Pretending medical conditions for journalistic clout

I have lately been seeing a lot of understandable pushback concerning the BBC Panorama documentary involving a journalist going undercover to access private diagnosis and treatment for ADHD - for which there are very substantial waiting times in the NHS. This had been described by the ADHD Foundation in their Response to BBC Panorama “Private ADHD Clinics Exposed” as

a poorly researched, sensationalist piece of television journalism. This programme has focussed on a niche issue whilst completely ignoring the broader context, including why there has been a rapid growth in private providers.  Some private providers do provide quality service. We believe the unscrupulous behaviour of some people/organisations in the private sector should be challenged, but it must also be contextualised within the wider environment of our health services.

I am not sure if anyone else was reminded of this, but it recalled to me the 1974 scandal around articles in the News of the World, subsequently published as a book, Babies for Burning, based on very dodgy undercover journalism involving abortion providers. The authors, Michael Litchfield and Susan Kentish, made unsubstantiated claims about the practices of abortion providers, including non-profit organisations such as the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, up to and including offering abortions to women who were not even pregnant. In the course of their investigations, the couple gave themselves out as seeking an abortion for Kentish, who was not pregnant: they had provided themselves with a urine sample of a confederate who was, to lend verisimilitude to their narrative.

The libel case brought by BPAS is substantially documented in their archive at Wellcome:

Much of the content of the book was found to be based on misleading evidence, as revealed in a Sunday Times article, 'Abortion Horror Tales Revealed as Fantasies'. The authors withdrew their allegations against the BPAS in a statement in open court on 18th January 1978. They ‘apologise[d] for any distress and damage’ which their allegations had caused and ‘recognise[d] that BPAS exercises the greatest care in the employment of qualified medical practitioners, and in selecting and training its counsellors.’ There is also documentation of several other separate but related cases[.]

There is also a significant group of files relating to the case in the archives of Brook, as well as Diane Munday's own file among the archives of CO-ORD: Co-ordinating Campaign for the Defence of the 1967 Abortion Act:

Papers, correspondence and press cuttings relating to statements made in the book Babies for Burning (1974) alleging that pregnancy testing agencies deliberately informed women that they were pregnant when they were not. The BPAS claimed that many of the conversations allegedly reproduced in the book were distorted by the authors. 

Litchfield and Kentish were not only found guilty of several instances of libel: they were also guilty of lying to the Select Committee on the Abortion (Amendment) Bill (1975), by submitting to it transcripts which they alleged were a faithful account of interviews and tapes recorded:

I wish, Mr. Speaker, to raise a question of privilege.... Mrs. Diana Munday, of the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, has spent 300 hours transcribing the tapes and comparing them with the transcripts produced to the Select Committee. As you may know, Mr. Speaker, apologies have been made to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service and all the allegations against it have been withdrawn.... My point is that the Select Committee was deceived by Miss Susan Kentish and by Michael Litchfield and lies were told to the Select Committee in order to mislead and influence that Committee's conclusions. This is a serious matter.

The case is discussed in Sally Sheldon, Gayle Davis, Jane O’Neill and Clare Parker, 'The Abortion Act (1967): a biography', Legal Studies (2019), 39, 18–35:

The investigation had a clear impact on early attempts to restrict the Abortion Act. One MP is said to have based his personal research for his 1975 abortion bill on reading the proofs, and others explicitly attributed their support for it to the book. Litchfield and Kentish were invited to give evidence to an important Parliamentary Select Committee, which in turn influenced further measures aiming to restrict the Act.

They suggest that 'While it was without doubt the most important scandal to have engulfed the Abortion Act, more than forty years on, Babies for Burning has been largely forgotten' but that 'the ongoing use of media ‘stings’... [has] become a significant and recurrent feature of [the Act's] life'.

 

Lucy Bland, Modern Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper (Manchester University Press, 2013)

I have fallen sadly behind in writing up my reading of recent months, but hope to repair this omission. Starting at perhaps the wrong end, i.e. the most recent book bearing on my general research interests read.

