'In our modern world, there's something
'we've all searched for - romantic love.
'I've been investigating its history.
'Seeing how the Georgians and Victorians invented
'so many of the traditions of romance.'
# I wish a falling star
# Could fall forever...#
'But the main revolution is yet to come.'
# And sparkle through the clouds and stormy weather...#
'When the idea of finding The One
'would become the central focus of our desires.'
During the first half of the 20th century,
there was more social upheaval than at any point in history.
And out of this turmoil came romance as we know it today.
'As women became indispensible, their needs began to matter.
'A new kind of fiction emerged for a new kind of woman.
'It was racy, explicit.
'It was devoured avidly and lived out in reality.
'It didn't stop at boundaries of class, or sexuality.
'This new kind of romance was based on the idea that a soulmate
'was essential to personal fulfilment.'
By the end of the century, romance wasn't just highly desirable,
it had become a right, to be demanded by everybody.
Welcome to the age of modern romance.
# And let's never
# Stop falling in love. #
'It's 1917 and the Great War is at its peak.'
Millions of men have been taken away.
Not just from home, but from a generation of women.
The sixth formers of the Bournemouth Girls' School
have assembled for an important address from their senior mistress.
Girls, I have something terrible to tell you.
Only one in ten of you can ever hope to marry.
The men who might have married you have all been killed.
You will have to make your way in the world as best you can.
Sitting amongst the pupils in that classroom was Rosamund Essex.
And years later, when she came to write her autobiography,
she remembered what a significant moment that had been.
"It was one of the most fateful statements of my life.
"Quite simply, there was no-one available."
"There would be no husband,
"no children, no sexual outlet,
"no natural bond of man and woman.
"It was going to be a struggle indeed."
And it turned out that only one in ten
of Rosamund's classmates would get married.
And she was among those who didn't.
The gulf between the sexes had never been greater.
Many of the men who had survived the war
were physically or emotionally broken.
A generation of so-called surplus women were left unmarried
and were also left holding things together.
'Romance seemed far out of reach.
'Fortunately, help was at hand.'
In 1919, many thousands of British women
indulged in a little light relief.
The Sheik.
It was the 50 Shades of Grey of its day.
It was a steamy, erotic, sensational tale.
It was a must-read, whether you admitted it or not.
'The Sheik was so successful
'that Hollywood studios fought over the movie rights.
'Within a couple of years, the film, starring Rudolph Valentino,
'was breaking box-office records.
'It offered exactly the escapist thrill that women needed.
'A journey to a world that couldn't be further from reality.
'So, what's it all about? Well...'
The fiercely-independent Miss Diana Mayo
has rejected many offers of marriage.
She's chosen instead to go travelling in the Sahara Desert.
But now she's been captured by the dangerous
Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan and his followers.
This woman, who swore
that she would never bow down to the authority of a man,
is completely at the mercy of the sheik.
Here was a physically impressive alpha male.
A fantasy figure for women who wanted their men to be strong once again.
"She was trapped! Powerless, defenceless.
"And behind the heavy curtains near her
"was the man waiting to claim what he had taken."
"There was no help to be expected. No mercy to be hoped for.
"She clenched her hands in anguish!
"The flaming light of desire burning in his eyes
"turned her sick and faint.
"Her body throbbed with the consciousness
"of a knowledge that appalled her.
"She understood his purpose with horror.
" 'Oh, you brute! You brute!' she wailed,
"until his kisses silenced her."
'But hang on a minute! Our hero is forcing himself upon our heroine?
'It doesn't make for an easy read today.
'But in 1919, this was the only way that readers could accept Diana
'embarking on a sexual relationship without being married.'
'And it's one that she ends up enjoying.'
The novel celebrates female sexual desire without any guilt.
"She lay shaking with passionate yearning,
"hungry for the clasp of his arms. Faint with longing."
This spicy page-turner was the debut novel
of the wife of a pig farmer from Derbyshire.
Edith Maude Hull, whose husband, Percy,
had been called up at the outbreak of war.
The bored and frustrated Edith wrote the book to distract herself
at a time when she felt all on her own.
And she obviously struck a chord.
Royalties for The Sheik and her later novels
came to the equivalent of £50 million.
Ker-ching!
The 20th century was putting the sex into romance.
And females everywhere were lapping it up.
EM Hull understood what women,
both married and unmarried, wanted in the post-war years.
Her novel was tapping into a curiosity about sex.
A subject that had been off-limits.
'It was also a topic that was exercising the minds
'of Britain's scientific community,
'where women were beginning to have an impact.
'It was from this world of academia
'that a new manifesto of love emerged.'
At its heart was a radical idea.
That romantic happiness lay in sexual satisfaction within wedlock.
Of the marriages that had survived the Great War,
many had been put under strain.
This book promised to reignite them.
"Every heart desires a mate.
"We are incomplete in ourselves.
"There is nothing for which the innermost spirit yearns
"as for a sense of union with another soul."
Behind all this flowery, romantic language
lay a very practical purpose.
Married Love was an out-and-out sex manual.
