Tuesday, August 26, 2003
A nation of spivs
I have just finished reading a really great book by Donald Thomas called "An Underworld at War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War".
This book really was a inisight because the second world war is rosily remembered as a time when the British people buried their differences to work together against a common enemy - a period of unity in adversity, with the armed forces bravely carrying the torch for democracy and selfless civilians building an honest and upright Home Front.
Over the years, several historians (among them Angus Calder and Corelli Barnett) have tried to correct this sentimentalised self-portrait. But Donald Thomas is the first to concern himself exclusively with the wartime criminal underclass - the spivs, swindlers, traitors, looters, gangsters, deserters, robbers, rapists and racketeers. This is the story not of the dogged British Tommy but of his dodgy brothers, Flash Harry and Jack the Lad.
As Thomas says with understandable nervousness at the outset, it's not his intention to deny the heroism and self-sacrifice. But so comprehensive is his demythologising that you begin to wonder whether there was anyone who wasn't on the fiddle. The criminality came, in part, from the privation. With so many basic items subject to rationing - meat, butter, clothes, paper, petrol and cigarettes - even men and women who were instinctively law-abiding found themselves turning to theft and fraud. Everything from paint to coffin lids was subject to pilfering.
When goods belonged to the state, no one was hurt by them going missing; when "fair shares" weren't being given, they had to be grabbed; when nobs were stockpiling provisions, proles had every right to use the black market - so the justifications for dealing and stealing ran. But it wasn't just the poor who ended up in court or prison. Among the celebrities who ran foul of the law were Noël Coward, fined the equivalent of £64,000 for failing to declare investments, and Ivor Novello, sent to prison for four weeks for the private - and therefore prohibited - use of his Rolls-Royce.
Burglary, offences against property, GBH: all increased during the war, with an especially sharp rise in crime as hostilities drew to a close. The average citizen was 85 per cent more likely to be a victim of violence in 1945 than in 1940. But the vast majority of transgressions were minor (counterfeit ration books, over-charging, goods falling off the back of a lorry), and many offences wouldn't have been offences at any other time. The applauded peacetime profit-maker became the derided wartime profiteer. There was more lawbreaking because there were more laws to break.
One of the more bizarre crimes under the Defence Regulations was the spreading of "alarm and despondency". A Mrs Rycraft of Wood Green was found guilty of this in 1941, after telling her local housewives' club "we will never win the war" and encouraging them to demand bigger rations; a Mrs Hayward of Brighton was fined £25 (no paltry sum when the average weekly wage was £4.50) for remarking to a shop assistant, "we do not get true news in the newspapers because journalists are all crooks". Undaunted, Mrs Hayward was soon back in court for uttering pro-German sentiments and was sentenced to a month's hard labour.
Some offenders were shopped by their neighbours. But the state also appointed its own snoops and narks, whose methods smacked of Stalin or the Gestapo. "I am suspected, inspected, examined, informed, required and commanded so that I do not know who the hell I am and where I am, or why I am here at all," one small trader complained to his MP.
Shopkeepers took the brunt of the petty officialdom. The attractive young woman inveigling the butcher to give her an extra ounce of steak might turn out to be from the Ministry of Food. The sneakiest example of entrapment was the army car driven round London with a union flag on its bonnet and only the driver inside - anyone failing to "salute the flag" would then be arrested by the military police following behind.
By today's standards, punishments were severe: hefty fines, long sentences, even execution. Though rape was not a capital offence under English law, the Visiting Forces Act gave the US power to administer its own code of justice, and eight American servicemen were hanged for raping British women. The darker their skin, the less forgiving the authorities.
One example that for some reason caught my attention was the case of Leroy Henry, a black truck driver from St Louis, Missouri, was courtmartialled and sentenced to death for raping a 33-year-old married woman near Bath, though the evidence suggested she was a willing partner; it was only thanks to a campaign by the Tribune and the Daily Mirror that Henry was reprieved.
