And ‘therefore’, as Mollie Panter-Downes not long afterwards informed her New Yorker readers, ‘Eton, Harrow, and the others will be left as they are’.
The document inevitably provoked some strong criticism. ‘We are afraid to tackle the public schools to which the wealthy people send their sons,’ lamented the working-class ‘Manny’ Shinwell (a former Labour minister) in The Times, ‘but at the same time are ready to throw overboard the grammar schools, which are for many working-class boys the stepping stones to the universities and a useful career – I would rather abandon Eton, Winchester, Harrow and all the rest of them than sacrifice the advantage of the grammar school.’ The journalist Geoffrey Goodman, in a letter to the New Statesman, was equally appalled: ‘It is almost inconceivable that a party dedicated to the concept of greater equality (to say nothing of Socialism) can argue that privilege of any kind will wither away in an acquisitive society, provided you offer “suitable” alternatives.’ And in the same magazine, the Cambridge literary critic Graham Hough offered a caustic prediction: ‘There will remain to the Labour Party the glory of messing up the grammar schools, the oldest and best of English educational institutions; and of continuing the nineteenth-century public school system for the very few who can afford to pay for it.’29
The party conference was at Scarborough at the end of September. In the same debate that endorsed the anti-11-plus aspect of Learning to Live, Fred Peart, a dissenting member of the Study Group, moved a resolution calling for the integration of public schools into the state system. In support, Gillingham’s delegate, the young Gerald Kaufman, declared that ‘a progressive measure of this sort would be advancing Socialism and gaining middle-class support’, while for Frank Cousins the issue was that something needed to be done about the fact that ‘this country’s economic, international, political and industrial affairs are in the hands of a privileged group who hand the privileges on from place to place, whether it is in the Tory Party or in our Party’. On the other side, Alice Bacon (also of the Study Group) argued that the practical problems of integration were too great and its immediate relative importance too limited, but promised that the ‘scandal’ of public schools getting ‘priority of entry into Oxford and Cambridge’ was ‘something we can stop’, while Stewart dismissed Peart’s resolution as irrelevant: ‘Ask yourselves how many members of your own constituency party want to send their children to public schools.’ The outcome, on a card vote, was a defeat for Peart by 3.54 million votes to 3.07 million. ‘Some day,’ reflected the New Statesman soon afterwards, ‘Labour must clearly make away with the fee-paying public schools; but it had better choose its own time, which will not be until the comprehensive schools have been firmly established in sufficient numbers and have had time to show their merits.’
A range of reasons had contributed to Labour’s unwillingness to take on the public schools – not least an honourable dislike of interfering with people’s liberty, a dislike felt as much by Bevan as by Gaitskell and Crossman. But perhaps the last word should go to Sir Richard Acland, reviewing Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy in 1959. According to this singular man – Rugby and Balliol, from 1935 a Liberal MP, then founding member during the war of the socialist Common Wealth Party, later a Labour MP until in 1955 resigning from the party over its support for nuclear weapons – Young’s optimistic forecast that by the end of the 1970s the public-school question would be (in Acland’s paraphrasing words) ‘quietly and effortlessly eliminated’ as a result of vastly increased educational expenditure on the state system was ‘almost wholly divorced from reality’:
The privilege of public school education has little to do with better teachers – man for man I doubt if they are very much superior to grammar school staff. Still less has it anything to do with some subtle atmosphere distilled from the spirit of Matthew Arnold hovering in the quads. It is based on something far more material which I very seldom see mentioned. Having them under their hands all day long the public schools can give their pupils many more hours of education per week.
At a typical public school known to me the boys have 38 hours of organised instruction per week, including all games, and 1½ hours prep. per night in quiet study or under discipline in hall. The corresponding figure for Wandsworth School (comprehensive) where I taught last year is 28 hours, including 1 hour’s prep. in a home where there may be no escape from the tele. The other material factor is size of class – averaging about 22 compared with 32 at Wandsworth.
Speaking to a sixth form at a public school recently I had to say to them: ‘Of those at Wandsworth who will seriously try to reach university this year and will fail, two-thirds would succeed if they could work under your conditions; of you who will succeed in entering university, two-thirds would fail if you worked under Wandsworth conditions.’
