You had to become the Incredible Shrinking Woman. You had to make yourself smaller than them [men] in every way possible: small ego, small brain, small voice, small talk.84
The educational writer Jane Miller grew up a tomboy and went to Bedales, a coeducational and ‘progressive’ school. She learned early that boys ‘were simply and obviously better than girls’, and she acquired ‘a contempt for anything girlish’ in consequence.85 Jane’s bookish and artistic background supplied complex messages about gender. She had strong-minded aunts, for instance, who also disdained feminine frippery. Jane recorded a poignant memory of going to a family party ‘wearing modest court shoes, with what were known as Louis heels, and raspberry-pink lipstick – all this in order to try out what felt like a new and transvestite femininity’.86 The aunts, Jane remembered, ‘honked and spluttered’ with laughter. Femininity itself could be experienced as a form of humiliation, a ‘passport to shame’.
The 1950s, then, were not altogether a good time to be a girl. Things were beginning to change, however. The (Butler) Education Act of 1944 had introduced secondary schooling for all in England and Wales. The school leaving age was raised from fourteen to fifteen from 1947. The Butler Act later became notorious for enshrining a ‘tripartite’ system of education, which was effectively class-based. Children were divided into brainy types, those who were good with their hands, and a lumpen, ‘less able’ majority. The eleven-plus examination was there to weed them out and to grade them, like eggs. But the Act broke new ground for bright working-class children and for girls. Indeed, girls did so well in the eleven-plus examinations in the 1950s that some local authorities began to discriminate in favour of boys, lest the girls take over the grammar schools.
A grammar-school education could be a lifeline for a clever working-class girl. The writer and poet Maureen Duffy was born in 1933 and was brought up in difficult and impoverished circumstances. School was hugely important, in spite of conflicting messages and the strains and competing emotional claims of home. She learned to be guarded about herself and her sexuality, later coming out as a lesbian. Maureen Duffy noted in her autobiographical novel That’s How It Was (1962) that ‘the great enemy to advancement for working-class girls’ in the 1950s was to become pregnant.87
The literary scholar Lorna Sage was born ten years later than Duffy in 1943. In her brilliantly insightful autobiography Bad Blood (2000), she describes growing up in Hanmer, Flintshire in the 1950s.88 Lorna’s social background defied easy description. Her grandfather was an Anglican clergyman, a difficult man with dodgy morals. Lorna’s father was in the haulage business and her parents lived in a council house. Lorna tells us that her father only stopped hitting her as she entered her teens, a point at which spanking acquired sexual overtones. Sex and disappointment seethed beneath the surface of family life.89 Lorna’s grandfather lusted after her friends. Her uncle Bill made leery passes at his niece, seeing her as ‘the poor man’s Brigitte Bardot’. Access to books and a sound education at Whitchurch High School nurtured Lorna’s imagination and provided her with a rich intellectual and imaginary life. At the same time, she and her best friend Gail were lured by the sounds of a new teenage culture. Brushing their hair into ponytails, they experimented with black eyeliner and white lipstick. They ‘crackled with emotional static’, brooding over the allure of Elvis-type bad boys.90
There were clever girls, and there were ordinary girls. Whitchurch High, like so many of the girls’ grammar schools of the time, suggested a choice: ‘You were supposed to choose between boys and books,’ Lorna remembered. Girls were seen as ‘the enemies of promise; a trap for boys’, although as she ruefully observed later, ‘with hindsight you can see that the opposite was the case’.91 At sixteen she met a clever boy, Vic Sage, and the pair became close. Their physical intimacy seemed natural enough. However, without even being aware of having ‘gone all the way’, Lorna found herself pregnant.
There was consternation – and shame – all around. But the outcome confounds any assumptions about the 1950s as a completely hopeless decade for girls. Lorna’s and Vic’s parents eventually came round. The teachers at Whitchurch High also rallied, and Miss Roberts, her English teacher, was non-judgemental and supportive. The young people married and continued with their A levels. Getting into university was more of a challenge, for Lorna if not for Vic. Eighteen-year-old mothers were not seen as ideal applicants. County Education Officers would routinely stop girls’ grants if they married or became pregnant. But the University of Durham eventually accepted both Lorna and Vic, and Lorna’s parents looked after baby Sharon during termtime. Both Lorna and Vic went on to build successful careers in academia.
