Great article from Salon.com
Well-Traveled
Hellfire Holidays
Phallic drinking cups, a saucy platter, and a wig made of what?
Secrets of the Great British Sex Clubs
By Tony Perrottet
It wasn’t the most romantic setting for royal intimacy. I was sitting in a fluorescent-white room of the Museum of St. Andrews University in Scotland, and a curator was handing me a pair of latex gloves so that I could examine an exotic relic from the 18th century. It looked like a typical silver snuff box, oval in shape and delicately engraved. But when I popped the lock, I found its true curiosity. Inside was a tightly packed clump of hair along with a parchment note. It explained that these tufts were pubic hairs trimmed from “the Mons Veneris of a Royal Courtesan of King George IV.”
For a history-loving traveler, stumbling on rare artifacts is exciting enough, but this sudden human connection to the past had me breaking out in a sweat. And this was just foreplay. I was here at the museum to inspect a whole cache of lewd memorabilia rescued from the raunchy British sex clubs of the 18th century. We often forget that the pre-Victorian era was more lusty than today. Such intimate curls, plucked from one’s conquests, were a favorite souvenir; lovers exchanged them as tokens of affection, and rakes wore them like cockades in their hats as talismans of potency. But an aura of mystery still surrounds the extent of the licentious behavior behind club doors. The famously randy George IV had become a member of a notorious Scottish club called the Beggar’s Benison while he was still a dandyish young prince in cravat and cuffs. Years later, when visiting Edinburgh as king in 1822, he apparently provided this token to the club for old times’ sake. It’s impossible to know from whom the curls originated, but his consort at the time was Elizabeth, the Marchioness of Coyningham, a feisty and alluring gold-digger (“beautiful, shrewd, greedy, voluptuous,” rejoiced one writer) who listed future Russian Czar Nicholas I among her many paramours.
For me, this was more thrilling than fondling King Arthur’s helmet. It was for moments like this, I told myself, that tourism to Britain is alive and well. And I hadn’t even gotten to the dildolike toasting glasses or masturbation props.
“Of course, every request to see the club relics has to be approved,” one college figure said to me. “We have to be careful. We don’t want the story to be,University where Prince William went to college has rooms full of porn!”
“Quite,” I agreed.
***
A couple of years ago, while researching a treatise on salacious European history, I discovered the phantasmagoric wonderland of sex that was Georgian Britain, the era from 1714 to 1837. Long before the heyday of Austin Powers, debauchery proliferated up and down the rain-soaked land, fueled by riotous boozing and self-indulgence. “There was a gusto about 18th century vice unmatched before or since,” writes historian Fergus Linnane with tangible nostalgia, in London: The Wicked City. A flood of wealth from the budding empire allowed the leisured classes to fulfill their carnal fantasies without restraint. And perhaps the most striking feature of the age was the explosion of British sex clubs, where a colorful array of rakes, libertines, courtesans, and aristocratic adventuresses dressed up in outrageous outfits for kinky ceremonies. Each club accumulated its own peculiar regalia, such as erotic drinking vessels, sleazy curios, and obscene ballot boxes modeled on human torsos (yay or nay votes going into respective orifices). There would be ribald toasts, poring over the latest dirty books, and visits from comely young “posture molls,” who posed nude on tables and gyrated like modern lap dancers. Special rooms were provided so members could retire in pairs or groups, and ladies of fashion could unwind with handsome rent boys. Surviving accounts suggest that some clubs would spice their orgies with a dash of Satanism, while others focused on elaborate rituals of self-abuse.
Sadly, during the prudish Victorian era, most references to these naughty clubs were scotched from the historical record. Horrified relatives burned embarrassing documents and club regalia. But their subversive antics survived in pornographic novels, travel guides to risqué tourist sites, and, of course, popular memory. In the countryside, colorful tales endured of partygoers racing through the dark forest for frenzied couplings or meeting in ruined abbeys, erotic gardens, and underground tunnels.
In the 1960s, British swingers revived their kinship for the world of Georgian sex and its giddy freedoms. Researchers have located a number of documents and relics that survived the Victorian purges. And academics argue that the clubbers were more than upper-class twits; they were motivated by a philosophical yearning and were essential for promoting the Enlightenment ideal that sex was for pleasure, not just for procreation.
Poring over these revisionist texts, I realized that a number of club locations could still be tracked down today. So I mapped out an itinerary that would take me through the hidden recesses of Georgian Britain to sample its fabled pleasures.
It was in swarming London town that the club craze began. But visiting the city today, you must constantly look past all the ponderous Victorian institutions that smothered the world of whimsical sex romps. No trace can be found of the Mollies Club for homosexuals, the range of transvestite societies (both men and women relished gender-bending in the 18th century), the Flagellants’ Club for the many gentlemen who favored a little birching, or the women-only club for discreet lesbian encounters on Jermyn Street. A creative leap of imagination is needed to picture Covent Garden, now given over to flower markets and Body Shops, as the city’s most sordid red light district, where, in the seedy Shakespeare’s Head, waiter-pimps would set gentlemen up with ladies like Oyster Moll, who would “open the wicket of love’s bear garden to any bold sportsman who has a venturesome mind to give a run to his puppy.” And in tree-lined St. James’s Square, nothing remains of upmarket bordellos like Miss Falkland’s Temple of Love, where one could sip champagne in damask-lined parlors and enjoy such luxuries as “elastick beds” that were spring-loaded “to restore old men and debauched youths,” much like the vibrating mattresses of Las Vegas hotels, and where resident doctors who would screen ladies for the pox.
