Policing youth: Britain, 1945–70 9781526102171

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Policing youth Britain 1945 –70 Louise A. Jackson with Angela Bartie

Policing youth

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Policing youth Britain, 1945–70

Louise A. Jackson with Angela Bartie

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

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Copyright © Louise A. Jackson 2014 The right of Louise A. Jackson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 0 7190 81781 hardback First published 2014 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by DoubleDagger.co.uk

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Contents

List of figures and tables Acknowledgements List of abbreviations

page vi vii viii

1 Introduction: welfare and justice 2 The police 3 The juvenile court: property, place and play 4 Violence 5 Sexuality 6 Home, neighbourhood and community 7 Commercial leisure 8 Reform

1 20 52 86 117 145 174 200

Afterword Select bibliography Index

226 231 238

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Figures and tables

Figures 1.1 Number of juveniles found guilty of indictable offences in England and Wales by age bands 1.2 Number of juveniles against whom charges were proved, all courts in Scotland 1945–68, by age bands 3.1 Delinquency areas, Manchester 3.2 Housing schemes in Dundee 7.1 Number of prosecutions for drug-related offences (all courts), Manchester City Police, 1962–68

page 8 9 70 71 180

Tables 3.1 Manchester Juvenile Court: charges faced by juveniles as percentages of male and female offences 3.2 Dundee Juvenile Courts (Burgh and Sheriff): charges faced by juveniles as percentages of male and female offences 3.3 Manchester Juvenile Court: objects stolen in property charges faced by boys 3.4 Dundee Burgh Police Juvenile Court: objects stolen in property charges faced by boys 3.5 Manchester Juvenile Court: objects stolen in property charges faced by girls 3.6 Manchester Juvenile Court: categories of property charges faced by juveniles as percentages of male and female property offences 3.7 Dundee Juvenile Courts (Burgh and Sheriff): categories of property charges faced by juveniles as percentages of male and female property offences

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Acknowledgements

The research for this book was initially funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland (2006), through a small grant to Louise Jackson for research on Manchester as a case study. This was followed by an award from the ESRC (RES-000-22-2644 ‘Policing Post-War Youth: a Comparative Study of England and Scotland c.1945–1971’), which enabled Angela Bartie to join the project as a research assistant (2008–9) to undertake archival work on Scottish materials. The writing up of this book has been supported by the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, through the award of two semesters of research leave to Louise Jackson. Angela Bartie co-authored Chapters 4 and 6, which also draw on her own research on Glasgow gangs and the Easterhouse project; materials she collected are used elsewhere in the book. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright owners of Figures 3.1 and 3.2; anyone claiming copyright should contact the authors.

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Abbreviations

ACPO BPP CCAR CID DC DCA GACS GH GMPM HMI JLO JLS LCC MA MEN MG MP MRC NAPO NRS NUT PF SACJD

Association of Chief Police Officers (England and Wales) British Parliamentary Papers Chief Constable’s Annual Report Criminal Investigation Department Dundee Courier and Advertiser Dundee City Archives General Assembly of the Church of Scotland Glasgow Herald Greater Manchester Police Museum Her/His Majesty’s Inspector Juvenile Liaison Officer (police) Juvenile Liaison Scheme (police) London County Council Manchester Archives and Local Studies Manchester Evening News Manchester Guardian Member of Parliament Modern Records Centre, Warwick National Association of Probation Officers National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh National Union of Teachers Procurator Fiscal (Scotland) Standing Advisory Committee on Juvenile Delinquency (England and Wales) SACTRO Standing Advisory Committee on the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Offenders (Scotland) Scottish Catholic Archives SCA SED Scottish Education Department TDA Taking and driving away (without the owner’s consent) TNA The National Archives, London WR Wythenshawe Recorder YDT Youth Development Trust (Manchester)

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1 Introduction: welfare and justice

The 1944 documentary film Children of the City, which aimed to educate parents, teachers, and all those involved in social work, criminal justice or local government about the work of the Scottish juvenile courts, made stark connections between urban living and youth crime. Overcrowding and poverty meant that the street, with all its temptations, was the only playground outside of school hours: There are rides to be stolen on trams and lorries. There are the shopping centres, with miles of inviting windows. There are the big chain stores to wander through. There is noise and colour and bustle, and they can listen to people’s conversations. They get to know where everything is and how much it costs. They see that money is the key to all this, to the cinema, and to the billiard saloon, and Dixon Hawke (pie and beans). In this careless world of adults, who is to tell children where to draw the line, where excitement ends and crime begins?1

The film was a response to local and national concerns about ‘juvenile delinquency’ in wartime, reflecting increased reports of burglary, housebreaking and vandalism by boys of 12 or 13 years of age.2 Whilst the absent father, ‘the feckless mother’ and dislocation caused by evacuation were cited as factors leading to the breakdown of discipline in England and Wales, attention was also given in Scotland to economic conditions, lack of appropriate housing, amenities and leisure opportunities. Children of the City was researched, directed and scripted by 31-year-old Budge (Bridged) Cooper, with urban tenement scenes filmed largely in Dundee by émigré photographer Wolfgang Suschitzky, who described them as ‘the worst slums I had ever seen’.3 It depicts the three fictional cases of Alec aged 13, Duncan aged 12, and Robbie aged 10, caught by a policeman breaking into a clothes shop.

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The juvenile court is shown weighing up their character, educational ability and home background (including parental culpability) before deciding on a different treatment for each: Robbie (who has learning difficulties) is to be treated at a Child Guidance Clinic, Duncan (from a ‘respectable’ but fatherless home) is to be befriended by a probation officer, whilst Alec (whose father is a ‘drunkard’ and mother ‘apathetic’) is sent away to a residential Approved School. Children of the City presented the work of the juvenile courts in terms of scientific intervention, with the socio-psychological profiling of young offenders informing decisions about individualised forms of rehabilitation. It also called on Scotland’s broader community – churches, youth organisations and schools – to join together to provide moral leadership and education for citizenship. It was confident that the problem of youth offending could be fixed through a combination of prevention, therapy and training in a time of crisis. The film was a product of a particular period, most obviously in its optimistic belief in ‘penal welfarism’: an approach that sought to combine justice with education and social care to produce self-disciplined, well-adjusted and dutiful citizens.4 Significantly, the film presented youth offending as a normal or natural element of children’s development in deprived urban areas; it did not seek to identify one specific pariah group. Yet it did reinforce gendered perceptions of a distinction between the ‘respectable’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. Moreover, there are striking resonances across the decades since its making, in terms of the formulation of a social problem. Broader discussions about the causes of youth crime have continued to focus on young people’s misuse of both urban space and leisure time, on the corrupting effects of consumerism, and on inappropriate parenting (with the ‘feckless mother’ relabelled as the ‘single mother’). Since the Second World War there has been an almost perpetual wave of public anxiety, rhetoric and debate about youth and crime in Britain. This has been inflected through the stereotyping of a series of ‘folk devils’: the ‘cosh boy’ and ‘teddy boy’ in the 1950s; rioting ‘mods and rockers’ as well as knife-wielding Glasgow ‘gangs’ in the 1960s; ‘football hooligans’, ‘skinheads’ and ‘muggers’ in the early 1970s.5 From the mid-1950s, too, the theme of the ‘blackboard jungle’ relating to a perceived lack of discipline in state secondary schools has fired press headlines; the origins of these concerns can be linked to the expansion of ‘free’ education through the welfare state and the raising of the school leaving age (to 15 in 1947 and 16 in 1973). More recently, the spectre of the ‘hoodie’ or ‘chav’ (England) and the ‘ned’ (Scotland) framed discussions about the introduction of anti-

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social behaviour orders for young people (in England from 1998 to 2010 and in Scotland since 2004), whilst young people’s involvement in protest against the raising of university tuition fees in December 2010 and in the ‘riots’ of August 2012 led to the labelling, by members of national and municipal government, of an underclass of ‘feral youth’.6 Historical research has much to contribute to current debates in reminding politicians and policy-makers that the problem of youth and crime is not in itself ‘new’; it is not an indicator of a society that has suddenly, or even gradually, ‘broken’ or gone off the rails. The relationship between law, order and young people cannot be reduced to the simplistic descriptions and categories that have all too frequently been invoked to talk about it. This book joins a wealth of historical studies that have focused on the late-eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term ‘juvenile delinquency’ was first deployed around 1815 and was used to comment on the problem of the ‘street arab’ of the 1860s and the ‘hooligan’ of the 1890s.7 The more recent past has been substantially neglected, assumed to be the terrain of sociologists, criminologists, and the interdisciplinary area of cultural studies.8 Policing Youth not only seeks to fill this historical gap, but to offer a significant antidote to prevalent myths about ‘the Fifties’ and ‘the Sixties’ that have been formed through nostalgia and popular memory. Television series from Dixon of Dock Green to Heartbeat have helped construct a narrative of policing in the 1950s and early 1960s as a ‘golden age’ and of a society that was benign, safer and more deferential to authority. Similarly, the ‘teddy boy’, the ‘mod’ and the ‘rocker’ are now often affectionately remembered. Stripped of the ‘threat’ that shaped initial public reaction to them, they are used to signify whole decades without questioning their provenance. This book aims to probe beneath the sensationalism and stereotypes that have surrounded youth crime, to examine the everyday regulation of young people under 17 by police officers, magistrates, social workers and other practitioners during a key period of social change. Young people as a social group were strikingly more visible by the late 1950s than in the late 1930s. An immediate postwar baby boom saw the number of live births rise substantially in 1945–47, with these ‘babies’ inhabiting their teens between 1958 and 1966.9 Whilst it is possible to talk of the existence of interwar youth culture, the end of rationing, opening up of markets and arrival of rock and roll music in the 1950s led to the delineation of specifically youthful styles of dress and of taste.10 The term ‘the teenager’, first used in the USA in the 1940s, was widely adopted in Britain from the early 1950s to describe a

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cultural identity, distinct from that of older children or, indeed, young adults. ‘Teenagers’ expected to spend time outside of school and work on leisure and recreation. They also increasingly saw themselves as a ‘generation’ distinct from parents and other figures of authority; this sense of being ‘young’ and of age as a great divide was popularised through song lyrics that spoke of generational identity.11 As a number of recent studies have shown, many parents were often supportive of teenage leisure and culture, encouraging sons and daughters to participate in these expanded opportunities.12 Nevertheless, some adults who were keen to defend an existing social order, value system and way of life against a new ‘permissiveness’ viewed the ‘teenager’ as a moral challenge or disruptive ‘other’. Intergenerational tensions were apparent across modern western and European states, while concerns about postwar delinquency and youth crime were international phenomena. Yet the specificities of policy and practice at national and local levels require unpacking. It is hoped that this book, in analysing regions and nations of the UK, will enable further international comparative discussion of the postwar years. Since the 1707 Act of Union with England, Scotland had retained its own legal and educational systems. Indeed, when it came to the distribution plans for the film Children of the City, differences between English and Scots laws as well as juvenile justice provision became an area of contention. While the Scottish Office (which had sponsored the film) took considerable pride in the finished product, civil servants at the Home Office were of the view that it should not be shown south of the border because ‘the juvenile court, the probation office and the approved school scenes were over prim and not up to the best English standards’; instead they commissioned their own film, Children on Trial, released in 1946.13 The juvenile courts, which originated in 1908, followed different models in Scotland compared to England and Wales. Moreover, youth justice diverged significantly in 1968 with the introduction in Scotland of children’s hearings – non-judicial proceedings with a solely welfare orientation that did not involve formal criminalisation – while the juvenile courts were retained in England and Wales.14 This book explores the particularities of England and Scotland, arguing that, while similarities outweighed differences, important nuances are detectable. These were shaped by differences in structures, in resourcing, and also by the desire to protect local autonomy and discretion within Scotland against external centralising tendencies. Historical sociology has demonstrated that the concepts of ‘childhood’ and ‘youth’ (and related terms that invoke age, development

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and maturity) are social and cultural constructs whose meanings shift across time.15 If ‘childhood’ in modern western societies had come to be associated with innocence, then ‘adolescence’ raised concerns about successful emotional transition to the state of knowledge and experience associated with adulthood, including the potential that this held for corruption.16 As Harry Hendrick has persuasively argued, this meant that young people were positioned symbolically as either innocent ‘victims’ to be pitied or contaminating ‘threats’ to be feared.17 This book makes use of the legal terminologies that contemporary practitioners used to talk about age bands in the postwar period since these ascribed status and agency (or their lack) in the eyes of the law. Thus the term ‘child’ is used to refer to those under 14 and ‘young person’ to those aged 14–17 as laid out in the Children and Young Persons Acts of 1933 (England/Wales) and 1937 (Scotland). The terms ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ are also used throughout to refer to male and female juveniles although it is recognised that this can be problematic in infantilising those on the cusp of adulthood. Given that the age of criminal responsibility was set at 8 in 1933 (raised to 10 in England/ Wales – although not in Scotland – in 1963), it focuses on young people aged 8–17. The book as a whole examines ‘policing’ in its widest sense: as the range of practices concerned with the regulation of social behaviour within the modern state.18 This includes the specific bureaucratic institutions of the police service and criminal justice (including the juvenile courts) which are a central focus. However, it also deals with a series of related agencies – public, private and voluntary (including the churches, schools and also the family) – that were engaged in the social regulation and welfare of young people. The book is concerned with those who came to the attention of official agencies, as either possible perpetrators of criminal offences or as ‘victims’ in need of care or protection, but also with young people who were objects of the regulatory gaze but not of any formal intervention. This book evaluates the challenges that social change presented for practitioners, the range of mediations and responses that were developed, and the relationship between youth culture and the occupational cultures of practitioners. It investigates the negotiation of a social work ethic within the police service as well as synergies and tensions between police officers, social workers, probation officers, magistrates, teachers, and also parents.19 Whilst it is often claimed that ‘multi-agency’ approaches and ‘partnerships’ are innovative aspects of current policy, Policing Youth demonstrates that they were important components (formal and informal) of the preventative strategies developed

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in the earlier part of the twentieth century to reduce the likelihood of juvenile delinquency. The book identifies significant antecedents, most obviously Juvenile Liaison Schemes, initiated within a number of police forces from 1949 onwards. Indeed, ‘juvenile delinquency’ was presented as a collective responsibility requiring the involvement of a broad range of civil society associations and institutions working alongside the police and official state agencies. Constructing and deconstructing the ‘juvenile delinquent’ Between 1945 and 1970 the primary object of this surveillance and intervention was the white working-class adolescent male, a striking continuity with the Victorian past. Discussing her influences for the film Children of the City, Budge Cooper referred back to her own childhood: ‘We did all the things that “delinquents” do, but of course we never got to court. You see, we were “middle class”.’20 Her polemic neatly encapsulates a point that will be demonstrated empirically across this volume. Whilst the postwar education system led to social mobility for some, through the provision of places in grammar schools (England) and Senior High Schools (Scotland) for those achieving exam success, it also perpetuated and institutionalised class divisions for the sizeable majority. These divisions were reinforced through social agencies including criminal justice. It was assumed that public (fee-paying) and grammar school boys would be disciplined for misbehaviour by headmasters or parents, not by (working-class) police officers or juvenile court magistrates. Ideas about criminality in the postwar period were also affected by discourses of racial difference in that adult black and minority ethnic males were constructed as a predatory sexual danger to young white females. Until the later 1960s, however, minority ethnic groups (including Afro-Caribbean and Cypriot) featured mainly as victims of attacks carried out by young white males. Black and Asian youth – the children of those who had migrated to Britain in the 1950s – were viewed as more law-abiding than their white contemporaries.21 This was to change at the very end of the period of this study, as black teenagers in large urban areas such as London and Manchester began to report harassment by police as black youth were constructed as a significant threat for the first time.22 In Scottish cities, as well as in English cities such as Liverpool where sectarianism between Catholic and Protestant had flourished as a point of conflict in the interwar period, religion retained its importance as a marker of identity. Where Catholic ‘ghettos’– inner-city ‘slum’ areas associated with

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Irish migrant communities – continued to exist, they were linked to high levels of ‘juvenile delinquency’ and attracted the attention of the police. Yet religion in itself was not viewed as causal (although lack of church attendance of any kind was viewed as morally detrimental). ‘Delinquency-prone neighbourhoods’, as they were described by criminologists and probation officers, usually correlated with areas of deprivation. Of fundamental importance in the shaping of public debate regarding ‘juvenile delinquency’ was the annual publication of criminal justice statistics, which confirmed that criminality was overwhelmingly associated with males. In England girls constituted 8 per cent of juveniles against whom indictable convictions were recorded in the 1950s, rising to around 12 per cent in the mid-1960s. Even more starkly, in Scotland, girls constituted only 5 per cent of juveniles against whom charges were proved in courts of law in the 1950s and only 8 per cent by the late 1960s. This did not necessarily mean that they were not ‘misbehaving’; rather, that recourse to criminal justice solutions was more likely to be invoked in relation to male rather than female delinquency. As Pamela Cox has shown for the period before 1950, girls tended to be dealt with ‘through welfare mechanisms rather than criminal justice mechanisms’.23 They were more likely to be made the subject of supervision orders (as in need of care or protection) than boys, and were more likely to be dealt with informally (through schools or through referral to a probation officer without court proceedings). The juvenile court, in Scotland even more so than in England, was viewed as a mechanism designed to deal with deviant ­masculinity. Reluctance to release any information that might damage morale had meant that criminal justice statistics were not published during wartime. This did not stop local communities voicing concerns about perceived increases in juvenile property offences. When crime statistics were finally released in 1947, they demonstrated that there had been a hike in proceedings (as well as cases proven/convicted) against both boys and girls: in the year 1941 specifically for England and Wales, and from 1941 to 1945 in Scotland. Whilst this then dropped for Scotland, not rising again until the 1960s, England and Wales experienced gradual increases across the 1940s and another sharper rise from 1958 onwards (figures 1.1 and 1.2). These statistics starkly demonstrate a shift in the age profile of those assumed to be ‘juvenile delinquents’. Wartime concerns had focused, unusually, on those aged 12–14. In Scotland, however, those aged 14–17 rapidly began to outnumber the under-14s in the statistics from 1947 onwards. Contemporary

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c­ ommentators linked this to the rise in the school leaving age, which was unpopular among many working-class families, and which it was assumed simply encouraged truancy, boredom and bad behaviour. A similar shift was apparent in the statistics for England and Wales, but over a decade later, from 1963; the changing profile, here, was in part a function of the rise in the age of criminal responsibility (from 8 to 10). It was also linked to the baby-boom: it was in the early 1960s that those born shortly after the war reached 15. However, neither of these factors account for the steep rise in convictions of those aged 14–17 in the late 1960s. As this book demonstrates, those under 14 were increasingly more likely to be diverted away from criminal justice proceedings altogether (through initiatives such as Juvenile Liaison Schemes): because of their youth but also because they were also more likely to be first-time offenders. This was an approach that was favoured in Scotland in particular. By the 1960s it was the 15-year-old boy, who had already encountered the police in his younger years, who tended to be viewed as a troublemaker, was watched with suspicion, and was more likely to be dealt with through a formal charge. 60,000 14–17 50,000 Under 14 40,000

30,000

20,000

10,000

0 1938 1940 1942 1944 1946 1948 1950 1952 1954 1956 1958 1960 1962 1964 1966 1968 1970

Figure 1.1  Number of juveniles found guilty of indictable offences in England and Wales by age bands. Source: British Parliamentary Papers, Criminal Statistics, England and Wales.

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Introduction: welfare and justice 18,000 14–17 16,000 Under 14 14,000 12,000 10,000 8,000 6,000 4,000 2,000 0 1945

1947

1949

1951

1953

1955

1957

1959

1961

1963

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1967

Figure 1.2 Number of juveniles against whom charges were proved, all courts in Scotland 1945–68, by age bands. Source: British Parliamentary Papers, Criminal Statistics, Scotland.

Statistical information about juvenile delinquency was also presented and discussed in comparative geographical and regional perspectives; overall, crime rates in relation to population tended to be far higher in urban than in rural areas.24 Metropolitan London consistently outstripped other cities in England as a location for high rates of recorded juvenile offending. In very rural areas of Scotland, youth offending was practically non-existent. For example, 0.5 per cent of Orkney’s juvenile population, and only 0.16 per cent of that of Shetland, had offences proven against them in the years 1946–50.25 This compared very favourably to juvenile crime rates of around 1.6 per cent for Glasgow and an even higher 2.7 per cent in the west coast towns of Kilmarnock and Greenock. Whilst urban areas were presented as crimogenic environments, it is also highly likely that informal methods of discipline continued to be preferred in rural areas, particularly those remote from administrative centres. As this book demonstrates, variable policing practices mean that these figures should not be taken at face value. Howard Taylor has argued that official criminal justice statistics

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(and the data submitted by police forces and constabularies to the central state) are a reflection of bureaucratic process and of the politics and economics of policing.26 Figures for youth offending cannot be viewed as indicative of actual trends in young people’s criminal behaviour. Yet neither can they be dismissed as fictions. Rather, we need to deconstruct them by focusing on the processes that shaped their genesis, viewing the trends they present as an intersection between the practices of professionals and those of young people. The strategies and tactics of the police and other agencies become a crucial point of analysis as, indeed, do the social networks and behaviours of young people themselves. Forms of regulation and surveillance, including the labelling and measuring of ‘delinquency’, served to construct and thus constitute the very problem that they sought to solve. Criminal justice statistics in themselves formed a discourse through which particular and partial narratives about youth offending were circulated. The sense of a rising ‘wave’ of youth offending (as well as crime more broadly) led to a proliferation of national and local inquiries, which sought to identify causes and propose solutions. Across the period the term ‘juvenile delinquency’ was used to encompass offending, but also other forms of anti-social behaviour and disobedience, including truancy and running away from home, which it was assumed might lead to criminality. In 1942, Secretary of State for Scotland, Tom Johnston, wrote to local councils in areas considered ‘black spots’ for delinquency (Dumfries, Kilmarnock, Paisley and Dundee) asking them to organise local day conferences.27 Questions relating to youth were also among the first that he asked a newly appointed Standing Advisory Committee on the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Offenders (SACTRO) to consider in 1945. In England and Wales a similar process of reflection was initiated in 1948, with the organisation of a spring conference in London for representatives of the churches, local authorities, juvenile courts, teaching, and voluntary organisations. This was followed by a memorandum, sent to all local authorities in April 1949 by Labour Home Secretary James Chuter Ede and Minister of Education George Tomlinson, calling on local ‘leaders of public life’ to inquire into causes of delinquency and to seek close cooperation between all those engaged in the ‘welfare of young people’. The memo commented on ‘the widespread influence of changing moral standards’, expressing concern that the nation was entering a new moral era long before the so-called ‘permissive’ 1960s.28 The hiatus of inquiry of the 1940s dissipated as juvenile crime rates momentarily fell. Nevertheless, the conferences of the 1940s

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reflect a clear and widespread belief that rational recreation, religious observation and education would provide the solution. With offending rates rising from the late 1950s the next decade saw a proliferation of nationally appointed committees of enquiry relating to children and young persons, penal policy and the youth service, whilst the local conference model was also resurrected in 1959 by Conservative Home Secretary Rab Butler. In 1963 his successor Henry Brooke appointed a much-publicised Standing Advisory Committee on Juvenile Delinquency (SACJD), made up of forty criminal justice, education, and social work professionals from across England, Scotland and Wales, as well as the popular entertainer Frankie Vaughan, who was a supporter of the National Association of Boys’ Clubs.29 Yet its members became rapidly disappointed in their inability to make progress; most felt the body that had been created was too big, unwieldy, and lacking in focus. It was rapidly dissolved after the general election of October 1964 by incoming Labour Home Secretary Frank Soskice, who viewed the committee as a case of window-dressing on the part of the Conservative administration. Revealingly, Soskice informed Standing Committee members that ‘a diagnosis of the causes of delinquency is likely to come, if it comes at all, from long-term research rather than from discussion among people, however expert in their fields’.30 As the whole area of crime and delinquency prevention became a political battlefield, the mood was shifting away from emphasis on local solutions and responsibilities towards the view that national policy interventions were paramount. If the statistical and the governmental (local and national) were important sites through which youth crime was discursively constructed, so too, was the growing discipline of scientific criminology. The work of London County Council (LCC) psychologist Cyril Burt had been profoundly important in shaping the approach to youth offending that was set in place in the interwar period. First published in 1925, Burt’s The Young Delinquent, argued that ‘juvenile delinquency’ was caused by multiple factors (economic, social, cultural, environmental, medical and psychological) rather than originating in either hereditary defects or the ‘unnatural’ conditions of city slums (two previously favoured views). Moreover, the ‘young delinquent’ was not significantly different in any one aspect from the well-adjusted child; indeed, the early signs of ‘delinquency’ were imperceptible. This meant that a ‘preventative’ approach needed to be built into all aspects of child nurture:

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The problem of delinquency in the young must be envisaged as but one inseparable portion of the larger enterprise of child welfare. Crime in children is not a unique, well-marked, or self-contained phenomenon, to be handled solely by the policeman and the children’s court. It touches every side of social work. The teacher, the care committee worker, the magistrate, the probation officer, all who come into official contact with the child, should be working hand in hand.31

This statement exemplifies the educative approach to delinquency prevention, which viewed penal and welfare policies as flipsides of the same coin, and that was hegemonic until the late 1950s. Whether it was actually delivered in this period – and whether the idea of ‘working hand in hand’ was realised in practice – is an important consideration of Policing Youth. As civil servants turned their attentions to increases in the figures relating to juvenile offending, they identified a shortfall in subsequent criminological research in Britain.32 The only notable research that had been carried out in the 1930s was J.H. Bagot’s study of delinquency in Liverpool, which had found a high correlation between youth offending and severe poverty, and John Bowlby’s psychoanalytical study of cases brought before the London Child Guidance Clinic, which emphasised the role of emotional trauma, particularly ‘maternal deprivation’.33 In Scotland, independent charity the Carnegie Trust UK was responsible for commissioning two very different pieces of research after the war: D.H. Stott’s psychological study of young offenders in Glasgow (published in 1950 as Delinquency and Human Nature), and a practical survey of agencies and activities engaged in delinquency prevention carried out by the Glasgow sociologist John Anderson Mack in 1951.34 The two distinct and ostensibly contradictory research trajectories – the preoccupation of the psychologist with interiority and of the sociologist with broader ecological factors – were to play out across the postwar period. For those who emphasised the problems of emotional adjustment, the growing emphasis on affluence by the late 1950s was evidence that the old arguments about poverty had been insufficient. Many studies, however, emphasised interaction between ecological structures and psychical processes, including the ethnographic research published by Liverpool University settlement social worker John Barron Mays, which was an important stimulus for fieldwork involving participant observation.35 The setting up of an official Home Office Sub-Committee on Delinquency Research in 1958 to coordinate and fund research on the causes of youth

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offending and recidivism is again suggestive of a change of emphasis from locally based solutions towards centralised research-informed decision-making.36 A further discursive lens was that of the cinema. The documentary film movement had a clear influence on the didactic and moralising ‘social problem’ film that dealt with both male and female ‘delinquency’ in the late 1940s and early 1950s: Good Time Girl (1947), Boys in Brown (1949), The Blue Lamp (1950), I Believe in You (1951) and Cosh Boy (1953). A more nuanced treatment, that began to tell the story from the perspective of working-class youth, can be traced through the social realism of Violent Playground (1958), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Bronco Bullfrog (1969), before shifting into the carnivalesque dystopias of If … (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1972).37 Film (cinema and television), literary fiction and, of course, the news press formed another important site through which debate about youth offending took place and through which public ‘knowledge’ was acquired. This book is not primarily about policy analysis, the history of criminological ideas, or crime film. Rather it mines primary source materials generated within these areas for what they tell us about the discretion exercised by practitioners, the challenges that social change presented for them, and the relationship between youth and occupational cultures. Committees of enquiry required the collation (and archiving) of significant amounts of information about the everyday work of practitioners. Similarly, criminology involved collection, reflection and analysis of ethnographical observation or data provided by practitioners. Finally, research was often carried out by documentary and realist film-makers that involved fieldwork, interviews and consultation. Moreover, comment and critique of these films, including that offered by practitioners, enables us to access the perceptions and viewpoints of those involved in grass-roots delivery. Arguably, there are three aspects of the ‘regulatory gaze’: identification and interpretation (of a ‘social problem’); formulation of policy (national or local); and its operational delivery at grass-roots level. It is the latter that most concerns us here. However, these aspects are inter-related. One of the ways in which the construction of juvenile delinquency as a social problem – by the media, the expert, the practitioner and the politician – has been discussed is through the concept of ‘moral panic’. The term was popularised as a result of the work of Stanley Cohen, who famously described a ‘moral panic’ as a series of events through which:

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a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerge to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylised and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions [and] ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to.38

This theorisation was produced as a result of Cohen’s fieldwork observing the policing of the ‘bank holiday riots’ involving ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ between 1964 and 1966, his interviews with young people, police and magistrates, and analysis of the media. The concept of ‘moral panic’ is sometimes misinterpreted to refer simply to the process of labelling, distortion and amplification by the media and those in positions of authority. Also important, however, are the moments of initiation (the event or individual that provokes such a strong reaction) and closure (the resolution that is generated through the actions of experts, politicians and other authority figures). ‘Moral panics’ within Cohen’s initial formulation are relatively short-lived although they may reoccur with remarkable frequency. As this book shows, a whole series of specific episodes of ‘moral panic’ can be identified that relate to particular ‘youth’ folk devils, both male and female. These were often local or regional in derivation, whilst attracting interest from the national press. However, the postwar period can also be characterised by an almost continual phase of social anxiety about juvenile delinquency and hence the ‘moral’ condition of teenagers and young adults. By the mid-twentieth century the newly-labelled ‘teenager’ had come to be seen as the essence of the truly ‘modern’, ‘hip’ and ‘new’ – and of social investment in the aftermath of total war – but it had also come to signify rebellion, revolution, dissent and disorder. ‘Youth’ functioned as a metaphor through which concerns about social change were articulated, particularly in the pages of the tabloid press, in which the stereotypes outlined at the beginning of this chapter were most likely to be deployed. Whilst the concept of ‘moral panic’ has its uses, it should not occlude discussion of complexity. The ‘bishops, politicians and … socially accredited experts’ did not all hold the same view. During the 1960s, crime – and in particular youth offending – was rapidly politicised as a barometer of ‘state of the nation’. Positions were often characterised in terms of stark polarity: between those who advocated a disciplinary approach towards the young offender, including a return to corporal

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punishment, and those who advocated progressive approaches that recognised the agency of young people. Both were highly critical of the earlier confidence in penal-welfarism. These polarities, however, concealed the range of positions that were taken in discussion and debate, which is more accurately analysed as a spectrum or continuum. The ‘harder’ disciplinary focus was usually associated with the police and judiciary, the ‘soft’ ‘do-gooder’ approach mapped on to social work practitioners. As this book shows, however, a far more subtle range of views was apparent within, as well as between, the proliferating professions and occupations engaged in criminal justice and youth welfare work. Place and space In addition to a broad comparison of England and Scotland, this book makes use of two detailed cases studies to examine the relationship between national policies and local implementation: of the cities of Manchester and Dundee. Although Dundee (population of 180,000 in 1947) was approximately a quarter of the size of Manchester (population of 750,000), both shared significant socio-economic characteristics, most notably traditionally high rates of women’s labour force participation within their dominant textile industries of jute (Dundee) and cotton manufacture (Manchester).39 Both cities saw significant relocation of their inner-city populations with the development of peripheral council-owned housing estates in the postwar period as a perceived antidote to ‘slum’ housing. Moreover, both were associated by contemporaries with concerns about youth crime although slightly differing trends emerged. Manchester was regularly highlighted in the press as having the highest rate of juvenile offending of all British cities outside London (for boys as well as girls).40 During the Second World War, Dundee had been identified by the Scottish Office as the east-coast ‘black-spot’ for juvenile delinquency and, by the late 1940s had the highest juvenile offending rate of all Scottish cities.41 Figures had improved (significantly in Dundee) by 1953 but increases were apparent again from the late 1950s and were commented upon with alarm by the early 1960s. Archival work on these two cities has involved the creation of two datasets of cases that came before the juvenile courts for the sample years of 1947, 1953, 1959 and 1965 (and within these years for offences allegedly committed in the period January to May). Research has also involved an analysis of the content of local newspapers for these sample years – including the Manchester Evening News and Dundee Courier and Advertiser – as well as

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a broad range of other available materials including autobiographical writing, police returns and inspection reports, local authority committee minutes, and reports produced by voluntary associations. The case studies also enable consideration of the regulation of individuals in relation to specific geographical spaces and places: home, school, youth clubs, streets, parks and gardens, commercial premises and leisure venues. David Harvey reminds us that ‘the conquest and rational ordering of space’ was ‘an integral part of the modernizing project’.42 Since the late nineteenth century young people’s use of space and time has been circumscribed by their legal status as minors. They were (and are) required to attend school for fixed hours, and to reside at ‘home’ or with another in loco parentis at night. Moreover, young people often came into conflict with the police or other adults because they were deemed to be using the street for the wrong purposes at the wrong time. These encounters were affected by pre-existing perceptions, including the stereotyping of certain districts or areas as ‘black-spots’ for offending. This book examines, in turn, the role of the police (Chapter 2) and the courts (Chapter 3); concerns about violence (Chapter 4) and sexuality (Chapter 5); more informal forms of regulation through home and community (Chapter 6); attempts to structure and shape young people’s leisure time (Chapter 7); and the types of reform delivered through the institutions associated with penal welfare (Chapter 8). Notes 1 National Records of Scotland, Edinburgh (hereafter NRS), HH60/435 Juvenile Delinquency 1944–59, Children of the City, film script. 2 D. Smith, ‘Official responses to juvenile delinquency in Scotland during the Second World War’, Twentieth Century British History, 18 (2007), 78–105. 3 M. Omasta, B. Mayr and U. Seeber (eds), Wolf Suschitzky Photos (Vienna: SYNEMA, 2006), p. 106. 4 D. Garland, Punishment and Welfare (Aldershot: Gower, 1985) and D. Garland, The Culture of Control (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 5 P. Rock and S. Cohen, ‘The teddy boy’, in V. Bogdanor and R. Skidelsky (eds), The Age of Affluence 1951–64 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1970); S. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 2002 [1972]); D. Hebdige, Subculture: the Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979); S. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis. Mugging, the State and Law and Order (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978); S. Hall and T. Jefferson (eds), Resistance Through Rituals (London: Hutchinson, 1976). 6 Comments of Deputy Mayor of London Kit Malthouse reported on

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BBC News 8 August 2011 (www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-14439970). 7 M. May, ‘Innocence and experience. The evolution of the concept of juvenile delinquency in the mid-nineteenth century’, Victorian Studies, 17.1 (1973), 7–29; J. Gillis, ‘The evolution of juvenile delinquency in England, 1890–1914, Past and Present, lxvii (1975), 96–126; S. Margarey, ‘The invention of juvenile delinquency in early nineteenth-century England’, Labour Studies (1978), 11–27; G. Pearson, Hooligan: a History of Respectable Fears (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1983); P. King and J. Noel, ‘The origins of “the problem of juvenile delinquency”: the growth of juvenile prosecutions in London in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries’, Criminal Justice History, 15 (1993), 17–41; H. Shore, Artful Dodgers. Youth and Crime in Early Nineteenth-Century London (London: Boydell, 1999); L. Mahood, Policing Gender, Class and Family, 1850–1940 (London: UCL Press, 1995); V. Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship: Reclaiming the Young Offender, 1914–1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); P. Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare. Bad Girls in Britain, 1900–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003). For a useful historiographical overview see H. Shore, ‘Inventing and re-inventing the juvenile delinquent in British history’, Memoria y civilizacion, 14 (2011), 105–32. 8 For exceptions that examine the postwar period see A. Wills, ‘Juvenile Delinquency, Residential Institutions and the Permissive Shift, England 1950–1970’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2005); A. Wills, ‘Delinquency, masculinity and citizenship in England 1950–1970’, Past and Present, 187 (2005), 157–85; D. Fowler, ‘Juvenile delinquency in northern Ireland’ in his Youth Culture in Modern Britain c.1920–c.1970 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008); P. Cox, ‘Race, delinquency and difference in twentieth-century Britain’, in P. Cox and H. Shore (eds), Becoming Delinquent: British and European Youth, 1650–1950 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); K. Bradley, ‘Juvenile delinquency and the public sphere: exploring local and national discourses in England, c.1940– 1969’, Social History, 37.1 (2012), 19–35. 9 M. Peplar, Family Matters. A History of Ideas about Family Since 1945 (Harlow: Longman, 2002), p. 133. 10 D. Fowler, The First Teenagers: the Lifestyles of Young Wage-Earners in Inter-war Britain (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995); M. Abrams, Teenage Consumer Spending in 1959 (London: Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, 1961). 11 S. Frith, Sound Effects. Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock ’n’ Roll (London: Constable, 1983); M. Brake, The Sociology of Youth Culture and Youth Subcultures (London: Routledge, 1980). 12 C. Langhamer, ‘Leisure, pleasure and courtship’, in M.J. Maynes et al. (eds), Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); S. Todd and H. Young, ‘Baby-boomers to “Beanstalkers”: Making the Modern Teenager in Post-war Britain’, Cultural and Social History, 9 (2012), 451–67.

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13 The National Archives, London (hereafter TNA), MH102/1129, Film about Juvenile Delinquency. The Home Office later agreed that the Scottish film might be shown in England and Wales to specialist audiences only. 14 F.M. Martin and K. Murray (eds), The Scottish Juvenile Justice System (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1982). 15 P. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962); C. Jenks, Childhood (London: Routledge, 2005); A. Davin, ‘What is a child?’ in A. Fletcher and S. Hussey (eds), Childhood in Question (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 16 J. Springhall, Coming of Age: Adolescence in Britain 1860–1960 (Basingstoke: Gill & Macmillan, 1986). 17 H. Hendrick, Child Welfare (London: Routledge, 1994). 18 J. Donzelot, The Policing of Families (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997). 19 M. Punch and T. Naylor, ‘The police: a social service’, New Society, 17 May 1973, pp. 358–61; T. Thomas, The Police and Social Workers (Aldershot: Gower, 1986). 20 TNA, MH102/1134, magazine (title unknown) cutting, interview conducted by Lyn Arnold for article ‘From out of the City’. 21 Cohen, Folk Devils (2nd edn 1987), p. lxiv. 22 Hall, Policing the Crisis. 23 Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare, p. 15. 24 See NRS, HH60/427 Juvenile Delinquency Statistics, for the impossibility of making direct comparisons of statistical series for Scotland and England/Wales. 25 J.A. Mack ‘Crime’, in J. Cunnison and J.B.S. Gilfillan, The City of Glasgow: the Third Statistical Account for Scotland (Glasgow: Collins, 1958), p. 665. 26 H. Taylor, ‘Rationing crime: the political economy of criminal statistics since the 1850s’, Economic History Review, LI (1998), 569–90. 27 Smith, ‘Official Reponses’; NRS, HH60/428 Juvenile Delinquency Measures. 28 Home Office and Ministry of Education, Memorandum on Juvenile Delinquency (London: HMSO, 1949), p. 2. 29 TNA, BN29/1793, Membership and first meeting of the Advisory Committee. Police membership consisted of two chief constables: David Gray, Stirling and Clackmannanshire, and John McKay, Manchester. 30 TNA, BN29/1783, Consideration of future work of Advisory Committee, Letter from Frank Soskice, 11 December 1964, to all members. 31 C. Burt (1925), The Young Delinquent (London: University of London Press, 1925), p. 610. 32 For example, NRS, HH60/418, Juvenile Delinquency Enquiry 1937–38. 33 J.H. Bagot, Juvenile Delinq0uency (London: Jonathan Cape, 1941); J. Bowlby, Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves (London: Baillière, Tindall & Cox, 1946). 34 NRS, HH60/593 Juvenile Delinquency, Research Schemes, Carnegie UK

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Trust, and HH60/813 Juvenile Delinquency 1960–63. The Glasgow focus of Scottish research was further reinforced by the publication of Thomas Ferguson’s The Young Delinquent in his Social Setting (London: Nuffield Foundation, 1952). 35 J.B. Mays, Growing Up in the City (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1954). 36 NRS, HH60/721, Home Office Research Committee on Delinquency 1959–63. 37 S. Chibnall, ‘The teenage trilogy: The Blue Lamp, I Believe in You and Violent Playground’, in A. Burton, T. O’Sullivan and P. Wells (eds), Liberal Directions. Basil Deardon and Postwar British Film Culture (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 1997); S. Chibnall, British Crime Cinema (London: Routledge, 1999). 38 Cohen, Folk Devils, p. 9; A. Hunt, ‘Moral Panic’ and Moral Language in the Media’, British Journal of Sociology, 48.4 (1997), 629–48. 39 J.M. Jackson (ed.), City of Dundee. The Third Statistical Account of Scotland. (Arbroath: Herald Press, 1979); J.A. Tomlinson and C.A. Whatley (eds), Jute No More: Transforming Dundee (Dundee: University of Dundee, 2011); A. Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-class Culture in Manchester and Salford, 1900–39 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992); C. Langhamer, Women’s Leisure in England 1920–1960 (Manchester University Press: Manchester University Press, 2001). 40 In 1960 the proportion of young people appearing before the courts was calculated as 2.2 per cent in Manchester compared to 1.3 in Birmingham, 1.9 in Liverpool and 1.7 in Leeds; see Youth Development Trust, Juvenile Delinquency in Manchester (Manchester: Youth Development Trust, 1965), p. 6. 41 NRS, HH60/428, Juvenile Delinquency, 1942; Mack, ‘Crime’, p. 665. The incidence of juvenile delinquency in Dundee was given as 1.7 per cent in 1946–50 compared to 1.6 per cent in Glasgow, 1.4 in Aberdeen and 0.8 in Edinburgh. 42 D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1989), p. 249.

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2 The police

This chapter examines the methods, styles and approaches used by police officers – who were on the front line of the decision-making process – in their dealings with children and young people in postwar Britain. Specialisation was apparent in the development of Policewomen’s Departments and experiments with Police Juvenile Liaison Schemes (JLSs), both of which provide instructive examples of the ways in which a ‘social work’ ethic was negotiated within policing. Nevertheless, in the vast majority of cases, juveniles continued to be dealt with by uniformed policemen as part and parcel of general police duties. Their approaches were informed by the idea of ‘commonsense’ policing, acquired through practical experience and ‘on the job’ training, which was often contrasted with ‘expert’ theory or knowledge. There were, thus, significant continuities of practice with the earlier part of the century, in which policemen exercised considerable discretion in balancing a social role (offering advice or assistance) with a more coercive display of discipline and authority. However, as concerns about the so-called ‘juvenile crime wave’ captured headlines, police methods for dealing with the young as a specific group became a focal point of attention, debate and politicisation. Whilst Manchester and Dundee are used as case studies for the book as a whole, this chapter offers a broader overview of developments and debates concerning the relationship between the police service and young people. It emphasises heterogeneity: both within individual police forces and across the cities and towns of Britain. There was no such thing as a ‘police’ response but, rather, a range of responses, approaches and practices. Although national government (including the Home Office and Scottish Office) sought to standardise procedure and to advise on best practice, decisions about operational policing were devolved to chief constables (working with local police ­authorities).

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Their precise implementation by individual officers was further negotiated within the dynamics of pre-existing local relationships. The resulting picture was, in its detail, patchy and uneven. Nevertheless, this chapter reinforces the argument that the current phenomenon of ‘multi-agency’ cooperation around youth justice/welfare is not distinctly new. Across the twentieth century, but especially in the period 1940–60, police forces frequently worked in cooperation with religious organisations, the voluntary sector, education services, social work providers and parents. They were brought together through a shared belief in the need for social reconstruction during and after the war, expressed in terms of community and citizenship. Because of their role as law enforcers, police officers were often associated with a ‘justice’ orientation to young offenders that was contrasted with the conflicting ‘welfare’ orientation of social workers. These approaches were stereotyped within occupational cultures, as well as in broader media coverage, as a dichotomy of ‘hard’ and soft’. This chapter demonstrates, however, that both were present within the repertoires of policing, forming a continuum of responses rather than polar opposites; both, too, were subject to critique. The use of physical coercion was increasingly censured, whilst police attempts to develop a social case-work role was viewed by opponents within policing as too ‘soft’ and by those outside as amateurish. Historian David Walcott has suggested that police discretion in relation to juveniles in early twentieth-century America was shaped by ‘situational variables’: most obviously the type of offence they were alleged to have committed and the demands (or expectations) of complainants. Also significant, however, were the local reputations of young people and families, including general demeanour and level of cooperation, as well as assumptions about ‘race’ and gender.1 This formulation is equally applicable to mid-twentieth-century Britain, where other additional factors included ideas about social class, age and generation, as well as the significance of dress and appearance as markers of social status (given the widespread demonisation of postwar youth subcultures). This is not to offer an overtly determinist reading of police responses; rather to stress that police officers were embedded within existing sets of social and political relationships, and that broader, often dominant, assumptions about other social groups impacted upon their ways of thinking.

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The police

The ‘bobby on the beat’ In Britain’s towns and cities, beat patrol was the central plank of crime prevention from the mid-nineteenth century until around 1960. In England and Wales officers patrolled on their own, whilst in Scotland the rule of corroboration (which necessitated supporting evidence from two witnesses to effect any conviction) entailed patrolling in pairs. In the era before widespread car ownership and where innercity overcrowding was prevalent, the street was a focal point of social life, a playground for children and a meeting place for young adults. Police officers were required to deal with lost or ‘strayed’ children found on the streets. In 1947, for example, Dundee police took 391 children to police stations (as a place of safety) where they were temporarily cared for by ‘female turnkeys’ (matrons) until collected by parents or guardians.2 The beat officer was directly involved in the regulation of street culture, given that local by-laws (in Scotland the Burgh Police Acts) prohibited activities that obstructed the street and caused nuisance, including unruly play. His work involved considerable discretion in deciding whether to deal with activities such as street football through informal or formal censure. Historians of interwar policing are divided as to whether police officers should be viewed as an official apparatus that clamped down on working-class male youth culture. Oral history interviews collected by Steve Humphries and Andrew Davies relating to interwar Salford and Manchester, suggest that ‘street corner lads’ often felt vulnerable to police harassment for loitering or obstructing the footpath, that prosecutions for illegal football games were sorely resented in working-class communities, and that the policeman was viewed by many as an unwanted disruption to the rhythms of street life.3 Joanna Klein, who has worked with police-generated records, argues that police officers tended to share the value system of the ‘respectable’ working classes from which they were drawn and were lax in enforcing laws that did not fit with a working-class moral consensus.4 Ethnographic research undertaken in the 1950s to 1960s is insightful on the work roles, values, perceptions and use of discretion by postwar police officers. John Barron Mays’ 1953 study of a Liverpool police division involved interviews with 50 ‘ordinary’ policemen in order to assess their attitudes towards young people.5 Michael Banton’s 1962 snapshot of policing in one Scottish city division (assumed to be Edinburgh) highlights the use of informal means to resolve disputes as well as the preponderance of incidents involving juveniles.6 Around a third of Mays’ respondents thought that insufficient play

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spaces were provided by local authorities: ‘they confessed that, as fathers themselves, they felt embarrassed at having to interfere with street games or games on wasteland which they were obliged by law to do’.7 According to Mays, officers who were keen on pressing formal charges were viewed with ‘great contempt’ by their peers and ‘blamed for bad personal relationships with the neighbourhood’.8 Successful policing was viewed as entailing an officer’s ‘judgement, his tact, sympathy and commonsense’, which was shaped ‘much more by popular morality than by the letter of the law’.9 This might involve negotiation, advice and informal intervention. Banton described work in one police area, where a great deal of time was spent on complaints from ‘shopkeepers and householders’ about the conduct of young people who congregated in particular places and were thought to have damaged property. Officers visited the young people’s homes in the early evening, interviewed them and sometimes admonished them in the presence of their parents.10 However, Banton does not address the extent to which this ‘popular morality’ was that of the adult community and thus reflected generational differences. Whilst the bulk of their activities may have been concerned with preventive work of a social nature – or, at least, maintaining the ‘peace’ rather than prosecution – this did not mean that police officers were accepted everywhere as part of the community or that they were accepting of others. According to Banton, police were viewed with suspicion in the industrial towns and slum clearance schemes of the west of Scotland; in one area the children of police officers were subject to ‘so much victimization from other children’ that police families had ‘to arrange a roster to escort their own children from school’.11 Amongst Mays’ Liverpool sample, 10 per cent of officers complained of ‘social ostracisation’, while others were aware of an attitude of ‘hostility … tempered by secret co-operation’ in which information might be passed on covertly.12 In espousing the ‘values’ of the ‘respectable’ working class, expressed though ideas about cleanliness and propriety, police officers characterised those beneath them as ‘rough’ and ‘uncouth’, amplifying suspicion and mistrust. Among Liverpool police, ‘the general opinion was that the people in the “bad area” along the side of the docks, were hostile to the police’.13 Officers interviewed by Banton had absorbed similar social stereotypes: ‘I was [living] on the fringe of a very bad area where my children had to go to school with children from this bad area who were dirty. Their language was bad. Their habits were bad.’14 Moreover, in forging alliances with other ‘authority’ figures – church ministers, youth club leaders, headmasters and teachers – the police reinforced their

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The police

association with the ‘respectable’ representatives of community, from which other marginalised groups were implicitly excluded. While Mays’ Liverpool study, like Banton’s Scottish research, emphasised the ‘social work’ dimensions of the beat officer’s role, it is clear that a range of orientations, particularly towards juveniles, were observable across his interviewees. He classified 62 per cent of his sample as ‘sympathetic’ towards children (assessing this by analysing their responses to key questions), 16 per cent as ‘neutral’, and a further 22 per cent as ‘unsympathetic’. Those classed as ‘unsympathetic’ had ventured opinions such as ‘the children don’t appreciate what is done for them’ or ‘they are not respectful enough to the man in uniform’ and tended to blame young offenders themselves for their actions. The ‘sympathetic’ were those who were ‘keen on youth clubs’, concerned about the ‘lack of play space and equipment’, and tended to blame other factors (environmental conditions or poor parenting). Arguably his study demonstrated a spectrum of positions, from the more authoritarian to the more welfare-oriented; all shades and both extremes were present in policing. If the ‘average’ officer in Liverpool was kindly, helpful and sympathetic towards children, his ‘common-sense’ approach was highly critical of parents: 90 per cent of Mays’s sample believed that bad home life was to blame for juvenile misdemeanours and there was ‘strong agreement that coercive measures should be adopted to deal with lazy, indifferent or criminal parents’.15 It was a common theme within the Annual Reports of Chief Constables in Dundee and Manchester. In 1950 Dundee’s J.C. Pattison was concerned about an increase in house-breaking among children who had been ‘denied the benefit of sound guidance by responsible and conscientious parents’, identifying a need for ‘corrective training’ for parents.16 While ‘poverty’ was replaced by ‘affluence’ as discussions of the causes of criminality shifted in the 1950s, the blaming of poor parenting remained a constant.17 For the most part, the ‘police’ attitude towards parenting placed a strong emphasis on disciplinary codes and structures, which were also apparent in their involvement in youth work more generally. As Weinberger and Klein have both demonstrated, police officers were actively engaged in voluntary work as part of the boys’ club movement in the early part of the century in order to keep boys out of trouble.18 This practice continued during the Second World War and beyond. Manchester City Police Lads’ Club offered structured recreational opportunities to prevent delinquency in wartime.19 Former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Philip Game set up a boys’ club named after him in Croydon at the end of the war and divisional

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police officers were involved in fund-raising, organising the club and instructing boys in various sports.20 Moreover, the 1948 Criminal Justice Act allowed magistrates to require boys convicted of offences to spend their Saturday afternoons at ‘attendance centres’, which were effectively ‘compulsory’ clubs designed for those deemed ‘unclubbable’. The act did not specify which local institutions should be responsible for running them but in many areas they were incorporated into the police role. In Hull the attendance centre was run by the Local Authority Children’s Committee, and was located in a remand home, whose superintendent acted as officer in charge. In London and Sheffield, however, the attendance centre was not only run by the police but based at the force Training School (Peel House in London).21 In January 1953 an attendance centre was set up in Salford to take boys from across Lancashire (including the Manchester area), run by a police inspector with an established reputation for youth work as assistant district commissioner of Salford scouts. Military-style inspection for neatness and cleanliness was followed by physical training instruction and tuition in carpentry, shoe repairing and electrical repairing; advice on employment and joining a youth organisation was also offered.22 The South Manchester Attendance Centre was similarly set up in 1957 with the intent of instilling ‘self-discipline’ and promoting ‘a healthy interest in worthwhile activities’.23 The centre was staffed by policemen until 1965 when ‘a professional tutor in arts and crafts’ was appointed to teach a new intake of 10- to 12-year-olds.24 The ‘social work’ role of the ordinary uniformed officer encompassed informal advice and admonishment through to a highly structured educative role. In their annual reports, chief constables regularly paid homage to the work of ‘such splendid organisations as Youth Clubs, the Boys’ Brigade, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides’ for their work towards ‘the strengthening and building of juvenile character’.25 Law and order, crime prevention, the cultivation of self-control, and the training of effective citizens were closely linked within the rhetoric and philosophy of policing in the early and mid-twentieth century. Defining the police role In Scotland, where fully constituted juvenile courts were only set up in four locations (Ayrshire, Fife, Renfrewshire and Aberdeen), police developed an alternative raft of semi-formal methods to deal with children and young people at a sub-court level. In Glasgow, from 1905, a ‘Superintendents Court’ was held on a Saturday morning or after school, at which juveniles received a warning, with parents and other

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authority figures present. A similar practice had been implemented in Kilmarnock in the 1920s and in Dundee during the mid-1930s and again from 1942.26 In Dundee warnings were issued through a monthly ‘Senior Police Officer’s Court’, involving a representative of the Union of Boy’s Clubs as well as a Church of Scotland minister, who liaised subsequently with parish ministers and probation officers (Protestant or Catholic); juveniles who were warned were encouraged to join a church or youth organisation.27 Dundee police thereby aimed to instil ‘responsibility’ in the minds of parents and guardians but also to ‘try to convince them that the Police are not for convictions but rather to assist in seeing the children growing up into good and honest citizens’.28 The Chief Constable of Coatbridge, described as ‘an enthusiast in social welfare’, criticised official court proceedings for juveniles as ‘too formal’ in a conversation reported by a Scottish Office civil servant: ‘he said he favoured the idea of a boy who had been caught stealing apples being given a task to do, say on a Saturday afternoon … this could not be ordered by a Court’.29 The Coatbridge model embraced restorative justice; parents were often asked to make ‘good’ any damages caused, deducting the expense from their child’s pocket money.30 These initiatives are significant in highlighting the autonomy of local chief constables, close working relationships between the police, the church, local dignitaries and other authority figures in the community and, moreover, the arbitrary nature of criminal justice statistics. As Scottish Office civil servants began to investigate the worrying hike in reported levels of ‘juvenile delinquency’ during the Second World War, it soon became apparent that court data for different areas were not comparable given the differential use of these sub-court procedures. In Dundee and Coatbridge, warnings were given in roughly a fifth of all juvenile cases. In the far larger urban hub of Glasgow, in marked contrast, the balance shifted from warnings to court hearings. Glasgow police data showed a 45 per cent increase in juvenile court cases between 1939 and 1943 but a drop of 50 per cent in the use of semi-formal police warnings issued to juveniles. In Glasgow, the burden of war duties as well as reduced manpower left little time for preventive work with juveniles, leading to both an escalation in their activities and a failure to deal with minor transgression through the warning process. It was likely that Dumfries was distinguished as a specific ‘black spot’ for wartime juvenile delinquency because its chief constable had abandoned a brief experiment with cautioning.31 In Scotland, the Lord Advocate’s office, represented at the local level by the Procurator Fiscal (PF) and the Burgh Prosecutor, was

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a­ ssumed to make all decisions about prosecution after preliminary inquiry (as a buffer between the public, the police and the judiciary). The juvenile warnings system controversially blurred this distinction between police and judiciary. Warnings were usually carried out in consultation with, or on the advice of, the PF. Yet in some areas they were administered by the PF himself although he had not technically been given any ‘statutory authority’ to do so, whilst Glasgow police superintendents also performed the office of Assistant PF.32 Nevertheless, the SACTRO recommended warning systems for general adoption throughout Scotland in 1945, although stressing that the term ‘court’ was best avoided and that any data generated was to be collated and submitted within annual police returns. Across the 1950s and 1960s Glasgow’s warnings system was used to divert trivial cases – petty thefts, disorderly conduct, malicious mischief, stone throwing and street football – away from the judicial system; in 1964, for example, 3,824 juveniles were warned, whilst 8,144 were brought before the courts.33 In England and Wales a slightly different pattern had emerged. Most significantly, in Metropolitan London cautioning (the equivalent of the Scottish ‘warning’) was actively discouraged at the behest of the Home Secretary from 1931 to 1968.34 It was expected that all juveniles accused of offences should be charged and brought before the juvenile courts. It is highly likely that police discretion acted as an informal check on prosecution, but it is also clear that the official rejection of any ‘sub court’ cautioning system meant that juvenile justice statistics for the Metropolitan Police District were inflated in comparison to other areas. In Birmingham around half of juvenile cases were dealt with through cautioning in the 1940s compared to around 5 per cent in the West Riding of Yorkshire.35 In England and Wales the Young Offenders Committee of 1927 had not objected to police cautioning on a first offence. It did, however, object strongly to the development of more ritualistic ad hoc procedures ‘as usurping the function of a tribunal and … outside the proper duties of the police’.36 In 1944 questions were asked in the House of Commons about the use of an ‘Admonitions Court’ set up by the police and the Education Authority in Rochdale, Lancashire; Home Secretary Herbert Morrison stated firmly this was not done with his approval.37 Nevertheless, despite Home Office reluctance, most English and Welsh forces (with the exception of London) used some form of ‘cautioning’ by the late 1950s; by 1968 Manchester police were cautioning a quarter of all juveniles aged 10–17 in relation to whom action was taken.38 Police experiments with preventative and ‘sub court’ mechanisms continued

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to generate opposition and controversy as magistrates, probation officers and other practitioners sought to delineate and justify their own roles – as professionals and experts – within the expanding sector of postwar youth justice/welfare. From the Second World War onwards, too, the police were engaged in discussion and negotiation with schoolteachers: about their respective roles as disciplinary agencies, but also over responsibility for crime prevention education. In August 1945, amidst concerns that petty crime had increased in south London with the return of evacuees, the Metropolitan Police proposed that crime prevention talks in schools should be added to an existing repertoire of road safety talks (well established by the 1940s). Typed drafts that were prepared shed interesting light on police culture, including ideas about the relationship between moral virtue and masculinity at the end of war: Some few weeks ago I had to deal with several cases of burglary in the district and after quite a lot of trouble and work I arrested the man who committed the crimes … He knew the difference between right and wrong but he just hadn’t the strength of mind to pull out when he found that he was being led into doing wrong things. He knew they were wrong things. He thought he was being manly and tough. Actually he was just being a silly little idiot … He could have joined the Air Training Corps or a Cadet corps or a club. He could have taken up boxing or gymnastics or flying. Such things would have given him lots of excitement and adventure, lots of chances of showing his pluck and stamina … It is up to you boys – who will be men soon – to do your bit, each of you, to keep … [the] Englishman’s reputation [as law-abiding] unspoiled.39

This text was resonant of Baden Powell’s Scouting for Boys in its use of vignette and reference to adventure, pluckiness and duty. It went on to emphasise the message that ‘crime does not pay’, with the threat of a life of prison and unemployment the result, whilst stressing that the police were there to ‘give a truly helpful hand to all in need’. However the LCC’s Education Committee came to the firm conclusion that ‘it would be undesirable for the police to come into the schools’ to talk on the subjects suggested. The reasons given were professional ones: ‘this is best done by the teachers … if it is done clumsily it may do more harm than good’.40 A compromise was arranged: police representatives were asked instead to attend a large meeting of London teachers to discuss how crime prevention issues might be handled in schools and to encourage teachers to develop this area. Nevertheless, as levels of reported juvenile crime continued to rise,

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experiments with educational roles for police officers were taken further in the early 1960s. Nottingham City Police were engaged in a ‘Scholar/Police Relationship Scheme’ which involved the designation of a ‘Police Week’, during which officers from different departments visited schools, assisting pupils on project work, whilst the theme of policing was incorporated into all curriculum areas, including mathematics.41 In Dundee, police developed a scheme targeted at those in their final year of secondary school to encourage ‘civic responsibility’. This involved a mobile exhibition, a police dog display, and an address by a senior officer on the effects of vandalism.42 The Nottingham and Dundee schemes were viewed as innovative at the time, the latter worthy of imitation in Glasgow.43 Home Office education advisers remained sceptical: ‘I know many policemen whose appearance at a school on Nottingham lines would do more harm than good; indeed some forces might be able to produce no-one who could and would do this job well.’ Leeds teachers were issued with lesson notes prepared by the police, which combined endorsement of the police as ‘our friends’ with an emphasis on penality. Those aged 8–9 were to be told: ‘If any other boy or girl asks you to do something which you know is wrong … then tell them that you don’t want to be sent away from your home to an Approved School for two years and don’t take any part in what they want you to do.’ For older children this was accompanied by the threat of social shame: ‘to be convicted by any court of dishonesty, or any of the offences discussed, brings unhappiness and disgrace upon that person and his family, and will also prejudice future employment’.44 Time and again, the ‘friendly’ policeman invoked the threat of punishment as his ultimate preventative tool. There was little consistency in the negotiation of roles between police and teachers when it came to pupils’ offending. In Mays’ 1953 Liverpool survey, only a quarter of officers reported having some contact with local schools; most were allowed to caution children or question them on school premises, but a minority (8 per cent) thought that some schools objected and took the view that offences committed outside school hours were no concern of teachers.45 Responses collated by the Home Office in 1951 reveal a range of practices, all of which were designed to keep pupils out of court. A headmaster of a large secondary modern school in Somerset wrote: ‘I personally adopt an attitude of loco parentis and allow police officers to question boys in my presence … I have had cases which have been cleared up in this way by liaison between myself, the police, the parents and the boy, in which the case has not been brought to court’.46 In Alloa, the headmaster of a school in a new council housing scheme reported that he

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worked ‘in close co-operation with the police … if a policeman has a complaint regarding some children he invariably comes to the school and the boy is interviewed in my room, always in my presence’. Court appearance was replaced with a warning administered directly by the headmaster at the request of the police.47 In a further example, the school concerned preferred to deal with criminal offences committed both outside of school hours and away from school property as internal disciplinary matters: a boy found to have been involved in shoplifting was ‘made to take stolen items back in person to managers of the shops concerned’.48 These examples highlight the range of agencies that dealt with ‘delinquent’ behaviour, the myriad of other routes that sat alongside court procedure, and the importance of localism. Women in the police service Work with children and female adolescents (as well as adult women), was increasingly delineated as a ‘specialism’ associated with separate women police departments in major towns and cities. The Women Police Branch of the Metropolitan Police had developed a key role in child protection during the 1930s, which expanded further in the postwar period. Involving a close working relationship with other welfare agencies (including local authority children’s departments), it was viewed as closely connected to social work in its orientation: ‘unlike any other social worker, they (women police) are out in uniform, at all hours of the day and night and they can therefore find the boys and girls in danger spots’.49 The Met’s Women Police Branch kept centralised indexes of all girls and children reported as missing from 1934 through to 1973 (when the branch was disbanded and women were integrated fully with the male establishment); by 1950 there was also a separate index of ‘problem families’ about whom the police had concerns. For women officers standard police training was supplemented by further ‘specialist’ courses relating to their genderrelated role. Outside London, women were employed in far smaller numbers in the interwar period, often in plain clothes and within criminal investigation departments (CIDs), to take statements from female and child victims in sexual assault cases. The postwar years, however, saw an expansion in their use – in uniform as well as plain clothes – across all police forces in England, Scotland and Wales.50 With regard to Northern Ireland, the historian David Fowler has argued very convincingly that youth offending policies were developed not within government but within the Women Police Branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary under the leadership of Marion Macmillan,

