An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (7 page)

At the rally a youngster in a boiler-suit persistently heckled the Prime Minister. One of his interruptions concerned the level of old-age pensions: the Labour Party was calling for the basic rate of old-age pensions to be raised to £3 a week and to be annually adjusted to the cost of living. ‘
You’ve
never had it so good,’ Macmillan cried back at the heckler, contrasting the youngster’s rising wages with the fixed income of a pensioner, rather than targeting everyone in Bedford football ground. According to another account (that of Quentin Skinner, the historian of political thought, then a sixth-former at Bedford school, who was present), the heckler shouted facetiously: ‘What about the workers?’ Macmillan responded as if a serious objection had been called. It was this phrase that beyond any other became associated with his premiership.
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If people’s material standards were improving, in Bedford and nationally, there was a perception that, perhaps in consequence, sexual standards were deteriorating. Two years after Macmillan’s football-pitch speech, Peter Kennerley of the
Sunday Pictorial
went to Bedford. ‘Good-time girls – drunken teenagers – mothers who leave home for the bright lights – and plain unvarnished vice – these are the problems … earning the town of Bedford the reputation of “BRITAIN’S SIN TOWN 1959”.’ Kennerley reported that seven brothels had been raided and closed by Bedford police in the preceding six months. Twenty children from Bedford had been taken into council care in the last four months because their mothers had deserted their homes. A probation officer was quoted as saying that the absconding mothers, like troublesome teenagers, ‘go where the money is’. Money in this case meant hundreds of American servicemen from three nearby airbases.
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Six weeks after Macmillan’s Bedford speech, on 4 September 1957, the Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution in Great Britain published its report. This recommended that homosexual activity between consenting adult men should no longer be criminalised; that penalties for street-soliciting by women should be increased; and that landlords letting premises to prostitutes should be deemed as living off immoral earnings. The recommendations on heterosexual prosti-tution were adopted in the Street Offences Act, which came into operation in 1959, while the recommendations on homosexuality were resisted.

Although the Profumo Affair would be, exclusively, a tooth-and-claw heterosexual business, reactions to it were part of a continuum of sexual attitudes. The fears, insults and cant surrounding male homosexuality in this period were not restricted in their impact to the communities that were targeted. On the contrary, the obtuseness of intelligent people about sexual motives, the punitive urges, the notion that collective respectability was maintained by newspaper bullying and abasement of vulnerable individuals, the prudish lynch mobs, the deviousness behind the self-righteous wrath of the judiciary – all these defining traits of homophobia erupted nationwide during the summer of 1963, with the Profumo resignation, Ward trial and Denning report.

Writing about Ward’s mis-trial, the jurist Louis Blom-Cooper later commented: ‘The law does not care for social realities; it bases its action upon highly emotive opinion on what is best for the country’s morals.’ The truth of this was exemplified by sundry interventions from Lord Hailsham, a barrister who held several Cabinet posts under Macmillan and hoped to succeed him as Prime Minister in 1963. In an epoch when it was unthinkable for Cabinet Ministers to appear in shirtsleeves, Hailsham and Ian Macleod were pioneers among Tory politicians in trying to indicate that they were hustling, businesslike modernisers by tightly buttoning the middle button of their suit jackets. At the time of the Wolfenden committee’s appointment, while citing his courtroom expertise, Hailsham had published a scourging essay on homosexual ‘corruption’. He was emphatic that male homosexu-ality was ‘a problem of social environment and not of congenital make-up’. For most men, ‘the precipitating factor in their abnormality has been initiation by older homosexuals while the personality is still pliable’. Homosexuality was indeed ‘a proselytising religion, and initiation by an adept is at once the cause and the occasion of the type of fixation which has led to the increase in homosexual practices’. Hailsham, with his authority as a Queen’s Counsel and Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn, held that ‘homosexual practices are contagious, incurable, and self-perpetuating’, that ‘homosexuality is, and for fundamentally the same reasons, as much a moral and social issue as heroin addiction’. Homosexuals, he averred, were pederasts by preference. ‘No doubt homosexual acts between mature males do take place … but the normal attraction of the adult male homosexual is to the young male adolescent or young male adult to the exclusion of others.’

