I was in the dentist of all places when I picked up a magazine with an article entitled, Memoirs of a Porn Star. The title was obviously tongue-in-cheek as the photograph was of a woman who looked like she might be in a care home in the 1970s.
However, I was surprised to find out that article was about the columnist’s long dead grandmother who had posed for some saucy pictures in the dying days of the First World War and into the 1920s.
By today’s standards the pictures were fairly innocent, but grandmother had apparently kept her secret from her daughters and husband until he was in his grave.
Her career had begun after she had been approached on the way home from school by ‘a respectable photographer’ when she was barely 18. She was offered the princely sum of 10 shillings if she posed for him.
Her first pictures were coy shots of a bit of leg but, her granddaughter explained, she was soon offered an extra half a crown if she would go a little further.
Nude bathing shots, ‘voyeur’ keyhole scenes and school girl spanking tableaux’s soon followed.
“I would have been spanked in earnest if Dad had found out,” she later cheerfully told her granddaughter. A man it was explained who kept a respectable shop and was not averse to laying his belt across his adult daughters’ bare bottoms.
The only regret she expressed is that she was persuaded to invite some of her school friends to take part in school room scenes. These were largely innocent but included some posed for caning and the inevitable spanking. “It was all tremendous fun and we all felt dreadfully naughty,” she is reported as saying. However, one of her friends got more deeply into it and ended up as a sex worker and hard core porn actress; this being the source of her regret.
On a lighter note one of her other friends married the photographer and went into the “respectable side of things.”
It was not unusual, we were told, for ladies’ maids, shop girls, women clippies (bus conductresses) or even nurses to be approached on the street and offered an easy way to earn a little extra cash.
The spanking of school girls and maids was particular popular and it was a common practice to sell these images as being of real disciplined maids or students, although these ‘schoolgirls’ were frequently well into their 20s.
I have previously read elsewhere that it was not unusual for some women to get into darker more hard core BDSM. I have pictures of quite brutal thrashings and neo ‘torture’ scenes where marking and bruising can clearly been seen. A lighter example is used above Still tame by some modern standards, but these are not merely posed for shots and some of them go well beyond that even.
Usually these women were paid double the ‘nudie rate,’ and one can only speculate on the level of exploitation. But maybe they were early scene players and this was their only outlet.
A popular theme for these harder scenes was white slavery and some later well-known stars cut their teeth in such films. Boris Karlov and Joan Crawford are rumoured to have made serval ‘whipping movies.’
Again audiences liked authenticity and a big star if this underground scene was a woman reputedly once held captive in a harem.
Another story, which may be apocryphal, is that a maid well known for her spanking portfolio was discovered by her real life mistress. Rather than sack the girl the hitherto respectable woman offered her own services and are said to have shot several series of erotic scenes over some years.
The mistress would sometimes be nude and attended to by her maid and in other scenes she would spank the maid for some domestic crime or other. Apparently this ‘authenticity’ was a hot seller. However, it could just have easily been made up, but it is not entirely unbelievable when one thinks of how bored a cash-starved stay-at-home 1920s housewife might be.
The aforesaid memoirs of a lady who ended her days in a care home opened my eyes to might and might not take part in such adventures.
In Germany between the wars things were even more interesting. Karl Heinz was a well-known cabaret photographer who used to specialise in spanking and BDSM. He paid night club dances to take a punishment and then photographer their markings in stark black and white photography.
He is also said to have approached matrons with grown-up daughters in the guise of social research to find out how they punished their daughters. He is said to have offered a small fee to document ‘certain corrections.’ Whether this is true or not it did enable him to sell his work as being authentic, which seems to be a common theme for the ages.
In the 1940s and 1950s, photography clubs bloomed both sides of the Atlantic, with models freely posing for private photographers. Bettie Page made her start here and some of the output were little more than documented orgies in private houses.
This kind of professional ‘amateurism’ seems to have lasted in one form or another up until the permissive 1960s when home movies and mainstream producers overtook them.