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who also acted as prosecuting officer in the Belfast juvenile court from 1956 onwards.51 In Manchester a handful of women had been employed as plainclothes statement-takers in the 1930s. In 1940 they were sworn in as uniformed officers with full powers of arrest undertaking patrols to ‘deal with the inevitable offences of immorality which resulted from war and the influx of troops into the city’.52 Under the rigorous scrutiny of Superintendent Nellie Bohanna (head of the Women Police Department from 1949 to 1972) their numbers and work roles increased. By 1960 Manchester employed 58 policewomen; while this was less than 5 per cent of the overall establishment, they constituted a critical mass of expertise.53 Bohanna herself was appointed to lecture on university social work courses from 1955 onwards and developed a particular interest in youth offending, her lecture notes reflecting the influence of psychologists such as Cyril Burt and John Bowlby.54 In Dundee only nine women were employed as attested officers as late as 1965; problems of recruiting ‘suitable candidates’ meant this was short of the approved establishment of fourteen. Nevertheless, their work had also developed along ‘specialist’ lines. While the two women based in the CID dealt with ‘all the crimes and offences involving women and children’, the seven women in uniform were engaged in beat patrol, giving particular attention to ‘the dock area, dance halls and cafes’ amidst concerns about girls ‘in moral danger’.55 In both cities, as elsewhere, women officers investigated shoplifting allegations relating to girls and women, and in Manchester women officers prosecuted these cases in the juvenile court. Much of the work involved informal advice, support or ‘befriending’ rather than formal use of the law. In 1965 Dundee’s women police were able to trace all but one of the 243 persons who were reported as missing from home, assisted by child protection legislation, which allowed them to stop juveniles whom they suspected were runaways: ‘the majority of those dealt with were boys and girls in their teens staying out overnight or running away from home. Every young person missing from home is interviewed when traced, the family background and associates investigated, and the particulars noted with a view to assisting the person concerned to overcome the problems that had confronted them.’56 Women officers were also briefed to stop children out and about during school hours (subject to the approval of local education authorities), given that truancy was increasingly identified in the works of psychologists and criminologists as an early predictor of delinquency. From 1960 onwards Manchester’s women police operated a ‘truancy patrol scheme’ on the Wythenshawe

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c­ ouncil estate with the aim of reducing vandalism as well as indictable offences committed by juveniles. Police estimates suggested a reduction of a sixth in indictable offences committed by juveniles in the first six months of its operation.57 Thus women officers, too, had developed a clear profile of activities that were preventative although disciplinary in nature, with children and adolescents the specific target of their interventions. Minor disputes had emerged with other voluntary and professional groups over the delineation of respective areas of responsibility; for the most part, however, amicable working relationships had been established between women police officers, local authorities, child protection agencies and probation officers based on shared assumptions about the balancing of welfare and penality that united practitioners until the early 1960s. Arguably, this equilibrium and shared framework was possible because of women’s institutional positioning within the police: as part of the police service but different from the male establishment through the construction of a gender-defined work role as ‘the gentle arm of the law’.58 In marked contrast, attempts to delineate a more welfare-oriented role for male officers with the setting up of JLSs generated significant controversy, particularly in England and Wales. The example of the JLS also crystallises many of the points about local and regional differences, multi-agency working, and the heterogeneity of police culture with which this chapter is broadly concerned. The JLS: Liverpool, Greenock and beyond Anxieties about the wartime increase in juvenile ‘hooliganism’ were felt most keenly in Liverpool, where they led to a crisis of public confidence in police and judiciary.59 The city’s religious leaders described ‘a reign of terror’ in some districts entailing ‘virtual mob rule by gangs of quite young boys’. Churches, schools, warehouses and private homes had been broken into, property stolen and goods smashed; it was alleged that many ‘victims’ were too frightened to report incidents because of intimidation.60 The city’s police and juvenile court magistrates initially defended themselves against accusations of ‘leniency’, arguing that their critics, swayed by incorrect reporting in the local press, were ignorant of the finer workings of the criminal justice system.61 With the ending of war, however, Chief Constable Herbert Winstanley agreed that the problem was a serious one: ‘The public have ceased to have any confidence in the juvenile court and many people who have suffered injury to their property will not complain

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to the police’.62 Lack of cooperation was further exemplified in the refusal of parents to allow fingerprints to be taken from their children when they were charged with property offences.63 In May 1946 Liverpool City Council (in common with local authorities elsewhere) established its own Juvenile Delinquency Committee, which included leaders of religious communities (Anglican, Catholic, Free Church and Jewish) and other agencies (police, magistracy, education and welfare services, women’s and youth organisations). The committee promoted delinquency prevention as a community responsibility and a poster campaign was launched around the slogan, ‘Children from Happy Homes Don’t Get into Trouble.’64 Youth welfare associations were set up in areas across the city to provide ‘acceptable and satisfying leisure activities’ for young people.65 This ‘partnership’ approach was apparent in the creation of what was viewed by contemporaries as either a visionary or troublesome policing initiative: the JLS. The idea of the JLS, launched in Liverpool in 1949 by a new Chief Constable Charles Martin can be understood as an attempt to rebuild police–community trust in the aftermath of the war. It was also a response to the practical difficulties of bringing prosecutions in the juvenile courts; whilst shoplifting by children from city centre department stores was increasing with the expansion of self-service facilities, many firms were reluctant to prosecute because of loss of staff time to give evidence in court.66 The JLS was linked to earlier policing practices: it was an extension of the interwar system of ‘cautioning’, with the crucial ‘new’ addition of police supervision.67 Most significantly, it kept juveniles out of court, sifting cases away through preventive welfare work. Those who admitted committing a minor office (and where a complainant did not wish to prosecute), who had not previously come to police notice and whose parents agreed to cooperate with the police, were cautioned and then placed under the care of a plain-clothes juvenile liaison officer (JLO). The scheme was also used in relation to ‘potential delinquents’: juveniles involved in truancy, absconding from home, or other forms of behaviour that it was assumed might lead to criminal activity. The JLO undertook home visits to ‘befriend’ youth and family, offered advice about parenting, encouraged membership of an appropriate youth club or society, and approached schoolteachers, ministers or youth leaders for assistance in supervision. It was this cross-over with social work that was to generate both support within local communities and censure from outside. At the Home Office the response was mixed, as splits emerged between departments concerned with the probation service, ­education,

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child welfare and constabularies. A proposal that the JLO model should be presented to the Chief Constable’s Conference (England and Wales) early in 1952 to be considered for general adoption was hastily withdrawn.68 The Chief Constables Conference finally met to discuss the JLS model in November 1952 and agreed that information about the scheme might be circulated but that the crucial decision of its adoption should be left to local discretion. Many were resentful of ‘any centralised attempt to foist it on to all forces’.69 For its critics within policing, the supervision that ‘liaison’ entailed was not ‘proper’ police work (at least for male officers), whilst the Met remained opposed to the use of cautioning. The Liverpool operation was carefully scrutinised by the Home Office Education Department through a series of visits, interviews and reports in 1953, which offered useful insights on the relationship between the police, local communities and other agencies. Liverpool’s Director of Education spoke of the scheme’s success ‘in invoking the co-operation of parents and of heads of schools’. Chief Constable Martin said that ‘before this scheme was introduced many Heads would never allow a Detective in the school but now most, if not all, co-operate gladly’. The Liverpool JLOs were seen as exemplary individuals with a clear social work orientation who had been ‘chosen because of a sense of social purpose and usually because they are engaged in voluntary youth work activities’.70 In marked contrast, however, Liverpool headteachers described the general police ‘attitude’ towards the inhabitants of the north dockland area (where a significant Irish Catholic population lived in poverty) as ‘unsympathetic and unlikely to improve the existing state of delinquency’ despite the ‘sympathetic influence’ of the JLO.71 Nevertheless, for primary school teachers in particular, the JLOs had a notable impact: ‘Their best work is done in the evening when they deal with boys on the streets: they know the gangs and can often prevent young boys being taken in tow’. Indeed, Liverpool head teachers viewed the JLOs as more effective than probation officers in getting the ‘respect’ of children because of their status as policemen, and felt they were ‘well-trained and experienced men’. Clearly the success of the scheme was hugely dependent on the motivation and commitment of the individuals concerned, which led to conclusions that, ‘it would be very difficult to extend it generally to other cities by administrative action or exhortation’.72 Moreover, opposition towards the JLS concept soon emerged from the magistracy, probation service and other social workers. In 1956 the Magistrates’ Association (representing justices of the peace in England and Wales) argued that it was contrary to the principle of a fair

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trial (since juveniles were under pressure to ‘admit’ an offence), persuading the Home Office not to encourage their spread until the findings of the Ingleby Committee (which was carrying out a full inquiry into services for children and young people) were known. The highprofile juvenile court magistrate Sir Basil Henriques was reported to have told a meeting in Manchester that ‘a policeman was not a social worker; he could not be expected to be proficient in both the detection of crime and family case work’.73 The National Association of Probation Officers (NAPO) issued similar statements; the JLS role was seen as encroaching on the sub-court supervision that probation officers carried out with juveniles referred to their care. Indeed, when it finally appeared in 1960, the Ingleby Report sided with the opinion of magistrates and probation officers in casting doubts on police attempts to perform social work since it ‘required special training and should be done by other agencies’.74 The Home Office adopted a position of ‘neutrality’, supporting the monitoring of existing schemes through academic study but refusing to recommend their general adoption. Despite orchestrated opposition, JLSs were gradually launched by forces in predominantly northern England that were dealing with the social legacy of an industrial past. By 1967 they were in operation in Birkenhead, Blackburn and Accrington, Blackpool, Bristol, Burnley, Glamorgan, Grimsby, Halifax, Herefordshire, Huddersfield, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Southend-on-Sea and Stoke-on-Trent. A further JLS in West Ham (London) was significantly different in that it did not involve cautioning and had been initiated by the Education Committee rather than police. In all cases the support of local probation officers was key, demonstrating that national opinion was often very different from the view on the ground. In November 1967 the Magistrates’ Association finally modified its view: ‘where a satisfactory relationship with the probation service and other appointed local agencies dealing with juvenile offenders has been obtained, the Association sees no objections to police juvenile liaison schemes being operated in the interests of prevention’. Nevertheless individual branches, including Merseyside where the whole experiment had started, continued to voice opposition.75 In Scotland the first JLS was introduced in Greenock in 1956 by another enthusiastic new chief constable, David Gray, who, like Martin in Liverpool, saw it as part of a broader set of preventative measures to break path dependencies among deprived social groups. Within Greenock, there were particular concerns about the Weir Street area, part of an interwar council housing scheme associated with poor quality amenities and high levels of vandalism: ‘children broke the

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law, not so much from badness but because they were conforming to the pattern of behaviour which existed in the area’. The JLS was part of a concerted plan for community improvement and collaboration. Local authority interventions – the creation of play areas, repairing of fences, attempts to encourage tenants to cultivate their gardens – was combined with a more proactive style of everyday policing: four officers were ‘instructed to get to know the people and give them encouragement in raising the standard of the area’.76 Gray himself convened the Youth Committee of Greenock Social Services Association and encouraged his officers to take an active role in youth work. The aim was to ‘push the old-fashioned concept of the police as a heavy-handed law enforcement machine further and further into the background’.77 Gray took his experiment to Stirling and Clackmannan Constabulary when he moved as chief constable in 1960. Greenock, like Liverpool, became something of a laboratory for both police experimentation and criminological inquiry, as it attracted the interest of John Mack of Glasgow University’s School of Social Study, who not only studied the scheme but became one of its strongest advocates, and was involved in the design of specialist training for JLOs in Scotland to counteract criticisms.78 Like the Home Office, the Scottish Office drew short of officially endorsing the scheme, but its viewpoint was an extremely positive one: JLSs were seen as ‘valuable in improving police relations with the public’ and ‘in impressing on the police that they are always to some extent a social service’.79 This impression was shaped by the Scottish Office endorsement of earlier experiments with police warning schemes. Unlike the Ingleby Committee, its Scottish equivalent, chaired by Lord Kilbrandon, enthusiastically endorsed the work of JLSs, similarly recommending their continuation in the interest of ‘good police–public relationships’.80 Kilbrandon, a lawyer, sheriff and Queen’s Counsel, supported attempts by Gray and Mack to train Scottish JLOs and to organise conferences where their work might be discussed. Opinion within the police service was divided. The Chief Constables’ (Scotland) Association opposed the use of JLSs in its submission to the Kilbrandon Committee, while the Chief Constables of Greenock, Coatbridge, Stirling and Clackmannan submitted a separate memorandum of support.81 As in England, JLSs appeared in police districts where there were enthusiastic chief constables, cooperative local authorities and broadly positive principal probation officers. Schemes were further adopted in Kilmarnock (1962), Perth (1962), Argyll (1965) and Inverness (1965).82 In all areas adopting the scheme, specific criteria were used for

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the selection of JLOs. Manchester introduced a cautioning scheme in 1959, adding a supervision component and relabelling it as a JLS in 1962; officers were selected for ‘possessing the right temperament and interest in the general well-being of the younger generation’. The preference was for married men with families whom it was assumed would exercise appropriate ‘tact’.83 Similarly, the Bradford JLO was described as ‘a pleasant easy-going person with strong moral and religious convictions’.84 The idea of an approach that was ‘fatherly and firm’, which in all likelihood emerged from the ‘common-sense’ approach to policing, seems to have been dominant across JLSs. To what extent this was practicable led to some scepticism, as the comments of a Scottish Office civil servant visiting Greenock attest: ‘he told me his line of action would be a mixture of authority, giving of advice and a sympathetic fatherly interest … It struck me (I didn’t mention this) that the inspector might find it difficult to combine these three attitudes when dealing with each case.’85 Police use of cautioning/warning schemes (including full supervision under JLSs) reveals the ways in which decision-making by the police was gendered: girls were closely regulated whilst being kept out of the juvenile courts.86 In working with ‘potential delinquents’, JLSs received referrals for staying out at night or other behaviour that was deemed to place juveniles ‘in moral danger’, and in these cases girls tended to predominate. In Liverpool a ‘Moral Welfare Section’ was added to the JLS in 1957, making use of women police officers; out of 461 girls supervised between November 1957 and December 1958, two-thirds were referred for ‘behavioural difficulties’, such as running away from home, being victims of indecent assault, ‘in moral danger’ or ‘beyond control’ of their parents.87 Mack’s analysis of Greenock data for the period 1956–60 showed that the ratio of boys to girls who were taken into the JLS was 4½ to 1; this compared to a gender ratio of 21 to 1 for those issued with a simple police warning, and 13 to 1 for those appearing before the courts. In Dundee girls consistently constituted only 4 per cent of those appearing before the juvenile courts; yet they constituted 10 per cent of those warned in 1962, rising to 16 per in 1965 and 17 per cent in 1968 (a full JLS was finally introduced in 1971).88 In terms of boys, a further class bias was inbuilt. Research on the use of JLSs in England in 1962 suggested that: ‘Headmasters in schools close to large housing estates and Headmasters of secondary modern schools in working class and slum areas use the services of the JLO more than Headmasters in other schools’.89 Similarly, boys referred to the West Ham scheme were more likely to come from secondary

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modern schools than grammar schools (although girls’ schooling was similar to the profile for the general population).90 While educational background cannot be viewed as a straightforward proxy for social class, it is clear that the police in England developed different practices for secondary modern schools in working-class areas compared to grammar and public schools, and that the social capital associated with the grammar school boy meant that recourse to action (the courts or supervision) was viewed very much as a last resort. In all forces male JLOs had to negotiate the jibes of colleagues: ‘JLOs may at first be looked on with something approaching scorn by the orthodox policeman’.91 Scottish JLOs attending a conference at the police college, Tulliallen, in 1965 spoke of ‘considerable opposition from within the police service, even within forces which had adopted this system. Opposition came mainly from older officers, many of senior rank, who thought this type of work was not police business.’92 The 1958 film Violent Playground, filmed on location in Liverpool, starred Stanley Baker as an initially reluctant JLO who is nicknamed ‘Uncle Jack’ and teased for ‘looking after kids’ by detectives presenting themselves as crime-fighters. Competing masculinities – including the macho or ‘hard’ approach and the avuncular or ‘soft’ welfare-oriented disposition – were present within policing across the twentieth century. However, the social welfare function had also been distinctively feminised through its positioning as ‘women’s work’. Sociologist Maureen Cain, who conducted fieldwork in Lancashire in the mid-1960s, highlighted the ‘conflicting role expectations’ facing JLOs given that their work was often viewed among colleagues as ‘going soft on offenders’. In one of the English forces she studied, three out of four JLOs had subsequently left to move into ‘probation or other social work’.93 Cain suggested that JLOs could be positioned across a spectrum of orientations from ‘punitive’ to ‘welfarist’, the most common being a mid-point position. Significantly, Scottish JLOs at the Tuliallen conference jumped to the defence of uniformed colleagues when another delegate, a youth worker in Glasgow, alleged that the latter adopted a far too heavy-handed approach: ‘It was pointed out that firm handling was necessary at times in certain areas where trouble was likely. A soft approach was often looked upon as weakness and taken advantage of.’94 Within the philosophy of policing, ‘authority’ and ‘sympathy’ – evoked in references to the paternal – were not opposites and hence incompatible; rather they were alternative resources to be drawn upon depending on the situation faced. ‘Authority’ was, ultimately, the default position if ‘sympathy’ did not lead to cooperation.

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‘Firm handling’ Police memoirs and oral history interviews regularly refer to the dispensation of a ‘clip’ or ‘cuff’ around the ear as one of an accepted range of informal modes of street discipline directed at children in the early twentieth century.95 During the 1930s and 1940s a small but persistent number of complaints against police methods were publicised in the national press. In relation to children and young adults these ranged from bullying to severe brutality, although courts invariably refused to convict.96 In 1934 Wimbledon Juvenile Court magistrates heard a case involving five 14-year-old schoolboys who admitted breaking into a Girl Guides’ hut: ‘One boy alleged that at Mitcham Police station a policeman put a noose round a gas bracket and put it round the neck of another of the boys. “He said he was going to hang us, and I should have fourteen years in prison …” One boy said a policeman placed one of the others against the wall and said, “You are all going to be shot now”, and held an airgun – one of the stolen articles – towards him.’ The chairman of the magistrates’ bench warned that whilst it may have been a case of ‘larking about, it is a very serious thing’. The matter was referred to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner who subsequently disciplined the officers concerned.97 In 1942 a 17-year-old youth alleged that he had been ‘beaten for three hours’ in a Liverpool bridewell by two policemen and he was awarded damages of £90. The case was brought to the attention of the Home Secretary, the Liverpool Recorder raised concerns about ‘unnecessary violence against arrested persons’, and the Liverpool Watch Committee set up a sub-committee to make a general inquiry into the conditions under which prisoners were detained under arrest.98 There are problems for historians in establishing what weight to give to complaints and disciplinary cases against the police. Should they be seen as the tip of an iceberg or as exceptional examples of individual ‘rotten apples’ within a generally well-behaved and well-disciplined service?99 Either scenario is difficult to prove. These cases do suggest, however, that, in these ‘extreme’ cases, different forms of intimidation were used in relation to children (giving them a fright) compared to young males (physical assault). It is interesting that those police officers who commented on the relationship between public pressure and changes in police methods tended to elide the ‘clipping’ or ‘cuffing’ of children in public with the most serious allegations of covert assault against young adults. In 1944 Glasgow’s Chief Constable stated that when he had joined in 1912 ‘the policeman usually gave the youngsters a “cuff on the lug”

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… but nowadays if a policeman lifts his hand to anyone at all, then it is the subject of discussion in Parliament and a wholesale inquiry into the matter, so we don’t do that any longer’.100 Given the timing of his statement, it is likely that he was referring to the 1942 Liverpool case. Far from being viewed as anachronistic, the physical disciplining of children continued as a persistent tactic of urban policing, interpreted by officers who used it as a necessary and realistic response. The memoirs of Tony Fletcher, who joined Manchester City Police in 1948, describe the continuation of a style of policing in which officers operated ‘according to their own rules’ into the 1950s. Called out to a school in the Ardwick district following reports of vandalism, the police found ‘boys were everywhere … some were balancing on the railings, some were ripping slates off the shelter roof; windows were being broken and stones flying’. Rather than attempt arrests, they administered their own form of ‘corporal punishment’: ‘every time a boy’s buttocks came within his reach, he [the section sergeant] landed them one with his stick, shouting “take that, you little devil”’.101 Police methods of dispensing ‘rough justice on the spot’ were also reinforced by parental discipline or the headmaster’s cane and these were seen as interchangeable into the 1950s.102 The oral history accounts collected by Barbara Weinberger suggest that prescriptive literature on parenting that warned against the harmful effects of smacking (particularly the bestselling work of Benjamin Spock) began to impact upon policing in the mid- to later 1950s: ‘You suddenly found parents saying, “Well, we ain’t allowed to hit ’em” … Probably the first time after the Dr Spock business, I can remember collaring a youngster outside a football ground, just took him by the scruff of his neck … the amount of uproar I got from the crowd, leave the children alone, type of thing.’103 As Deborah Thom has argued, the use of corporal punishment was increasingly subject to scrutiny after the Second World War and its use outside of the immediate family sphere was especially controversial.104 The sea-change was apparent in the abolition of birching for juveniles through the Criminal Justice Act of 1948. Nevertheless, corporal punishment was not finally banned in state schools in the UK until 1986 and in private schools in 1998, whilst its use by parents has not been similarly proscribed. Clearly police use of physical force must be understood in relation to a broader context in which corporal punishment was increasingly a subject of debate but was also still accepted across a range of institutions that dealt with children and young people. The memoirs of Robert Colquhoun reflected on his experiences of policing in a ‘rough’ neighbourhood in Glasgow in the 1930s, ­depicting

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violence as a way of life and as an integral element of working-class masculinity: men were expected to hold their own. Whilst the ‘hard man’ model lingered on in areas associated with heavy industry such as the west of Scotland, viewpoints were emerging that police methods should counteract rather than reinforce aggressive models of masculinity.105 Published in 1962, Colquhoun’s memoirs echo the comments made by Glasgow’s chief constable twenty years’ earlier: ‘A youngster stepped out of line – and he got a clip on his ear from the uniform man, then he was dragged home to his parents, who leathered the seat of his pants. Today if you clip one of our juvenile delinquents on the ear, you may end up in court charged with assault, and these youngsters know it.’106 The reference here was to the case of the ‘Thurso boy’, which had led to a public tribunal of investigation into the conduct of Caithness police in 1959. The investigation emerged from an official complaint of assault brought by a 15-yearold boy against two police officers in December 1957. They had questioned him in a café in Thurso one evening, there was an altercation in which his jacket was ripped; he followed them outside, claiming the two officers then took him up an alley and beat him. The PF for Wick reported the case to the Lord Advocate, who decided there was no case to prosecute. The case was then taken up by Sir David Robertson, independent member of Parliament (MP) for Caithness and Sutherland, who organised a petition of MPs, which finally persuaded Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to agree to a tribunal. Against the Thurso boy’s claim of police brutality, counter-narratives were offered of youths taunting and goading police. The Scottish rule of corroboration effectively exonerated the two officers (there were no direct witnesses who could say they had seen them hit the boy in the dark alley). They were not prosecuted but they were reprimanded for other aspects of their behaviour (offering bribes to the boy’s father to drop charges; taking a boy into a dark alley to ‘warn’ him).107 The case of the Thurso boy – and the widespread press coverage of the 1959 tribunal – led to a wave of complaints against police brutality, a high proportion of these involving young males, although few were proved.108 In March 1959 a judge in Wrexham, Wales, awarded a 17-year-old steel-worker £25 damages after it was proved that a police constable had grabbed him by the arm, taken him into a gateway entrance and hit him so hard that he lost consciousness.109 In April, a 22-year-old probationary constable in Birmingham was fined £3 for assaulting a 17-year-old youth who had to receive hospital treatment four days later to stop his nose bleeding. The prosecution stated that

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he had used ‘Gestapo methods’ to try to beat information concerning a broken street lamp (blamed on ‘teddy boys’) out of the lad. The magistrate hearing the case said that the officer had ‘temporarily lost his temper’ when the youth had been ‘obstructive’ and had addressed him ‘in an obscene manner’.110 In May 1959 the Chair of the Scottish Approved Schools Staff Association (of Oakbank Approved School, Aberdeen) made a speech at a national conference in which he said he had spoken with a group of boys about the Thurso case: eleven of them had said that they had received ill treatment from Glasgow and Edinburgh policemen involving ‘cuffing, punching, and language used to frighten them’.111 Other association members disassociated themselves from his statements and he was forced to withdraw them. Police methods had come under intense public scrutiny and the policing of young people was a significant flashpoint. Debates centred on what was meant by the ‘legitimate use of force’ in policing, as well as on broader methods for disciplining young people. Increasingly polarised views were thrown into sharp relief by the early 1960s as those concerned with a ‘law and order’ approach campaigned for ‘tough’ responses including the ‘bringing back of the birch’ while social workers advocated a ‘softer’ welfare orientation. Youth justice and the policing of youth were increasingly politicised areas of debate, which, arguably, put further pressure on the police, who were concerned that physical assaults on officers by members of the public had also increased over the same period.112 Public complaints against police continued to swell, with both the police and Her Majesty’s Inspectors (HMIs) of Constabulary viewing the majority as malicious; in 1964 Manchester City police received 47 ‘frivolous’ complaints of assault, none of which were found.113 In September 1965 a special constable alleged that he had seen two Manchester policemen punching a 16-year-old boy in the face and stomach after he had been detained on a charge of possessing dangerous drugs; a local magistrate dismissed the assault charge on the grounds that minor injuries received were due to resisting arrest.114 Denial of these methods was gradually replaced with an attempt to recognise their existence but to disassociate them from ‘modern’ policing. After visiting Dundee City Police in 1971, one HMI of Constabulary commented that: ‘most complaints [received] concern rough handling by police, and it may be that some officers are still handling prisoners and suspects in an “old fashioned” way … I was pleased to see that the Chief Constables’ replies to letters of complaint were sensibly worded and on occasions admitted error on the part of the police and expressed regret where this had occurred’.115

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‘Race’, class and age Levels of antagonism between police officers and young males in the 1950s and 1960s were exacerbated by cultural differences and misunderstandings both across and within generations. Stanley Cohen’s study of the policing of the ‘Bank holiday’ disturbances involving ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ in Brighton and Hove in 1964 demonstrates that the police targeted young people whose dress and hairstyles were viewed as symbolic markers of delinquency. Methods ranged from ‘subtle harassment’ (stopping youths on scooters ‘to examine driving licences or the vehicle’s roadworthiness’) to the curtailment of freedom of movement (keeping ‘suspicious’ looking youths corralled in one area on the beach), which triggered letters to the National Council of Civil Liberties.116 For police officers, including new recruits only a little older than those they were policing, military-style discipline, short haircuts and neatness were prized as markers of order, respectability and proper ‘manliness’; those who were outlandishly dressed with long or dishevelled hair were associated with dirt, disorder and effeminacy.117 It is unlikely that these forms of discrimination were distinctly new; Andrew Davies’s work on Manchester’s scuttling gangs of the late nineteenth century suggests that the ‘uniforms’ associated with earlier youth subcultures were equally likely to spark hostile police responses.118 What was distinctive about the postwar period, however, was the level of the national (rather than local) association of sub-cultural youth styles with a deviant and violent ‘other’. Young people as a broad demographic group tended to respond fairly positively when asked about their attitudes towards the police. In the extensive social survey carried out by anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer (published in 1955 as Exploring English Character), 75 per cent of respondents agreed that they were in ‘enthusiastic appreciation of the English police’, those under 18 were more likely to be appreciative than adults, with 83 per cent agreeing.119 In 1963, a survey commissioned by the Home Office on attitudes towards crime among British males aged 15–21 similarly found that 75 per cent agreed that they respected the police and would cooperate with them, while 85 per cent endorsed the statements ‘they are just ordinary people doing a job’ and ‘they ought to get more support from the public’. Increasingly, however, social surveyors were more sensitive to the need to disaggregate ‘youth’ as a category and to ask more probing questions. In the 1963 survey a significant minority – a third of the young males interviewed – went on to agree with the statements that: ‘they [the police] threaten you to try to make you admit you did whatever they

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have run you in for’; ‘they pick on teenagers’; and that ‘the young ones are specially down on teenagers’.120 Pearl Jephcott discovered fairly negative views of police when she interviewed teenagers in Glasgow and West Lothian in the mid-1960s: ‘Typical comment was that “the police think the clothes we wear are a cause of breaking the law”, that “you get booked for standing at your own close”, and that “they are all out to do you” and that “if you have a weapon they kick your head in”.’ Once again, ‘young policemen’ were highlighted as ‘want[ing] to use their authority too much’.121 Unsurprisingly, the 1963 Home Office survey showed a clear correlation between significant interaction with the police and a hostile view, which was also reinforced by James Patrick’s micro-study of a group of young male offenders in Glasgow: ‘the two groups appeared to me to be locked in eternal combat, the police treating the boys like dirt and the boys goading and taunting their opponents at every opportunity’.122 Awareness of social class also shaped the response of a quarter of interviewees in the Home Office survey who agreed with the statement: ‘there’s one law for the rich and one for the poor as far as teenagers are concerned’.123 It was not until the late 1960s that social researchers began to identify the ways in which ‘race’ and ethnicity led to differentiated experiences amongst young people. In 1965 Manchester’s Youth Development Trust (YDT) commented on the high representation of ‘West Indian’ children and adolescents in Moss Side, concentrated in an overcrowded and rundown area of the city. It found, however, that: ‘relatively few youngsters who come before the court from these areas are coloured, and there are even fewer Asians relative to their numbers than there are children of West Indian children’.124 However, it warned against complacency and predicted that existing discrimination against minorities in Manchester was likely to lead to social problems as the children of immigrant parents, currently of junior school age, grew up: ‘the present generation of teenagers are still protected by the customs they, and their parents, have brought with them. The next generation will have been brought up here and will expect to be treated like any other young person.’125 Manchester’s Watch Committee, in common with police authorities elsewhere, had persistently refused to recruit black or minority ethnic officers, although their appointment had been first proposed in 1953 (specifically for Moss Side), by members of the city’s Labour group.126 The first non-white officer in Manchester, Ruth Harding, was finally appointed in 1972.127 In 1969 there were only nineteen ethnic minority police officers across the UK.128 One police officer interviewed by

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James Whitfield for his study of the relationship between the Met and black Londoners is quoted as saying of the late 1960s: ‘The police at times were being very judgemental. If they saw a black person, then that black person would be up to no good, especially if he was a young black person.’129 In 1971 a study commissioned by the Runnymede Trust found that only a quarter of ‘West Indian’ youths felt that the police dealt with them fairly.130 By 1972 Manchester’s YDT was reporting ‘harassment of black youth by police’ as a significant issue emerging in its project work with disadvantaged young people, while project workers were spending ‘a great deal of time advising and arranging for legal services to defend alleged offences, including loitering, insulting behaviour, obstruction and petty theft’.131 Police in England undoubtedly faced a collapsing of legitimacy in the 1970s in relation to marginal social groups: the young, the unemployed and those from ethnic minorities (particularly those in all three categories).132 Despite high levels of urban deprivation in Scotland, the predominant ‘whiteness’ of its population meant that incidents involving confrontation with the police (including those involving youths) were less likely to attract national press interest and hence amplification and escalation.133 As the studies of Jephcott and Patrick show, this did not mean that tensions between police and youth were non‑existent. Conclusion The contours of police/public relations had shifted by the early 1970s, particularly in the context of youth. The idea of the police as ‘benign’ was replaced with a dominant representation that emphasised corruption and which was challenged by the police, adding to the atmosphere of confrontation. The feature film Violent Playground had offered a largely enthusiastic depiction of the JLO in 1958, presenting him as kindly and avuncular. This stereotype was contradicted by the controversial documentary film Juvenile Liaison, made in 1975 by Nicholas Broomfield and Joan Churchill, who had spent five weeks shadowing the work of two JLOs employed by Lancashire police in the Blackburn area. In one scene from the film, one JLO, Sergeant Ray, was shown talking to a tearful 7-year-old boy in a police cell and threatening him for stealing items from his own home as well as a cowboy suit from another child: ‘It goes very dark in here, you’d get frightened in here, wouldn’t you? Here’s nobody to call, you’d have to stay here till morning. And you’d stay in all day, the following night, and the day after that’. The film was shown at the London Film Festival, despite protests

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from Lancashire police that it compromised confidentiality (in showing actual juveniles); the governors of the British Film Institute, who had funded the film, agreed that it should not be shown other than to specialist audiences because they were ‘not satisfied that we have adequate consents’.134 Its content attracted concern from the Labour MP for Ormskirk, Robert Kilroy-Silk, who told the House of Common that the film ‘raises questions whether it is appropriate for policemen, who have no training in child care or problems, to deal with children in trouble’.135 Home Secretary Roy Jenkins ordered an inquiry into the operation of the Lancashire JLS; faults were found in their procedures for recording crimes and for deciding whether child supervision could be improved. Sergeant Ray was cleared of malpractice as a result of the inquiry but resigned shortly afterwards for ‘unrelated reasons’.136 Where the work of the JLO had been represented as an innovative and welfare-oriented response in the 1950s, Broomfield’s film showed ‘a sombre picture of an oppressive system for disciplining juveniles, carried out by untrained officers against the bleak backdrop of deprivation in Blackburn’.137 It was not simply that JLSs constituted a welfare response in contrast to an ‘unsympathetic’ law enforcement approach and an older style of ‘firm handling’. Both styles of policing were apparent and coexistent within the JLS model. Indeed, a range of approaches from sympathy to physical contact were seen as very necessary by many police officers. As one constable on the Aylesbury estate in Southwark (London) told a newspaper reporter in 1976: ‘some you talk to, some you shout at, some you take home to mum and dad – and some you might give a quick clip’.138 ‘Authority’ and ‘sympathy’ were wielded together as part of the day-to-day policing of juveniles; how this was done depended on context, social status and on the initial response of the individual concerned. The yoking of justice and welfare enabled the police to forge partnerships with other agencies provoked into action by the ‘increase’ in juvenile delinquency; these broke down, however, with the hardening of inter-professional rivalries. At its core, the controversy that JLSs generated from the 1950s through to the 1970s can be linked to a growing mistrust of the nature of police discretion. Initially expressed in terms of attempts to develop ‘soft’ policing, for which the police were inappropriately trained, the criticism collided with a very different set of complaints relating to abuse of police power: about the alleged use of ‘rough handling’. The use of discretionary and informal methods (including physical force) was increasingly challenged by the public as police legitimacy was eroded in the postwar period.139 Nowhere was this more apparent than in relation to the policing of young people.

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Notes 1 D. Wolcott, ‘“The cop will get you”: the police and discretionary justice, 1890–1940’, Journal of Social History, 35.2 (2001), 349–71; D.B. Wolcott, Cops and Kids. Policing Juvenile Delinquency in Urban America 1890–1940 (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005). 2 Chief Constable’s Annual Report (hereafter CCAR), Dundee, 1947. 3 S. Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working-Class Childhood and Youth 1889–1939 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981); Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty, p. 99. 4 J. Klein, Invisible Men. The Secret Lives of Police Constables in Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham, 1900–1939 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), pp. 53–4. 5 J.B. Mays, ‘Study of a Police Division’, British Journal of Criminology, 3 (1953); republished as Appendix B of Mays, Growing Up, pp. 178–88. 6 M. Banton, The Policeman in the Community (London: Tavistock, 1964), pp. 31–2. 7 Mays, Growing Up, p. 185. 8 Ibid., p. 180. 9 Ibid., p. 178; Banton, Policeman, p. 147. 10 Banton, Policeman, p. 32. 11 Ibid., pp. 211–12. 12 Mays, Growing Up, p. 181. 13 Ibid. 14 Banton, Policeman, pp. 206–7. 15 Mays, Growing Up, p. 184. 16 CCAR, Dundee, 1950. 17 See for example Chief Constable McKay’s comments in Manchester Evening News (hereafter MEN), 6 April 1959, p. 9. 18 B. Weinberger, ‘Policing juveniles: delinquency in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Manchester’, Criminal Justice History, 14 (1993), 43–55; Klein, Invisible Men. 19 Manchester Guardian (hereafter MG), 31 May 1941, p. 5. 20 Dundee Advertiser and Courier (hereafter DC) 26 July 1965, p. 3. 21 R.M. Braithwaite, ‘Attendance Centres for Young Offenders – Methods and Notes’, British Journal of Delinquency, 2.3 (January 1952). 22 MEN, 6 November 1953, p. 8. 23 CCAR, Manchester, 1960. 24 CCAR, Manchester, 1965. 25 CCAR, Dundee, 1962. 26 NRS, HH60/434, Juvenile Delinquency. Police Warning Courts. 27 Ibid; NRS, ED15/107, SACTRO, Children and Young Persons, Minutes of Evidence Oct 1944–March 1945. 28 NAS, HH60/434. 29 Ibid. 30 NAS, ED15/107. 31 NAS, HH60/434.

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32 Ibid. 33 CCARs, City of Glasgow, 1956 and 1964. 34 P. Lerman, ‘Policing juveniles in London. Shifts in guiding discretion’, British Journal of Criminology, 24 (1984), 168–83; I.T. Oliver, The Metropolitan Police Approach to the Prosecution of Juvenile Offenders (London: Peel Press, 1978). 35 TNA, HO 287/227, Cautioning as an Alternative to Proceedings. 36 Report of the Departmental Committee on the Treatment of Young Offenders (1927), Cmd. 2831, 22. 37 TNA, HO 287/227, Cautioning. 38 CCAR, Manchester, 1968. 39 TNA, MEPO 3/1965 Police appeal to education authorities, 1945–55. 40 Ibid. 41 TNA, ED177/531 juvenile delinquency 1955–61. 42 CCAR, Dundee, 1964. 43 A. Bartie and L.A. Jackson, ‘Youth Crime and Preventive Policing in Post-War Scotland (c.1945–71), Twentieth-Century British History, 22.1 (2011), 79–102. 44 TNA, ED177/531. 45 Mays, Growing Up, p. 186. 46 TNA, ED233/21. HMIs’ notes and papers on juvenile delinquency 1951– 63. 47 NRS, ED39/134, Juvenile Delinquency, Police Liaison Scheme. 48 TNA, ED233/21. 49 Metropolitan Police Museum, Metropolitan Women Police, Annual Report, 1950. 50 L.A. Jackson, Women Police. Gender, Welfare and Surveillance in the Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). 51 D. M. M. Fowler, Patterns of Juvenile and Youth Crime in Northern Ireland c.1945–2000 (Belfast: NIO, 2000). 52 Greater Manchester Police Museum (hereafter GMPM), Bohanna Papers, notes for talk on British Police (undated). 53 GMPM, Bohanna papers, record cards (members of Policewomen’s Department). 54 Jackson, Women Police, pp. 152–3. 55 NAS, HH55/1681 City of Dundee Annual Inspections, 1965 and 1966. 56 CCAR, Dundee, 1965. 57 MG, 25 November 1960. 58 Jackson, Women Police. 59 TNA, HO287/822 HMIs of Constabulary, annual inspections, Liverpool. 60 TNA, HO45/25144 Juvenile Delinquency. Problems in Liverpool. Letter from the Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool, and President of the Liverpool Free Church Council to Chuter Ede, October 1945. 61 Ibid., Letter from the Clerk to the Justices, to the Home Office, 30 July 1945.

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62 Ibid., Winstanley to Home Secretary, 21 November 1945. 63 Ibid. 64 TNA, HO45/25305 Police Juvenile Liaison Scheme, Liverpool 1952–54. Report of the Liverpool Juvenile Delinquency Committee, July 1952, p. 4. 65 Ibid., p. 6. 66 TNA, MEPO 2/8710/94821, ‘Liverpool Police and Juvenile Crime’, memorandum prepared by the Chief Constable of Liverpool. 67 It may also have been influenced by the ‘Juvenile Bureau’ model developed by some urban police forces in the USA including Los Angeles, New York and Detroit: Mays, Growing Up, p. 139. 68 TNA, HO45/25305, note on minute sheet. 69 Ibid., extract from the minutes of the Central Conference of Chief Constables, 10 November 1953. 70 TNA, ED233/21. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. 73 MG, 17 March 1956, p. 12. 74 Report of the Committee on Children and Young Persons, England and Wales (Ingleby Committee), British Parliamentary Papers (hereafter BPP) 1960, Cmnd. 1191, 49–51. 75 TNA, BN29/1693 Treatment of Offenders, Police Liaison Schemes. 76 NRS, ED39/134, Minutes of the Tuliallen Conference, 22–4 June 1965, address by Chief Constable David Gray. 77 Ibid., address by Chief Inspector Robert G. Campbell on Community Improvement Schemes. 78 NAS, ED39/134, notes on 1965 conference. 79 Ibid., J. Hogarth, Scottish Office, Home and Health Department, to Miss Nunn of the Home Office, 8 February 1963. 80 Report of the Committee on Children and Young Persons, Scotland (Kilbrandon Committee) (BPP 1964), Cmnd. 2306, 60. 81 E.B. Schaffer, Community Policing (London: Croom Helm, 1980), p. 30. 82 M. Ritchie and J.A. Mack, Police Warnings (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1974). 83 CCARs, Manchester, 1959 and 1962. 84 TNA, BN29/2787 Bradford Child Care Survey. 85 NAS, ED39/134, notes of A.J. Betts, HMI, Scottish Home Department, 21 June 1956. 86 M. Taylor, Study of the Juvenile Liaison Scheme in West Ham 1961–65 (London: Home Office, 1971), pp. 4 and 32. 87 TNA, MEPO2/8710/94821. 88 CCARs, Dundee, 1962, 1965 and 1968. 89 TNA, BN29/1692 Police liaison schemes. ‘Research on JLSs in England’, 1962 report by Hilda Gilbert (Manchester University). 90 Taylor, Study of the Juvenile Liaison Scheme, pp. 4 and 16. 91 TNA, BN29/1692.

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92 NRS, ED/39/134. 93 M.E. Cain, ‘Role conflict among police Juvenile Liaison Officers’, British Journal of Criminology, 8 (1968), 366–83, here 378. 94 Ibid. 95 Humphries, Hooligans; B. Weinberger, The Best Police in the World (Aldershot: Gower, 1995). 96 MG, 5 October 1932, p. 11; 6 October 1932, p. 5; 7 October 1932, p. 2; 6 October 1932, p. 10. 97 MG, 3 January 1934, p. 5; Scotsman, 3 January 1934, p. 10; MG, 24 January 1934, p. 12. 98 MG, 10 October 1942, p. 8; 21 October 1942, p. 5; 29 January 1943, p. 6; 30 January 1943, p. 6; Police Review, 16 October 1942 and 5 February 1943, cited in Weinberger, p. 196. 99 C. Emsley, ‘Sergeant Goddard: a rotten apple or a diseased orchard? Corruption and the Metropolitan Police since 1829’, in A.G. Srebnik and R. Levy (eds), Crime and Culture: an Historical Perspective (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 100 NAS, ED15/107, minutes, evidence of Chief Constable McCulloch. 101 T. Fletcher, The Cobbled Beat (Liverpool: Bluecoat Press, 2007), pp. 73, 36 and 37. 102 Mack, ‘Crime’, p. 663. 103 Quoted in Weinberger, Best Police, p. 195. 104 D. Thom, ‘Beating children is wrong’: domestic life, psychological thinking and the permissive turn’, in L. Delap, B. Griffin and A. Wills (eds), The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010). 105 H. Young, ‘Hard man, new man: re-composing masculinities in Glasgow, c.1950–2000’, Oral History, 35.1 (2007), 71–81; C. Emsley (2005) Hard Men. The English and Violence since 1750 (London: Hambledon, 2005). 106 R. Colquhoun, Life Begins at Midnight (London: John Long, 1962), p. 19. 107 NAS, AD65/54, Published proceedings of the Tribunal of Enquiry. 108 For example, MEN, 2 March 1959, p. 7. 109 MG, 16 March 1059, p. 20. 110 MEN, 10 April 1959, p. 7; MG, 11 April 1959, p. 9 and 14 April 1959, p. 10. 111 NAS, ED15/439, Press Cuttings, The Bulletin, 18 May 1959. 112 MEN, 29 April 1959, p. 10. 113 TNA, HO287/1293, HMI of constabulary, report on Manchester, 1964. The Police Act 1964 required detailed enquiry into all complaints. 114 MG, 4 September 1965, p. 16. 115 NAS, HH55/1681 inspection, 1971. 116 Cohen, Folk Devils, pp. 73–4. 117 M. Young, An Inside Job (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). 118 A. Davies, ‘“These viragoes are no less cruel than the lads”. Young women, Gangs and Violence in Late Victorian Manchester and Salford’, British Journal of Criminology, 39.1 (1999), 72–89.

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119 Quoted in J. Alderson, Policing Freedom (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1979), p. 53. Gorer’s survey was based on questionnaires completed by 5,000 people. 120 TNA, RG23/307 Inquiry into aspects of Juvenile Delinquency in young men 15–21. Structured interviews were carried out with 808 young males who had previously been used as respondents for a survey on labour mobility. 121 P. Jephcott, Time of One’s Own (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1967), p. 99. 122 J. Patrick, A Glagow Gang Observed (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973), p. 129. 123 TNA, RG23/307. 124 YDT, Juvenile Delinquency in Manchester. 125 Ibid., p. 16. 126 MEN, 30 July 1953, p. 1; 5 September 1953, p. 3. 127 Daily Mirror, 3 August 1972. 128 Jackson, Women Police. 129 J. Whitfield, Unhappy Dialogue. The Metropolitan Police and Black Londoners in Post-war Britain (Cullompton: Willan, 2004), p. 158. 130 P. Evans (1971), Attitudes of Young Immigrants (London: Runnymede Trust), pp. 28–31, quoted in M. Banton, Police Community Relations (London: Collins, 1973), p. 84. 131 B. Anderson, G. John, C. Hilton and T. Pritchard, The Hilton Project (Manchester: YDT, 1972), p. 3. 132 Commission for Racial Equality, Evidence & Recommendations to the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure (London: CRE, 1978); R. Reiner, The Politics of the Police (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1985), p. 81; Hall et al., Policing the Crisis. 133 Schaffer, Community Policing, pp. 77–8. 134 Guardian, 19 March 1976, p. 6. 135 Guardian 16 March 1976, p. 4; The Times, 18 March 1976, p. 6. 136 In the follow-up film Juvenile Liaison 2, made by Broomfield in 1990, Ray criticised the editing of the film as unfair; the film-makers had omitted discussion of the clothes and toys he kept in his office and of plans for one of the boys to ‘go on holiday’. 137 Guardian, 1 April 1991, p. 21. 138 Guardian, 15 March 1976, p. 7. 139 Weinberger, Best Police, p. 199.

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3 The juvenile court: property, place and play

The Children Act 1908 established the principle that juvenile courts should deal with those aged 7–16 (raised to 8–17 in 1932), as separate hearings from those associated with adult criminal justice, and with the aim of adopting an ethos oriented towards social welfare. Children in need of care or protection were dealt with alongside those accused of offences, terms such as ‘conviction’ and ‘sentence’ were avoided, and the child’s ‘welfare’ should be regarded in all cases. However, the form that juvenile courts took differed across Britain. In England and Wales, following the Children and Young Persons Act 1933, special panels of juvenile court magistrates were appointed, consisting of those with appropriate experience or some specialist knowledge. All cases were to be heard by three lay magistrates (Justices of the Peace [JPs]), one of whom, it was advised, should be a woman. Local authorities were encouraged to locate the juvenile court in a separate building from the adult court and in many urban areas, including Manchester, new premises were built.1 In Scotland, however, ‘Section 50 juvenile courts’ as they were known (in relation to the Children and Young Persons (Scotland) Act 1937) were set up in only four areas: the counties of Ayr, Fife and Renfrew, and the city of Aberdeen.2 In Dundee, as elsewhere, the Burgh Police and Sheriff Courts met for separate sittings to deal with juvenile cases but in the same building as the adult court, usually once a week. More trivial offences were heard before bailies (lay magistrates appointed to the Burgh court) and those of a more serious nature (including those where juveniles were accused of a string of offences) before sheriffs (legal professionals appointed as judges); there was no specialist juvenile panel.3 This chapter sets case studies of Manchester and Dundee within a broader comparative context to profile the kinds of cases that were dealt with by juvenile court magistrates. Clearly, a typology of c­ ases

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53

cannot be viewed as an unmediated indicator of actual trends in young people’s offending. The 1963 Home Office survey on attitudes towards crime among British males aged 15–21 suggested that 16 per cent had experience of being accused of an offence in a juvenile court, although 97 per cent claimed they had technically acted in contravention of the law at some point in their young lives. These contraventions mainly related to what can be viewed as very minor offences: riding a bicycle without lights, letting off fireworks in the street, or attending pubs or cinemas under age.4 Court appearance was a complex result of the combined behaviours of practitioners, complainants and young people themselves. Even where charges were admitted (as they were in almost all cases involving offences against property), adult intervention was a vital factor, and court appearance is a clear indicator that resolutions had not been reached through other means. Thus a study of case types can provide a clear indication of social and/or economic tensions relating to adults and young people in the postwar period. While fears of youth violence dominated popular press coverage of delinquency in the 1950s and 1960s, offences against the person constituted less than 4 per cent of cases heard in these two cities (see tables 3.1 and 3.2). Most charges, for both boys and girls, were for property offences (over 60 per cent for boys). Attention to the meaning and value of objects within both youth and adult cultures – whether linked to functionality, exchange or status – can shed light on the reasons why some young people may have engaged in property offences, and why it was that others brought their loss or damage to public attention. This chapter discusses opportunities and incitements for theft in relation to patterns of youthful consumption and taste, as well as the effects of municipal rehousing and changes in the layout of urban space. It also argues that contestation over the use of the city for play and recreation led to a significant proportion of juvenile appearances in court, suggesting continuity with the interwar period. Finally, it discusses the ethos of the juvenile court itself, examining the criticisms of the system that led, ultimately, to divergence between England and Scotland with the setting up of the Children’s Hearing system north of the border after 1968. Gender, age and class This study is based on sampling of Juvenile Court Registers for Manchester and Dundee for the years 1947, 1953, 1959 and 1965 (and within these years for the period January–May).5 Information was collected relating to 3,453 young people who appeared before the

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100 87

645

100

1.9

7

7.6

5

3.3

75.3

male

120

100

10

50.8

1.7

0

0

37.5

female

1953

1,202

100

1.5

4.8

14.8

7.6

3.1

68.2

male

217

100

6

36.9

1.4

0

2.3

53.5

female

1959

1,766

100

1.3

6.7

10.4

15.6

2.9

63.1

male

* refers to the breach of an order (e.g. probation or supervision) previously made by the court. Source: Manchester City Archives, M117, Manchester Juvenile Court Registers.

100

575

Total

N=

8

35.6

6.4

3.8

Social status

Breach of order*

2.3 10.3

1.9

13.7

Highway

Other offence

43.7 0

73.7

0.3

Crime - property

female

1947

Crime - person

male

306

100

8.8

43.1

3.3

0

1

43.8

female

1965

4,188

100

1.8

6.2

11.7

9.8

2.7

67.9

male

Table 3.1  Manchester Juvenile Court: charges faced by juveniles as percentages of male and female offences.

730

100

8.1

41.6

3.3

0.3

1.1

45.6

female

all years

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male

470

N=

female

6

100

0

0

0

16.7

16.7

66.7

male

355

100

0

0

11.3

8.5

3.4

76.9

30

100

0

0

23.3

13.3

0

63.3

female

1953 male

374

100

0.3

0

6.1

5.3

3.7

84.5

18

100

11.1

0

0

0

11.1

77.8

female

1959 male

941

100

0.1

0.6

17.1

12.2

2.8

67.2

54

100

5.6

42.6

25.9

1.9

1.9

22.2

female

1965 male

1199

100

0.2

0.3

17

8.2

2.6

71.7

108

100

21.3

4.6

20.4

5.6

3.7

44.4

female

all years

Sources: Dundee City Archives, TC/PC/2/1–11, Dundee Burgh Police Court, Juvenile Court Books; National Archives of Scotland, SC45/40/1– 3, Dundee Sheriff Court, Registers of the Juvenile Court.

0.4

100

Breach of order

Total

30

0

Other offence

Social status

0.9

2.1

Crime - person

Highway

66.6

Crime - property

1947

Table 3.2  Dundee Juvenile Courts (Burgh and Sheriff): charges faced by juveniles as percentages of male and female offences.

56

The juvenile court: property, place and play

Manchester Juvenile Court (2,848 boys and 605 girls) and to 1,131 young people who appeared before the Dundee Juvenile Courts (1,052 boys and 79 girls).6 With the expansion of court business by 1965 the registers systematically recorded fewer details, but they, nevertheless, shed useful light on the reasons why proceedings were taken against ­juveniles. The introduction of police cautioning/warning schemes made little difference overall to the types of offences for which juveniles were prosecuted, but it does appear to have affected the ages of those brought before the courts. In Dundee, police warnings were reintroduced towards the end of 1962 and, for the duration of the decade, the number administered was equivalent to roughly a third of the number of cases that were referred to the courts.7 In Manchester cautions were used, although less widely, from July 1959 onwards (they formed around 10 per cent of the number of cases taken to court).8 Across the period there was a marked shift in the age profile of those brought before the juvenile courts in both cities. For boys in Manchester the modal average age for court appearance rose from 13 in 1947, to 14 in 1953 and to 15 by 1965. In Dundee, across the same period it rose from 13 to 14. This shift, part of a national trend, tended to be explained in terms of the rise in the school-leaving age: boys in their last year of school were assumed to be bored and restless, and drawn to theft because, whilst ‘mixing with others a year or so older and at work, [they] find themselves short of money for cigarettes and ­entertainment’.9 In both cities, however, this was accompanied by a very striking redistribution of the age profile, as children below the age of 12 were gradually filtered out of the juvenile court system. For example, in Manchester 8 per cent of charges related to 10-year-old boys in 1947 but only 3 per cent in 1965. By 1965 over half of the juvenile court cases in both cities related to those aged 15–16, compared to much lower rates in 1947 of 23 per cent (Manchester) and 30 per cent (Dundee). Whilst the age of criminal responsibility was still set at 8 in Scotland, those between the ages of 8 and 10 were rarely taken to court. Gender, even more than age, was the most significant factor affecting the likelihood of court appearance.10 Girls were involved in only 15 per cent of cases in the Manchester sample and, indeed, this figure is much enhanced by their appearance for ‘social status’ offences – that is care or protection proceedings including being ‘in moral danger’ – rather than for criminal or public order offences. Half of all proceedings involving girls were unrelated to the commission

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57

of any ‘criminal’ offence whatsoever. They were brought before the courts because they were deemed to be vulnerable or because they had breached a previous probation or supervision order that was most likely to have been imposed for a ‘status offence’. Only 10.5 per cent of property offences heard in the Manchester Juvenile Court involved girls across the period. For Dundee, where social status proceedings were not listed in the Sheriff’s Juvenile Court books until 1965, girls constituted only 5 per cent of business across all samples and only 3 per cent of charges involving property.11 These profiles are broadly consistent with national patterns and trends. In Scotland, in particular, the juvenile court was thought about as a mechanism for dealing with errant males. One criminological researcher wrote of Scotland in 1951: ‘the implications of being stigmatized as “bad” are very much more serious for girls than for boys in the community, and the importance of good name and reputation very much greater’. Girls’ involvement in offending behaviour was limited by ‘the greater degree of parental supervision of girls, their close confinement at home, and their generally more restricted use of leisure time’.12 It is highly likely that this level of moral scrutiny was greater in Scotland than in England, given the continued significance of the churches in public life and despite women’s highly visible economic contribution in Dundee. The registers for Dundee’s police court also include important indicators of social class, including the occupational status of juveniles.13 Given that the school-leaving age was 14 until April 1947, a significant proportion of those who came before the juvenile courts in that year were in paid employment. Given that Dundee was very much a ‘working-class town’, it is unsurprising that comparatively few of those charged with offences in Dundee stayed on at school.14 Among boys of 16 appearing before the courts (who were clearly above the school-leaving age across the samples), only 6 per cent were described as ‘schoolboys’. Of boys aged 14–16 listed as employed, most were engaged in manual labour, including 15 per cent as mill-workers in the jute industry and 23 per cent as trades apprentices. A further 22 per cent worked as message boys, van boys, milk boys or page boys, all options that tended to be viewed as ‘dead-end’ routes with few career prospects by youth employment advisers.15 Eight per cent were described as labourers whilst 5 per cent were described as unemployed, the majority of these in 1965. Only 2 per cent were employed as ‘clerks’ in offices and 1 per cent as shop assistants. That the juvenile court was viewed as an institution that dealt with working-class boys is reinforced by other forms of national evidence. In 1943 representatives of the Director General described the

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The juvenile court: property, place and play

­ peration of class bias when it came to making decisions about proso ecutions by the Post Office in England: When … as in the recent case of the Rugby schoolboy, the mere fact of prosecution would have resulted in expulsion from school, the punishment was out of proportion to the crime, and some discretion was called for. It was inevitable … that there should be different treatment of boys in different social positions. In the case of a public school boy it was reasonable to suppose that the Headmaster would exercise the necessary control.16

Similarly, in 1962 a representative of the British Transport Commission (which brought private prosecutions in Scotland as well as England) described a case in which four public schoolboys had trespassed on the railway line. The matter was resolved through a telephone conversation with the headmaster: ‘I said “there will be no prosecution, but tell them not to do it again”.’17 Moreover, as Mays observed in Liverpool in 1950, there were simply fewer legitimate outlets for disorderly behaviour among working-class boys: ‘the city boy unlike the public schoolboy or university student is not given the privilege of a well-defined field in which he can indulge in violence and rowdyism without fear of the consequences’. Without access to the sports pitches of Eton and Rugby, the working-class ‘city’ boy had only the streets for a playground and this inevitably brought him into conflict with others about the appropriate use of space.18 Theft and consumption Noticeable gender differences suggest that boys and girls stole different objects from different places for different reasons. Boys were far more likely than girls to be accused of house-breaking, warehousebreaking or shop-breaking rather than simply theft. For boys in both cities money was a consistent prime target, indicated in 13.3 per cent of all Manchester charges 1947–65 (see table 3.3) and 19.9 per cent of all Dundee charges 1947–59 (see table 3.4 – this information is not given for 1965). However, boys were accused of taking a much wider range of items than girls. The prominence of theft of bicycles and, to a lesser extent, their accessories reflected their significance within boys’ street and leisure culture as well as their portability; they were probably taken for personal use. Cigarettes (and related objects such as lighters, matches and cigarette cases) retained a presence across all male samples, as desirable objects for personal consumption, display, gifts (of friendship or patronage), barter and also for sale. Cigarettes

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Table 3.3 Manchester Juvenile Court: objects stolen in property charges faced by boys (where indicated). Money Miscellaneous Bicycles Food Cigarettes Clothing Money from meters Jewellery Tools Motor cycles Confectionery Coal Purses/wallets Metal Electrical Soft drinks Radio Stationery Sports equipment Motor cars/vans Knives/sharp objects Alcohol Livestock Household furnishings Bicycle accessories Keys Wood Cameras Toys Records Books Air-rifles/pistols Luggage Cosmetics Record player Vending machines Linen Ration book Components Pharmacy Silver plate TOTAL

1947 22 38 22 19 15 17 7 7 39 0 13 25 9 6 3 5 1 6 20 0 3 0 7 1 3 0 12 5 3 1 0 0 0 4 1 0 3 6 2 0 2 327

1953 47 41 47 23 19 13 19 31 10 10 14 32 11 7 5 0 0 7 6 2 6 8 7 4 10 2 4 7 1 0 2 1 7 1 0 0 1 0 0 2 0 407

1959 88 53 34 53 26 22 45 30 25 16 19 5 22 11 17 7 1 19 12 14 9 5 10 3 6 10 1 3 7 3 6 7 1 2 9 10 2 0 3 0 0 616

1965 136 107 49 48 50 54 18 14 5 49 26 8 25 41 23 34 43 11 1 23 16 13 0 13 1 7 0 2 4 10 6 5 5 3 2 0 3 0 0 3 1 859

total 293 239 152 143 110 106 89 82 79 75 72 70 67 65 48 46 45 43 39 39 34 26 24 21 20 19 17 17 15 14 14 13 13 10 12 10 9 6 5 5 3 2209

% 13.3 10.8 6.9 6.5 5 4.8 4 3.7 3.6 3.4 3.3 3.2 3 2.9 2.2 2.1 2 1.9 1.8 1.8 1.5 1.2 1.1 1 0.9 0.9 0.8 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.6 0.6 0.6 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.2 0.1 100

Source: Manchester City Archives, M117, Manchester Juvenile Court Registers.

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The juvenile court: property, place and play

Table 3.4  Dundee Burgh Police Juvenile Court: objects stolen in property charges faced by boys (where indicated). Money Miscellaneous Food Bicycles Cigarettes Jewellery Livestock Electrical Wood Money from meters Metal Bicycle accessories Confectionery Clothing Motor cars/vans Purse/wallet Stationery Cameras Keys Knives/sharp objects Books Air rifles/pistols Motorcycles Plants Ration book Sports equipment Tools Total

1947 14 12 8 2 8 6 9 3 5 5 0 1 1 2 0 2 1 2 2 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 86

1953 10 10 1 1 0 0 0 1 3 2 5 1 4 2 4 2 2 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 50

1959 13 10 2 6 1 3 0 4 0 0 1 3 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 49

total 37 32 11 9 9 9 9 8 8 7 6 5 5 4 4 4 4 3 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 186

% 19.9 17.3 5.9 4.8 4.8 4.8 4.8 4.4 4.4 3.8 3.2 2.7 2.7 2.2 2.2 2.2 2.2 1.6 1.1 1.1 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.5 100

Source: Dundee City Archives, TC/PC/2/1-11, Dundee Burgh Police Court, Juvenile Court Books.

were sometimes stolen in sizeable volumes although in most cases one or two packets were taken at a time, often from dwelling houses. There was one large haul of cigarettes in 1947: of 1,350 packets of cigarettes by three 15-year-old boys who allegedly broke into a store in the Ardwick area of Manchester. In 1965 there were three significant hauls of cigarettes: three 15-year-olds allegedly broke into a shop in January and took 312 packets, five boys aged 11–15 were charged with breaking into a warehouse in February and stealing 600 packets, and three boys aged 13–14 were accused of shop-breaking in May and taking 125 packets. These hauls are suggestive of small groups of boys stealing to order, aware of how they might dispose of stolen goods.