It was full of really explicit detail.
I love the fact that all this sexy stuff
isn't coming from some exotic continental psychoanalyst,
it was the work of a highly-respected expert in prehistoric plants.
Dr Marie Stopes was the embodiment
of the new emancipated woman.
But she believed she'd suffered as a result of sex ignorance.
'She claimed that her first husband had been impotent
'and that marriage ended in divorce.
'So she was inspired to explore a new line of research.'
Marie Stopes' Marriage Manual is dedicated to,
"Young husbands, and all those who are betrothed in love".
She set out to educate couples that having a good sex life,
a satisfying sex life,
was central to the physical and emotional wellbeing,
both of the man and, here's the surprising bit, of the woman, too.
"So complex, so profound, are woman's sex instincts
"that in rousing them, the man is rousing her whole body and soul.
"And this takes time.
"More time indeed than the average husband dreams of spending upon it."
OK, then, Marie, so, what's he actually supposed to do?
"The kissing and the tender fondling with the lips of a woman's breasts
"is one of the first and surest ways to make her ready
"for complete and satisfactory union."
Just to be absolutely clear,
what is it that you mean by, "complete and satisfactory union"?
"The half-swooning sense of flux which overtakes the spirit
"in that eternal moment at the apex of rapture
"sweeps into its flaming tides
"the whole essence of the man and woman.
"The heat of the contact vaporises their consciousness
"so that it fills the whole of cosmic space."
# Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars. #
'Wow!
'The book became a massive talking point and a bestseller.
'The scientist had succeeded in her intention to electrify the public.'
Marie Stopes had rewritten the rules of romance.
Traditionally, the wedding had been seen as the climax of romantic love,
but now it was just the beginning.
If you followed Marie Stopes' advice and had great sex,
you could keep alive the excitement of courtship within marriage.
She was suggesting that your spouse could be a sort of one-stop shop
for all your emotional and physical needs.
'It was such a powerful idea that, after publishing her book,
'Stopes received up to 500 letters a day
'from people desperate to know the secret to a satisfying marriage.'
The Wellcome Library has a large collection of this correspondence
and Leslie Hall, Senior Archivist, has agreed to show me some.
So here is some...just some of the letters...
- Tiny sample... - ..written in, to her.
..of the - what, something like 10,000 letters we have here.
- Golly. - This is a young woman who's engaged to a young man -
"..and during this weekend we were discussing our future
"and my fiance revealed to me
"that he could not reconcile himself to having children, as he felt
"no sexual desire towards me, although he loves me exceedingly."
- Well, it's a good job she's discovered that at this stage! - Yes, yes, yes
and I think Stopes responds to that, pretty much saying,
"I don't think you should marry him."
"Don't do it! Run!"
A marriage was such...this thing that people did,
that you feel a lot of people married
even if they didn't particularly feel sexual desire either towards
- the person they were about to marry, or at all. - Yeah.
This letter over here - he says, "My wife is now 53 years old.
"We've been married for 14 years
"and she has never experienced any pleasure in married life -
"what I believe you call orgasm,"
and then he admits that "we've both done little to induce it.
"What should we do?"
There are lots of letters like that
and you even get people writing to her who had completely failed
to consummate their marriage for, you know, long periods of time,
and saying, well, you know,
"Is there any way we can finally achieve this?"
Yeah. So what Marie Stopes is doing is fantastic.
- She's putting all these people in touch with their sexual selves. - Exactly. Yes.
Does that suggest to you that people at the time were desperate
to know this sort of information, they were thirsty for it?
Absolutely, yes, there was
a real desire for the kind of information she was giving
in the way that she was giving it.
She's sort of wrapped it up in this very kind of idealistic
marriage-focussed way that makes it very acceptable
in a way that I think going straight to the explicit would not have done.
Yeah. What do you think was the gift that Marie Stopes gave to couples?
She brought, as it were, a kind of romance into marriage.
It wasn't just the precursor to the union.
It was embedded within marriage.
She's opened up the genie's bottle a bit, hasn't she?
Oh, she has, yes.
I mean, she's saying it's good for you to experience...
She's saying it's good and it's important
and everybody should be having this wonderful experience.
Of course, lots of people couldn't.
What's going to happen? All sorts of trouble ahead.
All sorts of trouble ahead.
Marie Stopes had bound together romance and sexuality
and in doing so has helped fashion the modern notion of what a soulmate could be.
A very different writer wanted to explore similar territory
but he wasn't going to kowtow to contemporary moral convention.
DH Lawrence was a romantic maverick.
In his infamous book, Lady Chatterley's Lover,
he rips up the rulebook of romance.
He believes the pursuit of the perfect union shouldn't be
constrained by marriage or by class.
His heroine, the aristocratic Lady Constance Chatterley,
is married, but she finds her soulmate
in the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors.
When they finally get together, it's explosive.
"Her whole self quivered unconscious and alive, like plasm.
"She could not know what it was.
"She could not remember what it had been.
"Only that it had been more lovely than anything ever could be."
