Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  VII

  The displacements caused by war, with people being uprooted and communities shifting, had other malign effects on behaviour and on society, and these became apparent before 1917. From early 1916 cocaine, a drug then still available over the counter to persons known to the chemist, or introduced by someone the chemist did know, caused an epidemic of addiction, though the expense of the substance tended to confine the problem to the better-off. A substantial black market had grown up in the drug for the benefit of those not well connected to an obliging chemist. ‘I am informed,’ Samuel told the Commons on 22 June 1916, ‘that there has been increased use of cocaine among certain classes.’136 It was widely believed it had become the drug of choice since the suppression of opium, which had happened under the 1908 Pharmacy Act; the government banned its sale to members of the Armed Forces and considered restricting it to the public. So-called ‘pick-me-ups’ containing ether or cocaine were widely available in shops in London’s more fashionable districts, and their use was thought to encourage a craving for pure cocaine. Suppliers and traffickers came before the courts almost daily, and most received harsh prison sentences; there were also concerns that Germany was flooding Britain with the drug through its agents, to undermine the health and morale of soldiers on leave. A high proportion of those convicted were foreigners, notably Russians. As a public panic developed, the government decided on 28 July 1916 to ban by Royal Proclamation the importation of cocaine and opium, except under licence.

  Soldiers in France had often become used to frequenting brothels, not so much for recreation as to help cope with alleviating the trauma of war; and demand for the services of prostitutes rocketed even in cities such as London, where prostitution had long been a problem. This helped fuel an epidemic of venereal disease, which gratuitously added to the casualties sustained by the Army. Questions were asked in the Commons from early in 1917 about the leniency of penalties imposed on those keeping ‘disorderly houses’.137 Cave promised on 13 February to give extra powers to magistrates to deal with brothels, and that new legislation would be introduced. The maximum fine for a repeat offender keeping a brothel was £40, which Cave described as ‘a mere flea bite’. He increased it to £500 or a year in prison for a third and subsequent offence; the maximum penalty for soliciting would be a month in prison. Most radically, he proposed to make it a criminal offence for someone knowingly carrying a venereal disease to have sexual intercourse with anyone else; and proposed to extend the 1889 Indecent Advertisements Act ‘not only to all advertisements relating to this disease, but to advertisements of means for procuring miscarriage or abortion, or suggesting that premises can be used for immoral purposes. We are also increasing the penalties, which seem to be too light. The penalties are increased to £100 and six months’ imprisonment, instead of 40s and one month’s imprisonment, and £5 and three months’ imprisonment respectively.’138 The purpose of banning advertisements for VD cures was to try to ensure that quack medicines – which included almost all so-called cures – were not taken as a substitute for genuine treatment.

  The war did not invent VD, a sufficient scourge in peacetime Britain that a Royal Commission on prevention and the better organisation of treatment had been established in 1913; but war had made the situation far worse. The Royal Commission wanted sex education to alert young people to the dangers; a conference of headmistresses of girls’ schools in July 1916 agreed the duty lay with parents ‘to give their daughters necessary moral instruction in the matter’, although a woman doctor who was present warned them that ‘her experience of middle and upper class parents was that they were unwilling and unable to deal with these things’ and parents from the lower orders ‘had not the gift of expression.’139 Self-appointed experts toured Britain lecturing on the dangers of VD. Mrs Bessie Ward, from the Council of Civil Liberties, in January 1917 addressed a meeting of the Women’s Co-operative Guild in Richmond-on-Thames, organised by Virginia Woolf. Mrs Ward spoke on conscription – a subject familiar to the Bloomsbury set, most of whose eligible members strove to avoid it – which inevitably caused her to talk about the dangers of VD to unwary young soldiers. After the meeting a regular member, a Mrs Langston, expressed her outrage at Mrs Ward’s remarks; she felt only a childless woman could have made such a speech and said, before bursting into tears, ‘for we mothers try to forget what our sons have to go through.’140 Mrs Woolf’s biographer describes her as ‘unrepentant’, and to have regarded the poor woman’s outburst as ‘nonsense’; Bloomsbury’s callous detachment from the realities that its members did so much to avoid encountering was seldom displayed so vividly.

