1960
Brides
The 1960s got off to a glorious start, with a great big traditional wedding.
Crowds of half a million converged on central London. A Pathé News film crew captured the neon lights of Piccadilly Circus, the illuminated clock face of Big Ben, cheery Cockneys celebrating by eating jellied eels and having a knees-up in Lambeth, heraldic décor, double-decker buses and flag-waving children. ‘Here is London in her pride …’1 pronounced the reverent commentator in plummy tones. The ancien régime and its subjects were en fête.
On a sunny morning in May 1960, the cameras preserved for posterity the moment when the Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, alighted from the Glass Coach outside Westminster Abbey, radiant in the beauty of her floating tulle veil and white silk wedding dress. A fanfare of trumpets sounded as she approached the altar to join her handsome groom, Antony Armstrong-Jones. The service was conducted in front of two thousand guests by the Archbishop of Canterbury, following the wording from the Book of Common Prayer:
Margaret Rose, wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband …? Wilt thou obey him and serve him, love, honour and keep him, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all other, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live?
and she replied:
I will.
For the first time in four centuries of British history a king’s daughter was marrying a commoner.
It was also the first time a royal wedding had been broadcast on television, and twenty million viewers tuned in that day to watch the occasion. I was one of them, though I was only four. However, we were not among the 79 per cent of households who, in 1960, owned a TV set. Instead, my mother picked me up early from my nursery school, and took me with her to watch it on a boxy wooden set at the home of some fortunate friends who did. In crackly black and white, the occasion nonetheless had a fairy-tale splendour.
But in May 1960 some people close to the newlyweds could already foresee the way it would go, and on that day of blue skies were predicting storms ahead. Though their temperaments were both mercurial, he was too bohemian and she was too traditional. He would not love, and she would not obey. The accident of birth played a part too; a number of foreign royals closed ranks and declined the invitation to attend the princess’s wedding to a jumped-up photographer.
Just five years earlier, the combined male élite of Church, state and press had demanded that the beleaguered princess renounce her love for the divorced Group Captain Peter Townsend. By 1960, even as she plighted her troth to Armstrong-Jones, the tables were beginning to turn, with the Establishment itself under attack. A new and unimaginable world was beginning to take shape under its censorious gaze.
Fear accompanied the clashing of values and the questioning of roles. Male citadels began to put up defences, build stronger walls.
In the sixties, a power struggle started which still hasn’t been won.
*
Just a month after the princess’s wedding, another Margaret – Margaret Forster – finished her last exam at Oxford and, leaving her legs bare, put on a simple white cotton dress. Deliberately opting out of the whole church-and-flowers-and-trumpets charade that had been paraded before the nation in Westminster Abbey, she and her boyfriend underwent a simple ceremony in an Oxford register office. Afterwards, the newlyweds had lunch in a pub in Woodstock.
It had been three years since this Margaret’s escape from her narrow-minded background in a proletarian neighbourhood of Carlisle. Since then she had acquired much useful knowledge about barrier forms of contraception from her fellow students at Somerville College, meaning that she could – unlike previous generations of women in her family – have all the fun of sex without having to face the ‘often fearful consequences’. But in the late 1950s, sparing her strait-laced parents the reality of her sex life committed Margaret to a series of elaborate lies involving much research, collusion and post-dated picture postcards. These somehow convinced her mother that she was not actually spending the holidays with her boyfriend the journalist Hunter Davies in Manchester, but was innocently travelling around Germany and Italy with a posse of girlfriends. However, finding a place where she and Hunter could cohabit after she had graduated proved much harder. Initially, they saw no reason to fudge their relationship, but were turned away by potential landlords from flat after flat. ‘In the end it had to be on with the Woolworths ring and the pretence that I was Mrs Davies, which I detested.’2 The lying finally got too complicated.
If marriage was nothing to us but everything to our mothers, why not just get married?
And so they did.
Later that summer, Margaret’s mother, Lilian, came down from Carlisle to visit the happy couple in north London. But when she stepped into their new home, it seemed to her that her familiar universe had been turned topsy-turvy.
Lilian Forster’s life in Carlisle had always consisted of drudgery. She had married, brought up her family, cooked, shopped and cleaned her house with little money and almost no labour-saving appliances. Her own home had no washing machine, and smoky open fires. Without a car, shopping in town involved large wicker baskets and a bus ride. But in the early sixties the younger generation was embracing the rapid progress of domestic technology with joyful enthusiasm while, between them, Hunter and Margaret had negotiated a very modern domestic deal.
Shortly after their marriage, the couple took delivery of a shiny Electrolux refrigerator. Its significance as a household revolution had to be spelled out to Lilian. It would mean not having to shop for fresh food more than once a week – ‘… the darling fridge would keep everything fresh’. This explanation was met by Lilian with baffled silence. After much thought, she questioned how anybody could carry home a week’s worth of heavy shopping. Simple, replied her daughter. Hunter would be supplied with a list, and get everything in the car – at the same time as dropping the washing off at the launderette.
There was an even longer silence … then she exploded, said it wasn’t right, a man shouldn’t be shopping and going to launderettes, whatever they were.
What was it that so perturbed Lilian? Not just the new appliances and the car, the fitted carpet and the shiny steel sink, thought her daughter. It was ‘the equality of our marriage’ that jangled and jarred with her understanding of the traditional sex divide. Lilian resisted, but she could sense that the certainties of her life were starting to crumble. Her fortress and power base, the home, and the relationships that underpinned it, were becoming unrecognisable. She and her generation had lived through the Second World War; they had fought, endured and won. But passive, and passé, they were now the baffled onlookers.
*
Margaret Forster was just twenty-two years old when she got married. Princess Margaret was less typical of her generation, in marrying at a relatively late age: she was twenty-nine.
Over the last half-century, the age of brides has risen steadily. Today, a substantial majority of women who marry do so at the age of thirty-plus. Sixty years ago, the reverse was the case, with numbers of very young marriages at an all-time high. The authors of the government’s Crowther Report (1959) pinpointed ‘the fact that, for an increasing number of girls, marriage now follows hard on, or even precedes, the end of education’. In 1959 and 1960, half the women in the country were married before they were twenty-five, over 26 per cent of them were under twenty and, overwhelmingly, they married men from their own socio-economic band.
True, the dash to the altar at this time paralleled another less hurried dash, into higher education. New universities were opening their doors, and women felt welcomed by them. But for many a teenager the lure of marriage was intense, and provoked much opining and soul-searching by the commentariat as they watched large numbers of young women pulled between a domestic destiny and wider horizons.
The herd mentality of the young brides was underscored in a survey, published in 1962, which quoted a teenager saying that ‘what she wanted to have was a wedding ring, what she wanted to do was to get married, what she wanted to be was a wife and mother’.fn1 ‘There is little doubt,’ wrote the survey’s author, ‘that marriage and maternity is the central objective of the “average” girl and that all other ambitions are ordered round this objective in an entirely rational way.’ That claim was confirmed by a later survey, which showed that aspirant husband-catchers aged between fifteen and twenty-four spent more on cosmetics – and bras – than all other age groups put together.fn2
Far from seeking to upturn the pre-war marital status quo, the post-war generation of women took it for granted that romantic love had only one natural outcome.
