That evening, I telephoned my mother and told her the news which was to be headlined in every newspaper next morning. She said: ‘Whatever happens, we will stand by you.’
Next morning, I felt like a hunted fox. I had been warned that my telephone would be ‘tapped’, in spite of the fact that this is illegal in England. To speak to my friends I had to go out to a telephone box, passing on the way the news-stands from which my name stared out in heavy black type. I felt that it did not much matter what the verdict might be; it was a trial by smear, not a trial by jury, which I was about to undergo. But I was determined to fight the case to the last ditch.
To do this, I needed money. My bank manager, rather callously, took the opportunity of writing to tell me that I had 7s. 5d. in my account. The Daily Mail, however, gave me to understand that they would assist me with the legal costs, and use their influence to brief a good counsel. I was invited to visit the Legal Adviser at Carmelite House to discuss the arrangements. It was not easy to go back to Fleet Street, under the curious stares of hall porters and lift boys, but I was desperate. The Legal Adviser, an urbane and kindly person, installed me in a large leather armchair and offered me a cigarette.
It was all most unfortunate, he explained, but somebody had changed his mind. It would cause a dangerous precedent if I was assisted with my costs; other reporters charged with motoring offences might also ask for help. So he was afraid, old boy, that there was nothing he could do. Anyhow I was not to worry too much because (merciful heavens!) there probably wouldn’t be that much publicity, after all....
My parents drew out all their savings and several other people gave me as much as they could afford, but there still did not seem to be enough to brief a first-class counsel. I could not hope for a QC, but it was possible that some young barrister with a name to make would take the brief for a reasonable fee. The man I wanted, I decided, was Peter Rawlinson, who had defended the ‘Towpath murderer’, Alfred Whiteway, a few months before. In this case he had attacked the police mercilessly—a thing which, I suspected, was ‘not done’ in legal circles. In the meantime, however, it was agreed that Mr. Myers should represent me at the magistrates’ court hearing.
This began at Lymington on a very cold Saturday morning. The magistrates were mostly local shop-keepers, who seemed to be basking in the limelight which the case had attracted to their Bench; indeed, one of the court officials was so impressed that he handed round one of his documents for us all to sign, as though it were a menu card.
Before the hearing began, the three accused were faced in the hallway by Superintendent Jones, who read out to us nineteen further charges. We were now charged not only with committing certain acts, but on each occasion with conspiring together to commit them. We were, of course, reserving our defence for the higher court. The whole of the prosecution case would therefore be reported in detail in the Hampshire papers, where it would be read by anyone who was likely to be picked as a juror at the subsequent trial.
The magistrates looked somewhat shocked when Mr. Fearnley-Whittingstall, representing Lord Montagu, suggested that they should exercise their right to hold the hearing in camera. It took them about three minutes to decide that the interests of justice would be best served by spreading the Crown allegations—many of which were subsequently disproved—all over the front pages of next morning’s papers.
Mr. ‘Khaki’ Roberts, the prosecution counsel, rose magnificently to this opportunity. He was an impressive person, with purple jowls hanging down over his collar. Occasionally, as though to underline a point, he paused in his oration and helped himself to a teaspoonful of bright pink cough-mixture from a bottle lying among his documents. His voice was fruity and passionate; it shook with horror as he described the scandalous liaison between the witnesses and the accused. It was hard to believe that only a few weeks before he had been equally sincere in the defence of Mr. Rupert Croft-Cooke, the novelist, on a similar charge. In his book The Verdict of You All (Seeker and Warburg, 1955) Mr. Croft-Cooke described Mr. Roberts’ peroration as ‘a very powerful speech, charged with sincere indignation at what I had undergone already at the hands of the police and at the prosecution’s methods in general.... He spoke, I thought, so brilliantly, he thundered in such righteous ire ... wholly in earnest ... a passionate honest speech....’