So I spent a couple of days on swank Pall Mall, scoping out London’s oldest private clubs, which mostly date from the 19th century and are now lined up like bunkers, their ornate wooden doorways guarded by liveried staff. These traditional clubs remain fearful temples of exclusivity, with dark reflective glass and nary a plaque to indicate their existence—a sure sign of upper-class hanky-panky, as far as I’m concerned.
I had to know what went on behind those closed doors. So I called in favors from British friends and penetrated a few—the Athenaeum, the Travellers, and the Society of Antiquaries. There were many leather chairs, valuable oil paintings, and porters half-asleep in their tuxedoes, but no whiff of depravity, historical or otherwise. Even the once-wild Brooks’s Club, where Lord Cholmondeley had in the 18th century staked Lord Derby 500 guineas to fornicate with his mistress 1,000 feet up in a hot-air balloon, was now a quiet redoubt of toothy brokers. I could only hope they had hidden their spanking birches as soon as I entered.
But even this made a certain historical sense, I realized. In 1721, rumors began circulating throughout the city about a new group that called themselves the Hellfire Club, some 40 “persons of quality,” male and female, led by a handsome and depraved young peer, Philip, Duke of Wharton. Along with the group sex and sadomasochism, there was talk of sacrilegious rites in their townhouses—mockeries of the Holy Eucharist, feasts of Devil’s Loins and Holy Ghost Pie—so the club was shut down by royal order.
Not long afterward, London fell out of favor among the most extreme clubbers; it was too difficult to keep their rites secret, too close to the hand of the law. But the idea of mixing sex and mockery of religion was in the air. Imitation Hellfire Clubs began to crop up in rural England, Ireland, and Scotland. And the evocative name became the popular label for all the carnally adventurous societies of the 18th century. (The Hellfire Club title has lingered for centuries, claimed by dozens of S&M societies around the world, even one that flourished in New York’s Meatpacking District in the 1970s.)
Clearly, London was passé. So, like any Georgian gentleman looking for hard-core entertainment, I set off into the English countryside.
From: Tony Perrottet
Subject: Damnation, Members Only
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 15, 2009, at 11:41 AM ET
West Wycombe, 30 miles up the Thames from London, is typical of a thousand quaint English villages, except for one intriguing twist: It was also home to the most notorious Hellfire Club of the 18th century, a cultlike society accused of blasphemous orgies and devil worship. The most terrifying thing about planning a visit today is the Travelocity.com reviews of West Wycombe’s only hotel, a 300-year-old carriage inn called the George and Dragon, a rich litany of abuse that makes Fawlty Towers look classy.
“Oh, dear!” reads one subject line above a one-star review. “A real let-down!” complains another. “Skip it.” “Never again.” “One to avoid.”
Knowing I was destined to stay there anyway, I scrolled down to the detailed comments:
“The first thing I noticed was the smell on the stairway …”
“Our hearts sank …”
“The real shame was the staff …”
“Food and service was a joke.”
“Boy, how disappointing.”
“Take earplugs!”
Actually, I was delighted. I wanted sordid Georgian history, not a Holiday Inn with kitchenettes. So I set off into Buckinghamshire, a bucolic landscape of rolling green pastures, in search of the rollicking sex club that had blossomed under the care of Britain’s most colorful rake, Sir Francis Dashwood.
The scion of a fabulously wealthy aristocratic family, Dashwood is a mass of contradictions—connoisseur, intellectual, humanitarian landowner, and shameless debauchee. (“Rapist, sodomite,” condemns one writer. “Gentleman, scholar,” notes another.) Dashwood’s true gift was for performance art, and he turned his life into a provocative piece of theater. As a young reprobate, he “fornicated his way across Europe” on two Grand Tours, causing scandals from St. Petersburg to Constantinople. Then he returned to London to help found the famous Society of Dilettanti, to promote classical studies, and the Divan Club, for Ottoman culture. Both clubs mixed their scholarly meetings with exuberant bouts of drinking, whoring, and wearing of fancy dress: The Dilettanti swanned about in red togas with an MC done up as Machiavelli, while members of the Divan Club wore sultanlike outfits and were attended by harems of pink-cheeked lovelies. Although Dashwood was by now a member of parliament, the era was marked by a bracing indifference to the private behavior of politicians. But his irreligious Hellfire Club—officially known as the Order of the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe—would be his most subversive achievement, whose rites he preferred to conduct in secret.