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61

The theft of metals such as lead, copper and zinc, often from roofs or yards is also suggestive of knowledge of black economies. In March 1965 a 15-year-old Manchester boy was found to have appropriated 38  lbs in weight of copper strip from his employer, an engineering firm that made car radiators; a 16-year-old boy was also convicted of receiving a third of the haul. In Dundee in 1953 the largest haul was of 140 lbs in weight of lead removed from the Camperdown country park (owned by Dundee Corporation) by two brothers, one a 16-yearold apprentice bricklayer, the other a 14-year-old schoolboy. In the same year two 14-year-old schoolboys were put on probation for stealing 6 feet of lead flashing from the roof of a school toilet block; a 15-year-old message-boy was also dealt with in a similar manner for stealing lead glazing from the roof of a workshop. Theft of food featured in charges faced by Manchester boys across the period; unlike cigarettes and metals, however, charges were usually for small single items (of cake, fruit, bread or tinned soup), suggesting that these were impetuous thefts, but that they may also have been used to subsidise the family diet. In Dundee the theft of food, and also of livestock (which may have been stolen for the cooking pot), is a particular feature of 1947, reflecting the impact of rationing. A 15-year-old mill-worker was charged with the theft of nine hens from henhouses in backyards and allotments (on one occasion with another 16-year-old boy who lived in the same street). A group of four boys aged 11–13 was also alleged to have stolen seven hens, worth over £8, from henhouses on an allotment. Other complaints of food thefts related to boys taking items from farms on the edges of Dundee (leeks and seed potatoes). By 1959 different motivations seem to have informed theft of food and livestock. In Manchester there was a spate of prosecutions for the theft of individual bottles of milk from doorsteps, which, whilst relating to items of low value (8d.), had clearly caused annoyance for householders; in Dundee, two brothers aged 12 and 13 were similarly charged. The theft of budgerigars and homing pigeons (kept locally by pigeon-fanciers) generated the most charges in the ‘livestock’ category in Manchester by 1959. Contemporary commentators made links during the war between rationing and crime, the clerk of Liverpool’s police court referring to increases in house and shop-breaking ‘accompanied by theft of controlled good’.19 The Dundee examples cited above suggest a correlation. Confectionery (including chocolate biscuits) appear to have been taken in larger volumes before sweets were removed from rationing in February 1953. In April 1947 four Manchester boys (aged 9 and 10) were accused of warehouse-breaking in Longsight and stealing 43 lbs

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of chocolate and 6 lbs of sweets. A 14-year-old youth was also charged in April with shop-breaking in Ardwick and stealing six dozen chocolate bars. In Dundee confectionery was stolen on far fewer occasions and mainly during the period of rationing. A sweetshop was probably deliberately targeted in March 1947 by a 16-year-old boy, who was accused of breaking in and stealing cash, a wristwatch, a box containing 4 lbs of chocolates, two dozen packets of chewing gum and 2 lbs of loose chocolates. In January 1953 three boys aged 12–13 were alleged to have helped themselves to a large glass jar containing 5 lbs of barley sugars from a shop counter. Mays commented that, in Liverpool, juveniles were prosecuted for taking packets of sugar, which was tightly rationed and which they sold.20 This may also have been the case in Manchester, where a 16-year-old youth allegedly stole 6 lbs of sugar from a house in 1947, and three boys allegedly stole 4  lbs of sugar from a school in January 1953. Tables 3.3 and 3.4 reveal the effects of changes in taste, consumption and technology on theft. In Manchester the motorcycle began to feature as a stolen object from 1953, whilst the portable radio became a common object of theft when it burst on the scene in the early 1960s, vastly outnumbering all other electrical goods as a stolen item by 1965. The use of pre-payment meters for gas and electricity in private homes was assumed by contemporary commentators to account for the rise in juvenile house-breaking and its decline can be attributed to their replacement. In 1953 Basil Henriques, the wellknown chairman of East London Juvenile Court, stated that the gas meter was commonly known as ‘the modern child’s money box’, to be raided by boys who ‘wanted to go to the cinema’.21 This perception was apparent in the 1949 film The Blue Lamp, in which an older member of the criminal fraternity condescendingly tells the young Tom Riley (played by Dirk Bogarde): ‘Stick to gas meters, sonny.’ Theft from meters generally tended to be concentrated in working-class areas, where pre-payment meters were most common. It is a form of crime commonly cited in working-class autobiography that deals with growing up in postwar Dundee.22 Girls, like boys, were charged with the theft of money, jewellery (or watches), purses or wallets across the period, reflecting their use, exchange value and easy disposal (see table 3.5). However, in Manchester, a very distinct profile emerged for girls’ participation in theft that contrasted with boys. In 1947 clothes already constituted a third of all objects allegedly stolen by girls (where indicated); this rose to 63 per cent in 1953 and 67 per cent in 1965. By 1965, too, the theft of cosmetics outstripped money, constituting 10 per cent of

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Table 3.5 Manchester Juvenile Court: objects stolen in property charges faced by girls (where indicated). Clothing Money Coal Purses/wallets Jewellery Miscellaneous Cosmetics Household Furnishings Money from meters Food Cigarettes Confectionery Plants Soft drinks Bicycles Motor cars/vans Ration book Silver plate Stationery Tools Toys Keys Metal Total

1947 9 2 6 2 0 1 0 0 3 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 28

1953 25 4 1 1 3 1 0 2 0 0 0 0 2 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 40

1959 70 14 0 4 3 4 4 2 0 5 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 108

1965 53 5 0 0 0 0 8 0 0 3 0 2 0 2 0 0 0 0 3 0 1 1 1 79

total 104 20 7 7 6 6 4 4 3 5 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 255

% 41 8 3 3 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 100

Source: Manchester City Archives, M117, Manchester Juvenile Court Registers.

all objects allegedly taken by girls; items relating to girls’ appearance, whether clothes, accessories, make-up or other toiletries, formed three-quarters of all stolen goods. This trend reflects the expansion of high street retail and the development of Manchester as a regional commercial centre in the postwar period. It is also suggestive of the increasing centrality of department store browsing and shopping in girls’ leisure patterns (most charges involved girls aged 14–16) as well as the importance of fashionability as an aspiration.23 In 1959, for example, 89 per cent of the charges faced by girls for stealing clothing involved shoplifting from city centre stores (such as C & A. Modes, F.W. Woolworths, Littlewoods, Lewis’s Ltd, and Marks and Spencer), 57 per cent of these arising on Saturdays. The prevalence of the same stores in prosecution suggests different policies for dealing with shoplifters. Indeed, the association of girls with city-centre shoplifting led to the deployment of women officers

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The juvenile court: property, place and play

to undertake the investigation and prosecution of these charges in Manchester.24 Girls were slightly more likely than boys in Manchester to be accused of ‘theft by a servant’, a particular category of offence that had no equivalent in Scotland, and which related to workplace appropriation or ‘abuse of trust’ by an employee. In one case a 15-year-old girl was prosecuted for taking £44 from a design company for whom she worked, whilst a small number of clothing retailers and manufacturers prosecuted workers for the theft of shoes and jackets. Girls were clearly ‘tempted’ to steal from locations that they went to regularly for work or leisure; the lack of evidence of their participation in other forms (and sites) of property offending suggests that they used the city in different ways to boys. The very small number of female juveniles (only 29 individuals accused of property offences across the four samples) makes it difficult to produce robust statements about gendered theft in Dundee. As in Manchester, girls were overwhelmingly associated with simple theft, whereas boys were much more likely to be involved in aggravated offences using forced entry (housebreaking or opening a lockfast place) (see tables 3.6 and 3.7). In both cities, girls were most likely to face charges as individuals or to be jointly charged in small female groups; they rarely appeared in mixed groups. In 1959 two groups of girls were charged with shoplifting from the F.W. Woolworths store in Murraygate; yet this type of charge, typical for Manchester, did not proliferate in Dundee. Girls in Dundee were most likely to come to court if viewed as persistent offenders or special cases in need of formal discipline and supervision. In 1953 a 16-year-old ‘clerkess’ was placed on probation for three charges of stealing money from a shop in Lochee High Street, as well as for two charges of house-breaking. Also in 1953, two girls aged 14 and 15 faced four charges of housebreaking: one was made the subject of a probation order and the other was sent to an approved school. In 1965 all property charges were faced by girls aged 14–16, with the exception of a 9-year-old charged with three counts of theft who was sent to an approved school by the sheriff’s court, presumably because of concerns about unsuitable family background and lack of appropriate supervision. It is highly likely that girls were engaging in shoplifting activity in Dundee but that it was not viewed as significant a problem as in Manchester. Trade directories for Dundee show that small independent retail outlets still dominated the city’s main shopping thoroughfares in 1953, although Marks and Spencer, Etam and a number of chain shoeshops had established stores on Murraygate. The city’s ­department

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The juvenile court: property, place and play

stores, run by old established firms such as Draffens and D.M. Brown, were associated with an older clientele.25 In their 1962 study of shoplifting, researchers Trevor Gibbens and Joyce Prince found that police in one Scottish city had made alternative arrangements with some stores to keep juveniles out of court.26 An increase in female shoplifting prosecutions did receive comment from Dundee’s Chief Constable in his Annual Report of 1966; he linked the rise to the growth of selfservice shops but particularly their employment of security staff. This suggests either that the police had advised stores not to pursue court action or that female shoplifters were simply going undetected in previous years.27 Clearly, Dundee was moving towards the Manchester trend. In Edinburgh, similarly, a Church of Scotland probation officer commented in 1964 on a craze for shoplifting among schoolgirls that Table 3.6  Manchester Juvenile Court: categories of property charges faced by juveniles as percentages of male and female property offences. 1947 

1953 

1959 

1965 

male

female male

female male

female male

female

Theft

43.2

73.7

55

91.2

43

83.6

43.9

77.6

Attempt theft

0

0

1.4

0

0.5

0

1.4

0

Theft by a servant

3.3

5.3

1.6

0

0.5

0.9

1.1

3

Breaking and entering (or attempt)

8

5.3

5.5

0

9.7

0.9

6.1

0

Found on enclosed premises

0.9

0

2.3

0

1.3

0

1.4

0

Breaking, entering and stealing

30.7

13.2

23.8

4.4

29.4

4.3

29.1

9

Robbery

0

0

0.4

0

0

0

0.2

0

Attempted robbery

0

0

0.4

0

0

0

0.4

0

Fraud/forgery

0

0

0.6

4.4

0.2

6

2.2

3

Receiving

1.7

0

1

0

1.8

1.7

2.8

3.7

Wilful damage

11.6

0

5.5

0

10.4

2.6

4.8

3.7

Arson

0

0

0.4

0

0

0

0

0

TDA (or aid)

0.7

2.6

1.8

0

3

0

6.6

0

Total

100

100

100

100

100

100

100

100

Source: Manchester City Archives, M117, Manchester Juvenile Court Registers.

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The juvenile court: property, place and play

Table 3.7  Dundee Juvenile Courts (Burgh Police and Sheriff): categories of property charges faced by juveniles as percentages of male and female property offences. 1947 

1953 

1959 

1965 

male

female male

female male

female male

female

Theft

31.6

75

35.9

47.4

36

100

16.5

66.7

Attempt theft

0

0

0

0

0

0

0.0

0

Housebreaking or open lockfast place (OLP) or attempt

19.1

0

11.4

10.5

11.7

0

29.3

0

Housebreaking or OLP with theft

30.4

0

39.2

42.1

31.2

0

46.0

0

Robbery or attempt

0

0

0

0

0

0

0.0

0

Fraud/forgery

1.9

0

1.1

0

2.8

0

1.4

8.3

Reset (receiving)

0

0

0.4

0

0

0

0.3

0

Malicious mischief (damage)

16.9

25

8.8

0

14.8

0

4.6

0

Fire-raising

0

0

0

0

0.3

0

1.6

16.7

TDA (or aid)

0

0

1.5

0

0.3

0

0.0

0

Post Office Acts

0

0

1.8

0

1.3

0

0.0

0

Other

0

0

0

0

1.6

0

0.3

0

Total

100

100

100

100

100

100

100

100

Source: Dundee City Archives, TC/PC/2/1–11, Dundee Burgh Police Court, Juvenile Court Books; National Archives of Scotland, SC45/40/1–3, Dundee Sheriff Court, Registers of the Juvenile Court.

was driven by peer pressure and desire for status: ‘One of these young people confessed that in her school a girl was reckoned to be “not with it” unless she could show something she had stolen, [and] rather than be called “chicken” many followed the crowd’.28 In cities where informal and semi-formal methods were used extensively, including for shoplifting, girls were more likely to be kept out of the courtroom. Where shoplifting was more assiduously prosecuted and semi-formal methods were not encouraged, girls appeared in higher numbers but with a very specific profile for their offending behaviour.29 Children’s participation in thieving tends to be dismissed as ‘irrational’ or ‘senseless’, resulting merely from the pursuit of excitement and adventure rather than strategy or instrumentality.30 U ­ ndoubtedly,

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as Jack Katz has argued in a more current context, damage to ­property, stealing cars and even shoplifting can be viewed as ‘symbolic and sensual crimes’, in which the thrill of the act is more important than the object of its attention.31 One of the Liverpool boys who Mays talked to in the early 1950s ‘described Saturday mornings in the city as “like Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”’.32 However, a composite overview of juvenile court charges suggests that objects allegedly stolen can also be explained in terms of need, exchange value, cultural capital (the gaining of status through their possession) or as mirroring young people’s consumer needs and aspirations. Girls stealing stockings and skirts from Manchester department stores may have been indiscriminate as to which items they took, but the location and items taken still tell us something very important about a direct relationship between theft, leisure and consumerism. Social surveyor Mark Abrams identified patterns of ‘distinctive teenage spending for distinctive teenage ends’ in the late 1950s. The young people who were the subjects of his market research were slightly older (aged 15–25) than those appearing before the juvenile courts. Niche goods such as records, record-players and magazines, which he presented as significant targets of teenage spending, rarely appeared in juvenile property charges.33 However, other items identified by Abrams as integral to ‘teenage’ consumerism and as valued items within boys’ culture, namely confectionery, cigarettes and bicycles, featured prominently in theft charges. For girls, the dominance of charges relating to the theft of clothing mirrors consumer practices; according to Abrams, the average working-class girl spent 30 per cent of her budget on clothes (twice as much as boys) and very little on cigarettes or tobacco.34 Across the postwar period money (including from meters) featured in a high proportion of property charges; in Manchester in particular its relative increase across the sample years can be linked to the end of rationing, higher disposable incomes for some (leading to greater opportunities for the theft of cash), as well as desire to participate as a ‘teenage consumer’. Indeed newspaper coverage of theft cases suggests that stolen money was most likely to be spent on sweets or ice-cream and entertainments such as cinema or ice-skating.35 When parental expectations that young workers should contribute to the family economy came into conflict with youthful expectations of entitlement to leisure, some teenagers may have been pushed into theft. In 1947 a Dundee youth told the sheriff he was paid 25s. per week in wages, which he gave to his family in return for 6s. in pocket money; this was ‘insufficient’ so he had stolen a radio set and other equipment from his employers to sell on.36 With the continuation of poverty and

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austerity in the late 1940s, the hardship of young people and their families was also a factor.37 Mays commented that in Liverpool children were prosecuted for stealing floorboards to use as fuel at home;38 this may also explain the juvenile theft of wood (including timber, fencing and firewood) from yards and allotments in Manchester and Dundee in 1947. The presence of basic foodstuffs as well as coke and coal in 1947 theft charges suggests stark continuities with the interwar period, in which some forms of appropriation (of ‘perks’ from employers, coal from railway sidings, vegetables from fields) were justified by working-class communities as part of a makeshift economy.39 The geography of property offending The participation of young people in property offences can also be explained in terms of their use of spaces and places. In 1965, Manchester’s YDT commented that ‘the typical male offender commits crimes against property in the area where he lives’ with most offending occurring in working-class residential districts. However, for girls, as we have seen, larceny was concentrated in the city centre, which acted as a magnet for those who lived across the city’s broad span.40 This centrifugal tendency for girls was accompanied by a centripetal tendency for boys, which was accentuated by postwar changes in the city’s housing provision. Manchester consisted of thirty districts (originally townships), which still retained strong ‘village’ identities in 1947.41 It was part of a wider conurbation, with Salford lying immediately to the west of its central commercial centre. Immediately to the north, east and south, Manchester’s city centre was surrounded by a belt of densely populated working-class residential districts (Ancoats, Ardwick, Hulme, Gorton, Chorlton-on-Medlock and Moss Side) whose housing stocks of Victorian terraced back-to-backs were viewed as slum-standard and in urgent need of replacement. Manchester Corporation’s response was a grand plan to re-house residents of some of these inner-city districts in the Wythenshawe area, on the south-west edge of the city periphery. Some relocation had begun in the interwar period with the building of low-rise suburban housing (Benchill, Baguley, Crossacres, Newall Green). After the war further council-owned estates were rapidly constructed in the area: at Woodhouse Park, Moss Nook and Royal Oak.42 High aspirations were not delivered, in that facilities and services were severely lacking, a factor that Wythenshawe’s residents viewed as causal of youth crime and vandalism. Calls were made for the setting up of youth clubs to enable teenagers to ‘leave the street

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corners … [and] to enter into the healthy, trouble-free recreation provided’.43 A Benchill shopping centre, appropriated as a meeting spot for young people, was soon labelled as ‘Wythenshawe’s worst blackspot’ for vandalism following damage to the public conveniences on three occasions.44 The male ‘street-corner society’ that Davies has identified in interwar Manchester and Salford was transported to the new estates, as was the ‘crime’ that this generated, whether minor theft, the new ‘crime’ of ‘joy-riding’ in other people’s cars, or behaviour that was viewed by others as anti-social or disorderly.45 As families moved away from the commercial centre (St Peter’s ward), which was also rebuilt following substantial damage during the Blitz, so the proportion of male property charges associated with it decreased: from 12 per cent in 1947 to 7 per cent in 1953 and 1.9 per cent in 1959.46 The high density housing area of Chorlton-onMedlock (St Luke’s ward) was associated with 15.5 per cent of juvenile male property charges in 1947 but this had dropped to 4.8 per cent by 1959; there was a similar decline in Hulme (All Saints’ ward) from 11.7 per cent to 5.2 per cent. In the same period, however, the proportion of boys’ property offences associated with the Wythenshawe area grew from 1.3 per cent to 9.6 per cent. Nonetheless, boys’ property charges continued to be diffused across the city rather than concentrated exclusively in one area (as for girls). High levels continued to be experienced in the industrial and residential district of Gorton, where 12.4 per cent of boys’ property offending was located for the 1959 sample, and boys were more likely to be accused of shoplifting in neighbourhood shops than large department stores. In 1965 Manchester’s YDT identified six ‘black areas’ for male juvenile delinquency in the city: the postwar housing area of Woodhouse Park in Wythenshawe, to which white working-class populations had moved; the run-down areas of Moss Side East and West which had attracted a black immigrant population as white working-class residents moved out; and the white working-class residential areas of Ardwick, Miles Platting and Harpurhey (see figure 3.1).47 The shifting geography of juvenile offending in response to reconfiguration of urban space is even more apparent for Dundee, whose juvenile court registers provide details of both the location in which offences were committed and the residential addresses of juveniles. Bounded by the River Tay to the south, Dundee’s boundaries included, to the east the wealthy seaside suburb of Broughty Ferry, and to the north the small town of Lochee (which still had its own high street). The most overcrowded area of the city according to the 1951 census – in terms of both population density and the high number

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Figure 3.1  Delinquency areas, Manchester. Source: YDT, Juvenile Delinquency in Manchester – the Facts (Manchester: YDT, 1965), p. 11. Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council.

of families living in small one/two-room tenement apartments – was the Hilltown ward to the immediate north-east of the commercial centre.48 A small number of spacious tree-lined housing schemes had been built immediately after the First World War, but budgets dwindled and new housing schemes constructed in the 1930s in the ‘Craigie’ ward (including the ‘Mid-Craigie’) lacked amenities.49 During the Second World War, the ‘Craigie’ ward was described by the Lord Provost as the ‘worst’ for juvenile delinquency even though it was an area of new housing.50 The Craigie ward was the clear black spot for juvenile male property offences in 1947: 20 per cent of offence locations and 32 per cent of boys’ residential addresses (where indicated) fell within this ward. The postwar years saw a period of intensive municipal housing construction, including the completion of nearly 9,000 homes by the corporation between 1951 and 1959 (see also ­figure

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Figure 3.2  Housing Schemes in Dundee. Source: Dundee Courier and Advertiser, 1 October 1959, p. 5. © D.C. Thomson & Co Ltd, 1959.

3.2).51 With the re-housing of ‘Hilltown’ families, the ­proportion of male juvenile property offence locations in this ward declined from 11.2 per cent in 1947 to 1.5 per cent in 1965. The juvenile court records show, however, that it was rapidly being associated with other areas of the city. In 1953 it was the Downfield ward, positioned towards the city’s northern periphery and including the new Kirkton housing scheme (built in the late 1940s), which generated the largest proportion of male property offences in the juvenile courts: 21 per cent of offence locations and 23.8 per cent of juvenile addresses. However, for both the 1959 and 1965 samples it was the ‘Linlathen’ ward on the city’s north-eastern age, which, significantly, included the Mains of Fintry housing scheme (to which inner city residents were gradually re-housed from 1948 onwards). In 1959, 21.3 per cent of juvenile male property offences were associated with those living in Linlathen, rising to 32.6 per cent in 1965. The Fintry, rather than Craigie, had become notorious as the ‘black spot’ in the city ‘in respect of crime, vandalism and general social conditions’.52 The housing scheme has been described as ‘the nadir’ of corporation plans, consisting of ‘shuttered concrete houses’ without ‘aesthetic or social amenity’.53 In 1953 around forty ‘angry women’, newly accommodated in the Fintry, had protested noisily at a Corporation meeting about the lack of shops, post office, chemist or school (children had to travel away from the scheme).54 In 1959 Fintry women were described as ‘being terrorized by young hooligans breaking into their homes’.55 As a result, two

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boys, aged 12 and 15, were jointly charged before both the police and sheriff’s court with a dozen incidents of house-breaking, as well as fire-raising and criminal damage (some involving two other boys). The 1968 Mains of Fintry Improvement Plan was to comment that ‘little or no thought was given … to the total environment in which these families were to live resulting inevitably in the high incidence of vandalism which at present exists’.56 Whether this was ‘inevitable’ may be challenged. As in the case of Glasgow’s Easterhouse, it is likely that the labelling of the scheme as a ‘black spot’ resulted in a cycle of increased police surveillance, more intense reporting of incidents, the internalisation of negative labelling by some young people, and some concomitant increase in anti-social behaviour.57 A young Fintry resident told a local newspaper reporter in 1965: ‘You’ve only got to mention that you come from Fintry and some folk put you on their “black list” without even trying to get to know you.’ A 15-year-old apprentice butcher was reported as saying: ‘We don’t deny that Fintry teenagers are at fault some of the time. But we still feel that we are too often accused of trouble-making when it’s not us who are responsible.’58 Thus, in Dundee as in Manchester, juvenile offending was redistributed rather than ameliorated as a result of new build on the city’s periphery. It continued, too, to be associated with some older neighbourhoods: in 1959 14.8 per cent of male juvenile property locations were in Lochee, rising to 30.5 per cent in 1965. In Dundee, too, a significant proportion of boys’ property crime (55 per cent across all samples) appears to have been ‘local’ in that there was a correlation between the ward location of alleged offences and that of the residential addresses of juveniles charged (where both can be identified). Charges of ‘local’ offending were highest in Hilltown (90 per cent), the West Ferry ward (83.3 per cent) that included the Douglas and Angus housing scheme built on in-fill between Dundee and Broughty Ferry, Lochee (75.9 per cent), Downfield (79 per cent), Linlathen (65.6 per cent) and Craigie (62.3 per cent). Types of offences, however, varied. In Lochee, simple theft as well as breaking and entering charges related to shops and stores in the local commercial centre of the high street. In Downfield and West Ferry, property charges were almost exclusively cases of ‘malicious mischief’, involving damage to street fixtures (lamps), windows (usually by stonethrowing) or buildings under construction. In Craigie and Linlathen (Fintry) the profile of property crimes was more mixed (theft, breaking and entering, and malicious mischief).

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Highways and by-laws While property offences overwhelmingly formed the largest category for which juveniles were brought to court, contestation over the appropriate use of place and space was a significant element of many of the charges that have been classified in the ‘other’ category (tables 3.1 and 3.2). In Dundee over a third of the latter were for street football alone. Snowball throwing (in the harsh winter of 1947), stonethrowing, and letting off fireworks in the street together constituted a further 17 per cent of ‘other’ charges. All such offences were prosecuted under the Burgh Police Acts or the Dundee Corporation Act of 1957, which were effectively concerned with the maintenance of order and cleanliness in the city’s streets and closes. By 1965 charges mostly related to housing estates: two boys aged 14 and 11 were admonished at the burgh police court for playing football one January Saturday in the avenue where they both lived on the Douglas and Angus scheme; two older males, aged 14 and 16, were prosecuted for a similar offence a week later in an adjacent road, for which they were fined. Similarly in March, four boys aged 11–16 were prosecuted for a game of street football in the residential street where they lived in Kirkton, for which they were also admonished. Prosecutions for street football were less assiduous in Manchester (6 per cent of ‘other’ charges) but it is noteworthy that they continued to be used into the 1960s. Of significance, too, were prosecutions of juveniles for possessing and playing with airguns under age in parks and public places to the annoyance (and obvious danger) of those around (28 per cent of ‘Other’ cases in Manchester and 7 per cent in Dundee). Irresponsible play – whether discharging airgun pellets or other missiles such as stones or fireworks – elicited concern across the period. As film-maker Budge Cooper commented following her research for the film Children of the City: ‘the fact is that the leisure hours of the city schoolchild are a nuisance to society’.59 In Manchester 40 per cent of charges in the ‘Other’ category relate to prosecutions by the British Transport Commission (railway police), mostly for trespassing on railway property, but also for damage to light bulbs, travelling without tickets, and disorderly behaviour in carriages. On a small number of high profile occasions, criminal damage had led to major safety threats to trains nationally.60 However, the railway trespass cases that came before the Manchester court appear to have been relatively minor and to have involved groups of children of a much younger age profile compared to the rest of court business: in 1965 three-quarters of those prosecuted were aged 12 or under. Those prosecuted for railway

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trespass were usually fined or, in a small number of cases discharged (with or without conditions). Provoked to write to the Manchester Evening News, one ‘worried mother’ complained that it was unclear where play ended and trespass began: ‘British Railways [have] urged teachers and parents to help beat the menace of children playing on the railways. But what are the railways doing? In the Chorlton area there are open fields and public footpaths along many parts of the track, but nowhere is there adequate fencing.’61 In Scotland the railway police were concentrated mainly around Glasgow and Edinburgh, which perhaps explains the lack of prosecutions in Dundee Sheriff’s Court. They had carried out an extensive campaign of prosecutions in Greenock, which had led to a tripling of cases of trespass brought before the local juvenile court. It was alleged that children were stealing coal from the tracks under the instruction of their parents, some using wheelbarrows to transport it home. However, as a representative of the British Transport Commission in Scotland stated, the majority of trespassing cases were ‘just natural things to do’, a result of children ‘seeing their elders and betters taking the same short-cut’ along railways sidings, and that ‘there is no vice at all in that type of case’.62 Highway offences as a discrete category rose from 2 per cent of cases involving juvenile males in both Dundee and Manchester in 1947 to 12 per cent (Dundee) and 16 per cent (Manchester) in 1965. Moreover, their nature changed: from the incorrect use of bicycles (cycling without effective lights or on pavements), to charges relating to motorcycles (included riding without ‘L’ plates, appropriate insurance or licences, driving under age, or illegally carrying a passenger). Also significant was the new problem of ‘taking and driving away’ (TDA) of a motor vehicle, which rose from barely 1 per cent of property offences faced by Manchester boys in 1947, to nearly 7 per cent by 1965. In 1965 Manchester’s YDT pointed out that juvenile highway offences (including TDA) tended to proliferate in different areas of the city from those associated with property offences: residential areas (such as Longsight and Burnage) where householders had their own vehicles and where main thoroughfares were lined with cinemas and restaurants with cars parked outside.63 While the taking of cars and motorcycles – or illegal driving – was clearly done ‘just for the thrill of it’,64 it was also associated with boys’ street culture and legitimate hobbies.65 The Manchester boy who was accused of taking a bus from Northenden bus depot and driving it for 60 miles into Lancashire in February 1959 was described in court as an ‘enthusiast’ who collected bus registration numbers.66

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As prosecutions for railway trespass and highway offences demonstrate, ‘play’ and ‘nuisance’ were overlapping and contested categories. Snowball throwing, stone-throwing, and street football, too, were often on the edges of complaints of criminal or malicious damage, forming a continuum with other more serious allegations of property crime. Unruly street-play could lead to the breaking of panes of glass or street lamps, as the juvenile court registers testify. Moreover a significant number of charges of theft or breaking and entering involved the (mis)appropriation of place and objects for the purposes of what might be described as ‘play gone wrong’. In December 1953 four Dundee boys were brought to court for hoarding stolen property including cigarettes and whisky in an air-raid shelter which they called their ‘gang headquarters’.67 Other incidents that regularly came before the courts involved the theft of sports equipment (cricket bats and footballs) from schools and pavilions or of clothing and money from changing rooms at public swimming baths; legitimate ‘play’ became the incentive or opportunity for theft. The ethos of the court A new professional confidence can be said to have characterised many juvenile court panels in England in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. However, given the minor nature of the offences with which it dealt and the difficulty of effecting significant change in young people’s lives, this had been replaced with more marked criticism by the 1960s. This final section scrutinises the ethos of the juvenile courts in Manchester and Dundee, highlighting splits of opinion within the local judiciary, as well as the broader divergence between England and Scotland in approaches to youth justice. As in other English cities, women played a prominent role, constituting just under a half of Manchester’s juvenile court panel.68 The historian Anne Logan has demonstrated that women JPs, as a group, took an active lead in the ‘professionalisation’ of the magistracy; they stressed the importance of training, were often at the forefront of debates concerning the use of ‘“scientific” rehabilitative treatment’, and gained local prominence as ‘experts’ on juvenile delinquency.69 In Manchester prominent postwar juvenile court magistrates included Labour Councillor Nellie Beer (who also chaired the Corporation’s Children’s Committee from 1948 to 1952) and former teacher Lady Cordelia James of Rusholme (who acted as a Manchester JP 1950– 62 and went on to chair the Juvenile Courts Committee of the national Magistrates’ Association).70 It is impossible to investigate the

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s­ignificance of the gender of magistrates on courtroom decisions given that these were made by mixed panels, often over a series of adjourned hearings.71 Neither should it be assumed that all women magistrates were supportive of the welfare approach to justice; some were responsible for imposing the birch as a punishment before it was banned in 1948, while some supported calls for its return.72 Other parties, such as probation officers, were influential in shaping the decision-making process.73 Nevertheless, an approach that carefully balanced welfare with ­discipline was stressed in the pages of the Manchester Evening News in 1946: When children were brought into the bright new distempered courtroom they stood in front of a small table facing [the male and female magistrates] … Their parents were asked to sit behind their children. After uniformed policemen had given evidence the magistrates and parents, seated only a few feet apart, discussed what was best for the children.

The occasion of this sketch was a directive from the Home Secretary that police officers should appear in uniform rather than plain clothes, removing the ‘sloppy’ or ‘sports jacket and flannels’ atmosphere that had emerged before the war. Mrs Herbert, the magistrate on duty that day, commented that ‘a constable in uniform adds dignity and impresses the child’.74 Similarly, the chairman of Manchester’s Juvenile Panel, Mr R.H.D. Lockhart, supported this move, and went on to criticise police use of cautioning in 1949 as ‘contrary to English justice’.75 Both male and female magistrates in Manchester upheld the belief in penal-welfarism that underpinned the juvenile court system: proceedings should be fair (in terms of justice outcomes), serious (reflecting ideas about discipline and self-control) and leading to an outcome that was in the best interests of the child or young person (to prevent further misbehaving rather than simply to punish wrongdoing), including advising parents and children alike. However, these nuances were, at best, lost on the young people who entered the courtroom and, at worst, not delivered. Peter Scott’s analysis of 112 essays, written by English remand home boys who had been asked to describe their experience of the juvenile court in 1957, found little awareness of procedure. A small number referred to the reading of ‘school reports’ in court, but none to psychiatric or probation reports. The boys incorrectly referred to the chair of the magistrates as ‘the judge’ and assumed that other officials were the ‘jury’. Long waits of up to three hours prefaced appearance before

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the magistrates, with a fifth of the boys referring to feelings of fear and anxiety. Around a half of the boys described the proceedings as ‘fair’ or were accepting of the decision that had been made while a quarter felt they had been unfairly dealt with. One boy was appreciative that the woman magistrate ‘spoke to me in a way that told me she was trying to help’, while another voiced distrust of ‘the pretence of friendliness and forced grins’. Women magistrates were viewed as more ‘sentimental’ and likely to give ‘lighter sentences’ in contrast to the ‘old pensioned gentleman who doesn’t like the clothes you are wearing or long hair [and] give[s] stiff sentences’. Significantly, the remand home boys were consistently of the view that ‘the punishment should fit the crime’. They either did not understand or did not accept that the individual – rather than the offence – was the central focus of the decision-making process. Minor thefts that led to custodial orders were viewed as ‘harsh’, because they did not see them as linked to previous offending history. Scott commented: ‘it is abundantly clear that the boys consider themselves on trial in a criminal court and expect punishment if they are found guilty. They nearly all refer to the order of the court as a sentence, and their idea of justice is usually retributive.’76 In Dundee, as in most Scottish juvenile courts, the idea of a ‘specialist’ approach to juvenile justice had failed to emerge given that there was no distinct juvenile panel and proceedings took place in the formal atmosphere of the adult courtroom. Amongst sheriffs – themselves criminal justice professionals – there was some continuity and significant expertise. Sheriff J.B.W. Christie (working alongside Sheriff Inglis) regularly heard juvenile justice cases across the postwar period, and was an enthusiastic supporter of the probation service, arguing in 1959 that it could be expanded to deal with a wide range of casework, including marriage guidance for adults as in England and Wales.77 When it came to the city’s bailies, however, a senior Dundee police officer wrote that: ‘justice [is] dispensed by a magistrate who is seldom familiar with court procedure prior to taking office, and [who is] frequently filling this important function and endeavouring to conduct a business, trade or profession in addition to other local government duties’.78 Moreover, while a small number of women bailies were appointed in Dundee in the years after 1945, their work in the burgh courts rarely received newspaper coverage.79 They were given a clear gender-related role in care or protection cases, being appointed members of the local authority’s Children’s Committee, which made formal recommendations to the sheriff’s court; when it came to criminal justice, however, their role was indistinct.80 M ­ oreover,

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the ­example of Dundee demonstrates that politics as much as gender was a significant factor affecting approaches to juvenile justice, particularly as crime figures escalated into the 1960s. In 1965 Bailie George Soutar, a former police inspector who regularly heard cases in the burgh juvenile court, called upon fellow magistrates to support his call for the reintroduction of the birch, speaking of the ‘thugs and hooligans who menace our law-abiding citizens today’. Both at an initial meeting of the city’s magistrates and at a later full council discussion, his motion was opposed (and defeated) by the Labour majority, but backed by their opponents (the ‘Progressive’ alliance of Unionists/Conservatives, Liberals and Independents). Bailie Fettes (Labour) argued against Soutar (Progressive) that ‘we have become more enlightened today’.81 Despite the differing models in Manchester and Dundee, not only was the business that came before the courts remarkably similar in its mundanity; so too were the kinds of decisions that were made. A direct comparison of court orders is simply not possible given the weighing up of the juvenile’s previous offences, home background, educational development and character that was supposed to inform decision-making. However, it is worth noting that magistrates in both cities made significant use of probation orders. In Dundee they were used in 26 per cent of juvenile justice cases (i.e. excluding social status offences) in 1947, rising to 44 per cent in 1953 before declining to 27.7 per cent in 1959 and 16 per cent in 1965. Figures were marginally lower in Manchester, which is surprising, given the juvenile panel’s clear embrace of penal-welfarism: 18 per cent in 1947, 26 per cent in 1953, 24 per cent in 1959 and 16 per cent in 1965. As Chapter 8 shows, however, juvenile courts were constrained by resources, including the inability of probation, approved schools and remand homes to cater for the number processed. Approved school orders were used to deal with around double the percentage of cases in Dundee (17 per cent of criminal justice charges in 1953 and 15 per cent in 1965) compared to Manchester (8 per cent in both years), in line with broader national trends.82 This may also reflect the wider range of options available in England, including the attendance centre, which was used as a method of disposal in 11 per cent of cases in Manchester by 1965. Significantly, however, in both cities, fines and various forms of discharge (absolute or conditional) were used in around a half of all cases. In Manchester and Dundee fines were applied in a third of all proceedings in 1965. In Dundee the ‘admonition’ was used in 27 per cent of cases in 1947 and 18 per cent of cases in 1965.

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The inadequacy of juvenile courts to effectively combine ‘­ education’ and ‘discipline’ was the subject of protracted national policy discussion from the early 1960s. The 1960 Report of the Ingleby Committee had endorsed the juvenile court model in England and Wales. In Scotland, however, the Kilbrandon Report of 1964 proposed the introduction of Child Welfare Panels to deal with offenders as well as care or protection cases, a measure that was introduced through the Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968.83 This shift was made possible because a wider range of professional and occupational groups were critical of the juvenile courts as they had emerged in Scotland. In 1961 Dundee City Police prepared comments to feed into the Kilbrandon inquiry, stating that juveniles in the city had only ‘contempt and disregard’ for the courts and viewed admonitions as well as probation with ‘amusement and derision’.84 The Chief Constables (Scotland) Association ultimately gave its support to the new proposals for Children’s Panels, a move that was viewed as extremely significant given that they carried ‘considerable weight with the public in matters of law and order’.85 Only probation officers and some sheriffs defended the older system (there was no equivalent of the Magistrates Association in Scotland to act as a lobby group for bailies) on the grounds that they guaranteed liberty and fairness. Dundee’s Sheriff Christie went on to comment that the attempt to combine welfare and justice in the Scottish juvenile courts had produced ‘an unattractive mongrel’: ‘many cases turned out to be trifling and resulted in no penalties being imposed so that it must have appeared to many youngsters that the law could be broken with impunity’.86 In England and Wales, Harold Wilson’s Labour government began to put forward similar proposals to the Scottish ones. The controversial 1965 White Paper, The Child, the Family and the Young Offender, argued for the setting up of ‘family councils’ as a first port of call, with ‘family courts’ as a resort for cases that could not be resolved through the former. However, in England and Wales senior police overwhelmingly came out in support of the treatment of young offenders through the ‘existing judicial framework’.87 Despite the criticisms of the English juvenile court system made by a small number of socialist and radical magistrates such as Barbara Wootton, the Magistrates Association as a group was intent on its defence.88 Manchester’s juvenile panel voiced its objections to both the 1965 White Paper and to the later one of 1968, Children in Trouble (a much diluted set of proposals), on the grounds that they were against the ‘fundamental principles of justice’.89 A compromise was reached south of the border: the Children and Young Persons Act 1969 retained the institution of the juvenile

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court although its uses were substantially reduced, with the majority of criminal proceedings replaced with civil care proceedings. Conclusion This chapter has introduced the institution of the postwar juvenile court and has offered an initial analysis of the business that came before it in Manchester and Dundee: whilst numerical increases were viewed with alarm, the majority of cases were trivial and mundane. Indeed, most offences related to minor property crime and what Wootton described as ‘social nuisance’ but which might also be described as ‘play gone wrong’.90 They related to children and young people’s leisure time, the misappropriation of public spaces and objects during the course of play and thus contestation with adults over their uses. While economic deprivation was accepted as an explanation for the theft of money, food or fuel in the late 1940s, the desire to participate as a ‘teenage consumer’ was increasingly reflected in the theft of items such as radios, motorbikes and, for girls in particular, clothing. Subsequent chapters focus on the prosecution of young people for violence and disorder (Chapter 4), examine proceedings for sexual and ‘social status’ offences (Chapter 5), and include discussion of the involvement of parents as complainants (Chapter 6). As this chapter has also demonstrated, the actions of the juvenile court (in terms of its business but also its responses) were increasingly viewed as anachronistic, leading to their overhaul by the end of the 1960s. Wootton’s comment that she sometimes felt as though she were ‘taking part in a scene from Dickens’ had resonances in both the north and south.91 Despite the emphasis of many English magistrates on scientific and welfarist approaches, these nuances were lost on juveniles themselves who interpreted proceedings as retributive and judicial. It is noteworthy, however, that the juvenile court provided an important structure and set of approaches through which young people’s behaviour was regulated for sixty years, creating stark links between the Edwardian era and the postwar period. Notes 1 See also K. Bradley, ‘Juvenile delinquency, the juvenile courts and the Settlement Movement 1908–1959 Basil Henriques and Toynbee Hall’, Twentieth-Century British History, 19.2 (2007), 135–55. 2 F.M. Martin and K. Murray (eds), The Scottish Juvenile Justice System (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1982).

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3 In county areas of Scotland burgh police courts were replaced by Justices of the Police (JPs) courts. 4 TNA, RG23/307 Inquiry into aspects of juvenile delinquency. 5 Manchester Archives and Local Studies (hereafter MA), M117, Manchester Juvenile Court Registers; Dundee City Archives (hereafter DCA), TC/PC/2/1–11, Dundee Burgh Police Court, Juvenile Court books 1926–71; NRS, SC45/40/1–4, Dundee Sheriff Court, Registers of the Juvenile Court 1946–65. All subsequent references to cases relate to these volumes. 6 This chapter works with the formulation of ‘charges faced by juveniles’ (generated using a relational database), which is a multiplier of individual charges and individual juveniles. This enables the weighing of demographic variables for juveniles (sex, age, residential location) in relation to the variables associated with offences (object, place, time). 7 CCARs, Dundee, 1962–70. 8 CCARs, Manchester, 1959–70. 9 The Times, 8 December 1952, p. 5; see also Mays, Growing Up, p. 77, and Ferguson, Young Delinquent, pp. 12–13. 10 See also Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare. 11 Care or protection cases were brought by Dundee’s town clerk on behalf of the local authority and were heard before the sheriff, even though they were not formally listed in the court registers until 1965. 12 NAS, ED26/176, ‘A statistical survey of the policing of Scottish courts in the disposal of cases of juvenile delinquency 1946–50’, by Bernard P. Queenan (1952, unpublished BEd dissertation, University of Glasgow). 13 Information about occupational status is given for 665 of the 1,052 male juveniles appearing before the Dundee courts. Lack of information about place of birth and ethnicity precludes analysis of these factors. 14 D.S. Riddell, ‘Social structure and social Relations’, in Jackson (ed.), City of Dundee, pp. 459–514. Compared to the other Scottish cities in the 1951 census, Dundee had the lowest proportion of professional and business people in its population and the highest of semi-skilled and unskilled labour ; as in Manchester, boys and girls tended to leave school at the earliest opportunity (because of a high demand for both female and male labour into the 1960s). 15 DC, 16 January 1959, p. 8. 16 TNA, NSC9/407 Post Office, National Savings. Prosecutions were for theft of postal orders or National Savings books, and the forgery of signatures to obtain money through deception. 17 NRS, HH60/890 Juvenile Delinquency, Kilbrandon Committee, oral evidence, 5 November 1962. 18 Mays, Growing Up, p. 19. 19 TNA, HO45/25144. 20 Mays, Growing Up, p. 118. 21 DC, 30 October 1953, p. 5.

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22 M. Reynolds, Voices in the Street. Growing up in Dundee (Edinburgh: Black & White, 2006), p. 231; G. Robertson, Skeem Life. Growing up in the Seventies (Edinburgh: Black & White, 2010), p. 156. 23 Langhamer, Women’s Leisure, p. 84. 24 Jackson, Women Police. 25 Anon., Dundee Directory 1954–55 (Dundee: Burns and Harris Ltd, 1954). 26 T.C.N. Gibbens and J. Prince, Shoplifting (London: Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency, 1962), p. 103. 27 CCAR, Dundee, 1966. 28 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (hereafter GACS), Annual Reports, 1964, p. 328. 29 The Manchester trend was similar to that observed for London in Gibbens and Prince, Shoplifting. 30 See for example, MEN, 17 March 1947, p. 2. 31 J. Katz, Seductions of Crime (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 32 Mays, Growing Up, p. 108. 33 Abrams, Teenage Consumer Spending. Part II, p. 5. 34 Ibid., p. 7. 35 MEN, 17 March 1947, p. 2, 23 September 1947, p. 8; DC, 27 February 1953, p. 7, 24 December 1953, p. 7, 29 September 1959, p. 10, 28 August 1959, p. 2. 36 DC, 14 March 1947. 37 For example, MEN, 16 September 1947, p. 1, ‘Boy of 16 stole to pay rent for wife and baby.’ 38 Mays, Growing Up, p. 108. 39 S. Humphries, ‘Stealing to survive: the social crime of working-class children 1890–1940’, Oral History, 9.1 (1981) 24–33. See MEN, 28 May 1947, p. 3 for a case in which a mother had encouraged her son to steal coal from railway sidings. For ‘robbing berries and peas from the tractors’, which was both widespread and rarely prosecuted, see W. Robertson, On the Milk (London: Hachette, 2009), p. 119, and M. Stewart, Dae Yeh Mind Thon Time (Edinburgh: Black & White, 2009), p. 143. 40 YDT, Juvenile Delinquency. 41 TNA, ED149/37, Youth Service in Manchester. 42 K. Hunt and A. Hughes, ‘A culture transformed? Women’s lives in Wythenshawe in the 1930s’, in A. Davies and S. Fielding (eds), Workers’ Worlds: Cultures and Communities in Manchester and Salford, 1880–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), pp. 74–101; A. Ravetz, Council Housing and Culture (London: Routledge, 2001); P. Shapley, The Politics of Housing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). 43 Wythenshawe Recorder (henceforth WR), 4 February 1953, p. 3. 44 MEN, 7 May 1959, p. 4. 45 Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty, pp. 96–7.

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46 The locations for charges are not given in the 1965 Juvenile Court ­registers. 47 YDT, Juvenile Delinquency. Their findings were based on the evidence of charge sheets for the second half of 1962 supplied to the YDT by Manchester City Police. 48 J.M. Jackson, ‘Housing’, in Jackson (ed.), City of Dundee (1979), pp. 362–85. Overcrowding and lack of amenities in Dundee’s Victorian tenements were worse than in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Only 38 per cent of households had a fixed bath in 1951 and only 57 per cent of households had their own water-closet (the rest shared with neighbours) (p. 370). 49 B. Lenman and W.D. Carroll, ‘Council housing in Dundee’, Town Planning Review 43.3 (1972), 275–85. 50 NAS, HH60/430 Juvenile Delinquency in Dundee, City Conference. 51 Jackson, ‘Housing’, p. 372. 52 NAS, HH55/1681 inspection, 1972. 53 Lenman and Carroll, ‘Council housing’. 54 DC, 4 September 1953. 55 DC, 28 March 1959, p. 7. 56 Quoted in J. Doherty, ‘Dundee: a Post-Industrial city’, in C. Whatley (ed.), The Remaking of Juteopolis: Dundee c.1891–1991 (Dundee: Abertay Historical Society, 1992), p. 53. 57 G. Armstrong and M. Wilson, ‘Delinquency and Some aspects of housing’, in C. Ward (ed.), Vandalism (London: Architectural Press, 1973), pp. 64–84. 58 DC, 17 November 1965, p. 8. 59 Scottish Screen Archive, Papers of Donald Alexander and Budge Cooper, 4/20/64, Typescript, Scottish Juvenile Delinquency, preliminary report, 11 June 1943, p. 2. 60 See for example DC, 17 April 1965, p. 9; 18 August 1965, p. 7. 61 MEN, 8 May 1959, p. 4. 62 NRS, HH60/890 Kilbrandon Committee oral evidence, 5 November 1962. 63 YDT, Juvenile Delinquency, pp. 10 and 14. 64 DC, 8 September 1959, p. 6. 65 The Dundee juvenile court data presents an anomaly in that a larger proportion of girls’ prosecutions related to ‘highway’ offences in 1947 and 1953 than for boys. This is, however, skewed by the very low number of girls included in the sample. One girl was charged with riding a bicycle without lights in 1947; the 1953 charges relate to girls’ cycling offences. 66 MEN, 6 February 1959, p. 9. 67 DC, 19 December 1953, p. 4. 68 MCA, M117/162 Juvenile Court Panel Draft Minute book 1933–50. In 1946, 11 out of 26 panel members were women. 69 A. Logan, ‘A Suitable Person for Suitable Cases’: the Gendering of

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J­ uvenile Courts in England c.1919–39’, Twentieth Century British History, 16 (2005), 129–45; A. Logan, Feminism and Criminal Justice. A Historical Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 44–77. 70 T. Dalyell, ‘Obituary’, Independent, 22 March 2007. Cordelia James (née Wintour) was the wife of Eric James, who was appointed as High Master of Manchester Grammar School in 1945 and then as founding ViceChancellor of York University in 1962. 71 See also H. Mannheim, J. Spence and G. Lynch, ‘Magisterial policy in the London Juvenile Courts’, British Journal of Delinquency, 3 (1957), 119–38. 72 In neighbouring Stretford, two boys aged 10 and 11 were ordered to be birched in July 1947 by two women magistrates; calls for a public inquiry were supported by fellow magistrate and anti-corporal punishment campaigner, Alice Titt; MEN, 11 July 1947, p. 5. See also Logan, Feminism and Criminal Justice, pp. 71–6. 73 Glasgow City Archives (hereafter GCA), TD422.8 Records Relating to Delinquency collected by Dr D.H. Stott, Probation Officers Reports, 1959. A sample of Glasgow reports suggests that magistrates tended to follow probation officers’ recommendations in around 70 per cent of cases where charges proceeded. 74 MEN, 14 June 1946, p. 3. The move was viewed as a ‘backward step’ by the Howard League for Penal Reform. 75 Justice of the Peace, 29 April 1949, cutting held in NAS, HH60/434. 76 P. Scott, ‘Juvenile courts: the juvenile’s point of view’, British Journal of Delinquency, 3 (1958–59), 200–11. 77 DC, 20 August 1959, p. 4; this proposal was rejected by Dundee’s Probation Committee. 78 Tayside Police Museum, Children’s Hearings Questions and Answers: Comments submitted to Chief Constable by Detective Chief Inspector, August 1961. 79 On women’s late appointment to local government in Dundee see K. Baxter, ‘Matriarchal or patriarchal? Dundee, women and municipal party politics in Scotland c.1918–c.1939’, International Review of Scottish Studies, 35 (2010), 97–122. 80 DCA, Minutes of Dundee Corporation, Children’s Committee. Bailie Janet Brougham was convenor of the committee in the early 1960s. 81 DC 14 October 1965, p. 9; DC, 5 November 1965, p. 7. Only one woman bailie was listed as attending the meeting of magistrates at which the motion was discussed, alongside six of her male colleagues. The council voted against the motion to call on the Secretary of State for Scotland to ‘bring back the birch’ by 21 to 14. Across England and Wales, too, local Labour politicians tended to oppose corporal punishment. The ultimately conservative ‘Progressive’ alliance in Scotland should not be confused with the liberal progressive agendas described in Logan, Feminism and Criminal Justice.

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82 Report on Child Care, BPP. 1966–7, Cmnd. 3241, s. 31, commented that double the proportion of children were committed to Approved Schools in Scotland compared to England and Wales. 83 L. Gelsthorpe and A. Morris, ‘Juvenile Justice 1945–1992’, in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); A.E. Bottoms (1974), ‘On the Decriminalization of the English Juvenile Courts’, in R. Hood (ed.), Crime, Criminology and Public Policy (London: Heinemann, 1974); Martin and Murray, Scottish Juvenile Justice. 84 Tayside Police Museum, Children’s Hearings Questions and Answers: Chief Constable of Dundee to David Gray, Honorary Secretary of the Chief Constables’ (Scotland) Association, 19 August 1961. 85 NAS, ED11/575, Juvenile Delinquency 1964–65, Kilbrandon Committee, action following report. Views of bodies consulted by Scottish Home and Health Department and SED, 26 Feb 1965. Rank and file police ­officers in Scotland remained sceptical of Children’s Panels. 86 J.B.W. Christie, ‘Crime’, in Jackson (ed.), City of Dundee, pp. 587–8. 87 Jackson, Women Police, p. 159. 88 B. Wootton, In a World I Never Made (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967), pp. 218–47, argued that government proposals did not go far enough: the legal/penal model needed to be abandoned entirely for an educational one. 89 Guardian, 1 February 1966, p. 18; Guardian 15 October 1968, p. 5; Guardian, letter to the Editor, 18 July 1968, p. 7. 90 Wootton, In a World I Never Made, p. 220. 91 Ibid., p. 222.

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4 Violence Louise Jackson and Angela Bartie

Across the postwar period crimes against the person remained a tiny minority of charges for which juveniles were brought before the British courts. They formed less than 0.5 per cent of proceedings against boys in the late 1940s, rising to little more than 3 per cent by the late 1960s; cases involving girls were even fewer.1 Yet, at the same time, there was a series of ‘moral panics’ linking male youth with criminal gangs, violence and offensive weapons, and depicting teenagers – particularly those who adopted sub-cultural styles of dress – as lawless and uncontrollable. Clearly, the discrepancy between comparatively low levels of reported youth violence and high levels of social anxiety requires investigation. In line with national trends, the number of teenage boys brought before the juvenile courts in Dundee and Manchester for acts of physical aggression increased (though remained small) across the postwar period. For the sample months January to May, only four Dundee boys appeared in 1947, 16 in 1953, 10 in 1959 and 21 in 1965, and all were charged with assault; the youngest were aged 9 although over half (57%) were 15–17 years of age. In Manchester, with a population four times larger, prosecutions were proportionately even fewer. Two boys appeared before Manchester magistrates in 1947 (including, uniquely, one for murder), 10 in 1953, 18 in 1959 and 28 in 1965; the youngest was 8, although as in Dundee over half (56%) were aged 15–17. Across all samples, only three girls were prosecuted for physical aggression in Dundee, and six in Manchester, their alleged ‘victims’ usually other females (including relatives). This chapter suggests that the increase in proceedings for boys was, in part, a result of a change in sensibility, which meant that violent incidents were increasingly likely to be reported to the police and dealt with as serious complaints. This was linked to a lower tolerance of violence generally

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but also to a growing fear of working-class male youth as a social group who, more visible in public life, were seen as intimidating by adults, especially when gathered in groups. There was undoubtedly a real increase in levels of conflict and aggression linked to the marginalisation of the ‘teenager’ as a threat, the lack of access to leisure and entertainments amenities that some experienced, and the adoption of antagonistic policing tactics. In some cases real harm was caused to individuals and communities. Across time, however, the effect of press and public debate has been to distort perceptions of the reality and prevalence of violence. Media, ‘moral panic’ and national debate The term ‘cosh boy’ appeared in the tabloid press in 1950 to describe a style of robbery involving any blunt weapon (including adapted objects such as pieces of lead-piping).2 Released in February 1953, the film Cosh Boy narrated the downfall of a ruthless 16-year-old ‘gangster’, who fatally shoots a member of staff at a dance hall in an attempt to rob the manager’s office. The Prevention of Crime Act, which came into force on 6 May 1953, was aimed at the ‘cosh boy’. Its definition of ‘offensive weapons’ encapsulated adapted or home-made objects as well as knives; it also included everyday items, such as hammers, scissors or other tools, although conviction in this case required proof that there had been intention to cause an injury.3 However, the ‘moral panic’ did not end there. The new label of ‘Teddy boy’ began to proliferate in the English press in the spring of 1954 in the wake of the reporting of a small number of ‘notorious events’.4 During court proceedings relating to the ‘Clapham Common murder’ of July 1953, Old Bailey judge Mr Justice Pearson had allegedly described the incident in court as the culmination of ‘miniature gang warfare’.5 Michael John Davies had been questioned in court as to whether the style of the clothes he had been wearing was ‘Edwardian’ and whether he carried a knife in his breast pocket.6 However, the ‘dramatic event’ that launched the ‘Teddy boy’ as a ‘social problem’ was a fight at St Mary Cray station, Kent, covered in the press as involving around fifty young males ‘in Edwardian dandy suits with velveteen collars and drainpipe trousers’.7 Coverage of the ‘Teddy boy’ in the national tabloid press was at its most intense in 1955 and 1956. Complaints of violence and hooliganism – reported in the English regional as well as national press – were blamed on ‘teddy boys’ whether they led to proceedings or not. The term ‘Teddy boy’ acted as synonym for the juvenile ‘thug’, whilst the style of dress was

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viewed as a symbol of violent behaviour. The ‘Teddy boy’ became the repository of everything that was wrong in society when he took the blame for the Nottingham and Notting Hill ‘race riots’ of August 1958, leaving the broader issue of endemic racism unaddressed. At the Old Bailey nine youths aged 17–20 were sentenced to four-year terms of imprisonment for wounding or assault of five ‘coloured men’. Mr Justice Salmon told them: ‘it was you men who started the whole of this violence in Notting Hill. You are a minute and insignificant section of the population but you have brought shame upon the district in which you live and have filled the whole nation with horror, indignation, and disgust.’8 The linking of the ‘Teddy boy’ with juveniles, despite the older profile for convicted violence, was substantively a result of a further set of new stories that broke in 1955 referring to ‘Britain’s blackboard jungle’ and ‘the flick knife in the classroom’. The coverage made explicit reference to the 1954 novel Blackboard Jungle by the American author Evan Hunter, which narrated the terrifying experiences of fictional teacher Richard Dadier in a vocational school in New York’s East Bronx; his adolescent pupils imposed a regime of terror on their teachers that included attempted rape and assault. The book reached international attention when it was turned into a film in 1955, starring Glen Ford, Ann Hunter and Sydney Poitier, and featuring the initial cinematic outing of the song ‘Rock around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and the Comets (the film of this title was released the following year). Awarded an ‘X’ certificate by the British Board of Film Censors (taking it out of the viewing of juveniles and those of school age), Blackboard Jungle was premiered in Britain in mid-September. At the very same time, the News Chronicle ran a series of three articles – ‘Jungle in the Classroom’ – purportedly written by New Zealander, Dr John Laird, and based on his experiences as a supply teacher at five inner-London secondary modern schools, in which, he maintained, educational achievement was low, respect for authority was minimal, and teachers were subjected to threats and violence.9 This unleashed a set of tabloid features along similar lines. A teacher in a boys’ secondary modern school in the north wrote that ‘Teddy boys’ were ‘born in the schoolroom in the last two years before they leave’: ‘… a recent search brought to light one spiked knuckleduster, one length of bicycle chain (strictly for assault) and several reports of torture inflicted on junior boys’.10 In May 1956 another London-based supply teacher, Ronald Balaam, was suspended by the London County Council (LCC) for making ‘revelations’ on national television about discipline problems in north London secondary modern schools. He went on to write

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for the Daily Sketch of the weapons discovered in schoolboys’ pockets and of the ‘rough house’ faced by teachers.11 A common feature of these articles was the argument that the breakdown of discipline had been caused by restrictions on the use of corporal punishment in schools leaving teachers powerless to intervene. Lines were rapidly being drawn between those who favoured an ‘old-fashioned’ punitive approach to young people that included a renewed emphasis on the cane and reinstatement of the birch (and, ultimately, defended the use of capital punishment in Britain), and those who favoured a more progressive pedagogy. The LCC and National Union of Teachers (NUT) viewed Balaam and Laird as mavericks, acknowledging that discipline problems might be experienced by some inexperienced teachers, but suggesting that it was atypical. The NUT began an ambitious survey of ‘discipline in secondary modern schools’, which it hoped would counter ‘bad publicity’ and ‘draw attention to the friendly relationships between staff and pupils which exist in most of them’. A questionnaire was sent out to a 10 per cent random sample of all secondary moderns in England and Wales, asking for evidence of weapons (particularly flick knives), disciplinary difficulties, assault, and the existence of ‘so-called “Teddy Boys” or any organised “gangs”’.12 The union’s analysis of the questionnaires found that ‘the “jungle conditions”’ described in the press were ‘quite foreign to the vast majority of secondary modern schools’, although a small number had experienced ‘isolated incidents and difficult periods’, which were usually attributable to staff shortages or problems with individual teachers. Some 93 per cent of schools reported that there had been ‘no assaults or threats of assault against members of staff in the past year’, with only four cases of actual assault having taken place; 86 per cent of schools said there was no evidence of weapons being brought into the classrooms.13 The possession of sheath knives, flick knives and catapults was against school regulations and items were confiscated. For example, at one school in Birmingham, ‘nine boys were found with razor blades in the turn ups of their trousers’; these boys were caned by the headteacher and parents had sent letters supporting the school’s action.14 The NUT survey sheds light on regulatory mechanisms within schools, often without recourse to the police. The Cardiff NUT branch commented that where ‘gangs’ did appear, they were ‘broken up into different classes in the school’, stating that ‘the things mentioned by the press do exist, but with vigilance and proper supervision they stop at the school gate’.15 Moreover, the equation of Teddy boys, gang culture and violence was dismissed by NUT members, none of the schools

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reporting a ‘gang problem’. The Warrington NUT branch stated that: ‘There is not necessarily anything wrong with this type of dress and … it may simply be self-expression, a desire to be different … There is no evidence of organised gangs intent on hooliganism but we believe boys naturally like to be members of gangs and always have done.’16 Teachers were clearly distinguishing between membership of peerfriendship groups and the negative characterisation of the gang as a delinquent, violent or criminal organisation. Those who wore ‘Teddy boy’ dress would be sent home to change into correct uniform; it was also ‘banned’ by many youth clubs, dance halls and cinemas. Whilst the NUT survey related to England and Wales, headteachers in Scotland similarly defended the reputation of their schools against occasional references to ‘blackboard jungle’ type conditions.17 Journalist Hugh Latimer wrote of the developing pariah status of the ‘Teddy boy’ in June 1955: ‘The Edwardians currently face more discrimination that any race-group in this country.’ They were, he stated, defended only by ‘social workers, tailors, barbers and intellectuals’.18 Teachers (or at least NUT members) were further additions to this list that consisted of the ‘soft’ professionals. Some police officers and magistrates were rather less tolerant of sub-cultural styles of dress adopted by young people, viewing them with disdain as symbolic of inner turpitude rather than desire for self-expression. The ostracisation of those adopting ‘Teddy boy’ style because they were ‘thugs’ was also circular. Rock and Cohen suggest that the use of violence by some groups of self-styled ‘Teddy boys’ was escalated by exclusion from cinemas, dance halls, existing youth clubs and cafes. Ultimately, the concerns about ‘Teddy boy’ violence were channelled into the promotion of further legislation to ban the sale (and import) of flick knives in England, Wales and Scotland, which gained an extensive groundswell of support from local councils, watch committees, and police forces, and was enshrined in the Restriction of Offensive Weapons Act 1959. As tastes and styles shifted among young people themselves, the press moved its attentions to the rituals associated with ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’. Concerns about violence and ‘hooliganism’ persisted, leading to the introduction of legislation designed to enable the imposition of tougher sentences in 1961 (Offences against the Person Act) and 1963 (Public Order Act). The Conservative administration published its White Paper War Against Crime in April 1964, amid press coverage of ‘disturbances’ involving ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ at Clacton over the Easter weekend. However, in his speech to the House of Commons, then Home Secretary Henry Brooke revealingly acknowledged that ‘there was never anything in the nature of a riot or gang warfare’. He

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stated that ‘a crowd assembled in the town centre on the Sunday afternoon, but was kept under strict control by the police who, warned by last year’s experience, had been reinforced; the crowd eventually dispersed without any serious incidents having occurred’.19 Yet the press had flocked to town, in pursuit of lawless youth, intent on telling a good story. Clearly, the threat of an ‘invasion’ by teenagers from London created very real fears for the residents of Clacton. As Cohen demonstrated in his analysis of the ‘riots’ of the previous year, newspaper coverage of ‘violence’ was not reflected in actual prosecutions.20 If press coverage of crime ‘news’ served to over-emphasise the threat of violence, leading to knee-jerk legislative solutions, to what extent is it possible to measure its actual incidence? Homicide Historians who study comparative levels of violence across societies have argued that data for homicide (in comparison to other forms of violence) bears the closest relationship to the ‘real’ incidence of the offence; changes in homicide rates can be viewed as an indicator of a society becoming more or less violent.21 Across the twentieth century there was remarkable consistency in the rate of reported homicides in England and Wales at around nine per million population per year, with the 1960s seeing a drop to 7.3 per million; significant increases occurred in the 1970s–1990s, coinciding with a period of de-industrialisation and recession, and suggestive of some correlation between violence and social inequality.22 In Scotland the number of convicted homicides per year was in fact lower in the 1940s and 1950s than during the interwar period, although a rise was evident in the early 1960s, continuing into the late twentieth century.23 Thus anxiety about youth and violence was initiated in a period in which sociological indicators of levels of violence were in fact low. Similarly, convictions of juveniles for murder were extremely rare in Britain. For the period 1946–70 they averaged less than one a year in England/Wales and around one every three years in Scotland, all of which were of males. The year 1947 unusually saw the conviction of five boys for murder. This included four residents of Standon Farm approved school, Staffordshire, who had stolen rifles and ammunition from the school cadet corps as part of a plot to kill their headmaster in February, and who had shot another male teacher when he got in their way.24 In March 1947 a 16-year-old boy admitted the murder of a 10-year-old girl, who lived in a neighbouring terraced house in Miles Platting, Manchester. The discovery of her body in January had

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resulted in a three-week murder hunt during which mothers escorted their children to and from school through ‘fear of an unknown killer’. The boy was reported to have told juvenile court magistrates that she had ‘cheeked’ or insulted him in the street and that he ‘did not know what came over’ him, although it seemed he had pushed her into an air-raid shelter where he strangled her with his belt. Too young for the death penalty, he was ordered to be detained at His Majesty’s Pleasure.25 Across the postwar period, cases in which juveniles were convicted of murder most commonly involved lethal assaults involving everyday objects on other children (usually younger) who were neighbours and playmates. For example, in May 1950, a 13-year-old Stalybridge boy was convicted of murdering his 10-year-old friend by hitting him on the skull with a stone on the recreation ground near their homes.26 Domestic violence was a significant context to other cases involving an older age group of adolescents. For example, in 1956 a 16-year-old boy was alleged to have shot his parents, as they lay in bed, with a .22 rifle belonging to his father and with which his father had threatened the boy and his mother earlier in the evening.27 A further set of murder convictions related to attacks on those in authority, again by adolescent males. In addition to the Standon Farm case, a 16-year-old boy was convicted of murder in 1956 after he had attempted to run away from Ty Mawr approved school, taking a kitchen knife with him and with which he struck the assistant matron as she tried to stop him leaving.28 The case of 16-year-old Christopher Craig, convicted of murder alongside 19-year-old David Bentley for the shooting of PC Sidney Miles in Croydon in 1952 (after they were caught attempting to break into a confectionary warehouse) has been well documented. Craig was alleged to have fired the shot and acted as ring-leader but escaped the death penalty because he was under 18, whilst Bentley’s controversial conviction and execution fuelled the campaign for law reform, including the abolition of the death penalty for adults. References to firearms (relatively easily available following wartime) in murder prosecutions involving adolescents during the 1940s and 1950s were superseded in England by references to knives. A 16-year-old boy from Longsight, Manchester, was convicted of murdering a 17-year-old Withington youth during a fight in a bus shelter outside a youth club in Gorton in 1967.29 Most fatalities resulting from fights in streets and open spaces, however, tended to involve older youths in their late teens and early twenties, exemplified in the 1953 Clapham Common case (which resulted in the convictions of 21-year-old Davies for murder and of five youths aged 16–21 for c­ommon ­assault).30

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If intent could not be proved, a jury might convict for the lesser charge of manslaughter. Legal changes, partly triggered by the case of Bentley, impacted on homicide trials for juveniles as well as adults. The Homicide Act 1957 introduced the formal defence of ‘diminished responsibility’ into English law (it already existed in Scotland) and was used in cases involving juveniles accused of murdering younger children, most notably that of 11-year-old Mary Bell who was sentenced to life detention for the manslaughter of two infant boys in Newcastle in 1968.31 However, convictions of juveniles for manslaughter and culpable homicide never reached more than one or two a year in either England or Scotland across the postwar period. A numerical increase was apparent, however, in homicide convictions of those aged 17–21, quadrupling from seven in 1947 in England/Wales to 28 in 1965, with a further increase to 47 in 1970. In Scotland the shift was felt at the end of the 1960s, with homicide convictions for those aged 17–21 increasing from three in 1959 and seven in 1965 to 21 in 1970 (and 35 in 1971). Those in this age group were significantly over-represented compared to all other age groups. Wounding and assault While homicide was extremely rare across the period, criminal justice statistics for other forms of physical violence showed a sizeable increase overwhelmingly associated with young males. In England and Wales, the number of convictions of males for indictable woundings and assaults – the data most often cited in press coverage – increased seven-fold from 1,975 in 1947 to 13,968 in 1965.32 The increase was disproportionately spread across the population, with the largest taking place in convictions of young adults aged 17–21 (as for homicide) with a 17-fold rise from 256 in 1947 to 4,717 in 1965. The rate of increase for juveniles under 17 was not far behind, increasing from 126 in 1947 to 1,848 in 1965. The increase was barely discernible in 1953, despite press concerns about ‘cosh boys’; the most significant rises took place in the mid-1950s. In Scotland a similar trend emerged but at a later stage – rates for juveniles remained static during the 1950s (although there was a doubling in convictions of those aged 17–21). A significant hike, however, took place in the early 1960s, as convictions of juveniles for assault leapt from 14 in 1959 to 71 in 1965 (and for young adults from 97 to 263). The Dundee study suggests this was overwhelmingly a result of the prosecution of 15- and 16-year-olds (who constituted 75 per cent of juvenile cases sampled in 1965 compared to 45 per cent of for the 1940s and 1950s).

