Love Now, Pay Later?: Sex And Religion In The Fifties And Sixties

By Nigel Yates

Nigel Yates brings together the religious and social dimensions of the 1950s and 60s and examines the enormous changes in moral attitudes that took place in these two decades. Much of the popular literature on post-war Britain tends to present the 1950s as a period of continuing repression and respectability in the area of private and public morality, and the 1960s as one in which there was rapid social change. Using a wide range of contemporary sources - books (including novels), magazines, newspapers, advertising, fashion catalogues, films and television, as well as a number of significant archive collections - Nigel Yates argues that changes in attitudes to religion and morality in the 1960s were only made possible by developments in the 1950s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SPCK
• Release date: Jan 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780281065448

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First published in Great Britain in 2010

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge

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www.spckpublishing.co.uk

Copyright © Paula Yates 2010

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978–0–281–05908–9

E-ISBN 978–0–281–06544–8

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Printed in Great Britain by Ashford Colour Press

Produced on paper from sustainable forests

This book is dedicated with gratitude to our friends in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Wales, Lampeter

Contents

List of illustrations

Preface

Introduction

1  The churches and religious attitudes

2  Foreign influences and the broadening of British culture

3  Male fantasies, female realities and the sexual revolution

4  The legislative framework for moral change

5  The censorship of public entertainment: theatre and live performances

6  The censorship of public entertainment: cinema and television

Conclusion

Appendices: Church statistics

Notes

Further reading and viewing

Search items

Illustrations

Figures

I.1  The crush inside Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, Kingsway, London, as people fought to buy the first copies of the Denning Report, September 1963

2.1  Brigitte Bardot photographed in a bikini on the beach during the Cannes Film Festival, 1953

3.1  The Liverpool University Panto Queen in boots and mini-skirt, 1970

5.1  Dudley Sutton and Madge Ryan in the first production of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane at the New Arts Theatre, London, 1964

6.1  Patrick Macnee (John Steed) and Diana Rigg (Emma Peel), the latter in the role of Madam Sin, in ‘A Touch of Brimstone’, an episode of The Avengers, 1966

6.2  Barbara Windsor in a scene from Carry on Camping, 1969

6.3  Mary Whitehouse with a petition to the House of Commons objecting to ‘dirt that the BBC pours into millions of homes through the TV screen …’, June 1965

Tables

I.1  Comparison of household expenditure in 1950 and 1960

I.2  Economic growth in the United Kingdom compared with selected other nations, 1950–70

1.1  Increases and decreases in church allegiance, 1950–70

1.2  Comparison of proportion of population attending Sunday schools in England and Wales in 1951 and 1961

1.3  Religious attitudes of Sheffield University students, 1961–85

3.1  Pin-up photography in university and college student rag magazines by date of first appearance, 1956–76

3.2  Attitudes to premarital sex by teenage boys and girls in Britain, 1965

6.1  Statistics of films passed by the British Board of Film Censors, 1954–70

6.2  Objectionable content of radio and television programmes, 1966

Preface

Writing in Never Had It So Good, Dominic Sandbrook expressed the view that ‘as probably the first historian to write about the period [1956–70] whose earliest memories only just encompass the years before Thatcherism’, he was able to approach it without having been involved in the events he was describing. Thus he could approach the 1950s and 1960s as any other historian could approach the First World War, for example, with a high degree of detachment. Having been born 30 years before Dominic Sandbrook, I cannot make such a claim, nor would I want to. Part of the attraction for me in writing about the 1950s and 1960s is that it was a period I had lived through, and to which I could contribute a degree of autobiographical reminiscence. I have in fact used this facility very sparingly and have, I hope, approached the topic in my customary way, through an analytical consideration of the core primary sources for the period: archives, print, film and television.