It's often remembered for being a steamy, sexy book
but I think that Lady Chatterley sits squarely in the great tradition of British romance.
And it's said to have been inspired by the real-life love affair
of one of Lawrence's acquaintances.
This is Lady Ottoline Morrell.
She was a very striking-looking person.
She had a habit of wearing red high-heeled shoes.
Some people said that she had strong features,
others that she looked like a horse!
This picture in the National Portrait Gallery
was painted by her one-time lover Augustus John.
DH Lawrence said there was only one Ottoline and "she has moved one's imagination".
Lady Ottoline was a ferocious socialite.
In 1902, she'd married the MP Phillip Morrell
but her happiness ended the minute she took off her wedding dress.
On their wedding night, Phillip suddenly announced
that he didn't want to have a sexual relationship with her.
Bit of a downer!
But just like Lady Chatterley in Lawrence's novel,
Ottoline found comfort elsewhere.
She had so many affairs that
Lady Ottoline Morrell earned herself the nickname of Lady Utterly Immoral.
But there was one affair that she kept deeply secret.
In 1920, a young stonemason called Lionel Gomme came to carry out
repairs at her country house, Garsington Manor.
The aristocrat was immediately drawn to this handsome workman.
# At last
# My love has come along... #
Ottoline wrote in her diary that she'd discovered this "remarkable boy".
He was "extremely beautiful with a very intelligent face".
But there was a problem - she was 47 years old,
more than 20 years older than him.
She wondered whether he would ever show the slightest interest in her.
The sexual adventuress was reduced to a quivering schoolgirl.
But Lionel did respond eventually
and they embarked on a passionate affair.
The physical side of their relationship was a revelation to her.
She confessed that she'd never before experienced such wild sexual abandon.
In her diary, she describes Lionel as the only man
she had ever loved sexually AND emotionally.
But alas, this happiness would be short-lived.
In 1922, only two years after Ottoline first set eyes on him,
Lionel suffered a brain haemorrhage.
He died at her home in Oxfordshire, being cradled in her arms.
Despite Ottoline's efforts to keep her tragic love affair secret,
rumours of it reached Lawrence.
His novel celebrated the idea of passion breaking free of constraint.
But it was too much for its time, and in 1928, it was banned.
However, other people in other places were also challenging
romantic boundaries.
If you knew where to look in 1920s London,
you may have spotted a new social phenomenon - a lesbian scene.
For centuries, there had been a male homosexual subculture,
but now it was the turn of the ladies.
RAGTIME PIANO MUSIC
Women's freedom was growing
and many were now earning their own salary.
After work, they could be found drinking
and letting off steam in bars and nightclubs.
Their new independence was also reflected in a trend
for boyish clothing and hair.
You'd have seen plenty of androgynous-looking women in fashionable circles in the 1920s.
For some of them, the style took hold
because it expressed their sexuality.
It was a visible way of turning their backs upon traditional gender roles
and flirting with a new-found confidence.
# Masculine women, feminine men
# Which is the rooster, which is the hen
# It's hard to tell 'em apart today and say... #
Women in masculine attire
and their partners graced the dance-floors of bohemian nightclubs
like the Orange Tree and the Cave of Harmony.
# Now we don't know who is who or even what's what... #
One such couple was the novelist Radclyffe Hall
and her partner, Una Troubridge.
OK, I know they may not look like they're the life and soul of the party here
but their lives were anything but glum.
Within their social circle, they - and others like them -
were able to conduct their relationships without drawing attention.
But the rest of society wasn't so open-minded.
Radclyffe Hall was tired of living a semi-secret life.
She decided to risk her successful career as an author
by writing a novel about what she called "sexual inversion".
The book's title was The Well of Loneliness.
Radclyffe Hall wanted to take things overground.
She thought that her romance was as valid a romance as anyone else's
and what better way to prove it than by using the form of the romantic novel?
The book's protagonist, Stephen Gordon, has all the
qualities you'd hope for in a romantic hero -
expert rider, keen scholar, successful novelist
and a war veteran with a passion for sharp suits
and an eye for the ladies.
There's just one difference - Stephen Gordon is a woman.
After a series of doomed affairs, she finds romantic love with Mary,
whom she meets while driving ambulances during the war.
But living under society's disapproval,
they miss having a complete and normal existence.
Radclyffe Hall wanted to draw attention to the
loneliness and the isolation that could be experienced
by anyone living beyond the boundaries of heterosexuality.
She knew that by coming out like this,
her life would never be the same again.
But she felt it was worth it
to convey something of the doubt and the self-hatred
that might be felt by these so-called sexual deviants.
She told her publisher that her new book required complete commitment.
Not a single word was to be altered.
"Then Stephen took Angela into her arms,
"and she kissed her full on the lips, as a lover.
"Through the long years of life that followed after,
"Stephen was never to forget this summer when she fell quite simply and
"naturally in love, in accordance with the dictates of her nature."
When the novel was published in 1928, there was instant controversy.
One particularly vicious campaign
was orchestrated by James Douglas of the Sunday Express.
"I", he said, "would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl
"prussic acid than this novel."
