The Profumo Affair was made in Fleet Street more than in Wimpole Mews or Cliveden. It was incited, publicised and exploited by journalists. It erupted during a phase of newspaper history when editors reacted to falling circulation with aggressive pursuit of stories and scapegoats; and it was seized as a godsent chance by some newspaper proprietors to skewer targets of their own. Whereas Lord Beaverbrook’s staff at Express Newspapers paid and manipulated Christine Keeler and other Profumo Affair protagonists as a means of envenoming the old man’s feud with the Astors, the men at Mirror Group Newspapers played a bigger game. Their involvement began with a deal to buy Keeler’s story, which they hoped to run as a scandalous circulation stunt. It escalated into a campaign, with ruthlessly plotted tactics, to inflict mortal injuries not merely on the Macmillan government and the Establishment, but on ways of life which the Mirror chiefs, Cecil King and Hugh Cudlipp, both envied and resented, even as they brashly emulated them. The Profumo Affair aroused a Fleet Street frenzy of ferocity. It managed to glorify what was shabby, and had an enduring influence on investigative journalism.
Already, for more than half a century, journalists had been creating a headline blizzard of sensational crimes, lewd scandals and quirky escapades. They relished dramatising the confrontations between deviance and control that were manifested in manhunts, criminal trials and judicial punishments. The burglar Alfie Hinds, who escaped three times from high security prisons during the late 1950s but was always recaptured, became the darling of the tabloids because he epitomised the breaking of bounds and the reassertion of control: his wife, and later he himself, sold their memories for lucrative serialisation. The gutter press, with its entertaining scrapes and vicarious punishment, provided a histrionic morality for its readers and frontier markers for society. Its contents were a map of moral landscaping, showing the contours of normality, the roads to right and wrong, the boundaries that must not be crossed.1
Popular journalism was modelled on the pillory. It was intended to make money for newspaper proprietors, to cover them in glory and to buy them influence. Sensationalism defined the product. Snobbery – increasingly it was inverted snobbery – was mixed with puritanism. The formula for Sunday newspapers was supremely punitive: they were meant to hurt. An editor, who was a self-described puritan, declared his credo to the Royal Commission on Divorce in 1910. ‘The simple faith of our forefathers in the All-Seeing Eye of God has departed from the Man in the Street. Our only modern substitute for Him is the Press. Gag the Press under whatever pretexts of prudish propriety you please, and you destroy the last remaining pillory by which it is possible to impose some restraint on the lawless lust of Man.’2
Until late in the twentieth century the overwhelming majority of the English hid what they felt, did, and thought: from childhood they were taught to conceal their desires, appetites, physical necessities; adults maintained a tacit conspiracy to keep them hidden. But the game for journalists was to trample discretion, catch people out, and pelt them with retributive publicity. Hugh Cudlipp, former editor of the Sunday Pictorial, wrote in 1953 of its rival the News of the World: ‘This is no hole-in-the-corner, nasty-minded little news-sheet. The News of the World is a national institution. It is a newspaper which goes into two-thirds of our homes, and to which great judges and statesmen have been happy to contribute.’ He quoted the retort of its proprietor, Lord Riddell, to someone who complained that it recorded crime: ‘No,’ said Riddell, ‘it records punishment.’3
Victorian England abominated Sunday newspapers as radical, infidel and disreputable. When, in 1899, Lord Burnham’s Daily Telegraph began to publish seven days a week, and was copied by Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail, Baptists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists censured both men, who abandoned their Sunday editions. The demand for weekend news of the Western Front in 1914–18, however, made popular Sunday newspapers irresistible. Although national press readership rose during that war, the combined circulation of nationals did not exceed the figures for local newspapers until 1923. During the next fifteen years, the habit of reading national newspapers spread from the lower-middle class to the working class. The Sunday press boomed: by 1939 almost the entire population saw a Sunday newspaper, while two-thirds saw a national daily. For millions the conscientious pleasure of Sundays was sharing the morbid indignation of its mass-market newspapers.
Circulation, which rose during the Second World War, peaked in 1950–51, when Sunday newspapers sold over 30 million copies a week, and national dailies 16.6 million a day. Thereafter, television, especially the commercial channel ITV inaugurated in 1955, drove sales downwards. In 1959 the ten national Sunday newspapers sold 27 million copies, and the eight national dailies under 16 million. Almost every household still took at least one Sunday newspaper – many households took two or three – but the News of the World, which sold 8 million copies weekly in 1950, dispersed only 6,665,000 weekly by 1958. Some optimists hoped that this meant that working-class sexual taboos and salacity were receding. At the end of 1961, the News of the World led circulation figures with 6.6 million followed by three Mirror Group Newspapers: The People (5.5 million); Sunday Pictorial (5.3 million); Daily Mirror (4.6 million). Lord Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express and Daily Express followed with 4.5 million and 4.3 million respectively. The Times, of which Bill Astor’s uncle Lord Astor of Hever had been chief proprietor since 1922, had a circulation of about a quarter of a million, while the Astor-edited Observer was approaching three-quarters of a million.
Chequebook journalism began when the News of the World paid the defence costs of John Haigh, ‘the Acid Bath Murderer’, in return for his exclusive memoir in 1949. Editors had long known that sex stories sold their papers. After 1955, faced with competition from ITV, they told their staff to produce sizzling stories with lots of pictures to vie with screen images. Rising newspaper production costs, keen competition for advertising revenue and the battle in the middle and lower ends of the market meant that print journalism by the late 1950s aimed to titillate more than ever – while keeping its patina of prudish rectitude. Cyril Connolly in 1963 could not imagine England without sexual inhibitions, lavatory jokes, lust murders, ‘its virgins and sadists of all ages and sexes, its squeamishness and evasions’.4
The National Union of Journalists insisted that tyro journalists must serve an apprenticeship on provincial newspapers – just as a left-wing cabal in Equity tried to insist that actors must serve in provincial repertory before they could be allowed into London theatres. English reporters, wrote an American journalist in 1965, were toughies ‘with provincial accents and newspaper tea-boy educations; many of them held the old spit-and-polish, school-of-hard-knocks, learn-the-hard-way-on-the-stone, and other equally soporific philosophies for journalistic success. Public schools were never mentioned.’ Newsrooms were pugnacious and chauvinistic. Women were a tiny minority among Fleet Street journalists, excluded from the Press Clubs in London and Manchester, ritually humiliated in the rowdy Fleet Street bars, and estranged by the long hours, hard-drinking, and oafishness. Racist mentalities were also commonplace in newsrooms until late in the twentieth century, even on newspapers which campaigned against landlords’ ‘colour bars’. ‘Come in, Tom,’ beckoned Reg Payne, editor of the Sunday Pictorial, to Tom Mangold, a young recruit from the Croydon Advertiser, ‘the Pic wants to do a serious sociological’ – Payne garbled the six-syllabled word – ‘experiment. Go up and dress yourself as a fuckin’ nigger.’5
For five years Peter Wildeblood worked for the Daily Mail. He was successively general reporter, gossip columnist, assistant drama critic, and diplomatic correspondent. He covered King Farouk of Egypt’s honeymoon, Don Carlos de Beistegui’s masked costume ball in Venice, the Craig and Bentley shooting at Croydon, and the Queen’s Coronation. He delved into the Acid Bath Murderer’s boyhood in the Plymouth Brethren, hunted for Burgess and Maclean on the French Riviera, and waded through the East Coast floods. ‘Fleet Street is a hard-working, nervous community with shabby suits and nicotine-stained fingers, living on beer and sandwiches and catching the last train home to the suburbs,’ he wrote. ‘Its contacts with the great, wide, lurid world about which it writes are usually brief, disenchanting and fraught with suspicion on both sides. At one moment a reporter may be trying to gatecrash an earl’s wedding in a hired morning coat; an hour later he is in Stepney, persuading a group of stevedores that, at heart, he is one of them.’
