Against the Law

by Peter Wildeblood; Max Lerner

  The third circle into which I now moved was that of the men among whom I had previously worked. It is not easy to go back to Fleet Street when your name and photograph have been displayed on the front page of every newspaper, and I hesitated for some weeks before I did so. Again, I need not have been afraid. The men and women who work in Fleet Street may be cynical in some respects, but they are generous and delightfully frank. There was not a moment of embarrassment, even when I met the reporters who had ‘covered’ the trial; there was no moral judgment and, I am glad to say, no pity.

  I went back to Islington, feeling vaguely apprehensive about the neighbours. I had never spoken to any of them before, and I wondered how they felt about a man with an Oxford accent who came to live among them, re-decorated his house in a manner which probably struck them as obnoxious, and then proceeded to go to gaol. If they had resented my presence there, I thought, they had every opportunity of showing it now. I began to sweep and dust the rooms and clean the windows, feeling rather depressed. After a few minutes the woman next door leaned out of a window and said that it was wonderful to see me back again, and was there anything she could do to help? I thanked her for her kindness and, feeling much better, went to the front door to shake the mat. Another neighbour stopped in the street, smiled, and said: ‘Welcome home.’ For the rest of the afternoon my work was punctuated by these greetings, and offers of assistance—did I want a hand with the cleaning? Was there any shopping they could do for me? They were just going to the launderette; could they take anything for me? And, like the reporters, they were perfectly open about it all. They did not pretend to think that I had been away in hospital or in Jamaica. They said: ‘We read all about it in the papers, and we thought it was a rotten shame.’ Nothing in my life has been more heart-warming than this welcome back to the place where I had made my home.

  That is public opinion, so far as I am able to judge it for myself. I am a homosexual and a convict, but I have been allowed to return; and in that fact there lies a measure of hope for all homosexuals, and for all ex-prisoners. I have moved out of darkness, and into light. I should be untrue to myself if I did not help others to make the same journey.

  Two months after my release from Wormwood Scrubs I was sitting, not without an awareness of irony, in the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery at the House of Lords. Below me, on the Woolsack, sat Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, now disguised in knee-breeches, a full-bottomed wig, the title of Viscount Kilmuir and the office of Lord Chancellor. It was hard to believe that this inconspicuous-looking man was one of those who had sent me to prison; I found that I was able to look down at him with no hatred. It was fear that had bred hatred in me, and I had cast them out together.

  Lord Pakenham was speaking of his inquiry into the causes of crime. He said: ‘I have, I believe, made a number of friends during this inquiry, on both sides of the fence. I include among friends found in that way one or two who have recently been imprisoned and who bear well-known and honoured names, and who have borne themselves, as I have the best reasons for knowing, very bravely in their adversity.’

  He said that he would not go into the ‘very complex and sometimes very tragic questions associated with homosexuality,’ which were being investigated by the Government Committee, but that he would like to draw attention to the failure of the prison system to carry out its declared aim, as described by the Chairman of the Prison Commissioners, Sir Lionel Fox: ‘The purposes of the training and treatment of convicted prisoners shall be to establish in them the will to lead a good and useful life on discharge, and to fit them to do so.’

  The figures showed, he said, that only about one prisoner in six was receiving any training at all. He called on the Government to match words with deeds, and to reconstruct the Prison Service in such a way that it might carry out the reforms to which lip-service had been paid for so long.

  Peer after peer rose to support him. From the Government benches Viscount Templewood declared: ‘We know what ought to be done, but we do not do it. In certain respects, far from making any progress, we have actually fallen back, I would almost say 50 or 60 years.’ The practice of locking prisoners up, three to a cell, ‘would have horrified the great penal reformers of the past who made our system one of the best in the world’. Nothing was being done to repair the older prisons, and the idea of work in prison was still tainted with the idea of the treadmill—‘we ought to revolutionise our ideas in this respect. Such work should be useful; it should be paid for at the regular rate of wages, and the wages paid should be allocated to the man’s keep, to compensation for the victims, and to the accumulation of a sum for the prisoner when he leaves prison. ... I am convinced that the best hope for many of these prisoners, some of whom may at first sight appear to be absolutely hopeless, is to make them work and take an interest in their work.’

