Generation gaps and girly men

One of the central background issues in my study of the Pace case are the changes in the ways that femininity, masculinity and marriage were seen in the inter-war period in Britain.

The current issue of the London Review of Books has a fascinating review by Alan Allport of a new book by Melanie Tebbutt, Being Boys: Youth, Leisure and Identity in the Interwar Years. 

It emphasises the new opportunities for young men in the 1920s and 1930s.

And also some of the new challenges:

Together, the cinema and the dance hall transformed courtship. Film provided instruction in manliness and the dance hall was where young men put what they had learned into practice. But it could be an unforgiving venue. [...] At the approach of a 16th or 17th birthday, dancing, in the words of one young man, ‘assumed, quite suddenly, a devastating importance, an arcane significance’. There were just as many male as female wallflowers at the Hammersmith Palais, self-conscious boys shuffling awkwardly at the periphery of the dance floor.

Unfamiliarity with the latest dance steps was only one of many sources of unease for the new young man. As courtship moved beyond neighbourhood circles, so appearance and deportment acquired a heightened importance. The availability after the war of good quality off-the-rack suits from Burton’s and Fifty Shilling Tailors created an expectation that men would dress smartly and fashionably in public, opening up a possibility of embarrassment hitherto unknown to working-class men. [...] Advertising of personal hygiene products was aimed mainly at young women, but boys were also swept up in the new insecurity about perspiration and bad breath. As working-class men became more visibly indistinguishable from the middle class, so they acquired all the hang-ups of embourgeoisement.

And they also became the target of a good deal of criticism from the older generation:

With his ‘constant combing of well-oiled locks of long hair, tidy clothes and well-kept hands and nails’, as one exasperated army physical training instructor put it, the new teenager was symptomatic of a greater national effeminisation that was undermining Britain’s ability to defend itself in an ever more dangerous world.

And here lies a great historical irony. For while at the beginning of the 21st century our fading ‘Greatest Generation’ is lauded for its hardscrabble upbringing and its stoic sacrifices, on the eve of the Second World War it was being lambasted by its elders for being spoiled, self-absorbed and dandified.

‘By comparison with the French, or the Germans, for that matter, our men for the most part seem distressingly young, not so much in years as in self-reliance and manliness generally … they give an impression of being callow and undeveloped,’ General Auchinleck was to warn the war cabinet in 1940. Not so long before Dunkirk, Britain’s heroic Tommies had been its wayward youth.

Modern Women on Trial

I'm very pleased to draw your attention to the release of Lucy Bland's new book, Modern Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper.

I hope to get a chance to read it soon and post some comments here; however, having spoken to the author several times about the book during its later stages, I'm eagerly looking forward to it.

From the Manchester University Press description: 

Modern women on trial looks at several sensational trials involving drugs, murder, adultery, miscegenation and sexual perversion in the period 1918–24. The trials, all with young female defendants, were presented in the media as morality tales, warning of the dangers of sensation-seeking and sexual transgression. The book scrutinises the trials and their coverage in the press to identify concerns about modern femininity. The flapper later became closely associated with the 'roaring' 1920s, but in the period immediately after the Great War she represented not only newness and hedonism, but also a frightening, uncertain future. This figure of the modern woman was a personification of the upheavals of the time, representing anxieties about modernity, and instabilities of gender, class, race and national identity. This accessible, extensively researched book will be of interest to all those interested in social, cultural or gender history.

As I discuss in The Most Remarkable Woman in England, when Beatrice Pace first came to the attention of the press in January 1928, was in many ways not the image of the 'modern woman' that proved such a magnet for comment and controversy in the 1920s. Indeed, her image as a 'traditional' woman -- a faithful, caring wife and a doting mother -- positively inflected her treatment in the press accounts surrounding the 'Fetter Hill Mystery'.

However, after her acquittal, Beatrice underwent a 'makeover' of sorts, in a sense 'becoming modern' while building her 'new life' away from the shadow of the gallows.

In her new book, Bland provides a broad contextual analysis of the narratives of 'modernity' that surrounded women on trial in the early 1920s. 

Careful readers of The Most Remarkable Woman in England will note the many citations of Lucy Bland's previous important research on images of women on trial in inter-war Britain (especially Edith Thompson and Marguerite Fahmy). This was work that I found very helpful while constructing my own analysis of the 'tragic widow of Coleford'.

Not least for that reason, I'm very pleased to see the book's release, and it certainly deserves a wide readership.

A female barrister in 1920s Britain

One of the central issues in The Most Remarkable Woman in England revolves around the perceptions of gender roles in the inter-war period.

There are many intersections between the topics of gender and murder in the 1920s (as in any other period).

I ran across one of the more striking ones today: a pair of newspaper stories in the Daily Herald on the first time a female barrister led the defence in a murder trial in Britain.  (It is also worth noting that a female barrister, Florence Earengey, participated in Beatrice Pace's defence.)

Woman Counsel Makes History 

Leads for First Time in Murder Trial. 

For the first time in the history of murder trials a woman barrister, at the Old Bailey yesterday, led for the defence of a man charged with the capital offence.

