was nationalized in 1870 under the auspices of the General Post Office. Widely touted at the outset as an example of effective government intervention into commerce and communications, the nationalized telegraph service aimed to vastly increase coverage and accessibility. Commentators from across the political spectrum favored the move, citing the Post Office’s previous successes.Footnote 16 GPO telegraph lines spread rapidly, both in urban centers and between more isolated communities throughout Great Britain and the Empire. Three hundred additional stations were hastily set up throughout London alone in order to promote speedy telegraph reception and delivery.Footnote 17 However, unlike the widely admired penny post innovation of the 1840s, telegraph revenue quickly fell short of expenditure, and for the rest of the century the telegraph service had to be supported by surplus revenue from the mail, the savings bank, and eventually the parcel service.Footnote 18 The Treasury kept a close watch on GPO spending in the 1870s, and the GPO retained and expanded upon the cost-saving methods employed by the private sector in its initial involvement with telegraph services: they relied heavily on juvenile male labor and, for the first time in the civil service, hired women in significant numbers.
In the 1870s over two thousand boy messengers worked in telegraph offices and on the London streets. Unlike their female coworkers and nonuniformed indoor male staff who were kept inside seated at telegraph machines or behind counters, telegraph boys were expected to have almost limitless mobility. Martin Daunton describes how the delegation of indoor and outdoor staff was a deliberate attempt by the GPO to maintain class hierarchies: “A clear line was drawn between the duties of the postmen and the indoor staff, between the uniformed outdoor workforce and the higher status white-collar indoor occupations.”Footnote 19 Uniforms had always explicitly performed a disciplinary function at the Post Office: in 1793 the first uniforms were issued to postmen in order to monitor their “loitering and mis-spending their time in Ale Houses.”Footnote 20 In the early nineteenth century the post office uniform, a bright and fairly elaborate costume, had become both a sign of pride and a badge of state authority. Both the uniform and postmen’s social standing changed dramatically in the Victorian era. As the Post Office developed into a far-reaching and affordable network of communication, the postman became common, in both senses of the word. By the 1870s the GPO uniform signified state efficiency over the mail and state discipline over its lower-status outdoor staff. Even the simple, militaristic blue uniform came in a wide variety of subtle variations so that its workers were never in doubt of their caste. Telegraph boys received the lowest-grade fabric, boots, and belts; were subject to morning inspections; and were suspended without pay if their uniforms were disheveled or torn.Footnote 21 Their public behavior was obviously circumscribed to a certain extent, as is demonstrated by an unfortunate encounter in St. James’s: “Mr. Tilley met telegraph messenger No. 561 in St. James Street this morning smoking and looking dirty and untidy. Mr. Tilley told him not to smoke on duty; and he considers that if the boy passed before the Inspector before starting he was no Credit to that Officer’s supervision.”Footnote 22 The fate of messenger no. 561 and his inspector is unknown, but Mr. Tilley, soon to be Sir John Tilley, the secretary to the Postmaster General (the second highest ranking member of the GPO executive), initiated a short-lived proposal to include more identifying marks on telegraph messenger uniforms. The proposal was eventually thrown out because the cost of embroidering was deemed too expensive.
Messenger 561’s example highlights the perceived downside of having cost-saving boys on the front lines of the new communications order. Youth combined with working-class status made them a potentially vulnerable and capricious staff. Smoking was particularly evocative of troubling urban boyhood.Footnote 23 The London press, heavy users of the telegraph, displayed either amused exasperation or patronizing enthusiasm when it came to the young messengers. Humorous anecdotes about telegraph boys mixing up deliveries or being distracted by street games while on duty were fairly common, and a grumpy poem in Moonshine went further and bemoaned “the lazy and blundering / Telegraph boy.”Footnote 24The Licensed Victualler, a gossipy, jocular London weekly, had the opposite to say about telegraph boys: “Whoever yet saw a telegraph boy run off his legs or distressed in any way whatsoever? … Who can come forward and say he is fallen in with any specimen of the genus who has not been sharp, perky, full of animal spirits, and, in a general way, up to date?”Footnote 25 Here we have a modern, “up-to-date” telegraph boy who is a unique “genus” of the busy streets. He is fueled by “animal spirits,” which keep him happy and running. This combination of elite admiration and condescension of telegraph boys reveals both their appeal and their danger: those animal spirits were volatile components in the context of London’s possibilities.
Telegraph boys reportedly developed their own language to describe their experience of delivering and what to expect from their customers: a “lag” was an unusually long distance to cover; a “cop” was a house or business that tipped.Footnote 26 The city was being physically and mentally rezoned through the telegraph, both by messengers themselves and by the calculations of the GPO. New stations sprang up to accommodate the expected speed of communication, with areas associated with business, government, affluence, and retail (Westminster, the City, the West End) heavily catered to and other areas (North London, the East End) to varying degrees ignored. London was being divided along familiar class lines, but the commodity was now the speed of communications. Telegraph boys ensured that people at home and at work did not themselves have to interrupt their schedules and check for incoming messages at the post offices. To send messages, other than direct replies, telegraph customers who could not afford to rent their own lines and pay for an in-house telegraphist still had to make the initial connection with the GPO, but station proximity was making this trip more convenient. In addition, for many telegraph customers, servants and office boys often performed this task and provided an insulating link between the home or the workplace and the annoyance of street traffic and post office lineups. To further enhance the importance, prestige, and efficiency of the system, telegraph dispatches were designed for single message delivery: unlike postmen who carried multiple letters and delivered the post according to laid-out routes, urban telegraph boys were sent out with a single telegram the moment it came up. This was at least the theory. In practice, telegraph boys at busy London offices would be sent out with up to three messages, hopefully ones whose addressees were in close proximity to each other.Footnote 27 Messengers were instructed to appear as if the one message in their hand was the single focus of their run across town. This personalized service combined old ideas of deference with new expectations of the efficiency of wired communication.
