7th March, 2024 in Society & Culture, Women in History

Daisy Hopkins: The prostitute who fought against being imprisoned by Cambridge University

By Caroline Biggs

Cambridge University is internationally renowned for its ancient colleges. It is lauded for its educational excellence. But in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, infamy blighted its hallowed name. As an alarming number of courtroom dramas exposed the university’s steadfast resolve to cling to its archaic right to lock up women in its own private prison – the Spinning House – the great institution began to look tarnished. None of those women had broken the law of the land. Yet their removal from the streets of Cambridge was deemed essential to protect the moral character of the gentlemen scholars fresh from the constraints of masters and parents. This little-known tale of woe came to my attention after I heard the name Daisy Hopkins mentioned at a meeting of local historians. Read this shocking extract from recently released book The Spinning House by Caroline Biggs.

The story went that she was the girl responsible for the abolition of special laws, applicable only in Oxford and Cambridge, permitting the arrest and imprisonment of women suspected of soliciting. Because of her, the Spinning House prison – Cambridge University’s private prison for women – was torn down in 1901. I was curious about this story. It seemed unlikely that a prostitute would be the cause of such a seismic shift. I went to the local library in search of evidence. There, I discovered that in the eighteenth century the vice chancellor had paid the town crier 10s to whip ten unruly women. How could this have happened and so few people know about it?^* The situation in Oxford was less brutal than in Cambridge. There, women were taken before the local magistrate and, if proven guilty, were sent to the local prison. ^{10 The Spinning House}

More research led me to a report in the New York Times newspaper about the trial of Daisy Hopkins. Why, I wondered, had a London barrister fought the case of a streetwalker? The titillating story didn’t quite add up. In the years that followed this first discovery, my curiosity about this teenage girl niggled. Who was Daisy Hopkins? What was this prison? And did the internationally famous university really have such a murky, misogynistic past? In 2016, I decided I couldn’t leave the tale alone.

A return to the archives I’d exhausted a decade before rewarded me with a document that changed everything. Someone else had been as curious as me about this untold story. And luckily, that person was like me. Her sense of injustice about what had happened to thousands of young women at the hands of a powerful group of men led her to write her Open University PhD thesis on the topic. Every page of ‘Girls of the Spinning House: A Social Study of Young Cambridge Streetwalkers, 1823–1894’^* filled me with anger and outrage. Sitting in the local studies library, I paused my note-taking. All I could do was greedily devour the facts unfolding before me. Between 1823–94, senior members of the university known as proctors were responsible for over 6,000 arrests of young women. Under the common law of the land, none of those women had committed a crime. I’d uncovered a tale of overwhelming social injustice against young, working-class women. I found, too, that Daisy Hopkins was the topic of the Law Bar Association’s Annual Lecture in 1999.

One of her cases against the university had made legal history. I wondered why this story hadn’t broken free of academic studies. The more I discovered, the more I felt determined to change this. Although I am Cambridge born and bred, I am not a member of the elite group of people who inhabit the ‘other’ side of Cambridge. I discovered I couldn’t research the story until I’d gained the authority to delve into college and university archives. It wasn’t enough to have a BA from the local university, as opposed to Cambridge University. I needed more before I could get inside the places where the treasure, supporting this story, lay buried.^{* Janet Oswald, ‘Girls of the Spinning House: A Social Study of Young Cambridge Streetwalkers’, Open University thesis (2008).}

Following a few courses in creative non-fiction writing at Cambridge University, I was offered a place at the University of East Anglia to take an MA in Biography and Creative Non-Fiction. Doors that had previously been closed to me swung open once I had a UEA email address. Now I wasn’t just an amateur local historian, with a chip on my shoulder, banging on about the mistreatment of women at one the world’s most famous educational establishments. I was – almost – ‘one of them’; no longer a victim of the same class and gender stereotyping as the women dragged into the Spinning House. The more I read, the more furious I became about this dual reality. Women have been edited out of the history of Cambridge for too long. I decided I wanted to write a story about the Spinning House that everyone would want to read. I wanted to discover, and reveal, as much as I could about the real lives of the young women thrown into a prison repeatedly condemned by prison inspectors. It was a damp, cold place where women would emerge in a much worse condition than when they went in. Plenty of biographies and histories are written about the people, mainly men, who ‘went to Cambridge’. Daisy Hopkins was not a member of the group of people who ‘tell’ or are ‘told’ about, in the history of Cambridge.

