A TOURMALINE IS A gemstone found in a wide variety of colours. Red ones, sometimes known as rubellites, can be confused with rubies to the untrained eye; for example, Caesar’s Ruby, a 255-carat stone which has, at various times, been part of the French, Swedish and Russian crown jewels is, in fact, a rubellite tourmaline. In the absence of sophisticated equipment, such mistakes were easily made. Indeed, the British crown jewels include the Black Prince’s Ruby, which we now know isn’t a ruby either, but a red spinel. One way to tell the difference is that tourmalines can be magnetic, but rubies cannot. It would be unusual for a rubellite tourmaline to display as strong a magnetic force as the Blood Flower, but not unknown.
Both rubies and tourmalines were imported to the UK from Madagascar. In 1883, when the French began their invasion of the island, the British Royal Navy had three ships in port, including HMS Dragon. However, despite the best efforts of the Navy captains, there was little political will in London to protect their outpost, which had diminished in strategic importance since the opening of the Suez Canal. The British largely exited, leaving the local army to fight the Franco-Hova wars over the following twelve years. The French were eventually victorious, but only after many thousands of lives had been lost.
The HMS Colossus was built in the Portsmouth Dockyard and commissioned in 1886. She was arguably the first truly modern warship, boasting steel construction, steam-only propulsion and a pair of gun turrets. She was notably fast through the water but had poor manoeuvrability and was decommissioned in 1901 and scrapped in 1908.
Quinton’s New Hippodrome is based on Ginnett’s Hippodrome, opened in 1880 by Frederick Ginnett. It was situated next to the Portsmouth Town railway station and had an eventful history through the 1880s, including being burned down and rebuilt, and changing name several times.
Miss La La was a stage name of a circus performer whose real name may have been Olga Brown. She was born in Szczecin in Prussia (now in Poland) in 1858. Her feats of strength and skill as an acrobat earned her a level of fame unusual for a Black woman, such that painter Edgar Degas became fascinated by her. You can see his painting of her in the National Gallery in London. She often performed with her partner Theophila Szterker, together becoming known as The Two Butterflies. Shortly after Szterker fell to her death in 1888, Brown ceased performing and married Emanuel Woodson, an African American contortionist. She became a mother to three daughters, living until at least 1919.
Nicolaev (or Mykolaiv) is a Black Sea port city in Ukraine. During the nineteenth century, it was part of the Russian empire. In 1834, its Jewish population was expelled by force and removed to the ‘Pale of Settlement’ to the west. Over the following years, many of them, like Jacob and Lilya Kleiner, fled across Europe, trying to escape from persecution. Jews were not permitted back until the 1860s. During the Second World War, the city was occupied by German forces, and in the autumn of 1941, nearly 36,000 citizens, almost all of them Jews, were murdered.
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the punishment for male homosexual acts was brutal; a minimum of ten years in prison and, more commonly, life. Even minor indiscretions – embracing or kissing – could be punished by months of hard labour. Gay clubs, known as ‘molly-houses’ were often well-known to the police, who tolerated or raided them according to political whim. It was a very precarious life for a gay man. Homosexual acts remained a criminal act in the UK until 1967, but in the Royal Navy were illegal until 2000, and were still considered grounds for dismissal until 2016.