Man in dark suit, 45–50
Man, 60, bald, blue blazer
Middle-aged man, black suit, white shirt and tie
Very smart elderly man
Man, 50, white Rover car
Man in trilby hat, briefcase
Man in smart-looking suit, smoking pipe
Clearly, they all knew what they were getting up to. And the house (as the prosecutor had to admit) was anything but disorderly: ‘It was a large and well-run house, run by an experienced and able brothel-keeper.’ She shared it with a former RAF Spitfire pilot, decorated for his war service, who lived there in return for being allowed to work as her ‘slave’. They held party nights, on which men who paid £25 were given a luncheon voucher that entitled them to mount the stairs and the ladies waiting in the bedrooms. Surely, I thought, with my Law School criminology course fairly fresh in my mind, this was not a crime that merited imprisonment for Cynthia? The women were not all in it for the money – there was a sub-postmistress from Glamorgan, for example, who said she came to Cynthia’s parties for fun. As the prosecutor explained, ‘I emphasise that there was no question of any of the girls being forced or coerced into prostitution … they could, without being facetious, be described as amateurs taking part to raise money for Christmas.’
The day before the case I was visited by Cynthia and some leaders of her trade union – the English Collective of Prostitutes. They explained that Cynthia’s services were not only to the benefit of the middle-aged and elderly men, but to the women, by providing them with a safe place to work, with classy clients and an ex-squadron leader to keep order. The English law on prostitution forced women in that profession to work without male company (or that male would be guilty of ‘living off immoral earnings’) and alone, prey to abusive, drunken or violent customers. The alternative was to work on the streets, which was worse, because it was even more probable they would be assaulted, and it was easier for police to accost and blackmail them.
I had no experience of English (or Australian) prostitutes, but the law certainly seemed an ass, at least for sex workers. The men, who had instigated the crime, were always allowed to walk away. I wondered who they were. The police had at least taken their occupations, so the next morning before court I had a whispered conversation with the superintendent in charge of the case. When he gave evidence, I asked some questions:
Q: As far as the clients were concerned, the fifty-three men, I think, who were found in the house at Ambleside Avenue when you raided it, they were broadly speaking middle-aged and elderly men?
A: There was a general cross-section, but principally middle-aged and elderly.
[‘If Mr Robertson had stopped there, he might have done his client some good,’ the Court of Appeal was later acidly to observe. ‘But he went on …’]
Q: Of that cross-section, you had businessmen, managing directors, accountants …?
A: Yes.
Q: You had barristers?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: And solicitors?
A: Yes.
Q: Among those fifty-three men you had a Member of Parliament from Ireland?
A: Yes.
Q: You had a member of the House of Lords?
A: That is correct.
Q: You had several vicars.
A: Yes.
The press reporters scribbled furiously, and one or two left to phone in their copy for the evening papers. I made my mitigation pitch to the judge, with words that I naïvely thought might move him to mercy:
Your Honour, by the plea of ‘guilty’ to these offences, Cynthia Payne recognises that the party is over and she, and she alone, is picking up the tab. The fifty men who flocked to Ambleside Avenue have escaped punishment, as men always do in this class of offence. The Wolfenden Committee, reporting in 1957, pointed out that if there were no customers, there would be no prostitutes. That is true today and has always been true.
Cynthia Payne was called upon to provide those men with good times … endless parades of suburban male respectability beating a path to the door, queuing on the stairs, waiting for a vacant room. Had the police not raided, the men would have donned their trilbies, picked up their briefcases, adjusted their ties and gone off to their otherwise respectable lives. Now their hostess is in peril of imprisonment. They took their pleasures and departed, and she stands alone in the dock.
… It is easy for barristers to condemn frailty and wish that people were better behaved. In view of the evidence in this case, that would sound rather smug. All I can ask is that Cynthia Payne receive a measure of mercy for her misbehaviour, frivolity and immaturity, and some understanding of the pressure on her from her own social circle and the eager demands of her male customers, recognising ultimately that without those customers there would be no prostitutes.
This was a speech that in 1980 produced aggravation rather than mitigation. It inflamed the judge, who gave Cynthia eighteen months in prison, as well as a massive fine. How dare I, a young Australian barrister, use the trial of a brothel-keeper to expose British hypocrisy? Much of the fury I encountered from the three judges in a hastily summoned Court of Appeal stemmed from the story’s appearance on the front page of all the newspapers the next day – the luncheon-voucher brothel where the upper classes (and ‘several vicars’ – how the press loved that) took their pleasures, while the woman who provided them went to prison. The story flew around the world. There was a full-page essay on the case in Time magazine, taking as its text King Lear’s indictment of sexual hypocrisy: ‘Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand. Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back. Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind for which thou whipst her.’ My mother telephoned from Sydney, having been alerted by a neighbour: ‘You have made it to the front page of Mr Murdoch’s Mirror, dear. Fortunately, they spelled your name wrongly.’
