Abstract
In this chapter, the threat of air raids in the build-up to the Second World War is explored. This led many in medicine and politics to anticipate ‘mass hysteria’ amongst the population on the Home Front, and left the Home Office Drugs Branch facing a new and somewhat unprecedented challenge: how to regulate morphine when the drug was widely and densely distributed across the social body, with many doctors advocating using the drug in a therapeutic capacity to guard against civilian panic. It alarmed a Drugs Branch staff accustomed to restricting access to opiates, and led to tensions with the Ministry of Health, which supported a broad relaxation of controls. Meanwhile, the new wartime proliferation of licit opiates offered opportunities to the addict population, who were quick to infiltrate the civil defence system with a view to accessing supplies. In this period, changes in the addict subculture begin to be apparent.
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Notes
- 1.
McAllister, Drug Diplomacy, p. 37.
- 2.
The International Opium Convention, article IX, in The American Journal of International Law, 6,3, Supplement: Official Documents, (1912), pp. 177–192.
- 3.
Berridge, ‘War Conditions and Narcotics Control’.
- 4.
The Single Convention was followed by the two further UN conventions that together form the basis of the global system, Convention on Psychotropic Substances, 1971 and the United Nations Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychoptropic Substances, 1988.
- 5.
Though the system may be coming under unprecedented pressure to change due to a complex set of recent developments. See D. R. Bewley-Taylor, International Drug Control: Consensus Fractured. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (2012). See also D. R. Bewley-Taylor, & M. Jelsma, (2012) Regime Change: Revisiting the 1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs International Journal of Drug Policy 23,1 (2012) pp. 72–81.
- 6.
A. W. McCoy, (2003) The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drugs Trade (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2003) and P. A. Chouvy, Opium: Uncovering the Politics of the Poppy (London: I.B. Taurus, 2009).
- 7.
S. R. Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
- 8.
HO 45/21172 ‘Relaxation of regulations to allow administration of morphine by approved persons in war emergency conditions. Control and storage of drugs at wartime first aid posts and in factories under government administration.’ (1938–1947); MH 76/83 ‘Equipment; storage of dangerous drugs 1939–1945.’
- 9.
TNA HO 45/21172, Thornton to Harris 18 April 41.
- 10.
TNA HO 45/24948, Drugs Branch Annual Report for 1941.
- 11.
During the 1930s, its optimum staffing level consisted of four inspectors, a staff officer and several clerical and administrative staff. In the advent of war, Chief Inspector William Coles was himself transferred to the Ministry of Labour and National Service, although he continued to take an interest in drugs affairs and gave advice when necessary. Boothroyd, another inspector, was called up for national service, leaving Frank Thornton and John Sloane, and the latter was, for reasons which remain unclear, ‘summarily dismissed’ in January 1941. The Branch was able to recruit a very able new inspector in the form of Len Dyke, who had, in the late 1930s, been the leading expert drugs officer at Scotland Yard, though he was unable to take up the Drugs Branch post until April 1941. This left Thornton as the sole member of Britain’s Home Office Drugs Branch for a period of three months.
- 12.
HO 45/24948, Home Office Drugs Branch, Annual Report 1941.
- 13.
MH 76/83, Thornton to Neville, 26 April 1941.
- 14.
R. M. Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
- 15.
G. Rivett, The Development of the London Hospital System, 1823–1982 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
- 16.
‘Air Raid Casualty Services’, British Medical Journal 2,4168 (1940) pp. 716–7. Later, these were supplemented by light units consisting of a car carrying a doctor and nurse.
- 17.
R. Mackay, Half the Battle: Civilian Morale in Britain During the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) p. 31.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
Berridge, Opium and the People, pp. 258–278.
- 20.
Hansard, 30.11.1938 p. 511 Fremantle also reminded the House that ‘that in an air raid you might not only have numbers of the civil population wounded, but you might have a large number of medical cases among the civil population—cases of nervous breakdown, hysteria, mania, and mental cases—with which it would be very difficult to deal’.
- 21.
TNA HO 45/21172, Thornton to Harris 18 April 1941.
- 22.
Mackay, Half the Battle, pp. 31–38.
- 23.
