Ending just over a decade before I was born, the Second World War (WW2) still maintained something of a hold our family, as I was growing up at 5, Padnell Avenue, in Cowplain, a small village just north of Portsmouth. Due to its naval base, Portsmouth had been very heavily bombed during the war years and a lot of social housing (known as prefabs) had been built in Cowplain & its surroundings, to quickly house those made homeless in Portsmouth; in fact we lived close to a large prefab estate. My father did national service in the post war years before becoming a teacher. His first job, teaching at Milton Secondary School for Boys, had a bomb crater as the playground. Like many cities in the 1950’s, Portsmouth still very much bore the scars of the war but my parents saved to buy Padnell Avenue, brand new in 1960.
What was not talked about then (at least openly) and something I only discovered well after I had come out in the late seventies, (in fact only really in the last few decades) is that in a similar way to the First Great War, the changed social conditions in the period had a particular influence on some of the men and women who served in it & lived through it. Even on just the Allied front, it is estimated that as many as 250,000 people may have defined as ‘homosexual’ and up to 1.1 million people may have experienced some form of same sex intimacy, that came about as a result of the particular conditions that existed during the period (and, it is fair to say to a lesser extent, the changes that had been occurring in the thirties). ‘Indecency’, the catch all term for sexual activity between men, still contravened military law and prosecution would likely result in a lengthy prison sentence and dismissal. In the women’s services, same sex activity was not illegal but lesbians were overwhelmingly viewed as a ‘dangerous contagion’.
However, the experience of men who have spoken about it since, shows that there was in fact an increased acceptance of what has been termed ‘homosex’ (sex between men or what the HEA, had it existed then, would have called ‘MWHSWM’) in the forces during the war years. To some extent, it seems the ‘unusual’ situation of forced intimacy acted as an excuse or a reason to engage in activities that would not normally have been felt to ‘acceptable’ by many of those involved (similarly in fact to the conditions that I mentioned in the First War). In all areas of the services, both in the UK and abroad, there existed fairly widespread examples of same sex engagement. Whilst many of the men involved had, or had had, girlfriends ‘back home’ and would in no way have defined as being ‘homosexual’, to use the clinical term that was fairly widely used then in official literature, clearly some would have and the opportunities presented actually served to help clarify and to some extent define their sexuality. It goes some way again to explaining, why some people quite enjoyed this time in their lives, during the war years
As Emma Vickers writes in her book ‘Queen & Country: Same sex desire in the British Armed Forces, 1939-1945′, after examining interviews with various men who defined as ‘homosexual’ by the end of the 20th century and had formative experiences in that time, whilst in the British services as relative youngsters and since:
‘For many of the queer men and women who served as part of the Armed Forces, their service was sacred. (For example)… Richard Briar believed that he developed ‘socially and sexually’ as a result of the war,and likewise John Booker emerged from his Army service with a better understanding of himself and his sexuality.
Without the war and his service within it, Booker believed that he would have ‘continued at Cambridge and probably been even more closeted. I developed subsequently’. So in this sense she writes ‘the war played a significant role in accelerating the sexual maturity of my interviewees‘. They met like minded people, formed social circles, patronised formal homosexual spaces together and manufactured their own. ‘They fell in love (and out of it) and some became surer and more secure in their identities’. It is very likely that similar activities occurred in the First ‘Great’ World War as well, though this activity has been less well documented, in part because there was less attempt to document it before those involved had died natural deaths. Attitudes then were even stricter and more dogmatic, regarding such behaviour.
Equally there were other men, like the marvellous Dudley Cave (1921-1999), whom I met years later on in the eighties, when we both worked together on Lesbian & Gay Switchboard in London. Dudley and his partner Bernard lived together (with his ex wife in fact; very ‘Bloomsbury’) from 1954-1994, when Bernard died. He had a fascinating life, having joined the Royal Army Ordinance Corps in 1941, aged 20, (“I was basically a pacifist, he said later but I thought the Nazi persecution of the Jews made it a just war.”) and had been openly homosexual there without great problems, then having fought the Japanese but been captured in the fall of Singapore, set to work on the River Kwai railway.
After becoming ill with malaria there (in fact three quarters of his fellow prisoners died) he was incarcerated in Changi prison in Singapore in 1944. There a British army medical officer gave him a copy of Havelock Ellis’s “enlightened, eye-opening” 1920 book Sexual Inversion. Talk about a role model! It made him feel “much better about being gay” he later said. Dudley became one of the first volunteers on London Gay Switchboard in 1974, doing countless shifts there, talking to others about coming out and he also set up the important Lesbian and Gay Bereavement Project in 1980 as he realised that the partners of lesbians and gay men were often getting little conventional support when their partners died. It went on to encourage many same-sex couples to make wills, to ensure that their relationship and wishes were properly recognised when they died and was in fact the very organisation with the word ‘gay’ in its title to win charitable status (despite initial objections from the Charity Commission!). So yes, here was a role model I would have been proud to have learnt from, when I was younger. The ‘tragedy’ of it all, was like so many other gay men of my own generation I had no idea of any of this, until I met him in the mid eighties and actually even later, as he never really ‘bragged’ about his past . It was still relatively unusual yes but the fact is there were ordinary men (and women) living together in the period from after the Great War until the sixties. It was possible.