This time, Mr. Roberts was on the other side of the fence. He introduced his two ‘star’ witnesses, Reynolds and McNally, with some distaste as ‘men of the lowest possible moral character’, who had been corrupted long before they had met us. He then alleged that the airmen had committed immoral acts ‘under the seductive influence of the lavish hospitality’ with which they had been loaded by Edward, Michael and myself. This set the Press benches scribbling busily.
I thought wryly of McNally and myself cooking scrambled eggs on the gas stove in the hall, and going out occasionally for a pint of bitter in a pub; of the carpetless rooms in the beach hut with their shabby furniture; of the bottle of cider, shared by four.
Mr. Roberts, however, was getting into his stride by now. The cider had been transmuted, as though by a miracle, into champagne. The beach hut had become a gilded den of vice in which all-male orgies went on till dawn. I became so fascinated that it was only with difficulty that I remembered that Mr. Roberts was talking about me. At one moment, in order to mop his brow, he pulled a handkerchief from his coat pocket, dislodging a spare set of false teeth which shot across the floor and landed, grinning, between my feet.
Farce changed abruptly into horror when McNally entered the box. He looked pale and sulky, wearing a blue serge blazer and flannel trousers. His mouth began to open and shut like that of a ventriloquist’s dummy, and what came out, I swear, was not his own voice but the voice of a policeman, drearily repeating in the official formulae the fantasies which formed the basis of the prosecution case. What was so surprising was not that his evidence was so inaccurate, but that a large proportion of the inaccuracies seemed so trivial. But all of them, however small and irrelevant, tended to corroborate the charge on which the Crown was relying to convict Lord Montagu—the charge of conspiracy.
The transformation of McNally was complete, horrible and pathetic. It had been brought about, apparently, in the following way. The technique used should be of interest to all students of police methods.
On December 16th—the day, significantly enough, of the ending of Edward Montagu’s first trial—McNally had been interviewed by a member of the RAF Special Investigation Branch about letters which had been found in his kit. These had been written by a number of men, including myself. He was again ‘grilled’ on December 23rd, and on the following day was arrested and charged by the RAF with indecency with male persons, no names being mentioned. He spent Christmas under close arrest, and was brought up before his CO on December 27th. In spite of his plea of Guilty, no evidence was offered and he was released ‘without prejudice’. The Crown was after bigger fish than Corporal McNally.
By this time he had confessed to offences with numerous men, but the police were interested in only one name—mine. This was because, in one of my letters, I had mentioned the magic word ‘Beaulieu’. Although it was pretended by the Crown that the inquiries had begun as part of a general inquiry into homosexuality in the RAF, none of the other men accused by McNally and Reynolds—of whom there were 24—was ever prosecuted.
On December 28th Superintendent Jones, arrived upon the scene, and took over the questioning of McNally from the RAF Police. Altogether McNally was interrogated for a total of 18 hours. He was first persuaded to confess by being told that Reynolds had already ‘squealed’; then the threat of a prosecution was held over him, and backed up by the extraordinary mock trial held on December 27th; finally he was told that he would never be prosecuted for any of the offences which he had revealed, provided that he turned Queen’s Evidence against Edward, Michael Pitt-Rivers and myself.
It is, I think, rather too easy to despise the stool-pigeon in a case like this. McNall
y and Reynolds were, by their own admission, browbeaten into a state of such terror that they were prepared to say ‘yes’ (I quote Reynolds) to any question that was put to them. My own contempt is reserved for the men who permitted such a course to be taken in the name of justice. The words ‘immoral’ and ‘obscene’ have been freely used to describe the lives of men like myself. I ask: could anything be more immoral than the way in which the confessions of Reynolds and McNally were extorted? Could anything be more obscene than the sight of these men, under the promise of a free pardon, being dragged to court to betray those whom they had once called their friends?
I know how difficult it is for a law-abiding citizen to believe that the police, in England, acquire their evidence in such a manner; two years ago, I should have found it hard to believe, myself. We have all been brought up to believe that crime-detection is carried out by painstaking research and brilliant intuition, a la Agatha Christie; the truth is that it relies almost entirely, if this case is typical, on trapping the accused man into making an incriminating statement, or by coercing someone else—often an accomplice—into giving evidence against him.
