#4 Madame Brussels with Lenny Robinson
Lenny Robinson and her publisher Dale Campisi from Arcade Publications discuss the life and legacy of Madame Brussels, a.k.a. Caroline Hodgson, keeper of Melbourne's most famous brothel in the 1880s and 1890s.
Lenny Robinson moved to Melbourne from a farm in South Gippsland eighteen years ago. She has worked as a tutor, university lecturer, freelance writer and teacher.
The talk is 40 minutes long. It was recorded at Brunswick Library on 3 December 2009.
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Transcript
Dale Campisi: So most people’s first encounter, I think, with Madame Brussels either involves the bar above the Spaghetti Tree on Bourke Street or it involves the story of the missing Parliamentary Mace which disappeared in 1891 on the 10th of October and allegedly found its way to her bordello. Now that allegation has since been proven untrue but, Lenny, I was wondering if you could tell us a little more about how Madame Brussels came to be implicated in the story of the missing Parliamentary Mace?
Lenny Robinson: Yes, it’s interesting because when I was doing all the reading through the records and so forth it actually wasn’t her name that came up. It was Annie Wilson who owned a brothel called Boccaccio House and she was actually implicated, not implicated, it’s probably not the right word, but she was under suspicion at the time and I remember going around to my grandmothers and saying, “You know I’m going to write a book on Madame Brussels” and my grandmother said, “Oh she was involved in the Parliamentary Mace”. That was the first time I’d actually heard of her involvement. I since know that that’s become a bit of a legendary story of her involvement.
The Parliamentary Mace is like an ornamental mace that was kept in the Speaker’s chamber and it was thought to be worth this huge amount of money but it actually wasn’t. It was just gilded. It was ceremonial more than anything else. It went missing on the 10th of October and the night before it went missing Parliament had sat for a really really, really, really long time, all tied up one o’clock in the morning and the Mace was put away and the next morning they went in. George Upwood, who is the Parliament Sergeant-at-Arms, discovered that the box where the mace had been kept in the Speaker’s chamber had been broken into and he went and told the police. Police started a really big search. They interrogated silversmiths and second-hand dealers and they went through all the pubs and the cribs that were in the area and they couldn’t find anything out.
Then a few days later, about five days later, this story came out that this tramway grip called James Merrick had been telling all his mates down at the Victoria Street depot that someone had jumped on his tram at about one o’clock in the afternoon, the day after the Mace went missing, and was carrying this big parcel, big long parcel much like a mace. So the cops go him in and they took him for a walk through Queen’s Hall and he actually fingered someone who was ... he was called an engineer but he was actually really just a handyman more than anything else. His name was Thomas Jeffrey and Thomas Jeffrey is an interesting character, a very strapping, good-looking young man but very, very confused about things and can’t remember where he was and what he was doing.
They searched all him out and he was the major suspect and there was no mention really of the brothels, but at this time and for quite some time Parliament House had a lot of involvement, shall we say, with the brothels, particularly the elite brothels like Madame Brussels who ... the Parliamentarians were big clients of the brothels. But nothing was really said about the brothels until about a year later when an article appeared in the Sydney Bulletin and it claimed that the mace had actually ended up in one of the brothels of Lonsdale Street. It claimed that what had actually happened was the Parliamentarians were in the habit of entertaining women at Parliament after hours and they had somehow got a bit tipsy after their late night sitting and had invited some ladies up to Parliament and had taken the mace to one of the brothels for what they referred to as low travesties of Parliamentary procedure.
So this was the rumour at the time and the media, of course, loved this story and it sort of spread like a wildfire. It sort of spread from the Sydney Bulletin. It was picked up by Table Talk which was a bit of a tabloid rag at the time and eventually it was picked up by the Ballarat Courier which was a bit more of a serious newspaper. So this sort of legend began that it had ended up in the brothels. Madam Brussels, as I said, wasn’t actually named as the brothel it ended up in, it was Boccaccio House that was named but Maurice Brodsky when he gave evidence at the big hearing about the disappearance of the Mace mentioned that it had been taken to a brothel where a phone line had been connected and, of course, Madame Brussels had a phone line connected or was planning to have a phone line connected at that time.
