State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Like so many self-consciously progressive films and plays in the early 1970s, Family Life was heavily influenced by the ideas of the Scottish psychiatrist, poet and countercultural icon, R. D. Laing. A trained psychotherapist, Laing had more than a few mental issues of his own: his father was a violent and unstable man, his mother was widely regarded as virtually mad, and he was afflicted with alcoholism and clinical depression. By the mid-1960s, however, his pioneering ideas – on the ‘divided self’ under threat from others, or the oppressive tyranny of the ‘family nexus’ – were all the rage. At Kingsley Hall, in the East End of London, he set up a community for therapists and psychotic patients, encouraging the latter to regress into a kind of infantile state, from which he believed they would emerge saner and better adjusted than ever. More often than not, Laing explained madness as the alienated reaction of a confused young man or (more typically) woman to the tyrannical repression of the family. The ‘mad’, he argued, often had a clearer view of reality than people who thought themselves ‘sane’; parents’ affection for their children was really ‘violence masquerading as love’; and the mental health services were running a ‘police state’ and a ‘guerrilla war’ against their patients. ‘They’re the violent ones,’ he insisted in 1967, ‘but they think they are maintaining sanity, peace, law and order.’20

  It is hard now to reread Laing’s books without shuddering at the thought of the damage they caused. No doubt traditional psychiatry had its flaws, but its practitioners were generally well-intentioned people trying to do their best for patients who were genuinely sick, and they deserved better than the crude, childish caricatures of Laing’s books and Loach’s film. And although some doctors listened to Laing’s theories with interest and respect, many were appalled that he seemed to be trivializing, even glamorizing the serious illnesses that patients faced. Kingsley Hall, meanwhile, was not a success: local residents were horrified at reports of wild encounter sessions and patients running riot, and it closed down within five years. Yet even as Laing’s medical career spun out of control, his cultural influence grew ever stronger. To a generation of writers and artists who liked nothing better than to poke fun at what they saw as bourgeois assumptions and power structures, the spectacle of an LSD-taking, poetry-writing, Buddhist-influenced ‘anti-psychiatrist’ was too good to resist. Laing ‘made madness, alienation, hating your parents … all glamorous’, wrote the novelist Angela Carter. ‘God knows what he did for people who were really mad, apart from making them feel smug and self-righteous, but he certainly set the pace for the crazy hinge of the decade from 1968 on.’ In the theatre, his influence was ubiquitous, from Edward Bond’s shockingly violent Lear (1971) to Peter Shaffer’s equally powerful, if didactic, Equus (1973), the story of a psychiatrist invited to treat a boy who has a pathological obsession with horses. Indeed, in its own way Equus was the perfect distillation of the fashionable themes of the period: its fascination with ritual and symbols, for example; its obsession with sex and death; its crude satirical treatment of the conservative, Christian parents; its debunking of the psychiatrist’s conventional assumptions; above all, its implicit message that the mad were sane and the sane mad. All of this, like Loach and Mercer’s Family Life, was pure Laing.21

  Although Laing himself was in palpable decline by the beginning of the 1970s, lurching bizarrely into a nightmarish world of shamanism, robe-wearing and ‘rebirthing workshops’, his ideas had never been more influential in the cultural mainstream. It was not merely a question of plays and poetry: now academic experts and feminist writers alike queued up to deliver sentence on the supposedly demented, oppressive institution of the nuclear family. When, in the 1967 Reith Lectures, the eminent Cambridge anthropologist Edmund Leach insisted that ‘the family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents’, he provoked a firestorm of protest, with tabloid critics fulminating against his godless moral relativism. But within a few years, such opinions were becoming almost conventional. And by the time the curtain rose on Shaffer’s Equus, no self-respecting bohemian could fail to produce an apposite quotation from Laing or Marcuse, while premature obituaries for marriage and the family were as common as wildcat strikes. The idea of a lasting romantic union was historically ‘exceptional’, another anthropologist, Lucy Mair, argued in 1971. Husbands were ‘not necessary’ to bring up children successfully; the single-parent family was the model of the future. Monogamy was an artificial restriction on human urges, agreed Alex Comfort: sex was a natural physical pleasure, like eating, and as long as they did not hurt others, people should be able to do it when and with whom they liked. And perhaps oddly, given that these views were a standing invitation to male predators and implicitly heaped all the burden of childcare onto single mothers, they struck a chord with many feminists, for whom the traditional family was nothing but an instrument of male oppression. ‘We need an ideological revolution,’ wrote the feminist Ann Oakley in 1974. ‘We need to abolish gender roles themselves … Abolish the housewife role, therefore abolish the family.’22

