‘Surely that puts you at a disadvantage. Shouldn’t the case be decided on the facts?’
‘It’s a waste of time for another judge to start from scratch.’ A date was set in August.
‘That’s not enough time to prepare – ’
‘Application for adjournment refused – bring back the jury!’
Interviewed in the West Australian, many years later, Judge Argyle said, ‘Neville was a card-carrying communist at the time, willing to be a martyr for the cause, and one of the others was a Jesus freak.’
I could barely concentrate on the next witness, Michael Duane, the former headmaster of Rising Hill Comprehensive, a progressive school. ‘Does the prosecution of this magazine surprise you?’
‘I hardly know what to say, except that the magazine is not obscene in my view. The fact that some apparently mentally deranged people can bring the whole process of law to bear on young people – that’s obscene.’
During the recess, Geoff Robertson and David Offenbach reassured me about the pot case. The amount seized was trifling, and there were good grounds for a High Court adjournment. The entire Drugs Squad was under suspicion and its operational head, Detective Chief Inspector Kelaher, was on trial in Middlesex for corruption. Interestingly enough, he was being defended by the esteemed Tom Williams QC.
The next witness was Edward de Bono, associated with Oz from the early days, ever since we gave Lateral Thinking, his first book, an enthusiastic review (printed sideways). He told the court that Oz was a window into the hippie sub-culture. Leary questioned him about the drawing of a pipe-puffing teacher having a wank while goosing a vomiting pupil. ‘You can see why the Crown suggests,’ said Leary, ruffling up his gown, ‘that this sort of picture puts boys off sex and encourages them to masturbate.’
‘I think it would affect about as many people as an average sermon in a church.’
The judge cut in: ‘Please let us not bring the pulpit into this.’
Leary professed to be firm with his Lordship. ‘We musn’t prevent Mr de Bono from bringing anything into this.’
‘No, but it’s a long jump, is it not, from the dirty old man to the pulpit?’
‘I suggest to you, Mr de Bono, that the mental shock to a young girl seeing a man exposing himself could well be damaging.’
‘The mental shock of being told you are going to burn for eternity is equally damaging.’
Scrutinising the Rupert Bear cartoon, Leary enquired, ‘What is the purpose of equipping the bear with such a large-sized organ?’
‘I don’t know enough about bears to know their exact proportions. Aren’t they hidden in their fur?’
‘Are you refusing to see the point that an outsize organ, in some minds, is a badge of masculinity?’
‘Is that so?’
‘Yes, and that’s why Rupert Bear is equipped with a large organ.’
‘What size do you think would be natural?’
‘You musn’t ask Counsel questions,’ cautioned the judge.
Dr Josephine Klein, a social psychologist from Goldsmiths College, was asked by Leary if she was a ‘Mrs or a Miss’?
‘Miss.’
‘So we have no children of our own?’
‘No, but I’m a teacher of children.’
She often lectured for the National Association of Youth Clubs. Asked by Leary if she thought Oz would implant lustful and perverted desires into the minds of schoolchildren, she replied, ‘Certainly not!’
‘The cover?’
‘I just thought how nice it would be for bathroom wallpaper.’
‘Oh, really, doctor.’
‘Yes. A pretty picture, with a nice pattern . . .’
‘Would you really wish these pictures in your bathroom?’
‘It’s not immediately obvious they’re lesbians.’
‘Now that you realise . . .’
‘Of course, but it’s such a pretty colour.’
The judge was astonished: ‘Is your eyesight good?’
‘Yes.’
Leary asked if she had heard the expression ‘blue films’?
‘Yes.’
He called her attention to two women caressing. ‘What’s going on here?’
‘A woman seems to have her hand on the other’s breast.’
‘It matters not, madam, if a hand is on her breast, but that a nipple is in her mouth.’
Dr Klein was asked to focus on the woman’s pubic region. ‘See something?’
‘Yes.’
‘Worked out what it is?’
‘One report said it was a rat’s tail.’
‘Could it be?’
‘It would have to be a small rat – where’s the rest of it?’
‘Up her vagina.’
‘Oh, it would have to be a large vagina.’