The woman to whom this distinction fell was Miss Venetia Stephenson, who has on several occasions defended prisoners at the Old Bailey.

Miss Stephenson wears horn-rimmed glasses and is petite and business-like.

A lucid speaker, she has several times been complimented by judges on her ability in conducting cases.

The case yesterday was that in which William John Holmyard, aged 24, a musician, was charged before Mr. Justice Humphreys with the murder of his grandfather.

Miss Stephenson had as her junior Dr. F. Hallis. Mr. Percival Clarke and Mr. G. B. McClure were for the prosecution.

 Mr. Clare, in opening the case, said the dead man, William Holmyard, aged 72, was a commission agent, living in Tachbrook-street, Pimlico. He was found at his house on December 7 with a fractured skull and other injuries, and he died in Westminster Hospital on December 10.

From time to time he had assisted Holmyard, who with his father lived next door. Asked to explain his movements on the day of the tragedy, Holmyard said he had been at Kennington all the time. Bloodstains were found on his coat, and he was asked how they got there.

Miss Stephenson asked that Holmyard’s answer to this question should not be disclosed to the jury, and Mr. Clarke commented contented himself with saying that Holmyard had made a statement which might be read later.
(Daily Herald, 16 January 1929)

Judge’s Compliment 

Ability of Woman Counsel in Murder Trial 

The first woman barrister to appear as leading counsel for the defence in a murder trial was complimented by Mr. Justice Humphreys at the Old Bailey yesterday on the ability she had displayed on her client’s behalf.

The barrister, Miss Venetia Stephenson, defended William John Holmyard, aged 24, a musician, charged with the murder of his grandfather, a commission agent, in Pimlico. He was found guilty and was sentenced to death.

Mr. Justice Humphreys prefaced his summing-up to the jury with a tribute to the “learned counsel for the defence.”

“This case,” he said, “has been defended with conspicuous ability. I am sure you will agree that a serious responsibility lies on her shoulders, but at least she may feel that she has discharged her duty to her client in a manner that reflects the highest possible credit upon her carefulness and her own ability.”

“It is a satisfaction to know that everything possible that could possibly be said for this young man, or done for him by advocacy, has been said and done.”
(Daily Herald, 17 January 1929)

There is, certainly, something condescending about the tone of comments directed towards Miss Stephenson; however, her efforts in this case were certainly one example of the continuing progress of women in the professions in this period.

As for Mr. Holmyard: he was hanged at Pentonville Prison on 27 February 1929.

Girls these days

Something not especially relevant to the Pace case but which is certainly part of the broader context of press narratives about women in the 1920s, which is an important aspect of the book.

It's also just very interesting....

Devil-May-Care Girls 

“All the riskiest things are done by girls nowadays,” a traffic policeman told me the other day, as a girl motorist sailed through an apparently impassable block on two wheels without slackening speed. “And yet they have the fewest accidents. They have the nerve, that’s what it is.... All nerve, they are.”

It is no use inviting one of them to a quiet dinner to be followed by conversation. They will talk—also dangerously—only at lunch. There must be something with risks in it to be done afterwards. If there is nothing else, the motor-car must come out and be raced through a hundred miles or so in the darkness, with perhaps a river bathe, at the imminent risk of cramp, in the middle.

These girls find a private dance dull unless it is decked out with all kinds of extravagances. There is more “fun” to be found in a round of the night clubs with a chosen small party, particularly if any night club is forbidden ground.

The tragic part of it all—since the Empire needs risks to be taken—is that their dangerous living is of such an unproductive kind.

There is one consolation. These devil-may-care girls who must live dangerously, even if they have to manufacture the danger, will certainly be the mothers of no generation of mollycoddles. I think we may look forward with some confidence to great things to be accomplished by their sons. 

Daily Express, 13 August 1926, p. 8

'A strange new creature called woman'

One of the most important aspects of the context in which the Pace case was discussed was the debate around women's roles.

As Adrian Bingham, in his excellent book Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain, notes:

‘Flapper’ has often been described as ‘one of the defining words of the Twenties; equally pervasive was the visual image of modern femininity, slim, short-skirted with cropped hair. ... ‘In the old days,’ [an article from Newspaper World in August 1927] claimed, ‘a two-page account of a murder...was the great attraction; now it seems to be what some well-known man or woman thinks of the modern girl.’ ... ‘If a future chronicler were to study the files of our newspapers,’ speculated the novelist Rose Macaulay in 1925..., ‘he would get the impression that there had appeared at this time a strange new creature called woman who was receiving great attention from the public.’ (pp. 48-49)

Mrs. Pace, who was 38 at the time of her trial and idealised as a traditional wife and doting mother, hardly fit the image of the 'flapper': nonetheless, her presentation in the press was influenced by the discussions around the 'modern woman'.

That's a long story (to which I devote a whole chapter in the book).

However, as is well known, 1928 was the year in which women's voting rights were equalised with those of men.

There was a lot of discussion around the 'flapper vote', but I think my favourite contribution to it was the following advert, which appeared shortly before the 1929 general election, the first in which women could vote on equal terms as men:

Daily Herald, 20 May 1929, p. 3