This is the measure of the educational privilege which the rich can buy. This is the reason why no wealthy socialist can do other than send his son to public school – he cannot face the vision of his own son, aged 21 and perhaps by then a keen Conservative or Liberal, saying to him: ‘You had the means of giving me the best chance, and for your blasted political humbug you didn’t do it.’
And this is the reason why the Labour Party, in the present temper of the nation, does not and dare not propose to end public schools. Putting it quite brutally, they know that against such an appalling invasion of privilege and inequality, the rich would ‘go on strike’ in one way or another and bring the economic life of the community to chaos in which (once again in the present temper of the nation) the government would not receive such zestful backing from workers and middle-classes as would win from the chaos a government victory over the rich.
Therefore, let it be perfectly clear, we are not going to have Michael Young’s Meritocracy or anything like it merely by accentuating our present tendencies.30
Part Three
10
Unnatural Practices
Pinky and Perky, not yet sundered by musical differences, starring on Sunday Night at the London Palladium; a television critic laying into the fake bonhomie of ITV’s ‘Show Biz Corps’ (‘Mr Michael Miles’s awful relish . . . Mr Hughie Green’s twangy transatlantic archness . . . Mr Bruce Forsyth’s twinkle-toes and strident congratulations’); Grandstand starting to show rugby league (commentator, Eddie Waring); Cliff Richard’s ‘Move It’ peaking at number 3, ‘Hoots Mon’ by the novelty act Lord Rockingham’s XI climbing to number 1; Walter Allen praising Stanley Middleton’s first novel A Short Answer as ‘a sharp and fruitful picture of middle-class provincial life’; reading Angus Wilson’s The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot feeling for Pamela Hansford Johnson like being ‘hobbled with the author in a sort of three-legged race’; Arnold Wesker issuing his first major blast (‘Let Battle Commence!’) on the need to bring art to the masses (‘It is the bus driver, the housewife, the miner and the Teddy Boy to whom I should like to address myself’); Philip Larkin admiring a newspaper photo of London Zoo’s Guy the Gorilla (‘I felt considerable kinship with him’); John Fowles, on his way to the Whitechapel Gallery’s Jackson Pollock exhibition, walking through the ‘eighteenth-century streets’ of Spitalfields, ‘full of Indians, Jews, poverty, beautiful doorways painted in tatty varnish, dirty, ragged children’; a Gallup poll finding 81 per cent had a favourable view of the Royal Family, 71 per cent of the House of Commons, 52 per cent of the House of Lords and 51 per cent of the trade unions; Marian Raynham in Surbiton rebelling one Saturday (‘Why should I spend all morning making cakes & scones? Seem to be spending all my life doing these foolish things. I just won’t . . .’); Judy Haines’s younger daughter Pamela doing an old 11-plus paper at home one evening (‘Nearly screamed when I found she had gone wrong in two of the simplest sums . . . Must get her a tonic. This swotting for 11+ is getting on her nerves’); and Anthony Heap citing ‘the latest craze’ among girls and young women – ‘rotating an old fashioned child’s wooden hoop (now called a “hula-hoop”) around one’s waist as long as possible w
ithout letting it drop’ – as further evidence it was ‘a mad world’ . . .1 Yet nothing mattered more in November 1958 than the fact that on the 26th the House of Commons at last openly debated the issue of homosexuality – almost fifteen months after the Wolfenden Report, six months after the founding of the Homosexual Law Reform Society and by chance just a few days after a high-profile episode had thrown the whole issue into uncomfortably stark relief.
