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GREAT BRITAIN: Harpies and Hussies

3 minute read
TIME

Home Secretary Sir John Anderson, a tight-lipped disciplinarian with a hard but twinkling eye, perfectly appreciates that the moderate whoopee requirements of Tommy Atkins on leave are all but irrepressible. Last week Sir John continued to maintain a firm laissez-faire stand toward London night life despite a great twittering of complaint from the shires that today night club “harpies and hussies” are again preying on the morals and emptying the purses of apple-cheeked subalterns as in 1914-18.

In flats deserted by wartime évacués from London, new clubs open almost every night. Sir John keeps an eye on them by means of occasional Scotland Yard “raids.” The polite British inspectors merely take down the names of patrons in little notebooks, but do not close the joint. In the House of Commons there is mildly derisive laughter whenever His Majesty’s Government is questioned about “blackout morals” and “harpy clubs” by such anxious moralists as Manchester Conservative E. L. Fleming, M. P. “I am worried about wicked women,” Mr. Fleming recently observed. “Britain’s young fighting men should be fit, not unfit.”

Scenting news. Fleet Street has sent reporters to interview London harpies, some of whom seem to have been upset by the twittering from the shires. At the Cabaret Club, the London Daily Express found “a great big, graceful, healthy girl,” Miss Eunice Allman, who explained that her work consists in “soothing bruised egos,” begged, “If you’re writing about us, don’t make us out to be the scum of the earth. We’re not so bad.” In general the press survey went far toward confirming Sir John Anderson’s evident feeling that there can be nothing very awful about even such ostentatiously “lowlife” dives as the Nut Club in Greek Street so long as its regular patrons continue to include such people as Mrs. Anthony Eden.

Because of Britain’s liquor-curbing early closing laws, extra-late London night life has for years been an affair of “bottle parties” —i.e., the guests either bring their own liquor, paying a stiff “corkage charge” or they leave advance orders at the club to have it sent in from wholesalers and “stored” until the guest arrives. The cheapest wine comes to $4 per bottle by this system, the cheapest whiskey $5. In the World War II bottle party boom, Mayfair clubs are now offering elaborate and sexy floor shows (see cuts), causing some wonder at London’s Picture Post’s observation that “the atmosphere is rather like that of a family party where the younger girls are in tearing spirits and occasionally do the splits or snatch a cigar from uncle’s mouth. Everyone is out to be as naughty as possible, but it is a very schoolboyish kind of naughtiness without much sign of the sinister or the vicious.”

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