The Sunday Express congratulated Michael Argyle: The Judge Who Kept His Cool. The reporter, Anne Edwards, deemed him the star of the proceedings – ‘a splendid, quiet, controlled, intelligent, articulate performance, like a great professional at an amateur operatic society’.
Our Wandsworth days were soporific. We made acquaintance with the other bed-dwellers – mainly deranged thieves, rapists and axe murderers who were spoonfed Largactil twice a day. Visitors were prohibited, apart from legal advisers. To my delight, we were called to a meeting with Geoffrey Robertson.
He was aghast at our shearing. The initial tone of the press had been hostile, he agreed, but there was now a strong groundswell in our favour. Louise had resorted to taking the phone off the hook, and the Oz office had been flooded with telegrams of support. A High Court application for bail, pending the sentence, had been refused, but Argyle had been ordered to reach his decision within a week. A setback was the plight of Ink, whose trial reports had provided an aggressive balance to Fleet Street. It was ceasing weekly publication for lack of funds. Ed and Andrew were bailing out. Plans were afoot to relaunch it as a fortnightly, run by a ‘collective’. I penned a note for Louise, suggesting she invite David Widgery and Sheila Rowbotham to guest edit the next issue of Oz.
‘Darling, if I’m released on suspended sentence or fined, let’s have a candle-lit dinner immediately . . .’ It’s strange, isn’t it, I recalled, how little we had to do with Schoolkids Oz? And as for the deportation order, it hung heavily – ‘being transported back to Mosman is a fate worse than death’.
By now, with Geoffrey’s help, the news of our shock haircuts had hit Fleet Street. The Daily Mail published an ‘artist’s impression’ of the trimmed defendants, which failed to capture the severity of the shearing. The Daily Mirror, which a few days before had sided with the judge, decided the act was ‘deplorable’. One of its columnists, Keith Waterhouse, confessing he was a regular reader of Oz, wrote that the Schoolkids issue possessed ‘the menace potential of Scouting for Boys’. Three Labour MPs announced that the compulsory haircut was ‘designed to humiliate’ and called for an end to judicial barbarism.
After a week in Wandsworth, the three of us were put in a van and returned to the dock of the Old Bailey.
The Court was packed. In the opening pages of this book, fragments of the scene are recalled – the gasp of the crowd at the sight of the shearings, the cold severity of the judge, the sea of lawyers, police, court officials, reporters . . . The only cast member absent was Brian Leary, already drinking margaritas in Acapulco.
On the previous day, the New Law Journal, which circulated widely among the legal profession, had launched a fierce attack on the authorities at Wandsworth jail and the custodial strategy of the judge – ‘scarcely likely to be cited in years to come as one of the more intelligent or enlightened instances of the use of medical reports’. The Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, had told the House of Commons that remand prisoners would no longer be forced to have haircuts.
The amiable probation officer read his report to the court – we were healthy and sane and proud of our deeds. When the judge asked for my plea of mitigation, I told him our case was unrecognisable in his mouth. He seemed to flinch. ‘There’s an old saying about not seeing the wood for the trees. In this case, I don’t think you even saw the trees, for all the naked bears.’
I expressed my bitterness, that for the rest of our lives we would suffer the slur that we had somehow interfered with young people. If he sent us to jail, it wasn’t so bad, personally – we needed the rest – and there was always the Court of Appeal. But what about the damage to the fading optimism of a generation?
‘The responsibility will be yours, and yours alone, whether or not you think you are acting in the name of God and Christianity, both of which have cloaked evils and misdeeds.’
Instead of a society seeming healthy and pluralised, a jail sentence would mark it as sick and polarised. ‘By jailing us you will show the world that your generation, while it appears to listen with every courtesy, is in fact deaf.’
In the silence that followed, the judge asked what guarantee I could give in regard to my future conduct. I told him I needed a few minutes to consider my answer.
Mortimer rose to his feet, looking a little hung-over – his play, A Voyage Around My Father, had opened the previous night in the West End. The reviews were ecstatic.
‘My Lord, these are not professional pornographers . . .’
