Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  Quite apart from the generally high prestige of grammar schools (‘Your school and other schools like it, represent what may be called the cream, and it is the object of schools such as yours to direct students to walks of life that call for leadership, ability, character and high standards – in a word, endeavour,’ declared Air-Marshal Sir Francis J. Fogarty in July 1953 before handing out the prizes at Purley County Grammar School for Boys), it was not quite so cut-and-dried even in Labour ranks as Simon might have wished. ‘Nearly all the delegates either were at grammar school or had their children at grammar schools,’ Richard Crossman astutely noted at Margate, while the following month the veteran local Manchester politician Wright Robinson privately confessed himself a ‘heretic’:

  My own points are first a strong exception to any one type of education being regarded as It, the complete super type justifying the exclusion of all others. The argument is that all other valid types are comprehended within this perfect common school. It is further contended that it cannot be successful unless the competition of its most powerful rival is removed from its catchment area. The grammar school must go. Given free choice the parents will prefer to send their children to a grammar school. Parents are not the best judges of what is best for their children, it is said . . . London which has wholeheartedly gone in for the C.S. is building one seven storey and one nine storey school, vast education factories with most of the features of the mass production workshop, in order to produce, or mass produce, ready made democrats. We jeer at the totalitarian methods of the Soviet, and ape them ourselves by trying to impose in a compulsory system of education, one common pattern, one type of school.

  Crossman may also have had further reservations after dining at about the same time with the headmaster of Maidstone Grammar School. ‘Claydon made an extremely good impression on me,’ recorded the Wykehamist diarist:

  What he really believes in is building up the maintained grammar schools on the one side, and making the Modern schools really good on the other. His central argument is that the comprehensive school really does neglect the differences in intelligence. ‘When you talk of Eton being a comprehensive school, it’s sheer nonsense,’ he said. ‘Every boy at Eton, however stupid, is far above the average intelligence. You don’t understand the average intelligence, and you will flood the grammar school and kill it if you try to mix the average Modern school child with the grammar school child.’4

  With the political temperature over selection starting to rise, it was a potentially acrimonious debate set to run and run.

  Lorna Stockton (later Sage) – fresh from her semi-triumph on Coronation Day – began that autumn at Whitchurch Girls’ High School in Shropshire. ‘The high school cultivated the air of being somehow still fee-paying, it was designed to produce solid, disciplined, well-groomed girls who’d marry local traders and solicitors like their fathers,’ she recalled. ‘The eleven-plus had let in a leavening of out-of-towners and outsiders, but that had only made it more vital to insist on sub-public-school mores – uniforms, “houses”, and an elaborate hierarchy of prefects and deputy prefects whose job it was to remind their juniors to stand up straight, and send them out to run up and down the playing field at break in wet weather instead of huddling in the cloakrooms.’ Social distinctions were naturally acute on the bus from and to the village where she lived:

  The back seats were reserved for big girls of fourteen and fifteen who went to the secondary modern, but only just. They had perms, boyfriends and jobs lined up, and they wore their school uniforms in a sketchy, customised way, with extra bits and bits missing, and nylons whose ladders they fixed surely with nail varnish. They had a lot to talk about and laugh over in private. They painted their nails on the way home and picked off the varnish the next morning . . .

  The secondary modern boys were younger for their age and scuffled about in the middle seats, playing at being wild, priding themselves on the filthiness of their ties and wearing spare cigarettes behind their ears. Although they sometimes looked up girls’ skirts and told dirty jokes, they were second-class passengers, the bus was girl territory, the real tearaways among the boys didn’t stoop to catch the bus, but biked to school on the days when they weren’t truanting.

  And the grammar school boys and high school girls, a conspicuous and shifty minority, distributed themselves around the front seats as they boarded. Grammar school boys stood out sacrificially in bright purple blazers and caps. At least the high school’s navy blue matched the majority – although only at a distance, there was no getting around the stigma . . .

