Girl Trouble (4 page)

1.1
Innocent victim of the white slave trade pictured in
Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; or, War on the White Slave Trade
, edited by Ernest A. Bell and published in 1910. Note the shadowy predator in the background.

Well before the raid on Queenie Gerald's flat in Piccadilly, and the meeting in Caxton Hall, the public had been baying for action against white slavery. In 1910, a fat volume edited by Ernest A. Bell brought together English and American campaigners in a series of essays entitled
Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; or, War on the White Slave Trade
.
33
The book's cover carried an image of a terrified young maiden trapped in a cage, a shadowy, lecherous figure advancing threateningly, and a cry to action
from General Booth of the Salvation Army, ‘For God's sake, Do Something!' When W. T. Stead was drowned, on the maiden voyage of the
Titanic
in 1912, many campaigners redoubled their efforts in his name. A pamphlet issued by the Ladies' National Association for the Abolition of State Regulation of Vice and for the Promotion of Social Purity in 1912 gave extremely vague details about a couple of cases of attempted abduction under the heading ‘True cases which could easily be multiplied'.
34
Historian Edward Bristow noted that public hysteria had got to a point where the 5,000 girls working London's telephone exchanges were given official warnings to watch out for drugged chocolates and similar dangers.
35
Those pushing for new legislation insisted on the urgency of intervention at Christmas time, when they suggested that girls were particularly vulnerable, about on the streets doing their Christmas shopping.
36
Public pressure succeeded in bringing about a new Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1912, which tightened provisions against brothel keeping, procuring and those living on immoral earnings.
37
It gave increased powers to the police, and provided for the flogging of male procurers. There were cheers in the House of Lords when Lord Haldane expressed his approval of flogging in such cases. Some thought penalties should be even harsher. The Earl of Lytton, for instance, suggested branding offenders instead of thrashing them.
38

1.2
The white slaver disguised as a helpful gentleman approaching an unwary young lady at a railway station. From Ernest A. Bell's
Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls; or, War on the White Slave Trade
, 1910.

While many applauded any crackdown against those they saw as ‘human beasts of prey', male or female, some voices at least were raised in liberal protest. Enthusiasts for the flogging of procurers tended to gloss over the fact that those accused of procuring (as in Elizabeth Robins's novel or in the Piccadilly Flat case) were often female. A number of prominent women, most of them feminists, expressed their distaste for the penalty of flogging itself. They considered this brutal and degrading, and spoke
of their unease at a new standard of inequality in punishment between women and men. Signatories to a letter of protest to this effect, forwarded to the prime minister through the Humanitarian League, included Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the labour politician Margaret Bondfield, Elizabeth Robins, Beatrice Webb, Mrs Bramwell Booth of the Salvation Army, Teresa Billington-Greig and several other prominent suffragists.
39
Rebecca West was incredulous: ‘Our instincts tell us that normal healthy people do not flog other people, any more than they skin live cats in their back gardens,' she commented acerbically.
40

Not all of this group were convinced that white slavery even existed in the form often imagined. Feminists were increasingly divided on the issue. For some, the term ‘white slavery' had become coterminous with prostitution and the sexual slavery that they believed men inflicted on women. Others were uneasy about seeing the majority of men as sexually dangerous and the majority of women as victims. In June 1913, Teresa Billington-Greig published an article in the
English Review
entitled ‘The Truth about White Slavery'.
41
She noted that a wave of public anger brought about by an ‘epidemic of terrible rumours' was what had led to the punitive Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1912. Stories of the trapping of girls circulated everywhere. Most of these were embroidered with details of chloroformed handkerchiefs, drugged sweets, or syringes administered by strangers at railway stations. These horror stories invariably turned out, on close investigation, to be apocryphal. Everyone knew someone who had confided in someone else whose distant acquaintance had heard about the terrible case of the Hampstead hairdresser's daughter, or someone like her, who had inexplicably gone missing. Billington-Greig categorised such stories, relentlessly tried to track down evidence for what we would now call ‘urban myths'
of this kind, and found none. She collected and scrutinised statistics from chief constables in twelve different towns. All showed that the majority of girls and young women reported as gone missing were traced fairly quickly, more quickly than was the case with missing boys. Eleanor Carey, an experienced probation officer at Thames Police Court, confessed that she had never come across a single case of a girl being trapped or forced into prostitution.
42
In every case known to her, where a girl had been found in a brothel she had been ‘a willing, though blind and misguided victim'. Many police court missionaries, wardens of women's settlements and other social workers gave the same story. Finally, Billington-Greig questioned F. S. Bullock, the Assistant Commissioner of Police responsible for Scotland Yard's White Slavery Suppression branch. Bullock replied:

I cannot call to mind a single case of the forcible trapping of a girl or woman by drugs, false messages, or physical force during the last ten years that has been authenticated or proved. I should say such cases were very rare indeed … The average number of cases of procuration in London is about three per annum, and none of these are really cases of trapping.
43

All this led Billington-Greig to denounce what she dismissed as ‘sedulously cultivated sexual hysterics', premised on the notion that all men were vicious while women were ‘imbecilic weaklings'.
44

