12

The Hour of Our Death

‘They might all be killed tomorrow. Surely you don’t mind them having a good time with the girls?’

From the days of the Romans to the twentieth century, London had always offered rest and relaxation to visiting military. From the lupanaria of the Bankside to Damaris Page, ‘the great bawd of sailors’, and the docklands whores recorded by Mayhew, there had always been plenty of action for men who wanted to forget the terrors of battle. But London reached its zenith as a city of pleasure during and between the two world wars. The impact of these wars transformed a generation’s attitude to sex and swept away many of the tattered remnants of Victorian morality at all social levels, from the aristocracy (who had always done what they liked anyway) to the working classes. The wars also changed the status of women dramatically, permitting them to develop sexual and social autonomy.

The young men arriving in London from France and Belgium were desperate for distraction after the horrors of trench warfare; the young women waiting to greet them back in Blighty were going through upheavals of their own, many exhilarated by their own new-found freedom but also devastated by grief. Young widows, married less than a year, found themselves as eager for sexual solace as the men on leave, while the threat of sudden death, in the form of Zeppelin raids, loomed above the city like an evil shadow. (A total of 600 people were killed by Zeppelin raids in London during the First World War.) The prospect of imminent annihilation was a tremendous aphrodisiac, and of course London’s sex workers rose to the challenge, as one contributor to the Weekly Dispatch observed:

A young officer from Scotland was accosted sixteen times in the course of walking from his hotel near Regent Street to Piccadilly Tube, a walk of a few hundred yards. Sometimes by those who appeared to be mere children. To a relative who met him later he said: ‘No healthy lad could withstand this kind of temptation.’ There is no city so absolutely vicious as London has been since the outbreak of the war…We do not wait for dark in the West End to open this dance of death. From the early hours of the afternoon the soldiers’ steps are dogged by women. In the tea-shops, in the hotels, in kinemas [sic], in music-halls they wait for them. He must jostle them upon the pavement and have them at his elbow whenever he stands to greet a friend. And 70 per cent of them are diseased, as one great authority computes…¹

Purity campaigners, struggling to retain their hold on the nation’s morals, seized the opportunity to swoop on any unlawful sexual activity, ostensibly in the interests of preventing the spread of venereal disease, but essentially in a desperate attempt to gain social control. With the men away at war, it was left to a battalion of hatchet-faced killjoys to patrol the streets of London seeking out acts of gross indecency. In the name of the NCCVD (the National Council for the Control of Venereal Disease) eagle-eyed women broke up courting couples, berated prostitutes and on one occasion reported a couple of homosexuals to the authorities for having sex in a cemetery. But the sex spies were impotent when it came to controlling the sheer scale of prostitution and the unrepentant activities of the amateurs of all classes, and the women who, experiencing more freedom than at any other time in history, were also discovering the freedom to have sex like men. Bored, frustrated debutantes at last got the opportunity to do something constructive in the form of nursing or performing clerical duties for the army, while working-class women found themselves pressed into service in the factories, railways or on the land, performing the tasks forsaken by the men who had signed up ‘to have a go at the Bosch’. For all the hard work and the danger, the freedom these women enjoyed was unparalleled: restricting gowns were exchanged for uniforms, and silk slippers replaced with stout boots; hats with long trailing veils were laid away, in favour of caps. The scores of widows were discouraged from wearing full Victorian-style mourning on the grounds that heavy veils and black crepe dresses were impractical, and also because the returning soldiers did not want to see dozens of girls in widows’ weeds as they walked through the city. Practical dress and a welcoming attitude towards men on leave were considered good for British morale. Girls learnt to smoke cigarettes and even carry condoms, as eager as the men to experience every pleasure before they died. Armistice Day, when it eventually arrived, developed into a bacchanalian festival worthy of the days of Roman London: as crowds celebrated the end of the war to end all wars by dancing in the street and drinking the pubs dry, men and women embraced freely. The writer Norman Douglas wistfully recalled seeing scenes of wild lovemaking on the streets of the West End.²