Yes it was never solved what happened with the mace. No one ever knew and it really wasn’t until the 70s, I think it was when a guy, I think his name was John Lahey, who was a writer for The Age said the mace was taken to the most famous brothel in Australia’s history, Madame Brussels. It was really from there that the legend came that Madame Brussels was the infamous brothel where the Parliamentary Mace had ended up. Of course, nobody knows that. It’s never been found. There’s a $50,000 reward if you’re looking for it but, yeah, we don’t actually know what’s happened to it.
Dale: So giving rise to the myth of Madame Brussels actually arises in the 1970s some 80 years after that story takes place.
Lenny: At the time, 1978, I think when that article was written, they were planning to demolish the site, so there was a lot of interest in the site at that time.
Dale: Yes, I’d like to talk more about the site. So, of course, Melbourne’s grid during Madame Brussels’ day was radically different to what we know today. Skyscrapers obviously now replace the hundreds of lanes. We’ve still got over 200 lanes in the city of Melbourne but there were hundreds more that criss-crossed the grid. We’ve still got a remnant of Little Lon up at Casselden Place at the very top of Little Lonsdale Street, where you can see a set of two hotels from early Melbourne as well as a very small terrace and one of the lanes that features in your book, Lenny. So can you paint a bit of a picture of Little Lon for us? What was it like, what did it sound like and smell like?
Lenny: What was it like? When Caroline, Caroline was actually her name, Madame Brussels was a pseudonym, but when Caroline would have arrived there I think those ... you know the little brick ... has anyone been down Casselden Place? There’s a little remnant of a brick terrace. It’s like a turret. It’s a beautiful little building it’s worth going and having a look. I believe there was wooden buildings behind there at that time. They were build around the time that she actually arrived there. So there’s wooden buildings. Her famous brothel which she acquired, sort of, in the late 70s had a pub right near it that had a horse yard out the back. So I imagine at night the girls would have had the windows open and be able to smell horse manure.
At this particular time there was a big Irish community so whenever I visit the site ... and I visited the site quite a lot because I loved just shutting my eyes and trying to hear it and trying to see it and trying to smell it which the smelling was, of course, very difficult for our sensibilities these days and I imagined the sounds of fiddles and Irish jigs and singing and, I mean, there was 35 brothels in the area, so a huge sex industry.
Dale: How big is this area that we’re talking about as well around Little Lon?
Lenny: It’s just the block really, that’s Exhibition, Spring, Lonsdale to La Trobe and there was brothels obviously on the other side of Lonsdale Street as well. There was brothels either side of where Madam Brussels was and all behind her and so the sex industry was massive. But there was also industry there as well, like little workshops, people lived there like the city was full of people at the time. We always thing, you know whenever I try to envision the city as it used to be, we always think of there being so many less people but we forget ...
Dale: Might be because we went through the 1990s and there was no one else there.
Lenny: There really was nobody yes. I mean it was such a big residential area and everyone walked to work and work was so close so the streets would have been full of people and their auctioneers, touts, ringing bells and hawkers walking around selling sausages and cups of coffee.
Dale: Inside Telstra Tower which has since been built on top of the Little Lon area, you can go in there and there are two archaeological digs conducted in the 1980s and early 1990s which has retrieved a lot of artefacts from the era. So you can go in there and there’s a couple of display cases that you can see to see some of the objects that they’ve retrieved so we can get a bit of a sense from that. You know the kinds of things they were eating and the kinds of things that were picked up. One of those things is certainly that they were a lot of children in this area. There were lots of marbles found. Lots of bones in cesspits, so we begin to get a sense of the kinds of things that people ate form that period. It’s well worth having a look.
