Revealed: The real scandalous reason Prince Eddy, Duke of Clarence was known as ‘Collar and Cuffs’

CHRISTOPHER WILSON

He was the eldest son of King Edward VII and was always poised to take the crown.

But Prince Eddy, Duke of Clarence, didn’t survive long enough to have a chance at the throne.

Handsome, elegant, and whip-thin, Eddy, born Prince Albert Victor in 1864, was known mockingly as ‘Collars and Cuffs’ after his flamboyant dress sense. He was bisexual; loving women but attracted to men.

He was raised with succession in mind but spent his childhood under a bullying grandmother – Queen Victoria – and an overbearing father who could not forgive him for his sensitive nature.

In 1899 Eddy became entangled in the Cleveland Street Affair, a colossal scandal centred on a male brothel near London’s Euston Station which was frequented by members of the aristocracy. The clientele were predominantly blue-blooded, while the rent boys were teenagers employed by the Post Office to drop off their telegrams.
Constables had discovered the brothel by chance, when a routine police investigation into thefts led to the discovery of a ‘den of infamy’. A detective was sent to interrogate a 15-year-old telegraph boy, Charles Swinscow, who’d been found with 18 shillings in his pockets – the equivalent of two months’ wages in those days.