1950s London, an increasingly cosmopolitan capital city, witnessed “vice” pushed to the forefront of public anxieties. Vice came in the form of transgressive sexuality, namely male homosexuality and female prostitution; its composition changed through spatial and public visibility in this decade, but the driving force transforming social developments into significant public anxiety was the media’s era of pruriency and sensationalism. Combined with fears of the Cold War, immigration, concerns for London’s presentation on an international stage, and the focus on strong national identity, the frequency and tone of vice-centred news stories underlined these anxieties. That vice was such a significant focus during the 1950s is indisputable; the resultant Wolfenden Committee, commissioned in 1954 and lasting until 1957, shows the prevalence of these discourses. Vice was depicted and believed to be a direct threat to principled society; with growing xenophobic sentiments throughout this period, there was a growing belief this was a foreign threat imported to an inherently moral Britain. Tabloid pruriency was fuelled both by public titillation and journalistic moral crusading. Concerns with burgeoning competition from television ushered in this sensationalist era of the media, intensifying the coverage of vice emerging from Fleet Street. The sensationalism of the media when conflating other national worries in a context of London on the international stage exacerbated anxieties; none of these forms of vice or their reception were new occurrences in the 1950s, but the extent of their presence in the public sphere intensified fears.
When discussing the role of media sensationalism in contributing to the public anxieties of the 1950s, it is vital to consider the motivations of newspapers and journalists to promote these anxieties. Frank Mort has commented on the combination of increasing commercial pressures, the advent of competition from television and a renewed moral responsibility felt by many journalists.[1] The increasing pruriency of the tabloids was a result of these developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stories became more dramatic and salacious, increasingly focusing on human and social features as they were profitable either due to the voyeuristic interest of the public or outrage of a morality-centric Britain. Journalists such as Duncan Webb and Douglas Warth exemplify this tabloid revolution; the numerous exposés, largely concerning prostitution connected to organised crime, were promulgated across decades of news stories, often recomposing old information. Warth’s 1949 exposé identified Shepherd Market as hotspot for foreign prostitution while Webb’s notorious exposé series targeted around the Maltese Messina brothers and connections to organised crime. To an extent, these journalists also saw themselves as crusaders of the truth, in a trend of ‘justifiable sensationalism’.[2] Warth, in his series published in the Sunday Pictorial named ‘Evil Men’, outlined his motivations to highlight homosexuality as a vice because previous silence on the topic had allowed it to spread.[3] Likewise, Webb saw his coverage of vice as justified through a sense of duty to the public, despite its’ unsavoury nature.[4] This “unsavoury” nature of vice had previously limited coverage of homosexuality and prostitution but, fuelled by the post-war moral panic, it developed into a more debated subject.[5]
Douglas Sutherland touches on the shifts in moral standards in tandem with journalism after the war in his depiction of life in 1950s London. While he recounts that immediately following the end of the war there was a relaxation of moral standards, a so-called “sigh of relief”, this allowed for the flourishing of criminality and frivolity which therefore saw a backlash in this reinvigorated sense of journalistic crusading that Warth took as an opportunity to curb vice.[6] Moral panics were not a new phenomenon in London; this concept of deviancy as a threat to society was almost commonplace in British society. However, the moral panic following from the world wars, in which a mindset of undivided morality was widely promoted, differed from previous panics with the intensity of media attention and its inescapability.[7] This founds the basis for the argument that media was the primary reason behind public anxieties of vice in the 1950s. Both commercial sex and homosexuality were by no means recent occurrences, but the increase in and type of reporting they received saw this explosion in public discourse.
Worries about immigration and multiculturalism meant the existence of foreign sex workers clients drew an increasing amount of attention to an already troubled atmosphere, intensified further by fears of espionage. Public imagination often saw female prostitutes as foreign, mainly French, and the connection between commercial sex and pimps from European gangs resulted in a general belief that vice was being imported from abroad and defiling an inherently moral Britain.[8] Helen Self commented on two moral panics across this period. Firstly, the concern over tourists faced with sexual depravity on London’s streets, and secondly, the xenophobic fear of immigration producing foreign gangsters and pimps.[9] The conflation of organised crime with vice exacerbated public anxieties, making it appear as if the whole of London was underneath the thumb of a single criminal entity. Exposé’s such as Webb’s enflamed these anxieties and allowed for an apparent justification of the moral panic against vice.
