1964
Whitehouse-land
For a fifty-three-year-old Art teacher from the Midlands, the BBC’s coverage of ministerial high jinks was the last straw:
Homosexuality, prostitution and sexual intercourse became the routine accompaniment of the evening meal …1 as night after night, the Profumo Affair unfolded before our eyes …
A totally different way of life became accessible to all of us, including children, via the television screen.
Mary Whitehouse felt embattled. As an observant Christian, much influenced by the Moral Re-Armament movement, the traditional morality that she had taken for granted all her life felt threatened, not just by badly behaved teenagers, but by the professional and religious Establishment. First it had been Professor Carstairs defending pre-marital sex in his BBC Radio Reith Lectures, followed soon after by Dr Chesser’s Is Chastity Outmoded? Then the clergy themselves had begun to unpick the Church’s doctrines. In 1963 John Robinson, the Anglican Bishop of Woolwich (a prominent defence witness at the Lady Chatterley trial) published a controversial bestseller, Honest to God, in which he pointed the way to a ‘new morality’, and offered up a transcendent vision of personal freedom and sexual love. That was followed by No New Morality: Christian Personal Values and Sexual Morality, a book written by another ‘South Bank theologian’, Canon Douglas Rhymes, who aired his view that contemporary moral codes were outdated.
But Mrs Whitehouse was even more offended by what she saw on the television. By 1963, the small screen was in 82 per cent of homes, and there was no avoiding its cultural impact. It was utterly dismaying to her to be invaded by the suggestively sexual tone and content of That Was the Week That Was, hugely popular as it was. She also took particular exception to the BBC’s flagship religious discussion programme, Meeting Point, which had promoted the acceptability of pre-marital sex. One of her teenage pupils watched this programme, and came to her saying, ‘Well, I know now that I must not have intercourse – until I am engaged.’ Mrs Whitehouse was appalled; she felt the girl had been ‘won over to a sub-Christian concept of living’.
The post-war world order had been based on the idea of the wife surrounded by four walls. The female ruled her fortress. It was clean, domestic, impregnable and familial. Now, the baleful piece of technology in every living room threatened to reshape and denature family life. Meals were eaten on the knees, from trays, with all eyes refocussed on the pundits, actors and advertisers drowning out family discourse from the corner. Television threatened to poison and corrupt woman’s sanctified domain, releasing – as if from Pandora’s box – a swarm of malignant and noxious pests into the very heart of the home, uninvited. Mrs Whitehouse, and thousands like her, were seeking for ways to pull up the drawbridge.
Early in 1964 she sought out her friend Norah Buckland, a vicar’s wife and leading light of the Mothers’ Union, to join her in a fight-back. Mrs Buckland was only too willing to come on board. Women in her parish had already been talking to her about their concerns. One of them said that she had persuaded her teenage daughter not to give way to her boyfriend’s pressures to have pre-marital sex, only for the girl to change her mind after seeing a programme broadcasting the opposite view. ‘You see, the BBC say it is all right,’ the girl told her parents.2 Another mother was very distressed because a television programme had shown a man unbuttoning his trousers before getting into bed with a woman who was not his wife. ‘There was not the slightest suggestion that it was wrong, and it came straight into our family circle.’ Soon after, Mrs Buckland rented a television to see for herself, and was equally disgusted.
Both women firmly believed that there was a causal link between what young people saw on television and what they did; their virtue was consequently at risk of corruption. ‘Cannot something be done about the demoralising effects on our children?’ Equally, Mrs Whitehouse believed that a majority of British people, particularly women, agreed with her that society was on a slippery slope to perdition. So when, on 27 January 1964, the pair launched their manifesto for the Clean-Up TV campaign, it was to ‘The Women of Britain’ that it principally spoke:
– We women of Britain believe in a Christian way of life.3
– We want it for our children and our country.
– We object to the propaganda of disbelief, doubt and dirt that the BBC projects into millions of homes through the television screen.
– We call upon the BBC for a radical change of policy and demand programmes which build character instead of destroying it, and encourage and sustain faith in God and bring Him back to the heart of the family and national life.
Over the next three months, leaflets were distributed and journalists invited to report on the growing campaign. Through the channel of the Birmingham Evening Mail Mrs Whitehouse urged those who supported her to join a rally in Birmingham Town Hall planned for 5 May. She thought a couple of hundred might show up, but the response exceeded her wildest expectations.
It was so fantastic …4 We were absolutely petrified, and then to see that great town hall absolutely packed. Thirty-seven coach loads …
Mrs Whitehouse kept her nerve and, conspicuously authoritative in a dark suit and fancy pillbox hat, put her case from the platform:
We recognise that the period between 6 and 9.15 is a period for family viewing.5 Well, I think we’re being palmed off! Because last Thursday evening, we sat as a family, and we saw a programme that started at 6.35, and it was the dirtiest programme that I have seen for a very long time …fn1
The roots of our democratic way of life are set deep in our Christian faith … Do we want a materialistic philosophy to control our country and have power over the minds of our children?
It was fighting talk, and the press, local and national, caught on quickly. The Times reported, ‘Perhaps never in the history of Birmingham Town Hall has such a successful meeting been sponsored by such a flimsy organisation,’ describing the attendees as mostly middle-aged women from as far afield as Wales and Devon.6 By August the Clean-Up TV campaign had collected 235,000 signatures endorsing its manifesto, and 7,000 letters of support. For though Mrs Whitehouse and her campaign often came across as sanctimonious and ridiculous, her cause nevertheless tapped into something deeper than just puritanical moralising. There was a sense among Mrs Whitehouse’s many correspondents that female self-respect was at stake. ‘The women of Britain need to give their all to ensure an end to this portrayal of them as a sex symbol,’ wrote one signatory to her manifesto.7 ‘My experience is that the men seem very reluctant to sign. The women do so willingly. I think that this is another “battle of the sexes”.’ As Middle England stood on the brink of a national sea-change, the fortress of home, femininity and family looked as if it was in danger of being swept away. And a lot of women like Mary Whitehouse and Norah Buckland felt fearful, vulnerable and defensive. If women were knocked off their pedestals, cheapened and degraded, where would it all lead? Would male idolatry of the fair sex turn to violation and misuse?
Mary Whitehouse looked like everybody’s respectable aunt. Her image, with heavy-rimmed glasses and helmet of elaborately permed grey hair, would soon come to embody the guardianship of a particular set of values. To many those values were dated and disapproving; but few could deny her sincerity, her unclouded certainty and her single-minded determination in the face of derision and abuse. There was, too, more than a touch of sexism in the vilification levelled at her. Soon after her campaign launched, Mrs Whitehouse had to defend herself in court against a TV producer who commented in a press interview that she was a member of the lunatic fringe who had given up her job to monitor late-night TV programmes. What could that job possibly have been? – he asked. ‘I suppose she must have been on the streets.’ And her principal adversary, the director general of the BBC Sir Hugh Greene, purchased a cruelly scurrilous caricature of her, naked with six breasts, hung it on his office wall, and amused himself by throwing darts at it.
*
Mrs Whitehouse made many enemies. But throughout a campaign which would last the best part of thirty years she continued to claim that she had the grass roots support of a silent majority in Britain:
People say this isn’t a Christian country, but if you move among the rank and file, as I do, you know it is.8
The 1960s are often portrayed as an extravaganza of colour and permissiveness. For a significant minority this would become their reality. But Whitehouse-land was real too. Though church attendance in Britain was steadily declining – the membership of major Christian denominations had halved since the start of the century and, overall, only one in ten people were regular Sunday worshippers – nevertheless a surprising number of young people were churchgoers.
