Wolfenden's Witnesses

Homosexuality in Postwar Britain

Brian Lewis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137321503
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Engineering General
• Index: Technology & Engineering

The Wolfenden Report of 1957 has long been recognized as a landmark in moves towards gay law reform. What is less well known is that the testimonials and written statements of the witnesses before the Wolfenden Committee provide by far the most complete and extensive array of perspectives we have on how homosexuality was understood in mid-twentieth century Britain. Those giving evidence, individually or through their professional associations, included a broad cross-section of official, professional and bureaucratic Britain: police chiefs, policemen, magistrates, judges, lawyers and Home Office civil servants; doctors, biologists (including Alfred Kinsey), psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and psychotherapists; prison governors, medical officers and probation officers; representatives of the churches, morality councils and progressive and ethical societies; approved school headteachers and youth organization leaders; representatives of the army, navy and air force; and a small handful of self-described but largely anonymous homosexuals. This volume presents an annotated selection of their voices.

Part I

Introduction

Introduction

In May 1954 Gilbert Andrew Nixon, 37, a company director of a firm of manufacturing chemists from West Kirby, Cheshire, killed himself with cyanide in a gaol cell. He had just been sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment at Somerset Assizes at Wells on a charge of gross indecency. Fourteen other men, some with Taunton addresses, had also pleaded guilty to committing or attempting to commit unnatural acts and acts of gross indecency; nine of them received prison sentences, ranging from one to four years. During the Second World War Nixon had received the Military Cross in Sicily and had recently retired as a lieutenant-colonel from the Territorial Army. ‘It is a terrible thing’, said Mr Justice Oliver in passing sentence, ‘to see a man like you with a gallant military record standing as you are.’ As recorded in The Times,

The Judge said that it was an appalling thing for him that an ancient, historic, not very large town like Taunton should at one single Assize exhibit as many cases of homosexual crime as in the ordinary way he met with in a whole year. The answer, as he saw it, was not that the population of Taunton was more debased than other groups of the community, but that once that vice got established in any community it spread like a pestilence and unless held in check threatened to spread indefinitely.¹

Gilbert Nixon’s tragic end caused only a ripple in the national press. But it came amidst a period of intense introspection about homosexuality and the law among those hankering for reform and those, like Mr Justice Oliver, who wanted the ‘pestilence’ eliminated. (The two groups were not mutually exclusive.) On 24 August 1954 the Conservative government of Winston Churchill appointed a Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution. Its remit was to consider and recommend changes to the laws relating to homo-sexual offences and prostitution, and to consider the treatment of those convicted of homosexual offences. This would involve and necessitate a thorough investigation into the causes and consequences of sexual deviancy. Chaired by John Wolfenden, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Reading, the committee met on 62 days over the next three years; 32 of those days were devoted to the ‘oral examination’ of ‘witnesses’, mostly at the Home Office in Whitehall, partly at the Scottish Home Department, St Andrew’s House, Edinburgh.² This volume provides a selection from the memoranda submitted by those witnesses and from the transcripts of the interviews themselves, all housed at the National Archives at Kew. It covers solely the homosexual concerns of the committee’s remit; Julia Laite’s companion volume deals with the prostitution.

The Wolfenden Report came out in 1957. It has long been recognized as a landmark in moves towards gay law reform. What is less well known is that the testimonials and written statements of the witnesses provide by far the most complete and extensive array of perspectives we have on how homosexuality was understood in Britain in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Those giving evidence, individually or through their professional associations, included a broad cross-section of official, professional and bureaucratic Britain: police chiefs, policemen, magistrates, judges, lawyers and Home Office civil servants; doctors, biologists (including Alfred Kinsey), psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and psychotherapists; prison governors, medical officers and probation officers; representatives of the churches, morality councils and progressive and ethical societies; approved school headteachers and youth organization leaders; representatives of the army, navy and air force; and a small handful of self-described but largely anonymous homosexuals.