We were not in it for the money. Our sincerity was not in question. A custodial sentence was inappropriate and, besides, there was a lack of precedent. Calder and Boyars, the publishers of Last Exit to Brooklyn, had been convicted of obscenity in this court, and fined a hundred pounds. The editors of IT, despite being convicted of the major offence, a conspiracy to corrupt public morals, were given a suspended sentence. Passions had been aroused on all sides, surely it was now time to take the temperature down a bit. ‘Don’t turn these young men into martyrs, my Lord.’
Felix spoke in mitigation on his own behalf. ‘In your handling of this case, my Lord, you have exhibited the same lack of tolerance and, above all, lack of understanding, that has led in a wider sense to the generation gap.’ As an example of communication breakdown, he cited Argyle’s address to the jury – ‘in my opinion a flagrant misrepresentation of our case’. Felix said he emerged from the trial, whatever the outcome, deeply saddened, by ‘the lack of understanding between myself as a young man and yourself as another man. An old man.’
The judge sought my reflection on his enquiry as to my future conduct.
‘There are other battles beside sexual repression,’ I said, ‘so my future activities will be broader based.’ And I wanted to make it clear to the court that I had never been a party to malpractices between children and adults, as inferred by the tabloids. ‘I am weary of Oz, your Lordship, and I am even more weary of trials, but I will not willingly relinquish my rights as a publisher.’
Argyle prefaced the passing of sentences by disparaging the witnesses, yet again, and singling out the Oz cover as an example of vileness. ‘All of the defendants being over twenty-one, probation would not be appropriate.’ Due to our poverty, a fine was also out of the question. ‘That brings me to a custodial sentence. The only question is whether it should be suspended, and Mr Dennis has made it quite plain this morning that he intends to continue his activities and does not consider he has committed an offence.’
The judge turned his attention to me. ‘Stand up! You have very great ability and great intelligence. I have borne in mind constantly that you are a man of previous good character, but I have no option but to sentence you to prison for fifteen months. The court recommends you for deportation. Jailer, take him down.’ Louise screamed and was hauled from her chair by four policemen. I was handcuffed and led downstairs to the lock-up.
‘Jim Anderson, stand up! You are a member of the Australian Bar, a man of previous good character and your case has given me the greatest difficulty and concern.’ (Mortimer had referred to Jim as the ‘gentlest of souls’, but Argyle had a public duty to perform.) ‘Twelve months!’ Marsha shouted in protest and was frog-marched from the court.
Felix got a lesser sentence, but with a sting in the tail. ‘Nine months! You are younger than the other two, and very much less intelligent!’
As Felix was being taken down, Argyle commended Inspector Luff for his diligence and ordered that Schoolkids Oz be forfeited to the Crown and every copy burnt. Outside, as a massive demonstration swung into action – the wildest and angriest at the court in memory – the first person to be put in a police van was Vivian Berger.
The following afternoon, the three of us were taken from our ‘one-man’ cell at Wormwood Scrubs for a spell of exercise. Around and around the asphalt yard we trudged, like the prisoners in the painting by Van Gogh, forbidden to run, skip or perform gymnastics. A screw sat on a chair, his head in the Daily Mirror, and the sight of its front page lifte
d my spirits: OZ: OBSCENE! BUT WHY THE FEROCIOUS SENTENCES? The word Oz covered the width of the page. I had not seen it so large since our promotional posters, eight years ago, when Martin Sharp and I had spent a night pasting them all over Sydney: OZ IS A NEW MAGAZINE! And here I was, an old lag, my third jail in a matter of months. This time, I was no longer on remand.
The fifteen months stretched before me like an eternity. An appeal would be lodged, and was likely to succeed, but it was not customary for bail to be granted. Deportation carried a sting. While Jim and Felix were likely be transferred to a low-security prison farm with a relaxed atmosphere, I would be retained at the Scrubs as an undesirable alien. I circled and recircled the yard, fighting off depression. After half an hour we were herded back inside. As Felix, Jim and I approached our little home on the upper level, a radio in one of the cells along the way was turned up. A song crackled through the bars: Oh God Save Oz one and all . . . Oh God Save Oz climb the wall . . . I couldn’t stop the tears.
