State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  It was another, even more derided outpost of Greater Metro-land, however, that most clearly pointed the way to the future. In March 1970, developers unveiled the plans for the last of the New Towns, a ‘city of the future’ in rural north Buckinghamshire, based on an American-style road grid, ‘landscaped parks’, a ‘health campus’ and a spanking new shopping mall to mark the town centre. ‘Los Angeles, Bucks’, wags called it, but its ethos was pure Metro-land, its advertisements showing off the projected landscape of lakes, fields and bridleways, an expanse of manicured green dotted with new homes. The planners had big ambitions: 70,000 people by 1981 and more than 250,000 by the 1990s, with ‘Mr and Mrs 1990’ at the forefront of their thinking. Even in 1972 they were anticipating a brave new world of fibre-optics and computers: homes were fitted with cable to allow Mrs 1990 ‘to stay at home, dial her shopkeeper on her audio-visual telephone, and choose the Sunday lunch as the camera scans the shelves’. Talk of a monorail, that emblematic transport dream of the 1960s, had already been abandoned; instead, this was to be a town centred on the car, although the developers had plans for a ‘dial-a-bus’ scheme, in which a passenger would dial his destination into the nearest bus stop, and a ‘central computer’ would send ‘the nearest bus’ to pick him up. There were plans for golf courses, water-skiing, a ‘water bus’ zipping to London along the Grand Union Canal, even ‘an orchestra floating on a lake with the audience listening from the banks’.58

  Like all New Towns, Milton Keynes was the subject of criticism and mockery from the very beginning. Newspapers eagerly reported the developers’ problems in securing enough labour and materials to build tens of thousands of homes, while inflation and government cuts meant that the budget was endlessly revised. When the first families began to arrive in the mid-1970s, there were the usual unrepresentative reports of disappointment and loneliness, as well as genuine complaints about poor sound insulation and draughty windows. And when the Daily Telegraph’s Christopher Booker went to inspect the site in July 1974, he made no effort to disguise his horror and contempt. Unlike the ‘leafy, affluent’ suburbs of Los Angeles, he found ‘hundreds of grim little misshapen boxes, in brick or corrugated metal, turned out by machine’. Milton Keynes, he thought, was the ‘ultimate monument’ to ‘the utterly depersonalized nightmare which haunted Aldous Huxley in Brave New World just forty short years ago’. It was with something approaching glee that he predicted that ‘in the present economic climate … the chances must be high that over the next decade Milton Keynes will simply become a pathetic national joke, falling ever further behind its ambitious schedule, and finally grinding to a stop in a sea of mud and rusting contractors’ equipment, unsold houses and half-finished factories’. And ‘in the name of the poor people who will actually have to live there’, he said, ‘such a horrible mistake must never be made again’.59

  But he was wrong. Milton Keynes was neither a horrible mistake nor a pathetic joke; it was, in fact, a great success. By May 1973, Tesco, British Oxygen, Legal & General and the Abbey National had already committed themselves to opening offices or warehouses in the new town, and by the end of the 1970s more new jobs had been created in Milton Keynes than in any other city in Britain, with the exception of the North Sea oil boomtown of Aberdeen. And although housing completions had fallen behind demand, that was simply because industry and jobs were coming to Milton Keynes much faster than anybody had expected. By the end of 1973, the developers had finished more than 5,000 homes, and by 1976 the town’s population already stood at 76,000 people. The majority of these people, defying the stereotypes of suburban fragmentation and New Town blues, were very happy with their lot. As the town’s chief architect later proudly put it, they had ‘voted with their feet’. And in 1975, even before the shopping centre and other amenities had been opened, a survey found that between 83 and 95 per cent of the residents were pleased with life, while only four families out of 290 questioned said that they wanted to go back to their old homes.60

  Milton Keynes thrived because it matched the ordinary ambitions of hundreds of thousands of British families: a steady middle-class job, a neat suburban home, a little garden and a safe environment to bring up children. The editor of the Architectural Association Quarterly was probably going a bit far when he said in 1975 that it represented ‘the nearest thing we shall get to Utopia’. But in its mundane, understated way, Milton Keynes was the apotheosis of Metro-land, the ultimate blend of social mobility, material ambition and conservative cultural values. It was ‘not much of a place to look at’, another visiting journalist reported in 1976, but there was ‘much to admire’ in the gentle, low-level design of the housing estates and ‘the absence of graffiti and vandalism’.

