It was a still September night when nearly 400 schoolchildren descended on the Southern Necropolis in Glasgow’s Gorbals district in 1954. The neighbouring steelworks provided a suitably spooky backdrop, casting a red glow across the graveyard, a thin smoke seeping between the stones. Armed with crosses, knives, stakes, and dogs, these children were hunting. A seven-foot-tall creature with iron fangs was said to be lurking in the Necropolis, waiting for its next victim. These brave souls were ready to drive the Gorbals Vampire out of Glasgow.
But what caused these kids to form their own Monster Squad?
The Southern Necropolis Cemetery Gate, Glasgow.
(Photo by John McCreadie for the Geograph project, 2007.)
Entertainment boomed in post-war Britain. People suddenly found themselves with more expendable time and money, which adults happily spent on hobbies and leisure. But it wasn’t just the adults looking to be entertained outside of working hours. With a sharp increase in births between 1946 and 1948, thanks to the post-war baby boom, there were now a lot more children in the country on the lookout for anything that could add a dose of fun to their daily lives. As rationing loosened its grip on paper and sweets in 1953, Britain’s youngsters would head to the newsagents each week with a pocket full of money to pick up their favourite rag and some sugary treats.
Britain’s pop culture became heavily influenced by American musicians and film stars during the Fifties. The arrival of rock and roll was a pivotal moment for the youngsters of Britain, with Bill Haley and The Comets leading the invasion in 1955. A year later, the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Elvis Presley, marked his arrival in the UK charts with ten singles breaking the top thirty in 1956 alone. Disapproving adults looked on in horror as Presley was shown on television provocatively shaking his hips and whipping screaming teens up into a frenzy with his music.
This disdain for American influence on culture extended to comic books. During the 1950s, the comics on offer in the UK’s newsagents were resoundingly British. This was in part due to the difficulty importing the US funny books during wartime. Any American comics that made it to Britain during this era likely arrived in soldiers’ pockets. But there was more to the disappearance of American comics from the shelves of the nation’s corner shops than the disruption caused by the Second World War. These American funnies were corrupting the impressionable children of Britain!
Everything about the American comics format was appealing to young readers: the entire book burst with colour (unlike British books, which reserved full colour for their front pages only), and their portable pocket size meant it was possible to carry these stateside cowboys and caped crusaders anywhere. Next to the dull newsprint tones of the larger British comics, they were instantly more attractive. But with the great American appeal came unsavoury American ideals.
While the books may have been eye-catching, they weren’t afraid to delve into mature subject matter. Graphic horror, sinister crimes, and dark fantasy lined the pages, with monsters and crooks delighting in terrorising busty damsels, directly opposing ideals of ‘proper’ British etiquette and were considered to be profoundly anti-Christian.
Some American publishers, like EC Comics, favoured shock value in their stories, where they also confronted all manner of social issues from race and gender to war and the environment. When combined with the long-held prejudiced notion that comic books were for the illiterate lower-classes of society, these books were deemed dangerous and disruptive by groups of adults who were concerned their children might be negatively influenced by the stories.
In 1944, following a tirade of pressure from concerned teachers, angered church members and pearl-clutching parents, the British parliament passed the Children’s and Young Person’s (Harmful Publications) Act, banning the import or reproduction of American horror and crime comic books in the UK, predating the creation of the American Comics Code by ten years.
Britain’s tirade against American comics didn’t end with the Harmful Publications Act of 1944 but continued well into the 1950s. The brave young vampire hunters only emboldened the argument against American comic books.
Hysteria gripped Glasgow as rumours of the towering, iron-toothed vampire who prowled the vast Southern Necropolis in search of children to eat spread across the city’s playgrounds. It was believed the creature had already claimed at least two young lives. Organising themselves in a remarkable way, without the help of social media to rally up a crowd, hundreds of children ventured to the cemetery over the course of three nights, armed with their makeshift weapons. Bewildered police constable Alex Deeprose arrived at the scene to find the Southern Necropolis swarming with kids, but police presence wasn’t enough to deter them. Only the rain would eventually send them scarpering—although some rumours suggest it was actually the appearance of a strict local headmaster that sent the kids fleeing home.
National papers covered the incident, and it was quickly concluded that American horror comics were responsible for conjuring the mythical Gorbals Vampire in the youngers’ minds.
Gorbals’ MP Alice Cullen persuaded the government to further settle worried parents’ minds by introducing the Children and Young Person’s (Harmful Publications) Act 1955 which banned the sale of publications featuring ‘incidents of a repulsive or horrible nature’ to minors; an act which still holds today. American comic books wouldn’t appear on British newsagents’ shelves again until the end of the decade.
Tales of Horror #9 (February 1954), Toby Press. Cover Art by Jack Sparling.
Making global headlines, this incident quite possibly supported the argument for the creation of America’s Comics Code. Psychiatrist Frederic Wertham led the battle cry against comic books, believing them to be the root cause of bad behaviour in the country—even condemning the squeaky-clean superheroes of the era. Concerned that crime and romance comics were falling into the hands of young children, rather than their intended audience of teens and adults, Wertham’s opinions sparked a campaign to moderate comic book publishing in the United States. The subsequent outrage meant the American comics industry was forced to wage war on its publications and instil the strict Comics Code, dictated by the Comics Code Authority, in September 1954 to combat juvenile delinquency. News of the hundreds of children arming themselves to hunt a monstrous creature which could well be from the pages of a comic book would have surely added potent fuel to Wertham’s argument.
Was the Gorbals Vampire really a product of overactive imaginations and comic book creations?
While a bloodthirsty villain with iron teeth was found in a comic available in the States around the time of the event, there’s no mention of a villainous boogeyman like the looming Glaswegian vampire in any of the titles available to British children at the time, nor in the comics that adults investigated and blamed. Parents also turned a blind eye to the possibility the iron-toothed monster could have sprung from the Bible, a beast with ‘great iron teeth’ being referenced in Daniel 7:7.
It’s possible the Gorbals Vampire became mixed up with the frightening Jenny Wi’ the Airn Teeth, a nineteenth-century poem written by Alexander Anderson. The poem, clearly intended to frighten children into behaving at bedtime, told of a ghostly apparition of a woman who would snatch children away from their beds, clutching them between sharp iron teeth. Jenny quickly morphed into an urban legend, said to haunt Glasgow Green. Some believe Jenny and the Gorbals Vampire still roam the area, avoiding the Southern Necropolis as the dark rolls in.
Whatever the reason, the rife imaginations of hundreds of school children and their adventures in the Southern Necropolis could have been ripped from the very pages their parents demonised. Their brave expedition to hunt the Gorbals Vampire demonstrated how urban legends can sink their teeth into the heart of a community. Little did these children know that their parents would embark on a hunt of their own, stripping away the popular American comics, preferring to hide from the monsters they believed lurked in the dark instead of confronting society’s real horrors head-on.