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. 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, for gross indecency, 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 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 Thompson "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 Whitehouse was born in Croft Road, Nuneaton, Warwickshire. In her autobiography, she claimed that the house later became a sex shop,Report by Toby Neal, part of 'Great Lives' series on Midlands worthies. although this is understood to have been either a falsehood or exaggeration, as it is instead RAM Newsagents, who were selling pornographic magazines, not a "sex shop" as she described. She 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 [née Hutcheson], (Constance) Marywhitehouse, Mary", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
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 teaching at the end of 1964 to concentrate on her campaigning.
Clean Up TV campaign and the NVALA
Beginnings Whitehouse began her activism in 1963 with a letter to the BBCJonathan Brown "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,Tracey and Morrison Whitehouse, London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979, p. 41 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 Town Hall.David Winter 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 Hoggart "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."The Times, 6 May 1964, cited by Tracey and Morrison, p. 44
Sir Hugh Greene at the BBC Hugh Greene, knighted in January 1964,Michael Tracey The Production of Political Television, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, p. 159 became her bête noire. He was, according to Whitehouse, "the devil incarnate" who "more than anybody else ... [was] responsible for the moral collapse in this country."Dennis Barker "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 Stubbs "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."Quoted in Dominic Sandbrook White Heat, London: Little, Brown, 2006, p. 544The full manifesto is quoted by Roy Shaw in "Television: Freedom and Responsibility", New Blackfriars, no.553, June 1966, p. 453 Interviewed by the Catholic Herald for its Christmas 1965 issue, Whitehouse thought the BBC loaded its programmes in favour of the 'new morality'.Ian James "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 [and] there 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.Steve Fielding A State of Play: British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trollope to "The Thick of It"" , London & New York; Bloomsbury, 2014, p. 136
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".Reprinted in Sir Hugh Greene The Third Floor Front: A View of Broadcasting in the Sixties, London: The Bodley Head, 1969, p. 100-1 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.Michael Tracey and David Morrison Whitehouse, p. 47 The former cabinet minister Bill Deedes, later editor of The Daily Telegraph, supported the group in that 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.Stephen Robinson The Remarkable Lives Of Bill Deedes , London: Little, Brown (Hatchette Digital) 2008, p. 111-12 Quintin Hogg, better known as Lord Hailsham, was another high-profile politician who gave his support to NVALA and Whitehouse at that time.