As so often, hostility to same-sex activity splayed into asinine condemnation of heterosexual behaviour. ‘Adultery and fornication may be immoral but, on the lowest physical plane, they both involve the use of the complementary physical organs of male and female,’ Hailsham explained. However, ‘between man and woman the persistent misuse of these organs in any other way is often fraught with grave dangers, emotional, or even physical, to one or both of the participants’. This seems to be a verbose warning that people who enjoyed using either mouths or fingers in their sex lives were in peril of nervous or bodily collapse. Homosexual practices were worse because they used ‘non-complementary physical organs’, Hailsham continued. ‘The psychological consequences of this physical misuse of the bodily organs cannot in the long run be ignored … nearly all the homosexuals I have known have been emotionally unbalanced and profoundly unhappy. I do not believe that this is solely or exclusively due to the fear of detection, or of the sense of guilt attaching to practices in fact disapproved of by society. It is inherent in the nature of an activity which seeks a satisfaction for which the bodily organs employed are physically unsuited.’
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Hailsham sounded moral alarms monotonously, although the miscreant modernity that he despised was tied to material ease promoted by the government of which he was a member. His inaugural address as Rector of Glasgow University in 1959 flailed ‘the emotional, intellectual, moral, political, even the physical litter and chaos of the world today, when truth has almost ceased to be regarded as objective, when kindness is made to depend on political, class or racial affiliations, when only the obvious stands in need of publicity’. He felt revulsion, he declared, ‘when I look at popular pin-ups, playboys, millionaires and actresses with the bodies of gods and goddesses and the morals of ferrets lurching from one demoralising emotional crisis to another and never guessing the reason; when I view the leaders of great states, the masters of immense concentrations of power and wealth, gesticulating like monkeys and hurling insults unfit for fishwives; when I reflect on the vapidity of so much that is popular in entertainment, the triteness of so much that passes for profundity, the pointlessness and frustration in the popular mood.’ In these rounded periods lay the quandary of the Macmillan era, and the trap for Jack Profumo.
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Despite the spiritual pride of Hailsham and allies like him, Macmillan won the general election of 1959 because the Tories were more convincing as a party of liberty and progress: Labour, by contrast, seeming conservative and cheeseparing. Profumo’s campaign message to the electors of Stratford-on-Avon decried his socialist opponents as regressive killjoys and fretful regulators. ‘Most people are suffering from acute political exhaustion. Facts, figures, graphs, slogans, promises, boasts, taunts and threats galore have been chucked about for weeks.’ But some things were clear: the Labour government of 1945–51 had failed to meet expectations. ‘The Labour leaders were all so keen to establish a Socialist State that they failed to observe what made people tick and what made them kick. They divided us, depressed us, disillusioned us and nearly destroyed us.’ By contrast, since 1951, ‘we have swept away all the paraphernalia of controls and proved that Conservative freedom does work to the benefit of everyone’. Voters were ‘glad to be free of controls; but a Labour Government would clamp them on again … This is your life – don’t let Labour ruin it.’
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Hugh Trevor-Roper, who masterminded Macmillan’s election as Chancellor of Oxford University in 1960, thought that the tendency of the times was towards ‘a vulgar, jolly, complacent, materialist social democracy’. He found ominous ‘the universal absorbent materialism even of spiritual life which has triumphed in America and, unless one fights against it, will gradually triumph here too – has already triumphed in the majority of the population’. A Salford bookmaker’s son thought similarly to the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. ‘I jumped at the chance,’ Albert Finney said in 1961 of his lead in the screen version of Alan Sillitoe’s novel
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
, ‘because of what the film had to say about our present-day smash-and-grab society’. Some Tories shuddered at Macmillan’s bribery of voters. During elections, declared a discontented backbencher in 1962, each political party entered ‘a sort of spiv auction, each one trying to outbid the other with promises of material gain to the masses, in the cynical belief that the electorate is composed of unthinking dupes whose highest aspiration in life is to worship Mammon’.
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If Macmillan’s England seemed a smash-and-grab society to some, it remained a place of frugal, unimaginative routines for many others. Michael Wharton, the
Daily Telegraph
columnist, lunched every working day in a dingy Fleet Street pub on an identical meal of corned beef sandwiches washed down by brandy and ginger. He ate the same supper each evening at his Battersea flat of lime juice and soda with five fish fingers (never more or less). Yet Wharton felt deep passions, cravings and regrets, as shown by his lament for England in 1961: ‘Her empire and influence is almost gone; her patriots are too much ashamed and beaten down with incessant jeers to speak up for her, or if they do, their voices are shrill and ugly with rancour’ (a reference to the League of Empire Loyalists, a group of embittered hecklers, opposed to decolonisation, who followed Macmillan about shouting that he was a traitor). As to the countryside, farmers had become ‘money-mad mechanics, forever searching for new poisons for the soil which will ensure quick profits at any cost’; fox-hunters chased their quarry around housing estates; Morris dancers cavorted beside atomic power stations; in summer the Lake District was infested by smelly, honking pleasure traffic.