I can’t even remember the specific decision to get married.3 It just seemed a progression … [In the sixties] it was just accepted that if you went out with someone for a long time and you got on, then you’d get married …
recalled one woman. And another:
I got married in 1959, straight out of college …4 I was just twenty-one. I was terribly in love with my husband, so I thought I ought to marry him.
The mass culture of the day, particularly pop music, fed the notion that romantic love led speedily and inevitably to matrimony. The symbol of commitment, the wedding ring, has a special place in early 1960s pop lyrics, positioning it firmly in the teen mindset of the time, as in Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Third Finger Left Hand’. And echoes of Romeo and Juliet float from the plaintive notes of Welsh pop vocalist Ricky Valance’s 1960 number 1 so-called ‘death disc’, ‘Tell Laura I Love Her’, in which the promise of a wedding ring ends in tragedy.fn3
More often, a happier future lies in wait. The Everly Brothers, in their jaunty and hugely successful rock number ‘Claudette’, get great mileage from rhyming her name with ‘pretty little pet’, and ‘the best loving that I’ll ever get’. But by verse three we’ve reached ‘I’m gonna ask my baby if she’ll marry me …’, and the final couplet is an affirmative ‘… rest of my life / … brand new wife’. Lyrics expressing eternal commitment could ensure number 1 hits, with even diehard rock’n’rollers like Elvis Presley distilling lifelong devotion into a law of nature (‘Like a river flows – surely to the sea / Darling so it goes / Some things are meant to be’).5 The Ronettes, however, with ‘I’m So Young’ (‘They say our love is / Just a teenage affection / But no one knows / Our hearts’ direction …’), and Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, with ‘Not Too Young to Get Married’, had their fingers even more on the pulse.
The topic dominated women’s magazines. An academic study analysing the subject matter of bestselling weekly titles like Woman and Woman’s Own allotted percentages to the themes of their feature coverage. In the early 1960s ‘Getting and keeping your man’ was the magazine theme that consistently made double figures, while a breakdown of role characteristics showed up ‘Wife’, ‘Mother’ and ‘Marriage Fixated’ as the highest scorers. The researcher then dissected and scored the magazines’ content for values and goals. Here, ‘Romantic love’, ‘Male finding/keeping’ and ‘Happy marriage/family’ all came top.
The right hand of convention and the left hand of culture squeezed many a couple like Margaret and Hunter into marriage. But the pattern was starting to change.
Hearth and Home
The Britain of 1960 was a nation in transition. To appreciate the strange plant now germinating, we have to do a little digging into the past.
Many women like Margaret Forster who reached adulthood in the 1960s were born during the war or during the period of austerity that followed it. So childhood memories of the time tend to start with post-war rationing and the piecemeal reappearance of pleasures like fruit and sweets. Early recollections also often include the ubiquitous visible reminders of the conflict. Cities presented a dreary, unpainted face to the visitor – cracking façades and bomb sites – while the countryside bore witness with concrete defences, prefabs and disused army camps. Men born before 1939 – elder brothers or boyfriends – continued routinely to be called up to serve two years’ National Service.fn4 The recent war’s mythologies lived on in Britain’s collective memory. Many a housewife still recalled the depressing round of misery-inducing substitutions with which meals were achieved: root vegetables, whale, dried egg. Khaki battledress, hair above the collar and Utility fashions remained too close for comfort. War meant blackout curtains, queues and gloom. It also meant listening to your father or uncle’s war reminiscences, absorbing the vocabulary of the regiment, with its discipline and esprit de corps, its hierarchies, its unquestioning obedience, its moral certainty.
The war had also given birth to the Welfare State. Sir William Beveridge, its founding father, was a progressive. Nevertheless, he had been born in 1879, and he spoke for a generation of men whose views on women had been formed in the nineteenth century. Beveridge’s reforming initiative enshrined in law an essentially discriminatory vision for women. He and many like him saw housewives as the pillars supporting the British way of life. They were vital – but unpaid. Spelling out this orthodoxy, he wrote: ‘Housewives as Mothers have vital work to do in ensuring the adequate continuance of the British Race and of British ideals in the world.’ And despite increasing numbers heading for the workplace, it was still considered normal to hold the view that women who did so were wrong and misguided. One noble lord told Parliament, ‘If I had my way I would introduce a law forbidding young mothers with children to leave them all day and go out to work.’6
This deeply rooted Establishment vision could not be eradicated overnight. On so many fronts, our society conspired to keep women caged and indoors.fn5
One of these was the perennially popular Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition, which in the post-war period was one of the most loved yearly events of the calendar, feeding the public appetite for dream houses. The mid-1950s building boom made picture windows, fitted kitchens, central heating and perfect plumbing a reality for families in new towns like Stevenage, Basildon, Harlow and Hatfield; and more of their ilk were on the way.
However, Ideal Home modernity was set against a backdrop of stagnation. And while the space-age, labour-saving dream might come true for some, for far more, drudgery was their lot. Even in 1960, in isolated and forgotten pockets of the country, women were living lives that were more medieval than mid-twentieth-century. In his book Britain in the Sixties: The Other England (1964) the journalist Geoffrey Moorhouse uncovered a way of life not usually associated with affluent modern Britain. He told of remote East Anglian communities where sewerage or mains drainage would not be provided until 1968 at the earliest. When the housewife wanted to empty the sink in her cottage she would have to put a bucket under the plughole to catch the waste water, then carry it out and empty it in the garden. Lavatories came in the form of heavily disinfected tin containers, often housed in small cubicles in the kitchen, whose contents were collected weekly by ‘the bumble cart’. For many urban dwellers too, conditions were primitive. Moorhouse visited the Manchester suburb of Openshaw, where it was estimated that for 20 per cent of families living in rented accommodation, the only way to take a bath was to visit the in-laws – once a week. In this down-at-heel neighbourhood, the sound of women’s clogs was still heard on the cobbles. The louring factory walls blocked light from the windows, and it wasn’t worth bothering to hang your laundry out to dry, or leaving your baby to sleep in a pram in the backyard, as emissions from the chimneys would cover them both in smuts.
A diehard form of domesticity, inherited from the days of Mrs Beeton, was deeply ingrained in many communities. The 1960 Guide to Housework (published by the Institute of Houseworkers) laid down a list of ‘every day’ jobs to be carried out in the well-regulated home, including brushing the stairs, polishing brass door furniture and dusting banisters daily. On top of that, there were the weekly tasks, with the cleaning of sitting room, kitchen and bedroom determined with clockwork regularity. For many a housewife, washday had to be Monday, with all the week lying ahead for the subsidiary tasks of drying and ironing. Other days were allocated specifically to tasks like ‘Market’ and ‘Doing your front’. This last, particularly in the north of England, often involved the curious ritual of ‘donkey-stoning’: using a tablet to treat and whiten the stone doorstep onto the street. It was hard work, done on hands and knees, but well into the 1960s was a matter of great pride to those who undertook it. For many mothers, preparing ‘real wholesome food’ for their families was also non-negotiable. ‘You didn’t think twice about cooking a meal.7 You did proper dinners and proper puddings. Pastry was made from scratch, and vegetables came with earth and slugs on them, possibly from one’s own garden.’
As a new decade dawned, the centrality of home showed few signs of diminishing.