Male homosexuality was also included in this aspect of the moral panic. The ‘Sexual McCarthyism’ which had originated in the U.S. saw witch hunts for homosexual men due to fears of espionage. This began travelling to London by the 1950s and intensified after the Cambridge Five Scandal began to unfold.[10] The Cambridge Five, a spy ring passing information to the USSR, entered public consciousness after members Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess fled there in 1951. Burgess, who was openly homosexual, and Maclean, who was married but understood to be bisexual, gave ammunition to tabloids to connect their espionage to their “vice”; this connection was not made in tabloids immediately, but by 1956 there was a strong assertion that homosexuality impacted moral integrity and thus was a matter of national concern.[11] The narrative provided to the public was that the weak morality and emotional instability of homosexual men made them national security risks. Douglas Sutherland commented that “it has become accepted dogma by readers of the avalanche of print which it has inspired that all homosexuals are a security risk if not active spies”[12] while the Sunday Mirror published ‘How to spot a possible homo’ in 1963 which gave the secret service a guide to identify and remove homosexuals after this scandal.[13]
A wider discourse of transgressive sexuality and commercial sex also became attached to treason through a weakness of moral character. In the dichotomous London, an overworld and underworld existed to separate the world of supposed vice to that of morality. Those that were involved with the underworld of vice, especially homosexual men, dealt with secrecy and thus there was a correlation between more homosexual men recruited for espionage, if only due to more extortion material. However, this was promoted as a causation in the frequent prurient stories emerging from Fleet Street, which presented homosexuality as a weakness of character and thus, a target for treason. The role of the tabloids was vital in translating scandals and other anxieties of the 1950s into a general moral panic conflating vice with national integrity, and the Vassall and Profumo scandals of the early 1960s saw the continuation and explosion of this. Gillian Swanson’s discussion of sexuality with morality asserts that the scandals of the 1960s consolidated growing sentiments from the previous decade that a lack of discipline threatened the stability of Britain as a nation; the feminisation of male homosexuality, as well as the unregulated feminine sexuality in commercial sex, were obstacles to achieving a national identity which would be inherently male.[14] This alignment between homosexuality and female promiscuity, frequently equated with sex work in reports, allowed for a further justification by the press in reporting about the dangers of vice.
The other moral panic in London concerned the visual presence of vice into the city which would be perceived by tourists. As London further joined European cities as an imperial metropolis, it received more attention on an international stage. In addition to this, London was particularly highlighted in the late 1940s and early 1950s due to large scale events. The London Olympics of 1948 and the Festival of Britain in 1951 witnessed large swathes of tourists arriving in London, but the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 was the ultimate occasion for London to cement its status as a world city. Mort comments that the coronation gave journalists an opportunity to expose the vice that threatened the capital’s integrity.[15] This aligns with the argument that public anxieties about vice in the 1950s were either formed or intensified by the tabloids, and the spatiality of vice was a key element. The infiltration of female prostitution and male homosexuality into the public sphere and onto the streets brought into question the public versus private dichotomy of sexuality. The rhetoric informing tabloids claiming the streets needed to be cleaned up before the coronation was championed by Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, Home Secretary from 1951 to 1954, which in turn led to the Wolfenden Committee. Soho, now seen as a vice underworld, became more cosmopolitan thus its longstanding status as a centre of homosexual men and female prostitution for decades was more obvious to the public eye.
Commercialised sexuality, in venues such as Murray’s Club witnessed vice entering more public spheres. The changes to the geography of commercial sex in the post-war period is significant in understanding this narrative; the County of London Plan from 1943 aimed for the city to be neatly sectioned and functional, but this did not translate to reality. Laite dissected the movement of prostitution throughout the city, with increases in Hyde Park, Paddington, Mayfair, Victoria and Stepney, each with a distinctive reputation.[16] Stepney, for example, produced the ‘Stepney Problem’ with working class women and mainly immigrant client bases, which fed the narrative that vice was an imported European issue. A large basis for the rhetoric of an imported vice was the arrival of West Indian immigrants; young black men were heavily associated with sexuality and therefore vice. Racial tensions skyrocketed in this decade, and hostilities towards the West Indian diaspora often developed in the form of anxieties of lower moral standards accompanying them to the paragon of Britain. The severity of public reaction to the Profumo scandal could lend to Keeler’s involvement with two West Indian men alongside British high society; miscegenation and vice were seemingly infiltrating British society. Changes to the visible social fabric of London resulted in the exacerbation of pre-existing anxieties about the uncontainable vice, and the depiction of its importation from both West Indian and European immigration.
Sex work’s spatial changes throughout the city was equated with a direct rise in prostitution. However, the issue seems to be less that there was an increase in commercial sex, but that there was an increase in its visibility. Rising arrest numbers for solicitation and an increase in the boldness of sex workers on the street were wielded by the tabloids to claim vice was uncontrollable without mention of other factors. For example, there were economic crises for sex workers as less work was available with the departure of soldiers, thus more risks were taken to secure work. The dramatic rise of arrest rates in Soho in the 1950s was partially due to a higher visibility of sex work rather than purely higher rates of solicitation. Caslin and Laite have argued that the transition to peacetime after the war resulted in an increase in solicitation arrests due to this governmental pressure to control the social problem of prostitution.[17] The heightened police action was to an extent self-reinforcing; more arrests were made when more police action was dedicated to curbing street prostitution, and when these arrests were shown an increase in sex work, further police action was called for.