This introduction gives a concise overview of the history of the committee and of the report, and maps out the major debates surrounding homosexuality in the 1950s. Part II, the meat of the collection, includes a representative range of the differing perspectives before the committee, contextualized and annotated. Part III highlights excerpts from the Wolfenden Report itself as a logical culmination of the committee’s three years of information-gathering and deliberation.

∗

When Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, the Home Secretary, brought the twin evils of prostitution and homosexuality before the cabinet table for discussion in February 1954, he thought that he had a growing and increasingly visible problem on his hands. The Conservative government craved an ordered society of gendered conformity, enhanced fecundity and contented domesticity, but the postwar reality appeared instead to have thrown up a host of social problems requiring urgent solutions.³ For example, as John Wolfenden later reminisced, there was increasing alarm in official circles about the ‘shamelessness’ of prostitutes on the streets of London (their numbers and visibility especially embarrassing during Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953, when the city was on show) and about an apparent increase in homosexual behaviour. The policing of both of these problems was no longer fit for purpose: the police had resorted to pulling in working girls in rotation (the prostitutes would be fined—in effect, taxed—and then return to the streets), and the policing of homosexual offences varied wildly across the country and had included some recent high-profile cases. All of this was serving to bring the law into disrepute.⁴

The greater visibility of homosexuality was critical in generating what a number of scholars have characterized as a moral panic.⁵ There had been a considerable spike in England and Wales over the previous quarter of a century in cases known to the police of buggery, gross indecency and indecent assault—from 622 in 1931 to 6,644 in 1955—and in prosecutions for the same offences: from 390 in 1931 to 2,504 in 1955. The more than threefold rise since the end of the war was especially alarming.⁶ A number of prominent individuals had found themselves before the courts in 1953 on homosexual charges, including the actor Sir John Gielgud (fined for persistently importuning in a public lavatory in Chelsea),⁷ the Labour MP for Paddington North, William Field (ditto, in public lavatories in Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square)⁸ and the writer Rupert Croft-Cooke (sentenced to nine months for indecent acts with sailors picked up in the Fitzroy Tavern, near Tottenham Court Road).⁹ The conviction in March 1954 of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, his fellow landowner Michael Pitt-Rivers and Peter Wildeblood, the diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Mail, for private and consensual offences, and after highly questionable police methods, caused particular disquiet.¹⁰ Croft-Cooke wrote darkly of a sexual McCarthyism, and the story became ingrained of a witch-hunt against homosexuals orchestrated in high places.¹¹ As Patrick Higgins, Matt Houlbrook and others have pointed out, the reality is more prosaic: lower-level decision-making in a small number of Metropolitan Police districts and among certain provincial forces accounts for most of the rise in statistics.¹² But the bulk of commentators at the time discounted the potential impact of more vigorous policing, preferring to believe that more prosecutions meant more offences committed—that homosexual practices were on the rise. It was difficult to pinpoint any one culprit, but the dislocation of families and the alleged breakdown of communal moral values because of the war featured prominently in most explanations.¹³

Just as worrisome for the government was the impression that more people were talking about homosexuality. The popular press in the late 1940s and early 1950s was jettisoning its former reticence about reporting in any but condensed and opaque terms on acts of sexual deviancy. The Sunday Pictorial featured a three-part series on ‘Evil Men’ in 1952, making it clear that these sick individuals were organizing in a degenerate sexual underworld and had designs upon your children.¹⁴ More soberly, a serious newspaper such as the Sunday Times was calling for reform, picking up not only on the unsatisfactory spectacle in the courts but also on many decades of medical, scientific and religious questioning about sexual inversion. Its leader of 1 November 1953 argued, on the one hand, that ‘the law that makes intercourse between males as such an indictable offence is neither enforceable nor consonant with current ethical standards’, but also, on the other, that, ‘It is not, in the long run an uncontrollable phenomenon. If, for some, perversion is an inherent and deep-rooted psychopathic state, for a far greater number it is a tendency which can be resisted, sublimated, or never awakened.’¹⁵

