Marriage itself was the unassailable norm. ‘Never before,’ reflected Richard Titmuss towards the end of the 1950s, ‘has there been such a high proportion of married women in the female population under the age of forty and, even more so, under the age of thirty.’ Or take ‘gross nuptiality’ indicators, ie the percentage probability of marrying before the age of 50:
Men
Women
1900–02
88.0 81.6
1951–55
93.5 94.6
1956–60
94.1 96.0
1995
65.4 68.7
Unsurprisingly, given such figures, Gorer found on the basis of his
People
survey that the English placed ‘a very high valuation’ on ‘the institution of marriage’. Put another way, marriage was the all-pervasive expectation, especially of course among as yet unmarried adolescents, above all working-class girls. ‘From “having a boy” to “going steady”, and from “going steady” to “getting married”,’ noted Pearl Jephcott on the basis of her Nottingham study in the early 1950s, ‘were the proper steps for any dutiful daughter to take in her teens and to have completed by her early twenties.’25
It seems that at least a quarter of couples (of all social classes) first met on the dance floor, while on Sunday evenings – in south Wales anyway, and probably elsewhere – there was the so-called monkey parade. ‘Gaggles of girls strolled in their finery: hoop skirts, stockings and a flash of scarlet across the lips; gangs of boys marched by in their Vaseline-sculpted Tony Curtis hair – big DA at the back and quiff in the front,’ wrote Robin Eggar in his biography of Tom Jones. ‘All evening they criss-crossed, exchanging glances and giggles, sometimes pairing off for a sneaked coffee, but more often relying on flirting and safety in numbers.’ Jones himself, Tommy Woodward at the time, got married at Pontypridd register office in March 1957 at 16, the same age as his heavily pregnant bride, Linda. ‘Nobody can touch me now I’m a man,’ he reckoned to himself after first seeing the baby some six weeks later. In less rushed circumstances, the wedding would probably have been at a church or chapel, though in any case a proper honeymoon was far from invariable. ‘We went and stayed at my brother’s house,’ recalled a mid-1950s bride from the north-west about what followed the reception at the Co-op. ‘Of course, we didn’t have a lot of money, but we had bought a house of our own, so we just went away for a long weekend and then came back to our home to settle in.’
Divorce was highly unusual through the decade, running at an annual rate of around two divorces per thousand married people once the immediate post-war upwards blip had played itself out. In part this reflected what was still the largely restrictive, judgemental, illiberal law, requiring guilt – usually in the form of adultery – on the part of either husband or wife. A Labour MP, Eirene White, did try in 1951 to achieve a measure of reform and in the process inspired a notable speech by the young Tory politician Reginald Maudling, who declared that ‘broadly speaking, we are dealing not with the misdeeds of men and women but their follies and misfortunes, which are much harder to deal with’. The Attlee government took fright, however, and set up a royal commission – which, lawyer-dominated, took five years to report, and then inconclusively. Although the Mothers’ Union refused to admit the divorced, attitudes in general towards divorce seem to have been conflicted: often an inability or unwillingness to imagine that it might be a possible outcome to one’s own marriage, however unhappy or imperfect, as well as a certain censoriousness towards well-known figures (for instance J. B. Priestley or the comedian Max Wall) whose marriages had failed; but at the same time, a certain underlying pragmatic tolerance towards the concept, allied to instinctive dislike of those, like the church, seen as too inclined to go on the high horse. By 1955, moreover, there were significant straws in the wind: not only the widespread sympathy for Princess Margaret in her wish to marry a divorced man but also the arrival as Counselling Officer at the National Marriage Guidance Council (precursor of Relate) of John Wallis, who would oversee a shift away from guidance in order to save marriages and towards counselling aimed at maximising individual fulfilment.
Even so, whatever the precise mix of social attitudes, divorce itself was still so much the exception that the psychological burden on the children of divorce remained considerable. ‘I was eight, relieved at a more peaceful homelife but very embarrassed about having divorced parents,’ Angela Hogg remembered more than 30 years later about the aftermath of her parents’ ‘very stormy’ marriage ending in 1955:
I shrivelled in history lessons about Henry VIII when his divorces were mentioned. After the divorce my brother, sister and I [living with their mother in Bristol] were handed over to my father on neutral territory – the White Tree roundabout – every third weekend. My father then lived in Birmingham but rented one room as a base. He cooked us meals on a one-ring stove but took us out to ‘places of interest’. Both parents married again. It was very hard to balance loyalties. In those days nobody ever thought of counselling the children or sorting out the huge problems of being adolescents in two households. We kept our agonies to ourselves and hardly dared discuss them with each other.
