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In Racket Town: Gangster Chic in Austerity Britain, 1939–1953

2011; Routledge; Volume: 31; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01439685.2011.620846

1465-3451

Mark Roodhouse,

Political and Economic history of UK and US

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements Thanks to Madeleine Bowley, Mark Glancy and James Chapman for reading earlier versions of this article. It is much better for their comments. None of them, however, is in any way responsible for my conclusions or for any errors. Notes 1. Bill Naughton, Meet the spiv, News Chronicle, 13 September 1945, 2. 2. Robert Murphy, Riff-raff: British cinema and the underworld, in: Charles Barr (ed.), All Our Yesterdays: ninety years of British cinema (London, 1986), 286–305; Robert Murphy, Realism and Tinsel: cinema and society in Britain 1939–48 (London, 1989), 146–167; Peter Wollen, Riff-raff realism, Sight and Sound, 8 (1989), 18–22; Andrew Spicer, The emergence of the British tough guy: Stanley Baker, masculinity and the crime thriller, in: Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy (eds), British Crime Cinema (London, 1999), 81–93; Andrew Spicer, Typical Men: the representation of masculinity in popular British cinema (London, 2003), 126–144. 3. Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy, Parole overdue: releasing the British crime film into the critical community, in Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy (eds), British Crime Cinema (London, 1999), 7. 4. Frank Fraser interviewed by Dick Hobbs, Coupons and Nylons: the underside of VE Day, BBC Radio 4, 11 October 1996. 5. cf. Daniel Lang, A reporter at large: menus, nylons, wiping cloths, and abdullahs, New Yorker, 14 July 1945; Stuart Cosgrove, The zoot-suit and style warfare, History Workshop Journal, 18 (1984), 77–91; and, Steve Chibnall, Whistle and zoot: the changing meaning of a suit of clothes, History Workshop Journal, 20 (1985), 56–81. 6. Sarah J. Smith, Children, Cinema and Censorship: from Dracula to the Dead End Kids (London, 2005), 48–52. 7. Andrew Davies, The Scottish Chicago? From ‘hooligans’ to ‘gangsters’ in inter-war Glasgow, Cultural and Social History, 4 (2007), 511–527; Chibnall and Murphy, Parole overdue, 6–7. 8. John Carter Wood, ‘The third degree’: press reporting, crime fiction and police powers in 1920s Britain, Twentieth Century British History, 21 (2010), 464–485. 9. Robert Murphy, Smash and Grab: gangsters in the London underworld 1930–60 (London, 1993), 20–21; Anthony Simkins, Sillitoe, Sir Percy Joseph (1888–1962), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36092, accessed 6 May 2011]. 10. Ken Worpole, Dockers and Detectives: popular reading, popular writing (London, 1983), ch. 2. 11. Steve Chibnall, Law-and-Order News: an analysis of crime reporting in the British press (London, 1977), 49–51 and post-war 51–60. 12. George Orwell, Decline of the English murder, Tribune, 15 February 1946. 13. Richard Whittington-Egan, The literature of crime, Contemporary Review, 292 (2010), 356–363. 14. Raymond Chandler, The simple art of murder, Atlantic Monthly, December 1944, 53–59. 15. Ken Worpole, Dockers and Detectives: popular reading, popular writing (London, 1983), ch. 2. 16. Davies, The Scottish Chicago?, 518; Richard Ford, Children in the Cinema (London, 1939), 73–75. 17. Sir Cyril Burt, The Young Delinquent (1925; 4th edn, London, 1944), 143–150. 