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Original Article

Delinquency and Welfare in London: 1939–1949

Pages 67-87 | Published online: 12 Nov 2013

Notes

  • Thomas D, An Underworld at War: Spivs, Deserters, Racketeers and Civilians in the Second World War (2003); E. Smithies, Crime in Wartime: A Social History of Crime in World War II (1985); M. Waller, London 1945: Life in the Debris of War (2004); P. Addison, No Turning Back: The Peace-time Revolutions of Post-War Britain (Oxford, 2010), 96–98; D. Smith, ‘Official Responses to Juvenile Delinquency in Scotland During the Second World War’, Twentieth Century British History, 18:1 (2007), 78–105; A. Bartie and L. A. Jackson, ‘Youth Crime and Preventive Policing in Post-War Scotland (c. 1945–71)’, Twentieth Century British History, 22:1 (2011), 79–102. Juvenile delinquency in 1950s and 1960s Manchester and Glasgow is described in: L. A. Jackson, ‘‘The Coffee Club Menace’: Policing Youth, Leisure and Sexuality in Post-War Manchester’, Cultural and Social History, 5:3 (2008), 289–308; A. Bartie, ‘Moral Panics and Glasgow Gangs: Exploring ‘the New wave of Glasgow Hooliganism, 1965–1970’’, Contemporary British History, 24:3 (2010), 385–408; and L. A. Jackson and A. Bartie, ‘‘Children of the City’: Juvenile Justice, Property, and Place in England and Scotland, 1945–1960’, Economic History Review, 64:1 (2011), 88–113.
  • Garland D, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Oxford, 2001).
  • Cox P, Gender, Justice, and Welfare: Bad Girls in Britain 1900–1950 (Basingstoke, 2003), 17–37; C. Adler and A. Worrall, ‘A Contemporary Crisis?’, in C. Adler and A. Worrall (eds), Girls’ Violence: Myths and Realities (Albany, 2004), 3–7.
  • Jackson and Bartie, ‘Children of the City’, 92.
  • Sindall R, Street Violence in the Nineteenth Century: Media Panic or Real Danger (Leicester, 1990), 26.
  • Bartie, ‘Moral Panics’, 385–408.
  • Sindall RS, ‘Criminal Statistics of Nineteenth Century Cities: A New Approach’, Urban History Yearbook (1968), 34.
  • Taylor SeeH, ‘Rationing Crime: The Political Economy of Criminal Statistics Since the 1850s’, Economic History Review, 51:3 (1998), 569–90; Bartie and Jackson, ‘Youth Crime and Preventive Policing’, 87.
  • Taylor H, ‘Forging the Job: A Crisis of ‘Modernization’ or Redundancy for the Police in England and Wales, 1900–39’, British Journal of Criminology, 39 (1990), 133.
  • Henriques BasilLQ, ‘The Wartime Delinquent in England’, in Yearbook of the National Probation Association (New York, 1943), 92. Henriques, a magistrate and chairman of the East London Juvenile Court, was forced to hold his court in a passage or cellar during air raids.
  • Between 1200 and 1400 boys’ cases and between 100 and 200 girls’ cases were dismissed or discharged between 1934 and 1946. LCC Education Committee, Special Sub-Committee, Juvenile Offenders and Neglected Children Brought Before the Courts, 1934–1946, 21 Oct 1946, London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), LCC/CH/D/14/2; LCC Special Education Sub-Committee, 2 Feb 1946, LMA, LCC/CH/D/14/2. The largest number of charges came from North West London, an area that included Westminster, Hampstead, St Marylebone, and St Pancras.
  • Greater London Council, We Think You Ought to Go (1995), 45.
  • Ibid.
  • London Times (1 Oct 1942); Comments by E. Elton, 6 Feb 1944, LMA, LCC/D/04/007.
  • Henriques, ‘Wartime Delinquent’, 97.
