Within days of the sentence, the case catapulted from being ‘the longest obscenity trial in British history’ into one symbolising the clash of generations, the limits of freedom, the highs and lows of the counterculture. The drift of public debate turned against the Crown. Both The Times and the Daily Telegraph were swamped with letters of rebuke from their readers for their endorsement of Argyle. Three of the jurors were tracked down, and expressed shock at the jailings. What had finally swayed their decision, apparently, was the number of times Oz had been warned by police. One remarked, ‘I no longer condemn young people on sight because they have long hair or are untidily dressed. It changed me in that way.’ Another found Oz ‘filthy’ at first, but as its contents were explained, he developed ‘sympathy for what the defendants were trying to achieve’. A third juror said the alternative society sounded good – ‘much better than ours’.
By Monday morning, 9 August, Wormwood Scrubs was driving us nuts. A warder swabbing the landing outside our cell chose to shower us with volleys of invective. An American prisoner in E wing, who proposed starting a Prisoners’ Liberation Front (as once expounded in Oz), was hauled away to solitary confinement. The overcrowding, the lack of proper exercise and the unlikelihood of bail all started to eat away at our self-esteem. We were sick of being cooped up with each other, sick of Oz and the whole damn thing. In my mind, other events were assuming more importance. That morning, under tougher new regulations, hundreds of homes in Northern Ireland had been raided by the British Army. People were dragged from their beds and put into jail, some still in their pyjamas, without being charged, without prospect of a trial, without legal representation; all in the name of a brilliant new Tory initiative – internment.
I applied to the governor for a typewriter, to try and make sense of the swirl of my thoughts, the enlarging circle of injustice. The application was refused – in case I used my Olivetti to commit suicide. How, I wondered? By putting my tongue in the roller and choking myself with a carriage return?
Trudging around the circle that afternoon, an Aussie voice twanged in my ear: ‘You and I shared a schooner once, down at the Royal George . . .’
‘How come you’re here?’
Burglary. His speciality was stately homes, targeted from the colour spreads in the Tatler. As we started to reminisce about the George, I was summoned to the governor’s office, along with Felix and Jim.
A piece of typewritten paper headed Criminal Appeal Act 1968 was handed to us; we were asked to sign: ‘I acknowledge that I owe to our Sovereign Lady the Queen the sum of £100, payment thereof to be enforced against me if I fail to comply with the following conditions.’ We glanced at each other, barely able to suppress our relief. The governor leant over his desk, waiting for the signatures. It all seemed standard, except for a hand-written amendment: ‘That you do not take part in any activities which might involve the commission of further offences of this kind whilst on bail.’ In other words, no more editing Oz – what a relief!
A buzzer was pressed, a door opened and our lawyers appeared. Geoffrey Robertson, with David Offenbach and his father, Harry, all grinning. I could have kissed them. In the High Court, Mr Justice Griffiths had taken eight minutes to find that the sentences were ‘considerably more severe than usually imposed’, and he set us free. Two sureties of a hundred pounds were required of each of us, which, in my case, were Tony Palmer and John Birt. A few minutes later, we climbed into a waiting van. Louise was in the back. We flung our arms around each other. Outside the gates of Wormwood Scrubs milled the biggest pack of journalists I had ever seen.
‘I’m afraid we acceded to the governor’s wishes to avoid interviews in the prison vicinity,’ said Harry Offenbach. The press looked devastated when we didn’t stop, and hurtled after us, cameras clicking.
‘Fuck the governor’s wishes,’ I said, and the van pulled over.
21
DANCING to the MUSIC of TIME
‘What next?’ the reporters asked in the media riot at Wormwood Scrubs. ‘I want to go home and be obscene with my friends,’ I replied, an arm around Louise. And then what? Take a break – ‘somewhere quiet, like Ulster’.
The euphoria of freedom quickly subsided. With Oz out of bounds, edited by a collective, the three of us decided to take a break. Felix retreated to the Norfolk Broads, Jim boarded a freighter to Tangier, Louise and I found ourselves back in the basement.
‘We need a little time apart,’ it was agreed. Louise lugged a pile of paperbacks to Germaine’s hideaway in the Tuscan hills, and Marsha went along for the ride. The plan was to reunite in October, prior to facing the Lord Chief Justice, at the Court of Criminal Appeal.
