Girl Trouble (15 page)

Today's sermon tells us what happens to little girls who like dancing and jewellery and run away from their brutal daddies who beat them – as if you didn't know.

Dilys Powell in the
Sunday Times
was one of the few who
considered the film a morality tale rather than an incitement to debauchery. But even she wondered whether its depiction of the workings of the juvenile courts was overly pessimistic.
31
Comparatively few of the reviewers seem to have engaged with questions about the kind of treatment meted out to girls in approved schools, even though both
Night Darkens the Streets
and
Good Time Girl
were critical of current practice. It was the government's reputation in this respect that had worried the Home Office.

Approved schools for girls attracted a disproportionate amount of public interest. This was probably not unconnected with the subject's potential to stimulate erotic imaginings and the regular production of second-rate films and bad novels.
32
Markedly fewer girls than boys came before the juvenile courts.
33
Girls were more likely than boys to be classified as delinquent for moral and sexual, rather than criminal, behaviour. Lilian Barker, Governor of Aylesbury Girls' Borstal in the 1920s, judged that most of the girls in her care got into trouble because they were ‘over-sexed'. ‘Sex to my mind ought to be put in the same category as stealing and lying,' she asserted, adding somewhat scarily: ‘It has to be got out of them somehow.'
34

Dame Lilian acquired a reputation for humane prison governance. But some reform schools (later approved schools) could be frightening places. Knowle Hill, originally a reformatory school for girls in Kenilworth, Warwickshire, housed up to fifty girls. There had been riots among the inmates in 1923: the school was said to be entirely out of control and the police were called in.
35
An officer reportedly was badly bitten by one of the girls. Punishments were harsh. Some girls were whipped with the tawse on their hands or buttocks. Others were forced to swallow castor oil – a traditional punishment which produced cramp-like
stomach pains. A few girls alleged that they were threatened with injections by the school doctor, which they were told would be painful and make them sick. The Home Office had been forced to intervene by visiting the school and carrying out an inquiry. Much of the girls' testimony was denied. Notes on the case suggest that the injections may have contained apomorphine, sometimes used in cases of hysteria.
36
The issue of corporal punishment was controversial: two female inspectors had strongly objected in the Knowle Hill case. But while discouraging the practice, the Home Office was reluctant to ban it altogether. An internal memorandum in 1923 submitted that the task of controlling difficult girls – especially when hysterical – could be formidable.
37
The punishment book from Knowle Hill shows that canings and slappings continued into the 1950s.
38
A boy from the local grammar school, who visited as part of an exchange in 1970, never forgot his sight of the ‘padded cell' at Knowle Hill, a small lockable room with heavy padding on walls, floor and door.
39
There were, no doubt, institutions run on enlightened and compassionate principles, but others found it hard to shed the punitive traditions of the reformatory.

The good-time girl had become a folk-devil. Stereotypes of her appeared in surprising places, sometimes under the guise of ‘objective' social research. In 1946, for instance, the
British
Medical Journal
published an article on ‘The Unstable Adolescent Girl' which had originally appeared as an appendix to a report of the Committee of Psychiatry and the Law, and had gained the approval of both the British Medical Association and the Magistrates' Association.
40
This urged attention to what it defined as a serious social problem, one which it contended had become worse since the end of the Second World War: that of ‘the good-time girl', ‘unamenable to discipline and control'. These unstable
girls often showed ‘precocious physical development, especially in the breast and hips'. They were cunning, and targeted good-looking men with money.

They spend a great deal of time on making up their faces and adorning themselves, though they often do not trouble to wash and are sluttish about their undergarments. Their favourite reading matter consists of the weekly journals dealing with the love life of film stars, and they live in a fantasy world of erotic glamour. Frequently they are a good deal more intelligent and sophisticated than their parents, whom they outwit and despise.
41

This report has echoes of Cyril Burt, who had characterised girl delinquents as sometimes highly intelligent but ‘oversexed': reckless adventuresses with no sense of shame.
42
According to the
British Medical Journal
writers, such girls did not settle well in remand homes or approved schools, and needed medical and psychiatric treatment. These wayward girls, they submitted, were out of control.
43

Criticism of young girls' appearance, their hairstyles, make-up and mode of dress is common in post-1945 accounts of wayward girls. H. D. Willcock's report on juvenile delinquency, for instance, published in 1949, contained observations such as ‘the girls are all extremely heavily made up, with extra thick lipstick applied carelessly', and ‘Their faces were heavily and inexpertly made up, one [girl] sported a pair of long ear-rings.'
44
Writing about girls' problems, and problem girls, is shot through with prejudice stemming from assumptions about class, aesthetics, taste and morality. With references to breasts and underwear, and accusations of sluttishness and nymphomania, these descriptions are also eroticised. This is apparent in the representations; it is also
clear from the way in which they were read, both at the time and subsequently. An internet trawl for ‘reform school girl' yields predictable results. And nearly a century later, accounts of the riots and of the punishments meted out to the hapless girls at Knowle Hill are detailed on semi-pornographic websites.
45

