My very own 1970s sex pest

To understand the Jimmy Savile affair, you had to be there. By ‘there’ I mean the late 1970s.

At the time my school on the Welsh borders had its own very minor provincial sex-pest. I think every school did. Ours was known as ‘the 50p man’. Periodically he would approach a straggler on a cross–country run, or someone taking a walk (i.e. smoke) by the river, and expose himself, announcing, ‘If you touch this, I’ll give you this 50p.’

Even allowing for inflation, 50p was an offer you could easily refuse. So the schoolboy victim would scarper off, usually (perhaps not always) to relate the incident to general hilarity.  Every now and then someone might have reported such an event to an adult, but I certainly don’t remember police involvement or any kind of vigilantism. His behaviour was viewed as regrettable but not heinous — as smoking was then and divorce wasn’t (our moral compasses seem to shift).

Among the pupils there may even have been a tacit agreement not to make a fuss. Perhaps it seemed like snitching. Or perhaps, when viewed from the strictly Benthamite perspective of the teenage boy, the 50p man was seen as a net contributor to human happiness.

One interesting side effect of the 50p man may be unique in the annals of economic history. Within the school, in a strange manifestation of Gresham’s Law, the 50p coin became worthless. You had to launder them clandestinely into five 10p pieces at WH Smith. Handing over a 50p for your ten Fruit Salads and a Curly Wurly at the tuck shop was impossible — usually met with finger-pointing and the chant ‘Eeeeuuugh! You touched the 50p man!’

In retrospect the lack of parental action seems surprising. Or was the relaxed response better? The effect on a child of any incident might be affected by how other people react to it.