In 1750, Dashwood gathered his friends and concocted a fake religious sect, renovated the abandoned medieval abbey of Medmenham near his family estate, and began to use it as a private rumpus room for carnal misbehavior. In this isolated setting, beneath old stained-glass windows and new erotic frescos, a dozen randy “apostles” would gather in monks robes for twice-weekly bacchanals. Aristocratic women would travel from London to join the frolics dressed as nuns, and comely local “nymphs” were hired, allegedly to lie naked on his altar so the monks could lick holy wine from their navels—an exciting aperitif before the real festivities began. To crank up the eerie atmosphere, revelries were also held inside purpose-built caves dug on Dashwood’s estate, in torch-lit chambers that evoked the pagan catacombs of ancient Rome.
What exactly transpired in these inventive club settings has been a matter of feverish speculation by historians ever since, with rumors of sacrilegious sex games, pagan fertility rituals, and, of course, a spicy dash of Satanism. We do know that club members included high-level figures from the British government, including the Earl of Sandwich and radical John Wilkes, plus celebrities like the writer Laurence Sterne, artist William Hogarth, and Benjamin Franklin, who became Dashwood’s close friend.
Tales about Dashwood’s debauches have been passed on through the generations, inspiring a string of Victorian pornographic novels, not to mention the 1961 Peter Cushing movie The Hellfire Club and certain saucy episodes of The Avengers. A version even turns up in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut,when Tom Cruise stumbles onto a remote rural manor filled with masked aristocrats indulging in unspeakable acts.
No sooner had I decided to research the club than I learned that Sir Francis’ 10th-generation descendent, Sir Edward Dashwood, 12th baronet, was still going strong at his family estate. He was even running his ancestor’s old tunnels as a tourist attraction called the “Hellfire Caves.” The George and Dragon could be as Fawlty as it liked.
A summer drizzle was falling as I made my way along West Wycombe’s narrow High Street, only 100 yards from end to end and comprising a few village shops selling boiled sweets and sausages. Despite the town’s proximity to London, renovations have yet to begin on most of the sagging historic buildings, which are all owned by the National Trust. The infamous George and Dragon looked innocent enough at first sight, with whitewash thatch walls and exposed beams that survive from its days as a coaching inn and a cobbled driveway worn with ruts. I stooped under the low doorway and entered the darkened pub, where I eagerly savored the whiff of ancient beer soaked into the decaying carpet. Every angle was slightly askew, like a German Expressionist film set. A couple of orange bulbs gave off less light than candles.
“Hello,” croaked a voice from the gloom. “Fancy a pint, mate?”
Two figures were hunched at the bar like gargoyles, with tobacco-yellow skin, greasy long hair, and 18th-century dentistry. Nobody can say that traveling in rural England isn’t exotic. Just a few miles from modern London, and the Hogarthian stock seemed quite undiluted. On the wall, I spotted an engraving of a monk trying to ravish a local maiden. A half-dozen beers later, I lurched up the zig-zagging stairs as the building creaked and groaned, as if it were alive, and finally found my attic room—a bit frayed, perhaps, but hardly the terrifying rat hole I expected from the reviews.
The next day, after my black pudding and tea, I passed beneath a Tudor arch and hiked the leafy lanes to the Hellfire Caves. Sir Francis had ordered them built in the 1750s, converting a chalk mine into elaborate tunnels and grottoes going down 300 feet. A bridge was built over a subterranean river, dubbed the Styx, and an elaborate entrance added with a Gothic flint-work façade to evoke the nave of a church. Ben Franklin was reportedly impressed with the effect when he visited the caves in 1772: “His Lordship’s imagery, puzzling and whimsical as it may seem, is as much evident below the earth as it is above it,” he wrote. We know from the club’s cellar book that parties were held there in the 1750s. And when Medmenham Abbey was abandoned in 1765, after members fell out over politics, and stories of its rites spread, a persistent local legend holds that the monks reconvened their secret meetings here.
In later Victorian times, tourists would clamor with candles over fallen chunks of chalk to visit this fantastical underworld. Then, in 1951, inspired by a visit to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico, the current Sir Edward Dashwood’s father, the 11th baronet, realized the caves could be a genuine money-spinner. He cleared the fallen debris and opened the tunnels as the Hellfire Caves. Publicity was unwittingly provided by the local vicar, who denounced the unholy project from his pulpit and complained to the Daily Mirror that “my tummy wobbles like a jelly every time I pass the entrance.” Today, the Hellfire Caves are a local fixture, rented out for singular functions—popular at Halloween and with ghost-hunter TV shows.
I paid my entrance fee at the gift store, where Devonshire teas and Hellfire Nachos were available, and ventured into the cave’s dark maw. A sign soberly warns that “sufferers of dizzy spells, faints, blackouts and loss of balance should not enter.” The clammy air seeped down my collar as I followed the sepulchral corridors and peered at niches that had been decorated with mannequins in period dress. Along the way, an audio commentary was piped in, recorded in the 1980s by the 11th baronet Dashwood. (Despite their religious habits, he chortled in avuncular tones, the monks who met here “weren’tat all saintly.”) Even though this was a family-friendly attraction, it seems the Dashwoods still can’t resist a little mischief. One plaque recounts the juicy “Nun’s Poem,” in which a young initiate confesses to a ménage à trois with a lecherous abbot, an induced abortion, and various “Sapphic pleasures” with her fellow convent girls. With an eye to American visitors, a famous dirty ditty by Ben Franklin is also offered, advising young men to seduce older women rather than younger. (The “corporeal enjoyment … is at least equal and frequently superior … and they are so grateful for the attention.”) But these hokey flourishes can’t detract from the genuine weirdness of the space, where the tunnels seem laid out for anything but mining.
