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GENDERS AND SEXUALITIES IN HISTORY
Wolfenden’s Women
Prostitution in Postwar Britain
Samantha Caslin · Julia Laite

Genders and Sexualities in History
Series Editors
John Arnold
King’s College
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK
Sean Brady
Birkbeck College
University of London
London, UK
Joanna Bourke
Birkbeck College
University of London
London, UK
Palgrave Macmillan’s series, Genders and Sexualities in History, accom-
modates and fosters new approaches to historical research in the fields
of genders and sexualities. The series promotes world-class scholarship,
which concentrates upon the interconnected themes of genders, sexuali-
ties, religions/religiosity, civil society, politics and war.
Historical studies of gender and sexuality have, until recently, been
more or less disconnected fields. In recent years, historical analyses of gen-
ders and sexualities have synthesised, creating new departures in historiog-
raphy. The additional connectedness of genders and sexualities with
questions of religion, religiosity, development of civil societies, politics and
the contexts of war and conflict is reflective of the movements in scholar-
ship away from narrow history of science and scientific thought, and his-
tory of legal processes approaches, that have dominated these paradigms
until recently. The series brings together scholarship from Contemporary,
Modern, Early Modern, Medieval, Classical and Non-Western History.
The series provides a diachronic forum for scholarship that incorporates
new approaches to genders and sexualities in history.
More information about this series at

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Samantha Caslin • Julia Laite
Wolfenden’s Women
Prostitution in Post-war Britain
Samantha Caslin Julia Laite
Department of History Department of History
University of Liverpool Classics and Arch
Liverpool, UK University of London
Birkbeck College
London, UK
Genders and Sexualities in History

ISBN 978-1-137-44020-4 ISBN 978-1-137-44022-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44022-8
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

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in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
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The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, UK
To the sex worker activists, advocates, and allies who have demonstrated,
through their tireless work campaigning for the rights and safety of people
who sell sex, just how much the Wolfenden Committee missed by not speaking
to the women they dismissed as ‘common prostitutes’.
Series Editor’s Preface
John Wolfenden’s Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences

and Prostitution (which was convened in 1954) has attracted the attention
of numerous historians, primarily because of its approaches to homosexu-
ality. In contrast, Samantha Caslin and Julia Laite’s Wolfenden’s Women
focuses attention on the Committee’s deliberations about prostitution. In
the 1950s, women who were labelled ‘common prostitutes’ were margin-
alized; by editing this critical sourcebook, Caslin and Laite give these
women a prominent place in debates about sex, labour, and law in post-
war Britain. Prefaced by introductory essays and organized by themes
(such as public space; prostitution outside of London; policing; law, juris-
prudence, and punishment; causes, prevention, and intervention; third
parties and exploitation; and the question of demand), the sourcebook
gives readers an insight into the lives of women who sold sex. In common
with all the volumes in the ‘Genders and Sexualities in History’ series,
Wolfenden’s Women is a multifaceted and meticulously researched scholarly
study. It is an exciting contribution to our understanding of gender and
sexuality in the past.
vii
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Brian Lewis for sharing his work (and working
process) on this book’s companion volume, Wolfenden’s Witnesses. Julia
would especially like to thank Helen Self for her generosity many years ago
in sharing ideas and materials, and for her groundbreaking work on post-
war prostitution. We would like to thank the National Archives for permis-
sion to reproduce these materials for an academic purpose, as well as the
Women’s Library. Permissions were sought in the case of any material that
might still be under copyright and all due diligence was taken to contact
any individuals who might still have an interest in this material.
Note on Style
This book draws mainly on the memoranda of evidence and transcripts of
interviews found in the papers of the Departmental Committee on
Homosexual Offences and Prostitution at the National Archives, London,
in the series HO 345/8-16. These papers were originally typed by stenog-
raphers and by the secretaries of submitting organizations and the style is
not standardized. We have maintained all grammatical infelicities and style
choices of the original documents but in places have edited the format for
consistency. We have used ellipses (…) to indicate where material has been
abridged. For more on how we have selected these excerpts and con-
structed this book, see the final pages of the introduction.
ix
Contents
1 Introduction: Prostitution and the Law Before the

Wolfenden Committee—A Brief History 1
2 Prostitution and Public Space 21
3 Beyond London 43
4 Policing 71
5 Law, Jurisprudence, and Punishment 87
6 Brothels, Off-Street Premises, Privatization121
7 Third Parties and Exploitation151
8 Causes, Intervention, and Pathologization167
9 Demand183
10 Wolfenden’s Missing Women201
xi
xii CONTENTS
11 The Report of the Departmental Committee on

Homosexual Offences and Prostitution235
12 Conclusion: The Legacies of Wolfenden289
Glossary295
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Prostitution and the Law

Before the Wolfenden Committee—A Brief
History
Prostitution had troubled the government and the police in Britain long
before John Wolfenden was asked to convene the Departmental Committee
on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution by the Conservative Home
Secretary David Maxwell Fyfe in 1954. Indeed, by the 1950s prostitution
had been considered one of the most significant modern social problems
for at least three-quarters of a century. While prostitution had always pre-
sented problems and questions about the control of public space and sex-
ual morality, it was the Victorians who redefined it as one of their great
‘social questions’. In the mid-nineteenth century, concerns about the ram-
pant spread of syphilis during the Crimean War led to the Contagious
Diseases Acts of 1864, 1865, and 1869. This legislation required women
in ports and garrison towns who were suspected of being prostitutes to
register with the police, submit to compulsory genital inspection, and suf-
fer incarceration in a ‘lock hospital’ if an infection was discovered. By the
late 1860s, an enormous protest movement had sprung up demanding the
Acts’ repeal, claiming they licensed vice, rode roughshod over the consti-
tutional rights of the women, and codified a ‘double standard of sexual
morality’ that saw women punished for sexual misdeeds while men’s
behaviour was accepted and normalized.1
1
For more on concerns about the morality of the Contagious Diseases Acts see, for exam-
ple, S Caslin, Save the Womanhood: Vice, urban immorality and social control in Liverpool,
c.1900–1976 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018), pp. 22–23; J Laite, Common
Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2012), p. 7; L Shapiro
© The Author(s) 2020 1

S. Caslin, J. Laite, Wolfenden’s Women, Genders and Sexualities in
History, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44022-8_1
2 S. CASLIN AND J. LAITE
These mounting objections to the regulation and thus supposed legiti-

mation of prostitution and to the mistreatment of women labelled prosti-
tutes led to a wider interest in the question of harm and exploitation in the
sex industry. In 1879 a shocking expose of young girls being trafficked
from Britain to regulated brothels in Belgium led to the appointment of a
Joint Select Committee for the Protection of Girls and Young Women in
1881, the first government committee that investigated sexual exploita-
tion and prostitution. This Committee recommended a new law against
what was called ‘procuration’, which would make it illegal for someone to
‘procure or attempt to procure a girl or woman to become a common
prostitute either within or without the king’s dominions’. A subsequent
Criminal Law Amendment Bill dealing with just this issue met with resis-
tance, and it took another major newspaper expose to push the bill through
Parliament. William Stead’s 1885 Pall Mall Gazette series, the ‘Maiden
Tribute of Modern Babylon’, created a panic about children being prosti-
tuted in London brothels. With his investigative style of ‘new journalism’,
Stead offered scandalous descriptions of rape and abuse within brothels
and he wrote that, as part of his investigation, he had been able to pur-
chase a girl, thirteen-year-old Eliza Armstrong, from her mother for just
five pounds.2 As a result, public concern about child prostitution and the
age of consent became intertwined with concerns about brothels. When
the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed, just over a month
after the publication of Stead’s expose, it raised the age of consent from
thirteen to sixteen, it outlawed procurement, and it made ‘keeping a
brothel’ a non-indictable, and therefore easily prosecutable, offence.
Subsequent case law defined a brothel as a place where ‘more than one
woman practices prostitution’. The 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act
was also the Statute that included the notorious Labouchere Amendment,
Sanders, ‘“Equal Laws Based Upon an Equal Standard”: The Garrett Sisters, the Contagious
Diseases Acts, and the Sexual Politics of Victorian and Edwardian Feminism Revisited’,
Women’s History Review, 24:3 (2015), pp. 389–409. Judith R Walkowitz, Prostitution and
Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1980); Paul McHugh, Prostitution and Victorian Social Reform (London: Croom Helm Ltd,
1980); Catherine Lee, ‘Policing Prostitution in Kent, 1860–1880’, in Social History Annual
Conference (University of Exeter, 2007).
2
Rachael Attwood, ‘Vice Beyond the Pale: Representing “white Slavery” in Britain,
c.1880–1912’ (UCL, 2013); Gretchen Soderlund, Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the
Transformation of Journalism, 1885–1917 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 2013); Julia Laite, ‘Justifiable Sensationalism.’, Media History, 20.2 (2014), 126–45.
1 INTRODUCTION: PROSTITUTION AND THE LAW… 3
which was added in its final reading, making ‘gross acts of indecency’
between men a crime. It was this Act that Wolfenden would recommend
repealing over seventy years later.
Ultimately, however, John Wolfenden’s Departmental Committee on
Homosexual Offences and Prostitution was little concerned with ques-
tions of sexual exploitation in prostitution, or even with brothel-keeping;
instead it focused on an older, and more persistent, debate concerning the
control of prostitution on the streets. Across the country, several laws were
directed against women who solicited prostitution in the streets. The
1824 Vagrancy Act, which was applied across England and Wales, stipu-
lated that ‘any common prostitute’ who was in a public place and ‘behav-
ing in a riotous or indecent manner’ could be fined or imprisoned. This
same Act included a clause against ‘importuning for an immoral purpose’
which was used against men who were soliciting men. The 1839
Metropolitan Police Act, in force only in London, made it an offence for
‘any common prostitute to loiter or solicit for the purposes of prostitution
to the annoyance of inhabitants or passengers’.3 Outside of London, the
Towns and Police Clauses Act of 1847 enacted similar measures, but
stated that the ‘common prostitute’ had to be soliciting ‘to the obstruc-
tion, annoyance or danger of the residents or passengers’. The legislation
in Northern Ireland was broadly comparable: Belfast had the Belfast
Improvement Act 1845, which prohibited ‘common prostitutes’ loitering
for prostitution or solicitation to the ‘annoyance of … inhabitants or pas-
sengers’, and the similar Towns Improvement Act (Ireland) 1854 applied
to towns in Northern Ireland.4
All of these laws differed little in practice. Direct evidence of annoyance
or obstruction was very rarely required, and police forces developed vari-
ous systems to identify, sometimes caution, and ultimately permanently
label certain women ‘common prostitutes’ which greatly facilitated their
arrest for soliciting. They would be introduced as a ‘common prostitute’
in court before their trial began and would almost always be found guilty.
By the time the Wolfenden Committee sat in the 1950s, the conviction
rate for solicitation offences had reached over 99 per cent, the highest
3
For more on these laws in London, see Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary
Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885–1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
4
Leanne McCormick, Regulating Sexuality: Women in twentieth-century Northern Ireland
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 23–24.
conviction rate of any offence in the United Kingdom.5 Yet this approach
left the courts and the police open to accusations of prejudice and even
corruption. As such, the Wolfenden Committee considered with interest
the way prostitution was handled under Scottish law. In Scotland, women
who solicited were dealt with under the Burgh Police (Scotland) Act 1892
and various pieces of local legislation, such as the Edinburgh Municipal
and Police Act 1879. In addition, the Licensing (Scotland) Act 1903 was
used to target pubs and hotels where prostitutes gathered, while the
Immoral Traffic (Scotland) Act 1902 dealt with living on the earnings of
prostitution and with men who solicited in public places for ‘immoral
purposes’. Unlike in England and Wales, there was no requirement under
Scottish law to prove annoyance, but prosecutions in Scotland required
more evidence than just one uncorroborated witness and prosecutions
were initiated by the Prosecutor Fiscal rather than by the police. All of this
meant that the Scottish system attracted less scandal in the form of accusa-
tions of police bribery and the manufacturing of evidence.6
Indeed, the complexities and inconsistencies of the system in England
and Wales increasingly gave rise to media storms and scandals. The first of
these happened in 1887, when PC Endacott arrested a woman named
Elizabeth Cass as a ‘common prostitute’, only to be challenged in court by
her respectable employer. The incident saw Endacott on trial for perjury,
new orders issues by the Commissioner Charles Warren, and a dramatic
drop in arrests for more than three years afterward.7 Then, in 1906, a
series of allegations of wrongful arrest, police corruption, and police bru-
tality saw the establishment of the first Royal Commission on the Duties
of the Metropolitan Police which, despite its generic name, was heavily
focused on prostitution and the policing of other kinds of street offences
and vice. Nevertheless, with the arrival of the First World War in 1914
came growing concerns about the spread of immorality in Britain.
Promiscuity and prostitution were framed not just as threats to respecta-
bility but to the very war effort. The term ‘amateur prostitute’ was applied
to young, sexually liberal women who engaged in sexual activity with men
5
Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London,
1885–1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), p. 75.
6
For more on Scottish prostitution legislation see Roger Davidson and Gayle Davis, The
Sexual State: Sexuality and Scottish Governance, 1950–80 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2014), pp. 13–35; Louise Settle, Sex for Sale in Scotland: Prostitution in Edinburgh
and Glasgow, 1900–1939 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017).
7
Laite, Common Prostitutes, pp. 70–71.
in exchange for gifts or payment in kind, while soldiers’ camps opened up