Reporters’ nerves were always jumpy lest (unknown to them) a good story was happening round the corner. They faced hostility everywhere. They were controlled by pawky managers who ‘peddled tragedy, sensation and heartbreak as casually as though they were cartloads of cabbage’, and exploited a ‘false, over-coloured and sentimental view of life’. It was hard for Wildeblood to imagine work in which his homosexuality was more of ‘a handicap’ than journalism, for Fleet Street had the morality of the saloon bar: ‘every sexual excess was talked about and tolerated, provided it was “normal”’. When Nancy Spain was recruited as a Daily Express book reviewer in 1952, its editor described her to his proprietor Beaverbrook as ‘a raging Lesbian’, whose manliness made her a ‘circus freak’. Express journalists feared their paper might become a ‘laughing-stock’ by employing her.6
Peter Earle was the News of the World journalist who did much to publicise the Profumo Affair. He had been investigating call-girl rings for some time, and was scampering ahead of the pack in 1963. Earle was a tall, gangly man who cultivated clandestine contacts with policemen and criminals. They would telephone him with tips, using codenames such as ‘Grey Wolf’ or ‘Fiery Horseman’. He was unfailingly ceremonious with ‘ladies’, though he called his wife Dumbo. Office colleagues were addressed as ‘old cock’ or ‘my old china’. Earle’s speech was peppered with phrases like ‘Gadzooks!’ or ‘By Jove!’ When he agreed with someone, he exclaimed: ‘Great Scot, you’re right!’ To quell office disputes he would say: ‘Let there be no murmuring.’
Earle was the archetype of the seedy Fleet Street drunk. He scarcely ate, but survived on oceans of whisky, which he called ‘the amber liquid’. He held court in the upstairs bar of the News of the World pub, the Tipperary in Bouverie Street, or at weekends in the Printer’s Pie in Fleet Street. ‘Hostelry’ and ‘watering-hole’ were his words for pubs. ‘Barman, replenishment for my friends,’ he would call when ordering a round. Earle had a prodigious memory for the details of old stories, talked like Samuel Johnson, and was an avid gawper at bosoms. Dressed in his Gannex raincoat, he left on investigative forays clutching a briefcase which was empty except for a whisky bottle. His doorstep technique was based on devastating effrontery; his questioning was indignant; and if rebuffed he mustered a baleful glare of wounded dignity. Either because he could not write intelligible English or because he was always drunk, his copy was unusable. He jumbled his facts and muddled their sequence. Subs had to read his incoherent copy, patiently talk him through it, and prise out a story that was fit to be printed.
Fleet Street in Earle’s heyday was quickened by the commercial strategies and journalistic innovations of a formidable duo, Cecil King and Hugh Cudlipp, who controlled Mirror Group Newspapers. Beginning in 1958, King pursued an aggressive merger and takeover strategy in newspaper and magazine publishing: the great combine that he created was in 1963 renamed International Publishing Corporation (IPC). King and Cudlipp proved to be the proprietors who exploited the Profumo Affair most effectively for their own purposes, which were to divert the currents of political power, to install a Labour Prime Minister in Downing Street, to entrench the privileges of their allies and to command domineering influence in a new social regime which was supposedly to be characterised by salubrious modernity and merciless egalitarianism.
The Daily Mirror had been founded by Northcliffe in 1903 as a snobby publication for office girls who aspired to become gentlewomen. Taken over by Northcliffe’s brother Lord Rothermere, it remained until 1935 an ailing, torpid newspaper losing readers under fusty management. Thereafter, with Rothermere’s nephew King as its grey eminence and Cudlipp as its features editor, the Daily Mirror chased young working-class readers with politics that were left-leaning and insubordinate. In 1937, King appointed Cudlipp as editor of the Daily Mirror’s sister paper, the Sunday Pictorial. Together the two men deftly repositioned both newspapers. They became market leaders of ‘the cheap press’, as it was described in 1937, ‘that strange, crooked mirror which distorts the world for our entertainment’.7
A representative issue of the Sunday Pictorial of March 1939 had an editorial headlined ‘The New MAN!’ It lauded its male readers with a rhetoric that was to be revived and loudened during the Macmillan years. ‘There is no smug complacency about the New Man of the New Britain. He’s awake, virile, courageous, eager to defend his hard-won freedom, resolved at all costs to remain supreme. The mind of the New Man is no longer clogged with worn-out doctrines and moral shams.’ In the same issue of 1939 there was an equally characteristic feature depicting Mayfair in terms that dived from inverted snobbery to salacity. ‘Shiny limousines glide through the quiet streets. Disdainful duchesses take pompous Pekinese on shopping expeditions. Ducal mansions look down their noses at £10,000 cottages. Butlers buttle; head-waiters pocket £5 tips; and smart page boys scurry across the roads laden with the merchandise of Hartnell and Molyneux.’ However, the backstreets behind ‘skyscraper hotels and blocks of luxury flats’ were ‘honeycombed with flatlets kept by ladies of easy virtue’.8
In 1945, King’s newspapers helped Labour to win a swingeing victory in the general election. ‘You must remember,’ Churchill’s daughter warned of the impending Conservative defeat, ‘the Daily Mirror is widely read by all Ranks and especially the Other Ranks.’ Its tone was youthful, demotic and irreverent. King and Cudlipp subjected the secrets of sex and power to the same levelling demystification. They identified sexual candour with modernity, cheeriness and populism. Their democratic openness hit the circulation of the News of the World, with its sickly hypocrisies and furtive guiltiness.9
