Girl Trouble (14 page)

Across the country in the 1940s, local newspapers, probation records and juvenile court proceedings show a high level of concern about girls consorting with servicemen. In Brighton, for instance, Mrs Cooke, a woman probation officer, wrote to the Home Office Children's Department over her worries.
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She maintained that girls under seventeen were regularly hanging about with soldiers, and refusing to attend VD clinics. Echoing Gladys Hall, Mrs Cooke insisted that enthusiastic amateurs were putting professional prostitutes out of business. She complained that local councillors were reluctant to address the problem because they did not want to detract from Brighton's reputation as an ‘unfettered holiday town'.

These various fears were all brought into sharp focus in 1944, in connection with the widely reported horrors of what became known as the ‘Cleft Chin' murder case. This was the sorry tale of two individuals, one a seventeen-year-old girl named Elizabeth Marina Jones but styling herself ‘Georgina Grayson', the other a Swedish-born American GI named Karl Hulten.
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The pair went on a six-day spree of cold-blooded, hit-and-run crime and violence in London and South-East England which led some to liken them to an English Bonnie and Clyde phenomenon, although the Hulten–Jones collaboration was nasty, brutish and short. It certainly lacked any romance. George Orwell, who wrote about this ‘pitiful and sordid' case in his essay ‘Decline of the English Murder', was somewhat at a loss to explain why it should have become the ‘cause célèbre' of the war years and predicted that it would soon be forgotten.
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He judged that it lacked the haunting, memorable qualities of the ‘old domestic
poisoning dramas' or Jack the Ripper stories which lived on in the public imagination.

Elizabeth Jones met Karl Hulten in a café near Hammersmith tube station in October 1944. She introduced herself as a dancer, Georgina Grayson. He posed as a lieutenant called Ricky Allen. He was actually a private who had deserted. Back home, he had both a wife and a baby daughter. Elizabeth had a troubled history. Her parents had despaired of her as a child and she had run away first from home (in Neath, Glamorganshire) and then from the approved school in Cheshire to which she had been sent by a juvenile court. At sixteen she married a family friend, mainly to gain independence from any further supervision. Almost immediately she fought with, and left, her husband and ran off to London. Her husband being on active service, Elizabeth benefited from an army separation allowance of 32 shillings per week. In London she supplemented this by working for brief spells as a tearoom waitress, cinema usherette and barmaid. She then tried to establish herself as a striptease artist and dancer. This proved harder than she had expected. However, she seems to have built up a network of contacts among American servicemen, and to have made reasonable money by ‘hostessing'. She allegedly kept a scrapbook, with plentiful details.

The couple appear to have tried to impress each other with their recklessness and bravado. Hulten boasted of connections with a Chicago mob. Elizabeth professed an appetite for danger, fantasising about becoming a gangster's ‘gun-moll'. They took to the road that evening in Hulten's (stolen) heavy truck. Their first victim was a girl cyclist, whom they deliberately pushed off the road, robbed and left in a ditch. The following day they attempted to hold up and rob a taxi driver, but were frustrated by the sudden appearance of an armed American officer. Their
next move was to pick up a nineteen-year-old girl. She had missed her train, and they offered her a lift to Reading. Hulten stopped the truck at Egham, claiming a fault with the back axle. The girl got out of the truck with Jones to try to see what was going on. Hulten hit her over the head with a steel bar. Jones and Hulten then robbed the girl of her possessions and lobbed her into a river. Amazingly, she survived to tell the story. The following night, Hulten and Jones, still short of money, decided to target another taxi driver. Their victim this time was George Heath, driving along Hammersmith Broadway. Heath, married with two young sons, was a good-looking man of distinctive appearance: he had a pronounced cleft chin. Hailed by Elizabeth, Heath stopped his car and the pair got in. When they reached the Great West Road, sometime after midnight, Hulten asked Heath to pull in. As Heath was opening the rear door to enable his passengers to get out, he received a bullet through his back from Hulten's automatic. He was shoved into the front passenger seat, and as Hulten drove on, Elizabeth went through the dying man's pockets stripping him of anything they might sell. They dumped Heath's body in a ditch and drove back to Hammersmith.

