COULD THE GULF STREAM REALLY HAVE BEEN RESPONSIBLE FOR FALMOUTH’S ‘FALLEN WOMEN AND GIRLS?’

I wrote last month (Feb 10) about the scale and public identification of prostitution in Falmouth in the Victorian era.  

 

I’m now reminded that the topic was still coming up for public discussion, if no longer with its practitioners so openly identified, by the time of the First World War (1914-18). 

 

With the vast influx of soldiers, Royal Naval and Merchant Navy personnel, “prostitution, never unknown in a port, was a cause for concern.”

 

So wrote John Pollock, in his book, FALMOUTH FOR INSTRUCTIONS – The Story Of Falmouth In The Great War.

 

A public meeting in Falmouth – year unspecified – resolved to employ a “trained worker in connection with preventative and rescue work among actual or potential fallen woman and girls” at a cost of £100 a year.

 

And at another public meeting, the Falmouth Social Welfare Association, formerly the Female Rescue Society, was addressed by a Miss Hudson, who reportedly said: “It would be misleading for me even to imply that we have in Falmouth none of the colossal evils found in other places.  

 

“If you take the hand-to-mouth people of Falmouth with a number of the hand-to-mouth population of the east of London, you would find as much depravity, immorality, degradation and squalor in their town as would be found in the city.”

 

Somewhat bizarrely, as John Pollock noted, Miss Hudson said there was a feeling that this was due to “climatic reasons;” she had heard “a very great deal of the cause put down to the Gulf Stream.”

 

John added: “She seemed on somewhat stronger ground when she said that it might be due to the fact that Falmouth was a port and a railway terminus, together with poor and insanitary housing.

 

“With regard to the streets of Falmouth, all she had seen were a few giddy, loud girls making themselves cheap, but, watch as carefully as she could, she did not see the professional element about.”

 

But Miss Hudson also ventured to suggest that, with Falmouth being a port in which so many nationalities mingled, “certain conduct is carried on under the surface, hidden under the cloak of so-called respectability, by married and single women and girls.

 

“It crops up in most unlooked-for quarters, and is carried on under the guise of friendship, friendly calls, and some people condone it and connive at it.”

 

What were needed, declared Miss Hudson, were “clean-souled, public-spirited men and women of the town insisting on one moral standard, and a centre house where the fallen women can be looked after, medically and morally.”