Elizabethans

All nannies and many governesses, when pouring out tea, put the milk in first. (It is said by tea-fanciers to produce a richer mixture.) Sharp children notice that this is not normally done in the drawing room. We have a friend you may remember, far from conventional in other ways, who makes it her touchstone. ‘Rather MIF, darling,’ she says in condemnation.

So now the mundane and humble business of making a cup of tea became yet another tiny battleground.

Waugh rejected the extreme vision of Britain as a class-divided society, substituting instead the more realistic idea that, status-conscious as it still was, everybody was alert to those below them in some obscure pecking order: ‘everyone draws a line of demarcation immediately below his own heels’. There was relatively little horizontal stratification, he thought: ‘There is instead precedence, a single, wholly imaginary line … extending from Windsor to Wormwood Scrubs, of separate individuals each justly and precisely graded. In the matter of talking together, eating together, sleeping together this mysterious line makes little difference, but every Englishman is sharply aware of its existence …’

Waugh was by far the greater novelist but Nancy Mitford, affectionately satirizing the retreating aristocracy and gentry, was enormously popular in the first part of the Queen’s reign. Was she, therefore, in fact just an old-fashioned snob? Her biographer Selina Hastings thought not, but with reservations: ‘She was not a snob in the sense of looking up to someone solely because he had money or rank; but Nancy was never a member of the public … She believed that everyone should know his place, and in language was to be found one of the most crucial lines of demarcation.’

Everyone should know his – or her – place. That was the real, old way of thinking behind the U and non-U kerfuffle, and behind ‘milk in first’. David Hill, sent out as a young boy in the mid-1950s to start a new life in Australia, remembered Britain, even as the welfare state began to change things as a country in which ‘most Britons lived and died poor, in a land of appalling class rigidity and social inequality where there was virtually no prospect of social mobility’. Speech inflections, from East End costermongers to south-coast baronets, policed this Britain. And it is often when things are breaking down that the policing becomes heaviest. British drama of the period (Terence Rattigan), British comedy of the period (Joyce Grenfell and Alastair Sim) and many of the novels of the period, such as those of Anthony Powell, suggest that widespread sensitivity to subtle class hierarchies was real. And as Nancy Mitford made clear in her essay, the class system depended then – as it does now – on the monarchy, with the Queen as apex.

8

BRITISH SHINTO

On 6 August 1957, outside Television House, then the headquarters of ITN in London’s Kingsway, a tallish, urbane man, briefcase in one hand, was assaulted. John Grigg, the second Lord Altrincham, received a forceful, full-hand slap across the side of his face. It was strong enough nearly to knock him over, though he was able to recover and clamber, with an unconvincing smile, into a waiting taxi. His assailant was Phil Burbidge, a well-known and active member of the League of Empire Loyalists – of whom more later.

Burbidge was quickly led away by two policemen and charged. The following day, when he was fined 20 shillings, he told the court that he was defending the honour of the Queen: ‘Due to the scurrilous attack by Lord Altrincham I felt it was up to a decent Briton to show resentment.’ He added that the fine was the best investment he had ever made. The Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, Sir Laurence Dunne, who had fined him for breach of the peace, seemed to agree, remarking that ‘95 per cent of the population of this country were disgusted’ by Grigg.

What was Grigg’s offence? He wasn’t an obvious candidate to infuriate patriotic Middle Britain, although by this time he was being attacked by almost every newspaper and commentator in the country. This Old Etonian and former Guards officer had served during the war with distinction. He was the son of an imperialist Conservative politician who had also been military secretary to the Prince of Wales and, indeed, a member of Churchill’s wartime government. But now Grigg, the owner of a small-circulation monthly, the National and English Review, had broken the ultimate taboo and used it to launch a personal attack on the Queen.

He had argued that in her speeches she came across as too upper-class and British, and that she should strive to be more ‘classless’. Her style of speaking was ‘a pain in the neck … Like her mother, she appears to be unable to string even a few sentences together without a written text … The personality conveyed by the utterances which are put into her mouth is that of a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect, and a recent candidate for Confirmation.’ He hadn’t thought it would be much noticed; and hadn’t bothered to increase the print run of his review.

Instead, all hell broke loose. Grigg’s attack echoed around the world. It was picked up and discussed in the United States, which the Queen was about to visit. There the author and early television celebrity Malcolm Muggeridge, published a second attack on the ‘Royal soap opera’ which implied that Britain no longer needed a monarchy at all. There were plenty of people who agreed with both Grigg and Muggeridge in the mid-1950s, but criticism of the royal family directly was well beyond the pale.

It was the middle of the summer ‘silly season’ when the press had little else to write about, and a tirade of abuse fell on the heads of both men. The pile-in included the Prime Minister of Australia, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the main newspaper columnists and even an irate Italian aristocrat who challenged Grigg to a duel. Grigg, who eventually accepted the challenge but suggested they fight with rolled umbrellas, always insisted that he was himself a monarchist and had meant the criticism to help the Queen modernize.

Intriguingly, she may well have agreed. Martin Charteris, then her assistant private secretary, had a quiet meeting with Grigg to discuss the matter. After it, in December of the same year, the Queen made her first televised Christmas broadcast, during which she said she hoped television would make her message more personal and direct, though she also warned against ‘unthinking people who carelessly throw away ageless ideals as if they were old and outworn machinery’. Some thirty years later, meeting at Eton (where else?), Charteris told Grigg that by helping to change the atmosphere at court ‘You did a great service to the monarchy and I’m glad to say so publicly.’

Grigg reflected much later in the Spectator magazine that the real reason why there had been such a sensation was that the article:

contained direct criticism of the Queen (as well as considerable praise), at a time when the general treatment of her in the media ranged from gushy adulation to Shinto-style worship. This most unhealthy climate had prevailed since her accession and had been intensified by the secular religiosity of the Coronation in 1953. It was completely out of keeping with the traditional British attitude to the monarchy, which has always combined strong loyalty to the institution with a readiness to judge individual members of the royal family, favourably or unfavourably, on their merits.

British public opinion is hard to fathom properly, in part because the media was intensely nervous about reflecting any possible support for the criticisms: the reason Grigg was leaving the headquarters of ITN on the day he was assaulted was that he had just been interviewed there by Robin Day. The BBC had blacked out the entire controversy – in effect pretending that it hadn’t happened, so horrific was the thought of comparing the Queen to a schoolgirl. But Grigg argued that opinion polls, letters to newspapers and letters he received himself showed that most people at least understood his position and also felt that the Royal Household was out of date.

If so, this is another powerful piece of evidence to suggest that the 1950s were nothing like ‘the 1950s’. The Grigg episode is usually cited by historians to point out how different things were in the middle of the twentieth century. But consider the ferocious response to tweets criticizing Meghan Markle in 2018 when she was still engaged to Prince Harry. Direct attacks on the royals still produce the kind of Pavlovian response they did then. By the end of the Queen’s reign, there is no evidence whatever that old-fashioned, stuffy monarchism had in fact gone out of fashion at all.

Progressive thinkers of the 1950s often argued that Britain was on the verge of a major democratic overhaul, and that this might need to include the monarchy itself. They have been proved wrong. A decade after the Grigg episode, Tony Benn tried much more seriously to shake up the court as part of a project that was self-consciously republican in its aim. There was a serious tussle about removing the Queen’s head from postage stamps, but Harold Wilson’s instinctive working-class monarchism ensured that the Benn project went absolutely nowhere. It may be discreet. It may be rarely discussed. But British Shintoism is alive and well.

9

DIANA AND RUTH

For the vast majority of the 49 million British people in the early 1950s, post-war daily life was physically harder than it is today. It has become a commonplace to say that there was a yearning for fun, colour and excitement in the early years of the Queen’s reign, after the long, grey austerity years and the war itself. It is a commonplace because – basically – it’s true. But the greyness was not uniformly distributed. For the wealthiest Britons, as we shall see, the post-war years quite quickly brought a return to continental travel and more interesting food. Further down the social pecking-order, things remained a lot more meagre for a lot longer. And the group who had the worst time were working-class women.

Men had returned from the war, traumatized and angry, to be accommodated into families which had learned to live relatively happily without them. Women who had had clerical or factory work were encouraged to give it up so that there was ‘something for the men’. And this is the era just before labour-saving household appliances became common – when clothes were still often washed by red, calloused hands over porcelain sinks with wooden scrubbing brushes and dried in backyards with mangles; when doorsteps and stone floors were cleaned by hand, and when food shopping involved a long walk, a heavy basket and a sore back on the way home. Entertainment, before television became common, was limited to the wireless, comic strips in the newspapers and a weekly walk to the pictures. For the most impatient and ambitious women, who wanted something more – a more colourful and unpredictable life – this meant there could be dangerous choices ahead. The story of two friends reminds us why.

Among the films which had been playing in Britain in the winter before the Queen’s accession was an embarrassingly duff comedy from the Rank Organisation called (titter ye not) Lady Godiva Rides Again. Filmed in Folkestone, Kent, it was a fantasy about a young provincial English girl who wins a local beauty pageant and then plays Lady Godiva, going on to fame and fortune. It might deserve to be entirely forgotten except for a curious coincidence, a real-life one more interesting than anything in the script. This is a true 1950s story about working-class women, power, manipulation, success – and failure.

Among the film’s cast were three people who would all go on to become famous – in one case, notorious. The first was born Diana Fluck in Swindon; she had changed her name because, as she later said, ‘what would happen if they put my name up in lights … and one of the bulbs burst?’ She had chosen the name Diana Dors, and very soon was being touted as Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. The second was the young Joan Collins, in her first screen role. And the third, who became a friend of Diana Dors during this filming, was Ruth Ellis. She was the last woman to be hanged in Britain.

Dors and Ellis shared quite a lot that would help them to bond on the film set. Both had been born to working-class women having trouble with rackety men during the Depression in provincial towns. Though not quite the same age, they had much in common. Diana was born in 1931. Her father, a veteran of the First World War, was a railway clerk who played the piano in local pubs, although since her mother was having an affair with the lodger she was never quite sure whose daughter she was. Swindon was not the most exciting spot in the world in the 1930s and Diana’s mother, Mary Fluck, enjoyed the most common imaginative escape route of the time, taking her daughter from a very young age to weekly films. Diana also attended a private school run by two spinsters, saying later, ‘I loathed them and their stuffy little school.’

Not surprisingly, the young Diana dreamed as a child of becoming an actress, writing when she was nine years old in a school essay, ‘I am going to be a film star, with a swimming pool and a cream telephone.’ It’s the cream telephone that tells you everything. Diana’s relationship with the man who might have been her father was cold. She matured early and, aged thirteen but pretending to be seventeen, entered a local beauty contest, winning third prize. By the close of the Second World War, still a young teenager, she was entertaining American soldiers in camp concerts (the word camp is, at this early stage in Dors’s career, used in a strictly military sense). By her mid-teens Diana Fluck had had numerous boyfriends, including the future writer Desmond Morris. She was also allowing herself to be photographed semi-nude for ‘French postcards’. Aged fifteen, she enrolled at the London Academy of Dramatic Art and was appearing in plays and post-war British films remarkably soon.

Ruth Ellis was almost exactly five years older, but otherwise her early story is strikingly similar. She was born in Rhyl, North Wales to a French-Belgian mother, also in an unhappy marriage – and also to a jobbing musician. Arthur Hornby was always in the picture houses, but in his case playing the piano before the advent of the ‘talkies’ put him out of a job. He may have abused his daughters. The marriage was unhappy, and Ruth’s mother carried her children off to Basingstoke and to Reading, until the family was reunited in London during the war. Ruth took longer than Diana to get into the glamour business, working in factories and as a waitress, though with a personal motto Dors would have approved: ‘a short life and a gay one’.

While Diana was entertaining the soldiers, Ruth was a cinema usherette and a ‘photographer’s assistant’. Aged seventeen, she met and became pregnant by a Canadian soldier who turned out to be already married. Like Diana Dors, who had had a brief fling with an American soldier, Ruth Ellis was soon also enticed into nude photography. Not long after her first child was born, she saw an advert: ‘Wanted. Model for camera club. Nude but artistic poses. No experience required …’ With her dyed-blonde hair and good looks, she got the job and was quickly drawn into a very specific post-war world of Mayfair gambling and prostitution clubs. This was run under the dangerous and baleful eye of one of the major crime figures of the period, Morris Conley – named by the People newspaper as ‘Britain’s biggest vice boss and the chief source of the tainted money that nourishes the evils of London night life’.

Already, although their backgrounds and trajectories were similar, there were subtle but important differences between Diana and Ruth. Dors had more real talent as an actress and was appearing in her first films while still a teenager. She was hanging out with violent and predatory men in the hard-drinking so-called ‘Chelsea set’, but she had an obvious career escape route. Ruth Ellis did not. Her job as a ‘hostess’ involved sitting in one of Conley’s clubs and having drinks with clients; sex was negotiated separately but Ruth was probably making around five or six times more money each week than she could have made in a factory. At one of the clubs she met her next husband, George Ellis, an alcoholic dentist who beat her up badly and made her pregnant for the second time. In fact, she was four months pregnant when she appeared in Lady Godiva Rides Again.

As her biographer Victoria Blake put it, there was already a pattern of unstable relationships between this working-class girl and dangerous men. It was a world of ‘unpredictability, jealousy and violence, and a weak, alcoholic partner from a middle-class background who both tantalised and dashed her hopes of social respectability’. This man, David Blakely, was another outwardly smooth middle-class type with a serious drink problem and delusions of grandeur – in his case that he would be a successful racing-car driver. It was at one of the Conley clubs that he met Ruth Ellis and, despite her taking an instant dislike to him, began a relationship.

Soon, as Blakely pursued his dreams of building a racing car, he was sponging off Ellis. The two of them were living in a drunken, erratic West London milieu, dominated by traumatized former servicemen and young, would-be-theatrical women on the make. Backstreet abortions, furious public arguments and a perennial shortage of cash were the norm. A composed Ellis later told the court about Blakely at her trial: ‘I realised that he didn’t get any money. It would be spent on his racing car: but I did not mind this. I estimate that excluding rent, I was spending between £200 and £250 a year on David … He started becoming violent. He was constantly trying to belittle me …’

The comparisons with Diana Dors’s husband, Dennis Hamilton, are close. Hamilton was also a violent, drunken sponger, a middle-class boy who was drifting through the alcoholic haze of post-war West London. Diana’s biographer describes him as ‘an out-and-out louse: a thug, gigolo and serial philanderer who treated even his friends and most especially his girlfriends despicably, while always seeming to get away with it’. Like Ruth Ellis, Diana Dors had a weakness for aggressive and dangerous men. Her marriage to Hamilton, who frequently interfered in her career, usually with disastrous results, went on for years; her friends often noticed bruises from his beatings. Just like Blakely, Hamilton had delusions of importance and grandeur. His arrogance cost Diana a full-fledged Hollywood career: after insulting the film bosses who had lured her out to California as the ‘British Marilyn Monroe’, Hamilton was at the centre of a drunken scuffle at a poolside party that led to the pair of them being drummed out of America.

But – and this is the key point – Dors was tough enough to ditch Hamilton. The conundrum about Diana Dors is how much she was exploited, and how much she was an exploiter – of the growing and increasingly frank British interest in sex. Hamilton, who had met her on the set of Lady Godiva Rides Again and married her within weeks, promoted her as a sex star. He took and sold nude pictures of her and – according to rumour at the time – hired her out to producers and other actors who wanted to experience her in bed. Hamilton, eventually rejected by Dors, died shortly after their return to the UK, in 1956, from tertiary syphilis.

Diana Dors flew high above him, continuing to make films, cut records and appear on stage and television, always exploiting her sexual allure. In 1960 she sold her memoirs, full of outrageously fruity stories, to the News of the World for the then unthinkable sum of £36,000. Towards the end of the age of 1950s austerity she outraged MPs by driving around in a powder-blue Cadillac and being filmed going down the Grand Canal in Venice wearing only a specially made mink bikini … though in keeping with the ethos of ‘make do and mend’ it later turned out that the bikini was in fact sewn together from rabbit fur.

The journalist who got the best sense of the real Diana Dors was the Guardian’s Nancy Banks-Smith. She wrote in April 1999: ‘Certainly I remember Diana Dors. She was sitting on a wall looking like Jessica Rabbit and swinging her entertaining legs. At the other end was a humorous smile, like someone who has seen the joke first.’ Damon Wise, who authored a biography of her, absolutely agreed:

She was way ahead of her time. There are elements of Diana, Princess of Wales, about her, and there are elements of the Sex Pistols about her. She created the idea of glamour as an illusion of wealth and success. She was her own Malcolm McLaren, her own press manipulator, and she lived her life in the full glare of publicity at a time when nobody did that kind of thing. She was the kind of woman the Archbishop of Canterbury called a ‘wayward hussy’ but she was also the kind of person the British public mourns like a royal when she died.

Trevor Hopkins, the producer who made an ITV biopic about her, said later: ‘when I see all of these young British actresses trying to make it in Hollywood, and all the It girls trading their looks for tabloid pages, I see the mould Diana Dors created’. In the end, she was in charge. She was a change-maker and a pioneer.

But if Diana had indeed seen the joke first, she also understood what might happen to those who made slightly worse choices. After Ruth Ellis had been hanged, Diana Dors starred in a 1956 film Yield to the Night in which she plays Mary Hilton, a woman who shoots dead another woman she believes was responsible for her lover’s suicide and is eventually led to the gallows. The film was based on a book by Joan Henry, but the story and film were heavily influenced by the Ellis story. Like Ellis, Hilton never denied that she had committed murder – and, like Ellis, she might have got away with it on the continent where the defence of ‘crime of passion’ was possible. As happened to Ruth Ellis in real life, Diana Dors’s film character Mary is visited by her mother before she is hanged. Afterwards she sobs: ‘She doesn’t care about me. She never did. She always said I’d come to a bad end. Now she just wants to gloat at me because she was right. I didn’t ask to be born!’ Yield to the Night, Diana’s most substantial, least glamorous piece of film work, suggests that just a little extra misfortune, a certain lack of steel, can have catastrophic consequences.

So how did Diana herself triumph, rather than trip? The truth is that she was a big enough star, and rich enough early enough, to be partially protected even from Hamilton. She also had a self-protectively ruthless streak. She was perfectly able to manipulate men and had a series of second-fiddle partners after she got rid of Hamilton. Although Ellis is often portrayed as being cold, perhaps she just wasn’t quite as cold, as tough, as Dors – not quite as good an earner, nor as self-protective, or cynical. The two girls who had met and made friends on that cheesy film set in the early 1950s seemed on the face of it so very similar – two cheerful, determined, bottle-blondes from provincial towns, using their physical charms to escape the drudgery and boredom that was the lot of so many working-class women at the time. Yet there were small variations of temperament and talent that, for Diana and Ruth, would mean the difference between life and death.

This is also a story about booze. The British have always been big drinkers. Read accounts of Soho life or Fleet Street journalism in the period and the amount of alcohol being put away is astonishing. The flare-ups and the beatings between Hamilton and Dors generally happened late at night when both of them had been drinking heavily. In 1953, Dors ended up in court after Hamilton, following an all-night bottle party in Blackpool, took her with him and broke into a friend’s house and stole the contents of his cocktail cabinet. Dors and Hamilton ran drink-fuelled sex parties and orgies in their houses, with two-way mirrors and, later on, cine cameras.

In Ruth Ellis’s short life, the drinking and the rows happened in public, in clubs and bars rather than private houses. One of Ruth’s fellow barmaids, who watched the relationship between Ellis and Blakely at first hand, explained that in the final six months they were both drinking ‘a very great deal of spirits. Ruth Ellis would start drinking at 3 p.m. and go on to the small hours of the morning. She drank mainly gin and ginger and Pernod, sometimes champagne … I used to give her water instead without her knowledge. I estimate that she would regularly drink half to a bottle of gin a day besides Pernod.’ In this woozy atmosphere, Ruth Ellis then met her final lover, Desmond Cussen, director of a family tobacco business and, like Blakely, part of the post-war motor-racing world.