Family Britain, 1951-1957 (87 page)

No boy may have his hands in his pockets on meeting a master or other senior person. Boys are expected to raise their caps on meeting any masters, masters’ wives or ladies of the staff . . . There must be no communication of any kind between boys in the Sick Wing and other boys – e.g. dropping notes onto the Parade, lending books etc. Private wireless sets and gramophones are forbidden. Association football is forbidden. No boy may keep in his possession a sum of money larger than two shillings. Only English comics are permitted. All American publications of this kind are banned. In addition, cheap novelettes and such like reading matter are forbidden, but it is understood that this prohibition does not extend to Penguins and reputable publications of the same kind.

As for the corporal punishment that helped to enforce such rules, a national poll of teachers in 1952 found that 89 per cent wanted such punishment to be retained. Still, the probability is that its frequency was starting to diminish. ‘Masters dare not touch little Willie or mistresses cane little Mary,’ complained Dr N. S. Sherrard of Beccles in July 1954 in an address to parents at the Alderman Woodrow Secondary School, Lowestoft. ‘People would be up in arms today if they did. As they cannot do it, you must do it yourself in the home.’ Even an essentially kindly person like the clergyman Oliver Willmott, who took Scripture lessons in the village school at Loders, grumbled in his Parish Notes the following February that the Dorset Education Committee was no longer following the biblical precept ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child’. And he wondered whether the Committee’s members responsible for their ‘precious rules’ had ‘children of their own, or have ever taught in school’.15

Juvenile delinquency, and the moral welfare of youth generally (not least in the context of their disturbingly expanding wage packets), remained a pressing concern – even before the coming of rock ’n’ roll. In Gerald Fairlie’s
The Return of the Black Gang
(1954), a Sapper-style Bulldog Drummond yarn, Sir Bryan Johnstone, Director of Criminal Investigations at Scotland Yard, offers his analysis of what, in the context of the rise of ‘cosh boys’, was going wrong: ‘A strange lack of parental control in these modern days, caused by mistaken kindness and the fallacies of modern psychiatric education. The hysterical clamouring of youth for any sort of adventure . . .’ Plenty of other voices also called for a tougher approach. ‘There is,’ declared Stanley Smith, Brigade Secretary of the Boys’ Brigade, in a 1951 talk at the Athenaeum on juvenile delinquency, ‘a dangerously soft attitude present which whittles away all personal responsibility for wrong doing, and the child comes to regard himself not as sinful, but just as “a psychological case”.’ The police agreed, to judge by John Barron Mays’s analysis not long afterwards of a police division in inner-city Liverpool. ‘Stress was generally placed on punishment [including the birch] and behind many of the criticisms was the old idea of retribution,’ he found. ‘It was clearly only a minority who appreciated that a juvenile court was not a watered-down adult court, that ascertainment of guilt and consequent dismissal or punishment were not the main issues. They were either unsympathetic to, or ignorant of, the true purpose of the juvenile court, which is broadly therapeutic and concerned more with the rehabilitation of the child than the punishment of transgressors.’16

What about youth organisations? The still very popular Boy Scouts undoubtedly did their bit –
The Scout Song Book
, published in 1952, included such Ralph Reader favourites as ‘Comrades Are We’, ‘The Day Is What You Make It’, ‘It’s Great to Be Young’ and of course ‘Crest of a Wave’ – but Basil Henriques, doyen of the Boys’ Club movement and veteran magistrate in the East London Juvenile Court, worried about what happened when boys left the Scouts, the ‘greatest leakage’ being between 13 and 15:

Of those who leave [he wrote in 1955] many have the potentialities for becoming splendid men, while others are boys of a lower calibre who will not knuckle down to discipline or accept the demands made on them. Can the club ‘sink’ hold both these types? Does the club movement, like the Scouts, concentrate on the better grammar-school boy, and thereby neglect the difficult, mediocre boy who is driven out of the ‘sink’ down the ‘drain’, or is it inclined to concentrate on the sub-standard boy, and thereby drive the better type out of the ‘sink’, not necessarily down the ‘drain’, but into the non-co-operative and unsocial ‘stream’?

