Felix was right – it was monstrous. Despite his claim to the contrary at our recent application for adjournment, the Oz case had been assigned to Justice Michael Argyle.
‘It does seem sinister,’ said Jim, revealing a crack in his cloud nine armour. While we were the ones charged with conspiracy, it felt more like we were the victims of one.
‘In view of Argyle’s earlier remarks,’ said David Offenbach, flipping through the court lists, ‘an application to be tried by another judge would succeed.’
‘So what’s the fuck’n’ problem?’ Felix thumped.
‘The other judge!’ replied the lawyers in unison: Justice Edward Clerk, the alternative, had a more lenient attitude towards punishment, but was renowned as a stickler for legal niceties. The chances were that Argyle would run a more relaxed trial.
‘Clerk would rule out most of our witnesses,’ Geoff said. ‘No philosophers, no disc jockeys . . .’
‘And no fun,’ said Jim.
‘Groucho Marx is coming to town,’ said Louise, who was scanning The Times.
Geoff’s eyes lit up, and Marsha Rowe, crisp in her cream linen pants suit, whirled her spiral pad and made a note to invite Groucho to testify. Felix was not amused.
‘We shoulda pissed off.’
‘Calm down,’ Louise leant across the table and touched his arm. ‘We’ve got a good case, a good team, so much support . . .’
There was the sound of a drum from the street. Then a chant erupted and the customers at the Rex Café crowded the windows.
Oh God save Oz one and all . . .
‘Don’t go near it,’ snapped Geoffrey.
FRIENDS OF OZ, a huge banner spelled out. Charles Shaar Murray, the schoolkid journo, was one of the people holding it up. A cloud of balloons bobbed above the police helmets. A straggle of marchers, some in bare feet, were chanting John and Yoko’s anthem. Oh God save Oz in the street. Stan Demidjuk, walking backwards in his high-heeled cowboy boots, was conducting this ragtag chorus.
‘You don’t often see clowns around here,’ Offenbach commented. Circus troopers were somersaulting and juggling.
‘Fuckin’ great,’ said Felix, as a papier mâché Honeybunch Kaminsky, Robert Crumb’s nubile comic strip character, hove into view on the back of a truck. She was twenty feet high, bare-breasted, wore hot pants and had her hands in her crotch. Honeybunch was a personal favourite of Felix’s. In the Schoolkids issue, one of Jim’s full-page jokes had been to have Berti, the youngest of the editors, pose as Honeybunch and label her, in a parody of the original Crumb poster, JAIL BAIT OF THE MONTH. There were about 200 marchers in the procession, a colourful but modest affair, not what Jim had imagined would eventuate – a full-scale recreation of the fantasy currently on the news-stands as the cover of our Bumper Trial issue.
A few minutes later we were standing in the dock of Number Two Court at the Old Bailey, caught in the glint of Michael Argyle’s pince-nez. His face was pink, his lips thin. ‘Do you wish to apply for another judge?’
I let his words sink in. Perhaps the packed court would pick up on his preconceived attitude. The judge tapped his pen impatiently.
‘Well, Mr Neville. Are we to proceed?’
‘In view of the alternative, your Honour, there is no alternative.’
He smiled.
The Clerk of the Court bellowed: ‘Her Majesty the Queen versus Oz magazine.’
Procedural motions were dealt with swiftly. The sound recordists could switch on their machines, David Widgery was permitted to act as my Mackenzie Lawyer, and bail was continued for the three of us on the recognisance of a hundred pounds.
David Widgery, spruce in a black jacket and creased jeans, handed me the jury list. The only information it contained was name, address and occupation. Each defendant, including the Company, Oz Publications Ink, was allowed to challenge – but not question – seven jurors, bringing the total to twenty-eight. One by one, the prospective jurors were called to the stand. It was soon obvious that no matter how many challenges we made, finding a jury of our peers was impossible. Under the Jury Act of 1825, only those who owned their own house or flat were eligible. Lord Devlin, the renowned jurist, had once described juries as ‘male, middle-aged, middle-minded and middle-class’.
