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“Sex
and the British Sailor”
Christopher McKee, Librarian of the College, spoke on his
most recent research in “Want a Short Time, Jack? Sex and
the British Sailor, 1900-1945” December 1, 1999.
In his introductory remarks, Mr. McKee explained that most
studies of sailors are undertaken from the point of view of officers
or reformers. His own work, in contrast, was an effort to “get
inside the heads” of British sailors. He did so by relying
on an extensive corpus of oral histories taken from sailors who
had served in the British navy during the first half of the twentieth
century.
According to these interviews, sailors were “obsessed
with women and sex.” Sex pervaded conversations and songs,
and the ex-sailors reminisced about where they would go to meet
women, and the sorts of women that they met. McKee reports that
sailors on shore in England found women in pubs and dance halls.
As one ex-sailor put it, “Drink and women, that’s the
downfall of the sailor.”
While the sailors’ accounts tended to divide women into
two classes, “nice girls” and those who were not “nice,”
their reminisces suggest that the women they met, danced with,
and had sex with did not always fall into such neat categories.
Marriage to a sailor—and access to his monetary allotment—
might elevate a “not-nice” girl into respectability.
Some “not-nice” girls turned out to be upper class,
perhaps slumming it for political or social reasons, as was the
case with one “suffragette” who carried on a long affair
with a sailor. Sailors also came to think of some of prostitutes
and other women in the dance halls and pubs as “good women,”
decent sorts who would look out for a sailor in trouble.
McKee concluded that these oral histories are immensely rich,
but one-sided: “There are no voices of the women.”
In the following question and answer period, Mr. McKee noted
that sources exist for learning something about some of the women,
but that they are problematic and outside the scope of the current
project. - Marci Sortor |
