Post-War Childhood

by Webb, Simon;

  This chapter has provided an overview of the themes at which we shall be looking. In the wake of the revelations about endemic sexual abuse of children in the 1960s and 1970s by celebrities, it might be a good idea to begin by looking at attitudes to underage children, especially girls, at the time the baby boomers were growing up. This will be of particular interest, because many people today are simply unable to understand how abuse on an industrial scale was carried out more or less in plain sight at that time. The answer lies rooted in Britain’s past, which fashioned and shaped how many men saw young girls at that time. Readers should be warned in advance that some of this is exceedingly shocking to modern sensibilities.

  Chapter 2

  ‘Dumb But Pretty, Like a Schoolgirl Should Be’:

  The Sexual Abuse of Children in the Post-War Years

  In recent years, we have heard a great deal about the sexual abuse of children which was being carried out in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s by well-known entertainers, television presenters and others. The obvious question is how it was possible for these men to get away with such activities for so long. During the high-profile investigations into the lives and careers of men such as Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris and Stuart Hall, a phrase began to be widely used to describe the process by which wholesale abuse of this sort could take place without anybody apparently noticing what was going on. It was called ‘hiding in plain sight’. So commonly did the expression crop up in this connection that when a biography of the disc jockey Jimmy Savile was published in 2015, it bore the title In Plain Sight.

  To see how the sexual abuse of children in the period at which we are looking could be undertaken ‘in plain sight’, it will be necessary to look back considerably further than just the seventy years or so which separate us from the birth of the first baby boomers. Before doing so, we will examine a film made at the end of the 1960s, one which sheds light on the mores of British society at that time, particularly as they relate to sexual activity with very young girls. Only by looking at material such as this will it be possible to understand the attitudes which were prevalent when the baby boomers were growing up and so understand why it was that the indecent assault and even rape of young girls was at that time viewed with far more tolerance than is now the case. Prevailing standards of behaviour then, regarding girls under the legal age of consent, contrast very greatly with what is now considered acceptable.

  In 1969 a mainstream British film called Lola was produced. It had what might justly be called an all-star cast. Among those who appeared in the film were Honor Blackman, Jimmy Tarbuck, Charles Bronson, Susan George, Jack Hawkins, Robert Morley and Lionel Jeffries. Even Trevor Howard, famous for his starring role in Brief Encounter, was in it. The film was directed by Richard Donner, who went on to direct Superman and Lethal Weapon. Originally, the film was called Twinky and it is from the title song, of the same name, that the quotation at the beginning of this chapter comes. ‘Dumb but pretty, like a schoolgirl should be’ sounds more than a little sleazy and suspect to modern ears; as well it might!

  Some idea of the plot of Lola may be gleaned by simply looking at one of the posters which advertised it. It shows a schoolgirl in uniform and wearing white knee socks, together with a harassed-looking middle-aged man. The captions read; ‘She’s almost 16’, ‘He’s almost 40’ and ‘It may be love . . . but it’s definitely exhausting!’ This film is about a middleaged pornographer’s sexual relationship with, and subsequent marriage to, a schoolgirl. It is supposedly a romantic comedy and not one of those who produced, directed or acted in it, apparently saw anything in the least distasteful about the subject matter. The title of the film, incidentally, is a conscious reference to that most famous exploration of the mind of a predatory paedophile; Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita! The central character in the film, played by Charles Bronson, alludes to Lolita, when he admits to being a nymphetishist and calls his schoolgirl lover ‘Lola’ in tribute to this inspiration.

  The song at the beginning of Lola, written and sung by Jim Dale, reveals that the eponymous heroine is not in fact ‘almost 16’, but just a little past her sixteenth birthday. Jim Dale also wrote the lyrics of the song Georgie Girl, which was a hit for The Seekers and became something of an anthem of the Swinging Sixties, following its release in 1966. The opening words of the title song of Lola or Twinky are:

  Never met a girl like this for me,

  Dumb but pretty like a schoolgirl should be,

  It continues, by telling us that the subject of the man’s affections is:

  Sixteen summers and a month or two,

  A grown-up lover when the girls can’t see you.

