Thompson Ban This Filth!

Letters From the Mary Whitehouse Archive
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ISBN: 978-0-571-28150-3
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 416 Seiten

In 1964, Mary Whitehouse launched a campaign to fight what she called the 'propaganda of disbelief, doubt and dirt' being poured into homes through the nation's radio and television sets. Whitehouse, senior mistress at a Shropshire secondary school, became the unlikely figurehead of a mass movement for censorship: the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, now Mediawatch-uk. For almost forty years, she kept up the fight against the programme makers, politicians, pop stars and playwrights who she felt were dragging British culture into a sewer of blasphemy and obscenity. From Doctor Who ('Teatime brutality for tots') to Dennis Potter (whose mother sued her for libel and won) to the Beatles - whose Magical Mystery Tour escaped her intervention by the skin of its psychedelic teeth - the list of Mary Whitehouse's targets will read to some like a nostalgic roll of honour. Caricatured while she lived as a figure of middle-brow reaction, Mary Whitehouse was held in contempt by the country's intellectual elite. But were some of the dangers she warned of more real than they imagined? Ben Thompson's selection of material from her extraordinary archive shows Mary Whitehouse's legacy in a startling new light. From her exquisitely testy exchanges with successive BBC Directors General, to the anguished screeds penned by her television and radio vigilantes, these letters reveal a complex and combative individual, whose anxieties about culture and morality are often eerily relevant to the age of the internet. 'A fantastic read . . . I can't recommend it highly enough.' Lauren Laverne, BBC Radio 6 Music

Ben Thompson is one of Britain's most respected cultural critics. He currently contributes to the FT, Mojo and the Sunday Telegraph. As well as two critically acclaimed collections of rock journalism (Seven Years of Plenty and Ways of Hearing) and a landmark history of modern British comedy (Sunshine on Putty), he has also co-written memoirs with Vic Reeves (Me Moir), Phil Daniels (Class Actor), Mike Skinner (The Story of the Streets), Dizzee Rascal (as yet untitled), and others who prefer the collaborative nature of their best-selling autobiographical endeavours to remain a private matter.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Thompson, Ben

Leseproben

1. Becoming Mary

When Philip Larkin drily imagined sexual intercourse beginning in 1963 – ‘Between the end of the ban / And the Beatles’ first LP’ – he made no mention of the possibility that this process of erotic awakening might be reversible. But the ‘Annus Mirabilis’ commemorated in Larkin’s famous poem also saw the emergence of a figure who would do everything in her considerable power to restore Britain’s rapidly crumbling inhibitions.

The first public political controversy in which Mary Whitehouse became involved followed a speech by the Education Ministry’s chief medical officer Dr Peter Henderson in which he had seemed to condone pre-marital sex. At a Westminster conference of Moral Re-Armament – the evangelical Christian movement of which she had long been a member – she spoke out in condemnation not only of Henderson but also his boss, the education minister Sir Edward Boyle, who when bearded in his Whitehall den by a two-person deputation of Mary and her husband Ernest had expressed unease about possible reactions from the teaching profession were he to start laying down the law in matters of morality.

The of 5 December 1963 reported her comments anonymously – as those of ‘a woman teacher’ – and gave Sir Edward the opportunity to query her account of this meeting. ‘It is difficult to remember the exact words one uses on these occasions,’ he dissembled grandly, ‘but I do not recollect saying to her that I could not speak on Christian standards and that if I did I would offend the majority of teachers in this country. What I did tell her was what I said in the House of Commons – that I was against imposing conformity where there were genuine differences of view.’

To the casual reader of half a century later, this early piece of national newspaper exposure for Mary Whitehouse’s campaigning activities does not have the look of an unalloyed triumph. Nonetheless, in an early instance of the ‘carrot and stick’ strategy which she would adopt so successfully in dealing with the media over the decades to come, she still wrote to the editor of the to thank his newspaper for its responsible reporting of her comments, an initiative that left its object purring like a well-fed tomcat.

Daily Express

13th December, 1963

Dear Mrs. Whitehouse,

Thank you for your letter of December 8. It is most kind of you to express appreciation of the manner in which your speech at the Moral Re-armament Conference was handled in the Daily Express.

Very often readers write to newspapers only when they feel they have a grievance, so that a letter such as yours gives an editor considerable pleasure and satisfaction. I am greatly obliged.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Edwards

There were other, less propitious, tonal foreshadowings of Mary’s future engagement with Britain’s political and media hierarchies. The personal terms in which Whitehouse and other more intemperate allies had attacked the perceived dereliction of duty by a civil servant who was (by the terms of his employment) in no position to answer back were the subject of adverse comment in Hansard. And Henderson’s boss, Sir Edward Boyle, had earlier rebuffed her with the first of many telling left/right combinations of the word ‘travesty’ and a quotation from John Stuart Mill’s to which she would find herself subject in the decades to come.