When the evening fire glows, when the house becomes a home, then it seems to me that this is perhaps the path to true happiness …8
rhapsodised one happy housewife, while recognising that her comfortable hearth was the result of long and tedious efforts.
In 1960 the demarcations between home and the world of work still lay on either side of the conventional gender divide, and many women saw this as the way God intended. But subjection was breeding rebellion. For the writer Fay Weldon, home in the early sixties was a place of demons. Fay married Ron Weldon, a much older man, who took it for granted that, since men who did housework were to be despised, his wife would be the homemaker – never mind that she also had a job. But the obnoxious Ron refused to let Fay have a washing machine, because they were noisy. Instead, twice-weekly, she had to make time after work to haul her bags of socks and shirts to the Coin-Op launderette. Ron described his ideal woman as ‘barefoot, pregnant, and up to her elbows in soapy water’. Soon after, Fay wrote a surreal play – ‘a historical document of a time now gone’ – in which the heroine is lying on her deathbed, surrounded by visitors who are personifications of her daily life: Shopping, Washing, Cleaning, Dusting and Cooking.9 These odious guests bicker, carp, berate her and accuse her of preferring one over the other. The last visitor, Socks, turns up late ‘– bitter, faded and twisted, to deal the final death-blow. Between them, they finish her off.’
*
Alongside the Ideal Home, the England of my childhood idolised the Ideal Mother. As fundamentals go, motherhood could hardly be more central to post-war women’s self-image.
This ideal mother was beatified in children’s books, advertisements, popular media and literature. I was schooled with the help of Ladybird’s much-loved ‘Learning to Read’ series, in which Mother takes Peter and Jane shopping, and Father is the breadwinner. A doll or a cooking set was on every girl’s Christmas wish-list, while the homely television soap opera Coronation Street, which began in 1960, peopled by working-class matriarchs, gossips and community rocks, was quickly clasped to the national bosom.
Illegitimacy rates were rising steadily at this time. Moral panic around teenage and working mothers betrayed the anxiety felt about erosions to ‘normal’ family life, and women themselves bought into the heavy pressure to be stay-at-home mums. In 1959, barely 20 per cent of women with children aged between five and ten were working full-time, while those doing part-time jobs numbered less than a quarter of this sample. In the complete absence of state nursery provision for pre-schoolers,fn6 the remainder consigned a high proportion of their waking hours to the tasks associated with childcare: food preparation, toileting, endless laundry and play; they were aided in this by the dedicated producers at the BBC, who from the 1950s gave Britain’s children the gently reassuring strands Watch with Mother on television, and Listen with Mother on radio (‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin …’). They were also encouraged in their efforts by one of the most successful books of all time, Dr Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care (first published in 1946), whose sales were at a zenith in the sixties. Departing from the clock-watching and punishment recommended by previous childcare gurus, Spock emphasised the rewards of child-centred intimacy, instinct and leniency. ‘It is when a mother trusts her judgement that she is at her best,’ he said.fn7
A generation of girls was now growing up with little to challenge the status quo. ‘It never struck me,’ remembered one middle-class woman, who turned thirteen at the beginning of the 1960s, ‘that my mother could do anything but look after the house, cook, write shopping lists (1lb toms, a nice lettuce, 1 t-roll) and thumb lick through pattern books at the drapers.’10
*
This thirteen-year-old remembering her mother was named Mary Ingham. Mary, who grew up in the Midlands, also recalls the huge gulf of understanding about sex:
Our mothers had mostly married in white, with clear consciences, in their twenties …
she explains. But they never discussed any sexual practicalities with their daughters. At school Mary and her friends were taught some biological basics, but nothing that was exactly ‘user-friendly’. Garbled versions did the rounds. For example, when she and her fellow pupils were called for their medical, it was rumoured that the doctor could tell if you were a virgin by looking at your nipples.
Nearly every woman I interviewed for this book volunteered the fact that they had been given zero information about sex; though, it must be admitted, one Lancashire schoolgirl found out about childbirth in the most practical way imaginable:
Miss Green, who taught us Domestic Science, had clearly been assigned to tell the girls what was what, while the boys did woodwork.11 And in Miss Green’s class we had to knit a uterus. I’ve still got the pattern for it! It was a four-needle exercise, with scraps of wool in different colours. And if you knew how to cast on you were supposed to put a nice ribbed bit at the bottom for the cervix. But even then, some of us didn’t know how to cast off, so it got longer and longer, with endless dropped stitches.
And then we had to get a tennis ball and push it through this uterus. And then Miss Green said, ‘Well, now you know how a baby is born.’
And that was all very well, but of course what we wanted to know was, well, how does it get there in the first place?
These voices are more typical:
– My periods started at home and I thought I was dying!12 I told my mother. She just gave me a sanitary towel and didn’t say anything.
– I thought I came out of a tulip …13
– My mother just tutted a lot.14 She couldn’t bring herself to talk about anything like that. They never did, in those days.
But in the late autumn of 1960, Mary and her generation were about to be hit by a revelation.
Lady C
Just like her contemporaries quoted above, eighteen-year-old Clare Lane was given ‘no information about sex at all’ by her parents. It didn’t stop her getting informed herself, by going to bed with her boyfriend. In any case, her conscience was untroubled, since she had grown up in a family who leant towards tolerance. And in October 1960 her father, Sir Allen Lane, founder and chairman of Penguin Books, publicly declared those liberal values and risked prosecution, by standing in court as a representative defendant in the legal cause célèbre of the year, the trial of D. H. Lawrence’s erotic novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Clare sat in the Old Bailey to watch her father take the stand.
The story is now well known, of how the unexpurgated edition had been published by Penguin that summer, only to be prosecuted, in a test of the new Obscene Publications Act 1959. And one of Mervyn Griffith-Jones’s opening remarks for the prosecution was to earn him immortality – of a sort:
Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?
For Clare Lane the gravity of her father’s situation barely registered. ‘It all felt very grey.15 The penny didn’t drop really that he could have gone to prison. I think I was living in a kind of bubble. I was doing a typing course in Kensington at the time, and living in Holland Park. They were the boundaries of my world.’
But also watching from the gallery of the Old Bailey was another woman – not so young as Clare Lane – for whom the trial was of compulsive interest. Sybille Bedford sat with her press colleagues, ‘shaking with anguish and fury …16 I felt so desperately strongly about it – it was like being in the war’. Bedford already had a reputation as a novelist. But the law was an early love, and as a child she had harboured a secret ambition to be a barrister. This was not to be, since the profession discriminated against women. In 1960 fewer than one hundred women practised at the Self-employed Bar – ‘[We] were considered to have the wrong voice for it.’ For her, the Lady Chatterley trial, with all its flaws and hyperbole, was an education in her chosen career as a writer of fiction. But perhaps, though she didn’t refer to this, another factor in the trial that she must have found compelling was its challenge to conventional, prudish morality. Sybille Bedford had had a short-lived marriage, but was primarily lesbian. In her time, and in her world, the norm was still vanilla heterosexuality. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – with its depictions of transgressive sex – threw down a gauntlet to the sexual conventions of the post-war world. An acquittal must have had personal relevance to a woman whose loves were still shrouded in privacy and shame.
