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Immoral Traffic: Mobility, Health, Labor, and the “Lorry Girl” in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2013

Abstract

The story of the lorry girl and the lorry driver, the roads they traveled on, and the responses toward them allows for some telling insights into a strange kind of “immoral traffic” in 1930s and 1950s Britain. Whether seeking employment or adventure, leaving the “distressed areas” or absconding from an approved school, the lorry girl was linked to anxieties about women's mobility, unemployment, venereal disease, and delinquency. At the same time, the figure of the lorry driver, both romanticized and marginalized, showed that deviant and commercialized sexuality could be linked to the economic and social inequality of both men and women. Concerns about lorry jumping and hitchhiking in this period also reveal a different kind of narrative in the development of British roadways, which not only were tied to both the health and efficiency of the nation but also were spaces of sexual danger and sites of social delinquency.

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2013 

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References

1 E. T. Burke to Minister of Transport and Minister of Health, 29 August 1935, and City of Salford, VD Scheme Annual Report, 1934, The National Archives (hereafter TNA), MH 55/1371.

2 Memorandum on “Road Transport and VD,” Municipal Clinic, Salford, 29 August 1935, TNA, MH 55/1371.

3 News Chronicle, 23 October 1936.

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5 News of the World, 17 August 1935.

6 Minutes of a Departmental Conference held at the Home Office, 23 October 1935, TNA, MH 55/1371.

7 Sir. S. Hoare, Oral Answer to Question on Motor Lorries (Girl Passengers), 19 May 1938, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th ser., vol. 336 (1938–39), cols. 570–71.

8 Ibid. For more on sex scandals and the interwar press, see Bingham, Adrian, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press, 1918–1978 (Oxford, 2009), 1550CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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12 Ibid.

13 Minutes of a meeting held by the Approved Schools Central Advisory Committee, Home Office, 13 January 1954, TNA, HO 45/24986.

14 Ibid.

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28 Memorandum on “Road Transport and VD,” Municipal Clinic, Salford, 29 August 1935, TNA, MH 55/1371.

29 News Chronicle, 23 October 1936.

30 Hall, Prostitution, 37.

31 Report of the New Scotland Yard A4 Branch, 16 May 1938, TNA, MEPO 2/8401.

32 Report on questionnaire administered by Church of England Advisory Board for Moral Welfare Work, 17 November 1936, TNA, MH 55/1371.

33 Report of the New Scotland Yard A4 Branch, 16 May 1938, TNA, MEPO 2/8401.

34 Ibid.; Summary of replies received to Home Office Circular addressed to 26 Chief Constables and the Metropolitan Police, 15 November 1935, TNA, MH 55/1371.

35 Alison Neilans, “Moral Problems of the Road,” Association for Moral and Social Hygiene (AMSH) Pamphlet (c 1937), 2. For more on the AMSH, see Laite, Julia Ann, “The Association for Moral and Social Hygiene, Abolitionism, and Prostitution Law in Britain, 1915–1959,” Women's History Review 17, no. 2 (2008): 207–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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39 Ibid., 139–40; Laybourn, Unemployment, 1, 8.

40 Laybourn, Unemployment, 115.

41 Summary of replies received to Home Office Circular addressed to 26 Chief Constables and the Metropolitan Police, 15 November 1935, TNA, MH 55/1371.

42 Ibid.

43 Church of England Advisory Board for Moral Welfare Work to S. W. Harris, 17 November 1936, TNA, MH 55/1371.

44 For more on concern over internal migration, see Feldman, David, “Migrants, Immigrants and Welfare from the Old Poor Law to the Welfare State,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser., no. 13 (2003): 79104CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a brief examination of women's migration and work, see Todd, Young Women, Work, and Family, 113–44. Colin Pooley and Jean Turnbull choose to focus on the similarities of migration experiences between men and women, and admit that more work needs to be done on gendered experiences of internal migration in Britain, citing especially migration for domestic service. Pooley, Colin and Turnbull, Jean, Migration and Mobility in Britain Since the 18th Century (London, 1998), 331Google Scholar. For more on women's internal migration in an earlier period, see Gordon, Wendy, Mill Girls and Strangers: Single Women's Independent Migration in England, Scotland and the United States, 1850–1881 (Albany, 2002)Google Scholar.