Of all English newspapers, the Sunday Pictorial gave most coverage to the publication in 1948 of Kinsey’s American research, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. The paper then resolved to finance complementary research into English sexual attitudes by Tom Harrisson’s Mass Observation network: 2,052 members of the public were interviewed, while 450 members of Mass Observation’s voluntary panel gave information. The results were published by the Sunday Pictorial in a five-part serial during 1949. This was a rare example of the Sunday press not displaying repressive, derogatory malice about sexual secrets, and typified the Cudlipp-King approach to explaining the riddles of political and erotic power. One-third of respondents approved of sex outside marriage, particularly among engaged couples. Two-thirds favoured birth control. A quarter of husbands and a fifth of wives admitted adultery. Forty-nine per cent of bachelors and thirty-eight per cent of spinsters claimed experience of intercourse. A quarter of men had used prostitutes; twelve per cent had experienced ‘homosexual relations’; another eight per cent admitted milder same-sex contacts. Ninety-five per cent of men and sixty-six per cent of women said they had masturbated. A Labour MP who was chairman of the Birmingham Town Crier denounced the articles: ‘I have a girl who is still at school, and she takes the Pictorial. The recent Sunday Pictorial articles are real “stinkers”. Who went to bed with whom and how many times, is no sort of Sunday morning breakfast reading for young girls and boys.’10
Coverage of John Christie’s necrophilia in the Rillington Place murder trial of June 1953, more than the weekly Sunday circulation stunts, aroused revulsion. The General Council of the Press was launched during that summer – funded by newspaper owners and with council membership restricted to newspaper editors – to evade the threat of statutory regulation of press conduct. The Council met quarterly, and issued colourless, starchy reports of its deliberations. The second of these, in October 1953, deplored ‘the unwholesome exploitation of sex by certain newspapers’, which was ‘calculated to injure public morals, especially as newspapers and periodicals are seen and read by young persons’. However, editors of populist newspapers showed a studied insolence towards the General Council, especially during its inaugural phase under the chairmanship of Lord Astor of Hever, the remote, high-minded proprietor of The Times. The General Council remained an organisation of lofty self-esteem but neutered powers even after its restructuring as the Press Council in 1962.11
‘Newspapers and periodicals, by their unwholesome exploitation of sex, are corrupting the moral sense of the nation,’ Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury, declared in November 1953. ‘The papers in question have owners and editors, sub-editors and reporters, men with wives and families and domestic virtues. They cannot really enjoy the passage through their own minds of what they put into the minds of others. Will they not bravely face a reformation of heart, of moral judgment, of public duty, and of journalistic practice?’ The Archbishop called also for a revival of old notions of privacy, ‘which would abolish the smart, impudent and offensive ways of referring to individuals and their private concerns, which spoil so much of modern journalism’. Sir Victor Gollancz, despite publishing a mordant pen portrait of Fisher, nevertheless agreed with him about yellow journalism. ‘With the vilest of motives, to increase profit,’ Gollancz wrote in 1953, ‘the million-circulation newspapers have gone all out to titillate those sadistic and lascivious instincts that lie dormant in almost everyone; for this is the way, they think rightly or wrongly, to get more readers and down their rivals.’ C. S. Lewis similarly denounced proprietors and editors who profited from spreading ‘envy, hatred, suspicion and confusion’. The trouble was that no one hesitated to drink, joke or shake hands with journalists, any less than to read their stories. They enjoyed ‘all the sense of secret power and all the sweets of a perpetually gratified inferiority complex while at the same time having the entrée to honest society’.12
In November 1953, Cudlipp responded to this outcry with his three-part series: ‘Sex, Crime, and the Press’. ‘The Daily Mirror is not a pompous newspaper,’ he declared. ‘We are flippant about flippant matters, serious about serious ones – but we try not to be a bore about anything.’ His newspapers never truckled to puritanism. ‘The whole nation laughed at the silly attempt made to agitate Shropshire Women’s Institutes into demanding a ban on pictures of girls wearing bikinis … What’s disgusting about a pretty girl – if you aren’t faded and jealous?’ His newspapers were righteous campaigners. ‘When we learn of evils it’s our job to expose them. We detest hypocrisy. We give plain meanings in plain words … Fogies object to us because we’re lively. WE think it a crime against life to be tiresome. We’re a cheeky, daring, gay newspaper. But we’re blowed if we are a dirty newspaper.’ Cudlipp’s phrases were more plausible than those of King, who argued that reports of violence in his newspapers diverted people from committing murder. ‘Crime vicariously enjoyed in print is a substitute for violent crime itself,’ he argued in 1963. ‘If some people can read about murder, their murderous instincts will be sufficiently satisfied to remove the temptation to commit an actual murder themselves.’13
A paradox of the 1950s was that as the English increasingly claimed sexual acts as the private business of consenting adults, beyond the purview of clergy, magistrates and police, there was simultaneously a growing desire for the intimate details of people’s lives to be exposed to the dazzling searchlights of newspaper prurience. The collection of ‘human interest’ stories or the photographs that illustrated them was unscrupulous. It was to remedy a deteriorating situation that Lord Mancroft in 1961 introduced in the House of Lords his Right of Privacy Bill, which was intended to protect privacy and give rights of redress. It would have enabled the suing of journalists who published, without the plaintiffs’ consent, information about their personal affairs which was calculated to distress or embarrass.
