Family Britain, 1951-1957 (53 page)

He was John Profumo, who two days after the first night was, like other Tory backbenchers, at Margate for his leader’s much-awaited speech to the party conference. This was Churchill’s first major public appearance since his stroke, and he spoke for 50 minutes, standing throughout. To the faithful’s obvious relief, it was a passable version of vintage:

All the old mannerisms were there [reported the
Observer
] – the pretended search for the exact word, the delighted childlike glow that comes over his features as he nears a joke. When, as is his way, he got rather confused in some statistics about food, he put it all right by happily reflecting: ‘How lucky it was I wasn’t complicating it by percentages.’ . . . Later on when he drank a glass of water he confided – again with that cherubic smile – ‘I don’t often do that.’ And then as the hall roared its appreciation: ‘I mean when I’m making a speech.’

Not everyone shared the enthusiasm for the 78-year-old’s evident determination to stay in office. ‘London is very miserable at the moment,’ Kenneth Williams wrote soon afterwards to a friend, ‘the leaves falling in the parks, the evenings becoming colder and foggy and everywhere, the depression wrought by a Conservative government – O to be out of England, now that Winston’s in.’
⁶

By-election of the autumn was at Holborn and St Pancras South, whose Labour MP, Dr Santo Jeger, had died in September – ‘a rank red, and one of the ugliest little yids you ever did see’, generously noted a constituent, Anthony Heap. The party’s candidate was Jeger’s widow, Lena, who during the campaign was canvassing in a block of flats when she met a woman in the lift and addressed her on the issue of German rearmament. ‘People have been pissing in this lift,’ replied the woman. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ To which Jeger said that, if elected, she could not promise to be able to stop this. ‘Well,’ riposted the woman, ‘if you can’t stop people pissing in lifts, how are you going to stop Germans rearming?’ Jeger got home with a narrow majority on 19 November, just a few days after Crossman had spent ‘a disturbing weekend’ at meetings in the West Midlands. ‘Both at Coventry and at Leamington, Nye [Bevan] got an audience but he had to do all the lifting of it,’ he reflected. ‘I would say that there was absolutely no swing so far towards Labour and that, on the whole, the vast majority of the electorate are plain uninterested in party politics of any kind. This matters far less to a Tory Government than it does to a Labour Opposition.’

Crossman’s gloom about the passivity of the electorate would have deepened if, on the day of Jeger’s return, he had read Catherine Heath’s article in the
Manchester Guardian
about her recent experience dispensing citizen’s advice from the John Hilton Bureau, recipient of over 3,000 letters a week:

I sometimes felt that all politicians should work for a few months in such a bureau. It was to us the homeless wrote, and the old age pensioners, and the disabled soldiers. What startled me was the utter helplessness of these people in the face of the complexity of modern society; the failure of deserving cases to make use of welfare agencies existing for their benefit because they are ignorant of them. We often told a starving old age pension couple about National Assistance, or a lame man about the disabled persons register, and received a grateful letter back. Often, too, people would put themselves out of benefit, lose the right of pension appeal, &c, simply because they were quite incapable of reading a form right through and thus failed to realise there was a time-limit until it was too late.

There were also the victims of ‘swindles’ – ‘it was pitiful to realise what easy game for the unscrupulous many were, and how easily terrified by threats of legal proceedings’ – and altogether, she concluded, ‘a vast mass of our population live their days in a perpetual state of terror and confusion, and life is a fast game of which they do not understand the rules’.
⁷

One life-rule that almost every gay person in 1953 Britain did understand was the advisability of keeping secret their sexual orientation. The febrile atmosphere surrounding the whole subject was epitomised by the furore in September after Benny Hill made a televised gag about New Scotland Yard’s phone number as ‘WHItehall Home-Away-Home-Away’. It was, complained the War Office, ‘in deplorable taste’ that there should be this ‘reference to homosexuality’ on a BBC programme being broadcast live from the Nuffield Centre for service personnel. Historians have differed as to whether there was a systematic, McCarthy-style witch-hunt in operation at this time against homosexuals, but certainly 1953–4 did mark a peak of prosecutions, with key men at the top – Sir David Maxwell Fyfe as Home Secretary, Sir Theobald Mathew as Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir John Nott-Bower as Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Lawrence Dunn as Chief Metropolitan Magistrate – all actively hostile towards what Dunn called ‘male harpies’ or ‘the lowest of the low’. Or, as Maxwell Fyfe put it in December 1953 to the House of Commons: ‘Homosexuals, in general, are exhibitionists and proselytizers and a danger to others, especially the young. So long as I hold the office of Home Secretary I shall give no countenance to the view that they should not be prevented from being such a danger.’

