This Victorian dominatrix’s spanking machine brought all the boys to the yard
She could flog you, but she’d have to charge
In Mrs. Berkley’s shop men begged to be thrashed with birch branches, whipped with leather straps, and stung with nettles. Berkley kept branches in water so they were always green and flexible, able to lick the skin with heavy slices. She embedded needle points into her cat-o’-nine-tails whips. She pulled clients up to the ceiling by hooks.
Theresa Berkley worked as one of London’s most popular dominatrixes in the early 1800s—dubbed the “golden age of governesses,” as professional flagellators were known.
Berkley owned a flogging brothel at 28 Charlotte Street amidst an upscale arts district, and the BDSM business was booming. By the 1840s roughly 20 such establishments existed in London. (They don’t call it le vice anglais for nothing.) But increasingly discriminating customers returned to Berkley in particular, over and over. Henry Spencer Ashbee, a Victorian bibliographer of pornography, says her torture devices “restored the dead to life.” Moreover, she was intuitive; Berkley shifted to accommodate her customers’ whims and studied their microscopic reactions to pleasure/pain.
She had all the right stuff, but maybe her biggest contribution to the submissive arts was an apparatus that strapped customers in for easier spanking. Invented in 1828 and later billed the “Berkley Horse,” the machine was essentially a padded ladder with holes for face and genitals. The horse adjusted for height and angle. Ashbee witnessed one of Berkley’s design sketches:
“There is a print in Mrs Berkley’s memoirs, representing a man upon it quite naked. A woman is sitting in a chair exactly under it, with her bosom, belly, and bush exposed: she is manualizing his embolon, whilst Mrs Berkley is birching his posteriors.”
The Berkley Horse was so successful that customers begged for time on it. One wrote her a desperate letter, offering “a pound sterling for the first blood drawn, two pounds sterling if the blood runs down to my heels, three pounds sterling if my heels are bathed in blood, four pounds sterling if the blood reaches the floor, and five pounds sterling if you succeed in making me lose consciousness.”
Another wrote to Berkley, whom he addressed as “Honoured Lady,” “I have been told of your famous apparatus…which should succeed in punishing sufficiently undisciplined young men like myself.” He was referred by her “close friend, Count G.”
Indeed, many of Berkley’s customers were high-born. She entertained aristocrats, businessmen, and even royalty. Though Berkley was known for her staunch privacy, a fellow whipper, Mrs. Collett, was reportedly visited by George IV.
If they had more sadistic appetites, Berkley occasionally allowed clients to flog her — but only to a point. She had plenty of women with high pain thresholds, “who would take any number of lashes the flogger pleased, provided he forked out an ad valorem duty. Among these were Miss Ring, Hannah Jones, Sally Taylor, One-eyed Peg, Bauld-cunted Poll, and a black girl, called Ebony Bet,” wrote Ashbee. These women worked for Berkley while they learned the craft, in a sophisticated apprenticeship program that studied psychology and practiced role-play scenarios.
After her death, her doctor discovered boxes of Berkley’s letters “from the highest aristocracy, both male and female, in the land.” Their contents were so outrageous that it was claimed they could have “threatened the very fabric of society.” The letters were destroyed.
Berkley willed her estate, valued at £100,000, to her brother, a missionary in Australia. When he traveled to collect, he discovered the source of her wealth and refused the money. Ultimately it was donated to the crown — a rebate on services rendered, if you will.