  • In 1939, less than 1 per cent of the school population appeared in juvenile courts. LCC, Report of the Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, 22 Sep 1950, The National Archives (TNA), ED 233/20, 4. In 1949, only 1·8 per cent of London schoolchildren appeared in the courts.
  • Ibid., 6, 11.
  • Henriques BLQ, The Indiscretions of a Magistrate: Thoughts on the Work of the Juvenile Court (1950), 132.
  • Bradley also speculates, regarding the pattern of thefts, that perhaps the experience of war loosened concepts of morality and respectability. See K. Bradley, ‘Inside the Inner London Juvenile Court, C.1909–1953’, Crimes and Misdemeanors, 3:2 (2009), 49.
  • LCC Special Education Sub-Committee, 2 Feb 1946, LMA, LCC/CH/D/14/2.
  • Emsley C, ‘The Second World War and the Police in England and Wales’, in C. Fijnaut (ed.), The Impact of World War II on Policing in North-West Europe (Leuven, 2004), 157. The department remained under-strength until 1950.
  • Parliamentary Papers, Report of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, 1947–1948 (7406) XIV, 244; 1948–1949 (7203), XIX, 1540.
  • LCC Children’s Committee, Juvenile Delinquency Annual Statistics, 1947–48, LMA, LCC/CH/ D/14/2.
  • Lerman P, ‘Policing Juveniles in London: Shifts in Guiding Discretion, 1893–1968’, British Journal of Criminology, 24:2 (1984), 169–81.
  • Bradley K, ‘Youth, Crime, Surveillance and Social Capital in the Second World War: The East End of London and the Inner London Juvenile Court 1939–45’, unpublished paper, 2010, 13–14.
  • LCC Special Education Sub-Committee, 2 Feb 1946, LMA, LCC/CH/D/14/2.
  • Greater London Council, We Think You Ought to Go, 45.
  • Bradley K, ‘Juvenile Courts and Juvenile Justice: The Inner London Juvenile Court, 1930–1950’, Kent Academic Repository (KAR), University of Kent: <http://kar.kent.ac.uk/13035/3/Juvenile_courts_and_juvenile_delinquency.pdf>, 3
  • Ibid., 7.
  • Bradley, ‘Youth, Crime, Surveillance’.
  • Mass Observation, Youth Clubs: Home Intelligence, 5 Nov 1940, M.O.A., Youth Box 2/K, File 2474.
  • Bradley, ‘Youth, Crime, Surveillance’, 19–22.
  • LCC Children’s Committee, Juvenile Delinquency Annual Statistics, 1947–48, LMA, LCC/CH/D/14/2.
  • Ibid.
  • LCC Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, Joint Memorandum Submitted by the Chairman of the Metropolitan Juvenile Courts, 15 Feb 1950, LMA, MCC/CL/CH/044.
  • LCC Children’s Committee, Juvenile Delinquency Annual Statistics, 1947–48, LMA, LCC/CH/D/3/1.
  • Thomas, Underworld at War, 73. The fights prevented younger children from sleeping.
  • M.O.A., Underage Drinking, Box 1837.
  • Smithies, Crime in Wartime, 73–75. One gang in South London named themselves the Dead End Kids, alluding to the 1937 film Dead End starring Humphrey Bogart.
  • Meeting of the Grants and General Purposes Sub-Committee of the Southwark Youth Committee, 11 Jul 1949, LMA, LCC/EO/HFE/1/160.
  • LCC, Report of Juvenile Delinquency Sub Committee, London Youth Committee, 14 Jun 1948, LMA, LCC/EO/HFE/1/159.
  • Smithies, Crime in Wartime, 96; Thomas, Underworld at War, 75.
  • Bradley, ‘Inside the Inner London Juvenile Court’, 50; LCC, Education Officer’s Department, 21 Oct 1946, LMA, LCC/CH/D/14/2. Families with more than one delinquent were more common in the war, and there was consequently a ‘strong concentration of delinquency within a small group of people’. H. Mannheim, Juvenile Delinquency in an English Middletown (1948), 25.
  • Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare, 11–13.
  • LCC Education Committee, Special Sub-Committee, Juvenile Offenders and Neglected Children Brought Before The Courts, 1934–1946, 21 Oct 1946, LMA, LCC/CH/D/14/2; LCC Special Education Sub-Committee, 2 Feb 1946, LMA, LCC/CH/D/14/2. In 1938–1939, seventy-eight girls were beyond control, and this figure rose to 156 in 1944 and fell to ninety-one in 1945. Girls represented 62 per cent of juveniles charged as beyond control, as compared with 76 per cent in 1944.
  • Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare, 74–75.
  • Adler and Worrall, Girls’ Violence, 14.
  • London Probation Service to B. E. King, 1 May 1943, NA, HO/45/25144.
  • Smithies, Crime in Wartime, 73. The police were concerned about the increase in sexual activity in shelters and during the blackout. M.O.A., Youth, 3/E.
  • Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare, 168; L. A. Jackson, Women Police: Gender, Welfare and Surveillance in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 2006), 17–18, 23, 25, 138. In 1939, auxiliary police-women were recruited only for the duration of the war to replace male police called up for military duty.
  • LCC Education Officer’s Department, 21 Oct 1946, LMA, LCC/CH/D/14/2. Boys previously charged in the courts only rose from 32 per cent to 37 per cent over the same period.
  • Jackson, Women Police, 147–48.
  • Jackson L, ‘Care or Control? The Metropolitan Women Police and Child Welfare, 1919–1969’, Historical Journal, 46:3 (2003), 637–38.
  • Barton A, Fragile Moralities and Dangerous Sexualities: Two Centuries of Semi Penal Institutionalisation of Women (Aldershot, 2005), 102.
  • Greater London Council, We Think You Ought to Go, 45–46.
  • Special Education Sub-Committee, 2 Feb 1946, LMA, LCC/CH/D/14/2.
  • LCC, Juvenile Delinquency Annual Statistics 1947–48, Report by the Education Officer, 3 Feb 1949, LMA, LCC/CH/D/3/1.
  • Byng ES, Vice Chairman of the Lewisham Youth Committee to W. M. Knight, Secretary London Youth Committee, 18 Nov 1946, LMA, LCC/EO/HFE/1/159.
  • Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare, 18.
  • Burt C, ‘Delinquency in Peace and War’, Health Educational Journal, 1 (1943), 165.
  • LCC, Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, Memoranda Submitted by Interested Persons and Organizations, 13 Aug 1949, LMA, LCC/CH/D/3/1.
  • Mannheim, Juvenile Delinquency in an English Middletown, 4; M. E. Bathurst, ‘Juvenile Delinquency in Britain During the War’, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 34:5 (1944), 291–302.
  • Burt, ‘Delinquency in Peace and War’, 171.
  • Morgan AE, Young Citizen (1943), 58.
  • Memo of Meeting with Ministry of Works, Labour, Treasury and the Home Office, 15 Dec 1941, NA, ED 124/6.
  • Burt, Delinquency in Peace and War, 172. In January 1942, Bevin told Parliament that high youth earnings were exceptional, and the Home Secretary stated that wage levels were not instrumental in the growing incidence of juvenile delinquency. B. L. Pearson, Board of Education, to B. Odgers, Children’s’ Branch of the Home Office, 17 Jan 1942; B. Osgerby, Youth in Britain Since 1945 (Oxford, 1945), 9.
  • See also interview with Dr S. Harrow, Middlesex Child Guidance Clinic, M.O.A, Juvenile Delinquency, 2/E.
  • Ibid.
  • Logan A, ‘‘A Suitable Person for Suitable Cases’: The Gendering of Juvenile Courts in England, c. 1910–39’, Twentieth Century British History, 16:2 (2005), 144.
