Blitz Kids (44 page)

Prior to leaving school, Terry and his classmates were called back to London to sit the matriculation exam. Just as had happened earlier in the war, he found his return to the city coincided with increased enemy activity:

Despite the bombs, he passed the exam.

The middle years of the war saw many youths continuing to show the same enthusiasm that had been shown back in 1939 and 1940. Although the threat from enemy bombers had diminished, there remained a genuine desire for youngsters to play an active role in the war effort. For the teenage boys and girls working in munitions factories or in shipyards, there was already a sense that they were genuinely contributing, but for others there was a need to get involved in more martial activities. For many youngsters, first the Army Cadet Force, then the Home Guard, continued to be ideal. With recruitment set at seventeen, many youngsters found they were able to volunteer much younger, thus earning themselves the right to wear a uniform.

Whilst much has been made of the comic nature of the Home Guard, there was a seriousness that belied its early appearance. Once armed, the force played a genuine role by undertaking guard duties, releasing the regular Army to train and prepare for possible invasion. For youngsters who volunteered for the Home Guard, there was the sense that they were receiving training that they would put to use once they were conscripted. As the war progressed, the Home Guard increasingly trained alongside units of the regular Army, providing opposition during street-fighting exercises. By the time these youths were called up, they had an understanding of life in the Army and the tactics of the modern battlefield. Where once they had appeared as naive youths, in awe of the veterans of the Home Guard who paraded with their chests decked in medal ribbons of long-past campaigns, by the middle of the war these teenagers were ready to prove themselves as soldiers with a far greater understanding of modern warfare than their mentors.

In Aldershot, Dennis Hobbs reached the age of sixteen and was asked to leave the Army Cadets and join the Home Guard. Since Aldershot was a military town, the facilities available to the Home Guard were beyond those available to most local units. As a result, his
training was far removed from the comic efforts of 1940: ‘The Home Guard wanted runners and signallers. The signallers would use flags but they also made me learn Morse code. We all knew what we’d have to do in the event of an invasion; I’d have had to run between the commanding officer and the posts taking messages.’ For sixteen-
year-old
Dennis, it was the weapon training that was most attractive:

The Aldershot Home Guard also did hand-grenade and explosives training:

Some nights, the teenager was sent to guard the local power station, where he walked around the perimeter with his rifle, trying to look important and brave, rather than belying the truth: that he found it somewhat nerve-wracking to be walking around in the dark uncertain of what might happen next.

Having earlier worked as a thirteen-year-old ARP messenger, Roy Finch became one of the new recruits to the Home Guard after, aged sixteen, he found a job as a messenger at Waterloo railway station. He enjoyed the job and found wartime London a fascinating place. His
boss sent him out across the city, collecting documents, delivering papers and shopping for tobacco. He enjoyed the street scenes as he made his way across a city still struggling to cope with the occasional bombing raid and the after-effects of earlier raids: ‘London was a very interesting place, in an interesting time. It was full of foreign troops. There was the blackout and the bombs. I was queuing up at shops, seeing kids playing in bombed building. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.’

He particularly enjoyed watching the American servicemen as they came through the railway station on the way back to base after a day out in London: ‘I would see them going back in the afternoon, half-pissed, with a prostitute on their arm.’ The station staff enjoyed making fun of the Americans: ‘There was a tannoy system in the station. She didn’t like Yanks. So she would play their national anthem over the tannoy. They all had to try to stand to attention, half-cut, with these women hanging off their arms. “That’ll teach them,” she’d say to me.’

As he was working there, it was logical that Roy should join the Waterloo station branch of the Home Guard. It was mainly porters, guards and train drivers – all First World War veterans who were too old to be called up. But among them were a handful of messenger boys, like Roy, who were awaiting call-up. The unit underwent regular training at a Home Guard camp, learning drill, doing target practice and being instructed in throwing hand grenades. At other times, the unit were sent to east London where the Army had taken over bombed streets to use as a training ground, instructing the soldiers in street-fighting. Roy and his fellow railwaymen played the defenders as the soldiers practised house-clearing. Roy was given bags of flour that he would throw into ‘enemy’ vehicles to simulate the explosion of hand grenades. He was entertained by the sight of the umpires telling flour-covered Grenadier Guardsmen that they had been ‘killed’ by a Southern Railways messenger boy. On other exercises roles were reversed and troops of Boy Scouts were pressed into service, acting as ‘enemy’ units in Home Guard training exercises.

