'The coffee club menace': Policing youth, leisure and sexuality in post-war Manchester

Cultural and Social History

Volumn 5, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 289-308

  Jackson, Louise A ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Clubs; Manchester; Police; Sexuality; Youth

Indexed keywords

EID: 49649122042     PISSN: 14780038     EISSN: 14780046     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2752/147800408X331407     Document Type: Article

References (120)

1. Greater Manchester Police Museum (henceforth GMPM), Policewomer's Department, Box File on 'Clubs', Jungfrau, report, 23 June 1964.
2. Keith Rylatt and Phil Scott, Central 1179: The Story of Manchester's Twisted Wheel Club (London, 2001), p. 51.
3. Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock 'n' Roll (London, 1983), pp. 235-48
4. Sheila Rowbotham, Woman's Consciousness, Man's World (Harmondsworth, 1977).
5. GMPM, Annual Report of the Chief Constable of Manchester (henceforth AR) 1967, p. 2;
6. AR 1966, p. 4.
7. John J. Parkinson-Bailey, Manchester: An Architectural History (Manchester, 2000);
8. Alison Ravetz, Remaking Cities. (London, 1980).
9. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre (New York, 1982), p. 27.
10. The Times, 24 December 1965.
11. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation bf the Mods and Rockers (London, 1972).
12. Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds), Resistance through Ritual (Oxford, 1976);
13. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London, 1979).
14. Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital (Cambridge, 1995), p. 163.
15. For youth in the first half of the twentieth century see John Springhall, Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics (Basingstoke, 1998)
16. SelinaTodd, Young Women, Work and Family in England 1918-1950 (Oxford, 2005)
17. Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (London, 1983)
18. Andrew Davies, 'Street Gangs, Crime and Policing in Glasgow in the 1930s: The Case of the Beehive Boys' Social History, 23 (1998): 251-67
19. Pamela Cox, Gender, Justice and We~'are: Bad Girls in Britain, 1900-1950 (Basingstoke, 2003).
20. On youth in inter-war Manchester see David Fowler, 'Teenage Consumers? Young Wage-earners and Leisure in Manchester, 1919-1939', in A. Davies and S. Fielding (eds), Workers' Worlds (Manchester, 1998), pp. 133-55
21. Andrew Davies, Leisure, Gender and Poverty: Working Class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900-1939 (Oxford, 1992).
22. Angela McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture (Basingstoke, 2000); Angela McRobbie and Mica Nava (eds), Gender and Generation (Basingstoke, 1984).
23. Overviews include Bill Osgerby, Youth in Britain since 1945 (Oxford, 1998)
24. J. Pitts, The Politics of Juvenile Crime (London, 1988)
25. L. Gelsthorpe and A. Morris, 'Juvenile Justice 1945-1992', in M. Maguire, R. Morgan and R. Reiner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford, 1994), pp. 949-97.
26. C.P. Lee, Shake, Rattle and Rain: Popular Music Making in Manchester 1955-1995 (Ottery St Mary, 2002)
27. Rylatt and Scott, Central 1179, Alan Lawson, 'It Happened in Manchester'! The True Story of Manchester's Music 1958-1965 (Bury, no date).
28. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, (Longman, 1992);
29. Arthur Marwick, The Sixties (Oxford, 1998).
30. McRobbie, Feminism and Youth Culture, pp. 44-66.
31. British Parliamentary Papers 1963-4 War against Crime in England and Wales 1959-64, Cmnd. 2296.