27 August, 1963

Dear Mrs. Whitehouse,

Thank you for your letter on the subject of Dr. Henderson’s address to the seminar on health education.

I enclose a copy of the relevant passage from this address from which you will see that it really is a travesty of Dr. Henderson’s views to suggest – as some have done – that he was ‘advocating promiscuity’. His object was, rather, to consider the positions of charity and chastity in the hierarchy of moral values, bearing in mind both the words of the New Testament and our continuing concern with ‘the mental and moral improvement of the coming generations’.

Whether or not one agrees with Dr. Henderson’s views, I am sure it would be wrong for me as Minister to appear to ‘lay down the law’ authoritatively on a difficult moral issue with regard to which equally good and honest men, both inside and outside the Christian churches, genuinely differ.

Furthermore, while I do of course recognise the genuine difficulties which face many teachers who are asked – or feel it their duty to give – moral guidance, I cannot believe that the right way to resolve these difficulties lies in the direction of placing limitations on public discussion and controversy. As Mill said in his essay ‘On Liberty’, ‘Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action … Strange it is that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being “pushed to an extreme”; not seeing that, unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case.’

These words are surely as true to-day as when they were first written a little over one hundred years ago. I think it is true of many young people nowadays – this is something that I have often been told, for example, by principals of teacher training colleges – that they are very responsive to discussions on moral questions provided that these are presented in terms of real situations. And I am sure they can be brought to realise that a close personal relationship can be either the most life-enhancing and joyous, or alternatively the most destructive, thing on earth. But I don’t believe we serve their interests best by trying to conceal from them that there are some moral issues on which intelligent and sincere men are not all agreed, so that they must make up their own minds and (as one modern writer has put it) carry the cross of being human for themselves.

I do of course respect your sincerity in this matter, and the importance of the points which you raise. But I think the right approach to young people, after they have left school, does raise difficult issues, and I can’t find it in my heart to condemn Dr. Henderson for wishing to focus the minds of his audience upon them.

Yours Sincerely,

Sir Edward Boyle

After receiving a letter from Dr Henderson himself explaining the personal distress the vehemence of her attacks had caused him and especially his wife, Mary pondered her next step. Should she initiate a meeting with the embattled public servant, or restrict herself to writing a letter of apology for personalising the issue? As she agonised over the most appropriate course of action to take, she was advised by one of her friends in Moral Re-Armament that, in this instance and perhaps in others, the end justified the means.

25th September, 1963

Dear Mary,

Many thanks for your letter. I hope you have an excellent time with the Bishop and equally that the date with the Regional Controller went well.

My chief desire with the other man is to keep him faced with the challenge that he must face. I personally think you would be wiser to reply to his letter in writing, but you will know whether you wish to do so. It needs to have a certain directness.

If I were writing, I should say that naturally you endorse his views, which are the views of all sane and patriotic people, about the priority importance of sound family life. This is the foundation of democracy and the rightful heritage of a Christian nation.

But his letter still leaves the central question unanswered. He is reported as having said that there is justification for young men and young women who contemplate marriage to sleep together as if they were married. If people have written to him in violent terms, I do not justify them in doing so, but it may also be because they feel the urgency of maintaining the sanctity of the marriage bond, and because they see the danger of unmarried sexual union.

Surely the simplest way would have been to come out with a clear word to the nation that he had been misinterpreted and that he is against intercourse between unmarried people in any circumstances on the ground that it reduces the sanctity of marriage and may lead to all kinds of other difficulties which it would be easy to enumerate. A clear word from him to this effect would have silenced the press overnight, and would actually have spared his wife the pain to which he refers.

Could he not, even now, make such a statement with complete clarity, since you have to ask him to believe that his earlier word, whether it represents his full opinion or not, has in fact made the task of many teachers harder and has left a very clear impression in the public mind.

You may or may not want to write him in this way, but I do feel we need to guard against any softness or sentimentality over the way his letter to you was worded. No one wants to cause him or his wife trouble. But from the beginning it has lain in his hands to free himself from all embarrassment.

The question I ask is, why does he not do it?

With best wishes to Ernest and you,

Yours ever,

In an early demonstration of the capacity for independent thought and action which would serve her well, Mary...