Hitler failed to beat Britain – or its sex drive: The rise of promiscuity during WW2

Crime and sleaze. Zoot suited spivs, hair oily with pomade, fiddled while our towns and cities burned. They built black market empires by flogging silk stockings, cosmetics and groceries to families deprived of life’s little luxuries.

Organised crime flourished, often fuelled by items looted from wrecked homes.

And as with America’s Prohibition years, deprivation steered law-abiding folk to criminality. They courted the underworld.

The war was a time for heroes. It was also a time for villains.

And in the broken darkness of our bombed out wastelands, behind the blackouts’ drawn blinds, a red light shone.

The sex industry surfaced on streets never before blighted by prostitution, as pimps cashed-in on the tide of American GIs – in total, 1.5 million – shipped to our shores.

Their antics spawned the slogan: “Overpaid, oversexed and over here.”

The long nights of dropped bombs also sparked an unlikely sexual revolution, with shelters becoming hotbeds of promiscuity. Individuals, squeezed tightly together under blankets, were given the opportunity to know each other a lot better.

During the blitz years, bordellos blossomed in the most unlikely of places. Owners of once respected guest houses allowed their rooms to be used by prostitutes and their uniformed customers.

Concerned by the moral decay, the Bishop of Coventry publicly referred to an un-named Midlands town that had become “virtually a brothel”.

He declined to name the place, but it was later widely reported the bishop was referring to the ancient, spired city of Lichfield. As unlikely as it seems, the birthplace of the dictionary had been dubbed just another dirty old town.

In the Staffordshire town of Rugeley, police uncovered a thriving vice den – run under the guise of a legitimate B&B – and witnessed a steady stream of American soldiers enter the modest, detached home. They paid 25 shillings for a room… and “extras”.

Yet the business advertised bed and breakfast, presumably without a purchased companion, for only seven shillings and sixpence. Bed and bawd cost a lot more.

The majority of guests paid 25 shillings.

The man and wife who ran the house of disrepute were sentenced to six weeks custody despite vehemently protesting their innocence. “You should be boiled!” the furious woman ranted from the dock.

“They said they were their wives,” the husband insisted. “You can’t make them show their marriage certificates. What can you do?”

The red light discovery stunned those living in the vicinity who devoured salacious court case details revealed in the Rugeley Times of October 20, 1945.

“Both police officers who gave evidence said they saw a steady stream of American soldiers and girls coming to the house at late hours and that none of them had any luggage,” the paper reported.

“They gave witness to seeing certain scenes in rooms occupied by these couples. One morning when Police Constable Barley and Storer, who were staying there as civilians, left, there were on the premises three soldiers and three girls on the one floor and two soldiers and one girl on the first floor and a couple on the ground floor.”

Following the officers’ undercover surveillance, Inspector Brumhill arrived at the house on September 22 armed with a search warrant.

The Times said: “He stated that in one bedroom, on the top floor, he found a girl of 17 in bed with an American soldier standing in the room. In another room, which contained a single bed, a girl of 21 and an American soldier were standing.”

Damning evidence was provided by two women, aged 20 and 21, who admitted visiting the property with an assortment of American soldiers. There was a US marine thrown in, too.

And, according to police, the landlady had unwittingly admitted to the “stake-out officers” she knew what the rooms were being used for and was “a fool to let it go on”.

Both she and her husband were less contrite under formal police interview.

He said: “The wife and I meet them (GIs) at the dances and they ask us to fix them up and if we have a room, we like to accommodate them as far as possible.

“I have had quite a lot of US soldiers here at times. They have brought girls and come here as man and wife. One night two came with two girls, I think it was a Saturday night.

“They said they were their wives and had signed as Mr and Mrs so we fixed them up. Later the police came and asked if we had any Yanks in. I told them we had. He came in and had a look at the register. A night or two after we had some more come with girls and about half an hour after the police came, so it shows they must have been watching somewhere.”

The man was backed by his wife, who said: “Everybody who comes rings up for rooms. I say ‘yes’ and they sign Mr and Mrs.”

Faced with an overwhelming prosecution case, both defendants changed their plea and admitted allowing their home to be used as a brothel.

Their solicitor, Mr C.L Hodgkinson told the court: “There are many places up and down the country where the same kind of thing goes on. The wife had hitherto borne a good character. It was owing to pressure of work that she did not make the inquiries about the visitors which she ought to have done.”

The couple were not the only ones to be shamed. A similar establishment, again filled with GIs and call girls, was discovered in Lysways Street, Walsall.

In London, a near Sin City had risen from the smoke of the Luftwaffe’s constant pounding. Inhibitions had been shed by many facing death on a nightly basis and The Underground shelters became illicit, adult playgrounds.

A government “Mass Observation” report from one Tube station noted “necking among young couples along with glimpses of couples engaged in sexual intercourse in the darker areas”.

Quentin Crisp, brave enough to be openly gay in an unenlightened age, wrote: “As soon as the bombs started to fall, the city became like a paved double bed. Voices whispered suggestively to you as you walked along.

“Hands reached out if you stood still and in dimly-lit trains people carried on as they had once behaved only in taxis.”

The pavements had become a financial paradise for pimps, their girls even brazenly worked the air raid shelters.

A “Morality Council” patrol of Shepherd Market, Mayfair, in November, 1941, concluded the place was “over-run by both English and foreign prostitutes”.

Shelters that studded the Tilbury Docks, Essex, drew working girls like moths to a flame. One air-raid warden noted: “Bearing in mind there were still a lot of horse-drawn carriages about, the prostitutes used to be under the carts, on the carts, what have you, going full blast.”

Hitler set out to break Britain. He failed.

Subdue our spirit? He couldn’t even subdue our sex drive.