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It is impossible to establish the relationship between the actual incidence of assault/wounding and crime statistics for convictions. Unlike property offences, those charged were much more likely to plead not guilty and court proceedings were less likely to lead to convictions.33 Of the 28 males brought before Manchester juvenile court between January and May of 1965 for physical aggression, half submitted ‘not guilty pleas’ and the cases against four of them were dismissed. Similarly, in the Dundee juvenile court for the same period a third of assault charges were denied, whilst 20 per cent were dismissed or the trial was abandoned. Clearly more was at stake for defendants but assaults were also harder to evidence and conflicting accounts were more likely to circulate about the events. It is also likely that a lower tolerance of physical violence was combined with a greater propensity to report assaults in the postwar period, as well as with a greater likelihood that complaints would be taken seriously by police. It was the view of the police in Scotland in the 1960s that members of the public were much more likely to call them out to deal with ‘fights, brawls and minor assaults’ than they had been before the Second World War.34 The introduction of the emergency telephone system (the ‘999’ call) made it easier and faster to report incidents and to generate a police response. Nevertheless, these factors do not sufficiently explain the hike in convicted violence in England and Wales (from the late 1950s) and Scotland (from the mid-1960s). The historian Martin Wiener has suggested that male violence had been specifically targeted by the criminal law in nineteenth-century England as part of what was effectively a ‘Victorian criminalization of men’.35 As Annmarie Hughes has demonstrated, however, this endeavour was not mirrored in Scotland, where courts continued to deal leniently with domestic violence and where the ‘hard man’ stereotype was hegemonic during the interwar period, particularly in the southwest.36 As Davies and Emsley have shown, in England, too, physical ‘toughness’ and the use of physical force (to other men as well as to women and to children) was still viewed as a marker of male prowess within some interwar urban working-class communities.37 After 1945 dominant attitudes towards the use of violence began to shift markedly, reflected institutionally in the removal of birching, the suspension (and lifting) of the death sentence, and reductions in the use of corporal punishment in schools (although counter-arguments were continually made for their reinstatement). Violence was, increasingly, seen as a sign of weakness (moral and mental), lack of self-control and social responsibility, and hence of social marginality. Yet the concept of the ‘fighter’ as a measure of masculinity remained

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within many postwar working-class neighbourhoods, where the emphasis was on ‘toughness’ within urban street culture in order to stand up to ‘bullies’.38 Wiener’s formulation can be adapted to suggest that the 1950s saw a concerted attempt to ‘criminalise’ working-class male youth as a violent social threat. It is likely that this demonisation itself led to an actual increase in violent behaviours as some young people felt increasingly stigmatised, whilst police tactics often exacerbated rather than dissipated conflict and tension. The circumstances that led to prosecutions for violence can be analysed further by turning to the cases studies of Manchester and Dundee. Of the small number of assault and wounding charges that came before both sets of juvenile courts, the vast majority of cases involved individual male victims and assailants, often of a similar age, who were likely to be known to each other (rather than attacks by ‘cosh boys’ on mature citizens, or ‘battles’ between marauding ‘gangs’). The modus operandi (in both cities) was usually bodily impact rather than use of knives or other weapons. Dundee records show, too, that the alleged assault was likely to have taken place in the street or another public place, often close to where both parties lived. In 1947 a 15-year-old Dundonian was accused of assaulting a neighbour of the same age in their street ‘by striking him with his clenched fist, kicking him once on the stomach with his booted foot, knocking him down and striking him several blows on the face with his clenched fist’. In January 1953 a 15-year-old schoolboy was placed on probation for two years for attacking a peer ‘by butting him on the face with his head to the effusion of blood’ in a main thoroughfare. Witnesses included the victim’s father and two other schoolboys, and all parties lived in nearby streets. Five other juveniles were witnesses to an incident in the Fintry housing scheme one Tuesday evening in February 1953, in which a 16-year-old box-maker was found to have struck a schoolboy ‘several blows on the face with his hand to the effusion of blood’ and for which he was admonished. Rough and recreational ground near Dighty Water, which ran past the Mid Craigie, Fintry and Kirkton housing schemes, was used for play, recreation and also conflict between groups from rival housing schemes. Two 13-year-old Mid Craigie schoolboys were admonished for an assault on a Fintry boy one Friday evening in May, ‘by seizing him by the arms, dragging him, pushing him into two feet of water, seizing him by the shoulders and attempting to submerge him in the water’; three other Fintry boys acted as witnesses. The same boy was the alleged victim of another assault by two local boys two weeks later that involved head-butting, a blow to the groin with a knee, and striking the neck with a hand.

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Taken together these charges are suggestive of a standard choreography: head-butting, knocking to the ground and kicking. Fear of young people’s use of weapons, which had led to the Prevention of Crime Act 1953, was not reflected in charges for that year. In 1953 in Manchester, eight boys were accused of physical assaults; six of these had the cases against them dismissed. Only two boys were charged with wounding involving the use of knives. Similarly, despite the support of Manchester’s Watch Committee for legislation to ban the sale of flick knives in 1959, their use does not seem to have been in serious evidence in cases coming before the juvenile court.39 Prosecutions for possessing offensive weapons were rare in the juvenile court, with only three boys so charged in 1959 and one in 1965. Arguably a far larger ‘problem’ related to the illegal use of airguns, with which boys were clearly amusing themselves and in some cases causing serious injury, but which generated neither commentary nor campaigning for tighter legislation. Only a small number of cases in the 1959 Manchester Juvenile Court sample fitted the media stereotype. In February 1959 three 16-yearold males were ordered to attend a local attendance centre after they were found to have possessed offensive weapons, used threatening behaviour, assaulted and beaten another male, as well as assaulted the arresting police officer; this is a rare example of the conviction of a group of boys for assault. In April a 17-year-old was reportedly badly ‘beaten up’ in a ‘Teddy boy ambush’ in Newton Heath; four boys had appeared ‘from a dark side street’, hit him on the head with a milk bottle and kicked him in the face.40 One assailant was convicted of assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm and was sent to an approved school. Unruly behaviour at a rock and roll concert at the Hippodrome resulted in a 16-year-old Longsight boy being convicted of wounding in May 1959, but the case appears to have resulted from high spirits rather than violent intent. Whilst shouting and dancing, the boy had thrown a stool, which hit a 33-year-old woman in the circle and then ricocheted into the stalls where it hit a 15-year-old girl.41 In Dundee, similarly, cases involving knives were unusual rather than typical. In 1953 a 16-year-old mill-worker was accused of assaulting another boy of the same age ‘by brandishing and cutting him on the finger with an open-bladed pocket knife in the Plaza cinema’. In Dundee in 1959, a 16-year-old van boy was accused of throwing a kitchen knife at his grandmother and kicking her on the leg in her own home. In addition to this incident of domestic violence, he admitted that, with a 17-year-old youth, he had ‘brandished a razor’ and threatened another young man with assault in the city centre, and

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kicked a further male in the stomach. Incidents described as involving offensive weapons in 1965 appeared less serious upon investigation. In January three witnesses told the Sheriff’s juvenile court that they had seen a 15-year-old boy arguing with another in the street, that he was ‘wearing a spiked knuckle duster on one hand and in the other hand he carried a split leather belt’ with which he then struck his victim. The boy admitted the assault as well as possessing an offensive weapon, although the knuckleduster was found to be a plastic tool ‘normally used by masons to mark wet cement’. In court on the same day, a boy admitted ‘slashing a seat in the Palais dance-hall with a knife’. He admitted the damage and possessing an offensive weapon but it was argued in mitigation that he and a friend had ‘been discussing how sharp the knife was and he accidentally drew it along the arm [of the seat]’.42 Similarly, concerns about ‘dance hall hooliganism’ continued to attract press coverage, but were not transmitted into findings of guilt.43 A 16-year-old apprentice joiner pleaded not guilty when charged with assault and breach of the peace in the foyer of the ‘Palais de Dance’ in Tain; his plea was accepted and the case dropped. Cases involving rare individuals, viewed as extremely disturbed, suggest that for some young people institutionalisation was part of a brutal cycle of alienation and aggression. In January 1959, a 16-yearold Wythenshaw boy appeared before the juvenile court, accused of the grievous bodily harm of a police constable who was trying to arrest him. The boy had failed to return to his approved school after being allowed home on leave and officers on patrol in Moss Side identified him in the early hours of the morning, sitting in one of the allnight cafés, which were regularly targeted by the police as ‘haunts’ for teenage runaways. He ‘put a violent struggle and caused a crowd to collect before he butted the constable in the face, broke his nose and escaped’. Remanded to Strangeways Prison as ‘unruly’ before being sentenced to borstal training, he was accused of further incidents of violence towards warders whilst in custody, which were reported in the court.44 In April 1959 in Manchester, a rare case, in which a 16-year-old ‘razor-girl’ was accused of wounding a policewoman in an attempt to resist arrest, attracted the attention of the Manchester Evening News.45 Originally from Wolverhampton, the girl had escaped from Northenden girls’ approved school and had been missing for two weeks, during which it was alleged that she had lived ‘with coloured men in the Midlands’, the case echoing contemporary concerns about miscegenation (see Chapter 6). It also speaks of the desperation of young women deprived of their liberty. In an earlier attempt to escape

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the girl had fallen through the glass roof of the school, breaking her arm. On this occasion she was remanded to prison following the initial adjournment of her case and pending her return to the approved school; this was allegedly because of her ‘unruly’ character, but there may also have been a penal element to the decision. In Dundee in 1959 two girls aged 15 and 16 were accused of assaulting the remand home matron, striking her ‘with fists and with a broom’ as they were attempting to escape allegedly to ‘see their boyfriends’. Both were ‘care or protection cases’ who had been detained because they were assumed to be in ‘moral danger’, and had been channelled into the semi-penal institution of the remand home although they had not at that point been charged with any criminal offence.46 Girls were generally excluded from the ‘moral panic’ relating to youth and violence. Where they were viewed as aggressive or disturbed, however, they were likely to attract the attention of the press as sensational. The story of a 14-year-old Salford girl who had gone missing from home in March 1953 and was discovered in possession of a gun at the Surrey home of the parents of David Bentley, for whom she had developed a form of ‘hero worship’, attracted local and national media interest. She had followed Bentley’s trial assiduously, and her handbag was found to contain press cuttings relating to the case, a knife, razor blade and her father’s old army revolver, which she claimed she carried for protection ‘against the people of London’.47 It is highly probable, however, that girls were mainly dealt with through informal sanctions (discipline within schools or by parents) if involved in low levels of aggression. The gang ‘myth’? Whilst the idea of the ‘gang’ pervaded concerns about youth and violence in postwar Britain, there are considerable problems in establishing exactly what is being described when the term is evoked. Across the twentieth century it was used to mean anything from a ‘spontaneous play group’ of fairly young children or a street-corner gathering of adolescents, through to an organised ‘criminal’ network. In the aftermath of the Second World War teachers in Worcestershire complained that children who ‘are left to their own devices for long periods of time … resolve themselves into gangs or cliques which often embark on escapades of an anti-social character’.48 Most frequently the term ‘gang’ was used to suggest a group of young men engaged in territorial rivalries using comparatively high levels of violence (with lethal weapons). Use of the term was often nebulous, context was often not

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given, and the word ‘gang’ acted as an evocative trigger of fears about Americanisation, street fighting and physical danger. The idea that the ‘gang’ was an American export was linked to the popularity and alleged influence of Hollywood gangster movies in the 1930s; the subject of the youth gang specifically was brought to British screens with the release of Rebel Without a Cause in 1955 and Rock Around the Clock in August 1956, which led to reports of seat-slashing by youths in cinemas, and the musical West Side Story in 1957. Contemporary commentators viewed ‘gangs’ as predominantly male groups, in which girls played a secondary or marginal role as observers or weapon carriers.49 As David Downes commented in 1966, despite the prolific public attention given to the problem of the ‘Teddy boy gang’, there had been ‘no systematic’ research on its sociological existence. The wellknown study, The Insecure Offenders, produced by journalist T.R. Fyvel in 1961 had used ‘gang’ as an ‘emotive’ rather than ‘structured’ signifier, perpetuating many of the dominant stereotypes.50 At no point was an attempt made to define what was meant by ‘gang’; indeed the ‘problem’ reproduced itself circuitously. Young people tended to commit offences with others – usually peers of the same sex – rather than individually.51 Offending behaviour followed pre-existing social patterns (including friendship networks); and the concept of ‘gang’ was used to describe group offending. As Jack Katz has suggested in relation to a more recent context, this did not mean that the existence of gangs was causal of crime. Rather, the ‘idea that gangs cause crime’ was ‘a myth’ that was never investigated but was implicitly assumed.52 Yet it is possible to make use of both ethnographic research and materials collated by civil servants in the 1940s to 1960s to comment further on the relationship between young people’s social networks and violence. Overcrowded living conditions in working-class districts of Britain’s industrial cities meant that street corner culture was a central component of the leisure time of boys and young men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.53 Given the strong sense of neighbourhood identity within communities, it is unsurprising that territorial affiliations were adopted by peer groups; as with other social formations, there were individuals who were seen as ‘leaders’, but groups were usually loosely structured and permeable. Some of these social groups made use of violence to assert their collective identities, as Davies’s work on Manchester’s ‘scuttling gangs’ of the 1890s and Glasgow’s ‘razor gangs’ of the 1930s indicates.54 The phenomenon of the street corner ‘gang’ continued well into the postwar period.55 Mays’s interview with boys in the slum districts of Liverpool led him to emphasise the importance of the peer group

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for social development: ‘the juvenile gang or friendship group plays a distinctive part in the process of growing up’. The naming of a ‘gang’ and the feeling of a sense of allegiance or belonging enabled boys to gain a sense of ‘prestige’ and ‘feeling of security’ separate from family and the ‘world of adults’ (including parents, police and teachers who were concerned with enforcing rules). Most significantly, Mays stressed that ‘not all gangs are delinquent and not all delinquent gangs are delinquent all of the time’; many engaged in ‘harmless’ pursuits such as street games or camping trips.56 Within adolescent homosocial groups, masculinity was demonstrated through toughness and the ability to take risks, whilst the quest for excitement shaped the selection of activities.57 Engaging in largely unsupervised play, some friendship groups tested the boundaries of what they might get away with; sometimes these activities were illegal, anti-social, or dangerous to others, but criminal activity was rarely their primary or sole objective. Mays’s observations resonate with the autobiographical account produced in 1964 by Colin Fletcher, then aged 19 and lead singer of ‘The Tremeloes’, which described his involvement in Liverpool’s loosely constituted street corner gangs in the late 1950s. Boys’ street culture was shaped by a strong sense of place and territorial identity; local cafes and chip shops were important meeting places as well as landmarks. Social groups who played together or hung around together used the ‘gang’ label to describe an informal mode of association and loyalty. Given lack of financial resources and commercial leisure activities, ‘play’ and the quest for excitement easily bled into illegal activities, the most serious of which involved ‘prizing cigarette machines off the wall to obtain the money and weeds’ or breaking into sweetshops and tobacconists.58 Most evidence suggests that the properly ‘criminal gang’ was most likely to be an adult phenomenon,59 while it appears that violence often emerged from groups looking for ‘trouble’ in general terms rather than developing a specific strategy. Nevertheless, as Downes has commented, violence and vandalism clearly created significant problems for the residents of poor and working-class communities who were overwhelmingly the ‘victims’ of such activity.60 The street, open spaces (including bombsites), youth clubs and dance halls were focal points for ‘trouble’, when it occurred, throughout the period. These were the places where adolescents socialised and spent leisure time out of school or work and, more significantly, from which they might be excluded because of appearance, demeanour or previous behaviour. Unsurprisingly, too, fear of violence seems to have been much more prevalent than its actual reported incidence in those areas purported

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to have a ‘gang problem’. In 1949 concerns about ‘gangs of youths’ in south London (Southwark and Bermondsey) were brought to the attention of the Department of Education by eleven youth club leaders, who reported a small number of attacks on club members by youths assumed to be ‘gang’ members, and damage to premises caused by the smashing of windows with bricks and airguns. Two club leaders reported problems with gang members which they had successfully resolved themselves, one by allowing gang members to join ‘in hopes of influencing them’.61 The records suggest that the idea of ‘gangs’ with territorial allegiances, reflected in gang names, was a component part of young people’s street culture in this part of south London, that this sometimes led to violence and, more significantly, resulted in a strong awareness and fear of violence among young people. Meeting places allegedly included well-known landmarks such as road junctions, dance halls, milk bars and billiard halls, suggesting a close relationship between local topography and ‘gang’ identity. These gangs were also fairly permeable: gang members were said to ‘know and be on good terms with quite a lot of members of youth clubs’ whilst ‘some gang members have joined clubs for a period at one time or another’.62 Moreover, the ‘gang problem’ was reported as being remedied fairly easily through police involvement and a concerted attempt to prosecute actual incidents of assault. This suggests that a small number of individuals with a proclivity towards violence were concealed behind the ‘gang’ label. Similarly, Peter Scott’s ethnographic study of ‘gangs and delinquent groups in London in the mid-1960s found that although most ‘adolescent street groups’ were ‘innocuous’, those who were ‘more severely disturbed’ were likely to ‘congregate in separate groups’ to seek opportunities for ‘expressing their aggressiveness’.63 Scott’s findings reinforce the argument that ‘gangs’ were not intrinsically delinquent, but that violent individuals might well be attracted to a particular type of ‘gang’ model. This certainly seems to have been the case in James Patrick’s controversial study, A Glasgow Gang Observed, which was based on participant observation during 1966–67 of ‘the Young Team’, a group Patrick (a pseudonym) argued was structured around the pursuit of violence. Patrick was compelled to come to the conclusion that the gang’s core members were ‘boys suffering from severe personal and psychological difficulties’: ‘not only were the marginals terrified by the core members of the gang, but the leaders were disturbed by aspects of their own behaviour’.64 Pearl Jephcott’s interviews at a similar time with 600 ‘ordinary youngsters’ in Glasgow and Armadale (West Lothian) referred to ‘trouble-makers’ as ‘candidates for

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the asylum’, ‘louts and deadbeats’, ‘right bampots’ and ‘hard men’.65 Jephcott states that: ‘they were very conscious that the bad behaviour of a minority gave the whole age group and district a bad name. This they strongly resented.’66 Patrick took exception to Downes’s argument, based on London-based research that ‘the structured gang is unknown in this country’, depicting the ‘young team’ as a close-knit hierarchical group engaged in fairly high levels of planning and organisation of violent activities.67 Clearly, different patterns emerged in different cities at different points in time. However, Patrick’s contrasting conclusions may have resulted from his choice of research methods; the work focuses on one highly specific group rather than a range of young people within a neighbourhood or area. For sociological researchers carrying out ethnographical studies in the 1960s and early 1970s, the idea of the ‘gang’ (rather than its precise sociological existence) was an important component of youth cultures in urban areas. Downes drew attention to the ways in which the ‘fluid street corner cliques’ that he studied in east London sometimes tipped over into ‘mobilization for temporary purposes of reprisal’ and, perhaps more significantly, that ‘legends and stories’ were constructed around these isolated instances that sustained the ‘gang myth’.68 Similarly, in their account of youth work on a north London estate in the early 1970s, Robins and Cohen argued that the ‘gang’ motif was an important trope within the culture of children and adolescents. It borrowed from the sense of territorial belonging that was part of adult culture in working-class neighbourhoods, was ritualised and incorporated into play and group sociability, and was used to sustain a sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’, although there was little evidence of the actual existence of ‘highly structured gangs’.69 Regular calls had been made for the banning of ‘gangster films’ as having a harmful effect on children and young people from the 1930s onwards; these were reiterated during and after the Second World War by local committees and conferences concerned about the problem of ‘juvenile delinquency’.70 These calls, however, assumed that young people were merely imitative rather than creative when it came to fantasy, play and experimentation. Robins and Cohen argued instead that young people ‘draw on the resources of the mass media where it supports their imaginative capacities as story-tellers of their own lives’.71 Media representations of fighting gangs – whether Chicago gangsters of the 1930s, ‘Teddy boys’ on the rampage in the 1950s, or Kung Fu and oriental triads in the early 1970s – were attractive because they resonated with preexisting awareness of territorial and peer group identities.72 The case studies of Manchester and Dundee show that there was

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little direct relationship between perceptions of a ‘gang’ problem and high levels of youth violence in the years before 1970; well honed media stereotypes were not reflected in the actual business of the courts. However, the construction of a ‘moral panic’ relating to fear of youth sub-culture and group identity, the adoption of robust tactics by police and magistrates, and the lack of access to commercial leisure for young people themselves, created the potential for low-level conflict that, ultimately, led to arrests for disorderly and anti-social behaviour. References to ‘gangs’ were evident in both cities by 1953. The Manchester Evening News carried reports of vandalism and arson on a number of Salford schools by a group that self-styled itself the ‘Z gang’, who were reported to have got their name ‘from a crime film’ and who chalked and painted the letter ‘Z’ on classroom walls.73 In Dundee in September 1953, a 16-year-old boy was one of a group of mainly older males accused of a series of thefts, house-breaking, and also of an assault on an elderly man. The sheriff was told that the boy had carried ‘a leather cosh’ and ‘sewn into his jacket was also a sheath to hold a knife’.74 Other references in 1953 relate to children’s play that had tipped into dangerous zones. In May the juvenile court in Warrington, Cheshire, heard the case of two boys aged 13 and 14 who had branded 9-year-old twin brothers across the head with a red-hot sheath knife ‘while playing at being members of a gang’, an idea they said they had got ‘from comics and the cinema’.75 By the end of the decade, the local press, police and courts in both cities were increasingly associating violence with specific areas and with rivalry between groups of teenagers based on territoriality. The use of the term ‘Teddy boy gang’ as a euphemism for violent youth groups had made its way into the Manchester Evening News, usually to describe complaints of unprovoked attacks in the street that did not necessarily lead to arrests.76 In March it was reported that ‘two rival Teddy boy gangs’, had met in Urmston, Cheshire, to the south west of Manchester to do battle; the ‘local’ gang had then fled, leaving their ‘enemy’ to smash up a cafe window.77 Clearly groups of youths were causing problems in Manchester and its surrounding area in 1959, and fear of crime, grounded for some in graphic personal experience, was amplified by press coverage. The areas of the city that repeatedly came to attention were Moss Side and, just to its north, Chorlton-onMedlock, associated with slum housing, a night-time economy and a high immigrant population. A father whose 12-year-old son had been badly beaten up in Whitworth Park, Chorlton-on-Medlock asked: ‘when are they going to stop these gangs from terrorising people in the neighbourhood? … Children are frightened to go out. Old people

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are scared.’78 In April police were called to Levenshulme, where ‘fighting gangs of rival teenagers’ had brought traffic to a standstill outside a dance hall. Youths from Moss Side had been refused admittance by the doorman, a stabbing was alleged to have taken place, and a ‘pitched battle’ developed on the dance floor between Moss Side and Levenshulme youth before spilling into the street. Police rounded up a group of sixteen youths (including one juvenile) who were charged with using threatening words or behaviour.79 Coherent ‘gang’ names or identities were rarely cited other than through references to territoriality, suggesting loose associations of young people, linked together through place and dress codes. In the Manchester juvenile court sample for 1959 older youths aged 14–16 were more likely to be brought into the juvenile court for charges of disorderly behaviour under the Manchester Police Regulations Act 1844 than for assault; this encompassed the use of threatening, insulting or abusive words or behaviour sufficient to cause a breach of the peace. Twenty-two males aged 14–16 were charged in the juvenile court with a breach of the peace between January and May 1959 (compared to fourteen in this age group for assault). Breach of the peace charges were also used to deal with nine teenagers (three of them juveniles) who were watched by police constables from a patrol van as they made their way along Oldham Road, Newton Heath, one spring night. One threw a litter bin into the road while the others were ‘jostling, shouting and causing other pedestrians to cross the road to avoid them’.80 From street fighting through to more minor incidents, including refusal to turn down the volume on a portable radio, the ‘disorderly behaviour’ charge was used to tackle a broad range of offences.81 Forms of racial hatred had been a causal factor in a small number of incidents of youth participation in group violence in the Manchester area during the 1940s and 1950s. In August 1947 anti-Jewish riots that started in Liverpool spread to Salford and to the Cheetham and Ardwick Green areas of Manchester. A 17-year-old Chorlton-on-Medlock boy was convicted of assaulting two police officers during the Ardwick Green disturbances, whilst in Salford, the case was dismissed against a 16-year-old boy who was alleged to have been shouting abusive language and urging the crowd to break shop windows.82 Cafés in areas of the city associated with an immigrant population attracted a youthful clientele by the late 1950s but also became targets for vandalism that led some adults to take the law into their own hands. In April 1959 the Cypriot proprietor of a Rusholme cafe received a conditional discharge after he was accused of an assault on a 17-year-old customer

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whom he struck with a brush. His defence solicitor told the court that he had received ‘extreme provocation’ from ‘hordes of local Teddy boys’ who ‘had slashed the counter, broken stools, smashed glasses, prevented customers from entering and generally behaved insolently’.83 It is unclear whether this harassment was racially motivated. It is significant, however, that the racial violence that emerged in Nottingham and Notting Hill, London, in August 1959, was not directly mirrored by riots in Manchester, despite the presence of a sizeable West Indian population in Moss Side and the heightened anxieties in the city concerning the ‘Teddy boy gang’. Similarly, Mancunians observed from a distance the Bank Holiday disturbances that were assumed to be engulfing seaside towns in the early 1960s. It is significant that in 1965 Manchester’s YDT commented that ‘one of the most disturbing features of national trends in crime has been the rise in crimes of violence but fortunately Manchester has not yet been seriously troubled with gang warfare and riots’.84 Myths relating to the prevalence of youth violence elsewhere shaped interpretations of local scenarios. In Manchester, as Chapter 6 demonstrates, a new moral panic developed in the early 1960s around young people that related to concerns about commercial leisure venues, drug use and promiscuity, focused on the phenomenon of the ‘coffee club’ in the city. That the youthful clientele who attended some of the coffee clubs wore studded belts and carried knives as accessories associated with sub-cultural identities was highlighted in police reports and in the courtroom. When the police raided the Heaven and Hell Club in Sackville Street on 13 February 1965 it was alleged that an ‘arsenal’ of weapons had clattered to the floor. This ‘arsenal’ was not translated into a cache of prosecutions. Three young people (jointly charged in the adult magistrates’ court) were convicted and fined for possessing offensive weapons. The first, a 16-year-old boy claimed that he had found ‘a leather strap studded with metal buttons’ outside the club and that it did not belong to him. The second, a 19-year-old woman claimed that she carried a sheath knife for her personal protection because there had been attacks in her neighbourhood. The third, a 16-year-old girl, alleged that she had used a hammer and spanner to mend her bed earlier in the evening and had put them in her bag by accident.85 A single 15-year-old boy appeared in the juvenile court for possessing weapons following a raid the same weekend on the Cavern club. Whilst Manchester’s police and corporation were highly critical of the city’s club scene, it is possible that the clubs dissipated some of the tensions that had been building up in the late 1950s, most obviously by replacing street culture with comparatively cheap commercial

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l­eisure venues focused firstly on beat music and then northern soul. As the work of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies has demonstrated, some forms of music and the sub-cultures associated with them have broken down distinctions of race and class (jazz, northern soul) whilst other have been constructed around ideas of racism, most obviously the ‘skinhead’ identity that was at its height between 1969 and 1972, which appealed to some white working-class males attempting to assert identity in face of marginalisation (although it should be noted that racism amongst skinheads was complex, given their connections and identification with West Indian ‘rudeboy’ culture).86 Such dissipation was short-lived. In 1967, Manchester’s YDT warned of the ‘undercurrents of prejudice’ in the city.87 A year later the trust’s project leaders observed from close quarters attempts to victimise black and Asian youth in Moss Side: ‘a van load of skinheads came down and, because they were a bit stupid, they didn’t know the difference between Bengalis and Sikhs … the Sikhs have got a history of being a warrior race, and if somebody threatens a Sikh, he gets up and hits him back’. The result ‘was that these skinheads finished up in a pile of blood and guts all over Moulton Street and they never came back’.88 This anecdotal evidence is a reminder that many incidents were never reported through official channels, and of the ability of groups and communities themselves to deal with ‘violence’ informally. Whilst concerns about ‘gang’ culture in Manchester dissipated between 1959 and 1965, the opposite can be found in Dundee, where the summer months in particular continued to generate fighting and disorder. At the beginning of July 1959, police were called to a fish and chip shop in the Lochee area late one night after a man had headbutted one of the owners: ‘a mob gathered outside the police station … shouting and jeering at the police’ and a Black Maria van was overturned. The local press described it emotively as almost ‘a pitched battle between police and a gang of youths’.89 A few days later a 14-yearold boy who had just left the swimming baths where he was training for a gala was attacked in Lochee High Street: ‘the gang jumped on him, knocked him down and kicked his face and head … He asked the boys to fight him one by one but they would not do so’.90 The response of the ‘victim’ – to engage in a fair fight – was reported in a tone of respect. Whilst the use of weapons was viewed with concern, the ‘clean fight’ was still seen as an appropriate method for defending masculine status and reputation. Later in July, ten youths, half of them under 17, appeared at the Dundee police court on charges of disorderly behaviour for street fighting or, as the press put it ‘a gang

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battle’ between the ‘Black Hawks gang and the Lochee gang’. A studded belt, two dustbin lids and a large stone were produced in the court by the prosecution, although one police witness stated that it had been ‘a “clean” fight …[with] no weapons or instruments’, against suggestive of the distinction.91 The annual August Gussie Park Carnival (fun fair), held on an area of open ground opposite Dundee United football club (Tannadice Park), was increasingly viewed as a site for trouble, and the events of 1959 cemented this. Following arrests on 14 August, a group of fifteen young men (six of them aged 14–16) denied, but were found guilty of, assaulting three further youths (aged 16–18) by ‘striking them on the face, head and body with a chain or similar instrument’ as well as of a breach of the peace. One of the 16-year-old ‘victims’ was reported to have told the court: ‘a crowd of boys came over and asked if he came from Kirkton. He said “no”, then they all started on him. He felt an iron like chain hit him on the back of the head. They were all around him kicking him’. Another juvenile witness stated that he had seen ‘the Lochee gang’ approaching … with ‘chains and belts’. The solicitor for the defence claimed that ‘the suggestion that there is a gang as such is subject to a great deal of doubt. There is no evidence that they should be treated as anything but individuals in this case’.92 Nevertheless, the label began to stick. In October the Depute Fiscal prosecuted two cases in the Sheriff Juvenile Court in which he said ‘boys and girls were hunting in gangs’, threatening and intimidating others. In one unusual case a 16-year-old girl admitted head-butting and threatening to kill a younger girl. In a second linked case, a 16-year-old boy admitted that he had held a knife against the stomach of a 15-year-old girl, threatening to stab her. The presiding sheriff drew on media stereotypes in asking the boy’s father: ‘What do you think of your Teddy Boy son being a member of a fraternity known as the Pinkie gang?’93 A few weeks previously a similar incident, in which a 16-year-old boy had cut the arm of an older girl with a razor when they were seated on a snack bar, had been similarly prosecuted as assault.94 These cases are significant in suggesting that girls were linked to peer group violence as both assailants and victims. The tensions between police and groups of young people in Dundee that were hinted at in 1959 escalated further in the summer of 1965. In June the local press carried reports of young people gathering in groups in central parts of the city on Saturday nights, using bad language and obstructing the pavement, with fights ‘brewing’ between rival factions.95 Conflict was still overwhelmingly associated with males, although three 14-year-old girls were brought before the

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J­uvenile Police Court for engaging in a ‘stand up fight’ in a street behind Dundee Law on 18 June, for which they faced charges of a breach of the peace. On 20 June ‘two rival gangs’ were reported for fighting in the Cowgate area of the city centre, ‘eye-witnesses’ alleging that ‘at least one gang member had a knife’.96 When the police arrived on the scene, the youths scattered, with the police sending out squad cars to tour the city searching for groups of miscreants. Following a small number of arrests, a 17-year-old male chef ‘admitted brandishing a sheath knife, fighting with an unknown youth and breach of the peace’ and was fined by the police court. He stated that he ‘carried a knife more for show than anything else’, suggesting again that knives had symbolic, rather than functional, use as status objects.97 Five other young men were charged with breach of the peace and carrying an offensive weapon in the form of a metal belt. Youths in the Kirkton housing scheme were increasingly associated with the problem of violence in the city, and police and magistrates moved to curb the activities of a group who called themselves the ‘Kirkton Huns’ as well as rival groups. On the evening of 4 August a police constable spotted ‘a 70-strong gang marching along’ one of the residential streets ‘shouting and swearing’. He radioed for police assistance and a police dog was used to assist in the arrest of six youths, four of them aged 15–16, for breach of the peace.98 The following evening three vans of policemen were sent to Kirkton in response to a 999 phone call relating to a disturbance caused by youths in a local shopping centre. A group of young men were ‘parading about the footway … all were shouting, and passersby were not able to walk on the pavement’. Two 18-year-old males admitted being in breach of the peace when they were brought before the police court the following day. The burgh prosecutor stated that: ‘for two or three weeks a gang of youths known as “the Huns” had been running around the Kirkton area causing annoyance … Some were wearing leather jackets with the letter ‘H’ or the word ‘Huns’ on the back.’ Bailie George Soutar used the occasion to call for the reintroduction of the birching of young offenders, reinforced by an editorial in the conservativeleaning Dundee Courier as well as by some readers’ letters.99 He went on to ban the defendants from wearing their leather jackets: ‘I will give instructions to the police that if you are seen wearing this type of jacket on this housing scheme you will be apprehended and brought before the Court.’ Yet criticisms of the police handling of events were also emerging. One of the 18-year-olds, despite admitting the charge, claimed he was arrested simply because ‘he had “that slogan” on his jacket’. Twelve

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boys aged 14–16, charged with breach of the peace alongside the older youths, all denied they had committed an offence and were bailed until September.100 The subsequent police court trial lasted five hours, with the boys’ mothers playing an active role in their defence. One woman suggested in court ‘that the police had been hounding boys in Kirkton, and it was possible some innocent boys had been roped in’. Another mother asked a police witness whether he was the constable who had been overheard saying ‘there are another two boys … throw them in … the more the merrier’.101 The ‘summer wave of terrorism’, as it was described in the Courier,102 continued into August, culminating in a series of incidents at Gussie Park Carnival. On Thursday 12 August a group of 150 teenagers, some wearing leather jackets and studded belts, were said to have congregated in adjacent streets, fighting, threatening residents and shouting ‘we are the Huns’. Three police vans were again brought to the scene; a police dog was used to track and arrest youths who had dispersed into the bushes and were subsequently charged with breach of the peace.103 A complaint was subsequently made by the father of one19-year-old man, described as a member of ‘The Huns’, that he had been put by police in the dog cage of the handler’s van upon arrest, an action that suggested symbolic humiliation; the complaint was rejected by the Procurator Fiscal but is suggestive of the tensions between both parties.104 On Friday 20 August an 18-year-old man was charged with possession of a flick knife at the carnival. The following night a 19-year-old youth was stabbed repeatedly near the fairground waltzers by an attacker described as ‘aged 18–20 … wearing a brown suit with velvet collar’. According to the local press ‘a Pakistani youth’ was allegedly ‘attacked by a group of teenagers’ shortly afterwards; it is unclear whether this was assumed to be racially motivated, and no subsequent arrests appear to have been made for either of the incidents.105 By September, the relationship between police and young people on the Kirkton housing scheme seemed to have deteriorated further. On the evening of Wednesday 15 September a group was reported as gathering in one of the scheme’s residential streets shouting ‘we are the Huns’. Police officers at the scene said that the teenagers had refused to stop ‘cursing and swearing at the police’ when requested to do so, and that the boys had then shouted ‘the Huns can take you lot any day’. If such a challenge was issued, it had the effect of galvanizing a police response. Five juveniles aged 15–17 were taken to the police headquarters in a police van. The youths themselves claimed there had been no disturbance, whilst ‘many people in the

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housing scheme were complaining about the police lifting youths at random in Kirkton’ and ‘said the police had wholly fabricated the evidence’.106 As previously, two very different perspectives emerged in court, versions of events were contested and tensions were apparent, with magistrates upholding the police view. Rivalry, goading and the ritual display of bravado or assertive masculinity were probably part of the ‘play’ for both parties. Oral history interviews conducted by Gary Robertson with former ‘gang’ members in Dundee refer to mutual ‘animosity’ and ‘devilment’; they include stories of the mischievous slashing of the tyres of police bikes, as well as a challenge to a ‘fair fight’ that two older male officers lost.107 A police constable who lived in a police house in Fintry where he also patrolled a beat was a regular target of low-level vandalism, including the throwing of stones at his roof and door.108 Nevertheless, while the Courier and a small group of bailies were keen to ‘man the moral barricades’ the police do not appear to have viewed themselves as losing control of Dundee’s streets to gangs of teenagers. The types of behaviour and police responses that had elicited media coverage in the summer of 1965 continued apace over the next few years.109 The use of police vans and dogs was accompanied in 1966 by the setting up of ‘task forces’ to patrol dance halls, cafes, public houses and other leisure facilities as well as enhanced presence on the beat. Unit beat policing, involving the patrol of housing schemes by panda cars instead of the police bicycle was to follow in 1968. In his 1967 annual report, Chief Constable John Orr agreed that the ‘anti-social behaviour of the thug using “offensive weapons”’ required further attention by ‘the law makers’, supporting calls for tighter legislation to enable the police to stop and search for their possession. Significantly, however, he pointed out that it was not wholly a problem linked to youth, since the ages of those accused ‘ranged from 13 to 39 years’, and that ‘we in Dundee are fortunate not to have experienced the volume of crime of this nature which is receiving widespread comment’. Where it did occur, he asserted, it was a result of teenagers ‘wishing to assert themselves, to show off or just to let off steam’ and was often found in ‘the immature bullying type’.110 The conflict relating to youth, ‘gangs’ and policing in Dundee’s housing schemes had direct resonance with events in Glasgow where a gang ‘problem’ was rapidly (re)constructed in the Glasgow Herald from 1965 onwards, associated specifically with the Easterhouse estate and the carrying of knives by young people.111 It is undoubtedly the case that news coverage of the ‘gang problem’ in both cities resulted in imitative behaviour, including the adoption of a ‘gang’ label as a

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marker of identity by loose peer groups of young people. The building of postwar housing schemes with few amenities or resources meant that the streets and thoroughfares remained the central meeting places for young people; location and neighbourhood were retained as a distinctive element in the construction of self and other. Although significant in the interwar period, sectarianism does not seem to have fed into these peer group identities. Police targeting of teenagers in particular areas of Dundee and Glasgow – and their identification of particular individuals because of their chosen style of dress – are likely to have led to what sociologists describe as deviancy amplification, with young people’s behaviour becoming more aggressive in response to their demonisation as a group, creating a very real sense of fear among adults within the community. Charges of disorderly behaviour (breach of the peace) were used in Dundee to tackle boisterous and unruly behaviour that was associated with ‘gangs’. However, any relationship between serious assault charges and a ‘gang’ mentality are difficult to sustain. Researching the Clydeside phenomenon, criminologist John Mack analysed data submitted by seven Glasgow police divisions for the period 1965–67 to demonstrate that, of 890 listed names of gang members, only 7 per cent had been charged with serious assault or the carrying of weapons.112 Whilet police records of reported incidents are not available for Dundee, it is apparent from an analysis of the juvenile court registers and the extensive coverage of hooliganism in the Courier that there were few incidents in which ‘gang’ behaviour appears to have generated actual prosecutions for serious assault resulting from an offensive weapon. Proposals for enhanced police powers and the reintroduction of the birch united ‘hard-line’ justices of the peace and bailies in Glasgow and Dundee. As Chapter 7 also shows, however, a different set of responses, that viewed ‘vandalism’ and ‘hooliganism’ as a result of boredom, lack of amenities and social deprivation led to more community-oriented initiatives in Glasgow, such as a weapons amnesty promoted by the singer Frankie Vaughan in 1968 and the opening of the Easterhouse project in 1969. In Dundee too a softer tack emerged after 1968 with the appointment of a new chief constable, the formalisation of a juvenile scheme through a new Community Involvement Branch, and setting up improvement schemes on housing estates. Conclusion In the cases of both Dundee and Manchester we see the power of a rhetoric of aggression – ‘the gang battle’, ‘warfare’, ‘summer of

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t­ errorism’ – in labelling, constructing and, hence, shaping social conflict in a local setting. National ‘myths’ relating to the geography of violence led Dundonians and Mancunians to view their own ‘problem’ as less serious than elsewhere. By 1965 the ‘elsewhere’ referred to Glasgow and the southern seaside resorts. Upon probing, however, these myths largely break down. Nevertheless, beliefs about violence shaped police and magistrates’ responses, led to the demonisation of some young people, and heightened tensions and resentments. As Cohen has argued, ‘territoriality, solidarity, aggressive masculinity, stylistic innovation – these are all attempts by working-class youth to reclaim community and reassert values’.113 The comparison of Dundee and Glasgow with Liverpool and Manchester in 1965 reminds us too that youth sub-cultures took different forms in different places at different times. Writing in 1964, Colin Fletcher argued that Merseyside’s popular music groups had emerged from boys’ street corner gangs, but that ‘beat culture’ itself resulted in the decline of ‘gang culture’ among adolescents; a range of commercial leisure venues appeared, girls participated in similar types of leisure activities to boys, and homo-social peer groups were replaced with mixed activities and friendship groups (or the pairing off of girls and boys).114 Arguably, there was a restyling of working-class masculinities within ‘beat culture’ with a shift away from toughness as a marker of status. Similar patterns are observable in terms of the development of commercial leisure venues in Manchester’s city centre by the early 1960s. Significantly, the ‘gang problem’ that was associated with Glasgow and Dundee in the late 1960s was mapped onto the new housing schemes, in which leisure and entertainment facilities had been neither planned nor promoted, and in which the aspirations of young working-class males were severely constrained by lack of social capital. In some cases low-level violence was a resource for the marginal: those who had little else in the way of bargaining power. Indeed, Patrick’s explanation as to why a ‘gang’ identity was attractive in Glasgow in the late 1960s and why this sometimes spilled over into aggression is a convincing one. Continued poor housing stock and rising unemployment levels (unlike other parts of the UK) created feelings of ‘frustration, rage and powerlessness’, which was reinforced by the persistence of ‘a strong sub-cultural emphasis on self-assertion and on a rebellious independence against authority as a means of a­ ttaining masculinity’.115

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Notes 1 Criminal Statistics, Scotland, BPP, 1947, Cmd. 7595; 1953, Cmnd. 9134, 33; 1959, Cmnd. 1024; 1965, Cmnd. 3050; 1968, Cmnd. 4125, 35. Criminal Statistics, England and Wales, BPP, 1947, Cmd. 7528; 1953, Cmnd. 9199; 1959, Cmnd. 1100; 1965, Cmnd. 3037; 1968, Cmnd. 4098. All subsequent references to Criminal Statistics make use of this series unless otherwise stated. Charges involving violence were minimal for juvenile females, rising from only a numerical handful in the 1940s to less than 1.5 per cent of indictable offences by the late 1960s. Data for England and Wales is for violence against the person for indictable offences (excluding sexual offences and misdemeanours). Data for Scotland covers all crimes and offences against the person (including sexual offences). 2 E.g., Daily Mirror, 1 May 1950, p. 6. 3 Prevention of Crime Act 1953, 1 & 2 Eliz., ch. 14. 4 Rock and Cohen, ‘Teddy boy’, p. 292. 5 MG, 23 September 1953, p. 2. 6 MG, 18 September 1953, p. 2. 7 Rock and Cohen, ‘Teddy boy’, p. 296, citing Daily Mail, 26 April 1954. 8 Guardian, 16 September 1958, p. 2. 9 Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick (hereafter MRC), MSS.179/EDU/3/3/1, NUT investigation into school discipline in secondary modern schools 1954–6, press cuttings: News Chronicle, 14–16 September 1955. 10 Daily Mirror, 5 January 1956, p. 7. 11 MRC, MSS.179/EDU/3/3/1, Daily Sketch, 15 May 1956. 12 MRC, MSS.179/EDU/3/3/2, Letter and questionnaire to head teachers. 13 MRC, MSS.179/EDU/3/3/7, interim report. 14 MRC, MSS.179/EDU/3/3/12, Questions 5a and 5b ‘Teddy boys’. 15 MRC, MSS.179/EDU/3/3/4, County Borough returns. 16 MRC, MSS.179/EDU/3/3/12, Questions 5a and 5b. 17 DC, 26 January 1959, p. 4, letter from the rector, Stobswell Boys’ Junior Secondary School, Dundee. 18 Observer, 19 June 1955, p. 14. 19 TNA, BN29/1765 On hooliganism – disturbances at Clacton, notes for the Home Secretary’s speech, 27 April 1964. 20 Cohen, Folk Devils. 21 Lawrence Stone, ‘Interpersonal violence in English society, 1300–1980’, Past & Present, 101 (1983), 22–33; James Sharpe, ‘The History of Violence in England: Some Observations’, Past & Present, 108 (1985), 206–21. 22 Criminal Statistics, England and Wales, BPP, 1999, Cm. 5001, p. 76. 23 J.V.M Shields and J.A. Duncan, The State of Crime in Scotland (London: Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency, 1964). 24 Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the Conduct of Standon Farm Approved School, BPP, 1947, Cmd. 7150.

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25 MEN, 22 January 1947, p. 1; 1 February 1947, p. 5; 12 February 1947, p. 5; 11 March 1947, p. 5. 26 MG, 1 May 1950, p. 8. 27 MG, 3 July 1956, p. 10. 28 MG, 19 June 1956, p. 2. 29 Guardian 17 November 1967, p. 3; 26 January 1968. 30 Rock and Cohen, ‘Teddy boy’. 31 G. Sereny, Why Children Kill; the Story of Mary Bell (London: Holt, 2000). 32 F.H. McClintock, Crimes of Violence (London: Macmillan, 1963), p. 66 suggested that around 5 per cent of the rise in indictable violence could be explained by changes in the classification of offences (assaults formerly deal with summarily were now prosecuted as indictable crime). 33 Scottish cases might be proven (leading to a conditional discharge on a first offence) without a conviction being formally recorded. This explains the discrepancy between ‘national’ convictions and the Dundee juvenile court registers, which record all juvenile charges and all cases proven. 34 NAS, ED15/412, Advisory Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, 1964– 65; see also Jephcott, Time of One’s Own, p. 100. 35 M. Wiener, Men of Blood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 36 A. Hughes, ‘The “Non-criminal” class: wife-beating in Scotland (c.1800– 1949)’, Crime, History & Societies, 14.2 (2010), 31–54. 37 A. Davies, ‘Youth, violence and courtship in late-Victorian Birmingham: the case of James Harper and Emily Pimm’, History of the Family, 11.2 (2006), 107–20; Emsley, Hard Men. 38 D. Robins and P. Cohen, Knuckle Sandwich. Growing up in the WorkingClass City (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), pp. 90–2; J. Kelman, Kieron Smith, Boy (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2008); Robertson, Skeem Life, p. 52, on the ‘good scrapper’; Robertson, On the Milk, p. 94, on being a ‘best fighter’ at school. 39 Manchester Corporation, Watch Committee Minutes, 18 February 1959. 40 MEN, 25 April 1959, pp. 1 and 9. 41 MEN, 14 May 1959, p. 10. 42 DC, 15 January 1965, p. 4. 43 DC, 7 January 1965, p. 4. 44 WR, 19 March 1959, p. 1. 45 MEN, 6 April 1959, p. 7. 46 DC, 17 March 1959, p. 3; 26 March, p. 5. 47 MEN, 19 March 1953, p. 5. 48 TNA, ED233/20 Local conferences on juvenile delinquency 1949–50. 49 Mays, Growing Up, pp. 112–13; T.R. Fyvel, The Insecure Offenders. Rebellious Youth in the Welfare State (London: Pelican, 1963 [1961]), p. 97. 50 D. Downes, The Delinquent Solution (London: Routledge, 1966), p. 11; Fyvel, Insecure Offenders. 51 P. Scott, ‘Gangs and Delinquent Groups in London,’ British Journal of Delinquency, 7.1 (1956), 4–24, here p. 15.

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52 J. Katz, ‘The gang myth’, in S. Karstedt and K. Bussman (eds), Social Dynamics of Crime and Control (New York: Hart, 2000). 53 Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty. 54 A. Davies, ‘Youth gangs, masculinity and violence in late-Victorian Manchester and Salford’, Journal of Social History, 32.2 (1998), 349–69; A. Davies, ‘Street gangs, crime and policing in Glasgow during the 1930s: the case of the Beehive boys’, Social History, 23.3 (1998), 251–68. 55 Downes, Delinquent Solution; Scott, ‘Gangs’. 56 Mays, Growing Up, pp. 107 and 109. 57 D. Downes, ‘Interpreting delinquency’, in L. Taylor, A. Morris and D. Downes (eds), Signs of Trouble (London: BBC, 1976). 58 C. Fletcher, ‘Beat and gangs on Merseyside’, in T. Raison (ed.), Youth in New Society (London: Harrison Raison, 1966; article first published in 1964). 59 Davies, ‘Street gangs’; TNA, HO45/25144, letter from Chief Constable Winstanley to Home Secretary, 21 November 1945. 60 Downes, ‘Interpreting delinquency’, p. 49. 61 TNA, ED233/20, report on gangsterism in Southwark and Bermondsey, June 1949. 62 Ibid. 63 Scott, ‘Gangs’, p. 20. 64 Patrick, Glasgow Gang, pp. 207 and 202. 65 Jephcott, Time of One’s Own, pp. 42, 96, 98. 66 Ibid., p. 98. 67 Downes, Delinquent Solution, p. 190; Patrick, Glasgow Gang, p. 202. 68 Downes, Delinquent Solution, p. 199. 69 Robins and Cohen, Knuckle Sandwich, pp. 74–8. 70 S.S. Smith, Children, Cinema and Censorship (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005); NRS, HH60/432 Children and young persons, juvenile delinquency, 1942. 71 Robins and Cohen, Knuckle Sandwich, p. 101. 72 Ibid. 73 MEN, 7 February 1953, p. 1; 13 March 1953, p. 1. Two youths received borstal sentences. 74 DC, 24 September 1953, p. 3. 75 MEN, 5 May 1953, p. 3. 76 MEN, 28 Feb 1959, p. 1; MEN, 4 March 1959, p. 9. 77 MEN, 4 March 1959, p. 9. 78 MEN, 23 May 1959, p. 7. 79 MEN, 18 April 1959, p. 1. 80 WR, 30 April 1959, p. 3. 81 MEN, 7 May 1959, p. 4. 82 MEN, 11 August 1947, p. 4 and 14 August 1947, p. 4. 83 MEN, 1 April 1959, p. 9. 84 YDT, Juvenile Delinquency, pp. 16–17.

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85 MEN, 23 April 1965, p. 7. 86 Hebdige, Subculture; Robins and Cohen, Knuckle Sandwich; P. Willis, Learning to Labour (Westmead: Saxon House, 1977); M Brake, ‘The skinheads: An English working class subculture’, Youth & Society, 6.2 (1974), 179–200. 87 YDT, Young and Coloured in Manchester (Manchester: YDT, 1967), p. 5. 88 YDT, Working-class Youth and Racism (Manchester: YDT, 1978), p. 3. 89 DC, 10 July 1959, p. 6. 90 DC, 14 July 1959, p. 7. 91 DC, 31 July 1959, p. 8. 92 DC, 25 August 1959, p. 4. 93 DC, 2 October 1959, p. 2. 94 DC, 3 September 1959, p. 3. 95 DC, 9 June 1965, p. 7. 96 DC, 21 June 1965, p. 8. 97 DC, 22 June 1965, p. 9. 98 DC, 25 September 1965, p. 5. 99 DC, 7 August 1965, p. 6; DC, 9 August 1965, p. 6. 100 DC, 7 August 1965, p. 6. 101 DC, 24 September 1965, p. 8. 102 DC, 19 November 1965, p. 5. 103 DC, 13 August 1965, p. 4. 104 NRS, HH55/1681, inspection, 1966. 105 DC, 23 August 1965, p. 6. 106 DC, 19 November 1965, p. 5. 107 G. Robertson, Gangs of Dundee (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2007), pp. 35 and 36. 108 DC, 18 September 1965, p. 6. 109 See Robertson, Gangs of Dundee. By the end of the 1960s, territorial rivalries had been joined by gang identities that traversed geography and were played out through football hooliganism. Robertson suggests youth gangs in Dundee petered out in 1972 with the arrival of ­northern soul. 110 CCAR, Dundee, 1967. 111 For further discussion see A. Bartie, ‘Moral panics and Glasgow gangs: exploring ‘the new wave of Glasgow hooliganism’, Contemporary British History, 24.3 (2010), 385–408. 112 NRS, HH60/923 University of Glasgow School of Social Studies. Research into Gangs and Violence. 113 Cohen, Folk Devils, p. lv. 114 Fletcher, ‘Beat and gangs’. 115 Patrick, Glasgow Gang, pp. 169–70.