I took my separate vacation on a beach – in the south of France with my sister. Mary Whitehouse was also at the airport that August, carrying a prohibited item – Schoolkids Oz. As part of her plan to turn back the tide of moral pollution, she was off to the Vatican to show Oz to the Pope.
The white stone villa overlooked the harbour of Bouzigues, a village famous for its mussels and oysters. The scent of pastries wafted from the bakery below. Jill chopped garlic and basil, while David, her husband, drank vin ordinaire straight from the carafe.
The bouillabaisse bubbled, and Andrew Fisher, haggard from the ordeal of Ink, arrived with a new girlfriend. The end of summer. Idling through picturesque vineyards, swimming, oysters for breakfast. Near the town was a designated nude beach, far from the car park. On the last day, our group couldn’t be bothered to make the trek. We just ‘imagined’ – like John Lennon’s hit, now storming the airwaves – that the demarcation line had shifted to where we stood and took off our clothes. Baguettes, cheese, olives, a bottle of wine, a blaring cassette. As other bathers arrived we expected them to freak out, maybe call the gendarmes. Instead, they followed suit and ran naked into the sea.
According to the standards of Brian Leary, everyone on the beach was being indecent, even obscene. But we had taken a stand, and just a little, had widened the boundaries of freedom. At the Appeals Court, it would be decided once and for all whether we could shift a demarcation line in the laws of Great Britain as we did, however briefly, on that beach in the south of France.
In October, when I returned to Palace Gardens Terrace, Louise was hosting a series of meetings with Marsha Rowe, Rosie Boycott and others – the genesis of an alternative magazine, Spare Rib. There had been a feminist take-over of the rabid New York ‘Rat’, and a women’s issue of Frendz, but this plan was long term. ‘As Women’s Lib is widely misunderstood, feared and ridiculed,’ noted the first statement-of-aims, ‘we will avoid being élitist and thereby alienating.’ No more ‘chick work’ for the women in the basement, no more glib dismissals as ‘the sunshine around the office’ and first-name-only credits. Spare Rib was on its way – non-partisan, gynarchic, with a solemn determination to maintain a sense of humour.
Louise and I discussed the next move. Lately, she had found new interests, new friends. Her loyalty throughout the period of the trial had been unparalleled. Now that it and our vacations were over, we looked at each other across the room and wondered whether our relationship had anywhere to go at all. Despite her steadfastness, I had not evolved into a deep, caring companion for Louise, or even much of a friend. Oz, obscenity and me, me, me, took centre stage, crushing all else.
A friend lent me a flat in Primrose Hill and I moved up there while I sorted everything out. I was broke. A deal was struck with the Evening Standard – a fortnightly page, entitled ‘The Alternative Voice’. Fee: seventy pounds. (‘We do not endorse his views: judge for yourself.’) Having converted the court, so to speak, I was also being badgered to convert the world – in interviews, in public appearances, in nationally televised debates.
‘Please don’t confuse the media image of me as a sex-crazed freak with the real me,’ I wrote to Josie in Sydney, in response to her warm sisterly support. ‘Underneath it all I’m conventionally minded, a bit of a headline junkie and a spotty, immature boy dancing
on Bandstand.’ For goodness sake . . . I got the hippy hippy shake!
‘Where is all the fantastic exuberant joy and optimism from Flower Power times?’ Birgitta Bjerke had asked in Schoolkids Oz. ‘Love is beautiful and sex is part of it. Don’t vulgarise the only thing every human being longs for and needs so desperately . . . Oz does more bad than good.’ Did we?
No, I think we helped free things up, even if some of us got entangled in our own delusions. Orgies in Amsterdam were never the key to the New Jerusalem but it was an age of hedonism and, steeped in the sexism of the time, I took to it like a duck to water.
Abbie Hoffman was addressing a crowd of students at Drew University, New Jersey, when he pulled out a knife. ‘This is a symbolic rejection of hip culture,’ he said, hacking off his hair. These days, long hair had become an ‘affectation of children of the rich, rather than a form of honest social protest’. The Times reported that his reputation had sunk when it was revealed that his anti-establishment best-seller, Steal This Book, had been stolen, at least in part, from his fellow radicals.
