Girl Trouble (18 page)

5.1
Poster advertising the film
Beat Girl
(1959): a miscreant daughter strums her bra strap in tune with young pop singer Adam Faith's guitar (© GAB Archive/Getty Images).

Against all odds, it works out just fine in the end. An old friend of Nichole's stabs and kills the creepy, oleaginous owner of the strip joint. Jenny has hysterics but quickly comes to her senses and realises she's had a lucky escape. In the final scene Paul, Nichole and Jenny walk away from sleazy Soho, vice and squalor, hugging each other and ready to play happy families properly, this time round.

Beat Girl
bridges the concerns of the 1950s and the 1960s. It has themes in common with 1950s ‘sexploitation' movies such as
Passport to Shame
, which professedly aimed to stir up public concern about ‘vice' while revelling in its on-screen possibilities. There are plenty of prurient moments in
Beat Girl
too: few opportunities were lost to show buttock-squirming strippers or Jennifer in baby-doll pyjamas. The idea of a well-meaning, middle-class father tested by a daughter's craze for popular music was not new. It had received an earlier, and much more anodyne treatment, in the 1955 British screwball comedy
As Long As They're Happy
.
2
In this earlier film, directed by J. Lee Thompson, stockbroker John Bentley, living in suburban Wimbledon, finds his life disrupted by his daughters' passions for the wrong type of men. The youngest swoons over American crooner Bobby Denver (modelled on Johnny Ray). A crisis arises when all the women in Bentley's household, including his wife and his maidservant, are seduced by Denver's crooning and his masculine charms. The paterfamilias gets his own back by flirting with a floozie (Diana Dors). Nevertheless, order is eventually, and reassuringly, restored.

But
Beat Girl
showed patriarchal authority besieged by something rather more challenging. Paul Linden is shown trying to put Jennifer in her place by telling her that in spite of her cosmetics (‘all that muck on your face') she is ‘just a little girl'. This is
clearly wishful thinking on his part. Jennifer is all woman. And her friends in the Off Beat coffee bar, articulate about what they see as the older generation's limitations and failings, aren't in the mood to be treated as children either.
Beat Girl
is memorable for its heavy-handed rendering of teenage slang – ‘square', ‘fade-out', ‘daddy-O' and so forth – trowelled on to emphasise a whopping new generation gap.

Beat Girl
managed to press a lot of alarm buttons before coming to its rather unconvincingly reassuring conclusion. There was a great deal of concern about young people slipping off the bandwagon of respectability. Some post-war films focusing on juvenile delinquency had shown girls as passive victims of male hooligans. In
Cosh Boy
(1953), for instance, a young Joan Collins plays the part of the hapless Rene, exploited by a loutish young Roy Walsh.
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Made pregnant, she attempts suicide. All comes well in the end, though. Rene is saved from drowning and Roy gets a good thrashing. Unlike Rene, Jennifer in
Beat Girl
is no mere plot device: she is cantankerous, lippy, and out of control.

Representations of young people jiving, or hypnotised by jazz in coffee bars and basement cellars, were fast becoming a way of drawing attention to the problems of youth. After the Second World War, clubs of all kinds mushroomed in British towns and cities. These venues were often very small. A modest terrace house might have separate clubs on each floor. This was the case, for instance, at 4 Queen's Square, Brighton: premises which were associated with a notorious murder case in the early 1960s. There were three clubs at 4 Queen's Square in the late 1950s. The basement housed the Whiskey-A-Go-Go coffee bar, the ground floor the Calypso Club, while the Blue Gardenia Club occupied the first floor.
4
London and large towns like Manchester and Birmingham saw a huge rise in the numbers of clubs.
5
In the
London borough of Stepney, for instance, it was reported that whereas in 1954 there had only been eighteen registered clubs, by 1960 there were ninety-two.
6
In a debate in the House of Lords about the difficulties of licensing and controlling these venues, it was claimed that none of the ninety-odd clubs in Stepney was respectable.
7

As meeting places for young people, these clubs gave parents and magistrates headaches. Many of these places were no doubt harmless enough. They were often very crowded though, which raised questions of safety. In addition, the atmosphere was often dark and laden with cigarette smoke. There were reports of ‘Indian hemp', and suspicions, or even observations, of ‘heavy petting'. In places like Stepney, Notting Hill and Manchester, the clubs allowed young people from different social backgrounds and of varied ethnic origins to mix freely. The authorities suspected the worst.

