“Like Cock Pheasants in the Mating Season”: Englishmen in Scope Magazine, 26 August 1966

Abstract

Since its invention, the camera has been complicit in gendering the western interest in “appearance”. This article examines the coupling of “looking” and masculinity by filling in certain gaps in South Africa’s media history. Scope began in the mid-sixties as a popular newsy or general interest magazine, before evolving into a Playboy-esque men’s magazine in the seventies. I analyze one issue of Scope from 1966, its first year of existence, as a synchronic snapshot of the popular articulation of masculine identity politics at this particular moment of South African history. I argue that at its inception, it was already focused on a male market and on the dual project of visualizing white masculinity and “whitening” the gaze of its readers. As such, it makes sense to examine race as integral to the practices of looking encouraged by Scope but even in a period of high-apartheid, I intend to show that there is no authentic (white) vernacular culture that is untouched by the culture of others, and in this instance, the culture of the Empire.

Keywords:

• hegemony
• masculinity
• photography
• Englishness
• Scope magazine
• sixties South Africa

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the National Research Foundation.

Notes

¹ Williams, The Long Revolution.

² Ibid., viii.

³ Ibid., viii.

⁴ Anderson, Imagined Communities.

⁵ Tagg, “The Democracy of the Image,” 1988.

⁶ The popular press extended the division between racial groupings to “leisure” so that even publications that were not overtly “political” contributed to the general sense of separate interest. The most successful popular magazines, whether targeted at African or white readerships, focused their content on the lives of their readers as if contained in racial exclusivity. Lindsay Clowes, Lize Groenewald and Deborah Posel, among others, have investigated the racially distinct readerships and content of popular magazines such as Drum, Panorama and Zonk! in the fifties and sixties, as indicative of “apartheid as a consumerist project” (Posel, “Seeing Apartheid.” See also Clowes, “Are You Going” and Groenewald, “Cloudless Skies”). The Hyman brothers, who started Scope in 1966 had also founded Bona in 1956, a family-orientated magazine for African readers that is still published today. Zonk! magazine which, when it started in 1949, was the first popular publication targeted at an exclusively black audience, was incorporated into Bona in 1964 (Posel, “Seeing Apartheid” and Ntshentshe, “Cultivating a Culture of Reading,” 57).

⁷ Froneman, “The Rise and Demise of Scope,” 50.

⁸ Ibid., 55.

⁹ Founded in 1953, Playboy established a genre of publication more all encompassing of masculine interests. Founding editor, Hugh Hefner believed reconciling sexualised photographs of women with articles on American politics and exposés of a leftist sort by contributors such as Hunter S. Thompson lent an air of avant-gardism to the endeavor.

¹⁰ Playboy’s Penthouse was, for instance, the first nationally televised desegregated television program in America. It premiered in 1959, was hosted by Hefner and featured black and white guests together (see Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, 2009).

¹¹ Froneman, “The Rise and Demise of Scope.”

¹² I use the word “ordinary” to attest to the “[p]opular common sense about race in South Africa [that] had long acknowledged a close coupling of race and ‘way of life’” (Posel, “What's in a Name?,” 56). But it is also “ideological” because, in the culturalist tradition of Williams, popular culture connects the lived experience of a particular time, place and class to the cultural recording thereof by means of a selectively interpreted and reiterated tradition (Barker, Cultural Studies, 45). Thus, it is important to ask how the signifying practises in Scope might be syntagmatic of the “everyday” culture of its readers and the way this is remembered.

¹³ This issue of Scope is chosen because it is the first to overtly address masculinity as a subject of interest on the cover of the magazine, a point I return to later. Scope was published fortnightly from 29 July 1966 until Volume 6 number 16 when it changed to a weekly. By 29 August the editorial team might presumably have gained a clearer sense of the direction the magazine should take.

¹⁴ Procter, Stuart Hall, 5.

¹⁵ Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People, 497. Giliomee moots that the NP government faced security risks since the under-policed state rested on “the assumption that blacks would continue to submit passively to pervasive white domination” (ibid.). The increasing urbanization of the African population fed the National Party’s public justification that segregation was necessary in every sphere of public and private life in order to achieve what then Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd described in Senate Debates in 1948 as “the removal of friction” or the threat to security implied by integration (ibid.).

¹⁶ Froneman, “The Rise and Demise of Scope,” 54.

¹⁷ In Barker, Cultural Studies, 67.

¹⁸ Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 49.

¹⁹ The shooting of unarmed protestors at Sharpeville in 1960 by the apartheid police, ensuing strikes and unrest led the government to declare a State of Emergency and the banning of the ANC and PAC, the two strongest forces of opposition to the NP (Magubane, “Introduction,” 41–2). The early sixties also saw the NP’s concerted effort to root out all traces of “popular resistance” but in less than a decade “a small, multifaceted resistance press had reemerged with the Black Consciousness Movement” (Switzer, “Introduction: South Africa’s Alternative Press”).

²⁰ District Six, a vibrant suburb of Cape Town, was declared a whites-only area under the Group Areas Acts five months before Scope published its first issue in July 1966 and 60,000 residents were forcibly removed and relocated by 1968.

²¹ Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People, 492–3.

²² Ibid., 493.

²³ The South African edition of Tatler had a short run but is notable as a proponent of aspirational Englishness. It re-launched in 1964 when owner Desmond Niven, a descendent of Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, shifted the content from a tabloid-style society publication focused on the English uppercrust towards the more avant-garde British glossies such as Queen and Town. Sally Angwin was appointed as editor and introduced more local content to Tatler. She employed photographer David Goldblatt who covered typically South African visual contexts such as the farming communities of the Western Transvaal, a social landscape Goldblatt was eager to document as it had served as the iconic inspiration of the author Herman Charles Bosman (Dodd, David Goldblatt Timeline).