However, the Home Guard’s main role was to mount guard on Waterloo station:

At seven in the morning, Roy handed the bullets back in, went for breakfast in the staff canteen and then started work, meaning he remained in his Home Guard uniform for the rest of the day. This had both advantages and disadvantages:

Other boys serving in the Home Guard recalled how by keeping on their greatcoats, and appearing to be a serving soldier, they found it easier to chat-up girls.

Up and down the country were thousands of youths just waiting for their chance to serve their country. They had grown up in a world where the passage into manhood was marked by the issue of a uniform. Ray Clarke, a teenager in north London, explained the emotions shared by him and his mates:

With the Blitz at an end, the youth of Britain breathed a collective sigh of relief and carried on with their lives. Yet for so many among them, the old social order had been swept away along with the rubble and corpses that had been the legacy of the bombing. Children who had witnessed unspeakable horrors of war, who had sheltered night after night – never knowing if it might be their turn next – could hardly be expected to return to normality overnight. In the summer of 1940 war had gone from being a game to being reality. All over the UK were children and teenagers who had tasted some of the terror previously only known to the men in the front line.

With life so cheapened, it was little wonder the country’s youth began to change. The old certainties – the family, school and work – had been replaced by a new reality of dislocation and death. Absent fathers, working mothers, evacuation, closed schools and the
ever-present
threat of high explosive and incendiary bombs had ruptured the old social ties. Nowhere was this new reality more evident than on
the streets of London’s West End. It was not long before the press began to make sensationalist claims about teenage girls ‘running wild’ in the streets of the capital.

Right from the start of war, London had become a magnet for men in uniform. There were Britain’s own soldiers, soon followed by men from the Empire and Dominions – by early 1940 some 25,000 Canadian soldiers had already arrived in the UK. Next came the escaping survivors from the armies of the defeated nations, along with civilians, politicians and royal families seeking refuge. From early 1942 they were joined by hundreds of thousands of American servicemen, who soon stamped their distinctive, well-paid – and swaggering – mark across the nation. By early 1944 the UK was home to some 1,400,000 American servicemen. In Northern Ireland the US presence represented a tenth of the 1937 population. In Suffolk, by 1944 there was one GI to every six locals and in parts of Wiltshire the English were, at times, outnumbered two to one.

The American servicemen became the target of young girls seeking adventure. The girls flocked to dances wherever they thought Americans might be found. They copied the latest transatlantic fashions from films and magazines, using their sewing skills in a radical reworking of the ‘make do and mend’ ethos to dress like their idols. The Americans earned wages at three times the level of their English equivalents and could thus afford to take girls to restaurants that English soldiers could hardly dream of eating in. It was the same in pubs, where English soldiers looked on as Americans were able to keep buying beer as long as stocks lasted. In the parlance of the times, Britain’s boys shouted at American soldiers, ‘Got any gum, chum?’ to hear the reply, ‘You got a sister, mister?’

Of course, not all British girls were blinded by the Americans, with their smart uniforms and gleaming white teeth. Jean Redman, who enjoyed the attentions of British boys, was unimpressed: ‘I didn’t go with any Americans. I found them rather brash compared to our boys who had good manners.’

