The Sexual History of London (37 page)

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.'
³⁰
Female 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.