While the First World War offered liberation for straight women, it proved a godsend for lesbians. Hitherto caricatured as ‘mannish’ women with Tyrolese hats and waistcoats, and reviled as ‘the shrieking sisterhood’,³ lesbians had inherited a new, exciting world where being physically courageous and practical were positively encouraged and having cropped hair and work boots passed without comment. The writer Vita Sackville-West, who had always been something of a tomboy, experienced an epiphany one afternoon in 1918, when a parcel of land girl’s clothes arrived at her country home. Dressed in breeches and gaiters, ‘I went into wild spirits; I ran, I shouted, I jumped, I climbed, I vaulted over gates, I felt like a schoolboy let out on a holiday.’⁴ This episode was just the beginning of an outrageous affair with Violet Keppel (daughter of Alice, mistress of Edward VII) during which Vita regularly dragged up in men’s clothes and paraded along the streets of Mayfair, smoking a cigarette and being addressed by newsvendors as ‘Sir’. The fact that she was almost six foot tall was a great advantage in this escapade, and she recalled later that she looked rather like a scruffy undergraduate. ‘The extraordinary thing was, how natural it all was for me,’ she remembered. ‘I never felt so free as when I stepped off the kerb, down Piccadilly, alone, and knowing that if I met my own mother face to face she would take no notice of me.’ Vita and Violet regularly spent the night together in a hotel as ‘man and wife’, and Vita relished her double life, always returning home to Knole (her stately home) in time to greet her husband, Harold Nicolson, when he returned from London.

Vita continued to wear mannish clothes for the rest of her life; years later, the writer Peter Quennell described her wearing a pearl necklace, lacy blouse, tweedy gardening trousers and knee-high boots and concluded that she looked like Lady Chatterley to the waist, while beneath was all the gamekeeper’s.

Vita and Harold’s relationship survived her entanglement with Violet, and many other affairs on both sides, through a mixture of genuine love and mutual regard, wonderfully chronicled by their son Nigel Nicolson in his memoir Portrait of a Marriage. Vita and Harold were typical members of a set informally known as ‘the Bloomsbury Group’, an assortment of writers, artists and intellectuals which included Virginia Woolf and her publisher husband Leonard, Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell, the economist Maynard Keynes, and the writers Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster and David Garnett. In some ways, these individuals were similar to the ‘privileged wantons’ of the Elizabethan court, permitted a great deal of irregular behaviour on the grounds of wealth and social position. They also owed much of their sexual freedom to the recently translated works of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, whose theories on sexuality were wilfully misinterpreted by an entire generation as an incitement to sexual licence. As we have seen throughout this book, the wealthier and more influential members of society have always permitted themselves greater freedom, and in some respects the Bloomsburys were a recent manifestation of this phenomenon. If it seems to the outsider that the Bloomsbury men appeared to be extraordinarily tolerant of their wives’ romantic liaisons, it is worth noting that the Bloomsbury men were predominantly homosexual. There was consternation among the set when the hitherto gay Maynard Keynes married Lydia Lopokova, a Russian ballet dancer; Leonard Woolf appears to have been the only truly heterosexual man in the group. D. H. Lawrence, the provincial working-class novelist taken up by the Bloomsburys, was genuinely scandalized by the antics of this arty crowd, an irony given that his most notorious book, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, would become the subject of an obscenity trial.

A delightful vignette of a lesbian couple from 1913.

These homosexual intellectuals did not have complete freedom, of course, due to the existing legislation which had remained unchanged since the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, and the fate of Oscar Wilde continued to act as a deterrent to all but the most blasé. Public humiliation was still the fate of those who got found out; William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp, was driven into permanent exile in Europe when his vindictive cousin, the Duke of Westminster, threatened to ruin his political career by exposing his homosexuality. Lygon was subsequently the inspiration for Lord Marchmain, the patriarch in Brideshead Revisited, although Waugh reflected the climate of the times by making Marchmain an urbane heterosexual adulterer rather than a homosexual. E. M. Forster, author of celebrated novels such as A Room with a View, abandoned publishing fiction in despair because the existing laws meant he could not write about the subject matter which really interested him: sexual relationships between men. His autobiographical novel Maurice was eventually published in 1971, after his death.

Despite the continuing drawbacks of ‘feasting with panthers’, London offered solace for homosexual men to an unparalleled degree. They were drawn to London like moths to a flame, aware that the city presented them with a plethora of public and private arenas in which to explore their sexuality and obtain a level of acceptance inconceivable in the provinces. In London, many elements converged to create a world in which homosexuality was acknowledged, if not legally condoned; the theatre, light entertainment, the media and the rag trade all offered opportunities for a lonely boy who had grown up thinking he was the only one in Barnsley, or Gainsborough, or Port Talbot. The establishment itself, with its guardsmen’s barracks, lawyers’ chambers and the palaces of Westminster and Buckingham, provided rich pickings. In 1916, a young student, Robert Hutton, arrived in London and had his first sexual encounter with a man who picked him up in Victoria Station. After they had sex underneath the trees in Belgrave Square, Hutton wrote: ‘it was as if a curtain had been drawn back. I could see clearly what had been partially obscured before. This was what I had been looking for. I knew now, that other people felt the same way as I did. I was no longer alone.’⁵

