An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (32 page)

Hugh Cudlipp was twenty-two when he married a fellow journalist, Bunny Parnell, an upholsterer’s daughter. During their miserable, wet honeymoon in the Channel Islands she announced that Tom Darlow, editor of
John Bull
, was her lover. This affair continued unabated through her marriage. When she became pregnant by Darlow, she tried to hide the paternity of the child by telling Cudlipp that she wanted his baby and inveigling him into unprotected sex. It was only when she died, in 1938, following a Caesarean birth in which the baby also died, that Cudlipp realised her ruse. A few hours after his wife’s death, Cudlipp went to the
Sunday Pictorial
office to check the late edition. An assistant suggested substituting a new front-page lead, proffering a freshly received report with the words, ‘this is a better human interest story than that one’. Cudlipp replied: ‘Don’t talk to me about human interest tonight.’
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Cudlipp liked flirting with pretty women, taking them on dates, and seducing them. ‘They are tired of thinking, they are tired of working, they are tired of planning; they simply want to be loved, and they simply want babies,’ he told
Sunday Pictorial
readers in an article of 1939 about women:

The young woman of to-day still talks a certain amount of drivel about her career, but she’d sooner forget all about it if a man worth marrying proposed to her
… The truth is just this: That if the New Man of the New Britain is virile and courageous, the New Woman wants to be nothing more than the sort of mate he deserves.

Back to the home. That is where the modern woman wants to go
. She will deny it until she is blue in the gills, but she wants to go back there just the same. With her cooking, and her sewing, and her man, and her baby. Does she want to serve groceries over the counter, dish up cosmetics and lotions in a beauty parlour, weave materials for other women’s dresses in a mill, or tap the keys of a typewriter in a dreary, dusty office? Not on your life!
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For several years Cudlipp had an affair with a
Mirror
journalist, Eileen Ascroft, and in 1945, after her divorce, the couple married. She was a ruthless operator surrounded by dazed human sacrifices to her ambition. During the 1950s the Cudlipps were the most successful couple in Fleet Street. There was adultery on both sides in the marriage. Ascroft supposedly had an affair with one of their chauffeurs (the Cudlipps had a battery of secretaries, housekeepers and drivers to support their high-pressure lives). She had a long tangle with a married man whom she had met during the war. One has a sense of desperate flings masquerading as
soigné
diversions. An obvious affair with one of her husband’s closest colleagues was tolerated by Cudlipp, who was involved with her friend Jodi Hyland, editor of
Woman’s Mirror
(whose devotion he however had to share with a pug with a weak bladder). A revealing aspect of Cudlipp’s adulteries in this period was that the great democrat enjoyed exercising
droit de seigneur
by having sex with the wives of men who worked for him. It added to his feeling of sexual power. He liked to tarnish what he could not permanently possess.

Cudlipp was profiled by the
Observer
in 1961 as ‘one of those earnest, clever, bold, rhetorical men who seem to have been given a hard push at an early age, after which they have never been able to remain still. At the age of forty-seven Cudlipp cultivates tycoonery: telephones interrupt, the gin is freely offered, the cigars look like truncheons, the jokes to subordinates are tinged with meaning, and Cudlipp’s charm alternates rapidly with Cudlipp’s brusqueness.’ The paper
found in him that cardinal virtue of the 1960s: edginess. ‘He is better at toppling the mighty, at seeing the catch in things, than he is at taking his own beliefs seriously; this is a highly contemporary talent … there’s no doubt that Cudlipp is about the most successful journalist in Britain when it comes to pleasing the public.’
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Eileen Cudlipp died in 1962 of an overdose of Carbrital, a hypnotic sleeping-draught. In the preceding week Cudlipp’s book,
At Your Peril,
had been launched with a round of parties. On the evening before her death the Cudlipps attended a party at Sonning-on-Thames, where they had a new house, but she motored back from the party to their London house, also on the Thames, at Strand-on-the-Green, near Hammersmith. This was ostensibly because the curtains were not yet hung in their Sonning bedroom. ‘Sorry to desert you,’ she wrote in a note to her husband, ‘but I had to try & get some sleep. As you know I haven’t slept for nights – probably the excitement of the book. After Dr Thomas’ excellent pills & a good night’s rest I’ll be down feeling fine.’ Although the inquest recorded a verdict of accidental death, a few of the dead woman’s friends and her many enemies believed she had killed herself. A year later Cudlipp married Jodi Hyland.
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Until the early 1960s, Cecil King drank copiously. During long expense-account lunches he would order an aperitif, wine with the meal, and brandy afterwards. When he reached home in the evenings, he would down a treble gin and tonic before killing a bottle of wine. At parties he drank heavily to loosen his tongue. He liked martinis. He would leave his glass at a small distance, affect not to notice when it was filled by a waiter, and swallow the refreshed glass in a gulp. In restaurants he ordered wine by the magnum. (He also ate in a hurry, swallowing each of his breakfast fried eggs in one gulp.) King renounced alcohol on physician’s orders at the age of sixty, outlived two hard-drinking sons, and in sobriety was more frustrated than ever.