  • Bowlby J, Forty-four Juvenile Thieves: Their Characters and Home Life (1946); reprinted from International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 25 (1944).
  • Ibid., 48
  • Shore H, ‘Inventing the Juvenile Delinquent in 19th Century Europe’, in B. S. Godfrey, C. Emsley and G. Dunstall (eds), Comparative Histories of Crime (Cullompton, 2003), 114–15.
  • Winnicott DW, Deprivation and Delinquency, ed. C. Winnicott, R. Shepherd and M. Davis (1984), 38–42.
  • Ibid.
  • Barnet House Study Group, London Children in War-Time Oxford (1947), 87. See also E. T. Glueck, ‘Wartime Delinquency’, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 33:2 (1942), 122.
  • Mannheim, Crime in Wartime England, 129–30.
  • Henriques, ‘Wartime Delinquent’, 96.
  • Women’s Group on Public Welfare, Our Towns, A Close-Up: A Study Made in 1939–42 with Certain Recommendation by the Hygiene Committee of the Women’s Group on Public Welfare: in Association with the National Council on Social Sciences (1943), 4; M. Brown, A Child’s War: Growing Up On the Home Front (Stroud, 2000), 43–44; R. Inglis, The Children’s War, 1939–45 (1989), 8.
  • Worrall A, ‘Gender and Probation in the Second World War: Reflections on a Changing Occupational Culture’, Criminology and Criminal Justice, 8:3 (2008), 320; Henriques, ‘Wartime Delinquent’, 92.
  • Isaacs S S F, (ed.), Cambridge Evacuation Survey: A Wartime Study in Social Welfare and Education (1941), 102. The Cambridge survey noted that, after the influx of evacuees into Cambridge from London, 50 per cent more juveniles were prosecuted in 1940 than in 1939. Mannheim, Juvenile Delinquency, 11.
  • Crosby T, The Impact of Civilian Evacuation in the Second World War (1986), 43–44. Hermann Mannheim was not able to draw any firm statistical connection between juvenile delinquency and evacuation from the small samples available. Mannheim concluded, ‘In the very few cases only can war time juvenile delinquency be attributed to evacuation alone’ (Juvenile Delinquency, 66).
  • Mannheim, Juvenile Delinquency, 11.
  • Mannheim H, War and Crime (1941), 141.
  • Ibid., 92.
  • Isaacs, Cambridge Evacuation Survey, 68; Crosby, Impact of Civilian Evacuation, 43–44; Winnicott, Deprivation and Delinquency, 61.
  • Winnicott, Deprivation and Delinquency, 92–93.
  • Mannheim, War and Crime, 99.
  • Ibid., 97.
  • Bradley, ‘Inside the Inner London Juvenile Court’, 58.
  • Henriques, ‘Wartime Delinquent’, 96.
  • Giles FF, The Juvenile Courts: Their Work and Problems (1946), 26.
  • LCC, Report of the Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, 22 Sep 1950, NA, ED 233/20, 4.
  • Smith Wilson D, ‘A New Look at the Affluent Worker: The Good Working Mother in Post-War Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 17:2 (2006), 211.
  • LCC, Report of the Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, 22 Sep 1950, NA, ED 233/20, 5.
  • LCC, Special Education Sub-Committee, 2 Feb 1946, LMA, LCC/CH/D/14/2.
  • Care of Children Committee, Report of the Care of Children Committee, Cmd. 6922 (1946).
  • See M. D. Eilenberg, ‘Remand Home Boys 1930–1955’, British Journal of Criminology, 2:2 (1961), 11415.
  • Watson JAF, The Juvenile Court, Today and Tomorrow, Clarke Hall Lecture 11 (1951), 16.
  • Ibid.
  • Ibid., 88.