  I thought of the men whom I had left behind. Of the boredom, the squalor, the sheer nagging hopelessness of it all. The monotony, and the tenpence-a-week.

  The Earl of Huntingdon suggested that a man who worked well should earn thereby some remission of his sentence; it was precisely the suggestion that Dan had made, months before, on the exercise yard. It was strange to hear it repeated in this vast Gothic hall, with the chandeliers and the brass rails and the carved gargoyles. The sanitary conditions in some of our prisons, said the Earl, would disgrace a Hottentot village. The system of sewing mailbags in cells at night, with only a 40-watt bulb for illumination, prevented prisoners from reading and ruined their eyesight. Toothache ... epileptics ... censorship of letters... chamber-pots. The earl was remarkably well-informed. ‘If we are to educate prisoners to better standards,’ he declared ‘it will not be done by sending them into slum conditions.’

  Lord Moynihan pointed out that, although this was a matter in which the Church might have interested itself, not a single Bishop had stayed to listen to the debate. He had heard of Borstal boys who had been asked: ‘Are you a Christian?’ and had replied: ‘No, Church of England.’ Many of these boys came from bad homes, ‘either with fathers who are criminals themselves, or, much more often, with families who “couldn’t care less”. They have the wrong friends. They cannot go home to get help, because there is no help there. They get a little worse, and start on a life of crime. When they come out of prison, they go back to exactly the same surroundings....’

  I thought of Jimmy, and of Dan; of the penny-in-the-slot machine which had been the first milestone on Dan’s journey to the Scrubs—perhaps, eventually, to Dartmoor.

  Lord Chorley said: ‘There are still in existence gaols which were condemned long before the First World War, and which are not fit to house swine, let alone human beings....’

  I looked around at the noble Lords beneath me. Very few of them had bothered to stay. It was half-past six. Of those who remained, several were asleep, their hearing-aids drooping from elderly, blue-veined hands. The visitors’ gallery was empty, except for myself. Lord Mancroft, Joint Under Secretary of State for the Home Office, took his feet off the table, glanced at the clock, and rose to make the Government’s reply.

  He was a smoothly handsome, youngish man in a beautiful suit, who would not have looked out of place in a motor showroom. His purpose this evening, however, was not to sell their Lordships a Jaguar or a Rolls-Royce; it was to sell them an account of the prison administration so grossly ill-informed that I could scarcely prevent myself from unscrewing the nearest brass gargoyle and throwing it at his brilliantined head.

  ‘I will gladly deal with the important points which have been raised,’ purred Lord Mancroft; and then proceeded to ignore every unpleasant detail of prison life which had been exposed, ascribing these to ‘the sensational crime stories by ex-prisoners which appear in our Sunday newspapers’.

  The Earl of Huntingdon had asked why prisoners were made to sew mailbags in their cells at night, when they might have been reading or studying for correspondence courses. Lord Mancroft elegantly sidestepped this by remarking: ‘Many prisoner
s are incapable of anything except simple repetitive work—and that is the answer to the point which the noble Earl made about mailbags; that many prisoners could not handle the more complicated machinery which might be desirable for economic efficiency.’ It was, of course, no answer at all. It was not even true. At Wormwood Scrubs there were machines capable of sewing mailbags in a fraction of the time which they took to do by hand, and there was no shortage of prisoners who had been trained to work them. The ‘cell-task’ was obviously a deliberate time-waster; tread-mill work, as Lord Templewood had said.

  ‘Sanitation,’ said the Government spokesman, ‘has been mentioned by many noble Lords. Of course, nobody in his right mind would not admit that there is great room for improvement. We have exerted a great deal of effort to try to improve the Victorian sanitary conditions prevailing in prisons, and shall continue to do so. But, barring the pulling down of all prisons, we have done about as much as we possibly can.’