As more post offices and telegraph boys began to appear, actual telegraph wires began to vanish. After 1870 the GPO systematically removed telegraph wires from the city rooftops and installed them “safely and quietly underground.”Footnote 28 This was ostensibly done to better protect the wires, but it also served to “tidy up” the London skyline and to thin out obstructing telegraph poles. When the new Central Telegraph Office was built in 1874 at St. Martin’s-le-Grande, it housed a marvel of new technology that discreetly snaked its way under the city from the Tower of London to the House of Commons. This was a pipeline of “pneumatic tubes,” designed to transfer written messages between the main telegraph stations “in a few seconds.”Footnote 29 Thirty-six miles of pipeline stretched east and west from the Central Telegraph Office beneath central London. Compressed air fired telegram-filled canisters along these tubes to their destinations, where the telegrams would then be transferred into the hands of the district telegraph boys. “A stream of telegrams … continually flow[ed]” under the metropolis, and the few contemporaries who were aware of the tubes thought them “very wonderful in their working.”Footnote 30
All these measures of efficiency amounted to a reorientation of space and time with communication. As the pneumatic pipeline was relatively unknown, the new speed of message transfer was vaguely understood by its users to be the result of unspecified scientific advancement—something that just “happened” in the modern city.Footnote 31 The new technology hid itself underground, shrinking time and space in the process. Those who relied on telegrams developed new conceptions about information transfer and the city landscapes. Only the telegraph boy, dressed in the uniform of the GPO, remained as the last physical vestige of this largely invisible technology.
The consumers of the newly subterranean network were of vastly different class backgrounds than that of the messengers. In the 1870s, telegrams cost one shilling per twenty words, with free delivery in London. While cheaper than the private telegrams of previous decades, the cost of telegrams put them beyond the range of the majority of Londoners. Certain urban dwellers—elites, government officials, businessmen and traders, and gamblers—frequently communicated by telegram, but most people sent or received telegrams only in moments of extreme crisis. Telegraph boys certainly could not afford the messages they delivered. They were usually hired at age fourteen and were the lowest-paid employees at the GPO, earning five shillings a week at the outset. Their wages would rise in increments, and senior telegraph boys, at age seventeen, could make twelve to fifteen shillings a week. In the 1870s, telegraph boys could expect to be hired as assistant postmen or mail sorters when they turned eighteen. Some of the “brighter boys” were offered telegraph training, although most telegraph clerkships were reserved for boys with more schooling and higher up the social scale.Footnote 32 Telegraph delivery was at this point more or less a form of apprenticeship for the GPO mail delivery or sorting establishment.
The GPO telegraph boys were the latest addition to the uniformed members of Victorian London’s workforce. They joined their fellow postmen, along with police and soldiers, as visual staples of state presence in the capital. Also, like soldiers and policemen, telegraph boys exerted an erotic draw on upper-class men searching for “rough trade” on London’s streets. Here too, the telegraph boys’ youth made them a distinct subcategory in urban rent. These fourteen- to eighteen-year-old messengers were uniquely available participants in the late Victorian sex trade. They could literally arrive on your doorstep; they were expected to traverse every corner of the city; and their presence at almost any hour of the day or night, in almost every type of urban neighborhood, was expected and unremarkable. Telegraph boys’ obligations to get around the metropolis as fast as possible were aided by improved public transportation in this period, which, as Matt Cook has pointed out, also provided new opportunities for discreet, anonymous sexual encounters between men, often of different classes, and for greater access to homoerotically inflected urban landscapes.Footnote 33 The telegraph messengers’ GPO pledge of discretion and confidentiality when it came to telegrams was mirrored in their furtive sexual liaisons with elite male customers, who, as we shall see, could be just as compromised as the messengers if revealed.
Unintended Networks
Eighteen seventy-six was an auspicious year for the telegraph network. The nationalized system had grown exponentially, and while it had yet to make a profit, the new supposed ubiquity of telegraph offices was still the GPO’s chief asset and bragging point. Throughout the year, plans were made to reroute London wires centrally. The district offices’ role in transmission would be reduced, with almost all dispatches transferred through the central office at St. Martin’s-le-Grand.Footnote 34 Frederick E. Baines, the surveyor general of telegraphs for London, reported favorably on this transition throughout the year, and in his spare time he tried to arrange for reading materials and other wholesome activities to be provided for telegraph boys between dispatches. His new-found interest in telegraph boy welfare was directed by a memo from the Postmaster General, Lord John Manners, who had tipped Baines off that “disorderly conduct” of telegraph messengers had occurred at the Vere Street Post Office in 1875. A clergyman had sent a letter to the Postmaster General reporting on vague but disturbing behavior admitted to by boys preparing for confirmation.Footnote 35 In response, Manners began an informal inquiry into messenger supervision and whether the boys had anything to do in their down time.