  It lacked grandeur or romance; it was ‘low-profiled, commodious, efficient, unpretentious’. But that was exactly what people wanted – people like Henry and Lilian Foulds, a retired couple who had left their two-bedroom maisonette in Hackney for a neat bungalow in Milton Keynes. Instead of staring at a skyline of tower blocks and chimneys from a ‘four-walled prison’, they now spent their days in the garden, ‘growing nasturtiums, roses, peas and beans’. They took walks down to the canal; they caught the bus to Wolverton for a ‘hot plate of chips’ or to Bletchley for a ‘nice cup of tea’. They were surrounded by children, but unlike in London, they had no fears of harassment or vandalism. And with informal support from a ‘good neighbour’ paid by the Development Corporation, Henry and Lilian had made plenty of friends in the area, including a neighbour who grew strawberries and cheerfully swapped his surplus produce for their lettuce and beans. Some might mock, but after a lifetime working in the capital, this to them seemed a taste of paradise, their own private version of Betjeman’s Metro-Land. It was ‘like a holiday’, they told an interviewer in 1980. And what about London? ‘We don’t long to go back, not even for a visit.’61

  10

  Who Needs Men?

  The writer in residence spoke. ‘Look, are you trying to tell us … Is – what? – is Mr Richardson trying to tell us he believes that? About women being equal to men? Does he believe it?’ He looked around the room as if pleading for enlightenment. ‘I mean, you know, like really believe it?’

  – Kingsley Amis, Jake’s Thing (1978)

  But they’re like chaps, these days, like fellas, like blokes.

  – Martin Amis, Success (1978)

  In December 1973, with the headlines full of industrial unrest, economic meltdown and international terrorism, the youthful viewers of Doctor Who were introduced to the time traveller’s latest female companion. For ten years the Doctor’s companions had tended to be pretty young girls who spent most of their time screaming, falling over and asking the Time Lord to explain the plot. Now, however, Jon Pertwee’s Doctor seemed to have met his match. In the opening episode of ‘The Time Warrior’, he arrives at a secret research establishment to investigate the disappearance of Britain’s most eminent scientists, only to find that a plucky young investigative journalist, Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen), has got there first. From the moment she walks in, her hair cut fashionably short, her trim figure enclosed in a brown flared trouser-suit, it is clear that Sarah Jane is a distinctly modern woman. And when the Doctor gently suggests that she make him a cup of coffee – as her bubbly predecessor, Jo Grant, had done countless times – her anger is immediate: ‘If you think I’m going to spend my time making cups of coffee for you …!’

  Undeterred, the Doctor continues to talk down to her, but Sarah is having none of it. ‘Kindly don’t be so patronising,’ she snaps a few moments later, and then: ‘Stop treating me like a child.’ Even when, having stowed away aboard the TARDIS, she finds herself imprisoned in the Middle Ages, her feminist passion burns as brightly as ever. ‘She spits fire,’ one of her medieval captors says ruefully. And although Sarah Jane and the Doctor soon become fast friends, she remains a champion of what she calls ‘women’s lib’. ‘Harry, call me “old girl” again,’ she warns a fellow companion, a bluff naval s
urgeon, ‘and I’ll spit in your eye.’ In fact, not even the shock of travelling to distant worlds in the far future can dent Sarah Jane’s feminist ardour. Trapped in the middle of a miners’ strike on the planet Peladon, she is distressed to discover that the locals have decidedly unreconstructed attitudes to women in politics. ‘It would be different if I was a man,’ sighs Queen Thalira. ‘But I’m only a girl.’ ‘Now just a minute!’ Sarah exclaims. ‘There’s nothing “only” about being a girl!’1