Abbie dismissed the allegations in Oz as hogwash. ‘Furthermore, dear Richard, if I ever see you in New York, I plan personally to kick your la-de-da ass.’
The Oz industry exploded. A play based on the proceedings opened in Bristol to packed houses. A version was to be staged in London by the Royal Shakespeare Company, with the help of Geoff Robertson. The book by Tony Palmer, The Trials of Oz, hit the stands. For all my disagreements with its tone and bizarre evaluations of witnesses, the overall import favoured the defence. It sold 45,000 copies, and a reprint was ordered. Inexorably, public opinion had hardened against the judge.
The turning point had come soon after the jail sentences, when Private Eye produced its ‘Judges’ Issue’. For the cover, Ralph Stead-man drew a nude portrait of Michael Argyle, headlined THIS JUSTICE SHOULD BE SEEN TO BE DONE. Argyle’s face was obscured, and a note explained that to avoid prosecution, the obscene part had been blacked out. It was an amazing issue. In its investigative section, Paul Foot explained that a ‘blind and ignorant press’ had overlooked the importance of the conspiracy charge. By bringing it, the Crown had ensured that the case would be tried before a judge and jury, as opposed to a magistrate. The maximum penalty for obscenity in the lower court was a fine of a hundred pounds or six months’ imprisonment, automatically suspended. Whereas an indictment before a judge allowed a penalty of imprisonment for three years: ‘Neville, Anderson and Dennis never had a chance to be tried before a magistrate, due to the conspiracy charge.’
That tidbit in Private Eye confirmed our suspicion that the prosecution itself had been part of a conspiracy. On the day after the verdict, a week prior to sentencing, the Attorney-General, Sir Peter Rawlinson, ‘was telling friends that the Oz trio would go to prison, and that the sentence would be a “deterrent”’.
Later, I accepted an invitation to a Private Eye lunch, and found Richard Ingrams charming and hospitable. He appointed me their anonymous Alternative Voice, from which position I poked fun at my own antics and the whole Underground scene. It was an outlet for my ambivalence.
In the media uproar, Argyle lost his chance to try me on the cannabis charge. In February the following year, 1972, Louise and I pleaded guilty to possessing one third of a gramme of cannabis – the weight of four household pins. I asked Judge Bernard Gillis for an ‘absolute discharge’, on the grounds that marijuana never hurt anyone and that it was time for the courts to cease being a ‘bastion of reaction – a place where those on the bench put the sanctity of the law above the sanity of its administration’. The judge interrupted: ‘I will not let this court be used as a platform.’
Looking back, I am glad that marijuana entered my life. Overnight, I became stupider, but nicer. The story of a generation. The drug’s virtues were over-hyped, and we confused the quantity of intake with the quality of experience, the Coca Cola illusion – more is better. Over the years, I have found that the opposite is true – less is more. It’s wonderful in a ritualised setting to reconnect with a partner or a power spot; for lovemaking, yoga, surfing, singing, dancing, all kinds of creativity, and more. But too-frequent intake invokes the law of diminishing returns. Save the hooch for moments of celebration, I will tell my grandchildren, in the unlikely event that they will be interested in my opinion. Treat it as a homeopathic elixir and not as a crutch. Opening the doors of perception is a prelude to one day closing the doors on drugs.
Louise and I were fined twenty-five pounds. The Drugs Squad officers were not treated so lightly. In August 1971, the new Commissioner of Police, Robert Mark, set about cleaning up the Yard. In the end, hundreds of London detectives left the force in disgrace and a score were sent to jail. Among these were drugs squad chief Victor Kelaher and his offsider, Norman ‘groupie’ Pilcher, the hounder of hippies and rock stars.
On the first Sunday after our release from Wormwood Scrubs, the Observer delved into the mystery of Soho: ‘How do pornographers get away with it?’ The answer triggered an investigation: ‘Sweeteners to police.’ The Obscene Publications Squad was exposed as a ring of extortionists. Its senior officers raked in £100,000 a year from fifty porn shops. Commander Wallace Virgo of Scotland Yard, who had overall control of both the Drugs Squad and the Dirty Squad, was jailed for twelve years – as was his Chief Superintendent, Bill Moody. During our trial, police pay-offs by pornographers had been an ‘open secret’ among journalists and lawyers, though not to us. The Dirty Squad, it was revealed, put on the porno films at police Friday night stag parties. The judge who jailed the cops, Mr Justice Mars-Jones, called it ‘corruption on a scale which beggars description’. If it had not been for the Underground press, the Dirty Squad wouldn’t have had anywhere to raid.
