1962
Maids and Models
‘The Pill had to be the best thing ever, ever, ever.1 My mother’d had four children. And I remember her saying to me, “Don’t you think if I could have done something about it, I would have done?” It was so important that women took charge of their own lives.’
Veronica MacNab, tasteful, smart and smiley, is remembering her mother. But Veronica herself was an innocent when it came to sex and contraception. ‘I’d read about the Pill. But it wasn’t relevant to me. There was no question that I was going to need it, because it didn’t happen.’
Veronica MacNab’s teenage years are a necessary reminder that not everybody in the early 1960s was swinging, promiscuous, permissive or angry with the Establishment. On the contrary, her early story gives a picture of that Establishment: a society frozen in time, where manners, culture and above all class remained fossilised in the face of the prevailing currents of change.
Today Veronica is in her early seventies, comfortably settled in a Victorian semi in the respectable market town of Peebles, on the Scottish borders. Her bay windows permit a view onto the rolling hills and woodland of the Tweed valley. ‘I never lived in a street until recently, but I can still look straight up to the hills in any direction.’ The sense of space is as vital to Veronica as the air she breathes, because she grew up in one of the wildest, most isolated glens in the Highlands. It was immortalised by Sir Walter Scott, who wrote of ‘lone Glenartney’s hazel shade’ in The Lady of the Lake. Veronica comes from generations of Scottish hill shepherds; her grandparents, who spoke only Gaelic, guarded their flocks on the island of Eigg, but later transferred to Perthshire, where the glen was kept as a shooting playground by English aristocrats. Shortly before the Second World War her father, Padraic, was sent for a spell to work as gamekeeper on the south of England estate that they also owned. There he courted the pretty parlourmaid who worked for the neighbouring landowners, brought her back to Glen Artney, and raised a family.
So young Veronica grew up beneath open skies, in a timeless landscape of heather, deer, wheeling buzzards and trickling burns. Every day she walked two miles down the glen to her school, which had only six pupils. But this unalloyed childhood came to an abrupt end when her uncompromising parents sent her to a huge, noisy, sprawling grammar school in Lanark, where she was expected to get good results. Here, Veronica felt shipwrecked; her only consolation was books, which she devoured voraciously. ‘They didn’t see that I was shell-shocked, suffocated. I just hated it beyond anything.’ Withdrawn and de-socialised by her isolated upbringing, she failed to engage with her contemporaries. The teenage revolution passed her by. Scottish country dance music, the contralto ballads of Kathleen Ferrier, and Handel’s Messiah were the soundtracks to her youth. ‘And my mother was a wonderful needlewoman … there were no idle hands in our house!’ That meant wearing hand-stitched shirtwaisters and home-made cardigans. Her stern and dominant father frowned on vanities. There would be no make-up on his daughter’s scrubbed Highland complexion – ‘though maybe I wore Pond’s cold cream?’ – and certainly no jewellery.
Where her physical development was concerned, Veronica was ‘absolutely green as grass’. When puberty kicked in, her mother gave her a well-intentioned manual about fruit flies. She was none the wiser. Next to her streetwise contemporaries, she felt alone, ignorant and detached. As for the future, there was never any doubt in her mind that her mother’s career would be hers: menial work, followed by marriage. Vaguely, she considered trying for nursing. But she felt herself to be struggling through a swamp. School was that swamp, and she was sinking.
In 1962, with her O-level results looming, Veronica took drastic action.
I knew I had failed the exams, and I knew that there was going to be one hell of a row coming up. So I bought a copy of The Nursery World magazine, and there was an advert for a job in Sussex, which I applied for, privately, in my best handwriting: ‘Dear Madam …’ and so on. The first thing my parents knew about it was when I got a letter asking me for an interview to be a junior nursery maid. And I was offered the job.
By chance, her new employers, Jeremy and Rona Smith, moved in the same elevated circles as the family who had once employed Veronica’s mother as parlourmaid. It turned out that Rona Smith wasn’t any old Smith, she was the daughter of a baronet who lived in a castle. Suddenly, everything was all right, and Veronica flunking her O levels was clearly ‘meant to be’. In July 1962, just weeks before her sixteenth birthday, and never having gone further than the English border counties in her life – ‘I still had heather in my hair!’ – she packed her trunk and took a train to London.
Veronica travelled out of one time warp, and straight into another. At Euston station she was met by the Smiths’ chauffeur, who explained that he would drive her directly to the Earls Court arena, where the family were attending the Royal Tournament. For a wide-eyed lass from the glens, nothing could be more bewildering, exciting or intense than the military tattoo she now witnessed. Ushered to her seat in the vast auditorium, a cacophony of brass bands and gun salutes greeted her: the whole fandango of the British Empire, from RAF athletes to Ghurkha formations. There were march pasts, gymnastic displays, uniformed pageantry and horseback parades, all in the presence of Her Majesty the Queen. And there was to be no let-up in the sensory overload. Later, having been introduced to her young charges, Dione, Julian and Hugo (aged eight, six and four), she was driven down to the Smiths’ capacious Sussex seat and given scrambled eggs and potted shrimps for supper. ‘It was the first time I’d ever had potted shrimps!’
In 1962, 90 per cent of this nation’s wealth was owned by just 19 per cent of the population. Britain’s country houses and the inherited money that maintained them are indelibly pinned to our national psyche through the fictions of Brideshead and Downton Abbey, and romance still lingered around the turrets, terraces and minstrels’ galleries of countless decaying ancestral piles. Though the war had played its part in equalising mistress and maid, the chatelaines clung tenaciously to their rules, rituals and privileges. Here too, nannies and nurserymaids were indispensable in upholding the leisured lifestyle of their employers. This was the once-upon-a-time world that Veronica MacNab now entered, a world she had only ever imagined in the pages of books. In this household she was inevitably the most junior member, whose work was to care for another woman’s three offspring, with a fourth on the way. No concern here with reproductive controls; Rona Smith could afford the best in medical care, and her decorous life would barely be interrupted by the seamless arrival of an additional baby. Meanwhile, bombarded by unfamiliar experiences, Mrs Smith’s new nursery maid gratefully welcomed all that the post had to offer, below and above stairs. She learnt to swim in the family’s pool. She wandered in the manicured gardens. On Sundays she had lunch with the children at the big family dining table, to be served with fresh peaches from the hothouse, each one presented on a porcelain platter decorated in the deepest blue pigment and figured with exquisite gold and polychrome ornamentation. Much later she learnt that this ware was known as Sèvres. As for the peach – she had never had a fresh one before, and had to watch others carefully to discover how such a superior fruit should be eaten.
Summer turned to winter, and the family decamped for Christmas to Rona Smith’s family home, Knepp Castle in Sussex, where two butlers, Mr Pink and Mr Hack, premeditated the household’s every need. On Boxing Day morning, abiding by long-established tradition, the Crawley and Horsham Hunt met in front of the castle, providing an obsolescent spectacle of pink coats, majestic hunters groomed and braided, hatted and habited ladies side-saddle on their mounts, milling and munching Madeira cake and quaffing stirrup-cups to the echoing bay of the fox hounds resounding across Knepp’s icy lake and frosted woodland.
There was always a big, big turnout. It was just extraordinary. There were Mr Pink and Mr Hack handing round the cake, and me trying to keep the children away from the horses’ hooves. It was fairy-tale stuff, it really was. It was the stuff of magic.