‘Things,’ she concluded with heartfelt relief about using the past tense, ‘were kept much more under the carpet in those days.’26
Outside the statistically insignificant world of the open-marriage leftish intelligentsia – A. J. Ayer, Anthony Crosland, Kingsley Amis – it is all but impossible to know the extent of extramarital affairs. Virtually the only guide we have is M-O’s 1949 ‘Little Kinsey’ survey, which asked its unrepresentatively liberal, middle-class National Panel and found that ‘one husband in four, compared with one wife in every five, admits to experience of sex relations outside marriage’. The historian of adultery, Claire Langhamer, suggests that ‘there was a very real public perception that extra-marital affairs were more common across social categories than had previously been the case’, but for most of the 1950s her only contemporary evidence is
The Times
in May 1954 reporting the fear of the prominent, morally upright Judge Denning that ‘we have unfortunately reached a position where adultery, or infidelity or misconduct, as soft-spoken folk call it, is considered to be a matter of little moment’.
That, though, is as much about attitudes as practices, and in terms of attitudes we do indeed know more. ‘Little Kinsey’ revealed that although there was in theory widespread condemnation of sex outside marriage (63 per cent of the street sample), people when it came to particular cases were, in Langhamer’s words, ‘unwilling to make judgements without an understanding of individual circumstances’. Soon afterwards, in Gorer’s survey, the majority of responses to the question of what a husband/wife should do if the other was found to be conducting an affair had ‘the implicit or explicit assumption that adultery should not terminate the marriage (if that can possibly be avoided) and does not justify the wronged spouse in adopting violent and aggressive behaviour’. A 30-year-old woman from St Helens advised: ‘First of all discuss it calmly with him, then do nothing but wait. Let the affair die a natural death and the man will return. In the meantime, she can buy some new clothes and have her hair permed, make herself as attractive as she can. Spend more on herself than on the house.’
This measure of tolerance seems to have become the norm, to judge by what Marian Raynham heard on
Any Questions?
in December 1954:
My goodness, I nearly exploded. One question was ‘whether one act of adultery should be a cause for divorce’. The ‘holy’ Archbishop Fisher said it shouldn’t, there was forgiveness, & the marriage could go on happily as before. This was in the paper the other day. Well, I’ll be blowed, not one of those specimens, including Mary Stocks, had the courage to take another view. What a revelation. The other three were Tom Driberg M.P., Nigel Balchin, Sir Godfrey [Llewellyn, a prominent Welsh Conservative]. Well, I’m shocked to the marrow. So married people are allowed a ration of one adultery, leaving the marriage as before. The other innocent party not minding a bit presumably . . .
There was less sympathy for the plight of the third party. ‘He is talking nonsense about divorcing her,’ bluntly replied ‘Mary Grant’ (running the
Woman’s Own
problems page) to a single woman who had been asked by her lover to wait for his divorce. ‘Stop seeing him.’27 The marriage, almost whatever the situation, came first and last.
What about premarital sex? Again, hard evidence is patchy, although we know from Eustace Chesser’s extensive cohort-based survey (conducted in 1954 and somewhat skewed towards the middle class) that it was probably becoming more common during the first half of the century, 19 per cent of women born before 1904 reporting having had premarital sex, compared with 43 per cent born between 1924 and 1934, with generally those from wealthier backgrounds more likely to have had it. And again, attitudes are easier to ascertain. Gorer found that 52 per cent were opposed to premarital sexual experience for young men and 63 per cent for young women, adding the telling gloss that ‘whether pre-marital experience is advocated or reprobated, the effect on the future marriage is the preponderating consideration’; while when Chesser asked single women under the age of 21, 89 per cent said that for the success of their future marriage it was ‘important or fairly important’ that they did not have premarital intercourse, with 78 per cent wanting that stricture to apply to their future husbands also. On the reasonable assumption that more than 11 per cent of women and 22 per cent of men were having premarital sex by the 1950s, there was clearly something of a gulf between aspiration and reality, not least in the context of the continuing taboo about the loss of female virginity.