  Most people, of course, had no desire to abolish the family. Indeed, by some standards the traditional family was more popular than ever. By the beginning of the decade, 95 per cent of men and 96 per cent of women under the age of 45 were married, while young couples were positively rushing to the altar: in 1970, the average age of brides at marriage fell beneath 23 for the first time since the war. Despite all the nonsense in the newspapers about the generation gap and teenage rebellion, most youngsters dreamed of getting married and settling down like their parents before them; indeed, only a tiny minority of those who came of age in the 1970s never married. It is admittedly true that women in particular had very different expectations from their mothers, placing a much higher premium on sexual satisfaction, emotional fulfilment and even achievements in the workplace. Marriage was ‘increasingly required to serve the partners’ own personal development,’ reported a Home Office study in 1979, while a survey two years later found that people ranked love, mutual understanding and a healthy sex life as the most important ingredients of a happy union, well ahead of having children. Most people, however, still believed that marriage was the best vehicle to fulfil their dreams, and popular television shows abounded with images of lasting marriages, from the clearly loved-up Tom and Barbara in The Good Life to the rather more disputatious Basil and Sybil in Fawlty Towers. And only in a society that still valued marriage as the supreme sacrament would almost 28 million people have gathered around their televisions to watch the wedding of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips in November 1973 – or would almost 21 million have tuned in four years later to watch the wedding of Coronation Street’s Len Fairclough and Rita Littlewood, who were even less real than the princess and her captain.23

  Yet married bliss did not always live up to its billing. Twenty years on from his fairy-tale wedding, it emerged that Captain Mark Phillips had fathered a child with a New Zealand art teacher, while Len Fairclough’s extramarital adventures only came out after his death in a car crash. And when Princess Anne and Captain Phillips were divorced in 1992, they were following in the footsteps of millions of other couples whose marriages had ended in tears and recriminations. Of course this was nothing new: in the mid-1950s there had been around 28,000 divorces a year, and there were some 40,000 in the mid-1960s. The scale, however, was different, and for that some people blamed the Divorce Reform Act of 1969, which allowed the courts to grant a divorce on the grounds of irretrievable breakdown within just two years. As with the legalization of abortion, the Act’s framers never expected that it would lead to a dramatic increase: all they wanted to do was to end what Labour’s Leo Abse called the ‘jungle of lies, half truths, miserable stratagems and ugly publicising’ that had thrived under the old system, which demanded that one party admit fault. But once the new legislation came into force, the divorce statistics went through the roof. In 1965, there had been just three divorces in Britain for every 1,000 married people. In 1
970 there were almost five, by 1975 there were ten and by 1980 there were twelve. In less than two decades, in other words, the divorce rate had quadrupled, giving Britain the highest rate of marriage failure in Europe. By the end of the decade, there was one divorce for every three marriages, a statistic that filled most commentators with utter despair. What was most depressing, though, was the divorce rate among the young, which trebled in the course of the 1970s. Perhaps it was no wonder that while almost all teenagers expected they would get married, six out of ten told market researchers in 1977 that they also expected to get divorced.24