45 British Social Hygiene Council (BSHC) to Minister of Transportation, 19 September 1935, TNA, MH 55/1371. For more on the “problem girl” and venereal disease, see Davidson, Dangerous Liaisons, 114–18.

46 Church of England Advisory Board for Moral Welfare Work to S.W. Harris, 17 November 1936, TNA, MH 55/1371.

47 Ibid.

48 For more on the difficulties of contact tracing and continuity of treatment, see Davidson, Roger, “Searching for Mary, Glasgow: Contact Tracing for Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Twentieth-Century Scotland,” Social History of Medicine 9, no. 2 (1996): 195214CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

49 Report of Dorothy Peto, 19 April 1943, TNA, MH 102/895. This report also noted that “it is almost a matter of routine to examine an absconder for VD on her return to a School,” supporting Pamela Cox's arguments that compulsory venereal disease treatment continued long after the “voluntary” model had been established for certain vulnerable or marginal groups. Cox, “Compulsion, Voluntarism, and Venereal Disease.”

50 Though this did not translate into a fall in incidents, and the medical community remained concerned that antibiotics provided a false sense of security that actually increased the rate of infection. Davidson, Dangerous Liaisons, 246–48.

51 Minutes of a meeting held by the Approved Schools Central Advisory Committee, Home Office, 13 January 1954, TNA, HO 45/24986.

52 See Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens.

53 On the changing meaning of this kind of moral danger for girls, see Jackson, Louise, ‘“The Coffee Club Menace’: Policing Youth, Leisure and Sexuality in Post-war Manchester,” Cultural and Social History 5, no. 3 (2008): 293, 305CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Tinkler, Penny, “Girlhood in Transition? Preparing Girls for Adulthood in a Reconstructed Britain,” in When the War Was Over: Women, War, and Peace in Europe, 1940–1956, ed. Duchen, Claire and Bandhauer-Schöffmann, Irene (London, 2000)Google Scholar; Tinkler, Penny, Constructing Girlhood: Popular Magazines for Girls Growing Up in England, 1920–1950 (London, 1995)Google Scholar.

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55 Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare; Jackson, ‘“The Coffee Club Menace”’; Wills, Abigail, “Delinquency, Masculinity and Citizenship in England, 1950–1970,” Past & Present 187 (2005): 157–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 See, for instance, the film Scrubbers (1983) by director Mai Zetterling, which focused on the escape of two young women from an open borstal and was released on the heels of the controversial popularity of the film Scum (1979), set in a men's borstal. See also Oxford English Dictionary, “Scrubber” N2.2 (Slang) “A prostitute, a tart . . . an untidy, slatternly girl or woman. The first reference to the use of a ‘scrubber’ as meaning a tart or promiscuous woman is from 1959, in the London magazine Encounter, where ‘scrubbers’ are ‘very young girls who follow jazz bands round the country.’”

57 Stanley C. Jones to R. I. Guppy (Assistant Undersecretary of State), 16 October 1951, TNA, HO 45/24986.

58 William May, Coed-Y-Mwstwr School, Glamorgan to Home Office, 9 June 1951, TNA, HO 45/24986.

59 Cox, Bad Girls, 84–85. Wills, Abigail, “Juvenile Crime in Post-War Britain,” in Childhood and Violence in the Western Tradition, ed. Brockliss, Laurence and Montgomery, Heather (Oxford, 2010), 254–71Google Scholar.

