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Lynda Nead, "British Blonde: Women, Desire and the Image in Post-War Britain" (Yale UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
Hi, everyone. I want to tell you all about another podcast I think you'll enjoy. College Matters from the Chronicle. College Matters is a weekly show from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it's a great resource for news and analysis about colleges and universities. You'll hear sharp discussions with Chronicle journalists offering fresh perspectives on the latest salvos from the Trump administration and keen insights about how faculty and students are adapting to technological changes. College Matters also features incisive interviews with newsmakers, including recent conversations with Chris Eisgruber, Princeton University's president, and Rick Singer, who is best known as the mastermind of the Varsity Blues admissions scandal. Check out College Matters wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:50]
B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Linda Nead about her book titled British Women Desire and the Image in Post War Britain, published by Yale University Press in 2025. Now, this is a really interesting book because it takes us into these crucial decades in the UK, immediately after World War II, through sort of types of images that maybe we more associate with the US at this point. Right? The Marilyn Monroe blonde, the bombshell. And of course that is a big thing in US cult in those decades. But as this book helps us understand, it's a big deal in the UK too. But not because everyone in the UK is like super obsessed with Marilyn Monroe. There's very British blondes that are a huge part of pop culture, defined pretty broadly, as we're going to be talking about. So a very interesting way to get into this period and kind of what was going on in the media in kind of culture more widely.
- [01:55]
C
So.
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B
So lots to discuss. Lyn, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Tell us about it.
- [02:00]
C
Thank you very much for inviting me.
- [02:02]
B
Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
- [02:08]
C
Yeah. I'm a professor of history of art. I'm an art historian. I teach at the Courtauld, although I spent a lot of my career at Birkbeck, so still in the University of London. But very recently I moved to the Courtauld Institute of Art. My general interest is in gender, sexuality and kind of broadly cultural history orbit and more specifically the history of visual culture. And if I can sort of specify a little bit, I sort of started off as a Victorianist. Very much my work was associated with the 19th century, with representations of female sexuality in Victorian art. The Fallen Woman and then a book on the city, the Victorian City, Victorian London. And it's very particular form of modernization and modern life. And I find that I want to move on in terms of the projects that I do. I always bring certain issues with me. So I am a very interdisciplinary scholar. I think if you're a Victorianist, you have to be. So I am as interested in literature, parliamentary reports, religious tracts, medical texts as I am the visual culture of a period, although I tend to start off with an image rather than a text. And I also work across visual media. So I think anyone who is not in my discipline might assume that I work on painting and sculpture. But actually, as you sort of suggested in your introduction, I look at a lot of popular culture and mass produced culture as well. So I look at painting, but alongside photography, advertising, posters and, you know, even in my most recent book, British Blonde, Seaside Postcards. So I would refer to that as intermediality alongside a kind of interdisciplinary approach. But having spent a number of years working on the 19th century, I found I was pushing my period more and more towards the 20th century. And I wrote a book called Victorian, Sorry, the Haunted Gallery, which was about painting, photography and film around 1900. And I think somewhere in my life, I am a film historian, monkey. I am very deeply drawn to film culture. And this new project is also as embedded in the history of film as it is in the history of art. And so eventually I got into the middle of the 20th century and wrote a book more recently called Tiger in the Smoke, which is about art and culture in post war Britain and looks a lot about black and white grayscale imagery alongside the introduction of color and what color meant in the post war years. And I really loved working on that book on Britain in the post war years. But strangely for me, with my interests in gender, I felt that I hadn't explored gender fully enough. For me, in Tiger in the Smoke, there was one final chapter, but it just felt that I hadn't gone deeply enough into that. And I was left with this range of characters, actors in the post war period. There was the spiv, who I really wanted to work on, there was the slightly deranged ex RAF officer, and there was the blonde. And I thought, I wonder if I could do something with all three of those, or whether they're different projects or even articles. And I started off with the blonde. And it immediately became clear to me when I started my research that Blonde was a cipher for many different questions and issues that were central to post war British society. And culture. And so it became a book of its own. And the Spiv and the ex RAF officer are going to be perhaps other projects one day.