This taboo came through markedly in some of the responses to Gorer from unmarried men:
I, when I marry, want a pure girl, so the least I can do is to be the same myself. (
20, North London
)
I think all women should be married in white and can’t do so if she has had sexual exp. with men. (
19, Liverpool
)
Would not like my future wife to have had sexual experience with other persons prior to our marriage. Matter of principle also. (
21, Lincolnshire
)
I think it is wrong for anybody to gain experience at the expense of somebody else. I should hate to think somebody had tried married life out on my wife to be. (
23, Tilbury
)
Women’s magazines agreed, with ‘Mary Grant’ assiduously pushing the idea of the female chaperone for any girl worried about being induced to go too far. Moreover, for any girl who
had
gone too far, the cult of virginity was such that this could effectively mean the end of choice in terms of deciding on a husband. ‘When we ’ad rows,’ somewhat ruefully recalled a working-class woman from Birmingham some 40 years after marrying in 1957, ‘well I used to think “well I can’t fall out with ’im because – or break up with ’im – because I’ve ’ad sex, I’d be used goods for somebody else.” ’28
For most couples, of course, there was always the question of birth control – at a time when the size of the family was changing significantly. Archbishop Fisher may have told the Mothers’ Union in 1952 that ‘a family only truly begins with three children’, but as a young father in a rundown outer London borough unsentimentally informed an enquiring sociologist at about the same time, ‘Our parents had too many children: we want to give ours a good start in life, so we shan’t have more than we can afford.’ Chesser in 1956 confirmed the trend – ‘A family of four or more children is now regarded as large’ – and Gallup the following spring, asking about the ideal size of family, found that two children was easily the most popular. It was no coincidence, presumably, that matters of contraception were at last moving into the mainstream: almost every week a new family planning clinic opened, while in November 1955 Iain Macleod’s well-publicised visit, as Minister of Health, to the Family Planning Association ended almost overnight the media’s reluctance to discuss the whole subject. But there was still a long way to go. Many parts of the country did not have clinics, while new clinics were often viewed with considerable suspicion. Moreover, as Kate Fisher stresses in her study of birth control, widespread ignorance persisted, especially on the part of women. As for method, a subsequent survey of two working-class cohorts who had got married in the 1950s found the following about their early married lives: 37 per cent mainly using condoms (for which there was no British Standard until 1964); 33 per cent mainly relying on withdrawal; 15 per cent mainly using female methods such as diaphragms or IUDs; 12 per cent not worrying about contraception; and 3 per cent other. Quite apart from no single method being wholly reliable, there were other practical concerns. ‘Shaped like a doll’s bowler hat, with a hard rim of black rubber,’ was how Phyllis Willmott unfondly remembered the Dutch cap. ‘When I put it in I felt like a stuffed chicken.’29
There was one great, oppressive shadow, seldom openly spoken about. ‘Abortion was the awful spectre for girls,’ recalled Penelope Lively. ‘Each of us knew someone to whom the worst had happened, with accompanying whispered horror stories about backstreet addresses and £100 in a brown envelope.’ Some 12,000 abortions a year were performed legally, on the grounds that terminating a pregnancy would prevent the woman from ‘being a mental and physical wreck’, but the great majority were not, leading directly each year to some 70 or more registered deaths from dangerously conducted criminal abortions. There still prevailed, according to Barbara Brookes, historian of abortion, ‘an atmosphere of secrecy and shame’, though it does seem that public opinion was slowly moving in a more liberal direction. Not only did a newspaper poll in 1956 find majority support for abortions by doctors ‘at the request of the mother-to-be’, but there was an increasingly low rate of conviction for professional abortionists. Were there any real-life Vera Drakes? Jennifer Worth, an East End midwife during the 1950s, took issue in 2005 with Mike Leigh’s depiction of a heroine acting on principle and never taking payment. ‘I very much doubt that this was ever the case,’ she asserted. ‘From everything we heard, abortionists were in it for the money (the going rate was between one and two guineas). I never heard of one who was conducting a philanthropic practice.’ Significantly, she added: ‘It was not their fault they were medically untrained; the legislation was to blame. Fatalities among women undergoing an abortion were high, but they were far higher among women who tried to do it themselves, unaided.’30