Girls gone wild...

...or not, as the case may be.

Women Go Crazy at Sales

Magistrate’s Comment on Husband’s plea

‘It is the sales that seem to make the women go crazy,’ pleaded the husband of Lilian Philips, a Brixton woman, charged at West London Police Court yesterday with shoplifting at Barker’s store, Kensington.

‘I know she has done a very silly thing,’ added the man sorrowfully.

Mr. Mead: Silly? It isn’t silly. It is wicked to steal. Silly—that is the way people look at it. People seem to have lost the sense of standards nowadays. They talk of being in prison as if it is an accident; something they can’t help.

Mrs. Phillips was ordered to fourteen days’ imprisonment in the second division.

(Daily Herald, 4 July 1928, p. 1)

Meanwhile...

Slander on Southend

Unfounded Tales of Girl ’Drunks‘

The Truth

Happy Holiday With Few Police Cases

Southend is ‘up in the air’ about a report that ‘girl “drunks”’ among its visitors caused trouble on Bank Holiday. Indignation is expressed that this unfounded story should have been published in London evening papers yesterday, as well as broadcast all over the country by a news agency.

‘Two very quiet days for the ambulance men,’ was the way in which this Southend tale began. ‘Most of the cases were caused by broken bottles on the shore and the “drunks,” and several people dived head first into shallow pools with painful results, and were more or less injured.’

A SLANDER!

Then followed the allegation which is resented as a slander. ‘Though there were fewer men drunk,’ it ran, ‘there was an appreciable increase among young girls, and they caused considerable trouble.’

To a Daily Herald reporter the authorities at Southend dismissed this statement as absurd.

‘Nothing of the kind,’ said the Mayor, Mr. Arthur Bockett, when he was asked whether any drunken behaviour among girls had come to his notice.

‘The people who came to Southend on Bank Holiday were excellently behaved and we had no trouble at all.’

‘It was a very quiet holiday. There was no rowdyism of any sort.’

At the police station the story of trouble with intoxicated girls was also flatly denied. ‘We have not seen any,’ declared the police.

In fact, it appears that of all the thousands of men and women who visited Southend on Monday three only came under the notice of the police as having ‘taken a drop too much,’ and even these cases were not serious.

Indeed, no arrests were made, and there were no charges of drunkenness at the police court yesterday.

(Daily Herald, 8 August 1928, p. 1)

Rather an extensive article to conclude, essentially, that nothing happened.