  When Doctor Who began, the notion of a young female companion standing up to the Doctor, demanding to be taken seriously and insisting that a woman was just as good as a man, would have been almost inconceivable. Back in 1963, the Doctor’s first female companions had fulfilled highly traditional or stereotypical roles: the shy teenage granddaughter, the earnest school history teacher, the kooky dolly bird, and so on. But by the beginning of the 1970s, women’s lives and expectations had changed a great deal in a very short amount of time. To be sure, there were still glaring inequalities: far fewer women than men attended universities or went into the world of work, women were generally paid far less than men, and women in senior managerial or executive positions were almost unknown. As late as the mid-1960s, The Times noted that middle-class families still often sent their daughters to ‘lightweight schools’ that trained them in cookery, needlework and domestic management instead of maths, physics and chemistry. And it was revealing that when Heath announced his Cabinet in June 1970, it contained just one woman, Margaret Thatcher, who as Education Secretary was handling that part of the public sector traditionally associated with serious-minded middle-class women like herself. It was telling that when her local newspaper asked whether she would like to be the first woman Prime Minister, her reply was emphatic: ‘No, there will never be a woman Prime Minister in my lifetime – the male population is too prejudiced.’ And that prejudice often expressed itself in unexpected but doubtless highly frustrating ways. If Mrs Thatcher, snatching a few moments’ break from a hard night’s work at the Department of Education, had gone unaccompanied into a nearby pub, she would have attracted glares of suspicion, if not outright hostility. And she would have been well advised to banish all thoughts of a late-night hamburger. For until the end of 1971, women were banned from entering Wimpy bars after midnight without male companions, on the grounds that the only women on their own at that hour must be prostitutes.2

  If a young woman from the twenty-first century, following in the footsteps of Sarah Jane Smith, were catapulted back in time to the early 1970s, she would no doubt be shocked at the petty prejudices, restrictions and inequalities that still governed the lives of most British women. And yet at the time, the overwhelming impression was one of enormous change and opportunity, driven by the rise of labour-saving technology, the availability of contraception and consequent fall in the birth rate, and the expansion of white-collar work. A girl who came of age in the late 1960s could expect educational and economic opportunities that would have been denied to her mother and grandmother. More likely to stay longer in school, she could marry when and if she wanted, have children when she wanted, and pursue her own career even after marriage. As Brian Jackson recorded in 1968, even the average housewife found her load lightened by ‘such humble things as the proliferation of effective cleaning materials, more easily prepared food, the practical information in women’s magazines’. The change in the ‘personal quality of women’s lives’, he wrote,

  has surely been immense. Contraception removes fears about love-making, eats into that thick nest of taboos built protectively around working-class sex. Your children don’t die. Neither do you. The plastics revolution removes almost intolerably hard physical work from the home. And the demands of home are easier to bear, knowing that there is the chance of working years – with the social life, the skills and the income they will bring.3

  For young women in the early 1970s, the unexpected reality of these new opportunities could be both invigorating and bewildering. The journalist Mary Ingham, who was born in 1947, had grown up imagining ‘being married at 22, quite old really, and settling down to raise a family at 25’. But ‘at university 22 suddenly didn’t seem so old’, so she mentally revised her plans. Then ‘25 came and went without the wedding and 27 without the children’, and as she approached 30 in the mid-1970s, she found herself still sharing a flat with ex-student friends in a dilapidated Georgian terrace in London. Life had turned out completely differently from the visions she had nurtured as a teenager. ‘So much of what I was groomed and rehearsed for just didn’t apply by the time I grew up,’ she wrote, ‘because so many new opportunities had opened up for women: free, reliable contraception, abortion, easier divorce, job opportunities.’ She felt both excited and adrift, lost in a world whose landscape was still unformed, whose contours were not yet clear. And like many women, she turned to her contemporaries for solidarity and support. ‘How better to enter a new territory but together?’ wrote the feminist playwright April de Angelis. ‘How could the strange landscape be mapped singly when no apprenticeship had been served?’4