The highlight is a cavernous banqueting hall, with four cozy little “monks cells” radiating from the walls. They now contain moss-covered statues. The ghostly commentary advised me that these cells were once furnished to be “used by the club members for privacy with their ladies.” It then added that the Hellfire Caves are once again available to the public for hire—”a unique and atmospheric venue for any dinner party or disco.”
The chill air made this prospect seem dubious, but an attendant, who was fixing a light, assured me that they’d just had 220 people here for a birthday party. “There are some amazing sound effects in the tunnels,” he said. “Security is excellent: You don’t get gatecrashers down here, and no matter how much noise you make, you can’t disturb the neighbors. It even gets warm during parties. It’s amazing what body heat can do!”
I tried to imagine one of Sir Francis’ wicked fiestas based on the rare surviving accounts. Wide-eyed guests would have been led to this candle-lit chamber, where a table glistened with polished silver, crystal, and “food of a most exquisite kind and in gargantuan proportions.” They would be met by the 12 apostles wearing long white monks habits, and the chief voluptuary, Sir Francis, corpulent and red-faced in middle age, dressed in a red robe trimmed with rabbit fur. According to a 1779 account called Nocturnal Revels, which purports to be the work of a former member, each friar was allowed to invite “a Lady of cheerful, lively disposition, to improve the general hilarity.” The aristocratic “nuns” wore ornate masks until all the males had arrived so that they could leave unrecognized if an acquaintance—or even a husband—was among the guests.
It seems that a mock grace was recited in Latin, and fine claret was drunk from cups made from human skulls. Pornography was read from volumes bound as sermon books. Scraps of food were tossed to the club mascot, a baboon dressed as a priest.
Further details will always be vague. Many years later, a Buckinghamshire historian named Thomas Langley tracked down Sir Francis’ elderly housekeeper and quizzed her on the specifics of club meetings. Apparently, he was so horrified by her stories that he decided the information “might as well be buried in oblivion.”
The killjoy.
From: Tony Perrottet
Subject: Sense and Sensibility and Sex Fiends
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2009, at 10:24 AM ET
After a couple of days in West Wycombe, I began to see the lecherous hand of Sir Francis Dashwood all over the village. Crowning the hill above the Hellfire Caves is the tiny Church of St. Lawrence, which has a golden sphere the size of a weather balloon poised on its steeple. It gleamed in the sun like a Dr. Who prop or an antique Orgasmatron. It turns out Sir Francis devised this gilded wooden object so that he could sit inside it, knee-to-knee with a few of his fun-loving friends, and cavort over panoramic views of his estate, West Wycombe Park. Needless to say, these were not your average rural views. According to village lore, when the golden orb was completed in 1763, Dashwood invited the vicar up to the steeple to enjoy the vista. The man of the cloth was horrified to discover that the contours of Dashwood’s garden were sculpted to resemble the female form, with two hills topped with pink flowering shrubs and a tightly cropped triangle of forest. On a pre-arranged signal, fountains erupted at each of the garden’s erogenous zones, causing the vicar to collapse in shock. He was only revived with “strong liquor.”
The Dashwood estate was scattered with erotic “follies,” which remained so notorious in the early 1800s that Jane Austen includes sly allusions to them in Sense and Sensibility. (Even her use of the name Dashwood for her characters, argues Janine Barchas of the University of Texas, created “an uneasy atmosphere of wealth, infamy and illicit sexuality.”) To see if any sleaze survived, I had to get inside that ball. I crept up the stairs to the steeple, but the golden globe was bolted shut—and had been since the 1970s. Apparently, an insurance company feared that the fragile wooden support would break and send visitors rolling down the hillside. Still, the naughty reputation of West Wycombe endures: When singer Tori Amos was secretly married in the church in 1998, the wedding procession was led by two monks bearing torches, Hellfire-style.
It was time to visit Lord Dashwood himself—the 12th baronet, that is. I put a call though to Sir Edward on the George and Dragon’s crackling Bakelite phone and asked if I could possibly drop by for a chat. After all, who else could solve the mysteries of the Hellfire Club?
At the forbidding iron gates of West Wycombe Park, I punched in a security code, and they creaked open to reveal a majestic tree-lined driveway stretching into the distance. The air was fragrant with freshly cut grass; a lake stretched to the left, with swans regally cruising beneath the gaze of a stone Neptune. Thoroughbred horses gamboled in a sea of green, and a vast Italianate mansion hovered on a distant hilltop.
Dazed by the feudal idyll, I became disoriented on the paths and wandered into the forest, until a man in a white four-wheel-drive vehicle pulled up beside me.
