State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Indeed, although the strikes of the 1970s were later remembered for burly men in donkey jackets warming their hands around braziers, the picket lines often had a distinctly feminine feel. Wives’ support groups played key roles in the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974 – for example, forcing local grocery stores and fish-and-chip shops to lower their prices, or buying food collectively for their families – while both the Grunwick strike of 1976–8 and the massive public sector strikes of early 1979 were largely driven by low-paid women. It was often female trade unionists, moreover, who led the way in campaigning for nurseries and abortion rights, and against rape and domestic abuse. In 1978, the TUC organized a march of 100,000 members against interference in the abortion laws. And a year later, it published a ten-point ‘Equality for Women’ charter, which called not merely for equality but for positive action to promote opportunities for women.41

  But it was not only in the unions that women were making an unprecedented impact. Not only did the 1970s see Britain’s first female party leader and Prime Minister, it also saw a gradual trickle of women into the professions, so that by 1977 they made up 60 per cent of schoolteachers, almost 14 per cent of GPs and 8 per cent of barristers (although by later standards those last figures now look astonishingly low). Newspapers excitedly reported on the first female jockeys, Lloyds underwriters and RSPCA inspectors. Cambridge University appointed Dame Rosemary Murray as its first female vice-chancellor, while the BMA made Dame Josephine Barnes its first female president. In a piece on the effects of the Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts in February 1976, Time magazine noted that Sotheby’s had made 24-year-old Libby Howe the first female auctioneer in its 232-year history, while ‘Linette Simms, 43, black and the mother of six, is now tootling along as the first woman among 350 male London school-bus drivers after previously being turned down because of her sex’. There was even a ‘women’s revolt’ inside MI5, where in November 1972 female employees circulated a petition demanding better promotion prospects, and by the end of the decade female officers (among them the future spy chief Stella Rimington) were at last allowed to run their own agents. And even that bastion of the old order, the Stock Exchange, once one of the capital’s stuffiest and most conservative gentlemen’s clubs, gave in to pressure for change, electing its first women members in March 1973. Bizarrely, one of the reasons given for barring them had been the lack of adequate toilets. But with the opening of the new Stock Exchange Tower on Threadneedle Street, which had excellent facilities, the game was up for the diehards.42

  When we look back at the flood of women into the workplace and the rise of feminism, what we often forget is that they had enormous implications not just for women but for men, too. The days when a husband could confidently expect automatic deference and respect from his wife were over; in some households, the woman even earned more than the man. Men had been exposed as ‘vulnerable, dependent, emotional human beings’, terrified of being judged on their sexual performance, announced Cosmopolitan. Perhaps this was an exaggeration, but in an age when the old hunter-gatherer stereotype seemed to have run its course, the very nature of masculinity was apparently up for grabs. In 1977, the acerbic journalist Christopher Booker wrote that Britain had entered the ‘Age of Mother’, with ‘masculine’ qualities such as ‘prudence, firmness and conservatism’ replaced by ‘feminine’ qualities such as ‘intuition, dash, youthful glamour’ and ‘narcissism, self-love, weakness, irrationality and permissiveness’. Under Edward Heath’s ‘petulant parody of masculinity’, Booker claimed, ‘firmness, rationality, authority and other “male” qualities were at a very low ebb in English life’. As for Harold Wilson, his were apparently the characteristics of ‘a man with a very strong “feminine” side – the pursuit of the outward appearance, guile, winning ways, intuition, conciliation and outward show, punctuated by outbursts of petulance’. And the symptoms of the wider ‘collapse of the “masculine” ’ could be seen in ‘almost every walk of national life – from the reign of a kind of effeminate, unstructured permissiveness in morals, education and the arts … to the craze which swept politics and industry for every kind of “corporatism”, for building up ever larger, more amorphous groups into which everyone could huddle for protection’.43

