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At least it didn't employ them in any meaningful role - there were Catholics working in the canteen and sweeping the floor, but otherwise there was a strict policy of no taigs.This was 1960, the year Jack Kennedy was elected President of the United States and civil rights and racial equality were sweeping through the world. By chance there was an advertisement in that day's Belfast Telegraph for an announcer in its radio and television services.Tuohy was blessed with a wonderful speaking voice, youthful good looks (which he retained well into his sixties) and plenty of self-confidence. How do you become a celebrity television presenter, get to meet the Shah of Iran, Salvador Allende, Muhammad Ali, Seamus Heaney and Margaret Thatcher (to name just a few), and travel to the most exciting places in the world, all expenses paid? By accident, in the case of Denis Tuohy, one of the most familiar faces on BBC2 and ITV through the 1970s and 1980s. Tuohy was born in Belfast before the war and might well have followed his chosen career as an actor (he once appeared on stage in Chimes at Midnight which starred Orson Welles as Falstaff) had it not been for his mother who insisted, after all the money she had spent on his Jesuit education, he get a real job, with a regular salary and prospects. The Enlightenment drive to list, classify and catalogue still has its power. Yet there is a problem about all this - the problem of the heritage harlot.
Nobody wants a sermon, but while Rubenhold is scrupulous about the horrors of disease, forced labour, destitution, and addiction awaiting many of these women, she nowhere reminds the reader that such perils are not only things of the past.Small revenges can be taken, however. Rubenhold ends this compelling and ingenious book with her own list, naming from her researches all those gentlemen who were customers and keepers of the ladies of pleasure, including some of the highest in the land. Rubenhold tries not to romanticise her subject: "a patriarchal England," she explains, "where women existed to serve men, required prostitutes," pointing out that the women of the List had no voice with which to refute it. The historian Gwyn Prince suggests that between ourselves and history is a kind of "glass wall", which needs to be shattered for us to begin to grasp the past. Rubenhold's lively anatomy of Georgian male and female need sometimes comes close to doing this, but history lives in the present too.
Maybe Rubenhold is right to suggest that Derrick had sympathy and fellow feeling for the women he listed. Perhaps he thought there was little difference between selling your writing and selling your body.There is, though. Derrick managed to keep his authorship of the List a secret from the fashionable world. Charlotte Ward, Derrick's lover, did best out of the List, for at his death he admitted his authorship in an unofficial will, and left her its profits. Rubenhold is convinced that the List's "primary function was to serve as a practical catalogue to the sexual goods on offer".But The Covent Garden Ladies does much more than provide samples of the List, and here Rubenhold proves herself both a keen researcher and a writer who understands narrative tension (while the book is clear of footnotes, it provides sources and a good bibliography). She traces the three lives most affected by the List with sharp dramatic timing: "Pimp General Jack" survived a spell in gaol - illustrating the perils of being too conspicuously successful. There's the anecdote about Miss Grant, who allows one of her customers to pay her two guineas to wash her underclothes.