new markets for prostitution.8 In the late stages of the war, the govern-
ment introduced Regulation 40D in order to tackle venereal disease within
the armed forces. It meant that women who gave venereal disease to ser-
vicemen could be imprisoned. Repealed before the end of the war,
Regulation 40D was a controversial measure which treated women, and
prostitutes in particular, as sources of infection.9
Double standards in the way women and men were regulated contin-
ued to plague policy, policing, and prostitution after the First World War.
The interwar years saw the Metropolitan Police hit with new waves of
scandals concerning their application of England and Wales’ solicitation
laws, their corruption, and their mistreatment of prostitutes. In 1922 Sir
Almeric Fitzroy, Clerk of the Privy Council, was charged with ‘willfully
interfering with and annoying persons in Hyde Park’ after police officers
saw him approach a number of women in a single evening. Fitzroy had his
conviction overturned when one of the women annoyed, Mrs Turner, was
said to be a prostitute.10 Turner’s profession was used to discredit her tes-
timony and the injustice of this shone a light on discrepancies in the way
police and courts were handling evidence of annoyance. With the solicita-
tion laws leaving police open to accusations of unfairness and impropriety,
the government established the Street Offences Committee in October
1927.11 In many ways a precursor to the Wolfenden Committee, the Street
Offences Committee was asked to review the ‘law and practice … in con-
nection with prostitution and solicitation for immoral purposes in streets’.
While the Committee conducted its investigation there was further public
scandal. In April 1928, Irene Savidge and Sir Leo Chiozza Money were
arrested and charged with public indecency after Money was seen kissing
8
Philippa Levine, ‘“Walking the Streets in a Way No Decent Woman Should”: Woman
Police in World War I’, Journal of Modern History, 66:1 (1994), pp. 34–78; Angela
Woollacott, ‘“Khaki Fever” and its Control: Gender, Class, Age and Sexual Morality on the
British Homefront in the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary British History, 29:2
(1994), p. 326.
9
For more on Regulation 40 D see Andrew Grierson Bone, ‘Beyond the Rule of Law:
Aspects of the Defence of the Realm Acts and Regulations, 1914–1918.’ (McMaster
University, 1995).
10
Helen Self, Prostitution, Women and Misuse of the Law: The Fallen Daughters of Eve
(Frank Cass Publishers, London: 2003).
11
Caslin, Save the Womanhood, chapter three; Laite, Common Prostitutes, chapter seven;
Stefan Slater, ‘Lady Astor and the Ladies of the Night: The Home Office, the Metropolitan
Police and the Politics of the Street Offences Committee, 1927–28’, Law and History
Review, 30:2 (2012), pp. 533–573.
Savidge in London’s Hyde Park. As in the Fitzroy case, Money was a man
of high social status. Though he and Savidge were both acquitted, the
police’s treatment of Money and Savidge differed significantly. Savidge
faced extensive re-questioning by the police after her acquittal but Money
did not.12
As a result of these high-profile scandals, confidence in the Metropolitan
Police’s handling of solicitation and indecency was shaken. In August
1928 the Royal Commission on Police Powers was set up, but there was
little actual change.13 When the Street Offences Committee published its
final report in November 1928 it recommended the removal of the term
‘common prostitute’ from law and the creation of a gender-neutral law
against solicitation. However, these proposals were not enacted.
Differences of opinion among Committee members undermined the
strength of the report and there was continued debate about the eviden-
tiary threshold that should be applied to the matter of annoyance.14 As
such, the interwar years did not see the emergence of any consensus or
even clarity about how to manage prostitution on the streets.
As had happened during the First World War, the arrival of the Second
World War stoked fears about increased opportunities for prostitution and
promiscuity. Prostitution was blamed for wartime rises in rates of venereal
disease as young women engaged in transactional sex with soldiers.
Moreover, there was an explosion, more generally, in the organized and
professional commercial sex market at the same time as police numbers
were significantly reduced by the war. Once again, problematic wartime
regulations were introduced to try to limit the spread of venereal disease.
Regulation 33B, introduced in 1942, meant that anyone who was identi-
fied by two other people as having passed on venereal disease could be
arrested and made to undergo treatment. Though Regulation 33B was
not gender specific, it was used until 1947 and it was based on an assump-
tion that promiscuous women were the cause of venereal disease.15
When Britain emerged from the war, it needed to take stock of the
immense destruction to housing and infrastructure caused by bombing
campaigns, the high numbers of deaths and causalities, and continuing
Self, Prostitution, pp. 5–6.

12
For a fuller account, see Laite, Common Prostitutes.

13
14
For more, see Caslin, Womanhood, p. 83.
15
See Pamela Cox, ‘Compulsion, Voluntarism, and Venereal Disease: Governing Sexual
Health in England after the Contagious Diseases Acts’, Journal of British Studies, 46:1
(2007), pp. 96–7.
food shortages. As Britain began the process of negotiating a people’s

peace, ushering a new era of welfare capitalism, its hold on its imperial
possessions grew increasingly tenuous. The nation, it was felt, needed a
symbol of regeneration, recovery, and rebirth. It was with this in mind
that the Festival of Britain was held in 1951, and it was this that made the
1953 Coronation such an immensely significant event. More and more
attention was turned to what was widely described as ‘the state’ of
London’s streets.
The return to peacetime saw arrest rates for solicitation offences in
London skyrocket, going from a few hundred before the war, to over
2000 afterward.16 Anecdotally, street prostitution in London had gotten
worse after the conflict. Some claimed there were simply more women on
the streets; others said there were the same number, but their behaviour
had worsened. Police had their own theories about this which they never
spoke aloud, to Wolfenden or any other official record. But in their private
memoranda, they wondered whether the new policy to pay police officers
for their time spent in court had created an incentive that had previously
not existed to be more vigilant in the arrest of ‘common prostitutes’.
Meanwhile, the legal loopholes created by the 1885 Criminal Law
Amendment Act’s provisions against brothels and subsequent case law was
a cause for concern amongst particular local authorities, especially
Westminster City Council, who could not prosecute anyone if the flats or
houses were subdivided and rented out to one woman per room. This
meant that brothels could operate within the law, and landlords were
immune from prosecution. Pressure was being put on the government to
close these loopholes and better empower local authorities to shut down
brothels in their areas. The Metropolitan Police tried to frame this as a
highly localized problem, essentially centring on Paddington, a residential
area that had recently been inundated with commercial sex, which had
been escalated to one of national urgency.17 Paddington was an area des-
perate to rebuild and gentrify after a difficult two decades and had under-
taken significant hotel construction. The rise in hotels and the rise in
prostitution were strangely never correlated, but representatives of the
tourism industry were vocal proponents of new measures to clear the
streets, claiming that tourists, who arrived in London in greater and
greater numbers, especially from the old White Commonwealth, were
16
Laite, Common Prostitutes, p. 177.
17
Laite, Common Prostitutes.
shocked by the blatant solicitation they saw there. It was ‘the shame of
Britain’.
The story in London was reported nationally and set the tone for a
broader narrative about post-war prostitution being a significant social
problem. Though most of the attention was focused on London and
though convictions for solicitation in London made up a significant pro-
portion of the national average, there were increases beyond the capital.
Whereas during the 1930s and 1940s there were approximately 1–2000
convictions for solicitation in England and Wales each year, by the early
1950s the figure had climbed dramatically to over 10,000 in 1952 and
1953.18 However, it must be noted that there are problems with trying to
use regional police statistics to try to work out actual rates of prostitution.
Statistics not only reflect the degree to which particular police forces con-
centrated on the issue, they are also complicated by the fact that
prostitution-related offences were not always handled in the same way
across regions. For example, Manchester applied various offences to the
policing of prostitution. In Manchester in 1953, 207 women were con-
victed of obstructing the footpath and 83 women were convicted of aiding
and abetting males charged with indecent exposure, with most of these
offences being connected to prostitution. By contrast, just eight women
were fined for soliciting in Manchester in the same year.19
Yet regional reports do suggest that prostitution was an issue to which
police outside of London were paying more attention. For example,
Newcastle reported small increases in prosecutions against various
prostitution-related offences: during 1955 there were six prosecutions for
permitting, assisting, and keeping brothels, whereas there had been no
prosecutions for these offences between 1949 and 1954. Newcastle also
saw increases in prosecutions for living on the earnings of prostitution
during the 1950s, rising from zero at the start of the decade to three in
1953, one in 1954, and five in 1955.20 Moreover, though reported pros-
titution offences in post-war Scotland were in the hundreds rather than
thousands, prostitution offences in Scotland also increased between 1950
and the end of the 1960s. The average number of yearly offences in
Self, Prostitution, p. 8.
18
Conwy Roberts letter to Chief Constable of Manchester, 17th February 1956,

19
HO345/8.
20
Hansard, HC Deb 8th December 1955 vol 547 cc550.
Scotland leapt from 158 for the period covering 1950–1954 to 440 for
the period covering 1965–1969.21 Yet Scottish witnesses tended to sug-
gest to the Wolfenden Committee that prostitution was not a significant
problem in Scotland. Similarly, CH Watkins, the Chief Constable of
Glamorgan told Wolfenden that ‘offences involving prostitution and
brothel keeping’ did not ‘exist anywhere in Wales except possibly in the
large seaport town of Cardiff’ (though he quickly contradicted himself by
admitting that there were ‘occasional’ instances of prostitutes using motor
cars). Instead, Watkins said that homosexuality, that other area of the
Committee’s remit, was a greater issue in Glamorgan than prostitution.22
Similarly, Liverpool’s Chief Constable Charles Carnegie Martin was keen
to impress upon the Wolfenden Committee that his force had the port
city’s streets under control by pointing out that there had been just five
prosecutions against ‘street walkers’ in 1954, though he did acknowledge
that brothels were a problem in the city, with eighty-three warrants exe-
cuted in connection with brothels in 1954.23
Events in London, therefore, tended to dominate public conversation
about vice. At around the same time, a particularly tenacious newspaper
reporter, Duncan Webb, made the country aware of the growing problem
of foreign organized prostitution and turned the Messina Brothers into
notorious celebrities. These five Maltese brothers, who had been born
into their parents’ brothel-keeping business, had come to London in the
1930s and gained a reputation for running French women on the streets
of the Mayfair and the West End. Webb set about investigating the
Messinas and, on 3 September 1950, The People ran his expose on the
front page. ‘Arrest these five men!’ the newspaper cried, but the police,
unable to prove any charge, took no action.24 It was amid this persistent
use of prostitution scandals in newspaper headlines and ongoing pressure
from local councils and frustrated police and magistrates that the
Conservative Home Secretary, David Maxwell Fyfe, wrote a memoran-
dum to announce his intention to call an ‘independent’ commission to
find a solution which, he urged, should be in the form of a law that could
21
Roger Davidson and Gayle Davis, The Sexual State: Sexuality and Scottish Governance.
1950–80 (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh: 2012), p. 28.
22
CH Watkins witness statement to the Wolfenden Committee, 31st March 1955,
HO345/13, pp. 3–4.
23
For more on Martin’s account see Caslin, Save the Womanhood, pp. 191–194.
24
Laite, Common Prostitutes, c. 9.
more effectively clear prostitutes from the street. As Helen Self has argued,
the visibility of prostitution, not prostitution itself, was to Fyfe the
key issue.25
Histories and Memories of Wolfenden:

Erasing Prostitution
Wolfenden succeeded in making prostitution less visible in more ways than
one. While prostitution may have been the social problem that was the
impetus behind the Wolfenden Committee, it was homosexuality that
quickly came to take up more of their time and interest. This is relatively
easy to explain. Unlike prostitution, the Committee’s informal directives
on homosexuality were far less prescribed: they had not been given a steer,
as they had with prostitution, on what they might ideally recommend.
Also, unlike prostitution, this Committee represented the first time that
homosexuality had been explicitly and formally discussed by any govern-
ment body and, at a moment when theories about the psychological and
medical nature of ‘homosexuals’ were exploding, there was a great deal of
ground to cover. Lastly, the Committee was made up mostly of men, who
appeared far more interested in questions of male sexuality than women’s
sexual labour.
Most histories of Wolfenden, both public and academic, have main-
tained this uneven if understandable interest. They explore the Committee,
its findings, and its consequences, almost exclusively from the perspective
of the history of homosexuality and the experiences of men who had sex
with men in this period. The catalogue entry for the Wolfenden
Committee’s final report on the Houses of Parliament archive does not
mention prostitution at all, nor is it discussed on the British Library
Website’s section devoted to the report. Even the National Archives web-
site and the Parliament website, in discussing their holdings related to
Wolfenden, present it as being solely about homosexuality.26 In the aca-
demic sphere, more than four times as many books and articles have
appeared that discuss Wolfenden in the context of homosexuality than in
25
26
UK Parliament, ‘Wolfenden Report’, https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/
transformingsociety/private-lives/relationships/collections1/sexual-offences-act-1967/
wolfenden-report-/; https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/wolfenden-report-conclusion#;
[accessed on 23/10/2019] The National Archives, ‘Before and After Wolfenden’, http://
www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers/themes/before-after-wolfenden-report.htm
[accessed on 23/10/19].
the context of prostitution. Helen Self remains the only historian who has
explored the Wolfenden Committee in any great depth, and her book
Prostitution, Women and the Misuse of the Law: The Fallen Daughters of Eve
(2003) remains the authoritative analysis of its origins, proceedings, and
consequences. She is joined by work by this book’s editors, Julia Laite and
Samantha Caslin, in their own research monographs, as well as some talks
and short papers by other scholars.27 In addition, Roger Davidson and
Gayle Davis have usefully examined the implications of Wolfenden for
prostitution in Scotland, highlighting the importance of not viewing this
area of British history solely through the lens of the legal system in England
and Wales.28 More broadly, however, historians of sexuality in this period
tend, taking their cue from the subjects’ conflation in the Wolfenden
Committee, to assume that many things about homosexuality and prosti-
tution were analogous. In his examination of the sexual politics of ‘permis-
sive Britain’, Frank Mort refers to prostitution and homosexuality as ‘two
gendered forms of sexuality’, which immediately reveals the dangers of
this approach: prostitutes very rarely linked their prostitution to sexuality,
preferring to see it as a job.29
This imbalance of scholarship is surprising because, as Helen Self
argues, and we would agree, it was in fact prostitution, and not homosexu-
ality, that had been the initial impetus for the calling of the Department
Committee in the first place.30 It is even more surprising when one
acknowledges that the Committee had far more of a direct and swift
impact on legislative change in relation to prostitution than it did in rela-
tion to homosexuality. Specifically, the 1959 Street Offences Act removed
the need to prove annoyance from solicitation law; yet the law which sur-
rounded homosexuality remained unchanged until a decade after the
Committee published their recommendations. Ultimately, more than sixty
years on from its Report’s publication Wolfenden continues to be read
narrowly and woven into the narrative about permissive Britain in a way
27
Self, Prostitution; Laite, Common Prostitutes, page; Caslin, Save the Womanhood, Chapter
Nine esp. pp. 190–196.
28
Roger Davidson and Gayle Davis, ‘“A Festering Sore on the Body of Society”: The
Wolfenden Committee and Female Prostitution in mid-twentieth-century Scotland’, Journal
of Scottish Historical Studies, 24:1 (2004), pp. 80–98.
29
Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: The Making of the Permissive Society (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2010).
30
Self, Prostitution.
that does not properly account for how differently it approached