Over the next week, the three of us were stuck in the same small cell for almost twenty-three hours each day, getting on each other’s nerves and suffering from a diet of bread, margarine and potato. The last meal of the day was served at 4.30 p.m., an hour earlier at the weekend, with a cup of tea at bedtime. Every night we were awakened by strange noises coming from various parts of our wing. Prisoners swearing, angry shouts, a cry, a clang, all part of a general howling-at-the-moon frustration. I had heard it before at Brixton.
Felix sat on the bed and looked scared. ‘God Almighty,’ he said, ‘somebody’s done us a great bloody injustice.’ Felix rarely discussed his personal life, but then the Underground was like an orphanage, where none of us ever enquired into each other’s families. I knew he was concerned about his mother. Felix had been only three when his father disappeared to Australia, leaving him with no more than the most shadowy of memories. For the next twelve years, until she remarried, his mother raised him and a younger brother. It was all slog, grit and hard work, adversely affecting her health. Much of Felix’s anger, I suspected, stemmed from his father’s desertion.
On the weekend, David Offenbach and Geoffrey Robertson paid us a visit and told us that an application for bail had been lodged with the High Court, to be heard on Monday 9 August. Its granting would be unusual, they warned, even unlikely, but the groundswell of public opinion was such as to concentrate the mind of his Lordship. As he left, Geoff slipped me a folder of cuttings and a reply from Louise.
She had found the last days like some fantastic dream – the sentencing, the demonstrations, seeing me in the lock-up . . . She was preparing for the worst. ‘How amazing, this sudden, unwanted role which has been thrust upon you. Remember, I love you so much, and all the time you may be inside, I’ll be thinking of you.’
She said that the papers were full of the story, that telegrams of support were flooding in. Jill, Martin, my Dad, and dozens of others . . . ‘However, we must look ahead at the possibility of you being there for some months, so don’t forget your friends on the outside, all thinking of you.’ She listed the names. ‘Everyone liked your hair and are predicting a new trend. Love to Jim and Felix. Hullo Jim, Geoff rang your mother in Sydney and she’s fine. Felix, everyone thought your mitigation speech was beautiful.’
On the night of the sentence, Louise had had dinner at the home of my literary agent, Deborah Rogers, who in recent months had become a close friend. There Louise watched TV with Ed Victor and Geoffrey. ‘It was Oz all night.’ On Saturday, she saw John Mortimer’s play, A Voyage Around my Father: ‘It’s hard to be at the theatre while you’re in a cell, but I find it’s better to occupy myself. If there’s anything you want and need, just ask. Now it’s 2.30 a.m. Geoff went to sleep an hour ago, the rain keeps splashing down. I hope over there at the Scrubs, you are asleep and at peace . . .’
Fifteen Labour MPs tabled a motion in the House of Commons, expressing shock at the sentences. ‘This House considers the English system of justice is discredited by this treatment of first offenders of good character and integrity . . .’ The Sun described the trial as a ‘gold-plated sledgehammer to crack a very squalid nut’. The Guardian suspected the editors had been jailed ‘not for their dirty words so much as their nasty thoughts – swampy ground for a liberal society’. Even the Daily Mail weighed in, seeing the sentences as ‘excessive to the point of judicial brutality’. The Times, on the other hand, found ‘the judge had sufficient justification for severity’.
Strangers who passed through the village of Fiskerton, Nottingham, the home of the judge, were stopped in the street and questioned by police. The six-man guard around ‘Truncheons’ was reinforced by detectives from Scotland Yard, who toiled as gardeners, gamekeepers and handymen – one of them cleaned Argyle’s Daimler, another walked his whippets. In The Times, Bernard Levin called the trial a national disgrace. ‘It served notice on the young that we will listen to them, but not hear; look at them, but not see; let them ask, but not answer.’ The Listener examined the sentences imposed on those convicted of malicious wounding and culpable driving: ‘Judge Argyle’s sense of proportion leads him to rate Richard Neville’s obscenity as equivalent to twenty-two malicious woundings, or fourteen deaths by dangerous driving.’ In general, the press concluded that Oz was a foul piece of work, but that Argyle’s ‘blind lunge against obscenity’ was unjust, stupid and counter-productive.
