The two in question are Tom Riley (played by Dirk Bogarde) and his sidekick. The film turns on the scene, roughly halfway through, in which, in the course of robbing a box office in a Harrow Road cinema, Riley fatally guns down Dixon. The rest of the film is about getting Riley, who is finally hunted down in a remarkable closing sequence, partly shot during an actual greyhound race meeting at the White City stadium. It is as if everyone – police, bookmakers, tic-tac men, the crowd itself – is united in the pursuit of not just a criminal but a transgressor. ‘Riley’s real crime has not been the killing of P.C. Dixon,’ one cultural historian, Andy Medhurst, has acutely noted, ‘but his refusal to accept his station, his youthful disregard for established hierarchies, his infatuation with American culture.’ There was, Medhurst adds, no place in the British cinema of the early 1950s for ‘charismatic, sexy, insolent, on-the-make individualists’. Instead, the film is a hymn to shared values – of decency, of honest hard work, of understated humour and emotion, indeed of the whole Orwellian ‘English’ package, minus of course the politics. Or as Dixon puts it when confronted with a difficult situation, ‘I think we could all do with a nice cup of tea.’
The reviews were generally positive. Gavin Lambert, the young and already unforgiving editor of Sight and Sound, used the film as a vehicle in his campaign against mainstream British cinema, while The Times suggested that its depiction of policemen was unduly indulgent. But Woman’s Own spoke for the majority in praising an ‘extraordinarily vivid, realistic and exciting story’. At least three London diarists saw it. Gladys Langford ‘enjoyed it’ but thought Jimmy Hanley ‘badly cast for the young policeman’; Grace Golden called it an ‘excellent film’ and reckoned Bogarde ‘very good as young crook who accidentally murders a policeman – the inevitable Jack Warner’; and Anthony Heap, an assiduous cineaste, found it ‘at least as tense and thrilling as all but the very best American gangster films – and for an all-British effort, that’s darned good going’. Some six months after the film’s release, Mass-Observation’s questioning of its panel demonstrated a similar gender pattern of reaction to that of Scott of the Antarctic: ‘Men weeping (or at least gulping) at moments of reserve (the Hanley character painfully breaking the news to the initially stoical but soon distraught Mrs Dixon), women at moments of parting and loss (the murder itself)’. What is surprisingly difficult, though, is to find contemporary evidence backing the conventional wisdom that The Blue Lamp scandalised its audiences – whether in terms of the murdered policeman or language (including reputedly the first use of ‘bastard’ in a British film) or the Bogarde character as an American-style punk. Still, it was revealing that within weeks of release Bogarde was making a guest appearance on Variety Bandbox as a violent criminal. ‘Now come along, Mr Bogarde,’ twittered Howerd. ‘You must take that mask off. Oh, dear! You have given me such a shock!’7.
According to Ted Willis, who co-wrote the story on which The Blue Lamp’s script was based, the inspiration for George Dixon was one Inspector Mott, whom Willis watched in action for several weeks. ‘A middle-aged officer who had risen through the ranks’, he ‘had spent years in his East End manor, seemed to know every crack in every pavement and was instantly recognised and greeted respectfully by half the population’. He was also kindly, understood human psychology and could be tough if need be. This emphasis on local knowledge – acquired only through pounding the beat – certainly came through strongly in a study made in the early 1950s by John Mays of a police division in a working-class part of Liverpool. Not only was it ‘felt by many men that the sight of the uniformed constable constantly patrolling his beat had considerable preventive value’, but it was ‘agreed that nothing could replace the constable moving on foot in a limited area, knowing the alleys and backways where patrol cars could not penetrate, familiar with the people and knowing many of them by name and address’. Indeed, almost half the police officers interviewed by Mays revealed that they were ‘fairly often consulted by inhabitants of the district on matters that were not purely police concerns’:
The man on the beat is often asked in to help settle some family dispute or to adjudicate in an argument. Matrimonial advice is often sought where husbands and wives are at loggerheads. One of the boys may be insolent and so the policeman is asked to speak to him. One constable said he was asked to thrash a boy for his mother but wisely declined. A woman will stop a policeman on his beat and ask him how to apply for assistance or how to bring a complaint against a landlord. Does he know a club where Charlie could go to at night? Is 14/6 a week a legal rent for their sort of house?
