THERE ARE TWO particular male academics I want to ask Anne about, but I am nervous about the first one — Richard Titmuss, the LSE professor who supposedly made the comment about Hannah wearing too much eye make-up — as he was Ann’s father. But when I tell her the story, she says, ‘Oh, yes, that sounds like my father.’ She has even heard the story before, though about a different young woman — and I wonder aloud whether perhaps the story wasn’t about Hannah. As far as I know, and as photographs suggest, too, Hannah hardly ever wore make-up.
‘If it wasn’t eye make-up, it would have been something else,’ Ann says with a shrug. Her father was in theory a great advocate of social justice, she says, but he ‘didn’t like women, and he especially didn’t like working women’ — he could be ‘vitriolic’ to them, and didn’t like having them around the LSE. She can easily imagine that he would have found an excuse not to hire Hannah.
The other man I ask about is O. R. McGregor, Hannah’s lecturer and later professor at Bedford — the ‘enemy’, as my grandfather called him in his diary when Hannah was rejected by the LSE. After Hannah’s death, my grandfather wrote of seeing an article McGregor had written about equality for women, and wanting to ‘write and accuse him’.
I asked my father, but all he could remember was that McGregor in some way delayed her thesis and blocked her academic path. McGregor ‘must have felt guilty’, he said, because after Hannah’s death my father got into a train carriage with McGregor, who ‘scuttled away’ when they saw each other.
Ann got on well with McGregor herself, she says. When she had her problems with her supervisor, McGregor was supportive to her. He wasn’t specifically anti-women like her father, but ‘if he didn’t like you, he could give you a very hard time’. He was a ‘difficult man, a great manipulator’.
SHE SUGGESTS I get in touch with another former LSE professor of sociology, Terrence Morris, who was the same generation as Hannah. I send him an email, and he writes back immediately: ‘I may be able to help you with my recollections of the LSE of nearly fifty years ago, not least since Oliver McGregor and Richard Titmuss were people whom I knew well. Each was different but equally puissant. No-one with any sense of self-preservation would have wished to cross them.’
He never met Hannah, but he knew about her and he recalled ‘the suspicion that she had not been fairly treated in respect of her applications to the LSE. Times were not easy for young academics, not least since many professors approached human relations in their departments in a fashion that owed something to the culture of patronage in the Middle Ages. It was specially tough for women.’
Things were beginning to change in the early 1960s, he tells me, when I go to see him. But the elite was still an ‘old guard of academics, many of whom had been civil servants in the war, and imported into academia a patrician civil-service attitude’. McGregor produced ‘a lot of misery’, he says. ‘He was a schemer. I can say from personal experience that he would tell you one thing and do another, depending on what suited him.’ He could be ‘very spiteful’.
He doesn’t know any specific details about Hannah. There was ‘lots of smoke, but he doesn’t have the gun’, though the pattern was repeated with other women. He talks of Eileen Younghusband, a distinguished expert on social work, who was ‘pushed out of the LSE by Titmuss’, and Nancy Seear, who was ‘also treated badly’. The joke was ‘what’s that scrabbling noise — it’s [a particular woman] trying to get promoted’.
HE SUGGESTS A WOMAN SOCIOLOGIST, Bernice Martin, who might be able to tell me more. He offers to email her on my behalf, and later forwards her reply. Bernice, it turns out, was at Bedford with Hannah, considered her a friend, and also taught there later with McGregor. She knew, she writes, that there were ‘issues’ between ‘Mac’ and Hannah:
Mac called me into his office on the day he heard about her death to ask me for reassurance that his lukewarm references, which he knew had stopped her getting a job at the LSE, couldn’t have been the cause of her suicide. I couldn’t reassure him because I had no idea what had happened in her life. He excused himself by saying she was more a clever journalist than a real scholar, and that Hornsey was the right place for her, but I sensed that this was an excuse to save his conscience rather than a real conviction.