  • Mannheim, Juvenile Delinquency, 52; K. Bradley, ‘Juvenile Courts and the Settlement Movement, 1908–1950’, Twentieth Century British History, 19:2 (2008), 15. The Education Act of 1944 provided new methods for enforcing school attendance, because the LCC no longer had to apply to the courts for school attendance orders, and, as a result, there were 63 per cent fewer truancy cases brought to the courts in 1945 than in 1944. LCC Special Education Sub-Committee, 2 Feb 1946, LMA, LCC/CH/D/14/2.
  • LCC, Report of the Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, 22 Sep 1950, NA, ED 233/20, 9.
  • LCC Special Education Sub-Committee, 2 Feb 1946, LMA, LCC/CH/D/14/2. In October 1941, school attendance was 83·5 per cent of the 135,800 children living in London; in December 1942, it was 82 per cent of 222,550; in September 1944, it was 79·8 per cent of 128,994; but by June 1944, it had dropped to 32 per cent. Greater London Council, We Think You Ought to Go, 33–34; LCC Education Committee, General Purposes Sub-Committee, Report by Education Officer, reprinted in Greater London Council, We Think You Ought to Go, 51.
  • LCC, Report of the Committee on Juvenile Delin- quency, 22 Sep 1950, NA, ED 233/20, 10.
  • Ibid., 9.
  • LCC Children’s Committee, Juvenile Delinquency Annual Statistics, 1947–48, LMA, LCC/CH/D/3/1.
  • Ibid.
  • Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare, 151. In London, 17 per centof delinquent children’s parents had been delinquents themselves in World War I.
  • LCC, The Work of Problem Case Families, Report by the Education Officer, 16 Mar 1950, LMA, LCC/CH/D/3/1. Monthly Problem Case Committee conferences were attended by a district inspector, divisional officer, divisional medical officer, and district care organizer. However at conferences where recommendations were made about the placement of difficult children, an assistant education officer, special services personnel, an inspector of special education, the educational psychologist, the principal organizer of Children’s Care Work, and the LCC psychiatrist were also in attendance.
  • Ibid., 10.
  • Welshman J, ‘In Search of the ‘Problem Family’: Public Health and Social Work in England and Wales, 1940–1970’, Social History of Medicine, 9:3 (1996), 450.
  • In the year ending March 1947, 161 boys and 78 girls were committed to the care of the LCC as a ‘fit person’.
  • LCC, Report of the Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, 22 Sep 1950, NA, ED 233/20, 5.
  • LCC, Juvenile Delinquency Annual Statistics 1947–48, Report by the Education Officer, 3 Feb 1949, LMA, LCC/CH/D/3/1; LCC Children’s Committee, Juvenile Delinquency Annual Statistics, 1947–48, LMA, LCC/CH/D/3/1; J. Macnicol, ‘From ‘Problem Family’ to ‘Underclass’, in H. Fawcett and R. Lowe (eds), Welfare Policy in Britain: The Road from 1945 (Basingstoke, 1999), 76.
  • LCC, Report of the Committee on Juvenile Delin-quency, 22 Sep 1950, NA, ED 233/20, 8.
  • Glover E, The Diagnosis and Treatment of Delinquency being a Clinical Report on the Work of the Institute in the Five Years 1937–1941 (1941), 7.
  • Bradley, ‘Inside the Inner London Juvenile Court’: 10 per cent of cases were referred to Child Guidance in 1940, 18·57 per cent in 1942, and 16·21 per cent in 1945.
  • Donnington H, ‘The Care of Homeless Children’, Fabian Publications Research Series, no. 107 (1945); Winnicott, Deprivation and Delinquency, 55.
  • Home Office Conference on Juvenile Offenders, The Probation Service Report, 3 Apr 1941, LMA, LCC/CH/D/4/7.
