An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (19 page)

Many adults knew this disillusion, from Downing Street to the housing estates. When Dorothy Macmillan accepted in 1933 that her husband would not divorce her, she wrote that she was ‘reconciled to going on as we are. Of course that can’t be forever but it is no good looking too far ahead.’ In the event, the Macmillans remained together for another thirty-three years, albeit, as Dorothy said, having ‘got rid of all illusions & shams’. She described to Nancy Astor how she had been summoned to Chatsworth for rebuke by her mother, the Duchess of Devonshire: ‘She’ll have to get out of her head that my soul is like a bottle being swept along by a raging river & that she & the family have got to fish it out, & that my body is a suitcase to be picked up & put down & sent off & watched! I am in point of fact 32½ & a human being & I’m not going to be packed about like a suitcase any more.’ Dorothy Macmillan was desperate to escape the surveillance of her husband, mother-in-law and mother; refused to be either downtrodden wife or bullied daughter; determined to be neither doormat nor bird in gilded cage. Her liberty mattered as much as her lover. ‘I’ve not gone off to Bob because of the children & I am perfectly willing to make a façade up to a point with Harold. As a matter of fact he agrees, or says he agrees with what I say, but he is so weak that if Mother tells him something is bad for my soul, he’ll completely change his mind and persuade himself that it’s his Duty to save the same soul.’ She had told him that he could visit Birch Grove whenever he wished: ‘it’s his house, his children, but all I want is to feel that I haven’t always
got
to be there with him & that I can go away if & when I want to, without incessant badgerings. If I’m hemmed in by the family & virtually imprisoned I can always go off, not to Bob, but alone.’
¹¹

More than once Dorothy Macmillan likened herself to a suitcase that was filled, emptied, humped and knocked about. Other women, too, felt they were being treated like bags. Wayland Kennet’s study of Paddington prostitutes, published in 1959, quoted one who faked orgasms if paid enough. ‘There’s some of them lies still as stones, they think it’s more ladylike or something; but I say they don’t know which side their bread’s buttered. Listen; if you lie still the bloke may spend half the night sweating away. But if you bash it about a bit he’ll come all the quicker and get out and away and leave you in peace.’ Indeed she knew tricks ‘so that with a bit of luck they come before they even get into me. When they do I look ever so loving and say: “Traitor”. Well, I’m not paid to be just a bag, am I?’
¹²

Lena Jeger, a postman’s daughter whose physician husband was Labour MP for St Pancras, worked with a family planning clinic in Somers Town until she went to the Commons in 1953 after a by-election caused by her husband’s death. She reported that until the early 1950s, working-class women were loath to use pessaries, rubber caps, diaphragms or sponges. Women, for example, who inserted a cervical cap in expectation of sex with their husbands later in the evening, were thought to be taking the sexual initiative in a wanton way, which sullied them. A middle-aged mother of five, who ‘fell again on the change’, had explained why she had not resorted to the clinic: ‘My husband says to leave all that to him, and that if I interfere with myself he won’t have anything to do with me.’ By 1962, Jeger reported, such attitudes had receded. ‘Small families have become almost a convention, a status symbol, and those with four or more children often hasten to explain that this was by deliberate decision because they like a lot of children.’ The changes in attitude and practice were partly attributable to the improved types of condoms – latex, and above all pre-lubricated – that became available in the mid-1950s. Generally, young working-class wives had come to despise those who failed to protect themselves. This overthrow of old prejudices seemed encouraging to Jeger because it had all but eliminated ‘the exhausted, impoverished and prematurely aged, who used to come to my husband’s East End surgery with their tormented little calendars of fear, believing it was “their lot” to have, as one woman put it, “one at the breast or one in the belly”.’
¹³