Some powerful contemporaries came springing to Radclyffe Hall's defence.
The novelist EM Forster led the protest
by drafting a letter in support of The Well Of Loneliness.
Despite this, on 9th November, the book became the subject
of an obscenity trial.
Radclyffe Hall renewed her vow to smash "the conspiracy of silence"
on the lesbian issue
and to defeat censorship "on behalf of English literature".
At the trial, Radclyffe Hall's lawyer tried to argue that there was nothing wrong with the book -
it just showed innocent friendship between women.
Radclyffe Hall herself was pretty furious.
She saw this as a betrayal of her work.
She said, "I am proud and happy to have taken up my pen
"in defence of the persecuted."
Like many women of her generation,
her sexuality - lesbian or not - now formed a key part of her identity.
She wasn't going to deny it.
Radclyffe Hall believed that she and others like her
should not be deprived of the right to love.
The book's only real sexual reference consisted of the words
"and that night, they were not divided",
But she lost her battle and it was banned.
The establishment made sure those at the leading edge, like DH Lawrence
and Radclyffe Hall, would have to wait to get their ideas out.
But even in the mainstream, people were beginning to liberate themselves.
By the 1930s, a less inhibited generation were coming of age.
They wanted a romantic night out but with a greater level of intimacy.
So much so that it's come to be seen as a golden age of courtship.
The cinema offered excitement, glamour and romance.
Ticket, please!
But it wasn't just the escapist entertainment on screen that appealed.
To young people, the cinema also promised a different kind of pleasure.
Its dimmed lighting, comfortable seating
and hidden corners provided the perfect environment for hands to
roam and for members of the audience to get to know each other better.
My date for this evening is cinema expert Lawrence Napper.
What was it like for people in the 1930s,
going into a dark room full of other people?
Cinema's important in terms of client of courtship, partly because
it is... it's a public space, so, you can say, well, you know,
"I wasn't doing anything untoward. Everyone was around me.
"They could see me," but it's also a bit private, cos it's quite dark and
you CAN sort of get up to nefarious things without really be noticed.
Perfect for a date, then?
Perfect for a date, and of course, you know,
to enhance that feeling of romance you might want from the date,
you've got a film that's showing romantic activities,
which is kind of encouraging ideas of romance and glamour.
Just to get you into the mood.
To get you into the mood, absolutely.
British audiences were being dazzled by Hollywood's version of romance.
Film had now replaced the novel in teaching us the rules of love.
What's the secret of the success of a film like Top Hat?
Well, it offers you an idea of an exciting physical encounter
with a member of the opposite sex that is pleasurable.
# Heaven, I'm in heaven
# And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak... #
And the dance, to a certain extent, is a kind of seduction
so you get these dance sequences where at the beginning,
she's slightly resistant, he does a few taps,
she sort of, like, moves forward, she sort of mirrors him a bit.
But by the end of a number like Cheek To Cheek, of course,
she's completely submissive to him.
She's striking poses, she's doing all those jumps,
where actually, she is supported by him.
She couldn't physically do them
if he wasn't there supporting her in those dance moves.
You can think of the dance as a kind of metaphor for sex.
Well, totally.
There's that bit when she swoons and she's practically dead
and we all know what's happened there.
Absolutely, and Cheek To Cheek absolutely does that.
That number, you know, it builds up to climax where...
- and as you say, she's like... - HE INHALES
..just breathing and then it's sort of,
the climax is the end of the dance, more or less.
People of all classes are flocking to the cinema, aren't they? They love it.
Yes, absolutely. I mean, it's definitely something that
appeals to people across the board. The cinema is somewhere where
you can kind of fantasise about a different life,
a life where romance is about having a really hot dancing partner,
- as opposed to maybe the slightly drab blokes who are knocking around... - Yeah!
..that you actually might be able to go out with.
Well, good luck to them. I don't think they'll find a partner that good!
Though she went backwards and in heels, remember.
She did go backwards and in heels
and she was a pretty good dancer, it has to be said.
The cinema wasn't the only place where the new codes of dating
were being explored.
Amid the glitz of London's West End,
you could find another type of romantic encounter being perfected.
# Have you seen the well-to-do
# Up on Lennox Avenue
# On that famous thoroughfare
# With their noses in the air... #
A tryst that couldn't have happened just a few decades earlier.
It would have been completely unacceptable
for a respectable young lady to be wined and dined all by herself by a gentleman.
But now, glamorous new eateries were opening up
and a table for two was the ultimate romantic date.
# Oh, come with me and we'll attend their two bits
# Puttin' on the Ritz. #
Quaglino's opened its doors in 1929
to cater for this new market of courting couples,
and it quickly became the place to be seen.
I'm lucky enough to be stepping out tonight with food writer James Pembroke.
There's your friend, the maitre d'.
Exactly. Maitre d'!
Perfect.
Very good.
Now, let's get some champagne.
Excuse me! Champagne.
Ah, here we go. Wahey!
I guess that this was a pretty intimate new situation that men
and women would find each other in?
