by Pip Granger
The First World War brought hundreds of thousands of young men to London on their way to the front line, or back for a few days’ precious leave. This created an enormous rise in demand for sex workers in the capital, and particularly the West End, where so many other entertainments were on offer. The supply of willing women rose to meet the demand, creating a public scandal.
After the war, a sexual revolution swept through London. Those who had survived or avoided the trenches, and the Spanish flu pandemic that followed, flung themselves in to a world of dance crazes, jazz, booze, drugs – cocaine was a particular favourite – and scandalous behaviour. The ‘fast set’ based many of their activities in West End clubs, where ‘hostesses’ blurred the line between show business and prostitution. Soho and Shepherd Market became famous – or notorious, depending on your point of view – red light districts. The money to be made meant there was no shortage of recruits. Even in the Depression of the thirties, working girls could earn £15–£20 in a four-hour shift, at a time when a shopgirl was lucky to get more than £2 a week.
In the Second World War, history repeated itself. Camps in the Home Counties filled with young servicemen, most of whom headed straight for London when at liberty, packing the West End streets with young men who were in their prime and far from home. Essentially anonymous, they were free to seek out sexual adventures they’d never find in their own communities, where they were bound by strict social mores that demanded that a wedding came before a leg-over, and there was often hell to pay if it didn’t. Reliable birth control was not always readily available and the stigma of being an unmarried mother was something no ‘respectable’ girl would willingly face. The tarts cajoling them from dark doorways provided many young men with their first opportunity for sexual adventuring, and the very real possibility that they might die tomorrow emboldened them to seize the chance.
The boom time for West End prostitutes really got under way when America entered the war. The vast numbers of GIs – ‘over-paid, over-sexed and over here’ – who came to London were even further from home and the disapproving, prying eyes of those who knew them. Better still, as far as the vice trade was concerned, they brought with them lively libidos, large pay packets and no inhibitions about spending their money on a good time.
The extra money to be earned brought more women in to the streets, parks and nightclubs of the West End. In 1931, there were around 3,000 prostitutes in London, but by the end of the war this number had risen, at a very conservative estimate, to 6,700. This did not include what I think of as part-time or casual sex workers. Some were married to servicemen who were away in the forces, and saw prostitution as a way to earn extra money to buy expensive luxuries like black market goods, and to pay for nights on the town. Others were single mothers desperate for money to support their children, or war widows who also had offspring to keep. Opportunistic single women, often teenagers, were sometimes prepared to go with men for a bit of excitement, money, glamour and such elusive luxuries of life as nylons, chocolates, cigarettes – things that the American troops, in particular, had in abundance. These part-timers dropped in and out of the trade; some only hit the streets at weekends, having worked as factory hands, shop assistants or land girls during the week.
One interviewee, who was just fourteen at the time, remembers it all vividly. ‘My first sexual encounter was in Green Park with one of the girls. I can’t remember exactly what tree it was – it was just one or two back, because in the blackout you couldn’t see very far – but it was ten shillings, which was a lot of money then. She was fair-haired and – we used to sit on the bench talking afterwards – apparently her husband was away at war, and she was a clippie. And that was a – well, I won’t say it was a regular thing, but after that, if I had ten bob, I’d go down there.’
In the war (and, in fact, right up to the Street Offences Act of 1959), there were broadly two main classes of prostitute: those who worked as ‘hostesses’ in clubs, and streetwalkers. There were, in turn, two types of streetwalker, those who took their clients to nearby flats and those who did the deed outside – what my mother used to call the ‘ten bob and find your own railings’ sort of girl, like the clippie mentioned by our previous punter above. Hyde Park was a popular place for the latter, although the blackout provided many more nooks and crannies for such brief assignations. Those who were organized enough to take their clients indoors found that more and better flats to rent came on the market as wealthy people left the city to escape the bombing. As a precaution, streetwalkers rarely lived in the flats where they did business, which is why the abundance of rentable property was such a bonus.
There were so many women on the streets at times that they found themselves competing, sometimes literally fighting, for space. Newcomers had either to find new pitches or to buy out someone who was retiring. The buyer would pay a proportion of her earnings for an agreed amount of time, and the seller made sure the girls who had beats nearby were no trouble.
In the main, hostesses took their clients to a hotel or, more dangerously, to their own homes. Writing about nightclub hostesses in Madness after Midnight, jazz musician Jack Glicco states baldly that ‘It was the girls that brought the trade. It was the girls who boosted the sales of drink. It was the girls who, when the night was done, took their chosen clients home.’ During his long career as a musician in the West End’s many nightclubs, he met literally thousands of such women. ‘They parade through my memory in an endless stream: tall and short, dark and fair, old and young, wicked and (reasonably) good.’
After the end of the war, the GIs left and many of the ‘casuals’ gradually drifted off, clearing the way for a more organized trade. There was still money to be made, as men had got in to the habit of using prostitutes in the war, and the fall in prices immediately after the Americans left was steadied by an increasing demand for the services of women still on the game. There was so much money in vice that the authorities feared – with good reason, as it turned out – that the police would be corrupted. When the end of the blackout made the extent of prostitution more obvious, they instituted a crackdown. Arrests for prostitution rose from 1,983 in 1945 to 4,289 in 1946 and 5,363 in 1948.
