Ben Thompson - Ban This Filth!: Letters from the Mary Whitehouse Archive

Come with me to the University of Essex; round the endless ring road encircling Colchester (Britains oldest town). Turn a sharp right along the lane into the green fields of the campus, past the sign that says access only beyond this point, and into the kind of underground parking area that seems specifically designed to host a dourly climactic shoot-out in The Sweeney although the speed bumps are set just too high for a Ford Granada to get over in safety.

The university building is celebrated for being made from six different kinds of concrete, each of which seems to be engaged in a race to prove it can decay the fastest. Slowly keep on going up the gentle incline into the very furthest reaches of this unabashedly municipal space, and park in the final loading bay on the left. Here the obliging caretaker will kindly let you into the crisply temperature-controlled environment of the Albert Sloman Library Special Collections rooms.

As you turn the lights on and walk through the closely packed book-stacks full of unread volumes of German sociology and back copies of the West Mercia Gazette, the atmosphere is three parts Wernham Hogg (The Offices fictional antiseptic workspace ) to two parts Borgesian labyrinth. When you reach the final compartment at the far end, known as The Cage, theres an incongruous heavy-duty metal door to be opened. Beyond its thick steel grille lies the collection of three hundred large box files which constitute the Mary Whitehouse archive.

Preserved in this sarcophagus of respectable fears are nearly all of the thousands of letters this redoubtable campaigner sent, and most of the many thousands more she subsequently received (some of impassioned support, but others of vehement opposition). The records of Whitehouses National Viewers and Listeners Association include endless newspaper clippings, handbills, mail-outs, legal documents, monitoring forms, draft speeches and completed book manuscripts, all tied up in carefully knotted pink ribbons.

Every now and then, as you open up these Pandoras box files, an artefact of a rather less respectable nature will fall out; perhaps a set of saucy miniature playing cards, or a seven-inch vinyl copy of Alice Coopers Schools Out. There are also an inexplicably large number of photostatted printouts of the lyrics to the Anti-Nowhere Leagues So What, and a hardcore porn handbill that was once posted through the letter box of an eighty-six-year-old woman.

Bridging the gap between these two warring sides filth and anti-filth are the poignant physical traces of the domestic environment Marys letters were written in. One half-finished missive is scrawled on the back of a receipt for the anti-anxiety medication Declinax, another decorates an oatmeal pancake recipe from a fellow churchgoer who had recently recovered from cancer. Then theres the yellowing invitation long ago pressed into service in defence of the nations morals to a Barbecue Cheese and Wine Party: Swimming, dancing, sideshows bar licence applied for, proceeds to Claverly Village Hall rebuilding fund.

Did they barbecue the cheese and the wine, I wonder? Theres no way of knowing, but hopefully this book will be the next-best thing to actually going to that party. And whether the Britain that swims into bleary focus through the Mary Whitehouse archives evangelical Hipstamatic App looks more or less appealing than the one we currently inhabit will be very much in the eye of the beholder.

Ben Thompson, September 2012

Women of Britain manifesto frontispiece