- [07:34]
B
Yeah, who knows, maybe that will continue. But thank you for that introduction to the book and especially the kind of multiple disciplines that you're drawing from in putting all this together. I definitely think that's worth flagging early on in our conversation. And of course, before we get into kind of some of the specific examples and investigations you undertake in the book, staying on the kind of more foundational sorts of topics, can we discuss in more detail how, when and why we end up with the blonde becoming British?
- [08:05]
C
Yeah, yeah, of course. Now, I guess the first thing to say that this is not a long history of the blonde. I mean, it doesn't go from the Greeks and Romans, you know, through to the Renaissance and up to the 20th century. My focus is absolutely on the post war years in Britain because that context gives everything a particular twist and almost a specific kind of appearance. And that's what interested me. My original question was, what was the impact of Hollywood and the Hollywood Blonde? You know, from Mae west through to Marilyn Monroe, who was hugely influential in Britain. I mean, people did know her films were fascinated by her. She was in the newspapers and all the fanzines. But my interest was in what happened when women in Britain took up that look, when the films, the advertising, the goods from America hit Britain and British women after the war. And there was an image that I remember looking at, one of the first images that I looked at for the book, which was a picture of Diana Dawes. Now, people of my age will know who she is. Some younger people will also know that name, but there are many who are not familiar anymore with Diana Dawes. And that's a real shame. But she is an actor. She is primarily a film actor, but also a personality. And before her death in the 70s and early 80s, she was also a television personality. But her really kind of peak moment was the mid-50s, so around 55, 56. And her look was a kind of appropriation, a British appropriation of Marilyn Monroe's peroxide blonde, bombshell look. But the picture that really fascinated me was a photograph of her on the COVID of picture post in 1956. And she's standing there with gorgeous blonde hair, styled very much as Marilyn Monroe styled her hair, red lips. She's wearing slacks, a very fitted jumper. So these, you know, bullet point breasts are very obvious, wearing a lot of jewelry. And she is staring right out at the reader or viewer. But the headline behind her is the Suez Crisis. And that was really what interested me because I was thinking, first of all, this woman doesn't look like Marilyn Monroe. There's something that looks British about her. And secondly, what is the relationship between Diana Dawes, that body, that bombshell body, and the Suez crisis? And immediately you've got that kind of military warfare connection between bombshells, bullet breasts and the Suez crisis. And so, in a sense, that was my original research question. What is the relationship between this woman's body and the Suez crisis? What is it that turns this prototype of blonde, glamorous femininity, Marilyn Monroe, into something that becomes a symbol for Britain in the 1950s and a kind of political and military crisis? So I think that's my fascination. It's not with a long history because, of course, there were blondes in Britain before this, but it takes on a particular social and cultural and political significance immediately after the Second World War.
- [12:52]
B
That's a really key moment because of all those things coming together. Right, as you've outlined there. And of course, there's a number of reasons for that. But I wonder if we can talk about the role of technology in the popularity of lawns in this moment.