  By 1917 politicians believed Britain was in the grip of a VD epidemic. Despite a determination to discuss the matter as little as possible, the public too were increasingly aware of the problem. Cave’s Criminal Law Amendment Bill made it an offence punishable by up to two years’ imprisonment (with or without hard labour) for a person with a venereal disease to solicit another person for sexual intercourse, or to commit the act. Once this came before Parliament it became harder to contain public concern. A hospital in London specialising in VD, the Lock, had recorded 23,974 cases in 1913, but by 1916 there were 36,500 of them.141 The diseases affected infant mortality and child health, and a doctor who gave evidence to the commission said the effect on the nation generally was perhaps worse than tuberculosis. The higher incidence of the disease also helped drive up the divorce rate, and with it demands for liberalisation of the divorce law.

  In the Army, 43 men in every 1,000 were suffering, or a total of a 107,000 men in an army of around 5 million, a disaster when every man counted.142 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was so alarmed that he demanded all ‘notorious prostitutes and brothel-keepers’ should be interned until six months after the war; to others this smacked of the Victorian Contagious Diseases Act (which had left women in the vicinity of naval dockyards and military barracks liable to arrest and medical inspection), and the idea was deeply resisted.143 London was viewed as the centre of depravity, with the area around Waterloo Road regarded as ‘an open sewer’ where prostitutes solicited soldiers on leave, whose wallets they would routinely rifle after business was done.144 Even more horrific to contemporary sensibilities were reports that boys were ‘touting’ for business on behalf of the prostitutes in the ‘open sewer’. The problem was compounded by a number of ‘amateur’ women supplementing the already swollen ranks of the professionals.145 After a story in The Times highlighted the problem, patrols of military police went to the district to arrest soldiers for breaches of military discipline; and the local police rounded up women talking to servicemen and charged them with ‘interfering with soldiers’.146

  For civilians, the Local Government Board had asked a hundred and forty-five local councils to provide treatment plans; ninety-nine had done so by late April 1917 and sixty-one were already approved, serving a population of three million.147 The ratio of sufferers was roughly two or three men for every woman; to stop quacks making things worse the Bill made it an offence punishable by a fine of £100 or six months in prison to treat VD if unqualified. A publicity campaign would advertise the new centres, ending the culture of pretending the diseases did not exist. In the war until April 1917 there had been 27,000 cases of syphilis, 7,000 of gonorrhea and 6,000 of other syphilis-related diseases. Guest, the coalition chief whip, said women waited at railway stations for soldiers returning from leave to lure them to brothels, and advocated better supervision of men at home on leave. He also believed VD should be made notifiable, a view shared by many of his colleagues, with sufferers who refused treatment subject to arrest and detention while they were treated. In March 1918 he had his wish, when an amendment to DORA – Regulation 40D – made it an offence for a woman with any venereal disease to have sexual intercourse with a member of the Armed Forces. Some constabularies caused outrage by allowing the press to publish the names of woman charged with having sexual intercourse with a soldier while infected, but keeping the soldier’s name se
cret. Nor did it occur to the zealots that a woman could be charged for infecting her husband, even if he had infected her in the first place but had subsequently been cured.

  Rates of illegitimacy rose from 3.94 per cent in 1907 to 5.54 per cent in 1917; but the death rate among such children was said to be twice as high as among legitimate ones.148 There remained a severe social prohibition on sex outside marriage, a huge stigma on illegitimacy and single motherhood, and abortion was illegal. However, the latter phase of the Great War saw the first tentative steps towards a more permissive attitude regarding sex. Marie Stopes, a thirty-seven-year-old palaeobotanist at University College, London, who had at the age of twenty-three become the youngest doctor of science in the country, was trying to find a publisher for her book Married Love, which advocated more widespread knowledge and use of contraception, and which would be published in March 1918. Dr Stopes, a committed eugenicist, was passionately opposed to abortion, not least because of the dangerous and sometimes lethal conditions in which it was carried out; which caused her to write the book. Eventually, a philanthropist (whom she subsequently married) had to pay to have it published because no commercial publisher would touch it. When it ran to five editions in its first year, its patron rapidly recovered his investment. Marriage rates yo-yoed during the war: in 1913, in England and Wales, 286,583 marriages took place; in 1915 there were 360,885; in 1917, 258,885; in 1919, 369,411. There was hardly any increase in divorce, which did not take off until during and after the Second World War.

