Blitz Kids (61 page)
Authors: Sean Longden
In 1950 he was called up for National Service, joined the infantry and was sent to Korea. His experiences in Korea were shaped by what he had seen in wartime London, and he was reminded of the violence he had seen in the streets around his home: ‘It was nothing new. There were dead bodies everywhere, but I’d seen it all. There were kids my age with me in the Army who had been evacuated during the war. They hadn’t seen anything. In Korea, they’d see a body and be revolted. I could look at it and think nothing of it.’ In the increasingly bitter conflict, he began to learn the ways of the battlefield, especially that he could expect no mercy from the enemy: ‘The North Koreans never took prisoners. We’d find blokes who’d been nailed to a tree, left there, then starved to death. It was awful.’
Fred turned into a soldier without pity for the enemy. On one occasion his officer told him: ‘You are a cold-hearted bastard, aren’t you, Rowe?’ With utmost honesty, he replied: ‘I’m a realist. I’m going to survive. I come through one fucking war as a kid, I ain’t going to die here.’
On one occasion, he witnessed scenes that reminded him of being back in London during the Blitz, and brought home to him the difference between him and his comrades who had never experienced bombing:
We were on a hill. It was winter. You’ve not had a winter till you’ve had a Korean winter. It was fucking perishing! There was a platoon of us in this wooded area waiting for their patrol to come. Patrol! There must
have been a thousand of them coming towards us. The officer said, ‘When they appear we’ll start shooting.’ I saw all these Koreans coming towards us, looked at me gun and thought, ‘That ain’t gonna be any good!’ So the officer got on the radio and called up air support. Napalm! What a lovely fucking weapon! That sorted them out. Three jets came over and dropped their bombs on the Koreans. It cooked them all. You could smell it from where we were. It was a massacre. Hundreds of them done in seconds. We were safe: what a fucking blinder! I’d smelt burning bodies like that before, back in 1940. The others were moaning about the smell. I said, ‘What’s the matter with you? Do you want to fucking die?’ All I thought about was the threat they posed to me.
Fred Rowe had seen death close up at an impressionable age and grew realistic about his chances of survival. It was a kill or be killed world, where he would do whatever he considered necessary to survive. On one occasion his unit captured a North Korean intelligence officer. The Korean was needed back at headquarters for interrogation:
The officer said to me, ‘Rowe. Take him back to HQ.’ He gave me two new blokes – rookies – to escort the prisoner back. When we got about a hundred yards out of our camp I said to these two rookies, ‘I’m going to kill this cunt!’ I told them the North Koreans were probably watching us, and we’d never get to the HQ.
He justified what he was suggesting by telling the rookies that the Koreans might appear at any moment, shoot them, and help the prisoner escape. He was convinced the Koreans knew they were holding the officer and would not let them get him safely to headquarters:
I asked the lads if they wanted to die. No. So we had to make it look good. I told them to say the prisoner had made a run for it so we had to shoot him. So I told the prisoner to go. He knew what was happening, he wouldn’t go. So I got a pistol, held it up and said, ‘Fucking go! Or I’ll do it here!’ So I kicked him away, then I shot him in the back of the neck.
After their report of the prisoner’s escape and death a Court of Enquiry was held to determine the facts. Fred Rowe and the two other men
stuck to their version of events and the matter was closed. After the hearing, his officer approached and spoke candidly to Fred: ‘I know what went on. I saw your face.’
Another time he was asked to search a barn:
The sergeant said there was a Korean in there. I said, ‘Fuck him, throw a hand grenade in.’ The sergeant said no. So I went in. I had a pistol. The Korean was in there. He put his hands up and said, ‘No. No.’ I took his gun off him and searched him. I said, ‘Come.’ He said, ‘No.’ So I put the gun to his nose and shot him. It blew the back of his head off.
After leaving the Army, he returned home and slowly fell into the criminal fraternity. Starting with snatching wage bags, escaping on stolen motorcycles, he graduated to safe-blowing, earning his
nickname
‘Spider’ for his ability to scale the outside of buildings. He enjoyed the lifestyle. He made good money, spent it on cars and women, waited until the money was exhausted and then returned to crime. Prison was an occupational hazard that he grew to accept: after all, it was his own choice. Eventually he progressed to armed robbery. After a number of short spells in prison – all of which devastated his family – he was finally given a ten-year sentence.
