Against the Law

by Peter Wildeblood; Max Lerner

  ‘Do you admire Oscar Wilde?’ asked the jewel thief, hoping to cut the other prisoner out of the conversation.

  ‘As a writer, yes,’ I said. ‘As a man, no. I think he did everything wrong. He shouldn’t have let his friends persuade him to leave England when he came out. He should have shown a bit more guts.’

  ‘Yes, but I suppose it was more difficult in those days. As a matter of fact, I came across rather a good phrase of his the other day, about his trial and everything. He said the hue and cry against him was “the rage of Caliban, on seeing his own face reflected in the glass.” It’s very true, I think. It’s always the people who have a queer streak of their own who make the most violent attacks upon us.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘Yes; us.’

  ‘But I thought ...’

  ‘Oh, but the place is packed with gay people who are in for something else. Most of the screaming pansies are in for receiving, actually. Don’t have anything to do with them, they’re absolute hell, all having affairs with the Officers and bitching everybody like mad.’

  ‘Thanks, I won’t.’

  ‘Lot of bloody grasses,’ said the man with the stomach full of needles.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said the Australian, ‘are you still here? I hoped you’d dropped dead.’

  ‘What are grasses?’ I asked.

  ‘Informers.Short for “grasshoppers”, which is rhyming slang for “shoppers”, meaning people who go to the cop-shop and squeal on their friends.’

  ‘Shut up!’ yelled a warder. ‘Get ready for the Governor!’

  When my turn came, I was told to stand with my toes touching a line painted on the floor of the Governor’s office. ‘8505, Peter Wildeblood, Sir,’ I said.

  The Governor looked up from his desk. A brown trilby hat was perched incongruously on his rakish grey curls. He smiled.

  ‘Ah yes, Wildeblood. Do you know someone who might sign themselves “Mrs. Massey”?’ He had a letter in front of him.

  I thought for a moment. ‘No, sir, I don’t think I know a Mrs. Massey. I know a Mr. Massie....’

  ‘Aha!’

  I wondered why Henry Massie, a reporter who worked for the Daily Mail, should be ‘aha!’

  ‘Or perhaps,’ suggested the Governor, ‘perhaps you recognise this—this person’s, er, professional name, which appears to be ...’ He read out the name of a girl reporter on the Press Association, which I recognised at once. I had forgotten her married name was Massey.

  ‘Oh yes, sir, I know her.’

  The Governor appeared to be disappointed, for some reason. He took up another letter. ‘And do you know anyone who might sign themselves “Iris”?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I know three Irises.’

  ‘It seems to be quite a common name in your—ah—circles,’ twinkled the Governor. ‘You will not, of course, be allowed either of these letters, since they are superfluous to your entitlement. They will be put in your Property, for you to read when you are released.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ I turned and went out. Outside the door, the truth hit me like a brick. The Governor thought those letters were from men.

  There were three distinct types of homosexuals in the prison. First there were the genuine glandular cases, the men who were in fact women in everything but body. As my Australian friend had said, they had often been sent to prison for crimes quite unconnected with sex. They ran riot in the gaol. Since they were not officially ‘sex cases’, they were frequently put with other prisoners, three to a cell. They addressed each other by girl’s names, flirted with the warders, and even managed to acquire perfume and make-up. I thought them rather revolting, but it was quite obvious that most of them could not help being what they were. Their outrageous behaviour was simply their way of making the best of things. They enjoyed attracting attention, and they had never had such a good opportunity.

  Secondly, there were the men who had been sent to prison for seducing small boys. These were not popular with the other prisoners, although, curiously enough, they came in for rather less condemnation than the men whose sex-crimes had involved young girls. This may have been because their sentences were generally far heavier. It was impossible not to pity them, however much one disapproved of them.

  Thirdly, there were the men like myself, who had been convicted of crimes with other adults. There did not seem to be any discrimination against them by other prisoners. The general attitude was: ‘If someone wants to do that sort of thing, it’s their own business.’ At Winchester, many of these men had been sent to prison as the result of army or naval courts-martial. They were not in any way effeminate or ‘obvious’, and they disapproved as much as I did of the two groups I have already mentioned. In addition to them, there was quite a large number of men of the same type who were in prison for other kinds of crimes. Some of them had homosexual experience ‘outside’; others had become homosexual, or given way to homosexual feelings for the first time, in the all-male environment in which they had been placed.

  The homosexuality in prison, however, appeared—both at Winchester and at Wormwood Scrubs, where I was sent later—to be almost exclusively of the emotional kind. There was very little physical contact, because there were so few opportunities for it. What did happen—and I saw it happen again and again—was that two men became drawn together in a relationship so deep, happy and lasting that it can only be described as love.

  Two such men would take little trouble to disguise their relationship, because, in prison, no stigma was attached to it. It was accepted—and this was something I had never known before—as a logical extension of the relationship between a working-class man and his ‘mate’. It was, in fact, regarded by prisoners and warders alike as perfectly normal.