Between dispatches, telegraph boys congregated in the small kitchens that often shared space in the basement of telegraph offices with lavatories and the extensive machinery that generated electricity for the telegraph machines and powered the underground pneumatic tube system. They were usually supervised by low-paid matrons or older telegraph boys who had achieved the rank of “corporal” or “lance corporal.” These spaces had tables and chairs, as well as small storage receptacles for the messengers’ overcoats and waterproof gear. The number of boys in these spaces varied greatly, depending on the size of the office and the flow of telegraph business. Supervision was inconsistent, and in some London offices telegraph boys were left unmonitored or corralled near mail sorters and other indoor staff on the lower floors in the hope that some form of supervision would occur. Baines’s reading campaign, combined with other memoranda in 1876, illustrates a growing concern among officials about supervision of the messenger staff within the telegraph offices. By July, there were attempts by Tilley to standardize female matron supervision and pay, but this was left unresolved. A new concern over what was occurring off GPO premises had quietly taken priority.
A minute from Tilley to the Postmaster General appeared on 5 September 1876, indicating that an internal investigation of telegraph boys’ extracurricular activities was already underway: “I submit that the following boy messengers be at once dismissed from the service, viz.: Buck, Fovargue, Thompson, Juddick, Isaacs, Cave, Tindall; and I would suggest that copies of the report and its enclosures should be sent to the Home Office and Mr. Cross [the Home Secretary] be asked to consider whether the Police are altogether free from blame in not having called the attention of the Department to these proceedings of which they must have been cognizant.”Footnote 36
This initial report, produced by Thomas Jeffery, head of the GPO’s internal investigation department then known as the Missing Letter Branch, is thus far unavailable, but there remain the names of the culprits and an indictment of police negligence in not alerting the GPO to its employees’ practices. The boys came from at least three different offices: R. Isaacs worked at the West Central District Office on the Strand; J. E. Tindall was stationed at Kensington; and later correspondence identified the “Chief” office, at St. Martin’s-le-Grand, along with the West Strand office and the West Central District in general, as the main sources of the problem.
In response to this minute, the Postmaster General confirmed the telegraph boys’ dismissal and ordered that Jeffery’s report be sent to the Home Office, but cautioned the Secretary “to appear not to cast blame on the police.”Footnote 37 As H. G. Cocks and Charles Upchurch have noted, the Metropolitan Police in this period had adopted certain practices for regulating sex between men. Before the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, procuring enough evidence for a sodomy arrest between consenting partners could be difficult, and police wanted to avoid being themselves implicated in extortion or libel charges.Footnote 38 Adding to the police’s reticence to pursue discreet homosexual encounters were powerful legal and moral discourses that discouraged public discussion of the “nameless offence” except by calling it just that and leaving homosexual behavior literally below (or beyond) description. Lawyers, magistrates, doctors, and politicians concurred that publically getting into the details of the “infamous crime” would encourage its spread or at least adversely affect public morals.Footnote 39 Furthermore, the police commissioner, Colonel Henderson, veered toward caution when it came to sexual policing: he had reluctantly agreed to clear the Haymarket’s night-houses two years earlier and, in response to numerous complaints, insisted that his officers leave female street prostitutes and clients well alone unless they became rowdy, were indecent, or impeded the free movement of the streets.Footnote 40
In any case, a squabble brewed between the two police forces, and in November the Home Office responded with another report on telegraph boy behavior (also missing) that apparently cast aspersions on the Post Office constables. In Secretary Tilley’s summation of the report to the postmaster general, Tilley’s defense of the GPO’s internal police reveals how Buck, Fovargue, and the rest had been investigated:
On the occasion when Constable Butler [of the GPO] was accosted in the Haymarket by the Superintendent [of the Metropolitan Police], he had not … “been specially employed a considerable time in watching Telegraph Boys in the Haymarket in relation to these offences. …”The simple fact is this, that there being some reason to suspect what was going on, it was determined to have the Boys interrogated to see what could be elicited, but prior to doing so it was deemed expedient to send Butler to the Haymarket for a few nights just to observe their conduct without telling him the nature of the suspicions that were entertained.Footnote 41
Regardless of whether Constable Butler knew why he was asked to observe telegraph boys in the Haymarket—which had been notorious for prostitution throughout the mid-Victorian era and was still a haven, though less fashionable, for sexual bartering in 1876—this glimpse of the London streets courtesy of undercover police investigations evokes the sexual nature of the telegraph boys’ infractions and the extent to which they had come out into the open.
By early January of 1877, the telegraph boys’ kitchens were explicitly linked to homosexual practices, though what exactly went on is obscured by Victorian propriety. Next to the Secretary’s minute 149, titled “The Immoral Conduct of Boy Messengers. Assessment of Mr. Jeffery’s Report,” is a blank space. Underneath the Postmaster General remarked: “These distressing disclosures conform in the belief that the kitchens have been the source of the evil. I approve of the proposal to be adopted.”Footnote 42 Later that month, the Postmaster General responded to another missing minute titled “Immoral conduct and dismissal of certain boys” by ordering Detectives to be stationed “about the Office concerned.”Footnote 43
The previous evidence offers tantalizing peeks into a potentially well-developed youth sexual subculture within the GPO. It is plausible that the boy messengers’ workplace sexual interactions paralleled those of privileged juvenile boys at public schools, with the obvious exception that telegraph boys accepted money for sex after work. The kitchens and basements in telegraph offices appear to have been spaces of initiation into urban rent, and perhaps for homoerotic encounters between boys that may or may not have culminated in prostitution. That the dismissed boys came from different offices suggests a well-developed network of commercial sex that transgressed the boundaries of kitchen and street. Spaces like the Haymarket were clearly incorporated into a broader landscape intimately connected with messengers’ uniformed bodily display and dual occupations. Their knowledge of city streets, offices, theaters, and residences and how to navigate them effectively—so essential in their official capacity—proved a valuable asset in engaging with more liminal urban topographies. Some of London’s modern mercuries had quickly plugged in to the sexual possibilities inherent in traversing certain parts of the metropolis.