  I could spend a pleasant day, I reflected, taking Lord Mancroft on a conducted tour of the latrines at Wormwood Scrubs. We could start by having our breakfast in ‘D’ Hall, ten feet away from a lavatory whose contents had overflowed on to the floor. Then we could go to the Tailors’ Shop, to see what happened when two W.C.’s were shared by eighty men. Later, preferably during a blizzard, we could sample those in the exercise yard, listening to the musical hollow clanking which was the only response when one pulled the chain. Finally, we could examine the slopping-out sinks on the landing, forever innocent of disinfectant; and so to bed, with a nice crusty chamber-pot for company.

  ‘Food....’ said Lord Mancroft, with an appetising smile. ‘I want to draw attention to food because, whenever food is bad, or someone complains, it becomes headlines in the newspapers at once. Food is now served in cafeteria trays, and is of a standard which might surprise noble Lords.’ Yes, I thought, it probably might, particularly if they knew that the cafeteria trays had been washed in soapless water by prisoners who had not had an opportunity of cleaning their hands after going to the lavatory.

  His picture of the facilities for training in prison was rosy and bright. Everyone who could possibly go to a ‘training prison’—i.e. about a third of all imprisoned men—went there. The remainder stayed in ‘local prisons’ like Wormwood Scrubs, either because they were waiting to move on to another prison, or because they were ‘quite unsuitable to be sent anywhere else’. I could hardly believe my ears when I heard this, but he went on: ‘I do not wish to sing too highly the praises of the local prisons. They tend to become a sort of sump of the prison world, into which all kinds of people who cannot be fitted in anywhere else find their way. But, with this very unpromising material, we are doing the best we can with limited resources, with highly unsuitable buildings, with overcrowding, with under-staffing, and with the necessity to concentrate on discipline and safe custody.’

  I had always wondered why the Commissioners had decided that I was to spend the whole of my sentence at Wormwood Scrubs, and now I knew. I was unsuitable, unpromising and unfit for anything but Major Grew’s slummy and putrescent sump. So were all the friends I had made in prison. I wondered who made these decisions, and how. I knew that nobody had ever interviewed John, Dan, Charlie, Jimmy or myself with a view to discovering whether we were capable of improvement, or of being trained to lead a better life. Vic had been lucky enough to attract the attention of the Governor of a ‘prison without bars’, who visited the Scrubs occasionally in the manner of a prospective buyer visiting the Battersea Dogs’ Home. We were apparently the mongrels whom nobody wanted. It was all right for me, but what about the others?

  I suddenly felt ill and tired. I walked down the stairs and along the stone corridors, past the obsequious policeman at the door, and out into the roaring merry-go-round of Parliament Square. The scarlet of the buses hurt my eyes. Men and girls walked together, laughing. The pigeons strutted on the pavement. It was spring again, and the sparrows would be nesting.

  It has been said that the purposes of punishment are fourfold. The main objects are to deter the wrongdoer and others, and to reform him; the subsidiary objects are to compensate the injured party and to satisfy the indignation of the community. I doubt whether any of these ends are best achieved by prosecution.

  I do not believe that a homosexual can be transformed into a heterosexual overnight by the shock of prosecution and imprisonment. The most that can be expected is that he will, while still experiencing an attraction towards his own sex, refrain from giving way to it again. On the other hand, I have never met a homosexual who has resolved to mend his ways as a result of being imprisoned. The laws under which these men are prosecuted appear to them so flagrantly unjust that there is no question of their feeling any remorse or shame for what they have done. This attitude, which may or may not be justified, is strengthened by the fact that no moral stigma attaches to adult homosexuality in the prison community. In this respect it differs from pederasty, or the seduction of boys; and under the combined pressure of disapproval from their fellow-prisoners and perhaps the realisation that their actions are morally indefensible, pederasts do sometimes decide that they will never succumb to temptation again. Whether they carry out these resolutions, I do not know.