This book attempts to answer a very simple question: how did the moral and religious climate of Britain change between 1950 and 1970? This is a question which nobody has really attempted to answer before. The issue of religion has been ably dealt with by Callum Brown, Ian Machin and Hugh McLeod, but they have not really involved themselves in the broader moral attitudes of those who would not have considered themselves practising Christians but who nevertheless, at the beginning of the period at least, strongly identified with a morality based on Christian teaching. Similarly the wider cultural and moral climate of the 1950s and 1960s has been, equally ably, considered by historians such as Peter Hennessy, Arthur Marwick, Kenneth Morgan and Sandbrook himself, though largely as an adjunct to the economic and political history of the period, which provides no more than the most general contextualization to this book. I have tried here to bring together the firmly religious with the more amorphous, sub- or post-Christian, moral culture and social attitudes in Britain in the post-war period, and to relate them to one another as a key aspect of the changes that occurred within British society.

I am grateful to those who have assisted in this task. As usual Kathy Miles, in the University Library at Lampeter, has cheerfully acquired some of the more obscure titles I needed to see on inter-library loan. Part of Chapter 5 was read as a paper at the University of Wales Conference Centre at Gregynog in August 2007 and I am grateful for the comments of those who attended. I am also grateful to those repositories that granted me access to archive collections: the National Library of Wales; the University Libraries at Colchester (University of Essex), Liverpool, Manchester, Reading and Southampton; Lambeth Palace Library; the Centre for Kentish Studies at Maidstone; and the Wellcome Library. I am also grateful to the University of Liverpool for allowing me to reproduce the photograph of the Panto Queen; to TopFoto/PA for those of the Denning Report and Mary Whitehouse; to Mirrorpix for the photographs of Brigitte Bardot, Barbara Windsor and The Avengers; and to Lewis Morley/PAL for the illustration from Entertaining Mr Sloane. My son David has typed the manuscript and I am grateful to him, to my colleagues Sarah Lewis and Robert Shail, and as always to my wife Paula, all of whom have kindly commented on the text. They must be absolved from the many imperfections that remain.

The final stages of this book were completed after I had been diagnosed with prostate cancer and I am particularly grateful to those colleagues who rallied around to make sure that little jobs I could no longer do on the text were competently completed.

This book is a contribution to a wide-ranging debate about the state of British society between the late 1940s and the early 1970s, within which a core theme is the state of religion in the same period. I hope that it will help to open up some of these issues even further than they have been to date, and that the debate will be pursued with vigour so that, in due course, a broad consensus can be established on the topics that have been raised and discussed.

Nigel Yates

January 2009

University of Wales, Lampeter

The first draft of this book was completed in the late autumn of 2008, by which time it was becoming clear that Nigel’s cancer was in its final stages, and he wrote the last two paragraphs of the Preface only days before his death. Revising the text and putting it through the press has been a labour of love and I would like to join with Nigel in thanking David, Sarah and Rob for their very helpful comments. I am also immensely grateful to Rebecca Mulhearn and Philip Law of SPCK for their support and advice.

Paula Yates

University of Wales, Lampeter

Introduction

Victorian attitudes to morality, religion and respectability were by no means dead in 1950; by 1970 they were. In the past the interpretation of the two decades in between has tended to see the first as one in which serious attempts were made to uphold the traditions of the past, and the second as one in which these attempts were to be reversed in spectacular fashion, the so-called ‘swinging sixties’. This book will suggest that, though neither popular image is totally without foundation, the transition between the two was a complicated one and that there were more common threads between the two decades than has sometimes been appreciated.

Although considerable social change had taken place in Britain between the two world wars it had only a marginal impact on moral and religious attitudes. Callum Brown has described religion in this era as ‘mellow’: ‘British Christianity became like an old sofa – relaxing, unpretentious and less demanding on the user … observance of faith was linked to tasty breaks from the usual dietary discipline.¹ But the ultimate standards of confessional belief and fundamentalist morality remained intact and they were to remain largely unchallenged, except by a relatively small number of free-thinkers, until the post-war period. Sunday congregations may have been in gradual decline since the religious census of 1851, but the majority of Britons, even if they were not regular churchgoers, accepted the basic tenets of Christian doctrine and observance of a strict moral code in which sexual activity was expected to be conducted solely within marriages that were expected to last until the death of one of the partners.