And there was no need to be alone. London was a gay paradise during the war years, with Piccadilly Circus its glittering hub. Just as, decades earlier, prostitutes of every caste had been drawn to the Haymarket, ‘the Dilly’, with its distinctive statue of Eros and flashing bright lights, became the centre of the universe for homosexual men. Baedeker described the district as ‘the centre of London’ for the ‘pleasure seeker’ and this was certainly the case. There was Oscar Wilde’s former haunt, the Cafe Royal on Regent Street; the Empire and the Alhambra, music halls still going strong despite the passage of the years; there was the Trocadero and the Regent’s Palace Hotel, and pubs like the Bunch of Grapes, the Wellington and the Griffin, while the bar at the Strand Hotel attracted a wide range of men, from servicemen on leave to clerks and ‘respectable’ married men. Lyons Corner House on Coventry Street (known to the cognoscenti as ‘the Lilypond’) was to all intents and purposes a gay café, where shop assistants and labourers rubbed shoulders with intellectuals and ‘pansy boys’, and the waitresses, aware of the nature of their clientele, discreetly steered women away from the homosexual patrons. ‘Pansies’ or ‘queens’ represented one public face of homosexuality, the unrepentantly flamboyant homosexuals such as Quentin Crisp who risked a beating by parading along Piccadilly in lipstick and rouge. One Alex Purdie recalled that he was ‘a swine for make-up; my perfume was called Soir de Paris…if I could scrounge together half a crown to have a bottle of this, my day was made’.⁶ With powdered faces and eyebrows ‘plucked to hell’ these boys ventured out to battle. As one of them observed, ‘it’s not make-up, it’s ammunition!’ and sometimes ammunition was what one needed. Quentin Crisp recalled: ‘If I was compelled to stand still in the street…to wait for a bus or on the platform of an Underground station, people would turn without a word and slap my face, if I was wearing sandals passers-by took care to stamp on my toes, housewives hissed and workmen spat on the ground.’⁷

Despite the experience of homophobia, London’s homosexual scene was not so much an underworld as a flourishing alternative universe, and it even had its own language, ‘Polari’, derived from Romany and thieves’ slang. ‘Heterosexual people didn’t know what we were talking about,’ one man recalled. ‘We didn’t want people to know.’ Instead of saying ‘there’s a copper coming into the bar’, one man would tip off another with ‘there’s a sharping omi’; if a pretty boy was spotted, he was referred to as ‘bona’, meaning attractive.⁸

And, just as in Roman times, the bath houses flourished, in the form of Turkish baths, and municipal bath houses, the latter built in the Victorian era for London’s poor to wash their clothes and their bodies, but soon an irresistible attraction for homosexual men. Robert Hutton celebrated the Armistice in the Turkish baths, ‘which came as near to killing me as the war ever had…I slept for a week in a Turkish bath, which meant, virtually, that I did not sleep at all.’⁹ When the writer Christopher Isherwood was pursuing the young composer Benjamin Britten he took him to the Savoy Turkish baths in Jermyn Street, notorious for the amount of cruising and sexual activity which went on. Whether or not anything happened, the experience seemed to make Britten more comfortable with his emerging sexuality.

Extending outwards from Piccadilly, like the spokes on a wheel, were London’s other venues for homosexual encounters, the clubs of Soho, the bohemia of Fitzrovia, the pubs of Earl’s Court and everywhere, throughout London, the network of meeting points in the public conveniences and the parks.

Whilst lesbians had experienced a reasonable degree of tolerance, due partially to Queen Victoria’s refusal to believe in their existence, and received liberation of a kind during the First World War, sexual tolerance towards homosexual women was severely tested by the publication of The Well of Loneliness in 1928. This novel was a cri de coeur from Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943), concerning the lonely and masculine Stephen Gordon, a lesbian who eventually finds happiness and acceptance with a female partner after years of misery. Hall had decided to ‘put my pen at the service of some of the most misunderstood people in the world’, citing the theories of the sexologist Havelock Ellis that ‘inverts’ were ‘a part of Nature, made that way by God, and then punished by a cruel and uncomprehending world. Their suffering cried out for redress and an end to persecution.’¹⁰

Sir Chartres Biron, the chief magistrate at Bow Street, would have preferred ‘inverts’ and their kind to remain silent and ruled that the novel was an ‘obscene libel’ and all copies should be destroyed. Hall’s publisher, Jonathan Cape, immediately launched an appeal, while E. M. Forster mobilized eminent supporters including Leonard and Virginia Woolf to defend the book on aesthetic grounds. Unfortunately, Leonard claimed that the book ‘failed completely as a work of art’, while Virginia found it unreadable. Cape’s attempt to defend the book was doomed, since the judge had already formulated his views on what constituted obscenity and was not prepared to listen to London’s literati queuing up to defend it.

