The British Empire’s Brothels
British servicemen overseas bought sex, sometimes in brothels run by the British army. In the 1970s they began to talk about it.
Caught out of hours in a regimental brothel run by the British army in Kanpur, northern India, in the late 1930s, Private David Lloyd Griffiths was in trouble. Remembering the incident years later, he remained indignant, recalling his evening drinking in the nearby Bristol Café: ‘I had a few drinks, I wasn’t drunk by any means, I thought “oh well, I’ll go into the regimental brothel” … I was in there and I wanted to go with this piece.’ But the on-duty army policeman monitoring the brothel took him to task for his behaviour. Interviewed in the 1970s, Griffiths – then an elderly man – recounted how the policeman (‘a real bastard’) told him to go back to his barracks and refused to listen to his pleas: ‘I want my sex, and then I’ll go home!’ The issue was not that he wanted to pay for sex, but that he wanted to do so outside his allotted hours.
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