Photos discovered of officers' brothel in France

[BereniceUK]

Surely this has been mentioned before, but if it has I couldn't see it in a search. It's an online article, from 2014, about the discovery of a cache of photographs owned, and mostly taken, by Lieutenant William Noel Morgan, Royal Engineers (died 1983). Some are of the interior of an officers' brothel.

 

Apologies if this is old news to you all, but I'd not seen it before.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/inside-the-brothels-that-served-the-western-front-how-one-first-world-war-soldier-found-love-in-the-9643738.html

[Martin Bennitt]

The photographs feature in "They Didn't Want to Die Virgins: Sex and Morale in the British Army on the Western Front 1914-18", by Bruce Cherry, published by Helion, which I recently read. Recommendable, without being prurient.

 

Cheers Martin B

[BereniceUK]

Thanks. I wondered if they'd appeared in print since the newspaper article.

[Gareth Davies]

2 hours ago, Martin Bennitt said:

The photographs feature in "They Didn't Want to Die Virgins: Sex and Morale in the British Army on the Western Front 1914-18", by Bruce Cherry, published by Helion, which I recently read. Recommendable, without being prurient.

 

Cheers Martin B

 

I have just started it. There is a thread here on it. 

 

 

[Muerrisch]

Once again the "blue light" gleams in the newspaper account.

 

And once again I maintain that there is not a scrap of reliable evidence that officers' knocking shops displayed a blue light.

 

Please have a think ..... I have searched diligently, but I could easily have missed hard fact.

[Moonraker]

Apparently Robert Graves referred to blue lamps in

 

Goodbye to All That

 

though I can't be bothered to check my copy. There are other threads here on the GWF that discuss Graves' embellishments of life on the Front Line.

 

This is the only contemporary reference I found through casual Googling; all the others are relatively recent.

 

Moonraker

[Muerrisch]

Thank you.

 

Much as I admire Robert G, Goodbye to All That needs to be taken with the proverbial of course.

 

He presented a copy to Dr Dunn, famous compiler Of The War the Infantry Knew, and Dunn indulged in scathing marginalia regarding inaccuracies and fictions. The copy is or was in the Regimental Museum.

 

I have tried to unearth the accounts by Town Majors [who would or should have known] but not a mention.

 

Of course the blue lamp/red lamp suggested difference will help to reinforce the Lions and Donkeys narrative, which will give the matter legs.

[BereniceUK]

Could it be that, because brothels are linked with what are known as red-light districts, the officers wanted their activities not to have the same lower-class connection, hence the use of the term 'blue lamp,' rather than 'red light.'

[Muerrisch]

Yes, indeed it could, although from my limited knowledge I believe the officers were at it just like their men: class distinctions seem not to have existed below the belt!

[Beechhill]

This from a WAAC:

"Soon after this my chum and I thought that we would go to the cinema.  In the town we came upon a queue of Tommies.  One of them was shouting out: "This way for the one-an'-thruppennies." We tacked ourselves to the end of the queue.  The Tommies tittered.

For some reason we seemed to amuse them very much.  Then one rather nice boy came to us, and said: "Missies, this performance is for men only".  He blushed as he said it.  We did not understand, but we went away."

 

http://firstworldwar.com/diaries/storyofawaac.htm

[Andrew Upton]

George Coppard in "With A Machine Gun To Cambrai, Chapter 14 - Givenchy:

 

"The factory was near the centre of the town and a major attraction was the Red Lamp establishment, authorised with Anglo-French consent. Captain Graves has mentioned a Blue Lamp establishment for officers, but I never thought of officers in that connexion, and I don't remember seeing a Blue Lamp."

[Muerrisch]

Andrew, thank you, I had forgotten that reference.

[Gareth Davies]

Here's your original thread Grumpy: 

 

[IPT]

Perhaps some of the forum ex-officers could clarify which colour lamps advertised the establishments that they frequented? That might be illuminating in every sense.

[Muerrisch]

I can inform the thread that it was said that Rate One Subsistence paid to those officers of my acquaintance was enough for a visit to the better knockels of Liege in the 1980s, 1990s.

More I will not say.

[Moonraker]

When the Royal Canadian Dragoons were billeted in the Shrewton area of Salisbury Plain in 1914-15, William Lighthall witnessed the procuring success of his comrade 'Archibald', a British immigrant and bigamist who deprived his colleagues of any spare cash in the crown-and-anchor (dice game) sessions that he ran. Lighthall:

 

'noticed a furtive gathering around the kitchen door [of a house near Shrewton church] …. we looked through the kitchen window and there saw the reason for the crowd.

 

Stretched out on the kitchen table, stripped bare as the day of her birth, lay a daughter of joy serving the line of eager applicants who had paid a fee to Archibald at the door. And above – the church organ played a moving hymn to lead the devout to their weekly prayer meeting.

 

A few weeks later, a constant stream of invalids attended sick call and deeply regretted their participation in Archibald's lates[t] financial venture.'