This is not to say that the social privations during the Second World War gave carte blanche to all ‘homosexually minded’ men to express their feelings, either openly or otherwise. It was still a risky thing to do for many reasons. Another soldier who recognised that he was himself homosexual during the war, explained at a later date why he did not act on his feelings:
‘There was no sexual contact I hadwith anybody in the services. The simple reason [for me was], I got promoted to Sergeant from Corporal. As you’re getting promotions, you couldn’t take no chances. I had several chances, mind you,with two or three different private soldiers I knew. You can gauge ‘em, but the point is, when you come to look at it you say to yourself – well, is it mind over matter? You know, you say to yourself, No, I mustn’t. You’re jeopardising your chances, because if something happened you’re going to get a court martial.’
Interestingly, there is a contrast between the attitudes of society at large- in both wars but especially the first- to the ‘conscientious objectors’, pacifists, who refused to fight on moral grounds, who were often called what were derogatory phrases such as ‘pansies’ and ‘effeminates’ in the press and public and those, like Gerald Brenan, who in the First War enlisted and went to the front and found some kind of sexual and social liberation there as a result but who were awarded military medals and crosses for valour, courage and service to country.
Whilst all this is in no way to suggest, that the terrible sacrifices that were made by many forces personnel have any positive redemptive features, it is nevertheless to recognise that for certain people it provided a kind of escape from the heterogenerative norms that day to day life offered outside of this enforced service life and an opportunity that allowed them to explore their sexuality in a- relatively- safe environment, away from the battlefront, air raids notwithstanding.
Some large cities also developed a network of meeting places for forces personnel that wanted company of a ‘like minded kind’. London, in particular during the war years has been frequently described in literature as ‘a melting pot’. Very early in the war, troops arrived from Canada and the rest of the Commonwealth, then from Poland after 1940 and from the United States after 1941. The influx created a new mix of people, when even those stationed in the suburbs or the country at large, came to the inner city to spend their leave.
As Merryn Allingham writes ‘London was a good place to lose oneself, and the flux of people gave men and women the opportunity to assume new identities if they wished. Greater anonymity and new opportunities for sexual adventures led to changes in sexual attitudes. Socialising between the sexes became easier, boundaries were more often breached’. Fire watching duties, for example, had the effect of obscuring boundaries between workplace and home with many offices establishing sleeping rooms for those on duty or for use as shelters in air raids.
The fact that there were ordinary homosexual men and women about in the early twentieth century can be ascertained now by simply examining the evidence which shows that there were a significant number of meeting places for them to go to (in London in particular but in other larger cities also ) which would not have been there should not have been a need for them to exist in the first place. More to the point though they were still taking a great risk in opening their doors in this period, for much of the time.
Although homosexuals in London had always socialised in public places such as pubs, coffee houses and tea shops, it had became a little more overt, even by the early 1900’s. Waitresses ensured that a section of a Lyons Corner House (the ‘Wimpy’s or MacDonalds’ of their day) in Piccadilly Circus was reserved for ‘homosexuals’. The section became known as the ‘Lily Pond’. In 1912, London’s first gay pub (as we now know the term), Madame Strindgberg’s ‘The Cave of the Golden Calf’ opened in Heddon Street, off Regent Street.
By the 1930’s there were in fact many gay establishments in central London, both cafes & public houses; perhaps the busiest in the period was The Running Horse in Shepherds Market. There were also a few gay-friendly cafés in Soho of a bohemian nature. Quentin Crisp writes about sitting for hours with his friends, making one coffee last, in the Black Cat in Old Compton Street. This was an exception though, as Soho itself was not especially gay in the inter war years, more a place for older men to pick up younger women.
In particular though there was The Caravan Club, in a basement in Endell Street near Covent Garden, run by Billy Reynolds and a former strongman and escapologist called Jack Neave, (known as “Iron Foot Jack” because of the metal platform he wore to compensate for a shortened leg). It was raided and shut down in September 1934. A total of 103 men and women were arrested and taken to the nearby Bow Street police station. any of the young men there were working class – labourers, shop assistants, waiters – and the majority were found not guilty in court, on the condition that they never frequented such a club again. There was, however, no leniency for Reynolds and Neave, respectively given sentences of twelve months and twenty months hard labour in prison.
