Gun crime isn't new - look at late '40s London

In my last post, I wrote about how slum kids in wartime London resembled the sort of conscienceless junior thugs that make modern our city such a wonderful, vibrant place to live these days. The thing that set the 1940s variety apart from their modern counterparts – apart from the fact that they would all have been white back then – was the relative absence of guns (at least, George Orwell didn’t mention them). The same can’t be said for post-war London where, as the result of hundreds of thousands of demobbed soldiers, guns seem to have been far more prevalent than they are today.

Reading Paul Willetts’s North Soho 999: A True Story of Gun-crime in 1940s London is a disconcerting experience for those of us who yearn for an era of  avuncular clip-round-the-ear coppers and young tearaways (invariable called Terry) who are basically “good kids”, despite wielding greasy. black pomppadours and knuckle-dusters. 

Mr. Willetts focuses on a 1947 raid on Jays, a Soho jewelers in Tottenham Street (well, slightly to the north of Soho, to be exact - more like Fitzrovia, but why spoil a good title?). A fuller description of the raid can be foundhere, in an extract from the book, but, briefly,  three masked gunmen entered the shop brandishing guns at around 2.30 pm one afternoon in June. A shot was fired. The gunmen ran from the shop and hurtled into their getaway car,  parked directly outside, only to find themselves hemmed in by a delivery van. They piled out of the car and, still masked,  ran down Tottenham Street and into Charlotte Street. There, in an act of extraordinary courage, a motorbike-riding Anglo-Italian, Alec de Antiquis, tried to prevent their escape, and was shot to death by one of the gang. Photographs of the brave man’s dead body lying in the road turned the case into a sensation at the time. The killer, it transpired, as just seventeen years old.  

The media and the public were appalled and scared – with some justification, because this wasn’t an isolated incident: post-war London was awash with guns and callous young thugs only too willing to use them. The result was a genuine crime-wave. What, the papers asked, had happened to Britain’s youth? Where had it all gone wrong? Why was the UK’s traditionally low-crime capital turning into 1930s Chicago?

The book’s evocation of a seedy, bomb-scarred, multi-ethnic milieu is fascinating, as is the appearance of three figures who loom large in the world of 1940s and 1950s crime and punishment: the pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury (so badly paid, he had to work into his seventies, despite ill health), Bob Fabian (“of the Yard” – later the subject of a TV series), and the chief executioner, Albert Pierrepoint (who, bizarrely, witnessed de Antiquis’s murder from the Fitzroy Tavern, where he’d been enjoying a quiet drink  - small world back then).

So, why so much gun crime during an era most of us would have assumed to be almost crime-free compared with our own? After all, there was no drugs trade to speak of, no black gang culture or rap music lyrics to blame, and, of course, the death penalty was still in existence (although, on average, less that 10% of murderers were ever executed), television barely existed, and films were less violent than they had been in the previous decade.

The ready availability of hand-guns must have played some part. Life for many young men who had been recently demobbed must have seemed extraordinarily dull. For them, and for many who had been born too late for the war, the prospect of low wages and humdrum jobs in a country that had just saved the world from unimaginable evil must have seemed unappealing, to put it mildly, and somewhat unfair. Besides, unemployment was high, the economy was in a deep recession (it had to wait until 2009 for a worse one), rationing was in full spate, and the UK had just been through one of its worst winters on record. In addition, human life must have begun to seem fairly expendable after six years of war, especially following the revelation of the horrors of the Nazi death camps (the full story of Stalin’s slaughters was yet to emerge). 

Hackneyed as it sounds, there was just something in the air at the time: the end of the war saw the emergence of the so-called Mushroom Publishers, who produced an endless supply of short-form crime stories full of sex and violence in cheap paperbacks with lurid covers, aimed at ex-servicemen and, one presumes, teenage boys. Hank Janson, a pseudonymous British writer who wrote in a parody of the brutal style of the pre-war American pulps, was the king of this rather rank castle. Perhaps the post-war boom in barely-literate, sadistic crime fiction was the equivalent of today’s Gangsta Rap (or whatever the genre which promotes violence against women, homosexuals and policemen is now called).

When The Blue Lamp was released in 1949 - the film in which Dirk Bogarde’s young thug shockingly gunned down PC George Dixon - gun crime was still prevalent. The infamous “Let him have it!” Craig and Bentley case in which a policeman was shot while apprehending two young criminals happened in 1952. After that, it all seems to have quietened down: 1950s Teddy Boys may well have been slashing cinema seats with flick knives to a rock ‘n’ roll beat, but at least they  weren’t shooting each other, or anyone else. Britain - more concerned with loutish behaviour than ultra-violence – went back to being a low-crime country. 

It’s astonishing how little we know about the origins of crime waves, or why they die out. Pity, really, because such knowledge would no doubt come in very handy. The gun-crime craze of the late 1940 and early 1950s has pretty much been air-brushed from history in any case. But all those children of the Sixties who imagine the 40s and 50s were uniformly dull, safe, conformist decades, should really get hold of a copy of North Soho 999 – and think again. They were evidently much stranger and more interesting than we tend to imagine.