Lucy Bland's long-awaited follow-up to her classic and pioneering Banishing the Beast, Modern Women on Trial, does not disappoint. While some of the material may be familiar from the various articles and chapters she has previously published, this is not just one of those volumes which appear to consist of lightly-edited articles put together within one cover, and with the gentle reader apparently expected to draw out the connections between them. It is  a very good thing to have Bland's insights altogether in one volume and not to have to chase up  the original articles, but this book is a good deal more value-added than that. Modern Women on Trial effectively links the matter in the separate chapters together throughout, not just in a brief covering introduction or conclusion, by emphasising the common themes and threads that join these scandals and causes celebres of the period 1918-1924.

It is a very good read: I was reading it in the interstices and the aftermath of a fairly intense conference but still found it compellingly engaging.

The various cases dealt with are the Maud Allan 'Cult of the Clitoris' libel suit against the sleazoid journalist Pemberton Billing; the flurry of concern, focusing around the drug-related, or allegedly drug-related, deaths of two young women, the actress Billie Carleton and the dancer Freda Kempton, over 'white women' associating with 'Chinamen' as well as narcotic use by women; the well known trial of Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters for the murder of her husband; the shooting of her Egyptian husband by Madame Fahmy; and the extraordinary convolutions of the Russell divorce case. Several of these have been the subject of rather sensationalist popular accounts, but Bland provides a deeper analysis of the responses to these cases across a range of voices, and the resonances with wider social concerns of the time, in particular the changing roles of women, the allure and the threat of modern life, and the continuing impact of  the Great War upon British masculinity.

That's not quite what happened

I've just got my hands on the new biography of Rebecca West. I'm by no means a West scholar but as a besotted fan of Dame Rebecca for getting on for half a century, I have read, I think, pretty much all of her work that has been published and is obtainable (including some things that are quite hard to get hold of) and a substantial amount of the biography and criticism.

I have also had occasion to look at the Dora Marsden files relating to The Freewoman among her papers in the library at Princeton University, which the latest biographer does not appear to have consulted.

The standard narrative for the reason for Cicely Fairfield's switch to the pseudonym of Rebecca West, and the one which features in the Prologue to the new biography, has tended to follow her 1926 essay in Time and Tide and to state or at least imply that she chose to publish under a pseudonym because The Freewoman was considered so scandalous that her family (in some accounts, specifically her mother) refused to have it in the house. It is, of course, possible that this version is substantiated by correspondence I have not personally seen in one of the several collections of West papers.

However, according to an early letter to Dora Marsden about writing for The Freewoman, over the signature of Cicely Fairfield, she wrote:

I should like to reply to Lady Mayer's letter, but I cannot do it over my own signature. She is a power on the L.C.C. [London County Council] and it might conceivably happen that my sister [the doctor Letitia Fairfield, employed in the Public Health Department of the LCC] would be sacked for my heresies. If you will allow me to answer it over a pseudonym I will send something in by Monday morning at latest.

This suggests rather different motivations, and a concern for her sister's career that might not have been anticipated given their fraught relationship and much-recorded fallings-out.

It's possible to wonder if she improved the narrative in later telling - the idea of a young woman writing hard-hitting journalism in a shockingly radical feminist publication barred from the house by her mother makes a much better story - or whether, looking back after a dozen years of significant personal turmoil, she simply misremembered and conflated her mother's disapproval of the journal with her decision to take a nom de plume. It's also possible that the reason given to Marsden could have been a face-saving excuse.

Not exactly news

I never know whether to be exasperated or depressed when there is some 'news' story on the history of sexuality. It is probably utopian to hope that journalists will not report as exciting new discoveries topics that have not only been the subject of several decades of historical scholarship but significant amounts of revisionism. Partly I am sure this is also to do with publishers' marketing departments trying to find some Unique Selling Point to promote a volume in a competitive marketplace.

I have recently been noticing a number of advance promotional pieces for a new book on the C18th Sexual Revolution.

I am not a C18th historian: on the whole I prefer not to go back much further than 1850 and frankly, I much prefer the C20th, in particular the interwar period, if I had to choose. However, over my years in the field I have come across a fair amount of work on The Long Eighteenth Century and was rather surprised to see this being presented as (ahem) virgin territory in the matter of history of sexuality.

