State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Since the Responsible Society’s tone seemed so measured, it was not surprising that it immediately attracted an admiring editorial in The Times, which concluded, in its habitual wishy-washy style, that ‘the more permissive sexual life of adults … has to be reconciled with the need of children for stability’ (a view with which no sane person could conceivably have disagreed). The problem, though, was that a relatively measured tone was no good way to attract recruits, and within twelve months the Responsible Society’s rhetoric and opposition to sex education had become notably more strident. In fact, many of the pressure groups that sprang up to fight permissiveness in the 1960s and 1970s were avowedly religious, even evangelical in spirit, appealing to middle-class churchgoers who wanted to fight the increasing secularization of society. As a wholly secular group, however, the Responsible Society was at a disadvantage, and by 1978 it had only 719 members. Revealingly, only 7 per cent of them were under 30 while no fewer than 58 per cent were in their fifties or older. Still, some groups were even smaller: the Community Standards Association, founded in Cornwall in 1974 to mobilize public opinion against ‘mental and moral pollution’, had just 300 members by the late 1970s. But unlike many of its competitors, the Responsible Society kept going: four decades on, it was still fighting the good fight against teenage pregnancy, sex education and morning-after pills, in the guise of the Family Education Trust.52

  While the Responsible Society never aspired to become a mass-membership organization, another anti-permissive group formed at almost exactly the same time made a determined effort to attract thousands of recruits. In November 1970 a young couple, Peter and Janet Hill, had returned to Britain after four years abroad. Both committed Baptists, they had been working in India for an evangelical youth group, but almost as soon as they set foot on their native soil, they realized that they had been trying to spread the Gospel in the wrong country. Astounded by what he called the ‘moral slide’ of British society in just four years, which was characterized by the spread of pornography and the apparent media obsession with sex, Peter Hill had a vision of ‘thousands of young people marching as witnesses’ to the truth of the Bible’s moral teachings. In early 1971, he made contact with various like-minded people, from the Clean-Up TV campaigner Mary Whitehouse and the satirist-turned-born-again-Christian Malcolm Muggeridge to the Bishop of Blackburn and the housewives’ favourite, Cliff Richard. And by the summer he had established an eclectic steering committee, including a flying missionary, a shop-steward-turned-vicar and the general secretary of the Evangelical Alliance, and had also secured the support of various Anglican, Baptist and Pentecostal church groups. Both Muggeridge and Whitehouse, who were well-known television personalities with a substantial conservative following, pledged their support, and Muggeridge, with the journalist’s gift for a telling phrase, came up with a name for their new movement: the Nationwide Festival of Light. In July, Hill announced plans for a rally in Trafalgar Square, a gospel festival in Hyde Park, a national day of prayer and the lighting of beacons across the country to ‘alert Britain to the dangers of moral pollution which are now eroding the moral fibre of this once great nation’. The Festival would be a chance, Muggeridge added, to take back the cultural initiative from ‘those who for one reason or another favour our present Gadarene slide into decadence and godlessness. It is high time others made their voices heard.’53

  In many ways, the involvement of Muggeridge and Whitehouse in the Festival of Light was a very mixed blessing. While it secured all the publicity the organizers could possibly want, it also gave their movement a splenetic, even cranky air, and ensured that it would face plenty of mockery in the media. The campaign’s official launch in Westminster Hall on 8 September 1971, for example, was something of a disaster. Although some 4,000 people turned up, the proceedings were interrupted by at least 80 demonstrators, many of them from the Gay Liberation Front (including the young Peter Tatchell) and some of them dressed as nuns. Amid extraordinary scenes of shouting and struggling, the respected anti-apartheid activist and Bishop of Stepney, Trevor Huddleston, had to abandon his prepared remarks attacking pornography. Instead it was Muggeridge who dominated the stage, melodramatically telling the audience that the tide of permissiveness was a ‘devil’s arc reaching from the gutter to more rarefied and sanctimonious regions’. And this rather embarrassing beginning set the tone for the Festival’s next major event, a rally in Trafalgar Square two weeks later. Muggeridge confidently predicted that 100,000 people would turn up; instead, probably less than half did so, most of them young members of Baptist and other evangelical churches. Prince Charles sent a message of good luck, but the media again concentrated on the tension between the crowd and counter-demonstrators, among them GLF members armed with stink bombs. Muggeridge was so incensed that afterwards he completely lost his temper, telling the editor of the Radio Four’s World at One and The World This Weekend – an old friend and committed Catholic – that he had ‘a growing feeling of revulsion for the programmes you edit’. ‘In a time of moral crisis we’re on different sides,’ Muggeridge added, ‘so much so that I consider all personal relations between us now being at an end.’54

