Kate Macdonald
I am a child of Good Housekeeping magazine, from the generation of British children who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. As a little girl I was too young to understand why my mother and her friends dressed differently from my teachers and old ladies in the city we lived in. But I studied the advertisements for clothes, shoes and household appliances in my mother’s magazines, absorbing the coded messages about how women should live, and what they could wear. My mother liked to reread old magazines, and resolutely kept her collection of fashion magazines for years on shelves in the downstairs cupboard that I would often raid and read until I left home for university.
Vogue was an alluring fairy-tale treat, but it was expensive, and rarely seen in our house. Family Circle would appear in phases for six months at a time and then disappear. I remember occasional sightings of She, a glamorous large-format women’s magazine on strangely shiny paper. In times of magazine drought I had to make do with the features in the Radio Times, and its inexplicable adverts for dowdy clothes I could not imagine anyone actually wearing. But Good Housekeeping was our constant, the magazine my mother read for pleasure all her life. I was fascinated by the GH Look for a Lifestyle makeover feature, which supplied even more coded messages about how ordinary women could manage their busy lives and still wear high fashion and on-trend hairstyles, but my real reason for reading GH so addictively was Betty Bendell.
Betty Bendell wrote the My Life And I column for GH from 1968 to 1980. I grew up reading her stories about daily life with her family of four and her exuberantly recounted everyday accidents and embarrassments. The episodes she related were brief, occasionally charming and once or twice actually tear-jerkingly sad. But nearly always her columns were laugh-out-loud funny. She would reliably make me snort with laughter at a joke, a turn of phrase, at her unexpected verbal juxtapositions, at her comic timing. She had a glorious capacity to pull off the unexpected and the socially shocking that made me weep with laughter. When I was old enough to be interested in why and how her writing was so funny (for me, at least), I would try taking the jokes apart to see how she did it, studying her syntax and word choice. She taught me how self-deprecation worked, and how to draw back from socially unacceptable boasting with a pinprick and a pratfall. From her I learned what bathos and high farce looked like in practice, long before I discovered that Monty Python used the same techniques (at more or less the same time), and years before I learned the technical terms at university. She was simply a supremely funny writer, with an impeccable sense for when to stop and when to keep going.
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Betty Eileen Bendell was born in Wimbledon in south London on 28 September 1929. She joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service after the Second World War, entering the Education section, and edited the WRNS section of the camp magazine, often writing all the articles under different names. She met her husband David Rapkins in Scotland, where they were both based. He was a Royal Navy photographer, and they married in 1957. They had two children, Anna and Daniel, and emigrated to Canada twice to be near David’s family, for the second and last time in late 1975. Between these upheavals the family lived in Goring-on-Thames and in Henley, where George Harrison was a neighbour.
Betty wrote articles and helped with the editing of the county magazine Oxfordshire Roundabout. Her confidence in her writing was boosted in 1966 when she won a Daily Telegraph writing competition. She went on to write continuously for a range of magazines, including Annabel, Woman, Homes and Gardens, The Lady, The Countryman and Heal’s Fourposter Magazine. But she was most well-known for her long series of articles in Good Housekeeping and Family Circle.
Betty met an editor of Good Housekeeping at a party who suggested that she submit some ‘filler’ articles. Betty bought a copy of GH, carefully counted the words needed, and sent in a sample article. GH requested some more fillers, and then Betty was invited to write a gardening column. After reading Betty’s deadpan account of casually lifting up a dead tree from the front garden, GH decided that she ‘simply could not help being funny’. Their readers were dissatisfied with the syndicated political satirist Art Buchwald writing the GH humour column, because he was a man and because he was American. (GH orginally began as an American magazine, and its separate British title was overseen by the American managing editor.) Betty was asked to supply six columns for ‘My Life And I’. Since they didn’t ask her to stop, she said, she carried on writing for GH for thirteen more years. At the peak of her career she was writing a regular column for three separate magazine publishers and her columns were syndicated in magazines around the world. Her British readership would also have known her from the women’s monthly magazine Family Circle, where her columns, published between 1970 and 1977, were slightly racier, with a livelier reader in mind.