Lenny: Having a look. The other thing they discovered during that archaeological dig, because Little Lon was I guess one of the ... you know that whole area was surrounded by the places known as the back slums and you know places of poverty and disease and prostitution and all those things. But one thing they discovered on that dig was that there was relics of things like leisure and non-essential items which suggests the quality of life for people wasn’t as bad as it was painted. But the interesting thing about Madame Brussels was they dug up heaps of champagne bottles which I think is very telling.
Dale: So what do you make of ... the Melbourne Museum has, of course, an exhibition which is running every year called The Melbourne Story and it features the recreation of Little Lon, what do you think of that exhibition?
Lenny: I mean I loved it because one of the things I love about and I’ve always loved about history is that reimaging just everyday life. It’s a beautiful thing about Australian history. When I was a kid and you study European history it’s all kinds and queens and wars but Australian history you can get to everyday life because we’re not surrounded by all of that. I mean it was great for me because I’m always trying to ... whenever I walk through Melbourne I see 19th century Melbourne. To actually go into a recreation of a Casselden Place house and to sit there and imagine the sounds of carriages or people yelling or fighting or being drunk or whatever in those streets it’s amazing. You get a sense of it because some of those places were used as brothels and, you know, they’re only two rooms and the rooms are tiny, you put two single beds in there ...
Dale: You certainly can’t get a full sized bed in there, not that we know.
Lenny: No and the beds are almost touching so you can imagine using that as a crib really, I don’t think you’d go as far as calling it a brothel.
Dale: I think a lot of us when we think about Melbourne it’s that 1880s boom area is what we think about. Melbourne, of course, at that period was one of the wealthiest and perhaps the wealthiest per capita city in the world. I want to backtrack to when Madame Brussels first arrived in Melbourne. Of course Madame Brussels is a pseudonym, but she arrived in 1872 and she had her husband with her. So why did they come here for a start? What happened to her husband? How did she become the keeper of a brothel?
Lenny: Oh, if only I had the answers to such questions. This is why I need a time machine really. The interesting thing about Caroline and I guess like all women of her ilk, being in the sex industry that these are silent women. It’s very difficult to learn their stories because they’re not in the records and if they are in the records they’re in police records and Caroline was way too smart to get charged. So we don’t even have the police records for her. So a lot of it is speculation. What we do know is they were married in 1871 in London. Studholme was a gentleman, was the son of a gentleman, we know that much. Caroline, her death certificate says her father was a grazier. It seems that she also was the daughter of a gentleman, maybe a daughter of a gentleman on hard times. She came from Potsdam in Germany.
It’s difficult to say why they came here. There’s speculation. There was rumours that he was a remittance man which were boys who’d been a little bit naughty and Mum and Dad didn’t, sort of, want them around so they gave them a little bit of money to go to the Colonies. He was the eldest son. So he probably stood to inherit a lot of money. So it’s quite curious that he should leave his home. During my research I discovered he had a brother here who was a mariner and maybe his brother had told him stories that there was a lot of money to be made and it was a land of opportunity, you know, maybe you should come over.
Caroline seemed desperate later on in her life to prove that she’d been married to him, so maybe he was a bit of a dissolute kind of character, maybe his parents were shipping him off.
Dale: So what happened to the fact that she had a husband is very rarely referred to, it’s something that I’ve now read a lot about having read the manuscript, but what happened to him?
Lenny: They got here and maybe it wasn’t quite the land of opportunity they imagined. Being a gentleman he had no skills whatsoever and he worked for a little bit with an omnibus company in the first 18 months he was here and then he joined the police force and he joined with the mounted constabulary.
Dale: And that’s surely a step down for the son of a gentleman to be working for the coppers?
Lenny: It was yeah. It’s a step down for the son of a gentleman but when I was speaking with people at the library and the genealogy centre they said if he had a military background then it perhaps wouldn’t be an entirely unusual choice and he did come from a military family from what we know. But, yeah, like the pay was terrible, he wasn’t in the force long before he was shipped off up to ... he was in Santos which is Bendigo and he eventually ended up in Karang. So he’s in that sort of big district around there.
Dale: But Caroline didn’t travel with him?
