Crime Wave – the beginnings

In our unconscious assessment of the lives we lead and the Society we inhabit we make the easy mistake of assuming that the current level of crime is more or less what it has always been.

However, UK crime statistics from the 1950s show this to be untrue.  We are, if anything, currently living through a period where crime levels have plateau’ed after an inexorable increase since 1955 – and the sudden take-off in crime should baffle us, so why doesn’t it ? Is  it that, to date, no one has a workable theory for it.  If so, then perhaps the following will illuminate the dark.

With so much emphasis placed on a child’s background and early years as the determining factor in later life, it has always been something of a puzzle to understand why post-war crime figures in England & Wales suddenly exploded in the mid 1950s (see Fig. 70 below).

Crime levels today are 10 times their 1950 levels. The present high levels of crime undoubtedly have their roots in the mid 1950s; a period of seeming relative social calm and strong family ties, of strict, if not rigid, family unit structures unassailed by today’s alternative lifestyles (Fig 70). The question therefore is why this should have occurred when theoretically all social indicators of stability point to an opposite outcome ?

It has long been assumed that World War II led to some as yet to be determined fundamental change that utterly altered the complexion of our society, e.g. higher rates of divorce, and that we can never hope to regain that lost era. Conventional wisdom holds that it is the price we have inevitably to pay for being a modern, upwardly mobile society.

Although these alleged social pressures and changes are rarely itemised or explained in detail (and they are usually perceived as being generally negative by the public) we are told by leading voices that it is only to be expected given the huge changes that families and especially mothers have experienced.

But in this true ?  Brutal change and social unravelling did not happen after the First World War when equally or more serious social upheaval occurred and poverty was more endemic. Millions of young men maimed and disfigured and a million children made fatherless. So for a calamity to impact society does it have to do  damage at another level ?

One model holds that children born at the beginning of the World War II (e.g. 1940) would reach their most rebellious age at around 15 years of age, ie in 1955. Without parental guidance – a father off to war and a mother working in munitions – it is only to be expected that young people left to their own devices would later on find themselves in conflict with society and the police. But while that may fit our domestic experience does it hold true  for those Slavic children systematically kidnapped by the German state after 1939 so that they could be forcibly ‘adopted’ by German families and Germanised (see Annex A ).

The upward trend in reported criminality actually begins a few years prior to 1955 and that could be interpreted to mean that pre-war children (e.g. born in 1935) were becoming rebellious (anti-social) at a period in time when apparently both parents were available to them. This presents a problem for the above model of father deprivation leading to social unrest in later years. Or it could suggest learned behaviour from peers, ie copy-cat.

In 1938 there were a little over 4m women in ‘Insured employment’, by 1948 the figures was 6.9m women. The numbers of mother working in munitions or volunteering for the Armed Services, as we have seen earlier in Fig 67, 68 and 69 (p 163), are not sufficient for a confident linkage to be made between their absence and the subsequent rise in criminal behaviour.

It has to be recalled that many women were already in full time employment prior to hostilities. The majority of these women would have been Working Class or Lower Middle Class. It was customary in the labour market of the time for women to give up their employment when they married. This was true of all social classes except the Working Class who inevitably sought some form of employment soon after marriage because of their low income.

Thus, the various levels of social parameters that encompass social class, employment type, courtship, housing, income, skills sets, living patterns and crime levels were relatively fixed, making possible comparisons between pre-war and post war Britain. The only obvious exceptions in the post-war decade are crime levels and family disruption caused by war. But was war the catalyst for change ?

The number of crimes recorded by the police are a bleak record of change (see Fig. 71).

Totally unnoticed over the past 50 years of discourse into crime figures, has been the phenomenon of evacuation (a social calamity ?), when one million children were evacuated from major urban centres in Sept 1939. The increase by one million in recorded crime levels by 1964 arguably maps more closely as the most probable reason than any other theory to date. 

• Addendum: More recently a BBC programme “How we won the war” put the figure of child evacuees at three and a half (3.5) million – Operation Pied Piper, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01n85dj.  Even with these precautions in place ‘1 in 10’ of Blitz casualtes were  chidlren.

This overlooked factor (mass evacuation) also distinguishes the aftermath of World War I from the aftermath of World War II, i.e. no perceptible increase in crime after World War I.

Three and a half million children in 1939 must represent well over 50% of all school children and searching for camparison countries one needs to find nations which were affected at the same level.

Arguably, the calamity which was the Black Death, which killed so many in Britain (modern estimates vary between 20% and 30% of the total population), was also a societal game changer. In his 2002 book, Samuel K. Cohn writes of this period that it is believed that society subsequently became more violent as the mass mortality rate cheapened life and thus increased warfare, crime, popular revolt, waves of flagellants, and persecution.

