The moral panic over clubs in Stepney was highly revealing of contemporary anxieties and prejudices. For the Reverend Williamson, clubs were centres of vice to be thundered at. He denounced them as centres of everything he deplored: unchecked immigration, girls ‘oozing money’ on account of their ‘elastic moral standards’, contraceptives, and jukeboxes, which he clearly saw as the work of the devil. Ramsay was rather more measured in her attacks, except when it came to homosexuals. Remarking on the different categories of ‘pouffes’, whom she alleged flocked to the clubs in Stepney, she concluded that their presence undoubtedly added to a ‘prevailing sense of evil’.14 Investigating the clubs, both Williamson and Ramsay produced colourful descriptions of club-goers and atmosphere which were eagerly reproduced in the press. Relaying goings-on in the Shamrock Club, for instance, Williamson reported a girl ‘in scanty clothes’ ‘waggling her bottom’ to jukebox music and then stripping down to her G-string.15 About fifteen men were said to have been watching this performance. Visiting the St Louis, Batty Street and Play Box clubs, Ramsay described ‘young, grubby and shabbily dressed girls … embracing coloured men’, and a ‘curious atmosphere of frenzy and indecency’ as couples engaged in ‘expert Rock and Roll’.16
A campaign to extend magistrates’ and police powers to crack down on and control the clubs gained the support of Labour peers Lord Stonham and Baroness Ravensdale in the House of Lords. Introducing the subject in the Lords in 1960, Lord Stonham took the line that ‘Vice has “never had it so good” as in this country’.17 He saw clubs as debauching the young: as centres of vice, drugs, striptease and squalor. Baroness Ravensdale, much respected for her work with young people in London, spoke in the Lords about how she had been treated to a tour of the clubs in Stepney, escorted by Miss Ramsay. She would not name the establishments in question, Irene Ravensdale announced dramatically, because she did not ‘want to be slashed or to have vitriol thrown into my face’.18 The baroness proceeded to regale the House with descriptions of jukeboxes and teenage girls in G-strings. She also attacked the clientele of the lunchtime strip shows popular in the clubs. These audiences consisted mainly of ‘ordinary City types, with black coats and striped trousers’. ‘[B]egging your Lordships’ pardon’, she continued, these men ‘stride religiously into “Peeporama”, and they take a pal so that they can put it on an expense account. They are aged between 30 and 55. Why do they go in? They go in to giggle and goggle and leer at these miserable strip-tease girls.’19 Striptease was big business, she continued ruefully, before swerving off into another paragraph of revelations and rhetoric. ‘Doomed girls’ were smoking in doorways, touting themselves and coining money; they would ‘charge a “fiver” for a long spell and £1 for a quick bash’.20 The baroness’s journey around the clubs had left her in no doubt that they all had ‘the blackest record’:
The prostitutes were tragic and squalid and the men with whom I spoke and chatted mainly coloured. I have no doubt that they were all experts in vice, dope-selling and drug-peddling. One coloured man even offered me a dance to a ‘juke box’, and when I said that I was too old for the ‘Cha-Cha’ he said that he would put on a slow fox-trot for me.21
Some of these ‘experts in vice’ had manners. Baroness Ravensdale admitted that her host had been hospitable, even solicitously so. He ‘had the touching decency to say to Miss Ramsay and me as we left that he hoped his companions had caused us no inconvenience, as some of them were pretty drunk. There is a chivalry even among these thugs and gangsters.’ Hardly surprisingly, however, it was the shock-horror stuff that made it into the newspapers. The good manners, chivalry and the concern for young girls – for all of which Ramsay and Ravensdale found ample evidence in the clubs of Stepney – made for far less colourful copy. It was all too easy to stir up public outrage about what Baroness Ravensdale described with spirit (and in a sequence of mixed metaphors) as a ‘running sore’, ‘a great evil crossword puzzle that links up vice with drugs, nudist shows and striptease’ in the clubs.22 Other pillars of the establishment leapt to her defence, quick to seize the moral high ground. For the Bishop of Carlisle, for instance, the clubs were places ‘of evil in a gross and beastly form’, where wicked men lured young women into becoming ‘the victims and slaves of vice’.23