I go to church nearly every Sunday …9
an eighteen-year-old deb told one of the Generation X interviewers:
and I try to listen to the sermon and concentrate but it’s awfully hard sometimes, and I don’t think about it much between Sundays. I definitely believe in God, though, and I pray like billy-o when I want something …
One survey carried out among fifteen- to twenty-year-olds in Preston showed 45 per cent attending a religious service once a week. Religious education and daily assembly were compulsory. At my own primary school we gathered each morning, hymn books in hand, in the echoing hall. Mrs Mason, our headmistress (who could have been Mrs Whitehouse’s double), intoned the Lord’s Prayer and the Blessing, and read a passage from the King James Bible, so that I grew up well-versed in Testaments Old and New. Day in, day out, we sang such time-honoured favourite hymns as Bunyan’s ‘He Who Would Valiant Be’, or a lugubrious setting of ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’, with the result that, despite my irreligious upbringing I – like many of my generation – still know all the words by heart, their tunes as indelibly associated with my sixties childhood as those of Helen Shapiro or the Beatles.
Whitehouse-land coalesced around observance of the Sabbath. On Sundays in Middle England there was nothing to do. It was illegal for shops, theatres or cinemas to trade. Pubs could open for only five hours, and not at all in Scotland, while in Northern Ireland some councils even chained up the children’s swings in parks. Despite there being no legal requirement for them to do so, restaurants often remained closed. In villages and towns across the land the shutters were down, and only the churches kept their doors unlocked.
Coffee bars, Ready Steady Go!, TW3 and the Profumo Affair co-existed with a nation that seemed to become ever more static and backward-looking. When Geoffrey Moorhouse anatomised the nation as he saw it in 1964 (in Britain in the Sixties: The Other England) he singled out Chipping Campden – ‘[it] still feels and looks like a fifteenth-century wool town …’ – and cited the poet Housman’s eulogy to Shropshire for being as true as when it was first written nearly seventy years earlier:
Clunton and Clunbury10
Clungunford and Clun
Are the quietest places
Under the sun.
England was still ‘wallowing in the past’. This was the world of Sunday lunch, prayer books and retired gentlewomen: an ineradicable vision of Britain that, even thirty years later, would move Prime Minister John Major to eulogise ‘the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and, as George Orwell said, “Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist”’.fn2 Ann Gurney’s world, for example:
I have lived within a tradition of the past …11
As a deaconess, Ann was the nearest the Church of England could offer religious women short of priestly ordination, which for the next thirty years would remain barred to them. A deaconess was a sort of auxiliary vicar; her responsibilities were greater than those of a lay parish worker, but though it meant making a lifetime commitment, she had none of the power of a priest in holy orders. Ann Gurney had a vocation, and she gave herself up willingly to a life serving her Church by teaching other deaconesses. In 1964 she was in her mid-thirties, working as principal of a training college in south London. But while red buses rolled past the front windows on their way to the swinging West End, inside all was stained glass, prayer and austerity. Ann’s yearly remuneration was £210 – worth about £4,000 today. No television disturbed the pious atmosphere of her adoptive home; she hand-washed all her clothes, and barely travelled. The modern world and the increasingly vociferous challenge to the values of the older generation were muffled, and Ann was only scantily aware of them, while the religion that guided her life made no demands on her to meet that dissident sector halfway. ‘I think there were two separate worlds. There was no meeting point. One never felt threatened. One just felt they were totally on the wrong course. To tell the truth, I just couldn’t understand what they were getting at.’
This Britain, Ann Gurney’s Britain, Whitehouse-land, was bourgeois, unfashionable and conformist, but it exercised moralistic power over the wayward fringe, particularly in institutions. In 1964 Angela Patrick, pregnant aged twenty, spent four months at Loreto Convent in Theydon Bois, Essex, where the nuns told her, ‘You will be expected to work just as hard as we do; to rise early and use the day productively just as we do; to attend Mass and to ask the Lord’s forgiveness.’12 (‘I noticed she didn’t tag “just as we do” on the end of that last one,’ commented Angela.) The führer class could be depressingly petty. As the Mod, ‘swinging’ look infiltrated cities and shires, school authorities kept a beady eye on third-year fashion rebels, like those who attended Holton Park Grammar in Oxfordshire. There were penalties for girls who didn’t tie their hair back, or backcombed it. And here, at the end of the school day, the headmistress stood by the gate checking the length of skirts lest the young ladies be seen in the town indecently dressed, while bus prefects were charged with policing the school’s reputation on public transport: no pupil should be seen removing her regulation velour hat.fn3 ‘We felt honour-bound to keep up appearances,’ remembered one.
Female students were still expected to adhere to rigid regulations, with many women’s colleges resembling nunneries. Until 1975 the age of majority was twenty-one, so universities were in loco parentis. When the former MP Ann Widdecombe was a fresher at Birmingham University, her hall of residence had a female wing and a male wing. There were strict rules as to when the inhabitants of one wing might visit the inhabitants of the other, and there was no mixed dining. All-girls suited Ann just fine, and she sought out companions who shared her views and joined the same clubs. She hosted a weekly Bible study and prayer group in her room, and belonged to the Conservative Association and the Christian Union.
I think that’s quite normal?13 Birds of a feather flock together. We forget how conservative society was. People like me who were children in the 1950s just assumed the normal established order of everything. Outwardly, anyway, people all signed up to the same set of rules. There was an enormous social consensus at the time about what was right and what was wrong, and what we fought the war for.
Ann Widdecombe was indeed far from alone, and cases like hers abound. But her subsequent career tells a more complex story, for – though the ‘normal established order’ regarded women as stay-at-homes – she was one of a breed of women who directed enormous energy into standing on platforms, and combating permissiveness. ‘This was the age of socialism, of student unrest and of sit-ins and it was against this background that my political views and ambitions were crystallising.’
Julia Cumberlege, now Baroness Cumberlege, is another example of a young woman who combined conservatism with drive. The daughter of a village doctor in the rural south-east of England, Julia shared Ann Widdecombe’s deeply rooted values. Her upbringing had instilled into her a strong, observant Catholicism, as well as an unquestioning acceptance of a woman’s role – ‘There was no expectation in those days that you would do other than be a housewife.’14 But unlike Ann Widdecombe, and despite an offer from a nursing college, Julia stepped off the career ladder at the first opportunity. At seventeen she was married; by the age of twenty she had two small children. Nevertheless, passion and enterprise prevailed, and soon Julia Cumberlege found a new channel for her energies, first on the parish council, and soon after on the rural district council, which she was chairing by the age of twenty-two. Most of its members were men, naval and military types, lawyers and professionals, all at least forty years older than her.
But I never ever had any feeling that women weren’t as good as men. Being elected made all the difference.
The fact was, being with all these older people all the time, I became part of the Establishment … I didn’t have time to be caught up in youth movements, and fashion rather passed me by, though I do remember suddenly these things called the Beatles turned up …
I was very, very busy, and loving it …
*
Earlier in this book, we met Anthea, a student studying English Literature and Language at Reading University, who later married a clergyman. Anthea Martinsmith’s mother had been a high-flying girl in the 1930s, who had been removed from school because her parents could only afford to educate the boy of the family. Anthea would be the gainer. An only child, she was encouraged to star at her (single-sex) school, and never doubted that girls were as able as boys. She sailed into university without difficulty, and enrolled there in the Michaelmas term of 1963. At Reading, social life revolved around the Saturday night ‘hops’, held in the Great Hall. ‘One put on a pretty frock, and one stood round the wall hoping that a nice bloke would come and ask you to dance. And we would dance the foxtrot, the Gay Gordons, the waltz, the quickstep – and I had a lovely time …’
But when Anthea met the nice bloke who would become the love of her life, it wasn’t at a hop. At the end of her first year, she spent a week on the coast of north Devon.