Absolutely. I think there was also a great ritual about it.
They'd all seen the big screen, they'd seen their film stars
descending on a table, they'd seen a man pull up a chair.
- They knew how to do it. They'd seen this in action. - Mmm.
- And also, restaurants were dimly lit. - Yes.
- You also had a very sexy waiter which made you feel better. - SHE LAUGHS
- and he'd definitely, definitely not be English. - So the chaperone, your old maiden aunt, has turned into...
- Turned into... - ..a sexy young man.
..has basically turned into a very sexy Italian.
It's amazing to think that this is the first time that men
and women are sort of going out
and eating in each other's company on a really widespread scale.
- It's not that long ago, is it? - No, it's not at all. Not at all.
Going out alone with a man in a restaurant
really would have been a risque thing to do,
- a certain type of woman would have done that. - Yes.
They certainly wouldn't walk into a restaurant until basically
after the First World War. They just wouldn't, in any way alone.
- It was disreputable. - Absolutely, disreputable.
Some pretty loose characters in there and it was known for that.
How would a date work in the 1930s? You would ask me?
I would ask you and then we'd either meet for cocktails somewhere,
or we'd meet at the restaurant, but what's different from nowadays is we wouldn't probably look at menus.
I would have rung ahead and I would have chosen the menu
with the maitre d' and I'd probably try and find out if you didn't like fish or anything,
but everyone ate everything then, there were no allergies, so you kept going and collapsed if necessary.
They'd start with caviar, a typical menu would start with caviar.
- They'd then move on to turtle soup... - Turtle soup? - Turtle soup.
- Wow! - Left over from the sort of Georgian era.
And then they'd have a salmon mousse and then, which is
- still on the menu now, supreme de volaille. - Chicken supreme.
- This is it. - This is it. - Absolutely, same thing.
And then after that, they would even have a little asparagus salad
and after that, a little light pudding and some frivolites,
- so little petit fours or cakes or something. - Frivolities. - Frivolites.
Exactly. I would have chosen the wines.
Probably a different wine with every course. And wine was cheap.
- My goodness! - So going out was not that expensive, across the board.
It's a lot more expensive today, as a proportion of people's incomes.
- Massively more expensive. 150 times more expensive... - Wow! - Yeah.
- Absolutely. - And it was always the men that paid. - Always.
- It would have always been. - This is why people in the novels of the 1930s are going out
- the whole time, they can afford to do it. - Absolutely.
When it came to - let's go out tonight, love, the flicks was
all very well, but what they really wanted was a bit of glamour.
They'd seen on the flicks people eating in restaurants,
it was the breakthrough and it was very widespread.
Obviously Quaglino's was for the rich, definitely,
but all over Soho, there were tonnes of little cheap restaurant,
for two and six, serving five course dinners, so there was a major
restaurant boom, cos basically people wanted to party. It was the jazz mania.
It was dancing, music, and it was wild times.
But the party looked set to end in 1939,
as another war broke out.
Britain experienced mass casualties on home soil for the first time.
You didn't have to be on the frontline to be at risk of death.
The bombs brought fear, but also a strange kind of thrill,
as the danger drew people together.
BOMBS EXPLODE
One young woman who wrote frankly
about her experiences during the Blitz was Joan Wyndham.
Huddled in her air raid shelter, Joan wrote secretly and obsessively
about the strange but exhilarating times that she was living through.
"The war," she remembered later,
"was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me.
"One never knew what one was going to lose first -
"one's life or one's virginity."
In her memoirs, Joan candidly details her social
and sexual encounters throughout the war.
"I can't help feeling that each moment may be my last."
EXPLOSIONS
"And as the opposite of death is life, I think
"that I shall get seduced by Rupert tomorrow.
"After lunch, we laid down and tried to sleep,
"but there was another air raid.
"Then Rupert finally put his hand under my jersey, took
"hold of my right breast and said, 'Do you still want to be seduced?'
" 'Yes,' I said."
# Put your arms around me, honey
# Hold me tight... #
And it wasn't just Joan who succumbed to war aphrodisia.
As one British housewife put it, "We were not really immoral.
"There was a war on."
Sexual restraint was suspended for the duration.
As the blackout came, London became one vast double bed.
That's how the writer Quentin Crisp described
the lowering of sexual standards in the Second World War.
There was the feeling that you might die tomorrow.
There is the adrenalin of the air raids
and then there was the cover of the darkness itself.
All these things encouraged some people to lose their inhibitions,
along with their underwear.
But the war didn't just allow for snatched moments of sexual intimacy.
Women discovered other forms of freedom that they'd previously
been denied.
In 1941, Joan Wyndham joined up with the Women's Auxiliary Air Force.
Well, you were living on equal terms with men,
you were working with them, you were treated as an equal, totally.
And because you were doing your bit, you could go out
and not feel guilty.
She quickly rose through the ranks
and ended up stationed here at Bentley Priory in Hertfordshire.
In Love Is Blue, she describes her first day.
"Well, here I am an officer and life is absolutely the cat's whiskers.