  In fact, despite the ludicrous scenes in central London and Muggeridge’s intemperate reaction, the Festival of Light was a considerable grass-roots success. Outside London, the movement organized dozens of ‘Land Aflame’ rallies, attracting, they claimed, a total of 215,000 people. In Blackburn, 10,000 people joined the local bishop and chief constable on a march for ‘decency’; in Bristol, a special service in the cathedral was filled to capacity; in Sheffield, hundreds watched as none other than Cliff Richard lit a beacon, one of about 300 across the country. As far as evangelical groups were concerned, this was a moment of unprecedented unity and solidarity; indeed, it stands as a landmark in the history of inter-denominational cooperation, with Catholics and evangelical Protestants joining hands to protest against the ‘corruption’ of modern morals. And while the Festival of Light eventually faded from the headlines, it never went away. By the end of the decade it was still campaigning for ‘love, purity and family life’ and against ‘destructive influences in contemporary culture’, and a small team distributed 15,000 copies of a quarterly newsletter through grass-roots Christian and conservative organizations. It did not turn back the tide of pornography and permissiveness, of course. But it clearly appealed to thousands of people, predominantly middle-class churchgoers, who felt frightened and alienated by the cultural changes that were sweeping over Britain in the 1970s – people like A. R. Reynolds of Hereford, who told The Times that they were ‘ordinary responsible people collectively calling a halt to those who are imposing on us standards of behaviour which take away dignity and decency’. ‘We all know what happens to a family when self and mutual respect is lost,’ he added; ‘it is the crucial step towards break-up of the family. The same applies to a nation.’55

  To people like Mr Reynolds, the true standard-bearer of the anti-permissive movement was neither Longford, the socialist peer, nor Muggeridge, the satirist-turned-moralist. It was the former senior mistress at Madeley School for Girls in Shropshire, a deeply religious woman who presented herself as an ordinary wife and mother and yet had become one of the most familiar faces in the country, her polite Midlands voice belying a passionate sense of moral mission. Ever since 1964, when she had launched the Clean-Up TV movement at a mass meeting in Birmingham Town Hall, Mary Whitehouse had come in for unrelenting mockery from her critics. The extravagantly mustachioed Conservative backbencher Sir Gerald Nabarro publicly called her a ‘hypocritical old bitch’; the young Sunday Times columnist Jilly Cooper called her ‘sinister and chilling’; the former director general of the BBC, Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, reportedly kept a nude cartoon of her with (oddly) five breasts, and used to amuse himself by throwing darts at it. In one episode of The Goodies she is lampooned as Desiree Carthorse, head of the Keep Filth Off Television Campaign, who enlists the Goodies to make a sex education film (‘How to Make
Babies While Doing Dirty Things’); in Till Death Us Do Part, Alf Garnett admiringly reads her book Cleaning Up TV, which Mike and Rita later ceremonially burn while chanting ‘Unclean, unclean’. And all the time she was bombarded with hate mail, with threatening telephone calls and abusive letters. She even complained that her sons had been invited to orgies on the pretence that they were Christmas parties.56