- [13:06]
C
I mean, I think because I work across visual media, I'm interested in new technologies as they emerge and draw on earlier technologies, but create new kinds of visual pleasures and visual images. And the new technologies of the late 1940s and early 1950s were an aspect. They were part of the way that images of blondes were consumed in this period. So I argue in the book that this female body, you know, and it's familiar to all of us, it's excessive, it's very curvaceous. There are specially designed bras which make the. The breasts end in these extremely pointed forms. So it's curvaceous, it's excessive, almost demanded a new kind of technology, a new kind of film screen, in order to be kind of given its full representation. It's exactly in these years that you see the emergence of CinemaScope, Cinerama, Technicolor, and most of all, in my view of 3D, it's really, you know, around 52 to 55 that you get the peak of people wearing those, you know, sort of glasses in the cinema. Every member of the audience wearing their 3D specs so that they can watch 3D films. And one of the kind of main subjects for 3D is women and women's bodies. It's not the exclusive subject matters, but the makers of 3D films absolutely acknowledge that sex sells well in 3D, to put it, you know, very baldly. And 3D is used very effectively to express the proportions of this new bombshell body and the way it does that. So there are different sort of special effects of 3D, but the most significant effect in terms of these projected bodies is called ne negative parallax. And this is an effect in which images project into the auditorium. They seem to appear between the viewer and the screen. So if any of us have seen 3D, it's that amazing effect when you kind of go, whoa. Because something has kind of, you know, projected out of the screen and seems to invade our space. And so a lot of the discussions of 3D and of the visual imagery of 3D is of these bombshell women sort of stepping out of the screen and sort of sitting in the laps, you know, in a kind of caricatured way of male members of the audience, so gorgeous women stepping out of the screen and bigger sort of their giantesses. And there seems to me to be a real synergy between the bombshell bodies of Jane Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe and Diana Dawes and these new cinema technologies.
- [17:13]
A
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- [17:35]
B
that's such a fascinating kind of things to combine that as soon as you say it, it's like, oh, course it would have that sort of impact, right? Like, that's such a visual image that I think we even still have, but we don't necessarily think about kind of all of these implications of it in the ways that you've just outlined for us. So definitely a really interesting way to think about the intersections of blonde and women and technology at this point.
- [18:01]
C
I, I, it was something that I really wanted to do as soon as ever I, I began to think about, you know, where these stars and where glamour was being disseminated. Then I did want to think about the cinema. And for example, Diana Dawes did a 3D booklet in which she was not totally unclothed but was semi naked with bits of drapery or with sort of corsetry on. And that was sold and very widely sort of disseminated in Britain and in fact was prosecuted unsuccessfully, but was prosecuted for obscenity, which is really interesting to think about as well, the relationship between blonde glamour and the obscene. But that's probably a different question.
- [19:04]
B
Well, but I think that is really interesting because that also speaks to kind of not just the impact of the people looking at the blondes, but the people who are blonde themselves. Right. And kind of who gets to do this and who, when is it allowed and when isn't it? So can we discuss maybe the ways in which going blonde was seen as, or was actually a way to achieve social mobility in this context of post war Britain?
- [19:30]
C
I think it's really interesting during the research, I mean, yeah, I did my primary research and secondary research, but I found myself trying to imagine historical situations as well and what women may have felt like sort of, you know, in the post war years, having experienced the war as young women and with close relationships or relationships of different kinds to their mothers, what did they want? You know, that perennial question, what did women want? But after the war, and a number of the women that I looked at came from different kinds of working class backgrounds. Very few of the women came from what we might call middling classes or middle class backgrounds, but they were from either respectable working class families like Barbara Windsor, or less respectable working class families, downwardly mobile families such as Ruth Ellis. And in almost every case, their mothers were personally ambitious or ambitious for their daughters. So their daughters, you know, the women I'm concerned with, the post war blondes, are aware that their mothers like to dress well. They are frustrated with their husbands very often, you know, those husbands who may have been in the war and returned from the war or for whatever reason, not fought during the war, but there's a kind of dissatisfaction. And almost as I read the sort of memoirs from this period, I felt there was an ache in these women to do better for themselves, to improve themselves. Now, without education, which is what I was given by my mother, they aren't necessarily women who are educated beyond 13 or 14. How do you improve yourself? How do you realize those social aspirations when you don't have the education to do it? And, you know, work opportunities are still quite restricted compared to men's. Well, blond glamour gives you one pathway. Dressing beautifully and getting into that glamorous, but I would argue very dangerous world of nightclubs, beauty contests, acting, camera clubs. It's one way that you can maybe improve yourself and give yourself a kind of successful, glamorous image. It is tricky. And one other way to sort of camouflage your class origins, your working class origins, is with elocution lessons, speech lessons, and actually, I think, although I'm Younger than the women I'm writing about. I think I inherited the legacy of a lot of their aspirations. So that my mother came from a working class background in London and is slightly cockney and she really, really didn't want me to have a cockney accent. So I had elocution license so that I would speak with a received pronunciation, sort of non specific southern BBC kind of accent. So I really identified with figures like Diana Dawes wanting to get rid of her Swindon accent or, or Ruth Ellis trying to get rid of her regional accent and then trying to pull that masquerade off. You know, it is a set of masquerades which blond hair is part of it. You dress beautifully, you think about your manners and mannerisms and you also ensure that you speak properly. Now it's a really fraught situation because there are so many ways that you can give yourself away that you just make a little mistake. And if you're mixing in a group that include people above you in British class terms, then you can make a fatal mistake. And class is what crucially makes blonde British. You know, it's different from Marilyn Monroe and her social circumstances. Britain, British class, British racial attitudes. That's what begins to really make specific this idea of British blonde.