There were several causes célèbres around this time, among them the case of the writer Rupert Croft-Cooke, found guilty in October of committing acts of gross indecency with two naval ratings – even though the corroborative evidence had been secured by the police in the most dubious way – and sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment. There was also the case of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, his cousin Michael Pitt-Rivers and the
Daily Mail
’s diplomatic correspondent Peter Wildeblood, all three of whom were arrested in January 1954 for homosexual offences and conspiracy to incite acts of gross indecency (the latter charge being wheeled out for the first time since the trials of Oscar Wilde). Kenneth Tynan stood bail for Wildeblood, a move that – the editor of the
Evening Standard
enjoyed informing his proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook – provoked ‘a great roar of laughter of Fleet Street’. Later that month, the Admiralty issued new Fleet Orders highlighting ‘the horrible character of unnatural vice’ and insisting that naval officers ‘stamp out the evil’. Recommended methods included inspection of jars of Vaseline or hair gel for tell-tale pubic hairs, while officers were also encouraged to secure ‘the help of the steadier and more reliable men on the lower deck’ in order to counter the regrettable tendency ‘to treat these matters with levity’.
⁸

One case, in October 1953, had a special piquancy. ‘Sir John Gielgud in the news – fined £10 for “persistent importuning” in Chelsea,’ noted Gladys Langford on Wednesday the 21st. ‘He pleaded that he was the worse for drink. There must be a crusade against homosexuality just now.’ The theatrical community mainly closed ranks – ‘Who’s been a naughty boy, then?’ was how Dame Sybil Thorndike, wagging her finger, broke the ice as Gielgud sheepishly returned to the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, for rehearsals of N. C. Hunter’s
A Day by the Sea
, while on its first out-of-town performance in Liverpool the following Monday there was a standing ovation when the fearful actor came on the stage – but reaction elsewhere was less tolerant. Not only were posters outside the Haymarket smeared for at least a week with ‘Dirty queer’ graffiti, but the
Sunday Express
’s ultra-right-wing columnist (and former editor) John Gordon penned a fiercely anti-homosexual piece, though without actually using the word. Calling Gielgud’s offence one that was ‘repulsive to all normal people’, he declared that this ‘widespread disease’ had ‘penetrated every phase of life’ and ‘infects politics, literature, the stage, the Church, and the youth movements, as the criminal courts regularly reveal to us’. He went on:

The suggestion that peculiar people should be allowed peculiar privileges is arrant nonsense. The equally familiar plea that these pests are purely pathological cases and should be pampered instead of punished is almost as rubbishy.

It is time the community decided to sanitise itself. For if we do not root out this moral rot, it will bring us down as inevitably as it has brought down every nation in history that became affected by it.

There must be sharp and severe punishment. But more important than that, we must get the social conscience of the nation so roused that such people are made social lepers.

Gordon finished by suggesting that ‘the nation might suitably mark its abhorrence of this type of depravity by stripping from men involved in such cases any honours that have been bestowed upon them’. Gielgud himself had been knighted only that summer, and it was perhaps no wonder that in the immediate aftermath of the case Noël Coward privately lamented, ‘How could he, how could he, have been stupid and so selfish?’, perhaps guessing that his own knighthood would now be long delayed – in the event, another 17 years.

‘Concern has been expressed recently at the standard of morality in this country,’ observed a member of the
Any Questions?
audience at Parkstone the Friday after Gordon’s outburst. ‘What are the team’s views?’ Whereupon the unreconstructed Tory politician Julian Amery called for ‘a moral revival in England’, but John Arlott was adamant that such calls were irrelevant: ‘If a person is not sexually normal, that is not cured by punishment or the law, or by home influence, it’s solely a question of the way the person is, and I don’t believe that by detection, punishment, religion, or spiritual guidance, you will change a person’s basic fabric . . .’ Tellingly, during the whole discussion, there was no mention of ‘homosexuality’ as such. It is impossible to be certain whether Amery or Arlott was closer to the centre of public opinion, but the chances are that it was Amery. Two days later, the letters page of the
Sunday Express
noted that, in ‘an exceptional response’ to Gordon’s column, ‘most expressed strong approval’; while a few years earlier, Mass-Observation’s survey of sexual attitudes had found ‘a more genuine feeling of disgust towards homosexuality . . . than towards any other subject tackled’. This was hardly surprising, given the lurid, wholly unsympathetic approach of the popular press. ‘For many people crime reporters were the only source of information about homosexuality,’ the historian Richard Davenport-Hines has commented, ‘and they concluded that all homosexuals were chorister-molesting vicars or men who groped other men in subterranean lavatories in a fetid atmosphere of urine.’