  I have seen it suggested, in a recent book by two ex-convicts from Dartmoor, that for every homosexual who goes into gaol, two come out. This may be literally true, but not in the sense that men are introduced to homosexual practices in prison. A chance homosexual act, induced by the absence of women, does not make a man into a homosexual for the rest of his life. What may do so is a deep emotional attachment, such as I have described, with another man. The real danger in sending homosexuals to gaol lies in the fact that other prisoners may adopt their outlook, rather than their habits. As a punishment, it is strangely inappropriate. As a deterrent, it is worse than useless.

  Edward Montagu, Michael Pitt-Rivers and I remained together at Winchester for five weeks. This made the first shock of imprisonment much easier to bear; none of us had the feeling of total isolation which, in those first weeks, must be the worst punishment of most convicted men. We did not, however, compose ourselves into an exclusive group, although we had been warned by the authorities against making friends with other prisoners.

  The Chaplain, an amiable and sympathetic man, told me later that when we arrived the other prisoners and the warders had been ‘watching like hawks’ for any false steps on our part, particularly on that of Lord Montagu. I remember the first day that we queued up for our mid-day meal, each carrying a plastic tray divided into compartments for soup, meat and pudding.

  ‘You see that little room what we just passed?’ asked the mutineer, who was standing next to me in the queue. ‘Know what it is?’

  I said I imagined it was some kind of store-room, since it appeared to be full of wheelbarrows and sacks of flour.

  ‘No, it’s where the blokes drop down into after they’ve been topped. The condemned cell’s on the landing just above. Cor, look at Monty getting his dinner!’

  Edward was holding out his tray. The warder-cook ladled out soup, two slices of gristly meat, a wedge of washed-out cabbage and three potatoes. One of the potatoes rolled off the spoon. Edward picked it up off the table with his fingers and deposited it in his tray.

  This incident caused as much of a consternation as if a General Amnesty had been declared. All the other prisoners nudged each other, pointed and beamed. After that, Edward was ‘Monty’ to everyone in the prison.


  He was not, however, quite so popular with the Governor. Like me, he had started off on the wrong foot. At the ‘Reception’ interview he had been asked: ‘What are you going to do when you are released?’ and had replied that he was going to carry on exactly as before. He meant, of course, that he would continue to devote most of his time to the management of his estate at Beaulieu, but the reply was unfortunately phrased.

  ‘If you do,’ observed the Governor, his hackles rising, ‘you will most certainly pay a return visit to this institution.’

  We had become quite accustomed, by now, to being misunderstood by the prison ‘higher-ups’. The ordinary warders, known to everybody as ‘screws’ and to each other as ‘Officers’, were on the whole much easier to talk to.

  One of them asked Edward how he found prison life.

  ‘Not much worse than the Guards Depot at Caterham, thank you.’

  ‘Ah yes, I was in the Guards myself. And in a Jap POW camp after that.’

  ‘It’s wonderful what one can put up with, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, it might have happened to anybody, you know. Most people have something in their private lives that wouldn’t bear looking in to.’

  Edward told me of this conversation, which we both thought rather odd. If either of us had been in a prisoner of war camp, the last career we would have taken up on our release was that of prison warder.

  I asked one of the burglars why he thought anybody became a ‘screw’. He said: ‘Because they’re too bloody idle to do anything else.’

  There were no facilities for Association at Winchester, so we ate all our meals in our cells. Association is a fairly new privilege which has now been introduced at most prisons containing first offenders. The men have their meals together, and afterwards are allowed to talk, listen to the wireless, play chess or draughts and read the newspapers. We missed the newspapers very much, but the other prisoners used to cut out any mention of our case and slip the cuttings into our pockets during exercise, with appropriate comments pencilled in the margin. This was, of course, strictly forbidden; and, looking back now on my time at Winchester, I seem to have spent most of it in tearing up pages of newsprint into fragments small enough to flush down the lavatory. The Daily Sketch had said:

  ‘The verdict is—Guilty. Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Michael Pitt-Rivers and Peter Wildeblood are sentenced to terms of imprisonment. Yet doubt remains....

  ‘Not concerning the trial itself. It was conducted with scrupulous fairness, and we have no doubt that on the evidence before them the jury came to an honest decision.

  ‘But there will be disquiet in the public mind at the way in which these three men were hunted down. The evidence against them hinged almost entirely on the testimony of self-confessed perverts, who were at least as guilty as the men in the dock.

  ‘There are plenty of precedents for the use of criminals to bring other criminals to justice. But why should these three men go to gaol while their two accomplices, who were described by counsel as of the “lowest moral character”, go free?

  ‘The sentences passed will undoubtedly revive the controversy whether imprisonment is a suitable punishment for such offences. But in this case arguments about the possibilities of psychiatric or medical treatment are pointless. The court had to deal with the law as it stands: and, on that basis, justice has been done.

  ‘If the law is a bad law, as psychiatrists and others contend, then it should be altered. There may be a good case for an investigation into the whole social problem of the control and punishment of perversion.

  ‘But that is for the future—and for Parliament to decide.’