From austerity to prosperity

Hugh McLeod has rightly identified ‘the unprecedented prosperity enjoyed in most of the Western world from the late 1950s’ as an essential ‘pre-condition for the many far-reaching social and cultural changes of that time’. He sees four major reasons for these changes: a desire to ‘enjoy the new prosperity … and the enhanced leisure possibilities that it offered’; also ‘to experiment in sex and drugs, and to reject all puritanical restraints’; ‘women’s search for greater freedom and self-fulfilment’; theological and political radicalism.² Post-war Britain had, however, to suffer a decade of austerity before this emergent prosperity was clear to all. The Labour government under Clement Attlee, elected in 1945, had brought about major social change with the nationalization of most public utilities and the introduction of a national health service. The price that had to be paid for these changes, and to meet the costs of post-war recovery, was considerable. Virtually ‘all the materials of daily life’ were rationed: furniture until 1948, clothes until 1949, petrol until 1950 (briefly reintroduced during the Suez Crisis of 1956), and food until 1954.³ With the defeat of the Attlee government, and the re-election of the Conservatives under Winston Churchill, there was no immediately dramatic change of policy. The new government contained two key reformers, R. A. Butler and Harold Macmillan, who, during the period of Conservative opposition, had ensured the party would not seek to undo the social changes that Attlee and his ministers had brought in. Kenneth Morgan describes them as ‘a paternalistic, cautious, undoctrinaire body of men interpreting their role as maintaining the general lines of Labour’s policy’.⁴ Their immediate priority was to increase the housing stock, which had been seriously reduced by wartime bomb damage. In 1950, while still in opposition, the Conservatives had pledged to build 300,000 new homes. Under the overall direction of Macmillan and his junior minister Ernest Marples, 260,000 new homes had been built by 1952 and the official target exceeded by 18,750 by 1953.⁵

The growth in prosperity was noticeable by the mid 1950s, and was to increase dramatically thereafter. Average weekly earnings for industrial workers rose by 34 per cent between 1955 and 1960, and by 130 per cent between 1955 and 1969. Those of middle-class salaried employees rose by 127 per cent in those years. This compared with an increase of 63 per cent in retail prices, so everybody was more affluent. The price of small cars was falling in relation to earning power and, as a result, there were 8 million cars in Britain by 1964, compared with only 2 million in 1950. Young people who were not able to afford a car could still afford to buy a cheap Vespa or Lambretta scooter. Other consumer products, such as television sets and washing machines, actually fell in price during the 1950s and 1960s. Few people owned or rented a television set in the early 1950s, though many acquired them so that they could watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. By 1961, 75 per cent of British homes had a television set, and by 1971 the figure was 91 per cent. Although the traditional class structure of the pre-war years remained intact ‘there were significant changes in details and attitudes. The working class became visible and assertive as it had never been before.’⁶ We need, however, to be wary of getting too carried away by the increasing signs of growing prosperity in 1950s Britain. As John Rule has pointed out, it can be exaggerated. The national ratio of persons per car was 1:14 by 1955, 1:9.3 in 1960, 1:6 in 1965 and 1:4 in 1973, a noticeable but nevertheless gradual increase in car ownership. Only 8 per cent of the population had a refrigerator in 1955.⁷ Even so, hire purchase debts in Britain increased by 75 per cent between 1955 and 1959.⁸

The increase in prosperity resulted in considerable changes to the ways in which families disposed of their available income as shown in Table I.1. The greatest decreases were in expenditure on servants and going to the cinema, the latter the direct result of the increase in those owning or renting television sets. The most dramatic increase in expenditure was on motoring, clearly the result of increased car ownership. Even within categories of expenditure there were interesting variations. Although expenditure on alcohol increased by 31.7 per cent, that on beer did so by only 13.2 per cent, a clear indication that more people were buying wines and spirits than they had in less affluent times.⁹ Increasing affluence also encouraged unfortunate side effects. Crimes of violence increased from 5,689 in 1955 to 11,592 in 1960, 15,976 in 1964 and 21,046 in 1968. The 1966 general election campaign was ‘the first one in which law and order featured as a major campaign issue’.¹⁰

Table I.1  Comparison of household expenditure in 1950 and 1960

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Source A. Sampson, Anatomy of Britain, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1962, p. 577.

