Preliminary Programme

During the 1920s and 1930s, Glasgow acquired an unwelcome reputation as Britain’s “gang city” – a Scottish Chicago. Press coverage of the city’s gangs was extensive and highly sensationalised. In the spring of 1930, and again in the summer of 1936, the city witnessed full-blown “moral panics,” with widespread demands for the police and courts to wage “war” on the gangs. In feature articles and editorials in both local and (British) national newspapers, gang members were frequently demonized, as morally and/or psychologically deficient, even sub-human. Many of the city’s gangs were overtly sectarian, but their religious affiliations were routinely derided by commentators in the press who took their cue from the city’s police and magistrates as well as local church leaders.

A very different picture emerged from the pages of the Scottish weekly press. Weekly papers devoted considerable space to Glasgow’s gang conflicts, but – lacking the immediacy of the daily press – they were forced to seek new angles on events that had already been widely reported. In papers such as the People’s Journal, gang cases were re-cast as human interest stories centred on interviews with victims of street violence as well as relatives of both victims and perpetrators. In some instances, journalists were able to obtain interviews with prominent members of sectarian gangs based in Glasgow’s East End. These stories of gangland from the “inside” help us to reconnect both the practices and the meanings of violence to the contexts of family and community life. Some accounts from the 1930s bear striking resemblance to one of the key themes in recent criminological work on gangs in Britain: the difficulties faced by young people seeking to leave gangs. As one of John Pitts’ informants put it: “the problem is, once you get in you can’t get out” (2008: 97). (Show less)

The self within became a valued commodity in interwar Britain. To tease out this argument, I explore the relationship between mass culture, subjectivity and the crook life story. Just as psychoanalytic subjects sought the “truth” of the self, crooks and their ghostwriters turned reflection into profit. Animated by the innovations of human-interest journalism, their first-person revelations were central to the modern newspaper. In an unending succession of serialized “My Life Stories,” crooks sought to make sense of a life in crime. No longer concerned simply with rendering the underworld visible, such texts opened up a realm of emotion and the unconscious. The truth was revealed and the intimate confessed. Interiority sold.
I focus on Josephine O’Dare—glamorous Society darling until exposed as an adventuress, bankrupt and forger in 1926. Over the next decade O’Dare’s life was told and retold as she struggled with journalists and the state to define the terms on which her private life was made public. Suspicion fell after her lover’s serialized life revealed her humdrum background in the Weekly Herald. Imprisoned for forging an admirer’s will, her ‘intimate revelations’ appeared in the People in 1927. Free in 1933, she successfully sued Reynolds Weekly News for libel over the “My Life and Loves” series published under her name six years earlier.
O’Dare’s libel trial and “lives” are my starting point in mapping the commercial practices, social encounters, and narrative strategies through which the crook’s interior world was isolated and repackaged. Never just fiction or formula, such lives blended melodramatic forms with modern notions of interiority. As such, they embodied and exceeded a broader reconfiguration of selfhood. More than O’Dare’s reputation was at stake. The trial became a space in which to assess the authority of the material forms and practices in which interiority rested: photos and sketches, love letters, personal testimonies, reproduced signatures, expert and institutional knowledge. The commodified crook life story, I argue, might tell us a great deal about the transformation of cultural life and the emergence of new modes of selfhood. (Show less)

During the 1920s, the social section of the League of Nations investgated the worldwide traffic in women for prositution. The issue had been emphasised by belief that the music hall industry provided a cover for trafficked women, moved around by souteuners under the guise of artistes. Films such as ,The Blue Angel, played to the image of the cabaret as a place of sexual danger. The 1927 enquiry represents the first social scientific study of a global social problem. It was aimed at uncovering the reality behind media images. To do this, the researchers made use of undercover investigators to get inside the international underworld. This essay considers the reliance on secret research to find the truth of popular images. (Show less)

This paper will explore the changing press representation of the organised and professional criminal during the interwar period. Using a range of publications and other primary sources, the paper will argue that by this period newspapers were increasingly drawing on new models of criminality. On the one hand, it can be argued that the shift towards a more ‘modern’ definition of criminal organisation can detected in the later nineteenth century. This was particularly in relation to the growth of financial crimes such as fraud and swindling. On the other hand, after the First World War various factors contributed to the development of a broader and arguably more modern definition of criminal organisation. In part, as this paper will argue, this was a reflection of changing police priorities. However, the inter-war press also played a key role in the construction of new stereotypes of the ‘professional’ criminal. This paper will explore the key models of criminality that were re-shaped and re-imagined by the press during the 1920s and 30s: for example the racecourse gangster, the motor-bandit and the smash and grab raider. It will also consider the impact of new technologies (such as the increasing use of the motor-car in carrying out crime), the establishment of the Flying Squad from 1919, and the influence of emerging ideas about continental and international organised crime. (Show less)

In the early hours of 6 July 1928, a young woman who gave her name as Helene Adele was arrested in north London on a disorder charge. This otherwise unremarkable event quickly developed into a press sensation, one of several involving accusations of police corruption and abuse of power in the late 1920s. The scandal of the case emerged when Adele was brought before a magistrate. There, she claimed that the officers had invented the disorder charge to cover up an attempted sexual assault by one of them after they had found her asleep in a taxi parked in an Islington garage. (Adele was at this point without a fixed address and periodically slept in the cabs with the permission of the garage’s supervisor.)

Given the background of concerns about police treatment of women in mid-1928 – at this time one parliamentary committee was in the midst of examining problematic ‘street offences’ cases (mainly involving prostitution), another was about to report on allegations that Scotland Yard detectives had used ‘third degree’ questioning methods against a woman during an investigation into police perjury and a third was due to begin in the autumn to examine more general claims of police misconduct – these accusations raised press interest. Somewhat more remarkably, they also led to the prosecution and conviction of the two constables involved, who were both sentenced to prison and discharged from the force. Adele, who at the time of her arrest was to some extent homeless and involved in relationships with various men, was briefly catapulted onto the front pages of Britain’s sensationalist press, and the serialized memoir of the ‘Garage Girl’ appeared in two newspapers. However, given the context of widespread concerns about police powers, the Adele case was more than just a tabloid spectacle.

In this paper, I will explain various aspects of the Adele case and consider what they tell us about police procedure, the political debate about policing and the press’s presentation of gender. How was the Adele case linked to other concerns about police powers in that year? To what extent did these connections contribute to a situation in which a magistrate took the word of a homeless woman of questionable respectability over that of two married police constables with good service records? How did Adele’s memoir series present her own life story, particularly in the context of the 1920s cultural obsession with young women’s lifestyles and sexuality? (Show less)