Home & Companion and Family Journal: March 21st, 1953

Home & Companion and Family Journal March 1953.

Given the choice, I would always pick books over magazines but just now and again a vintage periodical catches my attention. I could hardly fail to notice this one considering the size and colour of the headline. My first thought was I wonder who Gilbert Harding is quickly followed by, and I wonder what he has to say about Woman. The answer is nothing very good.   

He begins by saying: 

Gilbert Harding

The first thing that no man likes about a woman is what no man likes about another man – a tendency to be bossy, to have a fatal inclination to be always in the right, and a constitutional inability to apologise. On the other hand, one might say at the other end of the scale, is the goo-goo clinging type who always wants someone else to make up her mind for her; that is, if she has a mind to be made up.

Those are two extremes, and if there weren’t plenty of admirable women in the middle we should have ceased to exist long ago. But even among those who are neither too bossy nor too helpless there are faults and failings, which make their society unrewarding and their appearance unsatisfactory. Why do so many women disfigure their hands by painting their nails bright red as though they were assistants in a post-mortem room? It has always been a mystery to me why women with beautiful hands are not just content with clean nails. When the paint begins to wear off and the nails are dirty! I need say no more. 

Please don’t!  

I have never understood why it is necessary for women to paint their lips. The lipstick they apply makes the cigarette ends, which they persist in smoking, repulsive and daubs the rims of the cups out of which they drink, and the glasses, too. These nasty cosmetic habits are bad enough, but when done in public they become outrageous.

Tiring of the subject of appearance, he turns to education:

I regret and resent the presence of women in men’s Universities, particularly those of Cambridge and of Oxford. Now what made women ever want to go to either of them? The only explanation is that they know they are in the majority, and that some of them must remain “on the shelf.” Therefore, the cry is: “Catch your man young, before his defences are up.” In fact, they go to the Universities, not primarily in search of learning, but to get husbands from among the young male undergraduates. Why should they screech, and hiss round the calm courts and quads of Cambridge and Oxford making themselves look ridiculous in academic dress, which was designed by men for men. I don’t think women have any idea how silly they look in mortar boards

Having had so much to say he ends the article by lamenting his lack of a wife! 

Although it is now too late to change it, I have never been really happy about being a bachelor. But I do think that if, when I was younger, I had had the good fortune to meet an unpainted lady with clean hands who did not talk with a cigarette in her mouth (and who did not want to be a judge or a governor-general, a bishop or a doctor), things might have been different. Let it be clearly understood that no one with a mother like mine could ever be a woman hater, and after all, I am only saying what I don’t like about women. The things that I do like would call for a whole issue of the magazine itself.

Those women (and there are so many of them) who can cook, can listen, can understand and do things without being asked – and very often without being thanked – are, after all, still in the majority. So if you have been made angry by what has gone before, put yourself in this latter bracket and we can all purr together like old cats. 

According to Wikipedia Harding was notorious for his irascibility and was at one time characterised in the tabloid press as the rudest man in Britain. His fame sprang from an inability to suffer fools gladly, and many 1950s TV viewers watched What’s My Line? less for the quiz elements than for the chance of a live Harding outburst. An incident on an early broadcast started this trend when Harding became annoyed with a rather self-satisfied contestant. He broke the genteel civility of 1950s BBC Television by telling the contestant that he was getting bored with him. The tabloids lapped this up, and the show became compulsive viewing.

I’m sure you will have an opinion on Mr. Harding’s views so please go ahead and tell me what you think.  

If you are interested in vintage magazines you might like these previous posts; 

The Ladies Journal and Portfolio of Fashions December 1931

The Best of British Homemaking     

Lilliput Magazines

Lucy from Loose and Leafy left a comment with a link to a fascinating article, in case you miss it this is the link Gilbert Harding and another interesting link shared by Willie TV star famed for rudeness dies