Betty’s readers loved her: her column was regularly cited as a readers’ favourite in the magazine, and she was reckoned to be one of the top five woman magazine writers of her day. Some of her columns were published in 1974 in a book, Home and Dry, but it was poorly advertised and vanished from sight. But on her emigration to Canada in 1977, Betty’s magazine career changed direction. She continued to write for GH for a few more years, and her columns featured new episodes about the trials and fascinating details of settling into Canadian culture, but she was losing touch with her GH readers. British English and its idioms were changing. In the new era of punk, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Evita, the return of food rationing (briefly) and strikes, when she wrote from Canada Betty was in danger of seeming no longer on top of the daily details of her readers’ lives in Britain. Eventually GH ended the column.
Betty then worked as an editor for the Canadian Scouting Association and wrote for Canadian magazines, such as Nature Canada, Canadian Geographic and Habitabec. She was invited to write a regular column, ‘Settling In’, for the Perth Courier, which she did for 18 years. After retirement in 2012 (at the age of 83) her life filled up joyfully with writing, gardening, her writers’ circle, country cottage life and grandchildren. Betty died in July 2021, three years after her husband David. They had been married for 61 years.
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Humour produces an extremely personal response. I hope the columns in this collection of what I think is the best of Betty Bendell, from GH and other magazines, will delight and amuse readers. They have been chosen also for their value as social history, fashion history and their absolute embeddedness in the Britain of the late 1960s to 1980. They offer new perspectives on the lives of women of her time and class, with a different kind of approach – reportage and memoir rather than fiction – from that of the much earlier Diary of a Provincial Lady by E M Delafield (1930). Betty recorded her era from the perspective of a woman at home, a mother and a wife, and occasionally as an office worker. She was in the school playground, at the parties, in the garden, on holiday, in the shops, or queuing at the butcher’s or in the supermarket. She went dancing, walking, picnicking, shopping (a lot), visited beauty salons and speculated wildly about the lives of her friends and neighbours. She learnt to drive (almost). She thought about applying to do a horticultural course, but was not encouraged by the thought of being called to work as a grave-digger.
She made her own clothes: one gloriously tragic column relates the process of making a garment perfectly by hand (incidentally showing later generations how home sewing, home tailoring even, was quite normal for this period), only to find that:
On its padded hanger the finished coat looked like something out of Vogue. There was just one problem though. It looked ghastly on me. (157)
Betty spoke for anyone who has sewn an unwise choice of garment, describing the pride in good dressmaking done well mixed with the chagrin of being unable to wear the wretched thing.
But Betty was not a slave to her treadle sewing machine. Many of her columns refer to hunting for the perfect new outfit – classically Seventies Lurex, chiffon trousers, a cream leather coat, even a velvet suit – as an alternative to the tyranny of an old brown dress fit only for housework. She bought herself clothes to cheer herself up, to wear to the many, many parties she and her husband were invited to, or because she had realised that she had neglected her wardrobe for too long and needed sparkles and oomph again, possibly with a new lipstick or an exciting new hairstyle. Some of the sartorial details she tosses in as a casual aside are startlingly alien now, but were apparently routine to women of her generation:
Now that I suppose most of us wear tights, we no longer have to face that moment of truth when, leaping up from a casual legs-crossed sitting position, we found that the back suspender on one leg had attached itself to the front suspender on the other. (71)
And the wigs! The instances of Betty buying and wearing wigs as a completely normal part of her personal wardrobe, without the imperative of religious observance that some other women would have had, remind us how glamorous the period could be, with its joyful embrace of artifice for the sheer pleasure of looking different and acting a part.
The parties she attended seem to have been so much fun.
Before marriage I did find that good old Chanel No 5 worked wonders. In fact at one party a young man followed me all evening on his knees, on the strength of it. (44)
I once went to a Christmas party in black stockings and a red dress. By some strange coincidence, the dress fitted me all over, the black stockings were in fashion and I was the star turn from the moment I inadvertently flung my Martini backwards into the fireplace. (19)
Sedate ladies in directoire knickers run themselves up chiffon culottes for her parties. Heavy men in local government leap into floral polo shirts. Harassed American fathers start clicking their fingers and making cha-cha noises as soon as they cross over the threshold.
