Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  One way and another, the result was near-unmentionability. ‘Sex was not a matter for general discussion,’ Penelope Lively bluntly recalls about being a young woman then, and most children of the fifties would nod in agreement. Women’s magazines were particularly circumspect in their treatment, with analysis of the Woman’s Own problems page in 1955 showing that ‘Mary Grant’ went to almost any length – ‘an important part of marriage’, ‘physical love’, even ‘intimate love-making’ – to avoid the dreaded word sex, a circumspection almost matched by the letter-writers themselves, for whom a favourite phrase was ‘the intimate side of married life’. The Mills & Boon authorial rules, not just guidelines, were strict – passion fine, ‘sex’ or titillation far from fine – while generally in fiction, films and plays there was an almost systemic lack of frankness in approach to sexual matters, an inhibition in part the direct result not only of censorship but also of a major government-cum-legal campaign in the mid-1950s against anything even faintly obscene, a campaign that among other cases saw the artist Donald McGill, king of the seaside postcard, briefly banged up for his depiction of an outsize, almost vertical stick of rock.

  Inevitably, a conspiracy of silence meant in turn deep sexual ignorance. Lively also recalls how she and her female generation ‘found out by trial and error, and mistakes ended in marriage or abortion’; for Joan Bakewell, her ‘total innocence of birth control’ as a Cambridge undergraduate was shared by her mother (unsurprisingly, given that only one in six of M-O’s ‘Little Kinsey’ street sample had had any sex education); and a common theme to Growing Up in the Fifties, a 1990 collection of female testimony, is embarrassment about sex and secrecy over menstruation. Boys were also stumbling in the dark. ‘Sex education did not feature on Quarry Bank’s syllabus, and [Aunt] Mimi could not be interrogated on such matters in other than the most general and theoretical terms,’ notes John Lennon’s biographer Philip Norman. ‘Like most of his generation, John had to piece together the facts of life from dirty jokes and diagrams on the walls of public urinals.’ As in Liverpool, so in Bristol. ‘At my school,’ remembered Derek Robinson, ‘the two periods of biology scheduled to cover human reproduction left many of us more confused than before. That tangle of plumbing created in chalk on the blackboard: did it really have something to do with our bodies? There was a rumour that sex was supposed to be fun. It didn’t look like fun. The way the biology master described it, it sounded slightly less fun than unclogging a drain with a bent plunger.’20

  Another area long shrouded by secrecy, rumour, guilt and fear was homosexuality. Admittedly there was a comic tradition of the effeminate queen, but it was not a tradition that ever embraced realistic portrayal. During most of the 1950s, moreover, the Lord Chamberlain’s Office resolutely refused to allow any discussion of the subject on the licensed stage, while it remained strictly off-limits in British cinema (notwithstanding Frankie Howerd playing Willie Joy in 1955’s Jumping for Joy and ordering a double ginger beer). In another sense, though, things were probably starting to change by the mid-1950s, amid the widespread prosecution of homosexuals, the establishment of the Wolfenden Committee in 1954 and quite extensive press coverage. ‘The subject was taboo and never openly discussed,’ Basil Henriques noted in 1955. ‘Lately it has become an ordinary topic of conversation, openly talked about by people of all ages and both sexes in each other’s company.’ Free and frank exchanges of view were perhaps in reality not quite so prevalent round the dinner table, but it was significant that Henriques himself, for all his generally high moral tone, strongly encouraged parents to show ‘the utmost sympathy’ towards homosexual sons.

  Inevitably, evidence to Wolfenden varied hugely, but it was arguably the British Medical Association that carried the most weight. In a lengthy written submission, it sat on the fence about what Wolfenden should recommend in terms of legalisation or otherwise, but did assert that prison was ‘not usually the most suitable place’ for ‘dealing’ with the homosexual offender and referred to ‘the apparent disproportion of sentences imposed’ as ‘sometimes greatly disturbing’. Even so, there was no disposition on the BMA’s part not to regard homosexuality as a problem requiring treatment. That treatment could take several forms, but subsequently released Home Office papers showed the quite widespread use in the 1950s of electric-shock treatment and oestrogen (a female sex hormone) in order to try to turn homosexual prisoners into heteros. ‘The desire for medical treatment is often expressed but much more rarely sincerely felt,’ was the typically caustic remark of prison staff in the report presented to the Home Secretary, and indeed in the majority of cases the ‘inverts’ (as they were called) refused treatment.

