Amidst the carnage that characterised life on the Western Front, soldiers on leave would seek out whatever pleasure they could. During the bloodiest phase of the First World War, the average lifespan of a British junior officer was just six weeks. Over the course of the war, more than one in ten British soldiers who signed up (or was conscripted) to serve in France and Flanders would never return home.
Daily facing such existential threat clearly stimulated sexual urges among the war’s combatants. Yet the extent to which French brothels (or maisons tolérées) were set up to service the needs of British servicemen really is quite staggering.
At least 137 establishments, catering for 35 towns across Northern France, were in operation by 1917. Business in these places boomed; the brothels frequented by a steady stream of clientele on rotation from the front lines to the reserve lines to postings in towns and villages a few miles behind the trenches. As one commentator remarked, apart from the distant roar of artillery fire, being stationed in one of these towns in villages you wouldn’t have known there was a war on at all.
These settlements were conspicuous for their lack of young and middle-aged Frenchmen, who had been deployed to other locations across the Western Front in a bid to hold back the German tide. Into this void stepped the British. Anecdotes about British Tommies hitting it off with local girls abound in histories of the First World War: one anonymous veteran would even brag about how he made love to a French girl the moment he disembarked from his train on the grass verge that substituted for a station.
Should we believe his boasts, the same soldier was later billeted with an old Frenchman and his beautiful granddaughter. Every morning he claimed that the granddaughter would offer him coffee in bed before climbing in beside him: all to the blissful ignorance of her grandfather.
Not all Tommies shared his Casanovan qualities, but for those unable to charm their way into the local culture there was always the paying alternative. Testament to how popular this alternative was is that in the space of just a year, one brothel-lined street attracted a staggering 171,000 customers.
According to eyewitness accounts, maisons tolérées were instantly recognisable, not just from their signage—a red lamp in the case of the eponymous “Red Lamp” in the village of Béthune—but from the crowds of soldiers queuing up outside.
The scene was described by the aptly named Jack Wood, a fresh arrival on the Western Front. Even trench warfare couldn’t numb young Wood to the surprise of seeing such a long queue outside the establishment, which he likened to a scene from a football match back in Old Blighty.
Conditions inside the brothel were no less cramped. After making it through the doors and paying the one franc admission fee, the men would crowd around inside a small café, little more spacious than their bunkers in the trenches. The difference, of course, was that the booze was flowing and they would be in the company of women willing to take them to one of the rooms upstairs (for the fee of a further five francs).
Yet even shelling out the equivalent of a week’s wages didn’t guarantee instant gratification; contemporary accounts describe men sitting on every step leading upstairs waiting for their turn.
As you might expect, life on the Western Front brought with it no shortage of first-time experiences. Not all of them, however, were necessarily scarring.
For Private William Roworth, it was during his time stationed in Northern France that he popped his cherry. He was a young lad; just 15 when he signed up, three years under the official recruiting age. Indeed, the fact that he was just a teenager when he lost his virginity shines through as clear as day in his Wordsworthian diary entry describing the deed:
“It was like pulling your thing, but you have someone to talk to.”
But while Roworth may have left disappointed, Lieutenant R. Graham Dixon had no such complaints. He saw these brothels as a necessary outlet for the excess physical energy of British soldiers; a view shared by a contemporary parliamentarian who addressed the House of Commons with the words, “continence is neither impossible nor harmful”. In fact, Dixon had a favourite brothel to which he would regularly return during his time in Dunkirk, not least because it was home to whom Dixon affectionately described as a “black-eyed, black-haired wench”.
We can all agree that Dixon was no Byron, but he was at least forthcoming in his praise for her professional expertise. Reflecting on his rapturous encounter with this lady of the night, he described her as a woman “whose enthusiasm was quite adequate and whose skill, likewise”.
Dixon doesn’t specify where the rendezvous with this “black-eyes, black-haired wench” took place, but it was most likely a “blue lamp” brothel. Unlike the “red lamp” brothels of the rank-and-file, blue lamps were reserved exclusively for the officer class by secret edict of the British Army.
Though it wouldn’t have been necessary for Lieutenant “Lord Flashheart” Dixon, at least one blue lamp establishment offered its patrons an early form of Viagra. A private of the 10th Battalion Royal West Surrey Regiment, Fred Dixon—no relation to the Lieutenant Dixon—visited a brothel in a couple of teenage girls handed out pills intended to give, “additional power in our amorous exploits.”
Dixon’s colonel greedily gobbled up two, though how this affected his performance is unfortunately lost to the sands of time.
It didn’t take long for new arrivals to be inducted into this lifestyle. In his memoirs, a man who voluntarily swapped his place at Oxford University for a posting in the trenches, Lieutenant James Butlin, recalls some time he spent in the city of Rouen before returning to the front. He described Rouen as ruinous, not just to his purse but also to his morals. For talking to those who had seen the hellish scenes of no-man’s land, he quickly resolved that his life (precarious as it was) was to be enjoyed to the full.
The maisons tolérées weren’t only a temptation for young unmarried men. A contemporary observer noted that one particular queue outside the Red Lamp was formed not of young lads, but of older married men who were “missing their wives.”
This might seem shocking, given how we imagine the sensibilities of the time, but the British Army was all too willing to forgive such transgressions. There were even chaplains on hand, ready to cleanse the consciences of those who strayed from their marriage bed provided they stuck to licensed brothels and didn’t bring their sweetheart in Old Blighty back a cocktail of venereal disease.
It was for good reason the chaplains inveighed against venereal disease. In fact, the threat of contracting a venereal disease such as syphilis or gonorrhoea was serious enough that it warranted the attention of the British High Command.
Lord Kitchener—that quintessential moustached military man of the Victorian era—issued an educational leaflet in the soldiers’ first pay packet warning against the horrors of contracting something exotic. “In this new experience you may find temptations in both wine and women,” it sermonised. “You must entirely resist both”.
Of course, there was a vast gap between what was practised and what was preached. As one recruit, Private Richards, pointed out: “it may as well not been issued for all the notice we took.” Yet there was sound reasoning behind Kitchener’s propaganda that went beyond adhering to the traditional morals of the Victorian Age. As the war progressed and the horror became too much to handle, more and more men were being withdrawn from active duty because some venereal disease had rendered them unfit for service.
Most of the time, this was accidental, but not always.
In their desperation for some respite from the rat-filled trenches, some men would actively seek out the brothel’s disease-riddled prostitutes in the hope of catching something. It really is testament to how bad conditions in the trenches must have been if syphilis was preferable, especially given how rudimentary the treatment was at the time and how it only brought you a month in hospital. Still, one never knew when the call to go “over the top” might come.
The frequency with which British Tommies visited French brothels (maisons tolérées) during the First World War is easily explicable given the situation in which they found themselves. Routinely staring death in the face was a good enough incentive to embrace a carpe diem mentality and not invest too much thought in the future, notwithstanding the strict Victorian ethos of the time that shunned indulgent sexuality.
Many of the younger rank and file would have arrived as virgins in France, and even for the married men of the British Army the low-hanging fruits combined with the apparent certainty of their imminent death offered tempting pickings. This is not to judge the actions of these men. The exceptional nature of their circumstances makes it both impossible and inappropriate for us to do so. But it does give an all-new meaning to the old cliché: all is fair in love and war.