  It was in the home that the transformation of male identity was most apparent. For decades, men and women, especially in working-class towns, had led virtually segregated lives. Men spent their daylight hours with their workmates and their evenings and weekends at the pub or watching sport; women stayed at home and built up entirely separate circles of friends, based around ‘feminine’ activities such as knitting, bingo and watching television. But as affluence eroded the old bastions of segregation, this was clearly on the way out. Young couples now expected to spend far more time together, and research in 1970 found that a typical married man in his thirties or forties spent just five hours a week with his friends, compared with fifty-three hours with his family. Men now devoted almost all their weekends to their immediate families, whether gardening, doing DIY around the house, taking the car for a spin, or going on some outing or shopping trip. More men, too, were happy to take on a share of domestic tasks, even those that were traditionally seen as ‘feminine’. The 1970 survey found that 70 per cent of professional and managerial men helped with cleaning, cooking and childcare, 16 per cent just did the washing up, and only 14 per cent did nothing, while fully 80 per cent of clerical men lent a hand with cleaning, cooking and the children. Working-class men, though, were much more reluctant to help: one in four refused to do anything, often claiming that their mates would think them ‘effeminate’ if they did.44

  But partly because of these class connotations, it was increasingly unfashionable for men to do nothing around the home. Even the kitchen was no longer a mystery, thanks to Len Deighton’s pioneering graphic cookbooks, in which rugged real men master the culinary arts to produce Continental casseroles worthy of Harry Palmer. As so often, sportsmen led the way, and football magazines often showed stars of the day lending a hand with the housework: Tottenham’s Steve Perryman armed with a carpet-sweeper in a bizarre montage of domestic tasks, say, or the Scottish full back Tommy Gemmell (‘an enthusiastic cook’) stirring a pot and struggling to muster a smile while wearing an apron patterned with baby elephants. In his interviews with the Tottenham squad in 1972, Hunter Davies found that some players were almost prehistoric in their attitudes. Pat Jennings, for example, said proudly that he had ‘never washed a dish’ because ‘in Ireland, men don’t do any housework’, while the future Premier League manager Joe Kinnear, then a cocky 25-year-old, said that he would ‘just want my wife to be a woman, you know, bring up the kids. I’d be the boss.’ But several readily owned up to helping at home: Mike England dried the dishes and put his children to bed; Martin Peters washed up, put his baby to bed and changed the nappies; Terry Naylor helped with the baby and said he wanted ‘to give my wife all the help I can. She works hard in the house.’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the most mature member of the squad who helped the most. ‘I think I should do my share. Juny has a hard day in the house so it’s only fair I should help,’ Alan Mullery explained, adding that he always did the washing up when Coronation Street was on, so that his wife could watch it. He had changed his daughter’s nappies when she was a baby, and still took charge of bath-time when he was at home. ‘I love it,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t miss it for anything.’45

  With their enormous collars, garish shirts, patterned ties and painstakingly curled, shaggy hair, the Tottenham players were excellent advertisements for male fashion in the early 1970s. Long hair, beards, floral designs and extravagant colours had once been seen as reliable signs of decadence, deviance and general degeneracy: now, thanks to cheaper dyeing and production techniques as well as the aesthetic legacy of the counterculture and the influence of overtly nostalgic designers such as Ossie Clark, they had found their way onto the provincial high street. Television and film heroes of the early 1970s, from Peter Wyngarde
’s Jason King to Roger Moore’s James Bond, often dressed in gigantic flares, powder-blue suits and lurid cravats that Richard Hannay or Bulldog Drummond would have found very disturbing indeed. When Moore appeared in the ITC series The Persuaders! (1971–2), he was credited with designing his own clothes: given the preponderance of orange silk shirts and polka-dot ties, however, his taste looks decidedly questionable.

  To be fair, though, it was only a few years since men’s clothes had been almost entirely grey, so it was not surprising that so many men wanted to experiment with wildly radical colours and styles – which is one reason why the look of the early 1970s now seems so horrifically tasteless. Television commercials showed handsome young men in clothes in which their fathers would never have been seen dead, from crotch-bulgingly tight Terylene flares to garish floral shirts. Meanwhile, aftershave commercials invited men to follow their wives in dousing themselves with pungent aromas, from Old Spice (‘the mark of a man’, according to its advertisements) to Brut (endorsed by the reassuring masculine boxer Henry Cooper). Even underwear was undergoing something of a revolution. ‘Bring a little colour to your cheeks,’ read the caption on full-page magazine adverts for Lyle & Scott briefs in 1971. ‘You may be forced to wear pin-stripes on the outside. But you’ve surely got more room to manoeuvre on the inside.’ The even skimpier Undercover-Masters briefs, meanwhile, were billed as ‘masterful, masculine styling’, although it is hard to imagine that, say, Christopher Booker would been happy wearing ‘Sugar Pink’ or ‘Flame Red’ pants.46