The idea of London as a ‘festering sore’, harbouring networks, ‘crossword puzzles’ or cobwebs of vice was unsettling, and of course it was taken up with gusto in the Sunday newspapers.24 One of the main concerns of the Wolfenden Report on Homosexuality and Prostitution, published in 1957, was with ‘public order and decency’. Comparatively liberal on homosexual acts (which Wolfenden recommended decriminalising if in private, and between consenting adults), the committee had taken a harsher line on prostitution.25 A double standard (fines for female prostitutes soliciting in public places, their male clients not regarded as nuisances) remained undisturbed. The Street Offences Act of 1959, mentioned earlier, was specifically designed to push prostitution from the streets. According to Edith Ramsay and other observers, however, this not only succeeded in driving prostitutes into clubs and cafés, but also encouraged a proliferation of ‘call girls’, operating to some extent underground.26 The idea of vice hidden in basement cellars and private clubs was no less unsettling than the idea of vice on the streets. On top of this, anxieties about immigrants and the foreign ownership of many of the clubs (such as the Maltese club and café proprietors in east London) added to concerns. And were girls always the victims of vice? The gentlemen discussing the clubs in the House of Lords liked to portray them as such, but there was evidence that becoming a call girl was an attractive career option that brought lucrative prospects.27
It was against this rich background of unease that the Profumo affair erupted in the early 1960s. John Profumo, Secretary of State for War in Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government, had a short affair with attractive young model and showgirl Christine Keeler. Scandal blew up when it was rumoured that Keeler had at the same time been sleeping with Yevgeny Ivanov, a senior attaché at the Soviet embassy in London. This had threatening implications for national security in the era of the Cold War. Profumo himself made things worse, first by lying to Parliament, then admitting that he had lied and resigning.
There were all manner of ramifications. Christine Keeler’s relationships with two West Indian lovers, Johnny Edgecombe and the jazz musician Aloysius ‘Lucky’ Gordon, led to episodes of jealousy and violence which received plenty of coverage in the press. It was these events, the arrests, and the subsequent trial of Johnny Edgecombe, which originally brought Profumo’s relationship with Keeler into the public domain. Keeler and another young woman, Marilyn (Mandy) Rice-Davies were both friends and to some extent protégées of Stephen Ward. Ward, a society osteopath (whose patients had included Winston Churchill, Ava Gardner and Gandhi), was a complex figure with both aristocratic connections and interests in London’s underworld. He was to prove the most obvious victim of the affair. Charged with living off the immoral earnings of Keeler and Rice-Davies, Ward committed suicide.28
Many aspects of the affair shocked the public. Most obviously, it exposed the muddy morals of persons in what was then known as the Establishment. The image of London as a city of vice was also reinforced. It now appeared that there were murky networks linking Notting Hill jazz musicians, West Indian immigrants, drugs and sex with aristocrats and politicians. Lively reports of call girls playing around in privileged haunts such as Lord Astor’s property in Cliveden disturbed and assuredly titillated the readers of the weekend papers.29
No small part of the discomfiture of some of those caught up in the affair stemmed from the parts played by Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. Their behaviour confounded conventional categories. Neither could easily be dismissed as wholly innocent or as wholly wicked, and both insisted on telling their own stories. Both Keeler and Rice-Davies strenuously contested descriptions of themselves as call girls or prostitutes. Rice-Davies objected that ‘I have been branded a cheap
prostitute. That is not so. I am an expensive courtesan, if you like, but never a prostitute.’30 Keeler’s determination to solicit media attention and to speak up for herself it seems took John Profumo by surprise. He had underestimated her, assuming her to be uneducated and only interested in make-up and hairstyles.31 Both girls had come to London at the age of fifteen, independently, to seek their fortunes. Keeler’s background was working class: she had been brought up in a converted railway carriage in Buckinghamshire. She was twenty-one when the scandal broke in 1963. Rice-Davies’s family was more middle class: she had grown up in Shirley, outside Birmingham. Both had done stints of modelling and worked as ‘showgirls’ in Murray’s Cabaret Club in Soho. Both girls were extremely resourceful. Keeler was tough-minded: she had survived a number of personal setbacks. Rice-Davies was shrewd, sexy and quick-witted. Under questioning at the trial of Stephen Ward, the prosecuting counsel challenged Rice-Davies by insisting that Lord Astor denied ever having met her, let alone having an affair with her. ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ replied Rice-Davies sweetly, a retort which was immortalised in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