The next day, the pair celebrated. They treated themselves to a day at the races, a meal out, and the cinema. There seems to have been an easy familiarity between the two, but no sexual intimacy. Hulten later confessed that a rash on Jones's body had made him wonder whether she was diseased. He commented that the American Army medical authorities had warned men against such things. Neither appeared remorseful after killing Heath. Rather, their recklessness increased. Jones expressed a whim for a fur coat. So they drove to the West End and hovered near a side entrance to the Berkeley Hotel. They watched women emerge until one appeared, resplendent in white ermine, which
caught Elizabeth's eye. Hulten leapt out and tried to strip the coat from the woman's back. A policeman appeared at this point, so they made a quick getaway. The couple parted soon after. Within days, police found Heath's body, and then his car. They closed in on Hulten. Elizabeth Jones began to panic, talked to third parties, and was soon herself arrested and charged.

The trial drew crowds and attracted massive attention in the press. Hulten appeared nonchalant and unrepentant in court and doodled sketches of cars and aeroplanes on a pad throughout the proceedings. He blamed Elizabeth, Elizabeth blamed Hulten. Both were found guilty and sentenced to death, although in the case of Elizabeth there was a recommendation to mercy. Elizabeth sobbed convulsively as the verdicts were announced, and she left the court shrieking accusations at Hulten as ‘a brute'. Both parties appealed. Hulten's appeal was dismissed.
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Elizabeth Jones was given a last-minute reprieve.

There was a public outcry at this. Most of the objectors thought that the verdict should have been the same for both parties. Large numbers of protestors – including many women – thought that Jones should hang. Indeed graffiti to this effect, accompanied by crude drawings of a figure dangling from a scaffold, were chalked on to walls in her Glamorganshire home town. Factory girls in some parts of Britain threatened strikes over the judgment. Support for Elizabeth was muted, although interestingly she received several offers of marriage. Hulten was hanged on his twenty-third birthday in March 1945.

What Orwell had found so squalid about the Cleft Chin murder was its pointlessness; there was no feeling in it. This was no crime of passion but a callous affair reflecting ‘the anonymous life of the dance-halls and the false values of the American film'.
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But this was precisely what caught the public imagination.
Elizabeth Jones brought into focus widespread but diffuse contemporary fears about the good-time girl. Alwyn Raymond, a journalist who wrote a popular account of the case, represented Elizabeth in just these terms. She is described as a striptease artist who had been booed off the floor, but had discovered the lucrative potential of American servicemen.

From this discovery can be dated the life of dancing, drinking and comparative luxury that she counted as success. In a few weeks, she had thrown away all her old clothes. Now it was silk stockings, high heels, American perfume, flashy jewellery and all the things that she thought made her ‘glamorous'. And she took upon herself what she called a ‘stage name' – Georgina Grayson.
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The Cleft Chin murder inspired a number of accounts and fictions. A. J. La Bern's popular novel
Night Darkens the Streets
, first published in 1947, was inspired by the case.
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The story is that of Gwen Rawlings, a working-class girl from Pimlico. Gwen is described as gorgeous but empty-headed, easily seduced by the glamour of American film stars. There is a rather contemptuous, even sneering tone about her portrayal as a ‘back-street blonde' with too much lipstick and ‘a gaudy soul':

