In recent British history no divorce case has attracted so much attention as that of the Duke of Argyl.
When it concluded the previous week after three and half years of litigation even quality papers like The Times and The Daily Telegraph carried over 4,000 words of the 64,000-word judgment. These reports contained some of the purple passages that made nonsense of the past controversy over Lady Chatterley’s Lover or even truly pornographic works for that matter. For the popular press this detailed description of the sexual appetites and behaviour of Her Grace (this is part of the title), the Duchess, in the judgment provided the climax to the detailed reportage of the case during the last stages of the trial. The judgment only whetted the appetite of what passes for upper class society and all manner of stories have been circulating about the photographs establishing the guilt of the Duchess on the charge of adultery.
As one relatively unacquainted with the British social hierarchy I was at first a little intrigued by this apparently excessive interest in the case in a land where divorce on the charge of adultery is not exactly a novelty. Nearly 50 per cent of 31,000 decrees last year were obtained on grounds of adultery.
High Status
Obviously the explanation for the popular interest and the most extensive newspaper coverage lay in the status of the Duke who is the chief of the Campbell clan well known all over the world for its valour, Hereditary Master of the King’s Household in Scotland, Admiral of the Western Coast and Isles, Hereditary Sheriff of Argyl, heir to a dozen earldoms, viscountcies, marquisates and baronetcies and keeper of several castles. This dry catalogue of titles might not mean much outside this country. To translate these titles briefly, the history of the Duke’s family is synonymous with the history of Scotland. In the Highlands which cover 60 per cent of all Scotland it is part of the folk lore, a byword at once for valour and treachery. One of the two towers in Edinburgh Castle is named after it and quite appropriately too.
The now thrice divorced Duke (his first wife was Lord Beaverbrooke’s daughter) did not come too well out of the trial either. The judge, Lord Wheatley, formerly Labour member of Parliament, known for his rather dry sense of humour, recalled the Duke’s admission that he had shown pornographic photographs to a mixed gathering in New York and commented: “I do not commend his standard of taste and habits”. The Duke was by no means downcast on that account. Within days of the judgment he was posing for a portrait to go up on the walls of Inverary Castle in the full regalia of a Highland chieftain. Incidentally Lord Wheatley is a Catholic and that may have had something to do with the harshness of the language of the judgment.
As a sidelight I might add that I happened to be visiting Inverary Castle last week. It was certainly in fine shape after the renovations and redecorations which, I was told, had cost £25,000. The bill was said to have been paid by the Duchess who received a substantial fortune from her first American husband. On the same account of possessing independent means she has been ordered to pay the cost of litigation, £18,000.
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The use of sex in advertising is nothing new in this or any other advanced country. Once in a while some public spirited men and women raise an outcry of protest. So it must be this time with the pamphlet issued by the national union of teachers.
The fact is that in the post-war years a whole new class of consumers has come into being whom advertisers find it is profitable to titillate. They are the teen-agers with colossal purchasing power.
It is estimated that there are over five million teenagers in this country who have over one billion pounds a year to spend after all deductions in tax, national insurance and board and lodging. The number of teenagers is growing. There are today nearly 40 per cent more eighteen-year-olds than in the fifties. Incidentally, this population bulge accounts for the pressure on educational institutions in Britain. The average real earnings of teenagers rose by 50 per cent, compared with 25 per cent for the adults between 1938 and 1958.
The manufacturers – particularly of articles like records, record players, radios, transistors, cosmetics, clothes, scooters and motor-cycles – must pay the greatest attention to this group because it is a market which is not only sizeable but is also continuously growing and changing. Since the most dominant feature of all adolescents everywhere is the emergence of sexual drives, the importance of sex in advertisement techniques for manipulating the tastes of the teenagers can hardly be over-emphasised. It is important to manipulate their tastes because mass production cannot be organised on any other basis and only mass production can be profitable these days. The figures are truly breathtaking. For example the sales of one popular department store with 239 branches amounted to nearly 185 million pounds.
The-impact of the teen-age style has been remarkable in certain fields like music and clothes. It is for instance now difficult to buy a pair of ready-made trousers with a turn-up wider than eighteen inches, if one wants to be “with it” seventeen inches in the thing. Recently one fashion writer in a national daily said that tighter pants were fashionable with young men because the display of the thigh was a sign of chivalry.
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The British press is still licking its wounds and it will be a long time before it can live down the findings of the Radcliffe tribunal. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Carrington, and Mr Galbraith, now back on the Government front benches, are seeking damages from the papers concerned.
Press Evils
The tribunal analysed 250 reports and articles in the national papers and dealt with some of them in detail. Some of the reports were described as “fiction” and others untrue. None of them stood the test of serious investigation. Even more serious was the general picture that emerged of the way in which men in Fleet Street function. An article in the Spectator described the Fleet Street habit fairly accurately when it said “reporters and commentators take each other’s dirty linen, muddy it a little more, and wash it in public – with, as like as not, their editors claiming they wash whitest”. Not only the popular but even quality papers were found to be practising this technique.
We Indians might not be the only Englishmen (in the Victorian sense) left as Malcolm Muggeridge sees us, but obviously we treat the British press more seriously than it deserves.
The Times of India, 26 May 1963