To show the need of such legislation, Mancroft cited the invasion by newsmen and photographers of the Munich hospital where the Manchester United manager Matt Busby and surviving players in his soccer team lay after their air crash of 1958, and similar intrusion when Aneurin Bevan lay mortally ill in hospital in 1960. He cited the bullying of Sir John Huggins at the time of his divorce and re-marriage in 1958; the callous, humiliating publicity given to the emigration plans of the parents of a convicted murderer; and the harrying of Colonel Christopher Hunter. At a quarter past one on the morning after his lovelorn daughter had committed suicide, Hunter’s front doorbell was rung. A voice called: ‘It’s the police.’ Colonel Hunter and his wife came down from bed, unhappy and confused, in their dressing gowns, to be caught on their front doorstep by a flashlight photographer, who then sped off in a car.14
Reporters and photographers, wearing pork-pie hats and scruffy raincoats, had no qualms about invading their quarry’s house: clambering over a wall into the garden; entering by an open window in summertime; ringing the doorbell, shoving past whoever answered the door, and firing a fusillade of questions once they had marched inside. If their quarry left home by car, one or two of them would swerve their vehicles in front, and drive slowly on the crown of the road to prevent overtaking, while the rest followed in a phalanx behind. Reporters and photographers were proud of their deceptions: inveigling their way into houses pretending to be meter readers; equipping themselves with flowers or grapes and invading hospital rooms masquerading as relatives; waylaying children on their way home from school; threatening incessant persecution (‘I’m going to be here all day, and we’ll go on asking until you talk to us’) or harassment of loved ones (‘If you won’t tell us, we know who to ask’); breaking confidences; bribing and suborning; inventing unattributed quotes. Sir Richard Glyn had constituents whose baby had been murdered by a maniac: ‘The mother,’ Glyn complained in 1963, ‘almost unconscious from shock, was receiving medical attention when the house was invaded by a journalist and a photographer. The latter forced his way into her bedroom in order to obtain “an exclusive picture” and had to be ejected by other members of the family.’15
The Duke of Atholl and his fellow press peers resisted Mancroft’s Bill as an unjustifiable restriction on journalists’ duty to report fearlessly; but it was the Lord Chancellor, Kilmuir, who squashed the bill on behalf of the government. His disingenuous speech implied that Lord Porter’s committee on defamation had, after conscientious thought, reported in 1948 that it was impractical to legislate to ensure privacy. In truth, Porter’s committee had reported that privacy was outside the terms of their remit. Kilmuir also objected that such cases would have to be tried before juries, who were unreliable in the amounts they awarded in damages. He did not explain why, if libel and slander actions were tried before juries, privacy cases should not be. Kilmuir denied that protection for privacy in England failed the standards set by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights (1950) which, he falsely insisted, applied only to interference by governments in individual privacy. Kilmuir refused to refer privacy for consideration by the Law Reform Committee.16
Although the government was scared of confronting press abuses, Macmillan as Prime Minister was increasingly exasperated by what he saw as Fleet Street’s vulgar stupidity. ‘The only exception to the deterioration of all the Press into treating politics, economics, finance, literature with a sort of “servants’ hall gossip” technique is The Times,’ he wrote in 1961. ‘It is sometimes very silly; often intellectually patronising; but it is not corrupt.’17 His dislike of press stunts was to lead him to confront Fleet Street exaggerations at the time of the Vassall spy case in 1962 – a confrontation that proved decisive to the development of the Profumo Affair. Moreover, despite Macmillan’s qualified praise, The Times did not fulfil all that its buyers wanted from their newspapers: forty-four per cent of its readers also read the Daily Express in 1958, and thirty-two per cent read the Daily Mirror.
Beaverbrook’s Express newspapers were seedbeds of ancient rancour. They pursued vendettas, smeared people and magnified spiteful gossip. A friend of the old man recounted in 1962 that when he mentioned that he would like to contribute an article, Beaverbrook purred softly, ‘Whom do you wish to attack?’ Beaverbrook typically used his power to persecute a reclusive baronet, Sir John Ellerman, from envy that he had inherited £20 million at the age of twenty-two. For a quarter of a century his newspapers inserted disobliging paragraphs about the Duke of Hamilton, partly because he was a duke, but chiefly because Hamilton as a young parliamentary candidate had rejected an offer of Beaverbrook’s support during a by-election. Other rebuffs were revenged. In 1949, hearing of Isaiah Berlin’s scintillating diplomatic reports on American politics and society, Beaverbrook summoned the Oxford don and asked him to write for Express newspapers. He was incredulous when the young man did not immediately submit to his overtures. He could arrange luxurious living, he told Berlin: ‘there could be – and it was an offer, he declared, that was not made to many – there could be a discreet flat where Berlin could entertain – a lady; indeed ladies, if need be, could even materialise’. Berlin resisted these blandishments, and shortly afterwards a BBC radio talk by him was decried in a leading article in the Evening Standard which Beaverbrook had perhaps dictated to one of his minions. Slurs and innuendos abounded in Beaverbrook’s newspapers. Macmillan noted in his diary in 1957 that they had sunk to the level of Confidential (an American scandal sheet), by entrapment of the Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd. While holidaying in Spain, Lloyd was tracked by a Daily Express cameraman, who snapped him walking with a friend and the friend’s wife. The husband, however, was excised from a doctored photograph of Lloyd with the woman published under the caption ‘Who is the Señorita?’ ‘Beaverbrook,’ thought Macmillan, ‘could stoop no lower.’18
J. B. Priestley had Beaverbrook in mind when he wrote in 1962 that he did not resent the power of newspapers to criticise everything and everybody. What he disliked was ‘their conviction that they are among the sacred objects and persons above all criticism, and that any public man bold enough to challenge this conviction may become the subject of a vendetta, disguised as honest news-gathering, that may last for years’.19 Few newsmen felt more sacrosanct from criticism than the Mirror Group’s Cecil Harmsworth King.
King was born in 1901. His mother, whom he hated, was a sister of Northcliffe and Rothermere. She held that monotony was improving for children. King’s eldest brother died at the battle of Ypres; his cousins Vere and Vyvyan Harmsworth – the Rothermere heirs – were killed in the First World War too; another cousin, Alfred Harmsworth, was castrated by wounds sustained at the Somme. Worse still was the calamity of King’s school holidays in the last year of the war. He and his surviving brother were pupils at Winchester College. After visiting their parents in Dublin in 1918, their mother sent them back to Winchester on separate Irish Sea steamers. At the last moment, King asked to travel on the earlier ship: his brother, who took his place on the Leinster, drowned when it was torpedoed by a German submarine. King’s cold, twisted sorrow, like his conviction that he was predestined for supreme power, was intensified by this tragedy. He wrote in his memoirs that he had hated himself until old age, and always hankered for suicide. For most of his adulthood he suffered from psoriasis – raw bleeding skin and scales – which deepened his woebegone moods. His self-loathing, though, had a self-congratulatory tinge.
The Daily Mail managing director who was ordered to give King his first job threatened but failed to break him. King became a director of his uncle Rothermere’s Daily Mirror in 1929. He led the new regime that was installed there in the 1930s. Its keynotes became more assertive after the abdication crisis of 1936, during which the Daily Mirror was less deferential than other newspapers. Thereafter it was always class-conscious, with jibes at aristocratic adultery. King selected Hugh Cudlipp, an abrasive young Welshman, as the Daily Mirror’s features editor in 1935. When King was appointed as editorial director of the Sunday Pictorial in 1937, Cudlipp, aged just twenty-four, was his choice as editor.
