Yorkshire Philosophical Society

Event Information

“In Racket Town”: Exposing Organised Crime in Wartime Leeds, 1941-1945

Joint lecture with the Historical Association (York Branch)

Dr Mark Roodhouse, Department of History, University of York

Crime news was a media staple throughout the Twentieth Century.  What we read, heard and watched shaped popular perception and sometimes prompted official action.  The same remains true today.  While we know much about what the media reported, we know little or nothing about the working practices of crime reporters before the mid-1970s.  Using a police investigation of press allegations of black marketeering and corruption in wartime Leeds, Mark Roodhouse considers whether the antics of journalists working during the golden age of crime reporting, which ran from 1930 to 1960, were any less reprehensible than those revealed in the Leveson Report into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press.  Was reporting saloon bar title-tattle as fact and paying for it forgivable?  And what impact did investigative reporting of the underworld have on popular perception of serious and organised crime?

Member’s report

Black markets in food, clothes and petrol are hardly surprising in wartime, but in January 1944 an article in the News Chronicle not only said such activity was rife in Leeds, but hinted that council leaders and the police were corruptly implicated. The next month a similar story appeared in the Daily Mail, clearly also about Leeds, labelling it ‘Racket Town’. Government was so alarmed it sent two senior men from the Metropolitan Police to investigate. They concluded that details had been exaggerated, or even fabricated, in proportion to the vast amounts of cash paid by the southern reporters to elicit them from locals.

Crime reporting has always been a staple of the popular press, but from the 1920s and 30s readers have favoured a romanticised version glamorised by cheap paperbacks and Hollywood films. The message behind this lecture was that, remembering Leveson, not to mention the ‘Fake Sheikh’, we should remain wary of stories written by journalists whose principal aim is to sell more newspapers.

Bob Hale