*
Knepp embodied an entrenched way of life in which a Scottish nursery maid not only knew her place, but embraced it.
But the Knepp model was itself in the process of change, heralding an era in which stirrup-cups and Sèvres porcelain dinner services were consigned to the museum of history. The young female products of the system – debs in search of a country landowner to marry – were (like Melissa North in the last chapter) reinventing the rules. And importantly, the embalmed hierarchy itself was losing legitimacy, as new money gained entry to such revered temples as the Ascot enclosure, Queen Charlotte’s Ball and the pages of Tatler, all for the price of a posh frock and a swanky hairdo. Royal presentations – those arcane yearly rites of passage in which upper-class virgins were paraded before the monarch in order to qualify them for the marriage market – had finally ended in 1958. By 1962 it was noticeable that jaded partygoers were starting to modernise the time-honoured rituals of the London season. Ball-gown designer Belinda Bellville was heard lamenting the downbeat chic of a new generation of debs in their ‘black stockings and a rather Chelsea-look and much more fashion conscious …2 not nearly as worried about waists and full skirts as they used to be’. The roll call of guests at these parties – once programmed by the debs’ mums around the match-making potential of the high-society invitee, each and every one of them carefully vetted against the stud book – was becoming a lucky dip of playboys, the upper classes and new money. You could get in if you could pay. A new terror loomed for the mothers of the well-bred virgins: interbreeding. Where formerly, dynasties had been secured and protected through prudent and reputable marriages, that exclusivity was now threatened, with a new front opening on the class war.
The culture of the late 1950s had already championed fluidity. Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 play A Taste of Honey put gender, class and race relations under the spotlight, while the ‘rough diamond’ working-class hero was glamorised on screen in Room at the Top (1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and A Kind of Loving (1962). A certain type of middle- or upper-middle-class girl – as Ruth Adam had pointed out in the Sunday Times – preferred her boyfriends gritty and proletarian. Compared to the chinless Hooray Henrys favoured by their mothers, these likely lads appeared to have more freedom, more ready cash, more sex appeal and more talent. And the boys were equally eager.
‘All us working-class lads love a posh girl.’3 The words were photographer David Bailey’s, spoken in 1996 at the funeral of his old comrade Terence Donovan. Along with a third photographer, Brian Duffy, these three (usually known only by their surnames) were the hub of a new London-based cultural meritocracy: edgy, mongrel and transgressive. They mixed easily with gangsters, artists, film stars and fashionistas. ‘Before 1960, a fashion photographer was tall, thin and camp,’ explained Duffy later.4 ‘But we three are different: short, fat and heterosexual!’ Their raw material was beautiful, posh women.
The story is well known of fashion model Jean Shrimpton’s affair with Bailey: their princess-and-frog myth is part of our cultural history. ‘I was a naive girl from the country and he was the streetwise Cockney,’ she recalled in a 1990 memoir.5 In his fashion photographs for Vogue, Bailey captured the essence of ‘the Shrimp’s’ breathtaking beauty. 1962 was the year when 1950s sex symbol Marilyn Monroe met a tragic death caused by a drug overdose. And now here to take her place was a new siren for a new decade. Supermodel Shrimpton substituted Monroe’s sultry, studied, voluminous womanliness with something different: a breath of fresh air. Every girl who saw Bailey’s images envied Shrimpton’s outdoorsy girlish allure, unkempt brunette waves, unaffected femininity and huge blue eyes. Men too were mesmerised:
There’s a hardness to her forehead and cheekbones only just mollified by that soft, lush mock-innocent mouth, the kind every man would like to have nuzzling the back of his neck from the pillion seat …6
wrote Hunter Davies in the Sunday Times. But it was Bailey who found the way to Shrimpton’s heart, and bed. In part, he seduced her with his world. ‘“Wanna come down the East End?” he would say casually.’ He would drive her up Brick Lane in his Morgan sports car, past the hangouts of razor gangs and thieves, or take her to visit his parents, Glad and Bert, in their fusty semi in East Ham. They didn’t go to fancy West End restaurants, because Bailey didn’t know how to order. Instead, they ate chicken chow mein at Chang’s in East Ham High Street. Jean was captivated.
But though Bailey’s Cockney world, with its noisome buildings, crooks and poverty, fascinated her, there was a side to it which was less welcome, if unsurprising. Evidently Bailey’s mum, Glad, like many working-class matriarchs, ruled the roost. But the expectation was that she had to know her place, and not rock the domestic boat. Sexism came with the territory. In East Ham and Poplar, men did as they pleased, and despite his ‘effeminate’ interests in fashion and art movies, Bailey was no exception. He pestered Jean for sex until she finally succumbed, one unromantic evening, on a piece of public grass in the dark. ‘[It was] quite awful.7 I was miserable, protesting all the time that I did not want to do it, and complaining that he was pressuring me.’ Though married, he – like all his group of cool East End photographers – saw no contradiction in infidelity.
None of the photographers went home to their wives. One … kept his wife safely tucked away at home by making sure she was constantly pregnant. It was said he used to push a pin gently through her Dutch cap.
In her memoirs Jean is largely resigned to the incessant backchat, making of passes, innuendo and macho posturing endured by the model girls. In the early sixties, she explains, nobody saw anything wrong with such behaviour, and ‘generally speaking, the girls could look after themselves’. So while Bailey and his mates felt free to take what liberties they liked – a tickle or a squeeze, a derisive or bawdy comment – the models kept working. Just once, Jean’s sense of sisterly grievance got the better of her. One evening after a shoot Bailey, Jean and the crew were drinking in the pub. Usually, Janet, the girlfriend of Bailey’s young assistant, hung around with them, but that evening she was absent. Jean asked him why. ‘She’s waiting for me in the car,’ was the reply.
I didn’t understand. ‘You mean she doesn’t want a drink?’
He looked at me as if I were stupid. ‘I don’t know. She’s waiting for me in the car,’ he repeated.
It dawned. I gave him a dirty look and, without asking for his yea or nay, went out and brought her in to join us.
*
Pattie Boyd’s early experiences with the photo pack mirrored those of the Shrimp. Pattie was a young blonde model of limpid loveliness, porcelain-skinned, with cornflower-blue eyes, aged eighteen in 1962. Like Jean, her background was relatively privileged; she spent her formative years on her grandparents’ Kenyan estate, and was convent-educated in Nairobi until the age of nine, when – her parents’ marriage having disintegrated – she found herself back in England with a new stepfather and a new family. Pattie was packed off to an inadequate Catholic boarding school. At seventeen, utterly unqualified for anything except marriage, she left. Strings were pulled, and Pattie was manoeuvred into an apprenticeship at Elizabeth Arden’s beauty salon in Mayfair. At last, flat-sharing with three other girls in South Kensington, life’s feast lay on a plate. ‘I was young, nubile and had everything in front of me …’8
Work at the salon was undemanding, but it opened doors to the imagination. Leafing through the once-prohibited pages of Vogue, Tatler and Queen, she saw glossy spreads of the latest celebrity models: Shrimpton, and Celia Hammond.
These girls were young, fresh and different. I wanted to be like them.
Agent Cherry Marshall spotted Pattie’s potential within minutes of meeting her. ‘She was clean, fresh and bubbly …9 With her coltish quality, beautiful legs and hands, she was the new contemporary girl, and she looked fantastic in all the way-out clothes of her generation.’ It was a look that needed little intervention, though Cherry had to impose a confectionery ban when Pattie gigglingly confessed that she had an insatiable appetite for sweets. Pattie was sent off, clutching her portfolio, ‘– and soon my diary was full of jobs’.