prostitution.
So why have we spent so much more time thinking and writing about
Wolfenden’s approach to homosexuality? One reason may be because, in
popular history especially, Wolfenden tends to be presented as a celebra-
tory moment which dramatically challenged the authority of the state and
church to legislate against same-sex desire. Because of the immense sup-
port for LGBTQ+ rights in the present day and the high-profile nature of
the issues, this particular history of Wolfenden resonates profoundly. In
contrast, the question of the ‘right’ way to deal with prostitution remains
extremely controversial, not only among the public, but amongst femi-
nists themselves. Even as the campaign for sex workers’ rights and safety—
which overwhelmingly calls for decriminalization—grows, a strong and
vocal anti-prostitution feminist campaign has allied itself with religious
groups and politicians to demand more criminalization, especially of men
who buy sex. Wolfenden’s ‘practical’ approach to prostitution—to push it
out of sight—leaves us with little to celebrate on either side of this seem-
ingly unbridgeable divide.
As Helen Self has argued, ‘the conflation of homosexuality with prosti-
tution as problems of sexual deviance diminished the clarity with which
the issues were perceived’.31 In conflating the two very different issues,
Wolfenden performed philosophical contortions to graft together a legal
rationale which would justify the Committee’s recommendations to relax
the law against homosexuality while strengthening the way the law was
used against prostitutes. The problem was that if these were both forms of
sexual deviancy, then how could such different proposals be reasonably be
reached by a Committee that supposedly wanted to be above moral dis-
cussion of these topics? For Wolfenden, the answer was to frame homo-
sexuality as a matter of private morals and thus outside the remit of the law
while framing prostitution as a matter of public offence. There is a ten-
dency to regard this as a liberal move, one which officially began a half-
century long process of securing more rights for gay men and women. But
this narrative has been seriously challenged by historians, who argue that
Wolfenden was more about controlling and defining gay men than
31
liberating them, about ‘privatizing’ morality, as Frank Mort has described.32

Matt Houlbrook, in his important work, shows how in the aftermath of
Wolfenden, prosecutions against gay men in public skyrocketed.33 And a
wealth of scholarship points to the fact that it was not state-sponsored
bodies like Wolfenden that really brought positive change into the lives of
LGBTQ+ people: it was the struggles, campaigns, words, and deeds of
these people themselves acting as their own advocates.
Moreover, just as conflating prostitution and homosexuality mislead
Wolfenden and its witnesses, so too does it muddle our historical under-
standing of prostitution and the law in post-war Britain. It is unproductive
and misleading to analogize homosexuality and prostitution. Doing so
erases the labour of women, and indeed men, who worked in the sex
industry and reduces prostitution to a ‘sexuality’. It conflates and confuses
the very different campaigns for decriminalization. It suggests that the
legal structures controlling both were similar: but while they were indeed
contained within the same statutes, they were enforced entirely separately,
with different legal processes, different forms of policing, and dramatically
different public attitudes. The persistent conflation of homosexuality and
women’s sexual labour, we might suggest, is larger than a simple issue of
distraction or oversight. It is part of the systematic way in which women
who had been labelled ‘common prostitutes’ have been marginalized,
invisibilized, pushed underground, and written out of public and social
life with very real and dangerous consequences. The binding together of
prostitution with homosexuality and Wolfenden’s public/private solution
to this inappropriate pairing meant that the law’s potential to impact the
safety of sex workers was written off as necessary collateral.
Therefore, we welcomed the opportunity to edit this critical source-
book exploring the other, far less examined, side of the Wolfenden
Committee. We see it as a way of restoring the question of prostitution
and the experiences of women who sold sex in this era to a central place in
the debate about sexual liberalization, morality, and the law in post-war
Britain.
32
Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: The Making of the Permissive Society (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2010).
33
Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 2005).
Forming the Committee, Selecting Evidence

and Witnesses, and Holding the Proceedings
In August 1954, The Home Office appointed a committee of fifteen com-

missioners, with John Wolfenden, an experienced public servant who had
recently become the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Reading, as its
Chairman. Conwy Roberts, Home Office civil servant, was appointed as
the Committee’s secretary and quickly became one of the key figures
steering the group, and Wolfenden’s advisor and confidant.34 The
Committee accepted submitted memoranda of evidence from a variety of
mostly invited individuals and organizations, though a handful of memo-
randa were submitted without invitation. Witnesses were then selected to
be called before the committee to answer questions about their submitted
evidence and to reflect more generally on the problems of prostitution and
homosexuality. Some people, mostly police officers, gave oral testimony
only. In some cases, witnesses and organizations were called to speak to
only one or the other issue, but in many cases, they were asked questions
about both subjects. It would be interesting indeed to compare what the
same witnesses said about both, using this book and our companion vol-
ume, Brian Lewis’ Wolfenden’s Witnesses (2016), together.
The committee sat for sixty-two days, thirty-two days of which were
devoted to interviews. They interviewed more than 200 witnesses. Forty-
two different organizations or associations were represented, and twenty
people were interviewed as individuals. Of these organizations and indi-
viduals, over half spoke to the issue of prostitution. All these meetings
were held in private. The privacy of the proceedings was integral to the
project and, to a large extent, spoke to the degree to which the subjects
under discussion were considered controversial. As Sir John Wolfenden
explained to representatives of the British Medical Association as they
were giving evidence on 15 December 1955:
[A]s you see, we have a shorthand note taken of all our meetings entirely
and completely for our own use, in order that in the weeks and months to
come, we shall be able to refresh our memories on exactly what was said. It
is in no sense for publication in any way, so that we speak entirely freely and
with complete frankness, making no distinction between what is on the
34
record and what is off the record, taking it, if you like, that it is all off the
record but happens to be recorded.35
Despite these assurances of frankness, however, the Committee were

still at pains to be seen to be handling discussions in a respectful and
proper manner. It is often noted that members of the Committee referred
to homosexuals and prostitutes respectively as ‘Huntley and Palmers’,
after a well-known biscuit brand. The supposed purpose of this was to
spare the embarrassment and offence of any women privy to the proceed-
ings. That such a step was considered necessary emphasizes the very gen-
dered nature of the discussions and the overall maleness of the Committee.
Over the course of their interviews with witnesses, it also became clear
who most Committee members felt were reliable and useful witnesses, and
who they felt were a relative waste of their time. These judgement calls
were based on a complex interplay of individual and social bias, political
expediency, and perhaps even personal enmity, but in all cases represented
a battle over who was permitted to claim expertise on the subject and
which kinds of expertise were valued. Often, this was linked to whether
the witness was advocating a stance that was in keeping with, or adverse
to, what the Committee had been informally told by the Home Office
would be a desirable outcome for the law on prostitution. Yet no groups
garnered more invective and dismissal than women’s organizations, espe-
cially the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene (AMSH) who had
formed in 1915 and had for many years campaigned for the repeal of all
laws against ‘common prostitutes’.36
In fact, the private proceedings of the Committee were not simply
about protecting the innocence of women; privacy also served to exclude
certain groups of women from exerting influence. When the AMSH and
the National Council of Women wrote to Wolfenden in October 1954 to
object to the Committee’s meetings being held in private, they were
treated with derision by the Committee Secretary, Roberts, and
Wolfenden.37 Roberts wrote to Wolfenden to suggest that ‘these worthy
ladies … want the meeting open so that they can send observers to hear
35
Wolfenden Minutes of Evidence, 15 December 1955, London, TNA, HO345/15.
36
Julia Laite, ‘The Association for Moral and Social Hygiene: abolitionism and prostitu-
tion law in Britain (1915–1959), Women’s History Review, 17 (2008), pp. 207–223.
37
Association for Moral and Social Hygiene letter to Sir John Wolfenden dated 14th
October 1954 and National Council of Women of Great Britain letter to Sir John Wolfenden,
dated 20th October 1954. HO345/2.
what other witnesses are saying’ and to ‘organise pressure groups’ to

‘counteract evidence with which they do not agree’.38 He was right to sup-
pose as much, since they were effectively cutting these groups off from the
conversation.
The AMSH were dismissed by Roberts as ‘cranks and busybodies’, and
obliquely referred to in other places as ineffective idealists. Despite being
the oldest and most respected civil society organization dedicated to the
study of prostitution, very little of what they had to say was reflected in the
final report. As Helen Self discovered from close examination of the
Committee’s correspondence, Wolfenden and the Roberts conspired to
keep as many of the AMSH representatives as silent as possible during
questioning, and saw that they were, in Self’s words, ‘furtively reduced to
a comic turn’.39 For example, when a session began late, Sir John Wolfenden
apologized to the police officer witnesses and explained ‘I am afraid we
have kept you waiting a very long time. That is because the two lots who
preceded you were both a pair of women, so you can understand there has
been a good deal of talking going on.’40 It was a frankly preposterous
thing to say given that the women had been invited by the Committee to
come in to talk, and in both cases the interviews were shorter than average.
Wolfenden’s approach to the AMSH was in part due to the Association’s
radical stance on prostitution law, but it was in no small part also owing to
the Committee’s general dismissal of women speakers. Alongside their
reluctance to engage with the AMSH, members of the Wolfenden
Committee were also keen to distance themselves from women’s moral
reform organizations. The Committee’s attempt to appear ‘modern’ and
‘practical’ meant that they needed to appear to be looking beyond moral
issues (including questions of sexual morality in the treatment of women
and the role of demand); however, many times they referenced morality
themselves. That the Wolfenden Committee was so reluctant to engage
with moral reform organizations stood out all the more for the fact that
the Committee’s overriding concern about the visibility of prostitution
actually had much in common with the preventative approaches that had
38
Conwy Roberts letter to Sir John Wolfenden, dated 26th October 1954. HO345/2.
39
40
Interview transcript of PCs Scarborough and Anderson, HO 345/12.
historically been adopted by groups affiliated to moralizing organizations

like the National Vigilance Association.41
Representatives of the increasingly professionalized social and psycho-
logical sciences also appeared before the Commissioners, and were largely
admired and respected for their knowledge and theories about prostitu-
tion, but ultimately their evidence was considered largely irrelevant
because, in the words of the final report, ‘we do not consider it within our
province or competence to make a full examination of the moral, social,
psychological and biological causes of homosexuality and prostitution, or
of the many theories advanced about these causes’.42 However, the very
fact that consideration was given to the possibility of prostitution having a
‘psychological or biological cause’ represented a culmination of attitudes
that had developed particularly since the early twentieth century, informed
by the entangled ideas of criminology, eugenics, and biological determin-
ism. The ‘social’ causes of prostitution, on the other hand, which had once
been so central to understandings of the problem, were marginalized in
this new era of welfare capitalism, and witnesses and Committee members
routinely dismissed the possibility that poverty and other kinds of social
need had caused women to sell sex.
The groups who were accorded the most respect, authority, and ulti-
mately weight in the final report were the police, the magistrates, social
workers, and community organizations. These groups, however, were also
in quite apparent tension with each other. The police were naturally seen
as the key authorities on how the law worked in practice and on the prob-
lems of controlling street prostitution; but the police often saw the
Magistrates and their insistence on certain kinds of evidence and a certain
number of prosecutions as a bar to the effective clearing of the streets. At
the same time, the Magistrates queried the law itself, which forced them
to accept police evidence that was circumspect on the one hand, and hand
out meaningless fines on the other when they would have preferred to
remand young women into custody. Social workers agreed—and made
repeated appeals for more authority within the system in order to inter-
vene to rescue and reform younger women. These roles, which had once
been filled by moral reform organizations and church-run charities, had
become increasingly professionalized since the Second World War. As a
41
For more on the side-lining of moral welfare groups by Wolfenden see Caslin, Save the
Womanhood, Chapter Nine.
42
The Wolfenden Report, p. 23.
member of the Liverpool Vigilance Association, a social purity organiza-