  And yet even as the attacks kept on coming, Whitehouse never gave up. In an age when female politicians were still extremely rare, with Barbara Castle, Margaret Thatcher and Shirley Williams the only well-known examples, she was rarely out of the headlines, ‘the model of a moral entrepreneur’. In one typical week in the mid-1970s, she spent Monday running her pressure group, the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, before addressing a meeting in the Midlands. The next day she drove to Sheffield for a debate at the university; on Wednesday she drove down to London to appear on the BBC’s Woman’s Hour; on Thursday she drove to South Wales for a television interview in Cardiff and a talk at a Methodist church hall in Merthyr Tydfil; on Friday, she had to go back down to Cardiff at short notice for yet another television discussion. All the time she hammered home the same message that had animated her very first manifesto back in January 1964. ‘We women of Britain believe in a Christian way of life,’ it began, demanding ‘the right to bring up our own children in the truths of the Christian faith, and to protect our homes from the exhibitions of violence’. And although her targets included plays, newspapers, films and novels, one loomed larger than any other: the BBC, which she accused of peddling ‘the propaganda of disbelief, doubt and dirt’ and celebrating ‘promiscuity, infidelity and drinking’. People watched the BBC, Whitehouse said, ‘at the risk of serious damage to their morals, their patriotism, their discipline and their family life’.57

  To Whitehouse’s critics, the obvious explanation for her campaign was that she was simply a crank, a self-appointed censor who wanted to turn back the clock to some imaginary paradise of church choirs and happy families. And in truth she often handed the scoffers all the ammunition they could want. Objecting to Till Death Us Do Part, for example, she took issue not with Alf’s racism or his reactionary opinions, but his language, sitting with a pen and paper to note down the ‘121 bloodies in half an hour’. Whereas most people found the Irish comedian Dave Allen, a great BBC favourite in the 1970s, gentle and rueful, she found him ‘offensive, indecent and embarrassing’, largely because he poked fun at the Catholic Church. At a meeting with the BBC chairman Sir Michael Swann in January 1974 – the very existence of which testified to her impact – she singled out the inoffensive sitcoms Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, claiming that they were guilty of repeated sexual innuendos (‘It seemed that the male sex organ’, she said unselfconsciously, ‘was the in thing’). Not even pop music was safe from her scrutiny: when Alice Cooper’s raucous ‘School’s Out’ reached number one in August 1972, she sent a furious letter to the producer of Top of the Pops. ‘You will hear that the lyrics contain the following chorus – “Got no principles, got no innocence; School’s out for Summer, School’s out for ever; School’s been blown to pieces, oh! No more books, no more teachers.” In our view the record is subversive. I hope you will agree and take the appropriate action. It could also amount to an incitement to violence.’ Amazingly, the producers agreed to ban the video; a few days later, Cooper sent Whitehouse flowers to thank her for the publicity.58

  Whitehouse’s most famous target, however, inhabited a very different world from the theatrical violence of an Alice Cooper concert. For all her determination, stamina and articulacy, her instincts sometimes led her badly awry, and in devoting so much attention to Doctor Who she made herself look frankly ridiculous. Even though parents often complained that it was too frightening for very young children, few would have described the teatime show as full of ‘the sickest, most horrible material … obscene violence and horror’. Yet to Mrs Whitehouse it was one of the most disturbing shows on television. She ‘believes the Saturday serial is giving nightmares to under-sevens’, explained the Evening News in January 1975, adding that she wanted ‘to “exterminate” the zany Doctor and his unearthly foes’. After watching the third episode of ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ two months later, for instance, she complained to the BBC that there had been ‘so much violence and sadism … that I believe this particular episode should not have been screened before 9 pm’. In March 1976, meanwhile, after watching Tom Baker defeat a giant man-eating plant in ‘The Seeds of Doom’, she solemnly denounced the programme’s reliance on ‘strangulation – by hand, by claw, by obscene vegetable matter’. Of course this only made her look absurd: if she wanted to maximize her public support, she would have done better to stick to genuine pornography than to worry about obscene vegetable matter. And yet the revealing thing is that for all the mockery, the BBC took her seriously. Eight months later, when the Doctor’s head was violently held under water in the climax to episode three of ‘The Deadly Assassin’, she wrote again ‘in anger and despair … because at a time when little children would be viewing, you showed violence of a quite unacceptable kind’. This time the BBC took note: the director general wrote her a letter of apology, while the master tape was edited to ensure that the freeze-frame cliffhanger could never be shown again.59