One report, the draft of Jeffery’s final report on “Immorality among Boys,” survives intact. Presented to the Secretary on 31 March 1877, Jeffery provided an exhaustive list of the causes and remedies for male prostitution at the GPO. He introduced the report rather dramatically by playing up the endemic nature of homosexual misdeeds among the messenger staff: “the discovery that the vice … as existing among the Telegraph Boys engaged on Night duty at the Chief Office, was found to exist in an equal, or greater, degree among a similar class of employés in some of the Metropolitan Districts … the facts brought to light by more recent enquiries give a clearer insight into the character and extent of the evil.”Footnote 44 For Jeffery, the “causes no doubt are various,” and he compartmentalized his findings into three zones of evil influence: “The bad source of supply for Telegraph Messengers,” “Things within the service that tend to this result,” and “Things outside the Service and beyond the control of the Department.”Footnote 45 The categories Jeffery employed are striking for their reliance on the divisions of inside and outside, and his delineations typified spatial divisions already built into GPO administration. They conformed to his instinct to restore control and order in these unruly environments. Yet movement across these imaginary boundaries inevitably leaked into his assessment and destabilized them. This fragility of his categories, rooted in an idealized insularity of workplace and anarchic outer world, is most apparent in that the report often contradicted itself on which zones produced the greatest danger.
Jeffery’s first targets of containment were the homes, neighborhoods, and class of the telegraph boys. He noted that the offices most affected by immorality were supplied with telegraph boys from Bermondsey, Whitechapel, and “the low parts of Chelsea.” These boys, he wrote, “had but one parent or none at all, and almost from their birth had been thrown on the care of some relative whose guardianship was but nominal.” The living conditions experienced by the marginalized youth of London were, for Jeffery, enough to foster moral depravity: “The sad effects of bad training, or of extreme poverty, or both combined, were seen in many of the boys, in an utter absence of truthfulness, except when falsehoods would no longer screen them, in a greediness for money, and a willingness to prostitute themselves even for very small sums.” Jeffery surmised that the degenerate telegraph boys “had no particular liking for the vice, as a vice, but, whatever dislike they had for it, was entirely and easily overborne by the money which was tendered to them by their seducers.”Footnote 46
Jeffery’s reading of poverty and moral depravity aligned with popular middle-class discourses of the Victorian slum as producer of disease and moral, as well as physical and social, degeneration. Homosexuality, along with female promiscuity, incest, infanticide, rape, and all manner of sexual sins were outcomes of poor living conditions and the attendant collapse of “natural” human sentiment.Footnote 47 His further musings into this “bad supply” line of telegraph boys underscored the class dynamics underlying telegraph boy labor and telegraph boy vice: he noted that it was impossible to get “a superior class of boy” on the five shilling starting salary offered to telegraph messengers. The GPO was left to hire “little more than the residuum.” The “superior class of boy” would not sell himself for cash, but the department’s terrible wages were essentially to blame for appealing only to the lowest, and therefore most corrupt, class of worker. For Jeffery, London’s slums, GPO efficiency, and telegraph boy vice were all-too-comfortable bedfellows.Footnote 48
Jeffery went on to posit what had long been assumed: that the structure of the workplace also fostered homosexual practices. He noted that the “idle life many of them lead when in the office” was conducive to vice, for “boys when together in numbers, without useful employment or exercise, or recreation of any kind, are sure to be planning mischief or doing something they should not.” Supervision was a key problem, especially when older boys supervised younger ones: “The evidence taken shews [sic] that the system of Corporals and Lance Corporals is of little or no value in a matter like this, as some of the worst boys were found in those ranks, and even when they were not personally involved, they often winked at, if they did not actually encourage, the vice in other boys.”Footnote 49 The repeated assertions of memoranda, letters, and ultimately this report that kitchens were the origin and focal point of “immorality” underscore a well-developed and dangerously mobile homoerotic youth subculture. As Jeffery reminds us, these unspeakable actions spilled out of the GPO buildings: “Another cause of mischief is that of sending off duty a large number of boys together, especially when there are two or three bad ones amongst them, as in such a case the corrupt influence spreads very rapidly.”Footnote 50 The seed of suggestion, the influence of older boys in charge, and the listless downtime between deliveries all coalesced to foster “immorality.”