18. James C. Robertson, British Board of Film Censors: film censorship in Britain, 1896–1950 (London, 1985), 78–79; James C. Robertson, The censors and British gangland, 1913–1990 in Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy (eds), British Crime Cinema (London, 1999), 16–26 at pp. 16–21; Smith, Children, Cinema and Censorship, 48–52. 19. For example Nos. 29A, 46, 50 and 60 in J. P. Mayer, British Cinemas and Their Audiences: sociological studies (London, 1948), 109, 117, 133, 137, 205 [http://www.archive.org/details/britishcinemasan029936mbp, accessed 21 June 2011]. 20. Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: cinema and society in Britain 1930–1939 (London, 1989), 28, 240–241; Richard Carr, Cinemas and cemetries: an examination of the film goers of a typical London suburb. The taste of Tooting, World Film News, 2 (1937), 18–19; Norman Cobden interview, in: Margaret O’Brien and Allen Eyles (eds), Enter the Dream-house: memories of cinemas in South London from the Twenties to the Sixties (London, 1993), 152–154. 21. Jeffrey Richards and Dorothy Sheridan (eds), Mass-Observation at the Movies (London, 1987), 32–41. 22. Jeffrey Richards, Cinemagoing in Worktown: regional film audiences in 1930s Britain, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 14 (1994), 147–166 at p. 152. 23. Smith, 49–50. 24. The Observer, 3 October 1937, 13. 25. Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan: a history of respectable fears (London, 1983), 32. 26. Thomas Burke, London in My Time (London, 1934), 30–31. 27. Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English: slang, including the language of the underworld, colloquialisms and catch-phrases, solecisms and catachresis, nicknames, vulgarisms, and such Americanisms as have been naturalized (London, 1937). 28. Islington and Holloway Press, 7 April 1934 cited in Jerry White, The Worst Street in North London: Campbell Bunk, Islington, between the wars, History Workshop Series (London, 1986), 166. 29. Annette Kuhn, An Everyday Magic: cinema and cultural memory (London, 2002), 104–109; Interview with Jim Godbold, 6 July 1995, cited in Smith, Children, Cinema and Censorship, 49. 30. No. 50 in Mayer, British Cinemas, 117. 31. Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998), 450–451. 32. Stephen Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels? An oral history of working-class childhood and youth 1889–1939 (Oxford, 1981), 188–189. 33. Billy Hill, Boss of Britain's Underworld (London, 1955), 17, 115. 34. Laurie Taylor, Ducking and diving, New Society, 6 January 1983, reprinted in Dick Hobbs (ed.), Professional Criminals (Aldershot, 1995), 371–373. 35. Andrew Davies, Crime and policing in Glasgow during the 1930s: the case of the Beehive Boys, Social History, 23 (1998), 251–267 at pp. 260–261, 266. 36. Carlos Clarens, Crime Movies: from Griffith to Godfather and beyond (New York, 1980), 172–190. 37. Picturegoer, 10 June 1943, 11. 38. See All Through the Night (Vincent Sherman, Warner Bros; US, 1942), Lucky Jordan (Frank Tuttle, Paramount Pictures; US, 1942) and Seven Miles from Alcatraz (Edward Dmytryk, RKO Radio Pictures; US, 1942). 39. Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood goes to War: how politics, profits and propaganda shaped World War II movies (1987; Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1990), 125–134. 40. No. 10 in Mayer, British Cinemas, 36. 41. See Monthly Film Bulletin of the British Film Institute, for the years 1942–1945. 42. No. 16 in J. P. Mayer, Sociology of Film: studies and documents (London, 1946), 197; Nos. 26A and 35A in Mayer, British Cinemas, 198, 218. 43. Michael Freedland, James Cagney (London, 1974), 171–173; Doug Warren and James Cagney, Cagney: the authorized biography (New York, 1986), 168. 