  ‘In theory,’ Sage added, ‘we who’d passed the eleven-plus were supposed to despise the secondary modern kids for being common and thick. In practice we envied them for knowing how to be outsiders and as we grew older we aped their style: caps and berets balled up in pockets, greased and lacquered quiffs of hair, secret lockets and chains with rings on them under their shirts.’

  The real fee-paying schools inhabited in every sense a separate world. ‘If they believed in equality of opportunity,’ Crossman’s fellow-Wykehamist Hugh Gaitskell was reported as telling the party conference, ‘they could not continue with a system of education under which wealthy parents were able to buy what they and most people believed to be a better education for their children.’ At the same time, Gaitskell insisted that he was ‘not attacking public schools, or the parents who sent their children to them, but the system was wrong and must be changed’. Alice Bacon, for all her left-wing credentials, disagreed, declaring to conference that the far more important priority was to focus on ‘privilege within the State system’ and that any attempt to outlaw private education ‘would lead to a black market in private tutors and the privileged classes would send their children abroad to be educated’. At which point the whole issue, virtually moribund since 1945, returned to its slumbers. One brave soul, John Wilkes, personally sought to cross the chasm between the worlds by deciding at the end of 1953 to give up the headmastership of Radley in favour of becoming a poorly paid vicar in the heavily working-class Hunslet district of Leeds. His reward was to be treated by his mother-in-law (wife of a former headmaster of Eton) ‘as if he had forged a cheque’.5

  ‘This will be the first time a British actress has appeared as leading lady at Drury Lane, home of the American musical, since before the war,’ noted the Daily Mirror’s Eve Chapman on 1 October (the same day as Labour’s education debate). The musical was The King and I by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and the somewhat surprise choice for the role of the governess was Valerie Hobson, the subject of Chapman’s profile, with her ‘pale, ladylike looks, her well-bred clothes, and her quiet hobbies – she likes embroidery and painting’. Opening night was exactly a week later. ‘Valerie Hobson was most charming and made a triumphant success,’ applauded Noël Coward; ‘more divinely fair and gracefully dignified than ever’, agreed another diarist, Anthony Heap. The weeklies were somewhat less obliging. The Spectator’s Derek Monsey found the whole thing only ‘adequate’, especially given that ‘the brilliant glow of Oklahoma! [the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that had hit London six years earlier] still warms and lights our memories’, though he did praise Hobson for her ‘grace and sincerity’; while according to the reliably acerbic T. C. Worsley in the New Statesman, she was ‘deficient in voice but works the charm hard’. Later in the year, during the Christmas holidays, the Eton schoolboy Hugo Williams, whose theatrical parents knew Hobson, saw the show. ‘I went to meet her in the star dressing room, said to be the most beautiful in the world,’ he recalled. ‘It had been freshly painted pink and white for her, and was like entering a risqué French apartment. There were three adjoining rooms: vestibule (for casual visitors), softly lit drawing room and brightly lit dressing area, the holy of holies, where Miss Hobson was taking off wide padded hips. I still have her autograph, but not that of her husband, who wasn’t famous yet.’

  He was John Profumo, who two days after the first night was, like other Tory backbenchers, at Mar
gate for his leader’s much-awaited speech to the party conference. This was Churchill’s first major public appearance since his stroke, and he spoke for 50 minutes, standing throughout. To the faithful’s obvious relief, it was a passable version of vintage:

  All the old mannerisms were there [reported the Observer] – the pretended search for the exact word, the delighted childlike glow that comes over his features as he nears a joke. When, as is his way, he got rather confused in some statistics about food, he put it all right by happily reflecting: ‘How lucky it was I wasn’t complicating it by percentages.’ . . . Later on when he drank a glass of water he confided – again with that cherubic smile – ‘I don’t often do that.’ And then as the hall roared its appreciation: ‘I mean when I’m making a speech.’