60 For a discussion by government departments about abscondment and the image of the approved school in popular culture, see a series of files on the controversy surrounding the film Good Time Girl (1948) in TNA, MH 102/1137–1142. For abscondment, see Wills, Abigail, “Resistance, Identity and Historical Change in Residential Institutions for Juvenile Delinquents, 1950–70,” in Punishment and Control in Historical Perspective, ed. Johnson, Helen (Basingstoke, 2008), 215–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Clipping from “The Pilot,” St. Paul's Church of the Port of London for Seamen, July 1960, TNA, HLG 118/66.

62 Commander A to Home Office, 1 October 1957, TNA, MEPO 3/2262.

63 Report of H Division, 22 August 1957, TNA, MEPO 3/2967.

64 Wilkinson, Rosalind, Women of the Streets: A Sociological Study of the Common Prostitute, ed. Rolphe, C. H. (London, 1955) 244–47Google Scholar.

65 Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare, 81.

66 Alison Neilans, “A Warning to Girls,” in “Moral Problems of the Road,” AMSH Pamphlet, c 1937, 3/AMS/B/05/03 box 53, The Women's Library (WL).

67 BSHC, Birmingham Branch, “Lorry Drivers and a Matter of Health,” Pamphlet, 1936, 2.

68 Barker, Theo and Gerhold, Dorian, The Rise and Rise of Road Transport, 1700–1990 (Cambridge, 1993), 63, 68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 The Times, 17 August 1936, 11G.

70 Cooper, Howard, “Lorries and Lorry Driving, 1948–1968: The End of an Era,” Journal of Popular Culture 29, no. 4 (1996): 71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

71 For more on the cultural representation, social position, and labor of sailors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Land, Isaac, War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially the chapter on nostalgia for “Jack Tar” in industrial Britain, 131–58.

72 The Times, 17 August 1936, 11G.

73 Hollowell, Peter, The Lorry Driver (London, 1968), 4954Google Scholar.

74 An extended section from the unpublished report of the Long-Distance Road Haulage Committee appears in the Reports of the Royal Commission on Transportation 1929–31 (Cmd. 3416, 3365, 3751).

75 Scott and Reid, “The White Slavery of the Motor World,” 311.

76 BSHC, “Lorry Drivers and a Matter of Health,” 2.

77 BSHC to Minister of Transportation, 19 September 1935, TNA, MH 55/1371.

78 Hall, Lesley, “‘What Shall We Do with the Poxy Sailor?’: The Problem of Venereal Diseases in the British Mercantile Marine, 1860–1950,” Journal for Maritime Research (2004)Google Scholar.

79 Gibbons, T. C. N., “The Clients of Prostitutes,” in The Alison Neilans Memorial Lecture VI (London: Josephine Butler Society, 1962), 5Google Scholar.

80 Ibid., 9.

81 Minutes of a Departmental Conference held at the Home Office on 23 October 1935, TNA, MH 55/1371.

82 Ibid.

83 Ibid.

84 Burke Report reprinted in Shiels, “The Transport Worker and the Lorry Girl,” 6–9; for more on the growing culture of safety and transport in interwar Britain, see Esbester, Mike, “Reinvention, Renewal or Repetition? The Great Western Railway and Occupational Safety on Britain's Railways, c.1900–c.1920,” Business and Economic History Online 3 (2005)Google Scholar.

85 Charlesworth, George, A History of British Motorways (London, 1984), 1113CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Merriman, Driving Spaces, 35.

86 BSHC, “Lorry Drivers and a Matter of Health,” 1.

87 Summary of police returns, January to June, 1935, TNA, MH 55/1371.

88 Undated minute on lorry drivers, TNA, MH 55/1371.

89 Summary of police returns, January to June, 1935, TNA, MH 55/1371.

90 News Chronicle, 23 October 1936; Neilans, Alison, “The Menace of the Lorry Girl,” Shield 4, no. 5 (1936): 195Google Scholar.