44. Manchester Guardian, 14 February 1944, 4. 45. New York Times, 13 February 1944 and 19 April 1944; and Atlanta Constitution, 6 and 17 March 1944. 46. Nos. 10, 32 and 5A in Mayer, British Cinemas, 36, 75, 162. 47. Phil Carradice, American GIs in Wales, BBC Wales history blog, 12 October 2010, [http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/waleshistory/2010/10/american_gis_in_wales.html, accessed 8 May 2011] 48. George Orwell, ‘Raffles and Miss Blandish’, in Peter Davison (ed.), The Complete Works of George Orwell (20 vols, London, 1986–1998), XVI, 345–357. 49. Y. J. in Mayer, Sociology of Film, 115. 50. Y. L. in ibid., 118. 51. No. 35 in Mayer, British Cinemas, 83. 52. W. D. Wall and E. M. Smith, The film choices of adolescents, British Journal of Educational Psychology, 19 (1949), 121–136. 53. White, Worst Street, 166–167; Worpole, Dockers and Detectives, ch. 2. 54. For example No. 60 [25-year-old serviceman] and the husband of No. 29A [23 ½-year-old housewife] in Mayer, British Cinemas, 138, 205. 55. Monthly Film Bulletin of the British Film Institute, June and September 1945. 56. Sue Harper, Fragmentation and Crisis: 1940s admission figures at the Regent Cinema, Portsmouth, UK, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 26 (2006), 378. 57. James Chapman, ‘Sordidness, corruption and violence almost unrelieved’: critics, censors and the post-war British crime film, Contemporary British History, 22 (2008), 187–188. 58. Peter Cheyney, Inside the black market: Willie the Spiv, Sunday Dispatch, 25 June 1944, 6–7. 59. Ritchie Calder, The food situation, New Statesman and Nation, 26 April 1941, 430. 60. Sidney Strube, Brothers under the skin, Daily Express, 12 May 1941. 61. Bernard Newman, Black Market (London, 1942); Roland Daniel, The Black Market (London, 1943); Brett Halliday, Blood on the black market, in idem, Michael Shayne takes a Hand (London, 1943), 106–210. 62. Margery Allingham, Slippery Ann (London, 1944). 63. Montagu Smith, In racket town, Daily Mail, 6 December 1944. 64. Evening Standard, 4 January 1945. 65. Vincent Evans, The black market of Leeds, News Chronicle, 11 January 1945, 1, 4. 66. Hank Janson (Stephen D. Frances), Jack Spot: man of a thousand cuts (London, 1959). 67. Ministry of Information Executive Board minutes, 13 August 1941, INF 1/73, Pt. 1, The National Archives: Public Record Office, London (hereafter TNA: PRO). 68. ‘Partners in Crime’, n.d. [1942], INF 6/460, TNA: PRO; Geoff Brown, Launder and Gilliat (London, 1977), 105 (Partners in Crime), 110–111 (Waterloo Road). Launder and Gilliat's search for authenticity in Partners in Crime (Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, Gainsborough Pictures; GB, 1942) prompted Robert Morley, who played the judge, to shadow a probation officer. See Sewell Stokes, Court Circular (London, 1950), 176 69. What Price Crime? (Ronald Haines, British Foundation Pictures: GB, 1942): No. 1 The Soho Murders, No. 2 Murder in Mayfair, No. 3 The Safe Blower, and No. 4 Vendetta. The success of the series prompted Haines to produce and direct a slew of low-budget British crime films in 1943 and 1944 including the Quiz Crimes series of six short films in 1943, Deadlock (1943) and The Man from Scotland Yard (1944). 70. Get a Load of This (Robert Nesbit, Hippodrome, London, 19 November 1941); No Orchids for Miss Blandish (Robert Nesbitt, Prince of Wales Theatre, London, 30 July 1942); The Petrified Forrest (Norman Marshall, Globe Theatre, London, 16 December 1942); Brighton Rock (Richard Bird, Garrick Theatre, London, 11 March 1943). 