32. See Howard Taylor 'Rationing Crime: The Political Economy of Criminal Statistics since the 1850s', Economic History Review, LI (199 8): 5 69-90, for the argument that statistics generated by the police were strategic and economic responses that bore little relationship to actual patterns of offending. Arriving in Manchester in 1958, McKay was tasked with improving the force's discipline, morale and crime detection rates. The increase in detected offences involving youths can be linked to his assiduity; see National Archives, London (henceforth NA), Reports of Her Majestys Inspectors of Constabularies, H0287/1290.
33. A juvenile was defined as a young person between the ages of eight and sixteen until the 1963 Children and Young Persons Act raised the age of criminal responsibility to ten.
34. GMPM, ARs 1947-1967.
35. Manchester Evening News (henceforth MEN), 3 May 1965.
36. GMPM, AR 1961.
37. Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare, p. 51.
38. Louise A. Jackson, Women Police: Gender, Welfare and Surveillance in the Twentieth Century (Manchester, 2006).
39. GMPM, Bohanna papers, notes for talk on British Police (undated).
40. GMPM, Bohanna papers, record cards (members of Policewomen's Department): clerical work and shop work predominated as previous occupational backgrounds.
41. Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare, p. 55.
42. Lesley Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880 (Basingstoke, 2000), 167-84.
43. For wartime attempts to regulate the behaviour of 'good time girls', see Sonya Rose, Which People's War? (Oxford, 2003).
44. The 'moral'danger' clause originated in the 1880s when industrial schools legislation had permitted magistrates to remove children found in 'immoral surroundings' from parents. See Louise A. Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England (London, 2000).
45. GMPM, Minutes of North West District Policewomen's Conference, 14 May 1963. Civil proceedings in care or protection cases were inaugurated by the police, the local authority or the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. In 1960 Manchester City Police was responsible for over a third of proceedings in the city (97 out of 253 cases); see Minutes of North West District Policewomen's Conference, 26 October 1961.
46. Abigail Wills 'Delinquency, Masculinity and Citizenship in England 1950-1970', Past and Present, 187 (2005): 157-85.
47. T.R. Fyvel, The Insecure Offender (Harmondsworth, 1961), p. 96.
48. Wills, 'Delinquency, Masculinity and Citizenship', p. 165.
49. Linda Mahood, Policing Gender, Class and Family (London, 1995).
50. Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare
51. Roger Davidson, Dangerous Liaisons: A Social History of Venereal Disease in Twentieth-century Scotland (Amsterdam, 2000).
52. Material in this paragraph is taken from GMPM, 'Clubs', Beat Club.
53. Ibid.
54. Policewomen recorded that they had come into contact with 289 girls as a result of routine enquiries in Manchester's coffee clubs in March to November 1964; care or protection proceedings appear to have been taken in only eight cases; thirty-two girls reported 'missing from home' were found in clubs as well as eight absconders. See GMPM, Policewomen's Department, 'Clubs' files.
55. Chief Superintendent Dingwall, 'Coffee Beat Clubs', in AR 1965, Appendix. Dingwall's article was also published in The Police Journal.
56. Manchester statistics cited here are from ARs 1959-68.
57. Virginia Berridge, Opium and the People (London, 1999).
58. See Daily Telegraph, 6 Aug. 1964
59. Manchester Guardian, 7 Aug. 1964
60. MEN, 27 Aug. 1964.
61. Cohen, Folk Devils.
62. City of Manchester Council Proceedings 1964-5, Vol. II, Report of the General Parliamentary Committee, 2 Sept. 1964, p. 429.
63. Hansard, 29 Apr. 1965, col. 720-1, Mr Paul B. Rose (Manchester Blackley).
64. Dingwall, 'Coffee Beat Clubs'.
65. MEN, 26 Apr. 1965.