Wharton did not wonder that England, ‘the first country to suffer industrialisation and uniquely vulnerable to its final triumph, clings to survivals, landed titles, splendid rituals’. The move towards classlessness was a drift into stereotypes and the culture of grievance. ‘Policemen and sociologists, clergymen and psychiatrists are chasing the fashionable hooligans and sex maniacs; housewives yawn in deathly new towns; journalists, television interviewers and experts endlessly discuss the Problems of Today. There is the Problem of Youth, the Problem of Delinquency, the Problem of Coloured Immigration, the Problem of the Eleven Plus, the Problem of Parking.’ People thought less in terms of class loyalties, and increasingly as categories of oppressed: ‘as teenagers, homosexuals, motorists, misunderstood criminals and so on’. Mammon ruled under Macmillan, Wharton thought. ‘Over all this England, with its mingled apathy and desperation, lies a thick fog of money and of the operations of money. The ideal Englishman of the advertisements is no longer an aristocrat; he has become a salesman or a financial speculator. His office skyscrapers shoot up overnight where familiar old buildings have been (and he hires public relations men to tell us how much more beautiful they are than the old buildings and makes us ashamed of ourselves for thinking otherwise); his empires of money grow and combine, grow and combine again, continually devising new needs, new categories of people to feel those needs and buy the goods that will satisfy them, temporarily, until new needs can be devised.’
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About the time that Churchill retired as Prime Minister in 1955, the patriotic catchphrases that public men had traditionally parroted abruptly began to seem bogus, weary and redundant. A few months later, after the revelations of the Burgess-Maclean espionage cover-up, the word ‘Establishment’ was first deployed with the overtone that anything established was suspect. The notion flourished that political, administrative and economic authority was controlled by a secretive sect with strange rites and arcane customs – a mafia comprised of Wykehamists and Etonians. ‘There certainly exists in Britain a number of persons, many of them known to each other and sometimes educated together, who exercise considerable power and influence of the kind that is not open to direct public inspection,’ wrote the young philosopher Bernard Williams at the time of the general election of 1959. ‘Large areas of British life are permeated by mediocrity and the refusal to face genuine issues. Influential figures undoubtedly share, in their own refined complacent way, these characteristics, but they are not the cause of them.’ Henry Fairlie, the political journalist who was amongst the most perceptive commentators on Macmillan’s premiership, complained in the same year that this demure coinage, ‘the Establishment’, had been debauched by publicists until it was a harlot of a phrase used promiscuously by dons, novelists, playwrights, artists, actors, critics, scriptwriters and band leaders to denote those in positions of authority whom they disliked. The Establishment’s defenders argued that it was rooted in neither class nor sectional interest, and was, therefore, disinterested. Its opponents found this lack of passion or commitment to be depressing, and perhaps reprehensible.
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