- [25:09]
B
Yeah, that is quite a distinction from how it's perceived in the us so definitely important to talk about here. And as you mentioned, right. In conjunction with all the other sort of visible class markers that would be very apparent to sort of anyone walking around in the uk. What we've been talking about so far though is a lot of kind of blonde as glamour. Right. Blonde as sort of like a good thing to have. And of course that is a big part of it. But there's also blonde noir that you discuss. So what is this and why was it so prevalent around these same sort of post war decades?
- [25:44]
C
So I, I guess the first thing for me to say is that blonde noir is a kind of, is my coinage. So it doesn't refer to a category that existed before my book. But it was a theme of one of my chapters and in a way it was, it included the material that I was most moved by. And I think I've already suggested this, but I really was affected by some material that I looked at. Some of the stories that I was going to tell were deeply moving and I had a kind of subjected as well as a kind of historian's response to it. So the 1950s female aspiration, blonde glamour, took me really quickly into a very British world of sleaze, sexual exploitation, a Landscape of urban nightlife and innuendo, British humor, all of this sort of. This kind of gray world between something that is utterly illegal and criminal, although some of it was, and a kind of superficially respectable world. And this kind of mid world was immediately the kind of landscape and space that British blonde took me into. Now, the term blonde noir is obviously referring to a cinematic term which is film noir, which is a group of films produced in America in the 1940s, you know, throughout the 1940s into the 1950s. Very kind of high contrast, black and white, a world of shadows, moral compromise. And of course, I use blond noir to refer to this kind of shadow world, the dark side of post war society. And one of the key characters in film noir is the femme fatale, the kind of morally compromised, weary, fatal woman who may lead to the downfall of the male protagonist, but who is also a kind of victim in some way. And very often the femme fatale in terms of her visual appearance. Very often she'll be a blonde, but also with a kind of faded glamour. This isn't the glamour of Marilyn Monroe and of those musical comedies. It's something darker than that. And it seemed to me to absolutely characterize British blonde. And so I wanted to talk about blonde noir. And I did this through the figure of Ruth Ellis, who was the last woman to be hanged in Britain for the crime of shooting and killing her lover, David Blakely.
- [29:46]
B
Yeah, that's definitely a really key part of this. I mean, she was like so incredibly iconic and famous in a way that seems kind of from a distance, like a bit odd, like, why would someone like that be famous? But she really was. And a big part of this idea of kind of, what does blonde look like? And kind of, what are blonde women? You know, what is a feminine blonde woman? What is that in this period? And of course, that continues, you know, it's not just something. In the 1950s, you discussed this moving on into the 60s, for example, through Barbara Windsor. Do we want to talk about that progression?
