‘We thought of ourselves as calendar girls’

Police raids at 10.45 in the morning are not common in the sleepy cul-de-sac of Chalton Heights, Bedfordshire. When the banging on the door began, Claire Finch was getting ready to have a bath. Although the small massage parlour she ran from her home was not yet open, she headed downstairs in her dressing gown.

Before she could reach the door reserved for her clients, several police officers kicked it in. Outside, 20 others had surrounded the house with four cars, three vans and a team of sniffer dogs. The 49-year-old was arrested and charged with brothel keeping, a crime under the Sexual Offences Act of 1956 that carries a maximum prison sentence of seven years.

“We thought of ourselves as calendar girls,” says Finch today, sitting in her lounge as she describes the parlour where six middle-aged women, two or three working at any one time, sold massages with “happy endings”. The prosecution’s view was less rose-tinted. Although women are legally entitled to sell sex individually, if they club together they risk a charge of brothel keeping for whoever has their name on the lease. “We weren’t worried though,” she continues, gesturing with an immaculately manicured hand. “A blind eye has been turned for so many years. You only have to open a paper to see the ads stating ‘Choice of eight ladies’.”

“We weren’t women doing drugs on street corners or even Belle de Jour, nipping off to Italy on the weekend. We were just middle-aged ladies trying to pay the mortgage,” she says.

The jury, it seemed, sympathised with her. Despite the legislation, Finch was cleared of keeping a brothel last month. Three of her neighbours, including an 87-year-old woman testified on her behalf in court, while another sent a letter of support. They told the jury that Finch was a decent member of the community who cared for an ill and incontinent neighbour and would look after their children in an emergency.

As the verdict was read out, Finch remembers seeing her daughter, neighbours and friends in tears. “It was a wonderful moment winning that case. Better than winning the lottery,” she says. “I was ecstatic. The whole place erupted . . . the policewoman squeezed my hand. Even the judge was smiling.”

“The question is whether it was in the public interest to prosecute the matter in the first instance,” says Finch’s solicitor, Stephen Halloran. “Parliament really needs to look at changing the law if a jury has lost confidence in something that’s more than 50 years old.”

According to research compiled by the English Collective of Prostitutes, working indoors is ten times safer than on the streets. The group also believes that the legislation on brothel-keeping needs to be changed, claiming that an increasing number of raids are forcing more women to work alone. The murder of the prostitute Andrea Waddell, who was found burned and strangled in her Brighton flat, where she worked alone, is cited as evidence of the dangers posed to this vulnerable group.

Certainly it is hard to imagine a more sheltered and suburban setting than Chalton. Among the rows of large detached houses, the voluptuous Grecian statues in the driveway easily identify Finch’s home. Inside, a disco ball hangs above a thick cream carpet; scented candles and oils subtly mask the smell of four pampered cats. The centre of her business operations is a converted downstairs office, now complete with massage table, whirlpool and copious amounts of hand sanitiser. Finch took a percentage of the group’s earnings for providing advertising and the premises, but each woman could choose what she wanted to offer to clients and when. “We were a happy house of women,” she recalls. There was always a friend on hand to intervene if a situation became threatening and chat to if it was a slow work day. “We talked about cushions, children or menstrual cycles. I don’t have a bunch of Ukrainians strapped to things in the cellar.”

Finch has avoided foreign girls altogether, cautious that they might have been trafficked. She also ruled out any association with drugs, or anything stronger than a cup of tea. But her most important rule was not to hire anyone under 35, telling them that they deserved a chance at other things in life. She admits that she would rather have been a veterinary nurse if things had been different.

During her marriage, Claire worked as an aromatherapy masseuse. But after a divorce, her husband ran into financial difficulties and couldn’t make the maintenance payments. With two small children to support, she came across a company that dealt in massage and other sexual services. “I thought, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t possibly do this. But I had a mortgage to pay,” she says.

The English Collective of Prostitutes estimates that around 70 per cent of prostitutes are mothers, mostly single. “These women were working collectively, not profiteering and not engaging in any way in coercion or force. And that’s how the majority of women working together operate,” says Cari Mitchell, spokeswoman for the ECP.

But other organisations disagree. The charity Eaves, the home of the Poppy Project, which deals with trafficked women, regards brothels largely as sites of sexual exploitation. “The English Collective of Prostitutes talks about cosy collectives of women,” says Ruth Breslin. “Well, that might be the case for some, but it’s not the experience of the women we work with.”

Hannah Morris, 28, has seen both sides of the coin. Determined and articulate, she describes herself as a girl from a nice middle-class family. During her own years in the industry, she experienced a number of violent situations that persuaded her and some friends to start their own business.

“It was about keeping women safe. Girls travelled from all over because of our reputation as a nice place to work,” she claims. The agency worked with outreach organisations to help the women’s health and had four rules: no drugs, no underage girls, no coercion and no causing a public nuisance.

Then in September 2009, Morris received a panicked phone call from an escort. “She just said, ‘There’s two men, they’ve got a gun, there’s petrol everywhere.’ I dialled 999 in a complete panic. It all happened so fast.” The police started to investigate a possible case of aggravated burglary, but their attention suddenly switched to the escort agency itself. Hannah was charged with managing a brothel and remains on bail with her bank account frozen. Her hands tremble slightly as she talks about the subsequent raids on her house and that of her parents, who until that point had not realised what she did for a living.

“It was the most horrific experience of my life,” she states. She argues that she paid tax and was a responsible member of society: “We were creating jobs. I had cleaners and receptionists. I was supporting myself and my family.” With two young children, she believes that with her qualifications she could not earn a sufficient salary to pay for childcare in any other job.

“Decriminalisation is the only way forward,” she says about the current rules on brothel keeping. “They are making any form of safe work illegal. At my agency, we always knew where girls were, we screened the clients. All this legislation that is meant to protect women who are trafficked is simply pushing things underground.”

Morris believes that escort agencies are now reluctant to report crimes to the police for fear of reprisal. She says there have been three violent incidents at brothels in the past four weeks: an increase on what used to be just one a month. None had been reported.

Claire Finch is now working alone, within the parameters of the law but her mortgage is in arrears and she has fallen behind on tax. She states that the police are still holding £780 that they confiscated in the raid: money she needs to cover her costs. “I’ve been on sleeping pills, anti-anxiety medication, afraid of losing my house. But I’ve still had to get up every day, get into a basque and work.”

She feels more vulnerable as well. This week, she asked the window cleaner to stick around for a couple of hours in case a new client got nasty.

Last year, the Royal College of Nursing called for the licensing of small brothels to protect the safety of sex workers. Finch will keep campaigning to change the law, and is hopeful that her landmark case will make life easier for other women. “After all, we’re the oldest profession in the world. We’re not going to go away.”

John Greene, Claire Finch’s neighbour for ten years, agrees. Neither he nor his recently deceased wife were concerned by the business next door. “If it had been parties and cars all the time, it could have been hard but it never was.Most people get on well with Claire. It’s a market and someone will service that market: no pun intended.”