The legal establishment had never been more humiliated, and it had to act. Appeals usually took a year, but something had to be done quickly – women had started to demonstrate outside courts, with awkward demands such as ‘Where are our women judges?’ In 1980 there was only one in the UK (and very few in Australia). The Court of Appeal convened in record time – just two weeks. It was presided over by Fred Lawton, who had been a prominent fascist in the thirties, marching through the Temple in his brown shirt as one of Oswald Mosley’s officers. As if to atone, he had become the most moralising of judges, and now he was apoplectic, my questions to the police officer being the object of his anger. ‘If you hadn’t asked these questions, this case would have been reported in four lines in the Streatham Gazette!’
But if I had not asked them, my client would not be having her appeal heard only two weeks after her eighteen-month sentence was handed down, and would certainly not be having that sentence cut by a year. That was the answer which went through my mind, in a Rumpole-like fashion, but I did not dare to voice it aloud. I did not dare say anything, as another judge continued, ‘And there would have been no cartoons.’
‘Ahh – those cartoons,’ groaned Lawton, wincing visibly at the memory. The wittiest was on the front page of the Guardian. It showed a vicar in bed with a prostitute, confronted by a perplexed police officer. ‘I demand to see my solicitor,’ says the vicar, ‘who is in the next bedroom.’
Having remarked that the revelatory questions would not have been asked by ‘a counsel with more experience’ (perhaps they meant a counsel who was not Australian) they reduced the sentence to six months and soon Cynthia was set free. She left prison in a Rolls-Royce, the toast of the tabloids, and was taken directly to the BBC, where she was interviewed on Newsnight, its main current affairs program. She was solemnly asked why she had refused to allow me to identify by name her famous clients. She paused, in deep thought. ‘Well,’ she eventually answered, ‘me morals may be low, but me ethics is high.’ She had found a distinction that had eluded philosophers for centuries, and her future on the chat-show circuit was assured.
Some years later, after the inevita
ble book (An English Madam by Paul Bailey), came the inevitable film, Personal Services. Terry Jones, its ex-Monty Python producer, wanted it to end with Cynthia’s sentence being delivered by a judge whom we recognise, in the last frame, as her first client. I was asked to advise on the libel risks, and pronounced them obvious and enormous. (Every prostitute I have ever defended boasted of having had judges for clients – usually, I suspect, mistaking solicitors’ clerks for the real thing.) Terry solved the defamation problem creatively, by a last scene in which the camera panned around the court to reveal every male in it – judge, barristers, solicitors, clerks and ushers – as her former clients.
Too much public time and money was spent in those days on ‘vice’ in the courts, prosecuting and condemning it. ‘It’, as Elinor Glyn apostrophised, undoubtedly corrupted – the laws; and the police who corruptly enforced them. There is no solution to the problem of prostitution and pornography short of decriminalising the trade and treating those who ply it, like Cynthia Payne, as workers in a sex industry which should be regulated for everyone’s health and safety. The alternative is to prosecute the clients for the crime of paying for sex – a law that has now been introduced, with mixed results, in Sweden. The most piquant comment on Cynthia’s crime of ‘running a disorderly house’ came from her neighbour in Ambleside Avenue, the composer Carl Davis, who said that he had never heard any noise from next door. The men queuing on her stairs clutching their luncheon vouchers were both sad and comic, but they did not spill out into the street to frighten the musicians.
There were much more serious hard cases. My early days at the Bar coincided with the resurgence of mainland violence by the IRA, which began with the bombing of the Old Bailey in 1973 and the following year with explosions in two Birmingham pubs that took twenty-one innocent lives. These atrocities put pressure on the police to produce results. They did so by recording false confessions from suspects – the alleged perpetrators of the pub bombings, who became known as the Birmingham Six, served seventeen years in prison before the advance of science proved that police notes of their alleged admissions had been fabricated.
My concern was that pressure on prosecutors was also leading to rigged trials, and my first book, Reluctant Judas, told the story of Kenneth Lennon, a Sinn Fein supporter turned informant on the IRA. He had been caught with an IRA member surveying a prison that held three other members and was put on trial with his accomplice charged with attempting to break them out of jail. To preserve his cover the evidence was rigged (with the approval of the DPP) to ensure his acquittal, but the IRA saw through the ruse; why would the police give false but favourable evidence against an Irishman? They picked him up, convicted him after a private ‘trial’, and executed him, dumping his body by a motorway leading to Gatwick airport, from where they made their escape to Dublin.1
I held no brief for the IRA – they were murderous thugs – but I wanted to expose the way the authorities were bending the rules in this war on terror. Reluctant Judas was welcomed in Ireland: ‘A book that knocks the wigged stuffing out of British justice,’ said the Irish Times. Its message had cautious support from The Economist – ‘It would be intolerable if Mr Lennon had been urged to egg on others to commit crimes for which they are now serving long prison sentences if the police can, in fact, fix a trial by a jury, so that their informer is acquitted and his partner convicted.’ That was exactly what they had done, yet few did see it as intolerable. ‘It is absurd and dangerous to apply the Queensbury rules to measures taken by the authorities. In this context there is no “right” or “wrong” – all that matters is success,’ countered the voice of the establishment, the Daily Express.