This wave of arrests did not greatly affect the number of girls on the streets, who treated the inevitable fine as a business expense. In the post-war years, Owen Gardner worked in Page’s on Shaftesbury Avenue. The company’s offices looked out on Romilly Street. ‘We had big long windows at the time, and you could look out and see two or three of them walking up and down there – and you could see the police pick them up, too.
‘The girls seem to regard it as “Oh well, Thursday’s my day to be collected,” sort of thing, and go to court. In those days, in the Evening Standard – or maybe the News – they used to have Courts Day by Day, and they would get fined thirty shillings or so. This was her 105th conviction, that kind of nonsense. It was just, like, in their costs, a sort of tax.’ Owen was not exaggerating. Lots of the girls could have taken out a season ticket at Marlborough Street court, racking up literally hundreds of convictions.
Some of the girls were independent, while others would turn over their earnings to pimps and ponces. The difference between ponces and pimps is that a pimp has a ‘stable’ of girls, and actively promotes them, while a ponce lives off the earnings of one or two women with whom he has some kind of relationship. Sometimes the line between being a ponce and a lover was blurred. Leo Zanelli remembers a working girl called Rita, who lived across the road from him in Romilly Street. ‘She was living with a black guy there, who was a very nice chap. You used to see him in the street, and she was always hanging out the window.
‘You know, a lot is made of pimps, and there are, if you like, pimps who have groups of girls and that sort of thing, but your average prostitute was basically working on her own. She’s hardly going to strike a meaningful relationship with someone working in an office somewhere. It’s got to be one of the lads from the streets or round about, and they
really were girlfriend and boyfriend, that sort of relationship. Sometimes they would have a row and just split up. I can’t really remember anybody being terrified or saying, “If I walk away, he’s going to come round and beat me up,” although I have no doubt it happened.’
Leo was right. There were vicious, violent pimps in the West End. In Madness after Midnight, Jack Glicco makes it clear that he knew many a nightclub hostess with loose knicker elastic and a greedy ponce in the background. He writes about Therese, who ‘genuinely hated the game’ and ‘confessed to me that she was going to chuck it. She was going to go respectable.’ Therese planned to break the news to her ponce the very night she confessed her longing for a normal life, but, knowing the man in question had a reputation for vicious and ruthless behaviour, Glicco warned her to be careful. She simply nodded and smiled.
‘I can see her yet,’ Glicco writes, ‘her eyes glowing with pride in herself at taking the decision; her soft skin clear and lovely.’ Six months after this conversation, Glicco saw her again. ‘She was soliciting at the corner of Bond Street and Piccadilly. Her face was partly in shadow, and when I went up to her and spoke I saw why. Down that once-lovely face ran a long and still livid scar. She did not tell me how she got it, and I did not ask. I could guess.’
In the mid twentieth century, the premier pimps in London were the Messina brothers. Usually described as Maltese, they were the sons of a Sicilian, Giuseppe Messina, who set himself up as a brothel-keeper, first in Malta – where a large concentration of British troops provided plenty of custom – and then in Egypt. His five sons all went in to the family business. In 1934, Eugenio – known as Gino – came to England, and his brothers Carmelo, Alfredo, Salvatore and Attilio soon followed. Before long, they were dominating the West End’s vice trade, building an empire that lasted well into the fifties. They made several thousand pounds a week from their girls, whom they paid £50 a week.
The girls controlled by the Messinas were put to work from four o’clock on weekday afternoons to as late – or early – as six in the morning. The brothers, or their henchmen, checked to make sure that they were on their beat and working the hours dictated by Gino, who appears to have been the dominant brother. They ran their girls from a bewildering number of addresses throughout the West End, and kept them on the move. They took these flats in a variety of false names, and retained the services of a solicitor to pay the rates, so neither their real names nor their favourite aliases ever appeared on official documents.
To maximize their profits, the brothers introduced the ‘short-time’ or ‘ten-minute rule’. This meant that a client had to be in and out, as it were, in ten minutes or less. If they strayed over this time limit, then someone, usually the prostitute’s ‘maid’, would bang on the door to remind them to get their trousers on or to cough up more money for extra time.
The rule was unpopular with punters, and its enforcement sometimes led to violence, but it soon became the norm. Quentin Crisp, in The Naked Civil Servant, recounts how, when he was working in Wardour Street in the fifties, he and his colleagues would watch the girls leaning against the wall across the way from the office window. ‘We measured the amount of time they were out of sight with the men they had picked up. Including getting into her flat and returning from it to the street, one woman was sometimes away for only seven minutes.’
The rule meant each girl could turn over many more punters in a working night. They could service as many as five or six men an hour, at as much as £5 a time. Girls regularly made £100 a night, a truly enormous sum when you consider that the average weekly wage was £8. Marthe Watts, who wrote of her life as a Messina girl in her memoir, The Men in My Life, reported servicing forty-nine men in a fourteen-hour shift on VE night: she was going for a round fifty, but she either ran out of time or stamina.