Cudlipp had been born in Cardiff in 1913, son of a commercial traveller in eggs and bacon, and grandson of a docks policeman. He was relieved to finish with schooling at the age of fourteen. His journalistic apprenticeship was served on a weekly newspaper serving a dormitory seaside suburb of Cardiff. At the age of fifteen he left Wales to work for Lord Kemsley’s Manchester Evening Chronicle. He thrived as a district reporter covering Blackpool: watching the English working classes holidaying was, he believed, an invaluable training for populist journalism. In 1932 he transferred to one of Kemsley’s Fleet Street titles, the Sunday Chronicle, where he was appointed features editor at the age of twenty. Three years later he joined the Daily Mirror.
Cudlipp enlisted in 1940, and fought on active service before launching the British forces’ newspaper, Union Jack. His military experiences honed his understanding of his readers’ aspirations as much as his training in Blackpool. They raised him in the world’s view, too: this bagman’s son was demobilised in 1946 with the rank of lieutenant colonel. In 1951, King made him editorial director of both the Daily Mirror and Sunday Pictorial. For the next seventeen years the two men collaborated in a formidable partnership. By the early 1960s the Mirror Group owned the Sunday Pictorial, The People (together commanding over forty per cent of Sunday sales), the Daily Herald and Daily Mirror, together with the six leading women’s magazines published in Britain, and held one-quarter of the shares in Associated Television.
Cudlipp never read a book if he could avoid it. He found it unbearable to sit still in a theatre for more than one act. It was as if plays were newspaper columns: it should be enough to read the first paragraph to get the story. His books Publish and Be Damned! (1953) and At Your Peril (1962) were ghosted for him. In them, Cudlipp resembled a celebrity cook praising his own recipes. His journalism was ‘rumbustious’, At Your Peril boasted. ‘Defying the conventions. Hastening the inevitable in social change. Cocking a snook at the hoary traditions and pomposities of our times. Fighting the taboos.’ Cudlipp’s working credo ran: ‘Say it first, get away with it first, and others will follow. At all events, say it first.’ For a newspaper to boom in popularity, ‘it must be alarmingly provocative in every issue and abundantly confident of its own importance’.20
A survey of English journalism extolled the Cudlipp-King regime in 1957: ‘the Daily Mirror has kicked, jeered, argued, fought, joked and shouted its way up. It has insulted powerful men. Its editors have been brought to court. It has been threatened with suppression. It has been called subversive, irresponsible, pornographic. Always it has kept on the side of the “ordinary” people.’ More than any other newspaper the Daily Mirror had identified itself with ‘the century of the common man’. With its ‘spluttering outrage’, and clamorous, denunciatory headlines, it was primarily ‘a paper of opposition’. What readers noticed most, though, were ‘the strip cartoons, the teasing cuties, the babies, the sob-stuff, the bottoms and busts’.21
Harold Macmillan lunched with King and Cudlipp in 1955. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more unpleasant type than Mr King. Mr Cudlipp (I wd say) though quite reckless, was not without a certain bias towards the interests of his country, always supposing that his personal interests were not involved.’ Meeting them again for luncheon a year later he judged them ‘as good a pair of ruffians as you cd find anywhere’. In 1957 the Macmillans gave a Downing Street luncheon for Cudlipp: ‘He is able, & not unreasonable – altho’ naturally, like all such journalists, without any scruples about truth, morality, good faith & the like.’22
King stood six feet four inches tall. His rumpled clothes showed his indifference to convention. Humankind, he believed, would live in brutal chaos unless discipline was imposed on the morass of fools by a strong leader. He dealt with letters by returning them with brusque responses written in biro in his even, sprawling script. Sometimes he sealed envelopes with a strip of sellotape. He loathed late nights, and stalked out of public dinners before ten regardless of the eminence of the speakers or his neighbours at table. For thirty years, despite his newspapers’ denunciations of the Tories’ grouse-moor image, he owned a shooting estate in Aberdeenshire, where the bags were mainly grouse.
Every year King made stately business tours of the Commonwealth: his newspapers in Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone were as valued by him as those in London. He selected office lackeys to accompany him, put them under his surveillance and delivered trenchant assessments: ‘That goose will never be a swan’; ‘Not ruthless enough’; ‘No fire in his belly’. The lackeys returned with tales of their own: how he ‘fought his way through a mob of four hundred excited gibbering Indians to buy a ticket for a native cinema in Bombay’, as they told Cudlipp; ‘the loud guffaw that astonished a group of nude African villagers when King discovered that the total equipment of their mud hat consisted of a sleeping mat, an eating bowl – and a selection of Hollywood pin-ups stuck on the wall’. In advance of his aircraft landing, his favourite meals were ordered: groundnut stew and palm oil chop. A fog of imperial condescension enveloped King’s tours. ‘He has pow-wows with the African editors and the commercial staffs, listening with patience to their problems and aspirations: with affection they call him “the father of the family”,’ Cudlipp described. ‘When the pow-wows are over, and he has listened to the politicians in their fine new buildings in the city, King wanders off on safari in the villages in his ill-fitting linen suit and floppy straw hat, talking with the chiefs in their mud huts or palaces, and giving lumps of sugar to the hordes of delighted, gurgling children who follow him around with smiles as long and broad as sliced melon.’23
Carnal possession was King’s only means of mitigating his emotional isolation. ‘Sex to me is suffering,’ he copied into his commonplace book. ‘This is what it means, has meant since my first pubertal longings, the fire in my head and loins, sometimes such that any woman, my mother or any other, would have helped; and what it has meant through two marriages and now into my sixties. I mean suffering identical with the pangs of Tantalus, a mental and physical hunger, a desperate longing for that which I can see, which is all around, but which I cannot touch at will – and touch, physical contact, is essential for any easement of my condition – but … which, even when perhaps briefly I can satiate or at least blunt its ferocity, returns next moment more urgent than ever.’ King was dismissive of moral panics about changes in sexual conduct, and credited his newspapers’ frankness for inducing these changes: ‘a great deal of the tut-tutting is due to the fact that working-class morals have invaded the middle classes’. Whereas men paid for illicit affairs in money, venereal infection, wifely reproaches or scandal, he admonished women that their ‘promiscuity had to be paid for’ in other ways. It was not a question of hell-fire, ‘but a woman tends to leave a bit of herself behind with each lover and at the end is so dispersed that she can never reassemble herself and become a complete woman. Perhaps this was the origin of the phrase “a ruined woman”.’24