  These couplets are sufficient to give the flavour of the thing. The singer goes on to compare the schoolgirl to Tinkerbell and say, ‘When we touch, I feel like Peter Pan’. She is also referred to as ‘Jezebel’ and a ‘Devil’.

  The film at which we have just looked shows us exactly what was ‘hiding in plain sight’ for young girls of the baby boomer generation. It was not so much this or that singer or celebrity, but rather an entire mindset; one which accepted that schoolgirls were a legitimate object of sexual desire for grown men. That a film like Lola should excite amusement, rather than disgust, tells us a great deal about the way that children, particularly girls, were seen in those days.

  Another illustration of how it was felt forty or fifty years ago to be quite acceptable for older men to express a sexual interest in young girls, often those below the age of legal consent, may be seen in a popular television programme made a few years after Lola was released. James Bolam and Rodney Bewes starred as the central characters of the situation comedy Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, which was broadcast in 1973 and 1974, at a time when they were in their late thirties. As with the film Lola, this was not the product of some sleazy Soho studio, but was rather one of the most popular sitcoms on television at that time. It was written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, the people who gave us Porridge, Lovejoy and Auf Wiedersehen Pet. In the episode Boys’ Night In, broadcast on 27 March 1973, Terry and Bob, played respectively by James Bolam and Rodney Bewes, talk about their favourite sexual fantasies. Terry says that, ‘Sometimes, I’m the new master at a girls’ high school.’ Bob understands this perfectly, replying, ‘Yes, gymslips. I’ve been worried about that. I think the sexiest TV programme is Top of the Form, not Top of the Pops.’ The quiz programme Top of the Form featured teams of schoolchildren aged between 11 and 16. The fact that a man approaching 40 could describe the sight of underage girls as being sexy in this way and raise a laugh from the audience, tells us that there was something odd and disturbing going on in those days! It is this attitude, that girls of 11 and 12 upwards might be viewed as sexually attractive, which was at the root of much of the abuse which was endemic in the baby boomer years. Sometimes, as in the case of Jimmy Savile, this might mean indecent assault and rape. At other times, it entailed men exposing themselves to children, something which was horribly common in those days. All such offences had in common the fact that it was not regarded as all that reprehensible to lust after pubescent girls. Indeed, as we shall see, throughout almost the whole of the 1950s, it was not even a criminal offence to interfere with children, as long as one did it in a non-violent way! Before looking at this extraordinary state of affairs, which resulted from the Lord Chief Justice himself ruling in 1951 that no offence was being committed if a grown man persuaded a girl of nine to touch his penis, we must think a little about the overall mentality which allowed adults to fantasise about and abuse schoolgirls, often with complete impunity. The state of affairs, in fact, which allowed perverts like Jimmy Savile to prey freely upon children of the baby boomer generation.

  It is sometimes forgotten that for most of the Victorian Era, the age of consent in Britain was 12. (Even this was an improvement on the situation at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when it was 10.) Girls of 12 and 13 married, had affairs and worked as prostitutes quite openly until the law was changed in
1875 and 1885, to raise the age of consent firstly to 13 and then to 16. That sexual activity with children was so common as to be unremarkable is neatly indicated by reading what the London correspondent of the French newspaper Le Figaro had to say of London in the early 1870s. He described how: ‘Every evening towards midnight more than five hundred girls in ages between twelve and fifteen years parade between Piccadilly Circus and Waterloo Place, that is on a stretch of ground no more than three hundred yards long.’ There was evidently no secret about the fact that children were openly prostituting themselves in the heart of London’s West End.