5.2 Mandy Rice-Davies unperturbed about the public impact of her revelations (© Express/Stringer/Getty Images).
Both Keeler and Rice-Davies showed a flair for publicity and a keen eye for profiting from ‘exposures’. Keeler tried to sell her story to the highest newspaper bidder. Rice-Davies published The Mandy Report. She warned her readers gleefully that she was about to tell ‘a wicked, wicked story’:
the sorry tale of a young girl, barely more than a child, baited with mink and diamonds until trapped in a web of complete moral depravity …32
This silken promise of a goodnight story may well have caused some of her acquaintances to writhe sleeplessly, uneasy in their beds and consciences. Mandy would reveal the truth at last, she promised, spilling the beans ‘about the millionaires who buy women as casually as they order champagne’, and about ‘the snake-pit masquerading under the title of High Society’. Then there were the details of the sex parties, which she claimed had shocked both her and her friend Christine, as far ‘too “kinky” for us’. The press didn’t know how to deal with these girls. As has often been the case in more recent scandals and kiss-and-tell stories, such as Monica Lewinsky’s relationship with President Bill Clinton, it was difficult to decide who was the exploiter and who was the victim. The historian Frank Mort has shown how Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies were variously represented as naïve ingénues, modest young women, sexual victims or wanton seductresses.33 The Sunday Mirror denounced both girls as shameless tarts, and Rice-Davies as a ‘pert slut’.34 But both were capable of standing up for themselves, and refused to be silenced.
The Profumo affair effectively undermined the credibility of Macmillan’s government. It discredited the male establishment, and suggested that young women from working-class backgrounds might not always be amenable to patriarchal control. Girls were getting somewhat uppity, it seemed. And the wages of sin (as columnist Marjorie Proops observed in the Sunday Mirror) might be anything but deadly.35 It was getting hard to tell the difference between ‘whores’ and ‘liberated’ – or enterprising – young women-about-town.
The colourful adventures of Christine and Mandy in the vice haunts of the metropolis may have appalled and enthralled observers in the rest of Britain, but the experience of most fifteen- to twenty-year-old girls was obviously very different. Anxiety over the influence of clubs, coffee bars and basement jazz, however, spread. The historian Louise Jackson has shown how Manchester City Police mounted an attack on what they saw as the ‘Coffee Club Menace’ in the early 1960s.36 In Manchester, clubs such as the Jungfrau in Cathedral Street, Beat City, the Cavern Club or the Twisted Wheel were important meeting places for young people. They were ‘members only’ clubs, which meant they were outside the licensing laws and that the police had no automatic right to enter them. There was concern over drugs, especially cannabis and ‘purple hearts’ (Drinamyl). Like the clubs in Stepney, these places were suspected of being a magnet for girls who had run away from difficult family situations, or from approved schools. These girls were regarded as being ‘in moral danger’.