"When I walked into the officers' mess, I nearly died of shock.
"It was all chintz sofas and roaring log fires.
"And a suave blond said, "Hello, Wyndham. How about a gin and lime?"
"The food is wonderful, the booze flows in abundance
"and my fellow officers are fairly glamorous and a gay, wild lot."
This luxurious atmosphere provided plenty of exciting encounters
with the opposite sex. Here, at Bentley Priory,
what mattered was that women were playing their part to win the war.
What they got up to in their private lives just wasn't a priority.
The authorities were content to turn a blind eye.
You'd meet a man and you'd have a passionate affair with him
and then he'd be posted or he might even be killed.
Thank God, that never happened to me.
And so, being normal, you know, healthy girls, in six months' time,
we'd move on and find somebody else.
Joan Wyndham is fascinating because her memoirs, in some ways,
show the Second World War as a sort of trial run
for the kind of relationships that we think of as belonging
to much later in the 20th century.
That permissive, let it all hang out behaviour of the
'60s' generation was in fact pioneered by their parents.
This new emphasis on living life to the full put increasing
pressure on existing relationships.
And during the war, marriages broke down in record numbers.
The divorce rate multiplied by ten.
Even though the laws surrounding divorce
remained extremely restrictive.
Even when both parties wanted a divorce, it wasn't
that easy to get one.
The law did allow for divorce on the grounds of insanity or desertion,
but that was very rarely granted.
The quickest way to get a divorce was to go for adultery,
but how did you go about proving you'd committed adultery
if either you hadn't or you didn't really want to.
Well, luckily,
a novel had come out that took you through the whole process.
It was the perfect how to guide.
Holy Deadlock focussed on a couple who were desperate to divorce, but
had to go to extraordinary lengths to convince a court that the
husband had been unfaithful.
Even though he hadn't.
If collusion was suspected, their divorce would not be granted.
The author, AP Herbert, wanted to highlight the absurdity
of a law that kept unhappy couples shackled together for life.
And he did this by detailing a practice that became
known as the Brighton Quickie.
One member of the couple, usually the man, would take part
in a staged incident of adultery with a professional co-respondent.
As the book says, "As a rule, the gentleman takes a lady to a hotel,
"Brighton or some such place, and he enters her in the book as his wife.
"He shares a room with her
"and then he sends the bill to his actual wife back at home."
The success of the whole thing depends upon the real wife's
agent being able to present watertight evidence that her
husband had been unfaithful.
Thanks to the novel, this pantomime became even more common.
And by the 1940s, it had acquired its own cast of key characters who
could later be relied upon as solid witnesses in court.
# I've got my eyes on you
# So best beware where you roam
# I've got my eyes on you
# So don't stray too far from home.... #
Firstly, there was the private detective.
The husband would hire a detective to observe the couple
going in to the hotel together.
He might also follow them around the town and hope to catch them
having a kiss.
Then, there was the hotel manager... Ah, hello.
- Will you be Mr and Mrs Smith? - That's right. - Please, come on in.
..who would usually want a fee for his or her cooperation.
And lastly and most importantly, there was the chambermaid, whose job
it was to discover the couple in bed
and be willing to testify to the fact in court.
I have seen you!
The Brighton Quickie might have had all the ingredients of a classic
farce, but it was the only way for many couples to obtain a divorce.
For Lorraine Ferguson's parents, it enabled them
to start a new life together.
Lorraine, tell me a bit about this wartime romance.
Well, my parents met in Austria at the end of the Second World War.
He was a surgeon and she was a nurse.
And they spent four amazing months together in Austria
before he was demobbed about eight months before her.
And so during those eight months,
they wrote these letters to each other.
They more than wrote! They exchanged hundreds of letters, didn't they?
There are almost 300 letters here. My mother gave them to me before she died and they wrote every day,
- sometimes twice a day. - So, here, she's writing to him, "forces overseas",
it says, and he's back at home in Shropshire.
Yes, and you can see that she's kissed the back of the envelope.
There's lipstick! Look at that! Sealed with a loving kiss. Mwah!
That's beautiful.
But there was one major problem with this romance, wasn't there?
My father had married before he went abroad,
as a lot of people did in the war.
He married literally two weeks before he was stationed abroad and
when he did come back on leave,
- his first wife had actually met somebody else. - Oh, dear.
So by the time he met my mother, the marriage,
as far as both parties were concerned, was over.
- What's to be done? A Brighton Quickie! - That's right.
That's exactly what had to be done.
So obviously he's read the book Holy Deadlock,
because he mentions it in this letter here,
where he says, "Have you ever read Holy Deadlock?"
It's exactly what he's got to do, he's got to provide evidence.
He didn't want to sue his first wife for divorce, because that would have
been very shaming for her, so he had to create
an adulterous situation so that she could sue him.
- He did the gentlemanly thing. - He did indeed, yes.
But of course he couldn't do that with the woman he loved.
- Because that would have dragged her into the divorce courts. - Precisely.
So how did he go about it then?