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5 Sexuality

Concerns about increases in young people’s criminality during the Second World War and into the 1960s were accompanied by similar anxieties about sexual activity. Both were viewed by the institutions associated with the state and civil society as symptoms of a decline in Christian values and moral standards. Teenage sexual ‘precocity’ was seen as a social problem because it was connected, in the minds of its critics, with increased incidence of venereal disease, a rising ‘tide’ of births outside marriage (‘illegitimacy’), and cycles of poor parenting (the ‘problem family’). Its implications were viewed as medical as well as moral and, despite the decline of eugenics discourse (which had emphasised racial deterioration), as a threat to national strength.1 The ‘problem’ of teenage sexuality was profoundly shaped by ideologies of gender. As civil servants commented in 1969 after examining recent research studies: ‘While anti-social attitudes tend to manifest themselves in specific offences [in boys], for example wilful damage to property, in girls these feelings tend to find expression in flouting generally accepted standards of sexual behaviour.’2 Although around half of girls processed through the juvenile courts were dealt with for property offences, female ‘delinquency’ continued to be stereotyped in sexual terms as it had it in the Victorian era.3 Moreover, the ‘sexual double standard’ that had been critiqued by Edwardian feminists was still very much in operation.4 Girls were constructed as ‘deviant’ for engaging in ‘promiscuity’ outside marriage, whilst ‘the general feeling that a lad should be allowed to sow his wild oats’ was shared by some policemen.5 The ‘problem girl’, the ‘good time girl’, and the ‘wayward girl’ were terms that were widely used across the period to describe the sexual delinquent; there was no male equivalent. Yet these gendered classifications, derived from medical practice, social work and policing, and picked up by the popular media (news-

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papers as well as cinema) were increasingly difficult to sustain in an era of social and cultural change that was labelled by some as a new climate of ‘permissiveness’. First staged in 1958, the play A Taste of Honey (written by Salford’s Shelagh Delaney at the age of 18) depicted inter-racial relationships, teenage pregnancy and homosexuality as social realities that were not necessarily any more ‘dysfunctional’ than a family life grounded in heterosexual marriage. The interpretation offered by Delaney can be viewed as an important counternarrative to the voices of experts and officials in church and state. This chapter examines strategies of moral regulation relating to young people including the operation of child protection legislation, the prosecution of boys for criminal offences, and the delineation of the ‘gymslip mother’ as a figure of local and national scrutiny from the late 1950s onwards. Setting case studies of Manchester and Dundee within broader national contexts, it considers the significance of legal, religious and medical frameworks in shaping responses to the gendered ‘problem’ of teenage sexuality. The concept of ‘moral danger’ According to statute law, young women over 16 could consent to sexual intercourse and contract into marriage if they had parental approval (the latter was necessary up to the age of 21).6 However, the Children and Young Persons Acts of 1933 (England and Wales) and 1937 (Scotland) defined all those under the age of 17 as juveniles who were potentially ‘in need of care or protection’. Thus the sexual status and agency associated with the 16-year-old girl was ambiguous. Clauses concerning young people who were ‘falling into bad association, or exposed to moral danger or beyond control’ (and which had their origins in earlier legislation of the 1880s) could be invoked to deal with minors engaging in underage sex if a parent or guardian had not exercised ‘proper care’. The clause blurred protection with control in that it was used to encompass a spectrum of circumstances from sexual abuse through to reciprocal relationships with boys of a similar age. As a ‘status offence’ – an act or form of behaviour that was only an offence because of the status associated with one’s age – it could result in civil proceedings before juvenile court magistrates. If the case was found, a young person could be made the subject of a supervision order (requiring them to work with a probation officer), committed to the care of another ‘fit person’ (this included the local authority or another guardian) or be sent to an approved school. ‘Care or protection’ proceedings (whether for those ‘exposed to moral danger’ or in other

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circumstances involving parental cruelty or neglect) could be inaugurated by the police, child protection societies, or the local authority, all of whom might bring cases before the juvenile court (with the latter increasingly playing an important coordinating role.7 During the Second World War a ‘moral panic’ had emerged about ‘good time girls’ and ‘amateur prostitutes’ – some as young as 13 – who were hanging around military camps, railway stations and the main sites of urban entertainment, consorting with soldiers including black American GIs. Sexual propriety – in particular a restrained and continent femininity – had been viewed as vital to nation building.8 In the aftermath of the war, attention continued to focus on girls aged 13 to 16 whose sexual precocity was presented as leading to a path of moral decline and disease. This narrative was apparent in the controversial film Good Time Girl, made in 1947, which was very loosely based on the real life story of Marina Jones, who had been sent to an approved school during the war ‘as in moral danger’, and who had a brief relationship with American GI Karl Hulton, which had led to her being tried and convicted of murder (as an accessory).9 The ‘good time girl’ was a well-worn stereotype of the popular press by the end of the war. In its most extreme form, this was the adolescent female ‘vamp’ who ‘seduced’ older men into unlawful sex, and who was an instrument of moral and medical contamination. In June 1947 the solicitor defending a 20-year-old man in a case of unlawful carnal knowledge described the 15-year-old girl concerned as ‘a little gold digger’. In his summing up speech the trial judge described ‘over-sexed’ girls of 14 and 15 as ‘a tremendous temptation to young men’.10 Whilst late Victorian and Edwardian discourses of social purity had depicted the young female victim of the ‘white slave trade’ as vulnerable, passive and naive in her ‘fall’ from ‘innocence’, wartime marked a shift in culpability as the young woman was recast as predatory. In 1946 a widely publicised report on ‘The Problem Girl’ was produced by a Joint Committee of the British Medical Association and the Magistrates Association. Whilst it aimed to understand rather than to condemn, and to identify appropriate forms of treatment and rehabilitation, it drew on an existing medico-moral framework.11 Acknowledging that girls in the 13–17 age group were as likely to be brought before the juvenile court for stealing as for being in need of protection, the report focused entirely on sexual delinquency. The ‘problem girl’ was characterised as a type: ‘Superficially she is a “good-time girl”, living only for her personal enjoyment, morally and emotionally unstable, perhaps guilty of sexual misbehaviour, and unamenable to discipline and control.’12 This ‘instability’ was linked to social causes:

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the ‘broken’ home, lack of fulfilment in work, the declining influence of religion and the dislocations of war, including evacuation and disrupted schooling. Yet a psychiatric ‘defect of character structure’ was emphasised as key. This was not simply a matter of mental defect (in the 1930s girls had been institutionalised as ‘morally and mentally deficient’), but included cases of ‘higher intelligence’ combined with ‘precocious physical development’. The ‘problem girls’ of the 1940s were presented as exhibiting an over-exaggerated femininity inspired by Hollywood: ‘They spend a great deal of time making up their faces and adorning themselves, though they often do not trouble to wash and are sluttish about their undergarments. Their favourite reading matter consists of the weekly journals dealing with the love life of film stars, and they live in a fantasy world of erotic glamour.’13 Those who were both ‘over-sexual’ and ‘over-trusting’ in their relationships with men were most likely to ‘acquire venereal disease or produce illegitimate children and may develop into a true nymphomaniac’.14 Whilst presented as a report informed by current psychiatric and social research, ‘The Problem Girl’ replicated an understanding of ‘normal’ that was predicated on middle-class respectability and monogamous marriage. For many practitioners the ‘problem’ or ‘wayward’ girl was viewed as foolish and naive rather than predatory. Former headmistress of Aylesbury (girls) Borstal, Molly Mellanby, told Dundee probation officers that the ‘fast girl’ was ‘restless, reckless [and] improvident’ but ‘very responsive, generous and with a good sense of humour’.15 Nevertheless, adolescent girls who ran away from home, approved schools or other residential institutions – rather than the boys or men with whom they had sex – were consistently viewed as the primary vector for venereal disease. In 1943 Head of the Metropolitan Women Police, Dorothy Peto had written that: ‘the semi-delinquent type of girl and young woman [i.e. care or protection case] … is a greater danger than the prostitute in spreading venereal disease’.16 Similarly, in 1944 the Church of Scotland’s Social Work committee reported that ‘the “easy girl”’ presented ‘the greatest moral and venereal diseases problem’.17 As historian Roger Davidson has shown, medical experts, as well as other agencies such as the churches, continued to adhere to a ‘pathological view of female sexuality’, with adolescent girls blamed for further rises in venereal disease rates in the 1960s and early 1970s.18 Girls were medically inspected for venereal disease upon admittance to approved schools as well as upon their return from absconding.19 By the 1950s adolescent heterosexual attraction was viewed within both medical discourse and a wider popular culture as a normal aspect

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of physical and psychical development. Adolescent girls should naturally have an interest in boys of a similar age and be involved in courtship. Sexual feelings, nevertheless, were to stop short of intercourse and anxieties were expressed about both intergenerational and interracial relationships. The adolescent girl was to keep herself ‘pure’ for marriage. Decisions about the provision of sex education were devolved to local authorities and individual schools, and there was no ‘national’ sex education policy so that instruction, which tended to follow a health education model, was piecemeal.20 In Scotland, where the former social purity organisation, the Alliance of Honour, was responsible for its delivery in many areas until 1967, sex education was underpinned by a philosophy of ‘enlightened asceticism’ that stressed the need for self-discipline and self-restraint; even in 1970 around a half of Scottish secondary schools did not include it in the syllabus.21 ‘Moral hygiene’ pamphlets for adolescent males, which warned of the dangers of excessive masturbation as leading to psychological problems, were circulated through youth organisations such as the Boys’ Brigade.22 As in North America in the 1950s, marriage and the family were viewed as the ‘only legitimate site for sex’.23 As Judy Giles has argued, ‘good’ girls were expected to take responsibility for sexual restraint within relationships: to defend their modesty, status and reputations against the ‘uncontrollable’ urges of boys.24 These expectations appear to have been reflected in young people’s behaviours and attitudes. Contemporary research suggested that less than 6 per cent engaged in intercourse before they reached the age of 16 in the 1950s and early 1960s, rising slightly to 10 per cent in the early 1970s.25 A moral conservatism best characterised the attitude of the majority of teenagers. In 1950 a survey conducted under the auspices of the Church of Scotland found that 17 per cent of young men and only 4.5 per cent of young women thought there was ‘nothing wrong’ with sex before marriage (a further 38 per cent of males and 12 per cent of females viewed it as permissible if the couple were engaged).26 The gender discrepancy suggests the internalisation of the sexual double standard by young women and demonstrates that the folk devil of the ‘good time girl’ provided a salutary warning of the dangers of promiscuity. Ethnographic research among young people in Manchester in the early 1960s states that teenage girls with ‘loose reputations’ were labelled as ‘communials’ (sic), who were discarded by boys when looking for ‘possible marriage partners’.27 Analysis of the status offences dealt with in the Manchester juvenile court samples for 1947, 1953, 1959 and 1965 show trends that became gendered when young people entered adolescence. Girls and

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boys were brought for school non-attendance in fairly equal numbers. For care or protection proceedings involving the under-12s there is no clear gender distinction, and it seems likely that most cases relate to neglect, cruelty or parenting that was viewed as inadequate. For those in their mid-teens, however, care or protection cases overwhelmingly related to girls. Within the 1965 Manchester sample, girls formed three-quarters of juveniles aged 14–17 who were dealt with as in need of care or protection. Half of these cases resulted in probation orders, and a further 41 per cent in approved school orders, suggesting the seriousness with which such cases were viewed as well as the perceived need for treatment and rehabilitation (simple thefts tended to result in fines). Similarly, in a study of girls passing through a London remand home and who were subsequently placed with a probation officer in the years 1951–53, researcher Trevor Gibbens found that 88 per cent were effectively ‘wayward girls’ (found to be either beyond the control of their parents or in need of care or protection). Around 20 per cent had come to police attention after they had run away from home, attracted to London and, in many cases, to the West End.28 Nevertheless, the ‘moral danger’ clause of the Children and Young Persons Acts was increasingly controversial in its dealings with girls aged 16–17. In 1955 the British Social Biology Council voiced concerns that the juvenile courts were ‘being used with an excess zeal to deal with mature, well-developed girls of 16 who stayed out all night with their boyfriends’.29 Women police officers, who were viewed as ‘specialists’ in this area, were clear that girls could not simply be charged for engaging in sex: the letter of the law required proof of underlying difficulties, usually relating to home life.30 Similarly, underage pregnancy on its own could not trigger care or protection proceedings, although ‘wider problems of promiscuity’ or ‘being beyond the control of … parents’ might.31 Where teenage girls’ own statements are available in relation to care or protection proceedings, evidence of abusive parenting and inability to hold down paid employment, leading to further social and economic marginality, are apparent. The following statement was made in 1951 by a 15-year-old girl from a southern coastal town, who had been sacked from five jobs since leaving school and had run away to London after finding herself pregnant. She came to the attention of the Metropolitan Women Police when she was deposited at a large London hospital, about to give birth, by a young man with whom she had been living. I was very glad to leave [school] as I didn’t like it and I was always bottom of the form … I have never been happy at home. Daddie hits

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me and he and Mummie say they don’t want me at home because I won’t help with the housework. So when I left school they got me a living-in domestic job … I only stayed there a few weeks as I got the sack because the lady said I wasn’t fast enough …. [Since] I have left school I have been out with quite a lot of young men. They have spoken to me in the streets or in cafes, invited me out with them and I have gone. I know what is meant by the word intimate and have been like this with three men.32

On two occasions sexual intercourse had taken place in public areas, with men a few years older, and she presented herself as an unwilling party: ‘I didn’t want this to happen and I struggled but I never shouted out or told any one what happened’. Clearly her statement was a response to the questions of women officers, who were attempting to establish her level of consent so as to ascertain whether prosecution for rape was possible. Thus it was shaped by the technicalities of the law. Nevertheless, the unwanted sex described here was part of a continuum involving meeting, chatting, and then kissing and cuddling. Those considered to be ‘in moral danger’ were those who were unable to restrain either themselves or the young men with whom they consorted. A final poignant paragraph of her statement refers to a series of incestuous sexual assaults by her father who had ‘first interfered’ with her when she was 13. This statement resonates in several ways with that of a 15-year-old Manchester girl who had been missing from home for five nights in August 1963 and who had come to police attention when she was thrown out of the Sovereign Coffee Bar for fighting with another girl. Since leaving school four months previously she had been worked in ten different jobs and, finally unemployed, had spent her time in a city centre amusement arcade, having lied to her mother that she was still engaged in factory work. I have known a lot of lads, and I have been going out with them since I was thirteen … I’ve forgotten the names of half the lads, I’ve been out with so many … When I was 13 and going out with [one] we were down an entry one night and we were kissing. He put his hand under my bust and he pulled my knickers down to my knees … I kicked him and we had a fight … I punched him and he fell on the floor and I ran away … I’m not a very good reader because I was never at school, I was always playing wag and the school board was always at the house. I don’t get on well with my mother. We’re always having rows because I stay out late at night and won’t say where I’ve been, but I have never stayed out all night before … I

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don’t know what I do these things for, I’m not happy at home, I don’t get on with my Mam, because I don’t want to do as I’m told. I don’t want to go back home.33

Whilst demonstrating assertiveness, agency and ability to resist, lack of a stable job and home life meant that her case was seen as one requiring intervention. Both girls were teenage ‘runaways’, a particular category that was closely associated with ‘waywardness’ and in which considerable time was invested by women police officers in urban forces. In Manchester, members of the Policewomen’s Department carried out regular patrols of the city centre, entering cafes and coffee bars on the look-out for female absconders. During wartime and its aftermath missing children or young people sometimes remained hidden for several days in air-raid shelters; in the postwar period the growth of commercial leisure venues provided not only spaces where absconders might hide, but places to meet those of a slightly older age group who had access to cheap rented rooms. The anonymity and possibility associated with cities made them magnets for absconders from a wide radius. Whilst the ‘missing person’ might be male as well as female, there was no such thing as ‘the wayward boy’. As the chief constable noted the following year, ‘it is extremely difficult to prove that a boy in his early teens staying out all night is in moral danger’.34 The prevention of ‘moral danger’ was profoundly shaped by perceptions of city space but also concerns about miscegenation and the depiction of ‘foreign’, black and Asian men as a threat to young white womanhood. These racialised narratives of sexual danger had a long history. Ice-cream parlours run by Italian migrants had been linked to a moral panic about ‘white slave trafficking’ in Glasgow and Dundee in the early part of the twentieth century.35 In the 1920s London’s women police officers had focused attentions on dockland cafes associated with Lascar seamen, who were assumed to have abducted and drugged young white women; by the late 1930s their attentions had shifted to ‘young girls frequenting Cypriot cafes’.36 In the postwar period immigration from the West Indies and the south Asian subcontinent led to a reconfiguring of this narrative. By 1953 the representation of Manchester’s Moss Side area as a red-light district was inflected by discourses of racial difference, since the area was also attracting a sizeable migrant population from the Caribbean. It was heavily targeted by plain-clothes policemen carrying out observations for brothel-keeping, leading to the prosecution of a number of ‘coloured men’ (sic) for living off prostitutes’ earnings.

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It was alleged that women solicited men in the central Piccadilly area of the city and took them back in taxis to houses in Moss Side, and that the residential area surrounding Whitworth Park was also a parading ground for prostitutes.37 Pre-empting the appointment of the Wolfenden Committee in 1954 (which examined the laws relating to homosexuality and prostitution), Manchester City Council set up its own ‘vice committee’ in the summer of 1953 to consider the problem of ‘offences against public decency’.38 Within Moss Side itself, the ‘linking of the coloured population … with recent allegations of vice and immorality’ was deeply resented. Community leaders, including councillors, ministers and the chairman of the Manchester and District Council for African Affairs, signed a letter of protest stating that ‘the majority of the coloured community are respectable citizens of the British Commonwealth, and that sensational treatment of the problem can only lead to an extension of the inter-racial disharmony we are most anxious to avoid’.39 Yet police targeting of black men and racialised stereotyping of Moss Side continued, the ‘vice’ problem being described in 1957 as exacerbated ‘by large numbers of West Indians and Irishmen who drift there’.40 References to girls under the age of 16 or 17 were rare but present in the coverage of the ‘vice’ problem of the early 1950s (actual incidence can only remain unknown). In July 1953 the Manchester Evening News reported the conviction of a 22-year-old Hulme woman for procuring her 15-year-old cousin for immoral purposes. The two were alleged to have hitched lifts on lorries to Leeds, where they had ‘spent the night with two Ukrainians and the next day met an Indian’.41 The rhetorical trope of ‘white slavery’, which had dominated accounts of sexual exploitation in the early part of the twentieth century, had resurfaced in the popular press and other literature by the 1960s.42 In January 1965 the News of the World alleged that ‘two pretty young girls have revealed … a fantastic story of white slaving in Britain. The girls alleged that they were abducted by car in Manchester and delivered for auction among Pakistanis in Bradford, Yorkshire.’43 Aged 17, these young women were too old to be considered ‘in moral danger’ and further police investigation showed them to have a string of minor convictions as well as aliases: they were living on the margins, had no fixed address or employment, and were described as ‘dossers’ who were evidently not deemed reliable witnesses. One had found herself pregnant at 16 and had allegedly run away to Gretna Green, Scotland, to be married. Given that they would have been prime targets for moral regulation a few years earlier, it is revealing that they seem to have fallen through the preventive net. In a similar and closely

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related case, two ‘coloured’ Moss Side men were, nevertheless, convicted later in the year of living off the immoral earnings of a 16-year old girl whom they had met in one of the city’s unlicensed clubs and attempted to ‘sell’ ‘to Pakistanis and Chinese in Bradford’.44 In Dundee, too, by the mid-1960s an increase in care or protection cases was blamed on ‘the number of Pakistanis who have settled in the city [who] … attract and harbour young girls’.45 Shared low status, poverty and marginalisation brought runaways and first generation immigrants together in deprived areas of towns and cities. Within a broader popular culture, however, this led to the representation of black and Asian men as a sexually predatory ‘other’ and drew attention away from sexual abuse within white families and communities.46 It was extremely rare for girls under the age of 17 to appear in the juvenile court on charges of soliciting or importuning. As Cox has shown, child protection legislation viewed minors as endangered and instead criminalised any adult who encouraged their prostitution.47 In January 1959 one 16-year-old girl was brought before Manchester juvenile court for ‘loitering for prostitution’, after being arrested by a male police officer. This charge was subsequently withdrawn but the girl was found to have breached the terms of a pre-existing supervision order and was sent to an approved school. In Dundee, as in other ports, women officers carried out patrols of the docks, where the presence of male crews were assumed to be a lure.48 In March 1965 two 15-year-olds (a schoolgirl and a mill-worker) were bought before the police juvenile court because they had been ‘found on board a ship’. In addition to being fined, they were formally ‘cautioned’ in an effort to ensure that they did not persist. Although they were officially classed as stowaways, the incident is suggestive of concern about minors engaged in prostitution. In his study of London remand home girls of the early 1950s, Gibbens commented that: ‘members of the public sometimes speak of these girls generally as potential or actual prostitutes, but this is a gross exaggeration; prostitution, in fact, appears rather rarely in their histories’.49 He found that four per cent of the 358 girls had been ‘living by prostitution when arrested’. A further 4 per cent were living with ‘prostitutes’ or were in their company ‘but there was no suggestion that they had been prostitutes themselves’. In many cases, he suggested, older women working on the streets gave shelter to those who were missing from home rather than seeking to recruit them. Similarly, oral history interviews with women police officers who worked in the 1950s suggests that known ‘prostitutes’ often p ­ rovided

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them with information about the whereabouts of girls reported as missing from home.50 Clearly, the early twentieth-century distinction between the ‘amateur’ and the ‘professional’ was a problematic one, which drew on a very particular stereotype of the ‘hardened’ or ‘common’ streetwalker. Newspaper coverage referred to child protection cases in which girls of 8 took money from elderly male neighbours in exchange for kisses, touching and other sexual acts.51 Female absconders and runaways used their sexuality as a resource to barter for subsistence: to attract men who would feed them and ‘treat’ them to drinks and entertainment, and give them shelter and somewhere to sleep. Gibbens argued that ‘many [remand homes girls] would be quite rightly insulted by the idea that this was prostitution’.52 Barrett and Brown point out that, from a twenty-first-century viewpoint all these experiences should be viewed as child abuse (if involving a minor) and thus it is not necessarily useful to distinguish between them.53 It is clear, however, that the twentieth-century concept of ‘waywardness’ was extremely nebulous and was used to describe a continuum of sexual experiences that encompassed abuse and agency within its extremes. Adolescent males and sexual offences Within popular culture concerns tended to be raised about aggressive or violent heterosexual tendencies amongst male youth, rather than boys’ vulnerability. The ‘Teddy boy’ was depicted as predatory towards girls, taking ‘his sexual pleasure where and when he wants it, and without further thought’.54 Nevertheless, cases involving boys ‘in moral danger’ were brought on rare occasions. In an important legal case of 1953, three boys under the age of 17 were placed under supervision orders, as in need of ‘care or protection’, for having sexual intercourse with a 17-year-old girl in a latrine on a football field; the case hinged on the argument that they had received inadequate sex education from their parents.55 Significantly, however, the ruling was overturned on appeal. Police officers were once again reminded that cases (whether for boys or girls) could not be brought ‘merely because the child or young person has been guilty of sexual misbehaviour on a few occasions without the knowledge of the parents’.56 Where adolescent boys were found to have had sex with girls under the age of consent of 16 – and the act was not deemed to be one of assault – prosecutions were increasingly unlikely to be brought against them, although this was dependent on the policy adopted within individual police forces. In Manchester ‘proceedings were rarely taken

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should the girls concerned be approaching the age of 16 years’.57 In Metropolitan London the decision was left to the girl’s parents as to whether they wished to prosecute and ‘overall regard was had to the welfare of all parties’.58 Where the male was under the age of 24, it was a valid defence on a first offence to argue that the defendant may have had reasonable cause to believe the girl was over 16 (under the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1922). Moral welfare workers in the dioceses of Liverpool and Chester reported a range of strategies: ‘in two areas the police often take boys before the court and obtain probation orders. In three other[s] … the police interview the boy but take no action. In the rest of the areas the police do not take any action concerning the boy.’ However, ‘if the man concerned is over 23 he is always taken before the court and sometimes receives a prison sentence’.59 On balance, therefore, the preference was heavily against the prosecution of young males for sex with underage girls. For boys, sexual danger was viewed almost wholly in terms of the threat of the male ‘pervert’, a folk devil that involved the conflation of fear of homosexuality with paedophilia.60 The press coverage of the trial and acquittal of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Hampshire, in 1953 for an indecent assault on a 14-year-old scout was accompanied by references to similar cases as ‘this evil scourge’.61 The Wolfenden Report of 1957, whilst recommending the decriminalisation of homosexuality, was keen to instate an age of consent of 21 for sexual acts between males (enacted in England and Wales in 1967), establishing a far lengthier period of protection/control for boys than for girls. In Scotland, where homosexuality was not decriminalised until 1982, largely on account of the continued influence of the churches on public life, prosecutions (including those for assaults on minors) were very rare, largely because of the Scottish rule of double corroboration but also because of concerns that publicity would encourage ‘indecency’.62 Yet there were notable ambiguities in the ways in which male youth and sexual offences, including ‘gross indecency’, were discussed. Boys were not necessarily viewed as innocent victims, but in some instances as potential ‘blackmailers’. When six schoolboys aged 10–12 were found to have been ‘soliciting men to pick them up’ in the Miles Platting area of Manchester in 1953, the Assize court judge, trying the 29-year-old man charged with offences against, described them as ‘repulsive little pests’ and agreed that they should be named to protect other adults.63 However, whilst girls had for some time been sent to different institutions depending on their level of sexual experience because their sexuality was seen as problematic, no such distinction was

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made in the case of boys. Indeed cases of ‘sexual malpractice’ between boys were more likely to be referred for psychiatric treatment and attempts were made to keep them out of the justice system altogether. In Scotland in 1947, for example, the SACTRO recommended that ‘in cases where the sexual offence is to be regarded as a mere episode in adolescence’, medical advice should be sought and the ‘offender’ should only be prosecuted if he refused to submit to treatment.64 Only a very small number of sexual offence cases involving boys were brought before the Dundee police courts for the periods sampled. A mere 0.4 per cent of all charges faced by male juveniles consisted of ‘lewd practices’ or indecent exposure in semi-public spaces (doorways, closes); there were none for unlawful carnal knowledge (statutory rape). Sexual offences were only slightly more prevalent in the Manchester sample (one per cent of all charges faced by male juveniles), and included one 1947 case in which a 16-year-old boy was bound over to be of good behaviour for being ‘party to an act of gross indecency’ with another unknown male in a passage off a street in the Ancoats area of the city.65 In 1953 the most widely used charge was for indecent assault on girls under 16, carried out by boys whose ages ranged from 10 to 15; a probation order was also imposed on a 15-year-old boy for an indecent assault on a 7-year-old male. In 1959 charges mainly related to a group of four boys aged 9–11 who were given absolute discharges for indecent assaults allegedly carried out on a 5-year-old girl on two consecutive days in the April holidays, suggesting inappropriate and aggressive sex play. Indeed, the previous December had seen a much publicised case in which five Wythenshawe boys aged 10–12 had taken two girls of a similar age into the woods, tied them up, and committed indecent assaults against them; they were dealt with through probation and remand home orders.66 In the Manchester sample for 1965 a small number of cases relate to underage sex between older peers, including a case in which a 15-year-old boy was given a probation order for his involvement with a 14-year-old girl. Most such cases involving boys and girls of a similar age were dealt with through fines or conditional discharges. A very different type of case involved indecent assaults by teenage boys on much younger girls, for which probation orders and forms of custody were used as methods of disposal; most of these cases were also adjourned, with boys sent to Rose Hill remand home for the preparation of medical and psychiatric reports to inform the court’s decision (in one case a report was submitted by the Child Guidance Clinic). Sexual deviancy in boys was more likely to be viewed as a psychiatric problem requiring personal treatment or informal advice, whilst in girls it

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continued to be thought about mainly as a social and moral problem, with girls requiring protection from both themselves and others. The ‘gymslip mother’ Outside the mechanism of the law and policing, the ‘wayward girl’ was befriended, advised, assisted, trained and reformed by an informal network of voluntary organisations as well as the postwar local authority children’s department. A key form of intervention was offered by the moral welfare worker. This work had its origins in the lateVictorian social purity and ‘rescue’ movement, which had aimed to save ‘fallen women’ and rehabilitate them through religious instruction, needlework and laundry to become domestic servants for the middle classes.67 By the 1920s the residential institutions run by moral welfare workers focused on two groups: younger adolescent girls (including victims of sexual assault), and unmarried mothers abandoned by the putative fathers of their babies, whose only other recourse was the workhouse.68 Moral welfare work was delivered through the voluntary sector and overwhelmingly through the churches. Whilst emerging from an evangelical and voluntary tradition, moral welfare workers were increasingly likely to be professionally trained through the Josephine Butler Memorial House in Liverpool (founded 1920), which, uniquely, combined social work instruction with moral and ethical theology (for all denominations). The ‘rescue’ homes that were founded in the late-Victorian era continued into the 1950s, in some cases with little in the way of regime change. The Dundee and District Female Rescue Home in Lochee Road had been set up in 1886 for young women ‘at an early age led away into sin and ruin’. It aimed to train them for two years in laundry, needlework and housewifery in order to transform their ‘manner and appearance’ through ‘Christian influence’.69 By the mid-1930s, girls admitted to the home were all in their teens, referred in many cases by parents who were ‘at their wits end’, but also by social workers, probation officers and policewomen.70 Rebranded as the Cobden Street Girls’ Training Home by the late 1940s, the home was increasingly used by the local authority Children’s Department to accommodate girls entrusted to its care. Singing, country dancing and Saturday afternoon outings were added to the programme of activity. Despite the change of name, however, the focus on laundry-work as the main mechanism of reform continued into the 1950s.71 There were also two mother and baby homes for unmarried mothers in Dundee itself: St Ronan’s, run by the Scottish Episcopal Church,

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and Florence Booth House, run by the Salvation Army.72 Most other provision was national. The Roman Catholic Church in Scotland ran just one mother and baby home – at Bishopton, Renfrewshire – administered by the nuns of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd. Similarly, the Church of Scotland ran just the Lansdowne House maternity home in Glasgow which, like the Catholic home, took girls from across the country. When waiting lists were too long, young women were referred to non-denominational homes (in Edinburgh and Aberdeen), which made use of the services of Catholic chaplains and Protestant ministers to encourage the religious observance that was viewed as important to the rehabilitation of the unmarried mother. No outdoor moral welfare worker was appointed in Dundee despite attempts by the Church of Scotland to fill such a post in 1944, although an appointment was made in Caithness, jointly funded by the Church of Scotland and the Scottish Episcopal Church.73 In Manchester a much more comprehensive programme of outdoor, as well as residential, provision had been run under the auspices of the Church of England since the First World War through the work of the Manchester Diocesan Council for Moral Welfare Work. This included a maternity home for ‘young’ unmarried mothers: the ‘Heywood’ home, originally opened in 1917 (renamed ‘St Anne’s’ home in 1952). A further mother and baby home, Enniesmore, in Lancashire, provided long-stay accommodation from 1927 to 1958: mothers could live with their children, engaging in paid work during the day, for up to two years after the birth. Outdoor workers offered advice to parents and adolescents alike and acted as a mediator in family disputes. During the 1940s a small number of cases of underage pregnancy came to light each year, including three cases involving 15-year-olds in 1946. In 1950 the Manchester Committee assisted a 16-year-old girl who had been ‘turned out of home’ by her father who had (wrongly) suspected she was pregnant. A year later it tried to help a pregnant 13-year-old girl who had been defamed in court (and hence in the local press) when she appeared to give evidence against the putative father. When three schoolgirls were found to be pregnant by boys from a neighbouring school in 1951, the worker arranged a meeting between headteachers and education advisers.74 In addition to these Anglican activities, the Salvation Army ran a mother and baby home in Manchester, as did the Methodist Mission, which also employed a deaconess who had been trained at the Josephine Butler home as an outdoor worker. Similarly, the Catholic Moral Welfare Council in Manchester employed two nuns and a laywoman who undertook moral welfare work.

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During the Second World War the rate of live births outside marriage had risen in England and Scotland. Both the Ministry of Health (England and Wales) and Scottish Office instructed local authorities to assist all unmarried mothers within their areas.75 They did so by turning to the voluntary sector, already a key provider of a broad range of services. Young women were put in touch with outdoor moral welfare workers (where available) or referred to maternity homes run by the appropriate denomination. Despite the emergence of the welfare state, which was seen as providing for physical and material need, church agencies (Catholic and Protestant) argued that they had a vital role to play in offering spiritual and moral care as well as assistance with ethical decisions; this role was paramount in assisting the unmarried mother and enabling her to come to a decision as to whether to keep her baby or place it for adoption. In addition to the role of local authorities in ensuring provision, some element of national coordination (as well as policy lobbying) had also been carried out since 1918 in England and Wales by the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child and, since 1945, by the Scottish Council for the Unmarried Mother.76 As the historian Callum Brown has demonstrated, the late 1940s and early 1950s can be viewed as a period of ‘moral austerity’: concerns about the breakdown of values during wartime led to an emphasis, within political and civil society institutions, on the importance of the family, marriage, moral purity and church attendance as part of the effort of postwar reconstruction. There is some evidence that this was reflected in behaviours as well as broader social attitudes. Despite the much-touted breakdown of moral standards during the war, rates for live births outside marriage in Scotland were lower in the late 1950s than at any other point in the twentieth century.77 The social historian Pat Thane has suggested that the 1950s were an unusual decade in that marriages were longer-lasting and family structures less complex than in preceding or subsequent epochs.78 Nevertheless, the reassertion of moral purity was far from stable, and its frameworks were increasingly challenged, rhetorically, by a less deferential postwar generation and, statistically, by continued increases in ‘illegitimacy’ rates in England (late 1950s) and Scotland (1960s). The labelling of the ‘gymslip’ or ‘teenage’ mother as a social phenomenon can be dated to the beginning of 1959 in England, when local authorities, moral welfare workers, social policy-makers and other commentators reviewed statistical profiles for the previous year. In Manchester the city’s Medical Officer of Health reported that births to girls aged 14–16 had more than doubled between 1954 and 1958

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– from five to 13 – in line with a similar trend for England and Wales as a whole.79 The statistics generated significant debate. Conservative councillor (for Rusholme), Dr Kathleen Ollerenshaw drew attention to ‘the large number of “shot-gun” marriages of upper-form schoolgirls in the city’, calling for ‘a tightening up of moral standards and closer supervision by parents’. The Diocesan Council for Moral Welfare Work was already aware that around two-thirds of marriages involving girls aged 16–19 took place when they were already pregnant.80 Its secretary Anne Campbell resisted calls to man the moral barricades. Rather, she argued that there was a multiplicity of causes, including ‘earlier physical maturity’, stating that ‘the best we can do is to try and impress on young people the responsibility involved and the sacred nature of sexual intercourse’.81 Moreover, the rise in the school-leaving age and the expansion of sixth-form education for girls increased the likelihood that the ‘young mother’ might, indeed, be wearing school uniform. The association of the ‘gymslip’ with childhood and innocence further sensationalised the ‘problem’. Particularly high rates of pregnancies involving girls under 17 were recorded in the ‘south Manchester’ area of the diocese (which included Moss Side as well as the new housing estates of Wythenshawe), constituting a third of ‘illegitimacy’ cases dealt with by diocesan workers there in 1959.82 Case books for this area show that a total of 136 girls under the age of 17 were assisted in the years 1960–68, 39 per cent of whom were still at school.83 Putative fathers were mostly one to three years’ older than the expectant mothers, suggesting that pregnancies mainly resulted from relationships between peers.84 However, discussion of teenage pregnancies was highly gendered, in that very little interest was shown in the putative fathers, whose situation was rarely ­discussed. Across the 1960s increases in both the overall number of live births outside marriage and those specifically to girls under 17 were noted. In England and Wales 5.9 per cent of births out of wedlock were to girls under 17 in 1968 compared to 4.4 per cent in 1960. In Scotland, too, there was some increase: to 4.1 per cent in 1968 from 3.1 per cent in 1960.85 Clear discrepancies between parts of the UK were explained in terms of religious influences, as well as differences in migration patterns and social structures (particularly between urban and rural areas). As an article in a public health journal explained, rates were lower in Wales because ‘the Churches have retained more hold over individual conduct than in the industrial and commercial areas of England’.86 Figures for both Northern Ireland and Eire remained low and static reflecting the continued dominance of religion in social and

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public life.87 There were also differences between cities. In Scotland the highest rate for births outside marriage was experienced in Dundee: 118 per 1,000 live births in 1968 compared to 104 for Glasgow, 95 for Aberdeen and 89 for Edinburgh. Similarly, Manchester recorded the highest rate for any city in England: 174 per 1,000 live births in 1968 compared to 155 in London, 124 in Leeds, 117 in Birmingham and 115 in Newcastle. High rates in both these cities were explained in terms of availability of accommodation and, more significantly, job opportunities for young women, which attracted those seeking ‘new’ lives in urban areas. Those who found themselves pregnant may have moved to these cities to escape the censure of family and neighbours. Despite low rates of births outside marriage in Ireland, young Irish women travelled to England and Scotland to have their babies and/or give them up for adoption: 20 per cent of unmarried mothers helped by the Roman Catholic church in Scotland (eastern province) were reported to have come from Ireland in 1963 (9 per cent in 1959).88 Girls’ experiences of moral welfare work, and hence of pregnancy, depended on the agencies to whom they were referred, which in turn was shaped by their response to the changing ‘moral’ climate of the period. The Church of England ‘outdoor’ workers in Manchester were very much aware that ‘moral welfare’ in its traditional form was outmoded and were attempting to develop a more modern approach that moved away from the labels of ‘sin’ and ‘the fall’ but still aimed to promote the ‘purity of life’.89 They were critical of the strict ethos of the maternity homes run by the Salvation Army, which they did not recommend for the majority of teenage girls; but exception was made for girls of a ‘rougher type’ with no settled home life who might respond to the regime.90 Attitudes and approaches varied; even within denominations there were splits between liberal and more traditional positions, with the latter critical of the work that was carried out with unmarried mothers. Whilst there was some evidence of denominations working together, this was not always possible. The Church of England and Church of Scotland made clear statements in support of artificial birth control, initially in the context of married women, in 1958 and 1960 respectively.91 For the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland, however, contrasting attitudes towards birth control and hence sex education meant that the use of homes and agencies run by other denominations was simply not an option. In 1962 the Scottish Council for the Unmarried Mother consulted a range of organisations as to whether there was a need for one specialist mother and baby home to take girls under the age of 18. For the Catholic Social Enquiry Office (eastern

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province), this was problematic since it was assumed that the moral education offered was likely to be Protestant and to advocate birth control.92 It seems likely, too, that some younger Catholic women were choosing not to approach their church for help because of the shame attached to ‘illegitimacy’. The church expressed concern about young Catholic women who had booked themselves into mother and baby homes run by other denominations and where adoptions were arranged to non-Catholic families.93 Lansdowne House, run by the Church of Scotland, was presented in 1956 as offering modern and well-equipped facilities. Instruction in handicrafts and childcare was offered, as well as help in finding employment and accommodation upon leaving, within an atmosphere of ‘Christian fellowship and influence’ shaped by the home’s own chaplain. Here, as in most other mother and baby homes, it was assumed that girls would stay for 5–6 months, including at least six weeks after the confinement. Increasingly, however, the pressure of numbers (around eighty passed through the home each year) as well as the lowering of the average age of mothers assisted, made it difficult for staff to cope. In 1961 it was reported that around half of the girls were aged just 15–17 years: ‘it is not easy for a schoolgirl, used to an active life, to adjust herself to life in a mother and baby home and to the experience of motherhood. This fact in itself has created the need for a different type of supervision and … has placed heavier responsibilities on the staff.’94 By 1967 in Manchester the Church of England’s moral welfare workers were concerned about provision in one of their own diocesan homes, St Agnes’s, where staffing was deemed inadequate.95 Indeed a survey of twenty-six mother and baby homes conducted in 1968 found confusion about their purpose and function and reported that most were ‘shabby and uncomfortable’.96 The concept of the ‘mother and baby’ home, with its emphasis on institutionalisation and discipline, was outmoded; this was apparent in the decision of the Scottish Council for the Unmarried Mother to work towards the closing down of these institutions.97 Alternative models, including schemes involving ‘flatlets’ for independent living, were initiated by the late 1960s. Some young unmarried mothers had been boarded out with sympathetic families on an ‘au pair’ basis; whilst this was on a small scale, there were hopes that it might be expanded.98 It is a common perception that unmarried teenagers, forced into mother and baby homes, were coerced into placing their babies for adoption.99 Although in some cases accurate,100 this assumes the hegemony of middle-class values. Delaney’s A Taste of Honey commented on the relationship between shame and gossip in working-class

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Salford, but it shows too that unwed motherhood was also absorbed into everyday life: ‘Helen’, the mother of 15-year-old ‘Jo’, had become pregnant herself during wartime and, indeed, marries during the course of the play. Jo herself is presented as making a home for herself, outside the provision of the state or the voluntary sector. The adoption laws prohibited adoption within the first six weeks after birth to prevent sudden decisions. The aim of most moral welfare workers, when informed of cases of teenage pregnancy, was to assist in decisions about adoption, and to help young women to engage with the realities of their situation. In the earlier decades of the 1930s and 1940s, single mothers were positively encouraged to keep their babies because it was assumed that it made further pregnancy less likely. There was no clear assumption that adoption was better, although in the case of very young mothers it was certainly agreed to be a likely outcome by the 1960s. The Church of England outdoor moral welfare worker in central Manchester was highly critical of the local adoption society for indulging in ‘sermonizing and moral judgements’ that made the unmarried mother ‘feel sinful’.101 Whilst taboos were lessening, some agencies continued to use older social purity discourses.102 A range of evidence shows that the single most important factor affecting the likelihood of adoption was the attitude taken by the young mother’s own parents.103 In some cases both mother and grandparents changed their minds about adoption after the birth and agreed to take the baby home with them.104 It is likely that those who made use of mother and baby homes were more likely to make use of adoption (around 50 per cent) compared to those who made their own provisions (10 per cent).105 In 1964 just over half of the babies born at Lansdowne House were placed for adoption: ‘most of the other babies were taken back to their mothers’ families but a few girls decided to keep their babies on their own without support of their parents’.106 The home’s matron described the counselling role that she performed: One of the first things [she] has to do is to help the girl’s people to win their way to the other side of the shame that they feel has been brought upon them. And the girl … is helped to think constructively, and learn to look after the little life for which she’s now responsible … Shall she take the baby with her and face it out? Or should she part with it? … Which is right for her? Which gives the best chance to the child?107

Anglican moral welfare workers in Manchester similarly aimed to counsel young women on the problems of coping with the ‘moral

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condemnation of others’ and of dealing with ‘emotional pressures’ mounted by their own parents in order to make an ‘objective’ decision.108 There were, nevertheless, considerable divergences between homes that cannot be explained in terms of denominational difference. Case registers sampled for the Salvation Army’s Florence Booth House, Dundee, show a significant propensity for adoption, with only 20 per cent of mothers under 17 taking their babies home.109 Yet the teenagers who had their babies at the Army’s home in Manchester (for the sampled years) were extremely likely to keep their babies: 66 per cent of under 17s in 1959–60 and 80 per cent of under 17s in 1965–66. One of these was a 15-year-old girl who had originally been sent to an approved school and was referred to the mother and baby home for the duration of her pregnancy. After the birth of her baby she went back to her home where her family helped her to support her child.110 Case records relating to the Church of England’s moral welfare activity in South Manchester similarly suggest that, of 28 girls under the age of 17 who were assisted in 1966, at least eleven (40 per cent) kept their babies.111 Local cultures, which shaped the responses of girls’ immediate families as well as the intervention of other agencies, were extremely significant in affecting the likelihood of adoption as well as other decisions made during pregnancy. In England as a whole there was evidence by 1970 of ‘decreased demand for mother and baby homes of the traditional type’, which was suggestive of a more tolerant social attitude as well as young women’s greater desire for independence. In Scotland, however, demand had risen in the late 1960s and seems to have been linked to the tendency for young unmarried mothers to go way from home to have their babies to escape local censure and gossip.112 The shame and stigma attached to births outside marriage varied between communities. As Brown has argued, the Catholic island of South Uist in the Western Isles, where the taboo against unmarried motherhood remained extremely strong, probably lay at one extreme. It might be contrasted with urban industrial areas such as south-east Essex where births outside marriage received little local censure.113 Across the period, the term ‘illegitimacy’ was used widely to denote lack of legal (and hence social) status, for both child and mother. Indeed, gradual attempts to remove the distinction between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ were slower in Scotland than in England, suggestive of the more profound hold of the churches over social life and of a slower response to the modernising agenda.114 The affinity of opposites that had brought religious organisations and unmarried mothers together was finally broken with the formation of local authority social

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service departments in 1970, which brought social work provision (as well as coordination) within the local state and saw the final closure of most old-style mother and baby homes. The introduction of legal abortion in 1967 also had a significant effect, although this too was regionally inflected. In Manchester it was argued that this was easier to obtain than the pill (notionally available to single women from 1967) because local hospitals had a ‘more liberal’ reputation than those in surrounding areas.115 National estimates suggested that two-thirds of 15-year-olds who became pregnant in 1971 went on to obtain abortions, foreshadowing a new social trend in which sexual intercourse was finally separated from reproduction, marriage and family life.116 Conclusion The assumption that girls were delinquent because of their sexuality was reflected in the stereotyping of the ‘problem girl’, ‘good time girl’ and ‘gymslip mother’ across the twentieth century, for which there was no male equivalent. Tamara Myers’ study of Montreal in Canada shows a different model emerging in the postwar period, where the ‘immoral conduct’ of boys (heterosexual as well as homosexual) became an area of concern for the juvenile court from the 1940s onwards. This resulted from a very particular local context: the raising of the age category of the juvenile delinquent from 16 to 18 and the setting up of a juvenile morality squad, consisting of male police officers, who rounded up couples in parks and public spaces in the city.117 This was unparalleled in British cities where moral regulation followed an older sexual double standard and was seen as the job of women police and social workers. Girls were far more likely than boys to be brought before the courts for status offences relating to ‘moral danger’. While criminal proceedings for sexual offences were specific to boys, they were brought in very small numbers and boys might be diverted into psychiatric treatment, including Child Guidance Clinics, because these behaviours were viewed as anti-social. Girls, not boys, were the continued focus of medico-moral concerns. A web of agencies, both state and voluntary, converged on the figure of the ‘problem girl’ with the intention of befriending, assisting and reforming her. In some cases they were of real and substantial practical benefit, enabling girls to negotiate a disapproving family, move out of abusive circumstances and find accommodation or work, assisting in decisions about pregnancy and hence helping girls to achieve independence. In other situations, however, independent young women were infantilised and institutionalised. Whether challenged or accepted, the gendered rhetoric of

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shame continued to shape the experience of sexuality and unmarried pregnancy into the 1960s. Nevertheless, tensions were increasingly visible by the 1960s, leading to the collapsing of the paradigm. From the 1880s until 1970 the Christian churches were key providers of ‘moral welfare’ work and, in Scotland in particular, continued to influence policy in this area. By the late 1960s, however, their inability to adapt to cultural change, the restructuring of state social service provision, and an increasing pace of secularisation signalled the end of an era. Notes 1 F. Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England Since 1830 (London: Routledge, 1987); R. Davidson (2000) Dangerous Liaisons: a Social History of Venereal Disease in Twentieth-Century Scotland (Amsterdam: Rodolphi, 2000). 2 NRS, ED15/583 Illegitimacy 1970–73. Report of the working party of officials on the problems of unmarried mothers and their children, December 1969. 3 Mahood, Policing Gender; Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare. 4 L. Bland, Banishing the Beast. English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885– 1914 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). 5 MRC, MSS.378/MWWA/8/1/12–17, Moral Welfare Workers Association, meeting with Miss Barker, chief superintendent of the Metropolitan Women Police, September 1962. 6 An anomaly in Scots law meant that, until 1958, those over 16 who were not of Scottish domicile might marry in Scotland without parental consent; this led to the phenomena of ‘elopement’ to Gretna Green. 7 Jackson, Women Police, pp. 138–70. 8 L. Bland and F. Mort, ‘Look out for the “good time” girl: dangerous sexualities as a threat to national health’, in B. Schwartz (ed.), Formations of Nation and People (London: Routledge, 1984); M. Nava, ‘Wider horizons and modern desire: the contradictions of American and racial difference in London, 1935–45’, New Formations, 37 (1996), 71–91; S. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 71–106; Davidson, Dangerous Liaisons. 9 S. D’Cruze and L.A. Jackson, Women, Crime and Justice Since 1660 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), pp. 154–9. 10 MEN, 3 June 1947, p. 1. 11 MRC, MSS.463/EY/A12/12, Eileen Younghusband Papers, ‘The Problem Girl’. 12 Ibid., p. 3. 13 Ibid., pp. 7–8.

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14 Ibid., p. 8. 15 DC, 27 September 1947, p. 5. 16 TNA, MH102/895, Absconders from Approved Schools soliciting American soldiers, letter to the Home Office, 17 May 1943. 17 GACS, Reports, 1944, p. 287. 18 Davidson, Dangerous Liaisons, p. 249. 19 TNA, MH102/895. 20 J. Hampshire, ‘The politics of school sex education policy in England and Wales from the 1940s to the 1960s’, Social History of Medicine, 18.1 (2005), 87–105. 21 R. Davidson and G. Davis, The Sexual State. Sexuality and Scottish Governance 1950–80 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p. 201. 22 TNA, ED121/146 youth clubs (sex education). 23 M.L. Adams (1997) The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality (University of Toronto Press), p. 32. 24 J. Giles, ‘“Playing hard to get”: working-class women, sexuality and respectability in Britain, 1918–40’, Women’s History Review, 1.2 (1992), 239–55. 25 H. Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 295. 26 GACS, Reports, 1955, pp. 545–5. 27 C.S. Smith, M.R. Farrant and H.J. Marchant, The Wincroft Project (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1972), pp. 26 and 84. 28 T.C.N. Gibbens, ‘Supervision and Probation of Adolescent Girls’, British Journal of Delinquency, 10.2 (1959), 84–103. 29 British Social Biology Council, Women of the Streets (London: Secker & Warburg, 1955), p. 106. The 1966 White Paper, The Child, the Family and the Young Offender, proposed that the age for ‘care and protection’ should be lowered to 16. 30 Jackson, Women Police, p. 142. 31 NRS, ED15/583, report; TNA, MH102/1452 Proposed maternity home for pregnant girls committed to approved schools, 1946–7. 32 TNA, MEPO2/6332, Children and young persons in need of care or protection 1943–1952. 33 GMPM, ‘Clubs’, Sovereign Coffee Bar, report of occurrence, 21 August 1963. 34 CCAR, Dundee, 1966. 35 Davidson, Dangerous Liaisons. 36 Jackson, Women Police, pp. 99–100, and p. 106, n. 83. 37 MEN, 16 November 1952, p. 5; 23 November, p. 1; 24 November, p. 1; 2 December 1953, p. 1; 15 December p. 8. 38 MEN, 13 November, p. 1. 39 MEN, 7 November 1953, p. 5. 40 TNA, HO287/1290, inspection, 1957. 41 MEN, 2 July 1953, p. 5.

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42 For example M. Ellison, Missing from Home (London: Pan, 1964), pp. 55–8. 43 GMPM, ‘Clubs’, News of the World, 17 January 1965. 44 Corporation of Manchester, Watch Committee Minutes, 17 July 1958. 45 NRS, HH55/734 Reports of HMI of Constabulary, Dundee, 1964–65, inspection of policewomen by Janet Gray, 26 October 1964. 46 C. Waters, ‘“Dark Strangers in Our Midst”: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947–1963’, Journal of British Studies, 36 (1997), 207–38; M. Collins, ‘Pride and Prejudice: West Indian Men in Twentieth-Century Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 40 (2001), 391–418. 47 Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare, p. 28. 48 NRS, HH55/1681. 49 Gibbens, ‘Supervision and probation’, p. 101. 50 Jackson, Women Police, p. 182. 51 MEN, 22 January 1959, p. 7. 52 T.C.N. Gibbens, ‘Juvenile Prostitution’, British Journal of Delinquency, 3 (1957–8) 3–12, here 3. 53 A. Brown and D. Barrett, Knowledge of Evil: Child Prostitution and Child Sexual Abuse in Twentieth-Century England (Cullompton: Willan, 2002). 54 Fyvel, Insecure Offender, p. 96. 55 All England Law Reports 1 (1953), 320–4, Bowers v. Smith. 56 E.R. Baker, Police Promotion Handbooks. No. 3. General Police Duties (London: Butterworths, 1969), p. 147. 57 GMPM, Minutes of Number 1 District Policewomen’s Conference, 14 May 1963. 58 MRC, MSS.378/MWWA/8/1/12–17 meeting with Miss Barker, September 1962. 59 Ibid. 60 Ellison, Missing from Home, p. 49. 61 MEN, 17 November 1953, p. 3. 62 Davidson and Davis, Sexual State, p. 51. 63 MEN, 3 December 1953, p. 9. 64 NAS, ED15/112, SACTRO, report on the psycho-therapeutic treatment of certain offenders, 19 December 1947. 65 See also Wills, ‘Delinquency, Masculinity and Citizenship’, p. 164. 66 MEN, 9 January 1959, p. 1. 67 L. Mahood, The Magdalenes (London: Routledge, 1990). 68 V. Cree, From Public Streets to Private Lives: the Changing Task of Social Work (Aldershot: Avebury, 1995). 69 DCA, GD/X406 Women’s Mission to Women, 4/1 Annual Report 1886. 70 Ibid., Annual Reports 1934 and 1938. 71 Ibid., Annual Report 1956. 72 The Salvation Army ran sixteen maternity homes across the UK in 1950 (including one in Belfast and two in Glasgow) providing maternity beds for around 750 women per year in the 1950s, rising to 950 in the 1960s. 73 GACS, Reports, 1945, p. 240, and 1956, p. 315.

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74 MCA, Records of the Manchester Diocesan Association for Preventive and Rescue Work, M629/3/15 Annual Reports 1916–59. 75 Ministry of Health, Circular 2866, 1943; NRS, ED15/583. 76 P. Thane and T. Evans, Sinners? Scroungers? Saints?Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 77 C.G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2009), p. 32. 78 P. Thane, ‘Unmarried Motherhood in England and Wales, 1918–1990: ESRC End of Award Report, RES-000-23-0545’ (Swindon: ESRC, 2008). 79 MEN, 10 February 1959, p. 1; 13 February 1959, p. 6. Births to those aged 14–16 were cited as increasing nationally from 664 in 1954 to 992 in 1957. 80 MCA, M629/3/15, Annual Report 1957. 81 MEN, 11 February 1959 p. 8; 13 February 1959, p. 6. Report on the Youth Service in England and Wales (Albemarle Report), BPP, 1959–60, Cmnd. 929, p. 14, noted that puberty tended to occur on average before the age of 15 by the 1950s as a result of improvements in standards of living including nutrition. 82 MCA, M629/1/14/1–2 South Manchester Moral Welfare Committee Case Books (Maternity) 1958–69. 83 Ibid. Of those who worked, the majority were engaged as shop assistants (39 per cent), in office work (28 per cent) or factory work (22 per cent). 84 Ibid. 85 NRS, ED15/583 Illegitimacy 1970–73. 86 R.A.N. Hitchens and E.B. James, ‘Premarital intercourse, venereal disease and young people: recent trends’, Public Health, 79.5 (1965), 258– 70, here 266. 87 Ibid. 88 Scottish Catholic Archives, Edinburgh (hereafter SCA) DE122/19, Archdiocese of St Andrew and Edinburgh, Catholic Enquiry and Social Service Office, 1963–73, Annual Reports. The ‘eastern province’ covered the whole of Scotland except Glasgow and Motherwell, which constituted the ‘western province’. 89 MCA, M629/1/1/2, Minutes of Commission on Moral Welfare Work, 1963–7. 90 Ibid. 91 Brown, Death of Christian Britain, p. 242. 92 SCA, DE122/21, Catholic Social Service Committee, general correspondence and documents 1962–3. See also Brown, Death of Christian Britain, p. 24; in 1968 Pope Paul VI banned all artificial contraception as morally wrong. 93 SCA, DE122/14 Catholic Enquiry Office, 1960. 94 GACS, Reports, 1961, pp. 364–5. 95 MCA, M629/1/13/1, Senior social worker’s files, 1964–67, notes for report of 1967.

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96 J. Nicholson, Mother and Baby Homes (London: Allen & Unwin, 1968). 97 Cree, Public Streets, p. 142. 98 NRS, ED 15/583. 99 See for example, L. Sage, Bad Blood (London: Fourth Estate, 2000) p. 237, also cited in Brown, Death of Christian Britain, p. 203. Lorna Sage preferred to marry the father of her child rather than be sent to a home ‘where you repented on your knees (scrubbed floors, said prayers), [and] had your baby (which was promptly adopted by a proper married people)’. 100 A. Patrick, The Baby Laundry for Unmarried Mothers (London: Simon & Schuster, 2012). 101 MCA, M629/1/1/2, Minutes of subcommittees 1958–61, questionnaires completed by moral welfare workers in 1958. 102 Patrick, Baby Laundry. 103 V. Wimperis, The Unmarried Mother and her child (London: Allen & Unwin, 1960); Patrick, Baby Laundry. 104 SCA, DE122/18, Catholic Enquiry and Social Service Office, Annual Report, 1961. 105 NRS, ED 15/583. 106 GACS, Reports, 1964, p. 321. 107 GACS, Reports, 1950, p. 294. 108 MCA, M629/1/1/2, questionnaires, 1958. 109 Salvation Army International Heritage Centre, London, Girls’ Statement Books 1 April 1953–31 March 1954, April 1959–March 1960, April 1965–March 1966. Also Statistics for Unmarried Mothers, 1949–70. Florence Booth House had 30 beds and approximately 60–70 girls were admitted per year (for stays of around six months each); some were Dundee residents but cases were drawn from across the central eastern area of Scotland. 110 Ibid. The Salvation Army’s ‘Oakhill’ home in Manchester closed in the mid-1950s and premises were opened instead at the ‘Adswood’ home in Salford. Around 30–40 cases were admitted per year. None involved girls under 17 in the 1953–54 sample. Two further cases involved girls who had been found in need of care or protection by the juvenile court but who, nevertheless, kept their babies; one was found accommodation in a mother and baby hostel in Worcestershire, another was found a ‘situation’ in Cheshire. 111 MCA, M629/1/14/1–2 South Manchester Moral Welfare Committee Case Books (Maternity) 1958–69. 112 GACS, Reports, 1965, p. 313. 113 Brown, Death of Christian Britain, p. 226. Dr A. Yarrow (1964) ‘Illegitimacy in South East Essex’, Medical Officer, 24 January, cited in NRS, ED 15/583, report, Appendix VII. 114 Through the Legitimacy Act of 1926 ‘illegitimate’ children might be legitimised by the subsequent marriage of their parents in England and Wales; the same change of status was not possible in Scotland until

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1968. It was not until 1987 that ‘illegitimacy’ was removed as a legal status; see Thane, ‘Unmarried Motherhood’, p. 8. 115 YDT, Young, Single and Pregnant (Manchester: YDT, 1973), p. 17. 116 F. Lafitte, ‘Abortion in Britain Today’, New Society, 14 December 1972, cited in Ibid., p. 5; H. Cook, ‘Teenage pregnancy in England: a historical perspective’, in P. Baker et al. (eds), Teenage Pregnancy and Reproductive Health (London: RCOG, 2007), pp. 3–16. 117 T. Myers, ‘Embodying Delinquency: Boys’ Bodies, Sexuality, and Juvenile Justice History in Early-Twentieth-Century Quebec’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 14.4 (2005), 383–414.

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6 Home, neighbourhood and community Louise Jackson and Angela Bartie In 1949 King George VI and his consort Queen Elizabeth issued a public message supporting the Home Secretary’s call for local action to prevent delinquency, in which they insisted that ‘a right standard of moral values, particularly when based on good influence in the home is of supreme importance’.1 For politicians, policy-makers and social workers, the ‘family’ was both the cause of, and the solution to, the problem of juvenile delinquency. This chapter offers a micro-political analysis of the regulation of young people in postwar Britain, examining models of authority and discipline, firstly within the intimacy of home and family, then in terms of immediate neighbourhood, and finally with regard to the broader local community (including agencies such as schools and churches). It focuses specifically on points of mediation and intervention, arguing that these offer some insight on actual experiences as well as idealised models of discipline. It shows that a wide range of state and voluntary sector agencies – even, as suggested here, the monarchy – were engaged in processes of ‘moralisation’ and ‘normalisation’ as they sought to comment on the social control mechanisms that were embedded in everyday life.2 These three sites – home, neighbourhood and community – can be evaluated as sets of social relationships in which power was unequally distributed and negotiated. They are examined here most crucially in terms of gender and generation, but also in relation to religion and ethnicity; the discussion centres on evidence relating to urban working-class communities in Manchester, Dundee and also Glasgow. The importance of mothers in forming emotional attachments to their children was increasingly stressed in childcare literature. Yet patriarchal frameworks, in which authority was derived from one’s ‘position’ and was associated with masculinity and maturity, continued as a key reference point in the 1940s and 1950s, in relation to home, school

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and associational life, and particularly with regard to adolescent boys. Ideas of duty, obligation and citizenship encompassed deference towards a chain of command. Increasingly, however, and most noticeably towards the end of the 1960s, young people themselves were likely to be viewed as a recognised group or set of stakeholders within communities, their opinions sought and valued, and attempts made to include them within initiatives as equal partners. Any shift needs to be qualified, however, as uneven, partial and not specifically a product of one decade. The sites of home, neighbourhood and community can also be analysed as physical spaces as well as social environments. Prescriptions about the correct use of specified places and objects (indoors and outdoors), as well as the construction of physical barriers and the demarcation of space as off-limits, are all mechanisms through which adults have sought to control the behaviours of young people. This chapter charts an intensification of the processes of spatial restriction and delimitation, linked to the re-housing of inner-city populations and the increasing association of the street with car usage rather than social interaction. It points, therefore, to a central paradox of the postwar period: that any gradual erosion of hierarchy and deference was accompanied by attempts at more rigorous control over public and, increasingly, commercial space through a process of restriction and exclusion. Home and family In his much-cited study The Policing of Families, French social scientist Jacques Donzelot characterised the twentieth-century growth of social intervention as a ‘tutelary complex’ through which technocrats and experts tightened a net of surveillance around working-class families. If the advice of experts was resisted, the more formal mechanisms of the law (child protection or criminal justice procedures) were invoked, so that the welfare agenda was reinforced through penality. The child or young person, the immediate object of the concerns of the national state, was positioned at the centre of ‘a series of concentric circles … the family circle, the circle of technicians and the circle of social guardians’.3 Thus, the disciplinary institution of the family, through which parents exercised control over their children, was itself subject to the scrutiny of other agencies. Donzelot also suggested, however, that attempts were made to form an alliance with parents, particularly mothers ‘as weaker members of the family’, exploiting conflict within the family, ‘in order to get a degree of consent rather than compulsion’ for state actions and interventions.4

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Donzelot’s thesis is to some degree helpful in analysing the relationship between the juvenile court and family life in postwar Britain (as well as France), although the suggestion that the ‘tutelary complex’ was totalising remains unconvincing and other claims need to be qualified. While some parents resented these intrusions, there are examples across the postwar period of parents and guardians who reported their children to the police for stealing from the family home, leading to criminal charges. Although this phenomenon appears to contradict popular assumptions about a parental duty to defend and support family, explanation can be found in oral history research on the ‘moral economy’ of working-class communities; theft from ‘one’s own’, particularly relatives or neighbours, was viewed with opprobrium in the 1950s as previously.5 Liverpool youth club boys interviewed by Mays agreed that it was wrong to steal from club mates or family members although ‘it was quite all right to steal from the large shops or stores because they did not feel that they were taking anything which belonged to the assistants personally’.6 In some cases children were causing their parents significant distress and hardship. One mother told Bolton magistrates in November 1947 that her 16-yearold son had neither held down a job nor brought home a regular wage since leaving school. Instead, he had sold the family’s clothing coupons and had continually raided the larder, ‘leaving nothing to eat for the rest of the family’.7 There was a continued expectation that young people who had left school should, of necessity, contribute to the working-class household economy.8 Manchester-based research conducted in the mid-1960s suggested that failure to keep a job was a particular crisis point for adolescents, leading to significant conflict with parents and, in some cases, homelessness.9 The idea of an alliance between magistrates and parents was most apparent in the clause of the Children and Young Persons Acts of 1933 and 1937 that enabled parents to prove to magistrates that they were unable to control their own children and to request that they be sent to an approved school.10 However, local newspaper coverage shows that magistrates did not consistently agree with, or reinforce, parental viewpoints. Indeed, this controversial clause, actively disliked by some magistrates, was removed in England and Wales in 1963. Rather, juvenile court magistrates acted as a mediator between young people and their parents, commenting on practices of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parenting, assessing and advising on the disciplinary regime within the family. The family was assumed to be the primary site through which children’s behaviour was regulated; a key objective of the juvenile court was to ascertain whether discipline was effectively delivered in

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the home, and, if not, to enable the state to intervene by making other arrangements for the child’s supervision. For many practitioners, including police, magistrates and probation officers, fathers in particular were associated with the maintenance of parental authority over children, and were expected to administer corporal punishment to an appropriate level, well into the postwar period. Child protection legislation was used to prosecute parents deemed to have caused ‘unnecessary suffering or injury to health’; in 1947, for example, a Dundee father was jailed for thirty days for ‘thrashing’ his sons, causing heavy bruising and leaving them in a distressed state.11 Yet clauses that dealt with ‘cruelty’ were not intended to affect ‘the right of any parent, teacher, or other person having the lawful control or charge of a child or young person to administer punishment to him’, maintaining the idea of the home as a private system of governance.12 In January 1959 Dundee’s Sheriff Inglis commented with approval on the actions of a father who had given his son ‘a good spanking’ for stealing a pair of football boots and a dagger from a house.13 Similarly, a father who was keen to impress on the sheriff that he was able to exercise appropriate control, told the court in 1953 that his son had ‘got a bit big for his breeches in the last three weeks and I have leathered him for it’.14 The lack of a disciplining hand was regularly invoked as a cause of misbehaviour in male children in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1946 a 15-year-old boy, accused of vandalising a number of Salford schools, was allegedly told by a male magistrate: ‘You are just a contemptible little squirt and you would not do this if you had a father who could tan the hide off you.’15 The use of the birch, rare in the years immediately before it was dispensed with in 1948, was nevertheless seen as an extension of the corporal punishment that fathers were expected to exercise in the home. In 1947 a Hulme boy who appeared before Manchester’s juvenile court was ordered to receive four strokes of the birch because he had ‘stolen money from his mother’s purse and had run away from home, sleeping in air raid shelters’. His mother was reported as saying: ‘I think it will do him good.’16 The acceptance of corporal punishment within a broader popular culture for those deemed troublemakers was demonstrated in the 1953 film Cosh Boy, which concludes with the 16-year-old Roy Walsh receiving from his new stepfather ‘the thrashing he so richly deserves’.17 The police discreetly withdraw, commenting ‘it’s all yours, mister’. Shocking to current-day audiences, the message is one that violent youth can only be held in check by the shame and threat of physical force. Roy’s criminality is blamed on ‘too much kindness’

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from his mother, widowed during the war, and the lack of ‘a man in the house’. His new stepfather tells him: ‘the magistrates will go lighter on you if they think I’ve given you a thrashing’, ignoring Roy’s weak plea that ‘you can’t touch me, it’s against the law’. Historian Deborah Thom has shown that corporal punishment was mainly discredited by the 1940s within the childcare advice literature produced by psychologists and educationalists, although it retained a significant presence in homes.18 Within youth justice it was a key reference point. If the ‘tutelary complex’ existed in Britain, the socio-educative approach was barely concealed for boys, given the continued emphasis for some magistrates on physical force as an ultimate and measured sanction. For girls, however, fatherhood was assumed to involve the provision of emotional support rather than physical discipline, particularly in the absence of a birth mother. In July 1947 a 14-year-old girl was brought before Manchester juvenile court by her father, who claimed that she was beyond his control and wanted her to be sent away. He alleged she had failed to come home one night, had not handed over her wages, and had stolen an item (‘a pair of toy glasses’) from the family home to give away to a friend. Earlier in the year she had been bound over by the court for ‘obtaining goods from her stepmother’s grocer’ by charging them to her account without permission. Chair of the magistrates’ panel, Mrs Evelyn Kershaw, dismissed the case brought by the father, counselling him to ‘try to show a little more affection and love to this girl’ who was ‘starved for affection’.19 In a similar case, a Salford father was told by magistrates that his 16-year-old daughter was ‘too big to be hit’ and that he should adopt more of ‘an attitude of give and take’. A local authority welfare officer reported that the man, separated from his wife, ‘continually shouts and nags’ at his daughter and had a very ‘fixed idea’ that ‘whatever he told the girl to do she must obey’.20 Both cases suggest that the concept of ‘emotional deprivation’, associated with the dislocation of families during wartime and increasingly popularised through the work of Bowlby, acted as an important reference point for juvenile court magistrates, particularly those who viewed themselves as ‘specialists’.21 In this they were assisted by the assessments and diagnoses of other practitioners who were similarly involved in making normative judgements about gendered parenting. Probation officers provided magistrates with detailed reports on the context of offending, including a juvenile’s material circumstances (parental income, employment, housing conditions), as well as on the character and personality of parents or guardians.22 They also routinely collated reports from

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headteachers on a juvenile’s educational ability, conduct, attitude and school attendance rate, as well as from other agencies (such as Child Guidance Clinics) where referrals had been made. Reports prepared by Glasgow probation officers in 1959 include specific comments throughout as to whether juveniles were ‘amenable to discipline’ and whether parents were ‘able to discipline their family’.23 These two assessments shaped recommendations regarding disposal: where both were deemed lacking, probation orders or approved school orders were more likely to be recommended. Probation officers’ reports are source materials that offer snapshots of the power dynamics within families, filtered through a highly subjective lens. They contain useful indicators of disciplinary methods used by some working-class parents in the 1950s in a particular urban industrial area, as well as offering the prescriptive commentaries of more middle-class practitioners on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parenting. This is not to say that all probation officers came from middle-class backgrounds or that, as individuals, they necessarily held the views that were articulated in the reports. Probation reports were a product of a particular form of discourse and set of professional practices. Yet they can also be read as the result of dialogue between parties, even though the outcome was articulated by the ‘expert’. Probation reports relating to girls, all of whom were reported for forms of theft, mostly referred to ‘discipline’ in general terms, although a parental decision that a 14-year-old girl should be ‘kept in and put to bed’ as ‘punishment’ for a shoplifting charge was viewed with approval.24 In such cases it was advised that girls’ leisure time should be ‘more closely supervised’; indeed, one mother decided that her daughter should be ‘withdrawn … from all activities outwith her home’.25 Parents tended to agree that girls should not be ‘spoiled’ by being given too much – particularly excessive pocket money.26 They also expected girls to carry out at least some housework and childcare to support their mothers in the home, which was viewed by probation officers as part of a successful disciplinary framework (unless it led to school non-attendance). Probation officers commented on the careful balancing of negative prohibition with constructive support: taking a genuine ‘interest’ and motivating one’s child through ‘praise and encouragement’. One 14-year-old girl who had a track record of ‘pilfering’ had already been subject to both a probation order and referral to a child guidance clinic, the latter reporting that she ‘more than anything else needs kind, sympathetic, but firm guidance. She likes to please and given good handling would probably respond on a simple level. It is doubtful if she can get this in her home’.27