Presumably King prided himself on leaving each of the many women with whom he had affairs reduced by their final parting. He warned his first wife before their marriage that he had no intention of fidelity, but she was too naive to understand what he meant. ‘Love-making,’ he told her, ‘is the only form of athletics that interests me in the least. It is the only handcraft too! In one form or another it is the only pleasure in life worth talking about.’ His target was to have a dozen women a year. He propositioned his wife’s twin sister, and her friends, as well as taking mistresses from his office. In the 1950s, when he invited his young daughter-in-law to holiday with him without her husband, she concluded that he had designs. He subjected his wife to invasive interrogation about her thoughts, beliefs and emotions, and criticised her replies relentlessly; but when he explained his hopes and vulnerability with unremitting emphasis, he required her responses to be wholly uncritical. King’s wife lurched into depression with occasional bouts of paranoid aggression. Following electric shock treatment, she spiralled by the mid-1950s into horrifying delusions, furies and self-loathing.25
In 1955, King began an affair with Ruth Railton, a choral conductor who a few years earlier had founded the National Youth Orchestra, which the Daily Mirror sponsored. Telling his adult daughter that he was going to live with another woman, he said that he could not yet give her name: ‘Let us call her Marilyn Monroe’. Railton, explains King’s biographer, ‘pictured herself occupying a bower of metaphorical fluffy clouds and pink roses from which she exuded love, kindness, sensitivity, spirituality and truth’, but in truth was ‘jealous, merciless, fiercely manipulative and an inveterate liar’. She claimed to have fought with the Dutch wartime resistance and therefore to be the object of postwar Nazi death threats; to have trained in sexual technique in a Paris brothel; to have been an Olympic rider, Dior model, ballerina and psychic consulted by police in murder cases. She convinced King that she possessed paranormal powers, and claimed that she could make herself invisible. He finally married her in October 1962, three days after his divorce was finalised. Several of his colleagues at Mirror Group applied the word ‘evil’ to her. One called her ‘a maniac’.26
Hugh Cudlipp was twenty-two when he married a fellow journalist, Bunny Parnell, an upholsterer’s daughter. During their miserable, wet honeymoon in the Channel Islands she announced that Tom Darlow, editor of John Bull, was her lover. This affair continued unabated through her marriage. When she became pregnant by Darlow, she tried to hide the paternity of the child by telling Cudlipp that she wanted his baby and inveigling him into unprotected sex. It was only when she died, in 1938, following a Caesarean birth in which the baby also died, that Cudlipp realised her ruse. A few hours after his wife’s death, Cudlipp went to the Sunday Pictorial office to check the late edition. An assistant suggested substituting a new front-page lead, proffering a freshly received report with the words, ‘this is a better human interest story than that one’. Cudlipp replied: ‘Don’t talk to me about human interest tonight.’27
Cudlipp liked flirting with pretty women, taking them on dates, and seducing them. ‘They are tired of thinking, they are tired of working, they are tired of planning; they simply want to be loved, and they simply want babies,’ he told Sunday Pictorial readers in an article of 1939 about women:
The young woman of to-day still talks a certain amount of drivel about her career, but she’d sooner forget all about it if a man worth marrying proposed to her … The truth is just this: That if the New Man of the New Britain is virile and courageous, the New Woman wants to be nothing more than the sort of mate he deserves.
Back to the home. That is where the modern woman wants to go. She will deny it until she is blue in the gills, but she wants to go back there just the same. With her cooking, and her sewing, and her man, and her baby. Does she want to serve groceries over the counter, dish up cosmetics and lotions in a beauty parlour, weave materials for other women’s dresses in a mill, or tap the keys of a typewriter in a dreary, dusty office? Not on your life!28
For several years Cudlipp had an affair with a Mirror journalist, Eileen Ascroft, and in 1945, after her divorce, the couple married. She was a ruthless operator surrounded by dazed human sacrifices to her ambition. During the 1950s the Cudlipps were the most successful couple in Fleet Street. There was adultery on both sides in the marriage. Ascroft supposedly had an affair with one of their chauffeurs (the Cudlipps had a battery of secretaries, housekeepers and drivers to support their high-pressure lives). She had a long tangle with a married man whom she had met during the war. One has a sense of desperate flings masquerading as soigné diversions. An obvious affair with one of her husband’s closest colleagues was tolerated by Cudlipp, who was involved with her friend Jodi Hyland, editor of Woman’s Mirror (whose devotion he however had to share with a pug with a weak bladder). A revealing aspect of Cudlipp’s adulteries in this period was that the great democrat enjoyed exercising droit de seigneur by having sex with the wives of men who worked for him. It added to his feeling of sexual power. He liked to tarnish what he could not permanently possess.
Cudlipp was profiled by the Observer in 1961 as ‘one of those earnest, clever, bold, rhetorical men who seem to have been given a hard push at an early age, after which they have never been able to remain still. At the age of forty-seven Cudlipp cultivates tycoonery: telephones interrupt, the gin is freely offered, the cigars look like truncheons, the jokes to subordinates are tinged with meaning, and Cudlipp’s charm alternates rapidly with Cudlipp’s brusqueness.’ The paper found in him that cardinal virtue of the 1960s: edginess. ‘He is better at toppling the mighty, at seeing the catch in things, than he is at taking his own beliefs seriously; this is a highly contemporary talent … there’s no doubt that Cudlipp is about the most successful journalist in Britain when it comes to pleasing the public.’29
Eileen Cudlipp died in 1962 of an overdose of Carbrital, a hypnotic sleeping-draught. In the preceding week Cudlipp’s book, At Your Peril, had been launched with a round of parties. On the evening before her death the Cudlipps attended a party at Sonning-on-Thames, where they had a new house, but she motored back from the party to their London house, also on the Thames, at Strand-on-the-Green, near Hammersmith. This was ostensibly because the curtains were not yet hung in their Sonning bedroom. ‘Sorry to desert you,’ she wrote in a note to her husband, ‘but I had to try & get some sleep. As you know I haven’t slept for nights – probably the excitement of the book. After Dr Thomas’ excellent pills & a good night’s rest I’ll be down feeling fine.’ Although the inquest recorded a verdict of accidental death, a few of the dead woman’s friends and her many enemies believed she had killed herself. A year later Cudlipp married Jodi Hyland.30
Until the early 1960s, Cecil King drank copiously. During long expense-account lunches he would order an aperitif, wine with the meal, and brandy afterwards. When he reached home in the evenings, he would down a treble gin and tonic before killing a bottle of wine. At parties he drank heavily to loosen his tongue. He liked martinis. He would leave his glass at a small distance, affect not to notice when it was filled by a waiter, and swallow the refreshed glass in a gulp. In restaurants he ordered wine by the magnum. (He also ate in a hurry, swallowing each of his breakfast fried eggs in one gulp.) King renounced alcohol on physician’s orders at the age of sixty, outlived two hard-drinking sons, and in sobriety was more frustrated than ever.