And so his criminal career continued until a fateful day in 1974 when Fred encountered a neighbour in his south London flats. The neighbour was a would-be artist and musician named Ian Dury. After a hesitant start, the two became firm friends. Fred would later credit Dury with helping him ‘go straight’. When Fred was offered
employment
as Dury’s driver he took the chance and never looked back. In the years that followed, Fred Rowe was Dury’s constant companion, setting up equipment for his bands, introducing Dury on stage, acting as a minder and, above all, being there as a friend. The exposure to this unfamiliar world, working around the world with bands, meeting the type of people he hardly knew existed, opened his eyes to another world. Though all his old criminal mates didn’t believe he would be able to, he changed his life and ‘went straight’. More than thirty years after he had first looted the bombed-out shops of south London, Fred Rowe had finally broken the cycle of criminality and settled down to a ‘normal’ life. Up until that point, he didn’t know any other life and –
apart from his family – had no contact with ‘straight people’. As he later admitted: ‘Ian turned my life around. He was in the right place at the right time.’
So what had made Fred Rowe the man he was? Whilst serving his ten-year jail sentence, he underwent an examination by a psychiatrist, who tried to understand what had made him into a career criminal. After all, he was from a loving family, his parents were both hardworking people and all his siblings were respectable. What had made him a criminal, in and out of prison, year after year? After listening to Fred’s story he came to a conclusion: he was like that because of his experiences as a wartime street-urchin. Every time his mother had accepted looted food from her seven-year-old son, she had encouraged him. Her acquiescence, in order to put food on the table, had made him view criminality as something acceptable.
He makes no excuses for his career as a criminal or for the killing of prisoners in Korea, nor does he ask for sympathy. Instead, he simply states:
It was a tough old life – but I brought it all on myself … World War Two prepared me for it. Things don’t shock you so much. It wasn’t a good way to live, but I was thrown into it … Now, I’m really ashamed of my criminal life because I know how good life can be.
Of course, not all young witnesses to the violence of war were hardened by their experiences. Some were profoundly affected by them, never escaping the memories of the turmoil. One such victim was John Norman, who became a prisoner of war aged just sixteen, experiencing five terrible years as a slave labourer in a Silesian coal mine. He and his wife Sylvia retired to Canada in the 1980s. In the latter years of his life he underwent tests on his heart that revealed he had suffered something unusual at some point in his life. He realized this was the massive electrical shock he had endured whilst a teenage prisoner of war working in a German coal mine. When he developed Parkinson’s disease, he wondered whether the effects of the electrical shock had been responsible for the development of the illness.
In the final years of his life, Sylvia noticed how he seemed to suffer from ‘flashbacks’ in which he was unable to differentiate between
reality and his earlier experiences of deprivation and suffering as a teenage prisoner of war. He would simply stop and stare into the distance, as if lost deep in thought. As the situation worsened, he became deeply suspicious of outsiders. At one point she discovered he had moved bottles of alcohol. When asked where they were, he replied: ‘I’ve hidden all the drinks in the garage so that the guards won’t find it.’ Sometimes he got up at night, staggered from his bed and sat in the hall, telling his wife he was waiting for his shift in the coal mine to start. When he heard his neighbour’s dog barking, he was convinced it was a German guard dog. As his dementia increased, he was convinced he was still in a prisoner-of-war camp and kept asking his wife where the rest of the prisoners were. He shouted out: ‘Where is everybody? They’ve all gone home! I want to go home!’ As Sylvia said: ‘My beloved husband was reliving all the horrors he had experienced as a POW.’ Eventually, after suffering a number of falls, he was admitted to hospital and found to be suffering from
Post-traumatic
Stress Disorder. His past had caught up with him. He died in a care home aged eighty-five.
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ADM1/9839 Loss of HMS ROYAL OAK: report on rescue and subsequent assistance to survivors
ADM1/9840 Loss of HMS ROYAL OAK: report of Board of enquiry
ADM1/11593 Summary of defences of Scapa Flow and Section 1 of report of board of enquiry into sinking of HMS ROYAL OAK
ADM1/14083 Training of sea cadets for RN communications branches under Bounty Scheme: appointment of RNVR (Sp) Officers as administrators of scheme and instructors
ADM1/14704 Welfare and recreational training in Open Units of Sea Cadet Corps
ADM116/4181 Boy and Sea Scouts and Sea Cadets in service as messengers, etc. with Naval Units: remuneration
ADM1/14737 Recruitment of boy buglers in Royal Marines: consent for sea service to be obtained prior to entry
ADM199/158 Loss of HMS ROYAL OAK, 14 Oct 1939: board of enquiry
ADM205/1 Committee of Imperial Defence. Chiefs of Staff Sub-Committee. Acceleration of defence programme 1939. Loss of HMS ROYAL OAK, etc.