tion which sought to prevent prostitution put it in 1952: ‘So many people
think that nowadays the Welfare state covers all needed charitable work
but this is not the case.’43 Moreover, while police and the magistrates
doubted the efficacy of moral intervention, they often replicated preventa-
tive moral discourses of the vulnerable and the fallen. For example, the
Chief Constable of Liverpool suggested that women police should be
given more ‘authority’ to deal with ‘girls’ at risk of being ‘led into this life
of prostitution’, while Metropolitan Magistrate Paul Bennett referred to
women who solicited near London’s Park Lane as ‘crossgrained creatures
with no sensibility’.44 Meanwhile, community organizations questioned
the power and performance of police, magistrates, and social workers, as
they laid before Wolfenden their ‘cri de Coeur’ as one group put it, for
something to be done to clean up the streets and houses in their areas.
These appeals, coming especially from the residential London borough of
Paddington, appeared to have a most profound effect upon the
Commissioners.
Most present-day readers will notice a glaring absence in the list of wit-
nesses to the Wolfenden Committee. While three men who were identified
as homosexual were called to sit at the table and speak to the Commissioners,
no woman who sold sex or who had been arrested as a ‘common prosti-
tute’ was called to speak on her own behalf. The idea of inviting prosti-
tutes to testify was mooted and was considered with some levity by
Committee members. Apparently, a paltry attempt was made to recruit
two women, who, claimed the Secretary, refused to come to the Home
Office to testify. No allowances were made, of course, for the fact that
women who had experienced repeated arrests were unlikely to relish the
thought of walking into the building that was the seat of the authority that
condemned them. In fact, the Committee showed very little initiative or
involvement in reaching out to these women: the process was poorly doc-
umented, and no names or details ever appeared in any correspondence.
The Committee appeared to wish to discuss two key issues—the best
way to clear the streets and the best way to word any new law to this
43
Caslin, Save the Womanhood, p. 189.
44
C.C. Martin, Transcript of Evidence, Departmental Committee on Homosexual
Offences and Prostitution, 31st March 1955, p. 28, HO345/13 and Paul Bennett, Transcript
of Evidence, Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, 5th
January 1955, p. 1, HO345/12.
effect; and what, if anything, might be done about prostitution that

occurred off the street. They were especially interested in what witnesses
thought of the term ‘common prostitute’, and of the potential impact of
removing the need to prove annoyance in the Metropolitan Police Act of
1839, to bring in a national law that more closely resembled the legal
language in Scotland that required only that a woman be proved to be a
‘common prostitute’ who was ‘soliciting for the purposes of prostitution’.
Their witnesses, on the other hand, used their memoranda of evidence and
interviews to explore a much wider range of issues. They spoke about the
social, medical, and psychological causes of prostitution, the ways in which
society could intervene to reform young women, the role of the courts,
the extent and nature of exploitation and third-party involvement, and the
question of licensed or legalized brothels. Most strikingly, the question of
demand—men buying sex—came up again and again in witness interviews
and, unlike the other topics mentioned here, did not appear to warrant
more than a few words in the final report. The huge range and diversity of
opinions on offer in the excerpts that follow, read alongside Wolfenden’s
final report, reflect the work that the Committee did to forge a superficial
sense of consensus for what remained, in fact, very controversial
recommendations.
How We Constructed This Sourcebook

We have chosen to organize this sourcebook by theme rather than, as our
companion volume Wolfenden’s Witnesses does, by category of speaker. We
felt that this method of organization was the most effective way to high-
light the range of topics, and the diversity of opinions (even within one
group or profession), surrounding the question of prostitution. Eight
chapters explore different themes found within the submitted evidence
and the witness interviews: public space; prostitution outside of London;
policing; law, jurisprudence, and punishment; causes, prevention, and
intervention; third parties and exploitation; and finally, the question of
demand. These chapters are subdivided to show different categories of
speakers and submitters: government officials, the police, and magistrates;
social workers and probation officers; local authority representatives and
community organizations; social scientific and medical professionals; and
finally, moral reform and feminist organizations.
In all cases we have made it clear whether the excerpt is from submitted
evidence, or from an interview transcript; but this will usually be apparent
to the reader without this signposting. While submitted evidence tended

to be carefully framed prose, witness testimonies were more disorganized,
idiosyncratic, and candid. Witnesses were sometimes taken off guard, or
taken aback, and some were treated with more circumspection or hostility
from the Committee than others. Very often, witnesses there to represent
organizations moved into expressing their personal opinions. All of this
creates a very specific kind of source for historians, which is different from
the material found within submitted evidence. Readers will probably
notice that often submitted evidence was discussed at the interview but
should note that not everyone who submitted evidence was called to
appear before the Committee.
Chapter 10, entitled Wolfenden’s Missing Women, presents excerpts
from published and archival sources that tell us about the attitudes and
experiences of women who sold sex both before and after Wolfenden,
which we have included as a counterpoint to the Committee’s failure to
interview any woman who sold sex. Chapter 11 includes excerpts from the
Committee’s final report. Each chapter begins with a short contextualiz-
ing and analytical introduction. Finally, at the back of the book readers will
find a glossary of laws, Committee members, organizations, and individu-
als that they can use for reference and further context.
Readers can use this sourcebook however they wish, but it is designed
to allow researchers, students, and others the opportunity to come to an
understanding of the law, politics, and social dimensions of prostitution in
this era through an exploration of these key and unprecedented primary
sources that were created by the Committee’s investigations and reflec-
tions. We hope to encourage more scholarship, especially amongst stu-
dents, that begins to redress the imbalances and misconceptions in the
histories we tell about Wolfenden. The excerpts in the chapters that follow
are carefully curated by us as editors, but we have in all instances endeav-
oured to capture the wide range of topics and opinions that Wolfenden
encountered, as well as fascinating moments of heated debate, obfusca-
tion, or startling honesty. We very much hope what follows gives readers
new, first-hand insights into the complex history of commercial sex and its
control in post-war Britain.
CHAPTER 2
Prostitution and Public Space
The presence of women selling sex on the street and in other public space
lay at the heart of the rising concern about prostitution in post-war Britain.
That women were soliciting on the street was nothing new: this had been
the primary form of solicitation in London and many other cities for more
than a century. Ideas about public space, however, had changed dramati-
cally during the first half of the twentieth century. Changes in consumer-
ism and in women’s leisure habits had raised concerns about the supposed
moral effects women’s engagement with public space. Then came the
destruction wrought by the blitz, which transformed many cities’ business
and housing landscapes, adding new urgency to ideas about urban regen-
eration, national identity, and safe public space.
By mid-century, women of all classes had unprecedented access to pub-
lic space as consumers, leisure-seekers, and workers. At the same time,
thousands of young women and their families had been emotionally, phys-
ically, and economically affected by the Second World War. Many of these
women flocked to bigger cities, and they helped to significantly reshape
the uses of public space. Women had, of course, travelled around the
country in search of work before this, but after the Second World War
there was a sense that their ambitions and lifestyles were pushing them
farther and farther from the watchful eyes of their parents. In Liverpool,
the Chief Constable expressed concern about young women travelling to
the city from Ireland, Manchester, Leeds, and Newcastle, only to turn to
prostitution when their experiences of work and economic independence
© The Author(s) 2020 21

S. Caslin, J. Laite, Wolfenden’s Women, Genders and Sexualities in
History, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44022-8_2
fell short of their expectations. Meanwhile, London continued to act as a

magnet for young women seeking out employment, independence, and
excitement. The Festival of Britain in 1951 and the Coronation in 1953
ushered in new drives to ‘clean up’ London in a new era of tourism and
television. At the same time, concerns about women’s behaviour morphed
into bigger questions about the moral image that the nation was project-
ing to the rest of the world.
Arrest statistics are difficult to correlate with relative amounts of street
prostitution, but it does seem clear that prostitution had moved into new
areas during and just after the war. In London, street prostitution had
always existed in pockets scattered throughout the metropolis, but it was
nonetheless most concentrated by a large degree in Soho and Piccadilly.
After the war, neighbourhood associations and borough councils claimed
that it had spread—and gotten far worse—in other places, especially
Mayfair and Paddington. Newspapers ran regular exposes on these areas,
adding to the sense of crisis. Many of these spatial changes in London had
been a product of a decades long, if uneven, campaign against street solici-
tation and off-street prostitution, which had displaced women and their
clients from established areas in Westminster, to neighbouring districts.
These districts—Bayswater and Mayfair—also happened to be extremely
affluent, mainly residential areas, and readers will note that the Mayfair
Association and the Paddington Moral Reform Council—as well as the
Borough Council—remark frequently on the incongruous nature of pros-
titution being seen in such respectable neighbourhoods. These municipal
and borough councils proved extremely influential to the Wolfenden
Committee, evoking images of ‘ordinary citizens’ being harassed, respect-
able neighbourhoods being blighted, the whole country feeling ‘shame’,
and the ‘shock’ of visitors who saw London’s rampant street
prostitution.
The Home Office certainly believed that solicitation was an issue that
disproportionately affected London, feeding into the London-centric
focus of the Wolfenden Committee. The Home Offices’ own memoran-
dum of evidence to the Committee suggested that a large increase in con-
victions for solicitation was mostly the result of London cases. Reports
from other parts of the UK often played down issues with solicitation. Yet
the general sense that prostitution was a London problem did not trans-
late into confidence about the wider state of Britain’s streets. Those con-
cerns about ‘ordinary citizens’ being harassed and about neighbourhood
decline carried tacit warnings about all of Britain’s urban life. What was
2 PROSTITUTION AND PUBLIC SPACE 23
less clear, however, was what could be done about the moral state of
London’s (and by extension, Britain’s) streets. Wolfenden wanted to avoid
accusations of using the law to intervene in matters of personal morality,
but, via allusions to public morality and public offence, Wolfenden carved
out a justification for using the law to target prostitution on the streets.
The Committee did not ignore the influence of police, and municipal
and borough councils. Indeed, they appeared to have clout in terms of
Wolfenden’s final recommendations. Yet the excerpts below, taken from
the Departmental Committee interviews and the memoranda of evidence,
reveal a diversity of opinions about prostitution and public space. There
were several questions raised by witnesses about how to define public
annoyance and disturbance when the offence was collective rather than
individual. Interviewees queried the relationship of prostitution to other
public nuisances. Police officers challenged the idea that prostitution in
public space had really changed very much. Feminist groups continued to
rail against the solicitation laws which made prostitution a specific kind of
nuisance, and labelled certain women in public space ‘common prosti-
tutes’. There seemed a significant gap, however, between the more
nuanced opinions Wolfenden heard, and the ones which the Committee
ultimately incorporated into their recommendations, which took collec-
tive public offence for granted and worked backwards from there.
Excerpts
Government
. Home Office, Submitted Evidence (Pertaining to England

1
and Wales)
For some years past, successive Home Secretaries have been pressed in
Parliament, in the Press, and by local authorities, leaders of the Churches
and civic organisations, to introduce measures more effective than those
provided by the present laws to check the activities of prostitutes soliciting
in the streets of London and some of the larger provincial cities.
The number of convictions for soliciting and kindred offences in
England and Wales rose from 3192 in 1938 to 10,291 in 1952. Most of
these cases occurred in London, where the number rose from 2966 to
9756. As will be seen from paragraph 40 below, figures relating to convic-
tions do not necessarily reflect the conditions actually existing in the streets
at a given time, and opinions may differ as to how far the figures quoted
reflect a real increase in the volume of prostitution. There can, however,
be no dispute that the conditions in some of the streets of London are
deplorable. They are probably without parallel in the capital cities of other
civilised countries.
Police and Magistrates
. Paul Bennet, Police Court Magistrate

1
Bennet: … Prostitution is not a thing you can stop, and I think it is rather
a waste of time and a mistake to try and stop it. What I object to, what is
so much worse today than it used to be, is this soliciting. It has now got
to the streets around Park Lane, mainly because of that big United States
service there. Then there are those two big hotels which have nothing to
do with it, but several friends of mine—ladies—coming out of the
Dorchester have told me how some woman has taken their husband by the
arm. That thing did not exist as late as 1938 in that part of London, and
it is the public order that I think from the public point of view is a thing
for the authorities to aim at.
. PCs Scarborough and Anderson

2
Q. [Linstead]: With your long experience of the West End which dates
back to between the wars, the 1930s, would you say the situation is very
much the same as it was in the ’thirties?
A. [PC Anderson]: I should say about the same.
A. [PC Scarborough]: They go from one street to another. Regent
street between Glasshouse Street and Piccadilly Circus—back in the
’thirties Ford’s Motor Showroom, that used to be a regular place, the
same as in Jermyn Street and St. James’ Street. It has moved from there to
Coventry Street, Glasshouse Street, and Brewer Street. It has merely taken
them from one street and put them in another.
. Association of Chief Officers of Police—Witnesses: Mr C Martin,