When Joyce Robinson married in 1949 she had no apprehension of loneliness and left her secretarial job to devote herself to marriage. ‘My husband was then a hairdresser and we had a four-roomed flat which I could clean out in a couple of hours. Then I just sat around being married. Sometimes I visited friends for tea. After six weeks I couldn’t stand it any longer, just sitting around like a plum pudding.’ To reduce her drooping isolation, she took part-time work, which she relinquished when pregnant with her first child in 1952. Young children kept her busy – ‘I thought it wrong to be away for work in their early years’ – but ‘if you spend all your time with young children you almost forget how to talk to adults. And the fewer people you see, the less you can think of what to say to them.’ Joyce Robinson restored sanity by working two mornings a week as a builder’s secretary: ‘I advise all my women friends not to work at home. Go out. See people outside your home even if it’s only at the bus stop.’ Her husband, meanwhile, started working nightshifts in the telephone exchange at Slough. Joyce Robinson felt ashamed that she spent less time on housework than other wives. ‘I’m always apologising about it and I shouldn’t. I say to visitors in case the house isn’t tidy enough, “Well, you must excuse us, we live in a perpetual weekend”.’ She felt that women who said they put their home and family first preferred housework to humanity. ‘They put objects before people. The polishing must be done on Mondays or they feel terrible. I don’t.’
¹⁴

Many authority figures wanted to make the Joyce Robinsons feel guilty. Journalists wrote approvingly: ‘Mum was a stay-at-home housewife’. Although the number of juvenile delinquents was infinitesimal compared with the number of mothers in full or part-time work, authorities, on scant evidence, insisted that working mothers caused crime. ‘Nearly everyone would now accept that lack of mother-love is an important cause of crime,’ declared Peter Scott, a physician at the Maudsley Hospital, psychiatrist at Brixton prison and Home Office consultant in 1954. Under the guise of condemning women for working, Scott indicted them for escaping domestic servitude. ‘If mother works it may mean that she must do so, but quite as often we find that she scarcely gains anything financially; it is very common to find that what the mother gains in wages she loses in paying a baby-minder, in fares, in the canteen of the factory, and in a reduction of father’s house-keeping allowance … what she really gains is a feeling of independence, and an escape from what her home has to come mean for her.’
¹⁵

This was a time when physicians could be found to blame everything from autism to homosexuality on bad mothering. John Bowlby of the Tavistock Clinic wrote a shameful book,
Childcare and the Growth of Love
(1953), based on his study of atypical children who had undergone the extreme disturbance of being bombed out of their homes and housed in wartime institutions, to argue that small children experienced separation anxiety if they did not have constant access to their mothers. It was a key text in the emergence of a new craft called ‘parenting’ – a middle-class secular faith, with bogus scientific paraphernalia like Christian Science – which justified competitive egotism by parents and reiterative fault-finding by parenting experts. ‘When a child steals sugar,’ the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott propounded, ‘he is looking for the good mother, his own, from whom he has a right to take what sweetness is there.’ The salvos against wilful women, and their weak men, never relented. ‘The boy,’ wrote a psychiatrist about teenagers who stole cars for joyrides, ‘usually comes from the rather better-class home, but he may have an over-possessive, dominating mother and, perhaps, an ineffectual father.’
¹⁶

As some women began to assert themselves, working to improve their independence, status and satisfactions, expanding their experiences and choices – all of these advances made with crablike stealth – there were people intent on subduing or rebuking them. ‘If I had my way,’ Lord Ailwyn told Parliament in 1961, ‘I would introduce a law forbidding mothers with young children to leave them all day and go out to work. Surely a woman with a husband at work should remain at home and look after her children.’ Ailwyn wished to make family allowances paid by the state to mothers, ‘these bonuses, or bounties, or whatever they call them’, eight shillings weekly for the second child rising to ten shillings for succeeding children, ‘conditional on the mother remaining at home and bringing up her children in the way she should’.
¹⁷

The reprimands of Scott and Ailwyn were the protests of men who feared that the women of the Macmillan years could not be stopped from their insubordinate courses. ‘The mothers of today,’ wrote Cecil King of Mirror
Group Newspapers, ‘are so anxious to have a job or go out to bingo that they neglect their functions as mothers.’ The respect traditionally shown to women was bound to be forfeited if they preferred jobs to ‘self-sacrifice’. As late as 1979, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Services in the Cabinet of the first woman Prime Minister promised a radio audience, ‘as the need for women’s paid work outside the family evaporates … we may expect a gradual return to the education of women for domestic labour’.
¹⁸