  Some took the idea of married love too literally. In 1912, 2.75 per cent of cases heard at the Central Criminal Court concerned alleged bigamous marriages. By 1918 it was 20.2 per cent; whether this was confined to soldiers, whose absences from home were easily explained, or became a wider problem is not clear. That bigamy prosecutions fell after the war suggests it was the former.149 The palme d’or went in June 1918 to Tom Wilkinson (alias Williams), a thirty-eight-year-old sapper. He was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude at Kent Assizes for bigamy, having already been given an identical sentence at Derby Assizes for another bigamy. ‘It was proved he had gone through ceremonies of marriage with five women,’ The Times reported, ‘and that at the time of his arrest he was making arrangements to marry three other young women.’150 Something of a pluralist, he had also deserted from three different regiments.

  Women were often working long hours in factories or on the land, compounding the sense of parental detachment in children with absent fathers. With so many men in the services the traditional family unit came under intense pressure. There was a marked rise in juvenile delinquency as boys, and a few girls, went out of control; this was the opposite of the rate of adult crime. With so many men in the services, crime began to fall so much that by March 1916 eleven prisons had been mothballed and several others partially closed. By 1918 there were only 1,393 men on average each day in convict prisons – the harshest institutions – compared with 2,704 in 1913, and 7,335 in local prisons compared with 14,352 five years earlier.151 Those too young to serve their country, however, kept the crime rate up.

  On 3 February 1916 The Times reported several cases of the manifestation of what it called ‘the bad boy’. In London, a magistrate at the Guildhall had ordered the ringleaders of a gang known as ‘the Black Hand’ to be birched for breaking windows and theft.152 The previous day a record number of cases for one day – fifty-five – had been listed at the Tower Bridge children’s court, and other London magistrates reported a similar workload. The incidence of boys stealing valuables, robbing people in darkened streets where police (as opposed to ‘specials’) were scarce, and even stealing parcels from Post Office vans was causing concern. There was no shortage of adults willing to act as Fagins and recruit young criminals to steal goods for them to sell on; but the more enterprising young criminals became Fagins themselves. In February 1916 Kingston magistrates sent a twelve-year-old boy, William MacQuerney, who had already been birched for stealing from an offertory box, to a reformatory for breaking into a tennis club and stealing the club silver, with a gang of other boys whom he had taught to steal.

  Contemporary society deemed fathers absent fighting for King and country to be the root of the problem: as The Times’s correspondent put it, ‘the unruly boy who roams the streets and is open to all their temptations is not very amenable to a mother’s discipline.’ Nor were many older brothers there to set an example. In the spring of 1916 the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, reflecting on a 50 per cent increase in juvenile crime over the previous year, blamed ‘the absence of parental control. In numerous cases the father is away on service and the mother has obtained employment in a munitions factory or on work of some other description, with the result that no adult is left in charge of the children.’153 The temptation to go off the rails without fear of paternal wrath and discipline had, for some, proved irresistible. A more humane view was taken by Lord Lytton, chairman of the State Children’s Association, who said: ‘the war spirit has produced in them a desire for adventure which in many cases can only be gratified through acts of lawlessness.’154 However, with fathers unable to dole out the necessary thrashings, the state assumed the responsibility instead. The matter was raised in the Commons on 4 May 1916, and Samuel, the home secretary, said that ‘it is generally believed that one of the causes is to be found in the character of some of the films shown in cinematograph theatres.’155 Films showing burglaries were especially condemned.

