Sad stories were not uncommon, but they were not the whole picture, either. Young women were often much more resourceful than their fictional prototypes, even when faced with men of the most unscrupulous and predatory type. Hayley Morris was a wealthy broker who owned a mansion and estate at Pippingford Park, near Ashdown Forest in Sussex. He had an appetite for young girls. With the help of his ‘housekeeper’ (whom he later married), a twenty-two-year-old woman called Madeleine Roberts, and another young woman, also under his spell and living in London, he regularly advertised for domestic staff. Young women ‘of refined birth’ were wanted, according to one of these adverts (placed in 1925), ‘to look after large dogs in the country’.77 The wages were generous: a pound a week and all expenses found. Those who arrived at Pippingford soon found themselves propositioned by Hayley. Some complied, or were scared into complying; others got away. Kathleen Weston, a nineteen-year-old, telephoned for help, then walked out. The police were alerted and picked her up in a lane. A full inquiry followed. Hayley Morris was indicted – on twenty-two counts – for conspiring to procure young girls for immoral purposes.
It transpired that Morris had also been in the habit of cruising around Brighton in his Rolls-Royce, trying to pick up girls. Two witnesses testified that he had taken them dancing at the Metropole Hotel and ‘flashed his money about’, lavish with chocolates and drinks. They weren’t taken in. Seventeen girls were traced and interviewed. Three had been under sixteen when they first encountered Morris. Miss MacDougall, ‘Lady Assistant to the Police’, was on hand with support and reassurance, lest any girls feel uneasy about testifying. The Metropolitan Police handled the case with tact and efficiency.78 Inspector Savage, in charge of the case, was commended for his excellent work. There is a letter on file from one of the girls involved, thanking Mr Savage ‘for his very great kindness’ to her and to her mother during ‘the most Beastly experience we have ever gone through’.
Hayley Morris went to gaol for three years. Madeleine Roberts served nine months for acting as his accomplice. This horrible case illustrates dangers that could face girls who were engaged for indoor domestic service, especially in isolated households. During the trial it emerged that Morris had tried to lean upon the telephonist working at the Nutley exchange, near Pippingford, to put through only those calls made ‘in gentlemen’s voices’. But his instruction was ignored as unacceptable. The telephone and the motor car were important resources in this context, making it easier for young women in danger to raise the alarm and to get away.
Morris made sure that none of the girls he pursued got pregnant. Stocks of quinine pessaries and douches were found on his premises. Knowledge about birth control, and aids to contraception, both became more easily available between the wars. Where women themselves made free decisions about their use, they could be life-changing. Marie Stopes’s phenomenally best-selling works Married Love and Wise Parenthood (1918) were landmarks in popular education.79 Her first birth control clinic opened in north London in 1921. Stopes emphasised that her advice was for married couples only. Nevertheless, her relish for controversy ensured massive publicity. At a time when unmarried mothers were often stigmatised and shamed as social failures or delinquents, many women were terrified of engaging in any kind of sexual relationship outside marriage. The availability of more reliable forms of birth control began to lift some of this fear.