71. Steve Nicholson, The Censorship of British Drama 1900–1968, Vol. 2: 1933–1952 (Exeter, 2005), 243–244; Robertson, The censors and British gangland, 1913–1990, 16–21. 72. Chapman, ‘Sordidness, corruption and violence almost unrelieved’, 187–188. 73. Jeffrey Truby, Crisis—and triumphs, in The British Film Annual 1949: Daily Mail National Film Awards (London, 1949), 5–16, 8–9. 74. Dancing With Crime (John Paddy Carstairs, Coronet Films and Alliance Film Studios Ltd; GB, [July] 1947), Black Memory (Oswald Mitchell, Bushey Studios and Ambassador Film Distributors; GB, [July] 1947), It Always Rains On Sunday (Robert Hamer, Ealing Studios; GB, [November] 1947), Brighton Rock [US title: Young Scarface] (John Boulting, Associated British Picture Corporation, Charter Film Productions and Pathe Pictures Ltd; GB, [December] 1947), Night Beat (Harold Huth, British Lion Film Corp and Harold Huth Productions; GB, [February] 1948), Good-Time Girl (David MacDonald, General Film Distributors, Gainsborough Pictures and Triton Films; GB, [May] 1948), A Gunman Has Escaped (Richard Grey, Condor Film Productions; GB, [June] 1948), Noose (Edmond T. Greville, Edward Dryhurst Productions and Associated British Picture Corp; GB, [August] 1948). 75. Chapman, ‘Sordidness, corruption and violence almost unrelieved’, 183. 76. Cited in Paul Addison, Now the War is over: a social history of Britain 1945–51 (London, 1985), 47. 77. Cited in Nik Cohn, Today there are no Gentlemen: the changes in Englishmen's clothes since the war (London, 1971), 19. 78. Penelope Byrde, A Visual History of Costume: the twentieth century (2nd edn, London, 1992), 14. 79. Arthur Shaw, Drape and co-ordination, Tailor and Cutter, 11 May 1945. 80. Ibid., 5 October 1945, 11 January and 8 February 1946. 81. Cited in Francis Wyndham, Gee, but it's great to be Gee, Sunday Times Magazine, 19 January 1969. 82. Eric Partridge (ed.), A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (8th edn, London, 1984). 83. Cohn, Today, 17. 84. Ibid., 19. 85. See Dennis Rooke and Alan d’Egville, Call Me Mister! A guide to civilian life for the newly demobilised (London, 1946), 11; Barry Turner and Tony Rennell, When Daddy came Home: how family life changed forever in 1945 (2nd edn, London, 1996), 27–28; and, Addison, Now, 47 for clothing touts. Wyndham, ‘Gee’. 86. Cohn, Today, 19. 87. Ibid., 20. 88. David Hughes, The spivs, in Michael Sissons and Philip French (ed.), Age of Austerity 1945–1951 (1963; Harmondsworth, 1964), 86–105. 89. Loot Alley, Picture Post, 13 October 1945 and Behind the nylon racket, Picture Post, 10 February 1950. 90. No. 35A in Mayer, British Cinemas, 218. 91. Wall and Smith, The film choices, 131. 92. W. D. Wall and W. A. Simson, The effects of cinema attendance on the behaviour of adolescents as seen by their contemporaries, British Journal of Educational Psychology, 19 (1949), 53–61. 93. H. D. Willcock, Mass-Observation Report on Juvenile Delinquency (London, 1949), 41, 46–52, 75. 94. Paul Rock and Stanley Cohen, The Teddy Boy, in Vernon Bogdanor and Robert Skidelsky (eds), The Age of Affluence 1951–1964 (London, 1970), 288–320; Christopher Breward, Style and subversion: postwar poses and the neo-Edwardian suit in mid-twentieth-century Britain, Gender and History, 14 (2002), 560–583. 95. Colin MacInnes, Sharp schmutter, Twentieth Century, August 1959 in Colin MacInnes, England, Half English (London, 1961), 149–150. 96. Chris Waters, Beyond ‘Americanization’: rethinking Anglo-American cultural exchange between the wars, Cultural and Social History, 4 (2004), 451–459.