  Not everyone shared the enthusiasm for the 78-year-old’s evident determination to stay in office. ‘London is very miserable at the moment,’ Kenneth Williams wrote soon afterwards to a friend, ‘the leaves falling in the parks, the evenings becoming colder and foggy and everywhere, the depression wrought by a Conservative government – O to be out of England, now that Winston’s in.’6

  By-election of the autumn was at Holborn and St Pancras South, whose Labour MP, Dr Santo Jeger, had died in September – ‘a rank red, and one of the ugliest little yids you ever did see’, generously noted a constituent, Anthony Heap. The party’s candidate was Jeger’s widow, Lena, who during the campaign was canvassing in a block of flats when she met a woman in the lift and addressed her on the issue of German rearmament. ‘People have been pissing in this lift,’ replied the woman. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ To which Jeger said that, if elected, she could not promise to be able to stop this. ‘Well,’ riposted the woman, ‘if you can’t stop people pissing in lifts, how are you going to stop Germans rearming?’ Jeger got home with a narrow majority on 19 November, just a few days after Crossman had spent ‘a disturbing weekend’ at meetings in the West Midlands. ‘Both at Coventry and at Leamington, Nye [Bevan] got an audience but he had to do all the lifting of it,’ he reflected. ‘I would say that there was absolutely no swing so far towards Labour and that, on the whole, the vast majority of the electorate are plain uninterested in party politics of any kind. This matters far less to a Tory Government than it does to a Labour Opposition.’

  Crossman’s gloom about the passivity of the electorate would have deepened if, on the day of Jeger’s return, he had read Catherine Heath’s article in the Manchester Guardian about her recent experience dispensing citizen’s advice from the John Hilton Bureau, recipient of over 3,000 letters a week:

  I sometimes felt that all politicians should work for a few months in such a bureau. It was to us the homeless wrote, and the old age pensioners, and the disabled soldiers. What startled me was the utter helplessness of these people in the face of the complexity of modern society; the failure of deserving cases to make use of welfare agencies existing for their benefit because they are ignorant of them. We often told a starving old age pension couple about National Assistance, or a lame man about the disabled persons register, and received a grateful letter back. Often, too, people would put themselves out of benefit, lose the right of pension appeal, &c, simply because they were quite incapable of reading a form right through and thus failed to realise there was a time-limit until it was too late.

  There were also the victims of ‘swindles’ – ‘it was pitiful to realise what easy game for the unscrupulous many were, and how easily terrified by threats of legal proceedings’ – and altogether, she concluded, ‘a vast mass of our population live their days in a perpetual state of terror and confusion, and life is a fast game of which they do not understand the rules’.7

  One life-rule that almost every gay person in 1953 Britain did understand was the advisability of keeping secret their sexual orientation. The febrile atmosphere surrounding the whole subject was epitomised by the furore in September after Benny Hill made a televised gag about New Scotland Yard’s phone number as ‘WHItehall Home-Away-Home-Away’. It was, complained the War Office, ‘in deplorable taste’ that there should be this ‘reference to homosexuality’ on a BBC programme being broadcast live from the Nuffield Centre for service personnel. Historians have differed as to whether there was a systematic, McCarthy-style witch-hunt in operation at this time against homosexuals, but certainly 1953–4 did mark a peak of prosecutions, with key men at the top – Sir David Maxwell Fyfe as Home Secretary, Sir Theobald Mathew as Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir John Nott-Bower as Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Lawrence Dunn as Chief Metropolitan Magistrate – all actively hostile towards what Dunn called ‘male harpies’ or ‘the lowest of the low’. Or, as Maxwell Fyfe put it in December 1953 to the House of Commons: ‘Homosexuals, in general, are exhibitionists and proselytizers and a danger to others, especially the young. So long as I hold the office of Home Secretary I shall give no countenance to the view that they should not be prevented from being such a danger.’

