The Gorbals Vampire – Children’s Reading Led To The Censorship Of Harmful Publications

Since Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’, stories about vampires have been popular, from the pen of Anne Rice to the earlier Le Fanu. Surely one of the strangest stories ever associated with the bloodsucking, daylight-hating beings with fangs for teeth is the story of a vampire said to haunt a graveyard in Gorbals, Glasgow.
In the 1950s, horror comics with titles like ‘Tales from the Crypt’, and ‘The Haunt of Fear’ were coming across from America, some though Airbases in Britain. Used only to ordinary comics of the day: Dandy, Beano and the like, these new, scary comics, once banned by the US Navy as being too bloodthirsty for sailors (I kid you not!), found their way into the duffle bags and satchels of schoolchildren and had a ‘playground trade value’.
Gorbals, a run down, teeming suburb of Glasgow, was, in the 1950s, full of children reading such stories, and one day the tale swept through the school yards of the area that a vampire with iron teeth had eaten a child in the local boneyard, the Southern Necropolis.
One PC Deeprose, plodding the streets of Glasgow that particular afternoon, was suddenly alerted to news of a massive and loud disturbance in the Necropolis. Hundreds and hundreds of school-children, just out of lessons for the day, and armed with bread knives and such, had rushed as one down the road to glimpse sight of the ghoulish vampire with the iron teeth, and maybe even kill it.
Of course, no such ghoul was found, though local character, ‘Jenny with the iron teeth’, from nearby Glasgow Green, was one of those suspected by the impressionable children.
That would have been that, except for the running of the tale in The Bulletin, a local rag. The story spread throughout the Press of Britain, and caught the ears of groups concerned with the harmful effects of such publications flooding in from the US. Diverse bodies such as teachers’ unions, the Communist party and Christian groups flocked upon Parliament and demanded action.
A reading of The Children’s and Young Persons’ Harmful Publications Bill was read and passed by a slim majority of sitting MPs in the House of Commons, and defended by stout socialist front benchers of the likes of Michael Foot, recently deceased former leader of the Labour Party, and his one-time, defecting colleague, Roy Jenkins, of the Liberal Democrats. The Bill became law, and four months imprisonment and a fine of 100 pounds were afterwards levied on guilty publishers and distributors of offending literature.
Doubtless, in this age of unspeakable pages daily visited on uncensored websites, all this sounds rather tame stuff, but the furore at the time was considerable, as were the flames of protest ignited by a bunch of imaginative school-kids from the streets of the Gorbals – once, ‘The gory-bells’, named after the bells sounded to let locals know that the inmates of a nearby asylum were being let out to air themselves – truth is indeed stranger than fiction.