Increasingly during the 1950s, some young women rejected semi-official, masculine notions of womanhood and shuddered at the idea of being a selfless
Listen with Mother
housewife. Significantly, women’s broadcasters began the discreet, almost inaudible radio discussion of judicial regulation of sexual preference.
Woman’s Hour
, in 1955, was the first BBC programme to utter the word ‘homosexual’: the innovation would have been too threatening during any programme to which men listened in numbers. Marjorie Proops of the
Daily Mirror
claimed to find in 1964 ‘a new don’t-care-what-men-think attitude among females’. The fact was that ‘women, after years of struggling to please, allure, delight and generally grovel to men, suddenly got tired of the whole thing’.
¹⁹

Pamela Green – the first woman to appear all-but-naked in a British feature film,
Peeping Tom
, in 1960 – did not feel devalued by sexualised work because she made good money out of it, and made sure to control her own images. She was born in 1929, and enrolled at the St Martin’s School of Art when she was eighteen. She paid her London rent by working as an artist’s model, but found that she could earn better money by posing for photographers who produced the decorous nude studies, often lit to resemble classical statuary, used in such magazines as
Lilliput
and
Men Only
. Green, who was lithe with long blonde hair, did hundreds of topless or naked shots used to adorn barrack-room lockers and garage workshops. In 1951 she pranced in the chorus of
Paris to Piccadilly
, a Folies Bergère comedy spectacle starring Norman Wisdom, and staged by Bernard Delfont and Val Parnell at the Prince of Wales Theatre.

After a brief marriage to a stagehand, Green fell in with George Harrison Marks, a clapped-out comedian with a beatnik beard and drink problem. She taught him to pose shots of nude women, and to retouch prints. They sold discreetly wrapped postcards of nude photographs of her through Soho newsagents and some of the seedier bookshops. With the profits from these postcards she and Marks launched a magazine called
Kamera
in 1957. Green designed the costumes and backdrops, and posed in tempting disguises such as the sultry, flame-haired ‘Rita Landré’. For other photoshoots she applied ‘Pancake Negro’ (Max Factor, boot polish and baby oil) to become an exotic princess.
Kamera
’s kitsch eroticism resulted in reported weekly sales of 150,000 copies.

When the director Michael Powell was casting the role of a model in his film
Peeping Tom
, he visited Green and Marks’s studio in Gerrard Street, Soho asking for ‘Rita Landré’, whom he had seen in
Kamera
. After explaining her multiple identities, Green posed for him in a setting, which she had painted herself, of a cobbled Paris street with an arched alley. Powell not only cast Green in his film, but used her backdrop design in
Peeping Tom
. When Green reached the Pinewood film studio, she found it thronged with lookers-on, including the ogling cast of
Carry On Constable
, which was being shot nearby. In Powell’s film, Green stripped down to a G-string to play a model who is murdered by a duffel-coated photographer who impales young women on the leg of his camera tripod.

‘What
are
we coming to, what sort of people are we in this country, to make, or see, or seem to want (so that it gets made) a film like this?’ asked the critic Isabel Quigly. It was ‘the sickest and filthiest film’ that she had seen. There had been sleek horrors before, ‘but never such insinuating, under-the-skin horrors, and never quite such a bland effort to make it look as if this isn’t for nuts but for normal homely filmgoers like you and me.’ The voyeur-murderer had, as a child, been subjected to psychological testing whereby his reactions to cruel, terrifying and erotic experiences were filmed and analysed. These experiments stimulate a compulsion to ram tripods into young women’s throats so that he can record their last agonies: he provides a mirror so that they watch themselves die. As accompaniment to his own death by self-spiking, he plays tapes of his screams as a tormented child. ‘Children’s terror used as entertainment, atrocious cruelty put on the screen for fun,’ deplored Quigly. ‘The madman murderer is played all through as hero – handsome, tormented, lovable, a glamorous contrast to the heroine’s alternative youths – and dies in the sort of well-it-was-worth-it huddle with his girl that Cocteau used at the end of
L’éternel retour
.’
²⁰