HO 45/25377, ‘Administration of morphine to air raid casualties’; memorandum by Thornton, 25 April 1951. In this note, Thornton confirms (in the course of a discussion of postwar requests to produce legislation permitting the use of morphine by civil defence staff) the fact that no other drugs legislation was introduced during the Second World War.
- 24.
TNA HO 45/19807, Dangerous Drugs (Hospital General Exemption) (Amendment) Order (1939).
- 25.
TNA HO 45/19807, Drugs to be ordered by LCC under Emergency Hospital Scheme, n.d.
- 26.
TNA HO 45/19807, Cover notes by Major Coles.
- 27.
TNA HO 45/21172, Thornton to Coles, 19 April 1939.
- 28.
TNA HO 45/21172, Drugs Branch to Logan, Ministry of Health, 25 April 1939.
- 29.
P. Hamill, ‘Morphine Injection at First Aid Posts’ Lancet 233,6038 (1939) pp. 1139–1192. See also British Medical Journal 1,4089 (1939) p. 1054.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
TNA HO 45/21172, Memo ‘First Aid Posts’ 09 November 1939.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
TNA HO 45/21172, Ministry of Health circular ‘Storage of Dangerous Drugs at First Aid Posts’ 05 January 1940.
- 35.
Ibid.
- 36.
TNA HO 45/21172, Thornton to Mackenzie 30 January 1940.
- 37.
TNA HO 45/21172, Fraser to Thornton, 24 March 1941.
- 38.
TNA MH 76/83, Bearn to Harris, 21 July 1941.
- 39.
TNA HO 45/21172, Thornton to Symon 21 December 1939.
- 40.
Omnopon was a medicine containing morphine and several other opiates.
- 41.
TNA HO 45/21172, CID Memo 01 May 1940.
- 42.
Ibid.
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
Ibid.
- 45.
Ibid.
- 46.
Ibid.
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
Ibid.
- 49.
G. Swanson, Drunk with the Glitter: Space, consumption and sexual instability in modern urban culture (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2007) pp. 15–26.
- 50.
TNA HO 45/21172. Memo re. Dr Charles White, 05 March 1940.
- 51.
Ibid.
- 52.
TNA HO 45/21172, Thornton to Mackenzie 08 January 1940.
- 53.
TNA HO 45/21172, Thornton to Harris 18 April 1941.
- 54.
TNA MEPO 3/2579, CID Memo, 15 October 1941.
- 55.
B. Nixon, Raiders Overhead: A Diary of the London Blitz (London: Scolar Press, 1980) p. 82.
- 56.
An account of bohemian life in frontline London may be found in R. Hewison, Under Siege: Literary Life in London 1939–1945 (Newton Abbott: Readers Union, 1978).
- 57.
Daily Mirror, 7 September 1943, p. 1.
- 58.
While Maud Brown is a name that has not been encountered previously in this research, it is possible that there may have been a linkage with Brenda Dean Paul, who had lived in Jersey for some months in late 1938. In such a restricted geographical and social setting, a shared interest in opiates may well have drawn the two women together, particularly since Paul was a figure of such notoriety. However, the connection remains purely speculative at this stage.
- 59.
TNA HO 144/20168 gives full account of Maxwell’s addict career. See also British Medical Journal, 2,3961, Supplement to the General Medical Council, 5 December 1936.
- 60.
HO 144/20168, The ‘Munro’ mentioned in connection with the employment of Dr Munro is Sir David Munro, Senior Medical Officer to the Ministry of Supply during the Second World War.
- 61.
TNA HO 45/21172, Thornton to Harris 01 August 1941.
- 62.
According to painter Michael Wishart, who visited the nightclub scene as a teenager during the early war years, ‘These clubs were about the only places where it was easy to buy marijuana, decades before it became the stock- in-trade of a generation.’ See M. Wishart, High Diver: An Autobiography (London: Quartet, 1978) p. 24.
- 63.
This can be seen in the attitudes to the use of marijuana on display in the classic 1944 film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, A Canterbury Tale.
- 64.