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Whilst the omission of corporal punishment is notable for girls, it featured prominently in parental accounts of the disciplining of offending boys and received a certain amount of qualified approval from probation officers. It was always administered by fathers in the Glasgow reports: ‘the father is a good disciplinarian and has thrashed his son for his part in the offence. Both parents are decent and responsible.’28 Similarly, within Manchester’s working-class culture ‘day-to-day discipline’ tended to be exercised by mothers ‘with the father being used as the ultimate threat’ into the 1960s.29 According to probation officers the physical force that was exercised should itself be administered in a disciplined and measured manner: ‘the father is said to be firm with the boy and is not slow to administer a sound thrashing when this is required’ (our emphasis).30 Where fatherly discipline was ‘of a rough and ready nature’ or involved ‘flying into a rage’, it was recommended that ‘a more ordered supervision’ was required.31 Where fathers were absent, concerns were expressed about maternal indulgence leading to ‘too much freedom at home’.32 The ‘spoilt’ boy was effectively feminised: ‘The boy had an abundance of toys and playthings. He impresses as physically soft and used to getting everything granted.’33 Involvement in housework was less a point of focus than for girls, but there was, nevertheless, an assumption that the completion of chores contributed to strength of character by developing a sense of duty and responsibility.34 The issue of ‘working mothers’ as a cause of delinquency was a source of debate across the postwar era. In 1944 a conference of all those working in delinquency prevention in Manchester had commented on the need to encourage mothers ‘who had young children and could make no other adequate arrangements to stay at home’.35 The majority of the local conferences held in England and Wales in response to the Home Secretary’s 1949 circular recommended that mothers of school-age children should be discouraged from working full time.36 Professor of Child Health at the University of St Andrews, J.L. Henderson, told a Dundee audience in February 1953 that: ‘the employment of mothers of a young family in industry is one of our greatest social evils, and a relic of the bad old days of the industrial revolution. I have been distressed to find this practice so prevalent in Dundee.’37 The gender division of parenting within the home, including the need for the stay-at-home mother, was emphasised by Sir Alec-Douglas Home, as Minister of State at the Scottish Office. He was reported as stating that ‘the mother was the architect of the home, and was there to care for, feed, and entertain the children when they returned from school’ and to give them ‘a sense of being loved, wel-

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comed and wanted’. Concomitantly, ‘obedience, self-discipline, and leadership derived most surely from the father’s authority’.38 In 1954 the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland noted ‘with concern the increasing employment of married women in industry in so far as it tends, where there are children, to prevent the development of healthy and happy home life’.39 Yet the matter was complicated by the continued industrial need for women’s labour in cities such as Dundee and Manchester, as well as the importance of their wages for the household economy. In 1950 the LCC’s committee on juvenile delinquency commented that ‘the contribution of women through employment should never be encouraged at the expense of … the welfare of children’, but recognised that the expansion of nursery provision was a necessary response given the economic realities pressing many households.40 Nursery provision in Dundee remained meagre and inadequate with long waiting lists; those run by the local authority tended to prioritise ‘crisis’ cases where mothers were physically ill, in hospital or widowed. Nevertheless, four nurseries had been opened within the city’s mills and factories by 1953 to ‘attract female labour’.41 Significantly, provisional findings of research conducted using 100 Bristol juvenile court cases found that there was ‘no specific proof’ that working mothers could be singled out as ‘a major factor in the production of delinquents’.42 In terms of broader cultural representations of inadequate parenting, it was ‘the feckless mother’ and absent, idle or unemployed father who were consistently portrayed as the cause of delinquency, not the industrious. Character flaws or ‘feeblemindedness’ were linked to difficulty in fulfilling family duties, responsibilities and basic care requirements. The 1944 documentary Children of the City depicted the father of 13-year-old Alec as a ‘drunkard’ and his mother as ‘apathetic’. Similarly, the promotional booklet produced to accompany the 1947 film Children on Trial describes the scene in which 14-year-old Fred Watson, sent to an approved school for robbery, absconds and returns home: His mother was hunched in the rocking chair with a glass in her hand. Her voice and face were blurred with drunkenness. His sister sat in accustomed torpor on the unmade bed, holding the baby on her lap. The filth and disorder of the room was unspeakable … At last his mother spoke … ‘I don’t want you and your troubles around ’ere. Go away!’43

Fred’s probation officer describes his mother as ‘feckless and unstable’ to the juvenile court. Specialist social work for ‘problem families’ was

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carried out by voluntary organisations such as Family Service Units, or through specialist residential units such as Dundee’s St Mary’s Mothercraft Training Centre, founded in 1952, which offered mothers who were ‘young’, often ‘of low intelligence’ and sometimes guilty of child neglect, the ‘chance to pull’ themselves ‘together’.44 The possession or acquisition of self-discipline by parents was assumed to set the tone for discipline within the family. Cultural geographer David Sibley reminds us that control over others can also be exercised in the home through spatial and temporal ordering, quoting, by way of an example, an interview with ‘David’, a teenager in the late 1960s: ‘Dad had his special chair near the TV and radio in the living room and the rest of the family had their own recognized seating places … mother organized the house. She liked everything neat and tidy. Feet were not allowed on chairs and neither food nor friends could be taken upstairs.’45 Hierarchies of gender and generation were reinforced through the layout of furniture in the living room, whilst the activities of children and friends were regulated through special segregation. Although probation officer’s reports do not provide these types of detail, they do indicate the imposition of temporal regulations relating to inside/outside. For example, a 9-year-old Glasgow boy was ‘not allowed out after 6pm by his mother’, whilst an 11-year-old boy was told that ‘time to be in is 9pm’.46 Sometimes these strategies backfired and led to resentment: ‘the parents state that [he] is not allowed out a great deal in the evenings but from discussion he impressed as being capable of mischief when away from the authoritative eye’.47 One boy who was found to be engaged in persistent stealing from his family ‘was locked in his room by his father but he broke out’.48 Juveniles who ran away from home, in some cases rebelling against excessive discipline or abuse within the home, were demonstrating agency and resistance that was a rejection of the temporal and spatial restraints placed upon them.49 Using the typology developed by the sociologist Basil Bernstein during the 1960s to discuss the exercise of power within the family, Sibley discusses the relationship between spatial regulation and other forms of parental control. He argues that within the ‘positional’ family, power is explicitly claimed through ascribed status (as ‘father’ or household head), rules tend to be unexplained, obedience expected, and ‘clear unambiguous boundaries’ of space/time are maintained in relation to children’s activities.50 The ‘positional’ family has been contrasted with the ‘person-oriented’ family in which ‘children will have greater involvement in decision-making’, control may still be practised but is a matter of ‘negotiation and influence’ and boundary

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maintenance is more fluid.51 Given that these are ‘ideal types’, actual family situations suggest elements of both or, indeed, movement across a spectrum. In one Glasgow case, parents who had helped their son to convert a cellar below their house into ‘a clubroom’ for local boys found out that the latter had hoarded stolen goods on the premises. Described as ‘somewhat alarmed that their own well meaning scheme … had boomeranged on them’, they became ‘adamant that the cellar will be closed up’.52 The space itself was liminal: the cellar was neither within nor outside the home, and it was partly external to adult scrutiny. Indeed, boys’ propensity for ‘dens’ and hideaways was about the creation of secret and non-supervised spaces of their own. However, the trust that the parents had bestowed upon the boys was deemed abused, leading them to reinstate a clear boundary of exclusion. Within Bernstein’s model the ‘positional’ does not necessarily equate with the ‘authoritarian’ or the ‘patriarchal’. If we look at empirical examples, however, we find that they were often linked. Although corporal punishment was criticised by magistrates and probation officers if it was deemed excessive, forms of fathering that were closer to the ‘positional’ end of the spectrum were viewed as necessary and appropriate for ‘troublesome’ boys during the 1940s and 1950s. For girls, however, a more ‘personalising’ approach, involving ‘give and take’ as well as ‘praise and encouragement’ tended to be stressed. Both approaches, however, were profoundly shaped by assumptions about gender roles. The feminist concept of ‘patriarchy’ refers to the system in which ‘fathers control families and families are the units of social and economic reproduction’.53 As shown here, ‘patriarchy’ was a means to claim authority over other males as much as over female members of a household. For the sociologist Jeff Hearn, the gradual development of the modern (welfare) state from the late nineteenth century onwards had seen the replacement of ‘private patriarchy’ (the idea that the family formed its own self-governing sphere with a father at the head) with ‘public patriarchy’ (the broader sovereignty of male officials and public servants).54 This is demonstrated here in the assessments made by (male) bailies and probation officers of the exercise of male authority within the home. However, it is important not to overstate the shift from ‘private’ to ‘public’ patriarchy. Fathers’ authority was assumed to be primary; the state sometimes intervened when this broke down and it sought, where possible, to bolster it up again. Nevertheless, fathers who felt their authority had been threatened by their children sought support that they did not always receive from public officials. Arguably, the

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continued disruptive behaviour of sons who resented a father’s attempts at authoritarian rule was indicative that the model was unstable. It had been eroded, too, in situations where fathers had been absent for extensive periods during the war, leading to inter-generational conflict on their return.55 Increasingly, into the 1960s, research findings suggested that boys who came from homes where corporal punishment was routinely used were more likely to be ‘delinquent’.56 What is unclear is whether its use actively encouraged boys’ disobedience, or whether parents turned to physical punishment thinking they had run out of other options when sons got into ‘serious’ trouble. Thom highlights the difficulties faced by historians attempting to generalise about experiences of family discipline, arguing that ‘many cultures of child-rearing’ coexisted across the twentieth century, and that ‘testimony about change in parental practice is varied and inconclusive’.57 However, a slow shift away from models of corporal punishment is apparent, marked by the banning of the birch in 1948, its gradual removal from schools and its decreasing familial use other than for ‘delinquent’ boys. Neighbourhood and street The significance of urban neighbourhood for propensity towards offending behaviour has been the subject of significant debate across the twentieth century. Influential American studies of the interwar period associated high offending rates with the overcrowded slum areas of industrial cities such as Chicago.58 Thomas Ferguson’s Glasgow study of 1952 similarly concluded that delinquency rates tended to increase as the ‘type’ of district in which a boy lived deteriorated. Significantly, however, the ‘tradition’ of ‘bad neighbourhood’ was transferred to the areas of new housing estates set aside for ‘slum clearance’ families.59 Yet for psychologists such as John Bowlby and D.H. Stott the ecological approach did not explain why many young people raised in slum areas did not in fact turn to crime, leading them to stress home background, parenting and emotional adjustment.60 In the holistic reports constructed by probation officers we see the continuation of a multicausal approach to assessment suggestive of the profound influence of Burt’s earlier The Young Delinquent, first published in 1922. As outlined above, family background received detailed attention, but notes were also completed on the reputation of the immediate local neighbourhood in terms of ‘high’, ‘regular’ or ‘low’ incidence of delinquency. The relationship between religious observation and neighbourhood presented a paradox for those who associated rises in youth offending

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with declining moral standards and irreligiosity. The Liverpool studies by Bagehot and Mays had reported very high levels of attendance at Sunday Mass by Roman Catholic children but also high delinquency rates among the city’s Irish Catholic districts.61 Similar patterns appeared in Glasgow – where Irish families were concentrated in old ‘slum’ housing areas such as Bridgegate, Garngad and Gorbals – as well as in Greenock.62 Officials and local dignitaries attempted to adopt a non-sectarian line, arguing that the correlation was with poverty and deprivation. The Lord Mayor of Liverpool was reported as stating in 1946 that ‘where you have bad housing you have bad children … it is not because they are Roman Catholics but because they are poor and badly housed’.63 The possibility that Irish Catholic areas were more likely to be targeted by the police was not entertained. In contrast to the discussion of the significance of Catholicism as a crimogenic factor in Glasgow and Liverpool, the sizeable Jewish communities of Manchester and London were presented as law-abiding and practically delinquency free.64 Similarly, in the late 1950s and early 1960s fathers who had migrated from the British Commonwealth were described, through simplistic cultural stereotypes, as exercising effective discipline over their children. Bradford’s juvenile liaison officer commented that ‘the Asian [father] would talk to his son in terms that emphasised the shame brought to the family and, if a Muslim, have the boy swear on the Koran to be good in the future, [whilst] the West Indian father would invariably give this boy a “sound thrashing with the promise of more to follow”’.65 Given continued problems with overcrowding in many urban working-class areas during and after the Second World War, the streets and open spaces of the immediate neighbourhood were an important terrain for children’s play; this included exploration, the excitement of risk-taking, and the creative appropriation and adaptation of objects found in the street. In 1946 London civil servant M.M. Simmons described the surroundings in which he had worked during the war: From the windows of one building … could be seen daily a crowd of dirty but happy little slum children playing contentedly with the piles of sand dumped by a contractor on one of the sites cleared of bombed buildings. It is true that they occasionally removed pieces of fencing to build their ‘castles’ and ‘robbers’ caves’ but the policeman who kept a friendly eye on them was not worried; he knew that such children were not delinquent.66

As previous chapters have demonstrated, the police were involved in regulating the street play of adolescent boys across the twentieth

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c­entury. In the postwar period, however, there were concerted attempts by local authorities to remove children’s play to specially designated parks and other areas as the street was increasingly associated with motor traffic.67 In older urban areas, the requisition of iron railings for the war effort had removed a strong visual ‘cue’ that certain places – cemeteries and school grounds – were out of bounds to children unless they were accompanied by adults. Participants at the Manchester anti-delinquency conference in 1944 demanded ‘the earliest possible replacement of railings for the protection of property especially schools’.68 A re-education project was necessary to ‘train’ children as to what were appropriate spaces for ‘play’. In 1953 Dundee Corporation Parks Committee recorded the need to build a permanent fence around the Logie cemetery in the west of the city to prevent damage caused by groups of ‘children and young men’ swinging on the trees, playing ‘cowboys and Indians’, and starting fires; air rifle pellets had been fired from the cemetery at a shop window and a petition had been signed by thirty-five local residents.69 Within designated parks, too, over-boisterous play was routinely condemned as ‘vandalism’. In Dundee’s Baxter Park birds’ nests had been raided and broken eggs strewn around; the park ranger was presented as powerless to intervene and calls were made for him to be provided ‘with a good strap to wallop these hooligans when they are caught’.70 The creation of boundary railings or fences and more effective supervision by police or park keepers were viewed as necessary solutions. In Manchester the effects of the Blitz had rendered many inner-city streets unsuitable for use by the young: in the aftermath of the war children were reported to be playing on rat-infested sites that were littered with bricks, rubble and litter.71 Concerns about children’s health and safety merged with delinquency prevention and traffic control. The Corporation used compulsory purchase orders to create new play spaces in the most built-up areas of the city. It also designated inner city residential streets as traffic-free ‘play streets’ through local bylaws.72 Yet the ‘play street’ scheme was not without difficulty; in September 1953 Manchester’s Watch Committee removed Back Temple Street, Chorlton-on-Medlock, from the list following complaints from a local firm that ‘children frequenting the street have caused damage by breaking windows and placing loose bricks in the hallway’.73 The designation of official ‘play streets’ and playgrounds was a demonstration of Manchester Corporation’s commitment to the provision of amenities for deprived children. Yet, at the same time, it reinforced the association of other streets with motor traffic. By creating s­ egregated,

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sanitised and supervised areas where play was permitted, it began the process of excluding children from other locations. The early 1950s saw the widespread promotion of the ‘adventure’ or ‘junk playground’ by local authorities as a solution to children’s vandalism and delinquency – a concept which ‘grew out of observations of what children actually did on patches of waste land and on derelict areas and bomb sites’.74 In 1950 the LCC argued that it combined ‘formal’ and ‘supervised’ elements with children’s ability to ‘indulge in free creative play, to pit their wits, skill and strength against one another, and to have a chance of adventure and taking risks without fear of breaking the law’.75 In Dundee, the corporation parks superintendent stated in 1953 that: the function of play parks was to keep children off the streets. They should be sited so that no child would need to travel more than half a mile. The ideal play park should be fenced off and have a junk area suitable for boys between 9 and 14 … it could be equipped with an old car, boat, bricks, pieces of timber and sand. With these the youngsters could build a fort then blast it before going to tea … This process of building and destroying appears to be a safety valve and tends to protect surrounding property from being destroyed.76

This statement demonstrates that the provision of playgrounds was double-edged in combining of freedom with control. As the social theorist and environmental educationist Colin Ward has argued: ‘the fenced off child-ghetto sharpens the division between the worlds of adults and children’ rather than enabling them to share the same world.77 Given the correlation between high ‘delinquency’ rates and urban deprivation, it was optimistically assumed in Britain as elsewhere that the re-housing of inner-city ‘slum’ populations would lead to improved standards of behaviour. However, as Jane Jacobs pointed out in 1961 in her famous critique of urban planning in the USA, this all too frequently resulted in ‘low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace’.78 Improved accommodation was provided – in larger homes with private bathrooms – but amenities and infrastructure were lacking. Most significantly, however, there was no recognition of the forms of ‘self-government’ that had emerged historically within inner-city neighbourhoods and which involved ‘social networks … of trust and social control’ and which helped to ‘assimilate children into reasonably responsible and tolerant city life’.79 These systems of governance were a function of

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spatial proximity and the everyday surveillance exercised by kin and neighbours. Scholars have warned of the dangers of viewing urban workingclass neighbourhoods of the early twentieth century through a cloud of nostalgia, as secure, friendly, caring and vibrant places to live. Yet it is difficult to refute the claim that, before the widespread take-up of the motor car and the amelioration of living conditions, adults and children participated together in a shared culture of the street. Adults, particularly women, kept a general watchful eye on other people’s children as much as their own when they were very young.80 Within working-class street culture, older children and adolescents were mostly left to their own devices to roam the city, socialisation was carried out by peers rather than parents, and young people selected their own friends.81 These issues were touched upon in a social survey of two residential areas of Dundee – the old ‘slum’ tenement housing area of Hilltown and the new postwar housing estate of Fintry – that was carried out in 1960 and analysed by the sociologist David Riddell.82 Given the extent of women’s involvement in paid work in Dundee, it was grandmothers who had tended to watch over children’s street play in the old residential area, standing in doorways or peering from tenement windows. The importance of neighbourliness was, arguably, less significant amongst Dundee’s tenements than in some working-class urban areas in England, where back-to-back housing (widespread in Manchester) facilitated the model of the ‘doorstep housewife’ whose house opened out onto the street, creating ‘a good forum for setting up relations’.83 Nevertheless, those who had moved to Fintry had found that the different layout of streets and housing mean that ‘the influence of the adult on the child had diminished greatly, and the gap between the generations consequently had tended to increase’.84 Grandmothers had stayed behind in their old tenement homes, so that there was no extended network of kin to help with supervision. Moreover, there was a high preponderance of children and young people: 42 per cent of Fintry’s population were under 15 according to the 1960 survey.85 On new housing schemes across Scotland, it was found that former tenement children did not understand the concept of the ‘garden’ as private property, leading to conflict between children and adults. Fintry residents commented that they had given up on their gardens because ‘the kids throw rubbish in all the time, and they’re always after their fitba’’.86 Memoirs refer to children’s games, such as ‘backie hopping’, which involved running across a row of gardens, over fences and hedges.87 Although Fintry was surrounded by

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attractive countryside, local farmers constructed ‘formidable fencing’ around its northern periphery specifically to keep children out. Park and recreation areas were available to the south of the estate, but not within it, and the patches of grass that lined the pavements were either ‘mud baths’ in winter or ‘bare patches’ in summer; so, whilst older children might roam further afield, there was little provision for their younger brothers and sisters.88 In none of these characteristics was Fintry unique; rather, Riddell argued, it was broadly similar to other Dundee housing estates. It was not until 1968 that a concerted effort was made to improve the local environment through landscaping and the provision of off-street parking, to foster a sense of ‘community’ responsibility and identity through the creation of a Residents’ Planning Committee in Fintry, and to provide a community centre that supported local youth.89 The lack of amenities on the new housing estates, as well as distance from grandparents or friends to whom they were close, meant that some young people found it difficult to make the geographical adjustment. ‘Drift-back’ to the old slums areas after families had been re-housed on the new estates of Pollok, Drumchapel and Castlemilk was viewed with disapproval by Glasgow’s probation officers in 1959: ‘I have repeatedly instructed and reminded him that he should keep away from his old environment … but he frequently … has returned there where his companions are all of doubtful character and … his return home is always very late.’90 Similar behavioural patterns for girls received adverse comments from moral welfare workers in South Manchester, who were concerned that lack of entertainment in Wythenshawe led many to ‘frequent Moss Side because of its seeming gaiety and easy money’.91 Postwar urban reconstruction and changing leisure patterns (including the increased use of television in homes) involved the privatisation of family and social life; adults withdrew from the street and other spaces, leading to increased concerns about their use by unsupervised youth who were increasingly viewed as a ‘threat’. As Ward has commented, in new housing schemes or tower blocks that had become overwhelmed by the problem of vandalism, ‘the war between children and adults for control of the environment has been lost by the adults’.92 As Chapter 4 has also shown, the alienation and marginalisation of some young people from ‘community’ social life, as well as their physical environment, was accentuated by a growing climate of fear amongst adults by the early 1960s. In the postwar period the assumption that children and young people should be supervised within increasingly defined and demarcated spaces meant that groups

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of adolescents or children on the street were viewed as out of place and hence dangerous. Community As this chapter has already suggested, fathers formed part of a broader circuit of male authority within the set of agencies and institutions that constituted a wider ‘community’. In the 1958 film Violent Playground, a series of paternal figures – headmaster, scoutmaster, policeman and priest – attempt to ‘save’ the fatherless tearaway Johnny Murphy from the destruction of self and others. Indeed, Catherine Lindsay, who interviewed a hundred schoolboys (and their parents) who were living in Glasgow’s new Easterhouse development in the mid-1960s, commented that ‘the authority of school’ was seen as ‘coming between fathers and police officers in degree of strictness’ (with police at the strictest end of the spectrum). Boys were described as having a ‘mixed attitude … advocating defiance or submission or compromise … on different occasions’.93 Churches, schools, workplaces (for those over school leaving age), clubs and societies, each operated their own sphere of governance and influence. Corporal punishment persisted in schools as a form of discipline although its uses were increasingly restricted. In Dundee, for example, the local education committee debated the use of corporal punishment in 1947, agreeing that the ‘tawse’ should be retained in schools but should be inflicted ‘as seldom as possible’ and ‘only in cases of cruelty, malicious mischief, or repeated wilful disobedience’. In 1965 the Educational Institute of Scotland, representing nearly 30,000 teachers, agreed that corporal punishment should be gradually abolished (in primary schools first then secondary).94 Lindsay’s Easterhouse study found that parents themselves mostly ‘accepted or approved of corporal punishment in school’, recognising that it was used far more discriminately by the 1960s (often restricted to the headteacher and very rarely for girls) compared to the 1930s.95 Detention was used for continued bad behaviour, with exclusion from school as the ultimate deterrent.96 This taxonomy of punishment in Easterhouse schools was broadly similar to that adopted elsewhere and was designed to deal with those who broke the myriad of school regulations relating to attendance, timekeeping and behaviour. Exclusion was, similarly, the ultimate sanction in the workplace and in youth clubs. The system of selective secondary education that was maintained across England, Wales and Scotland from the late 1940s to the mid1960s was largely based on regimes of social stratification and d ­ istinction

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that served to maintain the class and gender order, as well as status based on age and generation.97 In many boys’ schools the military model that informed the rigorous scrutiny of the school uniform was also reinforced through strong incentives to join the Combined Cadet Force movement which had been vastly expanded in the years during and after the Second World War and acted as preparation for military conscription at 18 (in place until 1960). In Manchester a three-tier system of selective schooling offered a grammar-school education for those who came in the top 18 per cent of their cohort in the 11-plus examination; a further 13 per cent won places at technical schools, whilst the remaining 70 per cent went to secondary modern schools.98 Manchester schools had a reputation for being ‘run on firmly authoritarian lines’ before the introduction of comprehensives in 1967.99 In Dundee and Glasgow, those selected for a five-year secondary schooling went to ‘academies’ (senior secondary schools) at the age of 12, whilst a three-year schooling involving less-academic training was provided for the remaining cohort in junior secondary schools. The first comprehensive school in Dundee, Kirkton High School, opened as a ‘flagship school’ in 1960. In his published memoirs, Willie Robertson describes being part of the first intake: there was ‘no tradition, no uniform, no heroic motto, heraldic badge or school colours’, leading to uncertainty amongst pupils about what to wear, although teachers were in academic hoods and gowns, part of ‘a toolkit for keeping others in their place’.100 The new comprehensive school ethos was described in Lyndsey’s Easterhouse survey as entailing a ‘modern permissive attitude towards … pupils’, which ‘ensured that boys would not be afraid to ask questions and would discuss matters fully’.101 Robertson, similarly refers to the comments of his new teacher that he was there ‘to help us if we had any problems or concerns’.102 The increasing shift towards ‘person-oriented’ approaches in schooling was, nevertheless, a gradual one and was counterbalanced by the continued use of older penal regimes, including use of the belt, as well as streaming, which segregated pupils by social class as much as intellectual ability.103 During the nationally orchestrated ‘delinquency’ conferences of the 1940s, the churches were viewed as important stakeholders, with a return to Christian values the central tool in the battle against moral decline.104 Similarly, the churches themselves saw their spiritual role as an essential underpinning to citizenship. For example, the Catholic Church in Scotland argued for the need for Catholic probation officers because ‘no amount of improvement in material environmental conditions … will be of real avail for the creation of enlightened citizens

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unless at the same time the spiritual character of those citizens is solidly formed’.105 Each of Dundee’s seven Catholic parishes had separate youth clubs for girls and boys, juniors and seniors, designed to prepare them for ‘their work in the community’. Sports days were held in the summer, and ‘spiritual rallies’ during the winter months.106 By the late 1940s Catholic youth clubs offered ‘common rooms for quiet reading … and informal discussion’ in addition to more structured activities. Clubs were to be run by ‘a committee of senior youths guided by an adult leader’ who had received specialist teacher training that was partially funded by the Scottish Education Department (SED).107 By the early 1960s Glasgow’s re-housing schemes appear to have reversed the trend that had associated delinquency with deprived Catholic areas. Lindsay’s survey suggested that in Easterhouse there were ‘significantly fewer delinquents’ in the Catholic school surveyed compared to the Protestant one.108 She linked this to the closer relationship that the Catholic clergy had established, visiting classrooms to meet parishioners. Without doubt Catholic youth continued to maintain stronger affiliations with their church than their Protestant peers. Nevertheless, in smaller towns and cities, the Church of Scotland also retained a very important influence, claiming that a steady third of the total local population aged 5–15 attended its Dundee youth clubs in 1931, 1951 and 1960, although a lapse tended to occur at the age of 12.109 In England these ties had more clearly fractured. Across the postwar period the term ‘anti-social behaviour’ was used by educationalists to describe the effects of ‘juvenile delinquents’ on others. The term implied actions that were ‘anti-community’. They were against the interests of residents of the local neighbourhood in terms of the damage to property wreaked through vandalism and the trauma or fear invoked through disorderly behaviour that damaged the peace. Yet they were also viewed as ‘anti-social’ in that they exhibited rejection of the hierarchies of deference that were still an important reference point in postwar Britain. ‘Anti-social behaviour’ was seen as the opposite of the model of ‘citizenship’ – as a highly gendered concept, involving duty, responsibility and respect for order – that was seen as necessary for postwar reconstruction. Moreover, the concept of ‘community’ that was invoked in relation to delinquency prevention in the 1940s and 1950s was a hierarchical one. In 1949 the ‘leaders of public life’ – local government dignitaries and officials, church ministers/priests, headteachers, magistrates and judges, senior police officers and probation officers, university researchers and scoutmasters – were instructed by the national state to seize the initiative and make an inquiry into the local causes of young offending. A proliferation of

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specialist investigating societies and committees emerged. The Manchester Criminological Society was formed in 1956 to study the causes and prevention of delinquency involving, as the Manchester Guardian tellingly put it, ‘nearly everybody in fact except the criminals themselves’.110 Young people were to be studied and pronounced upon but their advice was not sought. At the same time, however, a small number of experiments within residential institutions, schools and social work had begun to challenge hierarchical models based on gender, class and generational status. During the Second World War the work of Quaker David Wills had involved an experimental form of governance in a small residential home – Barns House, Peebles, in the Scottish borders – for ‘difficult boys evacuated from Edinburgh. Wills was critical of the ‘imposed discipline’ of ‘approved schools, public schools, boys brigades, training ships and such institutions, where life … is ordered and arranged, every moment of the day mapped out, and rough and ready justice applied by the adults … for every departure from an established routine’.111 This simply bred ‘conformity’ rather than the independence and initiative which, to him, were important components of masculinity. At Barnes the boys themselves actively participated in the decision-making process regarding the running of the institution, elected their own chairman, and set up their own ‘Citizens Association’. Similarly, the 1959 autobiographical novel To Sir, with Love, written by the West Indian author E.R. Braithwaite, depicted life at the radical secondary modern school in Stepney, London, established by educational progressive Alex Bloom. Whilst commenting on the experience of being a black teacher in Britain, it showed that slum children were not necessarily lawless and that a child-centred curriculum could flourish with patience and mutual respect.112 Those involved in delinquency prevention in the late 1940s had seen membership of pre-existing uniformed youth organisations, based on military organisational models (Boys’ Brigade, scouting, guiding), as remedial.113 The Youth Service, created by the Ministry of Education in 1939, continued to encourage structured recreation for young people that trained them in ‘self-government and citizenship’ to enable the ‘building of character’. Activities reinforced gender norms, including the sexual division of labour in the family.114 This rhetoric continued to be significant across the postwar period. In 1964 the figurehead of the boys’ club movement, popular entertainer Frankie Vaughan, articulated his belief that ‘it is the young men of this country who have to be the leaders – common sense tells us that a young man just has to find his feet. He has to make a living – he has

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to be the future breadwinner. Should he marry, he has to be a future husband and proper father, but above all a responsible citizen.’115 Increasingly, however, there was a notable move away from the language of hierarchy and ‘citizenship’ as attentions shifted to the ‘problem’ of the ‘unclubbables’: those who were alienated by disciplinary structures, could not be persuaded to join associations, and who, it was assumed, were thus more likely to engage in anti-social behaviour. The response to the problem of the ‘unattached’ youth was the phenomenon of the ‘detached’ worker.116 Used in the USA from the 1940s onwards the model involved a qualified youth worker who met with and gained the confidence of young people in their own environment and then helped them to arrange ‘their own socially acceptable activities, by using the natural organisation of the group’.117 The Albemarle Report of 1960, commissioned by the Ministry of Education to advise on how the Youth Service might assist young people ‘to play their part in the life of the community’, recommended that the vocabulary of ‘service’, religious values’ and ‘citizenship’ should be dropped as off-putting. It also encouraged the adoption of more fluid models in which young people themselves were enabled to participate as ‘partners’ in youth clubs and encouraged to initiate activities. At the same time, it emphasised the need for professional training for youth workers.118 Although the report marks a sea-change in rhetoric, it should not be assumed that it led to a sudden transformation in the Youth Service itself: as Emma Latham has shown, older models retained their influence in many areas.119 Manchester’s YDT was a significant pioneer of the ‘detached worker’ approach in the mid-1960s through what became known as the ‘Wincroft’ project. ‘Wincroft’ was the pseudonym for the inner-city district, consisting largely of blackened old Victorian terraces, in which young people’s lives had been circumscribed by ‘mean houses … barrack-live schools’ and ‘intellectual poverty’.120 The project centred on a ‘commercial-type café’ (the Bridge café 1964–66), its aim to assist its clients ‘to exercise more control over their destinies’. It also involved an action-research element that sought to measure its impact in terms of delinquency prevention.121 The project organisers saw it as a radical alternative to traditional social work in that it went out to find those who were in need, rather than simply responding to emergency situations. Rather than relying on individual casework – between professional and client – the role of groupwork was emphasised, enabling an adolescent to receive ‘support from his friends who were part of his social milieu’.122 The organisers also saw it as an alternative to conventional youth clubs, including those funded by the Youth S ­ ervice

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in Manchester and run by professional workers. Café clients were helped in their own tasks such as forming a football team, obtaining fixtures with other clubs in around the area, and organising training sessions in a local gym.123 Such a distinctively ‘person-oriented’ approach to decision-making was not easily accepted by the café’s clients, whose family background and schooling had been largely based on ‘positional’ forms of authority. Project workers were initially distrusted as ‘soft’ and there were suspicions that the police were using the café as a ‘front to keep tabs on boys with criminal records’.124 Many of those who used the café had developed a deep animosity towards those in positions of authority: police, probation officers, magistrates and school officials.125 Given these circumstances, the project organisers stressed a further innovative aspect of the approach: that it used ‘permissiveness’ (the granting of a ‘wide degree of licences to young people’) as a ‘technique’ rather than as an ‘ideology’ because this would ‘keep open a relationship where a client can and will break it off if he is subject to the disciplines that normal adolescents would accept’.126 The project had very clear aims – ‘the promotion of positive social attitudes’ – that were both regulatory and normative. It sought to achieve them, however, through inclusion rather than exclusion and by developing young people’s capacity to be part of a community in which they took an interest. The YDT went on to develop three subsequent ‘community projects’, grounded in a similar ethos, all of which commenced in the autumn of 1968: a project working with homeless youngsters in Manchester city centre; a project working with unattached adolescent girls in Stockport; and the ‘Hilton project’, which involved the setting up of an adventure playground, a social education programme and a counselling service in the multi-cultural Moss Side district.127 A further example of a shift in the conceptualisation of intervention can be found in the setting up of the Easterhouse Project in Glasgow, formally opened by Lord Kilbrandon on 8 February 1969. This was an innovative attempt to tackle youth violence through the provision of recreation facilities and to enable young people ‘to develop their personalities, skills and talents to the full’.128 It was run by, and for, young ‘gang members’ with the support of a Board of Trustees that they had chosen themselves (including Frankie Vaughan as well as Glasgow Chief Constable James Robertson, Bailie Frank McElhone, MP Hugh Brown, and Reverend Peter Youngson, minister of Lochwood Parish, Easterhouse). In September 1966, Youngson, who had sought to engage with young people in the area through the organisation of monthly beat dances in his church hall, had appeared on a Scottish

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Television programme This is the Day and criticised the unwillingness of ‘the church’ to accept ‘street corner teenagers’, describing church organisations like the Boys’ Brigade as ‘entirely irrelevant and therefore quite useless’ in their demand for conformity and uniforms.129 The need to engage with this group was not lost on the corporation. A Special Committee and Joint Working Party on Community Problems (also involving the Scottish Office) met at the beginning of 1968 and resolved to attract commercial amenities to Easterhouse: ‘It seemed clear that young people of this type would not take part in any activities within a building which bore the hall mark of a local authority, such as a school, etc., where they felt they were under supervision.’ The best solution was to ensure that facilities were used on a ‘customer basis’ so that young people felt ‘that they were entitled to take part and that they were there as of right and not subject to control’. They also explored the possibility of providing what they termed ‘hard-standing areas’ situated ‘some distance’ from houses for young people to meet and congregate.130 The important impetus for the development of the Easterhouse project was the high profile visit of the popular entertainer Frankie Vaughan to Glasgow in July 1968. Until then, little actual progress had been made and the Corporation’s commitment was questionable.131 At its formal opening, both civilian and military police were on standby to deal with the thousands of youths expected to attend. It was a controversial initiative, and the media kept its attention on the problems it faced in its early weeks of opening. One difficulty was that the public as a whole expected significant and rapid improvements. Moreover, the project’s difficulties in attracting financial support, which led to threat of closure, were linked to its ‘unorthodox approach’ and desire to work with ‘outsiders’.132 Its critics, such as progressive bailie, James Anderson, continued to call for repressive police measures and stern sentences to tackle youth violence.133 Conclusion The processes described in this chapter were gradual ones that impacted on differing parts of cities at different points in the postwar era. The period between 1945 and 1970 saw significant transformations in the spatial arrangements of urban dwelling that had profound consequences for the ways in which social relationships were negotiated. Older informal methods of regulation, in which adults shared the streets with young people and kin kept an eye on children’s play dwindled as: first, the residents of inner-city ‘slum’ neighbourhoods

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were moved to lower density suburban housing estates and, second, as the ‘slums’ were finally cleared to make way for the high-rise innercity flats of the late 1960s. Young people’s presence on the streets was increasingly viewed as a threat, whilst their own sense of alienation from this new environment was compounded; some drifted back to their old haunts to be with old friends in more familiar environments. In relation to both the family and the broader community there was a shift away from patriarchal and positional forms of authority, which assumed a culture of deference based on gender and generation, and a move towards approaches that were more inclusive, negotiated, and linked to potential for self-actualisation and self-realisation. Such a shift was increasingly discussed in relation to the language of ‘permissiveness’ that emerged in the 1960s, but the origins of any broad trend were apparent earlier on. It is important to stress, too, that this shift was only partial; the recourse to corporal punishment was still a significant aspect of institutional life in schools and, for some, within families, grounded in continued ‘positional’ understandings of authority. The tensions this created were articulated very effectively by Riddell, who viewed Dundee’s young people as ‘caught between two cultures’. On the one hand, there was ‘the old, of physical violence and rigid regime in schools, of the “disciplined labour force” … [and] of economic insecurity, which, in such circumstances, bred subservience’. This was declining, to be tempered by new values ‘where there was a measure of economic security, and the “mass media” of communication fostered the image of the independent, self-reliant, self-disciplined hero’.134 This transformation from ‘old’ to ‘new’ was implicitly concerned with governance and the role of the individual in the postwar state. It involved the demise of a particular model of ‘citizenship’, inherited from the Victorian past, that emphasised the ‘building of character’ through conformity, hard work and the performance of gendered ‘respectability’, and the concomitant turn towards models that embraced self-fulfilment, the development of personality and participatory democracy.135 Nowhere was this more apparent than in relation to young people. Notes

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1 Home Office and Scottish Office, Memorandum on Juvenile Delinquency. 2 Donzelot, Policing of Families. 3 Ibid., p. 103. 4 Ibid., p. 7. 5 R. Hood and K. Joyce, ‘Three generations: oral testimonies on crime

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and social change in London’s East End’, British Journal of Criminoloy, 39 (1999), 136–60; Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? 6 Mays, Growing Up, pp. 116–17. 7 MEN, 5 November 1947, p. 3. 8 S. Todd, ‘Breadwinners and dependants: working-class young people in England, 1918–1955’, International Review of Social History, 52.1 (2007), 57–87. 9 Smith, Wincroft Project, p. 14. 10 Children and Young Persons Acts: (England and Wales) 1933, 23 Geo 5, ch. 12, s. 64; (Scotland) 1937, 1 Edw 8 & 1 Geo 6, ch. 37, s. 68. 11 DC, 30 September 1947, p. 3. 12 Children and Young Persons Acts: (England and Wales) 1933, s. 3; (Scotland) 1937, s. 12. 13 DC, 13 January 1959, p. 3. 14 DC, 19 December 1953, p. 4. 15 MEN, 7 March 1946, p. 8. 16 Daily Mirror, 24 May 1947, p. 7. 17 Quotation from Monthly Film Bulletin, February 1953, p. 18. 18 Thom, ‘“Beating children is wrong”’, p. 268. 19 MEN, 10 July 1947, p. 7. 20 MEN, 15 May 1947, p. 6. 21 J. Bowlby, Child Care and the Growth of Love (London: Pelican, 1953). 22 F. McNeill, ‘Remembering probation in Scotland’, Probation Journal, 52.1 (2005), 23–38. 23 GCA, TD422.8 Records Relating to Delinquency collected by Dr D.H. Stott, Probation Officers Reports, sample 1959. Reports relating to all 19 girls were viewed. Reports for boys were sampled and consisted of the first 80 Protestant boys and first 80 Catholic boys. All cases involved comparatively minor property offences. Probation officers’ reports relating to Manchester and Dundee have not been traced. 24 Ibid., no. 9. 25 Ibid., no. 6; no. 3. 26 Ibid., no. 7. 27 Ibid., no. 12. 28 Ibid., no. 28e. 29 Smith, Wincroft Project, p. 20. 30 GCA, TD422.8, no. 113a. 31 Ibid., no. 28b; no. 101e. 32 Ibid., no.92c and no. 92d. 33 Ibid., no. 30f. 34 Ibid., no.11a. 35 Scottish Screen Archive, 4/20/89 1942–60 ‘BC – personal’, Manchester Information Committee, Report on Conference on Juvenile Delinquency, 15 November and 14 December 1944. 36 TNA, ED233/20.

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37 DC, 21 February 1953, p. 2. 38 DC, 13 August 1953, p, 5. 39 GACS, Reports, 1954, p. 358. 40 TNA, ED233/20. 41 DCA, GD/X37/2, Essay by Miss J. Robertson ‘A Survey of Services for the Protection and Welfare of Children in Dundee’; A. Mair, ‘Public Health’, in Jackson (ed.), City of Dundee. 42 TNA, ED233/20. 43 TNA, INF12/258 Production of COI Shorts and Features, 1946–50. ‘Children on Trial’, pamphlet, p. 8. 44 P. Starkey, ‘The feckless mother: women, poverty and social workers in wartime and post-war England’, Women’s History Review, 9.3 (2000), 539–58; R. Morrison, ‘Poverty, Distress and Social Agencies’, in Jackson (ed.), City of Dundee, pp. 626–7. 45 D. Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 97. 46 GCA, TD422.8, no. 93a and no. 109f. 47 Ibid., no. 7a. 48 Ibid., no. 22c. 49 Ibid., no. 106b and no. 54c. 50 Sibley, Geographies, pp. 95–7; B. Bernstein, Class, Codes and Control Volume 1 (London: Routledge, 1971), pp. 152–63; P. Atkinson, Language, Structure and Reproduction: an introduction to the sociology of Basil Bernstein (London: Methuen and Co., 1985), pp. 72–5. 51 Ibid. 52 GCA, TD422.8, no. 6a; no. 6b. 53 L. Gordon, Heroes of their Own Lives (London: Virago, 1989), p. vi. 54 J. Hearn, Men in the public Eye (London: Routledge, 1992). 55 B. Turner and T. Rendall, When Daddy Came Home (London: Hutchinson, 1995). 56 Thom, ‘Beating children is wrong’, p. 276. NRS, HH60/892 Educational Research into delinquency prevention, ‘School and community’ project, 1972. ‘Summary of findings’ by Catherine Lindsay. 57 Thom, ‘Beating children is wrong’, p. 278. 58 F.M. Thrasher, The Gang (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927); C. Shaw, The Jack-Roller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930). 59 Ferguson, Young Delinquent, p. 145. 60 Bowlby, Child Care; T.D. Stott, Delinquency and Human Nature (London: Carnegie Trust, 1950). 61 Mays, Growing Up, p. 94 reported that 85 per cent of Catholics boys in his sample attended church every Sunday but only 18 per cent of Protestants did so. 62 M. Paccione, Glasgow. The Socio-spatial Development of the City (Chichester: Wiley, 1995); C. Cameron, A. Lush and G. Meara, Disinherited Youth. A Report on the 18+ Age Group Enquiry (Edinburgh: Carnegie Trust, 1943), found that in Glasgow 60 per cent of young Catholic men attended

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church ‘either regularly or occasionally’ compared to 6.1 per cent of Protestants. Mack, ‘Crime’, p. 672, showed that Roman Catholics were 75 per cent more likely than Protestant children to have offences proved against them in the courts. 63 MG, 7 June 1946. 64 Ibid. 65 TNA, BN29/2787. 66 M.M. Simmons, Making Citizens (London: HMSO, 1946), p. 11. 67 C. Ward, The Child in the City (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979 [1978]), pp. 116–17. 68 Scottish Screen Archive, 4/20/89 Manchester Information Committee, Report on Conference, 15 November and 14 December 1944. 69 DC, 16 October 1953, p. 7. 70 DC, 1 May 1953, p. 4 and 11 May 1953, p. 4. 71 MEN, 27 March 1946, p. 1. 72 Corporation of Manchester, Proceedings, 28 July 1948. 73 Corporation of Manchester, Watch Committee Minutes, 17 September 1953. 74 Ward, Child in the City, p. 86. 75 TNA, ED233/20. 76 DC, 25 September 1953, p. 3. 77 Ward, Child in the City, p. 86. 78 J. Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Modern Library, 1993 [1961]), p. 6. 79 Ibid., p. 156. 80 M. Felson, Crime and Everyday Life (London: Sage, 1994), p. 55. 81 Smith, Wincroft Project, pp. 20–5. 82 Riddell, ‘Social Structure’. 83 Ibid., p. 498. 84 Ibid., p. 493. 85 Ibid., p. 489. 86 Ibid., p. 493. 87 Robertson, Skeem Life, p. 119. See also Stewart, Dae Yeh Mind, p. 132 for children’s games that aggravated the local farmer and building site watchmen. 88 Riddell, ‘Social Structure’, p. 487. 89 NRS, HH60/1061; Robertson, Skeem Life, p. 163. 90 GCA, TD422.8, no. 2a. 91 MCA, M629/1/1/2, Minutes of subcommittees 1958–61, questionnaires completed by moral welfare workers in 1958, Manchester County ­Borough. 92 Ward, Child in the City, p. 104. 93 C. Lindsay, School and Community (London: Pergamon, 1970), pp. 78 and 53. 94 DC, 19 February 1947, p. 3; 15 October 1965, p. 5. 95 Lindsay, School and Community, p. 42. See DC 7 November 1965, p. 5, for

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newspaper coverage of Scottish schoolgirls in three separate cities who refused to accept the strap. 96 Lindsay, School and Community, p. 50. 97 M. Sanderson, Educational Opportunity and Social Change in England 1900– 1980s (London: 1987); Willis, Learning to Labour. Comprehensive schools were introduced from the 1960s onwards by Labour-controlled local education authorities (grammar schools were retained in Conservative areas). Grammar schools and a significant proportion of secondary modern schools in England and Wales were single-sex. Secondary schools in Scotland were more likely to be mixed. 98 Smith, Wincroft Project, p. 17. 99 Ibid., p. 81. 100 Robertson, On the Milk, pp. 80–7. 101 Lindsay, School and Community, p. 43. 102 Robertson, On the Milk, p. 99. 103 Ibid., p. 290. 104 Home Office and Scottish Office, Memorandum on Juvenile Delinquency. 105 SCA, DE120/4 Probation 1943–5, Memorandum on probation, submitted by the Catholic Hierarchy of Scotland to SACTRO, 15 May 1945. 106 SCA, DE128/5 Catholic Youth Clubs c. 1940–44. 107 SCA, DE128/15 Catholic Youth, misc 1946–8, memo on youth club movement. 108 Lindsay, School and Community, p. 119. 109 H. Henderson, ‘Religious Life’, in Jackson, Dundee, p. 640. 110 MG, 19 April 1956, p. 16. 111 W.D. Wills, The Barns Experiment (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1945), p. 26. See also A.S. Neill, Summerhill: a Radical Approach to Childrearing (New York: Hart, 1960). 112 M. Fielding, ‘Alex Bloom, Pioneeer of Radical state Education’, Forum, 47.2 (2005), pp. 119–34. 113 See, for example, J. Springhall, Youth, Empire and Society: British Youth Movements 1883–1940 (London: Croom Helm, 1977). 114 Albemarle Report, pp. 8–9, quoting Ministry of Education circulars of 1945 and 1940; E. Latham, ‘The Liverpool Boys’ Association and the Liverpool Union of Youth Clubs: Youth Organizations and Gender, 1940–70’, Journal of Contemporary History 35.3 (2000), 423–37. 115 TNA, BN29/1784 Advisory Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, Frankie Vaughan, 18 December 1964 to Home Secretary. 116 Ward, Child in the City, pp. 113–14. 117 M.R. Farrant, ‘Inside the Delinquent Gang’, MG, 14 September 1965, p. 6. 118 Albemarle Report, pp. 1, 38–44, 108. 119 Latham, ‘Liverpool Boys’ Association’. 120 Smith, Wincroft Project, p. 3. 121 Ibid. Cyril S. Smith had previously been involved in the ‘Teen Canteen’

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project in Elephant and Castle, London, set up in 1955. Smith, Farrant and Marchant were employed by the University of Manchester and the project made use of student volunteers from the Manchester University Settlement as well as a small number of paid workers. It was funded jointly by the local authority and the Department of Education and ­Science. 122 Ibid., p. 250. 123 Ibid., pp. 111 and 113. 124 Ibid., p. 75. 125 Ibid., p. 96. 126 Ibid., p. 254. 127 YDT, The Family Advice Centre Book. A History of Moss Side family Advice Centre (Manchester: YDT, 1978), p. 3. Anderson, Hilton Project. 128 Blairtummock Housing Association Ltd, Glasgow, Easterhouse Project Deed of Trust, 7 and 8 February, registered 31 March 1969. 129 Peter Youngson, Many a Far Country (Angus: Astute Scotland Ltd, 2009), p. 167. 130 GCA, SR27/1/13 Special Committee and Joint Working Party on Community Problems, 23 February 1968. 131 Bartie, ‘New Wave of Glasgow Hooliganism’. 132 G. Noble, ‘In defence of Easterhouse’, New Society, 20 August 1970, p. 328. 133 GH, 19 August 1970. 134 Riddell ‘Leisure’, in Jackson, City of Dundee, p. 531. These comments were drafted in 1961 although first published in 1978. 135 M. White and A. Hunt, ‘Citizenship: care of the self, character and personality’, Citizenship Studies, 4.2 (2000), 93–116.

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7 Commercial leisure

If the institutions of home, school and workplace used techniques of temporal and spatial regulation to prevent ‘disorderly’ behaviour, what about young people’s ‘free’ time? As in the first half of the twentieth century ‘loafing’ on the streets continued to be discouraged, whilst membership of uniformed youth organisations and youth clubs was ubiquitously promoted as an antidote to increases in reported levels of youth offending. However, the postwar period also saw the demonisation – by police, media and some social workers – of new forms of commercial leisure specifically targeted at the teenage market. During the 1950s there were rising concerns about ‘hooliganism’ associated with dance halls and the arrival of rock ’n’ roll in cinemas and theatres across Britain, leading in some extreme cases to ‘pitched battle’ between police and young people. In the early 1960s, in a number of English cities but most prominently Manchester, attention turned to the new phenomenon of the members-only ‘jazz’ and ‘beat’ clubs, some of which ran ‘all-nighter’ events; because they served only non-alcoholic drinks they could not be inspected by the police under the existing licensing laws. As spaces outside ‘appropriate’ adult supervision, they were assumed to harbour runaways and to encourage criminal and illegal activity. Concerns about the actual sexual exploitation of young people merged with broader anxieties about ‘permissiveness’, including the hedonistic pursuit of individualism, and the erosion of distinctions of class, gender and respectability. This chapter begins by examining juvenile court proceedings relating to young people’s consumption of alcohol and other drugs, arguing that there was a fundamental mismatch between heightened concern and low incidence of judicial charges. It then moves on to outline the tactics that were used by the police and others in authority to regulate commercial leisure venues associated with young people and which

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all too frequently became the focus of ‘moral panic’. Whilst most existing research has tended to centre on the youth service (including youth clubs) and uniformed organisations,1 this chapter comments on the points of intersection as well as divergence between the commercial, public and voluntary sectors. On the one hand, the popularity of commercial leisure, as well as the anxieties that it created, can only be understood in relation to these other areas. On the other, the growth of a free market that catered for teenage taste and choice profoundly influenced the provision offered by state and voluntary sectors, albeit through the adoption of more sanitised forms. The idea that the male ‘teenager’ was subversive and oppositional in his use of leisure was encouraged both by his critics and his most enthusiastic advocates. In 1955 Conservative minister Sir James Henderson-Stewart, as a Scottish Under-Secretary of State for Education, was reported to have told the annual meeting of the Edinburgh Youth Welfare Association that ‘the leaderless army of young folk – of which the Edwardian style jacket was the symbol and insignia – represented a failure in communal life’. The Teddy boy’s jacket was ‘as much a uniform as a Boys Brigade cap or a Boy Scout hat, but too often stands for something tragically contradictory to everything that these movements represent’.2 In 1961 the 21-year-old Ray Gosling, then a youth leader in Leicester, spiritedly caricatured the new ‘Dionysian’ teenager: ‘he is genned up, jazzed up, and on the ball. He is anti-home, anti-community. It is undramatic to be seen at work. The large-scale focus is leisure.’3 Both sets of comments, although differently slanted, pre-empt the analysis of youth sub-culture as ‘resistance through ritual’ developed by Hebdige, Jefferson and others associated with the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies in the mid-1970s.4 Within these accounts youth fashion and commercial leisure choices are positioned as ‘anti-social’ in their rejection of existing social conventions and values, including the emphasis that had been placed on dutiful citizenship during wartime and reconstruction. However, the focus on ‘sub-culture’ is itself problematic in that it does not allow for the fluidity or complexity of many young people’s choices concerning participation and sociability. In the early 1960s working-class boys who frequented the ‘Bridge Street’ café (run by social-work volunteers in inner-city Manchester) made use of other less reputable commercial cafés in the area; they also attended church youth clubs ‘from time to time’, although avoiding ‘youth clubs run by professional workers’.5 It has been argued that long-standing voluntary sector clubs (including Salford Lads’ Club and St George’s Youth Club, Chadderton) had acted

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as incubators for Manchester pop groups such as the Hollies and the Dakotas.6 Thus a range of clubs and venues were used by overlapping groups of teenagers, and for their own purposes (rather than those necessarily intended by adults). As the sociologist Sarah Thornton has argued, youth culture may be better thought of as ‘multi-dimensional social space’ rather than binary opposition between ‘mainstream’ and ‘sub-culture’.7 Across a range of institutions and agencies, some adults were critical of the ways in which young people were reduced to simplistic stereotypes that assumed social subversion. In 1958 the Church of Scotland’s Social Service Committee considered it pertinent to report the more enlightened comments made by a woman magistrate at a recent conference: ‘Let us recognize that one generation always finds fault with the on-coming generation … Do you remember your father’s criticisms? When it became fashionable to have short hair, were we not told by our parents that we shed our womanhood with our crowing glory?’8 Nevertheless, youth stereotypes had considerable allure, shaping practices as well as debates. Moreover, young people classified themselves and others into distinct groups, influenced by the media as well as other discursive practices. For the historian then, it is important to approach these social classifications as cultural constructions or interventions rather than as simple descriptors of ‘reality’. Young people cannot be reduced to ‘sub-culture’; but neither can the effects of a dominant rhetoric that presented certain expressions of youth culture as oppositional be ignored. Drink, drugs and the juvenile courts At various points across the postwar period anxieties surfaced about illegal consumption of alcohol by those under 18. Yet these concerns rarely withstood detailed investigation and it seems unlikely that drinking was a significant element within the leisure practices of teenagers until at least the mid-1960s. In 1943 Mass Observation had claimed that alcohol consumption by the young had increased during wartime and that the majority of children had tasted alcohol, particularly beer, either in the parental home or at parties and celebrations.9 Attention focused specifically on girls aged 15 and 16 who, it was claimed, were using make-up and clothing to appear older, enabling them to accompany American soldiers to pubs and other licensed premises.10 Hence this particular ‘moral panic’ was an offshoot of concerns about the very young ‘good time girl’ (see Chapter 4). Yet London probation officers reported that ‘very few juveniles get into

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trouble through causes connected with drink and there has been no noticeable increase’. Whilst there were concerns about girls consorting with overseas servicemen, alcohol consumption itself was coincidental rather than causal.11 Nevertheless, the Mass Observation report led to significant debate concerning the ‘notorious’ increase ‘in juvenile drinking’ amongst girls in the pages of the Manchester Guardian, which suggested that it was a common problem in the cities of Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester. Solutions proposed ranged from the setting up of a large, well-lit café in Manchester’s city centre to the inclusion of date of birth on the identity cards of all those under 21 (neither was introduced).12 In Scotland, similar comments were made about the growing presence of young women in pubs, which it was assumed led to ‘moral laxity’. At the end of the war the Temperance Committee of Dundee Presbytery (Church of Scotland) called for a revival in the activities of the Band of Hope (the temperance organisation for juveniles founded in the 1840s), which had been abandoned during the war because of the blackout.13 Wartime concerns about underage drinking were highly gendered and reflected broader anxieties about moral decline and promiscuous sexuality, for which it was assumed that young women were largely culpable. Research on young men in Glasgow suggested that tobacco rather than alcohol was the ‘drug’ of choice in the 1940s, shaped by limited economic resources: ‘if it came to a choice between a drink and several packets of cigarettes, smoking won on almost all occasions’.14 In many working-class neighbourhoods the pub was still associated with an older age group of fathers and grandfathers although this was beginning to change. Abrams’s 1959 survey of the consumer trends of those aged 15–25 suggested that less than 40 per cent of males – and 10 per cent of females – consumed alcohol as much as once a week.15 In Scotland, however, concerns about the drinking habits of boys grew during the 1950 to 1960s, given awareness that ‘Scotland suffers more than most Western European countries from misuse of alcohol’.16 In 1959 the annual report of Dundee’s Youth and Community Centres’ Officer made reference to ‘the widespread habit of drinking, sometimes to excess, before social occasions’.17 This did not, however, translate, into court proceedings. Only two boys aged 15 and 16 (a vanboy and a labourer) were charged with being drunk and incapable in March 1959, and none in the samples collected for 1947 and 1953 (January to May). By 1965, however, 12 boys were charged with drunkenness within the sample, the majority of who were, similarly, aged 15–16 (with just one aged 14). All were picked up in major thoroughfares in the city, half of them on New Year’s Eve (all six

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were cautioned), and the remainder on Saturday nights in the warmer months of April and May (for which fines and admonitions were used by magistrates). Dundee magistrates expressed concern about the ‘many publicans who were guilty of serving underage youngsters with drink’, warning that their premises would be reported to the licensing authority.18 A similar trend was apparent in Manchester, although drunkenness charges were fewer in number, and the city four times larger in terms of population. Seven boys aged 15–16 were charged with drunkenness in the sample months for 1965, only two in 1959, and none in the previous sample years; most were fined, but one, who was not prepared to admit the charge, received an attendance centre order. Three boys aged 15–16 were also fined by juvenile court magistrates for ‘consuming intoxicating liquor on licensed premises’ one Friday evening in March 1965. The incremental increase in drunkenness convictions for juveniles was consistent with national profiles for England/Wales and Scotland. As a proportion of all juvenile charges, however, they remained trivial in both cities (less that 1.5 per cent in Dundee and less than 0.6 per cent in Manchester). It is highly likely that most cases involving alcohol misuse were dealt with through more informal mechanisms. A study of teenager alcohol consumption in Glasgow in the late 1960s found that boys aged 13–14 were most likely to engage in ‘clandestine’ drinking in parks and other open spaces ‘remote from the regulating adult influence’, before progressing to the public house at the age of 17. Given that many dance halls were unlicensed, the practice of smuggling drink on to the premises for consumption in the toilets was described as ‘fairly widespread’.19 The 1963 Home Office survey on attitudes towards crime amongst British males aged 15–21, found that 70 per cent of those questioned had drunk alcohol in a pub under the age of 18, but only 36 per cent had done so below 16. Only 9 per cent reported that they had ‘been very drunk in a public place’ at some point in their lives so far.20 Alcohol consumption and the pub was an increasingly important component of the leisure of those in their late teens. Both the statistics and lack of significant public comment suggest, however, that juvenile drunkenness (the use of alcohol to excess) was not a significant social problem in the 1950s and 1960s. It was in the mid-1990s that concerns about teenage ‘binge-drinking’, linked to the sale of ‘Alcopops’ (sweet drinks with a high alcohol content), became prominent within public discourse.21 Anxieties about other forms of drugs use increasingly concentrated on young people. There were resonances with the 1920s, when public revelations about the London ‘drug scene’ (relating to cocaine and

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opium), had centred on the corruption of ‘flappers’ – young middleclass white women – by men of Chinese and Indian origin.22 These revelations had led to the introduction of drug control policy in Britain. The Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920 (amended in 1923) prohibited the possession of cannabis and cocaine for non-medical purposes. The intervening period, however, has been characterised by Virginia Berridge as one of relative ‘calm’. Although the first ‘teenage’ cannabis smoker is recorded as coming to police attention in 1952, the use of illegal drugs continued to be associated with black and minority ethnic men, and often linked with merchant seafaring.23 For example, in 1947 Manchester’s CID undertook an extensive operation that led to the prosecution of an ‘Indian’ man, who had allegedly deserted his ship two years’ earlier, for the possession of sufficient ‘hashish’ to make cigarettes ‘of street value of £3,500’.24 During the 1950s prosecutions for possession of cannabis formed part of the police clampdown on ‘vice’ in the Moss Side area and involved the targeting of the growing Caribbean population. Manchester’s Chief Constable did not consider the enforcement of the Dangerous Drugs Acts worthy of mention in his annual reports until 1959, when there were 12 such convictions; in 1962, charges were brought against 23 ‘mainly coloured people’.25 In the early 1960s the police, press and the Home Office identified the increased recreational use, not only of cannabis but also of legally prescribed drugs (amphetamines and barbiturates) as a ‘problem’ amongst a young white urban population. The ‘pep pill’ phenomenon had arrived, but was accompanied by growing concerns about teenage use of more lethal substances. Significantly, whilst ‘moral panic’ relating to ‘Teddy boy’ violence was associated with white workingclass youth, a number of high-profile cases suggested that drugs posed a threat to young people of all social classes.26 From 1963 onwards, Chief Constable John McKay commented on the prevalence of youth (in addition to minority ethnic constituencies) in statistical profiles for drugs prosecutions in Manchester. Whilst cases were initially low in number, police strategies were shaped by national debates as well as, in turn, shaping them. It is likely, too, that the publicity accorded drugs’ use impacted on the recreational behaviour of young people. The Drugs (Prevention of Misuse Act) 1964, which was passed in June and came into operation in October, permitted prosecutions for the illegal possession of amphetamines, whilst the 1964 Dangerous Drugs Act further extended the range of cannabis offences. The 1967 Dangerous Drugs Act gave police officers powers to stop and search anyone suspected of carrying drugs. The introduction of this

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legislation overlapped substantively with media coverage of a youth drugs problem in Manchester. In August 1964 it was suggested that Manchester ‘had acquired the reputation of being the largest clearing house in Britain for ‘Purple Hearts’ pills’ (drinamyl). Although such hyperbole was initially denied by Manchester police it soon emerged that the ‘trade’ had become the focus of a major investigation.27 Prosecutions in Manchester rose steeply as the new legislation was implemented, but also as a result of the creation of a Drugs Squad in the city in 1965, which pursued a deliberate prosecution strategy (see figure 7.1). It was a ‘problem’ that was associated with youth (50 per cent of those prosecuted were under 21 in 1965) and was associated with specific leisure venues in the city. While girls’ involvement was seen as limited (15 per cent of the under-21s prosecuted for drugs offences in 1965), concerns about the involvement of young women in an allegedly dissipated lifestyle attracted attention.28 The introduction of the new legislation impacted on the business of Manchester juvenile court in 1965. Within the sample, five 16-year200 Drugs (Prevention of Misuse Act) 1964

Dangerous Drugs Acts (1920 and 1964) 150

100

50

0 1962

1963

1964

1965

1966

1967

1968

Figure 7.1 Number of prosecutions for drug-related offences (all courts), Manchester City Police, 1962–68. Sources: CCARs, Manchester.