‘I have only good memories of Hannah,’ she concludes:
She was everything I was not — cosmopolitan, cultured, effortlessly charming while I was a single-minded working-class scholarship girl painfully learning about the big world. But we admired and liked each other though our worlds barely touched. Jeremy ought to know what a very lovely young woman his mother was and what a tragedy and waste so many people thought her death.
I write back, and we meet at Clapham Junction station and head out onto the street to find a café. Walking beside her, I feel happy. It is partly that she wrote so enthusiastically about Hannah, talks now about her with such warmth, though I have felt this happiness meeting others of Hannah’s female friends. Am I, in my search for my mother, taking any motherliness I can get along the way?
Bernice didn’t see Hannah much after she left Bedford, she says, but a year or so before Hannah died — around the time she was rejected by the LSE — she bumped into her in Baker Street, and Hannah said to her then, ‘You don’t think that Mac would give me a bad reference on purpose?’ She can’t remember what she told Hannah then, but she says now that she can ‘absolutely believe’ that McGregor would have sabotaged Hannah’s application to the LSE.
I ask if it might have been a clash of wills — two strong characters. But she says it was more complicated, more insidious, than that. ‘Academia was an elite, an empire.’ McGregor ‘liked controlling the job market in sociology in London, and he was a man who preferred people who were beholden to him’, and Hannah’s work and character undermined and challenged his position.
It was partly Hannah’s qualitative approach, which older sociologists like McGregor were suspicious of. It was partly, too, that while he was publicly pro women, he was ‘uncomfortable with the first stirrings of feminist assertiveness that Hannah represented, which otherwise politically leftist men of his generation were inclined to sneer at as the whingeing of privileged young women’.
Most importantly perhaps, McGregor wanted to influence public ideas and government legislation, ‘to be like Sidney and Beatrice Webb’. Although his magnum opus was a work on divorce, his position on the contemporary family was that it was ‘healthy and happy for the most part’, whereas Hannah’s work revealed a more constricting pattern of family life for women.
Hannah’s work was ‘perhaps only a minor political embarrassment’ for McGregor, but that would have been enough for him to want to deny her ‘the sort of prominence that could undermine his optimistic predictions about the stable family just at the point when his influence was rising’.
Of course, Bernice says, Hannah may well have ‘got up Mac’s nose personally’. She remembers a cabaret at the Bedford sociology graduation party of 1959 at which Hannah had organised a skit about McGregor and another teacher based on a Calypso song. Nothing like that had been done before at Bedford, she says, and she doesn’t imagine McGregor liked it very much.
‘He wasn’t used to people who stood up to him and did something different. Hannah was moving in a new direction, she was a pioneer, what she was doing was quite new in England, and she was doing it herself, from within herself.’
‘The sense she gave to people like me was that there was more to life than you’d seen and she was determined to have it,’ she says. ‘But she was struggling against strong men. Even strong women buckled under that sort of pressure.’
THE GENERAL IMPRESSION of the 1960s is that it was a period of female liberation and advance; but talking to Hannah’s contemporaries, reading their books, suggests that Hannah’s last few years, the early years of the 1960s, were a time of particular, and particularly acute,
challenges for women, and especially strong, bright, ambitious women like Hannah.
In the 1950s, things were at least clearer. If a woman wanted a career, she had to sacrifice something. ‘It was exhausting to be even moderately “extraordinary” in that decade,’ Sheila Rowbotham wrote in a review of Rachel Cooke’s Her Brilliant Career: ten extraordinary women of the Fifties, and there were ‘painful costs’. Such women’s ‘endeavour isolated them from other women’, and if they had children they were ‘apt to bundle’ them ‘off to boarding school’.
An article published in Historical Research in 2003 by Elizabeth Kirk, ‘Women Academics at Royal Holloway and Bedford Colleges, 1939–69’, explores the experiences of the generation before Hannah’s.
