Do his findings suggest a broadly satisfied or dissatisfied female population? Much turns on that ambiguous phrase ‘a fair amount’, but overall it is hard to be sanguine, given other contemporary evidence and subsequent oral testimony. ‘Fifty out of every hundred wives still go through their years of married life without discovering that physical satisfaction can, and should, be as real and vivid for them as it is for their husbands,’ claimed Dr Helena Wright, on the basis of ‘hundreds of talks’ with her patients and much correspondence, in her More About the Sex Factor in Marriage, a 1947 follow-up book that was in wide circulation all through the 1950s. Or take a matter-of-fact sentence in Shaw’s account of family life in a working-class London suburb: ‘The impression gained from the remarks volunteered by many of the women in all age groups was that they did not enjoy intercourse, but rather regarded it as a necessary part of married life.’ It was probably even worse in Featherstone, where according to Dennis et al ‘very few women stated real satisfaction with their sex lives’, with the authors noting that for the men there, sex was essentially ‘a matter of conquest and achievement’. Nor did the fundamental misalignment necessarily ease with age. The Bethnal Green sociologists did not greatly concern themselves with sex, but Peter Townsend in his study of old people there did record his impression that ‘some women had rarely experienced sexual satisfaction and found it difficult to give a husband “his rights” when they became infirm’. The most vivid evidence – perhaps not altogether representative, but surely far from wholly atypical – comes from the recollections of Renee Lester, a Scunthorpe mother of six:
I wasn’t one of the lucky ones. Every night I’d maybe read for a bit and keep my eye ready on the clock for when he came home from the pub. He’d be home around ten to eleven. When I heard footsteps I’d blow the lamp out and pretend to be asleep. He would come home full of beer and start mauling me. I just wanted to sleep and it used to cause no end of trouble if I refused him. You’d get a swipe if you didn’t. And sometimes they’d say, ‘Oh bugger you if that’s the way you feel.’ I didn’t care if he said that, but mostly they demanded their rights. There was no affection with it, no love, they just wanted sex. It was a duty, a horrible duty to me, I didn’t like it. A woman didn’t get satisfaction from sex then, she was just disgusted with it, if she was owt like me. And you’d lie there and you’d be looking at the cracks in the ceiling thinking, ‘Oh that crack could do with filling in, that could do with a bit of whitewashing.’
‘It was no fun,’ she concluded bleakly, ‘it was just nasty, dirty and degrading.’51
How much did unsatisfactory sex lives matter to those involved? Probably quite a lot, in that among Natalie Higgins’s 1950s cohort (much likelier to complain about the subject than the 1930s cohort had been) ‘some women expressed disappointment that sex only lasted “two minutes,” that their husbands did not act tenderly toward them during sex, or said that they would have liked “a bit more foreplay” ’, while ‘some men wished that their wives had instigated sex sometimes, or were simply more active during intercourse’. Particularly for women, notwithstanding their underlying pragmatism about marriage, the ubiquitous messages of the era must have made a significant difference, heightening expectations and, all too often, increasing subsequent disappointment. Those messages, of course, were less to do with sex itself than romance and the ideal of the happy, mutually contented, indissoluble union, but it did not take a huge leap of the imagination to picture that ideal as finding its most perfect expression in the bedroom. The cruel gap between aspiration and reality – arguably the master-theme of the 1950s – comes out in the bitter tone of some of the complaints made to Gorer:
Treating their wives like servants instead of partners, and being very selfish and demanding in sexual matters. (Lower middle-class wife, 29, Bromley)
Expect a woman to submit to love-making because it is ‘their duty’ whether they like it or not. (Working-class wife, 28, Castleford)
Excessive sexual demands. A wife should be entitled to say no if she wants to, and not be forced. (‘A typical housewife of the Working Class’, 35, Maidenhead)
Taking wives for granted. Wanting intimacy without much love-making first. Not troubling if wife is sexually satisfied or not. (Middle-class wife, 33, Hove)
A.J.P. Taylor famously described the English between roughly 1880 and 1940 as ‘a frustrated people’ on account of inadequate methods of contraception. Those methods improved significantly after the war – even before the Pill – but the chances are that the frustration, for men as well as women, largely continued.
