Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties Read online

  Dedication

  For TQ,

  And in memory of my grandmothers,

  Madge Cooke and Elsie Goodson

  Epigraph

  The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.

  Willa Cather

  Funny business, a woman’s career.

  Margo Channing, as played by Bette Davis in All About Eve (1950)

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  1. In the Kitchen with Patience Gray

  2. The Show Must Go On: Three trouser-wearing characters – Nancy Spain, writer and personality; Joan Werner Laurie, magazine editor; Sheila van Damm, rally-car driver and theatre manager

  3. A Monumental Ambition: Alison Smithson, architect

  4. In the Garden with Margery Fish

  5. The Brontës of Shepherd’s Bush: Muriel Box, director, and Betty Box, producer

  6. Digging for Victory: Jacquetta Hawkes, archaeologist

  7. All Rise: Rose Heilbron, QC

  Fashion in the Fifties

  Some Good and Richly Subversive Novels by Women, 1950–60

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  Where does a book begin?

  This one began with a piece of furniture. Not so long ago, I bought a sideboard on eBay. I was very pleased with it: I’d got myself a lovely piece of fashionable-again early Ercol at a bargain price, and it looked so wonderfully pale and interesting, standing there in a corner of the kitchen. I relished telling people how little I’d paid for it; I loved watching them run their hands enviously over its warm beech and elm curves.

  Friends who admired this sideboard were always surprised by its age – the man who sold it to me believed that it dated from 1954 – and after a while I began to share their amazement. The more I lived with it, the more timelessly modern it seemed; it was difficult to picture it in the comfortable but old-fashioned living rooms of my grandparents, who would have been about the same age as I am now when it was made – they favoured wall-to-wall carpets, cut-glass rose bowls and what used to be known somewhat unappetisingly as ‘brown furniture’ – and because of this I began to wonder about the Fifties. In my mind, they split in two. There were the Sepia Fifties, all Linoleum and best china; and there were the Technicolor Fifties, all atomic prints and Swedish-inspired modernism. Ercol, whose designs were exhibited at the Festival of Britain in 1951, was not the cheapest of the new-style post-war furniture, but nor was it impossibly expensive; though beautifully made, it was certainly mass-produced. I wanted to know: what kind of people had first bought it, and what were they telling the world about themselves when they did? It wasn’t too long after this – aspiration of one kind surely signifying ambition of another – that I had the idea of trying to write a book about the career women of the Fifties.

  My Ercol sideboard

  (Author’s collection.)

  The more I thought about it, the more I questioned our idea of Fifties woman – so inflexible, so monolithic, a cultural symbol of all that we are most grateful to have sloughed off. In newspaper columns and magazine articles, the phrase ‘like the Fifties’ has become a kind of shorthand, especially when it comes to the lives of women, doing the work of at least a dozen other words, some of them contradictory. The phrase means, or can mean: old-fashioned, unambitious, docile, emollient, inhibited, clenched, prudish, thwarted, frustrated, repressed and, most recently, obsessed with baking (those who rage against the cult of the cupcake often marshal the backwards Fifties in their cause). But what if there was another side to the story? What if this collective readiness to move on has tilted history too far in one direction? Some people idealise the past, but far more common is the tendency to patronise it. We can’t help ourselves. We make it one thing, or another, and then we set about considering ourselves superior to it.*

  At first, I must admit, it seemed as though I might have set out on a wild goose chase. Many, if not most, of the heftiest histories of the Fifties were written by men, and while they have, for instance, an awful lot to say about Anthony Eden and the Suez Crisis, they are rather less forthcoming about the lives of women, especially the kind who might have longed for Ercol furniture. The male historians’ favourite resource, when it comes the female Fifties, is Mass Observation, the research organisation founded in 1937 to record everyday life via legions of diary-writing volunteers. And while the journals people wrote under MO’s auspices are vivid and fascinating, and often extremely moving, their female authors were mostly housewives and secretaries: women rather like my grandmothers, in fact. Still, I read on, and eventually was rewarded with a few names. Several weeks into the new Queen’s reign in 1952, I learned, the Picture Post ran a feature entitled ‘The New Elizabethans’. On the magazine’s list were forty-two men (among them Nye Bevan, Benjamin Britten, Graham Greene and Henry Moore) and five women. Two of these women were actresses: Glynis Johns, star of the 1948 mermaid hit Miranda, and Celia Johnson, whose performance in Brief Encounter had proved so resonant for a generation of women dealing with the return of the men from the war. A third was the ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn. Actresses and dancers probably weren’t, I felt, illustrative of anything very much – they are surely anomalies, whatever the age – but the last two names caught my eye: Barbara Ward, an economist, and Rose Heilbron, then Britain’s only female Queen’s Counsel. They sounded interesting. Then, six hundred pages into David Kynaston’s amazing panorama Family Britain, there came a couple more. ‘Contrary to subsequent mythology,’ writes Kynaston, ‘the 1950s were not entirely bereft of ambitious, independent-minded women.’ His examples were Sheila van Damm, the rally-car driver and theatre manager, and Margery Fish, the gardener and writer.