As a young woman the future writer Elspeth Huxley left her home in Africa in 1925 to embark on a degree course in agriculture at Reading University. She was interested in sex, although, she later wrote, ‘we were all nervous about starting babies, and if things got as far as that, more inhibited than girls later became about checking up before-hand that our partner had a french letter’.80 Elspeth was frank about her own fumblings with sexual partners – during walks on the towpath to the village of Sonning, or lying among boats in the dusk after Henley Regatta. One went as far as one could, while avoiding going the ‘whole hog’. But it wasn’t always just about prudence: there was also a shortage of opportunities. ‘It was not religion or morality that kept most of us relatively chaste, but lack of facilities,’ she insisted.81
Young women of ‘advanced views’ were beginning to experiment. This was clearly the case in intellectual and artistic circles, especially in London. Victorian prejudices about it being acceptable for men to sow wild oats before marriage, but not women, were everywhere being challenged – especially in an environment where marriageable men were in short supply. Even before the First World War there had been rumblings of a new kind of thinking. The popularity of a play by Walter Houghton called Hindle Wakes, first performed at the Aldwych in 1912, illustrates this.82 The play centres on the story of a mill girl, Fanny Hawthorn, who has a fling with her boss’s son over a holiday trip to Llandudno. Her parents discover this, and all hell follows. Fanny’s mother determines opportunistically that Alan, the factory owner’s son, must marry her daughter. But Alan is engaged to another girl, from a wealthy background: it is clear that the night with Fanny was ‘just a bit of fun’. The two families meet to decide how to put things right. Alan’s father reluctantly decides that his son should do the honourable thing and marry the girl he has slept with. But any chance of this botch-up solution coming about disappears when Fanny, an intelligent and independent-minded girl, speaks out for herself. She refuses, point blank, to be pushed into marriage with Alan. Fanny has come to see Alan as a bit of a wimp. She admits that going to bed with him was no more than a bit of fun for her too. Hindle Wakes enjoyed a long run in London and was filmed four times over the next thirty years – twice as a silent film, in 1918 and 1927, with sound in 1931, and again in 1952. It was also to be televised in 1976. Its message was clearly particularly potent and relevant for audiences between the wars.
In bohemian and literary circles all kinds of experiments were going on. ‘Sapphism’ and male homosexuality (the latter illegal) were perfectly acceptable to many. The ‘Bright Young Things’ sometimes flirted with drugs as well as downing cocktails; their escapades and wild partying became the stuff of press exposures and comic novels.83 A more telling guide to what was going on in this milieu in the 1930s can be found in Nerina Shute’s autobiography We Mixed Our Drinks.84 Shute at nineteen was a typist, bored by her work and ambitious to try journalism. She aspired to be bohemian rather than ladylike. With her friends, she cultivated an image of sophistication and outrageousness, but confessed that this often functioned as a cover for insecurity. Sexual confidence was particularly hard to acquire. She recalled ‘the sheer awkwardness of being a modern girl and at the same time, a virgin’.85 Shute wrote for Film Weekly and secured a contract with the Sunday Graphic for a regular diary series written by ‘an ultra-modern girl’. She was encouraged to shock. In place of valentines, she wrote, young women were now discussing contraceptives. Equipped with a volume of Marie Stopes, she determinedly set about losing her own virginity, and later experimented with bisexuality. She bleached her hair blonde. Carefully made-up, she dressed to look like a film star, or glamour girl, walking along Bond Street with a gardenia in her buttonhole and a small white poodle tucked under her arm.
3.6 ‘Miss Modern’ resplendent in her cutting-edge swimsuit. Cover image, Miss Modern, August 1934 (© IPC Media 2012; courtesy of the British Library).
Shute worked for a while as a publicity manager for the American cosmetics firm Max Factor. She was fascinated by the potential of cosmetics to alter appearance, marvelling that ‘she was changed by make-up and peroxide and expensive suits into a modern person who caught the eye’.86 But she was never easy about this deliberate creating of illusion, later abandoning the attempt to look like a glamour girl.
Shute’s memoir probes beneath the surface of what it meant to be labelled ‘a modern girl’. A magazine which targeted young women, the first issue of which appeared in October 1930, provides more insights. The magazine, published by George Newnes, was called Miss Modern. It ran for ten years, ceasing publication after the outbre
ak of the Second World War in 1940. Miss Modern was a highly attractive publication which addressed girls as independent-minded, competent young women, with a regular wage packet, and an interest in relationships and style. ‘At last I have found a paper that doesn’t waste half of its space on housekeeping and baby affairs,’ wrote one reader appreciatively.87 The paper was up-to-the-minute in its advice on fashion, with film star Madeleine Carroll writing a regular column on beauty and cosmetics. It carried adverts for soluble sanitary towels, alongside knitting patterns for bathing costumes and knitted dressing gowns with feather trimmings. There were patterns for sewing every kind of garment, from office frocks to satin beach pyjamas. Much of this must have been beyond the means of the majority, but they could still dream. The girl on a tight budget was provided with helpful hints such as how to make jewellery out of split peas, or by stringing nutmegs into necklaces and painting them gold. There were endless debates about the modern girl. It was assumed that the majority of young women still hoped to marry. But adverts for personal insurance and pension schemes encouraged girls to look after themselves if they didn’t. There were fewer torrid romance stories in Miss Modern than in some of the contemporary magazines produced for young women. In 1938 a story called ‘Flowering Desert’ warned that
No woman who awakens the desire of an Arab sheikh can ever feel secure – for love in the desert is passion unleashed, more bitter than sweet, more humiliating than rapturous.88
‘What are you marrying for?’ asked an article in the same issue, advising readers to consider their goals. Was it love/security/children/loyalty/shared interests or companionship they were after? Women needed to be clear about what they wanted. It was no good sulking later because a newly acquired husband turned out to be ‘a plodder’ in the business world.89 Miss Modern might dream of romance, and find pleasure in imagining a more luxurious way of living. But she was encouraged to keep her feet on the ground – and her eye on the road – nonetheless.