At this time there were no stylists. A model was expected to cart her necessities with her to every shoot, in a capacious bag. These included stockings in various shades, costume jewellery, a choice of shoes and boots, underwear, hair accessories including wigs and hairpieces, and a full supply of make-up and false eyelashes. A hairdresser would probably style her hair, but she would be expected to do her own face. Pattie’s life was disorganised but fun. She moved into a new flat off Cromwell Road with four other models, lived off sweets and Bird’s Eye frozen chicken pies, and broke all her stepfather’s injunctions. There was no shortage of boyfriends, and one of the earliest was the self-taught photographer Eric Swayne, an acolyte and fellow East-Ender friend of Bailey’s. Plebeian Swayne adored posh Pattie, but also saw her as the Shrimp to his Bailey: a passport to success. Seven years her senior, he felt entitled to mould her, telling her how to do her hair and make-up, telling her to smile, controlling her image.
Eric and I didn’t sleep together for quite a while. He kept asking and I kept refusing. Eventually I felt pressured and knew I’d have to give in, so although I didn’t really want to, I agreed. He was kind and sweet, but it wasn’t the big deal I had imagined. In fact, it was pretty painful and I regretted it …
Grace Coddington was another classically beautiful model who stepped over the class lines. From where she stood, going out with East End boys was the equivalent of a fashion statement. They were cool, fun, cheeky, drove Rolls-Royces and looked up to women. Terence Donovan’s adventurous artsy take on his home patch – industrial chic, blondes on bomb sites – earned him the street credibility to photograph and be seen with this flame-haired, polished Vogue cover girl. Coddington (inevitably known as ‘the Cod’) also patronised the hippest of hairdressers, Vidal Sassoon, another self-made working-class success story. The hugely talented and original Sassoon worked his way up from extreme poverty and recruited an elocution teacher to help rid him of his incomprehensible Cockney; Vidal’s Mayfair salon soon became a magnet for the fashion élite who came for his famous ‘five-point cut’, and repositioned hairstyling as heterosexual. Here, according to Coddington, the juniors tended to be raunchy boys, ‘who, after cutting the customers’ hair, took them upstairs and attempted to shag them’.10
The combination of sophisticated beauty and raw unvarnished sex, the ‘bit of rough’ having it off with the fairy-tale princess, was a potent one. In an era of fast-changing fashion and the expansion of aspirational colour magazines, photography made it even more so. The glottal accent, the interrogating eye, the explosive finger – ever ready to probe, detonate or combust – was explicit, exploratory and erotic.
The photographer must have absolute control over you …11
wrote Jean Shrimpton in The Truth About Modelling.
You must trust his judgement and his eyesight … You must be a blank sheet upon which he can create.
Note the pronoun. In 1962, though class barriers were starting to crumble, gender stereotypes were still deeply rooted.
Is Chastity Outmoded?
Nevertheless, in the early 1960s the British intelligentsia was starting to interrogate the sexual status quo. In 1962 the BBC commissioned Professor G. M. Carstairs to deliver a kind of state-of-the-nation address entitled This Island Now, via their flagship series of broadcasts, the Reith Lectures. The learned and liberal-minded professor incited controversy by questioning whether chastity was a supreme virtue in an age when women were moving closer to social and economic equality with men. ‘Women are taking the lead in re-exploring and rediscovering their own nature,’ he told his Home Service listeners, ‘and, in so doing, [are] modifying our concept of man’s nature also.’12 Another highly popular, if notorious, academic author who challenged conventions was the psychiatrist Dr Eustace Chesser. Where sexual behaviour was concerned, public opinion was shifting, and the old, Victorian conventions were no longer relevant, Chesser insisted (in Is Chastity Outmoded? (1960)). Even if pre-marital sex remained unacceptable in society, it was time for the notions of sin and guilt to be pensioned off, along with sexual fear and the resulting neuroses.
But outside chattering circles, the orthodox narrative held good. Even Chesser conceded that –
… no matter what stage of equality is arrived at between the sexes, the tendency will continue for man to insist, and woman to resist …13
– as Jean Shrimpton and Pattie Boyd found out.
When the sociologist Michael Schofield conducted his most famous survey among young people in the early sixties, it appeared that conventional attitudes persisted.fn1 Schofield’s interviewers asked nearly 2,000 fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds of both sexes, from all sectors of society, about their attitudes to sex before marriage. The responses his interviewees gave were not altogether surprising. Asked, why did they first have sex? the boys were – typically – motivated by sexual desire, and the girls by a belief that they were in love:
Boy, aged sixteen:
I felt like it. I felt I was entitled to it after four months.
Boy, aged nineteen:
You just get tired of kissing and that.
Girl, aged eighteen:
He kept on telling me that this sort of thing is all right for two people who are in love and plan to get married.
Girl, aged seventeen:
He wanted to. It wasn’t rape or anything. Just that I was in love with him.
More surprisingly perhaps, in the context of all the wringing of hands by Dr Leslie Weatherhead and his ilk, Schofield’s statistics revealed that most seventeen- to nineteen-year-olds, boys and girls, were virgins. Of the boys in that age group, one in three had had sex; of the girls, just one in six.
However, the fear of sexual licence felt by the older generation, and the threat, were real enough. Schofield demonstrated that there was a correlation between levels of sexual experience and disrespect for adults. An oppositional culture was growing up around the generation divide, and the smashing up of Christian morals. The flip side of Dr Weatherhead’s catastrophe scenario, in which the nation would be consumed by biblical plagues of rampant underage brides and Teddy boys riddled with gonorrhoea, was an intense and widespread anger and antipathy, sometimes verging on phobia, on the part of the young towards the old. As one oral history respondent told the interviewer:
Our elders and betters do not inspire us, do not give us the slightest incentive to be as they are …14 We see the death of life in the terrible faces of our elected ministers and pundits and judges …
Sometimes I positively hate these people.
Anyone over twenty is past it. The most terrible thing on earth would be to be drawn into the adult world.
Nineteen-year-old Kate Paul was more succinct:
Why can’t oldish women walk?15
she begged –
They really annoy me, they’re so grey and stiff and unnecessarily old …
while, echoing the Who, pop star Cilla Black told the Daily Express –
I would never want to grow old.16 I’ve always said I would shoot myself when I’m 50.
Two other writers with their fingers on the pulse of the younger generation were the journalists Charles Hamblett and Jane Deverson, who brought the voices of ‘Generation X’ before the public, in their book of that name. Hamblett and Deverson’s aim was ‘to get young people talking’. The multiplicity of voices that speak out from their pages testify to a generation of surprisingly honest, confident, entitled young men, and young women still wrestling with the imperatives of their 1950s upbringing:
Richard, 24:
If you go to a party and have a few beers, bed is the main thing you think about, then you don’t care how rough the girl looks …
Alan, 22:
I find girls are usually willing to sleep with me … But I don’t see them regularly. I smooth them over the first date. I take her out and we neck and I judge what she’s like, whether she’s hot stuff. If she is I take her out again and sleep with her … If I got a girl pregnant I wouldn’t marry her …
‘June’, 16:
You’re annoyed if a boy tries to make you on the first date because it shows he thinks you’re easy, and you’re annoyed if he doesn’t try to make you because it shows he doesn’t fancy you …
‘Annie’, 17:
Mother says never give in to a boy because he won’t respect you, you’ll only go on from one lover to another and end up a tart …
Of course, she’s right. But Sheila at school slept with her boyfriend and everyone looked up to her, there’s a sort of mystique about it. You feel you’re missing out on something and you’re not a real woman until you’ve slept with a boy …
First sex is abominable … But you feel great once it’s over and you want to go off and tell all your girlfriends.