The Black Death did bring about social calamity, re-ordering everything from law and land ownership to social customs, employment and expectations. But would mass mortality rate cheapen life ?

It is equally or more likely, given that survival would be everyone’s priority that the lack of manpower generally would lead to the subordination of warfare in favour of food production in a largely agrarian economy ? There are sharp indicators that it halted wars, e.g. the Hundred Year War (1337 to 1453), and a monarch sued for peace in the face of the Peasant Revolt.

For comparison purposes, if we look at post war USA – which did not experience mass child evacuation – we see that compared with Britain its crime data (jail occupancy rate which is a reflection of indictable offences) did not rise significantly until the 1980s. (Fig. 72 and 73), In other words 15 years after Pres. Johnson introduced the Great Society, which ‘accidentally’ increased fatherless families, crime begins an unremitting increase.

Of interest is the somewhat belated or apparently belated increase in the prison population seen after 1965 in the above Fig 72 when crimes levels had already taken off in 1955 (see Fig. 70).

The corresponding up-surge in the American prison population occurred after 1980 and the domestic political climate could be mainly responsible.

                                                

• NOTE :    The two graphs shown here ( Fig 72 and 73),  are illustrative only and are not to scale. Figures for the UK prison population are taken from the House of Commons Research Paper 99/111, Dec 1999, ‘Indictable Offences known to the Police 1900-80’, British Historical Statistics, Mitchell (1980), 1981-97  Criminal Statistics, Home Office.
• Also note  that the figures for US prison population shownin Fig 73 are taken from ‘Justice Policy institute analysis of US Dept of Justice  Data.’

Why this event (mass evacuation) might have significance is perhaps best illustrated by a tangential but recent finding related to imprinting and genetics (Epigenetics).

• New research into ‘trans-generational responses’ which should at present be viewed with scepticism, may provide a key to our better understanding of social changes. Work by Marcus Pembrey, a Professor of Clinical Genetics at the Institute of Child Health in London, in collaboration with Swedish researcher Lars Olov Bygren, has found evidence in Swedish records of an environmental effect (good harvests, food supply) being passed down the generations in the form of types illnesses and life chances.  
• Using a remote town in northern Sweden town, Overkalix, parish registries of births and deaths and detailed local harvest records They confounded traditional scientific thinking by showing that a famine at critical times in the lives of the grandparents can affect the life expectancy of the grandchildren. This is the first evidence that an environmental effect can be inherited in humans.
• Gunnar Kaati, at the Umea University in Sweden then went on to find that the period before puberty (in boys) and the period prior to birth for girls affects the likelihood of the second generation having diabetes. Both Gunnar Kaati and Marcus Pembrey & Lars Olov Bygren, work indicates the probability of a gene being “switched on” and once on cannot be easily switched off. [1]

This ties in with the field of Epigenetics. Epigenetics is “the study of heritable changes in gene expression or cellular phenotype caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence.” Epigenetics refers to factors affecting the development or function of an organism without directly affecting the primary sequence of the target genes, such as an environmental effect.

Epigenetics potentially adds a whole new layer to genes beyond our previous comprehension of the physical DNA. It proposes a control system of ‘switches’ that turn genes on or off – and suggests that things people experience, like nutrition and stress, can control these switches and cause heritable effects in humans.

This has never, so far as I am aware, been put forward as an explanation for the social problems faced by post-war Britain before now but consideration is perhaps now due.

Why mass evacuation ?

To understand why mass evacuation was considered at all and implemented we have to put ourselves in the position of politicians of the late 1930s.

Since 1922 it had been accepted military theory that “the bomber will always get through”. Lord Balfour, speaking in 1922 of the 1917 German aerial raids predicted an ‘unremitting bombardment of a kind that no other city has ever had to endure’.

The country had been shocked by the early Zeppelin bombing raids but was shocked still further in 1917 when German Gotha twin-engined bombers dropped much larger 1,100 lb bombs and operated at 15,000 feet, a height then unattainable by British fighters. Zeppelin bombing raids ranged as far inland as Walsall (Staffordshire) where bombs hit a busy bus/tram station and the dead included the town’s mayor.

The raids on London and channel ports continued until Oct 1918. Throughout this period only half a dozen aircraft were shot down by fighters and anti-aircraft fire.  Subsequent Air Ministry planning was, from 1931, directed at combating what they had been unable to achieve in World War 1, namely the security of the skies over England.