- [30:21]
C
Yeah, I mean, I suppose periodization, when you sort of, when you start a historical project and when you finish it and why are really interesting questions. And my assumption, I hadn't worked on the 1960s before, and therefore, although I had worked on the 40s and 50s, so the 60s was taking me into a new chronological period. And of course, you know, what do you think of when you think of the 60s in Britain in terms of culture and Americanization and new forms of visual culture? You would think of the swinging 60s and of swinging London and of new styles of youthful femininity and perhaps a style of femininity that is more liberated than the styles of the 40s and 50s. And actually I found the 60s in a way more troubling than the 40s and 50s. And Barbara Windsor is a really interesting character because she sort of sits between the styles, the Diana Doors styles of the 40s and 50s and then the kind of Carol White, Brigitte Bardot styles of the mid to late 60s which we might talk about later. So she's almost a residual form of British blonde and an emergent form of British blonde. She's kind of cute and clever. I mean, she's also a kind of national icon. I mean, probably as many people know her now as the publand lady in eastenders as they do from the Carry on films. Although those Carry on films which were made from the late 50s through the 60s into the 70s, right through the 70s are. I mean, they're almost on streaming platforms and on free to view channels every day. You can see those films still almost whenever you want to and even when you don't want to. But you know, there are some pictures of her. One that I was particularly drawn to, a photograph of her from 1964 that's in the National Portrait Gallery and she's got that beehive blonde hairstyle. So on top of her head, it's almost like a kind of rang of blonde hair is this highly back combed tower of blonde hair. She's seated in a raffia chair with a kind of huge oval back to it and she's in, you know, baby dolls basically. She's in, you know, very short lace negligee and baby doll outfit and then with sort of silk mules with a, with a furry pom pom. So everything about her is sort of soft and almost childlike, except she's got a very mature body and the way that she uses that body is really interesting as well. She's not a victim all the time. I mean, at times she is the victim of sexual violence, but she also, as a professional is very professional and she does know how to use her body and kind of exploit its qualities and its beauty. So she's a really interesting character. She's, you know, the object of, or rather she's. Yeah, she's the object of jokes and humor. You know, the Carry on films are all about this kind of end of the pier seaside kind of innuendo in which the female body is the constant butt of the joke. And you know, Sid James and the other male Characters in the films are the kind of voyeurs who make and enjoy the joke. But as I say, I think the degree to which she's in control of that humor, you know, in films like Carry on camping from the 1960s, is something that I haven't yet fully decided. I don't want to see her as a victim. I want to see her as an agent and as someone who is in control of her body. But it is within certain prescribed limits of what patriarchy and sexism is in Britain in the 1960s.
- [36:11]
A
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- [36:39]
C
Experian.
- [36:41]
B
Yeah, Questions of agency are always really tricky to determine, and especially in that sort of context. Do we want to go further into the 60s or 70s?
- [36:51]
C
I mean, we could take your point. I mean, depending on what you want to do. We could take the point about the end of the.
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B
Yeah, let's go there.
- [37:00]
C
Why it goes there is. Is that okay, Please. Or we could talk about Pauline Bosie, who we haven't mentioned yet.
- [37:08]
B
I mean, we do. Let's. Let's mention her a little bit.