Among the spectators on that first morning was Mary Whitehouse, who later reflected, ‘Any juryman with a tie and a decent suit was immediately objected to and off he went . . . they cleared the whole of the jury pool.’ In all, the defence team eliminated twenty-six candidates. It was an exercise in prejudice, based on age, appearance and ‘gut feeling’. One austere gentleman we declined to challenge on the basis of his name alone, William Blake.
The Clerk of the Court read the charges against us with relish and our pleas were entered.
The prosecuting counsel, Brian Leary, was an urbane man who took his holidays in Acapulco. Indeed, he was known in the trade as Acapulco Leary. He was reputed to be fair and thorough and had recently put a gang of skinhead gaybashers behind bars.
‘Let us examine this magazine,’ said Leary. ‘It deals with homosexuality, it deals with lesbianism – on the front cover!’ He waved it teasingly. ‘I don’t know whether you can see it from where you sit – but you will.’ A pile of Ozes was stacked in a box on the table, not to be given to jurors until the conclusion of the opening addresses. Oz deals with sadism; it deals with perverted sexual practices; and finally, it deals with drug taking.’ He implored our ‘peers’ in the jury box to ask themselves if Oz’s attitude to drugs would tend to deprave and corrupt young people in whom such desires were latent.
I made a note to counter the charge.
The role of the jury, concluded Leary, boiled down to deciding a single question – Is Oz a harmful magazine?
When he sat down, I was relieved. For all its shortcomings, I believed that the general impact of Oz was beneficial, and that, furthermore, we could prove it.
The next day John Mortimer opened the case for Felix and Jim. His tone was relaxed and intimate, so much so that one juror catnapped, another kept blushing. ‘It’s a very, very important case,’ he told them, his hands flat on his paunch, his horn-rim specs riding low on his nose, ‘one which stands at the crossroads of our liberty, at the boundaries of our freedom to think and say and draw and write what we please . . .’ This was a case about dissent. And while the members of the jury were entitled to disagree with the views of the defendants, ‘This trial is about whether or not they are also entitled to disagree with us’.
Unlike the dissenters of old, who thundered denunciations in dark clothes with rolling phrases from furtive pulpits, the defendants wore colourful clothes and dreamed their dreams from bed-sit basements in Notting Hill Gate.
As to the charge of corrupting public morals, Mortimer recalled the trial of Socrates, which resulted in his death. ‘And the charge on his indictment was that he had corrupted the morals of young persons.’ This was due to the philosopher’s habit of continually asking why – just as Oz was doing in its Schoolkids issue. Questions about the purpose of education, about drugs, the examination system, sex, corporal punishment . . . ‘You will find Oz a most interesting insight into the true state of teenagers living in a big city. Should we shut our minds to it, as if boys thought of nothing but cricket and girls thought of nothing but knitting patterns?’ In short, Mortimer suggested, it may be for the public good of all of us, as parents, teachers and human beings, to know what our children really feel and believe.
By the time he sat down, my spirits had risen. Felix’s scowl had softened. Jim whispered, ‘I thought I was just an irresponsible hippie.’ Spectators grinned from various parts of the courtroom, including the actor Alec Guinness, currently preparing a role in Mortimer’s new play, A Voyage Around My Father. In his subsequent book, The Trials of Oz, Tony Palmer noted that Mortimer did not look like a hippie, ‘but in truth, he was one of them’.
Later, a group of us sat in the shade on the front portico of Palace Gardens Terrace,
guzzling cold cans of Aussie lager, newly available in London. It was hot. Geoff removed his jacket and studied a draft of my opening speech. He scribbled amendments and Marsha took it downstairs to type. Although I was nervous enough about making an address to the jury, there was also the hurdle of winning the right to present an array of experts.
In the morning, as was to become our pattern, Jim and I took the Central Line to St Paul’s, and walked down Newgate Street to the Rex Café for a pot of tea before treading the white marble floor in the lobby of the Central Criminal Court.