91 The People, 22 November 1936, newspaper clipping from London, 3/AMS/B/05/03 box 53, WL.

92 Sunday Sun (Newcastle), 21 May 1938, newspaper clipping from London, 3/AMS/B/05/03 box 53, WL.

93 Anonymous, “How a Lorry Driver Sees It by a Man on the Road,” Health and Empire 11, no. 1 (1936): 1314Google Scholar. The new regulations put in place by the Road Haulage Act of 1938 were so difficult to navigate that a barrister produced a guide for drivers. See Smith, G. W. Quick, Lorry Drivers’ Wages and Conditions of Employment (London, c.1948)Google Scholar.

94 Joseph Mashford, of the Horse Shoe Café, Rochester, Kent to Alison Neilans, 20 January 1937, London, 3/AMS/B/05/03 box 53, WL.

95 Frank S. Bricknell to Dr. E. T. Burke, 18 August 1935, TNA, MH 55/1371.

96 Quick Smith, Lorry Drivers’ Wages.

97 Cooper, “Lorries and Lorry Driving,” 72.

98 The Times, 12 April 1958, 7F.

99 Bugler, Jeremy, “The Lorry Men,” New Society, 4 August 1966, 181Google Scholar. “Dollar” in this instance was an old term (like “bob”) in use in the 1940s that usually meant around five shillings.

100 Cooper, “Lorries and Lorry Driving,” 80–81.

101 Hollowell, “The Lorry Driver,” 192.

102 Charlesworth, British Motorways, 6.

103 For the historical meanings of the American motorway, see Jakle, John A. and Sculle, Keith A, Motoring: The Highway Experience in America (Athens, GA, 2008)Google Scholar.

104 Shiels, “The Transport Worker and the Lorry Girl,” 5.

105 Hall, Prostitution, 36. In these comments, she included the use of taxi and private cars by prostitutes, the practice of “gutter crawling” by motorist customers, as well as the use of “lorry jumping.”

106 E. T. Burke, City of Salford VD scheme Annual Report, 1934, 1.

107 For these schemes to relieve the depressed areas, see Merriman, Driving Spaces, 28.

108 For the motor car, popular culture, gender, and sexuality, see Pugh, Martin, We Danced All Night: A Social History of Britain between the Wars (London, 2008), 252–55Google Scholar; Sean O'Connell, The Car in British Society, 43–76.

109 Report of the Committee on the Social Welfare of Girls in London, 9 December 1929, TNA, HO 45/14242.

110 Feldman, “Migrants, Immigrants and Welfare,” 79–104.

111 For an examination of mobility, gender, and sexual danger in rail stations, see Bieri, Sabin and Gerodetti, Natalia, “‘Falling’ Women-Saving Angels: Spaces of Contested Mobility and the Production of Gender and Sexualities within Early Twentieth-Century Train Stations,” Social and Cultural Geography 8, no. 2 (2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

112 As cited in Merriman, Driving Spaces, 65.

113 Ibid., 66.

114 Cooper, “Lorries and Lorry Driving,” 76. See also Report of H Division, 26 June 1958, TNA, MEPO 3/9715.

115 Report of X Division, 23 August 1936, TNA, MEPO 3/9713.

116 Cooper, “Lorry Drivers and Lorry Driving,” 69.

117 For the social importance of cafés, see Merriman, Driving Spaces, 185.

118 The Times, 17 August 1936, 11G.

119 Merriman, Driving Spaces, 185.

120 Bugler, “The Lorry Men,” 181.

121 Ibid., 184.

122 Sculle, Keith A, “Review of The World Beyond the Windshield: Roads and Landscapes in the United States and Europe,” Material Culture 42, no. 2 (2010): 79Google Scholar.

123 Emsley, “Mother, What Did the Policemen Do When There Weren't Any Motors?,” 357–81.

124 E. T. Burke, Memorandum on “Road Transport and VD,” Municipal Clinic, Salford, 29 August 1935, TNA, MH 55/1371.

125 Robinson, Assistant Minister of Transportation, to E. T. Burke, 30 August 1935, TNA, MH 55/1371.

126 Report of the Long-Distance Road Haulage Committee, as cited in the Report of the Royal Commission on Transportation, 89–90. This lack of government intervention extended to car manufacturing, private motoring, and motorists as well, on which more work has been done. See, for instance, Plowden, William, The Motor Car and Politics, 1896–1970 (London, 1971)Google Scholar.