J. Fordham, Let’s Join Hands and Contact the Living: Ronnie Scott and His Club (London: Elm Tree Books, 1986) pp. 13–14. For the use of stimulants amongst the commercial sex workers of Soho in the 1940s, see also B. Tate, West End Girls: The real lives, loves and friendship of 1940s Soho and its working girls (London: Orion Books, 2010).
- 65.
A Member of the Community of St Mary the Virgin, ‘The Moral, Mental and Physical Background of Female Inebriates’ British Journal of Inebriety 42,1 (1944) pp. 3–20.
- 66.
TNA MH 76/83, Note from Neville to Fraser 05 March 1941.
- 67.
TNA HO 45/21172, Bearn to Harris 21 July 1941.
- 68.
J. Gardiner, Wartime: Britain 1939–1945 (London: Headline, 2004) p. 412.
- 69.
TNA HO 45/21172, Memorandum by Thornton, 19 August 1941.
- 70.
TNA HO 45/21172, Fraser to Thornton, 24 March 1941.
- 71.
TNA HO 45/21172, Bearn to Harris 21 July 1941.
- 72.
TNA MH 76/83, Bearn to Harris 21 July 1941.
- 73.
TNA MH 76/83, London Civil Defence Region Memo, 08 August 1941.
- 74.
TNA HO 45/21172, Thornton memo 20 May 1941.
- 75.
M. Donnelly, Britain in the Second World War (London: Routledge, 1999).
- 76.
TNA MH 76/83, Dr Clegg to Ministry of Health 19.06.1941. Dr Hollins was medical officer of the 22nd Battalion, Home Guard. He visited all the First Aid Posts in his area to advise them to buy morphine, at their own expense; he also wrote to District Nurses instructing them to administer morphine to casualties on their own initiative.
- 77.
TNA MH 76/83, Maitland Radford to Air Raid Precautions Emergency Committee, 12 September 1940.
- 78.
TNA MH 76/83, Ministry of Health to St Pancras Town Hall, October 1940.
- 79.
TNA MH 76/83, Morphine for District Nurses, 26 December 1941.
- 80.
Ibid.
- 81.
TNA HO 45/21172, ‘Distribution and use of morphine in invasion’ 10 February 1942.
- 82.
TNA MH 76/83, Anderson to Neville, 18 February 1942.
- 83.
TNA HO 45/21172, Thornton to Harris, undated (851,312/55). Emphasis added.
- 84.
TNA HO 45/21172, Thornton to Harris 17 February 1942.
- 85.
Ibid.
- 86.
For example, Thornton’s assurance that: ‘…the administration by of morphine by the nurse in the absence of the doctor and without his instructions would be irregular…in such circumstances…the Home Office would certainly raise no objection whatever to the administration by the nurse’. TNA HO 45/21172, Memo by Thornton, 19 August 1941.
- 87.
TNA MH 76/83, EH Circular 70/43, 16 August 1943.
- 88.
S. O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain 1939–45 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
- 89.
F. Steegmuller, Cocteau: A Biography (London: Constable, 1986) p. 436.
- 90.
Times 3 July 1939, p. 11; Daily Mirror 8 July 1939, p. 4; Daily Express 8 July 1939, p. 7.
- 91.
Addicts seem to have been linked by reputation with the entire class of wartime undesirables—spivs, deserters, the wide classes, those who lived in ‘funkholes’ or hotels used as unofficial sanctuaries for individuals who were not inclined to national service and so on.
- 92.
TNA MEPO 3/2579, Return of Convictions recorded against Brenda Dean Paul, 17 November 1952.
- 93.
TNA MEPO 3/2579, CID Memo 12 May 1944.
- 94.
TNA HO 45/21934, Memorandum, A. L. Dyke 12 December 1947. This case was one in which military surplus lifeboats had been sold off to the public. Later it was discovered that the first aid kits these vessels carried were complete and included a quantity of morphine intended for maritime emergency.
- 95.
TNA HO 45/23161, Memo, Gloucestershire Constabulary 6 July 1948.
- 96.
TNA MEPO 3/2954, Annual Report of HMG to the League of Nations for 1952.
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Hallam, C. (2018). Morphine and Morale: The British System and the Second World War. In: White Drug Cultures and Regulation in London, 1916–1960. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94770-9_7
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