The 1950s was a decade characterised by troubled beginnings for girls. The widening of educational opportunities was slowly raising aspirations. This in itself increased the frustration and conflict that would eventually drive social change. Young women who made it to university in the years after 1945 certainly expressed frustration. Autobiographies and novels of the time exude it. Clever girls cooped up in the women’s colleges of Oxford and Cambridge often felt excluded, relegated to living on the margins of an extended, male-public-school kind of world. Margaret Forster’s first novel, Dames’ Delight (1964), wittily caricatures the world of the women’s college.92 It depicts ageing, scholarly spinster dons focused on understanding the intricacies of medieval strip-farming and totally failing to communicate with younger students who are obsessed with sex and living in the shadow of the atom bomb. In Andrea Newman’s novel A Share of the World, also published in 1964, women students in London similarly agonise over sex and relationships and show uneasy commitment to academic work.93 Outside secretarial work or teaching, jobs for women seemed scarce. None of the women graduates in these novels has a clue what she will do after graduation.
These novels about women students can be seen as analogous to the ‘angry young man’ literature written by men in the 1950s. There are obvious parallels between Dames’ Delight and Lucky Jim, for instance, although Kingsley Amis’s novel was published ten years earlier, in 1954. The sense of blockage, of being stuck in a cul-de-sac of unhelpful social expectations, is pervasive in both texts. But in women’s novels and plays of the 1950s and early 1960s there is a stronger sense of marginality and exclusion. In ‘angry young man’ literature written by men, male working-class outsiders seek revenge on – or access to – power and social privilege by seducing middle-class girls. Two key texts written by women in this period are arguably more radical in that in each case their central protagonist looks outside the pale of respectable society altogether for some kind of hope or salvation. Nineteen-year-old Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey, first performed in 1958, showed a teenage girl, Jo, finding solace in relationships first with a ‘coloured’ sailor and later with a homosexual, Geoff, whose care and attention help her manage through the turmoil of coping with an illegitimate pregnancy.94 Lynne Reid Banks’s The L-Shaped Room, first published in 1960, dealt with similar themes.95 The novel’s heroine, Jane, is a middle-class, unmarried girl who has been thrown out of her father’s house on account of her pregnancy. She takes a bedsit in a seedy lodging house in Fulham. A gay black neighbour, John, and a Jewish lover, Toby, provide support. A spinster aunt, Addy, turns into something of a fairy godmother, leaving Jane a bequest which provides her with another dimension of independence. There is an implicit critique of patriarchy. Jane’s male doctor, like her father, is judgemental and controlling, but also capable of benevolence. The novel ends with reconciliation. Jane’s father, after a bout of misery and alcoholism, wants her back. Jane, her independence and autonomy now secured, returns on her own terms.
A Taste of Honey was adapted into a hugely successful film, starring Rita Tushingham, in 1961. Lynne Reid Banks’s novel proved an instant (and lasting) best-seller. A film version of The L-Shaped Room, with Leslie Caron as Jane, appeared in 1962 and created a strong impact. Both Shelagh Delaney and Lynne Reid Banks had succeeded in telling sto
ries about girls which challenged conventional morality. These were stories from the young woman’s point of view. In the past, unmarried mothers had often been silenced through accusations and shame. Now, questions about teenage sexuality and how society should deal with unmarried pregnancy began to be asked more openly. Neither ‘respectable society’ nor patriarchy looked as if it had all the answers.