127 Memorandum on “Road Transport and VD,” Municipal Clinic, Salford, 29 August 1935, TNA, MH 55/1371; Report of the Commercial Motor Users Association as cited in London, 3AMS/B/05/03, box 053, WL.

128 Minutes of a Departmental Conference held at the Home Office, 23 October 1935, TNA, MH 55/1371.

129 Summary of replies received to Home Office Circular of the 15 November 1935 addressed to 26 Chief Constables and the Metropolitan Police, TNA, MH 55/1371.

130 To E. T. Burke from the proprietors of the Woodly Transport Café (Stone), 14 August 1935, TNA, MH 55/1371.

131 Daily Mirror, 2 May 1939.

132 Report of X Division, 23 August 1936, TNA, MEPO 3/9713.

133 Summary of replies received to Home Office Circular of the 15 November 1935 addressed to 26 Chief Constables and the Metropolitan Police, TNA, MH 55/1371.

134 Burgess, J. A., MD (Medical Officer, Stoke-on-Trent), “Venereal Disease and the Transport Worker,” Health and Empire 11, no. 1 (1936): 11Google Scholar.

135 Ibid. For more on these “cinemotors” and venereal disease, see Davidson, Dangerous Liaisons, 141–42.

136 This recommendation was made to the Home Office in 1935, “but apparently nothing was done about it.” Dorothy Peto, Report of the A4 Women's Branch, 16 May 1938, TNA, MEPO 2/8401.

137 Jackson, Louise, Women Police: Gender, Welfare and Surveillance in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 2006), 138–64Google Scholar; “Girl absconders from Approved Schools soliciting American soldiers in the streets and spreading venereal disease,” 19 April 1943, TNA, MH 102/895.

138 G. T. Earle Ltd. Cement Manufacturers, Hull, Lorry Driver's Instruction Book (c.1947), 1, 2, 7.

139 Mort, Frank, “Striptease: The Erotic Female Body and Live Sexual Entertainment in Mid-Twentieth Century London,” Social History 32, no. 1 (2007): 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

140 Cooper, “Lorries and Lorry Driving,” 70.

141 For more on the social, political, and economic consequences of postwar mass consumerism, see, for instance, Cohen, Deborah, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (London, 2006)Google Scholar; Gurney, Peter, “The Battle of the Consumer in Post-war Britain,” Journal of Modern History 77, no. 4 (2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Matthew Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Search for a Historical Movement (2003).

142 Bugler, “The Lorry Men,” 183.

143 For more, see Laite, Julia, “Historical Perspectives on Industrial Development, Mining, and Prostitution,” Historical Journal 52, no. 3 (2009): 739–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There is a large epidemiological and sociological literature on the relationship among truck drivers, long-distance road haulage, and commercial sex in these areas. See AidsWatch, “HIV/AIDS Intervention in Truck Driver Population in Southern Africa: A Review of Literature and BCC Materials,” where the authors write: “Truck drivers are highly mobile and spend long hours on the road away from their families. Their need for entertainment and female companionship, coupled with relative solvency compared to the rest of the population, makes them very likely to use the services of commercial sex workers in stop-over towns near major transportation routes. These truck stop towns have developed an entire infrastructure of networks and services meeting the business and recreation needs of truck drivers, including gas stations, inspection points, lodges, bars and brothels, and a high population of commercial sex workers.” http://www.aidsmark.org/ipc_en/pdf/sm/hr/mwmp/HIV-AIDS%20Intervention%20in%20Truck%20Driver%20Populations%20in%20South%20A.pdf (accessed 28 October 2011).

144 For more on the concept of agency and resistance within residential reform schools, see Wills, “Resistance, Identity and Historical Change in Residential Institutions,” 215–34.

145 Ibid.

146 Report of the Royal Commission on Road Transport, 1930, 13.