4 | GOOD-TIME GIRLS, BABY DOLLS AND TEENAGE BRIDES
In the mid-1930s the Home Office did what it could to head off a minor moral panic about girls. There had been a spate of headlines in the British newspapers deploring ‘Immoral Little Girls’, ‘Shameless Little Hussies’ and so forth. A 1934 issue of the Daily Express inveighed against ‘Girls under 16 Who Tempt Men’, adding ‘They have neither morals nor manners, says a Judge.’1 The judge in question was Mr Travers Humphreys, who had presided over a case against a sixteen-year-old errand boy at Wiltshire Assizes. The boy had been charged with sexual offences against a thirteen-year-old girl. Mr Justice Humphreys was in no doubt that the girl was the more sexually experienced of the pair and that she had ‘led the boy on’. He considered it iniquitous that the boy should be criminalised while the girl was let off scot-free, and he wrote to the Home Secretary to explain his position.2 The newspapers used the case to sound off about moral depravity in young girls. Then the Archbishop of Canterbury decided to get involved, writing to the Home Office about whether he should bring up the issue in the House of Lords.3
Officials in the Home Office were tactful. Travers Humphreys was gently reminded that the recent Children and Young Persons Act of 1933 allowed local authorities to send girls who were considered in need of care and protection to ‘Approved Schools’. The girl in question in the 1934 case had in fact been sent to Walcot Home for Girls in Bath.4 The Archbishop of Canterbury received a full and careful reply to his letter. The Home Office conceded that girls under seventeen who were ‘out of parental control and beginning to lead a loose life’ posed a problem for the authorities since they often found it hard to settle in approved schools. They frequently ran away from these institutions and it was difficult to know what to do with them. The letter suggested that the archbishop might consider calling a small conference to consider some of these matters, rather than simply fanning the flames of more scandal and publicity.5
The Archbishop of Canterbury convened his symposium on ‘Lax Conduct Amongst Girls’ at Lambeth Palace in April 1935. Dr A. H. Morris, architect of the 1933 Children and Young Persons Act, attended on behalf of the Home Office. Representatives from the Salvation Army, the Church Army and various youth associations were also there. There was a great deal of vague talk about whether sex education and the availability of contraceptives should be seen as a problem, or as a solution. The archbishop thought that something might be done by stopping the needless advertising of contraceptives. One or two people thought that the age of consent to sexual intercourse should be raised to eighteen. The meeting petered out inconclusively, which was just what the Home Office had predicted.6
More liberal attitudes to female sexuality were seen as causing new problems. Gladys Mary Hall’s study of prostitution in the 1930s emphasised the enormous changes in attitudes to sexual morality which had taken place since the Great War. The book’s introduction conceded ruefully that ‘Between the old bogies of Victorian prudery and the new bogies of sexual promiscuity it is not easy to see and think clearly.’7 Hall defined prostitution to include ‘paid and unpaid forms of sex promiscuity’. She maintained that professional prostitution was in decline. This was because women were becoming much more adventurous about sex. It was becoming part of courtship. Many young women were ready to go to bed with their boyfriends in exchange for gifts, meals out, or a motor-run.8 Men much preferred this arrangement. Professional prostitutes, Hall concluded, were being replaced by amateurs.9
Hall’s way of looking at this subject, like that of so many of her contemporaries, made the relationships between young women, consumption and pleasure suspicious in a moral sense. There was little evidence, Hall insisted, to show that poverty was driving women into prostitution. However, there was ample evidence to show that they slept with men to obtain luxuries. Young women hankered after fashion, particularly ‘dress, drink, dainties and gay times’. Hall cited the psychologist Cyril Burt’s work on female delinquency, in which (as we saw in the previous chapter) he claimed that very young girls often became ‘habitual little courtesans’ for the sake of sweets.10