‘If anyone thought the Underground was coming on a bit strong,’ wrote Alex Comfort in the New Statesman, sorry now to have misjudged Oz, ‘they have their answer. Pigs are pigs.’ In the New Society, Colin MacInnes drew attention to the one picture in Oz forgotten at the Old Bailey – the largest image in the magazine. It was the shot taken in Jim’s garden of the editorial team. ‘These twenty young men and women look bright, handsome, healthy and irreverent; and if that’s what corruption and depravity do to them, I hope a lot more get hooked.’
The National Association of Probation Officers condemned the sentence, and the Daily Mirror tracked down the ‘forgotten children of Oz’. Six of the editors were interviewed: all were enraged by the sentences. ‘The charge of corrupting minors is a fallacy,’ said Berti Graham, who had posed as Honeybunch. ‘We were the minors, and we did it.’ Anne Townsend, penner of the plea for spontaneous copulation, found it crazy that we were in the nick for what she and the others had written. ‘No doubt my father will be pleased with the sentences.’
Clive James described the haircuts as symbolic castration. From her Tuscan hideaway, Germaine wrote to Louise: ‘I don’t put it past the Tory officials to set the three up as criminal lunatics. Please, love, don’t be too sad. You could come and live with me here for a bit, if you could bear it.’
Lillian Roxon offered to sell posters and T-shirts on the streets of New York – anything, anything, to raise money for the appeal.
John Lennon told the Evening Standard that as they had arrested the editors of Oz, they should now ‘arrest Soho’. He pledged to find funds to meet the costs of the appeal and said Mick Jagger had been phoning him several times a day, also wanting to help. ‘Yoko and I have proposed marriage to Richard Neville, so he can’t be deported.’ Mmmm, a three-way honeymoon lie-in for peace, I imagined, at Claridges.
It was the tabloid pics of the scenes outside the Old Bailey on the day of the sentences that I found the most moving, and humbling. We didn’t deserve the fuss – an effigy of Argyle blazing near the Old Bailey steps, Caroline Coon in her hot pants, Warren Hague, his hair a Hendrix halo silhouetted against another Great Fire of London, both exhorting the crowd. Hippies and yippies enveloped in smoke, scuffling with police, clenching their fists in defiance. Familiar faces were in the crowds – Oz schoolkids, Jenny Kee – but most demonstrators, of course, were men and women I had never met and probably never would, all of them angry. Like the young man parading in front of a uniformed line with his sandwich board: ‘OINK! OINK! EVENING ALL . . . NICE DAY FOR AN INJUSTICE EH!’
Arnold Latcham was beside hi
mself: ‘Stink bombs went off outside the Old Bailey, the judge’s effigy burned and the weirdies went wild . . .’
In Australia, my mother shut herself up in her mountain home, avoiding the locals. My father read the Sun editorial as he went home to Mosman on the commuter ferry, his neighbours beside him, also reading: ‘DIRTY WIZARD OF OZ. There will be more relief than shock in this country over the heavy sentences . . . It is no credit to Sydney that the Oz ringleaders are a product of our universities.’ Dad learned that his son was ‘one of a pyramid of part-time pornographers and smart alecs, who has spent much of his life creating filth. Britain, the cradle of permissiveness, has done decency a service.’ A few days later in the post, he received a gift-wrapped package of human shit.
This didn’t stop the Colonel posing in his dressing gown for the British press. While admitting that Oz was in bad taste, he damned the sentence as unfair and sadistic – ‘it was up to the older generation to show tolerance of youth’. What’s more, his grandfather, Charles Dalton, had fought the Russians in the Crimean War and survived the Charge of the Light Brigade. Funny, he’d never told me that. Maybe the old boy charged the other way.
Martin Sharp drove to the Blue Mountains to offer moral support to my mother. She was scathing about me, in her hilarious, scintillating way, and it made Mart’s day. ‘She did mention that your father had aged twenty years and was avoiding his friends, head hung in shame, though when I met him he was in excellent health and had a coat pocket brimming with press clips of your latest atrocities.’
Richie Walsh, now editor of a hard-hitting weekly, Nation Review, came out strongly in support of the embattled editors. Ironically, the Review was everything Ink aspired to be and wasn’t.
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