Guernica sounded alarm bells in all of Europe’s capitals. The indiscriminate daylight bombing by the German Luftwaffe of civilians on April 26^th 1937 of a non-military town, well behind the front lines was viewed as appalling. Three days later, Franco’s troops occupied the town. It was the 9/11 of its day.

This view of the potential carnage that could be inflicted on civilians by ariel warfare was reinforced by the bombing of Warsaw (1939) and the razing of Rotterdam (1940).

Left: Rotterdam, May 1940

 Rotterdam had surrendered on the basis of a German promise that it would not be bombed.

The false era of peace contrived at Versailles by the League of Nations precluded thoughts of another mass war. But 1937 was a rude awakening. It brought home to civil servants and the public alike what had been until then almost science fiction in its outlandish possibility – the mass murder of women and children in order to win a war.

With this first hand experience and Guernica upper most in their minds planners scurried along Whitehall corridors. European Gov’t were quick to take on board the full import. A sense of panic verging on desperation must have gripped many in those corridors. News a month later, 29^thMay, of the first successful aerial bombing of a capital ship, the German pocket battleship ‘Deutschland’, off the coast of Spain, must have added urgency to considerations and a wonder at where the limits lay of this new weapon delivery system.

Into the unknown

The expected civilian casualties in London alone were predicted to be in the region of 4,000,000 (4m). Faced with a seemingly inevitable onslaught all ministries drew up plans in 1938 for a mass evacuation of British cities. The man in charge of evacuation was Sir John Anderson.

Large public shelters were dug in parks and small bomb shelters were provided for use in back gardens (Anderson shelters). The Government, in common with airlines today, quietly made ‘arrangements’ for coffins to be stockpiled.

With hindsight it can be seen that these plans were hopelessly flawed. The evacuation, while modelled on the regime that had saved the lives of many hundreds of Basque children in 1937, failed to take into account the trauma induced. The Basque children and their parents knew where they were going – if their ship survived – they would be heading for England, France, Mexico, Russia etc. When those destined for Britain arrived some, but not all, where kept with their friends and family groups, e.g. Aldridge Lodge, Walsall, which catered for around 100 children. (see also URL)

But in Sept 1939 British parents and children were kept wholly ignorant of where they were going, what they would be doing and totally ignorant of when they would be coming back especially if invasion occurred – a complicating dimension completely lacking in the Spanish scenario.

In the first four days of September 1939, nearly 3 million people were transported to the safety of the countryside from towns and cities threatened by enemy bombers. No one was injured or killed. A few months later, in 1940, evacuation developments saw tens of thousands of children sent to the Dominions. (e.g. 7,000 to Canada).  [2] A similar picture emerged in the Far East when in 1942 the British government evacuated an estimated 2,000 civilians from Hong Kong and over 9,000 from Malaya and Singapore.

Some people werereluctant to move and only 47% of the schoolchildren, and about one third of the mothers went to the ‘designated areas’. This included 827,000 schoolchildren, 524,000 mothers and children under school age, 13,000 expectant mothers, 103,000 teachers and 7,000 handicapped people (1.4m). Combined with men called up for active service a quarter of the population of Britain would, within the space of one week, have a new address.

The schoolchildren, like the Basque evacuees children before them, were treated as if luggage with labels tied onto their lapels. However, these were not the only examples of mass shipments of children from one country to another during World War II.

An as yet under-reported aspect of the conflict saw thousands of racially suitable Polish, Ukrainian and Czechoslovakian children ‘Germanised’ in polices set out at the beginning of war (see Annex A).

Ministries in Britain had little understanding of the emotional upheaval that might be created by evacuation. Reception groups were organised in all the designated small towns and were supposed to smoothly process the children when they arrived. But it proved disorganised and as traumatic as their hurried departure from their parents. Rural communities themselves were ill-prepared for such an influx and the manpower in the various rural police forces was inadequate for proper policing.

Households ordered to have children billeted on them took no particular care at the reception point when making their selection of children. The process was so muddled that often a family of brothers and sisters was broken up and contact lost.

This widespread, haphazard, non-selective process was not in the Best Interests of the Child (see earlier chapter).  At some reception towns twice as many children arrived as had been expected. Families who had expected two children suddenly found themselves asked to care for four.

Some of the households with whom the children were billeted with were unsuitable, e.g. spinster sisters, pensioers etc, and some were indifferent, e.g. they had their own families. Some children, of course, had a good, even excellent time being in the country, seeing farm animals for the first time. But it is estimated that 15% were badly treated sometimes to the point of abuse.