  I took these names – new to me – as a gauntlet, thrown down. I would investigate (and celebrate) their achievements, and I would find others like them. I understood that I wouldn’t be rewriting the decade: the facts would see to that. It was a time when most women were married (75 per cent of adult women in 1951); when relatively few women worked (though not, perhaps, as few as you might think: in 1956, women comprised about 30 per cent of the workforce); and when, whether thanks to expectation or necessity, a huge amount of energy was devoted to housework (full-time housewives spent between sixty-one and seventy hours a week on washing, ironing and the rest). Women could not take out mortgages in their own name, even if they had a job, and if they wanted to be fitted with a diaphragm, one of the few forms of contraception then available, they had first to produce a marriage certificate. Abortion was illegal. But we need to be clear: the end of the war did not send every female hurrying back into the kitchen, just as the feminism of the Sixties did not spring from the minds of women who had spent the last decade in an apron and rubber gloves. As Katharine Whitehorn, who graduated from Cambridge in 1950, puts it in her memoir Selective Memory, ‘There’s been a tendency to look on the Fifties as simply a damp patch between the battleground of the Forties and the fairground of the Sixties; yet it was anything but . . . We had the heady sense that everything was getting better.’ It goes without saying that Austerity Britain could be grim: all that smog and rubble, the feeling that rationing would last for ever. Yet perhaps we underestimate the sense of excitement many people, especially the young, felt about what lay ahead. Margaret Steggles, the heroine of Stella Gibbons 1946 novel Westwood, can’t help but think of the
ruins of post-war London as ‘sombre and thrilling, as if History were working visibly, before one’s eyes’. Elaine Dundy, the actress and novelist, arrived in London from America in 1949; the city was, she later wrote, ‘a place where young people, besieged for six years of war, could finally see that they had a future. You could fairly feel the rush of air as they raced forward to greet it.’ I suppose you could say that I wanted to stir up that breeze all over again.

  At the start, my aim was to bag ten of these women because that seemed like a good, round number, but also because I feared I would struggle to find more. In the end, though, I was quite wrong on that score. When I finally sat down to write this book my poor heroines found themselves in a beauty contest; somewhat to my amazement they were too many, not too few. So many pioneers! Forced to make hard choices about who was in and who was out, I went mostly with those whose private lives were as modern as their professional lives. (Though this only narrowed things a little: the more successful career women of the Fifties were not often the spinsters I had been expecting.) Of the ten who survived, then, seven were married and the other three were lesbians. Six had children. Two worked in professional partnership with their husbands. Three were divorced and another separated from the father of her children, a man she never married. Several had extra-marital affairs. Three of the women lived together, bringing up two unrelated children as brothers. This interest in love and sex and all the permutations of the family, a sacred institution in post-war Britain, wasn’t prurience on my part. I wanted to know how these women solved the problems that most of us still struggle with today: the balance of work and the rest of life. So much was stacked against them. Were they lonely? Did they sacrifice love for ambition, or did fulfilment at home lead naturally to fulfilment at work? Who looked after their children? And how did they run their homes when they were so busy?

  For me, this is, I suppose, a sly kind of feminism – by which I mean that my message, in as much as I have one, is intended to hit the reader side on. Polemical books that tell us how we might close the pay gap, become CEOs and put an end to sexual harassment at the office are all very fine and important, but the truth is that they are rarely much fun to read. I prefer the idea of role models, inspirational figures who make you want to cheer. The extraordinary, mould-breaking women you will find in the pages that follow weren’t perfect. They were, like all human beings, flawed. They doubted themselves, they got in muddles, they made mistakes; feeling defensive, they sometimes seemed difficult and distant even to those who loved them. They certainly did not – dread phrase – ‘have it all’, or not all of the time, at any rate. Their children sometimes had a hard time of it. But they loved what they did and they got on with doing it as best they could in far less equal times than our own. If that isn’t encouraging – a kind of rallying call to the twenty-first-century battle-weary – I don’t know what is.

  ‘Everyone has an age when they are most themselves,’ says the narrator of Elizabeth Bowen’s first novel, The Hotel. For Bowen, that era was the Blitz. For the women in this book, it was the Fifties. The youngest of them was twenty-two when the decade began; the oldest, fifty-eight. Most were in their thirties. They were stoical and rather tough, but also hopeful, full of expectation. Their characters had, after all, been informed by two wars: the horror and privations of the first they had experienced vicariously through their parents (though the oldest, Margery Fish, was twenty-two in 1914, when she had bravely crossed the Atlantic at a time when the U-boats were doing their very worst); the second they had endured themselves and, perhaps, had even enjoyed at times.