As well as making economic sense, the rule also meant that the girls had no chance to get to know their clients, or to socialize with the locals. This suited the Messinas, as isolated girls were more vulnerable and easier to control. Nearly all their girls were recruited from overseas. Even before the brothers’ reign was established, the young women walking the dim, sooty streets of Soho came to be known collectively as ‘Fifis’, as so many of them came from France.
The British had long been of the opinion that the French were an unusually sexy and uninhibited race, with little, if any, of the tortured hypocrisy that we have historically displayed towards our ‘baser’ instincts. In the forties and fifties, a French girl was considered the epitome of sexual adventurousness, thanks in part to the pornographic films, books and pictures smuggled in from ‘the Continent’ by men like my father. The French ‘sex kitten’ (why a kitten should be considered sexy, only the lords of the tabloids and fifties boys of all ages knew) Brigitte Bardot’s pout and figure featured large in many an Englishman’s fantasies and because she was out of their reach, her compatriots on Old Compton Street had to substitute.
Later, pornography flooded in from Scandinavia, and Swedish girls took up the rather dubious mantle of fantasy nation – hence the cards festooning street doors and newsagents’ windows advertising the services of French and Swedish models. Of course, not all of the women were foreign. Some hailed from no further away than Wapping, Slough or Pease Pottage, but they knew that a little creative advertising could be very good for business.
There was another advantage for the Messinas in employing foreign girls. As they often had a rudimentary grasp of English, the pimps could keep them isolated from everyone except each other. Those who joined the Messina family had their activities closely supervised by their maids, and by the brothers themselves. They encouraged their girls to spy on one another and to report any misdemeanours. Transgressions were punished with violence. Gino Messina favoured using an electric flex, ripped from a standard lamp, to beat his women in to submission.
Because foreign nationals involved in prostitution could be deported, the Messina brothers developed a lively side trade in providing the girls with English husbands. Duncan Webb, a campaigning journalist on the People newspaper, made it his mission to bring down the Messina brothers. He was particularly scandalized by the way they traded in national allegiances: ‘By bribery and corruption they organised marriages of convenience both in Britain and abroad to enable their harlots to assume British nationality.’
They were not alone in doing that, although they were probably the first to set up an organized trade. For a fee, a broker would arrange a marriage between an Englishman in need of money and a continental – usually, but by no means always, French – woman to provide her with British nationality and a British passport. Once the ceremony was over, man and wife usually didn’t need to meet again. Marthe Hucbourg, a young Frenchwoman, and Arthur Watts, a semi-derelict drunk, went through just such an arranged marriage in November 1937. They met briefly before they were married, and afterwards only once, when a magistrate demanded reassurance that Marthe was entitled to live in England, Gino Messina managed to prise Arthur loose from his bar stool long enough for him to appear in court to vouch for his own existence, and assure the magistrate that Marthe was indeed a citizen and thus could not be deported. Marthe never saw her husband again.
Once a young recruit had been married off, she would be brought to London and set up to work in a flat – usually, but not exclusively, in Soho or Mayfair – along with a maid. Maids performed several vital functions. They were literally maids in that they kept the place of business clean and tidy, and shopped and cooked for any girls working from that address. Other duties went beyond the usual job description for domestic service. They had to keep a weather eye on the customers, make sure that business was conducted in an orderly fashion and call for help from the pimp or even the police if things became disorderly.
After the Street Offences Act drove the girls off the streets, the maids took care of the waiting punters, collecting the money, and so on, but the practice of having maids came in to being long before the Act, and there are
maids shopping in Berwick Street for their ladies to this day.
Once the Messina brothers had been brought down – largely because of their exposure by the efforts of the indefatigable Duncan Webb – a Maltese-born East End gangster, Frank Mifsud, became the dominant figure in the vice trade. Mifsud and his partner, Bernie Silver, had a new angle. They also owned many of the flats rented out to prostitutes, and ran drinkers and spielers, but ‘Big Frank’ took in even more money by telling pimps and ponces that if they drank or gambled anywhere other than in his establishments, their girls would lose their flats.
Men who lived off immoral earnings were despised, and often victimized by ‘honest villains’ and other criminals. Thugs like Tommy Smithson would ‘shake down’ these men for easy money, knowing they would not go to the police. There was a racial overtone to some of this violence. Many pimps and ponces were overseas nationals – in the fifties, a quarter of the men charged with living off immoral earnings in London were Maltese.*
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It’s hard for people today to realize just how many girls there were on the streets in the fifties. They were a tourist attraction in themselves, and not just for prospective clients. Paul C., who lived in Crawley, remembers taking the train to London after school with friends to soak up the sights, sounds and smells of Soho: ‘It was twilight time. Winter late afternoons. Not nights. The girls being on the street was a revelation to me, really, because there were so many of them. Whatever direction you went, they were there, and it just seemed to be very busy from that point of view, but also busy from the point of view of life going on, different nationalities working and enjoying themselves.
‘We had great fun observing the way the girls proceeded, which was to sort of talk guys in off the street, and then we would see them, even follow them in our imaginations going up the stairs to the room, and we’d see the light go on, and we would think, from a young male’s point of view, oh yes, someone else has scored here!