Under cover of darkness: sex and crime during the Blitz

Telegraph

04-05-2025

In 1941, as German bombs devastated British cities, a new member joined a London demolition squad. On his first day, he watched the foreman retrieve a purse from the rubble of a ruined house and look inside. 'It's the funniest bloody bomb I ever come across,' said the foreman. 'It's blown every bag open and knocked the money out! It's even knocked the money out of the gas meters!'
As he got to know his colleagues, the new man learnt that some were hardened labourers while others were opportunists in search of loot. Unknown to them all, he was an investigator with a social-research organisation called Mass-Observation. His job was to note everything he saw and heard – and he saw a great deal of theft, mainly of money and smaller items. Larger items, he was told, required planning. Lead from a damaged roof, for example, had to be driven away to another location. And while stealing from the very poor was discouraged, not everybody played by the rules. One squad member, it was said, would 'pinch his own f—king mother'.
The squad was never caught – unlike a team of firemen dealing with a large blaze opposite St Paul's Cathedral. After a long struggle to control the flames, the six auxiliaries stole 43 bottles of whisky and gin from a ground-floor pub, and piles of clothing, including 24 shirts, from the warehouse above. Watched by police from across the road, they crammed their loot into water buckets and carried it to their fire engine. Sentencing them to five years each at the Old Bailey, the judge regretted 'that it has been found necessary to add to the many difficulties of the police that of watching members of your force'. But the police were having to watch each other, too. Shortly after accepting an award for saving lives, a constable at City Road Police Station was given a six-month sentence for selling batteries stolen by his son from a factory in Dagenham.
To most modern eyes, these accounts are intriguing. They pierce the accepted Blitz narrative and humanise the past. But for anybody who had once served with a demolition squad or with the Auxiliary Fire Service, or who had a connection with someone who did, they might have proved too much to bear.
In November 1940, social research project Mass-Observation sent an investigator to Coventry to report on the intense bombing that had flattened the city centre. The dominant feeling, the investigator recorded, was of helplessness. There were 'signs of suppressed panic', trembling and crying. Desperate comments such as 'Coventry is dead!' were heard.
In 1972, this poignant but uncontroversial report was quoted in a national newspaper, sparking an avalanche of enraged correspondence adamant that Coventry had not wavered. Such fury seems misguided. The investigator had been watching Coventrians emerging raw from their shelters into a world of nothingness. They were not wavering; they were reeling from shock. Yet more than three decades after the event, many people were still deeply sensitive. They had no desire to look beyond the wartime consensus about Britain's response to the Blitz or the stories it reinforces. It is one reason why, for so long, tales of crime and 'bad behaviour' were simply not heard.
In our times of political polarity, it seems remarkable that British citizens with little in common came together during the Second World War to create a national consensus and build a wall of unity around it. The Dunkirk evacuation, involving the unlikely rescue of more than 300,000 soldiers from a pinpoint on the coast of France, fostered the story that the British people were at their best when fighting alone with their backs to the wall. Months later the Blitz, the German effort to bomb Britain into submission, fostered a parallel story of togetherness and resilience.
'We must all stick together,' ran a popular song, 'and the clouds will soon roll by.' But the common theme was survival. The innate qualities of the people would see them through the bleakest times to victory. And as Britain did ultimately survive against the odds, these identities solidified and continued to be taken at face value. The people of Coventry did not waver; the heroes of the Blitz did not break the law.
Over the years the consensus has weakened, allowing nuance to seep into the cracks. Uncomfortable truths are less likely to inspire anger or denial. But the smallest challenge to a more recent consensus – the one surrounding al-Qaeda's Sept 11 2001 attack on New York's World Trade Center – still risks being construed as an insult to those who responded and died that day.
The 9/11 attack has been described as a day when we saw the worst and, in turn, the best of humanity, and as was once the case with the Blitz, its consensus has a mythic quality. One young woman, who made her way out of the South Tower to safety, later told an interviewer of her disappointment at seeing firefighters and police officers 'helping themselves' to items from 'expensive stores' at concourse level. She twice qualified herself nervously: 'This is the part that I don't like talking about.' But then: 'It's still the reality of what I saw and what happened.'
William Langewiesche was the only journalist granted unrestricted access to the World Trade Center site during the clean-up operation. He gave a sense of life at Ground Zero, including the prevalent rumours that firemen liked to loot expensive watches, policemen went for kitchen appliances, and construction workers for whatever was left, including wine from the ruins of the Marriott hotel. At a time of such intensity, the distinction between hero and villain was blurred.
This was something that Wally Thompson, an old-school London villain, would have understood instinctively. Thompson, like other career criminals, welcomed the Blitz as a time of unparalleled opportunity. During one particular raid, he drove a stolen lorry down a narrow street near London Bridge. An air raid warden in his spare time, Thompson liked to wear his uniform when out on a job; it allowed him to move around the city freely. Alongside him in the lorry were the members of his gang – Batesy, Bob and a cat burglar known as 'Spider'.