  The Second World War had kicked open the door to another life. Some of them had joined one of the women’s auxiliary services and found themselves suddenly driving an ambulance or sitting behind a big desk in a government ministry. Others had been able to take advantage of the men’s absence. After 1939 more university places had become available to women; a young woman barrister like Rose Heilbron, meanwhile, found herself newly in demand with solicitors whose preferred male lawyers had all disappeared to fight. On a practical level, dress codes had relaxed. During the war, girls had worn trousers and flat shoes; those who couldn’t get hold of decent stockings – from 1942, nylon was used exclusively in the production of parachutes – had simply gone bare-legged. On an emotional level, restraint had been exercised more infrequently than before, and the chastening crimp of disapproval felt much less often. In Britain’s bombed cities people had slipped their moorings, falling in love easily and, sometimes, inappropriately. Future-less, couples had lived in the moment. Temporarily husband-less, wives had sought solace in the arms of others.* In London the joke had been that everybody was having at least one affair – and that some were enjoying two or three. All of these things together added up to something quite significant: the sense that there was a world out there, and that a woman was entitled to move through it as easily and as confidently as any man.

  During the war the numbers of women working had peaked at nearly eight million, but within a year of VE Day that figure had fallen by a quarter. The men wanted their jobs back, and the usurpers were expected to beat a nifty but decorous retreat. Of course, there were some women who longed for nothing more than to be a housewife again: the safety, the security and no officer or factory boss barking orders in your face. But for others, post-war retrenchment came as a shock. Those women who were accommodating returning husbands did not always manage to meet their expectations (and vice versa), the joy of reunion fading when couples woke up and realised they were strangers. In One Fine Day, a novel by Mollie Panter-Downes published in 1947, Laura and Stephen Marshall grapple with this altered landscape over the course of twenty-four hours. They must deal with a new world order, running their house without help, their girls Ethel and Violet having escaped to a ‘big bright world where there were no bells to run your legs off’. Laura knows they’ll have to adjust, but her husband is in denial: ‘He talked the situation over with other men on the train, and they reported that things were getting easier. Bellamy’s wife had got a cook immediately the other day by an advertisement in the Bridbury Herald.’ Stephen, the reader gathers, is in for a disappointment at some point quite soon. Even if he secures the longed-for domestic, this isn’t going to right the listing ship that is his marriage, post-war wives being almost as uppity as post-war servants. The novel reflected the reality. Nineteen forty-seven was a great marrying year, with 401,210 weddings, but at the same time the divorce rate began to rise, the number of Maintenance Orders made by magistrates courts almost doubling to twenty thousand (it had stood at 11,177 in 1938). Cut to 1954 and there were six times the number of divorces (27,417) as there had been before the war.

  But the lives of single women were also in flux. ‘What to do with my day, jobless and faced by the awesome prospect of endless leave?’ wrote Joan Wyndham, wartime diarist extraordinaire. ‘I was beginning to realise that now I was no longer in the WAAF [Women’s Auxiliary Air Force] I would have to recreate my world from scratch every morning.’ Joan was a twenty-two-year-old girl about town, whose sex life during the war had been both busy and exciting (‘the happiest time of my life’). The more determined among these young women refused to feel guilty for wanting to ‘steal’ men’s work,* and were fast learning to be on their guard when it came to the matter of their future. In 1951, twenty-one-year-old Grace Robertson, soon to embark on a remarkable career as a photojournalist, saw a woman in one of the full skirts made popular by Christian Dior and his New Look struggling to get on a London bus: ‘A crowd had gathered. Her skirt was so wide, she couldn’t negotiate the door. At first, I laughed with everyone else. But then I suddenly thought: are they putting us into these clothes so we can’t get on buses, and take their jobs?’†

  The question was: how should a woman who wanted to have a career conduct herself? Should she fly below the radar, or above it? Some didn’t bother to hide their ambition: ‘I knew exactly what I was going to do, and that was art,’ says Wendy Bray
, who began a career as a textile designer at Courtaulds soon after leaving art school in 1951. ‘And I was going to kill in order to do it. I had to fight my father every inch of the way.’ Others tried to disguise it: ‘I wanted to be a perfect housewife and a successful actor,’ says Sylvia Syms, who in 1953 had recently graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). ‘I would be away on tour, and I would rush back the following week to cook all the food for my husband. I mean . . . what was wrong with me?’ Still others worked in snatched moments, as if they weren’t really working at all, with the inevitable result that they often felt thwarted and resentful. In December 1957 the novelist Penelope Mortimer wrote in her diary that she was finding it increasingly difficult to run her family – by this time, she was a mother of six – and find the space to write: ‘I wake radiant to the thought of a peaceful work day . . . I long for it and can’t bear it to end – which it does with the key in the lock: “Hullo? What’s the plan?” We must have people in or go out, my room invaded, all routed and nothing left in its place.’* (All the same, her work was going well. She was delivering a steady stream of stories to the New Yorker, for which she was well paid. A useful side-effect of the way society was changing was that women longed to read about experiences like their own, and said so. Even the ‘dreariest days’ could, she found, be profitably mined for irony and farce.) Finally, there were those who only leapt into the fray when Plan A had failed. In Millions Like Us, her excellent book about women’s lives during and just after the war, Virginia Nicholson cites the example of Margery Baines. Abandoned by her husband – since their marriage in 1940, she and he had spent barely a year together – and with a young child to bring up, in 1946 Margery opened a one-woman typing agency in a tiny Mayfair room. This business would one day become the Brook Street Bureau, the first employment agency to be listed on the London Stock Exchange.