The deterioration in police ethics may have resulted from the post-war crime wave; it has now reached a stage where some hundreds of police officers are themselves convicted each year, usually of breaking and entering, and sometimes of blackmail. I am the first to agree that crime waves must be curbed, but not at this price.
The present trend was, incidentally, foretold with precision by H.G. Wells inThe Shape of Things to Come. Nearly fifty years ago he wrote, in his imaginary history of the 20th Century, that the police forces, ‘in spite of a notable amount of corruption and actual descents into criminality’ did manage to keep up their traditional war against crime.
‘But their methods underwent a considerable degeneration, which was shared, and shared for the same reason, by the criminal law of the period. Police and prosecutor both felt that the dice were loaded against them, that they were battling against unfair odds. Their war against crime became a feud. It grew less and less like a serene control, and more and more like a gang conflict. They were working in an atmosphere in which witnesses were easily intimidated and local sympathy more often than not against the law. This led to an increasing unscrupulousness on their part in the tendering and treatment of evidence. In many cases (see Aubrey Wilkinson’s The Natural History of the Police Frame-up, 1991) the police deliberately manufactured evidence against criminals they had good reason to believe guilty, and perjured themselves unhesitatingly.’
While I have been writing this, two London policemen have been sent to prison for blackmailing a man by threatening to accuse him of importuning them in Piccadilly. On two consecutive days recently there have been reports of the suspension of senior police officers for undisclosed reasons, after complaints from members of the public. A lawyer, writing to the Evening Standard, expressed the growing public disquiet at the methods of the police.
‘All those who have had any great experience of criminal litigation know that evidence is frequently tendered by the police which is later shown to be false.
‘In all my cases of recent years when police evidence has played a material part, I have always made a practice of warning defendants under no circumstances to challenge such evidence, even though it is known to be false. Experience has proved to me that there is no surer way for a defendant to lose his case than to say in effect: the police are lying.’
It would be tedious to describe in any detail the various stages in the hearing at the magistrate’s court. Inevitably, we were committed for trial. The preliminary hearing had received the fullest possible publicity. From now on, Edward Montagu’s name would be indelibly connected in the public mind—and therefore in the minds of the twelve men who would later try him—not only with Boy Scouts, but with all-male parties and champagne orgies. He had about as much chance of a fair trial as a Negro in the Southern States of America.
The weather continued to be bitterly cold. In my house, which had been so gay and cheerful at Christmas time, the life seemed to be ebbing gently away. The pipes froze. The coal supply ran out, but there seemed no point in ordering any more. There were several mysterious, anonymous telephone calls in the middle of the night; when I lifted the receiver I took to saying: ‘Beware, whoever you are. This telephone has three extensions; one in the drawing-room, one in the bedroom, and one at Scotland Yard.’ It was perfectly true that the line was being tapped. When I made a call, I could faintly hear someone moving about on a creaky chair, and sometimes humming, as of a recording-machine.
I still seemed to be no nearer to getting a counsel, so eventually I changed my solicitor. The new one was Arthur Prothero, a breezy ex-Naval type with a black beard who had worked with Peter Rawlinson on the ‘Towpath murder’ case. He succeeded in persuading Rawlinson to accept the brief, in spite of the fact that funds were still painfully low, and together we began to plan our defence.
I was determined to admit that I was a homosexual. This was not bravado; it was deliberate planning for the future. There were several signs that a full-scale inquiry into the problems of homosexuality would one day take place, and I meant to play a part in it. This I could not have done if I had taken the obvious line of defence and denied everything. I had been much encouraged in this course by hearing that Sir Robert Boothby, MP, had on several occasions pressed the Home Secretary to set up a Royal Commission to inquire into the efficacy and justice of the present laws. His campaign had gained strength recently from an unsuspected quarter—the Church of England.
