Was Sir William Joynson-Hicks hair-brained?
The Letters of Lytton Strachey, which I have just been reading, are a mixed joy. Odd that a writer supposedly so fastidious in the use of words should have produced effusions in the 1920s using ‘divine’ or ‘divinely’ half a dozen times in a single letter, just like a Bright Young Person from Vile Bodies. On the other hand, they provide nuggets of discreditable facts, chiefly about the sexual tastes of the Great and the Good, such as the Labour Lord Chancellor, Jowett. He also relates how he himself was pleasurably crucified by the young Roger Senhouse, an elaborate business which involved making a blasphemous ‘cut’ in his side. More interesting, really, is the fact (new to me) that when, during the reign of moral terror set up by Sir William Joynson-Hicks in the 1920s, the police raided an art gallery showing D.H. Lawrence’s ‘obscene’ paintings, they also seized a drawing of Adam and Eve by William Blake. The woman owner of the gallery protested and the police gave it back to her. Strachey complained that this was bad tactics: if she had let the police take it away, and then announced the fact publicly, the authorities would have been covered in ridicule.
All very well, but how were policemen supposed to know what particular marks on paper or canvas would be judged obscene by the courts? I recall, in the late 1950s, a senior police officer telling me: ‘What we tell our lads is, look out for pubic hair. If it’s there, you can be pretty sure the courts will convict. If it’s not there, best leave it alone.’ Was this the reason, about this time, that the police acquired the nickname of ‘the fuzz’? Possibly, but there may be quite a different etymology. Certainly there is great confusion about pubic hair, especially on women. Why did the Greeks, followed by the Romans, eliminate it (habitually, though not in every case) in their statuary? It is generally believed that this is what misled Ruskin so disastrously. Accustomed to seeing classical statues of naked women, and never having seen a real one, he was shocked and alarmed on his wedding night, in Perth of all places, to see that his beautiful bride, Euphemia (‘Effie’) Chalmers Gray, a lawyer’s daughter, had masses of pubic hair (lawyers are notoriously hirsute). As a result, Ruskin was unable to perform, became ill, and the honeymoon was aborted. Eventually she divorced him on grounds of non-consummation, and she married the burly and randy Millais. If you want to know what she looked like, there is a superbly proud and ravishing likeness of her in Millais’s great picture ‘The Order of Release’.
Whether pubic hair explains the failure of Ruskin’s marriage is still an open question. Statues may have misled him but there were plenty of sketches in the Prints and Drawings Rooms of the British Museum, where he used to rummage, showing ciccia and pubes. So far as I know his only comment on the matter was made in old age: ‘I wish I had known more when I was young. I might have been happier and had a son of my own.’ He may have been misled by a striking and characteristic remark of Sir Thomas Browne: ‘That women are menstruant, and men pubescent, at the year of twice seven, is accounted a punctual truth,’ which implies growing pubic hair is the male equivalent of menstruation. But I think it far more likely that the hair issue was an excuse. Ruskin, like many men, was clumsy, and his efforts to make love on the nuptial night were a failure. But this happened in countless Victorian marriages, and was overcome by patience and love. But I don’t think love came into it, the marriage being arranged by Ruskin’s masterful parents, and Effie, as the portraits of her show, was an impatient woman. She was much more suited to Millais, a steam engine of a man, and Ruskin became a better writer through suffering.
One of the drawbacks of pubic hair is that it provides a refuge for that revolting form of body lice known as crabs. Strachey’s letters show that he was twice infested with the scourge by his crucifixioner, Senhouse, which implies to me that the latter had dealings with the rough trade of Leicester Square. In those days the beast flourished mightily in Spain. When I spent a year in Gibraltar at the end of the 1940s, they were to be found, hanging on tenaciously, at all levels of society. Our soldiers got them, of course, and the chief medical officer of the Fortress sent round a warning, but called them by their Latin name. I found the Brigadier o/c Troops puzzling over it. ‘He means crabs, Sir,’ I said. ‘Oh, does he? Why the hell can’t these medics write English. Everyone knows what crabs are, by God!’ It is said that, during his long reign, General Franco, who had grown to hate crabs during his time in the army, managed virtually to eradicate them in Spain, just as Mussolini drained the Pontine Marshes and put down the Sicilian mafia. In both cases the victory proved transitory. At one time whores used to shave themselves, for this and other reasons. Some of their clients did not like pubic hair on women anyway, a distaste known to sexual therapists as — wait for it! — the Ruskin Syndrome. I am told that nowadays smart young women, Sloanes, Ladbroke Ladettes, Bayswater Bimbos and the like, go in for partial shaving, leaving an oblong thatch in the middle, known as an Airstrip. The Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, could not abide female pubic hair. This was not just because Ruskin advised him about how a prince should behave in artistic matters, but because he had been warned off Paris establishments known by the double entendre as un panier de crabes. In the expensive maisons he patronised during his Paris jaunts, he liked his ladies dressed as nuns and shaved beneath the habit. Hence Beerbohm’s shocking cartoon showing the Prince visiting a fashionable Paris convent. As the Mother Superior presented her nuns, he became confused and said: ‘Enfin, Madame, faites monter la première à gauche.’ But enough of this scatological gossip! Joynson-Hicks has always been a comic favourite of mine, and it is amazing there is no good biography of him. He was a highly successful solicitor, becoming famous as the first expert on motoring law. His handbook, The Law of Heavy and Light Mechanical Traction on Highways in the United Kingdom, dates from 1906. He invented Summer Time, destroyed the new prayer book, and raided more nightclubs than any other man in history. I have a plaster statuette of him, his hands joined in pious prayer, clutching an umbrella which came from the same shop as the more notorious brolly made famous by his colleague Neville Chamberlain. This statuette is or was part of a set based upon the portraits of the Daily Express cartoonist, Strube. The only other one of the set left in my possession is Stanley Baldwin. Churchill and Lloyd George have gone, alas. Jix smiles, and appears to be intoning. What can it be? Not that wicked Brendan Behan ditty, ‘The Hound That Caught the Pubic Hare’?
Previous page
