Mary Whitehouse

Constance Mary Whitehouse (; 13 June 1910 – 23 November 2001) was a British teacher and conservative activist. She campaigned against social liberalism and the mainstream British media, both of which she accused of encouraging a more permissive society. She was the founder and first president of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, through which she led a longstanding campaign against the BBC. A hard-line social conservative, she was termed a reactionary by her socially liberal opponents. Her motivation derived from her Christian beliefs, her aversion to the rapid social and political changes in British society of the 1960s, and her work as a teacher of sex education.

Whitehouse became an art teacher, at the same time becoming involved in evangelical Christian groups such as the Student Christian Movement (which became increasingly more liberal leading up to, and after, a 1928 split with the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship) and Moral Re-Armament. She became a public figure via the Clean-Up TV pressure group, established in 1964, in which she was the most prominent figure. The following year she founded the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, using it as a platform to criticise the BBC for what she perceived as a lack of accountability and excessive use of bad language and portrayals of sex and violence in its programmes. As a result, she was often treated as a figure of fun. During the 1970s she broadened her activities and was a leading figure in the Nationwide Festival of Light, a Christian campaign that gained mass support for a period. She initiated a successful private prosecution against '' Gay News'' on the grounds of blasphemous libel, the first such case for more than 50 years. Another private prosecution was against the director of the play ''The Romans in Britain'', which had been performed at the National Theatre.

Whitehouse's campaigns continue to divide opinion. Her critics have accused her of being a highly censorious, bigoted figure, and her traditional moral convictions brought her into direct conflict with advocates of the sexual revolution, feminism, children's rights and LGBT rights. Others see her more positively and believe she was attempting to halt a decline in what they perceived as Britain's moral standards. According to Ben Thompson, the editor of an anthology of Whitehouse-related letters published in 2012, "From ... feminist anti-pornography campaigns to the executive naming and shaming strategies of UK Uncut, her ideological and tactical influence has been discernible in all sorts of unexpected places in recent years."Ben Thompso
"Ban this filth!"
, ''Financial Times'', 9 November 2012. This article is a reprint of the introduction to Ben Thompson (ed.) '' Ban This Filth!: Letters From the Mary Whitehouse Archive'', London: Faber & Faber, 2012

Early life

Born in Croft Road, Nuneaton, Warwickshire (in a house she incorrectly stated in her autobiography later became a sex shop),Report by Toby Neal, part of 'Great Lives' series on Midlands worthies. Whitehouse was the second of four children of a "less-than-successful businessman" and a "necessarily resourceful mother".Obituary, ''The Times'', 24 November 2001 She won a scholarship to Chester City Grammar School,Obituary
''The Daily Telegraph'', 24 November 2001 where she was keen on hockey and tennis, and after leaving she did two years of unpaid apprentice teaching at St John's School in Chester, Cheshire. At the Cheshire County Teacher Training College in Crewe, specialising in secondary school art teaching, she was involved with the Student Christian Movement before qualifying in 1932. She became an art teacher at Lichfield Road School in Wednesfield, where she stayed for eight years, and at Brewood Grammar School, both in Staffordshire.

She joined the Wolverhampton branch of the Oxford Group, later known as Moral Re-Armament (MRA), in 1935. At MRA meetings, she met Ernest Raymond Whitehouse; they married at Chester on 23 March 1940 and remained married until he died in Colchester, Essex, aged 87, in 2000. The couple had five sons, two of whom (twins) died in infancy.Mary Warnock "Whitehouse /nowiki>née Hutcheson/nowiki>, (Constance) Marywhitehouse, Mary", ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography''

After raising her sons in their earliest years, Whitehouse returned to teaching in 1953. That year she broadcast on ''Woman's Hour'' on the day before the coronation of Elizabeth II "as a loyal housewife and subject" and wrote an extensive article on homosexuality for ''The Sunday Times''. According to Ben Thompson this concerned how a mother might "best avoid inadvertently pressuring her sons towards that particular orientation" and gained enough attention to be republished as a pamphlet.

She taught art and was senior mistress at Madeley Modern School in Madeley, Shropshire from 1960, taking responsibility for sex education. Shocked at the moral beliefs of her pupils, she became concerned about what she and many others perceived as declining moral standards in the British media, especially in the BBC. She gave up her teaching work at Christmas 1964 to concentrate more fully on her campaigning.