 

Archibald, like many of the Canadians, had become lousy and, after sleeping with the vicar's daughter, passed on his lice to her and her family, claimed Lighthall, who added:

 

'He also passed on something far harder to get rid of and the unfortunate damsel soon found she was pregnant – made so by a man who had one wife in Canada and another in England.'

Of course Archibald himself was soon to leave Wiltshire and his newly acquired responsibilities [for active service] , if indeed he was the type to recognize these.'

 

I have my doubts about the story about the vicar's daughter.

 

(W. S. Lighthall memoirs, Imperial War Museum, London )

 

Moonraker

 

Edited 23 January , 2018 by Moonraker

[seaJane]

Vide also the quotation from Gerard Hoffnung in this thread: 

 

[Muerrisch]

Good Hoffnung joke, much appreciated both then and now, thank you.

[BereniceUK]

From a review of the book Wine, Women and Good Hope, by June McKinnon, "During the [Boer] war, the going rate charged by less reputable white prostitutes was two pounds for a night, while coloured prostitutes earned only ten shillings for the same service. For a quickie, the princely sum of 7s 6d (seven shillings, six pence) was charged."

http://penguin.bookslive.co.za/blog/2015/11/20/how-olive-schreiner-scandalised-1900s-south-africa-with-revelations-of-sexual-attraction-excerpt-from-wine-women-and-good-hope/

[Moonraker]

£1 in 1900 is worth about £115 today. 7s 6d equates to £45. Of course, I have absolutely no idea what are today's going rates for such services.

 

Moonraker

[Muerrisch]

So how big does the population of a hamlet or village or town have to be to have one such servicer [not  an enthusiastic amateur]?

 

Ona average, of course. 

 

 

[Moonraker]

Seven hundred and ninety. Such was the population of Urchfont in Wiltshire in 1911. Three years later, the

 Wiltshire Advertise recounted a 'terrible story of immorality, which is, of course, not suitable for reproduction in these columns', though again there were reassurances that such cases were very rare in the district. A young widow, Mary Ann Watts, of Church Lane, Urchfont, was charged with keeping a disorderly house there with her sister, Nellie Stokes, aged 20, who was similarly charged. The police had been observing the house since 25 October (shortly after Canadian soldiers had arrived at Pond Farm Camp, three miles away). A soldier had been seen wearing women's clothes, in the company of Nellie Stokes in a soldier's uniform. Lieutenant Frederick Green, of the 2nd Field Artillery Brigade, billeted in the village, said that he had arrested a man there on 19 January and that NCOs had complained about the house. Watts was sent to prison for three months, Stokes for one, both with hard labour. A further consequence for Watts was the suspension of payments of 11s a week that she had been receiving from a Workmen's Compensation Award following the death of her husband. The pair must have thought it very fortunate when so many potential customers moved into the locality but, with the village having a population of fewer than 800, surely must have realized that what they were up to would quickly become common knowledge.

 

As is remarked in The Gentlemen of the Party, A. G. Street's factual wartime novel of the Fovant area (west of Salisbury and which from 1915 had two large army camps), 'girls were at a premium, and many of them loved too well, only to find when trouble came that their lovers were overseas'. One of the book's characters remarks (in Wiltshire brogue) that 'half the [village] 'oomen to-day be hoors .… there's one thing what 'ave got cheaper. An' that's 'oomen. They do vling it at 'ee, wi out waitin' to be asked. Dirty bitches.'

 

Street, a local farmer, himself, wrote that 'the newspapers might print articles telling how splendid the girls were, and in many cases these articles might be justified. But in any camp district during that hectic period of history, 1914 to 1918, the older men and women knew that the girls, both native-borne and war-imported, were anything but splendid'.

 

Moonraker

 

 

 

 

[Hedley Malloch]

On 22/01/2018 at 17:08, Martin Bennitt said:

The photographs feature in "They Didn't Want to Die Virgins: Sex and Morale in the British Army on the Western Front 1914-18", by Bruce Cherry, published by Helion, which I recently read. Recommendable, without being prurient.

 

Cheers Martin B

 

Shurely ... Bruce Lost-Cherry?

Edited 24 January , 2018 by Hedley Malloch

[Moonraker]

There's a modern myth about "blue-light" establishments - that they cater for transgender sex workers.

 

Even I hesitated about venturing off-topic time-wise, but in mitigation the same Googling led to a 1916 reference to officers' brothels and blue lamps.

 

Letters to Vimy, by Orlando French

 

who seems to have had plenty of time to go into great detail when writing to his uncle.

 

Moonraker

[Muerrisch]

2 hours ago, Moonraker said:

There's a modern myth about "blue-light" establishments - that they cater for transgender sex workers.

 

Even I hesitated about venturing off-topic time-wise, but in mitigation the same Googling led to a 1916 reference to officers' brothels and blue lamps.

 

Letters to Vimy, by Orlando French

 

who seems to have had plenty of time to go into great detail when writing to his uncle.

 

Moonraker

 

Thank you. Letters to Vimy is apparently an imagined exchange, according to the blurb.

I submit, m'lud, that it is not admissable as evidence.