One of the most significant of these recent intellectual sallies upon which the editorial built was an article in 1952 by a Church of England clergyman, Derrick Sherwin Bailey, followed by a report in 1954 commissioned by the Church of England Moral Welfare Council, both of which concluded that at least some homosexuals were born that way and—so long as they left the children alone and didn’t frighten the horses—they should not find themselves up before the magistrate for whatever they chose to do behind closed doors.¹⁶ Another was the 1952 study Society and the Homosexual, by the homosexual psychologist and sociologist Michael Schofield, writing under the pseudonym of Gordon Westwood, which sought to recast homosexuality as a psychological condition largely determined in early childhood rather than a deliberate, morally perverse choice.¹⁷ A third was the 1953 novel The Heart in Exile, by a Hungarian expatriate, Adam de Hegedus, writing under the pseudonym of Rodney Garland, which pleaded for tolerance for the middle-class homosexual.¹⁸

Maxwell Fyfe did not favour a relaxation in the law for homosexuals. Yet, in presenting to his cabinet colleagues the arguments for an official inquiry, he recognized the ‘considerable body of opinion which regards the existing law as antiquated and out of harmony with modern ideas’.¹⁹ His first concern was clearly the prostitution problem, but he believed that the government could not strengthen the law and penalties against streetwalkers without the backing of a Royal Commission’s authoritative findings. And, given the noise surrounding homosexuality, he reasoned that launching a thorough inquiry into prostitutes while ignoring the other sexual deviants would be scarcely credible. Churchill’s preferred method of dealing with the unwelcome chatter was to curtail press freedom to publish the details of criminal prosecutions for homosexual offences, to prevent a repetition of the sensational coverage of the Montagu trial, but Maxwell Fyfe was able to persuade the cabinet that a dispassionate inquiry, which might educate the public, was preferable to censorship.²⁰

In the event, the cabinet agreed to a Home Office departmental committee rather than a full-scale Royal Commission. This would have the advantage of allowing possibly reticent witnesses to speak off the record and in private.²¹ With the exception of a small minority of MPs, such as Sir Robert Boothby, there was no strong parliamentary pressure for the decriminalization of homosexual offences, and the public remained largely hostile, so Maxwell Fyfe and the cabinet were not pushing for a progressive agenda here.²² Their aim was to control the threat that marginal sexual figures posed to public morals and decent family values, however that might best be done. And this opened up the prospect that a more liberal variation on the state regulation of sexuality might prevail if this seemed to be the optimal way to achieve these goals.

∗

The Home Office brought together a committee of 15 members. John (‘Jack’) Wolfenden (1906–85) was a safe pair of hands to act as chairman. A grammar school boy who won a scholarship to Oxford, started his career as an Oxford philosophy don, then became the headmaster of Uppingham and Shrewsbury Schools, he had been appointed to the vice-chancellorship at Reading in 1950. He was establishing his reputation as a diligent public servant and chair of councils and committees; a knighthood duly followed in 1956.²³ In common with the rest of the committee, throughout the proceedings and in his memoirs Wolfenden was adept at preserving a façade of impartiality and innocence on the question of homosexuality.²⁴ His knowledge—their knowledge—was ostensibly based purely upon professional experience (in his case predominantly as a headmaster in boarding schools²⁵ ); family secrets or personal desires remained necessarily hidden. But if, as seems likely, he knew about the ostentatious homosexuality of his brilliant son Jeremy, this was disingenuous.

As an astonishingly self-aware 18-year-old, fresh from Eton and living in London, Jeremy Wolfenden wrote in 1952, in a statement anticipating many of the themes that the committee was going to encounter,

I am a queer; so much is physically evident. But I have a lot more important things to do than waste my time hunting young men … I may end up with an undemanding and unsensational ménage with a single boy-friend; I may end up unsatisfied except for an occasional Sloane Street tart … I may, I suppose, turn to heterosexuality; but if by a pretty mature (physically) eighteen, I am not attracted by girls either physically or emotionally or aesthetically it seems unlikely.²⁶

Jeremy’s biographer, Sebastian Faulks, claims that Jack Wolfenden must have known about his son’s sexual tastes for at least two years before he accepted the chairmanship of the committee,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Style
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: The Witnesses
• Part III: The Wolfenden Report
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index