  Even more surprising is the fact that although the age of consent for sexual activity outside marriage was raised to 16 in 1885, it remained 12 for the purposes of marriage. It was not until the passing of the Age of Marriage Act in 1929 that it became unlawful to marry a 12-year-old girl. This has a bearing on how children that age were viewed in the past, attitudes which lingered on until the 1960s and 1970s. We looked at a film released at that time about a man who has a sexual affair with and eventually marries a schoolgirl. A notable aspect is that Susan George, as the girl, talks and acts in a very childish way, more like a 12-year-old than a young woman of 16. This too, the idea of the child-wife, and also the very young girl who acts and is treated as an adult, is an old British tradition.

  The notion of schoolgirl as lover and prospective bride is a longstanding one in British literature. Such girls are to be found in the works of both Charles Dickens and Gilbert and Sullivan. In Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood, the hero is engaged to be married to a schoolgirl. Rosa Budd, known inevitably as ‘Rosebud’, is of an indeterminate age; her behaviour though suggests a young child. She sucks her thumb, is eating an acid drop when her ‘fiancé’ comes to visit her at school and is generally portrayed as being immature and childish. Her chosen destination when taken out for the day is a sweet shop and after the visit, ‘She remonstrates, laughing, and is a childish schoolgirl again.’ Of course, the pages of Dicken’s novels are littered with adult women who look like children, or girls who occupy the roles of adults. We think of Little Dorrit, who was so slight in stature and innocent in appearance that she was mistaken for a little girl, David Copperfield’s child-wife Dora, Jenny Wren from Our Mutual Friend and many others. Ambivalent attitudes towards young girls in Dickens sometimes spill over into frankly paedophile descriptions, as when the villainous dwarf Quilp is pursuing Little Nell and her grandfather. Nell is a little girl, ‘a small and delicate child of much sweetness of disposition’, and yet Quilp desires her for his wife. Here he is, describing the child: ‘Such a fresh, blooming, modest little bud . . . such a chubby, rosy, cosy little Nell . . . She’s so small, so compact, so beautifully modelled . . . such little feet.’ It is enough to make one’s flesh creep!

  It is not only our national author who features in his works young girls being pursued by adult males, often with no condemnation of their actions being implied. Perhaps Gilbert and Sullivan’s best-loved operetta is The Mikado. In it, we meet another schoolgirl who is engaged to be married to one man and, like Rosa Budd, is the object of desire by somebody else as well. In this case, the girl is called Yum Yum; suggestive of a tasty morsel. Yum Yum, like Rosa Budd, is of an indeterminate age. She introduces herself and her sisters by singing with them:

  Three little maids from school are we,

  Pert as a school-girl well can be,

  Filled to the brim with girlish glee

  Three little maids from school.

  These are not the only examples in Victorian literature of schoolgirls being presented as prospective sexual partners for grown man and a line may be drawn straight from this tradition, through the St Trinian’s films to productions such as Lola, at which we looked above. What, some readers might be asking at this point, could possibly be wrong with the St Trinian’s films? Surely, it was all harmless, British fun, with Alistair Sim crossdressing as the hapless headmistress of the ill-fated school? There was in fact a distinctly dubious and unsavoury side to these films, produced during the baby boomer years, which in a way exemplified the problem at which we are looking in this chapter.

  ‘Flash Harry’, played by George Cole, in the St Trinian’s films, ran the St Trinian’s Matrimonial Agency, arranging dates with wealthy men for the schoolgirls. Once again, the idea that schoolgirl brides are somehow a desirable thing. In one of the films, a schoolgirl gets a job as a stripper. Some of the girls are played by actresses in their twenties, wearing absurdly skimpy gymslips, so short that their knickers are revealed. We are plainly meant to see them as attractive young women, rather than immature girls. It is this sexualisation of schoolgirls and acceptance of them as being appropriate targets for male attention which was hiding in plain sight in the 1960s and 1970s when people like Jimmy Savile were operating. Things have, mercifully, changed since then and a middle-aged man today who expressed an interest in having sex with or marrying a schoolgirl would be viewed askance, but at the time when the baby boomers were growing up, it was felt by many to be no more than a bit of saucy fun, at worst a little risqué, like a Donald McGill postcard.