The press published lurid stories. In 1964 the Daily Mail reported that Manchester’s Heaven and Hell club, with its dark, gothic interior, was associated with the ‘dangerous teenage immorality lurking in the basements of Britain’s big cities’. The News of the World trumped this a year later by reviving stories of white slavery, this time centring on Manchester’s coffee bars and beat clubs.37 Two pretty young girls who had been ‘dossing’ in the clubs were said to have been abducted and delivered for auction among Pakistani men in Bradford. This pressed all the old alarm bells about race, immigration and sexual danger, even though it turned out that the girls in question were both over seventeen and that the real story was very different.38
In Manchester, police raids on the clubs brought a relatively small number of minor prosecutions. Most of the young people attending these venues were simply there to have a good time. But suspicions persisted. Part of the reason was simply unease about youth culture. The year 1964 was one which brought outbreaks of violence between Mods and Rockers on the south coast of England, particularly in the seaside resorts of Clacton, Margate and Brighton. In Brighton, the council had been concerned since the late 1950s about overcrowding, criminal networks and stolen goods in relation to the town’s myriad clubs and coffee bars. What went on at the Mogambo, or the Whiskey-A-Go-Go, certainly worried parents, although to this day people record on local websites their happy memories of teenage dances in such places.39
In Stepney, the Reverend Williamson had denounced jukeboxes as ‘pagan altars’.40 They had become the symbols of a new teenage culture. In 1945 there were fewer than 100 jukeboxes in Britain, by 1958 it has been estimated that there were probably over 15,000.41 Jukeboxes purveyed the new rock ’n’ roll in clubs and cafés all over the country and were interpreted by even the most law-abiding teenagers as something of a challenge to convention. Lorna Sage, growing up in the rural environs of Whitchurch, Shropshire, records the impact of Bill Haley and his Comets.42 She became a teenager just as music separated the generations and young people became ‘a tribe apart’. Lorna remembered a delight in Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and the bad boys of rock ’n’ roll; their heavy sensuality, the ‘insidious bump and grind’. On a family trip to Southport, she and her friend Gail rushed from one jukebox to another, intent on drowning out the music of Pat Boone with Elvis’s ‘All Shook Up’ at maximum volume. They were shrieking with glee at this, ‘like the Bacchae who dismembered Orpheus’.43 The behaviour was harmless enough, but probably not quite what was expected of young ladies at Whitchurch High School.
Class, like ethnicity, was an important consideration. In the mid-1950s, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson’s short documentary film Momma Don’t Allow featured young people jiving in a north London jazz club.44 The working-class youngsters (especially the Teddy boys) are fashionably dressed, confident and relaxed, until a middle-class contingent arrives and class tensions threaten disruption. Rock ’n’ roll, like youth culture generally in the early 1960s, was seen as emanating from the working class. Jazz clubs, coffee bars and beat cellars attracted a mixed clientele, and many parents, particularly of daughters, were uneasy about this. Sociologist Brian Jackson, investigating communities in Huddersfield in the mid-1960s, found that teenage girls attending the local grammar school were uneasy about going into coffee bars, let alone jazz clubs.45 They saw them as attracting ‘Teddy boy’ types, or girls who hadn’t been well brought up. But outside the bigger towns and cities, the majority of teenagers probably enjoyed rock ’n’ roll in parentally approved environments: youth clubs in church halls, at sixth-form dances, or even (given the growing importance of television sets and portable record players) in the family home.
5.3 Trendy teenagers enjoying the sounds at Brad’s Club, London, early 1960s (© Terry Finch
er/Stringer/Getty Images).
5.4 The lure of the juke-box (© Evening Standard/Getty Images).
A short film feature issued by British Pathé early in 1963 must have warmed the hearts of many a middle-class father of teenage girls. Entitled Beatnik Beauty, this film was set in Mayfair and introduced its audience to Stephanie Beaumont, a ‘beatnik’ who strides purposefully into the frame dragging on a cigarette.46 She looks stylish and cutting-edge in her leather jacket, biker boots and denim jeans. Notwithstanding this cool ‘don’t mess with me’ image, Stephanie is about to be both messed with and transformed. A smooth male voice-over describes the process of prettifying and taming. Stephanie is hauled into a Mayfair salon by two white-coated lady beauticians with hair backcombed and smoothed into a semblance of Mr Whippy sundaes. She is strapped into a chair, and her own hair is treated to an ‘egg rinse’, her face plastered with ‘anti-wrinkle’ unguents. She is clapped into rollers and face masks. Finally she emerges, lacquered and encased in gold brocade and lamé. The commentator burbles delight at her ladylike elegance; at her transformation from beatnik into Cinderella. To a contemporary viewer she looks prissy and defeated, like Greer’s Female Eunuch incarnate.
The style revolution of the early 1960s could scarcely be ignored by contemporaries: it had obvious links to the widening gap between generations. The historian Sheila Rowbotham remembered how in east London, comparatively young working-class women ‘still sported elaborate beehive hair-dos’ as they pushed prams on shopping trips.
But the teenage girls’ hair was now straight and they wore the dark-coloured three-quarter length leather jackets made in the local East End sweatshops.47
Girl Trouble Page 14