A woman in the public gallery laughed. Argyle barked, ‘I remind you this is a courtroom, not a circus.’ The familiar admonition.
Dr Klein continued, ‘You know, this is not a proper discussion. To me, it’s just a pretty cover. To go into it like this, you have to be sick in the head. Or in a law court.’
Apart from such exchanges, the time in the courtroom was deadening. Witnesses were questioned hour after hour, sometimes over several days. In the searing July heat, the judge whipped off his wig – he looked much sportier without it – and members of the Bar followed suit.
Coverage of the trial was fitful, inaccurate and focused on oddities. Fortunately, Fleet Street’s official court reporters were supplemented by ‘name’ feature writers and zealous stringers for the Underground, whose admittance to the court, much to their distress, was subject to the whim of the Clerk.
A stir was caused by an official visit of the American Bar Association, whose patrician delegates and their wives filled up the benches opposite the jury. Their hearty guffaws incurred the ire of Argyle. A party of schoolboys from Surrey appeared, and sat with rapt attention as a defence expert explained the finer points of fellatio. As the weeks rolled on, the case became a hit of the tourist season. One American, it was rumoured, enquired of an usher, ‘Do they run this thing every year?’
Michael Argyle was a recent addition to the judicial line-up at the Old Bailey. He first achieved notoriety in Birmingham, where, as the Recorder, he warned that burglars would be sentenced to life imprisonment – even first offenders. Results were immediate – burglaries declined in Birmingham and rose correspondingly in the surrounding districts. ‘He is absolutely charming to live with,’ his wife told the press, ‘I promise you that. But on the Bench, a different character seems to come over him.’ He was fond of inviting local sixth-form pupils to sit with him in court to get a feel of the law; a kind of Schoolkids Judge. Argyle lived in the village of Fiskerton, Nottingham, in a home called ‘Truncheons’.
‘The judge is against you,’ remarked a prison officer, one who stood near the dock.
‘How can you be sure?’ I asked.
‘A lifetime of observing trials. At the finish, there’ll be two prosecution speeches to the jury – and Argyle’s will be the better.’
With few exceptions, the members of the jury were a nondescript bunch. One was an atheist – revealed at the empanelment – with whom from time to time I shared a carriage on the Central Line. We never openly acknowledged each other, nor dared to make eye contact. The youngest of the female jurors was a Mrs Bathurst. Clearly a woman with an interesting past, she followed things closely and laughed in all the right places. One morning she was late, holding up the proceedings for ninety minutes. Mrs Bathurst explained she had been delayed at the maternity ward, where her eldest daughter had just given birth to a baby girl. Mrs Bathurst herself was obviously pregnant and Argyle discharged her on ‘compassionate’ grounds, despite her stated willingness to continue. As she walked by the dock I asked, ‘Guilty or not?’ She smiled.
On the whole, Judge Michael Argyle allowed me latitude with legal technicalities, probably on the principle of ‘enough rope’. But the demon within, hint
ed at by his wife, was never suppressed for long. Three weeks into the trial, I made an application to replace David Widgery, my Mackenzie Lawyer. His name had become familiar to the jurors, because Argyle kept drawing their attention to a letter in Schoolkids Oz which attacked David’s ‘seeming endorsement’ of heroin in his Playpower review. (The letter-writer warned our readers against letting Widgery’s views undermine their reservations about smack.) Argyle hammered home his point: ‘This is the man – Widgery – that Richard Neville has chosen to be his friend and adviser in Court.’ Day after day, David sat opposite Marsha, scribbling ideas for questions. He liaised between me and the defence team, flitting over to the dock railings from time to time with bits of paper and whispered encouragement. As his medical exams drew near, I agreed to relieve him. The effect of my request, little more than a formality, threw Argyle into a rage.
He cleared the court. He hauled Widgery before the bench and castigated him for ‘abandoning ship’. Then he lectured me on the treachery of friendship. It was as though I had asked for a retrial. After demanding an assurance that I could provide another Mackenzie Lawyer, free to see the case to the bitter end, he adjourned to consider the matter. Even Leary was sympathetic: ‘If it’s any consolation, Richard, I think the judge is wrong on this point.’
