The day Mary Churchill was spanked, part two

A couple of weeks ago I ran a report of Mary Churchill's July 1942 spanking at the hands of an American soldier at a dance. The Prime Minister's 19 year old daughter was in the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the forerunner to the Women's Royal Army Corp, where she served in an anti-aircraft battery. The spanking was seen by an American journalist who fed the story to the New York Times who ran it on the 1 August 1942 and from there it went out on the wire services. The Churchill archives are held at Churchill College, Cambridge, and there is a box of files relating to Mary's paddling - so I contacted the college and arranged for copies of those files to be sent to me. They make fascinating reading...

On the 3 August, the British embassy in Washington sent a long cable to London giving a summary of the account. At the bottom of the cable are the words "Unseen elsewhere so far." That cable was passed along to the Prime Minister's office by the duty officer at the Ministry of Information, with a handwritten note which read:

Herewith the answer from New York. It does not appear to have had much publicity.

Obviously someone in London must have asked the embassy to check the New York Times report, which means that they must have known about it, but those files are not in the Churchill Archive. Equally obviously, given the replies, the question must have related to the publicity that the story was attracting.

The information that London was getting was not entirely accurate since the papers were picking the story up all across the USA, but they were printing the report and then letting the story die - it wasn't attracting all that much attention.

Why the government was worried appears in the final note that went out from the Prime Minster's office on the 6 August. The reason why the government was worried had nothing to do with saving Mary's blushes and everything to do with the war effort. Put simply, if the story acquired wings, then "it might have a discouraging effect on mothers of possible recruits for the A.T.S."

The Ministry of Information did not feel that they could ban the story, and were worried that a request to ignore it could just lead to newspapers deciding to dig it up and ran with it. The best that the ministry could offer was to keep an eye on the papers and see if anyone ran the story, then call the editor and try and have it removed from later editions. Compared to the way that news is managed these days, it was a  curiously amateurish approach to controlling the news, but it worked. The British press did not pick up the story, and to quote from the final line of the note:

No further action is required and the papers may be put away.

It should be noted that nobody in all of this seems to have cared all that much about the fact that the Prime Minister's daughter had recently had her backside warmed up in public by an American soldier! The matter just was left to rest, presumably with everyone thinking that mouthy young 19 year old girls really do need to be taken in hand as and when needed.