Crime in Wartime Britain

by Read Listen Learn

When Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, daily life changed at home as well as for the hundreds of thousands of soldiers fighting abroad. Crime was one aspect of this. The special conditions created by the war increased certain crimes, while others stopped almost completely. Before the Second World War, the crime of forgery was beginning to disappear, for instance. The war, for reasons we shall see, changed all that.

Smuggling from the continent of Europe, on the other hand, became impossible, as all the coasts were watched by heavily armed ships. Of course, forgery and smuggling were crimes in both peace and wartime, but some crimes only existed because of the war. For example, showing a light in your house at night was a serious offence because it could help enemy bomber planes to find their targets. Desertion, the crime of running away from military service, became very common because British men and women between 18 and 39 years old all had to join the army. Many didn't want to. Others were useless as soldiers or sailors or airmen so the military put them back into civilian life.

Forgery had taken on great importance in wartime for two reasons: first, the war meant there were now a lot of documents that had not existed before (ID cards and ration books, etc.) and were needed just to buy food or a rail ticket. The other reason was that the new documents and papers were quite easy to copy perfectly – especially the ration coupons which, on their cheap paper, looked just like a cloak-room ticket at the theatre. Forgers and corrupt printers, who had found it practically impossible to copy bank notes before the war, now had much easier and very profitable work.

By the middle of the war, Britain's cities were full of deserters, British and American. Wanted by the police and their own military units, these young men needed forged papers just to live and eat. To pay for this, they usually turned to crime themselves. This was not difficult. The rationing of food and many other goods meant that there was a busy black market and any clever person could make a good living trading in whisky, cigarettes, clothing, forged or stolen documents, etc. These black marketeers were known as 'spivs'. Soho in central London was a well-known meeting point for these underground characters. Here, they drank in the pubs and made criminal contacts. The streets were full of young servicemen who could be cheated out of their money.

Soho was also full of prostitutes who, despite the availability of well-paid work for women during the war, had decided to make a living 'entertaining' the many soldiers, foreign and British, who passed through London. And all of this night-life, this life in the shadows, was kept going by the large numbers of amphetamine pills that were easily available on the black market.

These 'speed' pills were stolen from the military where they were used to keep soldiers and pilots awake during long battles. Now they were keeping Soho awake all night and the enforced darkness of the black-out (designed to stop the bombers seeing their target) meant that it was easy to find places for sex: bomb shelters were everywhere and, except in an air raid, were usually empty. The darkness was so thick that one could not be seen in a shop doorway or front garden.

During the war years, the number of children born outside marriage spiralled. However, the black-out and the bomb damage to many shops and houses caused another crime to take off: burglary. Most of the new burglars were schoolboys aged from about nine to seventeen. The situation was made worse because, for the first years of the war, the schools were closed, so many boys ran wild. When peace came, and the rationing and military service ended, Britain's criminal life began to return to normal. However, the war left two marks on the world of crime. Burglary continued to be a worsening problem until the late 1980s – it was still mostly schoolboys. And the amphetamine craze lasted another twenty years, well into the 1960s.