“But of all the causes within the Service that have tended to promote this vice is that of Night Duty.”Footnote 51 Jeffery’s emphatic declaration preceded a lengthy summary of the evils of having boys working on the streets after 8 p.m., apparently the magic hour when respectable London lost its hold on the city. “It was very apparent that much of the demoralization came from the Streets,” Jeffery argued, and the longer telegraph boys were forced to be out at night, the greater was the chance of exposure to “temptations of the worst and most powerful kind.” The telegraph boys’ late-night commute home was equally dangerous: with sleeping or absent parents, whose homes were “long distances from the Offices [where] they are employed,” night duty boys could, “if so minded, keep out to any hour of the morning.”Footnote 52 The neglected children of the working class, whose telegraph rounds necessarily segregated them from their working-class neighborhoods, had every opportunity to participate in the secret nighttime world of commercial sex and other illicit activities, so long as the GPO provided them with the means to do so. For Jeffery, city streets themselves infected its workforce. Day and night, “the naturally demoralizing influence of a Street life on juvenile character” was at work on telegraph boys, especially given that there was “no check on the conduct of the boys out of doors.”Footnote 53
Jeffery’s final zone of evil influence, “Things outside the Service, and beyond the control of the Department,” was the most unstable, for London’s streets, offices, pleasure venues, and private residences were incorporated into the telegraph network, as his previous argument made clear. He chose particular places comprising this zone to make his case: public houses, and the large number of brothels and houses of assignation, where “committing this crime with comparative impunity” was a matter of course. Jeffery apparently found “few cases of this evil … in which the boys were not in the first instance, and then repeatedly afterwards, taken into Public Houses and plied with drink.” He described “lewd conversations at the Bars or Counters and the exhibition of indecent pictures” and was shocked how “openly was all this done. … it is difficult to understand how the proprietors of such establishments, or the persons responsible for order in them, did not know what was going on.”Footnote 54
Jeffery further alluded to the challenges of policing homosexual acts: “There are again the immense obstacles in the way of the Police obtaining the necessary evidence to prosecute for a crime of this kind, and the natural objection they have against taking legal measures, unless the evidence is of the clearest character.”Footnote 55 As previously mentioned, police were loath to prosecute unless there was clear evidence or overwhelming pressure to do so. The GPO ran into this legal obstacle: “Considerably more than a hundred boys have been under examination in the matter … a great many of these have been dismissed on very clear evidence of their guilt … the rest have been more or less involved … [and] the names and addresses of the men concerned have in various instances been known, and yet out of all this only one man and one boy can be prosecuted for the capital offence.”Footnote 56 Even taking into account some measure of hyperbole, telegraph boy prostitution appears to have been commonplace in the capital. The growth and spread of London’s communications network fostered a culture of commercial sex among its young, exploited staff. Their liminal status in the department and the streets provided cover for after-hours work in the sex trade, and their youth, uniforms, and availability made them desirable to Jeffery’s final and most troubling outside offender: “The number of bad men who are always lying in wait, especially near Post Offices, to beguile the boys and bribe them with money, of which such men appear to have an ample supply.”Footnote 57 He portrayed London’s wealthy sodomites lying in wait around GPO buildings, as if drawn to these hubs in their pursuit of telegraph boys through the London streets. Jeffery went on to surmise that, “but for these men to seduce the boys, this form of immorality would in all probability be quite or almost unknown, so far as the Telegraph Messengers are concerned.”Footnote 58 In spite of what he had intimated before, Jeffery isolated homoerotic desire in the figure of the elite urban sodomite. The act of sex between men could be encouraged from below, but the desire for sex between men trickled down from on high. In describing the sodomite in this way, Jeffery also envisioned a decidedly queer communications system. The telegraph drew the sodomite out in the open; desire intersected with networks of wires and boys; the class positioning of telegraph consumer and worker was reiterated through sexual liaison; and the underground of vice, like the London underworld of wires and cables, was manifest in the figure of the telegraph messenger.
Notably, Jeffery’s description of bad men lying in wait around post offices did not make the final report. Tilley crossed out this section, the only part of the draft to be cut. His editorializing may have been inspired by fears that Jeffery’s analysis was flirting with paranoia, but it is a striking example of the literal “un-naming” of the carriers of homosexual desire. Across the board, government administrators embraced this tactic, referring to boys’ “immorality” as code for the sexual market whose specifics they were forced to confront. There was also a class element underlying Tilley’s omission: the GPO executive focused on their young employees, leaving the bad men with “ample” means unmentionable.
The logic of Jeffery’s assessment confirms what other historians have suggested regarding English cultural understandings of class and homoeroticism before the rise of sexology: the role of the city itself as progenitor of vice is very much on display in this report, as are deeply entrenched views of poverty, disease, and moral degeneration. On another level, however, the GPO’s investment in “immorality” maps out the interplay between the telegraph system and London’s homoerotic landscape.
These sources, in conjunction with Home Office correspondence, also prove the hunch of James Smith, the “one man” who was convicted of corrupting telegraph boys in 1877. Smith appears in H. G. Cocks’s thorough study of nineteenth-century convictions for homosexual offenses.Footnote 59 Smith’s case seems unusual in that there were no corroborating witnesses to testify against him. The telegraph boy he slept with had accepted five shillings payment, which technically made him an accomplice. By English law, the evidence of an accomplice had to be corroborated; only the testimony of a sexually assaulted victim or an uninvolved witness could legally be used. In Smith’s case, that fact was ignored.Footnote 60
More recently, Sean Brady has argued that Smith’s treatment is an example of the “culture of resistance in Britain to public discussion of sex and sexuality between men.”Footnote 61 For Brady, the Victorian and Edwardian periods were significant for their inflexible codes of appropriate manhood. “Alternate” masculinities were all suspect in a culture that required men to be breadwinning husbands above all else. Homosexual acts undermined the vulnerable balance at work in the movements between domesticity, the workplace, homosociability, and masculine display on the streets. Any public discussion of sex between men would amount to British social ordering being “shaken to its foundations.”Footnote 62 Brady has pointed out the reticence of some of the state attorneys to go after Smith as proof of the state’s unwillingness to expose a respectable and supposedly well-connected member of the masculine establishment. My reading varies somewhat from Brady’s in that, while his point about secrecy and Victorian crises of masculinity is well taken, I see the evidence in this particular case pointing less to a concern over Smith’s respectability (and masculine respectability writ large) and more toward an all-out effort to corral rather more flexible notions of Victorian boyhood into a legal response to state communications’ involvement with youth-focused homosexual markets. It was late Victorian notions of boyhood subjectivity, rather than adult male respectability, that drove the attorney general’s office to use a cautious approach to evidence and to adopt certain strategies of homosexual containment.
