London, early spring, 1944. It is late at night, and the wartime blackout is in force. No vehicles are moving in the darkness. Most Londoners are asleep at home or in bomb shelters — but in the heart of the capital, Piccadilly Circus seethes with furtive nocturnal life. The statue of Eros has been taken down for protection, but his spirit rules. American GIs are pouring out of West End clubs and bars, joyous, tipsy and looking for sex. On every corner the girls are waiting for them. They congregate at the bottom of Shaftesbury Avenue, near the Rainbow Club for American servicemen; they mass at the entrance to the Underground and walk up from the all-night Lyons Corner House, keeping on the move so the police won't book them for soliciting. In the streets near Mayfair, elegant women in furs await officer clientele.
The soldiers, their cigarettes glowing in the dark, loiter in shop doorways. The girls pause. They are carrying matches or pencil torches, and flash them on their faces before lowering them to illuminate their stockinged legs and ankles on high heels. A deal is struck at a rate of £3 or £4
(a huge sum in today's money), and then it all happens quickly, up against a doorway, the GI's greatcoat covering them both — after which the prowl begins again, four or five times a night.
The 1960s generation likes to believe that it was the first to have remembered something their elders had forgotten — the joys of sex. Recent discoveries in the archives prove them misguided. Well before the Beatles' first LP, the home front during the last three years of the second world war saw the greatest sexual free-for-all in living memory. It wasn't so much the "Piccadilly Warriors", as the local prostitutes were dubbed sardonically, but thousands of young British women, some of them wives of servicemen fighting abroad, who found the vast army of GIs billeted here in the run-up to the invasion of France completely irresistible.
The jokes and catchphrases of the time say it all. "Heard about the new utility knickers? One Yank and they're off." The army girls, the ATS, were known as "officers' groundsheets". With their unfeminine uniforms and khaki bloomers, they were far less popular than the much-envied Waaf girls in their dashing air-force kit, who were known as "pilots' cockpits" because of their access to airmen, all of whom were heroes after the Battle of Britain. Nor did the ATS match up to the more exclusive Wrens of the Royal Navy in their smart navy blue. "Up with the lark and to bed with a Wren" was the well-known crack. On official social visits to ships of the Royal Navy, Wrens were inspected to check that they were wearing special-issue black knickers with stout elastic at the waist and knee. As for the Women's Land Army, its motto "Back to the Land" became "Backs to the Land" when the GIs arrived.
Under a regulation known as Paragraph 11, servicewomen who got pregnant were demobbed and could not re-enlist. So any woman wanting a quick release could stand outside the men's sleeping quarters at night and yell "Paragraph 11!" whereupon every effort would be made to oblige her. Even so, venereal disease (VD) and illegitimate birth rates in the women's armed forces were much lower, and sometimes half their equivalent in the civilian population.
The statistics are astounding. In pre-war Britain, most petitions for divorce alleging adultery were filed by women. By the end of the war, two out of every three applications were filed by husbands against their wives, and there were five times as many divorce petitions in 1945 as there were in 1939. Not unconnected is the fact that, of the 5.3m British infants delivered between 1939 and 1945, more than one-third were illegitimate. Their mothers belonged to every age group and every section of society.
A wartime survey in Birmingham found that around one-third of all illegitimate births were to married women. This would be a conservative figure, given that any child born to a married woman was deemed to be legitimate unless the mother chose to register it otherwise.
The authorities were appalled. As we now know from a fascinating cache of documents that were declassified last month from the National Archives in Kew, dismay was registered throughout Whitehall, all the way to the office of the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden. Ministers were concerned that all this sexual activity, and the upsurge in VD, would damage Britain's image abroad. Besides endangering the transatlantic alliance, it could present the Germans with a propaganda coup, allowing them to portray Britain as a decadent nation in which "immoral women" preyed on unwary American soldiers. The Scotland Yard files reveal US Army chiefs were so concerned about the pestering of their troops by "loose women" that a series of high-level meetings had to be held to defuse the issue.
What got them going was an article in the Sunday Pictorial from August 1942 called The Spider's Web of Vice! It describes dens of vice in which flashy-looking men with heavy rings on flabby fingers connived to fleece innocent young servicemen far from home, "pretty girls whose attempts to look demure don't conceal what they are there for", and "pale dissolute Mayfairites whom the call-up hasn't combed out". "The mile of vice around Piccadilly Circus is a disgrace to the rest of Britain," it concludes. At the top of the page, an anonymous Whitehall hand has scribbled in ink to Scotland Yard: "What are you doing about this?"
There was little that the Metropolitan police felt it could do. In 1941 the US authorities had pushed through draconian legislation to check prostitution and VD. Red-light districts were closed down; a 1941 act made any form of prostitution illegal within "reasonable distance" of US military installations. The US legislature had recently permitted the authorities to compulsorily examine and treat VD suspects. But British law remained far more considerate of personal privacy. Brothels were illegal, but the transmission of VD was not a crime, nor was prostitution, unless it caused a public nuisance.
Joan Wyndham chuckled when I mentioned the dens of vice. "We should have been so lucky," she said. Living in Chelsea, with a painter's studio nearby, she was 18 when the war started. During the 1939 "phoney war", she spent hours bandaging healthy limbs for practice in a huge converted hospital nearby; when the bombs began falling, she was bandaging real victims. "You didn't know what you were going to lose first, your life or your virginity, but I didn't think I could possibly be killed," she said. "My mother had a bomb shelter on the lawn. I wrote my diary in a corner; we took along plenty to drink and talked about food until the all-clear." After Joan had finished her hospital shift she would go dancing and drinking. In 1941 their house took a direct hit, and her mother moved into a one-bedroom flat with her female lover, "who must have had to sleep in the bath". Rather than stay with them, Joan became a squadron officer with the Waaf. On her 48-hour leaves, she went overnight by train to parties at her studio.
Before the war, most people had never heard of VD. Those who had, like Joan, were phlegmatic about it. "I was much more worried about getting pregnant," she said. Almost 9 out of 10 parents didn't talk about sex to their children, any more than their own parents had talked to them. As a result, many young people were ignorant of the facts of life. The BBC was not about to enlighten them. Its first director-general, Lord Reith, did not allow any divorced person to work for the corporation. Meanwhile, churches preached that fornication was a sin. "Promiscuous" girls, many of whom had become pregnant through sheer ignorance, could still be dispatched to the workhouse to have their babies, or be locked away in an asylum under the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. Sex-education books insisted on chastity before marriage. As for the sex, a 1921 manual explained reproduction through an illustrated discussion of "the male and female parts in primrose and vegetable marrow".
The climate of fear this fostered led to pitiful misconceptions. Some girls believed they could get pregnant by kissing a boy or by sitting on a lavatory seat after one had sat there. Often, menstruation came as a terrible shock and increased a young woman's feeling of sinfulness. Sex education in most schools was minimal, and any sexual contact between boys and girls was considered a disgrace, to be punished. Doctors and clergymen preached that masturbation could lead to blindness, impotence, epilepsy, madness.