Religion and politics

In the interwar period the British churches had been overwhelmingly conservative in their political attitudes. A notable example was the attitude of most leading churchmen to the General Strike of 1926, many agreeing with ‘the Anglican Bishop of Ripon’ that it was ‘a threat to Christianity’.¹¹ When bishops had got involved in debates in the House of Lords before the First World War it was usually to protect the interests of the Established Church from attacks on it by Nonconformists and secularists. However, by the 1920s a number of bishops were beginning to accept that the churches had a right to comment on political and social issues. As Bishop of Manchester, William Temple, later Archbishop of York and then Canterbury, was instrumental in the establishment of the Conference on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship (COPEC) in 1924. Both he and Archbishop Lang of York, later of Canterbury, argued for state intervention to deal with the economic depression of the 1920s and 1930s.¹² A number of local clergy became actively involved in politics as members of the Labour Party. In Leeds, Charles Jenkinson, Vicar of St John and St Barnabas, Holbeck, was elected as a Labour member of the city council in 1930. When the party gained control of the council in 1934 it established a housing committee with Jenkinson as its first chairman. He immediately announced plans for a massive programme of slum clearance, the building of 30,000 new homes, the introduction of differential rents (with some very poor tenants paying no rents at all), a furniture hire-purchase scheme for those being rehoused and the establishment of a 500-room municipal lodging house.¹³

In the 1950s, as many of the social problems that had concerned churchmen in the 1930s had been resolved by the creation of the welfare state in the 1940s, radical clergy began to turn their attention to other, more international, moral issues, such as the threat of nuclear war, racial tensions in Britain, and the campaign against apartheid in South Africa. Leading figures in the campaign against the manufacture or deployment of nuclear weapons were the Methodist minister Donald Soper, and the founder of the Iona Community George MacLeod, who moved a resolution in the 1954 General Assembly of the Church of Scotland against ‘weapons of mass destruction’.¹⁴ In 1958 an alliance of Christians and humanists, led by Canon John Collins of St Paul’s Cathedral and Bertrand, Earl Russell, established the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which organized an annual march from the nuclear weapons base at Aldermaston in Berkshire to London where there was a rally in Hyde Park.¹⁵ The immigration of black and Asian communities to the British Isles began in the late 1940s. In May 1948 a house in which ‘newly arrived Indians were staying’ was stoned by a group of 200 white men. Sir Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader of the 1930s, established a new political party to campaign against immigration, and this was active in London and several large British cities by the mid 1950s. The leaders of the churches were keen to respond to this issue but found themselves in conflict with their, often more conservative, laity. When the Anglican Bishop of Birmingham tried to appoint a black Jamaican priest as chaplain to the black community in the city he was forced to back down and a white chaplain was eventually appointed. It was easier to attack racism outside the United Kingdom. When the World Council of Churches condemned ‘any form of segregation based on race, colour or ethnic origin’ and called upon member churches ‘to renounce all forms of segregation or discrimination and to work for their abolition within their life and society’, many British church leaders took up the cause of anti-apartheid in South Africa, where the government had introduced policies aimed at the complete segregation of the black majority and white minority communities, as well as those of mixed race. The publications of Father Trevor Huddleston, a member of the Anglican religious Community of the Resurrection, missionary priest in South Africa and later Bishop of Masasi, and of Alan Paton, who published Cry the Beloved Country in 1948, were highly influential in persuading British Christians to support the anti-apartheid campaign.¹⁶