²⁴ In a text box advertising a special feature on hormone replacement therapy, a subject the editorial team clearly feel needs justifying, the reader is told that whilst this is “more a men’s magazine than a woman’s,” men should “please give this remarkable SCOPE scoop to your womenfolk to read” (29 July 1966).

²⁵ Every issue contained fiction (usually three serials), four or five reports on world events, social phenomena, significant personalities or topical places, and a number of frivolous features on classy cars, gadgetry and curious sporting trends as well as a comedic column or two.

²⁶ Carrigan, Connell, and Lee, “Towards a New Sociology of Masculinity,” 551–604. Whitehead, Men and Masculinities, 89.

²⁷ Connell, Which Way Is Up?; Masculinities; and “Masculinities and Globalization.”

²⁸ Beasley, Gender & Sexuality, 227.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ In response to socio-economic and ideological changes, predominantly occurring in the run-up to the twenty-first century, Brian McNair notes, “the range of identities compatible with being a ‘real man’ had greatly expanded.” He describes the gender ethos of this period as a generic and apathetic flippancy, that addresses masculine anxiety and backlash by means of a masculine ideal that amalgamates the “confidence and decisiveness” of traditional patriarchal masculinity with “amalgams of “feminine” emotionality and sensitivity” (McNair, Striptease Culture, 33).

³¹ My focus is the presumed “male” vantage point but it would be interesting to note differences in the gendered reading of Scope.

³² “Doomed to Live,” 4–9.

³³ Froneman, “The Rise and Demise of Scope,” 55. Rhodesia was the first colony to unilaterally break from the United Kingdom since the United States Declaration of Independence nearly two centuries before. Harold Wilson, then Britain’s Prime Minister, implemented sanctions against Rhodesia in part as a means of contesting the system of white minority rule (“1965: Rhodesia Breaks from UK.” BBC online).

³⁴ “Doomed to live,” 18–25.

³⁵ “Rhodesia: Two Men, Two Ideals,” 20.

³⁶ Ibid., 21.

³⁷ Ibid., 20–2.

³⁸ Ibid., 20.

³⁹ Ibid., 24.

⁴⁰ “Smugglers Inn: Hotspot of Girls, Sailors and Excitement,” 10–4.

⁴¹ Ibid., 14.

⁴² “Harold Wilson: Tough, Professional and Aloof,” 16–7.

⁴³ Ibid., 16.

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ Ibid.

⁴⁶ Ibid.

⁴⁷ Williams, Culture and Society, 320.

⁴⁸ Ibid.

⁴⁹ Hearn, “From Hegemonic Masculinity”; Howson, Challenging Hegemonic Masculinity; and Pollert, Gender and Class Revisited.

⁵⁰ Hearn and Morrell, “Reviewing Hegemonic Masculinities”; and Morrell, “Hegemonic Masculinities.”

⁵¹ Whitehead, Men and Masculinities, 93–4.

⁵² Ibid., 94.

⁵³ In ibid., 89.

⁵⁴ Williams, Culture and Society, 118.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 117.

⁵⁶ Arnold on Williams, The Long Revolution, viii.

⁵⁷ Somerset Maugham published Of Human Bondage in 1915, a narrative thought to be semi-autobiographical. Nichols, “Of Human Bondage,” 65.

⁵⁸ Ibid.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 66.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 68.

⁶¹ Ibid. Some years into the tale, Nichols comes across Haxton at a casino in Le Touquet and recalls the sight of him. “He was still very decorative, but his cheeks were flushed, his eyes were glazed, and his white pleated shirt—he was among the first to wear a pleated shirt with a dinner-jacket—was crumpled and covered with cigar ash.” (Ibid).

⁶² In a separate box, Beverly Nichols’ profile picture endorses his status by means of this entitlement to photographic representation.

⁶³ Ibid., 67.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 69.

⁶⁵ Ibid.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 67.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 71.

⁶⁸ Ibid., 67.

⁶⁹ Carrigan, Connell, and Lee, “Hard and Heavy,” 179.

⁷⁰ In Whitehead, Men and Masculinities, 89.

⁷¹ Crosby, “Return of the Dandy,” 35.

⁷² Crosby, “Return of the Dandy,” 34. Out of the 50 photographs of men in the August issue, there are only five in which men appear to be smiling. Dawson is one of the men who is smiling in a slightly bemused way and one cannot help but wonder if this isn’t a conscious transgression when all the other men look characteristically disinterested in being photographed. In all 26 photographs of women they are smiling or laughing.

⁷³ Ibid., 37.

⁷⁴ Ibid., 36.

⁷⁵ Ibid.

⁷⁶ Ibid., 37.

⁷⁷ Calpin, “The English Contribution,” 32.

⁷⁸ Ibid.

⁷⁹ Ibid.

⁸⁰ Ibid.

⁸¹ Ibid.

⁸² Ibid.

⁸³ Ibid.

⁸⁴ Ibid.

⁸⁵ Giliomee, The Afrikaners: Biography of a People, 355.

⁸⁶ Ibid.

⁸⁷ In Giliomee, 356. “Agterryers” referred to attendants who assisted fighters during the Boer commandoes.

⁸⁸ Posel, “What's in a Name?,” 55.