When he left, David Widgery clasped my hand and said: ‘These old crocodiles are full of envy. They hate anyone just for being alive and free. Don’t let them break you.’
One of the few times that Geoff Robertson and I quarrelled over defence strategy was in the appointment of David Widgery’s replacement. Jim had suggested his friend Warren Hague, and I jumped at the chance. Warren was the hippie activist from the Gay Liberation Front who had planted a kiss on the cheek of David Frost.
Geoff’s main concern was that Warren’s appearance would alienate the jury. ‘It’ll cost you the case.’ It had already been agreed that tactically, it would be better if Jim kept quiet about being gay.
‘Come on, Geoff. He’ll make the three of us look that much straighter.’
‘No, no. They’ll think that Warren was waiting to pounce from the bedroom when the schoolkids were working in Jim’s flat.’ Geoff’s face was flushed, his lips in a downturn. It was rare to see him lose his cool.
Geoff had been working at breakneck speed since the trial began – researching intricate recesses of the law for John Mortimer, and ‘proofing’ the witnesses. Each night at Palace Gardens Terrace, he dictated his notes to Marsha, also a slave to the trial, and everyone slept where they dropped. His admiration for our almond-eyed helpmate, I suspected, was not confined to her shorthand.
In court, Geoff dealt with Scotland Yard’s Department of Dirty Tricks. One of their favourite tactics was to accost our experts in the Old Bailey canteen – ever so friendly – and hint darkly about the nasty goings on behind the scenes at Oz. Revolution, gay sex, acid in the drinking water. ‘You really want your own children to read this muck?’ they would ask, leafing through selected back issues. In addition to keeping the witnesses away from dirty tricksters, Geoff was sometimes required to keep them away from each other. When Hans Eysenck caught a glimpse of Edward de Bono, he hissed, ‘What’s that charlatan doing here?’
As for the new Mackenzie Lawyer, I overruled Geoff. Since his arrival from Canada, Warren Hague had been a fervent supporter of Oz and I liked him. In Granny Oz, he had written, ‘Gay means the ability to love someone of the same sex. This also involves fucking and sucking and anything else you can think of. You got it right. We think sex is good and we have the right to have it the same as everyone else. No revolution without us. So long as any people are oppressed, women, blacks, poor, young, old, we are all oppressed. Dig it!’ His flamboyance brought a breath of fresh (if patchouli-laden) air to the Old Bailey. After Judge Argyle had got over the sulks, the trial resumed, and Warren took his place as an honorary solicitor, earrings tinkling, bracelets jingling.
Like Old Man River, the experts kept rolling along: Dr Lionel Hayward, a lecturer on psycho-pathology at the University of Sussex; Michael Segal, formerly head of Children’s Television at Rediffusion; Leila Berg, a proponent of a draft charter of children’s rights; Feliks Topolski, artist; and the novelist Mervyn Jones, who defended Oz in court with the same ferocity he had once attacked Playpower in the New Statesman.
As the weeks went by and Leary kept up his badgering, I felt Warren Hague’s presence to be of great assistance, both a distraction for the prosecutor when he had a witness in a tight corner, and a diversion for the jury. What Warren was into, in those days, was known as gender-fuck drag. He looked, in fact, rather like Lee Heater in lipstick and flowery tea-gown. On a good day, his unruly beard was hung with tie-dyed bows and a little bell.
Eysenck – the Professor of Psychology at London University – was our surprise witness. He was a surprise to me, at least, because I recollected that his opinions – having devoured his popular paperbacks on the Mosman ferry – were archly ‘conservative’. Even more so were his controversial claims of a differing genetic inheritance, in terms of intellectual capacity, between the races. His views were independent and unorthodox, rather than categorisable as left or right. On the stand he was formidable, though all the court reporters chose that moment to go to the pub. When John Mortimer asked what effect he thought Oz would have on young people, he replied coolly, ‘Not very much’.
Eysenck agreed that the Suck ad portrayed oral sex in a favourable light, ‘which might conceivably lead children to the opinion that this was something they might experiment with’. The judge questioned him on the variation described in the second paragraph, where the narrator performs fellatio with an ice cube in her mouth.
‘I doubt it’s practicable.’