This reading relies on the crossover between two very different sources of archival evidence: the records of the Post Office and of the Home Office. Smith is solely a product of the latter; GPO officials, whose priorities were to restructure their boy labor contingent so as to minimize homosexual dalliances on the street and at work, never mentioned his name. The Home Office sources obviously present the series of interactions between telegraph boys and their client Smith in the context of sodomy laws; this case’s merit relied on the strength of evidence required to produce a conviction. Office kitchens, poor wages, night duty, and the intersections of wired communication and sex had no place in the language of this branch of the state’s solution to the problem of male prostitution. Rather, the tricky matter of sexually complicit boys and the reliability of their evidence drove Home Office correspondence. Two very different forms of administrative knowledge were at work to understand and contain the problem of telegraph boy vice, and the point they agreed on was to find a scapegoat, an influence outside the civil service, a “bad man” on whom to lay the blame. Ultimately, however, James Smith’s prosecution had very little to do with him and his claims to social prestige. It was the relative culpability of their telegraph boys that the state found distressing.
Smith, a self-described gentleman, was arrested at 3 a.m. on 19 February 1877 near his home in Islington for sexually assaulting a messenger named Walter Bushrod. He was brought before Clerkenwell Police Court and remanded until 27 February, at which point Bushrod dropped out of the proceedings and another telegraph messenger, George Wright, entered the scene. Home Office correspondence and Smith’s later appeals reveal that this switch in telegraph boys was carefully orchestrated: on 8 February, eleven days before Smith’s arrest, the Treasury solicitor, Augustus Stephenson, sent a letter to the Home Office outlining his legal opinion on prosecutions related to telegraph boys. Three messengers were mentioned: Wright, Nichols, and Hawking. They had all admitted committing “the full offence” with Smith. In Wright and Nichols’s case, “the want of corroboration … being each an accomplice” was the main legal obstacle for pursuing Smith’s prosecution. Hawking’s evidence might not have been enough to convict, as Smith had “probably made the victim almost helplessly drunk before committing the act,” though Stephenson thought a jury “looking at Hawking’s youth might not discredit his evidence because he did not scream or complain at the time.” For Stephenson, the question of prosecution was predicated both on dubious witnesses and on the risk of disclosing and detailing vice: public scandal “was much to be deprecated,” he noted, but he mused that “there is on the Men now in this case a matter for consideration which did not arise in the cases of Bolton [sic] and Park and men of the same character, when all those further implicated were grown men, of their own choice and free will indulging in these practices.” Harking back to the media sensation generated by the trial of Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, a.k.a. Stella and Fanny, the cross-dressing duo who were ultimately acquitted for conspiring to commit sodomy in 1871, Stephenson isolated the youth of the messengers in relation to their clients as the focal point for undermining thorny legal obstacles. For Stephenson, Smith was “a man, without doubt—whatever may be the legal evidence obtainable—making it his business to debauch and corrupt telegraph boys. … I think it is a matter for consideration whether some scandal should not be risked for the protection of children and to show that persons like Smith cannot indulge their passions with complete impunity [his emphasis].”Footnote 63 Once again, the telegraph messengers’ youth is crucial; whereas in previous assessments of the telegraph boys their age made them dangerous, untrustworthy subjects, here this danger was reframed as a lack of free will, that is, as their inability to achieve fully articulated, self-regulating citizenship. This provided a loophole for the prosecution. Paradoxically, the telegraph boys’ evidence was admissible because they were not yet able to speak and act for themselves.Footnote 64
The letter also made it abundantly clear that James Smith was a walking target. Shortly after his arrest, memoranda proliferated between the presiding magistrate, the police commissioner, the Treasury, and the Home Office. Stephenson was called in to conduct the prosecution, reiterating his conviction to “risk some scandal for the protection of mere boys.”Footnote 65 He picked his most promising “victim.” Bushrod’s name vanished from the proceedings, and seventeen-year-old George Wright was brought in and counseled to plead guilty and to turn Queen’s Evidence. This was enough for the magistrate: both Wright and Smith were convicted of buggery on 11 April. Smith was sentenced to life in prison, while Wright received a ten-year sentence. As it turned out, Stephenson’s fears of publicity were unfounded in this case. Other than short notices in a few London newspapers, including The Times—where James Smith was described as a “master tinman,” Wright’s occupation went unmentioned, and the popular euphemism “unfit for publication” took the place of specifics of the sodomy charges—the trial generated no media attention.Footnote 66 Smith and Wright’s case was presented as a singular occurrence, the discretion of the state won the day, and the GPO’s reputation remained intact.