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old boys and one 16-year-old girl were charged with the possession of small quantities of non-prescribed tablets (durophet, drinamyl and preludin) and cannabis. Four of these prosecutions resulted from police sweeps on unlicensed clubs on Valentine’s weekend. The girl, charged with possession of durophet, was acquitted, whilst male juveniles were dealt with through probation orders or fines. Clearly these charges represented a minimal proportion (0.3 per cent) of juvenile charges within the 1965 sample, suggesting that the under-17 age group constituted less than 9 per cent of all drugs prosecutions in the city in 1965. Nevertheless, concerns about youth culture and moral protection shaped the policing agenda. Sensationalist press coverage heightened police anxiety and triggered changes in policing strategies; these reactions were then further sensationalised in the media. It was only towards the end of the 1960s, as the social reality of drugs consumption was discussed and debated that an emphasis on education policies emerged as a more effective preventative solution.29 Manchester’s reputation as a ‘drugs’ capital was linked to its emergence as a commercial and entertainment centre for the north-west. The trajectory of concern played out differently in other regions and cities. In June 1959 the Scottish Council of Physical Recreation recorded, in its annual report, that ‘pep pills’ were ‘undoubtedly on the increase among young people’.30 In 1965 the Dundee Courier reported a case in which a 16-year-old Aberdeen schoolboy admitted that he had stolen 1,100 pills, including purple hearts, from his brother’s chemist shop in Glasgow, and had then sold some of them to fellow pupils for ninepence each; it also commented on London’s ‘Teenagers and the Soho drugs menace’.31 Dundee police, however, did not deem drugs’ misuse a problem, and continued to associate it with minority ethnic seamen. In 1969 an HMI of Constabulary was told that there was ‘no reason to believe that a serious drug situation exists in Dundee’ but that a close watch was kept on the harbour area because ‘Dundee is a major port for the importation of jute and many of the ships dock there direct from Pakistan’. In the previous year ‘a Chinese ship’s carpenter and a Jamaican who had travelled from London’ were each sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for importing cannabis.32 It was only in 1972 that mention was made of an increase in the misuse of drugs ‘particularly in persons aged in their late teens’.33 Dundee’s association with a high level of drug use amongst teenagers by the 1990s was not prefigured in the 1960s.34

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Leisure venues: the surveillance of place and space Cinema ‘rowdyism’ and dance hall ‘hooliganism’ Into the 1950s there were significant continuities with the interwar period in young people’s choice of commercial leisure, most obviously in terms of the popularity of cinema. Similarly, too, the potentially corrupting influence of films (particularly those featuring violence and ‘gangsterism’) was regularly invoked as a ‘cause’ of delinquency, although researched-based evidence tended to contradict this.35 The reports prepared by Glasgow probation officers suggest that the commercial leisure choices of those accused of offences were not distinctly different from ‘non-delinquents’ (cinema and skating) and, indeed, both groups also participated in uniformed youth organisations (in Glasgow the Boys’ Brigade and its junior section, the Life Boys, predominated amongst Protestant communities) as well as swimming, football and cycling.36 Cinemas themselves rarely featured as locations for the alleged offences heard in the Dundee and Manchester juvenile courts. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the practice by which the one boy who paid for a cinema ticket then ‘opened the exit doors for the rest to go in’ was nationally widespread if not endemic.37 It was unlikely to lead to formal charges but was either ignored or managed through the banning of individuals from the premises. In Manchester those who were banned resorted to their everyday habit of ‘hanging round “on the corner”’, sitting in cafés in the winter months and playing football in the summer.38 Cinema owners, local authorities and police across the country braced themselves for the arrival of the film Rock Around the Clock in September 1956 following extensive press coverage of ‘rowdyism’, including the slashing of cinema seats and disorderly behaviour in surrounding streets when it was shown to teenage audiences in London. In the Lancashire town of Burnley, £150 worth of damage was reported, including broken lamp bulbs, torn seats and the turning on of fire-hoses, all of which started when there was a ‘change over of duty’ for the two police officers deployed to ‘keep an eye on things’.39 Local authority Watch Committees (responsible for the licensing of cinemas in England) banned the film outright in Birmingham, West Bromwich, Wigan, Brighton, Gateshead, South Shields, Stockport, Taunton and Ipswich, whilst the Rank Organisation refused to show it in its own cinemas on Sundays – deemed to be the most ‘difficult’ night of the week in terms of English audiences (in Dundee and other Scottish towns cinemas, dance halls and pubs continued to close on the Sabbath).40

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In Manchester fourteen young people, including ten juveniles, were charged with breach of the peace in Oxford Street following the showing of the film at the Gaiety cinema on Monday 10 September. Press reports suggest that tempers escalated in response to a very visible security presence that was a reaction to disorder the previous evening. A large contingency of Manchester’s police force had been put on patrol inside and outside the cinema. Cinema management was reported to have employed ‘some “strong arm” men of its own’ to line the walls of the auditorium and to restrain anyone dancing in the aisles or throwing items at the screen. When this failed, the police were brought in, to alleged chants of: ‘We don’t want no cops’, and they escorted a number of young people from the premises.41 The crowd emerged from the cinema dancing and singing, and police officers stated that arrests were made when a request to disperse was refused: members of the crowd had ‘danced on the platform of the Cenotaph in St Peter’s Square, a youth danced on the roof of a parked car, another performed a “snake dance” in a dazed, hypnotized fashion, and others terrorised pedestrians’. In the courtroom two of the accused claimed they had not viewed the film that evening but had gone into town after attending youth clubs elsewhere in the city, out of ‘curiosity’ at the press coverage. Four of those accused were discharged whilst the remaining nine were fined by magistrates for what was described as ‘organised hooliganism’.42 In Scotland, where the film arrived later in the month, a muted response was evident, to the disappointment of newspaper reporters. In Edinburgh ‘young persons clapped and tapped their feet … but there was no rowdyism’, whilst ‘Kirkaldy cinema-goers gave the film a quiet response’.43 The ‘worst’ example of ‘hooliganism’ was reported to have taken place in the town of Ayr where ‘ash trays were torn from seats and seat-backs smashed’ whilst a cinema attendant ‘had his cap snatched and thrown’.44 In Dundee four young people were fined for causing a breach of the peace when ‘a crowd of 300 teenagers who were singing, shouting, dancing and clapping hands’ assembled in City Square after the film had been shown on 25 September.45 The press coverage of incidents associated with the showing of the film generated a clear ‘moral panic’ amongst local councillors, police and magistrates. It also led to some imitative and ‘copycat’ behaviours as the film itself ‘arrived’ sequentially in different towns and cities. This was coupled with resentment from teenage audiences when a knee-jerk and heavy-handed response was planned by police. Analysis of press coverage reveals a mismatch between the sensationalist headlines and the small number of low-level cases that were handled

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by the courts. It also reveals adult condemnation as well as acceptance of new forms of music. The comments of Sir Malcolm Sargent, then chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, that rock ’n’ roll was ‘nothing more than an exhibition of primitive tom-tom thumping’ were widely reported. Others felt differently, equating the ‘rock ’n’ roll ‘craze’ to the Charleston of the 1920s.46 One Salford cinema proprietor (also a local councillor) refused to call for the banning of the film; ‘Is it a crime for young people to sing and dance and enjoy themselves?’ he asked.47 Nevertheless, as sociologists of music have convincingly demonstrated, rock ’n’ roll was a physical and emotional articulation of generational difference. Its pleasures and qualities were visceral and sexually charged, as a result of its ‘sound effects’ as well as its lyrics. Rock ’n’ roll fuelled new forms of ecstatic engagement that had the capacity to shock others as ‘youths shouted, sang, jumped on to seats, and danced in the aisles’. As the solicitor defending a 15yearold boy accused of throwing a stool across the stalls of the Manchester Hippodrome explained, ‘in the rhapsody of the moment he just let things go’.48 Continuity with the earlier twentieth century was also apparent into the 1950s in the salience of the dance hall for teenagers and young adults as a place to meet prospective marriage partners and to engage in courtship.49 Venues were associated with slightly different age groups and clientele. Memoirs written by female authors who grew up in Dundee in the 1950s contrast ‘Robbie’s’ dance hall in Hawkhill, which was ‘small, smoky and intimate’ and catered for adolescent jive fans, with the ‘light, roomy and very elegant’ Palais in Tay Street, which attracted a slightly older crowd who would dance the waltz and quickstep.50 Sunday closure helped to perpetuate the ritual of the ‘Monkey Parade’ in the Overgate until around 1960, when the area was demolished to make way for a shopping centre.51 The large commercial dance halls in Manchester and Dundee employed ‘bouncers’ to patrol inside as well as doormen ‘to keep down the rowdy element’, whilst ‘Teddy boy’ clothing was often subject to a blanket ban.52 Dances were also run on Friday or Saturday nights by church youth clubs, working men’s clubs and other societies and associations with their own premises. The 1943 Mass Observation report on juvenile drinking had referred to ‘rowdy behaviour’ by a small ‘minority’ of boys aged 16–17 who brought bottles of beer into dances run in a church hall in Fulham.53 ‘Dance-hall hooliganism’ was not a specific creation of the 1950s. By the end of the decade, however, ‘trouble’ was most likely to emerge in relation to the dances run in church halls and working

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men’s clubs in outlying areas rather than urban centres; these lacked the resources and experience to deal with troublemakers and were clearly seen as easy targets by groups of bored male youth who had already been excluded from urban commercial venues. In August 1959 members of Monifieth District Council voiced concerns about ‘the “undesirables” attracted to village hall dances in small communities around Dundee’. One councillor commented that: ‘It’s the scum of Lochee who come to these dances. I was asked to go to one of these dances to judge the beauty queen and it was terrible. The local sergeant and constable have to be at the place from eleven o’clock until three in the morning to see them off the premises. When I was asked why they let these people come I was told, “We need the money”.’54 Chief Constable of Lothians and Peebles Police, William Merrilees, recounted in his memoirs that extra uniformed policemen were deployed to small-town dancehalls in the Scottish borders on Saturday nights to deal with ‘Edinburgh teddy boys’ intent on a fight: ‘it was a common thing for my officers to be subjected to cat-calls and other offensive gestures while performing their duties’. In August 1959 it was reported that 140 ‘Teddy boys’ had phoned a daily newspaper to say that they were ‘on the way to smash up a dance-hall at Wallyford’ near Musselburgh (the dance was being held in the Miners’ Institute). Merrilees himself attended with police reinforcements, whom he presents as dispersing the ‘mob’ as they advanced ‘in battle formation’.55 Clearly it was in the interests of the large public dance halls to self-regulate through the systemic banning of ‘Teddy boy’ clothing so as not to attract the ire of the licensing authorities. This, however, fuelled resentment, leading to their sporadic targeting of out of town events. The ‘coffee club menace’ Whilst a visible uniformed police presence was the response to ‘cinema rowdyism’ and ‘dance hall hooliganism’, undercover surveillance had been used, across the twentieth century, to deal with illegal drinking in licensed establishments as well as unlicensed ‘shebeens’. The selling of alcohol out of hours, or of drink to the under-18s in public bars, might lead to the conviction of landlords and the revocation of their licence.56 In the early 1960s police in Manchester and London’s West End turned their attention to the ‘new’ phenomenon of ‘coffee’ or ‘dance’ clubs, commercial venues that catered for an exclusively youthful clientele, and which sought to escape the attention of the licensing laws altogether. As ‘members only’ clubs which charged a small joining fee, and served only tea, coffee or soft drinks, they were

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neither wholly ‘private’ nor ‘public’ venues. Although police had a right of entry to inspect licensed premises, they had to seek ‘permission to enter’ from the ‘coffee’ club manager if they wanted to pursue enquiries inside. The clubs offered jazz, rhythm and blues, soul or beat music (both live and recorded) and, by 1962, many ran ‘all-nighter’ events. Clubs such as Manchester’s Twisted Wheel (which became famous for its role in the creation of ‘Northern Soul’) attracted coach parties of young people from Cheshire, Yorkshire and Humberside.57 In a city centre that was still scarred by the effects of the Blitz, clubs were often located in the basements of dilapidated warehouses, raising concerns about hygiene, health and safety. However, the police were more concerned about the potential ‘moral danger’ in spaces that were assumed to lack appropriate adult supervision: for drugtaking and illicit sexuality. In addition, the clubs were identified as ‘magnets’ for teenage absconders from approved schools or remand homes and those who were ‘missing from home’. The press referred to a new ‘type’ of teenage runaway: the ‘tramp’, ‘beatnik’, ‘dosser’ or ‘drifter’ who travelled ‘from city to city, loosely sleeping where they can and “living by their wits”’.58 The ‘liminal’ spaces of the coffee club were assumed to be the ideal place for concealment. In both Manchester and London the clubs were initially a point of focus for the Women Police Departments. Ordinary cafés and milk bars had routinely featured as key locations to visit when undertaking routine searches for missing juveniles (along with other places offering temporary shelter, such as public toilets). Policewomen were the first to be aware of the new premises as they attempted to incorporate them into their searches. For example, one Tuesday evening in June 1964 two Manchester policewomen visited the ‘Jungfrau coffee club’ as part of a routine search for a girl who had absconded from a local approved school. One of the officers reported that: The dance floor was crowded and very dimly lit, and around the walls were young couples several of whom were kissing and cuddling … I moved round the room and questioned three young girls who were kissing and cuddling with some youths in a corner of the room. One girl said she was sixteen years old but admitted her parents would not approve of her behaviour. The other two girls said they were fifteen and I warned them.59

The manager, ‘a youth of about 20 years’, accused the policewomen of pestering his customers and the club owner requested that they visit in plain clothes in future so as not to disturb his clientele. No formal action was taken. It was neither an offence for owners of licensed

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premises to permit entry to those under 17 (although most clubs had an ‘over 18’ door-entry policy) nor for parents to allow adolescents to stay out all night. However, the lack of appropriate supervision contrasted with the diligence exercised by the workers in youth clubs run by the voluntary sector and local authorities, where dancing was ‘regulated so as to avoid charges of sexual impropriety’ and ‘“professional” [French] kissing’ was not allowed.60 The policewomen were involved in a preventative strategy, involving advice and warning, designed to pre-empt adolescent involvement in underage sex. No evidence was found that sexual intercourse had actually taken place or to prosecute premises as ‘disorderly houses’. According to their files, Manchester’s policewomen came into contact with a total of 289 girls as a result of routine inquiries concerning a dozen coffee clubs between March and November 1964. Care or protection proceedings appear to have been taken in only eight cases. 32 girls reported as ‘missing from home’ were found in the clubs as well as eight absconders.61 At London’s West End Central police station, women police had similar concerns about young people attracted to Soho, who had run away from home and were staying out all night and thereby placing themselves in ‘moral danger’. Between February and June 1964 a total of 453 children and young persons had been picked up in the West End; whilst most were returned to parents or approved schools, three girls were taken before the juvenile court as in need of care or protection. Increasingly, their attentions focused on the ‘juvenile jazz and dance clubs’ in Soho, speculating that there was ‘a bush telegraph that worked in approved schools about what places existed where absconders might find shelter’.62 At a meeting of concerned parties in September 1964 representatives of the LCC’s Children’s Department stated that those in their care had absconded to visit clubs such as The Flamingo in Wardour Street, ‘where young girls go and can get drugs and meet coloured men’. In both London and Manchester concerns about miscegenation, the ‘white slave trade’ and prostitution were mapped on to the ‘club menace’. Runaways were described as finding ‘a free and easy atmosphere where they are accepted and not out of place, and where the restrictions of ordinary life which they find irksome do not exist’. For the ‘“mystery” girls’ – a term used to describe those who had run away to London ‘with no means of support’ – it was an escape from ‘parents, teachers or other authoritarian figures’. In relation to juvenile boys, concerns about ‘corruption’ into homosexuality, criminalised in England and Wales until 1967, were also hinted at. A police raid on the ‘Kandy Club’ in Gerrard Street in August 1962 had led to the apprehension of a 17-year-old male

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r­ unaway, who was found amongst a large group of ‘known homosexuals and four women known to be lesbians’.63 Similarly, undercover policewomen carrying out drugs observations in Manchester’s Twisted Wheel in March 1964 reported that they had seen ‘several queers, and although it was sometimes difficult to tell the boys from the girls, we definitely saw two boys holding hands’.64 Whilst the child protection remit of the uniformed women police brought these clubs to attention, as speculation about possible drug use increased, so too did the involvement of specialist plain clothes teams: the Drugs Squad (Manchester) and ‘Clubs’ Section (West End Central). Frustrated by their inability to carry out routine inspections, undercover surveillance techniques were soon deployed. For these purposes they often used young recruits, including women cadets, whose police identity could be more effectively concealed and who could ‘affect the dress and deportment of the persons frequenting coffee clubs’.65 When sufficient evidence had been accumulated, the Drugs Squad applied for warrants under the newly legislated Dangerous Drugs Act to raid premises. For example, in the early hours of the morning of Saturday 13 February 1965 forty-five police officers raided the Forty Thieves Club, situated in a basement in Fennel Street, Manchester.66 This was followed by two further raids the following night: on the Cavern Club, in a cellar in Cromford Court, and on the Heaven and Hell Club, in ‘an old warehouse scheduled for demolition’ in Sackville Street.67 In Soho, the raids rapidly came to be known as ‘juvenile sweeps’ and buses were deployed onto which young people were loaded to be taken to West End Central for processing.68 Police records relating to the raids on Valentines’ weekend 1965 are revealing because they show that the majority of the young people who used the clubs were not ‘delinquents’, drug addicts or absconders at all. In relation to the Forty Thieves, Manchester policewomen dealt with seven girls, two of whom were absconders; in the other five cases no action appears to have been taken. Six young adults were fined by city magistrates for the possession of small quantities of cannabis or pills and another received a prison sentence from a Crown Court judge since he was also charged with an assault unrelated to the raid.69 At the Cavern, policewomen found eight juvenile girls (aged 15 and 16), but no action appears to have been taken and the girls were sent home.70 A doorman and a 16-year-old boy were found to be in possession of small quantities of cannabis (the latter was dealt with in the juvenile court).71 At Heaven and Hell, police found five small packets of cannabis as well as a number of studded belts and small knives, the latter leading to three prosecutions for possessing offensive weapons

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(see Chapter 4). The policewomen took 42 girls under the age of 17 to Bootle Street police station for questioning. Two of these were absconders, who were returned to approved schools, two girls were referred to the Children’s Department as being beyond the control of their parents, and one girl, found in the possession of durophet capsules, was brought before the juvenile court. In all other cases, however, no action was taken: ‘the majority of girls appear to come from respectable homes and their parents were very distressed … most parents had no idea that their daughter was in the city, being under the impression that each was staying with a friend’.72 The coffee clubs cannot be viewed as the preserve of a sub-cultural group who were consciously resisting authority although the label may apply to some. In January 1963, shortly before the ‘moral panic’ emerged, the Guardian had described them as ‘warm classless havens’ bringing together a ‘metropolitan mixture’ of students, artists and manual workers for ‘a fairly inexpensive night on the town’.73 Arguably, it was this very phenomenon of social mixing that led to the escalation of this panic. The Twisted Wheel was described in a police occurrence report as ‘frequented by young people of all classes’, where younger policewomen passed themselves off as ‘student teachers’ when employed on plain clothes observations.74 The concern about the indiscriminate mingling of classes was highlighted by Manchester’s Senior Policewoman Nellie Bohanna when she told a national conference that ‘respectable youngsters also frequented the clubs and could be corrupted’.75 In relation to Soho, the Metropolitan Police and LCC were concerned about the coming together of approved school absconders with ‘those from good class homes who are “out for kicks” and [had] deceived their parents into thinking that they are sleeping at friends’.76 Concerns about the breakdown of familiar class-based distinctions were part of the broader fear of ‘permissiveness’. However, parents did not always agree with police. In March 1964 a woman sergeant, who had gained access to the Twisted Wheel just after midnight, ordered five girls aged 15 and 16, whom she found sitting quietly at tables with boyfriends, to leave the premises. Complaints were made the next day by two parents who said they had given permission to attend and that ‘their daughter was quite capable of looking after herself’.77 Police officers, welfare workers and newspaper reporters distinguished between club premises despite the broad-brush labelling. Those that were ‘well decorated’ and ‘clean’ were contrasted with venues where the decor was ‘obscene’ and the clientele ‘undesirable’.78 The police stated that around half of the clubs were ‘reasonably

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well conducted’.79 The Heaven and Hell, which was regularly viewed as the most disreputable, was profiled in a sensational report in the Daily Mail as an example of ‘the dangerous teenage immorality lurking in the basements of Britain’s big cities’.80 Significantly, young people themselves took on this rhetoric to contrast their tastes, interests and social circle with that of others. In his personal recollections as a fan of the Twisted Wheel, Phil Scott described the Heaven and Hell as far less salubrious: ‘It was a dive of a place with a notorious reputation, frequented by deadbeats and scruffs. Situated on the other side of town, the Heaven and Hell also had all-nighters but it was a club that attracted undesirables – a place where kids could “doss” down for a night on mattresses.’81 He admitted that he scoured the Manchester Evening News every night for information about ‘that grown up world down town’. The press, youth and police shared a common set of reference points as they constructed taxonomies of people and places through interdependent narratives. What was to be done about the ‘clubs menace’ given that the system of undercover surveillance and juvenile sweeps was costly, labour intensive, and ultimately unproductive in leading to prosecutions? In the autumn of 1964 the Metropolitan Police was proposing the introduction of a curfew in Soho for young people under 17. This was dismissed by civil servants and LCC officials in December as unlikely to get ‘sufficient support’.82 Manchester adopted a different approach to spatial regulation as a special clause to enable police supervision of clubs was added to the Manchester Corporation Bill which was being drafted for presentation to Parliament. The clause was proposed by Chief Constable McKay, supported by the Watch Committee and endorsed by the City Council.83 In fact much of the bill was concerned with the acquisition of further powers of compulsory purchase to enable redevelopment of the city centre through the clearance of slums and dilapidated warehouses. Supporters described it as an attempt to deal with ‘the legacy of industrial squalor’ by providing ‘modern amenities in a modern city’.84 The regulation of ‘coffee clubs’ was part of this clean-up operation. It can also be argued that publicity surrounding the ‘moral panic’ relating to ‘coffee clubs’ was used by Manchester’s Chief Constable as a tactic to extend police powers and thus influence in the city. When McKay had arrived in Manchester in 1958 he faced the task of improving the force’s previously poor performance with regard to discipline, morale and crime detection rates.85 The police response to the ‘coffee club menace’ was a highly visible attempt to enhance the force’s reputation as anti-vice and anti-corruption; young people were the pawns within such a moral victory.

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The Manchester Corporation Act received the Royal Assent in August 1965. All entertainment clubs were to be registered with the Corporation from 1 January 1966; applications could be turned down if the premises were unsafe, insufficiently lit, or not equipped with appropriate sanitation. Any person, not just a manager or owner, could be fined if they knowingly permitted drugs or alcohol to be sold on the premises. Moreover, police officers were given the ‘right to enter at all reasonable times’.86 As the deadline for registration drew near, The Times proclaimed an end to the ‘Manchester Coffee Club Menace’. The Heaven and Hell and the Forty Thieves had folded and those that were left were ‘almost unrecognisable with their new decors [and] their spotless floors’. The ‘unshaven youths’ who had acted as doormen (and even ‘managers’) had been replaced with ‘adults in dinner suits’ providing ‘discreet but firm supervision of the dancers’.87 The progress of the Manchester Corporation Bill was followed closely in London, where it was agreed that similar legislation would be desirable.88 Concerns about the ‘coffee club’ phenomenon were also voiced by senior police in Salford, Brighton and Leicester, who spoke approvingly of the need for similar action.89 The passage of a private member’s bill, introduced by the Conservative MP for Twickenham, Roger Gresham Cooke, was frustrated by the general election of 1966. In May 1967 legislation was enacted, with the full support of the new Labour administration, enabling all local authorities in England and Wales to introduce a system for licensing clubs and for prosecuting those who permitted offences to be committed on the premises.90 Very real concerns about public health (standards of hygiene and sanitation in dilapidated premises) and the actual sexual exploitation of vulnerable young people (absconders and runaways) had merged with a moral framework inherited from earlier decades together with fear about the demise of an old social order in which the markers of class and gender difference were certain. For the police who entered the clubs and had been trained to emulate military codes of smartness and physical presentation, ‘long hair’ was problematic; it was unclear whether it was a signifier of gender (femininity or effeminacy), homosexuality, or other forms of decadent or illicit behaviour (the ‘drug taker’ or ‘peddler’). The 1960s tends to be associated with ‘permissive’ legislation which saw sexual expression in private redefined as beyond state concern if it involved consenting adults; this principle was most clearly articulated in the 1967 Sexual Offences Act which decriminalised private sexual acts between adult males in England and Wales. As Jeffrey Weeks has commented, however, ‘by ceasing to be the guardian of private morality, the law would more effectively become the protector of public

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decency and order.’91 In relation to young people, there were rigorous attempts at the local and national level to define and regulate public space and to intensify its surveillance. A further significant aspect of the ‘moral panic’ over teenage use of coffee, jazz and dance clubs relates to its association with very specific cities in England: those with sizeable commercial and entertainments centres and a reputation for nightlife. In Manchester and London the discussion was shaped by the spatial relationship between teenage clubs and the red light district, whose expansion was also greeted with concern by the authorities. In Soho both types of premises were concentrated in the same area. In Manchester the problems of drugs – and even the prostitution of young women – in city centre clubs was connected back to Moss Side ‘peddlers’ and ‘vice’ circles. No such phenomenon appears to have received comment or censure in Scotland’s cities. Rather, a very different urban ‘moral panic’ concerning youth had emerged by the 1960s (see Chapter 4), associated with peripheral housing schemes rather than city centres and with street violence rather than the use of semi-private clubs for illicit purposes. In June 1965 the arrival of the Rolling Stones in Glasgow and Dundee to perform concerts for huge audiences of mostly teenage girls led to the deployment of significant numbers of stewards and policemen (including officers on horseback in Glasgow). In Dundee, the floor of the Caird Hall was likened to a ‘battlefield’ as ‘the girls were dragged or carried up the aisles’ as others attempted to jump on stage. It is significant, however, that the gendering of these incidents led to a tone of wry amusement in the Dundee Courier, which described ‘scores of hysterical girls’ engaged in ‘a vain effort to get the Rolling Stones’.92 As Chapter 4 suggests, violence was overwhelmingly associated with masculinity and girls were rarely viewed as a threat to public order. Youth, leisure and consumption The focus on venues that was apparent in these moments of ‘moral panic’ obscures the ways in which young people’s access to commercial leisure was already restricted and circumscribed. The overwhelming feeling of the 1969 film Bronco Bullfrog – directed by Barney PlattsMills and devised by a cast of non-professional teenage actors (from Stratford, East London) – is one of lack of opportunity and personal space. Life for young workers is presented as ‘boring as usual … [with] nothing to do’. West End cinema tickets are too expensive for Del, an apprentice welder, when he takes 15-year-old Irene (who is about to leave school) on a date; cheap cafés and a rare visit to a speedway

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track are the only tangible evidence of participation in commercial leisure. Inaccurate stereotypes conspire to construct the couple as a bad influence on each other. Del’s father disapproves of Irene because her father is in prison and is ‘an Italian’. Irene’s mother assumes that Del is taking drugs because ‘he wears boots – [and] I bet he doesn’t even go to work’. Claire Langhamer has shown that girls who grew up in postwar England had (like boys) higher expectations of entitlement to time and money for participation in leisure than their mothers and grandmothers.93 The ‘tipping up’ system, in which young workers passed their wage packets directly to their mothers before receiving ‘pocket money’ for personal spending was dominant in many areas of the country in the interwar period.94 Whilst it was less widespread by the 1950s, it had not disappeared entirely and its retention amongst some families in working-class areas of the north of England and in Scotland was still noted in 1960.95 Whilst it might be said that on average teenagers’ ‘real earnings’ had increased by about 50 per cent since the 1930s (in comparison to 25 per cent for adults) and that their ‘real discretionary spending’ had doubled,96 this concealed continued economic inequality and, for individual teenagers, much depended on family situations. In 1962 Manchester’s Chief Constable McKay was reported as commenting: ‘I think no-one in this country can hold the thesis that one of the main courses of crime is poverty. This is out of date now. One cannot seriously contend that this is so.’97 The naivety of this perspective was brought out in the YDT’s social work project in the Wincroft area of the city. A common cycle, structured by economic circumstance, led to ‘getting into trouble with the law’: demands by parents that a son should ‘pay his way’, arguments over money when sons lost their jobs, and periods of homelessness when sons either ‘left or had been forced to leave their homes’.98 Wincroft project workers identified the social distance of professional club leaders from the neighbourhood communities in which young people lived as a reason why many teenagers avoided local authority provision, preferring church youth clubs that were at least locally embedded.99 Pubs and the growing proliferation of cafés and coffee bars in the inner city were also a central reference point through which generational culture was fashioned, ‘strengthening their [young people’s] social ties and reinforcing their common values’.100 In Dundee, in 1959, discerning teenagers were attracted to the ‘new-style’ Haparanda café that had recently opened in Arbroath Road and which sought to instil a ‘club atmosphere’ with its record player instead of a juke-box; its ban on ‘Teddy boys’ led to its

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a­ ssociation with a different crowd that was cultivating a ‘mod’ image by the early 1960s.101 If commercial leisure in the form of the coffee bar or café had become the preference of many teenagers, then social workers were intent on imitating the commercial sphere in order to bring young people back within adult supervision and corrective influence. In response to concerns about the damaging effects of Manchester’s ‘Heaven and Hell’ club (decorated with skeletons, skulls and vampires), an interdenominational Christian group set up the ‘Catacombs Coffee House’ in the city centre, decorated with ‘Christian symbols’ and offering ‘gospel beat music’ as well as talks conveying a Christian message.102 Plans for the Church of Scotland’s annual ‘Kirk Week’ of 1965 were to include events involving jazz and beat groups, playing live in Dundee.103 This approach had already been satirised by Gosling as the conviction that the ‘bitter pill of self-advancement’ must be ‘sugar-coated’ with ‘modern jazz, followed by hot-dogs, and coffee’ and that ‘religion must be covered up with rock ’n’ roll’.104 The Albemarle Report of 1960 had famously endorsed the ‘coffee bar’ model of youth work, in which outreach to ‘the unattached’ (the 60 per cent of young people who did not officially belong to a youth clubs) was effected through non-hierarchical and organic models.105 Gosling’s argument was that what was needed was a type of club ‘created by the young consumer for the young consumer’. Similar to the model of the University Students’ Union, it would give young people genuine ‘dignity, independence and power’. At the same time, he argued, the youth service should continue to cater properly for the 40 per cent who still chose to join church youth clubs or uniformed organisations, or wanted support for involvement in specialist activities such as ‘sailing, pony-trekking or mountaineering’.106 Rather than seeing these entities as discrete groups, however, this chapter has argued that there was some overlap in terms of leisure choices and that those who appeared before the courts as ‘delinquents’ did not participate in distinctly different forms of leisure from other young people in working-class communities. Conclusion Broad changes in leisure were apparent across the period 1945–70. Cafes, coffee bars and dance clubs (offering live but, increasingly, recorded music played by DJs) simply grew in popularity, whilst the 1960s saw the decline of the cinema and old-fashioned dance hall. Many of these venues had become bingo halls for an older generation

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by 1970, facilitated by the Betting and Gaming Act 1960. The equivalent for young people was the arrival of the ‘amusement arcade’, which led to similar concerns about delinquency and susceptibility to corrupting adult influences that had been associated with the coffee clubs. In 1970 police inquiries revealed a network of adults involved in the sexual abuse of young boys who had been picked up at the Playland Amusement Arcade in the West End.107 It was undoubtedly the case that some vulnerable young women were exploited by adults that they met in the unlicensed music clubs of Soho and Manchester. What is notable, however, is that the ‘moral panics’ connected to leisure venues tended to brand each ‘new’ phenomenon as a social ‘menace’ and offered little recognition of young people’s agency or ability to make choices. Arguably, wherever young people are found, they may attract adults who wish them harm. In focusing on the intrinsic qualities of the venues themselves and on the reduction of criminality to ciphers such as ‘race’ and ethnicity, the narratives failed to represent or respond to the complexity of young people’s experiences. Sibley has contrasted his ‘own experience as a teenager in the 1950s, sitting for hours over a cup of coffee in an ABC café in a north London suburb, undisturbed by staff’ with the concerted attempts, by the 1990s, to exclude teenagers from shopping malls and other commercial spaces if they were not engaged in the transaction of spending and consuming.108 It can be suggested, however, that this phenomenon was already under way in the 1960s, evidenced in the Manchester example. As city centres were redesigned to remove the effects of the Blitz and blight, the commercial district was subjected to closer scrutiny and regulation by police and local authorities. The use of squares and other open spaces for the impromptu gathering of groups of teenagers was viewed as a social problem in the 1950s, and the employment of private ‘security staff’ in the form of doormen, bouncers, stewards and private detectives by leisure venues and the growing range of department stores was already in evidence. The more rigorous control over public and, increasingly, commercial space through processes of restriction and exclusion was targeted specifically at ‘troublesome teenagers’ in the postwar period. Notes 1 For example Latham, ‘Liverpool Boys’ Association’; Springhall, Youth, Empire and Society. 2 GH, 12 March 1955, p. 7.

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3 R. Gosling, Lady Albemarle’s Boys (London: Fabian Society, 1961), p. 5. 4 Hall, Resistance Through Ritual; Hebdige, Subculture. 5 Smith, Wincroft Project, p. 89. 6 A. Lawson, It Happened in Manchester (Bury: International Music Publications, 1998), p. 16. 7 S. Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), p. 163. 8 GACS, Reports, 1958, p. 377. 9 TNA, HO45/25144, Mass Observation Report, Juvenile Drinking, June 1943. 10 Ibid. 11 TNA, HO45/25144, Letter from Principal Probation Officer, London, to Children’s Branch, 1 May 1943. 12 MG, 9 October 1943, p. 4; 28 October 1943, p. 4. 13 Scotsman, 8 November 1945, p. 3. 14 Cameron, Disinherited Youth, p. 109. 15 Abrams, Teenage Consumer Spending, cited in NRS, HH60/813, Home Office Research Committee on ‘Drunkenness’, 1962. 16 NRS, HH60/1061, Scottish Council on Crime, General Papers, 1972. 17 DC, 18 September 1959, p. 9. 18 DC, 27 April 1965, p. 7. 19 NRS, HH60/892 J. Davies and B. Stacey, ‘Teenagers and Alcohol’. 20 TNA, RG23/307. 21 N. McKeganey, A. Forsyth, M. Barnard and G. Hay, ‘Designer drinks and drunkenness amongst a sample of Scottish schoolchildren’, British Medical Journal, 313 (1996), p. 401, found that half of their survey group of 758 Dundee comprehensive school pupils aged 12–15 had been drunk at least once. 22 M. Kohn, Dope Girls (London: Granta, 2003). 23 V. Berridge, Opium and the People (London, Free Association, 1999), pp. 280–2. 24 MEN, 8 Aug 1947, p. 3; 4 Aug 1947, p. 5. 25 CCAR, Manchester, 1959, p. 38 and 1962, p. 64. 26 MEN, 12 May 1965, 1, for the inquest into the death of Joshua Macmillan, 20-year-old Oxford student and grandson of Harold Macmillan, described as addicted to heroin and cocaine. 27 MCA, Cuttings, ‘crime’: Daily Telegraph, 6 August 1964; Guardian, 7 August 1964; MEN, 27 August 1964. 28 CCAR, Manchester, 1965, p. 55. 29 CCAR, Manchester, 1968. 30 DC, 11 January 1959, p. 7. 31 DC, 25 February 1965, p. 4; DC, 12 July 1965, p. 3. 32 TNA, HH55/1681 inspection, 1969. 33 Ibid., inspection, 1972. 34 M. Barnard, A. Forsyth and N. McKeganey, ‘Levels of drug use among a

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sample of Scottish schoolchildren’, Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy, 3.1 (1996), 81–9. 35 TNA, ED233/20. 36 GCA, TD422.8. 37 Smith, Wincroft Project, p. 89. 38 Ibid. 39 MG, 4 September 1956, p. 12. 40 GH, 12 September 1956, p. 9; 13 September 1956, p. 2; 14 September 1965, p. 5; 18 September 1956, p. 5; MG, 13 September 1956, p. 16. 41 MG, 11 September 1956, p. 16. 42 MG, 12 September 1956, p. 8. 43 GH, 25 September 1956, p. 7. 44 GH, 2 October 1956, p. 7. 45 Scotsman, 27 September 1956, p. 5. 46 See for example, GH, 18 September 1956, p. 5. 47 MEN, 11 September 1956, p. 16. 48 Frith, Sound Effects; MG, 14 May 1959, p. 10. 49 Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty, p. 90. 50 Reynolds, Voices, p. 212; Stewart, Dae Yeh Mind, p. 168. 51 Reynolds, Voices, p. 236. 52 MEN, 17 March 1959, p. 9 on a fight caused by a bouncer at the Alhambra; M. Stewart, O is Fir Ingin (Edinburgh: Black and White, 2010), p. 140 on bouncers at Dundee’s Palais. 53 TNA, HO45/25144 Mass Observation Report, pp. 115–24. 54 DC, 13 August 1959, p. 5. 55 W. Merrilees, The Short Arm of the Law (London: John Long, 1966), pp. 171–5. 56 Jackson, Women Police, pp. 122–3. 57 K. Rylatt and P. Scott, Central 1179. The Story of Manchester’s Twisted Wheel Club (London: Be Cool, 2001). 58 MEN, 2 February 1965, p. 66; The Times 12 May 1965, p. 13. 59 GMPM, Policewomen’s Department, ‘Clubs’, Jungfrau. 60 Latham, ‘Liverpool Boys’ Association’, p. 431; Riddell, ‘Leisure’, pp. 529– 30. 61 GMPM, Policewomen’s Department, ‘Clubs’. 62 TNA, BN29/1684 Causes of Juvenile Delinquency. Moral Danger. Undesirable Clubs 1964–5. 63 Ibid. 64 GMPM, ‘Clubs’, Twisted Wheel, 14 March 1964. 65 CCAR, Manchester, 1965,‘Coffee Beat Clubs’. 66 MEN, 26 April 1965, 7. 67 CCAR, Manchester, 1965, ‘Coffee Beat Clubs’. 68 DC, 12 July 1965, p. 3, ‘Teenagers and the Soho drugs menace’. 69 MEN, 13 February 1965, p. 1; MEN, 26 April 1965, 7. 70 GMPM, ‘Clubs’, Cavern.

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71 Ibid; see also MEN, 15 February 1965, p. 10. 72 CCAR, Manchester, 1965, ‘Coffee Beat Clubs’. 73 Guardian, 17 January 1963, p. 17. 74 GMPM, ‘Clubs’, Twisted Wheel, report of occurrence 22 March 1964; report on Three Coins, 26 October 1963. 75 GMPM, National Conference of Senior Policewomen, Minutes, 28 and 29 September 1965. 76 TNA, BN29/1684 Undesirable Clubs 1964–5. 77 GMPM, ‘Clubs’, Twisted Wheel, report of occurrence, 22 March 1964. 78 The Times, 12 May 1965, 13. 79 CCAR, Manchester, 1965, ‘Coffee Beat Clubs’. 80 Cutting in GMPM, ‘Clubs’, Daily Mail, 20 April 1965. 81 Rylatt and Scott, Central 1179, p. 91. 82 TNA, BN29/1684, Minutes of meeting, 15 September 1964, and of the Working Party on Juvenile Jazz and Dance Clubs in the West End of London, 10 December 1964. 83 Corporation of Manchester, Proceedings, 2 September 1964, 429; TNA, ED31/989, Manchester Corporation Act 1965. 84 Hansard, 29 April 1965, col. 720–1, Mr Paul B. Rose (Manchester ­Blackley). 85 TNA, HO287/1290, Reports of HMI of Constabulary, Manchester, 1959. 86 Manchester Corporation Act, Eliz. 2 (1965), Ch. 42. 87 The Times, 24 December 1965, 4. 88 TNA, BN29/1684, Minutes of the Working Party, 10 December 1964. 89 GMPM, National Conference of Senior Policewomen, 28 and 29 September 1965. It was noted that the problem had not surfaced in Liverpool, Leeds or Coventry; see Minutes from No. 1 District conference, 8 April 1965. 90 Private Places of Entertainment (Licensing) Act, Eliz. 2 (1967), Ch. 19. 91 J. Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society (Harlow: Longman, 1989), p. 243. 92 DC, 16 June 1965, p. 4; 19 June 1965, p. 6. 93 Langhamer, ‘Leisure, pleasure and courtship’. 94 S. Todd, Young Women, Work and Family in England 1918–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 95 Albemarle Report, p. 23; Langhamer, Women’s Leisure, p. 102; Reynolds, Voices in the Street, p. 200; People’s Journal, 3 October 1959, p. 2 on varied practices in Dundee. 96 Albemarle Report, p. 23. 97 Guardian, 30 March 1962. 98 Smith, Wincroft Project, p. 253. 99 Ibid., p. 251. See also A. Horn, Jukebox Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 100 Smith, Wincroft Project, p. 25. 101 People’s Journal, 26 September 1959, p. 13; L. Wilson, Take it to the Bridge. Dundee’s Rock and Pop History (Edinburgh: Black and White, 2011).

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102 The Times, 20 October 1965, p. 8. 103 DAC, 2 September 1965, p. 5. 104 Gosling, Lady Albemarle’s Boys, p. 7. 105 Albemarle Report, pp. 53–4. 106 Gosling, Lady Albemarle’s Boys, p. 15. 107 Jackson, Women Police, p. 164. 108 Sibley, Geographies of Exclusion, p. xii.

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The explicit use of temporal and spatial regulation to transform the ‘anti-social’ child or young person into a ‘decent citizen’, accepting of ‘orderly community life’, was publicised through the 1946 dramadocumentary Children on Trial, which focused on the work of approved schools in England and Wales.1 Filmed on location at the Liverpool Farm School, Newton-le-Willows, it unusually made use of one of the school’s pupils, ‘Fred Watson’, as a central protagonist in the narrative. The school’s headmaster, John Vardy, also appeared as himself, and there were cameo performances from other prominent figures in the youth justice/welfare field, including juvenile court magistrate Basil Henriques and Home Office Inspector, M.M. Simmons, author of Making Citizens.2 Authority figures were represented in terms of a benign paternalism, attempting to create reciprocity of trust and respect through the balancing of sympathetic care and measured discipline. ‘Delinquents’ were turned into citizens through participation in hard work, wholesome exercise and recreation, and acceptance of responsibility within the collective of the school. This chapter examines the range of formal institutions and mechanisms – including borstals, approved schools, detention centres, remand homes, probation and supervision – that aimed to reform juveniles who had been processed by the courts for criminal or status offences, considering to what extent they were fit for purpose. If the Liverpool Farm School was presented as an exemplary model in 1947, to what extent was it representative of the reform initiative more generally? Moreover, how and in what ways were the contours of penal-welfarism adjusted across the 1950s and 1960s? This chapter follows the work of Abigail Wills in arguing that an uneven but discernible shift in rhetoric and ethos was apparent across the period 1945–70; corporal punishment was increasingly rejected and

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there was a move towards psychiatric intervention, democratic forms of governance and person-oriented approaches to the management of behaviour.3 However, the chapter also emphasises distinct regional and national variation (including differences between England/Wales and Scotland), as well as substantial differences between individual establishments. Despite the centralising attempts of the national state (through the Home Office and Scottish Office), regimes were hugely dependent on the personality and outlook of those who ran them. A further significant impediment was lack of resources, including deficiencies of accommodation and staffing. The penal-welfarist approach to youth justice, assumed to be hegemonic in the postwar years was never fully or consistently delivered. The approved school regime In the 1840s the first ‘Reformatories’ had come into existence to remove young offenders from prisons and association with adult convicts. A parallel set of institutions, residential ‘industrial schools’, were developed from the 1860s to take on those whom magistrates viewed as deprived of a ‘proper’ home life (including destitute, neglected or abused children) and in danger of falling into bad associations. Under the Children and Young Persons Acts of the 1930s these twin institutions had been combined into one category of ‘approved schools’, so named because of the need for inspection and thus ‘approval’ (as meeting basic frameworks) by the Home Office (England and Wales) or Scottish Education Department (SED).4 Across the postwar period a significant proportion of approved schools continued to be run by the voluntary sector with close affiliations to the churches and catering for juveniles of specified denominations, forming part of what Cox has described as ‘a mixed economy of justice’.5 In England and Wales there were 121 approved schools in 1964, 28 of which (under a quarter) were managed by local authorities and 93 (just over three-quarters) by the voluntary sector.6 Manchester’s approved school for boys – Mobberley (in leafy Knutsford) – was brought under the wing of the Local Authority Children’s Department from 1948, providing an example of local state involvement. In Scotland the voluntary sector was even more dominant; only two of Scotland’s 25 approved schools were run by local authorities (these were in Glasgow) in 1964.7 The two Dundee approved schools – Balgowan for boys, and Balgay for girls – continued to run under the auspices of an independent committee during the 1950s and 1960s. It should not be assumed that approved schools routinely serviced

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juveniles committed by the local courts. In Dundee only a quarter of Balgowan boys and a fifth of Balgay girls were reported as coming from the local area in 1956; given that there was no Catholic school in Dundee, Catholic boys were often sent to St Mary’s School, Bishopbriggs, run by the La Salle brotherhood.8 Schools were selected on the basis of age, gender, religion, but also intellectual ability and special needs as much as geographical proximity to ‘home’. Experiments with the new institution of the ‘classifying school’ began in the 1940s in England and Wales, where from 1952 they were given formal statutory recognition, as approved school selection was removed from the hands of the local courts. Manchester girls aged 14–16 were sent to The Shaw Classifying School, Warrington, and boys to Red Bank Classifying School, Newton-Le-Willows for psychiatric and medical assessment, followed by appropriate referral.9 Prior to the introduction of the classifying schools, Manchester’s juvenile courts had made extensive use of Mobberley as well as other approved schools in the North-west for committals for boys. Given the lack of local provision, girls were sent to a wide range of approved schools across the North and Midlands.10 Given the specialist nature of these institutions local authorities (outside the large conurbations of London and Glasgow) were unlikely to invest in new schools since they would not necessarily be used for juveniles from the area. Significant attempts were made during the 1940s and again in the 1960s to improve the quality of accommodation and to move away from large institutional dormitories and refectories towards a more domestic model. Liverpool Farm School was exemplary in this regard. Vardy recorded in 1942 that ‘old depressing buildings had been pulled down’ and replaced by ‘modern ones which let in air and light’. Interiors were made more comfortable and homely: ‘instead of sitting in cold silence of fear at long benches, boys now eat in an attractively decorated dining-room at small tables, chatting freely’.11 Similarly, in Scotland, Rossie Farm School, Montrose, had been rebuilt in 1939, whilst the early 1950s saw concerted effort to renovate other schools whose fabric was viewed as ‘badly’ requiring attention. In some cases new classrooms were added, whereas other schools (Wellington Farm School, Penicuik, and St Mary’s, Bishopbriggs) were e­ ffectively ­rebuilt.12 Yet the replacement of estate was piecemeal and subject to the financial restrictions of postwar austerity; there were significant falls in Home Office capital grants to approved schools between 1953 and 1961.13 Manchester Children’s Committee was instructed by the Home Office to cut back on their improvement plans for buildings

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at Mobberley: washrooms were to be replaced using cheaper wood instead of tiles, walls were to be distempered rather than painted.14 Despite Scottish Office encouragement for the use of smaller ‘cottage style’ accommodation units, there was little sign of overall diminution in size, because of the pressure of demand. Whilst accommodation at Rossie Farm School was reduced from 128 to 105 beds in 1961 (as it was developed into a more specialist school for ‘those not amenable to normal discipline’), Oakbank continued to house 132 boys and Thornley Bank a maximum of 142.15 Balgowan school, Dundee, was consistently full to its maximum of 110 across the 1960s despite the desire of SED inspectors to see a reduction. By 1969 its buildings were viewed as ‘ancient and somewhat unattractive inside’ still housing ‘huge dormitories’ rather than smaller shared bedrooms.16 Approved schools were ‘open’ institutions without walls and were kept unlocked except at night. They were seen as educational establishments rather than penal institutions (unlike borstals, which were structurally part of the prison service). It was continually stressed that the approved school was not a ‘punishment’ but a training opportunity. Nevertheless, within a broader popular culture it tended to be presented as punishment; being ‘sent away’ was wielded by parents and police as a threat to children who misbehaved.17 Publicity (including documentary film) that drew attention to the educative value of the schools and their ‘success’ stories rarely outweighed adverse press coverage that focused on more sensational events such as absconding, mass break-outs, ‘riotous’ behaviour and accusations of mistreatment. Events such as the murder of the Standon Farm master by schoolboys in 1947, the mass break-out at Lochburn approved school for girls, Glasgow, in 1958, the disturbances at Carlton approved school for boys, Bedfordshire, in 1959, and allegation about excessive punishment at Court Lees School, Surrey, in 1967, led to inquiries into governance that exposed problems of discipline, violence and bullying and, inevitably, led to school closures.18 The ‘open’ institution aimed to instil techniques of self-discipline. Absconding by new pupils was treated with a degree of tolerance as understandable. However, repeated absconding could lead to reappearance before magistrates and committal to a stricter regime (including a closed borstal for those over 16). As Cox has pointed out, it is difficult to view absconding, disturbance and other forms of disobedience as sustained or effective resistance, given the marginal status of young people in the approved school system.19 ‘Absconding’ was a tactic that involved temporary escape from the regulatory gaze through a moment of opportunism. Ultimately, however, it drew the

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young person further into penality. Those who were referred to approved schools for status offences and not for criminal offences at all found themselves in breach of court orders and hence further tarred as ‘difficult’ or ‘unruly’. As Donzelot remarked, educative frameworks did not simply replace the penal or judicial; rather, like a nest of Russian dolls, ‘there is an initial model, the judicial one, of which all the others are only enveloping copies’.20 The Approved School Rules stated that school discipline should ‘be maintained by the personal influence of the Headmaster and staff and … promoted by a system of rewards and privileges’ (notably pocket money, and access to recreation including unsupervised activities). Absconding or misbehaviour led to their forfeiture. Other penalties included assignment to ‘a household job such as scrubbing the floor or polishing’, adjustment of diet (withdrawal of luxuries such as cake and jam, and in some cases the imposition of a ‘plain diet’), and the use of segregation.21 Corporal punishment by the headmaster was permitted and seen as necessary within boys’ approved schools within certain prescriptions: a limited number of strokes according to age on clothed buttocks (or hand) and the use of a specified size of cane or tawse. Three strikes of the cane on the hand was permitted for girls under 15 but was rarely used in most girls’ schools. According to Helen Richardson, headmistress of The Shaw in 1955, a cane was not in fact kept, the ‘detention room’ was used only very occasionally and the emphasis was on a ‘persuasive and therapeutic tactic’.22 Given that the behaviour of ‘delinquent girls’ was viewed in terms of emotional ‘attention-seeking’, it was assumed that corporal punishment would only exacerbate such tendencies. Details collected from a range of punishment log books in 1949 suggest that caning was routinely inflicted on boys for absconding, being out of bounds, stealing small items and using ‘filthy language’. In the case of girls, punishment log books recorded loss of privileges and treats for absconding, rudeness and defiance and, in a small number of cases, for fighting.23 As other chapters have demonstrated, attitudes towards corporal punishment shifted significantly across the period. During wartime the purely penal response of birching had seen a temporary renaissance; 321 juveniles were ordered to be birched in 1942 in England and Wales compared to 58 in 1939, 37 in 1944 and 21 in 1945. In part this was a knee-jerk response to the increased numbers coming before the courts and significant pressure on approved school places; indeed, the period of approved school detention was curtailed during wartime.24 Despite its supporters birching was phased out in 1948, and the rare instances in which it was imposed in 1947 generated

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­controversy.25 Some approved school staff, such as J. Dudley Park, mourned the loss of ‘authority’ that such a measure entailed. Published in 1951, his memoirs recalled his decision to leave his job in a school in south-east England because he felt he had insufficient power to ‘deal drastically’ with boys ‘who prefer lawlessness and criminality’; he called for the reimposition of the birch both as a court order and to use in approved schools for persistent absconders.26 His view was clearly out of kilter with the Approved Schools Rules and their emphasis on ‘personal influence’. The culture of the school, and the precise balancing of ‘care’ and ‘control’, was dependent on the pedagogical outlook and approach towards discipline taken by the head. From 1936 until his retirement in 1961 Mobberley was run by James Alexander, a well-respected and well-known figure in approved school work. Bob Holman’s detailed study of Manchester Children’s Department has shown that Alexander’s methods were controversial, leading to a falling out with juvenile court magistrate and Children’s Committee chair, Nellie Beer, who was opposed to the use of the cane in residential institutions. (Her view was not consistent with that of the Home Office.)27 However, the recollections gathered by Holman suggest that he combined discipline with a genuine concern for, and interest in, his young charges, many of whom continued to visit the home many years after they had formally left.28 If the school was run something like a ‘minor public school’ under Alexander with an emphasis on boxing, cricket and cross-country, a new head gave it a more contemporary feel after 1961 by replacing the austere 1950s uniform of corduroy shorts with jeans and expanding the leisure activities in which boys participated.29 There was a clear generational difference between heads whose formative experiences had taken place during the interwar years when the old-style public school was seen as an appropriate model for the approved school and the use of corporal punishment was viewed as unproblematic, and a younger generation who had trained as teachers in the postwar years when new understandings of children’s development were influential, and who were more sympathetic towards psychiatric approaches including ideas of a ‘therapeutic community’.30 In Scotland, the civil servants who constituted the approved school inspectorate were particularly keen to advocate the replacement of older hierarchical forms of governance (the ‘positional’ model), with more person-oriented approaches in which pupils were involved in discussion, negotiation and group counselling. They observed some significant shifting of the ground. Oakbank headmaster, Robert Macleod, had allegedly made himself unpopular with other heads in the

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late 1940s because of his interest in psychological approaches, although his school was seen as an exemplary model by the SED. By 1964, however, the SED inspectorate noted with approval that his peers had begun to ‘mount the Macleod bandwagon’ and ‘he was no longer the outsider’ since psychological casework was accepted even amongst ‘the more authoritarian schools’. Forms of group counselling were used at Kibble, Oakbank and Balgay by the early 1960s. Moreover, a more ‘enlightened policy of staff co-operation’ had been initiated at Oakbank, including experiments with ‘boys’ courts’ as well as combined staff and pupil meetings, and ideas had spread further in the sector as Macleod’s staff took up posts elsewhere. It was a model in which pupils were encouraged to act as stakeholders within the school community, to consider why rules were needed and what form they should take.31 In terms of systems of governance, however, the SED continued to be frustrated by the lack of response from many sitting heads. ‘Authoritarianism’ was apparent in the dominance of the head over the other staff, although it was commented that this had been broken down ‘a little’ where the post of deputy and other senior roles had been introduced. A shift to a more democratic model based on trust rather than physical force was far from realised. The SED noted in 1967 that ‘although such [corporal] punishment was now commonly deprecated there was no indication of any material diminution throughout the Scottish approved school system. There was no suggestion in it of irregularities but the recorded evidence was disturbingly high.’32 In 1969 inspection notes for Balgowan recorded that the headmaster was ‘a man who relates well with boys’ but was ‘a firm believer in the use of moderate doses of corporal punishment, not as a last resort, but as the easiest way for all of dealing with the petty bits of misbehaviour and disobedience which are daily occurrences’. Such an approach was viewed as lazy and ‘old-fashioned’ in its simple emphasis on blind ‘conformity’ rather than participation.33 Similar comments on approved schools in England were made by psychotherapist Robert Shields, who had worked in one of the more experimental LCC schools. Sheilds wrote that ‘a vast amount of money has been spent on specialised equipment and workshops’. However, the approach of many staff was ‘out of tune with present-day knowledge of child development’.34 Whilst most schools had a ‘visiting psychiatrist’, the therapeutic turn had not gone far enough for him, and the emphasis was still on the older modes of discipline through the rigorous timetabling of religion, work and rational recreation. As Gordon Rose observed in his assessment of the state of English approved

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schools in the mid-1960s, staff tended to be trained teachers rather than social workers, and specialist training had emerged somewhat slowly from 1950 onwards.35 Moreover, the emphasis on rigorous timetabling of incessant group activity did ‘not provide opportunity for close individual contact between staff and boys’ and could not easily accommodate the notion of individualised casework.36 Pupils were not encouraged to talk about the events that had led to their committal and the notion of the ‘fresh start’ or ‘clean slate’ created little space for the therapeutic or the reflexive. Rose commented that: ‘one senses a reaction of passivity, almost of apprehension, when one talks to approved schools staffs about the social work aspect of their job’.37 Clearly, however, alternative approaches were surfacing for debate and discussion. Assumptions about the relationship between gender roles and work as a redemptive activity continued to shape life in residential institutions (approved schools and borstals) in the 1960s as they had in previous decades.38 In the 1940s and 1950s boys were being prepared for employment in skilled manual labour or the armed forces, promoted through membership of school cadet and scouting units. Military models of masculinity were an important point of reference across the twentieth century. Although the use of Dundee’s ‘Mars’ Training Ship was discontinued in 1929, boys continued to be sent to three nautical training schools in England with the expectation they would join the merchant navy. A survey of 128 Liverpool Farm School boys, carried out by Vardy in 1942, suggested that 41 per cent wanted to become engineers, whereas 20 per cent wanted to join either the forces or the merchant navy. The army had been a common destination in the 1930s, Vardy expressing his frustration that the navy and RAF frequently refused to take boys from an approved school background.39 From the mid-1950s there was a move away from the tailoring and shoemaking that had been taught since the 1880s, replaced by bricklaying and house painting. These were seen as more in line with a changed labour market (the building trade was one of the few in which apprenticeships were still available), but might also foster ‘a greater sense of achievement and self-respect’.40 It is noticeable that the rhetoric of ‘citizenship’ had disappeared from discussion papers and promotion materials by 1960, as conscription into national service was lifted and as the Albemarle Report commented on its lack of appeal to young people.41 The concept of work for girls continued to be shaped by assumptions about domesticity. The addition of typing classes by the late 1950s was an indication that office work was now viewed as the ideal

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form of employment for young unmarried women, given the demise of domestic service. However, sewing and ‘domestic science’ were the other core skills to be learnt. Moreover, girls in residential detention continued to undertake significant amounts of domestic labour. Richardson revealingly commented that: In a girls’ approved school, as in a woman’s own home, the surroundings are embedded in her existence. As well as being the environment which she absorbed or which she resisted, it was often her work setting; her scrubbing or polishing of the corridors, her washing of the walls, her cleaning of the baths and toilets, or her hard work in the schoolroom, were a measuring rod of her keenness or her unwillingness to conform or show progress.42

Richardson contrasted the gendered division of labour in boys’ schools – in which masters lived with wives and families in their own homes on the grounds and women were employed in the ‘traditional female roles’ of cook and cleaner – with the single-sex regime of the girls’ school, which employed single women who had either chosen to be ‘career women’ or needed to support themselves following widowhood or divorce.43 Commentators were very aware that the majority of girls in approved schools had been committed for status offences – 57 per cent in England and Wales in 1966 – in comparison to boys whose committals were overwhelmingly for criminal offences.44 Whilst the details of cases indicate that their ‘delinquency’ may also have involved incidents of thieving, it is clear that concerns about sexuality informed most discussions of girls’ regimes. Richardson showed that in many cases girls came from extremely chaotic and troubled backgrounds, having run away from home to sleep rough, accepting lifts with lorry drivers and the hospitality of servicemen. The girls’ approved schools sought to curb their restlessness and tendency to abscond. Richardson’s comments on incessant ‘scrubbing’ are suggestive, however, of the longevity of the moral purity model. Given the lack of emphasis on intellectual skills, it was envisaged that the most appropriate outcome was ability to perform the role of wife and mother. Given that girls’ were far less likely to have been institutionalised for criminal offences – and upon attaining the age of 17 could continue to live ‘promiscuous’ lives if they so wished without state censure – it is unsurprising that ‘success rates’ for girls’ approved schools were continually high. At around 80 per cent across the period, this contrasted markedly with that for boys, which had fallen from around 60 per cent (1939) to around 40 per cent (1965), generating considerable debate about the meaning and purpose of the approved school regime.