Clean Up TV campaign and the NVALA

Beginnings

Whitehouse began her activism in 1963 with a letter to the BBCJonathan Brow
"Mary Whitehouse: To some a crank, to others a warrior"
''The Independent'', 24 November 2001 requesting to see Hugh Greene, the BBC's Director-General. Greene was out of the country at the time, so she accepted an invitation to meet Harman Grisewood, his deputy, a Roman Catholic who she felt listened to her with understanding.Asa Briggs ''The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume 5'', Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, p.332, 334 Over the next few months though, she continued to be dissatisfied with what she saw on television.

With Norah Buckland, the wife of a vicar, she launched the Clean Up TV (CUTV) Campaign in January 1964 with a manifesto appealing to the "women of Britain". The campaign's first public meeting, on 5 May 1964, was held in Birmingham's Town Hall.David Winte
Obituary
''The Independent'', 24 November 2001 Richard Whitehouse, one of her sons, recalled in 2008: "Coaches arrived from all over the country. Two thousand people poured in and suddenly there was my mother on a podium inspiring them to rapturous applause. Her hands were shaking. But she didn't stop".

Although he regularly clashed with Whitehouse, the academic Richard Hoggart shared some of her opinions and was present on the platform with her at this meeting.Richard Hoggar
"Valid arguments lost in an obsession over sex"
''The Guardian'', 24 November 2001. Hoggart is mistaken here in thinking he could have referred to Dennis Potter's plays on 5 May 1964, as Potter's earliest work in this form, ''The Confidence Course'', was not transmitted until 24 February 1965. ''The Times'' commented the following day: "Perhaps never before in the history of the Birmingham Town Hall has such a successful meeting been sponsored by such a flimsy organisation".

Sir Hugh Greene at the BBC

Hugh Greene, knighted in January 1964, became her ''bête noire''. He was, according to Whitehouse, "the devil incarnate" who "more than anybody else ... asresponsible for the moral collapse in this country".Dennis Barke
"Mary Whitehouse: Self-appointed campaigner against the permissive society on television"
''The Guardian'', 24 November 2001 The CUTV manifesto asserted that the BBC under Greene spread "the propaganda of disbelief, doubt and dirt ... promiscuity, infidelity and drinking".Mary Whitehouse quoted by David Stubb
"The moral minority"
''The Guardian'', 24 May 2008 In place of this, the authors argued, the corporation's activities should "encourage and sustain faith in God and bring Him back to the hearts of our family and national life". Interviewed by '' The Catholic Herald'' for its Christmas 1965 issue, Whitehouse thought the BBC loaded its programmes in favour of the 'new morality'.Ian Jame
"MRS. MARY WHITEHOUSE, co-founder of the Clean-up Television Campaign"
, ''Catholic Herald'', 24 December 1965 She commented about one unnamed television programme, believing it to be "unbalanced" and biased, in which "youngsters were asking questions ndthere was not a single member of the panel who was prepared to say outright that pre-marital relations were wrong. In fact, when a girl asked a clergyman, 'Do you think that fornication is sin?' he replied, 'It depends on what you mean by sin and what you mean by fornication. Whitehouse thought it was a "big hazard" for "present-day children" that "so many adults do not stand for anything" and affirmed that it was the responsibility of the BBC to have a "missionary role" to compensate for this social deficiency.

The Clean Up TV petition, using the manifesto, gained 500,000 signatures. Whitehouse complained in 1993 that during Greene's period at the BBC, "hardly a week went by without a sniping reference to me". Whitehouse's critics responded quickly. The playwright David Turner had heckled her at Birmingham Town Hall; his work was criticised during the meeting. Within a few months, an episode of ''Swizzlewick'', a twice-weekly serial he created, featured a parody of her as Mrs Smallgood.

In a speech Greene delivered in 1965, he argued, without naming Whitehouse directly, that the critics of his liberalisation of broadcasting policy would "attack whatever does not underwrite a set of prior assumptions" and saw the potential for "a dangerous form of censorship ... which works by causing artists and writers not to take risks". He defended the right of the BBC "to be ahead of public opinion". Greene ignored Whitehouse, blocked her from participation in BBC broadcasts, and purchased a painting of Whitehouse with five breasts by James Lawrence Isherwood.