  HannenSwaffer wrote in the People:

  ‘The sentences in the Montagu Case have caused glee in ultra-respectable circles, consternation and fear among many celebrities in the world of the stage, art and letters, and exposed the complete failure of our so-called “civilisation” to find any remedy for sexual perversion to replace cruel and barbaric punishment.... Society must realise that imprisonment is no cure for abnormality. Shutting up a nervous, highly-strung individual is mere brutality that increases, instead of removing, a psychological weakness.... Montagu and his two associates may have earned our condemnation. But they are also entitled to pity. They should be treated by psychopaths, not isolated by warders.’

  I particularly liked the suggestion about psychopaths.

  The Sunday Times headlined its leading article: ‘Law and Hypocrisy.’ It said:

  ‘One may well ask whether, in regard to acts between consenting male adults, the truth is not that the real offence is to be found out. Notorious inverts occupy eminent places, and few people of wide acquaintance would be prepared to say that they know no-one whom they could suspect of conduct which—if found out—would bring legal punishment and social disgrace. In all this matter, our society is riddled with hypocrisy.

  ‘The law, it would seem, is not in accord with a large mass of private opinion. That condition always brings evil in its train: contempt for law, inequity between one offender and another, the risk of corruption of the police.... The case for a reform of the law as to acts committed in private between adults is very strong. The case for authoritative inquiry into it is overwhelming. An interim report under the auspices of the Moral Welfare Council of the Church of England has recently given that case clear support.

  ‘Such acts must be clearly distinguished from public indecency, from prostitution and importuning, and above all from corruption of the young. One of the arguments for reconsideration of the present criminal law is that, until this is done, the public conscience will not contrast sharply enough those things which must needs be legally tolerated, and those which must be condemned and rooted out.

  ‘It is the problem of the young that chiefly needs the constructive attention of social reformers and the public. Homosexual inversion is not now regarded by most psychologists as inborn, save in the sense that the possibility of it may be latent in any child: it can often be started or stimulated at a formative age. Parents, schoolmasters, doctors, ministers of religion and all who have to do with youth, ought to be far more aware of the facts and the dangers than they commonly are, and more alert to protect and help those in their care.

  ‘This is the most important lesson of all that the scandals of recent months should have taught us.’

  Mr. John Gordon, in the Sunday Express:

  ‘A disquieting episode disclosed at the Montagu trial demands urgent consideration. A detective-sergeant admitted that on the morning Pitt-Rivers was arrested in the country, he entered Pitt-Rivers’ flat in London and searched it, without permission and without a warrant.

  ‘Now, I have always assumed—in common with most people—that in Britain a policeman has no right to enter any citizen’s house and examine his property without the authority of a search warrant issued by a magistrate. We have been encouraged to believe that to be the vital difference between a Police State and a democracy. Have we been deluding ourselves? Do policemen really have a right to enter a house and rummage without a search warrant?

  ‘If they do, it seems to me a most alarming development. One other piquant question: Is the RAF corporal still a corporal?’

  The New Statesman and Nation:

  ‘The methods of the police in getting their evidence will have shocked public opinion more than in any case since the affair of Irene Savidge in 1927—and may even result, as that case did, in a Royal Commission on police powers and procedure. It is hard to decide which is more repugnant, to have the police breaking into private houses, without even a search warrant from a magistrate, and reading men’s private letters in order to prosecute them for incidents in their sex life (which an increasing number of people and newspapers are coming to feel is no concern of the law) or to see that evidence supported by the “confessions” of accomplices obtained by a promise of immunity. The whole wretched case, which has, of course, won far more public interest than its intrinsic importance warrants, may nevertheless have f
ar-reaching consequences.’

  Mr. Alastair Forbes, in the Sunday Dispatch:

  ‘What the Montesi case has been to the Italian Press, the Montagu Case has been to the British. But there the resemblance ends. Excess, rather than lack of zeal on the part of the police, has caused widespread surprise and dismay. The methods chosen to secure these convictions can hardly be generally approved. The emphasis with which the judge stressed that he was dealing as leniently with the prisoners as it was possible for him to do will also have been widely noted.

  ‘Few people can have read unmoved Mr. Wildeblood’s attempt to explain the tribulations suffered, it is clear, by many members of the community, who have had bad luck in their glandular development and have received an uneven distribution of the cells, or what you will, required to make a “normal” man with “normal” instincts....

  ‘Enough is now known of sex inversion and its victims for many “normal” people to say: “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”’

  The Prison Commissioners had decided that we should not be allowed to finish our sentences together. It was, in any case, impossible for us to remain at Winchester, because it was not a ‘Star’ (first offenders) prison. We were told that Montagu would be going to Wakefield in Yorkshire, Pitt-Rivers to Maidstone and I to Wormwood Scrubs.

  I said goodbye to the mutineer, the various burglars, the jewel thief and the man who had given me my first twist of tobacco. The man who had been in Sing-Sing said: ‘The Scrubs should be better than this, anyhow. I expect they’re sending you there for treatment. If you go into the hospital, it’ll be a piece of cake.’

  On the night before we left, I was interviewed by the Governor again. He made himself very pleasant and expressed further concern about my religious beliefs. He was, it seemed, a Roman Catholic himself, but he suggested that I should consider the various religions and pick from each one what seemed best to me. This was precisely what I had said to him myself at our first meeting.