The plan was to break into a warehouse, pick up a safe from the office, and drive it away to be opened at their leisure. As bombers droned and anti-aircraft guns fired off, Batesy jumped out and opened the warehouse gates with a cloned key. Spider ran forward and forced a window, before jemmying the main door from the inside. Within moments, all four men were in, manhandling the safe out to the lorry. As they reached the door, a bomb landed nearby. Thompson was thrown through the air, landing on the stairs. The gates were destroyed, the lorry was turned upside down, fires started, and everybody was shaken – but unharmed. Choking on dust, cursing his luck, Thompson shouted at his men to run.
Spider had other ideas. He had spotted a young child trapped in a nearby building, and began scaling a wall to reach her. Minutes later, a fire engine arrived and a ladder was sent up to the ledge where he was hanging with the girl in his arms. He climbed down and handed the girl over to a police constable – who was deeply impressed. He asked for Spider's name and address; such courage deserved recognition. But Spider was already well known to the police. Feigning humility, he and his colleagues slipped away into the night without their safe. But they had experienced the sheer intensity of the period, a time when a man could go, in the flash of a bomb, from stealing a safe to saving a life.
Spider's experience might not have been typical, but it was not completely atypical either. Life during the Blitz was dangerous, hard, and lived in the shadow of invasion and death. But it was also exciting and shot through with optimism. People pulled together and helped strangers; they broke rules and exploited neighbours. They bonded with and stole from one another. They were scared and fearless, they coped and they cracked. They behaved, in short, like a lot of human beings. This was the reality beyond the consensus.
A few years ago I met a lady named Joan Varley who told me a deceptively simple story. On a winter evening in 1940, she had been smoking on the top deck of a London bus. She was at the back while the only other passenger was a stranger at the front. As they drove through Westminster, they heard a bomb falling nearby. The driver took a quick right turn, the bomb exploded elsewhere, and the driver returned to his route. But while it was falling and uncertainty existed, the stranger got up from his seat, sat next to Joan and held her hand. When the drama was over, he returned to the front of the bus. They never exchanged a word.
This tiny incident might stand as the defining story of the period, embodying Blitz spirit in its most raw and organic form. The nature of life under the bombs could – and clearly did – bring strangers together. And the same was true in the aftermath of 9/11. As William Langewiesche noted, the emotionalism of the period began as something 'genuine and necessary', uniting people as never before. But if these events could indeed unite strangers, then an increase in sexual activity might also be predicted. And as the bombs began to fall in September 1940, Joan Wyndham, a young Londoner, wrote in her diary, 'As the opposite of death is life, I think I shall get seduced by Rupert.' As good as her word, she soon climbed into bed with him. After a few short minutes, however, Rupert turned his back and went to sleep. 'If that's really all there is to it,' she thought, 'I'd rather have a good smoke or go to the pictures.'
For Peter Quennell, a night under the bombs with his lover was a delicious aphrodisiac. 'Fear and pleasure,' he wrote, 'combined to provoke a mood of wild exhilaration. The impact of a bomb a few hundred yards away merely sharpened pleasure's edge; and next day we wandered, agreeably bemused, around the shattered streets of Mayfair.'
But it was not just the risk of imminent death tempting people. Society was rearranging itself. Husbands departed, strangers arrived, and the blackout offered anonymity. 'Nature tapped out with the heels on the pavement an illicit semaphore,' wrote novelist Elizabeth Bowen.
One man with his ear to the pavement was Quentin Crisp, who, later in life, would become 'one of the stately homos of England' and 'an Englishman in New York'. In 1940, having recently been rejected by the Army as 'suffering from sexual perversion', he was an outsider. With his flamboyant dress and effeminate mannerisms, he was an oddity on the streets of London, often attacked verbally, and sometimes physically. But once the Blitz began, he noticed a change. 'The city,' he wrote, 'became like a paved double bed.'
It was 'a feast of love' laid on by 'St Adolf'. Travelling on a bus one evening, Crisp feared violence when an Australian soldier boarded and sat very deliberately behind him. But instead of causing trouble, the soldier removed a comb from his pocket and began to lovingly groom Crisp's carefully styled hair.
Temperatures were clearly rising for louche Londoners, but they seem to have been going up in other parts of the country, too. Lillian Rogers was the 39-year-old wife of a garage mechanic from Birmingham. With her seven-year-old daughter evacuated away, she found herself with the time and energy to experiment. 'I tease him, I tantalise him,' she later wrote in her diary of a sexualised friendship with a local air raid warden, 'and then I tell him it's time he went.' She was keen to tantalise as many men as possible without physically betraying her husband. 'I've a nasty mind,' she wrote.