The article quotes Gertrude Williams, Hannah’s original head of department, confessing ‘in a sad moment that she had been successful in large because unfortunately she had been unable to have children’. Of the other two senior women sociologists at Bedford in the 1950s, Barbara Wootton was childless, and Marjorie McIntosh, who had three children, ‘paid the price of an early death’, by stroke in her early fifties. Her death ‘sent a clear message to her students: “having it all” (a stressful job and a family) could have fatal consequences’.
As the 1960s progressed, things began to change. More women, helped by the new grants system, were going to university. More jobs were opening up for young women like Anne Wicks in the expanding businesses of the media and advertising. The arrival of the pill meant that women could have sex without worrying about getting pregnant. But while one foot was advancing into a new age, the other was still firmly planted in the 1950s.
These were the days when abortion was illegal, when men filled out their wives’ tax forms, when a husband couldn’t legally rape his wife. When Jessica Mann, a Cambridge graduate, went to live in Edinburgh with her husband in the early 1960s and applied to the university appointments board for work, she was asked by the man interviewing her, ‘What do you want a job for — you’re married, aren’t you?’
Most of Hannah’s contemporaries at Bedford, graduating in 1959 and 1960, went into traditional caring professions, and gave up work when they had children. One did manage to become the first woman on the graduate trainee scheme at Ogilvy & Mather, and went on to have a career in advertising — but she recalls sharing a flat with several women on the Shell graduate-trainee scheme who were in training to be secretaries for their male counterparts.
Sexual behaviour was changing, but sexual attitudes lagged behind. Sheila Rowbotham, who went up to Oxford in 1961, writes in Promise of a Dream, her memoir of the 1960s, how a girl she knew was found in bed with a boy. The girl was ‘kicked out of college, lost her grant and could not get into any other university’. The boy ‘was sent away from his college for two weeks’.
This was still a time when the BBC could send Christopher Brasher to Birmingham University to interview female students for a programme on whether ‘women want to compete with men or be competed for by men’.
These mixed messages pervaded married life for women of Hannah’s generation. An entry from Phyll Willmott’s diary in October 1965, a few weeks before Hannah’s death, gives a fascinating glimpse into the dynamics of a 1960s London middle-class marriage. Phyll’s husband, Peter (‘Petie’), was the breadwinner and a renowned sociologist, but Phyll was herself an expert on the social services — a book she co-edited, The Social Workers, was published by Penguin around the time of this entry:
Petie gave me a little ‘pep talk’ this morning before going to work! I explained I felt a bit at sea — not sure where I was going from now on, wondering a bit whether I ought to take on more of a ‘proper job’ with the boys so nearly grown. Feelings of guilt and parasitism etc. Petie, he says, would rather, ideally, I did less not more. He says he wants support from me in carrying his own load of responsibilities and although he likes me to have my own interests and sees I need them, he wants me not to get more pressed and so on. In other words, he would prefer me to go on much as I have been in the last two years. Free-wheeling away, taking an interest in his work, having my own small ‘reputation’. The talk helped.
Hannah was more fortunate in some ways than Phyll, and other women of her age. Her husband’s success in his work meant she could afford a full-time nanny, and later an au pair girl, and as long as it didn’t interfere with the running of the household, my father encouraged Hannah to study and work.
She was lucky, too, in being naturally strong in will and character. One of Hannah’s Bedford contemporaries told me how she went back to the college to do some research on battered babies, but McGregor ‘called me in and told me that no one was interested in the subject, and bullied me into giving up’.
Hannah didn’t give up. ‘She had no sense of deferring to authority,’ Bernice Martin said. ‘To succeed in those days, women had to give up something — children, work, femininity — whereas Hannah wanted and appeared able to have everything.’
But having everything, as the brave new world of the 1960s seemed perhaps for the first time in history to be offering, wasn’t easy. It took a lot of effort, as it does today, to be a mother, a wife, a worker. There was little slack in Hannah’s life, Gunilla Lavelle told me. There was no room for spontaneity in how she lived, Erica said. And there was also the not-so-brave old patriarchy waiting to trip up the new woman, belittle her, force her back.