That October, a report entitled
Citizens of To-morrow
, by four working parties of educationalists, sociologists and industrialists, identified a fateful ‘gap both in education and in life’ opening from 15 to 18. ‘The Youth Service which caters for these crucial years,’ noted the
Observer
in its summary of the report, ‘has been condemned to a losing battle against penury, with too few trained leaders and too many “dingy surroundings,” “outworn techniques and obsolete habits of thinking.” The results are garnered by the Forces [ie for National Service] in recruits with poor physique and poor education, who lack “religious knowledge, self-confidence, initiative and sense of responsibility.” ’

The article was called ‘The Trouble with Youth’, a trouble that not even Frankie Vaughan could fix. The crooner was a prominent supporter of youth clubs, and in November 1955
Picture Post
’s Robert Muller described how this ‘serious young man from the slums of Liverpool, with perhaps the greatest juvenile following after Dickie Valentine, and a passion to do good’, had recently spent a week on a tour of them, judging talent contests and sometimes performing himself. ‘Yet to do good,’ reflected Muller, ‘was not made easy for Vaughan’:

In some mixed clubs, members preferred to roar and yell and scream at the idol in the blue serge suit to putting on a show of their own. And always there were the girls. Thousands of them, swelling the mixed clubs to bursting point, infiltrating the boys’ clubs as friends and relatives. They were the girls who had not come to perform, or see the boys perform, but merely to pay their customary homage to a pop singer, to indulge in their weekly bout of exhibitionism. They were not content with adjudication. They wanted performance. They were not content with autographs or pictures. They wanted kisses.

On one such an occasion, as the girls screamed, and the boys hooted, he shouted: ‘Do you know what you are? You are a disgrace!’

‘The god showed his wrath,’ concluded Muller, ‘and the congregation was silent.’17

Occasionally, the views and voices of the trainee adults themselves come through. Mays in Liverpool in the early 1950s discovered that schoolboys were ‘almost unanimously in favour of the retention of corporal punishment’, having ‘the advantages of swiftness and brevity in its execution reinforced by long tradition’, whereas alternative punishments, including ‘a withdrawal of such privileges as attendance at the baths or playing fields’, would generate far more resentment. About the same time, Pearl Jephcott was investigating youth organisations in various working-class districts of London and Nottingham, to which around a third or just over of adolescents belonged. She was particularly interested in those who had left:

Not interested in learning knots. (
Girl Guide, 14
)

Started going out with boy. (
Girls’ Life Brigade, 15
)

Packed it in when I started courting. (
Club boy, 16
)

Too stuffy in the Crypt. (
Club boy, 14
)

Don’t like it, don’t like religion. (
Club girl, 14
)

Too much of a family clique. (
Club boy, 17
)

Boring – you just sit there and can’t get any games because the boys bag them all. (
Club girl, 15
)

One group safe to be left alone by the sociologists was the Young Conservatives, aka ‘the marriage market of the suburbs’, which during its 1950s peak had a membership of around 170,000. ‘Their dances were famous,’ according to Raphael Samuel (probably not on the basis of personal experience), ‘incomparably preferable, for the protective parent or the aspiring maiden or youth, to the roughness of the Locano or the dowdiness of the Church Hall; their car rallies – an innovation of the late 1940s – were a field day for show-offs.’ There were no doubt some YCs among the students at Bristol University:

We could not have been picked out as students in a crowd [recalled Helen Reid, 1954–7]: men wore blazers and flannels, or cords if they were arty, girls wore long full skirts with paper taffeta petticoats, jersey tops and ballerina shoes, and in the winter, tweed suits . . .

Social life hinged on hops: there were about ten dances and balls a term. Mostly they were cattle markets held at the Vic Rooms, where the ‘men’ gathered in groups round the bar (orange juice in half pint beer mugs, 3d a glass, was popular) while the girls hugged the walls, waiting to be singled out and kicked to pieces in the quickstep, under the flicking lights of the witchball.

Like Cinderella, every girl wanted to go to THE ball, in this case the annual Union Ball, a most formal affair where officers of other unions were invited, and the top men were expected to wear tails.

When the great day came, your partner, if he was properly trained, would present you with a corsage and hand you into a taxi, with your stole and your evening bag, your long gloves and your agonising high heels . . .

We all sat down to an austere institutional dinner, the Sauternes flowed like Tizer, and there were heavily witty undergraduate speeches, loyal toasts and singing of the University song, pinched from Gilbert and Sullivan.