There were signs, though, that a new, less intimate style of policing was starting to evolve. The pioneer city was Aberdeen, where since April 1948 there had been a system of so-called ‘team policing’, whereby an area of traditionally ten beats was instead policed by a single team, comprising four constables and a sergeant, with a police car with two-way radio ready to be summoned to any trouble spot. Over the next few years, this was an experiment copied in several other cities (Mays in Liverpool referred to ‘the increased use of motor patrols’) but for the most part only if a force was suffering from recruitment difficulties. The evidence is that the great majority of chief constables much preferred, if at all possible, to rely on what Bolton’s chief constable called in 1951 ‘the traditional system of beat working’. It was, in the words of a historian of the police, ‘a conception of policing that placed overriding emphasis on prevention rather than the detection of crime’ – and, crucially, it assumed close, continuous and broadly harmonious contact between the police and the policed.8.
‘What do you think of the police?’ was one of the questions asked in a remarkable survey of English behaviour and attitudes undertaken by the anthropologist-cum-sociologist Geoffrey Gorer in the winter of 1950/51. His sample comprised some 11,000 readers of the People, a Sunday paper with an almost entirely working-class and lower-middle-class readership; his expectation in advance was that ‘a very considerable number of the respondents would take advantage of the anonymous questionnaire to express feelings of hostility to the representatives of the state, of law and order, of the repressive aspects of society’.
He could hardly have been more wrong. Less than a fifth of the sample had any criticisms at all to make, prompting Gorer to conclude that (more or less equally across class, age, gender and region) ‘there is extremely little hostility to the police as an institution’; from many, there was positive enthusiasm:
I believe they stand for all we English are, maybe at first appearance slow perhaps, but reliable stout and kindly. I have the greatest admiration for our police force and I am proud they are renowned abroad. (Married woman, 28, Formby)
The finest body of men of this kind in the world. Portraying and upholding the time tested constitution, traditions and democracy of the British Way of Life combining humble patience with high courage and devotion to duty. (Married man, 38, New Malden)
Underpaid and overworked in dealing with masses of petty bureaucracy. Admire them for the results they get, and also for surprisingly little evidence of ‘fiddling’ among the Police force itself. (Unmarried civil servant, 30, Surbiton)
Oh I like them. I wish I could marry one. (Unmarried girl, 18, London)
As for the dissenting minority, Gorer noted that their criticisms were ‘mostly on points of character or behaviour, that the police as individuals are “no better than anybody else”, and the human failings of persons in the police’. For instance:
I think the police in big towns and cities do a grand job and their work is hard, but in villages such as this we become their friends and they ours, and they often turn a blind eye. (Married woman, 21, village near Newark)
Majority of them show off when in uniform as if everyone should be afraid of them. Yet they seem kind and considerate to children. My children love to say Hello to Policemen and it isn’t very often they are ignored. (Mother, 24, Birmingham)
Too much time is taken up with minor traffic o
ffences on the roads. Freemasonry should be barred in the Police Force. (Man, 26, Sidcup)
‘Some 5 per cent of the population is really hostile to the police,’ Gorer reckoned, ‘and with about 1 per cent of these the hostility reaches an almost pathological level.’ Tellingly, he added, little of this hostility was political in nature but rather stemmed from ‘the belief that they misuse their power, are unscrupulous, avaricious or dishonest’. And Gorer, who could speak with some authority, declared his belief that such suspicions ‘would be much more widely voiced in most other societies’.9. It was, all in all, a graphically consensual picture that this aspect of his survey evoked.
