by A. N. Wilson
A man for whom such sentiments were abhorrent was the 7th Earl of Longford (1905–2001), who visited both Brady and Hindley in prison. After Hindley became a Roman Catholic and professed her penitence, Longford–himself a Roman convert–campaigned tirelessly for her release, thereby guaranteeing that she spent her life behind bars. The more he campaigned, the more the tabloid newspapers revealed stories of her attempted prison escapes, and her affairs with lesbian wardresses, while reminding the public of the enormity of her crimes.
Longford was a puzzling, lovable figure. Had he lived in the nineteenth century, he might well, like another 7th Earl, that of Shaftesbury, have enjoyed a reputation as the philanthropist and human benefactor that he undoubtedly was. It was not fair to claim, as did his detractors, that he was interested only in celebrity criminals, and in seeing his name in the newspapers (though his lust for publicity was part of his complex nature). He spent all his available spare time, deep into his old age, waiting on cold railway platforms to change trains, and scurrying across England, to visit any prisoner who asked to see him. Many of them were abusive to him. He never complained, believing quite simply that he was obeying the Gospel injunction that inasmuch as we have visited those who were sick or in prison, we have done so to Chris.5 He had been a don at Christ Church, Oxford–he taught politics, his colleague Roy Harrod economics, to, among others, the future Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Lawson. Longford began as a Young Tory, but, having attended a rowdy Mosleyite rally at Oxford Town Hall, he was accidentally hit on the head by a chair and, when he came round, he was left wing. He had secretly become a Roman Catholic, under the influence of Father Martin d’Arcy SJ, without telling his clever, beautiful wife, Elizabeth, the biographer and historian. She saw him as Pierre in War and Peace. Others saw him, with his bald head often adorned by a patch of grubby Elastoplast, as at best a Holy Fool, at worst a deluded self-publicist. Whether or not it was true, there was an apocryphal story which appeared to sum up his paradoxical character: that of him going into a bookshop to protest that they had not displayed his book with sufficient prominence in the window. The book was a disquisition entitled Humility. Against this must be set the countless individuals to whom Longford provided their only hope of human contact when the criminal justice system seemed to have deserted them. In 1998 he caused a storm of protest among homosexual activists when, debating in the Upper House about lowering the age of consent for homosexuals, he said, ‘if someone seduced my daughter it would be damaging and horrifying but not fatal. She would recover, marry and have lots of children… On the other hand, if some elderly, or not so elderly, schoolmaster seduced one of my sons and taught him to be a homosexual, he would ruin him for life. That is the fundamental distinction.’
Beside this extremely unfashionable point of view, which certainly damned him in the eyes of those in 1998 who knew best, must be set the actual experiences of those who knew him. At Longford’s ninetieth birthday party at the House of Lords, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu said, with tears in his eyes, to a friend–‘When I came out of prison, no one would speak to me. I came to this place, and I was cut–until Frank came up and spoke to me.’6 He had been regular in his prison visits to Montagu when, after a celebrated court case, his fellow peer had been sent to prison in 1953. The title of Montagu’s autobiography, Wheels Within Wheels, alluded to his passion for veteran cars and the great collection of them at Beaulieu, his seat in Hampshire. It also, of course, alluded to the emotional and sexual complications of his reputation. He claimed in the book that he had been entirely innocent of the charges brought against him: ‘I had no qualms or hesitation about protesting my innocence. On the other hand I believe it was entirely wrong that such charges should have been levelled against anyone at all.’7 After his release from prison, Montagu went on to become a much-respected public figure, and as first chairman of English Heritage from 1983 onwards he did much to preserve the country’s historic architecture and environment. Indeed, it was the brutality of his sentence which helped, very slowly, to change the law in Britain.
During the August Bank Holiday of 1953, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, a young man aged twenty-seven, engaged to be married to Anne Gage, went swimming with his friend the film director Kenneth Hume. Some Boy Scouts had been camping in the grounds of Palace House on the Beaulieu River in Hampshire, which, together with his estate and his father’s title, Montagu had inherited when aged three in 1929.8
The two asked the young boys to join them for a swim. In the course of the day, Montagu’s camera was ‘stolen’ and there were subsequent suggestions that the camera was used for the purpose of blackmail. Montagu and Hume were charged by the local police with sexual assault upon the Boy Scouts. After the hearing at Lymington Magistrates Court on 7 November 1953, the case was heard a month later at Winchester Assizes. Montagu was acquitted of assault and not enough evidence had been produced to substantiate a second much more minor charge. The second charge, and Hume’s case, would be heard by the judge at the following Assizes in March.