  Only three professed homosexuals gave evidence to Wolfenden: Peter Wildeblood, Patrick Trevor-Roper (a Harley Street eye surgeon and brother of Hugh) and Carl Winter, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. All three were well-connected professional men, and Winter described with some satisfaction his extensive circle of very civilised homosexual or homosexual-tolerant friends:

  We are all completely at ease in one another’s company and the world in which we live, which is a much more extensive world, I think, than many people would suppose. We visit each other’s houses, go abroad, travel, look at the sort of things that interest us, art, exhibitions, ballet, and have a satisfactory life within that sphere. Somebody from outside is every now and then caught up in it. Somebody presents himself at one’s door and if he is in character a sympathetic person he is admitted, if not, he is excluded . . .

  It was a million miles away from the world of cottaging, smelly urinals and furtive encounters in parks – the world that, perforce, most other homosexuals inhabited. Accordingly, none of the three asked the Committee to recommend decriminalising homosexual activities in general, including in public places; all they wanted was legalisation inside the home, or, in Wildeblood’s words, ‘neither corrupting others nor publicly flaunting their condition’.21 Their evidence, in short, was still in its way a milestone, but it was very far from a rallying cry.

  Most homosexuals, before and during the Wolfenden Committee’s entirely private deliberations, got on with life as best they could. Two leading television personalities, the covertly homosexual Gilbert Harding and the covertly lesbian Nancy Spain, kept up a bantering, somewhat camp relationship for screen and press, even permitting suggestions of marriage; Dirk Bogarde allegedly paid annual visits to University College Hospital for aversion therapy; equally allegedly, Edward Heath was warned by police in 1955, during vetting to become a Privy Councillor, to stop his cottaging activities; the writer and radio producer Hallam Tennyson was staying in his marriage despite becoming aware of his underlying homosexuality, a process movingly described in his 1984 memoir The Haunted Mind; the young Peter Maxwell Davies, growing up in working-class Salford, knew enough to stay mum (‘keeping it secret became second nature’); and Alan Bennett, uneasily asked by his father if he was ‘one of them’, quickly replied, ‘Oh, Dad, don’t be daft.’ A gay couple during these long dark years were Daniel McCairns and Harold Smythe, even though they were living in Maryhill, one of the toughest parts of Glasgow. ‘I’d like to have asked them how the hell they got away with it,’ McCairns’s great-nephew reflected in 2005 following their deaths after over half a century together. ‘What was it like to spend your entire public life never showing any affection? Did you ever tell anyone else? But to ask would have been inconceivable, which is, perhaps, the answer to how they got away with it. No one dared hint at it.’22

  The Wolfenden Committee did not just consider the question of ‘Huntley’s’, as Wolfenden termed homosexuals to spare the feelings of his female secretaries. There was also the problem of ‘Palmer’s’, as he called prostitutes. It was a problem partly of numbers: the National Council of Women of Great Britain reckoned in its evidence that about a quarter of a million men visited prostitutes each week in London (perhaps an overestimate), while in 1958 the number of full-time streetwalkers there was gauged at
3,000 (perhaps an underestimate). But above all, in the eyes of the authorities, it was a problem of visibility. In particular, members of the Cabinet and senior Home Office officials were appalled by the sheer affront to decency and thus in 1954 sanctioned the subject as a last-minute add-on to homosexuality; while the following year, from a rather different standpoint, the American sexologist Alfred Kinsey was shown round the West End on a Saturday night and counted a thousand prostitutes at work, saying afterwards that he had never seen so much blatant sexual conduct.