Pain, humiliation, pride, regret, liberation, confusion: for women they were all part of the package, at a time when the sands were shifting fast, and a tide of sexual change was threatening to submerge the familiar moral landscape.
And – here too – bias, intolerance, hatred, exclusion and injustice came with the deal. It wasn’t till later in the decade that somebody found a word that summed up these attitudes: sexism.fn2
*
Since 1975, the Sex Discrimination Act has protected both men and women from discrimination on the grounds of sex or marital status. It is no longer lawful to treat someone unfavourably because of their sex, to abuse or harass them, or to pay them differently solely on the basis of their gender. Until that Act became law, you could abuse and discriminate with impunity. Women were generally on the receiving end, and never more so than when they attempted to ‘trespass’ on territory men regarded as their own.
Valerie Gisborn, uneducated and unconfident, worked for years in a Leicester textile factory before taking the controversial step of enrolling in the police force at the age of twenty-four. The probationary period, which she completed in 1961, called on all Valerie’s strength of mind in dealing with sexism in an almost all-male world. Physical harassment was the norm.
One officer was a sergeant who earned himself the nickname ‘Titter Fox’.17 No woman was safe in his presence. He thought it extremely funny to creep up to the girls … and touch them on their breasts. Often he approached them from the rear while they were on the telephone and slid his hand underneath their armpit, giving their breast a slight squeeze. Sometimes, as the girls walked along a corridor in the police station, he would stop them for conversation, then quickly touch them on the breast before parting. Most of us were wary of him and steered clear …
Threats to report the sergeant were dismissed as hearsay. The women had to cope alone.
After her probationary period, which she passed through with flying colours, Valerie was given a two-year trial in CID as a fully fledged detective officer, which she expected would lead straight into a criminal investigation qualification. To her astonishment, Valerie’s name did not go forward; instead she was put back into uniform. ‘The reason, only male detectives were allowed to attend the special course, because they were able to stay over the two-year attachment. Women were not allowed this privilege, and therefore not the special course.’
Or take the experience of Ann Leslie. In the face of blatant hostility and prejudice, she was outspoken and combative compared to the downtrodden Valerie Gisborn. But that was, and still is, her job.
Dame Ann Leslie is one of the foremost journalists of her generation, an award-winning star of the Daily Mail, who has covered entertainment, war and politics over a kaleidoscopic career. In 1962, fresh from a private education and with an Oxford degree, Leslie found herself posted to her first job working on the news desk of the Daily Express in Manchester. Here, her boss was the news editor Tom Campbell, a drunk and malevolent Scot, who was consumed with fury and resentment at having ‘a bloody intellectual’ from the south foisted on him. But his rage stemmed as much from the feeling that this young female had torn up the class rule book by mincing into a northern male powerhouse with her airs and graces.
I was everything he hated …18 upper middle-class, an Oxford graduate, privately educated, and thus someone who was ipso facto a ‘stuck-up snob’ …
What did a young woman with her lah-di-dah accent, who should have been on débutante duty, think she was doing in his down-to-earth proletarian office? When she arrived at work on day one, neatly turned out in an inexpensive knock-off Chanel suit, Campbell swore at her that she was ‘not at the bloody Savoy today!’ From then on, spitting with anger, he took every opportunity to point out to her that she was ‘keeping a good man out of a job’. The other bully who made her life a misery was Campbell’s deputy, Bob Blake. Blake’s famously discriminatory remarks were circulated among his underlings: ‘I have no objection to women on newspapers. I think women on newspapers can be a good thing for us. Just so long as they are on other newspapers.’ Or, ‘Bottle-washing, that’s what you university graduates have got to do here! And I’ll certainly see that you get a few dirty bottles to wash! Especially you women graduates!’
Together, Blake and Campbell allied in a power struggle to drive her out. Every morning Ann would choke down the watery fried eggs and fatty bacon provided by her landlady and force herself into work. Every evening she pushed pennies into the slot of a malodorous call-box, phoned her boyfriend, Michael Fletcher, in London and wailed: ‘I hate this job, this job hates me, I’m chucking it in!’ Frequently, Campbell dumped her on the ‘dog-watch’. She’d be ‘on’ from 4.30 p.m. till the small hours, and was required to trek out to far-flung police stations in toxic slums in search of ‘stories’. But as it was the norm for desk sergeants to sell any fruity tip-offs straight to their chums on the newspaper’s Crime Desk, Ann rarely came back with anything substantial. And it wasn’t until a colleague advised her to join the journalism union that Campbell was forced to concede her right to claim late-night taxis home against expenses.
At twenty-one, Ann was the youngest journalist working for the Express in Manchester. Halfway into her year there, the northern editor ambled across to her desk and told her to put together a column aimed at teenagers, about pop music and fashion. Ann did not feel suited for this; her own musical tastes veered towards Sibelius and light opera. But it wasn’t optional. The brief was to give column space to youthful trends south of the border and north of Nottingham. So she attempted to woo the younger generation by dutifully plugging a number of ill-favoured, tongue-tied Lancashire skiffle groups.
Ann’s lack of knowledge blinded her to the gathering momentum of the Liverpool music scene, which was now bubbling over with a new energy. At the start of 1962 the Beatles were still little-known outside their home town, but in January that year they had taken the important step of signing Brian Epstein as their manager, in August Ringo Starr joined the group as drummer, and in the north-west Beatle-idolatry was a growing phenomenon. Unaware of all this, Ann kept dialling around. Finally, she lucked into a funny, sardonic Scouser with a nasal voice, who told her jokes and provided her with observations for her column. His name was John Lennon. Ann Leslie had great instincts, and the Lennon wit and wisdom made fabulous copy. For several months she pulled off a series of interviews with him and his little-known band. Then the editor called her in and said she was overdoing it. ‘Too many of these “Insects”, or whatever they call themselves, on your page … sounds as if you’re in their pay,’ he complained. Soon after, Epstein invited her to hear the band play a gig in Liverpool. Apologising, Ann explained that she couldn’t; she’d been barred from running any more Beatles features.
Barely eighteen months later the Beatles became the biggest pop group in the world, and Epstein never took my calls again.
Back in Manchester, Ann Leslie infuriated her unreconstructed bosses by neglecting to play by their unscrupulous rules. For example, an assortment of ruthless male hacks from the Express had, one after another, failed to get a female crime victim to tell her story despite infiltrating her hospital ward in disguise as doctors, sending bouquets and the like. Ann tried approaching the woman through official channels, via the hospital secretary, with gratifyingly immediate results. ‘Mrs A says you sound like a nice, polite young woman, and certainly she’ll talk to you.’
‘How did you get the bloody story?’ barked Campbell the next day.
‘I asked the Hospital Secretary …’
‘You did what?’ His moustache bristled with rage. ‘That’s no way to get a story!’
‘But,’ I pointed out coolly, ‘I did get it. And no one else did.’