Montagu had undoubtedly antagonised the police. When the Boy Scouts made their initial allegations, Montagu had flown to France to explain matters to his fiancée but there had subsequently been a hare-brained scheme for Montagu to avoid trial by going to live in America. He later came to believe that the police had ‘tampered’ with his passport to make it look as though he had visited England during the time he was actually in America, and failed to give himself up.
By the time of the next Winchester Assizes much more serious evidence had been brought against him and his gay cousin Michael Pitt-Rivers and another gay friend, the journalist Peter Wildeblood. It appears that, a year before Lord Montagu had invited the Boy Scouts for a swim, Pitt-Rivers and Wildeblood had used the beach hut at Beaulieu for encounters with two Royal Air Force orderlies by the names of John Reynolds and Edward McNally. The police persuaded Reynolds and McNally to ‘turn Queen’s evidence’ against Wildeblood, Pitt-Rivers and Lord Montagu, and they thereby had enough evidence with which to send the three to prison. The trial began on 15 March 1954 and by a strange irony The Times chose to report it in a column directly adjacent to an account of ‘an exhibition of manuscripts, letters, books, and miscellaneous items associated with Walt Whitman’, at the American Library in Grosvenor Square. While the American Ambassador Mr Winthrop Aldrich praised the lyrically homoerotic author of Leaves of Grass, Mr G. D. Roberts QC for the prosecution spoke of homosexuals as ‘perverts’ and ‘men of the lowest possible moral character’. This salacious tale began in March 1958 with McNally on leave from the RAF at Ely meeting Wildeblood in Piccadilly Circus Underground Station; they ‘smiled at one another and got into conversation’. McNally then came back to Wildeblood’s flat where ‘unnatural acts were committed mutually between them’. McNally returned for duty at the RAF, subsequently being posted to Blackpool, but he kept in touch with Wildeblood and held on to his highly prosecutable letters. In July he and a friend, John Reynolds, were introduced to Lord Montagu and invited to stay at the beach hut on the Beaulieu Estate. ‘McNally…said that when he mentioned his friend Reynolds Lord Montagu asked him if he (Reynolds) was “queer”. The witness replied that he was.’
The charges brought against Lord Montagu, Michael Pitt-Rivers and Peter Wildeblood were that they ‘conspired together to incite John Reynolds and Edward McNally to commit acts of gross indecency with male persons’. Lord Montagu was further charged with having committed an offence with John Reynolds on 24 August 1952 and Wildeblood with having committed an offence on the same date with McNally.
Mr W. A. Fearnley-Whittingstall QC defending Lord Montagu said that were it not for recent events, ‘Lord Montagu today would have been a happily married man. That must be a devastating thought. He was a useful member of the House of Lords and a kindly landowner, he was faced with a bitter future.’
Part of the offensiveness, as far as the court was concerned, was that, as Edward Montagu’s sister later wrote, he had committed a terrible so
cial impropriety by entertaining people of an inferior social class. Hence, in part, the fantasy that the three better-born men had needed to ‘incite’ the airmen to acts of indecency. There was undoubtedly a social, not to say political, dimension in the case; if it was not true to say that the police wanted to punish Edward Montagu in part for being a lord, there was probably an element of wishing to make an example of a well-known prosperous figure, pour encourager les autres. Lord Montagu himself always denied being homosexual at all. The case ended on 24 March with Wildeblood and Pitt-Rivers each being sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment and Montagu to twelve. The judge, Mr Justice Ormerod, described the offences as ‘serious’, but said he was offering the most lenient sentences allowed by the law. A call by Wildeblood’s lawyer, to the effect that he should be allowed a course of psychological medicine at the Middlesex Hospital, was rejected. Dr J. A. Hobson, a consultant physician, had given it as his view that ‘Wildeblood was not a typical type [sic] of homosexual [sic]. There was a better chance than in most cases of homosexuality [sic] of curing him by treatment.’ The plea, too, was rejected.