In a desperate bid to ban the book on health grounds, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Archibald Bodkin, wrote to several doctors asking for a clinical analysis of what he called ‘homo-sexualists’. Sir Archibald was worried that women would be inspired to practise lesbianism after reading the book: ‘a large amount of curiosity had been excited among women, and I am afraid in many cases curiosity may lead to imitation and indulgence in practices which are believed to be somewhat extensive having regard to the very large excess in numbers of women over men,’ he wrote to Dr J. A. Hadfield of Harley Street.¹¹ Sir William Henry Willcox, consulting medical adviser to the Home Office and physician at St Mary’s Hospital in London, gave Sir Archibald the evidence he needed, declaring that lesbianism ‘is well known to have a debasing effect on those practising it, which is mental, moral and physical in character. It leads to gross mental illness, nervous instability, and in some cases to suicide in addicts to this vice. It is a vice which, if widespread, becomes a danger to the well-being of a nation.’ Publication of the book, he said, would risk its being read ‘by a large number of innocent persons, who might out of pure curiosity be led to discuss openly and possibly practise the form of vice described’.¹²

It is doubtful whether The Well of Loneliness sparked a Sapphic recruitment drive. The protagonists’ sexual activities get no more explicit than the statement ‘she kissed her full on the lips like a lover’, and an observation that ‘that night, they were not divided’, implying that two women shared a bed. Despite the comments from the judiciary that the book featured ‘two women making beasts of themselves’, any reader looking for hot lesbian action would be deeply disappointed. But it was to be almost twenty years before The Well of Loneliness was eventually published in Britain, in 1949. By then Hall was dead and buried in Highgate cemetery, secure in a tomb in the Lebanon Circle with her lover Mabel Batten.

Sex, gay and straight, thrived in London during the interwar years, despite all the best efforts of the authorities. The upper classes, particularly the men who had survived the trenches, became notorious partygoers, dubbed ‘the bright young things’ by the newspapers and enjoying an elite social scene of debutantes’ balls, cocktail parties, nightclubs and country house weekends. Some individuals found these bright young things completely insufferable. The iconic screen star Louise Brooks visited London in 1925 as a seventeen-year-old, before her career took off. Employed as a dancer at the Café de Paris in Coventry Street, Piccadilly, where she became the first person to dance the Charleston in London, Brooks had plenty of opportunity to meet the ‘fast set’ and was not impressed; indeed, Brooks dismissed them as ‘a dreadful, moribund lot’, adding that Evelyn Waugh must have been a genius to make them seem so fascinating in Vile Bodies.¹³

But this was a minority view. After the tedium and danger of the war, hitherto respectable young women were busy reinventing themselves as ‘flappers’, shingling their hair, smoking cigarettes and painting their faces, in unconscious imitation of the genuine whores. They drank cocktails (an American development, derived from the fact that the illegal alcohol circulating during Prohibition tasted so disgusting that it had to be ‘cut’ with other substances such as fruit juice or soda) and danced until dawn. This early example of binge-drinking among young women led, inevitably, to a certain amount of sexual experimentation. While married women began to have access to affordable birth control, in the form of diaphragms and condoms, thanks to the pioneering Marie Stopes (1880–1958), who opened her first clinic in London in 1921, female promiscuity still brought with it the unavoidable risk of unwanted pregnancy. The novelist Rosamond Lehmann presented a realistic account of an abortion in The Weather in the Streets(1936) in which the protagonist, Olivia Curtis, undergoes an illegal termination. Lehmann’s account of events is not shocking in the visceral sense; it is tastefully written up without melodramatic descriptions of knitting needles or haemorrhages. The abortionist who sets things in motion is presented as an avuncular figure who makes enough from the miscarriage trade to send his son to Harrow, while the doctor who attends Olivia after the subsequent miscarriage is gruffly efficient, warning her not to ‘monkey about with herself’ if she wants to have children in future. The shock for modern readers consists of the subterfuge Olivia has to resort to in order to get an abortion: she poses as a married woman, then sells her lover’s emerald ring (for less than its actual value) to cover the £100 cost of the operation (£2,500 in today’s money). When the second doctor is called out, Olivia’s male friend passes himself off as her husband to avoid awkward questions from the physician or the prospect of criminal proceedings. The book was considered outrageous at the time of publication; as an account of a disastrous affair with a married man, it was years ahead of its time.¹⁴

Marie Stopes, birth control pioneer and author of Married Love, one of the first sex manuals (1919).