  It must also be remembered that once a man has been taught to look upon himself as a criminal there is a tendency for him to abandon his standards of morality, not only in the respect in which he has been prosecuted, but in others as well. In the unmoral atmosphere of prison, it is easy to look upon all authority as an anonymous and baleful ‘They’, to be cheated and disobeyed. This, as I have said, was the outlook of men like Dan who had spent all their lives in and out of Borstals and prisons. It was very contagious. Since we were all indiscriminately branded as criminals, we acquired an extraordinary tolerance towards each others’ crimes. I was aware of the dangers of this tendency, and fought against it, but I was not always successful.

  In most respects I had always been a singularly law-abiding person, paying my taxes, doing my duty in the War, obeying the regulations, respecting the Government, the Crown and the Police. It would not be honest to pretend that I still feel quite the same. It is easy to believe in Justice when you have not been caught up in its workings. It is easy to have faith in politicians, when you have not listened to them lying about issues in which you are vitally concerned. It is easy to believe in the benevolence and incorruptibility of the police, when you have never been a ‘wanted’ man.

  I do not believe that the fact of my imprisonment, or that of Edward Montagu or Michael Pitt-Rivers, will deter a single person from committing acts such as those with which we were charged. Regrettably enough, I believe that the opposite may be true. I have already written about the influence of the Wilde case, and it has often been pointed out that a crime of a sensational nature which receives wide publicity is often followed by a wave of imitations, committed by people of weak intellect whose imaginations have been inflamed by the newspaper reports. After we were arrested and remanded on bail, Edward Montagu and I received many hundreds of letters from such people, including young boys. One boy of 15 used to try to telephone me almost every day during the weeks when I was waiting for the trial to begin. I find this horrifying and am sincerely grieved to think that I may, however unwillingly and indirectly, have been responsible for such a thing.

  The homosexual world is, of necessity, compact and isolated. It is also extraordinarily out of touch with reality. I have already mentioned that a number of homosexuals, respected and discreet, were courageous enough to offer evidence to the Home Office Committee when it was set up. These, however, were exceptional. The great majority of the homosexual community shrugged its shoulders, expressed the opinion that the law would never be changed, and carried on with its dangerous and tragic way of life. Our case caused a momentary flutter, and a number of the better-known homosexuals left the country for a time, until they decided that it was safe to return. I am obliged to admit that most homosexuals are furtive
and irresponsible, and that if a more tolerant and just attitude towards their condition is ever adopted by this country it will not be through their efforts. On the other hand, they are perhaps not entirely to blame. Their secretiveness and cynicism are imposed upon them by the law as it now stands.

  I do not know how far my prosecution acted as a deterrent. Its purpose as an instrument of reform concerns me alone.

  Long before I was prosecuted, I had considered the possibility of submitting myself to a ‘cure’, if any such existed. I had discussed the question with a number of doctors, without ever discovering one who professed to be able to effect any alteration in my sexual bias. Psychiatrists, psychotherapists, psychologists and psychoanalysts derive a large part of their incomes from men who fear that their homosexual instincts, if left unchecked, will involve them in prosecution and disgrace. It is not very surprising therefore, that there should be some resistance towards relaxation of the law among the official organisations of the medical profession. But individual doctors, if they are honest, will nearly always admit that there is nothing they can do. There is no magic cure. Extravagant claims were at one time made for treatment by means of sex-hormone injections. It has since been established that, although the injection of female hormones into a man produced a cessation of all desire, whether homosexual or heterosexual, the effect was only temporary and was sometimes accompanied by distressing physical changes. The man thus treated became a kind of hermaphrodite or eunuch, and suffered from the psychological upset natural to such a condition. A homosexual treated with male hormones, however, did not become more of a ‘man’; his desires were merely intensified.