Until the early 1960s, visitors to Cudlipp’s office before eleven in the morning would be offered a beer, except on days of celebration, when there would be a champagne conference at 10.30. After eleven he used to open a bottle of white wine. Like King, Cudlipp had power lunches accompanied by aperitifs, wine, and digestifs. He had blazing rows when drunk. His behaviour and judgement became so unreliable that King, having sobered himself up, insisted that his colleague must stop drinking. Cudlipp agreed to renounce spirits, except brandy, which he counted as wine.
The egalitarianism of King and Cudlipp was undetectable in Mirror Group’s brash, self-conscious skyscraper offices, built on the site of a bombed drapery at Holborn Circus at a cost of £9.5 million, and opened in 1961. There had seldom been an office so status conscious in its interior arrangements. Every employee’s place in the hierarchy was assessed with inexorable logic and fixed by fine gradations. King had a private lift to his ninth-floor suite, which as symbol of his paramountcy contained an open-grate fireplace – the first one ever installed in a centrally heated, air-conditioned office in a smokeless zone. King also had his own dining room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and luxurious carpeting. Cudlipp, by contrast, had only a refrigerator, bedroom, private lavatory and shower; but his bedroom was designated as his ‘studio’ to show that he was the creative ace rather than financial brains of the business.
Other directors had built-in cocktail cabinets and televisions, but to signal the importance of advertising revenue, only the advertising director had his own refrigerator. Whereas directors had rubber underlay to their carpets, editors had felt. Journalists were reduced to rubber-tiled floors, with no carpets. Only direct-ors could lock their office doors from inside. Deputy editors had venetian blinds and metal desks rather than the curtains and wooden desks of editors. Men with double-pedestal desks knew their superiority to single-pedestal men. Top men’s offices had brick walls, the next level of prestige had walls of frosted glass from floor to ceiling; the middle-rankers had frosted glass only halfway; and the subordinates worked behind plain glass. The office telephone directory printed some extension numbers in blue, to indicate that only internal numbers could be dialled from that instrument. Numbers printed in green indicated that the instrument could be used to dial external local numbers. Red numbers denoted a telephone which could connect to operators to make trunk and overseas calls. Racing tipsters (red telephones on double-pedestal desks) outranked news reporters (green telephones on single-pedestal desks). Chief sub-editors excelled sub-editors because they could eat in the executives’ restaurant, instead of the staff cafeteria, although never, of course, in the directors’ dining room.31
King specialised in destructive criticism, and had a jealous, levelling spirit. His resentments and Cudlipp’s envy ensured that their papers pilloried nepotism and the Old School Tie, although King was the Wykehamist nephew of Northcliffe and Rothermere. Moreover, despite his newspapers’ diatribes against Eton, King sent two of his sons to the school, and his other boy to Winchester. Eventually the Daily Mirror denounced Eton so viciously that one governor proposed Michael King’s expulsion. Other pupils became so hostile that the youth insisted on leaving Eton, to the sorrow of his masters, and went to work in a Glasgow shipyard. King and Cudlipp taunted privilege and decried luxury; but while their columnist Cassandra inveighed against those who dined in expensive restaurants during food rationing, they ate in the costliest places. Cudlipp said in 1962 that his newspapers were fighting notions ‘that all life begins on the playing fields of Eton. That it gets its second breath in a college in Oxford or Cambridge. Its third breath as a major in the officers’ mess of the Household Cavalry. Its fourth breath in an exclusive West End club. And its last breath as an obscure and impoverished parson in a quaint English village.’ He ranged his newspapers against ‘a restricted ruling clique, an upper crust of polite and discreet intellectuals, belonging to the same class and clubs, marrying the same sort of women and producing the same sort of children’.32
These editorial tactics gelled with the thinking of Labour poli-ticians like Wilfred Fienburgh, who believed that many Labour supporters were only jerked into voting at elections if they had something to vote against. When Labour won its great election victory in 1945, and one newly elected MP shouted in the Commons ‘We are the Masters now!’, the parliamentary party assumed that because it was the working-class party, and the working class far outnumbered the rest of the electorate, they were guaranteed to remain the permanent government. Labour MPs were puzzled, if not affronted, when it proved that they had no automatic majority. Fienburgh deduced that Labour voters in 1945, 1950 and 1951 feared that the Tories would return to mass unemployment, and filed into the polling booths to vote against. But there was no industrial depression or mass unemployment under the governments of Churchill, Eden and Macmillan; nothing for Labour supporters to fear or vote against at the general elections of 1955 and 1959. The decision of ten per cent of these voters not to vote contributed to the party’s defeat, Fienburgh judged. ‘The pot-bellied cartoon capitalist has ground very few faces. Indeed, he has provided a few million television screens to which working-class faces have been glued. There were in consequence no bogey men to vote against in 1955.’33
Cudlipp urged Labour to revive its vote by using Macmillan’s toffs as bogeymen. ‘As you’re bound to lose next time, let’s lose on a fine anti-privilege campaign,’ he urged Richard Crossman in 1958. Macmillan’s triumph in the general election of 1959, whereby the Conservatives increased their majority from sixty to one hundred, dismayed him. He blamed himself for misinterpreting his readers’ temper, and declared a holiday from politics. Crossman disappeared as a Daily Mirror columnist; the 1945 slogan ‘Forward with the People’ was discarded overnight, and the newspaper proclaimed that its new emphasis would be on ‘YOUTH’. The newspaper signalled this change by substituting the ‘Life Story of Tommy Steele’, the Bermondsey boy who became England’s first rock’n’roll teen idol, for its usual editorial. Other newspapers made money by starting moral panics about the young, belabouring them with insults, and criticising those like the Mirror Group who pandered to them. ‘It is natural,’ King retorted magisterially in 1963, ‘when we are worried about juvenile delinquency or sexual promiscuity to seek scapegoats. The root causes, the decay of religion, the abdication of parental authority, earlier puberty, greater mobility and life in large cities, are too unmanageable, and it is easier to blame the newspapers.’34
Cudlipp’s truce with privilege was short-lived. Mirror journalists soon devised new angles to stab at tradition, civility and amateurism while promoting clichés about innovation and expertise. The imagery of their Wake Up, Britain! campaign, for example, contrasted Mr Yesterday, a gent with furled umbrella, briefcase, bowler hat, and breastpocket white handkerchief, with Mr Today, equipped with space helmet and futuristic protective uniform fit for an experimental laboratory. The Daily Mirror was not, Cudlipp boasted in 1962, one of those newspapers ‘treating the usually vain pronouncements of Archbishops as if they were the word of God; imagining that the demise of an unknown peer in a midnight crash between expensive limousines was of any greater moment than the unhappy end of a railway wheel-tapper crushed between buffers in the sidings at Crewe on a wet Sunday morning; extolling the aplomb of wealthy, titled drones gambling at Deauville and ignoring the harassed joys of the plebeian customers at the Margate whelk stall where the vinegar, though watered, is free’.35
Most popular newspapers raised as much dirt and noise as they could during the Profumo Affair – but by unthinking reflex. They wanted to raise circulation by sensational stories and shameless stunts. Beaverbrook’s Express papers had a side agenda of hurting the Astors. The King-Cudlipp newspapers, by contrast, had premeditated, coherent tactics to accomplish their strategic aim of damaging the reputation and confidence of Macmillan’s government. Their newspapers were the ones that seized on the Keeler-Profumo affair not as a weapon for a general thumping of the Conservative Party, but as a poisoned stiletto which, if carefully inserted, would kill off a political class. They made the Profumo Affair into the ignition point of Britain’s modernisation crisis, which had been seething since 1958. Their strategy was facilitated by the changes in public mood that had occurred during the seven years of Macmillan affluence.
