Sex spies of SUBURBIA

They seduced girls in the cinema, peeked on canoodling couples — all in the name of official research. A new book tells the steamy story of the ...

‘I messed around with her. We did some kissing’

WALTER HOOD was strolling along Knowsley Street in Bolton’s town centre in the early spring of 1938 when a pretty girl caught his eye. ‘She looked at me hard so I t urned back and made her acquaintance,’ he recalled. Matters progressed at a rapid pace. ‘I asked her where she was going in the rain — “Oh! Just taking a stroll” — then she suggested we might go to the pictures.

‘She was about 20, dressed in cloche hat and a brown tweed coat, brown high heel shoes. We went to the Embassy.

‘When we went inside she went to the back seats. (In this picture house the seats at the back were for two.) Naturally, I followed. She sat quiet, for ten minutes, then I offered her a cigarette.’

‘She took off her hat . . . loosened her coat . . . took off her gloves — and took the cigarette.’

As Hood recorded — with a dispassionate meticulousness that, as we shall see, was no coincidence — he then took the opportunity to ask his new friend a few questions about the sort of films she liked. She didn’t like thrillers, she had confided, but she enjoyed films with good singing and something to laugh at — or a traditional love story.

They continued to talk about films until a wild-looking man came on the screen and this, Hood explained, ‘gave her an opportunity to appear afraid. She got hold of my hand and I put my left arm around her. She slightly lifted her right arm — so I put my hand around her breast.

‘I messed around. During the picture she let go of my hand and started to rub her hand up and down my thigh — I then began to feel the breasts of the girl with my now disengaged hand but she stopped my hand straying too far. We also did some kissing.’

After the show they had taken a bus together. It was still raining when they got off just before the terminus. ‘She took me to a shop doorway — with a streetlamp shining in,’ Hood recalled.

‘I tried to persuade her to move along to her home. “No” — she said, “I always stay here with a chap, at least for the first time.” She wanted to see me again. She was a pretty girl too . . .’

The wistful tone of Hood’s final words is, perhaps, telling. For this was not some innocent assignation that might blossom in to full-blown romance — indeed, Hood had picked up the girl under entirely false pretences.

He was, in fact, working under-cover on one of the most extraordi-nary social projects ever conducted in Britain — an attempt to observe and record the everyday lives of working-class people for posterity, down to the tiniest little details.

The meals they ate, the jobs they toiled at, the money they spent, the sex lives they enjoyed . . . all were to be investigated and faithfully chron-icled by an army of volunteers.

Indeed the only reason that Walter had enquired about the girl’s favourite films was because he planned to use her answers for a survey of cinema-going habits.

The project was the brainchild of a tall, dark-haired man in his mid-20s called Tom Harrisson. Brilliant, mercurial and charismatic, he’d won a place at Cambridge to study biology and zoology before drop-ping out to join an anthropological study of the cannibal population of Malekula, in the Pacific Ocean.

On his return to Britain in 1935 Harrisson had come to a startling conclusion that could be consid-ered as relevant now as it was then: that the country’s opinion-formers — its politicians, financiers and sections of the media — were completely out of touch with the l i ves and aspirations of t he common man.

With this in mind, he’d decided on a bold social experiment. He would try out his cannibal- watching techniques on a different group of ‘savages’ as alien to Britain’s ruling elite as the inhabitants of the South Seas: the working class of the industrial North of England.

Fired with evangelical zeal, Harris-son arrived in Bolton in the autumn of 1936 to launch his project.

Over the next three years, he and a team of volunteers made up predominantly of middle- class students, artists, writers and photo-graphers, went on to amass millions of words about the everyday lives of working people.

Conversations and behaviour in the street, in shops, in pubs, at dance halls and cinemas, in churches and chapels and in the cotton mills where they worked, were all faithfully noted and documented.

Harrisson hi mself was so disorganised about how his team’s findings were stored and filed that very f ew of t hem were ever published. But unorthodox and chaotic though his methods were, his study had a serious purpose.

Never before had ordinary people been asked what they thought about the issues of the day — the abdication crisis, for example, or the rise of fascism in Britain and abroad.

Most significantly of all, Harris-son’s Bolton experiment helped to launch Mass Observation — one of the defining social phenomena of Britain in the late Thirties.

A vast and ambitious investiga-tion into popular culture, it went to on to prove not only an extra-ordinary resource for the historians of the future, but an invaluable asset in the management of the Home Front as Britain faced its darkest hour. BELIEVING that the only way to observe the locals properly was to work alongside them, Harrisson signed up shortly after his arrival in Bolton for a job in a cotton mill earning 27 shillings (£1.35) a week.

The hours were l ong and punishing, and he was disturbed to discover that the wages didn’t provide even the basics for his fellow workers and their families, let alone luxuries. ‘It’s a life thrown away,’ another mill worker told him. ‘I wouldn’t put my lad into it.’

With the highlight of the day for most employees being the sound of the bell marking the end of their shift, how, wondered Harrisson, did Bolton’s residents let their hair down after a day of drudgery?

And, more particularly, what sort of love lives did they have?