The National Viewers' and Listeners' Association (later known as Mediawatch-UK) was launched to succeed CUTV in November 1965, with Whitehouse's then home in Claverley, Shropshire hosting its first office, replacing what they themselves perceived as CUTV's negativity with an active campaign for legislative change. The former cabinet minister Bill Deedes, later editor of ''The Daily Telegraph'', supported the group in this period and was the leading speaker at NVALA's founding conference in Birmingham on 30 April 1966,Thompson ''Ban This Filth'', p.36-37 and acted as a contact between his parliamentary colleagues and Whitehouse. Quintin Hogg, better known as Lord Hailsham, was another high-profile politician who gave his support to NVALA and Whitehouse at this time.

Through the letters she frequently sent to Harold Wilson, the Prime Minister, Whitehouse caused particular difficulties for civil servants at 10 Downing Street.Alan Travis ''Bound and Gagged: A Secret History of Censorship in Britain'', Profile Books, 2000, p.231-2 Reportedly, for some time Downing Street intentionally "lost" her letters to avoid having to respond to them. It has though been suggested that her contact with parliamentarians helped give her some leverage over the BBC which her own direct communication with the corporation's executives could not achieve. Although accepting the differences between them, Whitehouse wrote to Wilson on 1 January 1968: "You have always treated our approaches to you seriously and with courtesy."

Geoffrey Robertson, QC, suggests that when Greene left the BBC in 1969, contrary to the view that it was because of disagreements over the appointment of the Conservative Lord Hill as BBC chairman in 1967, whereby she could be given some credit for his departure, it was more to do with a political struggle between the BBC and Labour Prime Minister Wilson. (subscription required) Also see Geoffrey Robertso
''The Justice Game''
, London: Vintage, 1999 998 p.136 However, Hill was prepared to meet Whitehouse at Broadcasting House.

Television and war

War coverage met with her objections. During his brief period as editor of ''Panorama'' (1965–66), Jeremy Isaacs received a letter from Whitehouse complaining about his decision to repeat Richard Dimbleby's coverage of the liberation of the Belsen concentration camp. She complained about this "filth" being allowed on air as "it was bound to shock and offend". In a 1994 interview, Whitehouse continued to maintain that it was "an awful intrusion" and "very off-putting".

Later in 1965, the decision by the BBC not to broadcast Peter Watkins' '' The War Game'' on 6 August 1965 led to Whitehouse writing to Sir Hugh Greene and Harold Wilson on 5 September,Patrick Murphy and John Cook "The War Game" in Ian Aitke
''The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film''
, Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2013 006 p,974 and again to the Home Secretary Frank Soskice on 6 October.Thompso
''Ban This Filth''
, p.30 In her view, a decision over whether to broadcast Watkins' film should be taken by the Home Office rather than the BBC. Nuclear war was "too serious a matter to be treated as entertainment. For a producer to be allowed, as now appears possible, to prejudice the effectiveness of our Civil Defence Services, or the ability of the British people to re-act with courage, initiative and control in a crisis, surely goes far beyond the responsibility" which should be given to someone in this role. The letter was leaked at the time and extracts were published.

The contemporary coverage of the Vietnam War, "the first 'television war, demonstrated for Whitehouse that television was "an ally of pacifism".Mary Whitehouse 'Promoting Violence', Royal College of Nursing in the UK Professional Conference, ''The Violent Society'', 5 April 1970, quoted in Tracey and Morrison ''Whitehouse'', London: Macmillan, 1979, p.86-87, 205, n.27 In a 1970 speech to the Royal College of Nursing she argued that " wever good the cause ... the horrific effects on men and terrain of modern warfare as seen on the television screen could well sap the will of a nation to safeguard its own freedom, let alone resist the forces of evil abroad." Trying to reconcile this "pacifism" with her objection to fictional violence, she saw such news coverage as "desensitisation" in which the media use the "techniques of violence" to raise "impact" in order "to satisfy an apparently insatiable demand for realism".

Programmes: comedy and drama from the mid-1960s to 1980

The situation comedy '' Till Death Us Do Part'' attacked many of the things Whitehouse cherished. She objected to its profane language: "I doubt if many people would use 121 bloodies in half-an-hour", and "Bad language coarsens the whole quality of our life. It normalises harsh, often indecent language, which despoils our communication."

