The Raid on Mother Clap’s Molly House Sent “Sodomites” to the Gibbet

 

 Men arrested at Mrs. Clap's Molly House and others hung in a public execution at Tyburn in 1726.

On May 9, 1726 five unfortunate patsies  were strung up and publicly hung on the notorious gallows at Tyburn, the rural execution spot not far outside the walls of London.  Or it may have been just three.  Accounts differ.  Confusion may have arisen because the busy gibbet often accommodated several hangings at once and there may have been other common criminals dangled with them.  A woodblock print purporting shows the execution shows seven victims.

At the time hanging was a popular public amusement regularly drawing large crowds of witnesses.  The list of capital crimes was long and included not just murder and highway robbery but such petty crimes as pickpocketing or pilfering an apple from a greengrocer.  Twelve year olds were routinely snuffed out for lifting a gentleman’s handkerchief. 

The crime of these particular chaps was sodomy, a capital felony under the Buggery Act 1533.  They were among 40 men plus the proprietor swept up in a raid on Mother Clap’s Molly house on a February Sunday evening.  Margaret Clap operated a coffee house out of her home in Field Lane, Holborn, near the Bunch o’ Grapes tavern

The modest establishment, which Mrs. Clap had opened two years earlier, was supposedly also a Molly house—an establishment that catered to homosexual men.  Several had been operating in and near London since about 1700 discretely but openly despite the sodomy laws. 

Unlike most such places Mrs. Claps was neither a tavern nor did it serve as a bordello providing prostitutes for its customers.  She made her large parlor and several rooms available for the entertainment and amusement of her clients and beds were available in every room.  There was much gayety, dancing, singing, and petting in the common room with men frequently pairing up to be “married” in the smaller rooms, sometimes with doors left open so others could watch the proceedings.   Since she had no license as a pub, Mrs. Clap would frequently have to leave her home to visit the Bunch o’ Grapes to obtain libations for her guests.

Mrs. Clap seems to have been genuinely fond of her clientele and tended to their needs and desires with great solicitousness, going above and beyond the attention of a mere businesswoman.  She often extended small loans to some customers and once let one regular who had been thrown out of his home by an irate wife lodge in one of her rooms for a year and a half.  Even while she was being held herself in Newgate prison she evidently arranged an alibi that got one of the men arrested in the raid off the hook.  For their part many of the men returned the affection and tried as much as possible to defend her in their testimony to the court.  They called her in fondness Mother Clap.  She may have been what was in the parlance of 1970’s queer slang, a fag hag.

 

Gentlemen of quality like this Army officer did play cross dressing games and more hoity-toity Molly houses like Miss Muffs in fashionable Whitechapel, but probably seldom visited the more humble digs offered by Mrs. Clap.

As for her clientele, she served and welcomed all classes but most of the men were local artisans, tradesmen, farmers, and laborers as well urchin street prostitutes who they sometimes brought with them.  There may have been occasional slumming gentlemen if any were caught up in the raid, their connections and wealth soon procured a swift, discreet release without charges.

Despite this, popular illustrations published after the Molly house raids usually depicted clients as gentlemen—often as Army officers, judges, and high churchmen. Whatever might have been the case in some Molly houses in or on the fringes of fashionable districts instead of on the virtual outskirts of London, Mrs. Clap does not seem to have entertained these sorts.  The pictures, however, played into the common perception of many ordinary Britons that the elite ruling classes were riddled with homosexuality.  Which, of course, was quite true.

Convivial gatherings apparently occurred on any evening, but evidently Sunday nights were especially popular and may have amounted to weekly parties.  Authorities were aware of that.  They had the establishment under surveillance for more than a year and coerced a client to turn informer to introduce a police agent into the scene.

Actually, police agent is a misnomer.  There was no police department that we would recognize and would not be for more than a century when the Bow Street Runners, bailiffs of the court who exercised arrest warrants were consolidated with local constables by Sir Robert Peel in 1829 as the Metropolitan Police—the Bobbies of Scotland Yard. 

Instead, the investigation and raid were conducted by the Society for the Reformation of Manners, a private organization of zealous reformers out to erase the libertinism that had established itself in London during the Restoration period.  The organization enjoyed support at the highest levels of society and government up to and including the new Hanoverian Dynasty represented by King George I.  Acting in a quasi-official manner, the Society employed its own “constables” and an army of spies and informants who conducted investigations, raids, and pressed prosecutions in its own name.