It had been a high-profile case, but by no means unique. Four hundred and eighty men were convicted in England and Wales during the three years ended March 1956 for homosexual offences committed with consenting adults in private. Most pleaded guilty, and most made written statements to the police admitting their offences. Inevitably, given the nature of the evidence and the difficulty of substantiating it, the police would have been unable to do their work without snooping, hiding in likely venues for gay ‘cruising’, such as parks or public lavatories; on occasion they posed as homosexuals and on occasion they indulged in such acts themselves before turning in their victim-partners.
But it was on 4 August 1954, while Lord Montagu was beginning to serve the fifth month of his prison sentence, that a committee was appointed by the government to submit a report on the law and practice relating to homosexual offences and prostitution. The chairman was a former public school headmaster (Uppingham, Shrewsbury) named John Wolfenden. He assembled a committee which included Canon Demant, the Anglo-Catholic moral theologian; Goronwy Rees, by then Principal of the University College of Wales in Aberystwyth; Lady Stopford, family doctor and magistrate; and others with legal and medical experience. Wolfenden had a double brief: to report on the law relating to prostitution and to look again at the question of homosexuality. ‘For the sake of the ladies’ on the committee, it was agreed that when referring to homosexuals they should say ‘Huntley’, and when talking of prostitutes they should say ‘Palmer’–as in Huntley and Palmer’s Biscuits.9 Their all but unanimous opinion (James Adair, former Procurator General for Glasgow, dissented), published in the Wolfenden Report of 3 September 1957,10 was that ‘homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence’. Their report took ten years to be turned into law–the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. The Conservatives had dragged their feet over implementing Wolfenden and it was left to a courageous peer, ‘Boofy’ Arran, to introduce a bill calling for reform. The debate sparked some lively exchanges, with Lord Dilhorne (‘Bullying-Manner’) taunting the Archbishop of Canterbury about whether he favoured legalising the act of buggery, and the Chief Scout fearing the country would go the way of Greece and Rome,11 quite a good way to go if you imagined the Greece of Alcibiades or the Rome of Caesar, it might be thought. (The Archbishop was a liberal in favour of reform, but he did not admit to their Lordships’ House, as he once did to a private dinner when asked his view of homosexuality–‘Well.’ Long, long pause. ‘I tried it once.’ Long pause. ‘I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t try it again.’12) After the Lords debate, it was inevitable that the law would change. Germany decriminalised homosexuality in 1913, Russia in 1917. England, by doing so in 1967, was nonetheless in advance of some European countries, especially those where the Roman Catholic Church was dominant. (In Ireland, homosexuality was not decriminalised until 1993, a fact which perhaps lurks behind Captain Grimes’s mysterious comment, in Waugh’s Decline and Fall, that ‘you can’t get into the soup in Ireland, do what you like’.13) It was in 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its official list of mental disorders.14 The Church of England, in all its enlightened manifestations, had always known this, but in bringing the debate out into the open in the 1990s it smoked out some extraordinary bigotry within its own ranks and eventually caused the effective break-up of the worldwide Anglican Communion over the issue. So, it remained, throughout our times, a live issue, with many countries in the world, such as India and Uganda and Nigeria, retaining their ban on the activity.
Undoubtedly, the liberalisation of the laws governing sexual conduct brought to Britain a heady feeling of liberation. The old Tory world, which had been lampooned out of existence in 1964, was firmly knocked into its grave by the General Election of 1966, in which Harold Wilson won a second election victory. The ‘planned economy’ and the ‘white heat of the technological revolution’ would somehow pay the bills as public spending soared. The World Cup finals were held in England and England won. The football team, containing such figures as Bobby Charlton, Bobby Moore and Geoff Hurst, made everyone happy. Football is war without the blood. In a later, slightly more serious decade, the Argentine would be seen as a real enemy. In the World Cup of 1966 they were rivals, booted out in the quarter-finals. Alf Ramsey, the England manager, described the Argies as ‘animals’. That cheered everyone up, too. For, though everyone was supposed to be left wing, and sexually liberated, a little bit of xenophobia never failed to make the British smile. It took their minds off the grim realities of war in other parts of the globe. General William C. Westmoreland, US Commander in Vietnam, told his troops ‘to remove the people and destroy the villages’. While Bobby Charlton was restoring English amour propre, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, cheered on by young and not-so-young British lefties, was imprisoning the minds of millions, and leading to deaths and incarcerations which to this day are countless.