Leaning from the dock, I could almost touch the nine men and three women who sat on the jury. This was my chance to talk to them directly, to be frank. ‘You may be wondering why one of us has chosen to defend himself,’ I began. ‘It’s because I have no wish to hide behind the gowns and wigs of the legal profession. It’s not pleasant to be accused of corrupting the morals of young people, despite the shining example of Socrates. Yesterday, John Mortimer said this case raised serious issues – perhaps too serious to be left entirely to lawyers.’ The Annual Report of the National Council for Civil Liberties, I explained, had diagnosed in Britain a ‘drift towards tyranny’, and further, that ‘most lawyers were indifferent to it’. The court was hushed; behind the array of legal figures on my left sat Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the former British Prime Minister.
‘In the present political climate, some of our basic freedoms are being whittled away.’ I offered a series of examples, spanning the field of industrial relations, immigration, drug policy and the latest raid by the obscenity squad – a day before the trial began – on the offices of IT. Last weekend, I told them, a highly regarded American lawyer, David Dellinger, had been kicked out of Britain, merely because of his speeches against the Vietnam War.
‘And did you see the TV movie on Friday night, about Emile Zola?’ The pregnant juror nodded and smiled. The plot was apposite – after Zola had been sentenced to jail by the French court for trying to reopen the Dreyfus case, he fled to England to continue his campaign for legal redress. ‘I’m glad Emile Zola didn’t wait until 1971 to seek refuge in Britain, because the Home Office would turn him back.’ And as for children, they didn’t have freedom of expression, of dress, or of having a say in what they were taught. Only last week, a headmaster had torn up a school magazine because it criticised the tuck-shop. ‘One of the reasons we invited adolescents to edit a special issue of our magazine was to combat this tendency of adults to shut them up. Oz is their protest,’ I said, waving the issue, ‘this is their scream of rage. While I take full responsibility for the issue, its heart and soul stems from the minds of our guest editors.’
While Oz often projected the views of minorities, it was always – Geoff urged me to hammer this home – aimed at the usual Oz readership, whether Acid Oz, Flying Saucer Oz or Homosexual Oz. ‘Perhaps when this trial is over, we can ask you to edit a Jurors’ Oz, which, like all the others, will be distributed to the usual Oz readership.’
The major charge of conspiring to corrupt public morals was absurd and insidious. The law was invented by judges in 1657 to cope with the pranks of Lord Sidley, who relieved himself on a crowd from a Covent Garden balcony. The offence was forgotten for the whole of this century, until it was dredged up against the publisher of a directory of prostitutes, and the Underground press. Cheered by the conviction of IT, the Crown had added the corruption charge to the Oz indictment.
The offence rests on the assumption of a moral code to which all classes of the community subscribe, and that this code is so weak, so unstable, that a single publication may bring it into jeopardy. In our society, thank God, it is moral to tolerate different opinions. Sir Leslie Scarman, chair of the Law Reform Commission, recently told students at Oxford that he would recommend the offence be abolished.
‘In a way, I think it would make more sense for the Home Secretary to stand in this dock. Not only to answer the charge of resurrecting an ill-begotten law, but for violating the freedom of teenagers to express themselves.’
If, at the end of the trial, we were convicted, then jurors would really be convicting schoolchildren. ‘And if you convict school-children, then you, as parents, must take some responsibility for their guilt. So far from debauching and corrupting the morals of young people, our evidence will show that Oz is a part of a communications network which intends the very opposite.’
The jury spent the rest of the afternoon locked in their quarters with Schoolkids Oz, which they were forbidden to take from the building. The following morning, they communed with the mag for another two and a half hours. During the recess, two barristers played Scrabble, a cop read Reveille and the official court reporters, who lined the bench near the jury, repaired to the Magpie and Stump. Louise and I had a drink there, too, with columnist Auberon Waugh, who said he greatly admired Oz, but found Ink most unpleasant.
As his first witness, Brian Leary called Detective Inspector Frederick Luff, who wore a blue suit and stated that he was now a lecturer at the Detective Training Centre. He described his visits to our office and the seizing of Schoolkids Oz. There was a sense of expectation, as I rose to start his cross-examination. I asked Luff to remind me how many times he had raided our offices.
‘I’d have to do some research . . .’