Lenny: No, she didn’t. She could have, she could have travelled with him. You know there’s nothing to suggest they necessary separated for bad reasons. They never divorced they only ever separated. It’s quite uncertain why she didn’t go with him. Perhaps she didn’t ... I mean if she was the daughter of a gentleman perhaps it was a bit like you think I’m going to move to the country and live on your police wages you’ve got to be kidding.
Dale: Yes, so then we have the case where this is, what, 1872, 1873 and this woman is choosing to go it alone in the big bad city of Melbourne. One thing that Jenny Lee refers to in her book in Making Modern Melbourne is that a lot of women were quite reluctant to go to what was the frontier, to rural areas, because having come from overseas they’d already moved away from their families and then to leave the major cities and the colonies was then to separate themselves even further. So a lot of women actually wanted to stay in the city so that presented better opportunities for them. Do you think that’s one reason that she may have hung around in Melbourne?
Lenny: Possibly, I mean she’d come from Potsdam which is like the seat of German nobility and whenever you look at Australian history, you know, our outback was very frightening, particularly if you’d come from Europe where you’re used to being ... and closed in spaces and maybe it could have been that, the familiarity of the city. Maybe she had friends here?
Dale: And the choice to become a brothel, I guess we have to ask the question, was the women a prostitute?
Lenny: It’s a tough question. Was she a prostitute? There’s no evidence to suggest she was, there’s none. My feeling is she probably wasn’t. I don’t think she was and there’s nothing to suggest she was. They’d come here and stayed in boarding houses, maybe she’d seen it. A lot of the brothels were owned by men, like merchants in the city. Maybe she just happened to know one of them and got recruited to run a brothel and thought this is a nice way to make money, maybe I should try my hand at this but I don’t think she would have been a prostitute.
Dale: Certainly regaining, I can’t think of the right term, but you know the finery that she was afforded being the daughter of a gentleman and being married to a man of pedigree, that was something that she certainly chased for all of her life ... was the best quality living that she could afford and, of course, that meant leading quite a private life didn’t it?
Lenny: She’s an interesting woman of contrasts in the sense that in a way there is a sense where she did court notoriety a little bit, I think, but then she went and bought a house in St Kilda and she didn’t live there a lot but that would have offered her a private residence, I think, so yeah.
Dale: She becomes something of a real estate mogul too; doesn’t she? She’s running a number of brothels in the city as well as owning a few properties in St Kilda and Albert Park?
Lenny: Yeah, she had about eight. At different times she owned about eight brothels.
Dale: Are these all of the same elite brothel?
Lenny: No. There was sort of a lower place at 6 and 8 Lonsdale Street. She was renting one of the properties in Casselden Place and that would have been a low brothel I would imagine. So, no, they weren’t all of the status of Madame Brussels. They cost too much money to run something like that.
Dale: So for those that have been to the bar Madame Brussels on Bourke Street, it’s got fake grass on the interiors and it’s got a lattice work bar, that’s actually taken from a description of what it was like inside Madame Brussels during the 1880s. It was described as having carpets like meadow grass and it was set back from the road and had a big lattice front so it was discreet and it was fancy.
Lenny: Very fancy.
Dale: Speaking of fancy she had a fancy man; didn’t she?
Lenny: She did have a fancy man while Studholme was away desperately trying to climb the ranks of the police force which he wasn’t having very much success at because he was very haughty and he was prone to insubordination and once got into trouble for being drunk in his barracks. Yes, she started an affair in the 1880s. We think it was an affair, with Alfred Plumpton who was a critic for The Age and he was a composer in his own right and a musician and a music teacher and apparently the best dressed man in Melbourne. He was quite the fancy man.
Dale: And he did some work for her?
Lenny: Yeah they say, the story goes that he was what was called a traveller and what travellers were they were men who were given a little bit of cash by the brothels, usually men of quite good standing, and they would go to the various clubs where gentlemen hung out and have their cigars and the brandies or whatever and they would basically shout other men to come on come to the brothel and give them a shout and, you know, sort of ... so I guess they were like marketing men really.