The times, it appears, were changing, and London Life, a trailblazing 'lifestyle' magazine, was a sign of them. On sale at newsstands and with a startling emphasis on sexual fetishism, it specialised in features on mud wrestling, hair tickling, and other niche activities. The cover of a May 1941 issue featured three Windmill Theatre showgirls dressed in their underwear – all wearing gas masks. A more powerful symbol of the sexualisation of the Blitz would be hard to find. As the author Ronald Blythe noted of the period, 'There was a huge amount of adventure, excitement and romance because there was a breaking down of conventions… It was a permissive period that was more secretive than the '60s and never quite admitted.'
A better-known parallel came along 60 years later with the post-9/11 phenomenon known as 'terror sex', which saw an increase in sexual activity among New Yorkers. 'There's no more obvious antidote to death than sex,' said one sociologist. As Joan Wyndham well understood.
Alongside sexual activity, the Blitz saw a predictable rise in sexual assault. One young woman was attacked on Victoria Street in London by a man who forced her into a doorway. 'I was pretty strong in those days,' she said, 'and I gave him the hardest slap in the face.' The man spat at her like a cat, before gripping her shoulders, shaking her and running off.
A Women's Auxiliary Air Force officer, meanwhile, was learning to drink beer with her male counterparts when she was left alone with a creepy medical officer. 'I won't say what happened, but to this day, I resent having had to pay for my torn uniform. There was no point reporting it, it would have been his word against mine, and who was I?'
All manner of crimes proliferated under the bombs. The Metropolitan Police made 5,000 more arrests in 1941 than they had in 1939 – but many more offences were going unpunished. 'They were roaring days,' said Billy Hill, a man who was already on his way to becoming the 'Boss of Britain's Underworld', as he was later dubbed. Blackouts, bombing raids, bombed-out properties, the black market and a shortage of experienced policemen were creating opportunity.
The period also saw an entirely unsurprising increase in gun crime – including an early example of a campus shooting, when John Fulljames, a quiet student at University College Oxford, opened fire with a rifle on some of the more boisterous students as they walked through the quad. Tried for murder, Fulljames was described to the jury as having 'split-mind' in the fashion of Dr Jekyll. He was committed to Broadmoor – where the medical authorities quickly rejected the insanity finding. Other courts, meanwhile, were showing remarkable leniency to soldiers coming home on leave to find their wives in bed with other men – and opening fire. A Pioneer Corps private was bound over for two years at Derby Assizes for killing just the lover, while an Ox and Bucks officer received 12 months for killing the wife and the lover.
Of all the crimes of the Blitz, there is one that must stand for others that were doubtless committed but never discovered. At the height of the Blitz, Harry Dobkin was a fire watcher in Kennington whose job was to patrol the premises of a solicitors' firm throughout the night. In April 1941, days after the disappearance of Dobkin's wife, a fire broke out in the blitzed ruins of the next-door Baptist church. Dobkin failed to report the fire and when he was asked what he had seen, he replied that he had not started it. Soon after, he sent the police an unrequested record of his movements after his wife's disappearance.
A year later a body was found under a stone slab in the Baptist church. The body, which had been dismembered in an apparent effort to make it look as though it had been blown apart by an explosion, was identified as Dobkin's wife, Rachel. After an Old Bailey trial, Dobkin was found guilty of her murder and sentenced to death. He was hanged in January 1943.
It will never be known how many others disposed of bodies or settled old scores in this fashion – but, in the end, Dobkin was just clumsy. He had placed Rachel's body directly under the large stone slab, something that no bomb blast could possibly cause.
Such personal experiences have not always been easy to uncover. And having spent a great deal of time in archives and speaking to veterans, it seems to me that there are a number of subjects that individuals prefer not to speak about publicly: sex, killing and any kind of crime committed by themselves or associates.
According to an ex-British Army officer who has served in conflicts around the world, he and his colleagues tended to avoid talking – even to each other – about their bleakest and most gruesome experiences. In part this was down to a sense of survivor's guilt. But it was also, he felt, a British trait. People did not want to appear too emotional in front of each other.
It is hardly surprising, then, that people have not wanted to pierce the Blitz consensus. Why would they want to acknowledge anything that would show their demolition squad, their city, their nation, in a bad light? Those who have done so were the exception – and often the object of rage.
Officially, too, a consensus was needed. Playing, as Britain was, to a range of audiences, an all-purpose narrative had to be sculpted and maintained. For the enemy, it had to give an impression of greater strength than was the case. For the Americans, yet to enter the war, it had to offer a guarantee that Britain was worth backing. And for the country's own people, high standards of behaviour, courage and effort had to be encouraged. Or, as Churchill put it, blood, toil, tears and sweat. Britain had 'to take' the Blitz. But she also had to be seen to take it.
There were many understandable reasons, individual and collective, to create a consensus. Now, with the period almost beyond living memory, it is time to take pride in our national story because of its nuance and human complexity, not in spite of it. We can embrace the good behaviour, the bad behaviour, the glorious mess – and the lasting achievement. Because Britain, it turned out, could take it.
Joshua Levine is the author of The Secret History of the Blitz (Simon & Schuster, £10.99)