F. S. Bullock thought that the level of public anxiety and the mass of scare stories gave a completely false impression of the dangers facing girls and women on the London streets. In the main he thought the panic a ‘curious result' of press attention to the supposed existence of a white slave trade. The dedicated
work of his special department in its first twelve months had brought no evidence of any organised trafficking in the capital.
45
Rumours of girls being waylaid by women dressed as nurses at railway stations and so forth were invariably discovered to be without foundation. This did not mean that cases of sexual exploitation were rare. Bullock himself thought that the greater freedoms afforded to girls in recent decades had brought additional risks in this respect:

In these days of education and independence, many a girl, anxious to make her own living, but innocent of the world and its dangers, puts herself in the power of a man who cannot be called a trafficker in women, but may be and often is, a man of immoral character, and the result may be easily imagined. His proposals to an innocent girl strike terror into her heart, and such a case in the hands of a rescue worker naturally assumes the aspect of trafficking, though it is in reality an isolated case of sordid temptation and weakness.
46

Senior police officers were increasingly uneasy about the use of the terms ‘white slave trade' or ‘white slave traffic', preferring ‘offences against women and children'.
47

But the term ‘white slavery' had become locked into the public imagination, and would prove almost as hard to eradicate as prostitution itself. Even harder to eradicate were the fears of parents, and dark imaginings in the public mind. Girls growing up in the years before the First World War were subjected to endless warnings about the dangers of being kidnapped by white slavers. Kathleen Hale had studied at Reading University just before the war. After completing her studies she moved to London, rather nervous because her mother had ‘succeeded in scaring the daylights out of me with her stories of the perils of
the White Slave Traffic'. Train journeys threw her into a panic because she was convinced that ‘all men, and even old women – in fact, everybody except policemen and railway guards – were potential white slave traffickers'.
48
In her biography of Vera Brittain, Deborah Gorham notes that the young Vera's relationship with her father Arthur became strained during her adolescence not least because he lived with constant fear that she might be abducted.
49
In her diary, Vera recorded that her mother had insisted on accompanying her on a visit to an aunt because ‘Daddy started talking about pepperboxes, & gags, and White Slave Traffic as usual.'
50
Warned never to travel in an empty train compartment, Vera did have one scary encounter on a trip home from her select boarding school. A man, ‘hairy-handed' and smelling of alcohol, entered the carriage and leered at her. When he suggested a kiss, Vera panicked, her imagination conjuring up the worst.
51
The social historian Dorothy Marshall, who also grew up in the North of England before the war, recalled an unhappy year spent at a boarding school in Blackpool where she was subjected to lurid accounts of white slavery from the other girls in the dormitory.
52
Dorothy's parents, like Vera's, instilled anxious warnings. Looking back, Dorothy considered that these early fears ‘provided one strand in my make-up, it is one which I should be happy to do without'.
53

In reality, girls travelling alone in the 1900s were much more likely to be accosted by social workers determined to protect young innocents than by pimps or predators. England's ports and railway stations were by then swarming with voluntary workers representing the many societies undertaking to safeguard lonely country girls about to enter the big city. Young girls destined for domestic service were identified as a particularly vulnerable group, and Travellers' Aid Societies, the Salvation Army, and a
host of other groups stepped in to organise rotas and patrols at embarkation points and on station platforms.
54
The aim was to make sure that young workers found reputable employment, and to influence them in the way of good habits, continence, regularity and religion. Cinema foyers, bars and dance halls were also seen as key hunting grounds for procurers: the Ernest Bell publication mentioned above contained a series of graphic illustrations showing fashionably dressed villains twirling canes and moustaches and advancing on young girls in such places. The author of a warning manual for parents,
The Dangers of False Prudery
(1912), warned of ‘the cinematograph, the mutascope and kindred perils', especially at funfairs and ‘in ice-cream shops in Scotch towns run by Italians'.
55
Foreigners were particularly suspect: the white slavery obsessions of the 1900s fuelled a wave of xenophobia directed against Jews, Italians and Chinamen.

Those involved in campaigns against white slavery saw themselves as crusaders fighting a Holy War in the name of ‘social purity'. An enormous amount of individual and collective energy went into late Victorian and early Edwardian campaigns for social (effectively a euphemism for ‘sexual') purity.
56
There were societies like the National Vigilance Association, constituted in 1885 in response to Stead's ‘Maiden Tribute' campaign, whose secretary, the previously mentioned W. A. Coote, devoted his life to moral reform and campaigns against the white slave trade. Coote approached his self-appointed task with Messianic zeal.
57
There were also the societies originally formed to campaign against the state regulation of prostitution, in the form of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864 and 1866. These acts had subjected prostitutes (but not their clients) to compulsory medical examinations for venereal disease.
58
After the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1886, some of these societies, notably
the feminist Josephine Butler's Ladies' National Association, continued their existence, broadening their scope to campaign for social purity. In addition to these, there were church-based societies for social purity such as the Anglican White Cross Society, formed by Ellice Hopkins in the 1880s to bring a higher moral standard to young men.
59
There were numerous societies aiming to protect young women. Ellice Hopkins had founded a Ladies' Association for the Care of Friendless Girls in the 1870s. The Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants (MABYS) dated from 1875. Both of these had directed their efforts at the care of young girl workers in the city, aiming to keep them away from alcohol, crime and prostitution.
60