The story goes that Alfred used to do this for her, because I guess he would have had fabulous contacts, and apparently he lived in East Melbourne and he used to apparently walk past 32 Lonsdale Street, which was her brothel but also her home, and pick up his sovereigns for the day and off he’d go and talk about all the lovely women. And the brothel had this, I think, quite enchanting feature which was a walled garden where supposedly on hot summer nights, beautiful women would parade in states of undress for gentleman. So he probably told that story and didn’t have any trouble.
Dale: Yes, along they came. We’ve been talking almost exclusively about the elite brothels of town or the flash girls as they’re referred to. Could you tell us about the different ranks of prostitutes that are working in Melbourne during the 1880s?
Lenny: Yes. Prostitution was very hierarchical from the way I understand it. At the very bottom you had what were called by some the common prostitutes and these were probably ... I guess our stereotyped image, apart from the, sort of, burlesque image, the stereotyped image of the 19th century prostitute. They were often very poor, often ravaged by venereal disease and alcoholism and they worked really rough places like the wharves and the docks and I once read a description, I think it was in the Contagious Diseases Report of 1878, about how girls ... sometimes they’d band together and they’d hire these little hovels in the slums, you know there’d be three girls and they’d just be one room hovels and they’d work out of there. It was a really rough trade they were doing; they had it really tough those girls.
Then you had what were called the “sly girls” which is a great name I think and sly girls were girls who like worked so they might have worked in millinery or done factory work. I think factory work was probably pretty common, which were jobs that weren’t incredibly well paid and to supplement their incomes they’d come into places like Collins Street and they’d street walk there and, you know, it’s often said when you read stuff of the time, that you couldn’t tell them from other women. They were very demurely dressed and had their bonnets on and they’d, sort of, walk past and look up under their bonnets and you’d know that they were the women.
Dale: It was a sly wink.
Lenny: They weren’t just nice women walking down the street. What they’d do is there was heaps of hotels that were, sort of, in league with the prostitutes and they’d hire rooms out for an hour and so they’d go to places like that or they’d take them, sometimes they’d take them home. Some sly girls worked from their homes but, yeah, so there was those girls. Then, of course, there was the ones, the fabulous flash girls, who were dressed in their magnificent silks and satins and their feathered hats.
Dale: So all of them had something that gave them away as well?
Lenny: Yes. Yes I guess it’s like prostitution today, there’s a sense of uniform.
Dale: Yeah, another of the famous descriptions that we have from the 1880s is of a place called the Saddling Paddock at the Theatre Royal which was on Collins Street; is that right?
Lenny: Bourke Street.
Dale: Bourke Street, do you have a quote handy about that?
Lenny: The Saddling Paddock? I’ll have a look, I might have. Goodness me. The Saddling Paddock, yes interesting place.
Dale: I have one here actually.
Lenny: You have one?
Dale: We’ve got quite a number of really fantastic quotes from newspapers. The language is incredibly florid, often vitriolic, but always interesting and evocative.
“So here is a lady in her drunken old age, the wealthy proprietor of a notorious house. …of lowly social origin, born in a right of way and educated in an industrial school now loudly dressed in scarlet satin and sparkling with gold and jewels. Here is not wit and knowledge, redeeming her lack of morality by the wonderful use of her talents. For if one thing in these women is more conspicuous than another, it is their lack of grammar and utter vulgarity of speech and soul but it is an insult to the memories of those glorious women of Greece to mention their names and connections with such of these.”
That’s from a famous record ...
Lenny: That’s The Vagabond?
Dale: ...The Vagabond Papers.
Lenny: Yeah, Manning Clarke also wrote about the Saddling Paddock. Is it Manning Clarke? Marcus Clarke.
Dale: Marcus Clarke.
Lenny: Oops. Also wrote about the Saddling Paddock as well and there was like a little room off the side of the theatre. It was in the theatre but it was a special little room and he writes really well about, you know, the doors to the room and how inside that’s where the flash girls could have assignations. So they might go into the theatre. They were supposedly very loud and very crude and drew lots of attention to themselves and, you know, the men would be there probably with their wives or something shocking like that and these girls would be drawing lots of attention to themselves and men later could go into this room and ...