TOWARDS THE END OF 2010, around the time I was having these conversations, I went with my wife to our local cinema to see Made in Dagenham. It is based on the true story of the strike for equal pay by the women workers at the Ford car plant in Dagenham in 1968. I thought it might have some relevance to Hannah’s story, but that was not our main reason for going. It had been reviewed well, as a British ‘feelgood film’, so it promised to be a relaxing night out.
The film was chirpy, cheeky, and we were soon laughing with the rest of the audience. (‘Chop, chop, or we’ll miss the buffet,’ one of the young women workers tells her boyfriend as he has sex with her in his car.)
But as the film went on, and though the tone remained mostly light, and the jokes continued to come, my own mood changed. As the women workers — and, in particular, the main character, a young woman who even looked with her dark bob and big smile a little like Hannah — grew in militancy, in determination, they met with increasing condescension, anger, and obstruction from most of the men in the film. Watching the slights the main character received at the hands of a bullying schoolmaster, patronising union leaders and bosses, an initially uncomprehending husband, and even her female friends — let alone having to deal with her own uncertainties — it seemed to me that I was seeing into Hannah’s heart, my mother’s own struggles, and I watched the last hour with tears running helplessly down my cheeks.
Autumn 1965
A significant change has taken place in the subject matter of the British cinema. In recent years it has been preoccupied with the difficulties of the young working-class male. In these films women were shadowy figures.
In the last six months, however, two films with quite a different subject have appeared. The first of these was Darling, whose protagonist is a free woman in the sense that Doris Lessing uses the term. That is a woman who wants to make the same kinds of choices that men can make, and enjoy the same kinds of freedom that men possess. The mistake of the heroine in that film was to think that being a free woman was simply to enjoy sexual freedom, which merely extended the range of her activities but gave no freedom at all.
However a second film has just appeared which can truly be said to be for women, and about women, in the sense that it deals with women’s desire to be free, and given both the structure of our society and their own biological and emotional make up, their inability to hold onto that freedom if they get it. This film is Four in the Morning which contains three separate sad stories about women, all cleverly woven into one, so that in fact i
t could be the story of the same girl at different stages of her life. The stories concern one of a pair of would-be lovers who fail to relate, a young married couple whose marriage has become a trap, and the removal from the Thames and the classification at the morgue of a young unidentified woman aged about twenty-six who has committed suicide.
Fourteen
I WAS FIRST CONSCIOUS of suicide as a companion myself when I came back to London at the age of twenty-nine, Hannah’s last age. I had broken up with my girlfriend, and was spending a lot of my time alone as I worked on a book. Things I had witnessed as a journalist mixed in my head with thoughts of Hannah, her death, and at night I would lull myself to sleep with images of bullets barrelling towards me, and knives, sometimes held in my own hand, plunging into my chest.
Since then I have never entirely lost these thoughts; I have carried with me, through bad times and good, the possibility of suicide, its comfort, its siren voice. But in all these years I have never seriously considered, or taken any practical steps towards, killing myself.
In the course of my conversations with Hannah’s friends, perhaps because I have encouraged them to break one taboo, I have often found myself in the role of confessor, privy to their secret griefs. I have heard stories of rape, marital violence, struggles with alcohol, depression. One woman told me how she had locked herself in the lavatory and taken valium at her own wedding. Another spoke of her fiancé drowning in the Arctic, his body never found.
But for all their troubles, they are all here to talk about them. So why not Hannah? How did her ‘ordinary life crisis’ carry her to her death?
THERE ARE MANY THEORIES about suicide. For Camus, ‘judging whether life is or is not worth living’ is ‘the fundamental question of philosophy’. For Freud, thanatos, or the death drive, is the desire to return to the state of quiescence that precedes birth. For Durkheim, suicide is a product of social forces: either the bonds to the community are too weak, or too strong, or the suicide is caught out by abrupt social change.
A Woman on the Edge of Time Page 19