The Society recruited an informant named Mark Partridge who was enraged at having been revealed as a homosexual in previous investigations and blamed his former companions and lovers.  Partridge identified several Molly houses, including the one maintained by Mrs. Clap, to the society and then introduced one of their constable/agents into the houses as his “husband.”  Notes and testimony by the agent, Samuel Stevens became key in the future prosecutions and provided sensational accounts in newspapers, broadsides, and penny pamphlets.  For instance, he wrote in his report to the Society:

I found between 40 and 50 Men making Love to one another, as they call’d it. Sometimes they would sit on one another’s Laps, kissing in a lewd Manner, and using their Hands indecently. Then they would get up, Dance and make Curtsies, and mimick the voices of Women. O, Fie, Sir! – Pray, Sir. – Dear Sir. Lord, how can you serve me so? – I swear I’ll cry out. – You’re a wicked Devil. – And you’re a bold Face. – Eh ye little dear Toad! Come, buss! – Then they’d hug, and play, and toy, and go out by Couples into another Room on the same Floor, to be marry’d, as they call’d it.

Armed with such intelligence, the raid in February snared 40 men, but none were caught in flagrante delicto which complicated the prosecution on the capital crime of sodomy.  At most some were found with breaches unbuttoned or wearing snatches of women’s clothing.

To obtain convictions, the society had to rely on the testimony of two turn-coat informants, both petty criminals and likely prostitutes, Thomas Newton and Edward Courtney who had already been used as “queer-bait and agents provocateurs or entrappers.”  One or both of them testified to participating in sexual acts with all of those sentenced to hang and others who were sentenced to prison and the pillory.  

As the trial progressed there became some publish backlash for using the testimony of such disreputable characters as the sole evidence of actual sodomy.  That especially was the case for 43 year old Gabriel Lawrence, a milk peddler and widower with a teenage daughter who was able to produce many witnesses to his good character and that no one other than Newton and Courtney had ever been the recipient of any advances.  Lawrence admitted drinking at Mrs. Claps regularly with a friend, Henry Yoxam the cow keeper, who supplied him and several Molly houses with milk, but adamantly proclaimed his innocence of any indecencies.  None the less, he was sentenced to hang.

With outrage for the witch hunt growing, prosecutors quietly declined to press charges against those who had not already either bought their way out of trouble or been freed for lack of evidence.

 

In multiple sources this illustration is labeled as representing "Mother Clap in the stocks," but a close examination show the victim in male clothing.  No matter.  The brutal treatment of the mob to the prisoners likely fatal.

That did not include Mrs. Clap herself.  When she was finally brought before the bar she pleaded innocent to the charge of keeping a disorderly house.   She told the jury “I hope it will be consider’d that I am a Woman, and therefore it cannot be thought that I would ever be concern’d in such Practices.”  She was convicted anyway and harshly sentenced for the offense—“to stand in the pillory in Smithfield, to pay a fine of 20 marks, and to suffer two years’ imprisonment.”

She never survived to serve her prison sentence.  She was so grievously mistreated by a mob at the pillory—probably pelted with stones and beaten with sticks—that she collapsed three times and had to be carried away insensible.  She probably died of her injuries within hours or days, although no record of her passing has been found.  She simply vanished to official history.

This grisly and unfortunate tale is a useful counter to a somewhat fashionable claim made by some current historians that prior to the 20th Century there was no Gay culture and homosexuality as we understand it did not exist.  They don’t deny that there were individuals who engaged in homoerotic acts or relationships, but maintain that society viewed them differently and that so did the individuals whether the acts were suppressed or winked at.  But modern observers will quickly note the characteristics of a well established gay culture in this story—a common code slang, conventions, safe-space gathering spots, role playing, and cross dressing.  Similar establishments and cultures established themselves in large urban centers where there was some sense of anonymity and a certain critical mass of population.  Like the bathhouses of the ‘60s and ’70s and the bars, clubs, and discos of today, the Molly houses thrived in a culture with a modicum of tolerance and then became rallying points of resistance in times of repression.