From her vantage point, Sybille scrutinised the jury, projecting hope onto their anonymous faces:
The twelfth acting juror in this trial was a most educated-looking woman, with an alive and responsive face, and she may well have been the kingpin in the decision of that jury. Of course we shall never know …
Most of them looked like pleasant people. The women seemed at their ease. There were two of them besides the twelfth juror; one very pretty young woman with a gentle face – ought one to pin hopes on her? – and one middle-aged, more of the housewife type. The second day she had appeared without a hat. A favourable sign?
To her joy, the defence mobilised an impressive line-up of witnesses, including Clare’s father and a roll-call of the great and the good from the worlds of literature, religion and the arts. Their conviction and eloquence were decisive:
For us, who waited on that day [wrote Sybille] it was a long three hours before we heard – still incredulous in relief – those words: Not Guilty. A ripple of applause broke out …
It was 2 November 1960. On that day in Chesham, a pupil in Mary Ingham’s class scrawled ‘Congratulations, Lady C’ across the blackboard. The young English mistress took it in her stride, but the elderly puritanical spinster who taught them scripture took one look and had it promptly wiped off with a duster.
But she couldn’t stem the tide. Bookshops across the country reported queues outside at opening time, and quickly sold out of copies. The controversy – and sales – were stoked when an elderly lady missionary, watched by a posse of photographers, publicly burned a copy of the book outside an Edinburgh bookshop. Clare Lane’s father became suddenly and hugely wealthy. Clare, with her sophisticated background, was slightly bemused by the fuss. ‘Mellors and Lady Chatterley didn’t provide me with any information I didn’t already have.17 Actually, Henry Miller’s books, which I’d also read, are a lot more explicit! As far as I was concerned, Lawrence’s novel just felt like an imaginative way of describing something I knew about already.’ For her and her family, the trial and its impact were neutralised by unshockability and self-mockery. Having successfully floated Penguin, Sir Allen happily paid for Clare to have a generous twenty-first birthday party, at which the guests were entertained by the iconoclastic songwriter Sydney Carter:
When I was on the jury once18
I had to read a book,
And when I came out of the court
I wore a wicked look.
‘Oooh, tell us all about it Syd,’
The barmaid said to me –
‘What did the gamekeeper do today
To wicked Lady C?’
Meanwhile, consumed with curiosity, Mary Ingham walked straight into the newsagent’s shop on her way home from school and ordered a copy for 3s 6d. After it arrived she covered the novel’s notoriously recognisable cover with brown paper, concealed it at the back of a pile of text books – ‘I couldn’t risk taking it home …’ – and secretly read the naughty bits:
Then as he began to move, in the sudden helpless orgasm, there awoke in her new strange trills rippling inside her.19 Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite, exquisite and melting her all molten inside. It was like bells rippling up and up towards culmination. She lay unconscious of the wild little cries she uttered at the last.
Mary was now fourteen. For her, the mystery that Lawrence’s novel unveiled was that ‘Lady C’ was not lying back, thinking of England, she was having ‘an incredible physical experience’. Here was a free, disinhibited woman who loved to be aroused, loved to give pleasure, loved to succumb to it, loved the feelings it gave her. And this was new. For Mary, sex was still to come. But she and many like her made up their minds then and there that, when it did, it was going to be fun.
New Arrivals
In early November 1960, while the nation’s liberal-minded reading public were celebrating the Penguin victory, a young woman in a working-class neighbourhood in Edinburgh was facing the knowledge that nothing life could throw at her would ever be tougher than her present challenge.
We earlier caught a glimpse of Margaret Hogg as she is today in a Barnsley bungalow, fifty-four years after her eldest son David was born in a hospital at Leith near Edinburgh in October 1960. Margaret and Billy Hogg had married in July 1959, when she was just seventeen. The couple lived with her mother, in Burdiehouse, to the south-east of Edinburgh. Within weeks of the wedding Billy, who was in the RAF, was posted to Germany. In January, after his leave, Margaret missed her period, and started to feel sick. Then a bronchial infection set in. After missing a second period, Margaret braved the icy weather and took herself off to the doctor’s.
I had a right cough.20 And he says to me, ‘Is there any chance that you could be pregnant?’ And I says, ‘Well, yes, I’ve missed two.’ And he says, ‘The reason I ask is, I need to give you something for this cough. And I need to put a sedative in it, because if you go on coughing like that, you could miscarry.’
Miscarrying was not a risk Margaret was prepared to run with this, her first and entirely wanted baby.
I took the medicine, and the cough went away. And for the rest of my pregnancy my mother said she’d never seen me look as well in my life. I was blooming, and I never had any more sickness. And all that was going through my mind at that time was, it doesn’t matter what baby you have, so long as it’s hale and hearty.
All appeared well. Soon after the four-month mark the baby started to stir in her womb. Margaret acquired a cot and a set of terry nappies, and started knitting.
On Monday 24 October Margaret woke in the morning with a sore back. ‘I got up to go to the toilet and I thought, I don’t feel right, and the next thing I vomited.’ By midday she was on her way to the hospital in an ambulance. There, the procedures were straightforward. First she was examined, then shaved, then she was given an enema and a bath, before being parked in a ward. Nothing much happened. She slept. Towards evening the pains increased and she got a strong urge to push. At ten minutes past eleven that night, Margaret Hogg’s baby was delivered by a midwife.
And there was a doctor there as well. And then all I heard was, ‘Ohh!’
And I said, ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘nothing dear, nothing for you to worry about,’ she says, ‘Baby’s just a little bit blue … So we’re going to take him away to give him a bit of oxygen and sort him out.’
So I thought, ‘Fine.’ And I says, ‘What have I got?’
And she says, ‘A little boy …’
The baby was whisked away. Margaret was dopey with gas and air, the only pain relief she had had. Though dimly aware that she hadn’t heard her infant cry, she tried to put worries from her mind. The medical authorities had told her nothing was the matter, and who was she, a relatively uneducated eighteen-year-old, who had merely worked in a shoe shop till she got married, to question them? After a cup of tea she was put to bed. Exhausted after her labour, she mustered the energy to ask the nurse attending her, ‘When can I see my baby?’ The reply was reassuring. He was quite pink now and breathing fine, and she would see him next day.
But in the morning the medical staff began to produce excuses. First it was, ‘When you’ve had your breakfast.’ The tea trolley came and went. Margaret washed. At ten o’clock the doctors appeared on their ward round. Respect was owed to these authoritative beings, but by now Margaret was becoming increasingly impatient. ‘I still haven’t seen my baby yet!’ she pleaded. And the doctor said, ‘Haven’t you, Mrs Hogg?’ A discussion ensued, couched in incomprehensible medical terms. It was all above her head. Please, she begged, when would she see him? ‘Shortly …’ came the answer. And the morning wore on. More than twelve hours after she had given birth, her mother and mother-in-law appeared bearing magazines. It was outside visiting hours. Why now? They had been summoned by a phone call, they explained. ‘And I says, “Well I haven’t seen Baby yet, and I’m getting annoyed. I don’t even know how heavy he is!”’ Looks were exchanged. There was something unspoken in their discomfort. They left, promising to return.
