Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (57 page)

Oh I like them. I wish I could marry one. (
Unmarried girl,
18
,
London
)

As for the dissenting minority, Gorer noted that their criticisms were ‘mostly on points of character or behaviour, that the police as individuals are “no better than anybody else”, and the human failings of persons in the police’. For instance:

I think the police in big towns and cities do a grand job and their work is hard, but in villages such as this we become their friends and they ours, and they often turn a blind eye. (
Married woman,
21
, village near
Newark
)

Majority of them show off when in uniform as if everyone should be afraid of them. Yet they seem kind and considerate to children. My children love to say Hello to Policemen and it isn’t very often they are ignored. (
Mother,
24
, Birmingham
)

Too much time is taken up with minor traffic offences on the roads. Freemasonry should be barred in the Police Force. (
Man,
26
, Sidcup
)

‘Some 5 per cent of the population is really hostile to the police,’ Gorer reckoned, ‘and with about 1 per cent of these the hostility reaches an almost pathological level.’ Tellingly, he added, little of this hostility was political in nature but rather stemmed from ‘the belief that they misuse their power, are unscrupulous, avaricious or dishonest’. And Gorer, who could speak with some authority, declared his belief that such suspicions ‘would be much more widely voiced in most other societies’.
^9.
It was, all in all, a graphically consensual picture that this aspect of his survey evoked.

The Blue Lamp
was equally topical in terms of the prevailing moral panic about youth into which it so deftly tapped. ‘Rarely a day passes now without some act of criminal violence being committed,’ noted Anthony Heap in March 1950: ‘Gangs of young teen-age thugs, emulating the American gangster “heroes” they see regularly on the screen, go around “coshing”, robbing, and beating-up people with impunity. And on the few occasions when some are caught, what sort of punishment do they get? The good flogging [made illegal in 1948, along with birching] they so richly deserve? Oh dear no! That’s too “degrading”. It might hurt their feelings.’ ‘Women are quite nervous to go out alone after dark – a thing quite unknown before,’ observed Vere Hodgson in west London soon afterwards. ‘You do not need to have thousands of pounds of jewellery in your bag,’ she added about her particular fear of being ‘yammed on the head with a Cosh’ by youths. ‘They will yam you for 3½d and think it is all fun . . . I agree with the Birch.’

Was the immensely popular daily radio thriller,
Dick Barton
, an unintentional stimulus to juvenile delinquency – unintentional because Barton himself was a detective of impeccably upright language and lifestyle? Ever conscious of its responsibilities, the BBC in early 1950 sent out a questionnaire to more than 70 child-guidance clinics about the possible effects of the series. Several replies expressed concern:

Nightmares and undue mental tension are produced in some children . . . The educational value seems poor . . . Many of them look on Barton as a fool who gets away with too much, and miss the moral issues raised. (
Portman Clinic, W
1)

It fills a vacuum but it is not constructive. There is no indication that years of strenuous preparation precede heroic exploits. The characters are shadowy. The heroes are complementary to ‘spivs’, rather than their opposites. (
Department of Psychological Medicine, The Hospital for Sick
Children, Great Ormond Street
)

The fact that the child listens to Dick Barton is frequently mentioned by mothers of over-anxious children. (
Child Guidance
Clinic, Chatham
)

Generally, though, the experts took a reasonably robust line – ‘It is a useful medium for the projection of phantasy,’ asserted the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh – and by almost two to one they voted for the programme’s continuation. Henceforth, though, each episode was lumbered with a gratuitous tailpiece, in which a voiceover solemnly mulled over the moral issues that had been raised – a device that perhaps hastened the programme’s end in 1951.

Juvenile delinquency, although undoubtedly a real phenomenon, was almost certainly not as widespread as the moral panic imagined. One suggestive fact is that out of 1,315 working-class Glasgow boys who left school in January 1947, just over 12 per cent had been or would be convicted in the courts at least once between their eighth and eighteenth birthdays. Analysing the lives and outcomes of these boys over the three years after they left school, Thomas Ferguson (Professor of Public Health at Glasgow University) identified the main factors behind juvenile crime: low academic ability, employment problems, bad housing and criminal habits or tendencies in the family background. These were hardly unexpected findings, but the research was full and convincing.

However, where one gets closer to the subjects themselves is through John Mays, Warden of Liverpool University Settlement, who in 1950, before his work on the police, embarked on an in-depth study of 80 boys growing up in an impoverished, rundown area of central Liverpool. The majority of his sample admitted having committed ‘delinquent acts’ at some point during childhood and adolescence, with 30 having been convicted at least once and with 13 as the most common age for acts of delinquency. Mays’s findings were significant – emphasising the malfunctioning family and the importance of group solidarity in temporarily overriding individual conscience – but the real value of his study was, rather like Ferdynand Zweig’s, in the psychological depth of his case studies. Take one, with the interviewee probably in his mid- to late teens:

He has never appeared at a Juvenile Court but has committed offences which might very well have brought him there if he had been less lucky. All his delinquencies are typical of the pattern for the neighbourhood and were steadily but not excessively indulged in. He said ‘we’ used to steal fruit regularly from a shop on the way to school in the afternoon. When on holidays he shop-lifted in the company of other boys. Woolworths at———was mentioned. He has also stolen from a large Liverpool store and described how parties of schoolboys used to set off for town on a Saturday morning with the intention of shop-lifting. They carried with them a supply of paper bags so that they could wrap up the stolen goods and pass them off as purchases. The stealing was worked by a team with the usual ‘dowses’ and attention-engagers posted. He added some points on the ethics of shop-lifting. He ‘wouldn’t think twice’ about stealing things from a large store because ‘they rob you’ by ‘their fantastic prices’. However, he gradually broke away from such activities because had he been caught his mother would have been very upset and this acted as a deterrent. He did a lot of lorry-skipping but never took anything off the back. This he attributed to the fact that he knew that the driver would be held responsible and he felt sorry for him and didn’t want to cause him suffering. In the big stores he did not feel conscious of a similar personal relationship with the assistants behind the counter and did not think they would have to make good any losses.