I went on holiday to Lee Abbey with my recently widowed mother.15 It was a beautiful Christian place.
And when we got there, there was this lovely curate, Anthony Millican. He had come with his youth group. Well, we had a brief conversation, and later I saw him walking below, outside. And I thought, ‘Blow it – there’s this lovely guy.’ So – well, I pursued him … And to cut a long story short, within the week, we both fell deeply in love.
The sheer happiness that began then … On September 29th, St Michael and all Angels Day, Anthony asked me to come to the coast with him on his day off, so I did. And we were walking along at Rottingdean, on the front by the sea, at a good, brisk pace, in the sunshine, with a lovely breeze blowing, and we were holding hands. And he suddenly gripped my hand extra tightly, and he turned, and he looked at me, and he said, ‘My wife!’
And I whispered back, ‘My husband!’
So a term later I went back to Reading University, wearing an engagement ring. A beautiful topaz engagement ring with rose diamonds around it.
Anthea had grown up a dedicated Christian, and now she had even less interest in finding someone to pair up with at the college dances. But she had no intention of abandoning her studies, so marriage – and all that went with it – would have to wait until she graduated.
I had always had a very strong personal resolve, that I was going to be a virgin when I married. But that didn’t mean that Anthony and I didn’t have a good cuddle when we were engaged, because we did … We adored each other. But we kept ourselves until we were married. That is a Christian tenet. It did make me look forward to my wedding day though. And poor Anthony – I do remember he almost cried one evening with sheer frustration.
Darling man! The father of my children … But we didn’t and I think that was the right thing to do. It was lovely. I’ve been so blessed.
Anthea Martinsmith’s bred-in-the-bone Anglican beliefs have been a lifelong support. ‘We’re all wasting our time if Christ be not risen.’ She often attended church three times a day on Sundays; as a teenager she went to Bible study groups and bonded with other like-minded Christians whose faith illuminated her own. Reading from scripture has been a daily habit – ‘as a basis for my prayer’. Picture Anthea in 1964, beaming for the camera, her side-parted wavy hair framing open, clean features that radiate conviction and hope. She is wearing a simple, gathered, printed cotton frock; modestly girlish, knee-length and sleeved, with a wide Peter Pan collar and a sash tied in a bow at the waist. Anthea’s was a timeless, gently feminine look, a million miles from the Mod phenomenon which in 1964 was bringing cutaway shift dresses, geometrics and sepulchrally made-up faces to high streets and dance halls across the country. But her artless demeanour masks a steely determination and analytical intelligence. At nineteen, Anthea Martinsmith was her own woman, determined to be herself and pursue her chosen course, and even more intent on staying true to her beliefs in a fast-changing society.
I had a very strong inner resolve, which had grown in my teens. That resolve had been informed by my father’s early death. I felt that the bottom of my world had fallen out, and therefore I was going to swim not sink. I was quite determined that I was going to be a virgin when I married, but I also had a personal resolve that I was going to do my utmost academically. And I was going to fight this one, and I was going to win through, both personally and academically. I was going to keep me intact.
Anthea maintained her inner self-belief. But arriving when she did at university, she encountered attitudes and mores that tested it. As at many other universities and colleges, large numbers of the student population at Reading University were starting to challenge, to make demands, to find their voice, to experiment sexually. The overt love-play between students took Anthea aback. ‘I’d never seen that done before.’ She began to recognise that not everybody shared her sense of physical integrity. Returning after the 1964 Christmas vacation, Anthea found the hops had completely changed their character:
It was a different world. The social committee had changed, and there was no more waltz and quickstep and a pretty frock. Instead it was the Beatles, ‘Twist and Shout’, flashing lights, ‘I wanna hold your haa – aa – and …’, you know? And here I was, doing the twist, subdued lights. And being innocent I thought, this is fantastic!
But I did observe then how some people comported themselves, and I thought, well, I’m not going to do that. They were getting up pretty close to their partners, snogging – you know? I thought, I don’t want to snog with anybody. There was sleeping around too …
And I didn’t want to because I was me.
Then there was an incorrigible wing of the English faculty, where she encountered a strain of anti-Establishment sophistry that clashed with her deeply felt brand of Christianity; for example, Anthea was resistant to the way that specious, phallic interpretations of towers and turrets seemed, all too often, to find their way into poetry tutorials. And on one occasion, having divulged her intention to marry an Anglican curate, she was infuriated to be told dismissively, ‘Oh, the Church of England’s finished …!’ and that she would be wasting her life. Anthea had to restrain herself, and leave the room. But this was an attitude she was by now growing accustomed to.
Much around her in the university world spoke to Anthea of hostility to tradition, of cynicism and the sway of fashionable ideas, of blind dissent and reflex protest, of the sexualisation of behaviour and cultural references – and of certain men’s rapacious tendencies. But she felt protected by her faith, depending on its power to preserve all women:
There’s an element of self-preservation in my beliefs, as well as moral conviction. Men were getting off scot-free and leaving the damage behind. I wasn’t going to wreck my life!
Anthea Martinsmith did not feel imprisoned. Her self-respect drew not only on religious certainty but also on the unshakeable sense that, as a woman, she was every bit as good as a man.
I’m not a feminist – vive la différence!
But people tell me I have a fairly strong personality. And I inherited from my father his belief in equality, whether of class or gender: in the integrity and validity of the human individual. I have never really minded whether one was male or female.
These are not the words of a passive and docile woman. The idiom is modern, progressive and emancipated. But there is no contradiction in them being the words of a committed Christian, whose faith – like that of Mary Whitehouse – energised her life. Anthea too had certainty, and courage to swim against the stream. When the student magazine, Shell, ran favourable coverage of Eustace Chesser’s books advocating free love and criticising the Church, nineteen-year-old Anthea jumped straight in with a rebuttal: ‘Dr Chesser’s attitude is built upon the sand,’ she wrote. And she was quick, too, to pick holes in the student end-of-term revue for its lavatorial humour and depressing lack of zest. From where she stood, the prevailing current of sexual freedom, liberal philosophies, fashion, music and rebellion against the older generation was running too fast to stop:
Of course it was nonsense. How can we completely ignore our wellsprings, and our history, and break up our family lives, and snub our parents? I mean, I could see it all happening …
Her public stance quickly had her labelled as a square. Anthea Martinsmith had arrived at a point where she felt discounted and misrepresented for her own views. So when Mrs Whitehouse’s Clean-Up TV crusade came to Reading, she made sure to go along. Afterwards, they spoke, and it was a meeting of minds:
A more lovely, warm-hearted, articulate, intelligent, perspicacious, perceptive woman I have seldom met.
*
This glimpse into the world view of the ‘moral majority’ gives a snapshot of a less familiar, less mythic 1960s than the phantasmagorical one rooted in our collective imagination. It is socially conservative, chaste, conventional, patriotic, law-abiding and God-fearing. But it also places the women of that era centre-stage. Fearless, ambitious women like Mary Whitehouse, Norah Buckland, Julia Cumberlege, Ann Widdecombe and Anthea Martinsmith found a voice in the 1960s. They were no longer inhibited by a culture that suppressed their sex. The unstoppable Ann Widdecombe, for example, was simply amused by her father’s reaction to the role reversal she represented: ‘[He] shook his head in bewilderment and observed to my mother that “Ann should have been the boy”!’16 Ann’s ethic, and that of women like her, was one of work. And they chose to speak out – not as feminists, anti-Establishment activists, or student radicals – but on behalf of their country’s Christian tradition.
