Eliza Armstrong Case - W.T. Stead

W.T. Stead

As Parliament recessed for the Whit Week bank holiday on May 22, the next day Benjamin Scott, anti-vice campaigner and the chamberlain of the City of London, went to see W.T. Stead, the flamboyant editor of a leading London newspaper, the Pall Mall Gazette. Stead was a pioneer of modern investigative journalism, with eye-catching headlines and a flair for the sensational. While he was a supporter of the Social Purity movement, many were wary of him because he had a tendency towards emotional instability and his brand of journalism was often tasteless. Nevertheless, with the impending demise of the Bill, they were willing to try anything.

Scott told Stead lurid stories of sexually exploited children. Appealing to his reformist nature, as well as his sensationalist bent, he agreed to agitate popular support for the bill. Stead set up a "Special and Secret Committee of Inquiry" to investigate child prostitution, which included Josephine Butler, as well as representatives of the London Committee for the Suppression of the Traffic in British Girls for the Purposes of Continental Prostitution (of which Scott was the chairman) and the Salvation Army. As part of the investigation, two women, an employee of the Pall Mall Gazette and a girl from the Salvation Army, posed as prostitutes and infiltrated brothels at great risk, getting as much information as they could and escaping before they were forced to render sexual services. Mrs. Butler spent ten days walking the streets of London with her son Georgie, posing as a brothel-keeper and a procurer, respectively; together they spent a total of £100 buying children in high-class brothels. Stead, in turn, also spoke to a former director of criminal investigation at Scotland Yard to get first-hand information; he later cast his net wide to include active and retired brothel keepers, pimps, procurers, prostitutes, rescue workers and jail chaplains.

However, Stead felt that he needed something more to make his point: he decided to purchase a girl to show that he could do it under the nose of the law and write about it.