  This awful mindset, the openly-expressed belief that it was quite natural for adult men to find schoolgirls attractive or even to pursue them for sexual purposes, lingered on in this country until well into the 1980s and 1990s. It is still around of course, although not perhaps spoken of so casually and with the assumption that other men will sympathise with such a point of view in the way that we saw the characters in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? doing. As late as 1986 a major British film was produced, featuring a subplot involving sexual activity between a schoolgirl and a teacher presented in a light-hearted and supposedly amusing fashion. Clockwise, starring John Cleese, Penelope Wilton and Alison Steadman, was essentially a comedy road movie in which Cleese and a schoolgirl attempt to reach an important conference in time for him to give a speech. In the course of the journey, the girl reveals that she is having an affair with a married teacher, but this is played for laughs. The teacher himself is shown to be a bumbling comic character and we are invited to accept this dreadful business as being a bit of harmless fun.

  The girls born between 1946 and 1964 were victims of an entrenched culture in Britain, which regarded any post-pubertal girl as being fair game for sexual fantasies or even predation. To use an exceedingly vulgar saying which was current at that time; ‘Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed.’ In other words, the onset of the menarche signalled a girl’s availability for sexual activity. Even many grown women subscribed to this perverted view and a schoolgirl who was seduced by an adult was quite likely to find herself being blamed equally for what had happened, even by her own parents, expressions such as ‘She must have led him on!’ or ‘It takes two to tango!’ being freely tossed about in the aftermath of such situations.

  The fact that they were likely to be held at least partly responsible for any abuse which they suffered acted to discourage girls from reporting anything untoward to their parents. There was another reason for this reticence. Sex was a taboo subject in many families. It was not something which most children would dream of discussing with their mother or father. If they were interfered with, then the chances were that they would not mention it to their parents; it would simply be too embarrassing for all concerned. This too goes a long way towards explaining why so much of the sexual abuse in those days remained hidden from view. Almost unbelievably, this state of affairs is also remembered with affection by those growing up in the post-war years! Here is an adult recalling the childhood days of the late 1940s, when life was so much simpler. One of the contributors to a book called A Mobile Century, about the changing habits of travel in Britain, was a child in the years immediately following the end of the war. She talks of how children at that time ‘swam in dirty canals and played in air-raid shelters and did not tell their parents about encounters with “flashers”’. There is a lot to think about in this short statement about the way life once was for ch
ildren and before we look at the idea that it might ever have been desirable for a child not to tell his or her parents about ‘flashers’, let us consider briefly the other two points raised.

  It is certainly a debatable point as to whether swimming in dirty canals is sensible activity; we shall look in more detail at this in a later chapter. Apart from the risk of drowning, accidental deaths among the under-16s were far higher at that time: there is also the question of disease. There were no vaccinations in the late 1940s and infectious diseases such as polio were spread by contaminated water. There were definitely disadvantages too for young girls in playing in air-raid shelters. At the time of writing, Robert Black, the notorious child killer has just died in prison. Black, who was convicted of the murder of four little girls over the course of a long career of child molesting, began his offences at a very young age. In 1959, when he was just 12, he tried to rape a girl. Four years later, in 1963, he discovered a seven-year-old girl playing in a park without any adult looking after her. We have already seen that this practice of playing out alone, while beloved of many baby boomers, was sometimes fraught with hazard. So it proved in this case. The 16-year-old Black lured the child into a disused air-raid shelter, on the pretext of wishing to show her some kittens, and then attempted to strangle her. When she was unconscious, he indecently assaulted her, pushed various objects into her vagina and anus and then finished off my masturbating over his half-dead victim. By which it is seen that not all children’s games in air-raid shelters ended happily.