66. Dingwall, 'Coffee Beat Clubs'.
67. See also Tamara Myers, 'Deserting Daughters: Runaways and the Red-light District of Montreal before 1945', in J. Lawrence and P. Starkey (eds), Child Welfare and Social Action (Liverpool, 2001), pp. 15-35.
68. GMPM, 'Clubs', Dick Ewan's Beat Club, report, 10 May 1964.
69. Ibid., report, 26 May 1964.
70. GMPM, 'Clubs', Sovereign Coffee Bar, report, 21 Aug. 1963.
71. Judy Giles, '"Playing Hard to Get": Working-class Women, Sexuality and Respectability in Britain, 1918-40', Women's History Review, 1 (1992): 239-55.
72. Pamela Cox, 'Girls in Trouble: Defining Female Delinquency, Britain 1900-50', in M.J. Maynes, B. Soland and C. Benninghaus (eds), Secret- Gardens, Satanic Mills (Indiana, PA, 2005), pp. 192-208.
73. GMPM, 'Clubs', Dick Ewan's Beat Club, report, 27 May 1964;
74. Twisted Wheel, report, 22 March 1964.
75. GMPM, 'Clubs', Heaven and Hell. The Heaven and Hell was indirectly linked to the death of an unnamed eighteen-year-old boy on 31 May 1965 from an overdose of morphine.
76. The Times, 12 May 1965.
77. Dingwall, 'Coffee Beat Clubs'.
78. Daily Mail, 20 Apr. 1965.
79. Rylatt and Scott, Central 1179, p. 91.
80. News of the World, 17 Jan. 1965. For white-slave narratives in the 1880s see Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight (London, 1992).
81. Lucy Bland, 'White Women and Men of Colour: Miscegenation Fears in Britain after the Great War', Gender and History, 17 (2005): 29-61.
82. Dingwall, 'Coffee Beat Clubs'
83. MEN, 12 Feb. 1965.
84. See Jackson, Women Police, p. 179.
85. Chris Waters, '"Dark Strangers in Our Midst"': Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947-1963', Journal of British Studies, 36 (1997): 207-38
86. Stuart Hall, Policing the Crisis (London, 1978)
87. Paul Gilroy, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (London, 1987).
88. See Marek Kohn, Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drugs Underground (London, 1992) for the 'yellow peril' of the 1920s.
89. GMPM, 'Clubs', Aurora, report, 31 Oct. 1963.
90. MEN, 13 Feb. 1965
91. MEN, 26 Apr. 1965.
92. GMPM, 'Clubs', Cavern
93. MEN, 15 Feb. 1965.
94. Dingwall, 'Coffee Beat Clubs'.
95. MEN, 23 Apr. 1965.
96. Ibid.
97. GMPM, 'Clubs', Twisted Wheel, report, 22 March 1964
98. Three Coins, report, 26 Oct. 1963.
99. Manchester Guardian, 17 Jan. 1963.
100. GMPM, National Conference of Senior Policewomen, Minutes 28-9 Sept. 1965.
101. GMPM, 'Clubs', Twisted Wheel, report, 22 March 1964.
102. Quoted in MEN, 26 May 1965.
103. GMPM, 'Clubs', Twisted Wheel, report, 29 March 19641.
104. Malcolm Young, An Inside Job (Oxford, 1991).
105. GMPM, 'Clubs', Twisted Wheel, reports for 14 March 1964.
106. Ibid.
107. Hebdige, Subculture.
108. GMPM, Minutes of the North West District Policewomen's Conference, 20 Apr. 1967.
109. Hebdige, Subculture, p. 97.
110. Wills, 'Delinquency, Masculinity and Citizenship', pp. 168 and 182.
111. Jackson, Women Police, p. 160.
112. GMPM, National Conference of Senior Policewomen, Minutes, 30 Sept.-1 Oct. 1970, discussion of 'discreditable conduct'.
113. Young, Inside Job.
114. Manchester Corporation Act, Eliz. II (1965), ch. xlii.
115. The Times, 24 Dec. 1965.
116. Lee, Shake, Rattle and Rain, p. 82.
117. Senior policewomen in Salford, Brighton and Leicester supported the need for wider legislation. See GMPM, National Conference of Senior Policewomen, 28-9 Sept. 1965. For concerns about London's West End see NA, BN 29/1684, Causes of Juvenile Delinquency: Moral Danger, Undesirable Clubs 1964-5.
118. Private Places of Entertainment (Licensing) Act (1967), ch. 19: absolute right of entry was not introduced as in the Manchester act.
119. Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, p. 243.
120. The Times, 20 Oct. 1965.