“Are you Sir Edward?” I asked.
“Wish I was!” the warden guffawed before pointing me in the right direction.
I finally found the master sitting behind a desk in the estate office near the stables. This modern descendent of the wicked old rake had the affable, professional demeanor of a village accountant—he reminded me of British actor-playwright Alan Bennett. He is 45 years old, bespectacled, and casual in khakis and a crimson polo shirt. He spends his time managing the family’s 5,000 acres of land—which still has around 40 tenant farmers—and juggling film and TV shoots, including The Duchess, in which Keira Knightley played 18th-century femme fatale Georgina Cavendish.
Sir Edward was keen to defend his ancestor’s reputation, arguing that the popular concentration on Sir Francis’ sensational sex life does him an injustice.
“Sir Francis wasn’t crazy,” he insisted. “He was just a tremendous character. And he had bloody good fun. He traveled a hell of a lot. He supported the arts. He developed the first semaphore system.” (The golden ball at the top of the steeple wasn’t just for boozing—apparently, Dashwood used mirrors to flash his coded messages as far away as Oxford.) “He looked after his villagers in quite an enlightened way. There were so many facets to his life, which is probably why he got on so well with Benjamin Franklin. But, yes, he was also very self-indulgent—a bit like Richard Branson today.”
And the order? “It was a good, fun men’s club,” Sir Edward said. “Yes, they all dressed up and drank a hell of a lot, and, yes, there were women involved. But look at the men who were members. They were erudite; they loved the classics, astronomy, and astrology. They weren’t into black magic—it was Victorian accounts that turned them into devil-worshippers—but they were interested in exotic philosophies. I’m sure that was what drew Sir Francis to the Ottoman Empire, this chance to investigate Eastern mysteries.”
Later, I went to visit Sir Edward’s Palladian mansion, a blur of Italian marble, chandeliers, classical busts, and tapestries. The National Trust owns the villa, but the Dashwood family leases the top two floors on condition that the public have access to the rest of the building in summer. My guide insisted that nothing untoward happened in the Hellfire Club, but I was delighted to spot risqué artwork throughout the house: The murals gracing the central staircase grow increasingly saucy as they ascend to the floors where Sir Edward, his wife, and three children reside. (I tried to glimpse the highest levels, but the view is unfortunately blocked by the regal marble posterior of a statue of Venus.) Striking portraits in the plush dining room include devilish Sir Francis waving tipsily in Ottoman garb and luscious courtesan Fanny Murray exposing her left breast with an insouciant smile. (“I’d class her as the entertainment,” muttered my guide, disapprovingly.)
As for the sexy garden follies, I searched the grounds and found the temple of Venus, where a grotto’s slender entrance and curved walls were originally designed by Sir Francis to evoke a vagina and a pair of spread legs. It’s hardly a shocker by today’s standards. But I reminded myself that the structure was demolished in Victorian times by appalled descendents and entirely reconstructed from archival drawings by Sir Edward’s father in the 1980s. The entrance is now guarded by a statue of Mercury, the god who guides travelers on safe journeys and who, incidentally, taught humankind to masturbate.
It started to rain, so I slipped inside the damp cave. The interior was once filled with 25 indecent statuettes, which are now, sadly, gone. I sat on a marble block to ponder the ironies of sexual history. I suppose there is a touching symmetry to the Dashwood family’s ongoing promotion of the Hellfire Club. Two generations ago, the estate was in dire financial straits. The grand mansion was a wreck, with most of its period furniture auctioned off and many of its faux-finished walls whitewashed. But Sir Edward’s father bounced back to renovate the house; he even tracked down many of the original household artworks and furniture. Income from the Hellfire Caves, which milk Sir Francis’ dastardly reputation, is just part of the recovery plan. For better or for worse, the Dashwoods are stuck promoting the wicked vision of their ancestor.
Leaving the park, I thought I glimpsed Sir Edward on horseback in the distance, riding with a straight back alongside his two sons and sheepdogs, more Gainsborough than Goya. But I could hear Sir Francis cackling. The Dashwoods are still getting away with it, after all.
From: Tony Perrottet
Subject: The Sexy Beasts of Scotland
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 16, 2009, at 7:30 PM ET
The farther I traveled from London, the more lurid the sex clubs became. So it makes sense that the kinkiest societies lurked in Scotland, even though today it’s a land better known for haggis and deep-fried pizza than for hot-blooded lovers. Founded in 1732, the most influential was called the Beggar’s Benison, and since we have many records of its proceedings, we know its meetings were little short of bizarre. Most exciting, I’d heard that many of the club’s weird erotic relics had somehow survived.
So I set out to visit the Benison’s original home, a tavern in a fishing village called Anstruther. My map told me it was located on the East Neuk of Fife, by the Firth of Forth, which sounded like somewhere Bilbo Baggins might hang out. Soon I was driving along the rugged coastline north of Edinburgh. Its windswept cliffs, which seem carved by a giant bread knife, are beloved by hikers and bird-watchers today, but back in the 18th century, it was a gloomy expanse of coal pits and salt pans, where villagers eked out a harsh life pickling herring or smuggling.