The post-war moral panic over good-time girls was fuelled by unease over the belief that they were earning ‘easy money'. Women who struck up relationships with men from upper- or upper-middle-class backgrounds often came in for particular vilification. They were resented as being ‘on the make'. Ruth Ellis, tried and hanged for shooting her abusive lover David Blakely in the mid-fifties, suffered from the class hostility of those who condemned her social ambition along with her sexual behaviour as a good-time girl.
46
Like Gladys Mary Hall in the 1930s, most investigators maintained that girls traded sex for luxury, not out of necessity. Scotland Yard's Detective-Inspector Robert Fabian, whose colourful tales inspired a popular BBC television series,
Fabian of the Yard
(1954–6), insisted that he knew what made a girl become a prostitute. It was ‘sheer laziness, and vanity'. These girls were as hard as nails, he asserted. His own hardened, man-of the-world tone blended with an American-crime-writerish misogyny:

A whore is a bad apple. There is a big brown bruise on her soul, of self-indulgence and selfishness. I do not think that there exists in London any such person as an honest prostitute. They taint any flesh they touch.
47

But the pipe-smoking Fabian also set out to reassure. The Metropolitan Police made it their business to look out for runaway girls and wayward daughters, he contended. A big van (‘the Children's Waggon') did its rounds every evening, collecting young girls who had gone missing or escaped from remand
homes, in order to deliver them to safety.
48
Fabian's writing bristles with double standards, demonising good-time girls, indulgent towards the men who would consort with them.

But one group of men was singled out for particular opprobrium. Immigrants – particularly of Maltese and Sicilian origin – were seen as particularly responsible for the burgeoning of vice in post-war London. The popular press whipped up a great deal of scandal about the Messina brothers, a focus of police attention since the 1930s, who were finally forced out of Britain in the 1950s.
49
But it is difficult to know how representative the Messina enterprises were. Most of the women in the Messina network seem also to have been immigrants, often with Maltese or Italian connections, a fact which undermines any stereotypes claiming that the Messinas preyed on English girls who had run away from home.
50

In 1958 the film
Passport to Shame
claimed to expose the evil of girls trapped into prostitution by pimps with Italian-sounding names. The film began with a spoken introduction by Robert Fabian warning of ‘the terrible methods used to trap innocent girls into prostitution'.
51
The film trotted out all the clichés of 1900s white slavery: drugged cigarettes, blondes writhing on beds, a girl caged in by a grille of iron bars. A young Diana Dors added filmic interest, trussed up in a basque and suspenders. In the 1950s, lurid stories of London vice and criminality filled the pages of the
People
and the
News of the World
.
52
Any evidence of white girls consorting with immigrant or ‘coloured' men continued to provoke horror, and often predictably stereotyped reactions, in the press.

The real situation could be very different. Just before the end of the Second World War, for instance, social investigator Phyllis Young investigated conditions in the Stepney area. She found that
local cafés served as rendezvous for meetings between coloured male immigrants, often seamen, and white girls.
53
Reversing common stereotypes of girls as victims, Phyllis Young described how these girls were often opportunistic, bent on seeking a livelihood. She suggested that they found ‘the coloured man an easy prey'. Other girls were genuinely attracted to foreigners, finding them more passionate, or charming, than the ‘average Englishman'. Mixed marriages were becoming more common.
54
Edith Ramsay, who battled for many years as a community worker in the East End, noted that runaway girls often met with a warm welcome in the ‘counter-society' of the café world. In her opinion, forced prostitution was rare. But the high wages obtainable in the sex trade were to her a worrying incentive.
55
After the war, Inspector Fabian's confident assertion that London was the vice capital of the world, full of foreign pimps on the prowl for innocent girls, unsettled parents further.
56

Nevertheless, most girls lived lives very distant from all this. The delinquent adolescent female, the reform-school girl who loomed so large in the popular imagination after the war, was something of a rarity. Between five and eight times as many boys as girls came before the courts, charged with indictable offences in the 1950s.
57
Around six times as many boys as girls were admitted to approved schools between 1952 and 1957.
58
There were fewer approved schools for girls than for boys in Britain (39 for girls, 88 for boys) because they simply were not needed. In 1958, for instance, only 766 girls in the whole of England were sent to approved schools.
59

One journalist who was well aware of the extent to which moral panic had distorted the picture of youthful femininity was
Picture Post
's reporter Hilde Marchant. In January 1951,
Picture Post
published a feature written by Marchant and entitled
‘Millions Like Her' which described the life of Betty Burden, a young working-class girl in Birmingham.
60
Betty's life was described as typical of Britain's young girls. She was introduced as ‘The real thing – not the imagined creature the sociologists theorise about, novelists write about, and moralists deplore.' Betty lived with her family in what could only be described as a slum: back-to-back housing in an area scarred by industrial waste and bomb damage. But behind the squalid interior the inside of the house was gleaming. Her family was close-knit and caring. Betty worked as a children's hairdresser in a Birmingham department store. She had a boyfriend and enjoyed dancing. She didn't smoke, rarely drank alcohol, and dressed modestly and neatly. A great deal of her time was devoted to helping her mother with housework, Sunday dinner and the weekly family wash. The feature was illustrated with a series of photographs
by Bert Hardy celebrating Betty's love of her family, her modest aspirations and her unimpeachable respectability. Both text and captions make it clear that Betty and young girls like her were the hope of post-war Britain.