I, not to be outdone, put on a pair of ear-rings like ceramic bathroom tiles and paint my toe-nails silver. (‘You look as if a snail has crawled over your feet,’ says Anna.) (21)
Somehow the presence of children in close attendance during the preparation for and even at the parties makes them seem jolly friends-and-family affairs rather than louche and sweaty. Readers may wonder why some things are not mentioned in these columns (homosexuality, say, or reports of domestic abuse), or why stories avoid subjects that might be contentious. She skates briefly over an unpleasant episode of sexual harassment by her landlord (251), and a threat of rape on a boat (216) in comic anecdotes, but the rarity of this subject in her vast output of published writing shows that it was not particularly desired by her magazine clients.
GH, and her other magazines, would have had guidelines for its writers, and avoidance of controversy would also have been pragmatic for a comic column. Betty never wrote about religion or politics, the two most contentious subjects in British life, and only once mentioned fox-hunting. She only mentioned class issues in terms of encountering posh people in her past life, never in the present. Betty and David as characters are classless and infinitely relatable inhabitants of Middle England, as GH wanted them to be.
Betty was skilled in almost all the domestic arts: sewing and cooking, also gardening, interior decoration, making do and mending and hoarding useful items. She craved colour to enliven her surroundings: a purple tea caddy and a green washing-up bowl, and up-to-the-minute tea-towels from Heals and other trendy London shops. She visited the Design Centre in London to source the right kind of lighting fixture, and was enraged when her local supplier borrowed her catalogue, ordered its stock for himself and flooded the local market, destroying the exclusivity of her advanced good taste. She wrote about aspiring to go to art galleries, though didn’t describe what she saw there (possibly to avoid libel, or to avoid being seen as too elitist). She often mentions reading in bed (Iris Murdoch was her most-cited choice of author). Her passion for language is obvious throughout these columns, and sometimes she expresses this directly:
Let us feel able to make full, confident use of such mellifluous words as mellifluous. And clew and cleat and clerestory. And possibly even plumose. Let us get as far away as possible from sentences such as:
‘Er, well, I mean, like, you know.’
Let us not grope for words. Let us plunge with etymological assurance. (116)
Cinema was a background entertainment in her family life, as were radio and television: not described in detail, but indicated as part of a normal everyday life. She could have but never did mention programmes such as The Eurovision Song Contest, The Archers, The Onedin Line or Top of the Pops, which would have been completely familiar to her, but by not being specific about particular programmes she avoided endorsement: this also may have been a requirement by her client magazines. She doesn’t completely avoid brand names, but they are rare sightings. Only once is she critical about popular entertainment: ‘Have you ever watched Saturday evening television? Roll on Sunday.‘ (54)
Betty also never wrote about amateur theatricals, so these were presumably not part of her life. However she mines the drama in her everyday encounters with gusto, playing a part enthusiastically for the reader’s entertainment. She palpitates with excitement when the most handsome upholsterer she has ever seen strides through her door, and is only brought back to reality by the beady-eyed remarks of her pre-teen daughter. (This episode shows that Betty clearly also had a good grounding in the idioms of Georgette Heyer.) She revels in mild flirtations at parties, recalls the attractions and terminal failings of past boyfriends, and writes a little warily, but proudly, about the advances younger women appear to make on her husband.
Her columns show her enthusiasm about her husband, as well as her exasperation. He may be handsome, kind, steady and reliable, with a tremendous moustache, but his quick fixes include hammering a nail into a hot-water pipe, and he once sent her a supremely tactless Valentine’s Day card.
One year, early in marriage, I received a card. ‘Here is my heart ...’ it said. Mistily I turned the page. ‘… Why don’t you tear it out and eat it, you old vulture?’ it went on.
‘Look, I’ve said I’m sorry,’ said my spouse an hour later, a heavily lived-through hour for all concerned. ‘I honestly thought you’d laugh. Like you did when I bought you the rolling pin done up like a bunch of flowers.’ (105)
Perhaps laughing was all you could do in the early 1970s, when the joke gift of a rolling-pin simply reflected the fact that a woman’s work was expected to be in the home and unpaid.
It’s quite extraordinary that the words ‘feminism’, ‘feminist’ and (women’s) ‘liberation’ never appear in Betty’s writing. She was writing when second-wave feminism was rising, Spare Rib magazine and Virago Press were established, and when the Sex Discrimination Act was passed in the UK. She ignored, or avoided, mentioning these specific examples, even if their effects filtered through into more subtle acknowledgements of new feminist desires, undetected by the GH censors, or simply permitted, since they were so meek and mild. The most radical political gestures in Betty’s writing referred to women’s sexual freedom (although she also never mentions contraception). She frequently jokes about securing the attentions of devastatingly dishy men, but also remarks that she is not personally interested in taking a lover, suggesting that this was an accepted part of the social scenes she moved in, or at least talking about the possibility was.