  There were several causes célèbres around this time, among them the case of the writer Rupert Croft-Cooke, found guilty in October of committing acts of gross indecency with two naval ratings – even though the corroborative evidence had been secured by the police in the most dubious way – and sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment. There was also the case of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, his cousin Michael Pitt-Rivers and the Daily Mail’s diplomatic correspondent Peter Wildeblood, all three of whom were arrested in January 1954 for homosexual offences and conspiracy to incite acts of gross indecency (the latter charge being wheeled out for the first time since the trials of Oscar Wilde). Kenneth Tynan stood bail for Wildeblood, a move that – the editor of the Evening Standard enjoyed informing his proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook – provoked ‘a great roar of laughter of Fleet Street’. Later that month, the Admiralty issued new Fleet Orders highlighting ‘the horrible character of unnatural vice’ and insisting that naval officers ‘stamp out the evil’. Recommended methods included inspection of jars of Vaseline or hair gel for tell-tale pubic hairs, while officers were also encouraged to secure ‘the help of the steadier and more reliable men on the lower deck’ in order to counter the regrettable tendency ‘to treat these matters with levity’.8

  One case, in October 1953, had a special piquancy. ‘Sir John Gielgud in the news – fined £10 for “persistent importuning” in Chelsea,’ noted Gladys Langford on Wednesday the 21st. ‘He pleaded that he was the worse for drink. There must be a crusade against homosexuality just now.’ The theatrical community mainly closed ranks – ‘Who’s been a naughty boy, then?’ was how Dame Sybil Thorndike, wagging her finger, broke the ice as Gielgud sheepishly returned to the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, for rehearsals of N. C. Hunter’s A Day by the Sea, while on its first out-of-town performance in Liverpool the following Monday there was a standing ovation when the fearful actor came on the stage – but reaction elsewhere was less tolerant. Not only were posters outside the Haymarket smeared for at least a week with ‘Dirty queer’ graffiti, but the Sunday Express’s ultra-right-wing columnist (and former editor) John Gordon penned a fiercely anti-homosexual piece, though without actually using the word. Calling Gielgud’s offence one that was ‘repulsive to all normal people’, he declared that this ‘widespread disease’ had ‘penetrated every phase of life’ and ‘infects politics, literature, the stage, the Church, and the youth movements, as the criminal courts regularly reveal to us’. He went on:

  The suggestion that peculiar people should be allowed peculiar privileges is arrant nonsense. The equally familiar plea that these pests are purely pathological cases and should be pampered instead of punished is almost as rubbishy.

  It is time the community decided to sanitise itself. For if we do not root out this moral rot, it will bring us down as inevitably as it has brought down every nation in history that became affected by it.

  There must be sharp and severe punishment. But more important than that, we must get the social conscience of the nation so roused that
such people are made social lepers.

  Gordon finished by suggesting that ‘the nation might suitably mark its abhorrence of this type of depravity by stripping from men involved in such cases any honours that have been bestowed upon them’. Gielgud himself had been knighted only that summer, and it was perhaps no wonder that in the immediate aftermath of the case Noël Coward privately lamented, ‘How could he, how could he, have been stupid and so selfish?’, perhaps guessing that his own knighthood would now be long delayed – in the event, another 17 years.

  ‘Concern has been expressed recently at the standard of morality in this country,’ observed a member of the Any Questions? audience at Parkstone the Friday after Gordon’s outburst. ‘What are the team’s views?’ Whereupon the unreconstructed Tory politician Julian Amery called for ‘a moral revival in England’, but John Arlott was adamant that such calls were irrelevant: ‘If a person is not sexually normal, that is not cured by punishment or the law, or by home influence, it’s solely a question of the way the person is, and I don’t believe that by detection, punishment, religion, or spiritual guidance, you will change a person’s basic fabric . . .’ Tellingly, during the whole discussion, there was no mention of ‘homosexuality’ as such. It is impossible to be certain whether Amery or Arlott was closer to the centre of public opinion, but the chances are that it was Amery. Two days later, the letters page of the Sunday Express noted that, in ‘an exceptional response’ to Gordon’s column, ‘most expressed strong approval’; while a few years earlier, Mass-Observation’s survey of sexual attitudes had found ‘a more genuine feeling of disgust towards homosexuality . . . than towards any other subject tackled’. This was hardly surprising, given the lurid, wholly unsympathetic approach of the popular press. ‘For many people crime reporters were the only source of information about homosexuality,’ the historian Richard Davenport-Hines has commented, ‘and they concluded that all homosexuals were chorister-molesting vicars or men who groped other men in subterranean lavatories in a fetid atmosphere of urine.’