Dale: Into the ladies’ powder room I’ve seen it referred to as…The Theatre Royal in Bourke Street is long since demolished, yeah.
Lenny: That’s where the women would solicit. You know, if you get lots of drinks there and a lot of the brothels sent their girls up there to solicit. So they’d come and they’d end up bringing the men ... you know, get them very drunk and bring them back to the brothels so they’d spend lots of money and ...
Dale: And you also talk in terms of soliciting taking place at Flemington during the Melbourne Cup.
Lenny: Yes, Madame Brussels apparently sent her girls there. There’s a great ... I haven’t got it written down. There’s a great Truth newspaper quote about how, you know, all the men would be there with their wives and all Madame Brussels girls would be standing there powdering their noses, showing how superior they were in dress and looks to all the wives but, yeah, apparently they used to solicit there.
Dale: So we’ve talked a lot about the decadence of the 1880s. It’s a fascinating time in Melbourne. I mean, wealth brings so many things for a city and that’s certainly something that we’ve seen over the last kind of decade in our modern marvellous Melbourne. And the boom era really brings us that decadence and indulgence but the depression that followed was the greatest in Australian history in the 1890s and it brought depravation and conservatism. Madame Brussels became embroiled in evangelist Henry Varley’s The War Between Heaven and Hell. The language gets even better from here. Can you tell us more about his War Between Heaven and Hell and why he targeted her?
Lenny: Yes. I loved Henry Varley when I discovered him. I loved his apocalyptic rants. He was just divine. In fact, when I discovered him I was like, wow, this is the next person I have to write a book on. Henry Varley was ... he was a Lincolnshire born evangelist and he first came to Australia in the 1850s and went to the goldfields. And tried to make a buck. Worked in Geelong as a butcher. Worked in Collingwood as a butcher. Went back to England. Got all churned up with the evangelist movement and he came back in 1877 and delivered a speech called On the Social Evil and he pretty much hated everything. He hated gambling and prostitution and even benign things like dancing. I particularly fell in love with them. I read his pamphlet, one of his pamphlets at the rare books collection at the library and I fell in love with him when he gave a rousing speech to all these young men at the theatre, all men. And he told them how ... you know, I think it was Martin Luther he was referring to, had said that men should try to only have sex once a week. And he said, “Nay, I say once a month and let the passions die out from there”.
And then you could imagine that all these guys were sitting in their seats like this because he, sort of ... it was like in his speech he responded to something like that. He said, you know, I can't remember the exact words now but he’d come out with these remarkable things. He particularly ranted against prostitution that he called the sisterhood of shame, sorrow and death. Yes, he was not a man to mince his words. I’m just trying to see if I can find some of his lovely language.
Dale: While you’re looking for a quote from him I’ve got one from his ... he released a number of pamphlets ...
Lenny: Yes, I’ve found it.
Dale: ... I’ll just quickly mention Col was probably the main ... obviously the main bookstore in Melbourne at the time and Col did a lot of printing of pamphlets and was the main bookseller and in Henry Varley’s War Between Heaven and Hell he writes of Melbourne’s ten plagues. “Melbourne is literally weighted and cursed with, one unbelief, two intemperance, three gambling, four licentiousness, five covetousness, six dishonesty, seven blasphemy, eight idleness, nine inordinate love of pleasure and, ten, land booming. So popular and so strongly entrenched are these degrading sins that any man who dares speak out against them is sure to be persecuted.”
Lenny: Yeah, Varley was a great inspiration for me trying to find the voice for the book because of that wonderful language he uses. There’s a bit here from On the Social Evil which was a speech he gave that was later published:
“One Sunday morning in the company with a number of men I went amongst the inhabitants of Little Bourke Street and its surroundings reading the word of God. I never before saw in any place such countenances, scores of women. Women, did I say? Well, truly lust, drink and other sin had scarcely left a trace of what they once were. Old hags and procuresses who fatten upon the shame of poor girls they decoy into their dens. It was distressing to see peering out of the windows and crowding the doorways the sisterhood of shame, sorrow and death. To look upon some whose eyes flashed like incarnate demons, the result of the hateful and unnatural exhaustion caused by their sin, driving them to use strong drink, the false helper and sure companion of the fallen”.