Contemporary cinema added to their misgivings. Appearing in the same year as
Beat Girl
(1959), the film
Sapphire
similarly raised issues around girls, clubs and danger.
8
Sapphire
focused on the fictional case of a girl of that name who was murdered. Her body had been found on Hampstead Heath. We learn little about this girl except that she liked dancing in clubs, and wore sexy underwear. The film features memorable footage of young people, black and white, dancing wildly in the ‘Tulip Club'. In the aftermath of the Notting Hill riots of 1958, the subject of race relations was highly topical. Although the film sets out to contest ‘colour prejudice', it nevertheless seems mired in it. Detectives investigating Sapphire's murder watch a young woman dancing with a trance-like expression on her face, and are told that she dances like this because she is a ‘lilyskin': white-skinned, but with black blood. It emerges that Sapphire was of mixed race. The
glamorous underwear – a red taffeta petticoat under a demure skirt – is supposed to suggest this. ‘That's the black under the white all right,' comments the policeman. The hypnotic response to beat music indicates that all is not what it seems. ‘You can always tell, once they hear the beat of the bongo,' someone observes helpfully. Whatever its intentions, the film suggests the hidden danger of miscegenation.

In the East End of London, social worker Edith Ramsay and an impassioned local cleric, the Reverend Williamson, campaigned against the mushrooming of local clubs, which they saw as closely bound up with the rise of prostitution in Stepney. Ramsay, dubbed ‘the Florence Nightingale of the brothels', lived in Stepney and had many friends and strong relationships in the locality.
9
She also had easy access to the network of clubs and cafés in Commercial Road and Cable Street. In the mid-1950s, Ramsay argued, prostitutes (known locally as ‘pavement waitresses') could be found along the roadside, but the impact of the Street Offences Act of 1959 was to drive them off the streets and into the clubs and cafés.
10
The proximity of the London docks ensured that these all-night cafés were patronised by a richly varied clientele of West Indians, Somalis, ‘Jugo-Slavs', Sikhs and Maltese, as well as the locals. One of Edith Ramsay's main concerns was that the cafés and clubs offered a warm welcome to vulnerable young girls – both local girls and runaways from home and from approved schools elsewhere in the country – who were tempted into prostitution through the very high wages obtainable.
11

The wartime study of conditions among the immigrant population in Stepney by Phyllis Young (mentioned in
Chapter 4
) illustrates the background to these concerns.
12
This report offered a very different perspective. Young found that during the Second
World War Stepney proved a magnet for large numbers of young white women aged between sixteen and thirty-five, from all over the country, but particularly from bombed-out Coventry and Hull. Some of these young women, Young explained, adopted a predatory attitude to unattached foreigners. There were large numbers of lonely and vulnerable ex-seamen and immigrants haunting the cafés. British girls often found the foreign and darker-skinned men particularly attractive. Young's account differs dramatically from the complaints of Reverend Williamson, who urged the London County Council to crack down on ‘foreign pimps and club-owners'. He accused immigrants of ‘living on our poor girls who are weak in mind and character'.
13

The moral panic over clubs in Stepney was highly revealing of contemporary anxieties and prejudices. For the Reverend Williamson, clubs were centres of vice to be thundered at. He denounced them as centres of everything he deplored: unchecked immigration, girls ‘oozing money' on account of their ‘elastic moral standards', contraceptives, and jukeboxes, which he clearly saw as the work of the devil. Ramsay was rather more measured in her attacks, except when it came to homosexuals. Remarking on the different categories of ‘pouffes', whom she alleged flocked to the clubs in Stepney, she concluded that their presence undoubtedly added to a ‘prevailing sense of evil'.
14
Investigating the clubs, both Williamson and Ramsay produced colourful descriptions of club-goers and atmosphere which were eagerly reproduced in the press. Relaying goings-on in the Shamrock Club, for instance, Williamson reported a girl ‘in scanty clothes' ‘waggling her bottom' to jukebox music and then stripping down to her G-string.
15
About fifteen men were said to have been watching this performance. Visiting the St Louis, Batty Street and Play Box clubs, Ramsay described ‘young,
grubby and shabbily dressed girls … embracing coloured men', and a ‘curious atmosphere of frenzy and indecency' as couples engaged in ‘expert Rock and Roll'.
16

