The curious case of the vampire hunters in the night-time

Glasgow necropolis

 In 1954, PC Alex Deeprose was called out to the Southern Necropolis in Glasgow. He was expecting it to be vandalism. What he found instead was going to cause a worldwide moral panic and the introduction of new censorship laws in Britain.

He found the bizarre sight of hundreds of children, some as young as four and others as old as 14, armed with knives and sticks. They were patrolling the graveyard. For seven-foot tall vampires.

I'm exaggerating. They were looking for a seven-foot tall vampire. According to the children, he had iron teeth and had kidnapped and eaten two local boys.

This legend had grown, and been given a name. The Gorbals vampire, it was called. Some of the parents of the children had been unnerved by the urban myth, and were actively seeking reassurances from the police that it was bogus.

So, the authorities reassured. A local headmaster, at a time when the authority of a school headmaster carried some weight in the community, stated in the local paper that there was nothing to the rumour. The police were adamant that no children had been reported missing, never mind any mysterious deaths were the victim had two bite marks on the neck and no blood left in the body – if that had happened, PC Alex Deeprose wouldn't have gone out to check for vandals that night, the entire Glasgow police force would be doing double shifts, and the papers would have been carrying public warnings.

However, the children weren't so easily assured. The following night, this army of Buffy the vampire slayers was out again on patrol. Then the following night.

In the 1950s, there was less sources of information to your average person. This rumour was spread by Chinese whispers essentially, and given a boost by its coverage in the papers. Which is understandable. It can either be interpreted by the reader as collective hysteria (in the old-fashioned medical understanding of the word), or it can push fear buttons in the psyche that maybe there is a vampire somewhere. For a newspaper, then and indeed now, it would be too good a story to pass up.

Was he in Glasgow in the 50s? No.

Of course, most parents could see it for what it was – a story that got out of control. Humans are social animals, and we are born with the instinct to follow the crowd no matter how mad the purpose of the crowd is. As a person grows into an adult they usually learn to have a degree of independence, to break away from the comfort of letting the crowd make the decisions for you, but a child hasn't made that difficult journey yet. To say no to your peers on this matter would require a high degree of scepticism, to point out the multitude of flaws in the story, and to do something that for a time at least seperates you from the crowd. This can be very dangerous when you're a child, it could easily get you bullied. So, just better to go along with the whole thing.

Needless to say, no vampires were found. So, where did it come from?

There was a lot of debate. In the bible, Daniel 7.7, talked about a monster with iron teeth. There was also a poem taught in Glasgow schools at the time about a monster with iron teeth.

Except, to the adults of 1950s Glasgow, this couldn't be right. Those things had been around for ages, and hadn't made them go hunting for vampires when they were kids. So what else could it be?

Comic books. They were new, filled with disturbing violence and horror, and they were foreign – American youth culture was radically displacing British youth culture at this time, a new sensation to the 1950s.

They were new, so new that most parents had never read them. When parents looked at them, there would have been a sense of alienation, of a disconnect from youth culture. Comic books were so unlike the Beano or the Dandy, the exciting new comics of their generation. So not only did these comic books ever so slightly make parents feel their age, but also because they had not immersed themselves in American comic book culture at all there was no sophisticated understanding of the medium.

There was also a strong sense of anti-Americanism in Britain at the time. America had been allies in the second world war, but unlike the rest of Europe we had received an interest-based loan to reconstruct with. Not only that, but it was clear that Britain was on the decline and America and the USSR were ascendent. Of course, kids were mainly oblivious to this and they loved American pop culture. To the generation of parents back then, however, this jarred with their sensibilities. There was almost a crusade against the corrupting influence of American culture, and the Gorbals vampire was the perfect scapegoat for these crusaders.

Of course, some eggheads always want to ruin a good prejudice. Academics who had studied the things pointed out that there was no mention of a creature matching the descriptions of the Gorbal vampire, in any of the comic books available at the time (Which was a lot more limited than it is today). They also pointed out the bible reference, and the poem reference, two sources that the children will almost certainly have encountered. There was also that parents would sometimes threaten their children with "the iron man" (the Boogeyman, in other words) if they didn't do what they were told.

Something else that should have been remembered is that the Necropolis contains a quarter of a million dead people. Noise and light from the nearby ironworks at the time cast mysterious shadows everywhere. If you live anywhere near somewhere like that as a kid, it's going to spook you out. Children create ghost stories all the time, so you would expect those kids to invent a supernatural narrative that involves the graveyard in some way.

However, reason didn't stop..well, anyone. To blame the bible and a poem in a school-book, and geographic location, would have felt wrong. No-one even thought yet to criticise tv - the media hysteria over the corrupting influence of television was a decade away, to describe 1950s British tv as toothless doesn't do the word justice, and most of these kids wouldn't have had a television set anyway.

The media started calling for, and it was adopted by the political classes, young minds to stop being "polluted" by the "terrifying and corrupt" comic books. Censorship.

This led to the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955 which, for the first time, specifically banned the sale of magazines and comics portraying "incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature" to minors.

Remember, despite the even-handed language, this was created to stop comic books. Given that this was the 50s, people were a bit more delicate. So, comic books with titles like Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, with the 50s schlock images that were only a couple of steps up from a penny dreadful, were now banned (in America, something similar had been going on with congressional hearings on the matter, causing a clampdown on the industry).

In Britain, there were no actual prosecutions for the act in that decade, or indeed until 1970. Cases were brought, but the Attorney general refused the majority of them.

So has anything changed since then? I would argue that they haven't. Across time, the parental generation panics when a new medium appears that children collectively enjoy. In the 50s, comic books. In the 60s, television and pop music that wasn't polite to its elders. This goes back as far as mankind: in ancient Greece, Greek plays were denounced for the effect they were having on the young.

Looking back, these scares are ridiculous. Most parents today would be glad if their child studied ancient Greek plays, or listened to the pop music from their youth. And yet, we do have similar scares today. Video games are routinely denounced for their corrupting influence, in spite of the fact that as video game violence has been increasing violent crime overall has been decreasing. But video game culture is constantly renewing itself, lots of kids (and adults, it should be pointed out) play them, game culture is a culture that can't be viewed from the outside, so there is plenty of scope for parents to feel alienated.

So, things haven't changed. But then, they never will. Children will always have their own culture, and that will always worry their parents.