In 1964 there were already many signs that the 1960s were going to be a scary and bumpy ride for women. The attacks on moral certainty had begun. The satirists, iconoclasts, insurgents and despots were emerging into the open. In this climate, it is hardly surprising to see women pulling up the drawbridges of their fortresses, waving the flags of family and home, as Christianity became yet another front on the sex war.
Rockers
I was sent to a mother-and-baby home in Aylesbury.17 It was all very hush-hush. It was run by religious women, and they were very cruel with me. They said, ‘You’ve sinned against Jesus,’ and I said, ‘I did what?’ And I said, ‘I have done no such thing.’
Kimberley Saunders was fourteen. Attempts to disguise her advancing pregnancy had become ineffectual. Her headmistress in Harlow was told that she had gone to get a job in London, and she spent the next six months off her school’s radar.
Since the 1920s, mother-and-baby homes had replaced the workhouse as a refuge for ‘fallen women’. Though the institutions had a benevolent and religious purpose, and were generally run by well-meaning and righteous-minded women, the stigma often remained. There was a strong culture of rules. Kimberley had broken them, and was punished. But she was an unmitigated rebel.
They tried to make me write an essay about being a sinner, and I wouldn’t, so they made my life hell – absolute hell. They threatened me and gave me extra duties to do. They told me I was sinful. Oh, it makes me shudder to think of it – and I could NOT wait to get away.
Six weeks after the birth of her daughter, the baby was removed for adoption, and Kimberley, now fifteen, went back to school ‘as though nothing had happened’.
‘In those days you got a lot of stick for being on your own without a man, you know what I mean – one-parent families …?’ Kimberley Saunders knows what she’s talking about. Now in her late sixties, Kimberley has pitched up in a flat a minute from the Hastings seafront, where she spoke to me about her memories, wearing a bright floor-length caftan and smoking. Seagulls scream in the background. Her story provides a colourful counterpoint to the events that took place on that nearby shingled beach when she was a teenager, more than fifty years ago.
In the spring of 1964, hostilities erupted in a number of seaside towns across the country. There were renewed lamentations about the decline in public morality, and calls for the birch, compulsory hard labour and a reinstatement of national service. Beaches – at Clacton-on-Sea, Margate, Hastings, Brighton, Bournemouth – were the arena for rampageous collisions between gangs of Mods on two-stroke scooters and their arch-enemies the Rockers, who had arrived on custom twin-cylinder motorbikes, and immediately the newspapers spilled over with denunciations of ‘vermin’, ‘thugs’ and ‘grubby hordes’. But reports of the violence were probably exaggerated. What had started as a style statement had become another excuse to demonise the scary, freewheeling power of the young, and to reproach their mothers for bringing them up badly. Under the headline ‘Jolt for Complacent Parents’, The Times wagged its magisterial finger at ‘mothers [who] were out to work’ for spending too little time with their delinquent sons, and for being too lenient:
A mother trying to rear her family single handed said: ‘Sometimes my boy doesn’t get in till 3 a.m., but I’ve never asked him where he has been.18 He wouldn’t like that.’
Kimberley was another child who effectively made up her own rules. She had started life in Hayes Town, north-west London. Like those cradles of Mod culture where Twiggy and Elizabeth Woodcraft grew up – nearby Neasden and Chelmsford in Essex – it was another ‘invincible green suburb’ disturbed only by the revving of Lambrettas. Outer-city council estates were fertile soil for the edgy, asexual attitudinising of Mod. But Kimberley had a hard-up, messed-up, working-class upbringing. Her father was afflicted with a mental disorder. Her mother, suffering from post-natal depression and emotional repression, put Kimberley, her first baby, in a children’s home when she was ten months old. Effectively single in the post-war austerity years, Mrs Saunders struggled to bring up three small children in overcrowded conditions, her scant income topped up through the National Assistance scheme.fn4 When Kimberley was six, the family were rehoused in Bracknell New Town, a utopian developers’ dream superimposed on an area of fields thirty miles to the west of London. Now the family had space, big rooms, big windows, a garden and modern shopping facilities. But for a precocious teenager, there was nothing to do.
I went to a youth club – but I wasn’t going to sit there playing Ludo! I was out looking for blokes!
School had little to offer. As we have seen, Kimberley hated authority. She dug her heels in, and refused to attend any classes apart from Art. ‘I just didn’t like being told what to do.’ From early on, she identified as a Rocker. The bikers in black had what she wanted. Rebellious, stroppy, and starved of affection, Kimberley built a world around her rock music idols – P. J. Proby, Billy Fury,fn5 Jerry Lee Lewis, Chubby Checker – and any available good-looking leather-jacketed males she could attract, in possession of a motorcycle. At fourteen, wearing a provocatively short and shiny ‘Maid Marian’ dress with criss-cross lacing up her bust, diamond-design stockings and kitten heels, this wasn’t difficult. But like most of her generation, Kimberley had the vaguest notions about sex –
We had the usual biology lesson, with rabbits and all that. It was, like, ‘this goes there, and that goes there, and out pops a baby!’ So I thought, well, I think I know now what happens. So I tried it out one day, with some gorgeous fellow that lived in Enfield …
That one lasted a few weeks, and it was better than Ludo.
But sex was only part of the thrill that Kimberley was now discovering. Rocker culture – music, men, and bikes – hit all her buttons. And most weekends the tribe would gather in their statement uniforms: black, Brylcreemed and studded, bikes fuelled and ready to hit the arterial roads to the coast. Kimberley rode pillion, astride, wearing her kitten heels but no crash helmet, gripping on for dear life with her thighs as, exhausts roaring, twenty gleaming black and chrome Tritons ripped up the tarmac at 100 miles an hour. This was ‘doing a ton’. On a bike you were queen of the road. ‘I love speed – I thought it was fantastic … The adrenalin buzz, the excitement of it – it was like a fantasy come true … It was a real ego thing as well I suppose. You felt that you’d made it …’ Bikes were about masculinity and machismo, down and dirty. They roared, they thrusted; they were hard, dynamic, dangerous and also – as the lyrics of a whole genre of pop songs prove – intensely romantic.
This was the peak of the so-called ‘teenage tragedy’ song in which, to the accompaniment of revving throttles and grinding gearboxes, singers poured out tear-jerking melodramas of fatal skids and twisted metal. The Shangri-Las’ 1964 doo-wop classic ‘Leader of the Pack’ is probably the most famous, with its Romeo and Juliet themes of love at first sight, parental disapproval and violent death – though the BBC refused it airplay probably because it was thought to encourage Mod-versus-Rocker violence. Another home-grown, chart-topping version of the theme was written by a well-bred blonde, Lynn Annette Ripley, aka Twinkle, when she herself was just fourteen, and also released in 1964. At the age of nine I developed a morbid adoration for this singer with her straight hair, blackened eyes, peaked PVC ‘Lennon’ cap and her bewitchingly tragic song, ‘Terry’. The heart-rending tale of the girlfriend who quarrels with her beloved before he rides off into the night, ‘accelerating his motorbi-ike …’, had me close to tears and choked with emotion by the time the short ballad reached its beseeching climax: ‘Please wait at the gate of heaven for me, Te – e – erry!’