  For most of the 1950s and 1960s, feminism was widely supposed to have disappeared. On the left, it was often seen as divisive, distracting and self-indulgent: at the Labour Women’s Conference in 1969, one delegate even condemned pressure for equal opportunities and equal pay, insisting that if women ‘could not sacrifice five years for their children before the children went to school they did not know what they were missing’. When Barbara Castle, then easily the best known female politician in the country, was asked to address the TUC on the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage, she found it ‘agony’. ‘It’s time we stopped thinking in these women v. men terms,’ she wrote afterwards. ‘As long as we are so sexually conscious about our work we will never really get ourselves “assimilated”, any more than the immigrants will.’ These attitudes were by no means confined to older women. Even articulate, outspoken young women like Shirley Williams – the daughter of the pioneering women’s rights campaigner Vera Brittain – rejected the feminist label, which was thought to belong to the lost age of the suffragists. It was, she said, ‘a matter of generations’. And the young Sheila Rowbotham, who went to grammar school and Oxford in the early 1960s and later became one of Britain’s best-known feminist writers, thought that feminists were ‘shadowy figures in long old-fashioned clothes who were somehow connected with headmistresses who said you shouldn’t wear high heels and make-up. It was all very prim and stiff and mainly concerned with keeping you away from boys.’5

  All this changed in a very short space of time, roughly between 1968 and 1970. One key influence was the bohemian underground of the late 1960s, which was fertile soil for ideas of liberation and self-realization, and which included prominent future feminists such as Rosie Boycott, Germaine Greer and Rowbotham herself. In fact, although the well-educated young men and women who made up the counterculture thought of themselves as radicals and revolutionaries, their sexual politics were unattractive, to say the least. The gospel of free love was supposed to be a way of challenging bourgeois ideology; it was also, of course, a way for young men to blackmail women into sleeping with them. ‘Chicks’, as the underground journalist Richard Neville called them, were told that they were conservative or boring if they refused male attention. ‘It was paradise for men in their late twenties: all these willing girls,’ one woman later recalled. ‘But the trouble with the willing girls was that a lot of the time they were willing not because they particularly fancied the people concerned but because they felt they ought to.’ Another woman reflected that although she thought she was ‘breaking all the taboos’, ‘we had our own taboos and one of them was we couldn’t talk about our problems or admit to being unhappy’. She was ‘unfulfilled’, she said sadly. She rarely ‘had an orgasm, because the men were so selfish’; but she lacked ‘the confidence to say, “No, that’s not right, I don’t want to do that.” ’6

  Since so many intelligent, articulate young wome
n felt that their underground colleagues were using them simply ‘for fucks and domesticity’, as another put it, their rebellion was only a matter of time. In 1969, Rowbotham persuaded her colleagues on the radical newspaper Black Dwarf to devote an issue to ‘the Year of the Militant Woman’, including articles on equal pay, birth control, childcare and sex. In her lead article, Rowbotham gave voice to her resentment at women’s low pay and restricted opportunities as well as ‘something else besides, a much less tangible something – a smouldering bewildered consciousness with no shape – a muttered dissatisfaction which suddenly shoots to the surface and EXPLODES’. Women wanted, she said, to ‘drive buses, play football, use beer mugs, not glasses’, and not to be ‘wrapped up in cellophane or sent off to make the tea or shuffled into the social committee’. These were ‘only little things’, she granted, but ‘revolutions are made of little things’.

  While Rowbotham’s piece struck a chord with hundreds of like-minded young women, it was nevertheless revealing that in the personal ads, the male designer had inserted: ‘DWARF DESIGNER SEEKS GIRL: Head girl type to make tea, organize paper, me. Free food, smoke, space. Suit American negress.’ Rowbotham was not amused: this was, she wrote later, ‘the seedy side of the underground: arrogant and prejudiced’, and it explained ‘the anger which was shortly to cohere’ among many of her female peers. One letter to the radical paper Idiot International in October 1970 speaks volumes. ‘Will you please tell me’, the correspondent asked, ‘how you reconcile publishing information on Women’s Liberation and adverts which read “Dave seeks aware chick” and “the most delicious new cunt on the screen”? You are making me weary and sick with your stupidity.’7