Edward Shorter posited the late C18th as an epoch of sexual liberation way back in the mid-1970s, although his interpretation of the data has been subjected to significant critique since The Making of the Modern Family. Other names associated with the illumination of questions of gender and sexuality in the UK during the Long C18th and indeed paying considerable attention to changes and new developments: Lawrence Stone, Randolph Trumbach,  Rictor Norton, Roy Porter, Tim Hitchcock, Amanda Vickery, Julie Peakman, Lisa Cody, Mary Fissell, Michael Stolberg, Thomas Laqueur, Kevin Siena, Norma Clarke, Jane Cox, Dorinda Outram, Alan Macfarlane, Mary Abbott, Ludmilla Jordanova, Julie Gammon... a list which could go on.

Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity and the Popular Press in Inter-War Britain (2004)

A very good piece of work, looking specifically at the popular dailies of the period and their extremely polyvocal take on issues of gender. Makes a good point about the papers positioning themselves as about 'modernity', and issues of feminisation of their presentation and the types of things they dealt with, even beyond the actual women's pages. Not just about reinscribing traditional gender roles - some of that but because there are so many people writing in any given paper on any given day with different slants what they were getting across was a good deal more complex.

Even if there was a tendency to be 'yay modern girl - particularly in a bathing suit', with the increasing use of eroticised photographs of attractive women. But did get serious feminist voices out there too, even if there was often an agenda of drumming up sales-gleaning controversy.

Also has good chapter specifically on representations of masculinity and attitudes about men (which also comes up in the war and peace chapter  - the contrasting figures of the decorated hero who says never again, the shell-shocked veteran, and the languid foppish postwar male who hadn't fought).

A quote a day for Women's History Month: 9th March

[W]hen it comes to housework the one thing no book of household management can ever tell you is how to begin. Or maybe I mean why.

Perhaps no book can answer it completely: but what I am waiting for... is a book that starts off on the assumption that all sorts of goads and bribes are necessary to get some of us up off the hearthrug and doing the housework at all.

Katharine Whitehorn, 'Nought for Housework', in Roundabout (1952)

O the wonderous Katharine Whitehorn! Well before the advent of the so-called 'second wave' of feminism, indeed, during what is often considered a time of invisible feminism, she was slashing away in her columns with incisive wit about the inequities of women's position in society. E.g. on the attitudes of banks towards women, on abortion law reform, on women in the workplace, etc etc. She also fought the corner of women whose lives are full of domestic disarray, and assumptions that women were naturally good at the domestic arts.

Perhaps I am getting old and cranky, but I came of age when there was a wonderful array of women journalists telling like it was, with both passion and humour. There don't quite seem to be any contemporary equivalents.

Adrian Bingham, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life and the British Popular Press, 1918-1978

This really does fill in a much needed gap (which I flagged up in one of my chapters in The Facts of Life) about how sex figured in the popular daily/Sunday papers in Britain in the earlier part of the C20th, given that that was where a lot of people would have been picking up such sexual knowledge as they had.

Bingham does an excellent job, showing the ways in which newspaper proprietors and editors were well aware that 'sex sells' but also of the ways that they had to negotiate around societal taboos and the idea of being 'family newspapers' and making sure the content was suitable for the kiddies. One does get a very strong impression that sex got discussed rather a lot in the context of society scandal/divorce and criminality, although there was also a dimension of (male, heteronormative) 'healthy/normal' embodied in  the phenomenon of the extensive use of pin-up photos.

There's also interesting stuff about a moment, in the 40s and 50s and into the 60s, in which at least certain papers were taking a stance on being modern and the importance of knowledge and enlightenment around sex and there was a period in which it's arguable that there was some genuinely educational stuff going on  - note here role of women advice columnists and also the articles on e.g. abortion which were presenting the progressive legalisation case. Although this varied a lot over the range of topics and there is some very good analysis of the ways in which the popular press generally chose to deal with prostitution (as 'oldest profession' with occasional moral panics over 'white slavery', vice rings, etc).

But that moment was swept away by an increasing sexualisation and sensationalism that burgeoned in the 70s.

Useful stuff. I really ought to read his other book on Gender, Modernism and the Popular Press in Interwar Britain but it's wicked pricey. I could get it on ILL and take notes I suppose but I like to have my own copies so I can look things up when I need to.