Yet there is always the danger of ‘presentism’. Just because we live in an age of, relatively speaking, more companionate marriages and more reciprocal sexual relationships, we assume that their absence fatally blighted our parents’ or grandparents’ lives in the 1950s. This rather condescending assumption does not hold up, if Higgins is right in her core argument about marriage in mid-century Britain that so long as both parties to the contract did what they were supposed to do – husband as breadwinner, wife as homemaker – then the marriage was a viable one. ‘Neither romantic love nor sexual passion were given a high priority,’ she insists, though she adds that ‘there was a general wish for companionship and censure for domestic violence’. Geoffrey Gorer, an almost unfailingly perceptive observer, would have agreed with her. Highlighting in his study of the English character ‘the great importance for English men and women of the institution of marriage and the seriousness with which they consider it’, he went on: ‘It is marriage itself which is important, not, I think, love or sexual gratification: a marriage is living together, making a home together, making a life together, and raising children.’52 The greatest priority was to keep the family show on the road, even if that show involved untold frustrations and resentments, few of which could yet be openly talked about.
It is undeniable that many 1950s parents – especially fathers – could be harsh or authoritarian or remote figures to their children. ‘From as young as I can remember we were all regularly beaten, bullied and victimised by our father,’ recalled John Davies about his childhood in Machen, south Wales, soon after his younger brother Ron had resigned as Welsh Secretary in 1998:
We would get picked on for something as trivial as playing out in the garden without permission. I can vividly remember my father lining us up in the garden and interrogating us – hitting out with a leather strap he had specially made. He would use violence until one of us gave in to confess, then punish us even more. We would regularly be black and blue at our father’s hands. He would fly into a rage at the slightest thing – dinners would end up all over the walls and we’d all get beaten.
Jacqueline Wilson’s father, Harry, was not violent, but still inflicted terrible, unpredictable rages on his family. ‘When he was in full rant,’ she remembered, ‘his face would go an ugly red and the veins would stand out on his forehead.’ Or take Christine Keeler’s stepfather (‘Dad’) as she grew up in a converted railway carriage at Wraysbury in Berkshire: ‘It was always Dad who gave me orders and told me how to help around the house. Mum just carried on waiting on me hand and foot, cooking and serving food, washing and ironing and making the bed. Dad was the law . . . Once I brought a field mouse home. I held it out in my cupped hands, very pleased to have such a warm, living thing to play with. But he took it away from me, threw it on the floor and crushed it with his foot. I remember it squeaking.’ In the case of Rosalind Delmar, growing up in Dormanstown, both her parents insisted on no wavering from moral absolutes: he ‘believed that might was right and that children should obey paternal discipline without question’, whereas her absolutes ranged from ‘the right way to cook a pie or scrub a saucepan – “cleanliness is next to godliness” – to iron precepts which told you what to do, say and think’, precepts that usually reflected her strong Catholicism. What was so often missing was physical intimacy. ‘Ours had been a typical 1950s relationship,’ Angela Phillips wrote in 2005 after her fa
ther’s death. ‘We were affectionate and respectful but – I realised as I held his hand that last night – we had barely touched since I was a baby.’ And she went on: ‘Mine was the Truby King generation. Reared by the book. We slept in our own beds after a good-night kiss and a story. No snuggling into the parental bed, no curling up on a lap and falling asleep in front of the TV. At adolescence even the good-night kiss had to stop. Distance was maintained. Children need to be tough, resilient, independent (in case of another war?) . . .’53
Amid all this and much similar testimony, however, it is easy to forget that 1950s parents were, taken as a whole, significantly less old-school than the previous generation of parents. The oral evidence alone is striking: Margaret Williamson, on the basis of interviews in the ironstone mining district of East Cleveland, found post-war fathers appreciably more involved and willing to play with their children than pre-war parents had been; the same applies to the Higgins interviews from Hull and Birmingham; while in the post-war north-west, Roberts reckoned that ‘families became much more child-centred’, so that ‘parents were on the whole closer to their children, less authoritarian than their own parents and less feared’. Among contemporary observers, a particularly informed reading came from Shaw in her working-class London suburb:
The families in the younger generation showed the prevailing tendency to put the children first, and fathers as well as mothers seemed to be aware that a high standard of child health and upbringing is required today by the health and social services. Both made sacrifices so that their children might have the vitamins, the clothes, and the toys which the ‘good parent’ is expected to give them. The idea of the ‘good parent’ which the younger generation seemed to have was in contrast to that of the older; it was not uncommon for a young mother to speak of her father’s strictness in her childhood and to add ‘but fathers mustn’t be like that today, must they?’ . . .