3
CBE, the Chief Constable of Liverpool and Mr CH Watkins, the Chief
Constable of Glamorgan
CHAIRMAN: You would not think, Mr Martin, that there was any
advantage, from the point of view of the police in dealing with other more
serious crimes, in having these girls more easily accessible, in circulation
on the streets, for instance, than practicing in a brothel where it is, as we
have heard, more difficult to get at them?—A. Do you mean that they
would be more helpful to the police?
Q. We have had it put to us this way, that if—in London—there was any
serious attempt to drive them off the streets, that would perhaps in some
ways make the work of the police more difficult in connection with other
things, that it would not be as easy for the police to know what was going
on and know who was about, and so on, if the prostitutes were hidden
away either in brothels or in one-girl flats on a call girl system. Is there
anything in that, in your experience?—A. I do not think there is much
substance in that, really. There are prostitutes who give information to the
police, of course, about various crimes, and quite voluntarily they come to
us—I was only saying today to one of my officers: ‘What would happen if
there were a call girl system in Liverpool, for example?’, and he said: ‘They
would not exist, the street girl would tell us all about them and what they
were doing, they would not stand an earthly.’ That is probably some sort
of answer to your question, and they would have the protection of their
own profession to tell us what was going on in that direction. But some of
them do give us information about crime that is going on at times. They
are not hostile to the police.
[Mr Adair] Q. Are you troubled with either milk bars or public houses
where they are being encouraged to go?—A. [Martin] No, not encour-
aged. It is awfully difficult, you know, in the centre of the city, where these
places are packed at times; it is awfully difficult to suggest that anyone
encourages them to go in. It is if course a fact that they are more or less,
shall I say, for want of a better word, driven into them, in other words that
they find they cannot walk the street and that the next best method of get-
ting a man is in a milk bar or a public house.
Q. And that is controlled by your brothel prosecutions? Is that your
method of controlling that, controlling the amount of prostitution that
goes on?—A. No, I would not say that so much. It does help to control it,
but I think there are all sorts of other features. I think generally the stan-
dard is improving, and that there are gradually becoming fewer prostitutes
than there used to be.
. Sir Laurence Dunne, MC, Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, Meeting

4
on 4th October 1955
Q. [Chairman] In between the two dangers that are very clear I think to
all of us of (a) on the one hand the consequences of which are clear, and
(b) on the other hand the present state of the streets, granted that one is
not trying to abolish prostitution, granted one is not trying to drive it

underground, but still wanting to do something about the public
scandal which there is going on, is there anything that can be
suggested?—A. [Dunne] There is only this, and as to how far it would
work I do not know, and that is to move the market. You would make a
schedule of streets in which prostitution per se will be an offence, and
drive the women away from that particular locality. That seems to be per-
fectly feasible. As to whether it is an approach of expediency—it does not
have principles, but it might have the effect that you want.
Q. [Chairman] They would then go somewhere else?—A. [Dunne]
They would then go somewhere else.
Q. [Chairman] Chase them around somewhere else?—A. [Dunne]
They would have to trade in certain streets that were not scheduled, and
the man who wanted his woman would have to go there for her.
Q. [Chairman] He would start, I suppose, by knowing that
it was no good going to certain streets, because they had been
proscribed?—A. [Dunne] Yes.
Q. [Chairman] The danger would be, would it not, that before long
instead of having streets that were proscribed you would have streets that
were prescribed?—A. [Dunne] You would have streets in which it was
extremely dangerous to show your nose.
Q. [Chairman] That is what I meant.—A. [Dunne] You would have
streets that would become complete and absolute danger spots. Non-
prescribed streets in the vicinity of the main thoroughfares would be ….
Q. [Chairman] Rather hot spots?—A. [Dunne] Very dangerous I think
to go in after dark.
Q. [Mrs Cohen]: Is it not the case already that most of these prostitutes
are in the hands of ponces, and they have somebody who is responsible for
them, so that if we do drive them off the streets are we really making it
very much worse for them?—A. [Dunne] There are an awful lot of ponces
at the present moment. There are some big ones and some small ones, but
a lot of the women really use the ponces as their protector. They are men
who perhaps control two, three, four, five or six women, and that sort of
thing. I think if you really tackled the thing, and made the possession of
an address absolutely essential, suppose, for instance you, made prostitu-
tion per se an [28] offence, then I think you would fund the whole thing
organised, and the power would drift into a very few hands. At the present
moment I think there is safety in numbers, a lot of ponces, but they have
not got any very great power. Some of them have, that is to say some have
a great many more women than others, and they have more money, and
they can do more in the way of providing for their women than others, but
at the present moment there is safety in numbers.
Q. [Mrs Cohen] If you did not make prostitution per se an offence, but
you make any kind of solicitation on the streets an offence, would that not
be a possibility?—A. [Dunne] Soliciting for what?
MRS COHEN: For anything.
CHAIRMAN: For immoral purposes.
MRS COHEN: Take, for instance, barrow boys selling on the streets,
they are not allowed to go up and worry people, they are not allowed to
go up and say “Come and buy my goods”. They have to stand
there.—A. [Dunne] Yes.
Q. [Mrs Cohen] That is what I mean, any kind of soliciting.—A. [Dunne]
The women are there, but they must not make the active approach.
Q. [Mrs Cohen] If a woman is found continually loitering in the street
night after night, surely the police have a right to say “What are you doing
here?” I should expect them to if I were loitering.—A. [Dunne] Yes, they
are loitering, but they may pass and re-pass. As long as they are walking
along the pavement, along the Queen’s Highway, nobody can say any-
thing to them, unless they are doing something overt to show that they
are a rival ….
Mrs Cohen: If they keep walking ….
Mrs Lovibond: They might be round the corner.
Mrs Cohen: I know it is difficult, but I wondered what your reaction
was to it?—A. [Dunne] Yes, I can see what you mean, but really that is
almost the position now, that in theory if a prostitute chooses just to walk
about, and make eyes at somebody as they pass her, of course they should
be beyond the law, the rule of the criminal law, but, of course, as a matter
of fact if a well-known prostitute pokes her head outside in the West End
streets at the present moment and is seen by a policeman he will say
“Hello, you have not been on a charge for a fortnight”, and that is what
happens.
Local Authorities
. Paddington Borough Council—Witnesses: Councillor P Dyas,

1
Alderman WD Goss, and Mr C Jobson, the Deputy Town Clerk
Mr Dyas: I would only like to say that we have had in many cases we have
looked at this evidence of organised brothels, and we also know that many
men come into our Borough just for that purpose, both visiting Americans
and British. The matters that trouble me personally most are that in the
Borough this soliciting and the various other acts of indecency are being
carried on in the public gaze and are offending our citizens, in particular
the younger people in the Borough, and that is a great worry. If you like
we can be rather Victorian and admit that what goes on behind closed
doors is not so worrying as that which is seen in public as an example to
everybody living around. … In the Borough these women are parading
around in increasing numbers, and are not only just parading around and
soliciting but are annoying the citizens in an ordinary physical and moral
sense. Round some of our bus stops, for instance by Marble Arch, you can
see six or eight of them on a Saturday night mingling with decent women,
shouting coarse jokes, and generally being physical nuisances, disregard-
ing the moral side. Further down, for instance, in one of our roads, the
Bayswater Road down by a coffee place they would gather there, and if a
police patrol came down I know only too well they would gather for a
moment round the coffee stall, and there was nothing that the police
could about this … we found out later they were buying contraceptives
from a coffee stall, but that is a detail … the evidence of what they had
been doing was strewn around the parks, in the mews, in people’s front
gardens. … The effect that this has on the young people in the Borough
is only too obvious.
…
Mr Goss: At the house where I live we have an entrance of about 10ft
long which has six steps up to the front door and a side entrance within
that main entrance down to the basement. Prostitutes have been using
that front, as they have other fronts along the street. You come out in the
morning and you see evidence, a rubber sheath lying there, and I have
found as many as three in a morning. We are very disturbed as there is a
young girl of 14 years of age in the basement, and her parents and our-
selves are naturally disturbed, and we get out first to clear away the evi-
dence before she can see it. You can see them opposite us. There is a
garden with overhanging trees and you will see the evidence there of what
goes on nightly. We have caught one of these girls, regular girls they are,
using the fronts as public convenience and when I went out she was not a
bit worried about arranging her dress in front of men and when I said I
would speak to the police she just looked at me and said “They had me
yesterday and I paid my 40s”, just as offhand as that about it.
Civil Society and Charities
. British Medical Association—Witnesses: Dr R Gibson, Dr DC

1
Carroll, Dr TCN Gibbens, Mr A King, Dr Doris Odlum,
Dr EE Claxton
Q. [Mr Adair]: Regarding paragraph 140, would you tell us where you get
your justification for that: “It is still true that the prostitute’s client is most
frequently an unaccompanied male who has taken alcohol and who has
probably no intention of seeking a sexual partner until solicited.” A. [Dr
Odlum] I am very glad you raised that, because I was going to ask for the
permission of the Chairman to make a slight alteration to this sentence. I
think that is too sweeping and “very often” is the phrase I would like to use.
Q. [Mr Adair]: Not “most often”?
Q. [Mrs Cohen]: I had that marked, and I had inserted the words
“street walker”, rather than “prostitute” in that case—the normal person
hanging around the street, whereas a common prostitute is not necessarily
handing about the street.
A. [Dr Odlum]: I think that is what we really meant—“street walker”.
. Paddington Moral Reform Council—Witnesses: Mr Robert Allan

2
MP; Councillor Mrs Eyre and Mr MP Simpson
[Mr Allan] I merely wish to emphasize how extremely serious the problem
is in Paddington, particularly in Paddington, because that is what I am
talking about and because that is what I know about. I happen to have
been educated in America, and have a lot of French relations, so I have a
lot of Foreigners coming to see me for one reason or another, and I find
that they are absolutely disgusted by what they see. We have in Paddington
a great many hotels, and the whole area is one which we are striving to
improve. The hotels are very good. There are big, new building schemes
going on with nice flats with rents anything up to a thousand and over,
and yet they are in the middle of these extremely squalid conditions. What
goes on now goes on in absolute daylight. I have a friend who lives in a flat
on the ground floor and on Saturday morning two weeks ago—they have
a sort of drawing room on the ground floor—he looked out—and he lives
there with his young family—and a car drew up right in front of his door,
and the man and woman in the car began to take off all their clothes right
in front of his eyes, beneath his drawing room window. I could give you
many instances of this sort of thing. I tell you this merely to emphasize the
importance of this problem to Paddington, to the hotel people, and to
people who are trying to improve an area which has been allowed to go
down. As regards concrete suggestions, I think that some of the sugges-

tions made in this memorandum are well worth considering, but I think
the first thing is to try to get more police. I know that one is then just
perhaps pushing this particular problem away from one area to another,
but on the other hand, as Mr Simpson [his colleague] and I were talking
about outside, there are other areas where it does not matter so much, if
you are going to have prostitutes parading the streets, but it important not
to have them in a residential area where you have a lot of young families,
and parents are trying to bring their children up decently—it is important
they should not see this going on at their doorsteps. My personal feeling—
and I am talking only about Paddington—is that that area should be very
much more heavily policed. Let us admit that the prostitutes probably will
be somewhere, but they should be driven by police control into areas
where they will do least harm. I do not think it is probably true to say that
the inhabitants of any area see most harm in their own area, because I
understand this is prevalent around Victoria, where there are empty offices,
and where there is no a large residential population.
…
Q. [Chairman]: … When the girl has had a pick-up on the Bayswater
Road, where does she then go?
A. [Mr Adair]: Is she the girl who then goes to the park?
A. [Mr Alan]: I do not know, but I would have said that in the park it
is more the amateurs, and pure exhibitionism by men, which very often
happens.
A. [Mrs Eyre]: I fully agree with that.
A. [Mr Simpson]: I would like to add to the answer, Sir, if I may. Any
nooks or crannies which are convenient for this purpose are resorted to by
these women, and one of our preoccupations has been to make these
nooks and crannies, such as doorways and porches and basements of unoc-
cupied houses, inaccessible by locks, and even barbed wire. There have
been certain mews and garages that became a wholesale resort, but we
have put locks on them. The general idea is that if there are any such nooks
and crannies that can be used, the Commissioners [the landlords of the
Paddington Estate] do what they can to make the inaccessible. The
Commissioners, on their property, have done all they can within their
realm, that is, where they have a proprietary interest, but that proprietary
interest ceases at the pavement—that is beyond our control. So we, there-
fore, think that there will be very few places now in Paddington to which
these women can go, bearing in mind that Paddington is only in the
Commissioners’ ownership to one third, and now rather less since more
sales have taken place. The women will go to the most convenient places.
If they want accommodation under a roof or ceiling, then they appear to
leave Paddington.
…
[Mr Simpson] The Paddington Moral Reform Council are not a body
of starry-eyed idealists or cranks. They are people who have an honest
desire to help in a situation which really exists, and this memorandum is
intended to make suggestions as to what could and should be done in the
Paddington area. You, of course, have the broadest outlook necessary
towards this problem. This is a cri de coeur from Paddington where
unquestionably the trouble today is extremely bad. The local land owners
have done all they can up to the threshold of their authority, but they can
do nothing beyond it. The suggestions contained in this memorandum
are thought to be practical as to some action which could be taken beyond
that threshold so as to aid the good-intentioned landlord. The suggestions
have purposely been toned down so as to appear, and in fact actually in my
view are, sensible and of a kind that could reasonably be introduced and
exercised in respect to the problem. The principal point brought out there
is the inadequacy of the police force—because the most obvious trouble is
the accosting prostitute. There is no effective deterrent at the present time
in the method of dealing with her. There is a very serious problem in
respect of the immunity of freeholders in general, and relatively easy
dodges for the leaseholder who knows how to do this, and there is a gen-
eral inadequacy of method and power to deal with prostitution at large.
. Paddington Moral Council (Submitted Evidence)