‘Though I myself have said it, and it’s greatly to my credit, I am a Bristol man,’ sang the girls . . .

‘In fact, though we didn’t know it,’ concluded Reid a little wistfully, ‘we were elderly before our time.’18

Elderly, and perhaps also under-sexed, given that Mass-Observation’s ‘Little Kinsey’ survey back in 1949 had found only 32 per cent (mainly men) denying the possibility of ‘sexless’ happiness. ‘Generally it seems fairly clear that people’s approach to sex,’ the report had noted, ‘tends to be limited not only by their intentness on doing what they regard as socially “correct”, but also by anxiety and fears, particularly fears of transgressing the bounds of “normality”, and which may be all the stronger for their vagueness.’ The British through the 1950s remained ill at ease with the whole subject. ‘The kind of sex she suggests is warm, uninhibited, completely natural,’ Dirk Bogarde wrote in
Picturegoer
in 1955 about making
Doctor at Sea
with Brigitte Bardot, but at the same time expressed a rather haughty scepticism about her future in the British film industry: ‘Even without her French accent, Brigitte would be too much for British studios to handle. You see, Brigitte takes the trouble to put across sex as an art. For most of our girls it’s a farce.’ Bogarde himself exuded a smouldering, ambiguous sexuality, though that was hardly true of the other three most bankable British male film stars of the fifties – Jack Hawkins, Kenneth More and Norman Wisdom. As for comedians, in addition to Wisdom’s asexual gormlessness, one has only to think of the hugely popular Benny Hill, whose ‘leering comedy’ was, in the apt words of his biographer Mark Lewisohn, ‘rooted in the Variety stage, where many seemingly mild-mannered comedians, acting as if they were stags, brashly hinted at sex and ogled at women but when faced with the genuine prospect of intimacy would stammer, not stiffen’.

Perhaps the dominant sentiment was prudishness. ‘Saw “Pal Joey” [the American musical] at the Prince’s Theatre last night and found it most offensive,’ recorded Gladys Langford in April 1954. ‘All my natural Puritanism rose in revolt. The chorus girls were near-nudes . . .’ Or take the reaction in 1953 (as recorded by Mass-Observation) to the publication of extracts from Alfred Kinsey’s new study
Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female
, some three years after the
People
’s editor had forbidden Geoffrey Gorer to include in his survey an explicit question about female orgasms:

Kinsey? Stupid rot in the newspapers. They should never print the stuff. (
Travelling artist, 36
)

That dreadful man who wrote that book about women. (
Widow, 66
)

I’m glad to say that I did not stoop low enough to read his articles. (
Fitter, 45
)

Not very nice reading. Enough said. (
Railway platelayer’s wife, 53
)

He’s been minding other people’s private lives and making money out of it. (
Miner, 54
)

Almost anything, it seemed at times, was liable to give offence. ‘The fact is that to certain people and their families (and they include quite intelligent and ordinary people) the male body in tights, especially white tights, is quite shocking,’ asserted the BBC’s Cecil McGivern, Controller of Television Programmes, in a 1954 memo. ‘I must insist that great care is taken. The dressing of male dancers
must
be supervised and producers of ballet must shoot male dancers so dressed in such a way that the risk of offence is minimised.’19

One way and another, the result was near-unmentionability. ‘Sex was not a matter for general discussion,’ Penelope Lively bluntly recalls about being a young woman then, and most children of the fifties would nod in agreement. Women’s magazines were particularly circumspect in their treatment, with analysis of the
Woman’s Own
problems page in 1955 showing that ‘Mary Grant’ went to almost any length – ‘an important part of marriage’, ‘physical love’, even ‘intimate love-making’ – to avoid the dreaded word
sex
, a circumspection almost matched by the letter-writers themselves, for whom a favourite phrase was ‘the intimate side of married life’. The Mills & Boon authorial rules, not just guidelines, were strict – passion fine, ‘sex’ or titillation far from fine – while generally in fiction, films and plays there was an almost systemic lack of frankness in approach to sexual matters, an inhibition in part the direct result not only of censorship but also of a major government-cum-legal campaign in the mid-1950s against anything even faintly obscene, a campaign that among other cases saw the artist Donald McGill, king of the seaside postcard, briefly banged up for his depiction of an outsize, almost vertical stick of rock.