In his book ‘See You After the Duration’,  [3] Michael Henderson writes that most evacuees quickly settled in to the everyday life;

• “Evacuees who went overseas landed in a variety of homes and situations, a few of them exotic. In the US Peter Isaac, later a documentary film maker and author, found himself in Hollywood, taken in by film producer Hall Wallis. A young actor Ronald Reagan taught him and his sister to swim. Chris Eatough was in his high school soccer team captained by a skinny George Bush, Sr. At Princeton a girl evacuee had an old man help her with maths homework – he was Albert Einstein. In Dayton, Ohio, Anthony Bailey went trick or treating one Halloween and was rewarded with a silver dollar by Orville Wright, the pioneer of flight. Our host in Boston had captained the US cricket team, the Gentlemen of Philadelphia.”

What evacuees who were from predominantly low income families would have found was a more plentiful supply of food, both in the countryside and overseas. Food availability in the countryside was much better than in the towns throughout the war, notwithstanding the leveling effect of ration coupons.

The organised mass exit of children from urban areas into the countryside occurred not once but twice.

By January 1940, 4 months on, an estimated one million evacuees had returned home. A survey carried out in Cambridge, by ‘Mass Observation’, suggested that the lack of bombing was the reason why four out of five decided to leave. The ‘phoney war’ and the absence of bombers encouraged many families to reunite – only to dissolve again as the Blitz on industrial targets and London began a few months later.

In September 1940 the German air force changed its strategy and began to bomb London and other British cities such as Liverpool, Birmingham, Plymouth and Coventry. Parents were desperate to get their children out of target areas. Between September 1940 and December 1941, over 1,250,000 were helped by the government to leave the cities.

In all there were 60 million changes of address during World War II (more than the entire population of Britain) underlining the comprehensiveness of the disruption felt by families and children.

Only when the war finished did children see their parents again; but some saw only one parent; some never saw either parent alive again.

Education plummets

Between 1939 and 1945 only 50% of evacuee children went to school. Those that did went infrequently. Literacy and numeracy levels for this cohorts were markedly lower then any other.

Children who had left home at the age of 3 or 5 returned at the age of 8 or 10, in 1945. It is this group that when aged 18 or 20 in 1955 triggered the crime increase of that decade and which coincides with the Jesuit mantra of ‘give me the child and I will give you the man’.

The period 1945 – 47 saw serious food and heating shortages in Germany caused by the crippled state not only of Germany but the economies Germany had invaded but exacerbated by poor harvests. The situation was intensified in West Germany by the arrival of about 10 million ethnic German refugees from the Soviet zone and the former German territories of Eastern Central Europe.

The British government, hardly able to provide food and heating for its own citizens, was obliged to pay for food to feed those in the occupation zone under their control (see Annex A). This put an unwelcome additional £80m strain on finances. Children and teenagers returning home in 1945 would have felt the austerity of Britain in 1946 to be worse than wartime years and may have prompted recourse to criminality.  Armed hold-ups began to appear and had became a feature of the 1950s. In 1951 alone an unprecedented number of policemen, 4, were killed (see Derek Bentley aged 19, hanged on Jan 28th 1953 and Christopher Craig, aged 16, “Let him have it, Chris”).

From a parenting point of view, many mothers (and fathers) had become accustomed to not having children around them and perhaps had developed a lifestyle of evenings out at clubs and pubs. For some, 1945 and  the resumption of parental responsibly may have come as a shock. Still other parents may have lost their parenting skills or desire to parent; some may have resented this resumption.

One can only imagine, at this distance in time, how disorientated mothers must have felt by the world events of 1939 and how psychologically ‘disconnected’ was their existence by the loss of husband to war and children to evacuation.

Some have argued that children forgot their parents and place of birth and loved instead their foster parents and village. This might be true in some circumstances but cannot be taken as a reliably universal comment.

What is more likely is that children felt torn between both sets of parents – assuming both sets had been good parents. If children had not been ‘deeply disturbed’ by the initial mass evacuation this state could certainly be expected in some children parting form the only patents they has known for most of their life and for some when reunited with parents they hardly knew and/or had forgot how to ‘love’ children and how to ‘put up with them’.   With the resurrection of the family unit after the war, at least for the majority of children, family values, expectations and educational ‘norms’ would have been reasserted.

‘Trauma’ is today a much used and abused word.  In 1945 there was not, in the view of author Jessica Mann, widespread trauma due to the fact that “we were an accepting generation.”  She believes as did so many at the time (and in the decades since) that:

• ‘British society had been accustomed for centuries to Empire-builders, sending their children away from hot climates to foster homes or boarding schools. Our contemporary horror at the idea of parting children from their parents is a post-war development, and although it is often tempting to use that early “trauma” as the excuse for all my deficiencies, I have the impression that the majority of the evacuees survived intact and even enriched.’