The lives of working-class women are hard to trace. Yet, if they were summoned into a courtroom, their characters spring alive. Even then, we only know them in terms of their threat to author ity. Fleshing out their back stories takes a huge amount of, often futile, research. But it is worth the effort. For then their characters come alive, and rather than seeing them as troublemakers, we see them as ordinary women searching for a way to live when paid work was hard to find and entailed long hours of drudgery. It was over 100 years since Daisy’s arrest, but for a modern-day woman, the landscape wasn’t entirely unfamiliar.

Rules restricting merrymaking lingered. To ensure a suitably quiet atmosphere, curbs on nightlife limited noisy activity. But those, including me, seeking Saturday night entertainment discovered we could circumvent the ‘quiet’ crackdown. We joined the term-time queues outside the Student Union or Graduate Centre, and sometimes we made our way to the cellars of King’s College for their legendary discos. All these venues were in the city centre, their disturbance perfectly acceptable to university authorities. And there we danced the night away, an ink splodge on one hand, a drink in the other.

Mixing with The Spinning House townies both thrilled and scared undergraduates, a distraction their tutors still warned against. But at least they could no longer be whipped or arrested for it. My experience of working for Cambridge University at a time when the colleges were nervously opening their ancient doors to women was that the establishment was firmly dominated by men. I worked in university libraries and always there was a moment when a ‘new girl’ was taken to one side by an ‘old girl’: ‘Don’t get left alone with him …’ she would whisper in the junior’s ear. Little had changed since the diarist and Fellow Commoner, Charles Astor Bristed wrote in 1845 that many upper-class men believed working women existed purely for their pleasure. Armed with a precious reader’s ticket, I booked myself a table in the Manuscripts Room of Cambridge University Library. Here, I took a deep breath as I lightly brushed my fingertips over the stiff velum pages of the three large Spinning House Committal books covering the years 1823–94. It was a thrilling moment. I glimpsed the real lives of the young women who were dragged off the streets of their hometown into a carelessly run prison. Notes scratched in blotchy black ink in the margins revealed that some of women confessed to their ‘crime’, although no written confessions or statements were taken. In the vice chancellor’s court, unlike a magistrates’ court, no proof of wrongdoing was required.

Suspicion was all – true or false. If a girl didn’t ‘come quietly’, her sentence was lengthy. Admitting guilt of street walking essentially got the ordeal over as quickly as possible. But any girl finding herself inside the Spinning House, guilty or not, would be tainted by the experience, her employment prospects and those of her family plummeting. The few women who were brave or enraged enough to retaliate with legal suits provide us with fascinating facts about their real lives. Through such court records, archive material, newspapers and other primary and secondary sources, I began to hear the voices of four girls – Daisy, Elizabeth, Emma and Jane. I heard the anguish of family members pleading for the release of a daughter or sister, and of young women recounting the hours leading up to the death of a loved friend. I heard, too, the voices of men and women up and down the country demanding an end to the cruel regime of proctorial authority. I read the justifications of an elite group of men determined to ‘protect’ the young men in their care by clinging to ancient laws that allowed them to control almost every aspect of the lives of the townspeople of Cambridge.

Victorian society cherished high standards of personal conduct. It gave way to an impetus for social reform, but in doing so, it also placed restrictions on the liberty of certain groups. In Cambridge, hundreds of charming young men with time and money on their hands arrived each year – although not all were wealthy. We don’t know what promises were made to the young women they flirted with, or how easy it was to win the virtue of a beguiled beauty. What we do know is that the punishment for talking to an undergraduate after dark didn’t fit the crime.

Extracted from The Spinning House by Caroline Biggs