 

                                                                     Poster for the London production of Mother Clap's Molly House by Mark Ravenhill.

The story of Mrs. Clap’s Molly house has become foundational to modern British gay culture.  It has been told and retold in novels, poems, histories and in an avant-garde stage musical, Mother Clap’s Molly House by Mark Ravenhill.

 

The Man Who Never Died—Joe Hill

                    Joe Hill in a photo taken in prison awaiting his execution.

One hundred and seven years ago on November 19, 1915 Utah authorities took Joe Hill from his prison cell, tied him to a straight back chair, blindfolded him and pinned a paper heart on his chest.  Then, in accordance with the local custom a firing squad of five men, four of them with live rounds in their rifles and one with a blank, perforated that paper valentine.

No one was better at setting words to popular or sacred songs for use in educating and rousing up workers than Joseph Hillstrom, a Swedish immigrant who drifted into the migratory labor life of the American West shortly after the dawn of the 20th Century. He was born as Joel Hägglund in Gävle, Sweden and immigrated to the U.S. under the name Hillstrom in 1902 learning English in New York and staying for a while in Cleveland, Ohio before drifting West. 

He joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1910 and was soon sending songs to IWW newspapers, including his most famous composition, The Preacher and the Slave, meant to be sung to the music of the Salvation Army bands who were frequently sent to street corners to drown out Wobbly soapbox orators.

As a footloose Wobbly Hill was likely to blow into any Western town where there was a strike or free speech fight.  He was a big part of any Little Red Songbook from 1913 on with such contributions as The Tramp, There is Power in the Union, Casey Jones the Union Scab, Scissor Bill, Mr. Block, and Where the River Frasier Flows.  He also began to compose original music as well, the most famous of which was The Rebel Girl which he dedicated to the teen-age organizer of Eastern mill girls, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. 

This oil portrait of Joe Hill hung in a succession of IWW General Headquarters offices.  When I worked late into the night as General Secretary Treasurer in the early 1970's I seemed to feel those intense eyes looking over me.  I wondered if I was living up to his legacy.

Hill also dispatched caustic, if crude, cartoons to Industrial Solidarity, the union’s newspaper, some of which ended up on silent agitators—stickers meant to slapped up in mess halls, in lumber camps, in city flops and beaneries, and even on the factory floor. 

Joe Hill was often the first fellow worker ready to take the stump at a free speech fight and the first arrested.  He was loved by his fellow working stiffs and feared as an enormous pain in the side of Western bosses.

Hill came to Salt Lake City where the local copper barons feared he might bring their miners out on strike.  The small IWW miner’s local there was a target of police harassment.  But Hill apparently had no specific plans and was just booming around looking for work and possibly a place to winter over with sympathetic local Swedes. 

After he showed up at a doctor’s office with a bullet wound, he was arrested and charged with the robbery and murder of a grocer, a former policeman named Morrison—and his son the night before.  He told police that a woman’s honor was involved and would say no more.  He was tried, convicted, and executed by firing squad in 1915.  He was just 36 years old.

Most scholars agree that it was physically impossible for him to have been involved in the robbery or to be shot by the grocer.  But questions always lingered about the bullet wound and that vague alibi. 

                                            William M. Adler apparently solved many of the mysteries surrounding Joe Hills life and death.

Finally in 2013 writer William M. Adler did remarkable spade work and an exhaustive investigation of Hill time in Salt Lake in his book The Man Who Never Died, The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon.  Adler identified the likely real murder of grocery store owner and his son as Magnus Olson, a career criminal with a long record who was known to be in the area and who had beef with the former policeman.  The police had even picked him up as a possible suspect but he talked his way out of it and hid his identity under a welter of aliases.  Olson also matched the physical description of the assailant given by Morrison’s surviving son, which Hill did not.

Then Adler identified the mysterious woman—20 year old Hilda Ericson, the daughter of the family which ran the rooming house in suburban Murray where he was staying.  She had been engaged to Hill’s friend, fellow Swede, and Fellow Worker Otto Applequist who also boarded at the house.  Joe won the girl’s heart and she threw over Applequist for the Wobbly bard.  An upset Applequist shot Hill in a fit of jealousy, but immediately regretted it and was the man who took Joe to the doctor for treatment.  After taking Hill back to the rooming house he packed his bag and left at 2 am with the excuse he had gone looking for work.  Hill refused to name Applequist out of loyalty to his friend, and refused to identify the girl to spare her public humiliation—or perhaps to spare her and her family the risk of persecution from the police for providing an alibi.   And despite all that it cost him, Hill refused to say more.