  Almost certainly there was little sympathy for the position of these women. ‘Disapproval is not only strong but general,’ M-O’s ‘Little Kinsey’ found in 1949 about prostitution as such, with ‘moral objections’ being ‘largely directed against the prostitutes themselves’, viewed by most people as ‘hard, bad and degraded’. Those attitudes probably hardened during the more prosperous 1950s, as the traditional economic justification became less applicable. Yet to read Women of the Streets (1955) – undertaken for the British Social Biology Council, edited by the invariably humane C. H. Rolph, and typically for its era subtitled A Sociological Study of the Common Prostitute – is to encounter voices that should have reminded Wolfenden and his committee members that each prostitute (here based mainly in Soho or Hyde Park) was a unique individual working in a heartless industry:

  You don’t know the things they do and the things they want. Be all right walking down the street, talk to you ever so nice, but when they get alone with us women, well, some of them are like rats in holes. A woman doesn’t know a man; if a wife knew what her husband was really like she’d never live with him no more. We have to chain them up and beat them and jump on them . . . Sometimes a man sits beside me and I shudder away from him, if only people knew what you were like, you awful slimy toad, I think. (Bessie)

  Some of the men even want to kiss you! Why, they’d mess all your lipstick up . . . I get so mad when a man says to me, ‘But you must get some pleasure out of it, else you wouldn’t do it’ . . . you know, it’s funny, but once I get the money I change. Maybe going to my place in the car we have to talk, and I try to make myself nice and ask what they do, though sometimes I say ‘If you were a bank-robber I wouldn’t care.’ But the moment we get in and I get the money I feel fed up with them and keep on saying to myself, ‘Hurry up, hurry up and get out’ . . . One thing I can’t stand in business is anyone touching my breasts. I can’t bear it and nearly scream if they try. (Edna)

  Ten shillings a time, unless they don’t know the value of money, say a foreigner, then we charge them more. Of course, in the Park you don’t have the full intercourse; at least, you have to on the grass or on a chair, but you say ‘The grass is too wet, dear.’ You keep your legs together and the men don’t know any different. (Gwyneth)

  I like to have my eyes open. I’ll never take a man who offers me more than I ask. I only want thirty shillings, and if one offers me £3 I know it’s fishy. He’ll try to get me to take off my clothes and then get his money . . . We get a lot of sadists and men who want beating – they’re usually Army captains. (Kathleen)

  I hate the sort of man who says, ‘Of course my wife doesn’t understand this sort of thing.’ Judging from them I wonder which one it is doesn’t understand. They can be so dull! Anyway, I don’t think they should discuss their wives with me. Their relation with me is something apart. (Priscilla)23

  ‘The time in Britain is twelve noon, in Germany it’s one o’clock, but home and away it’s time for Two-Way Family Favourites.’ Every Sunday, after the signature tune ‘With a Song in My Heart’, these words were heard on the Light Programme, spoken by (as Denis Gifford fondly recalled) ‘the warm, ladylike, yet subtly sexy tones of Jean Metcalfe, BBC lady par excellence’. There followed an hour and a quarter of record requests, linking Armed Forces personnel in West Germany with their families at home, and invariably including the ‘Bumper Bundle’, the week’s most popular choice. Metcalfe herself, a railway clerk’s daughter, was married to the avuncular, rock-steady Cliff Michelmore – the two having met over the microphone in the late 1940s, when he was temporarily the presenter in Hamburg – and under her the programme became a household fixture, attracting weekly audiences of around 12 to 13 million. It was unique in its ability ‘to stimulate both the digestive juices and the heartfelt emotions of the nation at the same time’, remembers Ken Blakemore from his Cheshire childhood. ‘The air was laden with that theme tune and with yearning messages, the aromas of roast lamb and gravy, and the sounds of new potatoes being scraped and mint being chopped. Two-Way Family Favourites was, in short, the distilled essence of 1950s family bonding.’24

  Normative assumptions identifying the moral and social health of the nation with the moral and social health of the family were close to the heart of the era’s official and semi-official discourse – a discourse predicated on the perhaps exaggerated perception that the great disruption of the war and immediate post-war years had been hugely damaging to the cohesiveness of family life. To an unprecedented, almost cultish extent, children were seen as the future, and it was to them, more than any other section of society, that the new welfare state was devoted. The welfare state alone, though, could not do it all, and almost all activators were agreed that it was the family that provided the indispensable framework for a child’s development. A key conduit for the message were women’s magazines, by the early 1950s approaching their zenith of circulation and devoting page upon positive, glowing page to family matters, typified by Good Housekeeping starting a regular ‘Family Centre’ feature that dealt with all aspects – parental, marital, practical – of family life. Almost invariably applied to nuclear rather than extended set-ups, the very word, moreover, was ubiquitous. ‘To Be One of the Family’ was one of the adult stories in the randomly chosen 1 March 1952 issue of the People’s Friend, while for children there was ‘The Snowdrop Family Goes to Town’.