Soon I was appearing for IRA suspects. Miscarriages of justice did occur, but mainly through the mouths of expert witnesses – so called ‘forensic scientists’ who would speculate loosely on links between my clients and the parts of the bombs that had been recovered. It was not easy – I had to become an expert on the wiring of circuit boards. And a critical problem with these trials, which have conduced to so many wrongful convictions, was that they were labelled ‘terrorist’ trials, which of itself prejudged the guilt of Irish (especially Irish Republican) defendants. The atmosphere – which jurors picked up – was intimidating and redolent of guilt: there were police sharpshooters on the court roof, police Alsatians prowling the court’s yard and security helicopters hovering over the Old Bailey, narrowly avoiding collisions with the raised sword of Lady Justice. Intense body searches were inflicted on all who entered, including the jurors. For counsel, there was maximum security before we reached the cramped cells, thick with body odour and bad breath and the smell of boiled cabbage and urine. I did notice, however, that the prison officers made one concession – they never made us take off our wigs. We could have smuggled in guns or drugs underneath them.
The ethical problems involved in giving terrorist suspects a full-blooded defence, as was their right, could be agonising. The most difficult – which I have replayed in Hypotheticals, where it never received a satisfactory answer – happened to a QC friend. We were co-defending a group of Irish suspects accused of planning terrible atrocities – bombings of summer resort hotels around Britain. There was no evidence against my friend’s client, other than that he had turned up at the door of the ‘safe house’ just before the police arrived. Everyone expected his case to be thrown out by the judge. But this QC was punctilious, and insisted on going to Scotland Yard to inspect his client’s clothes and property, which had been confiscated by the police upon his arrest. They were arrayed on a table by a police officer, who then sat back in a chair reading a copy of the Sun. The QC examined them, finding a Catholic medallion that his apparently devout client had worn around his neck. He held it up and tapped it, and out popped a piece of tissue paper – on which the targets and explosive recipes were minutely written.
In the few seconds before the cop looked up, the barrister had to decide what to do. He could slide the tissue back into the medallion and hope for his client’s sake that it would not be found. He could say to the cop, ‘Here is the evidence you have been looking for – evidence that my client is guilty.’ Or he could eat the paper, ensuring his client’s acquittal. That is what his solicitor later suggested that his duty to his client required him to do. Unfortunately, or fortunately (depending on your solution to the dilemma), the solicitor had sent an articled clerk to the inspection, who asked my friend loudly, ‘What’s that? It looks interesting. What does it say?’ The cop looked up from the Sun and took possession of the tissue paper. It became the evidence upon which the client was sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison.
What would you do? Destroying evidence is a crime which counsel has a duty not to commit (so much for the third option), and although every citizen should assist the police, that does not extend to barristers incriminating their own clients (that rules out the second solution). Faced with that dilemma, I would have shoved the paper back into the medallion, told the client to pray to the Virgin imprinted on it that the secret would stay there, and advised him to find another barrister (because barristers cannot set up fake stories for clients they know are guilty).
One case that entered the law books involved three young Irish people of good character and university background, who had been found by police camping on a hillock with binoculars and poetry books. Their location gave a clear view over the country home and driveway of the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, and they had noted down the number-plates of some of his police protection vehicles. They had no guns, no explosives and no assault rifles, yet they were charged with conspiracy to murder. They had well-placed connections in Dublin, where many Republican sympathisers believed that the charge was over-egged. Before the trial, my instructing solicitor asked to see me privately. She opened with an observation. ‘I see that your junior is engaged to the daughter of Hugh Fraser?’ (Fraser was a Tory MP who had been the target of an IRA bomb which had killed someone else.)
‘Yes, that�
�s right. He’s a very good junior.’
‘And I’m told that gossip columns say you’re going to marry Nigella Lawson?’ (Her father, Nigel, Mrs Thatcher’s chancellor of the Exchequer, was another IRA target.)
‘Yes, I am told the gossip columns are saying that.’
There was a long silence. ‘Well, how do you think this will look in Dublin?’
‘I think it will look good. Here we are, reportedly about to be married into the establishment, yet prepared to defend the people accused of plotting to kill a Tory minister.’
She slowly shook her head.
‘Come on, do you suggest that the privilege of defending your client requires my junior and me to abandon our intended wives?’
From her steely look, that is exactly what she thought we should do.
The case went ahead and the police had no more evidence. Perhaps they had been bird-watching, we suggested, or collecting evidence for a journalistic exposé of the Northern Ireland Secretary, notorious among Special Branch protection officers for asking them to labour on his farm? The defendants offered no evidence, as was their right, and my final speech shredded the prosecution speculation – there were lots of reasonable doubts and the jury seemed willing to acquit on the charge that these defendants were planning to murder a cabinet minister.
Rather His Own Man Page 32