Despite the panic to raise funds for her abortion, Olivia Curtis and her friends were relatively affluent compared with other Londoners. Britain in the 1930s was blighted by the Depression, an economic downturn which saw millions of people out of work and starving; it would take another war before the safety net of the welfare state was in place. One response to this financial crisis was that more women than ever before resorted to prostitution, and the sex trade flourished in London, where conditions for prostitutes were better than at any time within living memory. Inspector Sharpe of the Flying Squad recalled that the majority of girls worked for about four hours a night (or day) receiving fifteen to twenty clients for between 10 shillings to £1 (£25 at today’s prices) per customer. A working girl’s weekly income of around £80 to £100 compared well with the average shopgirl’s wage of just £2 a week. Inspector Sharpe, counting around sixty-seven streetwalkers standing along Piccadilly, observed that this was seen as an acceptable way to get on in life. ‘If they had gone straight they must have contented themselves with a seventy-shillings-a-week husband and a semi-detached house in the suburbs. They would have had to pinch for their cheap finery and within a few years a brood of squalling children would have surrounded them. On the streets they make five times what a husband could have brought them, and three quarters of their talk is of the money.’ One woman in her thirties whom the inspector often met in Piccadilly looked like a little servant girl, with her pug-face and severe taffeta frock. ‘Before she went on the game she was married to a fifty-shillings-a-week railwayman and had five children. Now, she had a five-pound-a-week flat and a maid.’¹⁵

There were inevitably less fortunate women. The writer George Orwell noted down-and-out prostitutes in Trafalgar Square selling themselves for sixpence a time, although towards morning they would settle for a cigarette and a cup of tea. For these women, Trafalgar Square had become the twentieth-century equivalent of Gropecunt Lane. Nevertheless, the appeal of prostitution to working-class women had never been stronger. In Simon Blumenfeld’s novel Jew Boy (1935) a young woman who has given up work as a domestic servant to become a whore in the West End tells the protagonist: ‘It’s not so terrible. Really, I’m lots better off than I was before. When I was in service, the master would always be after me, or if it wasn’t the master, there was sure to be a son…And they expected all that thrown in buckshee, with scrubbing the house, and clearing out the slops. And I couldn’t say anything, or I’d lose my job. Now if I have to do that, I get paid for it, and at least I get SOME time for myself.’¹⁶

The streetwalkers were notable for their camaraderie. One WPC remarked that ‘they are a friendly lot, ready to help one another, exchanging clothes with each other, and even loaning small sums to a rival down on her luck and out of business for the time being’.¹⁷

Meanwhile, in the upper echelons a new development was under way: the emergence of the call-girl. These women operated out of houses and flats in the fashionable parts of London, servicing clients who sought discretion and comfort. One such operation was run by a dress designer in Grosvenor Square. Men would telephone and ask for a girl, and the designer would fix them up with one; she had 52 young women on her books, and a client list of over 154. The girls tended to be young, and avoided looking like prostitutes; the objective was to be classy and sophisticated, so that they would not attract attention in a Knightsbridge restaurant or a Mayfair hotel, on the arm of their powerful older clients. Special tastes were catered for: a raid on a house near the BBC headquarters at Langham Place revealed pornography, three flagellation canes, one of which had tin tacks secured to the end, a birch and two whips. Prosecutions were rare as the police had to rely on evidence from the neighbours or underworld rivals before they could raid a house.¹⁸

As in Victorian London, prostitutes often shared apartments, or took their clients to seedy hotels which specialized in renting by the hour. Renting a flat together had its own problems, as even two women could be accused of running a disorderly house and living on immoral earnings. Caution and discretion became the key, but if the girls did get arrested, relationships with magistrates were generally cordial. In 1939 one girl, a waitress, who shared a flat in Baker Street with a girlfriend to halve the substantial costs (£3 a week) was told by the judge that ‘if she chose to pursue that form of life she must take care not to break the law, that is, share with another prostitute’.¹⁹ Alexander Wollcott, an American writer and broadcaster, noted during a visit to Bow Street Magistrates’ Court that the major difference between Britain and the US was ‘the old-world courtesy with which your magistrates treat your whores’.²⁰ Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that so many of the judiciary patronized whores themselves. One notable exception to these affable relations was the Savidge Case.

Sir Leo Chiozza Money and a prostitute, Irene Savidge, were arrested on charges of indecent behaviour in Hyde Park in May 1928. Sir Leo was an eminent economist with friends in high places, and thanks to his influence the pair were eventually acquitted in the magistrates’ court, but not before Irene Savidge had undergone a lengthy police interrogation at New Scotland Yard at the hands of Archibald Bodkin, Director of Public Prosecutions. A female police officer had been dismissed and the interview had lasted several hours, with Bodkin twisting Irene’s words and even forcing her to reveal the red petticoat she had on at the time. Although Bodkin and the police were exonerated, the case led to questions in the House of Commons about the roles of the police and the Department of Public Prosecutions. Shortly afterwards, a prostitute named Helene Adele filed a complaint about two uniformed officers from Y Division who, finding her asleep in the back of a cab, attempted to have sex with her. When Helene refused, she was arrested and charged with insulting words and behaviour. Helene maintained her innocence, however, and the courts decided in her favour; she was acquitted at Clerkenwell Magistrates’ Court and the policemen were charged with perjury.²¹

