A particular focus of the project is to investigate the involvement of military and naval personnel in everyday offending  to ascertain what evidence there is of soldiers and sailors creating crime problems amongst the civilian population, especially those associated with immoral conduct such as drink related disorder and prostitution, and how service transgressors were subsequently dealt with. Particularly problematic was the area around Union Street and The Octagon, world famous among sailors for the number of public houses in the locality and associated drunken disorder and immorality.

Beerhouses and Brothels

The Beerhouse Act 1830 aimed to control working class drunkenness and immorality  by restricting the consumption of gin in favour of the more ‘healthy’ alternative: beer.  Licences became much easier to secure. Typically beerhouses were no more than a front room in a house; others were the whole house, including a couple of drinking parlours where men could sit and drink, gossip, smoke and play games (or, illegally, gamble). Sailors without families often used them for cheap lodgings, where they could also get a hot meal as well as cheap beer. But increasingly, they were also the preferred lodgings for women engaged in prostitution  who rented shared rooms for their businesses in collusion with the beershop landlady or landlord (as women did the brewing, it was often a landlady holding the licence).

Many prostitutes were itinerant moving from place to another when the authorities started to crackdown. The Devon and Cornwall ‘circuit’ took in Devonport ,Plymouth, Exeter and  Falmouth.  A sense of the weariness of the magistrates in dealing with these women is evident from this report in Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, 28 June 1849:

Mary Ann Glover and Mary Ann Hunt, both young and abandoned females, one from Devonport and the other from Kingsbridge or its neighbourhood, were brought before the Exeter magistrates by Mr John Shears, an officer of the Corporation of the Poor, to whom they had made application as being destitute. ‘These parties have been over and over again imprisoned, both in city and county but to no avail – and it was thought that under promise they would leave the place they had been relieved in Exeter from ten to a dozen times. Repeating this promise once more they were tried once more – relieved and sent out of the city.’

In the mid-nineteenth century the number of brothels in Plymouth prompted concern from ratepayers and the local gentry about the perceived scale of such ‘immoral practices’. In 1863 there were 154 brothels in the Plymouth area which led to regular crackdowns by the police and magistracy to control activities by arresting and prosecuting the owners and landlords of licensed premises and lodging houses. In 1865 it was estimated that over 100 ‘girls of ill- fame’ were working in the Fore Street and George Street areas in Stonehouse where between 2-3,000 soldiers were lodged in the immediate vicinity. The Stonehouse Police Superintendent successfully prosecuted a number of beerhouse keepers who were convicted for permitting prostitutes to frequent their premises. The Chairman of the Bench of Stonehouse Police Court commented that ‘We look upon your occupation with the most profound and unmitigated disgust, for the consequence on the morals and health of the town is to fearful to contemplate’ (The Royal Cornwall Gazette, 14 December 1865).

At the Devonport Quarter Sessions in October 1885, Ann Martin,  proprietor of the Raglan Arms beerhouse,  appealed against the revocation of her licence by the Devonport Bench, on the grounds  she had long presided over a ‘habitual resort of prostitutes and thieves’. The Commanding Colonel of the nearby Raglan Barracks had for two decades  ‘ordered a special patrol outside her house from 9.30 to 10 nightly in consequence of the way the place was conducted’. Ann Martin herself had convictions for receiving stolen goods  and had had the licence endorsed previously. The appeal was rejected.

Numbers of women, especially in  Devonport, married or co-habiting with sailors in the Royal Navy were vulnerable to dipping in and out of prostitution when their menfolk were away at sea to get money for rent and other costs, or because they were lonely and bored. While such behaviour seems to have been tacitly accepted amongst their own community (so long as they did not produce a child to foist on a returning sailor who could not have fathered the baby), Devonport’s respectable inhabitants deeply disapproved – especially as street prostitution (halfpenny and penny whores, in the terminology of the day) was more visible after brothels became illegal in 1885, meaning they could no longer resort to the beershops for their trade.  Image right from the Naval Brigade News Dec 1886 (c) British Library Board.