In vengeance, Campbell plotted her downfall, by sending her on the worst, most preposterous assignment he could dream up. There was, it seemed, a dwarf somewhere in Oldham claiming to have memories of his schooldays with the film star Cary Grant. Nothing else was known, and Campbell packed her off to track down the dwarf. ‘And, while you’re about it, lassie, there’s a flock of sheep frozen to death on the moors … You’ll find them by looking for hooves sticking up over the snow. And you know what? You’re keeping a good man out of a job!’ Ann struggled through a blizzard, located the dwarf, shared a few whiskies with him, and (omitting to cover the dead sheep) scooped the story.
Campbell and I were locked in a deadly battle,
recalled Ann Leslie in her memoirs,
… about class, education and above all gender – and I was damned if I was going to lose it to this ghastly, failed, fraudulent old drunk. I fully intended to leave – but on my terms. Modern feminism hadn’t been invented then, but I was innately feminist enough to know that I wouldn’t be driven out of a job – even one I hated – merely because of the genital arrangements I was born with.
Satire and Street Cred
‘Ann Leslie – yes, I remember her well.19 I can see her now, blue mascara and pale pink lipstick, always full make-up even then … She was a real dauntless journalist in a way I never was.’
Anne Chisholm was Ann Leslie’s exact contemporary at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Anne – ‘Chiz’ to her friends – graduated in History in the summer of 1962. Sharp-witted, gorgeous and confident, her education had endowed her with the knowing, faux-sophisticated and ironical mindset of her mostly male Oxbridge college generation. These were the affiliates of the Angry Young Men – like John Osborne and Kingsley Amis – who, according to the journalist Christopher Booker, had gone rogue in the mid-1950s, turned on the Establishment, and bitten the hand that fed them.fn3 The anger may have seemed indiscriminate, but it was very much alive, directed against the military, the bomb, complacency, royalty, the Church, sexual hypocrisy and the class divide. Booker identified 1956 as a turning point: ‘A new spirit was unleashed – a new wind of essentially youthful hostility to every kind of established convention and traditional authority, a wind of moral freedom and rebellion …’ For these clever young men, the waning of empire and all its ponderous values felt like a letting-go, a deliverance. The party could begin.
This was the zeitgeist when Anne and her contemporaries were at Oxford.
My earliest boyfriend was the son of a Hampstead Socialist MP. So though I came from a naturally Tory background I never voted Tory.
I was caught up in the whole anti-Establishment mood of the time. The prime minister, Harold Macmillan, seemed like an old, walrus-faced figure of fun. He just seemed ridiculous, out-of-date and stuffy, a man whose time had been and gone.
It was while at Oxford that Anne first tried her hand at journalism, writing for the university paper Isis, edited by Paul Foot. Soon she was bitten by the idea of pursuing a career in newspapers. So when her Oxford contemporary, a Balliol graduate called Peter Usborne, phoned her the autumn after she came down and said, ‘Hello, Chis, do you want to come and work for the Eye?’ she didn’t hesitate.
I simply said ‘Yes …’ thinking, while I look for a proper job, this will do, and it sounds like fun.
Private Eye was, and continues to be, the court jester of the Establishment – half in, but mainly out: needling, funny, and risk-taking. Like the all-male fun-poking hit show Beyond the Fringe, the magazine, founded in 1961, grew out of Oxbridge. Usborne and his college contemporaries were all public-school, all in love with their own brand of irreverent, anarchic undergraduate humour. By the time Anne Chisholm came on board the magazine had a cult following under the editorship of another talented fellow student, Richard Ingrams. Anne’s rather sketchy role was that of editorial assistant and office help, the office in question being a cramped, chaotic space up a grimy staircase above a striptease joint and a betting shop in Greek Street, Soho.
Everybody did a bit of everything. People would wander in and out with drinks or cups of coffee. We all sat around making jokes and reading the papers and thinking how clever we were … And they’d ask you to think up an idea for a caption or a cover or something. I just thought of it as an extension of student life. It was great fun.
This was Satire Central. A couple of doors down was the short-lived but hugely in-demand Establishment Club, a Mecca for hip metropolitans who didn’t want to miss out on the craze for puncturing pretensions. Here you could catch a glimpse of Alan Bennett hot from ridiculing the Royals in his Beyond the Fringe New York transfer, John Wells sending up John Betjeman’s Victorian-Gothic lavatory fetish, or über-camp comedian Frankie Howerd lasciviously comparing a sausage to a lamb chop. The Private Eye team had a free pass for the Establishment. Willie Rushton, one of Private Eye’s founders, also gained them entry to the live broadcasts of the BBC’s cutting-edge comedy current affairs show That Was the Week That Was (aka TW3), which drew television audiences of up to 13 million.
Punch (September 1962) mocks the smug subversives.
So Anne Chisholm felt that she was right where it was at. ‘Sitting in the audience at the BBC I felt I was in the forefront of all the most amusing, entertaining, different, subversive, naughty, rude stuff, you know? I remember my father shaking his head, bemused, and saying, “I knew you quite fancied journalism. But I hadn’t quite realised it would be this kind of journalism!”’
Like the satire craze in general, Private Eye, the Establishment and TW3 were male-dominated. ‘One of the reasons I knew I wouldn’t stay long-term was that it did feel very much like a boys’ club, and the humour was also very much public-schoolboy kind of humour,’ says Anne. ‘It all felt a bit misogynistic. You had to be “one of the lads”. Women weren’t taken awfully seriously, and I suppose I played along with it. But it wasn’t somewhere I wanted to get stuck.’ Though Private Eye’s inner circle were eager to ridicule most conventions, they suffered from a collective sense-of-humour failure when it came to entrenched female inequality, and as a mere office girl it was clear to Anne Chisholm that she wasn’t ever going to be asked to write anything.
There were exceptions to this. The Establishment gave a platform to the talented actress and comedian Eleanor Bron. Bron starred in one of the club’s favourite sketches, which shone a squirming, painful light on sexual embarrassment: this two-hander had an intellectually earnest boy navigating the vacuous shallows of intellectual pseudery to get his equally intellectually earnest girlfriend into bed. The sophisticated metropolitan audience recognised themselves, and loved it. On TW3, Millicent Martin deployed a pitch-perfect combination of wide-eyed sex-kitten and ice-maiden – both earthy and untouchable – to launch each week’s show with her brassy vocals. Martin’s class act made it all the more shocking when she stepped over the line with scripts alluding to sex before marriage, illegitimacy or – and this provoked unparalleled hysteria alongside alarmed accusations of smut-peddling – a sketch of a couple in a café, in which Martin’s character informed Roy Kinnear’s character in ringing tones, ‘YOUR FLY’S OPEN!’
My own family didn’t possess a television set in 1962, but such was TW3’s compelling attraction when I was a child that my parents would organise a babysitter every week in order to spend the evening watching it in company with a group of like-minded friends. Saturday nights didn’t get any more fun than this.
*
My brother, sister and I were children in Leeds in the early sixties. And, though our parents were middle-class southerners, we unthinkingly adopted a posture of scorn and derision towards those we termed ‘Snobs Down South’. We unlearned our long vowels, and took on the protective colouring of the Yorkshire accent. An unformulated but powerful instinct told us that the north, with its tough moors and sooty back-to-backs, was more gritty and authentic than the soft-bellied south – all dreaming Downland and pampered city commuters. Leeds was energised, and friendly too. ‘Down South’ seemed sleepy, subdued. In an infantile way, we were pro-proletarian, and anti-posh. The pop culture of the time endorsed those instincts.
