Alec Marsh writes about the licensed brothels used by British troops in France during the First World War. They’re part of the background to his new novel, Cut and Run.
One of the surprising and little known things about the Great War was the involvement, to a degree at least, of the British state in facilitating the sexual needs of British servicemen in France. This was achieved through the so-called Blue and Red Lamps, official or licensed brothels distinguished by the lights they displayed.
Where the Blue Lamp catered for British Army officers, the Red Lamp was for rank and file soldiers. Both were officially sanctioned – after all, when you’ve got tens of thousands of men stationed in a given area, most of whom were facing the prospect of death, meeting one of their fundamental human wants was the least you can do. By 1917 there were 137 so-called maisons de tolérances in some 35 French towns along the Western Front.
As Robert Graves pointed out in his autobiography, Goodbye to All That, young men on the front lines wanted to embrace life while they had it, and they quite reasonably did not want to die virgins, either. “There were no restraints in France,” he wrote. “These boys had money to spend and knew that they stood a good chance of being killed within a few weeks anyhow.”
Graves, who was stationed in Béthune, where my new novel, Cut and Run, is set, wrote: “The Red Lamp, the army brothel, was around the corner in the main street. I had seen a queue of a hundred and fifty men waiting outside the door, each to have his short turn with one of the three women in the house.
“My servant, who had stood in the queue, told me that the charge was ten francs a man – about eight shillings at that time. Each woman served nearly a battalion of men every week for as long as she lasted. According to the assistant provost-marshal, three weeks was the usual limit: after which she retired on her earnings, pale but proud.”
A day before the Battle of Loos in September 1915, one Private Richards saw “three hundred men in a queue, all waiting their turns to go in the Red Lamp” in Béthune. Another solider, who like many would doubtlessly never have considered visiting a brothel back home, compared the scene outside the Red Lamp to “a crowd, waiting for a cup tie at a football final in Blighty”. Another British soldier, Lieutenant James Butlin, noted: “Rouen has been ruinous to my purse (not to mention my morals). But I have enjoyed myself.”
Which was something. One Lieutenant Dixon remembered: “We were not monks, but fighting soldiers and extraordinarily fit, fitter than we had been in our young lives, and fairly tough – certainly with an abundance of physical energy. If bought love is no substitute for the real thing, it at any rate seemed better than nothing. And in any case it worked off steam!”
He added that “the business was compartmentalised – it was, as it were, shut off from normal human relationships, and belonged to this lunatic world of war and to nowhere else.”
Against this backdrop it will come as no surprise to discover venereal disease (VD, sexually transmitted disease) became rife. Indeed one in six British soldiers in hospital were there because of it. In all VD caused the hospital admission of an astonishing 416,891 British and Commonwealth soldiers between 1914-1918.
“During the war, at least a division was constantly out of action because so many troops had to treat VD,” declared one writer. Dedicated VD hospitals were set up and officers carried out inspections of troops – so-called ‘dangle parades’ – to ensure the absence of disease. Those infected could face having their pay docked for 12 weeks, while the treatments themselves were pretty horrific.
Mark Harrison, writing in Medical History, quoted a paper from the Lancet which describes a therapy for gonorrhoea: “he [the patient] is placed lying on his back on a table, with his legs apart… The glans and prepuce are thoroughly cleansed, the douche-canis raised about two feet above the patient’s pelvis, an assistant turns the stop cock, and a gentle stream of the irrigating solution is allowed to flow… The surgeon then inserts the nozzle… into the urinary meatus, and the anterior urethra is thoroughly washed out … By means of percussion and by heeding the patient’s sensations one can tell when the bladder is full.”
In addition to being subjected to this or mercury treatments, there were daily visits of the Army padre to lecture you on the morality of abstinence, and of course your pay could be stopped (the army stopped notifying family of hospitalisation owning to VD after a major committed suicide). Yet for a minority, all of the above was preferable to being killed in the trenches.
As the rate of venereal disease continued to rise and deplete British ranks it was decided that something should be done. The official response was mired in the prejudices of the time.
First there were attempts to redouble efforts to encourage soldierly abstinence: troops were subject to hundreds of lectures though they were did about as much good as Lord Kitchener’s famous exhortation to soldiers in the Active Service Paybooks of the British Expeditionary Force in 1914.
“Keep constantly on your guard against any excesses,” he warned troops. “In this new experience you may find temptations both in wine and women. You must entirely resist both temptations and while treating women with perfect courtesy, you should avoid any intimacy.”
As well as Victorian calls for purity, underpinned by the ‘muscular’ Christianity of men like General Gordon and campaigns against vice, there was also a pragmatic acceptance by many in the army that this sort of thing was inevitable. They regarded control and medicalisation as the answer – hence the decision to follow the path of licensed brothels in France the first place.
However remedies – available to soldiers in other armies – were denied British soldiers because of the arguments of the churches and morality campaigners who said that issuing personal prophylactics (ointments that soldiers would use themselves post-coitally to reduce the chance of infection) would encourage immoral behaviour.
Eventually the numbers took their toll and against fears that it would lead to the moral collapse of the empire, the pragmatists began to win.
In 1916 disinfecting stations were set up for troops to use within 24 hours of sexual intercourse, and then in 1918 some 130,000 prophylactic treatments – tubes containing potassium permanganate which could be used after sex to reduce the change of infection among soldiers – were issued to troops in the UK and later to overseas units.
It is a fascinating question just how many men – Victorians, for the most part, don’t forget – who enjoyed the relaxed sexual freedoms that came with the war. There were four million men in uniform by 1918 – but over the course of the war it’s estimated that some six million served in all.
As well as the documentary evidence of those there like Robert Graves, we have the official records of more than 400,000 cases of VD, which together gives us an indication, but it’s hardly the full story. After all some 900,000 British servicemen would die in the war and many of them might well have been infected, knowingly or not.
What we can assume with confidence is that each month during the Great War tens of thousands of British servicemen would have been trooping along to one of the 137 Blue or Red Lamp brothels in France, spurred on by the proximity of imminent death and the opportunity of hitherto unavailable sexual freedom.
Cut and Run by Alec Marsh was published on 15 November, 2024. It’s the first of his Frank Champion thrillers.
You may enjoy Alec’s other Historia features:
Black Elk, Lakota Sioux holy man, warrior, survivor
It’s time to remember Ganga Singh: maharaja, reformer, statesman
Other related features include:
A Guide to Victorian Sex by William Sutton
Parting fools from their money in the brothels and gaming houses of the 1600s by KJ Maitland
Merkins and masochists: a brief history of sex by Jemahl Evans
Damned Souls: an aristocratic Victorian scandal by Jane Dismore
PT Barnum and the Circassian girl by RN Morris
Sex in Ancient Rome by LJ Trafford
And The liberation of Naples in 1943 – and its dire consequences by Keith Lowe examines several similar issues, this time in Italy in the Second World War.
Images:
- Un coin du vieux Marseille — la rue Bouterie, postcard, 1919: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Men from a battalion of the 55th Division marching through Bethune on their way back from the trenches for rest, April 1918: © IWM (Q 342) (non-commercial licence)
- The Brothel by Vincent Van Gogh, 1888: Barnes Foundation via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Booklet, A cause of Military Inefficiency, on venereal disease, issued to First World War troops: Science Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
- Mercury Ointment from Ship’s Medicine Chest, from an Aberdeen Trawler wrecked on Hoy, early 20th century: Aberdeen Archives, Gallery & Museums (CC0)
- The Sport Tournament organised at St. Andre, 15 June 1918, another way of working off troops’ energy: © IWM (Q 6704) (non-commercial licence)