3
Grievous annoyance, disturbance, embarrassment and distress and in some
cases serious damage are experienced and suffered by property owners and
their tenants in these areas … and indeed senior officials of Foreign
Embassies have made complaints and grave as they are justified.
Furthermore many similar complains have been received demonstrat-
ing the amazement and disgust of foreign visitors at the sights of prostitu-
tion as they see them at the present time. It is though that such conditions
must, in addition to their other results, inevitably have a most detrimental
effect upon that valuable and invisible export, the Tourist Trade.
Thus the women regularly patrol certain streets, and their souteneurs
or protectors frequent and observe from these streets. Disturbances fre-
quently arise, and the debris of the traffic is deposited in quantity upon the
frontages of entirely respectable premises, to the high embarrassment and

anger of the inmates.
To the same streets, and in addition to those walking there for the pur-
pose, both taxis and private cars convey the men seeking the prostitutes.
These vehicles patrol the areas affected in a manner that is obvious and
highly detrimental to the interests of the owners and occupiers in the
locality.
One of the results of this is that respectable men and women are
accosted and importuned with a view to immorality, and all too frequently
insulted and abused. Because of these experiences, there is a steady flow of
complains being received which are couched in terms of high indignation.
. Association for Moral and Social Hygiene—Witnesses: Mrs Margery

4
Corbett-Ashby; Mrs Elizabeth Abbott; Miss EM Steel, Miss Chave
Collisson and Miss DOG Peto OBE
Mrs Abbott: But you say, can we not say that solicitation for an immoral
purpose might be a provocation—I will use our own phrases—a provoca-
tion to debauchery? I do not think a lot of streetwalkers do it. It does not
pay the prostitute to behave in that manner, and she does not. It is the
innocent girl in the street, on the other hand—and I have seen her do
it—who goes and lays her hand upon a man’s arm. Well, you could not call
it provocation to debauchery really. I do not know what the police direc-
tive at that time was, but I once went up to Soho, and alongside one side
of the street were the women and up the other side were the souteneurs
with their painted toes; and at either end were policemen in uniform. No
arrests were made. It looked exactly was if you had there a lovely closed
quarter for prostitution. However I do not know that it was a public prov-
ocation to debauchery. I walked through there, but very few of the public
did, and they were put off by the police.
…
Q [Chairman]: Suppose it is to be argued … that behaviour, sexual or
otherwise, of adult persons, is really not necessarily the concern of the law.
Suppose it was therefore to be said that that it is not the business of the
law to try to regulate the sexual behaviour of men and women but it is the
concern of the law—it might be argued—to see that the ordinary person,
who is not at that moment interested in sexual behaviour, either his own
or anybody else’s, that that person should be able to go about the streets
of London or any other place in unmolested freedom ….
A. [Miss Collisson]: Does not the law, if changed to cover annoyance
only, meet that situation? You cannot, by any law, prevent human beings
with powdered cheeks and platform soles, or, if you like wearing a small
identifying badge, from walking quietly on the streets. It is the point of
view of all decent citizens that the annoyance that may be caused by per-
petual approaches by one or two persons should be punished. Is it not
sufficient to punish annoyance?
Q. [Chairman]: By whomsoever the offence is committed?
…
A. [Miss Peto]: The moment we introduce “for prostitution” or “for an
immoral purpose”, it requires proof, which can only be satisfied by the
character of the person or by what we would call the complaint of the
person annoyed. [She later added] The act of solicitation is seldom as
aggravatingly carried out as trying to sell flowers or obstructing by means
of a barrow.
. Mayfair Association—Witnesses: Mrs M Anderson, Mr WR Sloman,

5
and The Earl Howe
Lord Howe: I think these women know me by sight now, and I personally
do not get involved; but is difficult for me because I have, for example, a
number of girls in my house, a number of children, and really, just after
dark, it is very unpleasant indeed. There are friends of mine who live at the
top of Curzon Street who complain bitterly they cannot keep their win-
dows open at night; one particular friend lives in a flat somewhere oppo-
site the Dorchester, and he said he cannot keep his windows open at night
because these women collect, 14 or 15 of them sometimes, outside and
use filthy language and make an awful noise. … It has always been a bad
area; but it seems now to be much worse than it has ever been, and it
seems if anything the nuisance seems to have increased.
…
Mr Sloman: … It has always been there, but up to the last few years it
has been in Shepherd Market, and not much anywhere else; suddenly it
has appeared on the main thoroughfares of Mayfair, not only to the detri-
ment of the streets, to the detriment of the peace and quiet of the district,
but I would say to the definite inconvenience not only of the local resi-
dents but of the visitors to the city. So much so that everyone I think can
tell stories of friends who have said that they have never seen anything like
this in a capital city before.
What we are against is not so much prostitution as such, but the fact
that it is where it is and that it is permitted to go on flagrantly where it
is … you have quiet streets and the Dorchester Hotel, and so on, and
along the walls of the Dorchester, outside the doors, all around that area,
all the way up Park Lane, there are these hordes of frightful women accost-
ing all males, even if accompanied by ladies. Their brazenness passes all
belief at times.
…
Mrs Anderson: My husband also has to come home after garaging his
car at Chesterfield garage, and he has to walk the length of Curzon street.
He has to pass always at least, without any exaggeration, five women
between Chesterfield garage and our house, which is no. 48, and they all
speak to him. If it is cold they say: “come in and have some gin”. And they
are quite brazen; there is no discretion about it at all.
…
Mrs Anderson: It was about six months ago two or three houses away
from me, I was awaked by the most awful screaming going on. I went and
looked out my window. I found that out of the window of this house was
a female throwing all her blankets out the window. She kept telling them
that she was just coming. Then eventually a young man climbed up the
blankets and got into her room, with everybody in the street watching. …
no policeman came along. Then the next night there were four women,
one of them standing under my window, yelling to each other about what
had gone on the night before; and I was awakened again. … My husband
went down and said to them: “Will you please go to bed, you women”
and so they all started tapping him and picking on him; and so he went
and phoned for a policeman, who eventually came along and he took them
off in a taxi to the police station.
…
Mr Sloman: The point of Mrs Anderson’s story is not so much the
story itself, but the fact that all that could happen without any policeman
appearing for that period … the point of the story is that we consider
Mayfair, despite the official assurance, is not getting sufficient police pro-
tection as is necessary because of the presence of large numbers of
these women
…
Mrs Anderson: We know that you cannot [stop prostitution] but we do
think it is a crying shame in a town like London that it should be so
unashamed. It looks to the visitor as if it were an export, if you like, or
a habit.
…
Mr Sloman: I did start our discussion first of all by saying that we were
really dealing only with our own parish, we were not concerned with what
happened except in our own back yard.
Chairman: That is from your point of view.

Mr Sloman: It just happens that our back yard is the showpiece
of London.
Mrs Cohen: Of course every district in London has this problem.
Mr Sloman: But on the other hand you do not have such a concentra-
tion of diplomatic and social life as you do get in this area of Mayfair. It is
for that reason we have been asked to do something about it; if it had been
at Victoria we should not have been complaining so much.
. Mayfair Association Submitted Evidence

6
The deputation [to the Home Office on 13 January 1955] said that the
situation in Mayfair had deteriorated steadily in the past few years, and
that soliciting by prostitutes was now being carried on there to such an
extent as to constitute a public scandal. Mayfair, although still partly resi-
dential contains embassies, hotels and the headquarters of a number of
associations and of important industries, all of which attracted numbers of
visitors to the area. The state of the streets had provoked much adverse
comment from foreign visitors to London, and was gravely detrimental to
the amenities and dignity of the area and the reputation of the capital city.
It was also a constant source of annoyance and disturbance to residents,
who felt most strongly on the matter. It is hardly possible for a man to
walk through the area without being accosted and respectable women
were frequently insulted. Properties in the area were sometimes acquired
outright, by the use of ostensibly reputable proxies, for the express pur-
pose of accommodating prostitutes; and owners, in spite of the most care-
ful precautions and preliminary inquiries, were finding it difficult to
prevent their properties from being let or sub-let to prostitutes whom,
under the terms of the agreement, they were then powerless to eject.
. National Council of Women of Great Britain—Witnesses: Lady

7
Nunburnholme, Mrs MF Bligh, Mrs. M. Lefroy
Lady Nunburnholme: To-day there is no obscene behaviour and none of
the horrors of fifty years ago, but my own experience shows a definite
obstruction by women of the streets. I have been reading the evidence of
the Commission on Street Offences, 1928 and I find it was brought to
their notice the conditions in Jermyn Street. I should like to bring to your
notice the conditions in Curzon Street. In the last five years I have spent
three or four nights every week in my club at the bottom of South Audley
Street. Conditions have distinctly worsened during those five years. Only
three or four nights ago I walked home after dinner and found seven of
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As it was less than an hour since we had left the camp, it was
quite impossible that he could have been tired, and as for his
blisters, when examined they proved to consist of a single small
“brister” on his instep, which, as we were travelling over smooth
sand and he, like all the rest of us, was walking barefoot, could not
have caused him the slightest inconvenience.
I pointed this out to him and told him that if he stayed behind and
left the caravan he would be certain to die of thirst.
“Never mind,” he replied heroically. “Never mind. I will stay behind
and die. I cannot walk any more. I am tired. You go on, sir, and save
yourselves. I will stay here and die in the desert.”
We had had many scenes of this kind with Khalil, and the bedawin
never failed to enjoy them thoroughly.
“What is he saying?” asked Qway.
I translated as well as I could.
“Malaysh” (“it’s of no consequence”), replied Qway calmly. “Let
him stay behind and die if he wants to. Whack the camels, Abd er
Rahman, and let’s go. We can’t wait. We are in the desert, and short
of water.”
“I shall die,” sobbed Khalil.
“Malaysh,” repeated Qway, without even troubling to look back at
him.
I felt much inclined to tickle the aggravating brute up with my
kurbaj, but it was against my principles to beat a native, so we went
on and left him sitting alone in the desert.
“My wife will be a widow,” screamed Khalil after us—though how
he expected that contingency to appeal to our sympathies was not
quite clear. Musa shouted back some ribald remarks about the lady
in question, and the caravan proceeded cheerfully—not to say
uproariously—upon its way.
After we had gone some distance our road dipped down to a
lower level, and we lost sight of Khalil for a while. I looked back just
before we got out of sight, and saw him sitting exactly where we had
left him. We travelled a considerable distance before a rise in the
ground over which our road ran enabled us to see him again. On
looking back through my glasses, I could just distinguish him sitting
still where we had left him. I quite expected that by the time we had
gone a few hundred yards—or at any rate as soon as we were out of
sight—that Khalil would have got up and followed us. But the fellahin
of Egypt are a queer-tempered race, who when they cannot get
exactly what they want, will sometimes fall into a fit of suicidal sulks
that is rather difficult to deal with. As Khalil appeared to have got into
this sulky frame of mind I began to fear that he really intended to
carry out his threat and to stay where he was until he either died of
thirst, or had been so far left behind by the caravan that he would be
unable to rejoin us, which would have led to the same result.
Qway, when I asked him how long it would take for us to reach the
oasis, was most positive in saying that it would be all that we could
do to get across the dunes before sunset the next day. The sand
belt, though easy enough to cross in daylight, when we could see
where we were going, would have presented a very serious obstacle
in the dark. With the possibility of another day of scorching simum or,
worse still, a violent sandstorm in our teeth, before we reached
Dakhla, a delay that would cause us to camp the next night on the
wrong side of the dunes, and so entail another twelve hours in the
desert before reaching water, might have had very serious
consequences.
“If we don’t cross the sand to-morrow,” said Qway impressively,
“we may not reach Mut at all. Look at the camels. Look at our tanks.
They are nearly empty. We must go on. We can’t wait.”
I couldn’t risk sacrificing the whole caravan for the sake of one
malingerer; so I told Abd er Rahman to whack up the camels, and
we left the “delicutly nurchered” Khalil to die in the desert.
Soon afterwards we lost sight of him altogether. We had started
early in the morning and we went on throughout the day, with hardly
a halt, till eight o’clock at night, when we were compelled to stop in
order to rest the camels. We saw nothing more of Khalil and gave
him up for lost. To give him a last chance we lighted a big fire and
then composed ourselves to sleep as well as we could, on a wholly
insufficient allowance of water.
Towards morning Khalil staggered into the camp amid the jeers
and curses of the men, croaked a request for water and, having
drunk, flung himself down to sleep, too dead beat even to eat.
That little episode cured Khalil of malingering, and he gave no
further trouble on our journey to Mut. It just shows what a little tact
will do in dealing with a native. Many brutal fellows would have
beaten the poor man!
The next day luckily proved fairly cool, and we made better
progress than we expected. We consequently struck the dune belt
just after noon and, as we seemed to have found a low part of it, by
Qway’s advice I decided to tackle it at that point.
But in coming to this decision I had overlooked a most important
factor in the situation—the light. Curious as it may seem, dunes are
sometimes almost as difficult to cross in the blazing sunshine at
noon as they are in the dark. The intense glare at this time of day
makes the almost white sand of which they are composed most
painful to look at, and the total absence of any shade prevents their
shape being seen and makes even the ripples practically invisible.
In consequence of this state of affairs, Qway, while riding ahead of
the caravan to show the way, blundered without seeing where he
was going, off the flat top of a dune on to the steep face below, was
thrown, and he and his hagin only just escaped rolling down to the
bottom, a fall of some thirty feet. After that, until we reached the
farther side of the belt, he remained on foot, dragging his hagin
behind him. Once across the dunes the rest of the journey was easy
enough.
The news of affairs in Europe that we heard in Dakhla on our
return was simply heartbreaking. The revolution in Turkey that had
promised to be rather a big thing, had fizzled out entirely. The Sultan
Abdul Hamid—“Abdul the Damned”—it is true had been deposed;
but his brother, Mohammed V, had been made ruler in his stead, and
was firmly seated on the rickety Turkish throne. The disturbance had
quieted down in Turkey; there was no chance of there being a
republic, and so the threatened invasion of Egypt by the Senussi,
was not in the least likely to come off.
All the same, we felt fairly pleased with ourselves, for we had
been for eighteen days in the desert away from water, with only
seven camels, in the most trying time of the year, and had got back
again without losing a single beast. But anyone who feels inclined to
repeat this picnic is advised to take enough water and suitable food.
The Gubary road by which we travelled to Kharga followed the
foot of the cliff that forms the southern boundary of the plateau upon
which ’Ain Amur lies. It was very featureless and uninteresting. But
though it contained no natural features of any importance, the
bedawin have a number of landmarks along it to which they have
given names and by which they divide the road up into various
stages. It is curious to see how the necessity for naming places
arises as soon as a district becomes frequented.
These little landmarks are often shown in maps in a very
misleading way. One of those on the Gubary road is known as Bu el
Agul. There is another Bu el Agul, or Abu el Agul, as it is sometimes
called, on the Derb et Tawil, or “long road,” that runs from the Nile
Valley, near Assiut, across the desert to Dakhla Oasis. I have often
seen this place marked on maps in an atlas, the name being printed
in the same type as that used for big mountains, or villages in the
Nile Valley, and there was nothing whatever in the way in which it
was shown on these maps to indicate its unimportance.
Now Bu el Agul is only a grave—what is more, it is not even a real
grave, it is a bogus one. The commonest form of a native nickname
is to christen a man the father of the thing for which he is best known
among them. I was myself at one time known as “Abu Zerzura,” the
“Father of Zerzura,” because I was supposed to be looking for that
oasis, and later on as “Abu Ramal,” “the father of sand,” because I
spent so much time among the dunes.
Bu el Agul means the “father of hobbles.” One of the greatest
risks that an inexperienced Arab runs, when travelling alone in the
desert, is that of allowing his camel to break loose and escape
during the night. Then, unless he be near a well, having no beast to
carry his water-skin, his fate is probably sealed. Many lives have
been lost in this way.
With tragedies of this description constantly before their minds,
the desert guides, as a reminder to their less experienced brethren
to secure their beasts properly at night, have made an imitation
grave about half-way along each of the desert roads. This grave is
supposed to represent the last resting-place of the “father of
hobbles,” who has lost his life owing to his not having tied up his
camel securely at night. It is the custom of every traveller, who uses
the road, to throw on to the “grave” as he passes it, a worn-out
hobble or water-skin, or part of a broken water vessel, with the result
that in time a considerable pile accumulates.
It was the end of June by the time we reached Kharga again.
Anyone attempting to work in the desert at any distance away from
water after March is severely handicapped by the high temperature. I
had already experienced nearly three months of these conditions,
and the prospect of doing any good in the desert during the
remainder of the hot weather was so remote that I returned to
England for the remainder of the summer.
CHAPTER XII
M Y first season’s work in the desert had been sufficiently

