Wicked Little Letters

Historical Lies Matter

Wicked Little Letters on Netflix, directed by Thea Sharrock, is a mildly entertaining though largely insubstantial piece of British film making. It is the kind of lightweight drama usually garnished with epithets such as ‘charming’ and ‘kooky.’ The cast is superb - Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Timothy Spall, Joanna Scanlan, Hugh Skinner - suggesting the script had the kind of appeal of other eccentric English gems. And of course, it’s based on real life events, which always ups the magnetism of an intriguing story about criminal behaviour.

It’s centred around spiteful, expletive-ridden anonymous letters sent in the 1920s to an upstanding Christian spinster living with her parents in a small English village. The immediate suspect is the louche, foul-mouthed Irish single mother next door who - gasp - has a black bidey-in boyfriend.

But how true is it really? Watching the drama unfold, I first had doubts when I saw that the heroic young woman police officer who solved the case was Asian. Were there Asian woman police officers in English villages in the 1920s? I looked it up. Surprise surprise - the first Asian woman police officer wasn’t recruited in Britain until 1971, a full half century later. Could they have cast an Asian actress to play what was originally a Black woman PO, I wondered. But no, the first Black woman police officer in the UK was not hired until 1968.

I looked up the real life story behind the film. It turns out that the WPO who cracked the case was white and completely English. Why then purposefully cast an Asian woman in the role? Of course, it’s to up the finger-wagging quotient. It isn’t scandalous enough that British women were subjected to horrific misogyny and seen as the tea-makers in most professional fields that deigned to allow them in back then. In fact, women were not routinely allowed to enter many professions in the 1920s. The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act was only passed in 1919. Prior to this, women were not allowed to practice law, for example. It is only in 1928 in United Kingdom were granted the right to vote on the same terms as men.  

Would it not have been powerful enough to convey the deep injustices towards women in that era? No, because nowadays everything has to involve race. Thus in a supposedly true story we are fed the fiction that Asian WPOs were subjected to prejudice in the 1920s because it’s not shocking enough that the victim of that prejudice was in fact the 50% of the population that constituted women.

In fact, of course, prejudice against Asian women in the 1920s *was* rife, but uncomfortably, much of it came from Asian men. There were few Asians in the UK at the time, but Asian countries lagged behind European counterparts in offering women equal rights to men. Tragically, in many countries, rights for women have actually travelled backwards since the 1920s. Look at the Albert Memorial, the subject of ululation a few weeks ago when some sensitive souls decided that the Africa sculpture depicted a woman reading from a book to a tribal man, and was therefore patronising and colonialist. Never mind that the Memorial is a historical artefact reflecting life back during Queen Victoria’s reign. In fact, the individual in power in the sculptures of each of the four continents depicted is a woman, astride a great animal. The woman depicting Asia is removing her head scarf. That couldn’t happen now in many Asian countries like Iran. And yet my grandmothers, born and brought up in Iran, didn’t wear veils, they enjoyed the right to feel the sun on their heads. They weren’t lucky enough to have the same rights as men in other areas, though. But showing this in the drama - revealing one of the few Asian families in the UK at that time with the Asian woman forced by her male relatives to stay indoors and not work outside the home would not have been of interest to the filmmakers because it couldn’t be blamed on white British men. Hence the fiction that Asian women police officers existed but were suppressed from doing their jobs properly by sexist old white men.

I was also surprised when watching the film to see that the judge in the court scenes was black. In fact, the first non-white Judge in Court wasn’t elected until 2004, a whopping 80 years after the time period in the film. But of course, why let historical accuracy take precedence over the more emollient fabrication that Black people were out there achieving in British society in the 1920s? Immigrants from the Caribbean arrived in large number in the 1950s, and it’s heartbreaking looking at photos of them finely dressed, arriving on Windrush and other ships, only to be faced by signs in B&Bs reading ‘No blacks’. They weren’t the only objects of prejudice; most of the signs also read ‘No Irish.’ For decades these good-natured people took on jobs in public services that British people didn’t want to do. But for a complex array of reasons, people from the Caribbean or Africa did not rise to the ranks of high court judges in those days. Racism, a non-level playing field, poverty, lack of access to Black people to university, an old boys’ club in the professions which made it difficult for women and Asians as well as  Black people to succeed in the top-paying professions - these were all to blame.

So what is achieved by distorting history and depicting Asian women as police officers and Caribbean or African men as judges? It is merely an emollient to try to make us believe that Britain was a colourful rainbow back then. It wasn’t, for all sorts of reasons. What is gained by pretending it was?

Another inaccuracy in the film is that the rowdy Irish woman accused of writing the letters is a single mother - her husband supposedly died in the War - living with her Black boyfriend. In fact, in real life, this woman was married and lived with her husband. But of course inserting a Black boyfriend allows yet another heroic Black character to be introduced: in the film, the Black boyfriend restrains the charging white bully who is the father of the recipient of the letters. Watching the film, I was struck by how this Black man is portrayed as a saint, restraining the white man as he attempts to rain blows down, but never being tempted to punch him. Any testosterone-fuelled man would have struck out in self defence but of course, the Black man has to be portrayed as angelic.

The whole saccharine exercise left a bitter aftertaste in my mouth. I’m Asian myself and I know lots of high achiever Asians and Blacks. But shoehorning such characters into positions they definitely did not hold in period dramas just renders the whole enterprise risible. It also avoids the more interesting question of why such people did not have the opportunity to shine professionally until a lifetime later. 

The whole film is somewhat twee, down to the scene where the Irish woman runs from police in her nightie and lifts it to moon her bare bottom at them. Britain is one of the countries that has historically been embarrassed by sex, so very British films often equate nudity with hilarity. There’s also a smirky classist tang about it - watch the uneducated but warm-hearted promiscuous Irish woman flash her bottom! If a true life story were being told of a crime I had been falsely accused of, I wouldn’t want to be portrayed gratuitously flashing my bum while running from the coppers.

Even the swearing is performative, in the way naughty schoolkids would dare each other to use more and more forbidden words.

The whole was like the froth on a cappuccino - it quickly dispersed to leave something rather flat. The very least we should be striving for with films based on real life events is to try and render them truthful.