Girl Trouble (12 page)

The flapper herself was often defined as ‘pleasure-seeking',
hankering after sweets, cocktails and new sensations. Young women were emerging as an important group of consumers in the economy of the 1920s and 1930s. Their spending power was increasing. The demand for cosmetics, inexpensive clothes, rayon stockings and underwear shaped the growth of a range of new industries. The film historian Jenny Hammerton has shown how images of girls enjoying fashionable new products were a regular feature of
Eve's Film Review
. In one sequence, for instance, a young woman resplendent in a feathery negligée reclines on her bed, reading magazines, eating chocolates and smoking cigarettes at the same time. Her indulgence in these multiple pleasures is made easier by a ‘novelty magazine holder' and a gimmicky little gadget which both dispenses – and lights – cigarettes at the touch of a button. The mood was playful, and tongue-in-cheek: girls were shown as having fun.
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But some social observers fretted over the easy availability of new pleasures. Negative descriptions of working-class girls often described them as hungry for cheap amusements. Indeed, the very idea of girls seeking pleasure seems to have discomfited many people. Their imaginations often pictured a swift descent from ‘easy pleasures' to ‘easy virtue'. Moreover, the fact that cheap, mass-produced clothing and cosmetics enabled working-class girls to look good unsettled hierarchies. Novelists such as J. B. Priestley and George Orwell picked up on the idea of factory girls looking like actresses as one of the most startling developments of the period.
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These anxieties certainly impacted on contemporary attitudes to sexuality. It wasn't just columnists in the
Daily Mail
who were likely to hint at a connection between confectionery and immorality. The academic psychologist Cyril Burt, reporting on ‘The Causes of Sex Delinquency in Girls' in 1926, insisted that
some of the youngest girl delinquents on his lists ‘have become habitual little courtesans for the sake of sweets or the money with which to buy them'.
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Girls' desire for new products and pleasures was suspect in a moral sense. This might feed into an undercurrent of social disapproval of women who looked too glamorous, or appeared to have too much worldly success, who might be seen as being ‘no better than they ought to be'.

3.5
Factory girls in Walthamstow, north London, mid-1930s, modelling carnival hats. Many young women preferred factory work to domestic service. Factory work could provide more space for spirited independence and camaraderie (photograph © Fox Photos/Stringer/Getty Images).

Some of this pursed-lip social disapproval was evident in the trial of Edith Thompson in 1923. Edith Thompson was a highly intelligent, attractive and successful businesswoman. Bored with her husband Percy, she had been having an affair with Freddy Bywaters, a sailor and shipping steward. Freddy was eight and a half years younger than Edith, who was twenty-eight. The
pair exchanged passionate letters about life, literature and their love, and fantasised about how they might be together. Percy was the obstacle. One night Edith and Percy were returning from the theatre when Freddy intercepted them. He got into an angry row with Percy and stabbed him. Percy died from the wounds. There was no evidence that Edith was other than horrified and confused by the attack. Bywaters shouldered all the blame, insisting that she was completely innocent. But the letters – where Edith had fantasised about ways in which she might be rid of Percy – were seen as condemning her. The pair were jointly charged and tried for murder. Both were found guilty and hanged. Many authorities have since concluded that Edith was effectively hanged for nothing more than having
fantasised
about the death of her husband, or indeed, for the ‘crime' of adultery.
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What was clearly evident in this sad and horrifying case was that the massive outpouring of public sympathy which followed the announcement of the death penalty was all for Freddy, not for Edith. Freddy was seen as a decent, loyal young man who had been led astray by a designing and worldly woman.
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As the contents of the romantic correspondence between the pair became public, attitudes to Edith had hardened. Her lifestyle and appearance were scrutinised and found less than ‘respectable'. Her love of dancing, her flirtatiousness, her pleasure in new hats and expensive perfumes were all seen as suspect. Even her own brother-in-law denounced her as ‘a flighty, forward flirt, pleasure-loving … loud and vulgar'.
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Edith had no children. This gave the press the opportunity to portray her as an unnatural or selfish woman. Others saw in her a warning of the moral dangers of cheap literature and the appetite for mass consumption. In a neat reversal of earlier anxieties about women's education, one writer in the
Daily News
asserted that what girls needed was
more
, not less schooling. Edith, he claimed, had been ‘educated to a point', but not enough to restrain her wayward imagination. She had left school at fifteen:

Then, when what she needed was God and William Shakespeare, she was given cheap sweets and Gloria de Vere … The Thompson case is a symbol of what happens to a State which attains to a certain degree of material prosperity, but lacks a genuine passion for art and religion.
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Sexual relationships were still often fraught with danger for girls. In 1921 the sad case of Edith Roberts, ‘the Hinckley girl-mother' attracted controversy and outrage among feminists. Edith lived in Leicester and was described as ‘a factory hand' in the hosiery trade. Aged twenty-one, she looked about fourteen. She was a shy and quiet girl. Her father, a foreman dyer, said of her: ‘no father in the world ever had a better daughter'. Edith was indicted for having murdered her newly born female child. The baby was said to have been suffocated with a camisole. Edith's baby had been born while she was in bed with her sister Lily. She had been too frightened and too ashamed to own up to the pregnancy, and had told herself that the baby had never drawn breath. She was clearly traumatised and probably in denial. Found guilty, she fainted while the judge was summing up. According to the press reports, she had to be held up, apologising, crying and moaning as the judge donned his black cap and pronounced upon her the death sentence (though with a recommendation to mercy).
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There was an outcry in Leicester, with feminists and other protesters outraged by the fact that there had been no women on the jury, and by the double standard of morality demonstrated in the case. The father's responsibility had been ignored completely.

Edith Roberts's case was contentious enough to lead to a change in the law. The 1922 Infanticide Act allowed for cases of this kind to be judged manslaughter rather than murder, because of disturbance to the ‘balance of the mind' at the time. Edith was sent to Walton gaol in Liverpool, where she was described as quiet and gentle, ‘of a refined and reserved disposition', and as ‘a good devout church-woman'. Pressure for her release continued, and she was eventually discharged in June 1922.
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Unmarried mothers were frequently driven to desperation by their situation. In Brighton, in 1931, Eva Garwood, ‘a picture palace assistant', was convicted of strangling her newborn son and dumping his body in a local churchyard.
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Because of the 1922 Act, she was convicted of infanticide and not subjected to having the death penalty pronounced on her. Coroners' records and records of forensic investigations (such as those of the famous pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury) show that it was not uncommon to find the remains of newborn infants stuffed up chimneys or buried under floorboards.
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It was even more common for women to attempt abortions, either hazarding the procedure themselves or subjecting themselves to dangerous interventions from amateurs or backstreet abortionists. It is difficult to find out how many such abortions were successful, but coroners' records make it clear that many young women died trying to rid themselves of their unwanted pregnancies.

Stories of young women's vulnerability were not hard to find. The literature of the period abounds with images of ‘odd women'; sad unmarried types, housemaids in basements, shop-girls and waitresses lonely for romance. Indeed the novels of George Gissing, Arnold Bennett, George Orwell, Patrick Hamilton and Graham Greene are replete with vignettes of such women.
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They are depicted as easy prey for unscrupulous male fortune
hunters or wide boys. Rose, in Graham Greene's
Brighton
Rock
(1938), is putty in the hands of the scheming Pinkie. These are fictional characters, of course, but they resonated with aspects of contemporary reality, and were also a reflection of individual writers' outlook and views about the world they lived in. They were in themselves comments on social change. Arnold Bennett, for instance, like George Gissing, was markedly uneasy about social change. In
Our Women
, published in 1920, he contended that it was a good thing that women should now expect to earn their own living. Women had been too parasitic on men in the past. Middle-class women with nothing to do had faffed around playing the part of ‘that odious creature', ‘Lady Bountiful'. Nevertheless, he pontificated, women needed charm and domestic skills if they were to please men. Modern young women were in danger of losing these. Their education, he thought, should teach them to be home-builders, and maybe there should be Chairs at Girton in ‘womanly subjects' such as ‘coiffure'? A woman without a man was unhappy, Bennett contended: she was incomplete and vulnerable.
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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'.
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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.
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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.
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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.