  For a minority, there was nothing to fear in the rising divorce figures. ‘The nuclear family, two adults and 2.04 children, is as artificial and unnatural and against the deepest instincts of mankind as its backlash – the attempt to do without a family at all,’ wrote the Guardian’s house feminist Jill Tweedie in September 1975. Instead of shuddering at the thought of divorce, people should welcome it, she thought, for ‘divorce creates an underground family that only needs to be stripped of its coverings, its shame, its inherent drama to produce once more a natural extended family’. This rather ludicrous rose-tinted view did not, however, chime with the views of most feminists. For decades, women’s groups had actually taken a very dim view of divorce reform, arguing that it would be a ‘seducers’ charter’ that would destroy wives’ legal protections. And although by 1975 more than seven out of ten divorce petitions were filed by women, many activists insisted that the majority were wives abandoned under the new ‘Casanova’s charter’, as they called it. For abandoned wives and mothers, argued the journalist Brenda Maddox in her book The Half-Parent (1975), divorce came at a heavy emotional cost: even after the marriage was over, the two parties were haunted by the ghosts of past failures and broken relationships, their children and stepchildren daily reminders of what had been lost. And even at this relatively early stage, some commentators worried that single mothers were falling into a poverty trap, caught between the demands of their children, the regulations of the welfare system and an increasingly cut-throat labour market. The charity Gingerbread, set up in 1970 after a Sunday Times feature about a struggling single mother, made valiant efforts to lighten the burden through babysitting, collective shopping trips and support groups. But already there were far too many lone-parent families for one charity to cope with. In 1974, a single parent headed one family in eleven; by 1980, this figure had already risen to one in eight, accounting for well over a million children – and it was still growing.25

  And yet despite the challenges, despite the stresses and strains of a world in which husbands and wives worked long hours and struggled to reconcile the demands of offices, homes and children, the nuclear family was a much more resilient institution than its critics imagined. It is certainly true that more people got divorced than ever before, that more people broke their wedding vows, that more children grew up without two parents and that – in overwhelming numbers – more youngsters slept and lived together before or outside marriage. But although ‘living in sin’, as it had once been called, was now widely accepted – only 8 per cent of people aged between 15 and 24 thought it was ‘wrong’ in a survey in 1980 – the idea of marriage in the abstract showed little sign of losing its fairy-tale appeal. And even after undergoing the misery and trauma of the divorce courts, the overwhelming majority still believed in the institution of marriage itself. By the end of the 1970s, almost one in three marriages involved somebody who had been married before, while eight out of ten divorcees under the age of 30 subsequently remarried. They had seen the worst that marriage had to offer, but they had not lost their faith that out there somewhere was the perfect union.26

  In December 1969, a light aircraft crashed in the Belgian village of Erpen, outside Namur. The pilot, who survived, was a 36-year-old British stuntman named John Howe, and when the Belgian police investigated the crash site, they found almost 800 pornographic films, each carefully disguised in Christmas wrapping paper. Howe had been smuggling the films on behalf of the Danish firm Original Climax, which was providing them for the London market. Instead, the films ended up in a Belgian police station and Howe in a Belgian prison. It was a satisfyingly bizarre, if trivial, story, and it caught the attention of executives at the Sunday People, which had recently launched a campaign against what it saw as the excesses of the permissive society. When the People sent two veteran reporters onto the streets of Soho to uncover the network behind the West End’s booming pornography market, the trail soon led to Original Climax’s local agent, a young man in his twenties called Stuart Crispie. But when the reporters set up a sting in the Hilton hotel, the tables were abruptly turned. Far from the People exposing the ‘Blue Film Boss’, as they later called him, Crispie seemed to know exactly what they were planning. He brought along a solicitor and a stills photographer of his own, and while the lawyer was threatening the People’s men with a writ, the photographer was taking pictures to distribute across the West End. With their photos pinned up behind the counter of every sex shop in London, the reporters’ cover was well and truly blown. They had been betrayed – and the culprits, it turned out, were officers of the Metropolitan Police.27