Even at the quality end of journalism there was great reluctance to cover the subject in a sober, detached way, not least at the BBC. ‘It would be a waste of time to do any serious work on the subject,’ asserted Donald Boyd, a senior figure in the Talks Department, in an internal memo in November 1953, having already in another memo called homosexuality ‘a distortion of the natural appetite which is incurable and unpredictable’. Moreover, his ultimate boss, the director-general Sir Ian Jacob, was adamant that the time was not right for such a programme, rumours about which were causing consternation to the Church of England’s Council for Sex, Marriage and the Family. At least one Christian, though, saw things differently. Chad Varah moved in the autumn of 1953 from a parish in Clapham to St Stephen’s Walbrook in the City of London, where within weeks he started the Samaritans. ‘In the early days,’ he recalled, ‘a frequent cause of a suicidal intent or attempt was that a male homosexual had been discovered to be such by some ill-disposed person who was blackmailing him.’
⁹

The topic was briefly alluded to when
Take It From Here
returned on 12 November for its seventh series. It was in its way a historic transmission. ‘Our family, the Glums, are very
ordinary
people,’ declared the announcer David Dunhill about halfway through, heralding the birth of a new radio family. ‘They might be
you
or
you
or
you
. . . all five of them are shifty, obstinate, argumentative and dim.’ They were in short, as the writers Frank Muir and Denis Norden fully intended, very different from cosy, upstanding families like the Dales, the Archers and the Huggetts (which several years after the films still had their own very popular radio comedy series). Jimmy Edwards played the rascally Mr Glum, Dick Bentley his mentally challenged son Ron, and June Whitfield (a newcomer to the show, just pipping Prunella Scales for the role) Ron’s loyal, long-suffering fiancée Eth. It took a while for the characterisation to emerge fully, but an exchange from the first episode already gave a flavour:

MR GLUM: Well, now, you two, what can I say? You’re embarking on the Great Adventure in very unsettled times. There’s trouble on the borders of Treest, uprisings in British Guinea – they’re clamping down on vice in the West End – I tell you the future looks black.

RON: Dad, what you don’t seem to realise is, we
are
the future. Me and Eth. The torch has been handed on. We’re trying to build a world that’s strong and splendid and fearless and – and – what you scratching for, beloved?

ETH: I think it was that dog. I’ll sit on the sofa if you don’t mind.

Long afterwards, Whitfield explained that she had based the way she played Eth on her mother’s daily, who not only ‘had a high-pitched voice and a terribly earnest way of speaking’, but ‘kept a very tight grip on her grammar, as though terrified that it might let her down, revealing her to be impolite’. The other female newcomer was the singer Alma Cogan – ‘a large, happy girl’, in Muir’s words, with a ‘swinging, chuckly style of singing’ – and
TIFH
was soon more popular than ever, with the Glums an immediate hit, occupying the whole second half of the show. ‘I never thought I’d miss Joy Nichols so little,’ noted Nella Last after the fourth episode. ‘One of the girls [presumably Whitfield] seems to have picked up her “vital” style.’

Other popular newcomers this autumn were the new Anglia and the new Prefect – essentially Ford’s answer, in the small-car range, to the Morris Minor, Austin Seven and Standard Eight. The Anglia, applauded
Autocar
, was ‘austerely furnished’, but with a ‘very modern and pleasing appearance’, while the Prefect was ‘a clean-looking car devoid of unsightly frills’. Altogether, ‘the comfort standards of today’s small cars are a far cry from the time when almost anything was good enough for the man with a slender pocket’. Even so, the magazine did note that whereas Britain ‘continues to scale down her larger familiar models’, French designers (for instance of the 750cc Renault or 385cc Citroën) had ‘sat down in front of a clean sheet of paper and banished, with considerable success, all thoughts of the previous products of their companies’. As usual, Dagenham’s finest were unveiled at October’s annual Motor Show, an event opened by Prince Philip in characteristically robust, go-ahead form. ‘I am not always convinced,’ he declared, ‘that the driver’s comfort is given enough thought. Why is it that there always seems to be a handle or a knob just opposite one’s right knee?’ Later in his speech he called on the motor industry to produce ‘a Comet of the car world’, in other words ‘something really revolutionary in price and overall performance’. And after noting the increasing amount of freight on the roads and the ever-greater congestion, he concluded: ‘However much some people may regret it, you cannot put the clock back. An efficient road system is essential to the industry and commerce of this country both in peace and war.’