The ‘joy-ride girls’, the flappers bent on weekend pleasure, were transmuted in the public imagination into the ‘good-time girl’.11 The good-time girl was ‘no better than she ought to be’. She had probably had her head turned by watching too many Hollywood movies. She was likely to wear cosmetics and cheap perfume, and to dream of owning a fur coat. With the outbreak of war in 1939 the kind of anxieties around girls’ behaviour with servicemen which had been evident during the previous world war resurfaced. Posters warned of peroxide-blonde harpies preying on soldiers for favours. There was widespread concern about ‘venereal disease’ (VD) reaching epidemic proportions in the armed forces. When American servicemen arrived in Britain, anxieties intensified and acquired another dimension.12 Would English girls throw themselves at well-fed and healthy-bodied American GIs with good teeth? Would they trade their virtue for nylons and chewing gum? And what about black American servicemen? Fears of miscegenation – ‘the spectre of half-caste babies’ – were again close to the surface.13
Across the country in the 1940s, local newspapers, probation records and juvenile court proceedings show a high level of concern about girls consorting with servicemen. In Brighton, for instance, Mrs Cooke, a woman probation officer, wrote to the Home Office Children’s Department over her worries.14 She maintained that girls under seventeen were regularly hanging about with soldiers, and refusing to attend VD clinics. Echoing Gladys Hall, Mrs Cooke insisted that enthusiastic amateurs were putting professional prostitutes out of business. She complained that local councillors were reluctant to address the problem because they did not want to detract from Brighton’s reputation as an ‘unfettered holiday town’.
These various fears were all brought into sharp focus in 1944, in connection with the widely reported horrors of what became known as the ‘Cleft Chin’ murder case. This was the sorry tale of two individuals, one a seventeen-year-old girl named Elizabeth Marin
a Jones but styling herself ‘Georgina Grayson’, the other a Swedish-born American GI named Karl Hulten.15 The pair went on a six-day spree of cold-blooded, hit-and-run crime and violence in London and South-East England which led some to liken them to an English Bonnie and Clyde phenomenon, although the Hulten–Jones collaboration was nasty, brutish and short. It certainly lacked any romance. George Orwell, who wrote about this ‘pitiful and sordid’ case in his essay ‘Decline of the English Murder’, was somewhat at a loss to explain why it should have become the ‘cause célèbre’ of the war years and predicted that it would soon be forgotten.16 He judged that it lacked the haunting, memorable qualities of the ‘old domestic poisoning dramas’ or Jack the Ripper stories which lived on in the public imagination.
Elizabeth Jones met Karl Hulten in a café near Hammersmith tube station in October 1944. She introduced herself as a dancer, Georgina Grayson. He posed as a lieutenant called Ricky Allen. He was actually a private who had deserted. Back home, he had both a wife and a baby daughter. Elizabeth had a troubled history. Her parents had despaired of her as a child and she had run away first from home (in Neath, Glamorganshire) and then from the approved school in Cheshire to which she had been sent by a juvenile court. At sixteen she married a family friend, mainly to gain independence from any further supervision. Almost immediately she fought with, and left, her husband and ran off to London. Her husband being on active service, Elizabeth benefited from an army separation allowance of 32 shillings per week. In London she supplemented this by working for brief spells as a tearoom waitress, cinema usherette and barmaid. She then tried to establish herself as a striptease artist and dancer. This proved harder than she had expected. However, she seems to have built up a network of contacts among American servicemen, and to have made reasonable money by ‘hostessing’. She allegedly kept a scrapbook, with plentiful details.
Girl Trouble Page 10