Until the early 1960s, visitors to Cudlipp’s office before eleven in the morning would be offered a beer, except on days of celebration, when there would be a champagne conference at 10.30. After eleven he used to open a bottle of white wine. Like King, Cudlipp had power lunches accompanied by aperitifs, wine, and digestifs. He had blazing rows when drunk. His behaviour and judgement became so unreliable that King, having sobered himself up, insisted that his colleague must stop drinking. Cudlipp agreed to renounce spirits, except brandy, which he counted as wine.

The egalitarianism of King and Cudlipp was undetectable in Mirror Group’s brash, self-conscious skyscraper offices, built on the site of a bombed drapery at Holborn Circus at a cost of £9.5 million, and opened in 1961. There had seldom been an office so status conscious in its interior arrangements. Every employee’s place in the hierarchy was assessed with inexorable logic and fixed by fine gradations. King had a private lift to his ninth-floor suite, which as symbol of his paramountcy contained an open-grate fireplace – the first one ever installed in a centrally heated, air-conditioned office in a smokeless zone. King also had his own dining room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and luxurious carpeting. Cudlipp, by contrast, had only a refrigerator, bedroom, private lavatory and shower; but his bedroom was designated as his ‘studio’ to show that he was the creative ace rather than financial brains of the business.

Other directors had built-in cocktail cabinets and televisions, but to signal the importance of advertising revenue, only the advertising director had his own refrigerator. Whereas directors had rubber underlay to their carpets, editors had felt. Journalists were reduced to rubber-tiled floors, with no carpets. Only direct-ors could lock their office doors from inside. Deputy editors had venetian blinds and metal desks rather than the curtains and wooden desks of editors. Men with double-pedestal desks knew their superiority to single-pedestal men. Top men’s offices had brick walls, the next level of prestige had walls of frosted glass from floor to ceiling; the middle-rankers had frosted glass only halfway; and the subordinates worked behind plain glass. The office telephone directory printed some extension numbers in blue, to indicate that only internal numbers could be dialled from that instrument. Numbers printed in green indicated that the instrument could be used to dial external local numbers. Red numbers denoted a telephone which could connect to operators to make trunk and overseas calls. Racing tipsters (red telephones on double-pedestal desks) outranked news reporters (green telephones on single-pedestal desks). Chief sub-editors excelled sub-editors because they could eat in the executives’ restaurant, instead of the staff cafeteria, although never, of course, in the directors’ dining room.
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King specialised in destructive criticism, and had a jealous, levelling spirit. His resentments and Cudlipp’s envy ensured that their papers pilloried nepotism and the Old School Tie, although King was the Wykehamist nephew of Northcliffe and Rothermere. Moreover, despite his newspapers’ diatribes against Eton, King sent two of his sons to the school, and his other boy to Winchester. Eventually the
Daily Mirror
denounced Eton so viciously that one governor proposed Michael King’s expulsion. Other pupils became so hostile that the youth insisted on leaving Eton, to the sorrow of his masters, and went to work in a Glasgow shipyard. King and Cudlipp taunted privilege and decried luxury; but while their columnist Cassandra inveighed against those who dined in expensive restaurants during food rationing, they ate in the costliest places. Cudlipp said in 1962 that his newspapers were fighting notions ‘that all life begins on the playing fields of Eton. That it gets its second breath in a college in Oxford or Cambridge. Its third breath as a major in the officers’ mess of the Household Cavalry. Its fourth breath in an exclusive West End club. And its last breath as an obscure and impoverished parson in a quaint English village.’ He ranged his newspapers against ‘a restricted ruling clique, an upper crust of polite and discreet intellectuals, belonging to the same class and clubs, marrying the same sort of women and producing the same sort of children’.