In late April, Smith appealed to the Home Office. He had a rather different take on the telegraph boys’ free will. According to Smith, who proclaimed his innocence and noted his connections to various Tory luminaries, George Wright was either merely confused or involved in even more nefarious activities. He claimed that he ran into Wright at midnight the previous summer on a drunken meander home. He had often used Wright for errands, and he did not think anything of asking Wright to walk him back to his house at 27 Park Lane, Islington. Wright “lived on the Surrey side of the water,” and, it “being late,” Smith “unwisely told him he could remain all night if he liked.” Smith had shown Wright a “book of Photographs of statuary (mythological subjects chiefly),” and on a later occasion shown the book to some of Wright’s “friends,” though he couldn’t be sure, given that he was going through a period of heavy drinking. Later on, in January, he had found Wright and another telegraph boy waiting for him outside his house at 2 a.m. He invited them in, and Wright had described to him how “there had been some unpleasantness at the office about the Book … that Scotland Yard had been consulted about it.” Wright had begged Smith not to go the Post Office and sort out the misunderstanding, and the two boys had spent the night. On the night of his arrest, he had met Walter Bushrod and “entered into conversation with him in order to find out if he knew anything about the alleged unpleasantness at the office. … He did and hence, in order to draw him out, I said more than I should otherwise have done and eventually asked him to wait at my rooms whilst I wrote a letter for him to take to Wright.” On the way back to his rooms, Bushrod “guided” Smith to the police. Smith then went on to plead his case, arguing correctly that Wright’s testimony was legally inadmissible and that “the Treasury ought to have obtained some independent Testimony before pressuring for a conviction instead of relying on the unsupported testimony of lads who admitted having allowed themselves to be defiled for two shillings.” Smith’s telegraph boys were either too impressionable or were willfully trying to ruin him; just as in Jeffery’s report, their cheap virtue made them less than trustworthy citizens.Footnote 67
Smith’s relative status is an ever-present framing device. Telegraph boys appeared in his imaginative narrative as all-purpose servants about town, whom a gentleman could call on at will. His access and reliance on them was part of his tactic of defending himself on the grounds that he was a rich and important citizen. He repeatedly emphasized his respectability, going so far as to plead clemency on the grounds that having “been reared amidst every indulgence and luxury … penal servitude would mean death in a few years.” He argued that the telegraph boys were part of a larger conspiracy involving a man Smith had prosecuted for stealing his watch, and he observed that “the crime for which I am sentenced has been very prevalent amongst the Telegraph lads and that many have been found out and dismissed in consequence and that the authorities were determined to prosecute me … as a warning to others.”Footnote 68 He was right, but the pressure exerted by the state to convict him was enough to overrule the usual English legal requirements of corroboration. In follow-up correspondence to the trial, Smith’s pleas for genteel immunity were dismissed out of hand. A. C. Hepburn, one of Stephenson’s clerks at the Home Office, described the legal affair as a collaborative state effort to “put a stop to such revolting practices [in the Telegraph Department] and to bring the principal offenders to justice. Their endeavours cannot fail to be materially assisted by the Conviction of Smith and Wright and the exemplary punishment inflicted on them.”Footnote 69 The divide between respectable and perverse had been compromised; the telegraph/rent boys whom Smith relied on to do his bidding had revealed sexual transgressions that undercut his status, and the state creatively manipulated the law in its zeal to shut down the sexual networks proliferating from the GPO.
Wright was quietly released two years later. Smith, after three appeals to the Home Office, was released in 1896 for health reasons. More immediate aftereffects of the investigation surfaced in revised GPO labor policy. The contours of the GPO Executive’s reading of homosexual practices among its youthful staff generated notions of spatial, sexual, and class discipline that had a lasting impact throughout the Post Office. Jeffery made a series of recommendations for eliminating prostitution among telegraph messengers and estimated that these measures would cost the chief office alone over £500 a year. The GPO followed these almost to the letter, and the usually tight-fisted Treasury approved the additional expenditures without complaint.Footnote 70 For most Metropolitan Telegraph messengers, the aftermath of the investigation was a pay raise. Seven shillings a week was the price calibrated to stamp out homosexual licentiousness and entice “the better sort” of boy, whose poverty was not so bleak and whose morals were still intact. Efforts were made to allow telegraph boys access to postmen’s libraries (often blocked by affronted postmen), and kitchens were nominally improved or at least finally all provided with wholesome reading material appropriate to the boys’ class. Moreover, boys no longer supervised each other in London. A new class of inspector and matron was hired to monitor the messengers. Even thirty years after the fact, when the next generation of officials suggested reinstating corporals among the senior telegraph boys in London, members of the old guard strenuously resisted this measure, reiterating the damage that self-regulating boys could do to the urban telegraph service.Footnote 71 Another class of inspector was established to inspect prospective telegraph boys’ homes and make sure they were not too poor to be hired. This penetration of working class homes by GPO officials coincided with the growth of state inspection and philanthropic investigation into the homes and lives of the London poor. According to social gospel principles, this urban exploration and information gathering was motivated by a desire to improve living conditions, but in the Post Office’s case the home inspection was a containment strategy to prevent the children of the most abject from sullying their department.Footnote 72 In both cases, however, this new state interest and exposure heralded the beginning of more direct interactions between government, philanthropists, and those whose neighborhoods were increasingly thought deserving of elite attention.