It was the same for Rosalyn Palmer. In September 1962 Rosalyn packed her trunk with books and black jeans, said goodbye to Surrey, took the train to grimy, salty, vibrant Liverpool – and fell in love with the city at first sight. The University had offered her a place to study Political Theory and Institutions. But first, she was going to have fun. So she showed up at the freshers’ dance at the Student Union, where an excited flock of fledgling students, girls in full skirts, boys in suits and ties, were milling and shuffling to the lush, polished, swooping rhythms of the star turn, celebrity bandleader Victor Sylvester and his Silver Strings. No music more perfectly represented the sound of the 1950s, conjuring a world of potted palms and tea for two.
Halfway through, Sylvester finished his first set and took a break. He was replaced on the platform by a local pop group with a rather different sound. They were called the Beatles.
And when they’d finished, the audience didn’t want Victor Sylvester to come back.20 And I can remember the impact of hearing their music: it was just amazing! And they were very tuneful … their singing was so good. I thought they were wonderful, and I just fell instantly in love with them. We all did – with their mop tops, and their collarless suits. They were just such beautiful young men!
You know, I never knew which one I really loved the most … George Harrison? Paul? John?
Rosalyn was hooked by the Mersey scene. Though the place was heaving, hot and sweaty, there was always great music to be heard at the Cavern: the Hollies, Wayne Fontana, the Big Three, Freddie and the Dreamers. Another popular Merseybeat haunt was the Casbah Coffee Club, a damp cellar in an outlying area of the city, where Cilla Black and the Beatles often performed. Lennon and his mates had painted the Casbah’s walls themselves, with spiders, rainbows and stars. But Rosalyn’s favourite was Liverpool’s big dance hall, the Rialto: the venue for Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Remo Four, the Searchers and the Swinging Blue Jeans. In the early days of the Mersey Sound all the Liverpool bands were exciting, and it was a matter of showing up at your preferred venue and dancing to whatever music happened to be playing that night. Audiences were from across the city, not just students. Rosalyn now worked on her street credentials, proudly acquiring a Scouse accent, cultivating her hip, edgy appearance, and relishing the wit and sociability of the Liverpudlians she met in bus queues. ‘There was loads and loads of laughter. People in the south never talk to each other at bus stops.’
The important thing was to be seen as a child of the sixties – not the fifties. To be fifties was to be a loser. To be fifties was to be old, not young. The fifties girls were still wearing the obligatory middle-aged uniform of twinset and pearls. But the fifties boys in particular were easily identifiable among the students. Victor Sylvester’s world was their spiritual home. They were neat, wore ties, liked ballroom dancing, had usually been to public schools, and their views on women were ineradicably snobbish.
I can remember one chap I dated casually, and he said, ‘I’m proud to say I’ve never been out with a girl that’s been to a secondary modern school, and I promised my mother I would never do it.’ To which I said, ‘Well, actually, I did!’
And he more or less got up and left the table. What a pompous little git!
The sixties boys, however – with their long scruffy sweaters, jeans, duffel coats, androgyny and centre-left political mindset – were different. Rosalyn’s Surrey upbringing – the nuns and crushing snobbery of her early years – fuelled her determination to identify with the new decade. Here again, posh met pleb. She hastened to make friends with the cool crowd, like Roger McGough, uncrowned king of the Liverpool poetry scene, a regular at the same drinking hole, whose irreverent and romantic verse inspired a generation. Being young in Liverpool in the early sixties felt like being at the centre of the universe, a vigorous, vibrant nerve centre of creativity. At this time Rosalyn and her friends regarded London with contempt. ‘We used to say, what we do in Liverpool gets picked up in London about six months later. All the energy was coming from Liverpool, all the dynamics were coming from Liverpool. And London was just where you go to make money – after you’ve done the exciting things.’
*
Like Rosalyn Palmer, teenage vocalist Beryl Marsden was anti-pomposity, a star of street cred. Her style was sloppy joes, jeans and winkle-picker boots, though the beautiful full-length leather coat she craved was beyond her budget. Her friend Ida Holly had one, and she looked on in envy. Ida, who was seeing John Lennon, was a double for Cleopatra, with long, straight jet-black hair and black-lined cat eyes, and would show up at the Cavern in her magnificent leathers.
The vaulted basement space of the Cavern was small, dark and smelly, and there wasn’t space to execute the extravagant moves of a jive. On the dance floor everyone had to get up close and personal, and a dance evolved known as the Cavern Stomp, with funky, precise, skipping moves which sexily echoed those of your partner. There was no alcohol – the club sold only soft drinks – ‘so you just took off on your own adrenalin, and the excitement of the music …’21 At this time the Beatles were still unknown outside a small north-of-England circuit – and Hamburg. But Brian Epstein was managing them now, and that included a makeover. He’d de-scruffed them, taken away the leather jackets, put them in matching suits and ties, and had their hair restyled. De-loused, de-contaminated, ‘embourgeoised’, they could now have national appeal. The working class was being mainstreamed.
Liverpool itself was a small city. According to Beryl, in 1962 everyone who was involved in contemporary music, poetry or art knew everyone else. When the Beatles played the Cavern, and provided John had his glasses on (‘he couldn’t recognise anybody when he took them off …’), they knew all the audience by their first names. ‘So there was all this banter – you know, “What are you up to today? And how’re you doing?”’ For Beryl, their on-stage relationship, the intimacy and the backchat, was almost as good as the music.
But already there was a dark side to the pungent, wisecracking front that would bring the Beatles so many fans. Much of their clean-living, wholesome appeal was a façade, for Epstein was a master image creator. John Lennon may have been dating Beryl Marsden’s beautiful black-haired friend Ida, but in reality he had been married for less than a year to a clever, classy, reserved twenty-two-year-old named Cynthia Powell. John and Cynthia had met at art school in 1958; she was blown away by his scruffy, rough-diamond sex appeal and, besotted, had started a passionate relationship with him. In thrall to John’s arty preferences, she jettisoned her middle-class ‘secretary-bird’ look and morphed into a black-clad bohemian with fishnet stockings. In the summer of 1962 Cynthia found herself pregnant. ‘Sick and faint …22 I broke the news to John …’ ‘There’s only one thing for it, Cyn, we’ll have to get married.’
The Lennons’ wedding took place on 23 August 1962 at the Mount Pleasant register office in Liverpool. Six weeks later, the Beatles released their first single, ‘Love Me Do’. It reached number 17 in the charts.
Under Epstein’s orders the marriage was to be secret, and the new Mrs Lennon was now firmly advised not to wear her wedding ring in public, and to keep a low profile. Behind the pretence was a concern that a married Beatle would alienate the fans and jeopardise the group’s growing popularity. It was true that, even in the days when she was just John’s girlfriend, Cynthia had lived in terror of some of John’s more fanatical followers. Accompanying him to performances, she didn’t feel safe:
I was a threat to their fantasies and dreams. The most dangerous place for me in those days was the ladies’ loo … I was definitely no match at all for those girls. They could have killed me as soon as look at me.
Now, awaiting the birth of their baby, it was a case of ‘Love Me Don’t’. Cynthia found herself virtually under house arrest and, enveloped in billowing shirt-dresses to disguise her expanding bump, John’s new bride was literally under wraps. With an unacknowledged wife, and an unacknowledged child on the way, John was as free to chase women as he had been prior to his shotgun marriage. Soon the beautiful Ida Holly was on his radar. Though Ida herself seems to have been unaware that he was married, John’s public flirtation with the brunette in the fabulous leather coat helped put his ever-growing army of fans off the scent. And Cynthia was trapped.