  Pornography was a relatively young industry in the early 1970s: although it had always been available to those with the money and contacts to import material from the Continent, it was only after the relaxation of the obscenity laws in 1959 that it could reach a big enough market to guarantee serious profits. Within a very short space of time, however, it was obvious that demand was very high indeed. The first home-grown magazine, Penthouse, appeared in 1964, followed by Mayfair and Fiesta two years later. By 1971, pornography was generating enough income for the entrepreneur Paul Raymond to relaunch Men Only, hitherto a rather dull pocket-sized magazine dedicated to cars, clothes, food and travel as well as ‘glamour’ pictures, as fully fledged pornography, a decision that paid handsome dividends. Naked bodies were now big business: in August 1971, the Observer’s business correspondent Raymond Palmer estimated that about 100 shops across the country were trading exclusively in explicit material, over half of them in London and most of those in Soho. Between them, he thought, the Soho stores had an annual turnover of at least £3 million, while the national total was probably around £10 million. But this was probably an underestimate. Most specialist sex shops charged gigantic mark-up prices on the materials they imported from Holland, Belgium and Scandinavia, and while small shops grossed about £1,000 a week, better-placed and bigger stores, like those dominating the streets of Soho, could expect to gross up to £10,000 – most of which, since they paid no tax, the retailers kept as profit.28

  And while the performers and models themselves made very little – a participant in a blue movie might make as little as £25 – a handful of entrepreneurs did very nicely indeed. One example was the urbane Gerald Citron, the son of a washing-machine magnate, who had been educated at Repton under the headmastership of Geoffrey Fisher (later Archbishop of Canterbury) and studied law at Manchester before becoming a porn baron. By the time the police arrested him in January 1973, Citron owned a £160,000 Surrey mansion (worth at least £3 million today) with a swimming pool, an E-type Jaguar and a Rolls-Royce, had married a glamorous model, and had set up his own wine-importing business. All of this was based on the wages of sin: at his nearby farm, the police discovered 18 tons of obscene material, worth at least £500,000. But Citron was not the only man making big money from masturbation. Another Home Counties wholesaler, ‘Big Jeff’ Phillips, specialized in importing films from Denmark as well as making his own (‘filthy of course,’ he said, ‘but technically very good’). Big Jeff made enough to buy a white Rolls-Royce, two blocks of flats, houses in Esher and Kingston (evidently Surrey held a weird fascination for pornography magnates), and an £80,000 country house near Reading, complete with 10 acres of land, stables and a heated swimming pool. ‘Britain’s first blue film millionaire’, the Sunday People called him with pardonable exaggeration, living in a �
�stately home paid for with filth’. Like Citron, however, Big Jeff came to a sticky end: exposed in February 1972 during one of the paper’s periodic investigations into ‘filth’, he killed himself three years later.29

  As the People had long since discovered, entrepreneurs like Citron and Phillips thrived not just because they exploited the fantasies of their fellow men, but because they had persuaded the Metropolitan Police’s Obscene Publications Squad (the notorious ‘Dirty Squad’) to turn a blind eye to their enterprises. Since the late 1960s, senior officers in the Dirty Squad had been regularly accepting bribes and sweeteners from Soho pornographers. ‘A police tariff operates in the West End,’ one investigator told the People in February 1972, ‘whereby certain police officers between them receive from the pornographic “kings” a sum in the region of £1,000 a week … paid by the “bucks” or managers of the shops either in the shop, in a club or in a pub.’ So systematic were the arrangements, in fact, that Commander Wallace Virgo alone, who controlled nine Met squads including Narcotics and Obscene Publications, was paid £500 a week plus a Christmas bonus of £2,000 between January 1970 and May 1972, as well as agreeing ‘rates’ to sanction new shops on West End sites: £1,500 for Cranbourne Street, £1,000 for D’Arblay Street, and so on. They ran ‘an evil conspiracy which turned the Obscene Publications Squad into a vast protection racket’, said Mr Justice Mars-Jones when the case finally came to court in 1977. All in all, more than a dozen policemen were convicted, and Virgo himself, the most senior officer ever found guilty of corruption, was sent down for twelve years. ‘Thank goodness, the Obscene Publications Squad has gone,’ Mars-Jones said solemnly. ‘I fear the damage you have done may be with us for a long time.’30