More hours passed, and a nurse arrived with her lunch. ‘By now I was beginning to lose it …’ Desperation gave her appeals renewed urgency. Margaret was beginning to learn that, to get what you wanted, you had to make yourself heard:
‘Look,’ I says, ‘I’m beginning to get annoyed now,’ I says. ‘I havnae seen my baby yet,’ I says, ‘He’s fourteen hours old,’ I says. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘The doctor is coming round after you’ve had a nap,’ she says. ‘Doctor’ll talk to you about Baby then.’ And I says, ‘NO, Doctor’ll NOT come after I’ve had a nap,’ I says. ‘Doctor’ll come NOW.’
‘Oh,’ she says, ‘Doctor is busy …’ I says, ‘I don’t care how busy Doctor is.’ I says, ‘If Doctor doesnae come to me,’ I says, ‘I’ll go to him.’
Her threat had its effect. In due course the nurse reappeared to collect the lunch tray, with a doctor in tow. ‘I believe you want to see me, love?’ This time Margaret was determined to get a straight answer out of him. She wanted to see her baby, she explained, and she wanted to see him now. She wanted to know what, if anything, was wrong with him, why he had not been brought to her, and whether he was dead. ‘Oh, NO NO no no no …’ was the emphatic answer.
And I says, ‘Well, bring him!’
The doctor sat on the bed. He said he thought they needed to have a little talk. Then he proceeded to tell Margaret that unfortunately her baby hadn’t developed properly. The baby, it seemed, had phocomelia. The word meant nothing to her. She asked him to tell her in English. Two things were the matter, he explained. Her baby had been born with a club foot. Also, he had only one eye. The other one hadn’t developed. That was all. And then he told her that she was to have her nap, and afterwards, the nurse would bring her baby to her.
So I must admit, that was the one time, the one and only time, that I cried myself to sleep.
And when I woke up my blood pressure and my temperature were up, and the staff nurse came and said, ‘You need something to calm yourself down with, Mrs Hogg.’ And I says, ‘No,’ I says, ‘I just need to see my baby.’
So I think I must have waited ten minutes … and they came back and walked into the room with this little wrapped-up bundle. And they put him on the bed, and then they walked out.
So I picked him up – and I had a good look at him, and I says, ‘Well,’ I says, ‘you’ve been a long time coming to see me.’ So I says, ‘Are you going to say hello to your mummy?’
Margaret was holding her child in her arms; and he was waking up. It was the moment she had been waiting for. His one eye opened. But no, this wasn’t how it should be. The eye was asymmetrical, its oval distorted at one end into a curious pear-shape, with the iris at the bottom. And now she saw that his feet, too, were indeed maimed. One of the tiny extremities protruding from the bundle showed signs of the pronounced inward curvature that comes with a club foot, the toe strangely bent back. And yet, after her day of strain and distress, Margaret reacted with relief. ‘Well, what was all the fuss about?’ A club foot was nothing new to her. She’d seen the condition before, and knew it could be rectified. The main thing was, her child was alive and, as for his eye – ‘Well,’ I says, ‘if you’ve only got one eye, you’ve only got one eye. We’ll take it from there.’
She wanted to get to know him. Gently, Margaret unwrapped her baby from the folds of blanket that enclosed his little body. Under the swaddling, someone had done their best to dress him in a back-fastening hospital nightie, but whoever it was had incompetently neglected to poke his hands through the flapping, empty sleeves. What a bundle of rags, she thought, feeling beneath the garment for his arms.
She couldn’t find them. With a lurch of anxiety she opened up the nightie. Her baby had no proper arms. Two short stumps ended on each side in a clutch of just three curled-in fingers. His tiny torso was contorted by hips that had dislocated from their sockets.
And I thought, now I know what they were talking about. Now I knew what the doctor meant when he said phocomelia. This was it. And I thought, ‘This poor little scrap of humanity, what am I going to do with him?’
But as I looked at Baby, it went through my mind, ‘Well, you’ve only got little arms. How are you going to cope? How are you going to eat? And how will you go to school?’
And I said to myself, ‘Well, Margaret, your mother always told you that God never gives you anything you can’t deal with.’ That was always a saying of Mother’s.
So I just thought, ‘Well, here goes. He’s yours. Now get on wi’ it.’
And I loved him. Oh, aye, I loved him.
But from that first day I saw David I found my inner courage. Before that I wouldn’t have challenged anyone. But I think it’s something that all mothers find, that have a baby that is nae normal, that is nae perfectly formed – they get a fighting spirit inside them telling them, ‘You’ve got to do it, because nobody else will.’ And in those days nobody else would.
Phocomelia, the word that Margaret Hogg failed to understand, means a birth deformity in which the hands or feet are attached close to the torso, with the limbs being underdeveloped or absent. As a diagnosis of David’s condition, it described, but it did not explain. And in 1960, it couldn’t – because nobody at that time knew enough about the ‘wonder drug’ thalidomide. Nobody had done the relevant tests on the drug, developed in Germany and marketed as a safe treatment for anxiety, insomnia and gastritis. And nobody in the UK saw any connection between Distaval, which contained thalidomide, and the estimated two thousand babies born in this country, the majority of whose impairments meant that they did not live to tell the tale. So when Margaret turned to the professionals and said to them, ‘Why is he like that?’ the only answer they could give was, ‘Well, Mrs Hogg, it’s just one of those things. It’s what we call an act of God.’ And Margaret was left with no choice but to say, ‘Well, if that’s it, then I don’t think much of Him.’
Coping with some of the hardest demands motherhood could impose has been Margaret Hogg’s lot in life, and one that was dealt to her with no warning or preparation, and very little professional support. Many of the defining freedoms enjoyed by young women of her age would be denied her. Instead, she herself believes that that terrible night in 1960, when she cried herself to sleep in a maternity ward in Leith, was the time she grew up, and went from being a teenage mother to being an adult with responsibilities.
That maturity had crushing costs, but also extraordinary rewards.
*
Today, Baroness Benjamin has not a single doubt that the bad times she too endured were worth it:
‘Adversity could break my spirit or make me strong.’
The words appear quoted on the cover of her second book of memoirs, The Arms of Britannia (2010), published after she had become a successful singer, actress, television personality, public figure and eventually, life peer. Floella Benjamin has come a long way from the little white clapboard house in Pointe-à-Pierre, Trinidad, where she lived till the age of eleven.
I knew we were getting closer to England because the weather started to get much, much colder and the sun seemed to disappear under the low clouds …21
It was September 1960. That year 57,700 immigrants – nearly 50,000 from the West Indies – arrived on these shores seeking a better life and new opportunities.
Floella’s experiences at this time mirror those of many black migrants to Britain. The terrible unthinking racism that she was about to encounter would put iron in her soul. But the 1960s was also a time when to be black was to be exotic, glamorous and desirable. When Floella eventually wrote her memoirs, she did so deliberately in order to reach out to those who felt discouraged and embittered by their experiences. But she also felt able to offer solace and inspiration.
After a separation of over a year, the Benjamin parents (‘Marmie’ and ‘Dardie’) sent for Floella and her elder sister and two little brothers to join them and the two younger children in the Mother Country. Dardie was now working as a garage mechanic during the day, but nursed dreams of breaking through as a jazz musician. Their island home, with its gaudy garden blazing with hibiscus, hummingbirds and butterflies, was a faraway memory.