Pubs and night duty were off-limits for central London telegraph boys for the rest of the century. For these messengers, respectable youthful masculinity was channeled into an urban topography typically reserved for respectable middle-class women. Undoubtedly many telegraph boys (and women) ignored these missives, but fears of prostitution in this instance transcended gender divisions, and GPO policy left young men as suspect as women when it came to sexual danger and (mis)adventure. Furthermore, while initially these policies only affected telegraph boys, they ushered in a new wave of internal and external surveillance that over time spread throughout the GPO. Up to the 1876–77 investigation, the GPO had four constables who conducted investigations into Post Office irregularities and non-GPO related crimes committed by employees were left to the Metropolitan Police. In the wake of the immorality report, the GPO police force expanded its personnel and its mandate. Now this wing of the Post Office—renamed “the Confidential Enquiry Branch” in 1883—took up all manner of crimes involving GPO staff and miscreant postal consumers. This force would later uncover the Cleveland Street Scandal, and its agents tracked the Cleveland Street brothel owner, Charles Hammond, across Europe. They created files on pornographers and entrepreneurs who mailed “indecent articles” through the British postal system, and they spied on union activists, Fenians, and later the suffragette movement.Footnote 73 They became another undercover wing of British law enforcement, patrolling the postal, telegraphic, and telephonic networks for misbehavior among the GPO’s consumers and workers.Footnote 74 As for Mr. Jeffery, he found the telegraph boy case so distressing that after submitting his report he took four months off on sick leave. On his return to work, he was rewarded for his vigilance by being promoted to controller of the London Postal Service, leaving his assistant, John Philips, to replace him as head of the Missing Letter Branch. Philips would go on to bring the first of the Cleveland Street boys to the Postmaster General’s attention in the summer of 1889 and to receive extra wages for monitoring Charles Hammond’s appearances in Brussels.Footnote 75
In spite of all its efforts, the GPO did not purge male prostitution from its ranks, and when some telegraph boys, supposedly of the “better sort,” were once again caught servicing well-healed men, not to mention having sex with each other on GPO premises, the executive resorted to two different tactics. On the one hand, in the wake of the 1889 Cleveland Street Scandal, libraries for telegraph boys increased, the recently instated Telegraph Messenger Institutes (which provided after-work lessons and were initiated just before the Cleveland Street Scandal) received more funding, and music bands and sports leagues were created for the boys. On the other hand, entrance requirements for telegraph messengers were enhanced and their apprenticeship status was temporarily ended. Starting in November of 1890, most telegraph boys were dismissed when they turned age eighteen and would only be hired back at the GPO after four years of military service. In 1893, a newly appointed Postmaster General softened the military policy, allowing most telegraph boys to stay on as trainee postmen and sorters, but he also introduced mandatory morning drilling and military parades. These occurred in public spaces throughout the metropolis, with the boys carrying unloaded rifles. In the late 1890s, London boys soon found themselves once again hindered from continuing in the Post Office, as returning soldiers were given priority for positions as postmen and sorters, regardless of whether they had worked as telegraph boys previously. Only in the first decade of the twentieth century, after Boer War veterans had effectively destroyed boys’ chances of promotion, and in the wake of a series of damning reports and the subsequent moral panic about urban boy labor, did telegraph boys regain apprenticeship status. The military drilling ended after the First World War.
The Victorian state acted quickly and decisively in containing immorality: they threw cash, inspectors, and a very loose interpretation of sodomy laws at the problem. This resulted in more comfortable working conditions but stricter discipline for the boys, an increasingly draconian supervisory culture throughout the London GPO as a whole, and nineteen years of jail time for the one man the combined efforts of the state could effectively scapegoat for the whole affair. The 1889 Cleveland Street Scandal, from the GPO’s point of view, was proof that twelve years of government policy attempting to weed out vice in telegraph delivery had utterly failed. The scandal prompted the GPO administration to incorporate a new set of tactics to corral vice, and these were to have lasting results on the ordering of urban state labor.
Conclusion
Male prostitution was a hard-wired tension within the telegraph network. This demands rethinking the interrelationships of sex, the state, communications technology, and the processes that created and maintained the late Victorian capital. Telegraph boys produced urban possibilities on a number of fronts, and their sexual antics quietly undergirded the ordering of London’s telegraph system throughout the late Victorian period. The GPO found itself pulled between competing urban visions: the telegraph service required boys to traverse the streets, their uniforms radiating state order over communications (and in theory over their bodies). They were supposed to be efficient, affordable human cogs in a well-ordered technology, a reminder of the achievements of late Victorian civil society. But their youth and class made them susceptible to the unruly city of unregulated leisure, desire, and vice.
By removing telegraph boys from the periphery of discussions about communications and sexual culture and placing them front and center, the more disruptive mechanics of nineteenth-century governance come into better focus: in this case, the types of spaces and movement desired by the British modern order to produce the correct type of informed citizen/subject triangulated with pederasty and urban youth labor. The telegraph was essential to late Victorian governance. It embodied the ideal of unfettered communication, and London was transformed by the material articulation of this goal. Boy labor was integral to this project. As an unintended result, telegraph boys became deeply enmeshed in London’s sexual markets. Long-standing traditions of pederastic prostitution in the capital were transformed, as spaces for homosexual encounters multiplied and the rent boys themselves incorporated state uniforms into their erotic draw. The telegraph/rent boy also reaffirmed the stratified nature of telegraphic communication. As such he stood on the verge of a number of thresholds: between public utility and state regulation, between market discipline and sexual subterfuge, and between high and low society. The telegraph boy’s liminality is central to the processes that combined gendered technological innovation with new forms of unruly urban mobility. The forms of sexual bartering and techno-moral regulation resulting from GPO policy, along with the legal system’s reaction to male prostitution emanating from the civil service, illuminate clandestine aspects of liberal urban rule, subject to the ascendant telegraphic order of London life.