The Blue Lamp was equally topical in terms of the prevailing moral panic about youth into which it so deftly tapped. ‘Rarely a day passes now without some act of criminal violence being committed,’ noted Anthony Heap in March 1950: ‘Gangs of young teen-age thugs, emulating the American gangster “heroes” they see regularly on the screen, go around “coshing”, robbing, and beating-up people with impunity. And on the few occasions when some are caught, what sort of punishment do they get? The good flogging [made illegal in 1948, along with birching] they so richly deserve? Oh dear no! That’s too “degrading”. It might hurt their feelings.’ ‘Women are quite nervous to go out alone after dark – a thing quite unknown before,’ observed Vere Hodgson in west London soon afterwards. ‘You do not need to have thousands of pounds of jewellery in your bag,’ she added about her particular fear of being ‘yammed on the head with a Cosh’ by youths. ‘They will yam you for 3½d and think it is all fun . . . I agree with the Birch.’
Was the immensely popular daily radio thriller, Dick Barton, an unintentional stimulus to juvenile delinquency – unintentional because Barton himself was a detective of impeccably upright language and lifestyle? Ever conscious of its responsibilities, the BBC in early 1950 sent out a questionnaire to more than 70 child-guidance clinics about the possible effects of the series. Several replies expressed concern:
Nightmares and undue mental tension are produced in some children . . . The educational value seems poor . . . Many of them look on Barton as a fool who gets away with too much, and miss the moral issues raised. (Portman Clinic, W1)
It fills a vacuum but it is not constructive. There is no indication that years of strenuous preparation precede heroic exploits. The characters are shadowy. The heroes are complementary to ‘spivs’, rather than their opposites. (Department of Psychological Medicine, The Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street)
The fact that the child listens to Dick Barton is frequently mentioned by mothers of over-anxious children. (Child Guidance Clinic, Chatham)
Generally, though, the experts took a reasonably robust line – ‘It is a useful medium for the projection of phantasy,’ asserted the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh – and by almost two to one they voted for the programme’s continuation. Henceforth, though, each episode was lumbered with a gratuitous tailpiece, in which a voiceover solemnly mulled over the moral issues that had been raised – a device that perhaps hastened the programme’s end in 1951.
Juvenile delinquency, although undoubtedly a real phenomenon, was almost certainly not as widespread as the moral panic imagined. One suggestive fact is that out of 1,315 working-class Glasgow boys who left school in January 1947, just over 12 per cent had been or would be convicted in the courts at least once between their eighth and eighteenth birthdays. Analysing the lives and outcomes of these boys over the three years after they left school, Thomas Ferguson (Professor of Public Health at Glasgow University) identified the main factors behind juvenile crime: low academic ability, employment problems, bad housing and criminal habits or tendencies in the family background. These were hardly unexpected findings, but the research was full and convincing.
However, where one gets closer to the subjects themselves is through John Mays, Warden of Liverpool University Settlement, who in 1950, before his work on the police, embarked on an in-depth study of 80 boys growing up in an impoverished, rundown area of central Liverpool. The majority of his sample admitted having committed ‘delinquent acts’ at some point during childhood and adolescence, with 30 having been convicted at least once and with 13 as the most common age for acts of delinquency. Mays’s findings were significant – emphasising the malfunctioning family and the importance of group solidarity in temporarily overriding individual conscience – but the real value of his study was, rather like Ferdynand Zweig’s, in the psychological depth of his case studies. Take one, with the interviewee probably in his mid- to late teens:
He has never appeared at a Juvenile Court but has committed offences which might very well have brought him there if he had been less lucky. All his delinquencies are typical of the pattern for the neighbourhood and were steadily but not excessively indulged in. He said ‘we’ used to steal fruit regularly from a shop on the way to school in the afternoon. When on holidays he shop-lifted in the company of other boys. Woolworths at———was mentioned. He has also stolen from a large Liverpool store and described how parties of schoolboys used to set off for town on a Saturday morning with the intention of shop-lifting. They carried with them a supply of paper bags so that they could wrap up the stolen goods and pass them off as purchases. The stealing was worked by a team with the usual ‘dowses’ and attention-engagers posted. He added some points on the ethics of shop-lifting. He ‘wouldn’t think twice’ about stealing things from a large store because ‘they rob you’ by ‘their fantastic prices’. However, he gradually broke away from such activities because had he been caught his mother would have been very upset and this acted as a deterrent. He did a lot of lorry-skipping but never took anything off the back. This he attributed to the fact that he knew that the driver would be held responsible and he felt sorry for him and didn’t want to cause him suffering. In the big stores he did not feel conscious of a similar personal relationship with the assistants behind the counter and did not think they would have to make good any losses.
