An Unworthy Man?

Edge Hill's Department of English and History has a number of leading guest speakers visiting this semester, and so it was with great pleasure that staff and students recently welcomed Professor Clive Emsley to discuss his paper ‘The biggest thieves in the world'? British service personnel during two world wars.

Clive, who has been a professor with the Open University since 1970, has in recent years dedicated his research primarily to the history of crime and policing.

Professor Emsley began the session by examining the significant statistic that most British service personnel are men aged from eighteen through to their late twenties, which is roughly the same age as the most criminogenic part of our population.

Looking back at the two world wars, Professor Emsley mapped British military crime levels with those of the general population, identifying a ‘traditional' trend that crime decreases at the beginning of conflict, but increases at the end of war. Yet during World War II however, the qualitative and quantitative evidence contradicts this and shows that crime actually rose during this period, which may be due to the fact that many men remained in Britain during their active service, and were not displaced to France and Belgium as in World War I.

Throughout both wars operating servicemen were tried by court-martial rather than by facing civilian courts, with service discipline being enforced by the Army Act of 1881. Few records have been preserved in the national archive but court-martial convictions included absence without leave, desertion, striking a superior, threatening or insubordinate language, theft and drunkenness.

By recalling first-hand accounts about these ‘unworthy men' it becomes difficult to determine if they had been offenders prior to wartime or whether it was their experiences that had turned them into criminals.

It was often the case that the ordinary young men who served in the military had come from poor backgrounds and they found that the war suddenly provided them with many opportunities. They were faced with decisions as to whether to send items around them, such as food and blankets, home to their families, or to earn extra money by selling these goods on the black market. Some even established illegal trade in petrol and ammunition with other allied troops.

Clive concluded by discussing to what extent the trauma of war impacted on the behaviour of these men after the conflict was over, with many using a ‘shell shock defence' or other such variants to give them an alibi in court. It was found that magistrates, judges and juries often used their ‘discretion' during a trial to acquit people of even the most serious of crimes.

Even today it is evident that the legacy of war still influences not just the individuals involved but our society as a whole, with an interesting statistic being that there are 9,000 British service personnel at the moment stationed in Afghanistan while over 8,000 ex-servicemen are currently serving a prison sentence here.