Taking a job was also quite normal, and certainly more acceptable to admit in public, but it was much less normal in this period to keep working once you had children if your husband could support the family. Betty writes occasionally about office jobs she had before her children arrived, or once they were off her hands, but in most of her columns she is at home with the children, and naturally from time to time she longed to escape. On one occasion, when she devised complex ways to have a day out in London on her own, she ruefully anticipated that she would probably use that ‘Me-time’ to buy new wellies for her children. Pointing out that she chose to buy children’s boots when she should have been enjoying herself was one of the ways Betty was careful to balance a feminist desire for freedom and self-expression with the expectations of her GH readership.
Betty’s columns remind us of the sheer physical labour she expected to tackle just to keep her house in order. The details of her normal housework routine may be daunting for many readers: waxing floors weekly, cleaning carpets, paintwork, the oven and behind the boiler, the tyranny of dusting Venetian blinds, always doing the cooking for all the meals. Many columns begin with Betty musing with her hands in the washing-up, or while surveying all the housework that is yet to be done. She bought the new zingy green washing-up bowl to cheer herself and her kitchen up (and it was ruined by David using it for engine oil). In 1973 she realises the joys of a new vacuum cleaner, and how her life will be changed by getting a deep-freeze. (GH advertisers must have loved that issue, which represents Betty’s closest flirtation with generic product endorsement.) She spends the minutes before the first guests at a party arrive by madly cleaning the radiators and lunging at cobwebs. Never mind that many of us have actually done some or all of this work: this is how she represented herself, an Everywoman, as The One Who Does The Cleaning.
Turning to the other permanences in her life, Betty’s children are as much a presence in her columns as her husband. They are much-loved and their caustic responses to the hapless mother that Betty presented herself as are hugely entertaining. One of the delights of Betty’s writing is that she refuses to be sentimental. In an early article for Mother magazine, she wrote about her eighteen-month-old son in quite startling terms. The juxtaposition of a toddler and the vocabulary of drunkenness make an unforgettable image: ‘his rosy face leering at us through the bars of the cot … wild laughter and boozy singing in the next room’ (14). Was this what the readers of Mother expected? It certainly reads true to life, but in 1969, was this the kind of instruction that magazines for parents expected to promote? Betty does not seem to have written for them again.
Betty was clearly a devoted mother, but her loudly expressed relief on being able to escape the drudgery of the home on day trips to London, or even to have time to herself once her youngest began full-time school might read as heartless to those who have never been trapped in a house with toddlers. For the rest of us, we empathised, because Betty articulated what her readers would have been reproved for thinking. The drudgery of motherhood for her was solely its service element: the picking-up-after and the providing for, with endless picky food requirements as well as immediately sourcing nature project materials or making a complicated party dress in 24 hours. What Betty loved about motherhood comes through in her pride in how her children grow up, the interests and skills they develop, their successes and extraordinary clevernesses.
Betty was delightfully honest about her complete uninterest in sport, even when her children were competing. Her anxious observation of the ‘little, slow-moving hump, still under the canvas long after the end of the obstacle race’ (60) at Anna’s school sports day is a perfectly timed moment of sympathy in a column battling with the hearty sporting ethos, for a child who is no good at sports but keeps at it doggedly.
This sympathy comes through again in a pair of articles that she and David wrote for the gloriously-named Tail-Wagger Magazine in the 1960s, about their daughter Anna’s discovery and adoption of a baby fox. The humour is tamped down a touch, but their (or Betty’s) control of narrative structure and economy with words is the same. What comes across in these articles is a Betty who responds with wonder and emotion to the miracle of finding a fox cub left abandoned after its mother’s death and raising it with the good advice of neighbours and the vet. Betty was not a natural inhabitant of the wilder world: she loves her garden and their allotment, but she was not a hiker or a sailor or an explorer in environments more radical than a different kind of supermarket system. Yet the adventure of Chuckles the fox, who went away when he wanted to, and the delight of his return, produced some of the most moving paragraphs Betty wrote. She retreated after this onto safer ground, and focused her writing on laughing at the world and marvelling at civilisation as she knew it.