Significantly, almost all of Mays’s interviewees were members of a youth club; he conceded that ‘the many young people who are at present inaccessible to research because they have never, and will never, submit themselves to the restraints of formal association are more deeply committed to delinquent habits than the youths who have co-operated in this project’.10
An array of different residential institutions sought to reform these delinquents. ‘There can be no finer calling than that of moulding and fashioning the character of a wayward boy . . . and the ultimate realisation of the useful purpose of life,’ declared Harold Hamer, President of the Association of Headmasters, Headmistresses and Matrons of Approved Schools, at its annual conference in 1950. Two years later, a member of staff at High Beech, a probation home in Nutfield, Surrey, for male juvenile delinquents, agreed: ‘We are trying to turn out good citizens and good men . . . we are not just a place of detention.’ Or, in the words of that home’s mission statement (formulated in 1949), its purpose was to provide ‘the means whereby young offenders from unsatisfactory homes, who do not require prolonged periods of re-education [ie in an Approved School], may learn to discipline their lives and to develop qualities of character’. On the basis of a close study of High Beech’s records, as well as the revealing if sometimes sententious monthly issues of the Approved Schools Gazette, Abigail Wills has concluded that by the 1950s ‘the project of reforming male delinquents centred around the notion of mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body), which involved ideals such as strength of character, emotional independence, restrained heterosexuality and disciplined work ethic’ – a set of ideals ultimately ‘conceived in terms of the reclamation of delinquents “for the nation”’.
In practice, a high premium continued to be placed on conformity, and in practice also, some of these residential institutions could be brutal in the extreme. In the rather patchy report on juvenile delinquency that he submitted for Mass-Observation in 1949, H. D. Willcock qu
oted the experience of a 14-year-old at an Approved School some distance from London: ‘One Sunday morning we went for a walk in the country and one boy with us messed his trousers, and, when we got back, the officer took his trousers off and rubbed them all over his face. The stuff went into his eyes, his mouth, and his hair, so that you could not see his face from the brown mess.’ Once, after trying to escape, the 14-year-old was summoned to the governor’s office:
First he started by getting hold of me by the hair and giving me two black eyes. He then kicked me in the stomach and winded me. I ran to the fireplace and picked up a poker and threatened to hit him with it. Then two officers pounced on me and held me down whilst the Head beat me something terrible. When I got to my feet it was only to be knocked down by a terrific blow on the mouth. He then laid me across a chair and gave me fourteen strokes with the cane on the back and backside. After this he took off his coat and belted me all round the office. I must have lost consciousness because I remember coming round crying, ‘Father, father, stop, stop.’ I was completely out of my head. When he had finished beating me he led me down to the showers, kicking me all the way.
‘Strange and improbable as such accounts may seem,’ commented Will-cock, ‘this one is not unique in our files.’ And after citing ‘the case of the six boys in a northern Approved School who shot a master – and intended to murder the Head’, he remarked, ‘That school is probably an admirable one. But of others we hear fearful things.’11
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