  Marriage itself was the unassailable norm. ‘Never before,’ reflected Richard Titmuss towards the end of the 1950s, ‘has there been such a high proportion of married women in the female population under the age of forty and, even more so, under the age of thirty.’ Or take ‘gross nuptiality’ indicators, ie the percentage probability of marrying before the age of 50:

  Men Women

  1900–02 88.0 81.6

  1951–55 93.5 94.6

  1956–60 94.1 96.0

  1995 65.4 68.7

  Unsurprisingly, given such figures, Gorer found on the basis of his People survey that the English placed ‘a very high valuation’ on ‘the institution of marriage’. Put another way, marriage was the all-pervasive expectation, especially of course among as yet unmarried adolescents, above all working-class girls. ‘From “having a boy” to “going steady”, and from “going steady” to “getting married”,’ noted Pearl Jephcott on the basis of her Nottingham study in the early 1950s, ‘were the proper steps for any dutiful daughter to take in her teens and to have completed by her early twenties.’25

  It seems that at least a quarter of couples (of all social classes) first met on the dance floor, while on Sunday evenings – in south Wales anyway, and probably elsewhere – there was the so-called monkey parade. ‘Gaggles of girls strolled in their finery: hoop skirts, stockings and a flash of scarlet across the lips; gangs of boys marched by in their Vaseline-sculpted Tony Curtis hair – big DA at the back and quiff in the front,’ wrote Robin Eggar in his biography of Tom Jones. ‘All evening they criss-crossed, exchanging glances and giggles, sometimes pairing off for a sneaked coffee, but more often relying on flirting and safety in numbers.’ Jones himself, Tommy Woodward at the time, got married at Pontypridd register office in March 1957 at 16, the same age as his heavily pregnant bride, Linda. ‘Nobody can touch me now I’m a man,’ he reckoned to himself after first seeing the baby some six weeks later. In less rushed circumstances, the wedding would probably have been at a church or chapel, though in any case a proper honeymoon was far from invariable. ‘We went and stayed at
my brother’s house,’ recalled a mid-1950s bride from the north-west about what followed the reception at the Co-op. ‘Of course, we didn’t have a lot of money, but we had bought a house of our own, so we just went away for a long weekend and then came back to our home to settle in.’

  Divorce was highly unusual through the decade, running at an annual rate of around two divorces per thousand married people once the immediate post-war upwards blip had played itself out. In part this reflected what was still the largely restrictive, judgemental, illiberal law, requiring guilt – usually in the form of adultery – on the part of either husband or wife. A Labour MP, Eirene White, did try in 1951 to achieve a measure of reform and in the process inspired a notable speech by the young Tory politician Reginald Maudling, who declared that ‘broadly speaking, we are dealing not with the misdeeds of men and women but their follies and misfortunes, which are much harder to deal with’. The Attlee government took fright, however, and set up a royal commission – which, lawyer-dominated, took five years to report, and then inconclusively. Although the Mothers’ Union refused to admit the divorced, attitudes in general towards divorce seem to have been conflicted: often an inability or unwillingness to imagine that it might be a possible outcome to one’s own marriage, however unhappy or imperfect, as well as a certain censoriousness towards well-known figures (for instance J. B. Priestley or the comedian Max Wall) whose marriages had failed; but at the same time, a certain underlying pragmatic tolerance towards the concept, allied to instinctive dislike of those, like the church, seen as too inclined to go on the high horse. By 1955, moreover, there were significant straws in the wind: not only the widespread sympathy for Princess Margaret in her wish to marry a divorced man but also the arrival as Counselling Officer at the National Marriage Guidance Council (precursor of Relate) of John Wallis, who would oversee a shift away from guidance in order to save marriages and towards counselling aimed at maximising individual fulfilment.