When Anstruther, just one of many small fishing communities, appeared, I navigated down a tight, salt-encrusted lane to the pebbly beach guarded by cawing seagulls. The tide was out, leaving a lush layer of pungent seaweed. Trawlers lay on their sides like beached whales, and a forlorn web of nets were drying on the stone walls. Every so often, tiny rays of sunlight peaked through the gray sky just long enough to remind you of the dismal weather.
Unlike in West Wycombe, nobody was peddling Hellfire Club history here. The only signs of life were a row of fish-and-chip shops and a small museum devoted to fishing, where the town’s local historian, Christine Keay, gave an involuntary shudder when I mentioned the Beggar’s Benison. “Every now and then, some artifact will come up at auction in Edinburgh or London, and there will be a flurry of interest in the club,” she said. “But, no, we’re not promoting it as a tourist attraction.”
And the relics? She didn’t think there was anything in Anstruther.
I slogged across the beach glass to inspect the foundations of Castle Dreel, where the club supposedly held its first meeting in 1732. The group’s odd name—which in full was the Most Ancient and Puissant Order of the Beggar’s Benison and Maryland—came from a story about King James V. While traveling in Scotland incognito, he asked a local wench, “a buxom gaberlunzie lass,” to carry him across a river on her back. Rewarded with a gold coin, the delighted woman offered the king her blessing: “May prick or purse never fail you.” This so-called “beggar’s benison” became the club credo.
Castle Dreel was already a ruin in 1732, so the club moved its meetings to a discreet neighboring tavern. Despite alterations, the tavern still exists and is now a pub called the Smuggler’s Inn. It could have doubled as a shabby film set for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, with stone steps down heading to the beach once used for contraband whisky deliveries.
Inside, a weather-beaten little housekeeper looked at me as if I were insane. “You want a room?” she asked. “Here?”
The owner, who was gnawing on potato chips in his office, looked me up and down suspiciously, as if he knew just what I was up to. “Take your pick, mate,” he said, jerking his thumb to the rear of the establishment. I chose a small chamber with an ocean view, so that sitting on my lumpy bed, I could stare across the village graveyard to the North Sea, frothing away like gray Coca-Cola.
Above the public bar there was a more desolate party room, with better graveyard views and a ship’s-cabin theme. In a dark annex, which had exposed stone walls from the original 18th-century edifice, the housekeeper was helping a technician set up a karaoke system. For a whole hour, agonizing feedback came out of the speakers until they gave up and had a drink.
* * *
If a traveler had managed to peep through a keyhole here 250 years ago, he or she would have found a disturbing sight. The meetings of the Beggar’s Benison were historical pageants that Masterpiece Theater has so far been in no hurry to depict.
From the records, we can reconstruct a meeting held on Nov. 30, 1737—St. Andrew’s Day. In miserable weather (the minutes read: “Tempest”), two dozen members, from customs clerks to local gentlemen, gathered in the fire-lit room wearing olive green silk sashes and pornographic medals. On a table in the center of the room, a pair of pink-cheeked posture molls hired from the village girls (“ages 18 and 19″) struck acrobatic poses in the nude, while members inspected the “Secrets of Nature” with a clinical eye. (Touching was strictly forbidden; if anyone was overcome by desire or booze and broke this club rule, he would be thrown into the rainy alley.)
A club official produced a large pewter plate, called the Test Platter, placed it on an altar, and folded a white napkin upon it. At the blowing of a horn, three initiates were led in from a small room. Perhaps the sheer anticipation, combined with glimpses of the posture girls, was enough to achieve a priapic frenzy. Or perhaps, like modern sperm donors, the waiting room was conveniently supplied with the club’s pornographic literature. In any case, the trio advanced to the platter and went to work until they produced a “horned spoonful.” The two dozen other club members then followed suit. (“24 met, 3 tested and enrolled. All frigged.”) The three flushed initiates were then presented with a diploma and handed phallic-shaped drinking vessels, called “prick glasses,” charged with fine port wine. A toast was offered to “Firm Erection, fine Insertion, Excellent distillation, no Contamination.” The prick glasses turned out to be party jokes; when the new members tried to drink, port spurted down their chins and shirts.
The club sovereign then reverently produced the most legendary of the Benison props—a wig that was supposedly made from the pubic hairs of King Charles II’s many mistresses—and put it on his head to raucous toasts and cheering.
The festivities continued until 3 a.m., as the waves lashed the castle ruins and rain pelted the tavern windows.
Surely someone at the Smuggler’s Inn knew about this? I ordered an Old Jock beer in the downstairs pub, which had a permanent clientele of about six, and began an informal poll on the Beggar’s Benison. Two characters unexpectedly came to life. One had found a copy of the records at a flea market. Another had bought an academic book about the club.
“A couple of years ago, some really young lads started a rock band called the Beggar’s Benison,” one remembered fondly. “They had heard about it, and knew it was sort of naughty-sexy, maybe a bit shocking to get some attention. They put up posters for their first gig all over town. Then I tipped them off as to what the club was really about. They ran around the village all red-faced, tearing down their posters. Wasn’t exactly the image the poor bastards were after, being associated with a bunch of wankers.”