‘Ours is an acquisitive society, interested mainly in its physical wellbeing and the possession and enjoyment of luxuries,’ King summarised. ‘The cohesion of the family itself, aided by the fireside television set and the family car, is stronger than for generations.’ The fireside television proved a more powerfully levelling device even than Mirror Group Newspapers. In 1951 there were 764,000 combined television and radio licences. Stimulated by the Coronation in 1953, this figure had risen to over 4 million by 1955 – the year when ITV was inaugurated. There were 10 million television sets in 1960 (by which year seventy-two per cent of people had access to both channels) and 13 million by 1964. Each set commanded the room in which it was installed. ‘There it sits,’ wrote a television critic, ‘shouting slogans and snatches of song, and wasting your time, and grabbing your attention.’36
For years broadcasters were forbidden from discussing on air any subject that was to be debated in Parliament within the next fortnight. In 1955, for example, panellists on BBC’s In the News could not animadvert on the hydrogen bomb because it was soon to be discussed in the Commons. When challenged on this suppression Churchill, as Prime Minister, insisted that it would be ‘shocking’ for debates to be forestalled ‘by persons who had not the status or responsibility of Members of Parliament’. The rule became insupportable during the Suez crisis, was suspended experimentally, and abolished in July 1957.37
The BBC continued to uphold exacting standards, hierarchical authority and seemliness. It was, wrote a former programme assistant, Penelope Fitzgerald, ‘a cross between a civil service, a powerful moral force and an amateur theatrical company which wasn’t too sure where the next week’s money was coming from’. Apart from vaudeville entertainment, it produced bland, deferential programmes. Henry Fairlie in 1959 pictured the scene when a minister or trade unionist arrived for interview. As the eminent visitor is ushered into the ‘hospitality’ room, a BBC mandarin, whose eye has been fixed on the door, ‘bolts the last corner of his sandwich and advances, hand outstretched, an obsequious smile laid across a face which is sallow from days spent in fruitless committees; he breathes the ritual BBC welcome to eminent persons, “How good of you to come”, and, overcome, relapses into a bold offer of a glass of sherry; if this is the kind of programme in which the eminent person is to be questioned by a number of journalists, the next fifteen minutes are spent in introducing him to his inquisitors, with the smiling, ritual reassurance, “I don’t think you have anything to fear from Mr – ”; nor does he, for Mr – has already pointed out to him that the point of the programme is, not to put the eminent person on the spot, but to “reveal his personality”.’ If a moment arose during the broadcast when a sharp question seemed likely to pin the interviewee finally to one unambiguous statement, the chairman would save him with an interruption of amiable fatuity: ‘I think we have had enough of that question. May I ask, Sir, if it is true that your hobby is fishing?’38
ITV, by contrast, emerged after loud controversy. Its birth was marked with fanfares and fireworks. It set out to make money. Programmes grabbed attention by challenging settled notions. There was less of the balming equanimity of BBC output. Associated Television’s scriptwriter Wilfred Greatorex felt that the commercial channels brought bracing change to broadcasting. ‘As a monopoly public service, the BBC spoke with an Establishment voice and gave many of its programmes an official hand-out flavour: it was stuffy, academic, able to make cultured noises and to indulge a sickening capacity for genuflection in the presence of the mighty. There were all those safe question-masters with unquestionable degrees and calm, neutral voices. There were all those standard-English accents.’ Greatorex judged that commercial television was developing by the mid-1960s towards ‘classlessness, not surprisingly for it has grown out of the meritocracy’.39
Admittedly, the BBC’s satirical programme That Was The Week That Was, broadcast from November 1962 until December 1963, jeered at the men in power – sometimes for good, well-researched reasons – as it launched its stars on their route towards Mayfair flats, columns in The Times, ducal fathers-in-law, knighthoods and multi-millions. The satirists’ tone of voice, wrote Malcolm Bradbury in 1963, was ‘quizzical, demanding, informal, vernacular, often faintly offensive and doctrinaire’. More temperately, the BBC police series Z-Cars, launched in 1962, taught viewers that while it was necessary to respect authority, the people who held authority were neither better nor worse than anyone else. It seems, though, that anti-Establishment organisations and individuals were protected from irreverence. Although Tony Hancock’s television comedy scriptwriters, Alan Simpson and Ray Galton, were not Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament supporters, they dropped the idea of hanging a CND banner on the wall of Hancock’s bedsit lest it bring CND into ridicule. Even progressive intellectuals recognised this bias against unfashionable authority and towards obstructive defiance. ‘Maybe,’ mused Michael Frayn in 1961, ‘we should be trying to inculcate a sense of duty, instead of exploiting the bolshie streak which runs through the otherwise orderly geology of the British character, engender a respect for authority, instead of drilling down to that layer of pure nihilism which makes people open to the suggestion that the Commanding Officer is an ass just because he is the Commanding Officer.’ It might be beneficial to remind commanding officers of the fragility of their authority, and to remind their underlings of their power, but unlimited derision of authority seemed facile, unfair and destructive to Frayn.40
‘Television,’ wrote Cyril Connolly in 1963, ‘is the greatest single factor for change in people’s lives and probably has done much to undermine English puritanism’. The goggle-box, as it was called, started to show criminals, prostitutes, and the sexually or socially marginalised being interviewed full-face without murky lighting to disguise their identities. It was abolishing shame. There were no full-frontal glimpses when Dan Farson visited a nudist camp, but several backward shots: ‘Thank goodness,’ wrote an affronted mother, speaking for the News of the World’s England rather than the Sunday Mirror’s, ‘that my son, aged twenty-four, was out playing table-tennis and thus spared the shame of watching’.41