Billie’s Club on Little Denmark Street attracted an alternative audience, and the acts that appeared on stage reflected this, including openly queer music hall performers. The impressive club room consisted of a dance floor and grand piano, and was a more formal and less bohemian set up than at similar clubs such as the Caravan Club.
However from May 1936 the property was under plain-clothed police surveillance; observations intensified in early November 1936, and return visitors to the venue were noted by undercover police. It was raided on the 14th November and thirty-seven people were arrested.
Another club in this period, perhaps culturally the most interesting of all, in retrospect, was the Shim Sham Club, a gay friendly jazz venue, a ‘shim sham’ being a lively tap dance originating from Harlem, New York. However, a complainant known only as ‘HC’ who was a neighbour, in the rear of Wardour Street wrote a letter to the Commissioner of Police at New Scotland Yard on the 14th May 1935 stating ‘In the Shim Sham there is a negro band, white women carrying on perversion, women with women, men with men.. a second Caravan Club’. It was documented as being even more shocking because it was frequented by black men “dancing with white women”. Another letter noted, ‘the encouraging of Black and White intercourse is the talk of the West End’. The police raided the club in July 1935 and it was closed but soon reopened as the ‘Rainbow Roof’; there was clearly a demand for these establishments.
Mad about the Boy, written by Noel Coward was released in 1932 and it is very likely it would have been played or sung live in such central London gay establishments as the´Caravan´ and ´Shim Sham´clubs.
In retrospect, writes Vicky Iglikowski-Broad, as part of a National Archives blog article:
‘The Shim Sham’s subversive mix of race, music, politics and sexual openness made it stand out to both the police and public. It can now be seen as progressive venue that has since been championed as a black queer space and a key source of new music’.
Police surveillance and raids of such establishments continued well into the latter part of the 20th century. A note added by Nicholas Billingham to the aforementioned article adds:
‘Plain-clothes police operations in clubs and around gay pubs continued well into the 80’s. In 1984 there was a famous case when a Tory MP was arrested by plainclothes officers in a gay theatre/strip show and there was a long debate in the Commons that year on the report stage of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act about plain clothes police entrapment of gay men including outside the Coleherne pub in Earls Court. I helped to gather evidence to brief MPs on that occasion and have plenty of documents about it including police witness statements in cases that went to court‘.
The London Gay Switchboard received calls about such events quite regularly in this period and kept a list of solicitors who would take on such cases.
However, according to an article in QX magazine by Hayden Bridge,* during the war years London during the blackout became ‘the largest and best dark room in gay history’. During the daylight, cinemas were used. The ‘best’ were little news theatres, which never put up the lights during continuous screenings of newsreels and cartoons. As I have mentioned already, one such cinema in Victoria, England’s second cinema The Biograph (originally the Bioscope), was popularly known as ‘the Biogrope’ until it was demolished in 1983. I went there in 1977 as an innocent lad taken by my hostel roommates, of which more later, to see ‘Le Grand Bouffe’ (link to trailer , a 1973 French–Italian film directed by Marco Ferreri about a group of french aristocrats that literally eat themselves to death) and can testify that it was still pretty seedy even then. I was entirely innocent of the building’s long reputation at the time. I had my film ticket held in my mouth as I was carrying various other things. ‘Ere, don’t put it in your mouth luv’ observed the laconic, weary attendant.
The Royal Vauxhall Tavern (RVT) remains one of the oldest ongoing LGBTQ venues in London and indeed in England. It has been recognised for its notable drag performances since the 1940’s (the late lamented Paul O Grady aka the infamous Lily Savage, called it The Royal Vauxhall Tavern School of Dramatic Art” as well as his ‘spiritual home’) though it became more particularly recognised as a gay venue early in the ’50s. In fact it was built on the site of the infamous Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, a known cruising spot in London since the 1800s. It became a grade II listed building in 2015, because of its long gay related history. Also in 1946, the City of Quebec Tavern opened (in Quebec St) and this has somehow managed to remain gay ever since, making it one of, if not the oldest gay pub now in London.
But there were ‘private members clubs’ also, where you had to be signed in by a member. The A&B (Arts and Battledress Club) was one such private club and opened in Orange Street, in 1941, behind the National Gallery. In 1952 it moved to Rupert St in Soho and was still going, as the ‘A&B’, even in the mid 1980’s. The Swiss Tavern in Old Compton St opened in 1941 and had a reputation even then, during the war years. It became the famous ‘Comptons Of Soho‘ in 1986, described as Britain’s highest grossing pub for its size; QX Magazine referred to it as “The Grand Dame of Queer Street” . Others clubs included the Gateway (informally known as The Gates) in Chelsea, one of the very few places in London which lesbians could openly meet at (although it was quite mixed in its early years). Now all are long gone (besides Comptons). Several other British cities had pubs and clubs in the early twentieth century where gay men (and to a lesser extent lesbians) could meet openly. All this (and so much more) was awaiting my discovery a few decades later.
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