Still, there did seem to be a perverse pride in the Benison. Wankers though they were, the members were also rebels. They were against the Scottish Kirk, or church, which repressed every whisper of sexual freedom. They were against the English, especially their taxes, and many were involved in smuggling. And the masturbation was an act of defiance against the new anti-onanism tracts coming out of London, which argued that self-abuse was a medical danger that could lead to blindness and consumption.
The next morning, with the beer still sloshing around inside me, I sat down to the “full Scottish breakfast” of fried eggs, fried potatoes, and fried tomatoes.
“Fancy some fried bread with that, love?” the waitress asked.
As diverting as the Smuggler’s Inn was, I hadn’t had any luck finding the fabled relics. The pub’s owner finally confirmed that he had no secret cupboard of masturbatory items. One book I found guessed that the items might have ended up in the United States in the 1980s—a plausible enough notion, given that so many off-beat European artifacts, such as Napoleon’s severed penis, found homes on American shores.
To solve the mystery, I tracked down historian David Stevenson, who has to qualify as the world’s leading expert on Scottish masturbation cults. Professor emeritus in Scottish history at the University of St. Andrews and author of The Beggar’s Benison: Sex Clubs of Enlightenment Scotland and Their Rituals, he lives in a suburban home on a hillside by the Firth of Forth. When I entered his living room, his wife looked at me askance. “So you’re one of the strange people interested in the Beggar’s Benison, are you?” she inquired.
“I first heard of the club when I was a student in Edinburgh,” said Stevenson, a soft-spoken, grandfatherly figure with a silver beard, who was wearing socks and sandals. “One or two scholars had touched on it, but they didn’t want to get their fingers dirty.”
And had the relics stayed in Scotland? I asked eagerly.
“It’s a miracle that they’ve survived at all,” he said. “I’m sure there were many more clubs of this nature at the time, only their relics were destroyed, so we don’t know about them. But yes, the Benison items never left these bonny shores. In fact, they’re only a few miles away. I’ll get you an appointment.”
From: Tony Perrottet
Subject: Gentlemen, Charge Your Indecent Props!
Posted Friday, Dec. 18, 2009, at 10:09 AM ET
Visitors flock to St. Andrews from all over the world to play its venerable golf course, the oldest in the world. But to me, the town just oozes history. I suppose I was thinking of balls and strokes too, albeit in a slightly different way.
At 10 a.m., I dashed through the flower-filled cloisters (yes, where Prince William once studied!), under Gothic arches to the university museum repository, an unassuming office building directly opposite the police station. There, a receptionist showed me to an anonymous room, painted a clinical white, as if I were about to give evidence. But the door opened and two chirpy female curators entered carrying heavy cardboard boxes containing the artifacts of Scotland’s celebrated 18th-century masturbation society, the Beggar’s Benison, and its even more perverse offshoot, the Wig Club. Giving me a cheery greeting, they snapped on white latex gloves and started to lay the contents on the table, carefully unwrapping each item from archival paper and acid-free bubble wrap.
This was it, I marveled—the strangest shards of British history.
“These items are a bit notorious here at the museum,” Jessica, one of the curators, confessed. It wasn’t hard to see why. One phallus after another, fashioned from glass and metal, was carefully revealed. These were followed by a colorful array of sashes, bowls, platters, and medals engraved with lewd, vaguely nightmarish images, like lighthouses that were modeled on penises and roosters with penis heads. Some were engraved with shapes known as “vulvaform,” but the male organ certainly got top billing.
I picked up the Test Platter, the receptacle for Benison members’ seed for over a century, and read the engraved inscription, “THE WAY OF A MAN WITH A MAID.” There was a clumsy drawing of an erection with a purse hanging from it and the date, 1732.
“I hope it’s been washed,” I said.
I was then presented with two of the so-called prick glasses, each about nine inches long. They were made from blown glass and had seen rough handling; each had suffered a cracked gonad. Perhaps this fragility was what inspired the other, longer version of the phallic drinking cups, made from metal. There was also a horn, mysteriously engraved with the words “My Breath Is Strange” from the Book of Job. And a rather nice porcelain punch bowl.
The Beggar’s Benison and Wig Club Collection relics have never been publicly displayed.
“St. Andrews is such a family tourist spot,” said the second curator, Amy, who was wearing a candy-pink dress, pink earrings, and pigtails. “There was some thought of exhibiting a few of the tamer items, but it was vetoed. I mean, how do you explain what they were used for in a G-rated way?”
But what of the fabled wig, the most notorious of the club curios? This secret mascot, supposedly woven from the pubic hairs of King Charles II‘s mistresses, was first worshipped by the Benison, but its powers were such that it attracted its own club. All that remains is the wooden wig box. Like a game-show host, Amy slowly creaked open its door to reveal the wig stand, a wooden head with a protruding chin and nose. Someone had painted on eyes, unfortunately crossed. The effect was ghoulish.
But the wig itself was missing.
