For all that so much of YouTube is drivel and trivia, just occasionally you can unearth an absolute gem.
One such – and I really should have found it so much earlier – is the Cornish Walking Trails channel with Sarah and Andrew.
Their real USP, apart from such professional, friendly and entertaining delivery, is the extent of their research into the historical background – much of it long lost or forgotten – to their featured trails.
Watch their 20-minute “Secrets of Victorian Falmouth Exposed” and I guarantee you will find it fascinating from start to finish.
In particular, you might never see the entrance to the town’s Wilco store in Market Street – albeit now being converted to Mountain Warehouse’s new home – in quite the same light again.
For it was through here, as Sarah and Andrew discovered, after a mazy tour of the town’s warren of iconic alleys and opeways, that you would have made your way in the Victorian era to what was known as Allen’s Yard.
This might especially have been your destination if you were a sailor returning to port after many months at sea.
For “the world’s oldest profession” was to be found here in abundance, with no fewer than four brothels and 33 prostitutes listed in the 1871 Census.
That’s right. They were openly self-identified, with full names and trades, i.e. “prostitutes.” They were all there, spotlighted in the video: Matilda Meworth, 15, prostitute, Falmouth; Susan Jordan, 16, prostitute, Budock; Harriet J Jordan, wife, 37, brothel keeper, Constantine, and so on.
At that time, the age of consent was as low as 13 and sadly, as Andrew points out in the video, in big, hard-pressed families children would routinely be sold as “commodities.”
Among other eye-catching entries in the 1871 Census records, one of the four Allen’s Yard brothel keepers was named as Elizabeth Defreeze, who was EIGHTY-FOUR years old!
Her son, Albert Defreeze, 49, was recorded as “supported by prostitutes” – or, as Andrew uncharitably suggested, “pimp of the day.”
Twenty years later, in the 1891 Census and for the same Allen’s Yard area, precisely no-one was listed as a prostitute or brothel keeper. Here Andrew speculated that the names may have been recorded by a local person who chose to disguise their true professions.
Allen’s Yard would have disappeared with Falmouth’s major slum clearance programme after the Housing Acts of the 1930s.
The age of consent wasn’t changed until 1885, when it was raised to 16, and brothel-keeping only became illegal with the Sexual Offences Act 1956.
Alas, the comments below Sarah and Andrew’s video include “nothing much has changed” and even “I never knew about all that. I think it was still going on behind closed doors back in the 1970s and ‘80s as I remember foreign merchant seamen walking around the streets and frequenting the pubs and clubs.”
And – back in the Victorian era - Falmouth was hardly alone in its profusion of such services. At one point in that era, apparently, Britain had more brothels than schools!
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