‘Did you ever hear of an actor called Fatty Arbuckle?’
‘Yes.’
This was not the first time Argyle had made an ominous reference to this silent era comedian, and I sent Warren pirouetting off to the library.
‘Oral sex is so widespread these days,’ said Eysenck in Olympian tones, ‘it can no longer be regarded as a perversion.’ Who dared to argue?
Not even Brian Leary could tarnish the professor. In fact, he seemed overawed by the credentials and composure. His final question revealed desperation. ‘Surely, taken as a whole, Oz would have some negative impact on its readers?’
‘Perhaps on one point only,’ replied Eysenck, delivering one last blow to the hapless Leary. ‘Their prose style.’
Fred Luff and I spent a lot of time avoiding eyes when we encountered each other, day after day, in and around the court. During the recess, when we were all coming down from the heights to which the professor had taken us, Luff, black hair slicked back, came up to me and told me that Eysenck was a ‘good witness’, and that he found his views ‘fascinating’. Eysenck’s views on fellatio had broken the ice – excuse the phrase – between the detective and the defendant.
To rebut the charge of corrupting public morals, I called Ronald Dworkin, Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University. Dworkin was, I suspected, secretly idolised by Geoff Robertson. The bouncy American had inherited his Oxford chair from the famous British legalist, H. L. A. Hart. To my amazement, Judge Argyle was not only unaware of Hart’s reputation, but sought my assistance in spelling his name. ‘H -A -R -T, Your Lordship.’ Once this was cleared up, Dworkin explained to the court that jurisprudence dealt with the philosophy of law, and the connection between law and morality.
‘Do you think Schoolkids Oz does, in fact, debauch or corrupt public morality?’
‘It’s complicated,’ he said, blinking at me through huge, round glasses. He enumerated the hidden ambiguities of such a question, eventually concluding that ‘the movement of which this magazine is a part takes aim to increase the role that morality plays in public and private behaviour. You may not like the language in which it is put, you may not like the style . . .’
‘This is not a lecture theatre!’ Argyle snapped.
&n
bsp; ‘OK. In short, this magazine is the vindication of the tolerance of a liberal society.’
‘What society are you talking about now?’
‘A liberal society.’
‘What sort of society is that?’
Dworkin went into detail and the judge turned his back. I rose and asked the professor what he felt about the legal machinery put into motion by the prosecution.
‘Firstly, it is an attack on the morality of toleration. Secondly, it may add to the polarisation of society, which we already see in America. In my opinion, this prosecution itself is a corruption of public morals.’
Argyle flew off the handle. ‘What did you mean by that?’
‘A successful prosecution would be . . .’
‘That’s begging the question. I am the judge, here to conduct a fair trial . . .’
In a soothing voice, I said, ‘Bearing in mind the visit to this country of the American Bar Association . . .’
‘Wait a minute! What’s that got to do with this trial?’
‘I’m just prefacing my last question.’
‘I don’t care if it’s your last question or not. Please omit any reference to the American Bar Association.’
The reason for his concern was mystifying. ‘Professor, do you think a case like this could succeed in the US courts?’
‘How can the witness possibly answer when he hasn’t heard any of the evidence?’
I was ready for this. ‘Your Lordship, I only asked because I noticed in The Times this morning that Lord Hailsham, the Lord Chancellor, and Chief Justice Warren Burger of the Supreme Court said publicly that the courts of this country and the United States had a great deal to learn from each other.’
‘Oh, go ahead and ask the question.’
Dworkin replied, ‘It’s true I’m not familiar with all the evidence, your Lordship, but I have read the magazine and I believe that this prosecution would be unconstitutional in the United States by virtue of the First Amendment which prohibits the infringement of the freedom of speech.’
For a time, the Oz record reviews became a focus of attack, particularly the line, ‘I’d love to meet a chick who could fuck like Led Zeppelin, but she’d wear me out in a week’. To clarify the role of music in the counter-culture, I called John Peel, who stood in the dock with shoulder-length hair, jeans and a Chuck Berry T-shirt. At the insistence of Geoff Robertson, who was always nagging me to invoke testimony as to my ‘good character’, I asked John whether, if he had a daughter, he would be happy for me to marry her.
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