  If there was one individual who came to symbolize the apparent changes in masculinity in the early 1970s, that man was the rake and adventurer Jason King, as portrayed by Peter Wyngarde in the ITC shows Department S and Jason King, which ran from 1969 to 1972. The word ‘camp’ hardly does justice to a character described by Jason King’s publicists as ‘flamboyant, extrovert, a lover of the good things in life’: his wardrobe includes silk lavender dressing gowns, suede jackets, snakeskin shoes, a vast array of cravats and a selection of kaftans and kimonos, while he wears his hair in a vast bouffant and sports an outrageous Zapata moustache. Once, hair like this would have been little short of a criminal offence, but in the early 1970s longer hair was all the rage, a fashion that had slowly filtered down the social pyramid from upper-middle-class hippies to ordinary working men. By 1972, many working-class football fans wore their hair so long that they ‘could have passed for hippies, except for their big heavy boots’. And even politicians wore their hair longer. Once installed in Downing Street, Edward Heath grew some impressively bushy sideburns, while front-bench Labour politicians such as Harold Wilson, Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crosland (though not, notably, the conservative Jim Callaghan) took to the campaign trail in 1974 with distinctly shaggy, uncombed hair very different from their neat, clipped styles ten years earlier – a transformation that aptly symbolized what had happened in the meantime to their modernizing ambitions.47

  For some men, however, long hair remained a source of deep anxiety. Tottenham’s manager Bill Nicholson, who had been born in Yorkshire in 1919, wore his own hair in a military crew cut and genuinely loathed long hair. When the club’s youngsters won the Youth Cup in 1971, Nicholson rejected their first team photo, which would be sent to their proud parents, because their hair was too long. The boys were sent off to have it cut, and then the picture was taken again. This kind of antipathy was not unusual. In the opening episode of Rising Damp (1974), Rigsby regards the student Alan’s long hair with utter contempt and suspicion: when Alan points out that Jesus had long hair, Rigsby retorts: ‘He didn’t have a hair-dryer, though, did he? Didn’t give himself blow-waves!’ Reports that his new lodger has short hair fill Rigsby with delight, although he is rather less ecstatic when he turns out to be black. In the first episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, too, hair is a bone of contention: returning from the army, Terry is shocked by his friend Bob’s elaborate bouffant, which Bob does not even allow him to touch, and which symbolizes his status as a domesticated, tamed fiancé. And in Fawlty Towers, Basil Fawlty is outraged when his guest Mr Johnson (the swaggering, shaggy-haired Nicky Henson) proves a great hit with the ladies. Sybil, however, is rather taken with their hirsute guest. ‘You seem to think that we girls should be aroused by people like Gladstone and Earl Haig and Baden-Powell, don’t you?’ she goads her grumbling husband. ‘Well, at least they had a certain dignity,’ Basil retorts. ‘It’s hard to imagine Earl Haig wandering around with his shirt open at the waist, covered with identity bracelets.’ Mr Johnson, he thinks, looks like an ‘orang-utan’ – although as Sybil points out ‘monkeys have fun; they know how to enjoy themselves. That’s what makes them sexy, I suppose.’48

  Since Basil found Mr Johnson outlandish and offensive, he would not have enjoyed being in the audience at the Rainbow Theatre on Seven Sisters Road on 19 August 1972, when Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, Elton John, representatives of the music press and almost 3,000 fans gathered to witness an even more outrageous vision of masculinity. The sound of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, played offstage by the organist from Procol Harum, echoed around the dilapidated former cinema as vast clouds of dry ice poured onto the stage, followed in short order by three awkward-looking men in silver jumpsuits, and then the main attraction: a slim young man wearing silver boxing boots, a greenish jacket open to the waist to reveal his bare torso, and a shock of violently dyed blood-red hair above his pale, spectral face, the cheekbones tinged with rouge. This was Ziggy Stardust; or rather, it was David Bowie, whose theatrical creation was the talk of the rock world in the summer of 1972. The onlookers were enthralled. ‘Judy Garland hasn’t left us!’ wrote the critic from Plays and Players. ‘David Bowie, his delicate face made up to look like hers, has the guts, the glitter, the charm of Garland and yes, even the legs.’ Nobody seemed to mind the overtly homosexual overtones – Mick Jagger even got out of his seat and danced – except one man. ‘That’s it!’ Elton John was overheard telling a friend. ‘He’s gone too far. He’s through!’49