The judgment of history is that Joe Hill was framed.  He became a martyr to labor in no small measure because of his Last Words, a letter to IWW General Secretary Treasurer William D. “Big Bill” Haywood,

Goodbye Bill. I die like a true blue rebel. Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize... Could you arrange to have my body hauled to the state line to be buried? I don’t want to be found dead in Utah.

That has been shortened as a union motto to “Don’t Mourn Organize.

He also composed a memorable Last Will:

My will is easy to decide,
For there is nothing to divide.
My kin don’t need to fuss and moan,
“Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.”

My body? Oh, if I could choose
I would to ashes it reduce,
And let the merry breezes blow,
My dust to where some flowers grow.

Perhaps some fading flower then
Would come to life and bloom again.
This is my Last and final Will.
Good Luck to All of you,
Joe Hill.

In keeping with Hill’s wishes his body was shipped by rail to Chicago, home of the IWW’s General Headquarters where it was cremated.   His funeral was attended by thousands at the Westside Auditorium on Thanksgiving Day where Haywood, spoke along with tributes in several other languages and performances of Hill’s songs.  The funeral possession was reportedly one of the largest ever held in Chicago up to that time.  It took Hill’s remains to Waldheim Cemetery—now known as Forest Home Cemetery—where the bulk of his ashes were scattered around the Haymarket Martyrs Memorial.

One of the packets of Joe Hill's ashes distributed around the world and to every state but Utah.

The rest of his ashes were divided into small manila envelopes which were sent to IWW locals or delegates in all 48 states except Utah as well as to Sweden, and other countries. 

Over the years some packets of Hill’s ashes have surfaced—some that were seized by the Federal Government in its 1917 nationwide raids on IWW halls and offices were returned to the union by the National Archives in 1988.  The packets have been disposed of in various ways, some ceremonial, some not.  British labor singer Billy Bragg reportedly ate some.  West coast Wobbly singer Mark Ross has some inside his guitar.  Former Industrial Worker editor Carlos Cortez scattered ashes at the dedication of a monument to the six striking coal miners killed by Colorado State Police machine gun fire in the 1927 Columbine Mine Massacre.   An urn kept at General Headquarters in Chicago contains his last known ashes.  

Hill entered American culture as a folk hero along with the likes of John Henry and Casey Jones largely thanks to the memorable 1936 song I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night with lyrics by Alfred Hayes and music by Earl Robinson.  As performed and recorded by the great African-American actor, activist, and singer Paul Robeson it became an anthem of the labor movement and eventually more famous than Hill’s own songs.  More than three decades later Joan Baez introduced it to a new generation of radicals and activists when she sang it at the Woodstock Festival in 1989. 

Phil Ochs, one of the heirs of Hill’s protest bard legacy also wrote and recorded his own Ballad of Joe Hill complete with a detailed account of his fate. 

The 1980 Swedish postage stamp commemorating Joe Hill.

Hill is also a revered figure in his native Sweden where he has been commemorated on postage stamps and where his childhood home is reverently preserved as a museum.  In 1971 director Bo Widerberg came to the States to film his Joe Hill.  Despite his reputation as the lyrical auteur of the internationally acclaimed Elvira Madigan, Widerberg botched the job by sacrificing much of the gritty class war content for a sappy and unbelievable romance.  The film sank like a stone when released in English in the U.S. 

IWW artist Carlos Cortez produced several versions of large format linocut hand printed posters of Joe Hill.

But even a bad movie could not erode Hill’s fame.  He has appeared in fiction, poetry, and plays and has inspired several works of art, perhaps most notably in linocut posters hand produced by Wobbly artist, poet, and editor Carlos Cortez.

For the centennial of Hill’s execution events were held around the country and the world all year, including a series of Joe Hill Road Show tours featuring contemporary IWW musicians and other performers of people’s music.

Truly, Joe Hill is the Man Who Never Died.

A centennial mural dedicated in Salt Lake City in 2015.