Novelist Jessica Mann adopts the mantle common to many pseudo-intellectuals who have a bigoted view of the public schooling system (‘public schooling’ here means private fee paying educational establishments where pupils board for the term, e.g. Eton, Harrow, Rugby, etc). Ms. Mann attended the prestigious St Paul’s Girls’ School which is an independent day school for girls founded in the 16^th century, so she has no actual experience of life at a boarding school. However, she was born in 1937 and it is at least possible that she experienced evacuation so her opinions are worth a moments consideration.

Perhaps the misguided mainstream sentiment re: Boarding schools should now be challenged in an effort to understand or shed light on post-1955 crime statistics ? 

The upper and middle class Empire-builders who sent their children away to boarding schools were themselves frequently serving in hotter climbs and though this may today appear irrelevant it was essential in the 19^th  and early 20^thcentury. Boarding school brings forth a range of inner depths from a child that ordinary day schools do not, e.g. fortitude, coping with stress and isolation. The famous British “stiff upper lip” and sangfroid would arguably not have been possible without the public school. Thsi was seen as a desirable trait and was widely adopted by the lower orders.

We also have to acknowledge that many in the lower orders made their way – and fortune – overseas. Some, however, did not and they disappeared without trace from history’s narrative. Perhaps the defining factor was, therefore, not the severance per se, but the severance at an early age ?

For the upper, middle and lower clases discipline was common in their respective schools and while there is no direct evidence it may have become diluted during the war years.

Overall, we can say there were approx. six ‘trauma/separation event’ experienced by children who were evacuated. In chronological order they were:- 

1. the separation when father goes to war (1939)
2. the separation from mother when children 1^st evacuated
3. the shock at reception town and family split up
4. the stress or events inducing a move back home
5. perhaps a 2nd move for some back to countryside and families splitting up again as the  Blitz begins (1941)
6. stress as moved around homes in the designated ‘reception towns’ (1940 – 1945)
7. return in 1945 to urban areas which were left unrecognisable and ‘altered’ parents followed by privation of total war, continued rationing and divorce rates.

For some children the above series of events must have represented an emotional if not spiritual cluster bomb.

What is clear is that the evacuees and the evacuation was a huge laboratory for workers in the fledgling social sciences.  Nothing had ever been attempted on this scale before; all the people involved – parents, foster parents and adults generally – did not know what was happening to them emotionally or psychologically.

Dysfunctional

 The Social Sciences in those days, it could be argued, had a more mechanistic or simplistic approach, i.e. disease was to be treated by medicine and slums had to be replaced by better housing. ‘Side effects’ were not considered a great hazard. The people who were the subjects of these plans were not equipped to differentiate between the consequences caused by wartime privations and stress, or the aftermath of alienation from family life – everything merged into one.

To one degree or another it can be argued that both parents and children had become dysfunctional to one degree or another (see Anna Freud URL).  For  children the imprint of disruption of social networks and inability to create friendships lasted into the 1950s and 1960s when they married. The product of the disruption may have played a part in the post 1969 scenario where divorce was made easier  – as it had for their parents from 1946 – 49, leading to more divorce through the no-fault divorce system of 1969.

The after-shock of combat is trauma among those adults who served in the armed services; this is well documented. It was the First World War that introduced the concept of “shell shock” to the vocabulary and subsequent conflicts have added additional epithets.

After every conflict some men find they can adjust well when they return to civilian life but some cannot. Some who cannot settle find themselves in trouble with the law;  while some other men prefer to re-enlist. Thsi unsettleing affect women just as much as the huge increase in  divorce show from  1945 to 1950 when it begins to rapidly decrease.

If commentators accept these conditions are the dividend society can expect to pay for combat stress, then social upheaval, the upshot of delinquency among the post war generation traumatised by wartime dislocation is an ‘outcome’ to be equally predictred.

Ref:

BBC TV. “Missing Decade”, Evacuees, 1945 to 1955. (10 October 2005). http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/ghostgenes.shtml

http://www.learningcurve.gov.uk/snapshots/snapshot46/snapshot46.htm#background

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWevacuation.htm

http://www.firstworldwar.com/airwar/bombers_gotha_giant.htm

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[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/ghostgenes.shtml Nov 2005

[2] The sinking of the “City of Benares” (torpedoed by U-48) was not unique in attacks on ships packed with children but it did mark the last such evacuation voyage from Spain.  Only 13 children survived the sinking with many drowned in the gale force 5 seas.

[3] http://www.michaelhenderson.org.uk/pdfs/EVACUATION%20ARTICLE.pdf#search=’evacuees%20dominions‘