During the 1950s the British churches became increasingly concerned about their lack of influence in working-class communities and the complacencies of the past that had made them predominantly middle-class institutions. This concern was reflected in Canon (later Bishop) E. R. Wickham’s Church and People in an Industrial City, published in 1957 and based on his experiences as an industrial chaplain in Sheffield.¹⁷ Generally speaking the churches had welcomed ‘the increasing prosperity of the people, but consistently warned of the need for caution in pleasure and consumption’.¹⁸ A particular concern was that people were using their money in ways that were inconsistent with Christian morality. In 1956 the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harold Macmillan, had introduced premium bonds in his budget. They were designed to encourage savings but offered people who bought them an opportunity to win substantial amounts of money. They were in fact ‘the first public lottery since the eighteenth century’. Archbishop Fisher of Canterbury condemned the announcement ‘as a direct encouragement to engage in the squandering of money’.¹⁹ The Betting Act of 1961 permitted the playing of bingo, which gave a new life to cinemas otherwise threatened with closure as a result of the decline in ‘going to the pictures’ now that more people had a television set. Within a year of the new legislation, Anthony Sampson estimated that

four out of five British adults gamble in some way, and Bingo has provided a safe new excitement for housewives, with the tense dedication of a casino without the disasters … it’s almost impossible to lose more than a pound a session.²⁰

There was much division between Christians over gambling. In 1965, 76 per cent of Methodists disapproved of football pools, compared with only 23 per cent of Anglicans. In 1964, the Free Church of Scotland condemned all gambling as ‘morally wrong, socially undesirable, and economically disastrous’, and the churches generally welcomed the defeat of a private member’s bill promoted by James Tinn, Labour MP for Cleveland, to introduce a national lottery in 1968.²¹ The present writer, however, recalls very clearly that, at about the same time, Father Walter Hum, the Anglo-Catholic Vicar of All Souls, Leeds, was defending the introduction of bingo in aid of parish funds on the grounds that if it was acceptable for Roman Catholic parishes to run bingo sessions it was acceptable for him to do so as well.

The collapse of empire

The dismemberment of the British Empire, largely created in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had begun immediately after the Second World War. Between 1946 and 1949 the Attlee government had granted independence to Burma, Ceylon, India and Pakistan, as a result of increasing violence by those determined to end the British Raj. Throughout the 1950s the Conservative government had to deal with similar campaigns for independence in Africa and elsewhere. When Harold Macmillan became Prime Minister in 1957 he quickly recognized that independence was the only option and that it should be granted quickly. He was undoubtedly influenced in this direction by the ‘trauma of Suez’ in 1956, in which his predecessor, Sir Anthony Eden, had taken the disastrous step of attempting ‘gunboat diplomacy’ on an Arab leader. Four years earlier the Egyptian monarchy, under the playboy King Farouk, had been replaced by the much more aggressive Colonel Nasser. On 25 July 1956 Nasser announced that he had nationalized the Suez Canal. This was seen by the British, French and US governments as a threat to international trade, and as something which must be resisted. The Americans urged caution and the British cabinet was divided, but the cabinet ‘hawks’, led by Eden, colluded secretly with France and Israel to attack Egypt. The Americans ordered the coalition to withdraw and the attack on Egypt was condemned, by 64 votes to 5, in the United Nations. Two British junior ministers, Anthony Nutting and Edward Boyle, as well as Eden’s press spokesman, William Clark, resigned. The government was condemned by the Labour and Liberal Parties and by the left-wing press, led by The Guardian and The Observer. Harold Macmillan, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, was worried about the financial consequences of the war and the threatened depletion of Britain’s gold and dollar reserves, and backed an immediate withdrawal from Suez as the only sensible option. Six weeks after they had first gone into action the troops were withdrawn, Eden was humiliated and forced to resign as Prime Minister, to be succeeded by Macmillan, who quickly began the disengagement from