  • Maureen Waller paints a grim picture of London’s children in the months after victory in Europe in 1945. Many returned to homes that had been destroyed or were overcrowded. Some children remained in the reception areas because their parents had been killed, separated, or divorced, or simply did not want their children back. LCC social welfare officers prevented these unwanted children from returning to London, if it was felt that the children would be in danger of neglect. In December 1945, 5000 children from London still remained billeted in reception areas, and another 800 were in residential nurseries apart from their parents. Waller, London 1945, 369–77.
  • Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare, 157–58.
  • Ibid., 159.
  • LCC, Report of the Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, 22 Sep 1950, NA, ED 233/20, 4.
  • Logan, ‘Suitable Person’, 847.
  • LCC Education Officer’s Department, London Juvenile Court Consultative Committee, Psychological Treatment at Approved Schools, 16 Jul 1947, LMA, LCC/CH/D/14/2.
  • Bradley, ‘Youth, Crime, Surveillance’, 25–26.
  • Sixth Report on the Work of the Children’s Department (1951), 48.
  • LCC, Remand Homes (1944), Cmd. 6594.
  • Morrison ACL, ‘The Jurisdiction of Juvenile Courts’, in P. H. Winfield (ed.), Penal Reform in England (1947), 101.
  • Bradley K, ‘Juvenile Delinquency and the Evolution of the British Juvenile Courts, C. 1900–1950’, <www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/welfare/articles/bradleyk.hmtl>. Even Henriques supported corporal punishment for teenagers who terrorized the public in air raid shelters. See Smithies, Crime in Wartime, 75.
  • LCC Education Committee, Special Sub-Committee, Juvenile Offenders and Neglected Children Brought Before The Courts, 1934–1946, 21 Oct 1946, LMA, LCC/CH/D/14/2.
  • LCC, Report of the Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, 22 Sep 1950, NA, ED 233/20, 6.
  • LCC to Educational Officers, 6 Oct 1947, LMA, LCC/CH/D/14/2.
  • Ibid.
  • Ibid.
  • Scott P, ‘Observations on Public Opinion and Juvenile Delinquency’, 13 Aug 1949, LMA, LCC/CH/D/3/1, 59.
  • London Times (1 Oct 1942).
  • In a survey, they attested to being bored and having time on their hands for getting into trouble. M.O.A, Young People: A Social Survey of London, 1940, 2K/2474.
  • M.O.A, Youth, 25 Nov 1941, 3/A. Three hundred and eighty girls’ clubs were affiliated to the London Union of Girls Clubs, but only twenty-five were open in November 1940, and in Southwark only thirteen clubs were open out of a total of fifty-eight.
  • Greater London Council, We Think You Ought to Go, 44–45.
  • LCC Assistant Education Officer, The Problem of the Unclubables, Memo, 7 Jul 1950, LMA, MCC/CL/CH/044.
  • London Youth Committee, Report, NA ED 233/20, 10 Jul 1950; LCC Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, Memoranda Submitted by Interested Persons and Organizations, Oct 1949, CH/D/3/1.
  • Metropolitan juvenile magistrates complained of the low funding for Service to Youth, and argued for supporting such initiatives; see LCC Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, Joint Memorandum submitted by the Chairman of the Metropolitan Juvenile Magistrates, 2 Feb 1950, LMA, MCC/CL/CH/044.
  • LCC, Report of the Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, 22 Sep 1950, NA, ED 233/20, 8.
  • Unsigned Memo from the Parks Committee, 1949, LMA, GLC/RA/A1/01/071.
  • Borough Conference on Juvenile Delinquency, Bermondsey Town Hall, 19 May 1950, LMA, LCC/EO/HFE/1/162.
  • LCC, Report of the Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, 22 Sep 1950, NA, ED 233/20, 15; M.O.A., Comments by Rev. Guthrie Gamble, Boys Brigade Paddington, 21 Jan 1947, Juvenile Delinquency, 2/4.
  • Bartie and Jackson, ‘Youth Crime and Preventive Policing’; Smith, ‘Official Responses to Delinquency’.
  • Garland, Culture of Control, 46.
  • Ibid., 45–51.

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