I have just finished reading a really great book by Donald Thomas called "An Underworld at War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War".
This book really was a inisight because the second world war is rosily remembered as a time when the British people buried their differences to work together against a common enemy - a period of unity in adversity, with the armed forces bravely carrying the torch for democracy and selfless civilians building an honest and upright Home Front.
Over the years, several historians (among them Angus Calder and Corelli Barnett) have tried to correct this sentimentalised self-portrait. But Donald Thomas is the first to concern himself exclusively with the wartime criminal underclass - the spivs, swindlers, traitors, looters, gangsters, deserters, robbers, rapists and racketeers. This is the story not of the dogged British Tommy but of his dodgy brothers, Flash Harry and Jack the Lad.
As Thomas says with understandable nervousness at the outset, it's not his intention to deny the heroism and self-sacrifice. But so comprehensive is his demythologising that you begin to wonder whether there was anyone who wasn't on the fiddle. The criminality came, in part, from the privation. With so many basic items subject to rationing - meat, butter, clothes, paper, petrol and cigarettes - even men and women who were instinctively law-abiding found themselves turning to theft and fraud. Everything from paint to coffin lids was subject to pilfering.
When goods belonged to the state, no one was hurt by them going missing; when "fair shares" weren't being given, they had to be grabbed; when nobs were stockpiling provisions, proles had every right to use the black market - so the justifications for dealing and stealing ran. But it wasn't just the poor who ended up in court or prison. Among the celebrities who ran foul of the law were Noël Coward, fined the equivalent of £64,000 for failing to declare investments, and Ivor Novello, sent to prison for four weeks for the private - and therefore prohibited - use of his Rolls-Royce.
Burglary, offences against property, GBH: all increased during the war, with an especially sharp rise in crime as hostilities drew to a close. The average citizen was 85 per cent more likely to be a victim of violence in 1945 than in 1940. But the vast majority of transgressions were minor (counterfeit ration books, over-charging, goods falling off the back of a lorry), and many offences wouldn't have been offences at any other time. The applauded peacetime profit-maker became the derided wartime profiteer. There was more lawbreaking because there were more laws to break.
One of the more bizarre crimes under the Defence Regulations was the spreading of "alarm and despondency". A Mrs Rycraft of Wood Green was found guilty of this in 1941, after telling her local housewives' club "we will never win the war" and encouraging them to demand bigger rations; a Mrs Hayward of Brighton was fined £25 (no paltry sum when the average weekly wage was £4.50) for remarking to a shop assistant, "we do not get true news in the newspapers because journalists are all crooks". Undaunted, Mrs Hayward was soon back in court for uttering pro-German sentiments and was sentenced to a month's hard labour.
Some offenders were shopped by their neighbours. But the state also appointed its own snoops and narks, whose methods smacked of Stalin or the Gestapo. "I am suspected, inspected, examined, informed, required and commanded so that I do not know who the hell I am and where I am, or why I am here at all," one small trader complained to his MP.
Shopkeepers took the brunt of the petty officialdom. The attractive young woman inveigling the butcher to give her an extra ounce of steak might turn out to be from the Ministry of Food. The sneakiest example of entrapment was the army car driven round London with a union flag on its bonnet and only the driver inside - anyone failing to "salute the flag" would then be arrested by the military police following behind.
By today's standards, punishments were severe: hefty fines, long sentences, even execution. Though rape was not a capital offence under English law, the Visiting Forces Act gave the US power to administer its own code of justice, and eight American servicemen were hanged for raping British women. The darker their skin, the less forgiving the authorities.
One example that for some reason caught my attention was the case of Leroy Henry, a black truck driver from St Louis, Missouri, was courtmartialled and sentenced to death for raping a 33-year-old married woman near Bath, though the evidence suggested she was a willing partner; it was only thanks to a campaign by the Tribune and the Daily Mirror that Henry was reprieved.
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