  He sent a letter to justices and chief constables on the subject. When the final figures were collated it showed that whereas in 1915 there had been 43,981 cases before the juvenile courts, there were 47,362 in 1916. The scale of offending became relentlessly worse: in 1917 the total was 53,300, by which time there had been well-publicised outbreaks of gang crime in Glasgow and Manchester.156 Larceny and malicious damage were the two most popular crimes. The problem was compounded by police numbers, which were also down because of men volunteering for the Army. Many of those left were inevitably older, less fit and less adept at catching young criminals. By October 1916 the magistrates of Liverpool, alarmed at the steep rise in juvenile crime, implored the government to extend the age up to which youths could be birched on a magistrate’s order from fourteen to sixteen, and to allow more severe sentences. They also wanted the power to fine parents.157 However, in addition they called for the greater provision of cadet corps and Scout troops to divert youthful energies; and for more youth clubs to occupy them of an evening.

  On 23 October 1916 Samuel convened a conference at the Home Office to discuss the problem, including several MPs, the chief inspector of reformatory and industrial schools and the head of the Children’s Department at the Home Office. He admitted a 30 per cent increase in juvenile crime in the last year for which figures were available; in the Metropolitan district offences had risen from 1,708 in 1914 to 2,713 in 1915 for boys and from 76 to 130 for girls.158 Matters had become so serious that the King and Queen had expressed ‘grave concern’ at this rise in delinquency, and Samuel had been asked ‘to convey His Majesty’s hope that adequate measures might be taken to deal with the evil.’ He ran through familiar reasons: the war having encouraged a spirit of adventure among boys; darkened streets since the blackout; absent fathers; and the cinema creating a ‘spirit of lawlessness’.

  Exhortations for the Boy Scouts or Boys’ Brigade to organise these youths were qualified by the fact that 70 per cent of men who ran such groups were on active service. Sir Robert Baden-Powell, who was present, said the problem was being addressed in the Scout movement by women and the boys themselves taking over the leadership; he wanted more active recruitment of ‘hooligan’ boys so they could be tamed, and felt schoolmasters should introduce boys to such groups. In December 1916 the Home Office devised a plan for a national Juvenile Organisations Committee, which would coordinate the efforts of clubs for boys and girls to occupy the young in constructive ways. In January 1917 the Board of Education announced grants to local au
thorities to set up ‘play centres where children from public elementary schools can be amused and profitably occupied after school hours.’159

  Meanwhile, matters had become still worse. In November 1916 three children, a brother and sister aged ten and a boy of nine, were convicted of safe-breaking. On the day of their conviction yet another conference was held to discuss the epidemic of delinquency, with the secularisation of society now being brought into the frame as a cause, and demands for the extension of birching as a punishment: though the Earl of Sandwich, who chaired the meeting, said he had been birched at school and it had made him ‘a most tremendous hero’.160 A full moral panic exploded: in December 1916 the Bishop of Birmingham, presiding over a conference in London of the National Council of Public Morals, said ‘the moral conditions prevailing now are very serious. Every kind of looseness of life, almost, was encouraged by the war conditions.’161 Thousands of young people had come to work in munitions factories in his diocese and ‘every temptation was put before them’. A clergyman from Lambeth said although 2,000 brothels had closed in his area in the twenty years before the war, there was now more prostitution than ever, ‘and the streets were full of girls of 15 and 16 who were throwing themselves at the feet of soldiers and sailors.’

  By February 1917 a Tory MP, Colonel Charles Yate, asked Samuel’s successor, Cave, whether, ‘considering the increase in juvenile crime, and that there is now said to be no place of detention to which young criminals can be sent owing to all such places being full, he will take into consideration the opinions expressed by county magistrates and the chairmen of county education committees regarding the necessity for the application of the birch rod and issue instructions accordingly?’162 Cave refused, but did say ‘considerable additions’ had been made to the capacity of reformatory and industrial schools. He hardly needed to issue instructions: in 1917 in England and Wales 5,210 male juveniles, up from 2,415 in 1914, received a sentence of corporal punishment.163 The stipendiary magistrate at Old Street magistrates’ court in London disclosed that ‘it is quite common now for parents, especially mothers, to charge their own children with larceny – a rare thing a few years ago. Had the father been at home the boy would have been thrashed, but now he is away the mother has no alternative but to go to the police.’164