With his customary determination and single- mindedness — and using methods that would be deemed entirely unacceptable today — he set his volunteers to find out. Humphrey Spender, the project’s celebrated photographer, was encouraged to travel on the top of double- decker buses and trams, as this was where couples ‘got up to no good’.

Other volunteers, meanwhile, were instructed by Harrisson to ‘dance with the local girls, and take them home afterwards and see how you get on’.

Responding to this outrageous tactic, one observer commented wryly: ‘Anthropologists were, apparently, relieved of certain moral restraints because this was the only way you could get to know people properly.’

In other words, if Harrisson’s directive were to be taken at face value, the researchers should not hesitate to sleep with the natives, and do so with a clear conscience.

The method met with only limited success, however, accord-ing to the same observer. ‘ The young women of Bolton were far too intelligent and sophisticated

to be taken in by any ploy of this kind,’ he added. But some of the research uncovered by the study might seem to suggest otherwise.

Frank Cawson, who was recruited to the project in the bitterly cold winter of 1938, described how Harrisson’s volunteers would join the courting couples who flocked to the warren of alleys running between Bolton’s terrace houses each day as dusk fell.

‘There were what you called the “backs”, a sort of alleyway which ran between the back doors of the houses to the road, and in which people made love,’ he recalled.

‘ Most of us were young and unmarried at the time, and I remember one chap, another observer, giving me a desperate account of how he was trying to make it with a local girl.

‘It was raining. There was a drop of water in the brim of his hat and he was terribly careful because he had to avoid jerking his hat so that the water might spill down her neck, which he thought would have a counterproductive effect.’

Researcher Walter Hood’s report on his seduction of the girl in the cinema revealed the extent to which he had taken Harrisson’s bizarre i nstructions to heart. Whether Hood ever saw her again is not recorded. But a poignant story told by Frank Cawson reveals the regrettable emotional and human cost of Harrisson’s unconventional methods.

Cawson had been delegated to observe the activities of the local Conservative party in the run-up to a election. ‘There was one awful circumstance where I thought one good way of getting information would be to chum up with a young girl worker,’ he said.

‘She was a terribly plain girl and I don’t know whether anybody had ever asked her out before. I asked her out and quizzed her about this and that. Then afterwards she discovered and was terribly upset and said: “You only asked me out for what you could get out of me.” ’

At the other end of the scale from the unfortunate and unattractive party worker, Harrisson issued detailed instructions to his volunteers to observe the activities of the town’s ‘whores’, both ‘amateur and professional’ in the local pubs. Eric Letchford, who was waas recruitedr by Harrisson after meeting him at an evening class, was able to oblige with a raft of information following a stay at the town’s Prince William hostelry.

‘I received some very interesting conversation during my visit there,’ he wrote. ‘I got in touch with a man who spends an average of six nights per week [there] and spends as much as a pound per week on drink for himself and lady friends. This man pointed out all the prostitutes as they came in and their methods of operation.

‘In the first place he gave me to understand that a great deal of jealousy was attached to this particular pub owing to the fact that where you find a dozen prostitutes in a particular place at one time they watch one another for stealing their clients. They also observe what clients their rivals pick up.

‘To give an instance of this he tells a story about himself and two prostitutes that attended there regularly and he says I always took the same one home and she often asked him why he did not take her pal home and he replied that he did not fancy her.’

Different types of prostitutes worked in the pub, the drinker had explained to Letchford. ‘He pointed out a mother and daughter and said: “There’s Ginger over there. You can do her on the doorstep for 2/6d.” When I asked him how much they usually charge he replied that there are types that will do it for a free drink. Those are the type who are married or receiving some income from elsewhere. Then there are those who manage to scrape enough together by backstreet methods, prices varying from two shillings to five shillings.

‘But the real professional type that take their clients home usually charge from ten shillings to any price according to what they think a client can pay.’

Letchford was no doubt proud of his extensive and successful research. Sometimes, however, the interviewees gave as good as they got, as a story from Harry Gordon, a local unemployed fitter, illustrates.

He had joined the observation project to help bridge the language barrier between the predominantly Southern researchers and their Lancashire subjects.

‘The best way for me to help was to go along with people and introduce the questions,’ he explained. ‘One thing that caused confusion was the fact that these fellows [the researchers] were very well dressed, in comparison to the rest of us. One young fella had a lovely suit on and he was also nice looking. So I approached this girl . . . and said, “Excuse me love. Would you mind answering a question or two?” and she said, “What’s it about?” I said, “This young fella wants to ask you, for instance, why you go to Blackpool always for your summer holidays. Then he’ll ask you some other questions after.”

‘And she said: “What I want him to do is to take me to the bloody pictures tonight, not to bother about Blackpool. That’s months and months away.” ’

Tom Harrisson once wrote: ‘Of course, if you really want to see how people live together you need flats with one-way ceilings and bugging. I’ve even invented a gadget which you can plug under a mattress to record sexual habits.’

Thankfully, there is no record that this invention was ever used. Even f or the eccentric, outrageous Harrisson, it might have been a step too far.

ADAPTED from Worktown by david Hall, to be published on August 13 by Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £20. © the View From the North Ltd, 2015. Offer price £16 (20 per cent discount) until August 15. Order at mailbookshop.co.uk, p&p is free on orders over £12.

‘Some women slept with you for a free drink’