The parks were also a major pick-up point, but the whores on parade were not the downtrodden ‘park women’ of Mayhew’s day. These prostitutes, dressed in their little black suits, walked their poodles along the Bayswater Road and through Marble Arch, in search of prey. (Poodles had long been the dog of choice for prostitutes, a French tradition dating back to the late nineteenth century when top courtesans would ride through the Bois de Boulogne in their carriages, pet dogs proudly on display.) The blackout turned London into one massive Hyde Park, and made it impossible to police. In 1938 there had been over 3000 arrests for prostitution in the Metropolitan Police District; in 1939 there were only 1,865 and in 1940 1,505.²²

The outbreak of the Second World War ushered in the years of plenty as far as prostitutes were concerned and the trade was transformed. Demand outstripped supply and prices rose accordingly. Another development was the change in attitude by the authorities: at the beginning of the war, the police were so overstretched dealing with air raids, looting and civilian casualties that they had less time to arrest prostitutes. The impact of the war upon London’s prostitutes was apparent from the outset. British men may have complained that their US rivals were ‘oversexed and over here’ but they were welcomed with open arms by the prostitutes. Huge numbers of soldiers, sailors and airmen converged on the city, along with foreign military; first the Canadian and then the US armies arrived in town looking for sex. The Americans represented the greatest foreign presence in London; even before the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, which brought the United States into the war, there were over 2000 service personnel based at the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, and within six months that number had doubled.²³ Billeted in the West End, at the Hotel Splendide Piccadilly, the Badminton Club and the Grosvenor House Hotel, these handsome young men fanned out into the city in search of entertainment; according to Quentin Crisp, this ‘army of occupation flowed through the streets of London like cream on strawberries, like melted butter over green peas, labelled “With Love from Uncle Sam” and packaged into uniforms so tight that in them their owners could fight for nothing except their honour’.²⁴ This benign army of occupation was also highly paid, with far more disposable cash than the British. A US sergeant, for instance, received four times the wages of his British equivalent, which led to resentment among British officers and men. One British officer was horrified to be charged 14 shillings for a carafe of wine, muttering that no doubt an American private could afford those prices.²⁵ London’s prostitutes were quick to seize the opportunity to raise their prices: a £1 trick had risen to £3 or £4 by 1943 and by 1945 US soldiers were parting with £5 (£125) for a quickie. Rising prices had no impact on turnover: as the Allied armies gathered in London and Southern England to prepare for the invasion of France, they visited prostitutes in scores. One plainclothes police officer observed thirty-three US or Canadian soldiers visit one brothel in a night, forty-two on another, thirty-five on a third and twenty-nine on the fourth.²⁶ When one house in Brighton was raided, the madam appealed to the police: ‘The boys belong to a bomber crew. They might all be killed tomorrow. Surely you don’t mind them having a good time with the girls?’²⁷

While many of the professionals made a killing, other women drifted into prostitution as a means of survival. Young girls, orphaned and homeless after being bombed out, found they had no alternative but to go on the game. Wives of men in the Forces also dabbled in the trade, such as the wife of an army sergeant discovered by the police with a houseful of prostitutes and soldiers.²⁸ When a sergeant in the Royal Engineers came home unexpectedly to his house in Camden Town in December 1944, he found two African-American soldiers in bed with two women. His five children were in the Morrison shelter, and his wife was in another room with the door locked. When he eventually persuaded her to open up he found her in bed with a black soldier. The sergeant was granted a separation order, the children were taken into care by the London County Council and their mother was sentenced to two months’ hard labour.²⁹

There was also no shortage of enthusiastic amateurs. The novelist Evelyn Waugh noted in his characteristic grumpy fashion that ‘for [the US servicemen’s] comfort there swarmed out of the slums and across the bridges multitudes of drab, ill-favoured adolescent girls and their aunts and mothers, never before seen in the squares of Mayfair and Belgravia. There they passionately and publicly embraced, in the blackout and at high noon, and were rewarded with chewing-gum, razor-blades and other rare trade goods.’³⁰Female commentators were quick to condemn their sisters for licentious behaviour. One Vivienne Hall described the young girls who flocked around the US servicemen as ‘the crudest specimens of womanhood, doing anything they want them to do and fleecing them in payment, cheapening themselves and screaming about the West End!’³¹, while another critic, Hilda Neal, regarded these good-time girls as ‘awful little flappers’, seizing on the Americans ‘like limpets; many look about fifteen or younger; the girls were of the factory type and loud at that’.³²

London’s nightlife expanded to cater for the free-spending American military. Despite the Blitz, the Café de Paris remained open, with 25,000 bottles of champagne in its extensive cellars and the guarantee that, twenty feet below ground level, it was safe even from enemy action. This glittering nightclub was a magnet for officers, diplomats, aristocrats and beauties; the professionals were also of course in attendance. At a slightly less elevated level, there was the Windmill Theatre in Soho. Opened in 1931 on the site of a windmill dating back to the reign of Charles II, the Windmill specialized in tableaux vivants, or tasteful nude scenes in which the models remained motionless. Any movement or gesture which smacked of burlesque would have aroused the wrath of the Lord Chamberlain, an official appointed to crack down on sleaze in the theatre. During the dark days of the Second World War the triumphant motto of the proprietor, Vivian Van Damm, was ‘We never closed’ (although at one point during the Blitz he and his troupe were reduced to sheltering in the cellar), and it provided quintessentially English entertainment in its morale-boosting displays of naked young women.

In Soho, tactics designed to appease the American servicemen included a series of sleazy clubs offering cold beer and hot jazz, run by proprietors who either verged on criminality or were outright gangsters. No matter how much effort the authorities expended in closing these clubs down, others soon sprang up, mushroom-like, an inevitable draw to homesick servicemen. One of the most popular was Percival Murray’s Cabaret Club in Soho, which featured ‘exotic dancers’ or burlesque acts. After the war, Murray’s was to play a crucial role in the Profumo affair.

Many of these clubs also operated as brothels. One, in Coram’s Fields, Bloomsbury, was a hotel with a club in the basement. The girls solicited in the bar and then took their clients upstairs. But the proprietors were good at covering their tracks. When the police attempted to raid it, they discovered only an elderly man on his own and a barmaid (also on her own). At a period when corruption was rife, it was obvious that the management had been tipped off before the raid.

While theatres and cinemas were frequently closed in wartime London due to the bombing raids, other venues insisted on business as usual. On the night of 9 March 1941, 150 debutantes, dressed in white, were curtseying to the cake in the ballroom of the Grosvenor House Hotel as part of the peculiar British ritual known as ‘coming out’ during which the daughters of the nobility were presented to the Queen. On this occasion, the event went ahead without a royal presence. Despite the fact that red warning lights shone through the windows to indicate an air raid, and the floor shook from bombs landing nearby, the instinctive impulse was to keep calm and carry on. Elsewhere in London, in pubs and clubs and church halls, people got on with their lives, drank beer and talked about the weather. Over at the Café de Paris in Piccadilly, manager Martin Poulsen promised that ‘the good times are just around the corner’. The tables were occupied by ‘handsome flying Johnnies, naval Jacks in full dress’, guardsmen, territorials and civilians, the servicemen making the most of their leave while the civilians made the most of the lull in bombings. As West Indian band leader Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson put his orchestra through their paces with a stirring rendition of ‘Oh, Johnny!’, the air-raid sirens rang out and bombs started to fall nearby. ‘Snakehips’ upped the ante and the orchestra played ‘Oh, Johnny!’ a little louder. But then came the hit. Heaps of wreckage crushed dead and injured, reducing the nightclub to a shambles of silver slippers, broken magnums, torn sheet music, dented saxophones and smashed discs. As young men carried out the bodies of their dead girlfriends, a special constable named Ballard Berkeley (who later found fame as the Major in Fawlty Towers) was one of the first on the scene. In a chilling vignette, Berkeley spotted the decapitated body of ‘Snakehips’ Johnson, while elegantly dressed people were still sitting at tables, apparently in conversation, but actually stone dead. Meanwhile, firemen and civilians coming to the rescue were horrified to see looters rifling through pockets and handbags, tearing the rings off the fingers of the dead and dying. A grim end to London’s determination to party on through its darkest hour.³³

Despite such blows to the city’s morale, the prostitutes kept working. Indeed, there was such a demand for their services that, towards the end of the war, the girls were running short of space and fights broke out between streetwalkers over strips of pavement, while new girls were forced to ‘buy’ a beat from retiring whores. In 1944, the authorities felt impelled to take draconian measures against prostitution, with the magistrates of London eager to clean up their city, claiming that there was a public outcry that the menace of prostitution was not being dealt with severely enough and that brothels brought London into disrepute. The Evening Standard launched a clean-up campaign, leading to the closure of one hundred nightclubs, although it was harder to control the streetwalkers; the prostitutes themselves were not impressed. Doing their bit for the war effort, welcoming the servicemen with open arms, they told the newspaper in no uncertain terms that they were most disgruntled. ‘First time I’ve ever had any trouble’ was one woman’s response to the clean-up campaign. ‘Behavin’ like that for no reason at all!’ protested another.³⁴ There was also the age-old tendency to blame the girls, not the clients: prostitutes were told by the judiciary, ‘girls like you are a very great menace to many otherwise excellent young men who are serving their country’.³⁵

One anecdotal historian of wartime prostitution was Marthe Watts, a French prostitute who arrived in London shortly after the beginning of the war and married the elderly Mr Watts to gain a passport. An experienced prostitute, Marthe was no stranger to the law herself: over the years she made more than 400 appearances before the magistrates. To hurry clients along, she ensured that her room was as bleak and functional as possible. When one American glimpsed her hard wooden bed, he exclaimed: ‘Huh, a workbench!’ Marthe’s finest hour came on VE Day, when she took home forty-nine clients, working through the night until six o’clock the following morning. Marthe’s lover was Gino Messina, a brutal, greedy gangster who controlled London’s sex industry for a generation. She claimed that Gino introduced the ‘ten-minute rule’ for punters, on the grounds of economy and jealousy; he could never last longer than ten minutes himself. Despite Gino’s unpleasant personality, Marthe was devoted to him, throwing a party when he got out of jail.

Perhaps Marthe’s loyalty to Gino derived from the fact that the Messina family had come to dominate London’s sex trade by the 1940s. Gino had arrived in London in 1934, having heard that the city offered opportunities to the enterprising criminal. He had received an excellent training in the sex trade from his father, who had trafficked women in Alexandria, Egypt. Despite their Sicilian surname, the Messinas maintained that they were of Egyptian and Maltese descent. Gino had shrewd business instincts and soon realized that London’s sex trade was chaotic, and that fines for prostitutes were comparatively low; the penalty for soliciting cost little more than a parking ticket. ³⁶

Within a year, he had built an empire in the West End and his brothers – Salvatore, Carmelo, Alfredo and Attilio – had come over to join him. On paper, the family business appeared to be legitimate; the brothers described themselves as antique dealers and diamond brokers and if pressed replied that they were in the ‘import’ trade. What they actually imported was women, sourced from the continent and further afield. As these women had their own passports and had arrived in Britain of their own volition, the Messinas could not be convicted of trafficking. And no expense was spared in tempting girls to throw in their lot with the brothers. One prostitute, taken out to dinner and sweet-talked by Gino, described him as a perfect gentleman.³⁷

By 1950, the Messinas were running 500 girls in the West End. ‘We Messinas are more powerful than the British government,’ Attilio Messina told the press. ‘We do as we like in England.’ In 1947, the Messinas’ grip on the trade was challenged by Carmelo Vassallo, a Maltese pimp, and during a violent encounter Gino slashed Vassallo’s face with a razor, which earned him two years in jail. He celebrated his release by spending £10,000 on a two-tone Rolls Royce. Hefty backhanders to the police also assured immunity from prosecution, until the legendary crime reporter Duncan Webb of the People began to investigate allegations of leaks from Scotland Yard to Alfredo Messina. On 3 September 1950, the People carried a front-page lead on prostitution, containing all the information necessary for a police investigation into corruption, including names, dates, photographs and interviews with over one hundred prostitutes. Edna Kallman was one such woman. At thirty-nine, she had been working for the Messinas for ten years and was ill and exhausted. She told police that Attilio had hired a maid to watch her and enforce the ten-minute rule. When Edna complained about her working conditions, Attilio retorted that she was lucky to have the work. ‘I could get a seventeen-year-old who would work harder than you,’ he told her, ‘and I could fuck her as well!’³⁸

Superintendent Guy Mahon of Scotland Yard set up a task force and engaged in such an aggressive campaign against the Messina brothers that, by the end of the 1950s, Alfredo Messina had been imprisoned on bribery and prostitution charges. Attilio Messina was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment after being caught illegally attempting to re-enter the country in April 1959. The remaining Messina brothers fled abroad. Gino and Carmelo resurfaced in Belgium; subsequently arrested, Gino was sentenced to six years while Carmelo was deported to Italy, where he died in 1959. The authorities had investigated the tangled roots of the Messina family tree and discovered that the brothers were not, as they claimed, Maltese, but Sicilian. In true gangster fashion, Gino continued working. A journalist visiting him in his Belgian jail found him signing cheques for rent and taxes on his London properties, which, according to the Sunday People, were still being used for immoral purposes. Meanwhile, the remaining brother, Salvatore, had disappeared, and was the only Messina never to be brought to justice.³⁹

The Messina brothers’ brutal methods were typical of the London underworld in the mid-twentieth century. The next generation of gangsters, the Krays, inherited the Messinas’ empire and ensured its survival through a terrifying reign of intimidation and violence. But, as we will see in the next chapter, London’s sexual underworld was about to change yet again.