On the night of Wednesday the 19th Ian Harvey – rising Tory MP, junior minister at the Foreign Office, married with two daughters – was walking along the Mall shortly after 11 o’clock. ‘A young guardsman in uniform passed me at a slow pace and I knew what that meant,’ he recalled in his memoir To fall like Lucifer. ‘I turned and caught up with him and we went together into the Park.’ There they were ‘caught by a park official accompanied by a policeman’, taken (not without a struggle on Harvey’s part) to a police station, and, next morning, stood side by side in the dock at Bow Street Court, each charged with ‘committing an act of gross indecency with another male person’ and ‘behaving in a manner reasonably likely to offend against public decency’, with both men being remanded until 10 December. It was the end of Harvey’s political career. ‘If (as I fear) he is guilty, it means that he must resign his post in the Govt and his seat in Parlt,’ recorded Macmillan on the Friday. ‘I saw him this morning, & did my best to comfort him. But it [is] a terrible thing & has distressed me greatly.’ In the event, Harvey resigned both post and seat on Monday the 24th, well aware that in his constituency association at Harrow East there were ‘many people who, whilst they were my supporters, regarded what I had done as unspeakable’. On 10 December each man was found guilty and fined £5 – with Harvey paying not only for the guardsman but also, as his counsel accurately predicted, for the rest of his life. He found himself rapidly being cut off by former colleagues in politics and advertising, with one remarking that ‘the only thing for Ian Harvey to do is to change his name and go to Canada’; the Carlton Club accepted his resignation without comment; the Junior Carlton Club hoped he would retain his membership, but asked him to promise not to enter the premises for two years; and the War Office had to be persuaded not to have this former lieutenant colonel in the Territorial Army cashiered. ‘I remember him,’ wrote Matthew Parris in 2002 (15 years after Harvey’s death), ‘a sad old man, living alone and forgotten in a small flat.’2
The proposed decriminalisation of homosexual relations was of course only one part of Wolfenden; on the other part – the recommendation that prostitutes be outlawed from the streets – Rab Butler as Home Secretary made it clear, opening the thinly attended debate, that he was fully in accordance, leading in due course to legislation to that effect. The story goes that an uncertain Butler had sought the opinion of the stationmaster in his Saffron Walden constituency, who had told him that people did not mind prostitutes, but had no wish to see them in public places. As for the more contentious question, Butler’s unyielding line, on behalf of the government as a whole, was that ‘there was at present a very large section of the population who strongly repudiated homosexual conduct and whose moral sense would be offended by an alteration of the law’ – a no-change policy backed by a narrow majority of the speakers, among them Labour’s Fred Bellenger. ‘I can well understand the pleas of those who say that those who practise this cult in private are inoffensive citizens,’ he conceded. ‘Perhaps they are, if it is meant that they do not break windows or behave riotously. Nevertheless, they are, in my opinion, a malignant canker in the community and if this were allowed to grow, it would eventually kill off what is known as normal life.’ A Tory backbencher, William Shepherd, agreed: ‘I think there is far too much sympathy with the homosexual and far too little regard for society . . . I believe that it is our duty as far as we can to stop this society within a society. I believe that to a great extent, perhaps 90 per cent of the cases, these men could be deviated from their path . . .’ Perhaps the most emphatic speaker was his colleague Cyril Black, an inveterate campaigner for traditional morality. ‘These unnatural practices, if persisted in, spell death to the souls of those who indulge in them,’ he declared. ‘Great nations have fallen and empires been destroyed because corruption became widespread and socially acceptable.’ On the morning of the debate The Times had contended that though it was ‘a foregone conclusion that the homosexual laws will not be reformed yet’, it was ‘equally a foregone conclusion that reform must come eventually’, given that ‘the majority of well-informed people are now clearly convinced that these laws are unjust and obsolete’. But for the moment, as Butler accurately indicated, public opinion as a whole continued to run the other way, and a few weeks later a Gallup poll revealed only 25 per cent wanting decriminalisation, as opposed to 48 per cent favouring the laws staying as they were. Ironically, it was in Shepherd’s own constituency – at Bilston in Staffordshire – that a fortnight after the debate two men (aged 66 and 41) gassed themselves to death, having been questioned by police in connection with (consenting) ‘indecent actions between men’.