Judge Argyle continued to claim he was hounded by Oz trial supporters, ‘including criminals in my home’. The man who had selected him to preside at the Oz trial was the Clerk of the Court, Mr Blackaller. Throughout the trial, Argyle often dined at the Blackaller home. In April 1972, Mrs Blackaller, the Clerk’s wife, was tried for making false reports to police. She was fined £700 after being found to have fabricated threatening notes to herself, wasting 1,200 hours of police time. No charges were laid against Michael Argyle.
As the Oz appeal drew near, the judge stepped up his behind-the-scenes campaign to blacken the Oz editors. After a speech to seniors at Westminster, his old school, the headmaster arranged a private chat with the judge for select sixth formers . . . The boys were told that the Oz trio were drug addicts and professional dealers in hard-core porn, that one of his whippets had been poisoned. He had sent us to hospital in Wandsworth, he explained, to monitor our ‘cold turkey’ from heroin. ‘And the short-back-’n’-sides?’ asked Patrick Wintour, the son of the editor of the Evening Standard. That was to stop the junkies strangling themselves with their own hair. Twenty years later, Argyle was still at it, telling reporters, ‘The trial was about a dirty little magazine being peddled to children – but it was a front for pornographers and drug barons’.
By curious coincidence, hair, or rather the lack of it, played a part in alerting our legal team to a possible case of jury tampering.
Concerned about impending baldness, our Junior Counsel, Jo Walker-Smith, consulted a trichologist. Hearing that Jo was a barrister, the specialist mentioned a friend who had served on the Oz jury. He alleged that the only reason the jury had convicted the three of obscenity was that the police had slipped them a stack of back issues. Once the jurors saw these – his friend had joked about Germaine Greer unbuttoning the flies of rock stars – and keeping in mind the continued police warnings mentioned by Felix, they apparently felt Oz deserved to be kept in check. Jo Walker-Smith was outraged. Back issues of Oz were inadmissible. Interfering with a jury was grounds for a mistrial.
The barrister took a statement from the trichologist and an application to interview the jurors was made before the Appeal Court. The application was heard in closed court on 19 October, before Jus
tice James. Leary and Luff were in attendance, describing the claim as ‘arrant nonsense’. The application was rejected.
Martin Sharp came back to London. His latest in a string of astonishing female companions was ‘Little Nell’ Campbell, the tap-dancing extrovert from Sydney who wore satin nightgowns for daywear and black tie and tails at night. His brilliant Sydney creation, the Yellow House, a surrealist commune of young artists, had collapsed in a mess of recriminations and bad debts, although years later it was to be much honoured. He wasn’t sure whether he belonged in Sydney or London, whom he loved, or even how to love.
On the last weekend before the appeal, Martin, Little Nell and myself visited Geoff Robertson in Oxford, each moment made poignant by the threat of jail. We loitered in the quad, punted on the river and retraced the inspirational strolls of Addison, the essayist I had once studied at my own brash campus, where Martin and I had first met and conspired to edit a paper together.
The Royal Courts of Justice, the Strand, 3 November 1971: Felix, Jim and I sat up the back of the gloomy chamber, in bulky shoulder-length wigs. John Mortimer was presenting our appeal to the Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Widgery, a distant relation of David, my former Mackenzie Lawyer. The full-wigged Chief Justice wore an ermine-trimmed red robe and was flanked by the similarly wigged Justice Bridge and Justice James. All those wigs. I felt quite at home in my Regency hairpiece. The gallery was jammed. Emerging from the taxi that morning, we were cheered by a flock of supporters carrying placards of protest, one of which read, ‘Take off your wigs and open your minds’. Inside, it was like a genteel club, timeless, hushed. That day, it would be gentlemanly interplay between Counsel and triumvirate, rather than an Old Bailey free-for-all.
With a pained yet gracious air, Mortimer explained how Mr Justice Argyle had misdirected the jury on seventy-eight occasions.
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