Why Mary Whitehouse Was Right

All cultures need their mythologies, and all mythologies their villains: an old truth, but one as true of Progressive Modern Britain as of any other society, any other civilisation.  Today, as in any other age, a whole cast of antagonists are kept ready to be invoked against any criticism or challenge, avatars of the forces of backwardness to be loathed and jeered.  Most are nameless caricatures: the beak-nosed mother superior, the grim-jawed sergeant-major, the hawk-eyed headmaster, and so on.  But one character does have a name, a name immediately recognisable to many of the elders of our culture, and viscerally hated by them.  To utter the dread syllables ‘Mary Whitehouse’, if one dares, is to summon an unmistakeable image into the progressivist mind: a reviled great-aunt, perhaps even a witch, lips pursed with disapproval, eyes blinking indignantly behind horn-rimmed glasses, preening her blue-rinse hair and sallying forth against all the fun and games of the Swinging Sixties.  This too is a caricature, and one quite as shallow as any of the others, but one equally necessary to the progressive cosmology.  Somebody had to be found to play that role, and Mrs. Whitehouse fit the bill.  And it was imperative to the Great Myth that she and all she stood for had to be defeated: vanquished emphatically, and seen to be vanquished.

Mary Whitehouse (1910–2001).
Picture from Mediawatch U. K.,
successor of the N.V.A.L.A.)

But the real Mary Whitehouse, who died twenty years ago yesterday (November 23rd), was no mere caricature.  She was an astute and brave woman, probably one of the most courageous British women of the twentieth century.  She knew what she was about, and her firm principles and faith led her clear-sightedly to choose a path that was often hard and lonely but which she knew to be right and just.  Today the campaign she fought may seem entirely lost — all around us reigns the ‘disbelief, doubt and dirt’ that she opposed — but the justice of her position has been vindicated by the passing years: vindicated, and one day will be seen to be vindicated.

Mass media is today so ubiquitous that we scarcely ever think about its fundamental mechanisms.  What is actually happening when we turn on the TV, when we allow a broadcaster’s signal into our homes?  A tacit trust is established between those transmitting and those receiving.  Viewers and listeners lend the broadcaster their ears and eyes, trusting it for a time to provide better company than they can muster amongst themselves.  If an Englishman’s home is his castle, then the BBC — promising to ‘inform, educate and entertain’, as it has since its foundation in 1922 — is being invited over the drawbridge to serve as seer, sage and minstrel.  This is, long though we have forgotten it, a solemn trust indeed.  It is the trust of hospitality, the mutual courtesy of guest and host.

In its early decades under the chairmanship of Lord John Reith (1889–1971), and above all during the Second World War, the BBC generally understood and fulfilled this duty.  When in peacetime the Television Service was resumed, similarly high standards were maintained for over a decade.  However, as the fore-tremors of the social revolution of the 1960s gathered strength, certain elements within the BBC, pushing first a little bit, and then further and further, discovered that the Corporation’s unwritten contract with its viewers could in fact be stretched, and stretched, and ultimately breached, with no consequence to itself.  After all, a householder could not really round on the television set in the corner and tell it, as one could an impertinent guest, “I will not have that under my roof!”  It all went one way.  Moreover, television, once installed in a home, could not really be got rid of  — not least because in those days, far more than now, it was experienced communally: both on the scale of the household, with families typically tuning in together, and of the nation, since the whole country shared the same two or three channels.  Thus the BBC discovered that it could say whatever it liked in front of the masters and mistresses of millions of houses at just the moment when it was cementing itself into place as the chief channel of national conversation.  

Accordingly the BBC, or at least revolutionary elements within it, laid intangible siege to millions of houses, against all those little castles flying the flag of Old Britain — gentle traditional Britain underlain by the Christian faith — precisely in order to undermine its decency, its restraint and its quiet respectability, and the more easily to usher in the great liberalisation of social customs and moral standards that has now transformed our society.  By no means was this necessarily the work of some dark complot or conspiracy: it is enough to understand it simply as the predictable consequence of the gaining of access by a concentration of people with a certain political and moral outlook to the technological means by which to make that outlook mainstream — means which also happened to constitute the most powerful form of propaganda ever devised.  The siege against the ordinary British household continues unabated to this day, but so successful has it been that in most places we scarcely notice, let alone discuss or debate, what the BBC and other broadcasters have persuaded us to tolerate.

Mary Whitehouse touched a nerve from the very start, then, because she was really the first ordinary viewer to stand up for herself, the first to call the BBC to account for this abuse of trust.  But it is worth saying that her concern arose initially not from her own television viewing, but from the effects she had observed particular programmes to have had on young people, specifically the girls in her care as a secondary schoolmistress in Madeley in Shropshire.  In her 1967 memoir ‘Cleaning-Up TV’ she recounts how conversations with her fourth-year pupils had revealed upset and confusion arising from televised dramas or panel discussions.  One among several examples was a drama including close-up shots of ‘the screams and agony’ of a woman in labour, which understandably caused them anxiety about the idea of marriage and motherhood.  ‘In one fell swoop,’ Whitehouse said, ‘all that I had been telling them about how wonderful and challenging an experience it was to give birth to a child had been wiped out.’ (Cleaning-Up TV, p. 15.)  Though confident that her pupils would recover in time, she still thought it a needless setback and an intrusion at a sensitive time in their lives.  She considered that the new trends in television were making them feel less free, less happy, less hopeful about the future — that then, as now, the Progressive Revolution favoured the ease of adults over the welfare of the young.  

This concern for young people is one of the most important things to understand about Mary Whitehouse.  It was perhaps her main motivation.  Far from blaming the young for the new social trends, she made it quite clear that it was her own generation that was principally at fault:

Sometimes if I am feeling tired or dispirited I think back to those youngsters [in Shropshire].  In their heart of hearts they want to regain so many of the things we older people have discarded in our attempts to keep ‘with it’.  They say they will bring up their children differently: they will have walks together in the country, they will be thrifty, they will discipline their children, they will teach them to say their prayers.  Will they when the time comes? […]  I don’t know the answer but I do know there was something genuine and wistful about they way they spoke and I believe that this is the real spirit of youth before it is sullied, and pressurised by the wrong values of the society that we have built around them.  

Mary Whitehouse, Cleaning-Up TV (London: Blandford Press, 1967), p. 14.

And again, in a later chapter:

When as sometimes happens I am shouted down or laughed at by students it helps to remember that those really responsible for the present permissive trend in our society are my own generation. […]  In our anxiety not to be thought square […] we have, by and large, created a candy-floss society in which the young can find little of hard substance on which to cut teeth of conviction.  The passion for the so-called ‘Open’ approach to everything, which discards all established values, has betrayed our young people into the hands of manipulators who exploit their immaturity and aimlessness for their own ends. (p. 39)

From her perspective, the Permissive Revolution was not so much being driven from below, by a spontaneous uprising of Baby Boomers, as being orchestrated by the cultural elites from above.  

Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, photographed by
Godfrey Argent, 25 April 1968. 
National Portrait Gallery, Photographs Collection
NPG x16892, ref. mw119795.
Reproduced under Creative Commons licence 3.0.

In the summer of 1963, Whitehouse went to London to take her concerns directly to the BBC and the Independent Television Authority, the fore-runner of ITV.  At the BBC she was received ‘courteously and sympathetically’ by the Director-General’s Chief Assistant, Harman Grisewood, who seemed to her ‘deeply and genuinely concerned’.  ‘How “up from the country” I was,’ she was later to say.  For the person she did not meet on that occasion was Grisewood’s superior, the extraordinary figure of Sir Hugh Carleton Greene (1910–1987), who served as the BBC’s Director-General during the crucial years 1960–1969 (and who incidentally was also the brother of the novelist Graham Greene.)  When Mary Whitehouse spoke of her own generation’s responsibility for the Permissive Revolution it was probably him that she had principally in mind.  Both were born in the same year — a remarkable fact pointed out by Louise Perry — and yet whereas Whitehouse sought to defend the values and faith of Old Britain, Greene was at the forefront of the push for the New Morality.  His ambition, he said, was to —

[…] open the windows and dissipate the ivory tower stuffiness which still clung to some parts of the BBC […]  I wanted to encourage enterprise and the taking of risks.  I wanted to make the BBC a place where talent of all sorts, however unconventional, was recognised and nurtured. 

Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, ‘The Third Floor Front’, quoted in Robin Carmody, ‘Sir Hugh Carleton Greene’, web article published by the Transdiffusion Organisation, retrieved 23 November 2021 from https://www.transdiffusion.org/2002/01/01/hugh.

These words, set down in 1969, could have been written last week: this is perfect Newspeak from a near-Edwardian.  Almost in itself it explains the broadcasting of the gritty ‘kitchen-sink dramas’ which were so to dismay Whitehouse in late 1963, along with the ‘satire boom’ of 1964.  And there is much to ponder in the fact that Greene had come to hold that position at all.  BBC Directors-General do not come from nowhere: other people, somewhere, had thought him the man for the job.

The kitchen-sink dramas — with their unflinching portrayal of social issues and in many cases uncritical depictions of extra-marital relations and even abortion — were followed, in 1964, by the news that the Government was willing to renew the BBC’s Charter for a further twelve years.  The Corporation had set its course, and with Charter in hand its way seemed clear.  So Mrs. Whitehouse, together with her ‘old friend’ Norah Buckland, wife of the Rector of Longton in Stoke-on-Trent, decided to organise a petition, calling on the BBC for a ‘radical change of policy’ and programmes ‘which build character instead of destroying it, which encourage and sustain faith in God and bring Him back to the heart of our family and national life’ (p. 24).  Ringing up the news desk of a local newspaper in order to spread the word was to have momentous consequences.  ‘Before the day was out a reporter had found his way to my home and in response to his questioning we had agreed that we would be holding a public meeting, and what was more that we would hold it in the Birmingham Town Hall’ (p. 24).

This impulsive decision caused Whitehouse and Buckland no little nervousness in the months that followed.  But they need not have worried, at least as far as attendance was concerned.  The petition took off like wildfire, and thousands of people were soon putting their names to it: men and women alike, of all different ages, in all kinds of occupations and living in all parts of the country.  (There is a particular pang in reading of a ‘significant trend’ of letters ‘from men who had positions of great responsibility during the war and who are now dismayed and amazed at the decline in the spirit of our people’.)  By the day of the meeting, the 5th May, 1964, 120,000 signatures had been collected — these were brought together and placed on the platform in the Town Hall — and a number of public figures had added their voices to the cause, some travelling long distances in order to be present.

It was at this meeting in Birmingham that one of the main battle-fronts of the 1960s was at last drawn up in plain sight.  Several factors combined to catapult the occasion into the national news, and thereby the national consciousness.  The first was an unexpected last-minute request from the BBC to televise the meeting, a request to which Whitehouse agreed — only to find, shortly after proceedings began, that the audience had been infiltrated by protestors:

Dotted about the hall, closely in touch with one another through pre-arranged signals and immediately next to the television cameras was a group of bearded toughs who had come to break up the meeting and steal the limelight in the press and television.  At a given signal one of them rushed across the stage to try and grab the microphone and questions were thrown at him from his colleagues in the hall […]  This interruption was not just a case of a few hoodlums acting the fool.  It was an organised affair.  My colleagues who were making a tape-recording of the meeting for our own use observed that BBC staff with microphones were stationed at frequent intervals around the hall in spite of their promise not to do so.  (Cleaning-Up TV, p. 36.)

Things did not all go the troublemakers’ way, however, as this enjoyable paragraph records:

A group of young Catholics, incensed by the publicity being given to this tiny group who had no support from the body of the meeting, made the camera men furious by turning the spotlight off the interrupters!  A row of nuns joined in the slow handclap which rose from the body of the hall (to drown the shouting of the interrupters) and the thick soles of their shoes made a great contribution to the beating of feet on the floor.  (p. 36).

The result was, of course, a sensation, on the strength of which the Clean-Up TV Campaign swelled into a national movement.  Mary Whitehouse found herself cast as its figurehead — and thus as her opponents’ arch-nemesis.

What was the response of the BBC to all this?  Negligible.  It refused to meet with members of the campaign, even when the number of signatures had reached nearly half a million.  There was not the slightest moderation of its programming.  Its only direct response would have been better not made at all: to mock Whitehouse very obviously and with astonishing cruelty in the satire programme Swizzlewick, even alluding to a quite unrelated incident involving her husband (a road accident which had caused him a nervous breakdown, whereby he had come round a bend in his car and run over a suicidal man lying in the road).  But perhaps it is the reaction of Hugh Greene himself, as the campaign gathered strength and numbers, that is most remarkable and most telling.  Quite simply, he was open in his hatred of Mrs. Whitehouse and all she stood for.  According to Mary Kenny, Whitehouse ‘was banned from entering Broadcasting House; indeed her name could not even be mentioned on the air without prior reference to senior management.’  He had an obscene Medusa-like portrait of her hung in his office.  She had been allocated her irrevocable place in the Progressive Mythology.

From all this behaviour — of the Town Hall troublemakers, of the BBC satirists and of the Director-General — one sees a pattern emerging.  One sees that Mary Whitehouse was not, as is almost invariably implied, an over-sensitive and hysterical maiden-auntish figure, forever clutching her pearls and grasping her smelling-salts.  No, she was quite in possession of her faculties.  It was her opponents, the progressive revolutionaries, who time and again revealed themselves to be lacking in reason and scornful of fair argument.  Some commentators in our own time, such as the comedian Andrew Doyle, have likened the aggressive activists of our own time to Mrs. Whitehouse, the accusation being that both she and they seek to suppress freedom of speech.  But this is terribly unfair to her.  It must be stated emphatically: she was fundamentally in favour of the free exchange of ideas.  ‘Properly handled[,] every subject is admissible,’ she said in Cleaning-Up TV (p. 151).  Although she certainly had decided views of her own on many matters, she was willing and well-equipped to defend them against rational objection in the public forum — on television, on radio, in print and in university debating societies — and needed no convincing of the media’s important role in facilitating genuine debate.

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Mary Whitehouse (L) with the singer Judy Mackenzie at the Festival of Light Rally in London's Trafalgar Square, 25th September, 1971

Furthermore, Mary Whitehouse’s methods were entirely civilised: petitions, public meetings, newsletter campaigns and telephone calls, with occasional recourse to the law as available to all British subjects.  Again it was the ugly stratagems of her opponents that sound only too familiar to us today: the disruption of gatherings, the shouting down of speakers, the assault on reputation by personal accusation and slander.  They objected not to her manner or language but to the very expression of her ideas, and moved not to defeat her in argument but to intimidate her into silence, a tactic that we have seen from the progressive sides of umpteen social and moral debates ever since.  Mary Whitehouse, for decades the recipient of hate-mail and death-threats, and the object to this day of highly vindictive and peculiarly and savagely personal mockery and satire, was no pioneer of our modern ‘cancel culture’: really, she was its first target.  Then, as now, a vocal and aggressive minority pursued its cause to the bitter end, showing no mercy in battle and giving no quarter in victory.  The strength of this movement was considerable then, and culturally speaking is almost total now — but it is one and the same radical progressivism.

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Receiving the O.B.E., 9th December, 1980

Mary Whitehouse’s understanding of freedom of speech was a nuanced and considered one.  She did not oppose the expression of any particular idea in itself, but she was against improper manners of expression.  In other words, she believed that there are right and wrong times and places, as well as tones and attitudes, for the discussion of sensitive or controversial matters.  ‘Family viewing time’ in particular she considered sacrosanct: to keep certain subjects for after the watershed was not a suppression of speech, but a channelling of it, a disciplining, for the sake of the peace of mind of younger viewers.  But she was not against the tackling of serious issues, as is evident from this candid and courageous paragraph: 

What about a play […] about women who are determined to see through a pregnancy whatever the difficulties.  I am not talking through my hat, as I gave birth, when our first child was seventeen months old, to twin boys following a very difficult pregnancy.  It was suggested that my babies should be medically aborted since X-rays showed that they were likely to be delicate.  I declined the offer.  The babies did not live, but I have never regretted the decision we made.  They remain part of our family and I am grateful for what they gave to me of courage and maturity.  Countless women are making the same kind of decision all the time.  This seems to me wonderful dramatic material as well as true reality.  If only such ideas were acceptable.  But they are not.  (Cleaning-Up TV, p. 168.)

Her views did align with those of today’s radical progressivists in one respect — and to this extent they too are quite right.  She understood that words matter.  In a television interview of 1973 with the writer Jill Tweedie, the conversation turned to the subject of swearing.  “What can be actually damaging, actually harmful to children, about words?” Jill Tweedie asks.  “Words are the means by which we express ourselves, by which to a great extent our culture is judged,” Whitehouse replies, “We have to help the young to grow through the rebellious crudities of adolescence and find more subtle, more beautiful, more tender ways of expressing what they feel.”  “But is there any harm,” Tweedie insists, “any active harm in certain words?”  “Yes, certainly,” says Whitehouse, “because it’s the degradation of your culture; it’s the degradation of the whole quality of the way you communicate with one another and the way you live.  I think it [swearing] is a very harmful thing.”  Not least as a Christian believer, a member of a religion of the Word, she understood that speech is not trivial.  Words are actions in so far as they influence other people’s thoughts and feelings and character, and to this extent at the very least they really do change reality.  Freedom of speech notwithstanding, we have a duty to mind what we say and how.

Jill Tweedie interviews Mary Whitehouse on Thames TV, 20 February 1973

Mary Whitehouse understood another distinction that seems never to be made in our present fraught debate over freedom of speech: the difference between necessary offence and gratuitous offence.  The former is something that we risk giving in any discussion of a controversial matter, and that parties in a debate must set aside, or rise above, for the sake of the common pursuit of truth.  The latter, however, is offence caused for its own sake, for the sheer thrill of causing outrage or upset.  And it is this second kind of offence that the BBC, from the Sixties onwards, has too often given to its family audiences.

The BBC has not appeared in a favourable light in this article, but it should not be forgotten that Mary Whitehouse, after the initial opening salvo of her manifesto, was always careful to ‘give appreciation to the many people working in the BBC whose programmes were first class in every respect’ (p. 20).  Such appreciation is as important now as it was then.  But in spite of these individually excellent programmes, and the BBC’s still-matchless ability to rise to great occasions when it knows the world is watching, it seems beyond doubt that of the two schools of broadcasting, John Reith’s and Hugh Greene’s, it is the latter that has prevailed when it comes to everyday programming.  (Just consider how jarringly the brash idents elbow aside the end of the Queen’s Christmas address every year).  Figures such as Robin Aitken have argued that, since almost all of the people in charge of BBC programming share a particular world-view, this world-view inevitably influences the flavour of its output, and thereby undermines its claims to impartiality.  In the past five years especially, there has been a growing and increasingly overt politicisation of much BBC output, and we seem to be back in late 1963, when, as Mary Whitehouse put it, ‘it looked exactly as if our much-respected BBC had launched into a trial of strength with its viewers and was determined to answer criticism by producing programmes even more likely to affront the good taste of the country.’ (Cleaning-Up TV, p. 20).

In our own time, which is proving to be a kind of second 1960s, Mary Whitehouse has much to teach us.  The battle-lines may have shifted since her time, but the combatants and stakes are much the same: aggressive radical secular progressivism versus such fortresses as are left of Christian and traditionally-minded Britain.  Mary Whitehouse was from the beginning ecumenical in her approach, and saw that Christian churches (to which we may now add many of our cousins in other religions) had to stand together for the sake of the common good.   This is perhaps why, broad-church Anglican though she was, she rather remarkably ended her book by quoting at length from Pope Paul VI — to the point of giving him the last word.  

We urgently need her sort of courage today: the courage, when scoffed or cackled at, when condescended to or dismissed out of hand, or when sworn at or slandered, not to back down; the courage to stand our ground even when the ground itself seems to be giving way under our feet.  Her only weakness, in so far as the weakness was hers, was a tactical one: many of her methods would have worked far more effectively had Britain still been the fair-minded country she believed it to be, and only failed because not enough people stood with her.  We need the strength of faith with which she defied ridicule and scorn for the sake of a kingdom not of this world.  ‘But for her,’ Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, ‘the total demolition of all Christian decencies and values in this country would have taken place virtually without a word of public protest.’ [1]

Mary Whitehouse, film director Michael Winner and a studio audience debate violence in film and television.  Hosted by Sarah Kennedy and broadcast on Thames TV on the 10th September, 1985.

And so, with one gentleman in a Thames TV studio who, having supported her arguments in a TV debate in 1985, praised her solitary courage in defiance of a largely hostile audience, I say, ‘Three Cheers to Mrs. Whitehouse’.  May her soul rest in peace.

[1] Sandra Salmans, ‘British Woman Carries On Crusade Against Sex and Violence in the Media’, Sarasota Herald-Tribune (NY Times News Service), 7 April 1977, p. 53.