He says here, "To my mother,
"if I picked up a common tart,
"she'd immediately have suspected something if I didn't sleep with her.
"If I failed to oblige, she'd smell a rat.
"If I did, I'd probably need a large course of penicillin."
So obviously, whoever you asked, even if you paid them,
they may well give the game away if they felt like it.
Because it was breaking... They were being used to enable
- the breaking of the law, weren't they? - It was a subterfuge
that was going to be produced as a legal document.
But then to this delight, his sister Margaret,
who is in with the theatre set,
has a friend who will do the deed with him.
But not really do the deed. Pretend to do the deed.
And there's a lovely bit later on in the letter where he says that
"she was a lovely person but not nearly as pretty as you, darling."
Oh, good, so she won't be jealous.
They didn't even hold hands, he assured my mother.
It's very funny to think of all these people running rings around the law, isn't it?
It's quite said that they have to do it.
- They felt it was sad, didn't they? - Yes, they did.
They felt it was sordid and unpleasant
and I think uncomfortable for them.
That more, I think, than sad.
There was a happy ever after, wasn't there?
Yes, there certainly was.
In March 1947, they were finally able to get married.
The war had ignited all sorts of volcanic passions.
It gave a glimpse of what was to come in the 1960s.
But in the post-war years,
a lot of people were keen to hold back the tide.
They'd had enough of cheap and dirty sex
and they were ready to re-embrace romance.
A new morally conservative mood took hold,
and by the 1950s, "we'd never had it so romantic."
More people tied the knot than ever before or since, and at younger ages.
Commitment, it seems, was the perfect antidote to the horror of war.
It was at this point
that our most potent expression of romance was invented.
# Under Orion's starry sky
# I lie in the moonlit garden
# Wondering where to cast my eye
# For all that I see is heaven... #
The De Beers corporation realised that there might be a market
for something symbolising permanence.
Something indestructible.
So they came up with an advertising campaign
with the most fantastic slogan - "A Diamond is Forever."
And in doing this, they created
the 20th century's most enduring and most sparkly love token.
The diamond engagement ring was a strictly post-war phenomenon.
Jewellery expert John Benjamin is fascinated
by how quickly the idea took hold.
This advert is produced by De Beers.
It dates from the 1940s,
and the campaign, "A diamond is forever," it started in America, did it?
It did, and it was a brilliant strapline,
because it just tapped in with all the subliminal issues
of what a diamond represents,
and also what your marriage will therefore represent.
If you buy a diamond, it means that your marriage will last
for the rest of time as well, so it was very clever in that respect.
Very quickly, certainly by the end of the '40s
and the start of the 1950s,
diamond jewellery becomes the must-have item.
So this all looks very aspirational, but down here it says,
"your diamond ring need not be costly."
Quite right too. At that time, in the late '40s and '50s,
when people got married, they had no money.
And it's worth showing this diamond ring because this is the perfect way
that diamonds are being set in those days.
OK, let's look at that.
Absolutely teeny-weeny little diamond chips.
Where is the diamond even?
It twinkles in the heart of the setting.
By carving the setting, you somehow make the setting
look like part of the diamond, and that gives a sense,
- "Ooh, I've got a bigger diamond." - I like that!
It works, it works, because at first sight you think
those are three diamonds, but they're not.
- They're three teeny-tiny diamonds. - Teeny-tiny little stones.
I feel really fond of the tiny diamond ring now.
I feel like this was a real purchase made with feeling by somebody.
The diamond ring tapped into a need to establish
a more stable world.
People wanted to believe in the power of love again,
and so they reached for the romance novel.
There'd been a return to the origins of the genre,
as regency romances filled the best-seller lists.
One author in particular made it her business to satisfy this desire.
She clocked up more than a billion sales.
She was British history's most prolific author,
publishing 723 books
and writing them at a speed of one a fortnight.
I think it's fair to say that nobody else
as precisely perfected the formula for a successful romantic novel.
Of course, I'm talking about the indomitable Barbara Cartland.
# I'll take romance
# While my heart is young and eager to fly
# I'll give my heart a try
# I'll take romance. #
Love is this thing that happens to everybody at one time in their life.
I write about the moment when everybody has stars in their eyes.
She dictated book after book to an army of secretaries...
"Am I interrupting?" he said.
A little hesitating voice replied, "No, I'm alone."
"Why are you not at the dance?" he asked.
"I had no partner," she answered.
..and created a brand that reflected the morals of an earlier age.
Her characters inhabit a world
that pre-dates the sexual excesses of the Second World War.
It's inhabited by wenches and rakes,
by impetuous duchesses and by dastardly dukes,
and there's the occasional guest appearance by the Prince of Wales.
The historical setting wasn't just a style decision.
Barbara Cartland really wanted to turn back the clock.
Born at the start of the 20th century,
she'd personally experienced much of its social upheaval.
She saw her mother widowed and lost two brothers as a result of war.
And her first marriage ended in divorce,
attracting lurid newspaper articles
because to its charges and counter-charges of infidelity.
Despite all this, she retained her belief in romance,
although she found it increasingly lacking in the modern world.
