Mary Whitehouse - Early Life

Early Life

Born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England, Whitehouse won a scholarship to Chester City Grammar School. On leaving, she did two years of unpaid apprentice teaching at St John's School, Chester, and attended the Cheshire County Teacher Training College in Crewe, specialising in secondary school art teaching. Hutcheson was involved with the Student Christian Movement before qualifying in 1932. She became an art teacher at Lichfield Road School, Wednesfield, Staffordshire, where she stayed for eight years.

She joined the Oxford Group, later known as Moral Re-Armament (MRA), in the 1930s. At MRA meetings, she met Ernest Raymond Whitehouse; they married in 1940 and remained married until Ernest's death, in Colchester, aged 87, in 2000. The couple had five sons, two of whom (twins) died in infancy.

After raising her sons in their earliest years, Whitehouse returned to teaching in 1953.That same year, she broadcast on Woman's Hour on the day before the coronation of Elizabeth II "as a loyal housewife and subject" and wrote an extensive article on homosexuality for The Sunday Times. This concerned, according to Ben Thompson how a mother might "best avoid inadvertently pressuring her sons towards that particular orientation", and gained enough attention to be republished as a pamphlet.

She taught art at Madeley Modern School in Shropshire from 1960, in due course taking up responsibility for sex education. Shocked at the response of her pupils to moral issues, she became concerned about what she and many others perceived as declining moral standards in the British media, especially in the BBC.