In Trinidad, the Benjamin children had been educated to feel pride at being British. Every day at the start of school the classes assembled to sing ‘God Save the Queen’, ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Lord Nelson, Queen Victoria and Alfred, Lord Tennyson inhabited the young Floella’s imagination. Would the English streets be paved with gold? Now, as she rushed down the gangplank onto the dock, the dreamed-of moment of reunion coincided with the start of a new life. Overwhelmed as she was by the joy of being back in Marmie’s loving embrace, Floella was almost as elated to receive her first English present. ‘I thought you might be a little cold …’ said Marmie, opening her bag, and presenting her daughter with a powder-blue Marks & Spencer’s cardigan, embellished with pink and yellow flowers. ‘I felt I had been sprinkled with magic dust and that all my dreams were coming true.’
The journey to London by train left Floella drunk on a cocktail of new sights and sounds: the hissing locomotive that carried them, the bright green grass, the swarming rush-hour crowds, moving staircases, automatic doors, roaring traffic. And staring people. Floella and her sister had dressed in their best for this important day. Were the colourless, funereal-looking passers-by staring at them because of their joyous parrot-hued outfits? ‘I didn’t realise … that staring was something I was going to have to get used to.’ Marmie led her brood up a side street, to the down-at-heel Edwardian semi that was now the family home. Weary and drained with new experiences, the children tailed her up the steep flight of stairs and across a landing, where she unlocked a door. Here it was. One dark, cluttered room, furnished with a large bed, table, couch, chairs, cupboards, for a family of eight. Was this the better life that had been promised? The land of hope and glory? Surely not.
I hadn’t considered the fact that it was all my parents could afford, that they had saved every penny to send for us to be together … My dreams were shattered and scattered. I suddenly burst into hysterical tears, Sandra started to cry too, then the boys joined in. [Marmie] started to cry as well, and began to prepare a meal. At least that was the one thing that hadn’t changed – Marmie and her cooking.
Growing up in 1960s Britain, Floella Benjamin had a long road to travel. There would be deprivation, abuse, discrimination, betrayal and horrible violence. But there would also be the dawning of confidence and ambition born of a rooted self-belief. She knew, deep down, that the colour of her skin was no cause for shame. And by the age of twenty, she was to discover that her own sense of black dignity – along with her wide smile, curly hair, rich voice, expressive body, her defiance and her fighting spirit – was part of something bigger. For this young woman, pride was on the march.
Forecast for a Future
Racial identity, rights and the validity of strongly held beliefs were ideas that would gather momentum over the coming decade. For the younger generation they were ideas that were worth shouting about, worth waving banners for.
Thousands of people marching, jazz bands – why aren’t I there?22
wrote diarist Kate Paul on 16 April 1960. Passionate, starry-eyed, defiant and questioning, twenty-year-old Kate kept her diary in the pages of an old ledger she’d found discarded in a cupboard at her art school in Somerset. That day, she had heard radio reports of the 100,000 protesters who were gathering in Trafalgar Square at the end of the third annual Aldermaston march by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, to protest against the atom bomb. These were mainly peaceable men and women of the left; idealistic students, and mothers afraid for their children. Though stuck in provincial Somerset, Kate was one among many who felt she had no future:
We’re a sitting target, it’s absolutely futile – radiation is inescapable. I suppose it won’t be long now.
I’ll probably die before I’ve lived, before I’m thirty. And all my friends and contemporaries.
With what seemed malignant intent, the last world war had extended its claws beyond the confines of the battlefield. Within three months of VE Day, the dropping of two atom bombs on Japanese cities cast a curse of fear over the entire world that has never since lifted.
On 17 May, the fear was worse than ever before:
I’m depressed and worried …
wrote Kate. Now, the news was carrying reports that a Paris summit, called to bring about a rapprochement between the Big Four nuclear powers (the USA, USSR, Britain and France), had fallen apart in tatters after Russians shot down an American spy plane over the Urals. As a result, talks between the four heads of state had descended into hostile recriminations.
That evening Kate and her fellow students were drinking in the Compass, Taunton:
There was a woman talking as people do in pubs. She said: ‘I haven’t been so frightened since just before the Second World War.’ People were coming in and their first words were: ‘Any news?’ or ‘Heard anything yet?’
‘What right have these four men got to just press a button and get rid of us just like that?’ said another woman …
I want to grip these maniacs by the shoulders and shout: ‘Don’t you dare destroy me!’
The prospect of nuclear annihilation blackened the future, but for many, another terrifying tomorrow seemed just as ominous. High on the post-war list of doom-laden terrors came the threat of population explosion. Ninety thousand people were being born every day, and commentators predicted that humankind would double in fifty years if unchecked. The planet would starve. For many, the only hope of avoiding calamity lay in birth control. ‘Are we really to go on bringing fresh individuals into the world until we have to put up the notice “Standing Room Only”?’23 asked Sir Russell Brain, head of a special medical advisory committee appointed by the Family Planning Association, which was spearheading research into new methods of contraception. Early in 1960, tests were being conducted among women volunteers in Birmingham, London and Devon of Enavid and Primolut N, hormonal compounds developed in the United States, designed to regulate fertility. Though side effects were still a worry, the doctors and scientists conducting the tests were optimistic. ‘I think we have reached a stage in this hormonal business which is quite remarkable,’ said Dr Margaret Jackson.24 ‘It is demonstrated without doubt that a hormone is practically 100 per cent effective.’ The momentum that would bring in the Pill was now unstoppable. Meanwhile, increased use of penicillin to treat sexually transmitted diseases reduced the morbid fear of consequences that throughout history had been connected with promiscuity.
For Kate Paul, and many young women like her, boxed in by the palpable destruction of the past, and the probable annihilation that lay in the future, there seemed little point in living whatever life was left to them by the dying rules of their parents’ generation. From music to morals, clothes to sex, the time had come to start living for the moment. And now it seemed that pharmaceuticals could save the world, it was also, perhaps, possible to live differently.
*
Fashion was on the front line in declaring your allegiances.
Sitting in the bus station café in Taunton, Kate Paul was picked on by the old ‘witch’ who ran it, and told that she must leave. She was running a respectable café for respectable people, and Kate’s skirt was too short to answer to that description.
Undeterred, Kate Paul recorded later that summer that she was making herself ‘a very short tight skirt … in pink and white check.25 It sounds revolting.’
By today’s standards most women’s garments in 1960 were uncontroversial and homogeneous. Dior’s 1947 New Look had left its mark in the bell-like shape of skirts. These, though shorter by the year, still had to amply cover an area of thigh from knicker to reinforced stocking top, thus concealing the complicated panoply of wired suspender attachments that upheld one’s hosiery. Tights weren’t readily available until 1968, and didn’t overtake stockings until the 1970s. Meanwhile, on any weekday lunch hour, there was barely a trouser to be seen clothing the legs of the average female office worker. Felicity Green, later a celebrated fashion journalist, began work at the Daily Mirror in 1960, and straight away ran up against an editor who pleaded with her not to wear trousers in the office, in case she was unexpectedly sent to interview the Queen. Indeed, Royalty was a byword for conservatism, in modest pleated skirts, matching hats, gloves and handbags, and an enduring love affair with the silk headscarf, demurely knotted under the chin. The Queen’s sturdy tweed suits (which had been made to last for ever) reappeared annually from their mothballs, as they still do. Her look had little to do with fashion.