“At some stage the wig got separated from its box,” she said sadly. “It never made it to the museum.”
The provenance of the pubic wig makes a fascinating story in itself. According to club lore, the relic dates to 1651, when hedonistic King Charles II visited Scotland and was treated to riotous drinking parties, especially in Fife. Later, he sent the wig as a gift to his debauched Scottish friends, its very size a symbol of royal virility. In the 1730s, the treasured headpiece was passed on to the Beggar’s Benison by its keeper, the earl of Moray, and worn in ceremonies by the sovereign in an attempt to tap into its talismanic power. Then, in 1775, a schism struck the Scottish club world. Lord Moray, a descendent of the wig’s original keeper, ran off with the prized item and started his own breakaway society in Edinburgh called the Wig Club. Instead of ritual self-abuse, new members were obliged to reverently kiss the wig and contribute a hair from their own mistresses’ nether regions to embellish the thinning mane.
It was as compensation for this sorry loss that King George IV, who had become an honorary member of the Benison four decades earlier, presented the club with a locket of his own mistress’s pubic hairs in a lovely silver snuff box in 1822. Club tradition holds that he greeted the sovereign at the Leith docks on his highly publicized official visit and pressed it into his eager hands. The tuft was intended to be the embryo, as it were, of a new and revitalized wig, although the idea never got off the ground. At least nobody stole it, as I found when I got to fondle the royal gift in the club cache at St. Andrews.
There had been concern, when Prince William was studying here from 2001 to 2005, that the press might take a leering interest in the trail of royal debauchery.
“You know the British tabloids,” Jessica shrugged.
All these royal connections, I mused absently, wondering who stole that wig.
In the underground archive of the university library, with pallid Ph.D. students blinking at their laptops, I sifted through original Beggar’s Benison diplomas and piles of correspondence until I found a crumbling, leather-bound tome—the minutes of the Knights Companions of the Wig, starting with the first meeting in March 6, 1775. The ornate cover features a gilt drawing of the stolen pubic headpiece—even more wild, florid, and curly than I had imagined, like an exuberant head of broccoli.
I tried to track the wig’s progress over the last century. It turned out that we can thank a retired Scottish army officer, Lt. Col. M.R. Canch Kavanagh, for the safety of the St. Andrews relics. In 1921, Kavanagh, whose two passions in life were military camouflage and masturbation clubs, tracked down the artifacts of both the Beggar’s Benison and the Wig Club. They had been saved by their last surviving members and ended up in Glasgow at the Kelvingrove Museum, where the curator was desperate to get rid of them. So Kavanagh bought them, and for a time he even tried to revive the Beggar’s Benison rites in Edinburgh. It appears that the wig went astray at some point in the 1930s. In 1938, when American historian Louis C. Jones of Columbia University hunted it down for a book on Georgian clubs, he received the report that it was in “a lawyer’s office in Leith … although which lawyer’s office [Jones writes] this author did not discover.”
Here ends the trail. But I couldn’t stop thinking about this last detail. Could it be that the sacred relic was somehow still sitting in a solicitor’s filing cabinet? I drove to Leith, Edinburgh’s harbor district (it provides the cheery setting for Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting), before I realized that instead of scouring every legal office in town, I should place a classified ad. Perhaps someone had heard stories from a grandparent or knew where the relic was but had kept quiet out of embarrassment?
I soon got a line back from the editor of the local online magazine, Leith Links. “This seems to be far, far too interesting to ignore, ” he wrote. He suggested that I write a report on the wig’s peregrinations, which appeared recently under the promising title “The Case of the Missing Wig: Is Scotland’s strangest relic still hidden in Leith? An ongoing investigation by our correspondent in New York.”
Up top was a fetching cartoon of a bald King Charles II asking, “Have you seen my wig?” I concluded with a rousing call to arms for all Scottish history lovers:
Could the wig—no doubt the worse for wear—still be somewhere in the musty cupboards of a Leith solicitor’s office? … Anyone with any information on the item’s whereabouts, please drop a line to historian Tony Perrottet.
I mentioned my media blitz to historian David Stevenson. He wasn’t optimistic. “I imagine some poor young legal clerk one day put his hand into a dark cabinet and discovered this festering ball of hair. Probably let out a shriek and threw it straight into the fire.”
Unless, I thought wildly, it was pilfered by agents sent from Buckingham Palace, whose job is to wipe out all historical trace of royal misbehavior …
I think I have the next plot line for Dan Brown.
Historian and travel writer Tony Perrottet is the author of Pagan Holiday and Napoleon’s Privates: 2,500 years of History Unzipped. His next book on the salacious underground Grand Tour of Europe will be published in 2011.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2238342/
Loved your research into the British ‘Sex’ Clubs of yore and the Hellfire Club of the Georgian era. I am proud to admit that ancestors of mine were prominent members of this club and recognised trend-setters in both fashion and a variety of ‘salacious’ activities of that era!
Thanks for sharing this research, I had no idea that we had such a raunchy and lusty past! Putting pubic hairs in your hat as symbols of your conquest, outrageous!
Sorry I cannot help you regarding your query.