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These editorial tactics gelled with the thinking of Labour poli-ticians like Wilfred Fienburgh, who believed that many Labour supporters were only jerked into voting at elections if they had something to vote
against
. When Labour won its great election victory in 1945, and one newly elected MP shouted in the Commons ‘We are the Masters now!’, the parliamentary party assumed that because it was the working-class party, and the working class far outnumbered the rest of the electorate, they were guaranteed to remain the permanent government. Labour MPs were puzzled, if not affronted, when it proved that they had no automatic majority. Fienburgh deduced that Labour voters in 1945, 1950 and 1951 feared that the Tories would return to mass unemployment, and filed into the polling booths to vote
against
. But there was no industrial depression or mass unemployment under the governments of Churchill, Eden and Macmillan; nothing for Labour supporters to fear or vote against at the general elections of 1955 and 1959. The decision of ten per cent of these voters not to vote contributed to the party’s defeat, Fienburgh judged. ‘The pot-bellied cartoon capitalist has ground very few faces. Indeed, he has provided a few million television screens to which working-class faces have been glued. There were in consequence no bogey men to vote against in 1955.’
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Cudlipp urged Labour to revive its vote by using Macmillan’s toffs as bogeymen. ‘As you’re bound to lose next time, let’s lose on a fine anti-privilege campaign,’ he urged Richard Crossman in 1958. Macmillan’s triumph in the general election of 1959, whereby the Conservatives increased their majority from sixty to one hundred, dismayed him. He blamed himself for misinterpreting his readers’ temper, and declared a holiday from politics. Crossman disappeared as a
Daily Mirror
columnist; the 1945 slogan ‘Forward with the People’ was discarded overnight, and the newspaper proclaimed that its new emphasis would be on ‘YOUTH’. The newspaper signalled this change by substituting the ‘Life Story of Tommy Steele’, the Bermondsey boy who became England’s first rock’n’roll teen idol, for its usual editorial. Other newspapers made money by starting moral panics about the young, belabouring them with insults, and criticising those like the Mirror Group who pandered to them. ‘It is natural,’ King retorted magisterially in 1963, ‘when we are worried about juvenile delinquency or sexual promiscuity to seek scapegoats. The root causes, the decay of religion, the abdication of parental authority, earlier puberty, greater mobility and life in large cities, are too unmanageable, and it is easier to blame the newspapers.’
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Cudlipp’s truce with privilege was short-lived. Mirror journalists soon devised new angles to stab at tradition, civility and amateurism while promoting clichés about innovation and expertise. The imagery of their
Wake Up, Britain!
campaign, for example, contrasted Mr Yesterday, a gent with furled umbrella, briefcase, bowler hat, and breastpocket white handkerchief, with Mr Today, equipped with space helmet and futuristic protective uniform fit for an experimental laboratory. The
Daily Mirror
was not, Cudlipp boasted in 1962, one of those newspapers ‘treating the usually vain pronouncements of Archbishops as if they were the word of God; imagining that the demise of an unknown peer in a midnight crash between expensive limousines was of any greater moment than the unhappy end of a railway wheel-tapper crushed between buffers in the sidings at Crewe on a wet Sunday morning; extolling the aplomb of wealthy, titled drones gambling at Deauville and ignoring the harassed joys of the plebeian customers at the Margate whelk stall where the vinegar, though watered, is free’.
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