The Contagious Diseases Acts 1864-69

In addition to the Three Towns’ police forces, the Metropolitan police also policed the Dockyard from 1860. Although their duty for the most part involved tracking AWOL servicemen and policing the river, more controversially, they also came into frequent contact with the public when using their powers under the Contagious Diseases Acts 1864-69. The Contagious Diseases Acts were introduced as a response to the ‘social evil’ of prostitution and the belief that these women spread venereal diseases, such as syphilis, through contact with men from the Navy. The aim was to try and stop the excess of immorality in Naval towns and indirectly improve the health of sailors and soldiers by controlling prostitution through the arrest and detention of ‘infected’ women. Initially the Acts only covered Plymouth and Devonport, not Stonehouse where the Royal Marines were based.

The CDAs gave power to the police to arrest anyone they believed to be a prostitute and subject them to invasive and brutal tests for venereal disease and also to send them to secure hospitals. In Plymouth and Devonport this was conducted by the Metropolitan Police whose insensitive and indiscriminate practice seemed to make little distinction between prostitutes and the poor. The particularly unsympathetic Inspector Silas Anniss was reported to have received between 70-80 women a day in the examination room. (M. Partridge, (2013) Policing in Plymouth, Devonport and Stonehouse, 1835-1886, unpublished MRes Thesis, Plymouth University, p. 76)  By 1870 there were still 139 brothels in Plymouth despite the enactments. The first two women in Plymouth to be convicted by the Plymouth magistrates for failing to comply with the requirements under the Acts were Lucy Hunter and Florence Rugg, who were given seven and 14 days respectively: ‘These are the first convictions of the kind in Plymouth’. (Royal Cornwall Gazette, 29 Jan 1870). In 1872 the Town Clerk noted that Union Street was unhealthy ‘ its level being as low as the sea and its inhabitants lower still.’ In 1888 it was estimated that 162 of every 1,000 sailors nationally had contracted a venereal disease, mainly syphilis (The Lancet, 22 February 1890).Seen as a threat to national security as many soldiers and sailors contracted gonorrhoea, the authorities’ response clearly blamed and punished women for the sexual conduct of the men.

Policing Immorality

While the Acts were popular with Plymouth magistrates (but not so much with Devonport magistrates) the police were less enthusiastic, for example, when testifying to the Home Office in 1882 Plymouth Chief Constable Wreford criticised their usefulness.  In the 1880s, Wreford regularly charged landlords for allowing prostitutes to habitually visit licensed premises and remain longer than was justifiably necessary for drink and refreshment but initially such prosecutions made little difference. The Plymouth magistrates only imposed small fines and were reluctant to revoke a publican’s licence even where there was strong evidence that groups of prostitutes would regularly gather, meaning there was no effective sanction on landlords or brewery owners to curb prostitution. From 1885,  the Criminal Law Amendment Act made brothels illegal but beerhouses still welcomed streetwalkers to enter and ply their trade. Plymouth’s Chief Constable Sowerby described Union Street as  the ‘most difficult street in Plymouth to manage’. He ordered his constables to be proactive filling the magistrates and petty sessions’ registers with lists of offenders charged with minor offences such as drunk and disorderly, drunk and incapable, using profane and obscene language, keeping disorderly houses and harbouring prostitutes. He also regularly visited the premises of every licensed trader in Plymouth instigating proceedings against many of them for unlawfully permitting drunkenness, opening premises during prohibited hours, permitting them to be used as an improper house, and harbouring thieves and prostitutes.

Sowerby instigated 79 proceedings against licensees for unlawfully permitting drunkenness, opening premises during prohibited hours and permitting them to be used as an improper house, harbouring thieves and prostitutes. The magistrates closed 60 public houses as a result with few licensees winning any appeals at the Quarter Sessions. And the reason why Sowerby conducted the inspections himself? Licensees were harbouring and supplying liquor to police constables on duty. When giving evidence to the 1897 Royal Commission on Liquor Licensing Laws he said: ‘I do not entirely trust to the men I have the honour to command, to get my information. I visit the houses myself, personally, night and day, and I have done so the whole time I have been there’ (Royal Commission on Liquor Licensing Laws [1897] c.8523 p.215).