During the 1950s and ’60s, the British Medical Association (BMA) published a successful monthly consumer magazine called Family Doctor that made a handsome contribution to the BMA’s income. It was well-informed and entertaining and breathed life into the arid BMA brief that it deal with ‘matters of health of interest to the lay public’.
The reason for its success was that it was edited by an ebullient man called Harvey Flack who was not only a talented editor but had the one qualification deemed essential by the BMA – a medical degree. Sadly, his worth was never really appreciated by his masters – a fate often suffered by the talented mavericks the BMA occasionally employs through inadvertence rather than through choice. As one journalist wrote when Flack died: ‘He did more to win friends for the BMA than they ever knew, and probably more than they deserved.’
In 1959, Flack’s editorial flair got him involved in a BMA happening that was strange even by the standards of an organisation that specialises in the strange and hilarious. In the spring of every year, Family Doctor published a highly profitable paperback Getting Married, addressed to the audience specified in its title. For the 1959 edition, Flack commissioned a piece from Dr Eustace Chesser, a psychiatrist of liberal views who could write well and was often asked by newspaper and magazine editors for authoritative trips around territory mapped by the titles of his books: Love Without Fear, Marriage and Freedom, Unwanted Child and How to Make a Success of Your Marriage.
Chesser responded with a lively yet essentially serious consideration of a question often asked in spring, when young people’s fancy turns to thoughts that have never really left their minds during the winter: do we really need to wait till the wedding night? The piece started with a double-page spread, across which ran the headline ‘Is Chastity Outmoded? Outdated? Out?’ and a photograph of a boy and girl sitting side by side in long grass and engaged in nothing more adventurous than conversation. For those who read the article through to the end – and events were to show that few people did – Chesser answered the questions posed in the title with an emphatic ‘no’. Chastity, he suggested, was still in.
Yet when advance copies were distributed to members of the BMA council, blood pressures rose and gaskets began to blow. The journalist Paul Vaughan, who was an assistant BMA press officer at the time, later wrote: ‘Even to ask the questions in Chesser’s title was considered by certain councillors to be grossly indecent, and to ask them in a publication adorned with the august name of the British Medical Association – well, no doubt about it, this time Flack had gone too far, and as for this Chesser fellow …’
The next meeting of the council was consumed by tempestuous debate. One councillor declared that Chesser deserved to be imprisoned for writing one sentence that suggested that pre-marital intercourse was not only common but could be ‘more than ordinarily pleasant’. At the end of the debate, indignant councillors demanded the destruction of the entire 1959 edition, a quarter of a million copies of Flack’s profitable annual. According to Paul Vaughan, one of the arguments that clinched the decision was the observation by a distinguished member of the Central Ethical Committee that if you carefully examined the couple in the photograph, you could just see that the girl in the long grass wore no stockings. When Chesser died in 1973, the British Medical Journal’s obituary acknowledged his championship of reform of the laws on abortion and on homosexual behaviour, but made no reference to you know what.