Most of the parents in the under-forty group were markedly indulgent and permissive in their handling of their children. The main burden of care necessarily fell on the mothers during the pre-school years, but fathers played with their children when they came in from work, took them out at week-ends, and made toys for them . . .
The overall sense is of parenthood on the cusp of fundamental change by the early to mid-1950s; tellingly, replies to Gorer near the start of the decade revealed that a continuing attachment to the need for discipline in the home was combined with a marked distaste (apart from a smallish minority) for corporal punishment which went beyond a spank or a slap.
This incipient revolution came at a parental price. ‘Five out of the sixteen men who were married in the 1950s expressed frustration with the conflicting pressures of their roles of breadwinner and father,’ notes Higgins about this time of ‘more work than people to do it’, and she quotes a Birmingham grocer who had married in 1954: ‘I only saw them [ie his children] a short time at night before we put them to bed, when I got ’ome ’cos I mean I used to work at Stechford, an’ I lived at ’Andsworth.’ This pressure to do something for the kiddies, which in practice usually meant long hours of overtime, was often complemented on the mother’s side by a gnawing anxiety about the best way to bring up her children, an anxiety probably exacerbated rather than relieved by the burgeoning advice (including Dr Spock’s Baby and Child Care from 1955) on the subject. ‘The mother of a first baby wanted to know if we disapproved of thumb sucking,’ noted Shaw:
She had been told by the Health Visitor to stop her baby from doing it, but ‘the gentleman on the wireless’ (in Woman’s Hour) said that it might do psychological harm to prevent a baby sucking his thumb. One mother of a pre-school child asked for advice about her son’s sleep disturbance and fear of cats. She explained that she felt very guilty because she had, once, failed to hear the child crying when he awoke suddenly.
Even the thoroughly well-balanced and mostly cheerful Judy Haines was prone to moments of doubt. ‘Ione asked to go and play with sand and in other gardens,’ she recorded in 1951. ‘I managed to resist this . . . The children are welcome to come in but I don’t like our girls running wild. I hope I am right. I believe in an organised life for them while young.’ Chingford was a very different world from inner-city Liverpool, where a pessimistic John Barron Mays found that ‘the degree of supervision and discipline exercised by parents differs enormously between family and family’:
There are still a number of fathers who when roused to anger employ an excessive amount of physical violence. It seems that ‘a good hiding’ or ‘a battering’ is the only method they know. The result is that many children genuinely fear their fathers and some mothers deliberately conceal their children’s misdemeanours from their husband because they dread excessive punishment. Children are quick, too, in such cases to exploit their mother’s sympathy to secure indulgence. It seems clear that training in parenthood is still at a most primitive level and, in so far as discipline goes, men and women either imitate the treatment that was meted out to them as children or react strongly in the opposite direction.54
No more than any other decade did the 1950s, with enough problems of its own, have ‘the answers’ for the problems of the future.