Out of the wilderness of Pimlico came Gwen Rawlings, an ignoramus with starry eyes, a well-developed body and an undeveloped mind. She had no inherent vice, only a greed for the sweet things in life …
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Gwen runs away from home, rents a room and secures a job in a nightclub. She poses as a sophisticate, but is soon out of her depth and taken advantage of: the city is shown as darkly menacing for girls. An affair with a jazz musician offers her a
short period of happiness. This is soon interrupted as she finds herself falsely implicated in theft and unable to defend herself in the juvenile court. She is sent away for ‘moral protection' in an approved school. Stripped of her feminine clothes and subjected to an austere regime, she becomes hysterical. Far from becoming penitent, she is corrupted further by the influence of other delinquent girls. Humiliation gives way to plotting and rebellion. Gwen runs away and hitches a lift to London. After a series of escapades she finds herself consorting with a set of dodgy, undesirable types in Brighton. One night she and her friends set out to drive to London for the races – they are all drunk. Gwen is at the wheel, swigging from a whisky bottle, when the car hits and kills a policeman. Desperately fleeing from all this, she takes up with a couple of American servicemen who have recently deserted. Like Hulten and Jones, they turn to robbery and violence. Gwen's story ends with her being tried for murder and found guilty – with a recommendation to mercy.

In May 1947 the popular paper
Picture Post
drew attention to a forthcoming film, based on the La Bern story but entitled
Good Time Girl
.
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The film was produced by Sidney Box for Gainsborough, an offshoot of the Rank Organisation.
Picture Post
's article was headed ‘Fight in a Reformatory', and consisted mainly of photographs of girls running amok: climbing over desks, kicking, slapping and biting each other, and tearing each other's hair out. These photographs (by Bert Hardy) carried captions such as ‘Good-time girls become the tough-time girls' and ‘The kind of scene that teachers have bad dreams about'. The feature unleashed a storm of controversy.
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A strongly worded complaint to the Home Secretary suggested that the film presented an appalling picture of what went on in approved schools: it was deemed near-libellous and detrimental to the government's
interests. The film was judged to be harmful to the interests of Elizabeth Jones (a former inmate of the approved school in Sale, Cheshire, and by May 1947 serving time in Aylesbury borstal). Equally, it was considered damaging to her parents.
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There were calls to Chuter Ede, as Home Secretary, to take action. Correspondence in the National Archives shows that the Home Office made contact with Gainsborough Pictures and explained these concerns. Chuter Ede had lunch with Mr Rank. However, the British Board of Film Censors did not consider that there was a case for censorship. Sir Sidney Harris, chair of the BBFC, maintained that ‘censorship cannot be used for the purpose of preventing misrepresentations'.
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4.1
Girls in an reformatory run amok. Scene from the controversial film
Good Time Girl
(1948) (photograph © Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Getty Images).

There was an attempt to reach some kind of accommodation. The Home Office wanted Gainsborough to portray the approved school in the film in a more sympathetic light. A letter to Mr Rank voiced a number of concerns, such as the harsh depiction of authority, and the out-of-date uniforms worn by the girls ‘which might have been seen many years ago in a reformatory' but were argued to have no resemblance to the clothes worn in
the schools of the 1940s.
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Some changes were made in response to these Home Office concerns. For instance, a short scene was inserted in which the school's headmistress comments on the difficulties of securing the right kind of teachers committed to working with difficult girls. But these changes failed to reassure many government officials, who thought the scenes in the film showing what went on in an approved school were so well acted and convincing that they might provoke great disquiet.
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The film told the story of Gwen Rawlings (played by Jean Kent) in the form of a morality tale, related by a female probation officer (Flora Robson) to a young girl (Lyla Lawrence, played by Diana Dors). Unhappy at home, Lyla was just beginning to go off the rails: ‘Why shouldn't I have a good time?' she asks petulantly. By the end of the film, the sad story of Gwen's descent into damnation has convinced her to reform. Finally released in the spring of 1948,
Good Time Girl
met with a mixed reception.
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Some felt that it glamorised vice. The
Daily Mail
's critic thundered against the film as ‘sordid', ‘vicious' and ‘loathsome'. The reviewer in the
Sunday Dispatch
alleged that it had made him vomit. Women's groups in Newcastle protested vehemently, insisting that ‘Girls should not see this film,' and asking, ‘Is it our desire to debauch our young people altogether, or do we really wish foreigners to think that this is the British way of life?'
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The
Evening Standard
was more phlegmatic: ‘Bad girl makes worse film,' announced its opinion column.
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‘The film has a MORAL,' announced the
Evening Standard
: