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The “K-Bomb”: Social Surveys, the Popular Press, and British Sexual Culture in the 1940s and 1950s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Adrian Bingham
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , January 2011 , pp. 156 - 179
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2011

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References

1 England, L. R., “Little Kinsey: An Outline of Sex Attitudes in Britain,” Public Opinion Quarterly 13, no. 4 (Winter 1949–50): 600Google Scholar. On Mass-Observation, see Hubble, Nick, Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History and Theory (Basingstoke, 2006)Google Scholar.

2 Sunday Pictorial, 3–31 July 1949.

3 Sunday Pictorial, 19 June 1949, 9.

4 Liz Stanley, Sex Surveyed: From Mass Observation's “Little Kinsey” to the National Survey and the Hite Reports (London, 1995), 3–4.

5 England, “Little Kinsey,” 600.

6 Stanley, Sex Surveyed.

7 See, e.g., Porter, Roy and Hall, Lesley, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950 (New Haven, CT, 1995), 198–99, 248–49, 255–56Google Scholar; Cook, Hera, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception, 1800–1975 (Oxford, 2004), 157, 168, 185Google Scholar; Weeks, Jeffrey, The World We Have Won: The Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life (Abingdon, 2007), 33–34, 39–40Google Scholar; Kynaston, David, Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (London, 2007), 373–75Google Scholar. BBC4 broadcast a program on “Little Kinsey” (5 October 2005), which also received some attention in the press; on this program, see Dennis, Norman, “Propaganda or Public Service Broadcasting,” Civitas Review 3, no. 1 (February 2006), 1–13Google Scholar.

8 Igo, Sarah E., The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Ibid., 243; on the Kinsey research, see chaps. 5–6.

10 D'Emilo, John and Freedman, Estelle, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (Chicago, 1997), 285Google Scholar.

11 Schofield, Michael, “Fifty Years after Kinsey,” Sexualities 1, no. 1 (February 1998): 103–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 The work on the European reception of the Kinsey report is concisely discussed in Herzog, Dagmar, “The Reception of the Kinsey Reports in Europe,” Sexuality and Culture 10, no. 1 (March 2006): 39–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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14 Kynaston, David, Family Britain, 1951–57 (London, 2009), 551–52Google Scholar.

15 Szreter, Simon, “Victorian Britain, 1837–1963: Towards a Social History of Sexuality,” Journal of Victorian Culture 1, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 144, 142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 For examples, see Sutherland, John, Offensive Literature: Decensorship in Britain, 1960–1982 (London, 1982)Google Scholar; Aldgate, Anthony, Censorship and the Permissive Society: British Cinema and Theatre, 1955–1965 (Oxford, 1995)Google Scholar; Marwick, Arthur, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958 to c. 1974 (Oxford, 1998)Google Scholar; Green, Jonathon, All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counter-Culture (London, 1999), chap. 6Google Scholar; and Donnelly, Mark, Sixties Britain: Culture, Society and Politics (Harlow, 2005)Google Scholar.

17 For example, the press is barely mentioned in three key collections exploring the culture of this period: Moore-Gilbert, Bart and Seed, John, eds., Cultural Revolution? The Challenge of the Arts in the 1960s (London, 1992); Anthony Aldgate, James Chapman, and Arthur Marwick, eds., Windows on the Sixties: Exploring Key Texts of Media and Culture (London, 2000)Google Scholar; and Collins, Marcus, ed., The Permissive Society and Its Enemies: Sixties British Culture (London, 2007)Google Scholar.

18 Seymour-Ure, Colin, The British Press and Broadcasting since 1945, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1996), 16–20Google Scholar; Williams, Francis, Dangerous Estate: The Anatomy of Newspapers (London, 1958), 1–2Google Scholar.

19 On this, see Bingham, Adrian, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press (Oxford, 2009)Google Scholar.

20 On BBC broadcasting in this period, see Briggs, Asa, Sound and Vision, vol. 4 of The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1979)Google Scholar; and Crisell, Andrew, An Introductory History of British Broadcasting, 2nd ed. (London, 2002)Google Scholar.

21 Igo, Averaged American, 256; Gathorne-Hardy, Jonathan, Alfred C. Kinsey: Sex The Measure of All Things (London, 1998), 270Google Scholar.

22 Igo, Averaged American, 237.

23 Notably “Too Darn Hot” from Kiss Me Kate (music and lyrics by Cole Porter; first performed in New York in 1948); on Kinsey's celebrity, see Igo, Averaged American, chap. 6.

24 Gathorne-Hardy, Alfred C. Kinsey, 269–70; Ferris, Paul, Sex and the British: A Twentieth-Century History (London, 1994), 209Google Scholar.

25 This statement is made on the basis of word searches of the digital archives of these four newspapers: the Mirror and Express archives are available at http://www.ukpressonline.co.uk/; The Times at http://www.archive.timesonline.co.uk/; and the Manchester Guardian at http://www.guardian.chadwyck.co.uk.

26 Ferris, Sex and the British, 209–10.

27 Sunday Pictorial, 2 January 1949, 5.

28 Bingham, Family Newspapers?

29 See, e.g., McKibbin, Ross, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford, 1998), chap. 11Google Scholar; Ward, Paul, Britishness since 1870 (Abingdon, 2004), 89–92Google Scholar; Swann, Paul, The Hollywood Feature Film in Post-War Britain (Beckenham, 1987), chap. 2Google Scholar; and Rose, Sonya, Which People's War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain, 1939–45 (Oxford, 2003), chap. 3.Google Scholar

30 Sunday Pictorial, 2 January 1949, 5.

31 Lynes, Russell, Snobs: A Guidebook to Your Friends, Your Enemies, Your Colleagues and Yourself (New York, 1950), 23Google Scholar; Daily Mirror, 20 November 1950, 2.

32 Herzog, “Kinsey Reports,” 40–41.

33 Seymour-Ure, British Press, 30–31.

34 Hugh Cudlipp (1913–98) joined the Daily Mirror as features editor in 1935, moving on to edit the Sunday Pictorial from 1937 to 1940 and (after war service) from 1946 to 1949. Following a brief spell at the Sunday Express, he served as editorial director for both the Mirror and the Pictorial from 1953 to 1968 and as chairman of the parent company IPC until his retirement in 1973. See Hugh Cudlipp, At Your Peril (London, 1962), and Walking on Water (London, 1976); Ruth Edwards, Newspapermen: Hugh Cudlipp, Cecil Harmsworth King and the Glory Days of Fleet Street (London, 2003).

35 Bingham, Family Newspapers? 73–75. On Haire and sex education, see Cocks, H. G., “Saucy Stories: Pornography, Sexology, and the Marketing of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, c. 1918–70,” Social History 29, no. 4 (November 2004), 465–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Sunday Pictorial, 1 February 1948, 7.

37 Waters, Chris, “Sexology,” in The Modern History of Sexuality, ed. Cocks, H. G. and Houlbrook, Matt (Basingstoke, 2006), 49Google Scholar.

38 Sunday Pictorial, 1 February 1948, 7.

39 Ibid.

40 Hugh Cudlipp claimed that Marje Proops was the first journalist to use the word “masturbation” in print, in the Daily Mirror, but this was certainly an earlier usage, and I have not found any before 1949; Patmore, Angela, Marje: The Authorised Biography (London, 1993), 181Google Scholar.

41 Sunday Pictorial, 2 January 1949, 5.

42 Ibid.

43 See, e.g., Kynaston, Family Britain, 558; and Collins, Marcus, Modern Love: An Intimate History of Men and Women in Twentieth-Century Britain (London, 2003), chap. 4.Google Scholar

44 On the Sunday Pictorial in these years, see Cudlipp, At Your Peril.

45 Tom Harrisson, preface to “Mass-Observation's Sex Survey of 1949,” reprinted in Stanley, Sex Surveyed, 68.

46 Ferris, Sex and the British, 210; England, “Little Kinsey,” 588.

47 England, “Little Kinsey”; Bodleian Library, Oxford, X.Films 200, Mass-Observation File Report 3110B, 2; Stanley, Sex Surveyed, 22.

48 Stanley, Sex Surveyed, chaps. 2–3.

49 Harrisson, preface to “Mass Observation’s Sex Survey of 1949,” 68.

50 Bodleian Library, Oxford, X.Films 200, Mass-Observation File Report 3110A, 18.

51 Seymour-Ure, British Press, 28–29.

52 Daily Mirror, 17 June 1949, 5.

53 Sunday Pictorial, 19 June 1949, 9.

54 Sunday Pictorial, 26 June 1949, 1.

55 Sunday Pictorial, 19 June 1949, 9; 26 June 1949, 1.

56 Ibid.

57 Sunday Pictorial, 26 June 1949, 1.

58 Sunday Pictorial, 3 July 1949, 6.

59 On this, see Stead, W. T., The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, ed. Simpson, Antony E. (Lambertville, 2007).Google Scholar

60 Sunday Pictorial, 3 July 1949, 6.

61 Sunday Pictorial, 3–31 July 1949.

62 Stanley, Sex Surveyed; see also n. 7.

63 Sunday Pictorial, 3 July 1949, 6–7.

64 Sunday Pictorial, 10 July 1949, 6–7.

65 Ibid.

66 Sunday Pictorial, 24 July 1949, 5; 3 July 1949, 6–7.

67 Sunday Pictorial, 17 July 1949, 6–7.

68 Ibid.

69 Bingham, Adrian, “The British Popular Press and Venereal Disease during the Second World War,” Historical Journal 48, no. 4 (December 2005), 1055–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Sunday Pictorial, 17 July 1949, 1.

71 Ibid., 6–7.

72 Ibid.

73 See, e.g., the public reaction to Stead's 1885 crusade or to the divorce reporting of the 1920s: Stead, Maiden Tribute; Bingham, Family Newspapers? chap. 4.

74 Royal Commission on the Press, 1947–49, Report, Cmd. 7700 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1949).

75 Evans, Speech to the House of Commons, 28 July 1949, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, 5th ser., vol. 467 (1949), col. 2786.

76 England, “Little Kinsey,” 599.

77 Gorer lamented in 1948 that through Kinsey's work “sex has been reduced to statistics”: Igo, Averaged American, 249.

78 Mandler, Peter, “Margaret Mead amongst the Natives of Britain,” Past and Present, no. 204 (August 2009), 226CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

79 Gorer, Geoffrey, Exploring English Character (London, 1955), 3.Google Scholar

80 Ibid., 4–6.

81 Ibid.

82 People, 12, 19, 26 August; 2, 9, 16, 23, 30 September 1951.

83 People, 5 August 1951, 4.

84 Beaverbrook to Robertson, August 1951, House of Lords Record Office, London, Beaverbrook Papers, H/151.

85 Robertson to Beaverbrook 13 August 1951, House of Lords Record Office, London, Beaverbrook Papers, H/151.

86 Gorer, Exploring English Character, 26, 33.

87 Mandler, “Margaret Mead,” 225–26.

88 People, 12 August 1951, 4.

89 People, 26 August 1951, 4.

90 People, 12 August 1951, 4.

91 People, 19 August 1951, 4.

92 Bainbridge, Cyril and Stockdill, Roy, The News of the World Story: 150 Years of the World's Bestselling Newspaper (London, 1993); Bingham, Family Newspapers? 127–33.Google Scholar

93 Mass-Observation, The Press and Its Readers: A Report Prepared by Mass Observation for the Advertising Service Guild (London, 1949), 14.

94 Sunday Express, 23 August 1953, 4.

95 See. e.g., Daily Sketch, 12 August 1953, 4; 14 August 1953, 4; 15 August 1953, 4; Daily Mirror, 12 August 1953, 2; 14 August 1953, 4; 15 August 1953, 12; People, 16 August 1953, 1, 7.

96 Irish Times, 7 September 1953.

97 See, e.g., Daily Mirror, 20 August 1953, 1.

98 Daily Mirror, 20 August 1953, 8–9; see also Daily Herald, 20 August 1953, 4.

99 Daily Herald, 20 August 1953, 4.

100 Daily Mirror, 21 August 1953, 8.

101 E. J. Robertson to Beaverbrook, 26 August 1953, House of Lords Record Office, London, Beaverbrook Papers, H/164.

102 Ibid.

103 Kynaston, Family Britain, 552.

104 Daily Sketch, 20 August 1953, 4.

105 Daily Mirror, 22 August 1953, 5.

106 Daily Herald, 21 August 1953, 4; 22 August 1953, 3.

107 Daily Mirror, 22 August 1953, 5.

108 People, 23 August 1953, 6.

109 Cited in Daily Herald, 21 August 1953, 4, and Daily Mirror, 22 August 1953, 2.

110 Daily Herald, 21 August 1953, 4.

111 Daily Mirror, 22 August 1953, 2.

112 Ibid.

113 The Times, 31 August 1953, 2.

114 Manchester Guardian, 20 August 1953, 4.

115 Manchester Guardian, 4 December 1953, 4.

116 Daily Express, 20 August 1953, 4.

117 Sunday Express, 23 August 1953, 4; Bingham, “The Popular Press and Venereal Disease.”

118 Tom Blackburn to Beaverbrook, 11 August 1953, Beaverbrook Papers, H/161; E. J. Robertson to Beaverbrook, 17 August 1953, Beaverbrook Papers, H/164.

119 On the nature of the Express in this period, see Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie, Beaverbrook: A Life (London, 1992).

120 Sunday Express, 23 August 1953, 4.

121 Ibid.

122 Sunday Express, 25 October 1953, 6.

123 Robertson to Beaverbrook, 26 August 1953; Atkins to Robertson, 8 September 1953, Beaverbrook Papers, H/164; World's Press News, 11 September 1953, 11.

124 The Encyclopedia of the British Press, 1422–1992, ed. Griffiths, Dennis (London, 1992), 268Google Scholar.

125 World's Press News, 28 August 1953, iii.

126 Sunday Express, 30 August 1953, 4.

127 The Times, 31 August 1953, 2.

128 The Times, 7 September 1953, 7.

129 Press Council, The Press and the People: First Annual Report (London, 1954), 21Google Scholar.

130 On the history of the Press Council, see O'Malley, Tom and Soley, Clive, Regulating the Press (London, 2000), chap. 4Google Scholar.

131 Daily Express, 4 November 1953, 5.

132 Sunday Pictorial, 22 January to 4 March 1956.

133 Brown, Callum, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London, 2001), 6Google Scholar.

134 Travis, Alan, Bound and Gagged: A Secret History of Obscenity in Britain (London, 2000), chap. 5Google Scholar.

135 Buckland, Elfreda, The World of Donald McGill (Poole, 1985), chap. 7Google Scholar; Barker, Martin, A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign (London, 1984)Google Scholar.

136 Marcus Collins, “Introduction,” in The Permissive Society, 7.

137 O'Malley and Soley, Regulating the Press.

138 Brian McNair suggests that it is “since the 1960s” that “sex has become a central part of mass, popular culture”: McNair, Brian, Mediated Sex: Pornography and Postmodern Culture (London, 1996), 1Google Scholar.

139 Higgins, Patrick, Heterosexual Dictatorship: Male Homosexuality in Postwar Britain (London, 1996)Google Scholar. Mort, Frank, “Mapping Sexual London: The Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution: 1954–7,” New Formations, no. 37 (1999), 92–113Google Scholar; Waters, Chris, “Disorders of the Mind, Disorders of the Body Social: Peter Wildeblood and the Making of the Modern Homosexual,” in Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain, 1945–1964, ed. Conekin, Becky, Mort, Frank, and Waters, Chris (London, 1999)Google Scholar.

140 Bingham, Family Newspapers?

141 Fisher, Kate, Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain, 1918–60 (Oxford, 2006), 240CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

142 By 1970, e.g., Germaine Greer was complaining that the “implication that there is a statistically ideal fuck which will always result in satisfaction if the right procedures are followed is depressing and misleading” (The Female Eunuch [1970; repr., London, 1972], 43).