But that phenomenon, too, was starting to realign and, along with so many other aspects of popular culture, it reflected the generational tug of war now mobilising. In 1955 Mary Quant had made fashion history by opening her first shop, Bazaar, in Chelsea, followed soon after by a second in Knightsbridge. Here she sold liberating chemises with kick-flared skirts that were ‘short, short, short …’ Quant’s ultra-modern silhouette was quickly taken up by the teen élite, while her extraordinary entrepreneurial flair conferred a new, edgy identity on bohemian Chelsea. This was, as Felicity Green later described it, ‘way-out, with-it fashion …’ It was London-centric too. And whereas in the past Dior, Molyneux, Jacques Fath, Schiaparelli and Chanel had ordained what women wore, by the end of the 1950s young women like Kate Paul were simply deciding what they liked to wear, running it up on their sewing machines, and wearing it. For the first time, Teddy girls, beatniks and art students found they could influence how their contemporaries dressed. The pavement became a catwalk for a generation of youthful self-created models.
One of these was Mavis Wilson. Today, Mavis is a soignée elderly woman with a shapely bob, taut skin and dangly earrings, who lives in a modest cottage in London’s westerly suburbs. In 1960 she was growing up in a working-class family not far away in leafy Wimbledon. Having failed the eleven-plus exam, Mavis knew that her face – with its huge round blue eyes and curtains of hair – was her fortune. Certainly, her Saturday job at Morden Co-op didn’t go far towards financing her teenage longings. Nonetheless, she dyed her hair red, and saved for a pair of high-heeled bronze mock-croc winkle-pickers. Tottering down the arterial road from Raynes Park to Kingston-upon-Thames, she and her friend Cherry would sing along to their favourite Ronettes numbers playing at top volume on Cherry’s portable tape recorder: ‘Be my, be my baby …’ ‘We were hoping for boys!26 That’s what we were hoping for.’ If they didn’t find any by the time they got to Kingston, they just turned round and walked back.
The journalist Mary Ingham’s portrait of her adolescence in Chesham also points to the emergence of a new kind of female effrontery in the first years of the new decade. On Saturday nights the ‘council estate girls’ milled around the local coffee bar, with their beehive hairdos, natty suits, pink lipstick and stockings. Mary and her friends from the high school straightened their curls, coated their faces with pale powder and defined their eyes with the blackest of eyeliner. Fake snakeskin boots and box-pleated low-waisted dresses completed this edgy, brazen, sexualised look. Pubescent fantasies also fed on romantic comics such as Roxy, Mirabelle and Romeo (‘banned at home as “common trash” and at school as an insult to our intelligence’). For no prohibition could suppress the ‘base bodily undertow’ and ‘forbidden thoughts’ which accompanied the journey towards the adult world.
The Sexual Supermarket
After Lady Chatterley the unspoken was starting to become the spoken.
In 1960, sex was getting ever harder to ignore. Lady Chatterley’s class status played a part in this, for the book’s acquittal was a recognition that ‘posh’ girls could enjoy sex, as much as ‘bad’ girls. And from now on, the class disparity which the guardians of this nation’s morality found so unpalatable was on course to be paraded as never before, with sexual double standards dragged protesting and denying from the closet. Titillation was going public.
Marilyn Rice-Davies was fourteen in 1958, so didn’t have the chance, at that time, to read the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was still under a ban.fn8 Instead, she got her teenage information about sex from another ‘contraband’ bestseller, Forever Amber, the spicy historical romance by American author Kathleen Winsor, set in seventeenth-century England; fourteen US states banned it as pornographic. The story, set in a seamy, noisy, colourful London of bordellos and coffee houses, is the reverse of ‘Lady C’ and its bucolic ‘slumming-with-a-gamekeeper’ theme. Winsor’s heroine, Amber St Clare, headstrong, beautiful and adventurous, is a rags-to-riches courtesan who sleeps her way to the top, taking in bubonic plague, civil war and the court of Charles II along the way.
Marilyn Rice-Davies seems not only to have internalised the social messages of Forever Amber undiluted, but also to have shared a number of characteristics with Amber St Clare herself: her resourcefulness, independence and sexual allure. Certainly, on a romantic level, Marilyn ‘believed fervently in the agony and the ecstasy of love – red, violent and blood-splashed’. But this was lower middle-class Solihull. And as the pretty daughter of a tyre-factory employee, Marilyn felt trapped in its prosaic, suburban streets. She started to plan a way out, left school and took a post in the china department of a Birmingham fashion store at £3 a week. It didn’t take long before she discovered that becoming a catwalk mannequin in a shop was more fun, if you had what it took: charm and sex appeal.
I have never done anything to encourage a pass, I have never been a great beauty, at best passingly pretty, yet all my adult life I have fended off men.27
Handsome Robin was the first to penetrate the barriers. Marilyn liked him, but was mildly unimpressed by the experience. Soon after, a man stopped her in the street and asked her whether she would like to model at the Earl’s Court Motor Show. In 1959 the brand-new car that was hitting the headlines was BMC’s Mark I Mini, designed by Alec Issigonis. ‘The car … was young in spirit, the girl had to be young too.’ Marilyn packed her high heels and launched herself on London. After a week of swish hotel bathrooms, glittery receptions and launches, and posing for photo sessions, she was hooked. ‘I was leading a glamorous life and I loved it.’ She had earned £80, and was dead set on trying her luck in the city on a permanent basis. The suggestion was met by her parents with horror. Nevertheless, undeterred, and without telling anyone, she gave in her notice at the fashion store, and wrote a note to her mother and father telling them not to worry. One Monday morning in the autumn of 1960 she picked up her suitcase containing three pairs of shoes, a cocktail dress and a leather-bound copy of The Canterbury Tales, left the house unseen and headed for the station. ‘I said no goodbyes …’ Marilyn was sixteen.
In 1960 three and a quarter million people lived in inner London. And everywhere, there were bulldozers. Road-widening schemes were wiping out Victorian terraces to make way for cars. New buildings were springing from the bomb sites, with flats, shops and concrete tower blocks replacing slums and changing the skyline. A new Hilton hotel was in the offing in Park Lane. The city was in flux, and for the young and adventurous it was a magnet: a tatty, squalid, vulgar, wealthy, foul-aired, pervasively grey, neon-lit, star-studded metropolis, where red-painted pillar-boxes and telephone booths furnished the streets, and muddy city sparrows pecked among wilted cabbage leaves in Covent Garden’s market halls. Tobacconists, fishmongers and dairies existed next door to Italian coffee bars and American-style Wimpy bars. The crumbling stuccoed porches of Notting Hill Gate gave onto the dingy basements and warrens of tiny rooms that now accommodated families of immigrant Caribbeans, while nearby Portobello Road was a colourful mix of cauliflower stalls and fruit barrows, side by side with poky junk shops and alleyways of stolen goods. Queensway after dark was the haunt of insomniacs, hookers and assorted people of the night who clustered around the stalls to drink coffee and eat hot dogs. By day, gloved and hatted débutantes congregated at their favoured teatime rendezvous in Piccadilly, Fortnum and Mason’s. Later, such aristocrats and sophisticates headed with their escorts for a cellar in Leicester Square, the 400 Club, where Princess Margaret might be seen. In this London, Islington, Clerkenwell and Fulham were down-at-heel working-class districts, home to grimy pubs; Fleet Street still meant newspapers, Chelsea meant arty bohemia, and – in among its bookies, pubs, cheap trattorias and tailors’ workshops – Soho meant sleaze.