In her memoir A Twist of Lennon (1978), Cynthia recalled:
The group was a marriage of four minds, three guitars and a drum, and the girls in the main tagged along and moved in whichever direction they were pointed by their men. The Beatles were very happy to have their women subservient in the background. It made life easier for them. The northern male chauvinism was quite strong within the group and independence was a bit of a dirty word …
It was a question of ‘don’t do as I do but do as I say’, and we did.
Alarm
The Lennons were long parted when John wrote one of the songs most powerfully associated with him: ‘Give Peace a Chance’ – it would become the slogan for a generation. But Lennon’s pacifist lyric is the outward expression of a movement mainly created by and for women. For more than a century, women had worked together against male militarism.fn4 And women were at the heart of the anti-H-bomb movement.
In 1958 the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament had been born – the brainchild of a conglomeration of north London women’s groups. In 1962 the word peace belonged with hearth and home, with domesticity, with the gentle, feminine virtues of healing, caring and nurturing. And many a woman born before war broke out in 1939 had reason to recognise the latent bellicosity and fieriness of their menfolk, their love of fists and firearms. ‘Men are brought up from early childhood to admire those who fight to destroy enemies,’ declared the author of a peace campaign newsletter. But post-1945, men’s appetite for war was being re-evaluated. ‘We were the first generation not to be conscripted,’ the film-maker Jo Durden-Smith told an interviewer.23 ‘Maleness was becoming peripheralised, there was no real function for maleness.’ A cohort of men was growing up without a war to fight.
But if they couldn’t have a hot one, they would have a cold one. Over the previous fifteen years of Soviet–NATO hostility, international tensions had been escalating. In the autumn of 1962, the temperature rose to an acutely alarming degree when an American spy plane confirmed that President Khrushchev and Fidel Castro were collaborating in constructing nuclear-missile launch facilities in Cuba. The resulting stand-off would bring the world to the brink of nuclear war.
*
We thought we would never grow up.24 That was our great fear really …
Sophie Jenkins, the bright daughter of lower-middle-class parents, was an eager Ban-the-Bomber. Sophie, who spent her teenage years in Abingdon, near Oxford, was appalled and terrified when she learnt at her school how the government planned to protect civilians. Towards the end of the 1950s, it had been explained to Sophie and her class that in the event of a nuclear attack the population would have just four minutes in which to gather together the necessities of life beneath a table – because the table would protect them from the house falling down. These necessities were: carrots, whitewash, flower pots and candles. The whitewash was to coat the windows in order to lessen the heat of the nuclear blast. The carrots were because they were the most complete form of nutrition. They could be cooked by placing the candle underneath the flower pot to make a primitive stove. ‘And you did this all underneath the table. Apparently you can survive for a very long time on just carrots.’
Sophie and her fellow pupils were utterly terrified. She and her best friend Cathy – the daughter of a well-established left-wing family – decided to join the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and, in their O-level summer of 1962, they set out with a crowd of beatnik students taking their anti-nuclear protest to the American air base at Greenham Common. The march was organised by the Committee of 100, yet another group which had been formed in 1960 to campaign for non-violent unilateral nuclear disarmament.
I can remember sitting on the hot tarmac, and you could smell the creosote – and I was reading De Bello Gallico, studiously trying to swot it up for my O levels …
The demonstration was good-humoured, exhilarating, spontaneous and youthful, all wholesome sandwiches, baggy shirts and bare feet. From time to time it swelled with the singing of a rousing CND anthem:
Don’t you hear the H-bomb’s thunder25
Echo like the crack of doom?
While they rend the skies asunder
Fallout makes the earth a tomb …
(‘And I’d think, yes, yes I can hear them!’). In due course, after a few hours sitting peacefully on the tarmac, Sophie and Cathy and some of their new-found CND friends were arrested in a friendly but businesslike way by the attendant policemen, put into a furniture van which served as prisoner transport, and driven to a makeshift magistrates’ court that had been set up in the vicinity. The students were asked whether they had anything to say. With all the certainty of a righteous cause, the majority made passionate pacifist declarations, and were each fined £5. But when her moment came in the dock sixteen-year-old Sophie was lost for words. So she just replied ‘No’, and somewhat to her surprise was let off with a £3 fine for obstruction.
Undeterred, Sophie and Cathy were among many thousands of women, young and old, who continued to march and wave banners whenever they could. But in mid-October the newspaper headlines started to proclaim Sophie’s worst Cold War fears.
On Tuesday 23 October The Guardian’s US correspondent reported that all American TV stations were being disrupted by newsflashes, confirming that President Kennedy would be speaking to the nation on a matter of ‘the highest national urgency’. In the Atlantic, Soviet and US ships were moving closer, while US military flights monitored their movements. Diplomacy had stalled. On 26 October the Pope appealed to the world to pray for peace. There were multiple arrests in British cities as peace protesters marched shouting ‘Hands Off Cuba’. The Guardian’s editorial that day stated unambiguously that, were the crisis to be mishandled by either side, a major war might ensue, which could ‘mean death or slow extinction for millions of people’. On Saturday the 27th the secretary of the Committee of 100 declared that they planned to go ahead with a Cuba crisis demonstration in Trafalgar Square, despite their application to hold it being rejected by the Ministry of Works. On the 28th, 623 British academics wrote to the prime minister in alarm at the ‘imminent threat of global nuclear war over Cuba’, and threatened mass demonstrations.
I have no memory of the crisis. 28 October 1962 was my seventh birthday. My parents, almost out of their minds with existential worry, had the unfortunate task of preparing a party for a dozen overexcited small children, organising pass the parcel, a treasure hunt and a birthday tea. Despite being oppressed with the near certainty of imminent oblivion, I suppose they must have put on a good face as they helped me blow out my candles while thinking, ‘Was it for the last time?’ (It was in fact on that very day that Kennedy and Khrushchev reached the understanding that would end the stand-off).
During the Cuba missile crisis I was convinced we were going to die …
remembered Sophie Jenkins.
We didn’t have a television, and I recall going to watch the news with our neighbour at the end of the road, who had one. And I can remember the background – very grainy pictures, of the grey sea, and these two grey battleships laden with missiles in conjunction with each other. And I can remember watching that and thinking, it’s the end of the world.
Because, it wasn’t just the fear of being dead oneself, but of one’s whole planet being dead – the whole human race being wiped out. That is what we believed.
Sophie’s sense of apocalyptic helplessness is echoed in many other accounts, such as that by Zena, a Cardiff schoolgirl:
I was 14 at the time …26 Someone burst into the classroom, exclaiming, ‘Russia and America are at nuclear war!’ In the hubbub that followed, I sat silent, and can now recall the desolation I experienced: that my family and friends (and I) would perish, with lives unlived and words unexpressed …
The writer Jenny Diskifn5 was another:
I … waited, along with the rest of the world, to be blown to pieces [in] October 1962.27 While I sat on the snowy pebble beach watching the grim-grey sea in Brighton, America and Russia played chicken in what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis … It was perfectly clear to me, and to others, that my world was very likely to end within forty-eight hours …
– while the broadcaster Joan Bakewell, having landed her first BBC appearance on a current-affairs chat show called Table Talk, expressed the opinion that President Kennedy ‘should act with extreme caution’.