Whilst there were thousands of respectable girls who were just excited to spend time with the glamorous Americans, there were some whose relationships were shaped by the changing tide of morality that swept the country. With so many thousands of men – far from home –
inhabiting Britain, there was a great need for the men to find sexual relief. From kings to lost and lonely cabin boys, from admirals seeking a navy to Lascar seamen seeking a bed for the night, from wealthy New York socialites to all-but illiterate farmhands, they came in search of excitement as Britain became first a haven, then a playground, for men at war. And with so many new men in town there was one commodity above all others that was in high demand: female company. To ensure the satisfaction of the men flocking to London a whole new wave of British girls turned to prostitution – whether by design or by accident – either on a full-time, part-time or amateur basis. Such was the demand that one recalled working a fourteen-hour day to meet it. To the older prostitutes these men were all the same – whether a medal-wearing hero in immaculate uniform or a gnarled old merchant seaman, they were all, in their language, ‘mugs’. To the youngsters, the situation was different, slipping into the ‘oldest profession’ as a result of a youthful enthusiasm for the excitement and glamour of wartime. The uniforms held a genuine attraction and often gave rise to their introduction to their new career.

To keep the Americans satisfied, London had plenty of prostitutes willing to offer them a few short minutes of female company and some much needed sexual release. Yet, with so many new punters, there was more work than London’s pre-war population of 3,000 street-walkers and brothel-workers could cope with. Pre-war it was estimated that most were over thirty years of age and a significant number were foreign women married, conveniently, to British men. By 1941 there were 5,000 girls working the streets. The Blitz had initially seen a fall in numbers of prostitutes working the city’s streets as some working girls decided to offer their services somewhere – anywhere – safer. Others changed careers and volunteered for military service, bringing a touch of brassy glamour to the female elements of the armed forces. By 1941 the Metropolitan Police had estimated a significant number of the new working girls were under twenty. The usual haunts of Soho and Mayfair soon became the hunting grounds for a new, younger generation of recruits to the crusade against tyranny. After all, who could not argue that the sexual services they offered played a vital role in preserving the mental stability of servicemen desperate for comfort and company in face of the prospect of a violently short life?

As prostitution flourished the Air Ministry complained to the Metropolitan Police about a brothel where it was found that married women were earning ‘pin money’ by having sex with clients, after detectives saw groups of RAF officers entering the building. During 1941 the Metropolitan Police prosecuted the bosses of just seventy-eight brothels, and it was believed that numbers were falling. Senior police officers admitted that the lack of prosecutions was actually a result of the blackout and that with bombs raining down on London, the police had other concerns: it was police policy not to waste manpower on investigating brothels.

By 1944 the figure for brothel prosecutions had risen to 178, with a further 156 cases in which there had been insufficient evidence to prosecute. The police also noted that whenever they took action in one area, the trade simply moved elsewhere. One example was in Eastbourne Terrace, Paddington, an area notorious for prostitution. When the police cracked down on brothels the girls swiftly moved on to nearby Marylebone Lane, where they upset the respectable residents.

The Ministry of Health reported on the: ‘parade of prostitutes now seen in a number of our better-known streets’.
3
In 1942, a Mayfair resident complained about the behaviour of the girls of Shepherds Market who, he wrote:

Appalled residents watched prostitutes lounging around in groups, day and night, leaning against railings and calling out to clients. Some of the girls chose to solicit in less obvious locations. In 1943 the police had to deal with the problem of prostitutes using Warren Street Underground station to pick up punters, annoying the ‘residents’ who used the station to shelter. Another problem that the police had to confront was that arrests were sometimes made difficult by soldiers who intervened.

Yet the traditional image of ageing, painted, syphilitic whores was far from that of the new generation who aimed to separate the
servicemen from their hard-earned cash. For many of the soldiers, sailors and airmen, the girls they picked up were far younger than the pre-war generation of prostitutes. One American general even
reported
his troops picking up girls as young as thirteen. The Ministry of Health soon recorded that teenage girls were taking up what was described as ‘an immoral life’ far earlier than they had during the Great War.
5
Official figures recorded a 100 per cent rise in juvenile offences by females during the war years, with a large number of offences related to immorality. The Home Office noted significant rises in the numbers of girls under the age of fourteen appearing among the juvenile crime statistics. A raid on one London brothel found that young girls who had not previously been reported as working as prostitutes were being shared between soldiers. Similarly, a
fourteen-year
-old Belgian refugee girl was found working as a ‘dance hostess’ in a London club, whilst a seventeen-year-old absconder from an approved school was found working in an illegal drinking club.