In 1959 the Street Offences Act had cleared prostitution off the streets and sent the women and their haggling pimps underground. But in the Soho of 1960 it was as easy as ever to get whatever kind of value you wanted for your money, whether that meant between the sheets, or something more imaginative. The coded adverts pasted to the interior of telephone booths (‘Rubber and rainwear made to measure …’; ‘Young lady gives Swedish lessons …’ and so on) were to be found in every city in the land. The upper crust spent their money on call girls – hotel porters could usually be trusted to outsource the visiting businessman’s needs – while clients prepared to risk it could still pick up women on the streets. But West End strip clubs and night spots were generally the first stop for the lonely and lust-driven. In 1960 it was estimated that there were two hundred strip clubs in London, many of them liberally scattered among Soho’s network of cobbled alleyways, street markets and grubby thoroughfares.
A guide to the capital’s sexual supermarket in the early years of the decade describes the strange ritual of club opening time, which was often lunchtime.fn9 Clusters of businessmen are to be seen on the pavement outside such establishments, shuffling in as the doors are unbolted, with many a furtive glance and muttered apology to the other bowler hats in the queue: ‘Oh, er, hello old man. Just thought I’d look in for a lunchtime drink. As good a place as any, don’t you think?’ A pink gin at the bar is pushed aside as the men make for the darkened auditorium, where no one speaks or makes eye contact.
Walker’s Court, an alley just off Brewer Street, was the location for the most famous of these clubs; in 1960 Marjorie Davis was one of the dancers there. Now seventy-five and the owner of a picturesque flint-cobbled pub in a north Norfolk fishing village, she spoke with nostalgia of the excitement and glamour of her days at the Raymond Revuebar.fn10
The Revuebar was first opened by Paul Raymond in 1958. Marjorie explained to me that, for female employees like her, their place of work had a hierarchy. Dancers like her were at the top of the tree – above (in this order) showgirls, hostesses and strippers.
The place was very glamorous, very plush, with bars and tables and restaurants – and there might have been gambling tables.28 And the men’s wives came too, all dolled up.
As dancers, we had the most wonderful costumes. Money was no object. It was all sparkling high-cut leotards and beautiful headdresses. We did sometimes have a midriff – but we were fully clothed over our bosoms and our nether regions.
The showgirls, however, were selected with toplessness in mind:
They were semi-nude: naked on the top but not on the bottom. They had G-strings on, and stickers on their boobs. Then as well, there were half a dozen of what were called hostesses: very glamorous women in low-cut evening dresses. And when two or three men came in, they were offered one of these hostesses to sit with them, talk to them, entertain them, and drink with them – and encourage them to spend their money.
Hostesses took commission on drinks, and did well out of this. At some clubs they used their flirtatious skills to persuade the customers to buy them cuddly toys and floral bouquets – generally recycled through new customers the very next day. More vulnerable to sexual entanglements than the dancers, the hostesses also provided many a lonely man with a sympathetic ear and a shoulder to cry on.
As for the strippers, a lot of them were foreign girls. Some of them hardly spoke English. Paul Raymond brought them over from Scandinavia and so on. One was a doctor, with a degree, from Sweden. It’s actually quite a skill, stripping. It’s very choreographed. You can’t just go on and take your knickers off, you have to know how to stand on one leg.
And Raymond was always getting into trouble with the Lord Chamberlain, because in those days there was a law set by his office, that a complete nude wasn’t allowed to move (except in private members’ clubs).fn11 She was allowed to strip off at the end of her act, completely naked. But she had to stand stock still till the music finished and the curtain closed.
And us dancers were mostly clad apart from our arms and legs, and we could dance our heads off!
‘By no means all club hostesses take men back to their own flats after the club or drinking dive where they supposedly work has closed. But there are not many who will say “no”, if the offered payment is high enough,’ reported The New London Spy.
On the face of it, the club culture of the 1950s and 60s played on the male fantasy of women as delectable forbidden fruit, with much of the attendant shame. Vice and depravity in dark hideaways. Look, but don’t touch. By the same token, women like Marjorie Davis working in these glamour palaces traded the supra-feminine projections of bodily perfection and eroticism for money. This mirrored the conventional sexual status quo, in which the bond between a man and a woman was all too often a transaction: security in return for subjection. For the club’s owner, a beautiful woman was an important commercial product, and was treated as such. A girl with chipped nail polish or ungroomed hair would have her pay docked. At the time, Marjorie Davis didn’t question the rules of this game:
I remember one man saying to me, ‘You can always tell the character of a man by looking at his wife,’ – meaning, was she overdressed, or was she subtly dressed, or understated? Was the ring on her finger a real diamond? That was how you told whether he was generous, and whether he was rich.
Marjorie herself had a full-blown romance with a wealthy bookmaker with whom she made flirtatious eye contact across the auditorium. He looked like the movie actor Montgomery Clift, ran a big flashy car and wore shiny mohair suits. It took two years for her to discover that he was married.
She finds it heart-warming to recall how supportive her fellow glamour girls were to her at this time, sharing the fun as well as the fallout. Some of the girls were respectably engaged or married, setting up home and choosing curtains. These were the friends whose shoulders she cried on, whose clothes she borrowed. They held her hand and kept her secrets.
This, then, was the world that Marilyn Rice-Davies entered that Monday afternoon in 1960. From the Raymond Revuebar, a fiveminute walk through Golden Square and past the end of Carnaby Street leads to Beak Street, which runs east–west off Regent Street, and here, at number 16, was Murray’s: a night club whose boast was that it catered to the élite. Unlike the Revuebar, Murray’s didn’t present strippers. But in other respects – the ‘boarding-school atmosphere’, the hierarchies, and the strict rules so easily bent – Marilyn’s working life would be the same as Marjorie’s.
When, at 4 p.m. on the same day as her arrival in London, Marilyn presented herself for audition as a dancer, she was one among thirty hopefuls who lined up obediently in the gaudy, airless surroundings of the cabaret, all flocked wallpaper and potted palms. Having checked that she could dance, the middle-aged owner, Percy Murray, sent her off to change into a skimpy leotard and then requested her to perform a simple routine. Her abilities and figure were to his taste. By the end of the session, the job was hers, at £25 a week. Murray asked her age. ‘“Eighteen,” I lied blithely.’29 It didn’t seem to matter, any more than her obviously baseless promise to supply a guarantee from her parents, something she easily forged.
Marilyn Rice-Davies was happy at Murray’s. It was fun, and it was very glamorous. King Hussein of Jordan was a regular there and was known to fill his car with girls and drive at top speed to Brighton, sirens blaring. Also, she could now afford an expensive pair of green velvet trousers from Mary Quant, a pair of high black leather boots and a batch of hit-parade records, as well as a flat with a film-star-style bathroom in Swiss Cottage. But despite the backstage companionship, Marilyn felt lonely. A few weeks into her job at the nightclub, she made a new friend. This stunning nineteen-year-old was another dancer, a sleek, feline beauty – vulnerable, susceptible, extravagant, flippant and infuriating. The name of the young woman who would become her flatmate, make her famous, and change her life was Christine Keeler.