In other words, bike culture, whether Rocker or Mod, had it all. Freedom and fantasy were enhanced inside these revved-up, supra-masculine fraternities; but femininity too, for how could a blonde in kitten heels look anything but vulnerable and sweet sitting pillion behind that hot-headed, hairy, animal he-man with his fenders and his handlebars? In her dreams, one day, through a woman’s love, she would tame him – (‘They told me he was bad – but I knew he was sad / That’s why I fell for – the Leader of the Pack – Vroooom, Vroooom’). But at fourteen Kimberley Saunders hadn’t joined their club because she wanted a wedding ring:
Obviously, there was another side of it: and it’d all get pretty steamy and sexual by the time you got down to Hastings! Ah, there’s a whole lot you can get down to on beaches, you know? – not just frightening the Mods …
To Rockers, Mods were the objects of scorn. Kimberley and the gang ridiculed them for their taste in music, their affected clothes and perceived effeminacy, but above all for their impotent scooters, the Toytown-style Vespas and Lambrettas that seemed like playthings beside their own monster motorcycles – ‘“Get off that spin dryer and milk it!” we used to say. We just saw their scooters as no better than a spin dryer …’ – and as domesticated, meek and feebly ruminative as a cow.
They were weak, they couldn’t stand up and fight or nothing – and they were tested out on the beach down there!
When fists started to fly, Kimberley stayed at a safe distance. The girls watched from the parade, and had a drink afterwards with the victors, listening to the juke box.
She is unapologetic about her casual, thrill-seeking attitude to life, while admitting that she paid a price. She’d got involved with a sexy-eyed, square-jawed guy with a mop of dark hair – ‘he looked like P. J. Proby!’ What was the attraction?
Well, looking back, that’s how music got to you, it was in your soul, it was in the air – and it was part of your everyday life … And I thought oh, he’s groovy! He had great big Chelsea boots on – and his hair was like P. J. Proby’s, and he had on this great big swanky jacket. I fell in love with him because of that. I mean how shallow is that? But I thought he was the business, you know?
So I was running risks …
Before her fifteenth birthday, Kimberley discovered she was pregnant.
My daughter was conceived with ‘P. J. Proby’ on the train from Victoria to Hastings, in a carriage with the shutters down. We had a really great time for that journey!
And that’s how she came along.
Becoming a mother was not part of the plan. Abortion was illegal, but plentiful folk wisdom about abortifacients was exchanged between women, and Kimberley’s mum – who was still unattached but who now had a new baby (‘my little sister …’) – having tried and failed to terminate that pregnancy using the hot-mustard-bath-and-quinine method, now passed on the tip to her elder daughter. ‘Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t.’ In Kimberley’s case, it didn’t. For a few months she continued to attend school in her own haphazard way, wearing a stretchy hold-in corset, but getting bigger and bigger. ‘P. J. Proby’ denied he was the father, and distanced himself by finding a new teenage girlfriend. And so she found herself in Aylesbury.
After that I didn’t want nothing to do with men …
But within a year, Kimberley would be engaged to be married.
Happenings
‘I’m a real sixties woman,’ Kimberley told me. But she admits now that being stuck in Bracknell (and six months in Aylesbury) excluded her from some of the decade’s key experiences:
What they used to call ‘Swinging London’ – that was the bit I missed out on: all those clubs with the live bands, and Carnaby Street and all that. I’ve tried to make up for it ever since, believe me!
In 1964, ‘Swinging London’ didn’t have a name. That would come later. But from 1963 people were starting to talk about the electricity, the new pulse of life being generated in Britain’s capital. Listen to what they were saying:
The young have taken over the London scene in a way that almost no generation has done before …19
Janey Ironside
There was energy then, and if you had an idea, however silly, you could get it on the road …20 It was a terribly naive period … it was like falling in love.
Jean Shrimpton
[It was] a time when ordinary people could do extraordinary things …21
Twiggy
There was a yeastiness in the air that was due to a great deal of unrestrained and irreverent frivolity …22
Angela Carter
We used to drink and dance till dawn in those early days …23
Grace Coddington
It was the women of Chelsea who fascinated me … not the men.24 They wore big floppy hats, skinny ribbed sweaters, key-hole dresses, wide hipster belts and, I believed, paper knickers. They had white lipsticked lips and thick black eyeliner, hair cut at alarming angles, op-art earrings and ankle-length white boots … They had confidence and, it seemed, no parents …
Alexandra Pringle
Well, five of us girls shared a flat in Gunter Grove in World’s End, Chelsea; one was studying cello, another was learning to be an opera singer, and I was at the Drama Centre, and there was another girl called Melissa, and she had a rolled purple umbrella, and always a velvet ribbon round her neck, and a Vidal Sassoon haircut.25 Well, Melissa was so WITH IT! And then just across the road were these artists’ studios, all lived in by journalists and painters. And us five girls gave a lot of parties, you know? And that’s really where the sixties began for me …
Patricia Quinn
You spoke to strangers and invited them back to your flat without thinking twice.26 The King’s Road was like an exclusive school playground. Everyone went to the same parties, the same shops, the same coffee bars, bistros and pubs. And on Saturdays, if you weren’t parading up and down the King’s Road, you would migrate to Portobello Road, in Notting Hill, to meander up and down looking at the market stalls and people strutting their stuff … Everyone looked glorious and was so relaxed and friendly …
London belonged to the young. All the old class structures of our parents’ generation were breaking down. All the old social mores were swept away. No one cared where you came from or what school you’d gone to, what accent you spoke with or how much money you had. All that mattered was what you could do, what you could create …
We were breaking new ground in every area, embracing everything that presented itself and, I suppose, living without a care for tomorrow.
Pattie Boyd
Pattie was surely wrong in declaring that class was dead. The working-class-boy/posh-girl dynamic we’ve already encountered in the magazine and modelling world served only to underline differences between the genuine riches and the nouveaux. But it is true that fashion models, fashion designers, style icons, advertisers, publishers, broadcasters, actors, artists, musicians, journalists and writers defined this excitingly meritocratic era. In 1964 TV audiences saw the first broadcasts of the BBC’s Wednesday Play and Top of the Pops. The latter triumphantly pulled off the trick of becoming required Thursday-evening viewing for every self-respecting chart-following teenager. This was also the heyday of the maverick pirate station Radio Caroline, hippest listening for pop fans. After dark, the Ad Lib club was a melting pot – ‘Where else can you find Lord Plunkett, Lord Blandford, Diana Dors, James Ormsby-Gore, a pool of typists, fashion models and fashion photographers and the occasional highly paid young docker all dancing together?’27 asked its PR. The Cromwellian (patronised by the Beatles) and Annabel’s were less democratic, but equally chic. The same year also saw the arrival of a new female daydream in London: Marianne Faithfull. Huge-eyed, motionless, passive, she sang her haunting, ethereal hit ‘As Tears Go By’ with a heart-rending, breathy intensity. Exposed, vulnerable, it was her very stillness that made her so sexy, so available.