  Bowie is often seen as one of the defining cultural personalities of the early 1970s, not merely because of his shifting sexuality and androgynous image, but because his emphasis on image, theatricality and pastiche, as well as the narcissism of his stage persona, seemed characteristic of the era. Born in suburban Bromley, the son of a charity promotions officer and a cinema usherette, he had broken into pop music first as a Mod and then as a folk singer in the mid-1960s. But he was always fascinated by ideas, masks and marketing slogans, reflecting not only his brief stint in an advertising agency after leaving school, but also the sheer theatricality of British pop music in the age of the Beatles. Although he enjoyed modest success after his first hit single, ‘Space Oddity’, it was not until the invention of Ziggy Stardust, three years later, that he really broke through to national fame. By now, glam rock was all the rage, a genre perfectly suited to (and partly influenced by) Bowie’s obsessive interest in dressing up. With its sense of the theatrical, its simultaneous looking ahead to the future and ransacking the past, and its emphasis on the invented persona of the star as a work of art, glam was bound to appeal to a former advertising man who had studied mime and commedia dell’arte. But there was also another element to its culture of dressing up: a strain of androgyny inherited from forerunners such as Mick Jagger, who had famously worn a dress in the Hyde Park concert in 1969, and Ray Davies of the Kinks, whose song ‘Lola’ (1970), the story of a boy falling for a transvestite, anticipated much of what was to come.50

  From a relatively early stage, Bowie’s publicity traded on his androgynous looks and ambiguous sexuality. In April 1971, he raised eyebrows by posing in what he called a ‘man’s dress’ on the cover of his album The Man Who Sold the World, and in January 1972 he told Melody Maker that he was gay, with the caveats that he had little ‘time for Gay Liberation’, despised ‘all these tribal qualifications’, and supposed he was ‘what people call bisexual’. Even so, the interviewer, Michael Watts, clearly had h
is doubts: after Bowie’s words ‘I’m gay, and always have been’, Watts noted that there was ‘a sly jollity about the way he says it, a sly smile at the corner of his mouth’. And although Bowie played on his bisexual image throughout his Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane phases – for instance, appearing on the Russell Harty Plus show in January 1973 in a bizarre green quilted tuxedo and yellow trousers, heavily made up and with his eyebrows replaced with thin red pencil lines – it was never clear how serious he was. Two years earlier, after all, he had told an American reporter that his performances were ‘theatrical experiences’, and that rock music needed to be ‘tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself’. And in May 1973 he confided to Melody Maker’s Ray Coleman that ‘this decadence thing is just a bloody joke. I’m very normal.’ Two decades later, he even admitted that ‘the irony of it was that I was not gay. I was physical about it, but frankly it wasn’t enjoyable … It wasn’t something I was comfortable with at all.’51

  Bowie was not the only example of glam rock’s ostentatiously androgynous style. Marc Bolan, for instance, told Melody Maker that he considered himself ‘bisexual in appearance’, and wore high-heeled shoes and glitter around his eyes to accentuate ‘the feminine aspect’. But the gender-bending vogue had its limits. Arriving for an interview with long ash-blond hair and mascara around his eyes, Bowie’s guitarist Mick Ronson explained that ‘having a gay image’ was merely ‘the “in” thing, just like a few years ago when it was trendy to walk around the streets in a long grey coat’. ‘I’m gay’, he said cautiously, ‘in as much as I wear girl’s shoes and have bangles on my wrists’ – which was to say, not at all. Meanwhile Slade’s Dave Hill, who wore costumes so outlandish that even other glam rockers blanched, claimed: ‘I couldn’t be camp if I tried, because my background is working-class.’ And music fans who followed Bowie’s lead and came out of the closet often encountered far more hostility than he did. In most places, wearing glitter and mascara was a sure way to ask for a beating: a boy from north London’s Monmouth estate who arrived to meet his friends one evening ‘looking like David Bowie, complete with make-up and streaked hair’, was greeted with so many wolf whistles, jeers and ‘fairy’ jokes that he beat a hasty retreat. And when Melody Maker’s reviewer met two gay Bowie fans waiting to hear him in Dunstable Civic Hall, even he could not resist a few quips about their moist eyes and trembling hands, or about how the two boys had since ‘become very good friends’.52