The Problem of Homosexuality: an Interim Report was the title of a pamphlet issued by the Church of England Moral Welfare Council shortly after I was arrested. It said that a group of Churchmen had been studying this problem for over a year, and that their full report would be published in due course; but in the meantime they had produced this preliminary draft ‘in view of the concern of the public with the subject which arose after certain well-known people had been prosecuted for homosexual offences, and of the possibility that some official inquiry into the whole matter might be set on foot’. There was a real danger, the authors added, that public opinion might be inflamed by the sensational Press ‘to the point of demanding persecution in addition to prosecution’.
The view of the Church was that although homosexual behaviour between consenting adults amounted to a sin, it was no worse—indeed, perhaps less harmful in its social effects—than adultery or fornication. There were certainly no grounds for treating it as a crime. The law as it stood did not merely fail to act as a deterrent; it encouraged blackmail, suicide and the corruption of the police. In the name of justice and humanity the Church called for a change in the law, and insisted that there should be an immediate official inquiry.
This pamphlet must have come as a considerable shock to those State officials who were now in full cry after Edward Montagu, cutting, as it did, the moral ground from under their feet. It surprised me, too. I had always thought of the Church as the last stronghold of prejudice and had never found an occasion for praising it for its courage in controversial matters; yet here, from Church House, came an attack on the law which was as broad-minded, clear-headed and brilliantly argued as one could wish. It was all the more surprising because the English laws against homosexuality were religious in origin and widely held to represent the views of the Church.
For the moment, however, our concern was with the law as it stood. Peter Rawlinson took the view that my statement to the police, however sincere, might have a damaging effect in the poisoned atmosphere of the court; he proposed to object to it on the grounds that it had been extracted—which was perfectly true—on the promises of Superintendent Jones that I would receive preferential treatment if I ‘made a clean breast’ of it all.
The weeks dragged on. Mr. Schofield, the Editor of the Daily Mail, was persuaded—with some reluctance on his part—to go to Winchester Assizes as a ‘character witness’. The men who had been pres
ent at the famous beach-hut party had all disappeared, and I could hardly blame them. The occasion had been represented in such lurid terms that it was as much as anyone’s reputation was worth to admit having been there. It had been such a dull party, too; to be bored to death was bad enough, but to have been subsequently accused of taking part in an orgy would have been intolerable. Very prudently, they all discovered reasons for having to go abroad.
I cheered myself up by thinking of the taxi driver who had taken me from Southampton each day to the magistrates’ court at Lymington. Undaunted by exploding flashbulbs and curious faces peering through the window, he had remarked: ‘Personally, and speaking man to man, I think it’s a lot of bleeding nonsense. If two chaps carry on like that and don’t do no harm to no-one, what business is it of anybody else’s?’
The trial began on March 15th, 1954 in the hall of Winchester Castle. Most of the courtrooms which I had seen during my work as a reporter were dark, solemn places, smelling of dust and leather. This was different. Its soaring stone arches had been freshly cleaned and the woodwork painted a glossy pale grey; the dock was so brightly illuminated that it appeared to be floodlit. Hanging high above the judge’s throne was the top of a huge round table, supposed to be the original one used by King Arthur and his knights. It was divided into coloured sections like a Wheel of Fortune.
I sat in the dock with Edward Montagu and Michael Pitt-Rivers. Behind us there was a warder from Winchester Prison, an affable person who filled in the time by doodling endless pictures of donkeys on a sketch-pad. In front of us, at a lower level, sat the leading Counsel with their Juniors and the various solicitors—a prospect of grey and white curly wigs looking, from the dock, like a bed of cauliflowers amongst which someone had flung several cartloads of papers tied up with pink tape. Beyond these was the judge’s dais, on which stood an elaborate throne and two smaller chairs for Chaplain and Sheriff. On our left was the witness-box and behind it six rows of benches for the public. On our right were the benches for the jury.
Against the Law Page 8