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If the management of juvenile sexuality was an aim of the approved school, this was implicit rather than explicit and was achieved for the most part through methods of silencing or forbidding that were resonant with a Victorian past. Data collected from punishment log books suggests that caning was very occasionally used in the 1940s to deal with masturbation or to punish those found in another boy’s bed.45 When the issue was reluctantly discussed by staff in one boys’ approved school in the mid-1960s, it was suggested that ‘it was punished in some [schools], [and] in others it was ignored’. To ‘condone’ was equated with ‘encouraging homosexuality’ and staff found it difficult to accept an argument that it was ‘psychologically harmless’. One teacher resorted to simple instruction ‘“not to be such dirty little bastards” and “leave it alone”’, which he saw as a more ‘permissive’ approach. Most staff in the school were described as wanting ‘to leave the subject alone as it was too complicated and disturbing’.46 Writing in 1966, Sheilds referred to a headmaster who said that ‘if he thought a boy masturbated (which he seemed to think was rare), he would tell him that he was committing a sin against God and would probably go insane’.47 Across the 1950s, newspapers reported a small number of cases involving gross indecency in approved schools for which boys were formally brought before the juvenile courts as same-sex practices between males were illegal.48 For girls there was no equivalent crime. Sparrow records that there ‘was no very constructive policy’ to deal with either lesbianism or masturbation and staff were unaware for a considerable length of time: ‘Even when we knew, Miss Gracey could not believe it until she telephoned a nun in charge of a similar school, and learned that all this is not uncommon in closed one-sex communities.’49 For many staff the daily challenges of working with difficult youngsters in institutions that were understaffed and under-resourced was an impediment to the adoption of best practice even if there was a desire to introduce it.50 Nevertheless, across the period examples can be found of highly motivated teachers. Jimmy Boyle, whose experience of Scottish approved schools in the late 1950s is portrayed as overwhelmingly bleak, has nevertheless been very complimentary in writing about Brother Paul, head of St John’s Roman Catholic school: ‘He was an admirable person, one who was interested and who cared … [who] would take progressive steps to include us by discussing things.’51 The memoirs of ‘Steven Slater’ (pseudonym), describing an approved school in the south of England in the early 1960s demonstrates that pleasant accommodation (the recreations room was equipped with easy chairs, comics and a record player) did

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not necessarily lead to a more nurturing atmosphere. Rather, the boys are described as fearful – ‘they seemed tense, nervous as though they were being watched by some strange power’ – and the housemaster as ‘afraid of the boys he was paid to control’. Bullying was depicted as endemic. His memoir is a profound reminder that the dynamics of power were subject to negotiation and did not simply reside with adults.52 Approved school heads, too, were subject to the regulatory gaze through the annual inspection. Ultimately, of course, the head had significant status as well as the right to exercise authority through position. Yet authority, which might all too easily be abused, also had to be earned if the reform project was to work. The memoirs of ‘Jane Sparrow’ (pseudonym), a teacher at a farm school for girls, contrast the unstructured regime of headmistress Miss Gracey, where laxity led to absconding and riots, with that of ‘Miss Strang’ whose authoritarian and bullying tactics ‘terrified’ other staff as well as pupils into submission.53 Sparrow left the school, disillusioned with residential care, and went on to retrain as a psychotherapist. The successful introduction of the ‘person-oriented’ or ‘therapeutic community’ approach – was not about the removal of structures of governance but their replacement. This could, however, be hard to effect given ‘the we and they’ concept that shaped pupils’ perceptions of adult staff.54 Borstals, remand homes and detention centres Attempts to convey a clear message to the public that approved schools were educational establishments were clouded by the existence of a confusing variety of other custodial institutions. Borstals, which received a very small number of juveniles aged 15–17 who were deemed too unruly for the approved school regime (as well as young adults up to the age of 23), were administered by the prison service.55 Nevertheless, the status of the borstal was still ambivalent, in delivering both detention (punishment) and rehabilitation (education). There was some irony in the fact that corporal punishment was no longer officially sanctioned in borstals in the postwar period, whilst caning had been retained in approved schools. A borstal officer did not wear uniform, was likely to be a trained teacher and was ‘expected to quietly control the lads by his influence’. In 1949 the SACTRO had recommended that borstals in Scotland should not be situated in prison buildings because this was ‘contrary to the whole conception of borstal’ and, indeed, that institutions should ‘foster a sense of sympathy and … security’ rather than assuming that ‘a boy of this

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type needs the stuffing knocked out of him’.56 In the 1940s the most ‘unruly’ Scottish juveniles were still housed in blocks at Barlinnie and then Saughton prisons. However, significant estate improvements were made in the 1950s, influenced by the model of classification into differing ‘types’ that was already in use in England. Polmont Borstal, Stirlingshire, was rebuilt, with the important addition of a classifying wing, to which all borstal boys in Scotland were initially sent for psychiatric assessment as well as referral to a set of new open and closed institutions. Because a very low number of girls were sent to borstal in Scotland (an average of 25 per year), they continued to be housed controversially at Greenock women’s prison, where the vast majority were occupied in laundry work as well as machining, knitting and stitching clothes (including their own ‘liberation outfits’). The borstal regime was broadly similar to that of approved schools and was highly gendered. In 1949 Greenock girls were expected to combine domestic chores with ‘music, reading’ and ‘elocution training’, presumably to replace ‘roughness’ with a more refined femininity. Each boy was to be enabled to ‘re-establish himself as a useful and self-respecting citizen’.57 Whilst the concept of citizenship had been dropped by 1960, that of ‘character training’ and ‘graduated self-discipline’ achieved through ‘useful and interesting work’ persisted.58 Visitors to borstals often commented on the contrasting atmosphere and ethos of ‘open’ and closed’ institutions, the former more resonant of the boarding school and the latter of the prison. In England the girls’ ‘open’ borstal was situated in a large country house at East Sutton Park, Kent, with leafy grounds, a small farm and market garden, and girls were more integrated into the local village community. In contrast, the ‘closed’ girls’ institution at Aylesbury was accommodated in the old Victorian prison building, with former cells converted into sleeping cubicles. Despite its ‘introverted’ and ‘institutional’ aspect, one journalist who visited in 1950 was surprised that ‘some girls prefer it to East Sutton Park’.59 Boundaries were more firmly delineated and demarcated, and the disciplinary intent was not obscured by the educative masquerade. If approved schools were under-resourced in comparison to borstals, it was the remand home that was the ‘Cinderella’ of all custodial institutions. Run by the local authority (through the Children’s Departments established in 1948), the remand home provided temporary custody for young people who were waiting for their cases to be processed by the juvenile court and who had not been given bail, as well as for those who were thought to be in danger and in need of a ‘place of safety’. Young people could also be ordered to spend a

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period of detention in a remand home, of up to three months, as a form of disposal by the juvenile court. For many it was their first experience of removal from home. Boyle describes the fear invoked by being ‘put away’ for the first time, recollecting the institutional reek of disinfectant and a first night in the dormitories that were permeated by ‘the sound of crying children’.60 In England and Wales there were 49 local authority remand homes (31 for boys, 15 for girls, and three mixed homes), accommodating up to 921 boys and 295 girls in 1960.61 Problems of recruiting and retaining high quality staff were felt across the sector but the most significant problem was overcrowding as the number of juveniles appearing before the courts swelled. Manchester’s remand facilities for boys had been temporarily removed to ‘Brookfield’ in Cheadle, Cheshire, after the existing remand home had been bombed during the war. In the mid-1950s it moved to Rose Hill, Northenden, formerly a local authority children’s nursery. Somewhat unusually, there was significant continuity and stability at Manchester’s boys’ remand home in the presence of John Tonks, superintendent from 1944 until his retirement in 1970, whose wife performed the role of matron. Holman has described his ability to develop good relationships with both staff and boys as leading to a low incidence of absconding.62 Nevertheless, the problem of numbers remained. Juvenile court records for Manchester show that the average stay in a remand home for boys awaiting committal to an approved school in 1947 was around one month. By 1965, however, severe delays were apparent, with juveniles experiencing continual extensions in their remand home detention whilst a place in the classifying school was awaited; a three-month stay in the remand home was not unusual and stays of 5–6 months occurred in some cases. Indeed, up to 60 per cent of Manchester’s remand home population was stated to comprise ‘committed cases awaiting transfer to approved schools’ because of the vacancy problem.63 Similar delays for girls, combined with a reliance on part-time and inexperienced staff can be viewed as instrumental in leading to disturbances and a mass break-out at Manchester’s girls’ remand home, Alder House, in November 1964.64 Holman convincingly suggests that Manchester’s Children Department developed a strong reputation as ‘a forceful and progressive agency’ within the council, fighting for extra resources internally for its services. Yet, whilst it strove to improve and to humanise its homes, problems of staff recruitment and economies forced by others made it impossible to achieve its aims.65 Conditions in remand homes were at their most acute in Scotland, where they were described as ‘deplorable’ in 1961 by the official

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c­ ommittee set up to advise the Secretary of State on their operation.66 Provision was deemed insufficient, particularly in northern rural areas, but concerns were also raised about the inadequacy of premises, lack of equipment, poor quality of management and of also of staff. There were eight remand homes in Scotland, accommodating a total of 158 boys and 47 girls, but the only qualified staff were two teachers, both at Larchgrove, the largest remand home, which took up to 72 boys in Glasgow. The difficulties were epitomised in Dundee’s remand home, Milnbank Road. The accommodation (for six boys and two girls) was deemed unsuitable, but too expensive to upgrade. In 1961 it was described as ‘cold, dark, bare and dilapidated’.67 Plans to relocate the remand home to a new wing adjacent to one of Dundee’s children’s homes were persistently blocked by Scottish Office civil servants from 1955 until the early 1960s on the grounds that the mixing of the two groups was inappropriate, but also because of government restriction on capital expenditure.68 Because of the smaller demand for remand home places, institutions in Scotland (unlike England) housed boys and girls together for the most part. For Dundee’s Children’s Department this was not necessarily a problem, the Children’s Officer arguing that it was ‘advantageous for girls to learn, under supervision, to mix decently with the opposite sex’.69 Yet at Milnbank Road the boys’ and girls’ dormitories were shut off from each other and from the landings ‘by iron grilles which are locked and the windows are barred’. Segregation was severely enforced. Those who experienced remand homes in both England and Scotland, whether as staff or juvenile, commented on the stark contrast. Run as open institutions south of the border, the emphasis was on the custodial role in Scotland. The disciplinarian Dudley Park commented with approval on Scotland’s ‘barred windows and locked doors [which] make sure that those who are inside shall remain there’.70 For Boyle, the far better resourced Shepherd’s Bush remand home was ‘much easier than Larchgrove’.71 The impossibility of attracting qualified staff to remand homes in Scotland was to a large degree due to appalling salaries, terms and conditions. The Dundee home was run by a married couple who acted as matron and superintendent, the husband a ‘former gardener’. Because of lack of training they were unable to provide the expert reports to the juvenile courts that equivalents (such as teacher John Tonks) did in England. Nevertheless, they were described as working over 76 hours a week, with just one evening off, earning £351 each per year.72 This contrasted with a minimum salary of £930 per year for the superintendent of a small home taking up to 29 children in England and Wales, a post that was usually filled by a qualified teacher

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or someone with previous relevant social work experience. Higher salaries had been achieved south of the border because of the representation of remand home staff through their professional association on the Joint Negotiating Committee; no such association or arrangement existed in Scotland.73 Embarrassed at the condition of Scotland’s remand homes in 1961, the SED encouraged the building of better facilities. New purpose-built remand home accommodation was finally opened in Dundee in September 1966 to accommodate 21 boys and four girls and ‘to facilitate modern concepts of good remand home practice’. This improvement also enabled Dundee magistrates to make detention orders of up to three months as a form of disposal (around two boys per month were dealt with in this way in 1965). Nevertheless, many of the difficulties in recruiting staff remained. Similarly, whilst demand for approved school places continued to outstrip supply, pressure continued to be placed on remand homes to accommodate those waiting for increasingly lengthier periods of time. Moreover, in England and Wales there was further experimentation with other forms of custodial intervention for comparatively short periods of time. The principle of the detention centre was introduced by the 1948 Criminal Justice Act. Its aim was characterised as the ‘short sharp shock’, ostensibly the opposite of the ‘therapeutic community’. Detention of a maximum of three months was permitted for the ‘well-developed, undisciplined young “rough” … who … requires to be taught a lesson, through an unpleasant experience and enforced discipline’. The first detention centre at Kidlington, Oxfordshire, opened in 1952 to take up to 52 boys aged 14–17 from London and the Midlands. It was a two-storey building with medium security and a high wire fence. The training that was offered inside was not, however, significantly different from most approved schools: domestic duties, class instruction or workshops and organised sport, to inculcate ‘standards of personal cleanliness, obedience and good behaviour’.74 Other detention centres followed at Goudhurst, Kent in 1953 and at Werrington, Staffordshire in 1957, leading to their characterisation by Home Secretary Rab Butler as strategies ‘to de-Teddify the Teddy boy’.75 Foston Hall, Derby, which opened its doors at the beginning of 1965, was subsequently used by Manchester juvenile court magistrates for an average of two boys aged 14–16 per month, although it, like other custodial institutions could not cope with the demand for places created by the courts.76 One 16-year-old girl, brought before Manchester magistrates for threatening behaviour and wilfully damaging the uniform of a council employee, was sent to the only detention centre for girls, Moor Court, which accommodated a small

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cohort of 14–21-year-olds from 1962 until its closure in 1968. For Terence Morris, writing in the Observer, the Moor Court experiment simply demonstrated the ‘damage caused by shutting up disturbed young women’.77 Probation and supervision As Chapter 2 has demonstrated, police officers developed a significant but sometimes controversial supervisory role with young people in the postwar period: first, through JLSs, which were an alternative to the initiation of juvenile court proceedings, and second, by running Saturday afternoon attendance centres that offered structured sport, craft and recreation to instil self-discipline. Police culture, including welfare work with young people, was largely unaffected by the therapeutic turn. Attendance centres became an increasingly popular form of disposal for juvenile court magistrates in England (used in 11.2 per cent of cases in Manchester, during January–May 1965), although this once again led to problems keeping up with demand.78 At the same time, the postwar period saw the expansion and professionalisation of the role of the probation officer, the title that was uniformly applied to social workers attached to the courts. As well as preparing reports on family background to assist magistrates in decision-making, probation officers delivered post-juridical supervision for those made the subjects of probation orders (criminal offences) or supervision orders (status offences). From 1945 to the late 1960s (when the role of the probation service began to shift to support those released from prison on parole) juveniles constituted a significant percentage of probation officers’ clients. This was most apparent in Scotland, where probation was effectively a youth service. Juveniles constituted 72 per cent of those who had probation orders imposed upon them in Scotland in 1938, 88 per cent in 1948 and 69 per cent in 1958.79 In 1961 the Report of the Departmental Committee on the Probation Service (Morison Report) sought to encourage greater use of probation for adults. Nevertheless, juveniles continued to outnumber adults as probation clients in Scotland, constituting 60 per cent of referrals in 1968.80 The popular ‘misconception’ that being placed on probation was effectively being ‘let off’ was assumed to be widespread in Scotland because of its association with the young.81 In England and Wales as well as most towns and cities in Scotland, the role of probation officers had developed from that of early-twentieth-century police court missionaries: voluntary workers who were usually closely associated with the churches. From 1931 each local

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authority in Scotland was required to set up a probation committee to oversee provision and to appoint probation officers. In Scotland alone the appointment of serving or former police officers to these roles was formally prohibited, further emphasising the separation of the policing and social work function.82 Probation officers were recruited from a general register of approved individuals that was maintained centrally by the Scottish Probationary Advisory Council, answerable to the Secretary of State. Nevertheless, the churches (Catholic and Protestant) continued to provide representatives to sit on the central council during the 1950s and to lobby for the appointment of candidates with a strong religious commitment.83 The recruitment of candidates with a ‘strength of character and personality calculated to influence for good’ was still seen as more important than paper qualifications, although relevant knowledge and experience were also key considerations.84 From 1951 onwards new probation officers were sent on a threeweek training course, whilst a full one-year programme was introduced as requisite from 1960. In England and Wales probation committees were linked to court jurisdictions (rather than local authorities as in Scotland) from 1948 onwards and a year-long pre-appointment training scheme was organised by the Home Office.85 These structural differences meant that those appointed in England and Wales were supposed to be in receipt of a more specialised training a decade earlier. Moreover, many felt that the probation service was better developed south of the border because it was clearly viewed as part of the court system rather than as ‘a relatively minor local authority service’.86 Certainly, this was the perception of Sheriff Christie of Dundee who commented that Probation Committee meetings in the city were ‘very poorly attended’, often in danger of not being quorate and that ‘it was not unknown for some members to make no appearance at all during their period of appointment’.87 Regardless of these differences, there were major problems of resources, recruitment and understaffing across England and Scotland, whilst a significant number of officers continued to be untrained. In 1944 it was acknowledged that Scottish courts were sometimes deterred from putting young offenders on probation because of a lack of facilities.88 The number of salaried probation officers in Scotland rose from 61 in 1942 to 150 in 1956 and 240 in 1966, but nearly half of this latter constituency (110) were untrained, having been appointed before 1960.89 Moreover, Scottish probation officers continued to struggle with heavy caseloads, with an average of 55 at any one time for male probation officers and 44 for their female colleagues in 1960,

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giving them significantly less than an hour a week to spend on each client. The caseload was even worse in England and Wales in 1960, with male officers struggling to juggle 60–70 clients (although their female colleagues were better off with 30–40).90 In Manchester, as in other cities, the probation service was described in 1965 as having ‘been seriously understaffed for some years’.91 Even dedicated probation officers were aware of the limitations of their role given this demand. In her memoirs describing her experiences in a London juvenile court Marjory Todd asked in 1964: ‘How far is it possible for the probation officer to “make over” the personality and developing sense of values of someone he can only see for a quarter of an hour, perhaps, on one day of the week?’.92 The requirement that candidates should have completed the Home Office training scheme was lifted as an ‘emergency measure’ in northern areas so that nearly half of those entering probation work in the late 1950s did so without pre-training, narrowing the distinction between England and Scotland.93 Despite some improvement, office accommodation was in many parts of Britain still ‘dismal and overcrowded’ with interviews taking place in corridors.94 This contributed to low morale in some places such as Stirlingshire where it was felt that money that could have been invested in probation was being spent on experiments with JLSs instead.95 Inter-professional rivalry was apparent in probations officers’ resentment of police initiatives as well as police criticisms of the probation service. In 1961, Dundee City Police submitted a report to the Chief Constables’ (Scotland) Association stating that probation was ineffectual and was viewed with ‘amusement and derision’ by young offenders.96 Nevertheless, the probation service constituted an important strand in the attempt to reform. The central component of the probation officer’s supervisory role was to ‘advise, assist and befriend’ which was, significantly, balanced with a surveillance function (first outlined in the Probation of Offenders Act 1907). As the Morison Report stressed, there was no ‘juxtaposition’ between ‘probation’ and ‘punishment’ since there was ‘a punitive element in the requirement to submit to supervision’. Moreover, the probation officer was required to initiate proceedings against the client if he or she were in breach of any of the requirements of their probation order (such as residence in a probation hostel). The model was one of ‘benevolent control’, as the report put it.97 These techniques of moral management were not necessarily dissimilar from those used by the older voluntary police court missionaries although the older rhetoric of ‘saving souls’ was no longer explicit.98 The probation officer encouraged his or her client to join a

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youth organisation or church youth club, assisted in finding employment or accommodation (if the client was over the school leaving age), and undertook home visits to offer parents advice and to help build family relationships (most probation officers viewed poor parenting as the root cause of delinquency). Increasingly, too, the postwar probation officer was required to develop the scientific skills of social casework associated with diagnosis and treatment and to make referrals to appropriate clinical experts.99 The juvenile courts did not order juveniles to be referred to the Child Guidance Service as part of the disposal process. This was, however, done by probation officers as part of their assessment of social and emotional problems and is indicative of the influence of the ‘psy’ professions on social work practice. Probation, like other forms of intervention, was a profoundly gendered activity in terms of both staff and clients.100 Women officers were employed to work with female clients and girls, whilst male officers worked with men and adolescent boys (both might work with children). The predominance of males within the criminal justice system was reflected in the male dominance of probation; around 30 per cent of officers were women. Nevertheless, postwar publicity materials tended to promote the image of the efficient young female probation officer as a model of modern scientific professionalism. This was very much the image presented by actress Celia Johnson in the 1952 film I Believe in You, which was based on the book Court Circular, penned by the journalist Sewell Stokes and depicting his four-year wartime stint as a probation officer at Bow Street magistrates’ court. The male protagonist of the book and film is presented as joining the service with no experience, training or qualifications other than his generally affable and gentlemanly manner.101 In 1947 Budge Cooper was commissioned to make a documentary film to encourage ‘the recruitment of well-educated men and women into the probation service’. Undertaking her own ethnographic research she visited courts in England and Wales, meeting different generations of social worker. It was the women officers who drew her admiration: both those who had just emerged from the new Home Office training scheme, but also the older ‘type’ who had had previously been involved in ‘missionary’ or moral welfare work and who had ‘masses of common sense and … can handle well any girl under the sun’. Cooper reported a conversation with one of the Home Office inspectors who had ‘deprecated the aura of virtue that sometimes surrounded [male] probation officers [who] often didn’t smoke or drink and in fact seemed milksops, as opposed to the women probation officers, who were often much stronger and better people’.102

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­ nsurprisingly, the film itself (Probation Officer, 1948) placed the emU phasis on probation work as a modern professional career for women. Other sources, including those produced by probation officers themselves, show that the capacity to act as a role model continued to be thought about in gendered ways. Probation officers in Scotland agreed that dress was important for both men and women who should present themselves ‘neatly and unobtrusively’, but that ‘women probation officers in particular should recollect their role in educating the dress sense of girls, and avoid looking drab’.103 The emphasis here was on the ability to influence taste in the direction of a modern but discreet femininity. Strength of character, however (not being a ‘milksop’), was prized in both male and female officers and seen as important to inculcate in their charges, particularly boys. Reports produced by Glasgow officers in 1959 pejoratively referred to boys as ‘easily led’, ‘weak willed … unsure of himself … likely to be influenced by others’, or as ‘a toady’ and ‘rather a colourless individual’. Nevertheless, a boy who was ‘a bully’ or ‘unbiddable’ was seen as a problem.104 So, too, was anomie: ‘when spoken to about his behaviour, [he] looks you straight in the eye in an insolent, arrogant manner and refuses to talk’.105 Those who met approval did so for being ‘tidy, ‘clean’, ‘neat’, ‘reliable’, ‘diligent’ and ‘amenable to discipline’, mirroring back the qualities associated with the ideal probation officer. Masculinity was policed through the language of personal description.106 Similarly, in the approved school regime, the use of insults, slang and derogatory comments by staff as well as boys – who referred to the ‘soppy’ ‘drip’ or ‘milksop’ as well as to the ‘poof’ – reinforced norms of acceptable demeanour and behaviour.107 The ‘home visit’ to probationers, required at least once a month and involving surveillance of parents and living conditions, was a demonstration of the probation officer’s authority as an agent of the state to ‘police’ the private realm of the family. It is significant, however, that these occasions were sometimes difficult and undesirable for both officers and their clients. Todd describes postponing or avoiding them if she thought parents were likely to make her unwelcome, whilst Boyle has stated that word went around his Glasgow neighbourhood when the probation officer was spotted, so that families could pretend that they were out. Both are suggestive of mutual dread.108 Despite the development of probation as a science of diagnosis and treatment, it was the older concept of ‘befriending’ that has been remembered by both officers and clients as having had an impact. Todd described her role as putting ‘confidence into those who lacked it’ by acting as ‘someone who believes you do not necessarily have to be

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a failure’.109 Indeed, Todd often went out of her way to support her client in the face of the bureaucratic excesses of the court. The best probation officers were not simply tools of the state. In a somewhat different context, the historian Efi Advela has commented that ‘it is the emotional involvement’ that is most recalled by those who served as probation officers in Greece in the 1950s and 1960s.110 It was social interaction rather than surveillance that most mattered and through which dedicated probation officers could justify their work and feel they had made a difference. Similarly, criminologist Fergus McNeill has carried out interviews with adults reflecting back on their experiences as juvenile probation clients in Glasgow in the 1950s and 1960s. Positive accounts refer to the probation officer as a role model or father figure who had acted as a support and confidant, and to whom the probationer could turn for advice and encouragement.111 Yet the concept of ‘befriending’ was limited by the professional context, as Todd painfully recalled. She was unable to grant a request made by 11-year-old Derek to visit her at her home and help her with her gardening. On another occasion ‘a fifteen year old girl had once arrived on a Saturday night to live with me. That situation had only been resolved after several hours, uncomfortable for all concerned.’112 McNeill’s work shows that probationers’ whose experiences were overwhelmingly negative were those for whom the predominant feeling was that of being surveyed and watched by uninterested officers for whom meetings were simply box-ticking exercises.113 Clearly, the experience was hugely determined by the work-orientation of the probation worker as much as by the receptivity of the probationer. Conclusion The penal-welfarist approach to criminal justice, which Garland has identified as hegemonic in the period 1880–1970, was most apparent in relation to young people. Reform and rehabilitation were guiding principles that were consistently and constantly evoked within the rhetoric of juvenile justice and many of the modes of ‘treatment’ that it used. Juveniles rather than adults absorbed the majority of probation officers’ time, whilst the idea of transforming character and inculcating self-discipline was the central principle underpinning the work of custodial institutions. ‘Penality’ and ‘welfare’ were not opposites but were mutually constitutive elements; they were dynamic and hence in constant flux. This is apparent, for example, in discussions about borstal. It was part of the prison service in terms of administrative structure, but was to be separated spatially if possible. It was often

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closed and secure, but did not rely on the corporal punishment that was used in other open institutions. As this chapter has shown, too, there was a rhetorical shift in the conceptualisation of penal-welfarism across the period 1945–70. The concept of citizenship as duty was dominant from the 1940s to the mid-1950s. It was profoundly shaped by the experience of war and aspirations for postwar reconstruction. Yet its emphasis on obligation and service was less convincing for a younger generation who had not undertaken war work. Models of governance that were based on selfrealisation through democratic participation were increasingly a reference point for civil servants, policy-makers and a small but growing number of practitioners within youth justice/welfare. Whilst initially viewed as experimental or pioneering, they were recognised as attainable models of good practice by the late 1960s. However, this chapter has also demonstrated the significant (and in some cases seismic) gap between rhetoric, aspiration or ideal, and practice at the grass-roots level. In many cases the methods that had been used in the 1940s were in fact still being delivered in the 1960s. Services were over-stretched, staff were often under-trained and under-paid, and material resources were insufficiently forthcoming. This was most acutely felt in Scotland and, in particular, in the institution of the remand home. The development of mechanisms to reform juveniles was outstripped in pace and demand by the vast expansion in the work of the juvenile courts. This is amply demonstrated by the continued reliance of the juvenile courts on fines, conditional discharges and, in Scotland, admonitions, which were simply penal attempts at correction; these non-rehabilitative methods of disposal were used in over 40 per cent of juvenile court cases in both Manchester and Dundee in 1965. For those on the political right who criticised the penal-welfarist approach to youth justice, the continued growth in young offending was an indicator that the ‘soft touch’ did not work. For those who advocated the therapeutic model as the way forward, penal-welfarism was too reliant upon the juridical (threat, fear, and loss of freedom). However, as this chapter has demonstrated, the penal-welfarist approach to youth justice cannot be evaluated in terms of either success or failure because it was only ever partially delivered. Whilst ‘welfare’ was a policy aspiration, lack of resource meant that in many cases, ‘penality’ may have been the overwhelming experience.

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Notes 1 TNA, INF12/128, ‘Children on Trial’, pamphlet, pp. 1–2. 2 Ibid. Simmons played the role of ‘Mr Sadler’, the School’s Welfare Officer. See also Simmons, Making Citizens. 3 Wills, ‘Delinquency, masculinity and citizenship’; Wills, ‘Juvenile Delinquency’; Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare; Mahood, Policing Gender. 4 Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship. 5 P. Cox, ‘Review of Fragile Moralities and Dangerous Sexualities by A. Barton’, Howard Journal, 45.5 (2006), 559–60. 6 Statistics Relating to Approved Schools, Remand Homes and Attendance Centres in England and Wales, BPP, 1964–5, Cmd. 296, table 1. There were 1,138 girls in approved schools in England and Wales in 1964 compared to 7,569 boys. 7 NRS, HH60/839 Kilbrandon Report, Scottish Grand Committee debate on Children and Young Persons. There were 264 girls in approved schools in Scotland in 1964 compared to 1,326 boys. 8 NRS, ED15/226 Approved schools accommodation. In Dundee an average of 30 juveniles per year were consistently committed to approved school as a result of criminal charges 1955–64; see Christie, ‘Crime’, p. 597. 9 H. Richardson, Adolescent Girls in Approved Schools (London: Routledge, 1969). According to Richardson, 6.5 per cent of girls at The Shaw were from Manchester. 10 In Manchester an average of 170 juveniles per year were committed to approved schools (for both status and criminal offences) by 1965, around double the number for 1947. See YDT, Juvenile Delinquency, p. 16. 11 J. Vardy, Their Side of the Story (Newton-Le-Willows: Guardian Press, 1942). 12 Education in Scotland, BPP, 1953–4, Cmd. 9141, 61. 13 G. Rose, Schools for Young Offenders (London: Tavistock, 1967), p. 121. 14 B. Holman, The Corporate Parent. Manchester Children’s Department 1948– 1971. (London: National Institute for Social Work, 1996) p. 49. 15 NRS, ED15/134 Approved Schools accommodation. 16 NRS, ED15/479 Balgowan accommodation; ED15/517 Balgowan Inspectors’ reports. 17 NRS, ED15/78 Approved Schools. Notes for speech to be given at the Approved Schools Association Conference, 25 May 1956. On the police see Chapter 2. 18 Report on Conduct of Standon Farm Approved School, BPP, 1946–7, Cmd. 7150; Disturbances at the Carlton Approved School, BPP, 1959– 60, Cmnd. 937. For Lochburn (run by the Magadalene Institution, a rescue society founded in the 1880s) see The Times, 19 September 1958, p. 4, and 11 December 1958, p. 7. 19 Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare.

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20 Donzelot, Policing of Families, p. 105. 21 Report of a Committee to Review Punishments in Prison, Borstal Institutions, Approved Schools and Remand Homes, BPP. 1951–2, Cmd. 8429, pp. 15–19. 22 Richardson, Adolescent Girls, pp. 36–8. 23 Report of a Committee to Review Punishments, Cmd. 8429, p. 36. 24 TNA, HO45/21223 Official history of the Second World War. Juvenile delinquency and other matters 1945–7. 25 See Chapter 3. 26 J.D. Park, The Order of the Court (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1951), pp. 181–2 and 186. 27 Holman, Corporate Parent, p. 40. 28 Ibid., pp. 102–3; pp. 42–3. 29 Ibid., p. 113. 30 See for example W.D. Wills, Spare the Rod. The Story of an Experimental Approved School (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). 31 NRS, ED15/451, Approved Schools Policy, HMI’s summary of changes since 1950, 10 Dec 1964. 32 NRS, ED15/259 Approved schools: Joint Consultative Committee, minutes 7 June 1967. 33 NRS, ED15/517 inspection, 24 January 1969. 34 Observer (Weekend Review), 25 April 1965, pp. 32–3. 35 Rose, Schools for Young Offenders, pp. 103–4. 36 Ibid., pp. 69–73. 37 Ibid., p. 173. 38 See Wills, ‘Delinquency, masculinity and citizenship’. 39 Vardy, Their Side, p. 40. 40 NRS, ED15/451 Approved schools policy: general reports on development of schools. 41 See Chapter 6. 42 Richardson, Adolescent Girls, p. 22. 43 Ibid., p. 23. 44 TNA, BN29/1721 Approved Schools. Problem of dealing with very difficult girls within the approved schools system 1966–68. 45 Report of a Committee to Review Punishments, Cmd. 8429, p. 36. 46 D.H. Miller, ‘Problems of staff training in a school for delinquent adolescent boys’, Howard Journal, 12.1 (1966), 52–60. 47 Observer, 25 April 1965, pp. 32–3. 48 MEN, 18 November 1953, p. 3; MEN, 15 October 1953, p. 5. Evidence suggests that same-sex acts were widespread, sometimes associated with bullying in boys schools. See Boyle, Sense of Freedom, p. 72, and L. Page (1950) The Young Lag (London: Faber & Faber, 1950), p. 239. 49 J. Sparrow, Diary of a Delinquent Episode (London: Routledge, 1976), p. 14. 50 NRS, ED15/259.

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51 Boyle, Sense of Freedom, p. 73. 52 S. Slater, Approved School Boy (London: William Kuber, 1967), p. 37. 53 Sparrow, Diary, p. 34. 54 NRS, ED15/259, minutes 7 June 1967. 55 Of the Manchester juvenile court samples, 4 boys were sent to borstal in 1947, 1 in 1953, 3 in 1959, rising to 11 boys in 1965. Only 2 boys processed by the Dundee juvenile courts were sent to borstal in the 1959 sample (none in previous sample year), as well as 3 boys and 1 girl in 1965. 56 NRS, ED15/112. 57 Ibid. 58 NRS, HH60/824 Juvenile delinquency, Debate notes on juvenile crime and methods of treatment, 1962. 59 Observer, 20 August 1950, p. 5. Aylesbury closed in 1959. 60 Boyle, Sense of Freedom, p. 36. 61 Ingleby Report, p. 118. Four homes run by the voluntary sector also took a small number of remand cases as necessary. 62 Holman, Corporate Parent, pp. 38–9. 63 YDT, Juvenile Delinquency, p. 18. 64 Holman, Corporate Parent, p. 114. 65 Ibid., p. 52. 66 NRS, ED15/476 Remand Homes Committee, Scottish Advisory Council on Child Care, papers 1961–2. 67 NRS, ED15/251 Remand Homes Committee, visits. 68 NRS, ED15/474 Remand Homes Committee, evidence. 69 NRS, ED15/251 minutes of meeting, 17 May 1961. 70 Park, Order of the Court, p. 32. 71 Boyle, Sense of Freedom, p. 75. 72 NRS, ED15/251. 73 Remand Homes, BPP, 1961, Cmnd. 1588, 26; Ingleby Report, 118. 74 MRC, Younghusband Papers, MSS.463/EY/A12/3, Detention Centres. 75 MG, 10 October 1958, p. 1. 76 The first detention centre for juveniles opened in Scotland in 1962 at Friarton, near Perth, but it was not used as a method of disposal by Dundee magistrates in 1965. 77 Observer, 22 December 1968, p. 9. 78 YDT, Juvenile Delinquency, p. 19. 79 Criminal Statistics, Scotland, BPP, 1938 Cmd 6150, 1948 Cmd 7708, and 1958 Cmnd 746. 80 Criminal Statistics, Scotland, BPP, 1968, Cmnd 4125. 81 Report of the Departmental Committee on the Probations Service, BPP. 1961–2, Cmnd. 1650 (henceforth Morison Report), s. 11. 82 McNeill, ‘Remembering probation’. 83 SCA, DE120/4 Probation 1943–5; K. Robertson, ‘Social Worker’ in C. Bell (ed.), Scotland’s Century (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1999).

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84 NRS, ED15/107, meeting, 14 November 1945. 85 W. McWilliams, ‘The English probation system and the diagnostic ideal’, Howard Journal, 25.4 (1986), 241–60; W. McWilliams, ‘Probation, pragmatism and policy’, Howard Journal, 26.2 (1987), 97–121; M. Vanstone, Supervising Offenders in the Community (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 86 Morison Report, s. 245. 87 Christie, ‘Crime’, p. 600. 88 NRS, ED15/107, 14 November 1944. 89 NRS, HH60/426 Juvenile delinquency in war-time; NRS, HH60/437 Juvenile Delinquency 1943–56; NRS, ED15/281 Scottish Probation Advisory and Training Council: training and recruitment. 90 Morison Report, s. 271 and s. 268. 91 YDT, Juvenile Delinquency, p. 18. 92 M. Todd, Ever Such a Nice Lady (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964), p. 58. 93 Morison Report, s. 269. 94 Ibid., s. 61. 95 NRS, ED 39/134, Visit of HMI, March 1960. 96 Tayside Police Museum, Dundee, ‘Children’s and Young Person’s Social Work’, correspondence relating to Kilbrandon Committee. 97 Morison Report, ss. 11 and 54. 98 McWilliam, ‘Mission transformed’. 99 McNeill, ‘Remembering probation’, pp. 26–8. 100 A. Worrall ‘Gender and probation in the Second World War: Reflections on a changing occupational culture’, Criminology and Criminal Justice, 8 (2008), 317–33. 101 S. Stokes, Court Circular (London: Michael Joseph Ltd, 1950). 102 Scottish Screen Archives, 4/20/65, Production File, ‘Probation Officer’, 1947–8. 103 NRS, ED39/134, minutes of probation officers’ refresher course, 12–26 October 1960. 104 GCA, TD422.8. 105 Ibid., no. 2a. 106 Wills, ‘Delinquency, masculinity and citizenship’. 107 Park, Order of the Court, p. 116; Boyle, Sense of Freedom, p. 72. 108 Todd, Ever Such a Nice Lady, p. 61. Boyle, Sense of Freedom, p. 41. 109 Todd, Ever Such a Nice Lady, p. 59. 110 E. Avdela, ‘Between voluntary workers and public servants: juvenile probation officers in Greece, 1954–1976’, in A. Dialla and N. Maroniti (eds), State, Economy, Society (Athens: Metaichmio Editions, 2012). 111 F. McNeill, ‘Supervision in historical context: Learning the lessons of (oral) history’, in F. McNeill, P. Raynor and C. Trotter, C. (eds), Offender Supervision: New Directions in Theory, Research and Practice (Cullompton: Willan, 2010). 112 Todd, Ever Such a Nice Lady, p. 87. 113 McNeill, ‘Supervision’.

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This book has sought to chart continuity and change in the moral regulation of young people from 1945 to 1970, identifying mechanisms that were rhetorical, structural and spatial but which were ultimately contingent on the agency of the interpersonal, forged through everyday encounters, relationships and experiences. The Second World War did not rupture the seams of youth justice. Residential ‘reform’ institutions that dated back to the 1860s and a juvenile court system that was founded in 1908 provided the basis for official responses until around 1970. The dominance of penal-welfarism as a strategy and set of practices, which reflected the belief that juvenile delinquents could be ‘saved’ and converted into productive ‘citizens’, continued into the 1940s and 1950s. The attempts to expand and professionalise the probation service marked the high watermark of this approach. Nevertheless, no clear agreement on the meaning of penal-welfarism was shared across occupations. Neither were there two polarised viewpoints in which the ‘hard’ professions associated with penality (police and judiciary) collided with the ‘soft’ welfarists (social workers, teachers). Rather, penal-welfarism is best viewed as a spectrum across which individuals positioned themselves. Debates took place within occupational fields as well as across them. The position of parents was particularly complex; whilst some looked to the state for assistance in the control of their children, others were protective of their children against the interventions of the state and the criticisms of ‘moral entrepreneurs’, defending the ‘right’ of adolescents to the pursuit of leisure. Sociologists have identified key shifts in ideas about citizenship and selfhood in the twentieth century, as the Victorian emphasis on ‘character building’, which involved the acquisition of highly gendered attributes associated with ‘respectability’ (including abstinence

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and self-discipline), was replaced with an interest in ‘personality’ that sought to enable ‘self-realization, self-esteem and fulfillment’, and was shaped by the association of identity with consumerism.1 This was paralleled by a similar set of transformations in ideas about authority as positional models, grounded in hierarchy and deference, were gradually replaced with an emphasis on participatory democracy and ‘rights’ rather than ‘duty’. This book has suggested that the late 1950s and 1960s was a crucial period within this realignment and that it was in relation to the governance of young people that this shift was most profoundly forged. The realignment is apparent across family and community as well as state institutions. A renewed appeal to ‘citizenship’ as duty had been made at the end of the Second World War, with familiar solutions to ‘delinquency’ being proposed in the form of uniformed youth organisations delivering ‘muscular Christianity’. The model of the boys’ public school similarly informed both secondary and residential education offered in the late 1940s and early 1950s. By the early 1960s, in contrast, ‘citizenship’ had become starkly unfashionable, therapeutic models of rehabilitation were raised for discussion and ‘detached’ social workers were attempting to enable young people’s involvement in decision-making. Changing attitudes towards the use of corporal punishment, sexuality and even styles of dress were all part of this shift. Yet any shift was uneven, incomplete and highly contested, and was not necessarily felt at the same pace or in the same way across institutions and agencies. Jennifer Hilton, an inspector in the Metropolitan Police, wrote in 1972 that ‘not all police officers are any more seen as punitive and repressive, nor are all social workers regarded as ineffectual and anarchic’.2 Nevertheless, the 1960s saw the development of fundamental and sometimes acrimonious disagreements between some social workers and some police officers and magistrates over the treatment of young people that was both cultural and ideological. Police forces continued to operate as hierarchical institutions in which deference and discipline were still highly valued and reinforced through a semi-military training regime in which both male and female recruits were instructed in drill, the meticulous care of uniform, deportment and self-control. It was this contestation that led to a tipping over into ‘moral panic’, rather than the events on which they centred. As Jock Young reminds us, ‘moral panic does not occur when hegemony is successful but when it is in crisis’ and is ‘rooted in structural and value changes’.3 As Chapter 4 demonstrated, 1947 unusually saw the conviction of five juveniles for murder in England (five times the average), and yet

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there was no ‘moral panic’ about youth and violence. The capacity for events to be transformed into ‘moral panic’ was shaped as much by local politics, economies, geographies and cultures as by the national (although the latter provided a vital comparative reference point). The Scottish cities of Dundee and Glasgow witnessed increased conflict between police and young white working-class males that was linked to lack of amenities on relatively new peripheral housing schemes. In inner-city Manchester and London, however, both seen as magnets for runaway teenage girls because of their vibrant entertainments industries, the attentions of police and social workers focused instead on unlicensed music clubs, sexual corruption, drugs misuse, and the mixing of classes and races. In both cases the opportunity was used by the police to increase their formal powers or to win local arguments about reputation and efficiency; more was at stake than simply the behavior of the young people who were the objects of surveillance. Geographical approaches are vital in enabling us to pinpoint the shifting spatial contours of regulation. Whilst an ethical shift towards the pursuit of individualism emphasised self-determination for young people, this was accompanied by an apparent tightening of restrictions on young people’s use of space. Concerns about risk, associated initially with the rise of motor transport, led to the creation of safe play spaces, removed from the public thoroughfare of the street. Similarly, attempts were rapidly put in place to impose surveillance and supervision on formerly unregulated commercial leisure venues, following concerns about moral contamination. The role of the local state in this regard has increasingly been transferred to the private commercial sector, which uses its supervisorial capacity in shopping malls and leisure venues to encourage or indeed enforce participation as active consumers.4 The shift of emphasis, then, has been towards enabling young people to exercise self-determination within increasingly structured and controlled social spaces. This book has also highlighted the gap between rhetoric and practice. Promotional materials for the youth justice system (that showcased the work of juvenile courts, probation officers and approved schools) evoked a modern, progressive and holistic ‘welfarist’ approach to youth delinquency. Yet schemes such as juvenile liaison were, ultimately, piecemeal and unsystematic whilst the probation service was understaffed, over-worked and poorly resourced. The postwar ‘rehabilitative ideal’ did not ‘fail’, in the sense that it was never fully delivered. Thus the shift towards penality that Garland has identified in Britain and the USA from the 1970s was based on an inaccurate assessment, at that time, of previous decades.5

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John Pitts has suggested that any way forward today lies in the creation of ‘new forms of social solidarity’ that involve the further inclusion of children and young people as well as adults in ‘the political process’.6 Steps towards the replacement of ‘welfare’ with the concept of ‘solidarity’ were apparent by the late-1960s in some of the experiments with ‘unattached work’ and community-based projects, including the ‘Wincroft’ and ‘Hilton’ initiatives.7 Clearly, however, ‘Wincroft’ was still, in part, concerned with the techniques of normalisation and moralisation that were central to penal-welfarism. The 1960s are an interesting period for empirical historical study in that they demonstrate tensions within the model of penal-welfarism, desire amongst some to work towards the more democratic ideal, and a counter-attempt to return to an (imagined) older social order. A final important theme of the book has been the comparison of England and Scotland in terms of policy responses. This is not merely a question of national jurisdictions and political arrangements, but is linked to local governance. Local autonomies were valued and emphasised, particularly in Scotland, demonstrated through the early acceptance of the police ‘warnings’ system. However, many of the institutions associated with penal-welfarism in England (juvenile courts, remand homes) remained comparatively under-developed and underresourced in Scotland. Whilst divergence between England and Scotland tends to be emphasised in the years after 1970 and the move to Children’s Hearings in Scotland has been associated with a preference for social welfare (over and above penality), further analysis suggests this was not in fact seismic and that it was largely a result of the failure to constitute juvenile courts in their fully developed form. This meant that there was no strong ‘juvenile panel’ identity and no professional interest amongst bailies to lobby for the retention of the court model. Moreover, as the work of Lesley Macara and Susan McVie has shown, Children’s Hearings have not removed the ‘stigma of criminality’ that they sought to do. Indeed, they can be viewed as an extension of the principles that underpinned the ‘Section 50’ juvenile court (as a hybrid of welfare and penality) rather than an attempt to replace them with a more community-oriented response.8 In the period 1945–70, young people’s experiences of criminal justice and social welfare were shaped most substantively by gender and social class. Girls were less likely to be suspected of offences and were more likely to be regulated through other structures and mechanisms if engaged in actual offending behaviour. The juvenile courts dealt overwhelmingly with white working-class adolescents. Since then, the categories of ‘race’ and ethnicity have impacted significantly on

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debates, responses and the likelihood of interaction with police and justice institutions. As Pitts argues, these encounters are likely to have been ‘precipitated by rather different factors’ and cannot simply be reduced to those identified for white working-class males (economic marginality, low expectation and lack of access to opportunity).9 This study has been predominantly concerned with the everyday regulation of young people in the immediate postwar period and the effects of policy on practice. A similar historical lens could be usefully brought to bear on the 1970s–1980s in order to chart the shifting relationship between those in positions of authority and the new demographic groups with whom they worked, as well as the interplay between rhetoric, practice and experience. Notes 1 White and Hunt, ‘Citizenship’, p. 101; see this article for a full set of references to the work of Michel Foucault and Anthony Giddens amongst others. 2 J. Hilton, ‘Juvenile Delinquents: Care of Control?’, International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 16 (1972), 194–200. 3 J. Young, ‘Moral Panic’, British Journal of Criminology, 49 (2009), 4–16, here pp. 13 and 4. 4 A. Crawford, ‘From the shopping mall to the street corner: dynamics of exclusion in the governance of public space’, in A. Crawford (ed.), International and Comparative Criminal Justice and Urban Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 483–518. 5 Garland, Culture of Control. 6 J. Pitts, The New Politics of Youth Crime (Lyme Regis: Russell), p. 184; Willis, Learning to Labour. 7 See Pitts, The New Politics of Youth Crime, p. 43 for discussion of H. Becker, ‘Whose Side Are We On?’ Social Problems, 14 (1967), 239–47 and D. Mazta, Becoming Deviant (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1969), which offered key critiques of the ‘correctionalism’ associated with penal welfarism. 8 L. McAra and S. McVie, ‘The Usual Suspects? Street-life, young people and the police’, Criminal Justice, 5.1 (2005), 5–36. 9 Pitts, New Politics, p. 85.

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Select bibliography Archival sources Dundee City Archives Burgh Police Juvenile Court books Minutes of Dundee Corporation Women’s Mission to Women Glasgow City Archives Records Relating to Delinquency collected by Dr D.H. Stott Greater Manchester Police Museum Nellie Bohanna papers Policewomen’s conferences Women Police Department, box file on ‘clubs’ Manchester Archives and Local Studies Manchester Corporation Minutes Manchester Juvenile Court Registers Juvenile Court Panel Draft Minute Book Records of the Manchester Diocesan Association for Preventive and Rescue Work. Modern Records Centre, Warwick Eileen Younghusband papers Moral Welfare Workers’ Association National Union of Teachers The National Archives, Kew Central Office of Information papers (INF) Department of Education and Science papers (ED) Department of Health and Social Security papers (BN) Home Office papers (HO) Metropolitan Police papers (MEPO) Ministry of Health papers (MH)

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National Savings Committee papers (NSC) Records of the General Register Office (RG) National Registers of Scotland, Edinburgh Education Department papers, Scottish Office (ED) Home and Health papers, Scottish Office (HH) Lord Advocate’s Department (AD) Sheriff’s Court Juvenile Court Registers (SC45/40) Salvation Army International Heritage Centre, London Girls’ Statement Books Statistics for Unmarried Mothers Scottish Catholic Archives, Edinburgh Papers of the Archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh (DE) Scottish Screen Archive, Glasgow Papers of Donald Alexander and Budge Cooper Tayside Police Museum Children and Young Persons’ Social Work Newspapers Daily Express Daily Mail Dundee Courier and Advertiser Glasgow Herald Guardian Manchester Evening News Manchester Guardian Observer People’s Journal Scotsman The Times Wythenshawe Recorder Official publications All England Law Reports British Parliamentary Papers Chief Constables’ Annual Reports General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, Annual Reports Public Statutes

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Select published sources Abrams, M., Teenage Consumer Spending in 1959 (London: Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, 1961). Armstrong, G. and M. Wilson, ‘Delinquency and some aspects of housing’, in C. Ward (ed.), Vandalism (London: Architectural Press, 1973). Bagot, J.H., Juvenile Delinquency (London: Jonathan Cape, 1941). Bailey, V., Delinquency and Citizenship: Reclaiming the Young Offender, 1914–1948 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Banton, M., The Policeman in the Community (London: Tavistock, 1964). Bartie, A., ‘Moral panics and Glasgow gangs: exploring ‘the new wave of Glasgow hooliganism’, Contemporary British History, 24.3 (2010), 385–408. Bartie, A. and L.A. Jackson, ‘Youth crime and preventive policing in postwar Scotland (c.1945–1971)’, Twentieth-Century British History, 22.1 (2011), 79–102. Bottoms, A.E., ‘On the decriminalization of the English juvenile courts’, in R. Hood (ed.), Crime, Criminology and Public Policy (London: Heinemann, 1974). Bowlby, J., Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves (London: Bailliere, Tindall & Cox, 1946). Bradley, K., ‘Juvenile delinquency, the juvenile courts and the settlement movement 1908–1959. Basil Henriques and Toynbee Hall’, TwentiethCentury British History, 19. 2 (2007), 135–55. Bradley, K., ‘Juvenile delinquency and the public sphere: exploring local and national discourses in England, c.1940–1969’, Social History, 37.1 (2012), 19–35. Brake, M., The Sociology of Youth Culture and Youth Subcultures (London: Routledge, 1980). Brown, A. and D. Barrett, Knowledge of Evil: Child Prostitution and Child Sexual Abuse in Twentieth-Century England (Cullompton: Willan, 2002). Burt, C., The Young Delinquent (London: University of London Press, 1925). Chibnall, S., British Crime Cinema (London: Routledge, 1999). Cohen, S., Folk Devils and Moral Panics, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 2002 [1972]). Cook, H., The Long Sexual Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), Cox, P., ‘Race, delinquency and difference in twentieth-century Britain’, in P. Cox and H. Shore (eds), Becoming Delinquent: British and European Youth, 1650–1950 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). Cox, P., Gender, Justice and Welfare. Bad Girls in Britain, 1900–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003). Davidson, R. and G. Davis, The Sexual State. Sexuality and Scottish Governance 1950–80 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Davies, A., Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working-class Culture in Manchester and Salford, 1900–39 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1992). Davies, A., ‘Youth gangs, masculinity and violence in late-Victorian Manchester and Salford’, Journal of Social History, 32.2 (1998), 349–69.

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Davies, A., ‘Street gangs, crime and policing in Glasgow during the 1930s: the case of the Beehive boys’, Social History, 23.3 (1998), 251–68. Davies, A., ‘“These viragoes are no less cruel than the lads”. Young women, Gangs and Violence in Late Victorian Manchester and Salford’, British Journal of Criminology, 39.1 (1999), 72–89. Donzelot, J., The Policing of Families (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997). Downes, D., The Delinquent Solution (London: Routledge, 1966). Ferguson, T., The Young Delinquent in his Social Setting (London: Nuffield Foundation, 1952). Fowler, D., Youth Culture in Modern Britain c.1920–c.1970 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008). Frith, S., Sound Effects. Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock n’roll (London: Constable, 1983). Fyvel, T.R., The Insecure Offenders. Rebellious Youth in the Welfare State (London: Pelican, 1963 [1961]). Garland, D., Punishment and Welfare (Aldershot: Gower, 1985). Garland, D., The Culture of Control (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Gelsthorpe, L. and A. Morris, ‘Juvenile justice 1945–1992’, in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Gibbens, T.C.N. and J. Prince, Shoplifting (London: Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency, 1962). Gillis, J., ‘The evolution of juvenile delinquency in England, 1890–1914, Past and Present, 67 (1975), 96–126. Gosling, R., Lady Albemarle’s Boys (London: Fabian Society, 1961). Hall, S. et al., Policing the Crisis. Mugging, the State and Law and Order (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978). Hall, S. and T. Jefferson (eds), Resistance Through Rituals (London: Hutchinson, 1976). Hampshire, J., ‘The politics of school sex education policy in England and Wales from the 1940s to the 1960s’, Social History of Medicine, 18.1 (2005), 87–105. Hebdige, D., Subculture: the Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979). Hendrick, H., Child Welfare (London: Routledge, 1994). Hood, R. and K. Joyce, ‘Three generations: oral testimonies on crime and social change in London’s East End’, British Journal of Criminology, 39 (1999), 136–60. Horn, A., Jukebox Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). Humphries, S., Hooligans or Rebels? An Oral History of Working-Class Childhood and Youth 1889–1939 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981). Humphries, S., ‘Stealing to survive: the social crime of working-class children 1890–1940’, Oral History, 9.1 (1981), 24–33. Jackson, L.A., Women Police. Gender, Welfare and Surveillance in the Twentieth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).

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Jackson, L.A., ‘“The coffee club menace”: policing youth, leisure and sexuality in post-war Manchester’, Cultural and Social History (2008), 289–308. Jephcott, P., Time of One’s Own (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1967). Katz, J., ‘The gang myth’ in S. Karstedt and K. Bussman (eds), Social Dynamics of Crime and Control (New York: Hart, 2000). King, P. and J. Noel, ‘The origins of “the problem of juvenile delinquency”: the growth of juvenile prosecutions in London in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, Criminal Justice History, 15 (1993), 17–41. Langhamer, C., Women’s Leisure in England 1920–1960 (Manchester University Press: Manchester University Press, 2001). Langhamer, C., ‘Leisure, pleasure and courtship’, in M.J. Maynes et al. (eds), Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). Latham, E., ‘The Liverpool Boys’ Association and the Liverpool Union of Youth Clubs: youth organizations and gender, 1940–70’, Journal of Contemporary History, 35.3 (2000), 423–37. Logan, A., ‘A Suitable Person for Suitable Cases’: the Gendering of Juvenile Courts in England c.1919–39’, Twentieth Century British History, 16 (2005), 129–45. Mahood, L., Policing Gender, Class and Family, 1850–1940 (London: UCL Press, 1995). Margarey, S., ‘The invention of juvenile delinquency in early nineteenthcentury England’, Labour Studies (1978), 11–27. May, M., ‘Innocence and experience. The evolution of the concept of juvenile delinquency in the mid-nineteenth century’, Victorian Studies, 17.1 (1973), 7–29. Mays, J.B., Growing Up in the City (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1954). McAra, L. and S. McVie, ‘The usual suspects? Street-life, young people and the police’, Criminal Justice 5.1 (2005), 5–36. McNeill, F., ‘Remembering probation in Scotland’, Probation Journal, 52.1 (2005), 23–38. McNeill, F., ‘Supervision in historical context: Learning the lessons of (oral) history’, in F. McNeill, P. Raynor and C. Trotter (eds), Offender Supervision: New Directions in Theory, Research and Practice (Cullompton: Willan, 2010). Pearson, G., Hooligan: a History of Respectable Fears (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1983). Page, L., The Young Lag (London: Faber & Faber, 1950). Patrick, J., A Glasgow Gang Observed (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973). Pitts, J., The New Politics of Youth Crime (Lyme Regis: Russell, 2003). Richardson, H., Adolescent Girls in Approved Schools (London: Routledge, 1969). Robins, D. and P. Cohen, Knuckle Sandwich. Growing up in the Working-Class City (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978). Rock, P. and S. Cohen, ‘The teddy boy’, in V. Bogdanor and R. Skidelsky (eds), The Age of Affluence 1951–64 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1970). Sanderson, M., Educational Opportunity and Social Change in England 1900–1980s (London: Faber & Faber, 1987).

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Scott, P., ‘Gangs and delinquent groups in London,’ British Journal of Delinquency, 7.1 (1956), 4–24. Scott, P., ‘Juvenile courts: the juvenile’s point of view’, British Journal of Delinquency (1958–59), 200–11. Sereny, G., Why Children Kill; the Story of Mary Bell (London: Holt, 2000). Shore, H., Artful Dodgers. Youth and Crime in Early Nineteenth-Century London (London: Boydell, 1999). Shore, H., ‘Inventing and re-inventing the juvenile delinquent in British history’, Memoria y civilizacion, 14 (2011), 105–32. Simmons, M.M., Making Citizens (London: HMSO, 1946). Smith, C.S., Farrant, M.R. and H.J. Marchant, The Wincroft Project (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1972). Smith, D., ‘Official responses to juvenile delinquency in Scotland during the Second World War’, Twentieth Century British History, 18 (2007), 78–105. Smith, S.S., Children, Cinema and Censorship (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005). Sparrow, J., Diary of a Delinquent Episode (London: Routledge, 1976). Springhall, J., Youth, Empire and Society: British Youth Movements 1883–1940 (London: Croom Helm, 1977). Springhall, J., Coming of Age: Adolescence in Britain 1860–1960 (Basingstoke: Gill & Macmillan, 1986). Starkey, P., ‘The feckless mother: women, poverty and social workers in wartime and post-war England’, Women’s History Review, 9.3 (2000), 539– 57. Stott, D.H., Delinquency and Human Nature (London: Carnegie Trust, 1950). Thane, P. and T. Evans, Sinners? Scroungers? Saints?Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Thom, D., ‘Beating children is wrong’: domestic life, psychological thinking and the permissive turn’, in L. Delap, B. Griffin and A. Wills (eds), The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010). Todd, S., Young Women, Work and Family in England 1918–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Todd, S., ‘Breadwinners and dependants: working-class young people in England, 1918–1955’, International Review of Social History, 52.1 (2007), 57–87. Todd, S. and H. Young, ‘Baby-boomers to “beanstalkers”: making the modern teenager in post-war Britain’, Cultural and Social History, 9 (2012), 451–67. Ward, C., The Child in the City (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979 [1978]), pp. 116–17. Weinberger, B., ‘Policing juveniles: delinquency in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Manchester’, Criminal Justice History, 14 (1993), 43–55. Weinberger, B., The Best Police in the World (Aldershot: Gower, 1995). White, M. and A. Hunt, ‘Citizenship: Care of the Self, character and Personality’, Citizenship Studies, 4.2 (2000), 93–116.

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Whitfield, J., Unhappy Dialogue. The Metropolitan Police and Black Londoners in Post-war Britain (Cullompton: Willan, 2004). Willis, P., Learning to Labour (Westmead: Saxon House, 1977). Wills, A., ‘Delinquency, masculinity and citizenship in England 1950–1970’, Past and Present, 187 (2005) 157–85. Young, H., ‘Hard man, new man: re-composing masculinities in Glasgow, c.1950–2000’, Oral History, 35.1 (2007), 71–81. Young, J. ‘Moral Panic’, British Journal of Criminology, 49 (2009), 4–16.

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Aberdeen 19n.41, 42, 52, 131, 181 Abrams, Mark 67, 177 Albemarle Report (Youth Service) 165, 194, 207 alcohol 174, 176–8, 185, 191 approved school 2, 4, 29, 42, 78, 91, 92, 97–8, 118–20, 122, 137, 147, 152, 164, 186–7, 189, 201–10, 214, 219, 228 assault 39, 41–2, 88–9, 93–8, 101, 103–5, 107, 111 attendance centre 25, 78, 96, 178 Bagot, J.H. 12 bailies 52, 77, 79, 110, 111, 154, 229 Banton, Michael 22–4 Bernstein, Basil 153–4 birching 48, 94, 108, 204 Birmingham 27, 41, 89, 134, 177, 182 School of Cultural Studies 106, 175 Bohanna, Nellie 31, 189 borstal 97, 120, 203, 207, 210–11, 220 Bowlby, John 12, 31, 149, 155 Boys’ Brigade 25, 121, 164, 167, 175, 182 boys’ club 11, 24, 164 boy scouts see scout; scouting Bradford 37, 125–6, 156 breach of the peace 97, 104, 108–9, 111, 183 Brighton 43, 182, 191 Bristol 35, 152 Brooke, Henry 11, 90 Burt, Cyril 11, 31, 155 Butler, R.A. 11, 214

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cafés 31, 90, 97, 100, 104, 110, 123, 124, 175, 182, 186, 193, 194 care or protection 5, 7, 52, 56, 77, 79, 81n.11, 98, 118, 120, 122, 126–7, 187 Child Guidance clinic 2, 12, 129, 138, 150 service 218 Children and Young Persons Act 5, 52, 79, 118, 142, 147, 201 Children’s Hearings (Scotland) 4, 229 Children’s Panels (Scotland) 79 cinemas 53, 74, 90, 99, 174, 182–4 citizens 2, 25, 26, 78, 95, 125, 163–5, 201, 211, 226 citizenship 2, 21, 146, 162–5, 168, 175, 207, 211, 221, 226–7 Coatbridge 26, 36 coffee club 105, 185–91, 195 Cohen, Stanley 13–14, 43, 90, 91, 112 Cooper, Bridged (Budge) 1, 6, 73, 218 corporal punishment 40, 89, 94, 148–9, 151, 154–5, 161, 168, 200, 204–6, 210, 221, 227 Cox, Pamela 7, 126, 20, 203 criminal justice statistics 7, 10, 26, 93 dance halls 31, 90, 100–1, 110, 178, 182–3, 184–5 Davies, Andrew 22, 43, 69, 94, 99 Delaney, Shelagh 118, 135 detention centres 214–15 Donzelot, Jacques 146–7, 204 Downes, David 99, 100, 102 drugs 42, 174, 178–81, 187–8, 191–3, 228

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Index Dumfries 10, 26 Easterhouse (Glasgow) 72, 110–11, 161–3, 166–7 Ede, James Chuter 10 Emsley, Clive 94 family 5, 29, 31, 33, 35, 40, 61, 64, 67, 117–18, 121, 131, 132, 134, 137– 8, 146–55, 156, 160, 164, 166, 168, 193, 215, 218, 219, 227 Ferguson, Thomas 155 film Blackboard Jungle (1955) 88–90 The Blue Lamp (1950) 13, 62 Bronco Bullfrog (1969) 13, 192 Children of the City (1944) 1–2, 4, 6, 73, 152 Children on Trial (1946) 4, 152, 200 Cosh Boy (1953) 13, 87, 148 Good Time Girl (1947) 13, 119 I Believe in You (1951) 13, 218 Juvenile Liaison (1975) 45–6 Probation Officer (1948) 218–19 Rock Around the Clock (1956) 88, 99, 182–3 Violent Playground (1958) 13, 38, 45, 161 Fintry (Dundee) 71, 95, 100, 159–60 Fletcher, Colin 106, 112 Fowler, David 30 Fyvel, T.R. 99 gangs 2, 32, 34, 43, 86, 89, 90, 95, 98–112 Gibbens, T.C.N. 65, 122, 126–7 Glasgow 9, 12, 25–7, 29, 36, 38, 39, 40–1, 44, 72, 74, 99, 101, 110–12, 124, 134, 145, 150–1, 153–6, 160–3, 166–7, 177–8, 181–2, 192, 201, 203, 213, 219–20 Gosling, Ray 175, 194 Gray, David (Chief Constable) 18n.29, 35–6 Greenock 9, 35–6, 74, 156, 211 Gretna Green 125, 139n.6 Henriques, Basil 35, 62, 200 Holman, Bob 205, 212 homicide 91–3 homosexuality 118, 125, 128, 187–8, 191, 209

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housing 1, 15, 29, 35, 37, 68–73, 95, 103, 108–12, 133, 149, 155–60, 168, 192, 228 indecent assault 37, 128–9 see also sexual assault Ingleby Committee (Children and Young Persons) 35, 36, 79 Jacobs, Jane 158–9 Jephcott, Pearl 44–5, 101–2 Johnston, Thomas 10 juvenile court 1–2, 4, 6, 7, 10, 15, 25– 7, 31, 32–3, 35, 37, 39, 52–80, 86, 94, 95–7, 103, 104, 105, 107, 111, 117, 118–19, 121–2, 126, 138, 147–9, 152–3, 176–81, 187–9, 202, 205, 209, 211–14, 217, 218, 221, 226–9 Juvenile Liaison Officer (JLO) 33–8, 45–6, 156 Juvenile Liaison Scheme (JLS) 6, 8, 20, 32–8, 46 Katz, Jack 67, 99 Kilbrandon, Lord 36, 166 Kilbrandon Committee (Children and Young Persons) 36, 79 Kilmarnock 9, 10, 26, 36 Kirkton (Dundee) 71, 73, 95, 107–10, 162 Klein, Joanna 22, 24 Langhamer, Claire 193 Leeds 29, 35, 125, 134, 177 Liverpool 6, 12, 22–4, 29, 32–8, 39, 40, 58, 61–2, 67–8, 100, 104, 112, 128, 130, 147, 156, 177, 200, 202, 207 London 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 25, 27–8, 30, 35, 45, 46, 62, 88, 91, 101, 102, 105, 122, 124, 126, 128, 134, 156, 164, 176, 178, 181, 182, 185–7, 191–2, 195, 214, 217, 228 Mack, John Anderson 12, 36–7, 111 McKay, John (Chief Constable) 18n.29, 190, 193 Macmillan, Harold 41, 196n.26 magistrates 3, 5, 6, 14, 25, 28, 32, 35, 39, 52, 75–80, 90, 103, 108, 110, 112, 147–9, 154, 163, 166, 178, 201, 214–15, 227

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240 Magistrates’ Association 34, 35, 79, 119 Mass Observation 176, 177, 184 maternity homes see mother and baby homes Mays, John Barron 12, 22–4, 29, 58, 62, 67–8, 99–100, 147, 156 moral panic 13–14, 86, 87, 98, 103, 105, 119, 124, 175, 176, 179, 183, 189, 190, 192, 195, 227 moral welfare 37, 128, 130–7, 139, 160, 218 Morrison, Herbert 27 Moss Side (Manchester) 44, 68, 69, 97, 103–6, 124–6, 133, 160, 166, 179, 192 mother and baby homes 130, 135–8 music 3, 106, 112, 184, 186, 194, 195 National Union of Teachers (NUT) 89–90 Patrick, James 44–5, 101–2, 112 Pitts, John 229, 230 play 22, 24, 36, 53, 73–5, 80, 95, 98, 100, 102–3, 156–9, 168, 228 playground 1, 22, 58, 158, 166 police beat officer 22–5 cautioning 26–7, 33–5, 37, 56, 76 complaints against 39–42, 46 warning 25–30, 36–7, 56, 229 women 30–2, 37, 120, 122–4, 126, 138, 186–8 pregnancy 118, 122, 131, 134, 136–7, 138 Prince, Joyce 65 probation officer 2, 7, 12, 26, 28, 32–6, 65, 76, 77, 79, 118, 149–54, 155, 160, 162, 176, 182, 215–20, 227–8 orders 78, 122, 128–9, 150, 215, 217 prostitution 125–7, 187, 192 remand homes 78, 127, 186, 212–14, 229 Richardson, Helen 204, 208 Riddell, David 159–60, 168 Robertson, Gary 110, 116n.109 Rose, Gordon 206–7 runaways 31, 97, 124, 126–7, 175, 187, 191

Jackson 11.indd 240

Index Salford 22, 25, 68, 69, 98, 103, 104, 118, 136, 143n.110, 148, 149, 175, 184, 191 schools 2, 6, 28–9, 37–8, 88–9, 162, 164 leaving age 2, 8, 56, 57, 133 Scott, Peter 76, 77, 101 Scott, Phil 190 scout 25, 128, 161, 175 scouting 28, 164, 207 sex education 121, 127, 134 sexual assault 30, 123, 130 see also indecent assault sheriffs 52, 77, 79 shoplifting 30, 31, 33, 63–7, 69, 150 Sibley, David 153, 195 Soskice, Frank 11 Sparrow, Jane 209, 210 Stott, D.H. 12, 155 street culture 22, 74, 95, 100–1, 106, 159 Taylor, Howard 10 theft 53, 56, 58–69, 72, 75, 77, 80, 103, 122, 147, 150 Thom, Deborah 40, 149, 155 Tomlinson, George 10 truancy 8, 10, 31, 33 Vaughan, Frankie 11, 111, 164, 166–7 wartime 1, 7, 26, 32, 119, 124, 132, 149, 176–7, 204 Weinberger, Barbara 24, 40 Wills, Abigail 200 Wills, David 164 Wincroft Project 165, 193 Wolfenden Committee 125, 128 Wootton, Barbara 79, 80 Wythenshawe (Manchester) 31, 68–9, 133, 160 YDT see Youth Development Trust youth clubs 16, 24, 25, 68, 90, 100–1, 161, 163, 165–6, 174–5, 183, 184, 187, 193–4 Youth Development Trust (Manchester) 45, 68–70, 74, 105–6, 165–6, 193

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