So, happy families or not? It is a very real historical difficulty that, happiness only writing white, some of the very best, most compelling memoirs of the era – for instance by Lorna Sage or Carolyn Steedman – record largely dysfunctional families and essentially miserable childhoods. Things become more mixed if one moves down a literary level or two. To pick just a trio from the biography shelves: Adam Faith remembers from Acton ‘a very free and easy-going home’ in which ‘Mum never minded much what we got up to – as long as it didn’t bring trouble to the front door’; John Sergeant, son of a clergyman, depicts ‘a happy childhood’ in the Oxfordshire village of Great Tew (‘the village was heaven for children who wanted to build igloos in the winter, to ride bikes in the summer, to chase bullocks in the field, to shoot catapults and on one glorious occasion to try to escape from home altogether’), though he was largely unaware that his parents were incompatible and wholly ignorant that they had made a ten-year agreement to stay together only while the children grew up; and Kenny Everett (real name Maurice Cole) had, according to his sister, a suburban childhood in Liverpool that was ‘perhaps too cloistered, too sheltered’, but nevertheless was within ‘a very close, very loving family’.
Clearly it is impossible to say that any one childhood or family was ‘typical’, but Ken Blakemore’s memoir Sunnyside Down, about growing up in the Cheshire village of Bunbury, has a particular – and attractively unassuming – authenticity about it. He was born in 1948 (the day the NHS began), had three much older siblings and seems to have enjoyed his childhood. But for all the memoir’s rich, atmospheric period detail, the keenest interest lies in the portrait of his parents. His father (Wilfrid) ran, undynamically and unprofitably, a small workshop servicing motor cars, and generally was a somewhat distant figure who ‘lived for coming home, putting his feet up and retreating into another world behind the paper or a historical novel’; his mother (Beryl) ‘was basically cheerful, and had an infectious laugh, but there was no mistaking the fact that, as the 1950s went on, eddies of discontent sometimes swirled into her moods’.
Blakemore includes an evocative setpiece of a typical family teatime, circa 1955:
5.30 pm. Mum is getting the evening meal underway. The contents of three misshapen aluminium saucepans are beginning to bubble on a small, grey electric cooker that has one larger solid heating plate, glowing red, and one smaller one. Mum is wearing a ‘pinnie’ with a faded flower pattern on it, and frowns as the cooker gives her a painful electric shock when she touches one of the knobs. She inserts some lamb chops under the uncertain grill.
5.40 pm. Enter Dad, through the front door. He is carrying a rolled-up Daily Telegraph and is whistling, partly to announce his arrival and partly to show that he is pleased to be home. He talks to Mum, running through his day. Each news item
is preceded with the phrase ‘I see’, as in, ‘I see there’s been another horrific accident at Fourways.’ She responds appropriately, but looks distracted as she checks the chops, pokes the potatoes and washes some sprigs of mint under the tap at the sink.
5.55 pm. As the weather forecast for land areas starts on the radio in the kitchen, Dad, on cue, makes his way upstairs to wash.
6.00 pm. The news headlines follow the Greenwich Time Signal on the Home Service, and the radio is switched off. Mum calls me in from the garden. Dad appears, wearing trousers and a short-sleeved shirt, looking pink and scrubbed.
6.05 pm. Everyone is now sitting at the table except Mum, who is serving up each meal on plates in the kitchen. She brings plates through, starting with Dad’s first, apologising as she does so for the way she’s cooked the food. Each plate has on it a lamb chop, a number of boiled potatoes, peas (picked from the garden) and carrots. ‘I don’t know if you’ll really like these chops,’ admits Mum. ‘They weren’t very good to start with – that Tony’s a real twister – but I’ve burned them a bit as well.’ No one responds to these apologetic remarks; we’re used to them, and also know that the chops will be delicious.
6.08 pm. We all start eating, except Mum, who hasn’t sat down yet nor brought a plate of food for herself. No one comments on this. We know that, about half-way through the first course, she will bring a much smaller, scrappier portion of food into the living room for herself. I have an uneasy feeling, looking back on this, that, like a lot of women in low-income families, Mum was regularly cutting back on her own food so her children and husband could have enough. She would eventually sit down reluctantly and say things like, ‘You don’t really fancy the food you’ve cooked yourself. I’m fed up with looking at it.’
Family Britain, 1951-1957 Page 72