successful to warrant a second attempt, as I had carried out
one of the objects on my programme by managing to cross the
dune-field; so I determined to follow it up by another journey. The
main piece of work that I planned for my second year was to push as
far as possible along the old road to the south-west of Dakhla, that
we had already followed for about one hundred and fifty miles.
Before starting I heard rumours of a place that had not previously
been reported called Owanat, that lay upon this road and was
apparently the first point to which it went. But I was able to gather
little information on the subject. I could not even hear whether it was
inhabited or deserted. I was not even sure whether water was to be
found there.
The journey to this place seemed likely to be of great length
before water could be reached, and as the ultimate destination of the
road was quite uncertain, and nothing was known of the part into
which it led, the possibility of getting into an actively hostile district
had to be considered, and arrangements to be made to make sure of
our retreat into Egypt, in the event of our camels being taken from us
and our finding it necessary to make the return journey on foot.
The distance we should have to travel from Dakhla Oasis, along
the road, before we found water or reached an oasis could not, I
imagined, be more than fifteen days’ journey at the most. I hoped, if
we managed to cover this distance and no other difficulties arose,
that we should be able to push on still farther, and eventually get
right across the desert into the French Sudan, where the authorities
had been warned to look out for me and to give me any assistance
they could.
This old road from its size had at one time evidently been one of
the main caravan routes across the desert. The Senussi, it was
known, paid considerable attention to the improvement of the desert
roads, and, from what the natives told me, under their able
management, Kufara Oasis had become a focus to which most of
the caravan routes of this part of the desert converged.
This road must always have been a difficult one, owing to the long
waterless stretch that had to be crossed before the first oasis could
be reached. So it seemed likely that it had been abandoned in
consequence of another road to Kufara having been made easier by
sinking of new wells.
My main object in this journey was to see if this route was still
usable for caravans or, if not, whether it could not be made so by
means of new wells, or by improving the road at difficult points.
A road running up from Wanjunga to Dakhla Oasis would have cut
right across all the caravan routes, leading up to Kufara from the
Bedayat country and the Eastern Sudan, and so might have diverted
into Egypt a great deal of the traffic then going to Kufara and Tripoli.
In addition some of the trade carried by the great north and south
road, from the Central Sudan through Tikeru to Kufara, might also
have been brought into Dakhla by reopening this old route. As the
railway from the Nile Valley into Kharga could easily have been
extended into Dakhla, that oasis might have supplanted Kufara as
the main caravan centre of the Libyan Desert, and a comparatively
large entrepôt trade might have been developed there, the
merchandise being distributed by means of the railway into Egypt.
The total value of the goods carried across this district by caravan
is not great; but still the trade is of sufficient importance to make it
worth while to attempt to secure it, especially as, if that were done, it
would give a considerable hold over the inaccessible tribes of the
interior, and at the same time be a severe blow to the Senussi, who
for some time had threatened to become rather a nuisance.
To meet the requirements of the long fifteen days’ journey to
Owanat from Dakhla, or rather of our return in the event of our
having to beat a hurried retreat on foot, I had thirty small tanks made
of galvanised iron. These were placed in wooden boxes, a couple
being in each box, and packed round with straw to keep the water
cool and prevent them from shaking about in their cases.
Each pair of tanks contained enough water for the men and
myself for one day, with a slight margin over to allow for
contingencies. During the journey, one of these boxes could be left
at the end of every day’s march, with sufficient food to carry us on to
the next depot, in the event of our finding it necessary to retrace our
steps. With a pair of tanks in each box, I felt as certain as it was
possible to be that, even if one of them should leak and lose the
whole of its contents, there would still be sufficient water in the
second tank to last us till we reached the next depot. Even if all our
zemzemias and gurbas had been lost, these tanks, even when full,
were of a weight that could easily have been carried by a man during
the day’s march. When empty they could be thrown away.
I went up to Assiut to get together a caravan for the journey,
engaged a brother of Abd er Rahman’s, named Ibrahim, and also
secured Dahab for the journey. Qway and Abd er Rahman joined me
in Assiut, putting up at a picturesque old khan in the native town, and
thus our party became complete. The attempts I had made to find a
guide who knew the parts of the desert beyond the Senussi border
had again proved fruitless.
I hesitated at first to take Ibrahim into the desert partly because—
like many young Sudanese—I found him rather a handful, who
required a good deal of licking into shape, but chiefly because he
had not had much experience with camels, owing to his having acted
for some time as a domestic servant in Kharga Oasis. What finally
decided me to take him was one of those small straws that so often
tell one the way of the wind when dealing with natives.
Once, while loading a camel, preparatory to moving camp, the
baggage began to slip off his back and Ibrahim, as is usual with
bedawin in the circumstances, immediately invoked the aid of his
patron saint by singing out, “Ya! Sidi Abd es Salem.”
The saint that a native calls upon in these cases is nearly always
the one that founded the dervish Order to which he belongs, and this
Abd es Salem ben Mashish—to give him his full name—was the
founder of the Mashishia dervishes and is perhaps still better known
to Moslems as the religious instructor of Sheykh Shadhly, one of the
most famous of all Mohammedan divines.
OLD KHAN IN ASSIUT.
The cardinal principle of the Mashishia is to abstain entirely from

politics—a most useful character to have in a servant when going
into the country of the Senussi. The same principle was adopted by
the Shadhlia order and nearly all its numerous branches, and also by
a set of dervishes which split from the Mashishia, that is known as
the Madania—the old Madania, not the new Madania, which is of a
very different character.
Ibrahim’s brother, Abd er Rahman, used to invoke Abd el Qader el
Jilany, the founder of the great Qadria order of dervishes, the
followers of which, as a rule, are about the least fanatical of
Moslems.
Qway, though he made great protestations of keenness, I soon
found to be obstructing my preparations, and he developed signs of
dishonesty that I had not noticed in him before. What was worse, I
found him secretly communicating with a member of the Senussi
zawia in Qasr Dakhla, who, for some unexplained reason, had come
to Assiut, and who seemed to be in frequent communication with
him. This all pointed to some underhand dealing with the Senussi,
who, until they were brought to their senses by being well beaten in
the great war, always opposed any attempt to enter their country—
usually by tampering with a traveller’s guides.
I concluded that I had better keep a closer watch upon the
conduct of my guide than I had done before.
Having finished all arrangements in Assiut and dispatched the
caravan by road to Kharga, I set out myself by train.
At Qara Station on the Western Oasis line, I found Nimr, Sheykh
Suleyman’s brother. He brought up to me a jet black Sudani, about
six feet three in height, who was so excessively lightly built that he
could hardly have weighed more than eight stone. He answered to
the name of “Abdullah abu Reesha”—“Abdulla the father of
feathers,” a nickname given to him on account of his extreme
thinness. He had, however, the reputation of being one of the best
guides in the desert, and was always in request whenever a caravan
went down to collect natron from Bir Natrun, where there was always
a very fair chance of a scrap with the Bedayat. Nimr suggested that I
should take him as a guide, and appeared to be greatly disappointed
when I told him I had already engaged Qway. I promised, however,
to bear him in mind, and, if I wanted another guide at any time, to
write and ask Sheykh Suleyman to send him.
Nimr told me the rather unwelcome news that the bedawin, who
had been pasturing their camels in Dakhla Oasis, were all scuttling
back again with their beasts to the safety of the Nile Valley, as there
was a report that a famous hashish runner and brigand, known as
’Abdul ’Ati, was coming in to raid the oasis. As I had counted on
being able to hire some camels off these Arabs in the oasis, to
supplement my own caravan when starting off on our fifteen days’
journey, this threatened raid was rather a nuisance and seemed
likely somewhat to upset my plans.
This ’Abdul ’Ati was a well-known character in the desert, and if
half the reports concerning him were true, he must have been a most
formidable personage. He was rather badly wanted by the Frontier
Guard (Camel Corps), as one of his principal occupations was that of
smuggling hashish (Indian hemp), at which he had proved himself
most successful. When business of this kind was slack, he
occasionally indulged in a little brigandage, presumably just to keep
his hand in.
Ibrahim, had the usual admiration for an outlaw common to youths
of his age all over the world, and ’Abdul ’Ati was his idol, and he was
a born hero-worshipper. He declared that he was a dead shot, and
owned a rifle that carried two hours’ journey of a caravan, i.e. about
five miles, and that he had no fear of anyone—not even of the Camel
Corps.
When next I heard of ’Abdul ’Ati, he was very busy in Tripoli
fighting against the Italians, and apparently making very good
indeed. The Camel Corps shot him eventually.
My caravan reached Kharga a day or two after my arrival, having
come across the desert from Assiut by a road that enters the oasis at
its northern end.
In Kharga I met Sheykh Suleyman, and, as I was camped not far
from his tent, rode over and spent an evening with him. Qway, of
course, accompanied me in hopes of a free meal, but was most
frigidly received by the sheykh, who treated him in the most
contemptuous manner. We had supper, consisting of bread and
treacle and hard boiled eggs, followed by coffee and cigarettes. After
which we sat for a time and talked.
“You had better take me as a guide instead of Qway,” suddenly
suggested Sheykh Suleyman.
Qway looked quickly up, evidently greatly annoyed, and the social
atmosphere became distinctly electric.
I explained that I could not well do that as I had found Qway an
excellent guide the year before, and had already signed an
agreement to take him on again for the season. Qway rather hotly
added some expostulation that I could not quite catch; but the gist of
it apparently was that Sheykh Suleyman was not quite playing the
game.
The sheykh laughed. “Maleysh” (never mind), he said, “if you want
another guide, write me a letter, and I will send Abdulla abu Reesha.
He’s a good man—better than Qway.”
Qway commenced a heated reply, only to be laughed at by
Sheykh Suleyman. As the interview threatened to become distinctly
stormy, I took the earliest opportunity of returning to camp.
The sheykh insisted on providing my breakfast the next morning.
Qway, for once, effaced himself, while breakfast and the subsequent
tea were in progress. He seemed to have seen as much of Sheykh
Suleyman as he wanted for the moment.
We got off at about ten in the morning, and after a short march
pitched our camp early in the day at Qasr Lebakha, a small square
mud-built keep on a stone foundation, having circular towers at the
four corners, all in a fairly good state of preservation. The walls at
the top of the tower were built double, with a kind of parapet walk
round the top, which may originally have been a mural passage of
which the roof had fallen in.
From Qasr Lebakha we went on to ’Ain Um Debadib. Our road lay
almost due west, parallel to the cliff of the plateau on our right, and
turned out to be anything but a good one, being both hilly and very
heavy going owing to the drift sand. The camels, too, gave a lot of
trouble.
The caravan, as a whole, turned out to be the worst I ever owned.
There was, however, one exception. He was an enormously powerful
brute from the Sudan, that it seemed almost impossible to
overburden. The proverbial “last straw” that would have broken that
camel’s back could not, I believe, have been grown. But like other
powerful camels, he was always trying to bite the other beasts and
was a confirmed “man-eater.”
’Ain Um Debadib is a considerably larger place than Qasr
Lebakha. At the time of my visit it was inhabited by two men and
their families, natives of Kharga village, to which they occasionally
returned, leaving this little oasis to look after itself. Like Qasr
Lebakha, the place was originally defended by a castle, also
apparently of Roman date. An old road runs north-west from ’Ain Um
Debadib, which leads over the cliff to the north of the oasis by what
appears from below to be a difficult pass. I intended at some later
date to come back and try to find this place; but unfortunately the
opportunity did not occur. The Spaniards have a proverb to the effect
that hell is not only paved with good intentions, but is also roofed
with lost opportunities, and probably, in omitting to find out what lay
beyond that cliff, I added a slate to the infernal regions, for I think it
extremely likely that a depression lay on the other side of it
containing the well of ’Ain Hamur—not to be confused with ’Ain Amur
—or possibly a place called ’Ain Embarres.
CHAPTER XIII
W E reached Dakhla Oasis on 23rd January, and stayed for a day

