Underworld at War

It was easier to break the law between 1939 and 1945 simply because there were so many new laws to be broken. A mind-numbing barrage of regulations sprang up, to govern the nation's consumption, such as food and fuel, and to protect the island's security. Scarcity drove many thousands of worthy, law-abiding citizens to become criminals.

World War II was, traumatic for pretty well everyone who lived through it. Young people, dealt with it in different ways - some, such as Daphne Baker, who lived then at Snodland in Kent, and now near Bexhill in Sussex, simply ignored the nightly air raids, as far as it was possible and got on with studying hard to fulfil her life's ambition to get to Cambridge and become a teacher.

All over Britain, families were becoming single-parent families. While Dad was away, on his country's business, the kids played more boisterously, and with less discipline. There were new 'toys' to play with. War toys were favourite toys - at least for a gang of youngsters at Broomfield near Herne Bay in Kent. The Finn family lived in the pub. It was the gang headquarters.

Some people take to organized crime like ducks to water. Frankie Fraser was 16 when World War II broke out in 1939 and he was already in Borstal for a jewel robbery.

The appetite for "who-dunnits" was as keen in World War II as it is today. In the post-war years, lawyer Edgar Lustgarten made a series of films for the cinema based on crimes and criminals - many of them thinly disguised versions of real-life crimes. This one, he called "The Drayton Case".

In the villages of Britain, though their job became more complicated, the wartime role of the policeman, his place in society, at least outwardly, changed little. But just as in society, not all policemen were incorruptible. The Folkestone force came under a cloud, as former Kent Policeman Roy Ingleton, now living in Maidstone, remembers.

The US army was still segregated. Some units were black. Others were white. At home, these men couldn't sit in the same bus seats as white men, couldn't eat at the same counter in the local diner. Now, they were in the same army. Tragically British citizens sometimes got caught up in military disputes.