The visibility of male homosexuality also rose in public consciousness during the 1950s, partially due to some high-profile cases. Alongside Burgess and Maclean’s defection to the Soviet Union in 1951 other prominent figures such as Baron Montagu, Peter Wildeblood, Michael Pitt-Rovers John Gielgud, William Fielding and Rupert Croft-Cooke were all involved to some extent in public charges or convictions of homosexual practices. A seemingly exponential increase in male homosexuality was a prominent theme in tabloid coverage which, in tandem with concerns over vice infecting new facets of London spatially and socially, exacerbated growing public anxieties. In particular, the Wildeblood, Montagu and Pitt-Rivers trial of 1954 took centre stage in the media, and Waters has argued that this was the catalyst for the decision to call for the Wolfenden Committee along with an increase in the number of arrests. In 1953, 2166 men were tried for homosexual offences, with 1257 found guilty, compared to approximately 400 cases annually in the 1930s.[18] However, as with solicitation arrests, there is a correlation between an increased police presence and their arrests rather than a simple increase in homosexuality but more its visibility. As London became heralded as the vice capital of Europe, the sense of urban spectatorship grew and was capitalised on. The Good Time Guide to London published in 1951 promised the London tourist access to the vice on offer in the city. This leans into the sense of sexual titillation which journalistic sensationalism relied upon, and the duality of the city to both commodify and neutralise the vice meant it was at its height in public consciousness.
The increase of media coverage and sensationalism into the public consciousness during the 1950s is paramount in understanding why vice became such a significant focus for public anxieties. In the post-war transitionary period, male homosexuality and female prostitution came into focus as a threat to a moral society. The importation of vice from the European continent was fuelled by external factors and acted to exacerbate the anxieties further; concerns over espionage, immigration and organised crime were connected to vice and repeatedly publicised by journalists. The increased visibility of male homosexuality and female prostitution both physically on the streets and socially in consciousness was consolidated by the media; it became particularly significant in the context of London’s presence on the international stage, with tourists flocking to the city for the Coronation and its creation as an imperial metropolis. Vice was posited as harmful to British society, and its repeated publication meant it was inescapable, resulting in the creation and intensification of public anxieties about vice in the 1950s.
Molly Davies is currently in her 3rd year of a BA in History at the University of Manchester.
Notes: [1] Frank Mort, ‘Mapping Sexual London: The Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution 1954-57’, New Formations: Sexual Geographies 37 (1999), pp. 92-113. [2] Julia Laite, ‘Justifiable Sensationalism: Newspapers, Public Opinion and Official Policy about Commercial Sex in mid twentieth century Britain’, Media History 20.2 (2014), pp. 126-145. [3] Chris Waters, ‘Disorders of the Mind, Disorders of the Body Social: Peter Wildeblood and the Making of the Modern Homosexual’, in Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945-1964, ed. by Becky Conekin et al. (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1999), pp.134-151. [4] Laite, ‘Justifiable Sensationalism’, p.128. [5] Adrian Bingham, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life and the British Popular Press 1918-1979, (Oxford University Press, 2009), p.160. [6] Douglas Sutherland, Portrait of a Decade: London Life 1945-1955, (London: Harrap, 1988), pp. 90-92. [7] Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London 1885-1960, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p.180. [8] Bingham, Family Newspapers?, p.164. [9] Helen Self, Prostitution, Women and the Misuse of the Law: The Fallen Daughters of Eve, (Frank Cass, 2003), p. 69. [10] Waters, ‘Disorders of the Mind’, p.138. [11] Gillian Swanson, ‘Good-Time Girls, Men of Truth and a Thoroughly Filthy Fellow: Sexual Pathology in the Profumo Affair’, New Formations24.1 (1994), 122-154 (128). [12] Sutherland, Portrait of a Decade, pp.175-177. [13] Mary Manjikian, Gender, Sexuality, and Intelligence Studies: The Spy in the Closet, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), p.110. [14] Swanson, ‘Good-Time Girls’, p. 124. [15] Mort, ‘Mapping Sexual London’, p. 96. [16] Laite, Common Prostitutes, pp. 179-182. [17] Samantha Caslin and Julia Laite, Wolfenden’s Women: Prostitution in Postwar Britain, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 7-8. [18] Waters, ‘Disorders of the Mind’, p. 137.
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