AIR2/3942 British Social Hygiene Council prevention of venereal disease: enquiry from Mr Amery, MP
AIR2/5995 Control of venereal diseases in R.A.F. proposed defence regulations
AIR49/365 Venereal Diseases: miscellaneous reports
ASSI36/72 Murder: Bailey, Ernest George
CRIM1/482 Defendant: Jones, Elizabeth Marina, Hulten, (Private) Karl Gustav Charge: Murder of George Heath, taxi driver
CRIM1/585/137 Pardon: Jones, Elizabeth Marina
CRIM1/1615 Defendant: ARMITAGE, Guy Hamer Charge: Procuring and living on the earnings of prostitution
ED11/248 Juvenile delinquency
ED124/6 Juvenile Delinquency. Issue of joint Home Office and Board of Education Circular 1554 “Juvenile Offences”. Reports from Standing Conference of National Juvenile Organisations, various local education authorities, youth committees and others. Welsh Youth Committee questionnaire and report on “Drinking amongst young people in Wales”
ED138/92 Juvenile delinquency. Extracts from Department’s files
ED147/32 Juvenile delinquency 1947–1949
FD1/6518 Venereal diseases amongst British Forces
FD1/6805 Ministry of Food: salmonella infection in poultry
FD1/6556 Foam and human thrombin
HLG57/295 Extension of venereal disease: services to meet war-time needs; certification of grant claims
HO45/18118 CHILDREN: Increase in juvenile crime statistics
HO45/18716 CHILDREN: Incidence of juvenile crime
HO45/19066 CHILDREN: Enquiry into juvenile delinquency on behalf of the Home Office under the supervision of the London School of Economics and Political Science
HO45/20250 Conference on Juvenile Delinquency 1941
HO45/21055 Juvenile Courts: publication of names of juveniles in newspapers
HO45/21119 Juvenile Courts: composition; age of magistrates
HO45/21120 Juvenile Courts: composition; age of magistrates
HO 45/21223 Official history of World War II: juvenile delinquency and other matters relating to children
HO45/23119 Proposal for training young offenders for the army or navy as an alternative to Borstal training
HO45/23766 Juvenile, member of British Union at 13 years of age, district leader East Leyton branch: detention
HO 45/25144 Juvenile delinquency: drink as contributory cause; problems met by juvenile courts; assistance by voluntary organizations; problems in Liverpool
HO45/25599 Venereal disease: proposal to introduce compulsory treatment under a new defence regulation. Joint Committee on Venereal Disease: minutes of meetings; investigation into the incidence of venereal disease in the RAF
HO144/21905 Borstal treatment for young female offenders
HO144/21619 Contraction of venereal disease by members of HM Forces
HO144/22002 Reverend Martin Kiddle convicted of importuning male persons for an immoral purpose: free pardon granted after sentence of imprisonment quashed
HO144/22219 HULTEN, Karl Gustav Convicted at Central Criminal Court (CCC) on 23 January 1945 for murder and sentenced to death. JONES, Elizabeth Marina nee BAKER Convicted at Central Criminal Court (CCC) on 23 January 1945 for murder and sentenced to death (commuted)
HO187/477 PERSONNEL: Venereal disease
HO213/811 Venereal diseases in merchant seamen
HO144/21808 Treatment of girls aged 14–17 brought before juvenile courts
HO144/22159 CHILDREN: Elizabeth Maud Baker (later known as Elizabeth Marina Jones): committed to approved school on account of her not being under proper care of guardianship and falling into bad associations
HO144/22160 CHILDREN: Colin Chester Sterne, aged 17 sentenced to be detained during HM Pleasure on a charge of murder
LAB8/109 Position of prostitutes
LAB19/98 Conference on juvenile delinquency
MEPO 2/6216 Extracts from minutes of Senior Officers Crime Conference: suggested action to reduce juvenile delinquency
MEPO2/6622 Reports and statistics on prostitution: post-war increase in convictions before passing of Street Offences Act, 1959
MEPO 2/6626 Attendance of police representatives at meetings on juvenile delinquency organised by St. Pancras and Richmond Councils
MEPO2/7012 Organisations interested in promoting conditions to reduce the prevalence of venereal diseases: police assistance requested
MEPO2/7146 Prosecution in cases of gross indecency and importuning: opinion by Metropolitan Police Solicitor
MEPO2/8859 Activities of homosexuals, soldiers and civilians: co-operation between the army and the police
MEPO3/758 The Caravan Club, 81, Endell St, W.C. 1: disorderly house, male prostitutes
MEPO3/770 The Arch Social Club, 67, Bryanston Street, W.1: keeping a brothel
MEPO3/994 Mitford Brice: attempting to procure a boy aged 15, to commit an act of indecency
MEPO3/988 Album of foreign prostitutes: its purpose and restricted distribution
MEPO3/1939 Venereal disease: compulsory treatment under the Defence Regulations
MEPO 3/1961 Power of Juvenile Courts to order birching of offenders over 14 years of age
MEPO 3/1965 Police appeal to educational authorities in preventative measures of juvenile crime
