The deportation of two hoteliers: a microhistory of brothel keepers in interwar Britain.

Abstract

In 1937, the Home Office deported two residents of Chinese descent, Amy and George Doo, for running hotels that sex workers frequently used to sell sex. As the British state intensified its criminalization of the sex trade in the interwar years, it limited options for where sex work could take place, and made hotel owners like the Doos an ever more important stakeholder within the illicit sexual economy. Yet, within the growing scholarship on prostitution in modern Britain, we know very little about the lives and networks of this key facilitator of the sex trade. This article therefore offers a double biography of the Doos. Using oral history, historical newspapers, and scattered archival records in London, Cornwall, and Singapore, this article reconstructs the lives of two brothel keepers (as legally broadly defined) and explains what brothel keeping entailed within the context of clandestine commercial sex. It unravels how brothel keepers straddled licit and illicit economies and mitigated against increasing prosecution. It also interrogates how racial prejudice shaped how state authorities policed those involved in the sex trade, and how the couple attempted to counteract such prejudice.