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Kent Today
12/4/1999
Victorian heyday of brothels and riots
It is the world's oldest profession. So it should be no surprise that prostitution is far from new to Medway. Kent Today has been focusing on the problem of prostitutes working between Rochester's Star Hill and Sun Pier in Chatham. And if you read Brian Joyce's new book The Chatham Scandal, you will see how significant the body-selling trade was here in Victorian times. GEOFF MAYNARD reports.
Brian Joyce's 275-page book is a powerful and compelling insight into working class life in Chatham at a time when the dockyard and trade in the River Medway was the focus of the whole area.
The High Street zone was home to run-down pubs, brothels and bawdy houses and the venue for bar brawls, street riots and back-street sexual shenanigans as soldiers and sailors and dockyard workers joined in revelries and traded punches.
In an area with a large male engineering and military workforce and very few respectable female professions, it was no surprise that many women decided to use their bodies to earn their keep.
The lives and times of those women, their trials and tribulations and the authorities' reactions to them are the basis of The Chatham Scandal -- a pioneering attempt to show just how scandalous life in Chatham was during the Victorian period. Author Brian, 49, was born and bred in Chatham, now lives in Rainham and teaches history and politics at St Simon Stock School in Maidstone.
He decided to write his first book after compiling a dissertation in the subject for an MA degree in industrial and social history at Middlesex University 10 years ago.
Further trawling though back copies of the Chatham Observer and Chatham Standard, visits to Gillingham Library, the Local Studies Centre in Strood and the Fawcett women's history library at London's Guildhall, helped him produce the work, which focuses on the prostitutes working the streets of Medway in the second half of the nineteenth century.
He chose the title after reading through the scores of newspaper headlines of the time which focus on residents' unease with the unruly goings-on out on the streets.
There were calls to increase the police presence in Chatham, which only had a dozen Kent County officers deployed from Maidstone compared with 28 in Rochester, which had its own police force.
When there was large-scale disorder in Chatham town centre the military police from the dockyard had to be called in to help and the locals were far from happy.
"There were several occasions in the early 1880s where at pub closing time, crowds gathered," said Brian.
"All it took to spark off a riot was for the police to arrest a drunk and take him up to New Road, where the police station was, and they would be followed by a stone-throwing mob who would try to climb over the station walls." And The Chatham Scandal contains plenty more scandalous information.The prostitution problem in Chatham became so great in the Victorian period that the government introduced legislation to try to curb the spread of VD among servicemen.
The 1869 Contagious Diseases Act allowed plain-clothes Metropolitan policemen, derogatorily known to locals as spies, to keep a register of working prostitutes and force them to have regular and often painful medical examinations to make sure they were not disease carriers.
If they were found to have VD the policemen could get the women detained in hospital for nine months.
The women were taken to St Bartholomew's Hospital for treatment and from 1870 attended the Lock hospital built by the government in Maidstone Road, Chatham.
Many women were accused of being prostitutes and forced to undergo the medical tests even if they were not on the game.
The case of Caroline Whybrow, who lived with a number of prostitutes but was not one herself and was dragged in for an examination anyway, was highlighted by campaigners calling for repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act.
Not only was she free of any venereal disease but a virgin as well.
Women had little else they could do
In the 1882 register of the country's garrison towns, which includes the likes of Portsmouth and Plymouth, there were found to be 15 working brothels. Nine of them were in Chatham.
Medway had 300 working girls in 1870 but the number had dropped to 150 by 1881 as the police measures bore fruit. Most of the Medway prostitutes were in their late teens or early 20s, native to the area and worked in and around Chatham town centre.
"There were so many prostitutes here because it was a case of supply and demand," said Brian.
"It was demand in terms of the thousands of servicemen and dockyard workers and supply from women who had little else to do in an area dominated by engineering and ship-building.
"Women who needed to make a living either went into prostitution full-time or did it casually to supplement their wages becauser there were very few respectable jobs around for them."
The book features several cases of attempted murder and serious assaults on girls working Chatham's streets, including Catherine Spelling -- a well-known figure who was nearly beaten to death by her Royal Marine lover.
"The book takes a look at the treatment these women received, the crimes they committed such as robbing customers and the community in which they lived," said author Brian.
"It's not an academic book, nor a sensationalist one. It's a look at life in Chatham 100 years or so ago which I don't think has been told before."
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