The line between professional prostitutes, amateur ‘good-time girls’ and young girls just attracted by the glamour of men wearing uniform was often blurred. Across the country, probation officers reported dealing with hundreds of cases of ‘wayward’ girls; many were under-seventeens who stayed out at night, often visiting Army camps. Rather than take official action, the probation officers attempted to deal with the problem by liaising with parents and most cases never reached the courts. During this period, the Ministry of Health pressed to bring wayward girls before the juvenile courts – hopefully shocking them into modifying their behaviour. In East Sussex the local courts were confused over how to deal with underage girls found to have been behaving ‘immorally’ with soldiers and seamen billeted in the area. One girl of fifteen came before the courts when she fell pregnant by a soldier. The court excused the soldier since the girl appeared way beyond her years.

It soon became clear to the authorities that the new breed of amateur prostitutes, who swarmed around off-duty servicemen, were not educated in the ways of the trade. In particular, they were responsible for a disproportionate increase in the number of new venereal disease infections. In September 1943 the Joint Committee on Venereal Disease reported: ‘the most dangerous sources of infection are the
“good time girls” who congregate at places frequented by members of the services in search of entertainment and excitement, and young persons who have no moral background and who are out of control’.
6
By 1943 the rate of venereal disease (VD) in England and Wales had risen significantly since 1939. The figures for gonorrhoea had risen by 63 per cent whilst syphilis infections had risen by 217 per cent.

In Scotland the figures were similarly troubling. For seventeen years leading up to the outbreak of war, new VD infection rates had been falling. Then in wartime cases rose again, with 1,000 new syphilis cases in 1939 rising to 3,700 new cases in 1942. A disproportionate number of these cases were in the fifteen to twenty-five age group. During 1942, ten people a day in Scotland contracted syphilis and sixteen contracted gonorrhoea. In one port the infection rates rose to eleven times the pre-war level. Observers noted prostitutes moving from port to port, seemingly with knowledge of where and when ships were due to arrive.

Whilst ‘professionals’ understood the need for sexual hygiene, knowing that keeping free from disease was the best way to maintain business, the ‘good-time girls’ were ignorant and irresponsible. As a result, it was not long before venereal disease infections became prevalent. The Metropolitan Police carried out a series of raids on boarding houses in the Bloomsbury area. It appeared the girls picked up Americans and Canadians in Soho then took them to the streets around Russell Square where there was a plentiful supply of boarding houses offering rooms for £4 a night. Of thirty-six girls arrested by the local police, 25 per cent were infected with VD, with fourteen of them under twenty years of age. The diseased girls were described as ‘mostly young and not professionals’.
7

The authorities reported that VD was spread by ‘young persons who have no moral background and who are out of control and in need of care and protection’.
8
The police reported these amateurs were mostly unknown to them, except for a number of juveniles who were regular offenders and were often before magistrates, and were recognized as needing care and attention. In December 1943, Basil Henriques, the Chairman of East London Juvenile Court, gave a speech at Hackney Rotary Club highlighting the social problems he encountered on a day-to-day basis. As widely reported in the press, he reported that child delinquents coming before the courts had increased from between
3,000 to 4,000 a year pre-war to 8,000 or 9,000 a year in wartime. As he told his audience: ‘War fever has affected girls far more than boys … They are attracted by anybody in uniform, and particularly a soldier who can afford to give them a good time.’
9

He blamed American films for influencing the girls, noting that their pernicious influence, combined with lack of parental caution and an absence of steadying influence at home, drew the girls into a life of delinquency. In particular, Henriques complained about an American film,
Stage Door Canteen
, that, he suggested, made out that the entire purpose of a soldier’s leave was to pick up girls. In his view, these influences meant: ‘we should not be surprised at the promiscuous intercourse and even prostitution of girls from 14 to 17’.
10
One of the cases he had dealt with at his court was of a girl of fifteen who had admitted going to central London to sleep with soldiers. He was shocked by the teenager’s frank admission of choosing a life of prostitution. After serving one week in custody, she was released and within a few days returned to the West End to continue as a prostitute.