MARTIN COLE, who has died aged 83, was a lecturer in genetics and human reproduction who achieved instant notoriety in 1971 when he produced a frank 23-minute sex education film called Growing Up; along with the Oz trial, which took place the same year, it engendered a state of moral panic about youth and sex among the British establishment.
Growing Up came out the year before the publication of Dr Alex Comfort’s Joy of Sex, at a time when any adolescent wanting to know about the technical details of sex had to glean the information from parents, school, friends or books with diagrams of the human reproductive organs which made it look as if the subjects had had the front halves of their bodies removed.
Amid a rising tide of teenage pregnancy, which reached an all-time record the same year at 50.6 births per 1,000 women aged under 20, Cole’s film attempted to drag sexual activity out of its dark, guilt-ridden corner and explain its mechanics and consequences in straightforward terms that a juvenile audience would understand.
Most controversially, the film featured explicit footage of genitals and sexual activity, including scenes of intercourse, and two models (one a woman schoolteacher) pleasuring themselves on camera.
The film received positive feedback from teachers, but few teenagers got to see it. The fuss, led by Mrs Mary Whitehouse and Lord Longford, was so intense that there is no record of it ever being screened to anyone under 18. During the furore that followed, the masturbating teacher was sacked from her job while Cole, dubbed “Sex King Cole” by the Sun, found himself deluged with hate mail.
“You are a dirty pig. Watch out because you are going to be tarred and feathered,” wrote one outraged correspondent. “I hope someone castrates you, you perverted bastard,” wrote another.
In Parliament, the Conservative MP Elaine Kellett-Bowman walked out of a screening of the film, declaring: “I would shoot that man.” In Birmingham City Council, which voted to ban the film, David Gilroy Bevan (later Conservative MP for Yardley) claimed that “the next thing we will have is people copulating in the streets and dogs throwing water on them”.
Cole even managed to upset the Women’s Liberation movement with his opening sequence (the only part of the film for which he expressed regret) in which the commentator described women’s role as “giving birth to children”, while men were said to be “better at giving birth to ideas”.
But in the end Cole probably had the last laugh. In today’s less sexually repressed society Growing Up is available as part of The Joy of Sex Education, a DVD issued by the British Film Institute.
The son of a Bank of England clerk, Martin John Cole was born in north London on October 4 1931. He later explained that his work as a sexologist was spurred by rebellion against the repressive values of parents who had “fed me enough guilt to last me a lifetime”.
From Enfield Grammar School, he won a scholarship to Southampton University where he took a First in Botany, followed by a PhD in plant genetics. After a few years teaching medical students at Ibadan University in Nigeria, in 1964 he took up a post as a lecturer in genetics at the Birmingham College of Advanced Technology (now Aston University).
The Pill had been introduced in 1961 and the sexual revolution was in full swing. Yet the main source of advice on contraception, the Family Planning Association, only dealt with married couples and Cole soon found himself being approached by his students for advice on sexual health issues. “The university didn’t have a medical officer so students would come to me, I suppose because I was in biology, with their problems because there was nowhere else for them to go,” he recalled.
He became a leading light in the battle for legal abortion and in 1966 he established a clinic to provide contraceptive advice to anyone who wanted it – the first such clinic in Birmingham.
After the Abortion Act was passed in 1967, he founded the Birmingham Pregnancy Advisory Service (which later became the British Pregnancy Advisory Service) to provide counselling and assistance to women considering terminations.
Also in the mid-1960s Cole established the Institute for Sex Education and Research, a place where men with erectile dysfunction could (at £95 a session) get what might be called “on the job” help from sympathetic female volunteers. Although it was said that such sessions rarely ended in penetration, Cole’s enemies accused him of running a brothel.
His books included Sex: Why It Goes Wrong and What You Can Do About It (1989).
Cole paid a high price for the permissive society he had done so much to promote. His three marriages ended in divorce and he regretted that his five children had been brought up away from him. For the last 32 years of his life he lived alone.
His children survive him. Martin Cole, born October 4 1931, died June 2 2015