For several days people lived in raw terror, expecting the flash in the sky at any minute.28 We tended our children with extra care …
In the case of fifteen-year-old Mary Ingham, whose recent under-the-desk discovery of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley had awakened forbidden adolescent appetites, the crisis made her curiosity ever more urgent:
The question was what to do with your last four minutes on earth, and the consensus of opinion was to rush out into the street and grab a man …29 Please God, don’t let me die a virgin.
But Sophie Jenkins and her friends were in less of a hurry:
I can remember young lads – undergraduates I knew in Oxford – saying ‘Yes, now’s our chance – we can’t die without having “had it”’ (as they put it).
Though of course we didn’t think that was a good enough reason.
*
‘Ban the Bomb!’ ‘A future for our children!’ In the early 1960s many women who were unaccustomed to being listened to were learning to shout louder. One of these was Margaret Hogg.
Shortly after the birth of Margaret’s first child, David – born on 24 October 1960 with one eye, a club foot, and shortened fingered appendages instead of arms – Billy, her soldier husband, was sent a telegram in Germany where he was stationed. It read, ‘Mother and baby doing well. Baby deformed.’ Billy was allowed home on compassionate leave and arrived in Edinburgh. He came to the hospital and found his young wife. Margaret called the nurse and asked for the baby to be brought in, but was met with refusal. No, he couldn’t be released, it wasn’t feeding time. But this time Margaret wasn’t taking no for an answer. ‘“I don’t care. My husband has just come home from Germany,” I says, “I want him now.”30 That was when I learnt to make myself heard.’
After ten days, Margaret was allowed to go home. But baby David had to stay. Every day she phoned the hospital, and every day she was told, ‘Oh, no, he’s not ready to come home yet.’ After a week of this, she protested.
And the doctor was blunt. He says, ‘Well, Mrs Hogg, we really think it would be better if you left Baby here, and went home and just forgot that you had him, and just carry on and have another baby.’
And I looked at him. And I says, ‘You what?’ You see, at that point they were only expected to live till they were five!
And he says, ‘Well, Mrs Hogg, he’ll never do anything, he won’t live a normal life, or a very long life,’ he says. ‘Why don’t you just make the break now?’
And I says, ‘Well, where’s he going to go?’
He says, ‘Oh, don’t worry, he’ll be well looked after.’
And I says, ‘Where, in a home?’ I says, ‘NO,’ I says, ‘he’s got a home – and that’s with ME!’
Margaret Hogg took her son back to her mother’s house when he was five weeks old. His twisted feet were in plaster; special toeless bootees had to be made for him. The family were matter-of-fact about his disabilities, though Margaret’s little sister was a bit glum when she realised that all David’s hand-knitted cardigans would now have to be altered. By and large, Margaret’s close working-class community were accepting, though sixty years ago society was less educated in reacting to disability than today. There were times when Margaret wheeled David down to the shops in his pram, when people would stare and whisper. The first time she braved the outing, it was a freezing Edinburgh winter day, and she had her baby swaddled in wraps. On her way back from the shops she encountered a provoking neighbour who greeted her with, ‘Oh, you’ve got your baby home, can I have a little look?’ while starting immediately to pull at the covers. Tact was not this woman’s strong point. ‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, as the side of David’s face was revealed, ‘he’s got TWO eyes! I thought he only had ONE eye!’ Margaret was contemptuous. ‘Well, yes, he’s only got one eye. But what did you expect? Did you think it would be in the middle of his head like Cyclops?’ Then she walked off home, smarting with anger.
But Margaret herself has always been completely without self-pity. ‘David thrived,’ she remembers, ‘and he was the most easiest, lovable baby to bring up. We never had any complaints, any bother or anything with him until he started to walk’ – though when asked how she and Billy coped in those early days there is a long hesitation before she points out that it was easier for her husband than it was for her, once he had been released from the army on compassionate grounds, and got a job locally. ‘He didn’t have to deal with David’s difficulties day in, day out,’ is all she will concede.
The first the Hoggs heard about thalidomide was in the late summer of 1962. Unknown to them, news was creeping out that there might be a link between thalidomide, an ingredient in Distaval, often prescribed as a sedative or analgesic, and birth defects. In November 1961 British chemists were asked to withdraw the drug, though only as a precaution. The chairman of the British company that distributed the tablets was quoted by the Sunday Times as saying that there was ‘not the slightest risk’ associated with them. But by May 1962 the link appeared incontestably established, and questions were being asked in Parliament about how to alert the public to the danger that might be lurking, unacknowledged, in their medicine cabinets. The Lancet meanwhile estimated that a possible 500 babies had been born in the UK with thalidomide-related abnormalities, but the British Medical Journal thought the number was nearer 800.fn6
Meanwhile Margaret – along with her mother, her two sisters, her auntie and uncle and their five children, and David of course – went for a week to a Butlin’s holiday camp, that magic, welcoming seaside dream of escape so loved by the half million-odd British holidaymakers who flocked there every year throughout the 1950s and 60s for an annual release from the daily grind. Butlin’s was all about joining in. So Margaret entered a smiling curly haired David, eighteen months old, for the Bonny Baby contest – ‘but only because everybody else was doing it’. For his thrilled and exultant mum, the moment of triumph when she heard that David had won second prize was a high spot that challenged and confounded the craven bullies who had told her that he would never amount to anything. Her baby was beautiful. She knew it, and the judge had told her so. Even better, the judge took Margaret’s mother aside, and made a point of telling her, ‘If he’d opened his other eye he would have got first prize.’ ‘Och,’ said her mum, matter-of-fact as ever, ‘he hasn’t got another eye.’ But to this day, Margaret is almost speechless with pride at the memory.
It was at this time that the story behind David’s distressing condition started to hit headlines. In June The Observer ran an investigation into the drug testing failures that had led to the thalidomide babies’ tragedy. ‘No one … had ever thought of testing drugs for their effects on the foetus …’ wrote their correspondent. In July, the News of the World announced, ‘These are Thalidomide babies’, alongside touching photographs of some of the affected children. ‘For pity’s sake let us look after them.’ In August The Guardian reported that an appeal was being launched to fund research into birth abnormalities and to develop technologies ‘to help those born cripples’.
The autumn that David was two, Margaret Hogg visited her general practitioner and asked him point blank, ‘Did I have Distaval?’ ‘No,’ came the answer. He had never prescribed it. Not only that, but the GP insisted that she couldn’t ever have had Distaval, because it was a sleeping tablet, and, knowing his patients as he did, he was well aware that Margaret had never had sleeping tablets during her pregnancy.
But Margaret’s doctor must have been alarmed. Though she had had a straightforward pregnancy, there were records in his surgery files of her early bout of bronchitis, and of the medicine he had prescribed for her – in good faith at that time – to alleviate a racking cough. What did that medicine contain? If it was Distaval – and therefore contained thalidomide – Margaret would need proof. And that might not look good for him. Given what emerged later about those medical records, this appears to be something he anticipated. What he did not anticipate was that, in Margaret Hogg, he had a young mother who was loving, determined, indefatigable and a believer.
They said David wouldnae live till he were five. He wouldnae see his teenage years. He wouldnae see twenty. Well, he’s fifty-six this year.
I’m well-known now, for saying how proud I am of him – of all of them – for what they’ve achieved. And after we were told they would be nothing.
And what about her own achievement?
I’m just a mum, I got on wi’ it. That’s all. You’re a mum and you do it.