And all his writing is like this. And he disappeared. He went off again. And he came back in the 1880s, late 1880s. And him and a friend of his, Colonel Barker who was with the Salvation Army, somehow got into Madame Brussels which I find intriguing because he was a very ... he had quite a public profile this man. He was giving huge speeches at the Theatre Royal, ironically, on Sundays and him and Barker got into the brothel and interviewed some of the girls there and made a huge scandal of it in the media and basically said if the police don’t do anything about it we’re going to prosecute them. And, of course, that’s what happened. Madame Brussels was dragged into the law Courts with a woman called Lottie Temple who was helping her out at the time, paraded in with all her girls. She often went in with all her girls. Somehow the prosecution was tied up and they couldn’t have the Court case. But it did occur five days later and she got off as she was want to do.
Varley was unhappy about this and he started his war. That’s what he called his War Between Heaven and Hell in 1891. It started off as a distribution of pamphlets, thousands and thousands and thousands of pamphlets on all sorts of social ills and preaching below the Celtic Club, which the Celtic Club members really hated and used to bang their billiard cues and sing Celtic ditties and all sorts of stuff. They were very unhappy about it.
Dale: This is then when the Celtic Club was located on the corner of Collins and Swanston Streets. It was right in the middle of town.
Lenny: Yeah. And they were very unhappy. He pinned things in his windows about all the iniquities of the wealthy people of Melbourne and, yeah, he ended up publishing this pamphlet called The War Between Heaven and Hell in which Madame Brussels got a very special mention for her behaviour. He was particularly upset about it.
Dale: There’s a great description from The Truth newspaper from the period where she’s described as “a well-behaved, quiet, little woman who was really charming and possessed an insinuating subdued placed beauty bordering on the aesthetic. Above all she was clean of speech and angelically demure. She had none of the loudness and vulgarity associated with the common, fleshy, boozing boisterous woman who follows illicit pleasure as a profession.”
So, you know, she certainly had this ... you know, she maintained a level of respectability and certainly that, obviously, afforded her a lot of freedom in a sense that she was able to indulge in buying a lot of property and always had an entourage that she took around with her and then ultimately she went through a number of Court appearances through ... during this War Between Heaven and Hell they were constantly getting charged and she would show up with the girls.
After one of them you talk about one Court appearance that they won ... they do a little jig on the steps of the Courts.
Lenny: Yeah, that’s what The Truth said. They had a little bit of a dance outside the Court in triumph. That was actually the 1889 that her and Lottie Temple and a few of the girls who ... the girls who were questioned by Varley, who gave evidence, but it was found ... they were 17 and 18 these girls. But it was found they weren't pure anyway. They hadn’t been introduced to sin at Madame Brussels. So that swayed the Court case a bit. She wasn’t ruining anybody. They’d already been ruined.
Dale: So we’ll just wrap up shortly. There’s two things that I want to cover though, the death of Madame Brussels.
Lenny: Yep.
Dale: Which ... she died at quite a young age. She was only 56.
Lenny: We think she was 56.
Dale: We think she was 56.
Lenny: She was notorious liar about her age.
Dale: This was in 1908. So, I mean, obviously there’s the cause of her death which I’m interested to explore. And also, you know, what is her legacy? What’s left of this woman? There’s so much myth that we have about her but having done so much detective work about her, who is this woman and what’s left of her?
Lenny: Okay, we’ll start with her death. One of the things that was interesting when I was reading about her and learning about her through the records and the newspapers and things like that was I feel in love with this, sort of, you know the picture that I’ve been drawing, this sort of character of the boom ear, you know. And then as time wore on after the turn of the century this brighter than life character suddenly became a little old woman who needed to be helped into her Court appearances, who was very fragile.