A campaign to extend magistrates' and police powers to crack down on and control the clubs gained the support of Labour peers Lord Stonham and Baroness Ravensdale in the House of Lords. Introducing the subject in the Lords in 1960, Lord Stonham took the line that ‘Vice has “never had it so good” as in this country'.
17
He saw clubs as debauching the young: as centres of vice, drugs, striptease and squalor. Baroness Ravensdale, much respected for her work with young people in London, spoke in the Lords about how she had been treated to a tour of the clubs in Stepney, escorted by Miss Ramsay. She would not name the establishments in question, Irene Ravensdale announced dramatically, because she did not ‘want to be slashed or to have vitriol thrown into my face'.
18
The baroness proceeded to regale the House with descriptions of jukeboxes and teenage girls in G-strings. She also attacked the clientele of the lunchtime strip shows popular in the clubs. These audiences consisted mainly of ‘ordinary City types, with black coats and striped trousers'. ‘[B]egging your Lordships' pardon', she continued, these men ‘stride religiously into “Peeporama”, and they take a pal so that they can put it on an expense account. They are aged between 30 and 55. Why do they go in? They go in to giggle and goggle and leer at these miserable strip-tease girls.'
19
Striptease was big business, she continued ruefully, before swerving off into another paragraph of revelations and rhetoric. ‘Doomed girls' were smoking in doorways, touting themselves and coining money; they would ‘charge a “fiver” for a long spell and £1 for a quick bash'.
20
The baroness's journey around the clubs had left her in no doubt that they all had ‘the blackest record':

The prostitutes were tragic and squalid and the men with whom I spoke and chatted mainly coloured. I have no doubt that they were all experts in vice, dope-selling and drug-peddling. One coloured man even offered me a dance to a ‘juke box', and when I said that I was too old for the ‘Cha-Cha' he said that he would put on a slow fox-trot for me.
21

Some of these ‘experts in vice' had manners. Baroness Ravensdale admitted that her host had been hospitable, even solicitously so. He ‘had the touching decency to say to Miss Ramsay and me as we left that he hoped his companions had caused us no inconvenience, as some of them were pretty drunk. There is a chivalry even among these thugs and gangsters.' Hardly surprisingly, however, it was the shock-horror stuff that made it into the newspapers. The good manners, chivalry and the concern for young girls – for all of which Ramsay and Ravensdale found ample evidence in the clubs of Stepney – made for far less colourful copy. It was all too easy to stir up public outrage about what Baroness Ravensdale described with spirit (and in a sequence of mixed metaphors) as a ‘running sore', ‘a great evil crossword puzzle that links up vice with drugs, nudist shows and striptease' in the clubs.
22
Other pillars of the establishment leapt to her defence, quick to seize the moral high ground. For the Bishop of Carlisle, for instance, the clubs were places ‘of evil in a gross and beastly form', where wicked men lured young women into becoming ‘the victims and slaves of vice'.
23

The idea of London as a ‘festering sore', harbouring networks, ‘crossword puzzles' or cobwebs of vice was unsettling, and of course it was taken up with gusto in the Sunday newspapers.
24
One of the main concerns of the Wolfenden Report on Homosexuality and Prostitution, published in 1957, was with ‘public
order and decency'. Comparatively liberal on homosexual acts (which Wolfenden recommended decriminalising if in private, and between consenting adults), the committee had taken a harsher line on prostitution.
25
A double standard (fines for female prostitutes soliciting in public places, their male clients not regarded as nuisances) remained undisturbed. The Street Offences Act of 1959, mentioned earlier, was specifically designed to push prostitution from the streets. According to Edith Ramsay and other observers, however, this not only succeeded in driving prostitutes into clubs and cafés, but also encouraged a proliferation of ‘call girls', operating to some extent underground.
26
The idea of vice hidden in basement cellars and private clubs was no less unsettling than the idea of vice on the streets. On top of this, anxieties about immigrants and the foreign ownership of many of the clubs (such as the Maltese club and café proprietors in east London) added to concerns. And were girls always the
victims
of vice? The gentlemen discussing the clubs in the House of Lords liked to portray them as such, but there was evidence that becoming a call girl was an attractive career option that brought lucrative prospects.
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