MEPO3/2135 Suspected brothels, male importuners: Statistics
MEPO3/2138 Prostitution in the West End of London with special reference to American troops
MEPO3/2139 Prostitution in Mayfair, London: complaints, police action and statistics
MEPO3/2140 Police action to prevent allied servicemen contracting venereal disease from prostitutes
MEPO3/2141 Women suffering from venereal disease: first conviction under Defence Regulation 33B
MEPO3/2142 Women suffering from venereal disease: procedure under Defence Regulation 33B
MEPO3/2277 Murder of Robert George Smith by Kenneth William Gribble (age 16) in a spinney at Kempston, near Bedford on 6 August, 1944
MEPO3/2297 Murder of Ivy May Philips by Peter Joseph Jarmain (age 18) at the Red Arrow Garage, Thornton Heath, on 28 June, 1945
MEPO3/2298 Murder of Daphne Jean Bacon, (age 14) by Ernest George Bailey, a soldier at Aldringham, near Leiston, Suffolk on 8 July, 1945
MEPO3/2331 Gross Indecency: importance of legal aid in cases likely to cause publicity
MEPO3/2967 Prostitution in London: research by British Social Hygiene Council
MH51/412 Protection of defectives from acts of sexual immorality; procuration
MH55/1341 Defence Regulation 33B: importation of venereal disease by Service personnel; wartime conferences
MH55/2317 Control: solicitation by prostitutes of United States servicemen based in London; Joint Committee on Venereal Diseases
MH55/2325 Joint Committee on Venereal Diseases: minutes of meetings and papers
MH71/104 Advisory Sub-Committee on Venereal Diseases: minutes, correspondence and report
MH96/1137 Treatment of venereal disease with penicillin
MH102/895 Girl absconders from approved schools soliciting American soldiers in the streets and spreading venereal disease
MH102/1117 Approved school accommodation: provision of new school to deal with girls suffering from venereal disease
MH102/1129 Publicity about Home Office schools: film on juvenile delinquency, comments by Scottish Education Department, also press cuttings
MH102/1134 Publicity about Home Office schools: film about juvenile delinquency involving the work of juvenile courts; recommended by the Institute for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquency
MH102/1146 Treatment of venereal disease in approved schools for girls: meeting of the Case Sub-Committee of the Brighton Probation Committee; letter to Home Office Children’s Branch concerning young girls associating, often immorally, with soldiers
MH102/1147 Treatment of venereal disease: juvenile delinquency in Blackpool; minutes by National Youth Committee police reports and general correspondence
MH102/1148 Treatment of venereal disease: Shirley Remand Home for girls; suitability of use as place for treatment
MH102/1149 Control of venereal disease: minutes of conference held at the Home Office; reports made by Joint Committee on Venereal Diseases
MH102/1150 Juvenile delinquency in young girls: parliamentary question on statement made by the Chairman of the East London Juvenile Court
MH102/1151 Venereal disease in juveniles: letter from Warwickshire County Council to the Ministry of Health asking whether sick juveniles should be brought before a juvenile court as being in need of care and protection
NSC9/407 Director General’s Office: notes of a meeting held at Headquarters to discuss policy regarding the prosecution of juvenile offenders against the Post Office (Includes memo on the law and procedure applicable to the prosecution of children and young persons)
PCOM9/413 Venereal disease: women prisoners
PCOM9/435 Young offenders in prisons: treatment and privileges
PCOM9/1034 DAVIDSON John Gordon: convicted at Manchester 1 May 1944 of murder and sentenced to death
TS27/549 Hereford Juvenile Court: enquiry by Lord Justice Goddard into the conduct of the Court in proceedings against Dennis Harold Craddock and others
TS335 – Merchant Navy Awards
WO32/9727 Battalions: Young Soldier Home Defence Formation
WO32/9847 Junior Training Corps Intelligence Scouting for boys under 15
WO32/9848 Young soldiers battalions
WO32/9849 Pre-military training for youths
WO32/10470 Age for drafting overseas
WO32/10471 Age of drafting overseas
WO32/10473 Young soldiers training camps
WO32/11187 Organisation post-war training
WO32/11519 Formation of General Service corps
WO166/14163 2 Young Soldiers Trg. Centre
WO199/919 Conferences: reorganisation of Home Defence and Young Soldiers Battalions
WO365/81 Young soldier battalions: disposal of unsuitable personnel
WO379/102 Guards Training Battalions; Guards Armoured Training Wing; Young Soldier Training Centres/Training Battalions
WO379/110 Special Training Units: Stamford Practical Training Area; Young Soldiers Training Units, later Special Training Units
WO379/124 Young Soldier Training Centre: Primary Training Centres affiliated to infantry Depots