This was a world in which women could make their mark. The lists of invitees to the annual Woman of the Year lunch give an indication of the range of female achievement, from sports to showbiz, publishing to diplomacy; in 1963 Mary Quant was asked to speak at the lunch, following in the footsteps of Janey Ironside, head of Fashion at the Royal College of Art. But the question du jour for modern women was still, ‘To trouser, or not to trouser?’ A Pathé Cinemagazine feature in 1964 aired the controversy: ‘What was once strictly for the beatniks, is now accepted at the best-dressed functions,’ purred the commentator, over footage of a woman in a very posh pink trouser ensemble and matching hat.28
Meanwhile on TV’s Late Night Line-Up, Joan Bakewell chaired the nation’s intellectual and cultural debating forum. Barbara Hulanicki (Biba) started her first Kensington shop on the proceeds of selling 17,000 sugar-pink gingham dresses mail order via the Daily Mirror’s fashion pages. In the art world Bridget Riley’s eye-popping aesthetic was the newest must-see – plagiarised as ‘Op’ on everything from tea towels to biscuit boxes – and Pauline Boty’s sexy, experimental collages gained her a meteoric reputation among the cognoscenti.fn6 Meanwhile Boty and Riley’s male contemporaries started to construct random events known as ‘Happenings’ – usually an excuse to project an image of the Pope onto a naked woman’s bottom, push a naked woman around a stage in a wheelbarrow, or paint her (naked) with red dye – and Allen Jones was starting to explore the violated, plasticised female body, using a visual language drawn from movies, superhero comics and pornography.
Chelsea was buzzing with the opening of the first Habitat in Fulham Road. There you could buy cheap pasta storage jars, tubular frame furniture and stripy butchers’ aprons. At this time an area of central London became a forest of scaffolding and cranes, as workmen erected sixties London’s most confident landmark, the Post Office Tower.
In 1964 Pattie Boyd was twenty. She had now crossed over from mute modelling to small speaking parts in adverts, such as the ‘Smith’s Crisps girl’, which led to a day’s shoot playing one of four scatty schoolgirls in the planned Beatles film, A Hard Day’s Night. The location was a train. The ‘schoolgirls’ spent the whole journey collapsing with laughter at the Beatles’ cute quick-wittedness, infectious humour and Scouse accents. ‘And George … was the best-looking man I’d ever seen.’29 Pattie was smitten, on fire, high on laughter, craziness and the unmistakable aura of creative energy that emanated from the four. ‘It was amazing, very powerful …’ At the end of the day the train drew into Paddington. ‘Will you marry me?’ said George, adding, as she giggled helplessly, ‘Well, if you won’t marry me, will you have dinner with me tonight?’ Within ten days she had dumped her photographer boyfriend Eric Swayne and they were going out together. Life with the Beatles’ lead guitarist now became a giddy fairground of experiences. There were holidays in Tahiti, Paris, Monte Carlo and the south of France. Private planes alternated with skirmishes with the fans and reporters who besieged them. Pattie and George were like children, shepherded from airports to vehicles to hotels by Auntie Epstein. George didn’t rate her cramped apartment near the Chelsea embankment, so he moved her and her flatmate into a bijou mews house in stylish Knightsbridge. Their relationship boosted Pattie’s modelling career and, while the Beatles were touring, she was kept busy by Vogue, Tatler and Vanity Fair. ‘I counted the days until George was due back …’ In August 1964 the band set off on a month-long, twenty-three-city tour of America, ending in New York, where Bob Dylan spent an evening introducing them to marijuana. ‘Somehow George managed to get hold of some … while he was away and brought it back for us to try … All of a sudden we were roaring with laughter and realised we were stoned … Everything seemed hilarious.’
Pattie Boyd, twenty years old, beautiful, successful, famous, and dating a Beatle, was living every girl’s stardust fantasy.
*
But for the Highlands-raised nursery maid Veronica MacNab, Pattie’s life was beyond her wildest dreams.
Until 1963 Veronica had no taste of teenage culture. Her preferred music was Scottish reels, and her first childcare post in an isolated Sussex mansion had brought her into contact with nothing more colourful than hunting pink or blue Sèvres porcelain. But that year Veronica gave in her notice to Mrs Smith and landed herself – via an agency – a new, city-based post as nursery maid to Charlotte, Henrietta, Alexandra and Philippa, the four little daughters of Count Joseph Czernin and his wife Hazel.fn7 The Czernins, who owned one of the most valuable family estates in London and a racing property near Newbury, lived in Chelsea Square, just a few minutes’ walk from the very heart of London hip, King’s Road. But 54 Chelsea Square was not hip. This timeless oasis was beautified with old masters, silver and antique furniture, and the household showed no sign of class breakdown or the sweeping away of social mores. Veronica now found herself one of three live-in staff along with Angelina the Spanish cook and Jean the qualified Norland nanny. The chauffeur lived out. Veronica took the job at four pounds a week,fn8 plus board. She was enchanted to find that her windows overlooked the square’s gardens, and that her tiny room was decorated in floral Colefax and Fowler fabrics:
It was so pretty – and it was mine!30
I had my own uniform too: a green checked gingham dress with white collar and cuffs, covered with a white apron, green tweed coat, brown gloves, brown brogues and thirty-denier lisle stockings. My hair had to be kept short and tidy, and on top of that I wore a green velour hat.
Thus clad, it was Veronica’s job to take her privileged little charges – aged four, three, two and nought – to attend a children’s party in some equally sumptuous residence, to their lessons at Madame Vacani’s dancing school in Brompton Road, or for an airing by the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, the select rendezvous for socially elevated babies. There you might meet David and Sarah, children of Princess Margaret, also accompanied by the nanny and their nursery maid Jenny, who was daughter to the Sandringham grocer. The little Czernin girls were accommodated in two magnificent, carriage-built twin perambulators. Veronica was required to polish up the chrome brake levers and handles on these conveyances (‘they had to be just so …’), as well as to goffer iron the children’s hand-smocked and puffed-sleeved frilly frocks. ‘I felt I was just a little person – but I was looking after some very important children!’ Then home for lunch: shepherd’s pie, rice pudding, and fish on Fridays.
Looking at the London social scene in 1964 through the eyes of a Scottish nursery maid from the glens is like observing a distant planet through a telescope. Mr Czernin leaves each morning for his office in the City. The Hon. Mrs Czernin has breakfast in bed before ascending to the day nursery to discuss with Nanny the routine for the day, the allocation of duties, and what errands need to be run.
Mrs Czernin did not have a job, but she had a full diary of lunches, shopping and appointments. Aged thirty, she dressed conservatively in twinsets and pearls. During the day she was not often to be seen, though at teatime she might join the children for Fuller’s walnut cake and egg-and-cress sandwiches. But after tea, the little girls were generally brought washed and brushed to visit their mother in the drawing room. ‘Daddy’ sometimes joined them for half an hour. Often, the Czernins dined out or attended society occasions that demanded all the trappings; then, Mrs Czernin would wish the children goodnight resplendent in evening dress and ‘sparkly bits’.
By comparison, Veronica’s social life was almost absurdly humble. Despite transferring from the Highlands to London, she was still wrapped up in ‘a safe cocoon’. She had every Monday off, but with a curfew imposed for 9.30 p.m. (10 in exceptional circumstances) there was little opportunity for adventure:
My big excitement was going to St Columba’s, the Church of Scotland in Pont Street, where they had Scottish country dancing evenings on a Mondayfn9 – and that was my connection with home …
Still, those evenings off sometimes offered tantalising tastes of a forbidden world:
My dancing partner was a very nice young Scottish policeman called Norman. He was Gaelic-speaking, and he would walk me home and I remember going to a coffee bar with him in Knightsbridge, where trendy people were smoking Gauloises and Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes, and you could drink coffee. Which I had never done before!
The coffee bar had a juke box too. To ears attuned to eightsome reels and Gay Gordons, ‘Carol’ and ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ were alien sounds – but she loved them.
Veronica began to feel like a member of the audience at an extravagant pageant. If she stepped out of her new front door in Chelsea she might encounter a host of leggy and beautiful young women her age, heavily made-up with dark eyeliner and pale lipstick, parading past in leather jackets, Courrèges trouser suits, or A-line Mary Quant dresses, with black-and-white PVC boots and sleek Sassoon bobs. Sometimes, she found herself in Harrods, where the upper crust bought their linen, longingly fingering the fashions on the hangers. ‘But I could only stand and look …’ Glamorous couples roared around the Chelsea streets in Jaguars or cute Mini Clubmans. To an utterly sheltered, sensible, ‘do-as-I’m-told, put-on-the-uniform, do-my-job, goody-goody’ virgin, these beings seemed like extra-terrestrials. Especially memorable was the sight of two long-haired Chelsea dandies, ‘one in a purple velvet suit, and his friend in a bottle-green velvet suit, both smoking cigarettes’. For decadence, there had never in her experience been anything like it. ‘It was like going to the movies!’ Their plushy swagger and bravado sent out an unmistakably licentious message – ‘but it was much too dangerous for a nice girl like me to even think about’.
Could Veronica ever be more than a spectator? Around her, people seemed to be living in a world of adventure, excitement, wonderful fun and magic freedom, where anything was possible.
There I was in the middle of Chelsea. Part of me was a little bit envious, in fact quite a lot envious I guess. I would have liked to have had the freedom to go and play … And, of course, I didn’t have any money – and one had to have money to dress appropriately to go to night clubs. And anyway, who was going to take me to a night club?
I was like a child looking into a picture book, and seeing the pictures, and not being part of it.
At the same time, I disapproved, because, gosh, weren’t they naughty? And I was a goody two-shoes. So I kept my knees together.
Behind the day nursery windows in Chelsea Square, Veronica MacNab felt protected from the naughtiness and risk of the big bad city with its brash modernity and alarming hairstyles. Instead, a different city laid out its treasures for her: its music, its museums, its traditions, its polish and privilege.
It was an education. Two years later, Veronica would return to Scotland. And when she did, she carried with her a passionate taste for art, antiques, beautiful objects and gracious living that would stay with her for the rest of her life.
Dreaming of Houses
There was King’s Road, with its Spanish bistros, Habitat and PVC-clad dolly birds. There was 54 Chelsea Square, with its Georgian silver teapots and Colefax and Fowler curtains.
And there was Lambeth. And in boroughs like this in London, and across the country, there was a very different story to be told. It was a story that counteracted the prevailing narrative of the affluent society, with money jingling in teenagers’ pockets to be spent on vinyl singles, make-up and motorbikes. In the autumn of 1964, as the Conservative government under Alec Douglas-Home geared up for a general election, the energised Labour Party led by Harold Wilson went out to campaign against the Tories’ record on homelessness. ‘Thirteen years of Tory rule,’ Wilson told his supporters, ‘have left Britain with a million families without houses of their own, at least a million slums and two and a half million other houses lacking fixed baths, piped water, or indoor sanitation.’31 The desperation arising from accommodation shortages would become a refrain of the 1960s, with hardship, eviction, exploitation and council-house waiting lists becoming familiar headlines in the press.
In the 1960s the significance, to women, of house and home remained primary. One writer who fully recognised this was the sociologist Hannah Gavron, much praised for her study The Captive Wife (1966), a ground-breaking analysis of the female dilemma. When Gavron lifted the lid on the ‘captive wife’, she uncovered a self-referential, introverted state of affairs. Young wives had few friends, but turned instead to their own mothers for support. Family and four walls had replaced community.
The nuclear family was clearly the focus of the wife’s attentions and interests … [This] was an inward looking unit, from which contact with the outside world was [in]frequent.
Home was a refuge. But it could also be a prison.
And yet for many a walled-in wife, old or young, the limits of her imagined happiness were a spick-and-span new-build with picture windows, a kitchen with wall cupboards and wipe-clean tops, and a plastic bathroom suite. The imagery beckoned to her from cereal packets, hoardings and TV. ‘Every couple who have ever set up a home have had a vision in their minds of their dream house,’ proclaimed the News of the World. ‘Win a £10,000 Dream House – a new, modern house sitting in its own grounds. A warm and cosy house, furnished and decorated smart as a new pin, all the cupboards full.’ Here was something for everyone to aspire to – like these women:
– I’d live in the future.32 I’d have it all modern. Nothing old in it. You know, all the buildings and everything. Not old and horrible like Balsall Heath. The people would all be happy, not miserable and fed-up.
– I’d just like to, you know, have a big place and everything in it, a swimming pool and all that type of thing.33
– We lived in a completely broken down house … we had practically nothing, a mattress on the floor … And I did suddenly feel that I wanted something better.34
There was no carpet on the floor, I couldn’t lie down on the floor and play with the child, and build bricks, and I suddenly saw myself with a carpet and a warm room in a sort of television advertisement world …
And yet, as Hannah Gavron spelled out, the dream was elusive, particularly for working-class wives and mothers like those quoted above. Families, particularly large ones, were unfairly disadvantaged. Gavron cited statistics showing that, whereas 50 per cent of childless couples owned their own homes, only 6 per cent of families with four children were home-owners; moreover, the younger the children, the worse the conditions they had to put up with. For low earners, children complicated everything. She gave instances in which mothers living in cramped rented rooms with active small children were tormented by the lack of play space, and by the complaints provoked by their noise. Stress and isolation were the result.
The worst case in this sample was a family of six …
wrote Gavron:
The husband was a plumber’s mate. They lived in one room and a small kitchen in which the wife and her husband slept on a mattress on the floor. Repeated attempts by the doctor to get them rehoused on medical grounds failed, and as the wife said, ‘There was only one thing left for me to do’ – she had made an attempt at suicide.
In 1964 a young woman named Pauline O’Mahony found herself in the distressing and daunting position of assessing the housing needs of many hundreds of such unlucky or dispossessed families in south London.
The numbers of them: the volume, the vastness – it felt like a huge problem!35 And I sometimes wonder how we ever coped with this volume of tragedy.
Pauline was born in 1948, in a Belfast slum. Homelessness played a role in her life almost immediately, as the family decamped to England to reunite with her father who, following his discharge from the army, had found a job as a removals driver. The O’Mahonys were lucky, and were provided with a council house in the London suburb of Brentwood. But their good fortune stopped there. There was never much money, and Mrs O’Mahony supplemented the family income by cleaning in a hospital. Pauline grew up feeling stigmatised and short-changed by life, with a determination to distance herself from her roots, and become self-sufficient. She loved reading, but was low-achieving at school. A talent for sport came to her rescue, but at the age of thirteen she was awarded a prize for public service, and soon after joined the Young Socialists and CND. Pauline O’Mahony – like many of her generation – was gripped by a growing conviction that young people, whether male or female, had something to contribute to running the world. ‘I did feel that both individually and collectively we had power, and we could make a difference.’
Her chance came in 1964. The family were in financial straits; following an episode of ill health, Pauline’s father was put on half pay and it became imperative for her to start earning.
So I wrote a letter to the Town Clerk at Lambeth Borough Council explaining that I’d won a school prize for public service, and that I was in the netball team! And I said, ‘Is there anything I can do? Could you take me on?’ And I got an interview, and he gave me a job as junior tea-maker in the Housing Department.
To start with, this job wasn’t going to change the world. Pauline made tea for over twenty men – architects, engineers, planners, welfare officers and housing officers – but there were also two other women in the department, and they were the housing manager and her deputy. In 1964 slum clearance was ongoing; the borough’s strategy was discussed around tables spread with paper plans and layouts. Pauline provided tea and biscuits to the officials, and would linger, fascinated to see the intricate drawings.
