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 a further five francs of course…) Yet even shelling out the equivalent of a week’s wages didn’t bring them 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. And the fact he was just a teenager when he lost his virginity shines through as clear as day in his 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 romantically 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 encountered 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, but the workplace of his “black-eyes, black-haired wench” 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—in no way a relation of 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.