Society had moved on and she felt it had gone too far.
There was less and less restraint.
The sexual freedom glimpsed during the war
had now fully exploded into the mainstream.
Explicit sex now seemed to be everywhere,
much to Barbara Cartland's distress.
We don't have to have all this terrible promiscuousness.
I'm so sick of naked bodies and hairy chests rolling about on beds.
I mean, it really does... I think it's so revolting and so unromantic.
If you have a lovely dream about yourself, you may be half-naked.
The man is always in full regimentals with his spurs, you know.
Looking glorious and romantic and exciting!
Why we should have to have the men naked,
who does it attract? Not women.
Barbara Cartland was almost evangelical in her mission
to take the actual sex out of romance.
She always left the couple at the bedroom door
on their wedding night.
But the hero and heroine were allowed a first kiss
and that could be pretty special.
"She felt a sudden flame shoot through her body.
"She felt her lips respond to his
"and knew that this was a love which would never alter or grow less.
"She felt him draw her closer still until they were one, indivisible -
"one heart, one soul, one love for all eternity."
Goodness, if that's just the first kiss,
imagine what was going on behind that bedroom door.
Passionate stuff! No wonder she had such devoted readers!
In the 1970s, Barbara Cartland and her fans
were also able to get their fix of romance elsewhere,
as television adaptations of classic love stories
burst onto our screens.
The most popular of them featured the work
of that real queen of British romance, Jane Austen.
The authors of romantic fiction had originally used
their writing to examine the reality of life in their own time.
But now they were providing escapism for people who felt that romance
was missing from modern life.
It's a love affair that's lasted.
When it comes to romance, we seem to prefer our heroes and heroines
in crinolines and breeches,
and I'm no exception.
When I was a teenager in the 1980s, there was one film
that I watched again and again.
It was the Merchant Ivory adaptation of A Room with a View.
I loved it, partly because the heroine was called Lucy
and had great hair, but mainly because of one particular scene.
The pivotal point in the poppy field.
The beautiful setting
and the surging Puccini give you a great big gush of emotion.
When George kisses Lucy so masterfully,
you know at once that they are soulmates.
Passion will eventually conquer all.
As a schoolgirl living in Nottingham,
this was the most romantic thing that I could imagine.
For one moment,
the characters break through the rigid rules that govern society
at the turn of the 20th century.
There are no interfering chaperones,
there's no consciousness of class.
These are barriers to love that my generation has never had to face,
but they're the classic ingredients of romantic period drama,
and we love it!
But there was one barrier that did remain intact
throughout the 20th century.
It was the focus of the novel that the producer/director team
Merchant Ivory chose as their follow up to A Room with a View.
It was another adaptation of an EM Forster novel.
Maurice is radically different from A Room with a View.
It's still a passionate romance, but this time it's between men.
Without a doubt, this was EM Forster's most intensely personal work.
It's a homosexual coming-of-age novel,
and just like Lady Chatterley,
the protagonist's in love with a working man.
"He loved men and had always loved them.
"He longed to mingle his being with theirs."
The novel was so controversial that it was only published in 1971,
nearly 60 years after it was written.
Like Maurice, the main character, Forster was gay,
and he deliberately suppressed his own book during his lifetime.
He knew that while homosexuality remained illegal,
a novel with a happy ending for two men in love
would not be tolerated.
At one point, Maurice expresses his loneliness,
doubting that he will ever find lasting love.
"I suppose such a thing," he says,
"can't really happen outside sleep."
At the end, Forster's hero does get it together with Scudder,
the gamekeeper, his soulmate,
but even so, it's a happy ending tinged with sadness.
The couple will be forced to live apart from society.
A self-imposed exile, which means they have given up everything for love.
Maurice and Scudder may have been united in love,
but unlike couples in traditional romantic fiction,
they were denied the happy ending of a wedding.
Even as the restrictions fell away during the 20th century,
marriage between two men was as impossible in the '80s,
when the film came out, as it had been when the book was written
in Edwardian Britain.
The gay rights movement had been active since the 1960s,
and in the 21st century, it focused on this goal of equal marriage.
When it was finally made legal in the UK,
it was with the sense that everybody has the right to choose a life-partner.
A human-rights based approach to love
is an awfully long way from where we started,
when romance seemed mainly to be about property interests.
It would have been hard for EM Forster to imagine it,
but 100 years after he wrote his novel,
his heroes would no longer be social outcasts.
They too could settle down and get married.
For me, this change has happened
because of the overwhelming importance we now place on romantic love.
That idea that you should share your life with a special someone
is essential to our notions of self-fulfilment.
Over three centuries, romance has taken us
from being a nation where courtship was rigidly controlled...
..to a country where everybody has the right to choose a soulmate,
no matter who they are.
Isn't it nice that the story of British romance
really does have a happy ending?
# We got love power
# It's the greatest power of them all
# We got love power
# And together we can't fall
# Sometimes we're up
# Sometimes we're down
# But our feet are always on the ground
# We always laugh
# Don't have to cry
# And this is the reason why. #