‘Roughly?’
‘I would think half a dozen times.’
‘You removed so many documents, wouldn’t you agree, not because you were gathering evidence, but because you had decided to close us down?’
‘We took such documents as I considered relevant to any proceedings which might be brought.’
‘At one stage, didn’t you actually say to the defendant Felix Dennis that you believed Oz ought to be closed down?’
‘I made it clear I didn’t like Oz.’
‘Do you think the Underground press in this country has a right to exist?’
Luff got a bit flustered. ‘As far as Oz is concerned, I think it’s undesirable from a family point of view. And when they attack society and try and change it, then – yes! I do have an objection.’
This point was taken up by John Mortimer. ‘That’s the real basis for police hostility towards this magazine, isn’t it?’ Luff ummed and aahed. Gave his blue jowls a rub. From the Crown exhibits, Mortimer produced a long list of people who received Oz regularly – authors, publishers, politicians and pop celebrities – which he read triumphantly to the court, noting that they were hardly pillars of the permissive society. The jury seemed impressed, little realising that this was a ‘free list’, compiled on my own initiative for purposes of PR.
The only other Crown witness was Vivian Berger, 16, the Oz schoolkid named in the indictment. Slightly built and wearing a brown suede jacket, Vivian told the judge he couldn’t take the oath as he didn’t believe in God. The judge looked pained and explained that he must ‘affirm’, which was just as binding.
Brian Leary took the boy through the events which led him to Palace Gardens Terrace. His mother, Grace, was not only aware of his involvement with Oz, but encouraged him. The Schoolkids issue circulated openly at his Islington school, Alice Owens Grammar, without complaint from the principal. Apart from technical advice, the defendants had not interfered with his output. Yes, he was responsible for the juxtaposition of Rupert Bear with the fantasies of Robert Crumb. Each member of the jury scrutinised page fourteen of Schoolkids Oz. In the strip, when Rupert first finds the recumbent Crumb female, his ‘curiosity is aroused . . . tee hee’. In the second frame, he examines her manually and ‘be blowed! She’s a virgin. AMAZING!’ In each frame, both the caption and a rhyming couplet are lifted from the original Rupert strip, providing an extra dimension of meaning. Then Rupert starts to push and peep/But finds the hole is much too deep. By frame six, after a series of stunningly crude antics, climaxing in a fully erect charge, the caption reads ‘Rupert Succeeds at Last’. The bear is shown shattering the stubborn hymen, as the couplet proclaims Just then he slips and down he slides/To where dark water
glints and glides.
John Mortimer asked Vivian to explain the motives behind this collage.
‘I think that, looking back on it, I subconsciously wanted to shock your generation – and to portray our attitudes as different from yours. Also, it seemed to me very funny.’
‘Was it part of your intention to show there was a more down-to-earth side of childhood than grown-ups are prepared to think?’
‘Oh yes. This is the kind of drawing that goes around in every classroom every day in every school.’
A voice barked from the bench: ‘Do you really mean that?’
‘Yes, I do mean it.’
In answer to my questions, Vivian recounted the number of times his previous drawings had been censored in school magazines, which is why he accepted the invitation in Oz.
‘You’ve seen Detective Inspector Luff in this courtoom – have you met him before?’
Yes – Luff had taken his statement after Oz appeared.
‘Since then?’
Several times – and several other policemen. ‘I’ve been stopped in the street two or three times a week and searched. Occasionally, I’ve been taken down to the station and searched again. It’s become a hindrance, Richard. Wherever I am, I feel I must look out for policemen.’ Vivian’s mother had even sought legal redress.
Argyle asked if he was prepared to put a date on these events.
‘There were so many incidents.’ He said the only date he could be certain of was 23 December. ‘I was searched on the way to the school play. When I refused to go to the station, I was beaten up in the car.’
‘Beaten up?’ I never knew this.
‘Yeah. In their car.’
This was a breakthrough, confirming our claims of a police campaign against Oz and its supporters. The jury seemed intrigued by Vivian’s revelations. ‘Were there similar incidents with police before your involvement with Oz?’
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