5 | COMING OF AGE IN THE 1960S: BEAT GIRLS AND DOLLY BIRDS
Beat Girl, a British film directed by Edmond T. Gréville in 1959, heralded the 1960s with a dire warning to fathers. An early poster for the film featured a wild-haired girl in saucy black underwear and a rah-rah skirt. The girl fingered her bra strap while a rather unhealthy-looking young man in the foreground strummed his guitar strings. The poster announced threateningly: ‘mad about “beat” and living for kicks, this [girl] could be your teenage daughter!’1
Beat Girl starred Gillian Hills as Jennifer, a Brigitte Bardot-style, sulky ‘sex kitten’. A sixteen-year-old art student, Jennifer goes increasingly off the rails and is a trial to her middle-class architect father Paul Linden. Linden, coming across with suave masculine reasonableness, was played by David Farrar. There were performances from the pop musician Adam Faith, Oliver Reed and Christopher Lee. Lee played a creepy strip-joint operator. Noëlle Adam played the part of Jennifer’s French stepmother, Nichole, disconcertingly close to Jennifer in age and appearance – tousled hair, tight gingham – if not in attitude. Jenny excels in awfulness, a true daughter from hell. She sneers at Nichole and sneaks out of the house at night to jive in a basement coffee bar. The Off Beat coffee bar in Soho happens to be close to a strip club, Les Girls. From a chance encounter it emerges that loyal new wife Nichole had something of a dodgy past, before redeeming herself by falling in love with Jennifer’s father. This knowledge supplies Jenny with opportunities for further persecuting Nichole, this time with blackmail. At the same time, she herself weighs up career prospects as a stripper in ‘the vice trade’. In the meantime she amuses herself with wild parties in her father’s house, and episodes of dangerous driving with the gang.
5.1 Poster advertising the film Beat Girl (1959): a miscreant daughter strums her bra strap in tune with young pop singer Adam Faith’s guitar (© GAB Archive/Getty Images).
Against all odds, it works out just fine in the end. An old friend of Nichole’s stabs and kills the creepy, oleaginous owner of the strip joint. Jenny has hysterics but quickly comes to her senses and realises she’s had a lucky escape. In the final scene Paul, Nichole and Jenny walk away from sleazy Soho, vice and squalor, hugging each other and ready to play happy families properly, this time round.
Beat Girl bridges the concerns of the 1950s and the 1960s. It has themes in common with 1950s ‘sexploitation’ movies such as Passport to Shame, which professedly aimed to stir up public concern about ‘vice’ while revelling in its on-screen possibilities. There are plenty of prurient moments in Beat Girl too: few opportunities were lost to show buttock-squirming strippers or Jennifer in baby-doll pyjamas. The idea of a well-meaning, middle-class father tested by a daughter’s craze for popular music was not new. It had received an earlier, and much more anodyne treatment, in the 1955 British screwball comedy As Long As They’re Happy.2 In this earlier film, directed by J. Lee Thompson, stockbroker John Bentley, living in suburban Wimbledon, finds his life disrupted by his daughters’ passions for the wrong type of men. The youngest swoons over American crooner Bobby Denver (modelled on Johnny Ray). A crisis arises when all the women in Bentley’s household, including his wife and his maidservant, are seduced by Denver’s crooning and his masculine charms. The paterfamilias gets his own back by flirting with a floozie (Diana Dors). Nevertheless, order is eventually, and reassuringly, restored.
But Beat Girl showed patriarchal authority besieged by something rather more challenging. Paul Linden is shown trying to put Jennifer in her place by telling her that in spite of her cosmetics (‘all that muck on your face’) she is ‘just a little girl’. This is clearly wishful thinking on his part. Jennifer is all woman. And her friends in the Off Beat coffee bar, articulate about what they see as the older generation’s limitations and failings, aren’t in the mood to be treated as children either. Beat Girl is memorable for its heavy-handed rendering of teenage slang – ‘square’, ‘fade-out’, ‘daddy-O’ and so forth – trowelled on to emphasise a whopping new generation gap.
Beat Girl managed to press a lot of alarm buttons before coming to its rather unconvincingly reassuring conclusion. There was a great deal of concern about young people slipping off the bandwagon of respectability. Some post-war films focusing on juvenile delinquency had shown girls as passive victims of male hooligans. In Cosh Boy (1953), for instance, a young Joan Collins plays the part of the hapless Rene, exploited by a loutish young Roy Walsh.3 Made pregnant, she attempts suicide. All comes well in the end, though. Rene is saved from drowning and Roy gets a good thrashing. Unlike Rene, Jennifer in Beat Girl is no mere plot device: she is cantankerous, lippy, and out of control.