  What the BBC had realized, of course, was that Whitehouse was more than an isolated crank. In March 1975, the Sun had mockingly wondered: ‘How many of us does Mary Whitehouse really speak for?’ But her support was wider than her critics often imagined. In January 1972, after the defendants in the Oz obscenity trial had been freed on appeal, she launched a ‘Nationwide Petition for Public Decency’, which called for the strengthening of the obscenity laws and might have been expected to sink without trace. Yet by the time she formally presented the petition to Edward Heath in April 1973 it had attracted a staggering 1.35 million signatures, making it by far the most successful petition since the peace campaigns of the 1930s. According to Whitehouse’s own (unverifiable) figures, more than eight out of ten of people approached had agreed to sign, and there can be little doubt that it represented a genuine surge of public feeling. And then there was her pressure group, the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, founded in 1965 as a descendant of Clean-Up TV, which by the mid-1970s boasted a membership of about 31,000 people in twenty-eight regional branches. It might well be objected that this hardly made it a mass movement in a country of almost 60 million people. Even so, this made it roughly the same size as the Communist Party and much bigger than the National Front and the Socialist Workers’ Party, while there were many more NVALA members than, say, Oz readers. But then of course the NVALA’s members were overwhelmingly female, elderly and middle-class, precisely the kind of people often overlooked not just by journalists but by historians, too. Many, perhaps most, were committed Christians; many lived in rural areas; a majority were connected to ‘the older professions, small businessmen, traders and shopkeepers’. These were people who lamented the abolition of the death penalty and the rise of the mugger, inveighed against the ‘rent-a-crowd’ agitators allegedly whipping up the unions, and struggled to contain their horror at Heath’s supposed appeasement of socialism. ‘I think this permissiveness comes to us through television and the newspapers,’ explained a maths and scripture teacher from Lancashire. ‘I’m very sympathetic to Enoch Powell …’60

  From the very beginning, Whitehouse saw her movement in explicitly political terms. As a middle-class schoolteacher from the West Midlands she was a natural conservative; more importantly, however, she had for decades been a member of the evangelical Christian group Moral Re-armament, which had a fiercely anti-Communist thrust. At the root of the new permissiveness, she argued, was the ‘the secular/humanist/Marxist philosophy’, and her husband Ernest even told an interviewer that they were fighting back against the ‘pressure from the left-wing’ to ‘destroy the Christian faith’. Throughout her career, she never failed to l
ink permissiveness and socialism, arguing – as did many like-minded people during the Wilson and Heath years – that they were part of the same campaign to subvert British democracy. ‘The enemies of the West’, she once explained, ‘saw that Britain was the kingpin of Western civilisation; she had proved herself unbeatable on the field of battle because of her faith and her character. If Britain was to be destroyed, those things must be undercut.’ Just as many grass-roots Conservatives believed that behind the industrial unrest of the 1970s was a tight-knit cabal of Communist agents, therefore, Mary Whitehouse believed, the BBC’s output was inspired by Reds at Television Centre. ‘They’ve infiltrated the trade unions,’ she argued. ‘Why does anyone still believe they haven’t infiltrated broadcasting?’ As she explained in her book Whatever Happened to Sex? (1977), groups as diverse as the National Council for Civil Liberties, the Albany Trust, the Campaign for Homosexual Equality and the Humanist Society all belonged to the same conspiracy, run by ‘dogma-riddled lefties who see the undermining of morality as the prerequisite of take-over’. Not even the Radio Times was safe from subversion: after the much-loved listings magazine had run a mischievous cover montage of Christ, Tariq Ali and Coco the Clown, she warned the Daily Telegraph that it had fallen victim to a ‘disturbing leftist trend’.61