- [37:11]
C
Okay, sure. Yeah. I was very keen also to include an artist in this lineup of actors and notorious murderesses and so on. I wanted to think about art in the 1960s, and specifically pop art and the work of a British pop artist called Pauline Bote. And she's a fascinating figure. She absolutely was part of the British pop scene along with people like Peter Blake. And she really achieved visibility and fame after Ken Russell's documentary Pop Goes the Easel, in which she's shown. She's one of the chief characters in this documentary, along with three young men. She is the only woman, and she is mesmerizing. She was a very beautiful, accomplished, gifted artist, actor, broadcaster, writer. I mean, a real polymath. And sadly, what is often most known about her is that she died tragically of cancer in her early 30s. You know, so it was just a terrible story. She was expecting a baby and it was discovered that she had cancer, and she declined any treatment. For it because of her fear that it would harm the unborn baby. So. But again, I didn't want tragedy to define her story when her paintings are so exuberant and explore female sexuality and female desire, which, you know, is very unusual for British art in this period. So, you know, she looks at nail pinups, she critiques the use of the body in female pinups, and she just, you know, delights in sex and sexuality, you know, active female sexual desire. Now, unfortunately, I think this takes you to a kind of really, you know, sort of close association with the idea that what female liberation is, is female sexuality and beauty and youthfulness. And I did feel that the women, such as Pauline Bote and other young women who were involved in this pop, swinging new cultural scene were very much enthralled to an ideal of youthful beauty. Pauline Botey was a blonde and very beautiful, as were others in that circle. But that can become a kind of slavery. And, you know, a lot of the women, again in interviews and memoirs, express a real fear of getting old. Mary Quant does this too. You know, for her, you know, that the style of feminine identity she's interested in is almost just out of childhood. You know, an adolescent prepubescent. Think of Twiggy. You know, those bodies and age and old age is that fulsome, curvaceous body of the 50s that becomes almost something fearful for these 60s women. But, you know, the swinging 60s is. Is a myth. It happened for an elite group in the metropolis. And for most women, you know, the 60s weren't that different from the 50s. There were different sets of politics. But the idea of, you know, liberation was very uneven throughout Britain and its different sort of regions and sort of experiences and social groups in the 60s.
- [42:19]
B
Yeah, that's a really interesting aspect of kind of adding the age piece into it and kind of what that means for the future and sort of how sustainable I suppose, this idea of British blonde is, or is it kind of only ever a moment really comes through in that section of the book? Why is it then that this is kind of where you draw the book to a close? How did you make that decision?
- [42:43]
C
Well, it does and it doesn't, actually. So the 60s, the swinging 60s chapter. 60s blonde is actually the title of the. This final chapter uses Pauline Botti as its kind of jumping off point, but looks at other 60s blondes, such as Julie Christie, Carol White, you know, those actresses from blonde actresses from the 60s. And it actually finishes with this point about how partial the swinging element of the 60s was in Britain. And to make that point, I referred to Myra Hindley. And I sort of wanted to make the connection between the sort of myth of the swinging blonde and the swinging 60s in London and. And the Yorkshire moors of Myra Hindley. And I used the Enoch Powell's speech about rivers of blood as a way of imagining this flow of something very dark, of perhaps the darkest of all, blonde noir, Myra Hindley, and the connectedness. Connectedness to this kind of myth of Sweeney London. But I thought that was such a depressing place to end the book. And I knew from my own history as being, you know, a young teenager in the 70s, that that wasn't my experience of being a very young woman in that period. And that the 70s was about the women's liberation movement. And of the first moment that politics, women's politics, feminist politics, addresses the politics of the image, because that's what my whole book was about. You know, what is the politics of these images of, you know, blonde, glamorous femininity? You know, what's going on here? How do we understand it? And that was a question posed by the women's liberation movement in the late 60s and early 70s. And so it was with the disruption of the Miss World contest just at the turn in 1771, and with the statements and political activism of the women's liberation movement that I finish the book with that epilogue. And that's really important to me because it's saying, you know, my approach, my methodology comes out of the women's liberation movement and those real pioneers who said, you know, let's think about how women are being commodified. Let's think about how women are being oppressed by notions such as glamour and in advertising and so on. So I hope that actually at the end, there's a real upbeat epilogue. And that's the point at which I wanted to end the book.
- [46:16]
B
Yeah, definitely don't want to end with Myra Hindley. That would not be.
- [46:18]
C
Yeah, you know, it wasn't the right point to make. That wasn't where the narrative was taking me.
- [46:26]
B
Yeah, no, that definitely makes sense.
- [46:28]
C
When.