Whitehouse and the NVALA won a libel action against the BBC and its writer Johnny Speight in July 1967 with a full apology and substantial damages, after Speight implied in a BBC radio interview that the organisation's members and its head were fascists.Mark War
"A Family at War: Till Death Do Us Part"
''The Main Event'' (''Kaleidoscope'' brochure) 1996 Shortly after Speight's interview, she was mocked in an episode of the series entitled "Alf's Dilemma" (27 February 1967). Alf Garnett is shown reading her book ''Cleaning Up TV'', and agreeing with every word, but the episode ends with the book being burned to exclamations of "Unclean, unclean".

Whitehouse was critical of comedians such as Benny Hill and his use of dancers; she described Dave Allen as "offensive, indecent and embarrassing" after a comic account of a conversation following sexual intercourse. In return, comedy writers during this era saw her as possessing humorous potential. The Goodies comedy team created an episode ("Gender Education", 1971) with the principal objective of irritating her.

Whitehouse criticised the work of Dennis Potter from '' Son of Man'' (1969) onwards, arguing that the BBC was at the centre "of a conspiracy to remove the myth of god from the minds of men", and also '' A Clockwork Orange'' (1971). In the case of the violence in ''A Clockwork Orange'', she rejected any attempt to show a 'copycat' correlation in academic studies, but urged its acceptance as a fact arrived at by common sense. In December 1974, she wrote of the "deliberate propagation" of the idea that there is no proof of the effects of television on "standards and behaviour". To reject its effect, and its ability to "declaim or pervert truth, is to deny the potency of communication itself, it is crazily to question the ability of education to affect the social conscience and to train the human mind".

Chuck Berry's novelty song "My Ding-a-Ling" was one of several pop songs to receive Whitehouse's disapproval in this period. She was unsuccessful in trying to persuade the BBC to ban it, but her campaign to stop Alice Cooper's " School's Out" being featured on ''Top of the Pops'' was successful. Cooper sent her a bunch of flowers, since he believed the publicity helped the song to reach number one.
The NVALA had around 150,000 members at its peak, but claimed 30,000 in April 1977.Sandra Salman
"British Woman Carries On Crusade Against Sex and Violence in the Media"
''Sarasota Herald-Tribune'' (NY Times News Service), 7 April 1977

''Doctor Who''

'' Doctor Who'' met with her heaviest disapproval during Philip Hinchcliffe's tenure as producer between 1975 and 1977. She described the serial '' Genesis of the Daleks'' (1975) as consisting of "teatime brutality for tots", said ''The Brain of Morbius'' (1976) "contained some of the sickest and most horrific material seen on children's television", and on '' The Seeds of Doom'' (1976), in which the Doctor (Tom Baker) survives an encounter with a giant carnivorous plant monster, she commented: "Strangulation—by hand, by claw, by obscene vegetable matterMary Whitehouse quoted by Dominic Sandbrook ''State of Emergency, The Way We Were: Britain 1970–74'', London: Allen Lane, 2010, p.461-62—is the latest gimmick, sufficiently close up so they get the point. And just for a little variety, show the children how to make a Molotov cocktail."

Following her complaint about ''The Deadly Assassin'' (broadcast later in 1976), Whitehouse received an apology from the Director-General of the BBC, Sir Charles Curran. A freeze-frame cliffhanger ending to the third episode, in which the Doctor appeared to drown, was altered for repeat showings. The series' next producer, Graham Williams, was told to lighten the tone and reduce the violence following Whitehouse's complaints. Senior television executives commented that at this time her views were not disregarded lightly.

Philip Hinchcliffe later remarked, "I always felt that Mary Whitehouse thought of ''Doctor Who'' as a children's programme, for little children, and it wasn't ... so she was really coming at the show from the wrong starting-point."Documentary on the DVD ''Doctor Who: Pyramids of Mars'', BBC Worldwide, 2004

After 1980

Whitehouse criticised the ITV adventure/drama series '' Robin of Sherwood'' (1984–1986). Simon Farquhar, in an obituary for ''The Independent'' of the series' creator, Richard Carpenter, wrote that Whitehouse "objected to the how'srelentless slaughter and blasphemous religious elements, but was deftly silenced by Carpenter in public when he introduced himself to her and the audience by saying "I'm Richard Carpenter, and