During the last summer of his life, playwright Joe Orton (1933–67) was walking from Islington to King’s Cross with his friend the actor and comedian Kenneth Williams (1926–87) and talking of sex. ‘“You must do whatever you like,” I said, “as long as you enjoy it and don’t hurt anyone else. That’s all that matters.”’ Williams quoted back Camus’s line, ‘All freedom is a threat to someone.’ He described a visit to an East End pub at which young men had clustered around him. ‘“Kaw! Ken, it’s legal now you know. And he started pulling his trousers down.”’ But Williams would have none of it. ‘“You should have seized your chance,” said Orton. “I know,” Kenneth said, “I just feel guilty about it all.” “Fucking Judaeo-Christian civilisation!” I said, in a furious voice, startling a passing pedestrian.’ Both men were destined to die unnaturally.15 Kenneth Williams took his own life in his bleak white flat near Great Portland Street Station in 1987. Orton was murdered by his lover, an unsuccessful actor named Kenneth Halliwell, two weeks after the conversation just quoted.
There was a studied frivolity, a need to see a passer-by startled as he denounced the Judaeo-Christian tradition. ‘Cleanse my heart’, he had prayed to a God in whom he did not believe, ‘give me the ability to rage correctly.’16
An early, and highly successful, attempt to spread mayhem among the respectable classes had resulted in the twenty-nine-year-old Orton–described as a ‘lens cleaner’ and his friend, later murderer, Halliwell, aged thirty-five–being found guilty at Old Street Magistrates Court for stealing seventy-two public library books and ‘wilfully’ damaging a number of books, including the removal of 1,653 art books. The pair were sent to prison for six months. In the first volume of Emlyn Williams’s plays the contents were amended to include dramas the Welshman never wrote, such as ‘Knickers Must Fall’, ‘Up the Front’, ‘Up the Back’ and ‘Fucked by Monty’. Dorothy L. Sayers’s mystery whodunnit would have surprised readers in the Islington Library by its b
lurb, beginning, ‘When little Betty Macdree says that she has been interfered with, her mother at first laughs. It is only something that the kiddy had picked up off television. But when sorting through the laundry, Mrs Macdree discovers a new pair of knickers are missing she thinks again.’17 Orton also delighted in spoof correspondences, often writing letters as ‘Mrs Edna Welthorpe’. Sometimes Edna was avant-garde, as when she wrote to the Heath Street Baptist Church, trying to persuade them to stage a play called The Pansy, ‘which pleads for greater tolerance on the subject of homosexuality’.18 Sometimes she is more puritanical, even writing to denounce the immoral plays of Joe Orton, or Horton as she mistakenly called him on occasion. (‘I myself was nauseated by this endless parade of mental and physical perversion.’)
Orton suggested that his library pranks were an act of revenge upon librarians, though members of that profession were not above book abuse. Strangely enough, in the same year that Orton and Halliwell were sent down, 1962, the librarian poet Philip Larkin and his girlfriend Monica Jones were having a holiday at Haydon Bridge, near Hexham, Northumberland, during which they enjoyed systematically defacing a copy of Iris Murdoch’s novel The Flight from the Enchanter–in the list of the author’s previous publications could now be found ‘UNDER THE NET her Garments’. Some originally innocent sentences were merely underlined–‘Today it seemed likely to be especially hard’. Others were altered so that, ‘Her lips were parted and he had never seen her eyes so wide open’ became ‘Her lips were parted and he had never seen her cunt so wide open.’19
The defaced library books were Orton’s first plays. The successes on the stage–Entertaining Mr Sloane, which was first presented in London at the New Arts Theatre on 6 May 1964, and Loot–at the Cochrane Theatre on 29 September 1966–were an extension of the same anarchic wit, the same sense of the intolerability of conventions. By the standards of a later age they would seem overwhelmingly misogynistic. The discovery of a woman’s dead body in Loot and her husband’s outraged feelings that she is in the nude nudge us towards the idea that all conventions of morality are absurd. As Hal, the son of the woman, stuffs stolen money into her coffin he remarks, ‘I shall accompany my father to Confession this evening in order to purge my soul of this afternoon’s events.’ ‘It is at times like this I regret not being a Catholic,’ says his friend. Hal retorts, ‘Afterwards, I’ll take you to a remarkable brothel I’ve found. Really remarkable. Run by three Pakistanis aged between ten and fifteen. They do it for sweets. Part of their religion. Meet me at seven. Stock up with Mars Bars.’