- [46:28]
B
One thing that has been really interesting to hear you talk about through this interview is the kind of way in which you are making these sorts of decisions and coming to these insights from very much a sort of historical, academic perspective, but also, as you've mentioned, from a personal one as well. So I was wondering if there's any last piece of this that we wanted to throw into our discussion of something that maybe surprised you or caused you to think about differently. As a result of going through this process of political putting together the book,
- [46:55]
C
I suppose, the images that. And, you know, although I've said I'm a cultural historian, the visual image is primary to me. And there were a small group of images that I came across when I was working on Ruth Ellis and. And her archive is basically a photographic archive from the news agencies. And I went to do some work in Getty Images with their really helpful curators and archivists. And they showed me a group of images that they had bought, their kind of last major new purchase, although it wasn't that recent. And it's a group of images dated around 1954 of Ruth Ellis attributed to someone called Captain Ritchie, who we couldn't find out who he was. And they're sort of very soft porn, glamour, amateur photographs of Ruth and she. Her career kind of, you know, tracks across that whole sleazy world of nightclubs, amateur camera clubs, modeling in inverted commas. And she knows how to do those images. She's in this small, small group of images. It looks like she. They're taken in her flat, which was above the nightclub that she was working in in 1954. And she's in sort of stockings and suspenders, she's, you know, reclining in very stereotypical soft porn. These are not explicit images where I could imagine she met some guy, Captain Ritchie, maybe his X RAF in the nightclub. And he said, I'd love to take some photographs of you. And she said, well, sure, you know, she's done that before and, you know, she perhaps made an appointment to do this in her flat above the nightclub. But there's one image that shows her with just this faux fur sort of bed cover. So she's, you know, fully covered up, but you can see her shoulders and arms and she's sort of, you know, it's quite a close up, not very skillful image. And on her arm there's a fading bruise. Now, when she murdered her lover, David Blakeley, there wasn't the defense of a crime of passion or of, you know, loss of control because of, you know, really brutal abuse, both psychological abuse and physical abuse. It's quite clear from legal records and from many other sources about Ruth Ellis in this period that he was physically violent. And her sister says that she would always see her sister Ruth with bruises on her and sometimes she'd use makeup to cover them up. And that photograph was like a sort of shock, you know, Roland Barthes refers to it as the punctum, as something in a photograph that is almost like A punch when you see it. And when I saw that bruise from this group of photographs in Getty Images, it was like, this is the truth of, you know, Ruth Ellis's life. And she, she was hanged in Holloway Prison, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. And yet she had no real legal defense to sort of put that abuse and provocation as a form of defense. You know, she just wasn't able to do that. And, you know, her lover was clearly a victim, but she was equally a victim, in my view.
- [51:42]
B
Yeah, I think in many ways that exemplifies kind of the ways in which some of what you've been talking about in terms of how women are perceived and the importance of things like accent and hair colour and clothing class markers are still a really big deal. But then in other ways, our perceptions have also really changed since the time of Ruth Ellis. And so looking at these sorts of things, kinds of, I think, puts that sort of societal change very much in perspective, which is, of course, really interesting. So thank you for telling us about that kind of process in your own thinking and of course, giving us insight into the many other topics that the book covers. Is there anything you might be working on now that you want to give us a sneak preview of before I let you go?
- [52:23]
C
Well, I've just finished a little book which was great fun to work on some. Something shorter and very focused. It's for the British Film Institute film Classic series, and it's about a British sort of noir film made in 1947 and set in the East End called It Always Rains on Sunday. And I've managed to write about spivs and blondes and brunettes and class and bring it all together into this kind of, you know, the petticoat market and the East End of London in the years immediately after the end of the Second World War. And that's been really good fun. I don't think I can leave the 20th century in Britain alone yet. There's. There's more to be done.
- [53:22]
B
Well, that definitely does sound fun and interesting that it does link to many of the things that brought you into the interest of this book, too. So lovely to hear you're continuing to work on that. And of course, for listeners who want more, they can read the book we've been talking about titled British Blonde Women Desire and the Image in Post War Britain, published by Yale University Press in 2025. Lyn, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [53:44]
C
Thank you, Miranda. It's been really good fun, Sa.