And one day the senior architect, Deirdre Haines, noticed me. And she said, ‘Do you want to learn to look at plans?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And she said, ‘Come back later, and I’ll teach you …’
After that, Pauline progressed quickly. In turn, she was seconded to the architecture and engineering departments. Before the year was out, and armed with her new-found training, she was given the dual job of housing visitor and housing interviewer, assessing families on the council’s waiting list, or whose homes were due for demolition, and interviewing evicted tenants with more immediate housing needs.
What Pauline now encountered was shocking and harrowing. On visiting days, she was given a caseload of up to a dozen households to assess. In theory, she was supposed to knock on doors when least expected, so that the owner or tenant was unprepared. There were risks to this. On one occasion a schizophrenic locked her in a cupboard, and on another she walked unsuspectingly into a south London brothel, innocently inquiring where the ladies’ husbands were. But before long she was known locally and, seeing her coming, somebody was bound to shout out, ‘Oh Gawd, it’s the welfare lady …’ Once inside, it was her task to review conditions and fill in a registration form: number of children, their ages, their state of health et cetera.
But in addition the officer was expected to make judgements regarding the applicants’ standards of cleanliness and tidiness. So a dirty floor, dishes piled up in the sink, or a baby’s nappy lying unwashed would all be logged; and then the accommodation had to be checked over for bug infestation – the bugs were often to be found by scratching under the wallpaper. All such factors affected the allocation: clean hygienic families got nice new houses. Dirty slovenly families didn’t. There was also embedded racism. The large immigrant population in south London was badmouthed and discriminated against. No law existed to prevent this so, no matter what their needs, white families would be pushed up the queue ahead of black families. Pauline found this dismaying. The black families she met were generally warm-hearted and welcomed her with cups of tea and condensed milk.
Temperamentally, Pauline was on the side of her ‘clients’. So when she filled in her case notes, she often found herself giving the immigrants, and the ‘dirty’ families, the benefit of the doubt. She could see how hard it was for them to do battle with rising damp, peeling walls, mouldy woodwork, leaky roofs and crumbling plaster, ‘and the children getting chest infection after chest infection …’ Many of the homes lacked indoor sanitation, electricity, gas or hot water. Some even lacked a floor: one elderly woman sat in her basement on a dirt foundation.
We were supposed not to show we cared. But I couldn’t ignore their plight. I couldn’t not be sympathetic …
On Christmas Eve, Pauline was in tears.
It was snowing, it was 7 o’clock at night, and it was dark. I was trudging through the snow, on the very last of my ten cases, and I was desperate to start out on my long journey back home to Brentwood. I knocked on the door, and it was an immigrant family and they had so many children – and they had literally nothing for Christmas. The youngest baby was lying in a bottom drawer. And I sat there, and I just put my head in my hands and wept with them …
But Pauline found the other side of her job equally pitiable. Home visits took up three or four days a week. The remainder of the week Pauline was an interviewer, installed in a tiny cubicle, hearing the grievous tales of evicted tenants who arrived in desperation at the doors of the Housing Department, because they had nowhere else to go. Outside her little space, the waiting room was thronged with these refugees from the rental market, mostly families, with numerous babies in creaky pushchairs and ill-favoured, sick toddlers. Most of them had been tenants of houses ‘in multiple occupation’, often entire families living in just one or two rooms, with access to an outdoor toilet. Their landlords (like the notorious Peter Rachman) were allowed, within the law, to buy up semi-derelict terraces, fill them with families, charge them uncontrolled rents and serve them with notice to quit at any time when there was a prospect of selling the property. It was a charter for intimidation, and in her time in the Housing Department Pauline witnessed the reign of terror exercised by merciless landlords who had the doors broken down and terrorised their tenants with dangerous dogs to compel them to leave. Fearful and miserable, the destitute families arrived in Kennington with their ‘Notices to Quit’. Time and again, Pauline heard the plea, ‘We’ve nowhere to go …’
I remember going to my male manager and saying, ‘I have a family …’ I can remember the family, I can see the man now with his trilby hat on, and the woman, very round faced, very warm, motherly, lovely, with the children at her skirts – and my manager showing no compassion or interest or care. And I thought, ‘I just can’t do this …’
Time and again, her seniors would say to her, ‘Send them away. There’s nothing we can do. We can’t produce accommodation out of nowhere …’ The only provision in such cases was the local authority hostel. Women and children were bundled into transport and taken to prison-like dormitory accommodation in Southwark. The husbands were prohibited from joining them.
Every so often this vast caseload of human misery was alleviated, when Pauline was able to inform some patient family whose slum home was threatened with demolition that the council was proposing to rehouse them. For many, that was cause to rejoice. But mixed reactions might greet the announcement that their new home would be an eighth-floor flat, or a low-rise in Bognor Regis. However unhealthy and wretched their slum houses, people were being forcibly removed from all that was familiar and sociable.
For Pauline O’Mahony, the work was gruelling, numbing and exhausting. But she was never in any doubt about her own motivation:
I learnt how to work the system in their interests, and if that meant stretching the story on occasion, I thought that was an OK thing to do – because it was about access to resources. Being in the position of a gatekeeper, it was my duty to get the most out of the system for the individual or household that I possibly could …
Unavoidably, in this context, we return to the vision that so dominated post-war social aspirations, in which every woman was goddess of her home, and that home was her temple, her refuge and her source of identity. But for thousands of unlucky women, the brutal, shameful, 1960s homelessness crisis, with all its attendant dispossession and exile, ate away at the very foundations of family and femininity, denying them status, sense of self and even a reason for living. For what was a woman without her dream? As Hannah Gavron’s desperate young wife declared: ‘There was only one thing left for me to do.’ Even worse off was the single mother, excessively vulnerable to exploitation by private landlords. In Mothers Alone: Poverty and the Fatherless Family (1969) the sociologist Dennis Marsden demonstrated that unmarried mothers were at the bottom of the pile in terms of housing deprivation. They lacked furniture and basic household equipment, suffered most from overcrowding, and were least likely to be rehoused by local authorities. For hundreds of Pauline O’Mahony’s supplicants, where dream homes were concerned, well, they could dream on.
Maybe – along with country dancing and church on Sundays – women’s exclusive self-identification with interior spaces needed to slip gently into the past. Of course, everyone required a roof over their head. But homelessness, and the sense of annihilation and negation that went with it, meant different things to women than to men. If you took a man’s home away, he remained an effective human being, but if you took a woman’s home away, she was nobody. More than that: all around them in 1964, women were being led to believe that their worth was enhanced through domestic acquisitions. Advertisers and journalists targeted them with the message that the secret of happiness lay in abundance, modernity and possessions; in vacuum cleaners, kidney-shaped dressing tables and covetable three-piece suites. The dream was legitimate – but did it have to be the only dream? Maybe there was another way to be a woman in the modern world?
Pauline O’Mahony wouldn’t describe herself as a goddess, and women do not have a monopoly on empathy and compassion. But in 1964, they felt more permitted to expose those qualities than men did. Society expected its women to be healers, givers and nurturers. Pauline was just sixteen, and she had little power, struggling with the contradictions of her position. But for many a hopeless and dispossessed mother, the friendly, bespectacled features and gladdening personage of ‘the Welfare Lady’ represented the chance of a future for her family, and the chance to rejoin the ranks of womankind. In a dingy cubicle located in a Kennington office building, humanity was conspicuous, and it had a female face.