Significantly, almost all of Mays’s interviewees were members of a youth club; he conceded that ‘the many young people who are at present inaccessible to research because they have never, and will never, submit themselves to the restraints of formal association are more deeply committed to delinquent habits than the youths who have co-operated in this project’.
¹⁰

An array of different residential institutions sought to reform these delinquents. ‘There can be no finer calling than that of moulding and fashioning the character of a wayward boy . . . and the ultimate realisation of the useful purpose of life,’ declared Harold Hamer, President of the Association of Headmasters, Headmistresses and Matrons of Approved Schools, at its annual conference in 1950. Two years later, a member of staff at High Beech, a probation home in Nutfield, Surrey, for male juvenile delinquents, agreed: ‘We are trying to turn out good citizens and good men . . . we are not just a place of detention.’ Or, in the words of that home’s mission statement (formulated in 1949), its purpose was to provide ‘the means whereby young offenders from unsatisfactory homes, who do not require prolonged periods of re-education [ie in an Approved School], may learn to discipline their lives and to develop qualities of character’. On the basis of a close study of High Beech’s records, as well as the revealing if sometimes sententious monthly issues of the
Approved
Schools Gazette
, Abigail Wills has concluded that by the 1950s ‘the project of reforming male delinquents centred around the notion of
mens sana
in corpore sano
(a healthy mind in a healthy body), which involved ideals such as strength of character, emotional independence, restrained heterosexuality and disciplined work ethic’ – a set of ideals ultimately ‘conceived in terms of the reclamation of delinquents “for the nation”’.

In practice, a high premium continued to be placed on conformity, and in practice also, some of these residential institutions could be brutal in the extreme. In the rather patchy report on juvenile delinquency that he submitted for Mass-Observation in 1949, H. D. Willcock quoted the experience of a 14-year-old at an Approved School some distance from London: ‘One Sunday morning we went for a walk in the country and one boy with us messed his trousers, and, when we got back, the officer took his trousers off and rubbed them all over his face. The stuff went into his eyes, his mouth, and his hair, so that you could not see his face from the brown mess.’ Once, after trying to escape, the 14-year-old was summoned to the governor’s office:

First he started by getting hold of me by the hair and giving me two black eyes. He then kicked me in the stomach and winded me. I ran to the fireplace and picked up a poker and threatened to hit him with it. Then two officers pounced on me and held me down whilst the Head beat me something terrible. When I got to my feet it was only to be knocked down by a terrific blow on the mouth. He then laid me across a chair and gave me fourteen strokes with the cane on the back and backside. After this he took off his coat and belted me all round the office. I must have lost consciousness because I remember coming round crying, ‘Father, father, stop, stop.’ I was completely out of my head. When he had finished beating me he led me down to the showers, kicking me all the way.

‘Strange and improbable as such accounts may seem,’ commented Will-cock, ‘this one is not unique in our files.’ And after citing ‘the case of the six boys in a northern Approved School who shot a master – and intended to murder the Head’, he remarked, ‘That school is probably an admirable one. But of others we hear fearful things.’
¹¹

It is clear that young people generally were increasingly being perceived as a social category – and social problem – of their own. ‘Was talking to a Hoxton greengrocer this morning who was inveighing against the behaviour of children of today,’ noted Gladys Langford in June 1949:

He said he heard a noise of cheering last winter after he had closed and opened his door to find some little girls of 8 or 9 lying on their backs with boys of 12 or 13 lying on top of them indulging in sex play – or even worse. He also said when he drove back thro’ Epping Forest the other night, by the Rising Sun among the bushes several little girls about 13 with faces mock made up were lying with boys & men in very abandoned attitudes. He blames the lack of home-life due to married women’s going to work. He says the Council provides houses but the homes no longer exist.

The nation’s youth, and not just its delinquent portion, became the object of sociological scrutiny. Mark Abrams, investigating leisure habits as early as 1947, found in a national survey of boys aged 16 to 20 that no fewer than 23 per cent said they spent their spare time doing ‘Nothing’. When Abrams specifically asked young people in a London borough how they had spent the previous evening, almost a third had been in either the cinema or the dance hall. In the spring of 1949, two researchers from the Social Medical Research Unit sought to investigate ‘the physical, mental and social health’ of 85 males living in a particular outer London borough and born between April and June 1931 – or, in the study’s evocative title, ‘Rising Eighteen in a London Suburb’. Their fieldwork did not contribute hugely to national uplift. Among only eight was ‘an outstanding aptitude, or strong interest in a specific subject, the main influence in deciding their choice of job’; most of the labourers and machine-minders concentrated their future hopes on ‘unrealistic dreams of becoming champion cyclists, football stars or dance-band leaders’; the ‘lack of creative or constructive leisure pursuits of these lads’ was ‘striking’, with ‘very few signs of any awakening interest in wider civic or community activities’; in terms of sexual mores, ‘the majority did not acknowledge the older sanctions of formal engagement and marriage’; and as for mental health, ‘a good deal of emotional disturbance was found’. Overall, the picture of these 18-year-old boys was one of ‘physically fit young men’ in a state of ‘passive acceptance of the world around them’ – a state very different, the researchers astutely reflected, from ‘the prevalent notion of restless youth eager to explore and experiment’.
¹²