Representations of young people jiving, or hypnotised by jazz in coffee bars and basement cellars, were fast becoming a way of drawing attention to the problems of youth. After the Second World War, clubs of all kinds mushroomed in British towns and cities. These venues were often very small. A modest terrace house might have separate clubs on each floor. This was the case, for instance, at 4 Queen’s Square, Brighton: premises which were associated with a notorious murder case in the early 1960s. There were three clubs at 4 Queen’s Square in the late 1950s. The basement housed the Whiskey-A-Go-Go coffee bar, the ground floor the Calypso Club, while the Blue Gardenia Club occupied the first floor.4 London and large towns like Manchester and Birmingham saw a huge rise in the numbers of clubs.5 In the London borough of Stepney, for instance, it was reported that whereas in 1954 there had only been eighteen registered clubs, by 1960 there were ninety-two.6 In a debate in the House of Lords about the difficulties of licensing and controlling these venues, it was claimed that none of the ninety-odd clubs in Stepney was respectable.7
As meeting places for young people, these clubs gave parents and magistrates headaches. Many of these places were no doubt harmless enough. They were often very crowded though, which raised questions of safety. In addition, the atmosphere was often dark and laden with cigarette smoke. There were reports of ‘Indian hemp’, and suspicions, or even observations, of ‘heavy petting’. In places like Stepney, Notting Hill and Manchester, the clubs allowed young people from different social backgrounds and of varied ethnic origins to mix freely. The authorities suspected the worst.
Contemporary cinema added to their misgivings. Appearing in the same year as Beat Girl (1959), the film Sapphire similarly raised issues around girls, clubs and danger.8 Sapphire focused on the fictional case of a girl of that name who was murdered. Her body had been found on Hampstead Heath. We learn little about this girl except that she liked dancing in clubs, and wore sexy underwear. The film features memorable footage of young people, black and white, dancing wildly in the ‘Tulip Club’. In the aftermath of the Notting Hill riots of 1958, the subject of race relations was highly topical. Although the film sets out to contest ‘colour prejudice’, it nevertheless seems mired in it. Detectives investigating Sapphire’s murder watch a young woman dancing with a trance-like expression on her face, and are told that she dances like this because she is a ‘lilyskin’: white-skinned, but with black blood. It emerges that Sapphire was of mixed race. The glamorous underwear – a red taffeta petticoat under a demure skirt – is supposed to suggest this. ‘That’s the black under the white all right,’ comments the policeman. The hypnotic response to beat music indicates that all is not what it seems. ‘You can always tell, once they hear the beat of the bongo,’ someone observes helpfully. Whatever its intentions, the film suggests the hidden danger of miscegenation.
In the East End of London, social worker Edith Ramsay and an impassioned local cleric, the Reverend Williamson, campaigned agai
nst the mushrooming of local clubs, which they saw as closely bound up with the rise of prostitution in Stepney. Ramsay, dubbed ‘the Florence Nightingale of the brothels’, lived in Stepney and had many friends and strong relationships in the locality.9 She also had easy access to the network of clubs and cafés in Commercial Road and Cable Street. In the mid-1950s, Ramsay argued, prostitutes (known locally as ‘pavement waitresses’) could be found along the roadside, but the impact of the Street Offences Act of 1959 was to drive them off the streets and into the clubs and cafés.10 The proximity of the London docks ensured that these all-night cafés were patronised by a richly varied clientele of West Indians, Somalis, ‘Jugo-Slavs’, Sikhs and Maltese, as well as the locals. One of Edith Ramsay’s main concerns was that the cafés and clubs offered a warm welcome to vulnerable young girls – both local girls and runaways from home and from approved schools elsewhere in the country – who were tempted into prostitution through the very high wages obtainable.11
The wartime study of conditions among the immigrant population in Stepney by Phyllis Young (mentioned in Chapter 4) illustrates the background to these concerns.12 This report offered a very different perspective. Young found that during the Second World War Stepney proved a magnet for large numbers of young white women aged between sixteen and thirty-five, from all over the country, but particularly from bombed-out Coventry and Hull. Some of these young women, Young explained, adopted a predatory attitude to unattached foreigners. There were large numbers of lonely and vulnerable ex-seamen and immigrants haunting the cafés. British girls often found the foreign and darker-skinned men particularly attractive. Young’s account differs dramatically from the complaints of Reverend Williamson, who urged the London County Council to crack down on ‘foreign pimps and club-owners’. He accused immigrants of ‘living on our poor girls who are weak in mind and character’.13
Girl Trouble Page 13