in the scrub-covered area, through which the road runs before
entering the inhabited portion of the oasis, on the chance of getting a
shot at gazelle. While camped here the ’omda of Tenida, the nearest
village, who was notorious throughout the oasis for his meanness,
sent down over night a ghaffir (night watchman) after dark, to spy out
who we were, and, having made sure of our identity, carefully got
himself out of the way, in order to avoid having to invite us in to a
meal, according to the hospitable custom of the oasis!
As gazelle-hunting, owing to some confounded bedawin, who
were camping in the neighbourhood and wandering all over the
place, seemed likely to prove a waste of energy, I moved on the
following day to the village of Belat.
Very little barley is grown in the oasis beyond that required for the
use of the inhabitants; but as I heard that the ’omda had a large
store of it that he had been unsuccessfully trying to sell, I
endeavoured to buy some off him.
But unfortunately he “followed the Skeykh,” and Qway continuing
his obstructive tactics of Assiut, secretly got hold of him, with the
result that, when I approached him on the subject, the ’omda
declared that there was not a grain left in the village—“not one.”
A distinctly stormy scene followed, which ended in the ’omda
caving in and producing about a quarter of a ton of the absent grain,
which I bought off him at an exorbitant price.
After this I gave him a thorough good dressing down, and then
graciously forgave him and we drowned our enmity in the usual tea. I
was not altogether dissatisfied with the transaction, for I felt that I
had read the ’omda a lesson that he would not forget for some time.
In this, however, as events turned out, I was to be grievously
disappointed—my troubles with regard to the camels’ fodder had
only just begun.
On our arrival in Mut, I went at once to the post office for letters,
and finding that the upper story of the place was vacant, arranged to
rent it during my stay in the oasis. It proved to be far better quarters
than the old gloomy, scorpion-haunted store, and I found no reason
to regret the change.
UPPER FLOOR OF POST OFFICE.
The man who tended the garden of the post office was quite a
local celebrity. He was no other than the blind drummer who
officiated in the band, when there was a wedding in the district. He
was also the town crier, and I frequently met him in the streets,
where, after beating a roll on his drum to attract attention, he would
call out the news that he was engaged to spread.
Curiously, considering that he was totally blind, he had the
reputation of being the best grower of vegetables in the
neighbourhood, and his services as gardener were in great request
in consequence. He was passionately fond of flowers, and was
almost invariably seen with a rose, or a sprig of fruit blossom in his
hand, which, as he made his way about the streets, he continually
smelt. Once, when I happened to meet him, the supply of flowers
must have run short, for he was inhaling, with evident gusto, the
delicious perfume of an onion!
His sense of locality must have been wonderful, for he made his
way about the streets almost as easily as though in full possession
of perfect eyesight. Plants of all kinds seemed to be an obsession
with him. He would squat down by the side of a bed of young
vegetables he had planted, feel for the plants by running his hands
rapidly over the soil, and, having found one, would tenderly finger it
to see how it was growing. He would in this way rapidly examine
each individual plant in the bed, and occasionally comment on the
growth of some particular plant since he had last handled it. The loss
of his eyesight had evidently greatly quickened his other faculties, for
he could find any plant he wished without difficulty, and seemed to
have a perfect recollection of the state in which he had last left them,
never, I was told, making any mistake in their identity. The gratified
smile that lighted up his blind, patient face, when his charges were
doing well was quite pathetic.
While staying in the post office my camels were accommodated
about a hundred yards away, in an open space under the lea of the
high mud-built wall that surrounds the town, close to where a break
had been made in it to allow free passage to the cultivation beyond.
The choice of this site for the camping ground of the camels turned
out to be unfortunate, for the locality was haunted. A man, it was
said, had been killed near there while felling a tree, and his ghost—
or as some said a ghul—frequently appeared there.
A night or two after our arrival, Ibrahim, who was sleeping there
alone with the camels, came up to my room, just as I was getting into
bed, and announced that he was not a bit afraid—and he did not
seem in the least perturbed—but an afrit kept throwing clods of earth
at the camels, which prevented them from sleeping, so he thought
he had better come and tell me about it.
The clods came from over the wall, and several times he had
rushed round the corner, through the gap, to try and see the afrit who
was throwing them, but he had been unable to do so, so he wanted
me to come down and attend to him.
BLIND TOWN CRIER, MUT.
It is not often that one gets the chance of interviewing a real

ghost, so taking a candle and my revolver, I went down to the camel
yard. Ibrahim showed me a pile of clods that had been thrown that
he had collected—there must at least have been a dozen of them—
and showed me the direction from which they had come.
It certainly was rather uncanny. On the other side of the wall was
a flat open space, and there was nowhere within stone’s throw
where any human being could possibly have hidden. I waited for
some time to see if any more clods would be thrown; but as none
came, I told Ibrahim in a loud voice to shoot any afrit he saw and
gave him my revolver, and then in a lower tone told him that he was
on no account to shoot at all, but that if anyone came he might
threaten to do so.
Ibrahim was perfectly satisfied. It was not so much the possession
of the revolver that reassured him as the fact that it was made of
iron, and afrits, as of course is well known, are afraid of iron!
No more clods were thrown that night; but they began again on
the following evening, and still Ibrahim was unable to see the culprit.
The thing was becoming a nuisance and it had to be stopped. It was
of no use going to the native officials; they would have been just as
ready to believe in the afrit or ghul yarn as any of the natives of the
oasis, so I decided to tackle the question myself.
Dahab, carrying a pot of whitewash and a brush, and I, with a
sextant and the nautical almanac, repaired to the scene of the
haunting in the afternoon. I wrote “Solomon” and “iron” in Arabic on
the wall, drew two human eyes squinting diabolically, a little devil and
the diagram of the configuration of Jupiter’s Satellites, taken from the
nautical almanac—an extremely cabalistic-looking design. I then
waved the sextant about and finally touched each of the marks I had
drawn on the wall with it in turn.
By this time a small crowd had collected, and were watching the
proceedings with considerable interest. A six-inch sextant, fitted with
Reeve’s artificial horizon, is as awe-inspiring an instrument as any
magician could show.
I told Dahab to explain to the crowd that I had just put a tulsim
(talisman) on the wall, and that if it were an afrit that had been
throwing the clods, the words, “Solomon” and “iron,” acting in
conjunction with Jupiter’s Satellites, would certainly do for him
completely. But if it were a human being who had been throwing the
clods, the little devil and the eyes would get to work upon him at
once.
The devil I explained was a particularly malignant little English imp
that I had under my control, and if anyone threw any more clods at
my camels, I had so arranged things, that the devil in the form of this
tiny little black imp would crawl up his nostrils while he slept, and
would stick the forked end of his tail into his brain and keep waggling
it about, causing him the greatest suffering, until in a few years’ time
he went mad. Then it would stamp with red-hot feet on the backs of
his eyeballs till they fell out; after which the culprit would die in
horrible agony.
Dahab, on the way back, said he thought my tulsim looked a very
good one, but he did not at all believe in the afrit theory.
“Afrit,” he said in his funny English. “Never. Ibrahim he very fine
man and women in Dakhla all bad, very bad, like pitch. One women
he want speak Ibrahim.” This was very likely the size of it.
But I laid the ghost anyway. No more clods were thrown at my
camels.

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Wolfenden's Women: Prostitution in

Post-war Britain 1st ed. Edition

Samantha Caslin · Julia Laite

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Genders and Sexualities in History

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

Cover illustration: Keystone-France / GettyImages

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer

John Wolfenden’s Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences

1 Introduction: Prostitution and the Law Before the

2 Prostitution and Public Space 21

5 Law, Jurisprudence, and Punishment 87

6 Brothels, Off-Street Premises, Privatization121

7 Third Parties and Exploitation151

8 Causes, Intervention, and Pathologization167

10 Wolfenden’s Missing Women201

11 The Report of the Departmental Committee on

12 Conclusion: The Legacies of Wolfenden289

Introduction: Prostitution and the Law

© The Author(s) 2020 1

These mounting objections to the regulation and thus supposed legiti-

in exchange for gifts or payment in kind, while soldiers’ camps opened up

Self, Prostitution, pp. 5–6.

For a fuller account, see Laite, Common Prostitutes.

food shortages. As Britain began the process of negotiating a people’s

Conwy Roberts letter to Chief Constable of Manchester, 17th February 1956,

Histories and Memories of Wolfenden:

that does not properly account for how differently it approached

liberating them, about ‘privatizing’ morality, as Frank Mort has described.32

Forming the Committee, Selecting Evidence

In August 1954, The Home Office appointed a committee of fifteen com-

Despite these assurances of frankness, however, the Committee were

what other witnesses are saying’ and to ‘organise pressure groups’ to

historically been adopted by groups affiliated to moralizing organizations

member of the Liverpool Vigilance Association, a social purity organiza-

effect; and what, if anything, might be done about prostitution that

How We Constructed This Sourcebook

to the reader without this signposting. While submitted evidence tended

Prostitution and Public Space

© The Author(s) 2020 21

fell short of their expectations. Meanwhile, London continued to act as a

 . Home Office, Submitted Evidence (Pertaining to England

Police and Magistrates

 . Paul Bennet, Police Court Magistrate

 . PCs Scarborough and Anderson

 . Association of Chief Officers of Police—Witnesses: Mr C Martin,

 . Sir Laurence Dunne, MC, Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, Meeting

not trying to abolish prostitution, granted one is not trying to drive it

 . Paddington Borough Council—Witnesses: Councillor P Dyas,

Civil Society and Charities

 . British Medical Association—Witnesses: Dr R Gibson, Dr DC

 . Paddington Moral Reform Council—Witnesses: Mr Robert Allan

down. As regards concrete suggestions, I think that some of the sugges-

 . Paddington Moral Council (Submitted Evidence)

frontages of entirely respectable premises, to the high embarrassment and

 . Association for Moral and Social Hygiene—Witnesses: Mrs Margery

 . Mayfair Association—Witnesses: Mrs M Anderson, Mr WR Sloman,

Chairman: That is from your point of view.

 . Mayfair Association Submitted Evidence

 . National Council of Women of Great Britain—Witnesses: Lady

M Y first season’s work in the desert had been sufficiently

OLD KHAN IN ASSIUT.

The cardinal principle of the Mashishia is to abstain entirely from

1 Introduction: Prostitution and the Law Before the

2 Prostitution and Public Space 21

5 Law, Jurisprudence, and Punishment 87

6 Brothels, Off-Street Premises, Privatization121

7 Third Parties and Exploitation151

8 Causes, Intervention, and Pathologization167

10 Wolfenden’s Missing Women201

11 The Report of the Departmental Committee on

12 Conclusion: The Legacies of Wolfenden289

. Home Office, Submitted Evidence (Pertaining to England

. Paul Bennet, Police Court Magistrate

. PCs Scarborough and Anderson

. Association of Chief Officers of Police—Witnesses: Mr C Martin,

. Sir Laurence Dunne, MC, Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, Meeting

. Paddington Borough Council—Witnesses: Councillor P Dyas,

. British Medical Association—Witnesses: Dr R Gibson, Dr DC

. Paddington Moral Reform Council—Witnesses: Mr Robert Allan

. Paddington Moral Council (Submitted Evidence)

. Association for Moral and Social Hygiene—Witnesses: Mrs Margery

. Mayfair Association—Witnesses: Mrs M Anderson, Mr WR Sloman,

. Mayfair Association Submitted Evidence

. National Council of Women of Great Britain—Witnesses: Lady