In her very last Court appearance where she actually gave up the brothel in a timely fashion because they were closing them all down, she cried during her appearance in Court which The Truth made much of because it was all crocodile tears. She had pancreatitis and diabetes and, basically, from what I gathered the last year of her life was really spent just locked up in her house in Lonsdale Street. Maybe she went out to St Kilda every now and then. Studholme had died by this time and Plumpton had gone back to England after the scandal of his affair, alleged affair with her, and she’d been betrayed by ... she had a lover who was 18 years ... oh, she married him, who was 18 years younger than her and he’d betrayed her as well.
And, sort of, quite sad at the end of her dying alone and she died in July of 1908. So a hundred years ago on a very cold winter’s night. And the night she died, I was reading ... I read the whole newspaper of the day she died and that night there was a big blue. Two guys had had some sort of fierce fight and been very badly injured and taken to hospital. You know, you can imagine that would have been the background of her last hours which, I don’t know, maybe it was comforting to a woman who lived in that area to hear the familiar sounds.
Not much was made ... there was no funeral notices or anything. She was quietly taken off to the cemetery, St Kilda Cemetery, to be buried beside Studholme which was her request. She said in her will, “No matter where I die anywhere in Australia I want to brought back and buried next to my husband”. And, you know, nobody ... you know, except perhaps a handful of her girls were there when she died which is, yeah, it was quite a ... I find it really sad.
Dale: Having seen one of the obituaries that appeared after her death, it had the headline “Madame Brussels is dead, dead, dead, dead”.
Lenny: “Dead, dead”. It was terrible. I don’t have the quotes here but from The Truth the obituary that appeared in The Truth, how is she going to meet her maker and even referring to the brothel itself, the physical building, as being saturated by sin which is quite interesting.
So as to her legacy, it’s a really hard ... it’s a hard question to answer because I think the way we remember her, if we remember her at all is through the bar…
But we probably remember her in a, sort of, that kind of way that I said, you know, the sort of Bohemia 1880s, kind of, larger than life brothel owner which I think actually diminishes her selfhood and I think that’s, I guess, the story of many ... of prostitutes, you know, in a way they’re faceless women. They’re voiceless women and so they become like ... I guess like a speculum which reflects our own desires and fantasies and perversions about prostitution and the image of Madame Brussels is that. She is the speculum by which we project our own desires and ideas of the 1880s and in a sense that erases her sense of self that we forget she was a complex person. That she was betrayed in love. You know, she fought hard to ...
Dale: And was a woman who was incredibly independent and had the acumen to be able to start her own business in a foreign colony alone against the issues of living in a patriarchal society and yet manages to start and operate a very successful, if illegal, perhaps is even more difficult, business.
Lenny: The feeling I get about her was that she was a very smart woman who knew how to play the game. She had very good business sense, I think. You see that with her acquisition of properties in the 1880s. I think she was a very ... I don’t know, maybe a sentimental person. You know, like in her will she had a Lieutenant they called her in the press, a woman who managed her properties, managed Lonsdale Street at times when she was in Europe, called Martha Birrell. And in her will she left two houses to Martha Birrell and stated that all debts had to be paid off out of her estate so Martha Birrell wouldn't be lumped with any debts. You know, to take care of one of her workers. Everything in the will, there was nothing left to a man. Everything was left to women. Yeah, and I think ... and, you know, she cared for her husband when they’d been estranged for 20 years and he was dying and she cared for him.
And I think this begins to paint a portrait of a woman who was so much more than that grand prostitute, you know, grand brothel owner in this wonderful house with her rococo bed and her 2,000 pound bedroom she alleged had in Lonsdale Street and her bottles of Champagne and, you know.
Dale: She was certainly an independent and a complex woman. She’s a signifier of Melbourne’s racy past. Lenny’s book Madame Brussels: this Moral Pandemonium is the last title will be out in March.
Please join me in thanking L M Robinson.
End of Interview.