More bleak years lay ahead. A Minority: A Report on the Life of the Male Homosexual in Great Britain was produced in 1960 by Gordon Westwood (pseudonym for Michael Schofield), based on a survey of 127 ‘self-confessed’ homosexuals. ‘It is impossible to work on a research of this kind,’ noted the book’s first sentence, ‘without becoming immediately aware of the repugnance with which homosexuality is regarded by many people.’ And Schofield itemised how ‘all sorts of difficulties were put in the way of the research’, not least by ‘the Medical Committees of some hospitals’, which ‘refused to allow doctors on their staff to help’. Inevitably, the interviewees themselves spoke eloquently of the attitude of heterosexuals:
They think it’s disgusting. The kind of remarks I get are, ‘Be a man,’ or ‘You’re not a proper man.’
It’s very difficult for a normal to understand. There are no expressions they would not use to show their disgust. It’s horrifying how men or women who in every other way are decent and sensible can lose their sense of proportion on this subject.
The normal men I work with simply don’t understand. They say, ‘Why do they have to do such things when there are plenty of women about?’
Many people – like my brother, for example – think it’s all a huge joke and just don’t take it seriously.
Inevitably it affects your social life. I always seem to go on holidays alone and sometimes I get a pitiful feeling, knowing that I’ll live the rest of my life in solitude.
A homosexual cannot relax in ordinary company.
The effect of acting a part can be exhausting. I envy people in jobs where they haven’t got to act a part. In the business world one spends a lot of time taking care – making sure one doesn’t give oneself away.
But of course, it all depended. ‘If you are a failure in the world, they look down on you if they know you are queer. But if you are successful and queer, you become rather quaint.’3
Even so, to an extent sometimes under-appreciated, there were clear signs by the late 1950s of the hold of ‘respectable’ morality starting to break up. Specifically, three pieces of essentially liberal legislation had been enacted – not without difficulty – by the end of the decade. The Mental Health Act, by abolishing the categories of moral defectiveness and feeblemindedness, made it impossible to lock up in Victorian mental institutions women deemed promiscuous or otherwise troublesome; the Legitimacy Act significantly extended the legitimisation of children born illegitimate; and the Obscene Publications Act, piloted through by Roy Jenkins, greatly reduced the powers of censorship over the printed word.4 Significantly, this last piece of legislation was not yet enacted when in spring 1959 Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial Lolita was at last published in Britain, by Weidenfeld and Nicolson – who were not subjected to prosecution. A battle had seemingly been won.
Two key industrial announcements were made in the closing months of 1958. The first, on 18 November, concerned
steel strip mills: the expectation had been that the government would back the construction of a huge new continuous one at Llanwern, near Newport in South Wales; but instead, in the general context of worryingly high unemployment in the old ‘depressed areas’, political pressure from Scotland was such that Macmillan decided – exercising what he called ‘the judgement of Solomon’ – to back two smaller, semi-continuous new mills, namely one at Llanwern and another at Ravenscraig in Lanarkshire. This call, justly comments the historian Peter Scott, ‘resulted in neither being sufficiently large to obtain the economies of scale achieved in continental plants’. But at least at this point there was not a problem of inadequate demand, quite unlike the ominous, rapidly developing situation in the coal industry. There, total consumption during 1957 had abruptly fallen by over 6 million tons, followed in 1958 by a drop of a further 13 million tons, as coal found itself being brutally undercut by oil. ‘Coal is still our main source of power – and a vital part of our natural inheritance,’ proclaimed a full-page National Coal Board advertisement in November 1958, exhorting ‘young men’ to become ‘the next generation of managers, engineers and scientists’ in the coal industry. Soon afterwards, on 3 December, the NCB announced that 36 pits would have to close (including 20 in Scotland and 6 in South Wales), most of them in the next few months, with some 4,000 mineworkers to be made redundant. Still, from a Tory point of view, this would hardly lose votes, whereas another sector in deep trouble, the Lancashire cotton industry, was a different, more troubling matter. The upshot was not only detailed negotiations to reduce Commonwealth imports but, in summer 1959, the passing of the Cotton Industry Act, in effect a state-supported scrapping scheme designed to eliminate excess capacity as painlessly as possible. ‘A sop to Lancashire,’ the historian of the Lancashire cotton industry brusquely calls this politically motivated, taxpayer-funded piece of government interventionism that did little to equip the industry for challenges ahead that might anyway have proved impossible to overcome.5
Modernity Britain Page 30
