Vic was a river-pilot, who had been unable to resist the sight of an unattended barge containing some thousands of pounds’ worth of copper ingots. One of his ancestors had been hanged for piracy in Execution Dock during the 17th century; Vic got four years. He was a tall, athletic young man with the most insatiable intellectual curiosity I have ever met. Since ships were his business, he had steeped himself in Conrad and Melville and Hakluyt and Darwin, and could talk about the sea for hours in a way that would have made Rachel Carson seem a landlubber. He had left school at 16 and had been educating himself ever since. Unlike most of the other men in prison, he was never bored for a moment. The only thing that worried him was his separation from his pretty young wife, always referred to as ‘my Shirley Rose’, and his baby son. They lived in a flat on top of a warehouse in Stepney, with the Thames outside the window. Shirley Rose kept rabbits in a garden on the roof, and it was Vic’s ambition to build a dinghy up there and launch it over the side.
Charlie had been convicted of robbery with violence. He never discussed his crime, and we did not inquire. He was extremely thin, with hollow cheeks and a bony forehead, surmounted by an Edwardian quiff. Even in his prison uniform, Charlie was unmistakably a ‘Teddy boy’. Although all the uniforms were supposed to be the same, Charlie’s jacket seemed tighter than the rest, his lapels higher, the legs of his trousers narrower. I do not know whether he had surreptitiously altered them, or whether, by some occult means, his clothes had moulded themselves to his personality of their own accord. He was quiet and intensely shy, breaking out occasionally into a mad Chaplinesque performance as he described, with a brilliant sense of timing and satire, some event in his Camberwell past.
Another person with a shell of quietness and reserve was Bob, the research scientist. He had occupied a highly important post on a national Board, and had a wife and two daughters. His whole world had collapsed when he was found guilty of the fraudulent conversion of some trifling sum, and sentenced to three years in gaol. Gradually, however, we coaxed him out of his corner. We discovered that he had been in the Navy during the war, and Vic began talking to him about various ports they had both visited. He spoke very quietly, and every now and then his voice died away in the middle of a sentence. His eyes had that frightening, unfocused look that one often sees in prisoners. But one day Charlie started some ludicrous, fantastic pantomime, all scarecrow arms and legs and staccato Cockney patter, and Bob threw back his head and laughed. After that he was all right.
And then there was Dan Starling.
I noticed him first on the exercise yard, where he was talking to the birds. Wormwood Scrubs was inhabited by a large flock of pigeons, which were sustained by the bread put out by the prisoners on their window-ledges. In addition, at this time of year, there were numerous families of sparrows nesting in the eaves.
One of the fledgling sparrows had fallen out of its nest and lay, piping feebly, a few yards from the line of marching men. Dan picked it up and addressed the mother, who was looking out of a hole in the wall with her head cocked on one side.
‘Hey, you!’ he said, ‘look after your own, can’t you? Want the poor little bastard to get squashed?’ He sounded quite angry. The fledgling lay in his big, calloused hands, opening and shutting its yellow beak.
‘How about putting it on top of that pile of bricks?’ I suggested. ‘It doesn’t look as if it can fly, but at least the mother can come down and feed it.’
‘Yes, that’s an idea. Hope the cats don’t get it.’ Dan reached up and put the bird on top of the bricks. He was about my own age, with a finely modelled, tanned face and fair hair brushed back from a high forehead. We walked on together.
‘You’re in the Tailors’ Shop, aren’t you?’ he asked. ‘I seen you when you come in. One thing, you don’t look as bad as your picture in the papers.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Looked like you was dead or something. How’s your bird going?’
‘Bird?’
‘Your porridge; your sentence.’
‘Oh, quite quickly, really. I’ll be out in March ... only forty weeks more. How long are you doing?’
‘Four and a half. I’ve done eighteen months, so I’m just half way.’
‘Do you live in London?’
‘I don’t sound like it much, do I.’ He grinned. ‘Where did you think I come from?’
‘Well, I—I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but you look a bit like a gipsy.’
‘Pretty shrewd, you are. My family’s all Pikeys, but we ain’t on the road no more. We lives in Hoxton.’
A voice bellowed: ‘Form up!’ It was time to go back to work.
‘I’ll be seeing you,’ said Dan.
While I was still ‘banged up’ in my cell—that is, during my first month at the Scrubs—other prisoners had gone to a great deal of trouble to keep me abreast of the news. They used to copy out any relevant articles from the papers, in pencil, on lengths of toilet paper, and hand them to me, rolled up, when no-one was looking. In this way I learned that The Times had published two long and authoritative articles on ‘Homosexual Offenders’, expressing the view that the laws under which I had been prosecuted should be abolished; and that the same view had been put forward by the Observer. Reynolds and McNally had been dismissed from the RAF, and Sir David Maxwell Fyfe sharply questioned in the House of Commons about the illegal searches carried out by the police. His answers, evasive and misleading, drew the following comment from a reader of the Sunday Express:
‘I am disappointed in Sir David Maxwell Fyfe. As Home Secretary he should act as a guardian of the people’s liberties. Instead, he seems far too ready to sacrifice individual freedom to police convenience.
‘I cite his extraordinary statement to the House of Commons over the police search of Major Pitt-Rivers’ London flat, made without a warrant after the arrest of Pitt-Rivers in Dorset.
‘Sir David said that the search was carried out with the consent of the person (a Mr. Anderson) to whom the key of the flat had been entrusted.
‘But in evidence at Lymington, the police officer concerned stated:
“1. He had advised Mr. Anderson not to get in touch with Mrs. Pitt-Rivers. (Why?)
“2. That Major Pitt-Rivers had been arrested on a warrant for a felony. (This was false.)
“3. That Mr. Anderson objected to letting the police in. (‘Consent’?)”
‘Sir David also said it has long been the practice that when the police arrest a person on private premises, a search is carried out on those premises.
‘But has it really been the practice for the police to search every other possible home of the arrested man, in his absence, and without a warrant? If so, the practice should be changed.
‘Sir David should realise this; to uphold the great principles of English justice is far more important than any individual’s suspected misdemeanours.
‘We don’t want even a suspicion of the practices of a police State here.’
Ministerial lying on the grand scale was not, however, the only activity that had been taking place at Westminster. The House of Lords had been debating a motion ‘calling attention to the incidence of homosexual crime in Britain’, set down by Earl Winterton.
Lord Winterton had been, for many years, the Conservative MP for the district in which my parents lived. During my trial, my mother had written to him, asking him, whatever the verdict might be, to take up with the Home Secretary the various questions of police behaviour which had been raised by the case. Lord Winterton replied that he had every sympathy with her personally, but that he was unable to do anything as he no longer sat in the Commons, and that anyhow provincial police forces did not come under the control of the Home Secretary. Having got this off his chest, he went to the House of Lords and said:
‘In some circles that ought to know better, there has been a whispering campaign against the police for the action they have taken. I believe that to be entirely unjustified. The police have been fully justified in al
l the action they have taken in recent cases.’
He attacked the Church of England for its criticisms of the law, and, as The Times put it, ‘blurted out’ the name of a well-known actor who had recently been fined for importuning.
‘Many of the great actors of the past, in the early days of the century,’ he said, ‘were my friends. It was inconceivable that they would have been guilty of the disgusting offence of male importuning. ... I am convinced that the majority of the British people agree that nothing lowers the prestige, weakens the moral fibre, and injures the physique of a nation more than tolerated and widespread homosexuality.’
His speech also included the phrases ‘filthy, disgusting and unnatural vice’ and ‘corrosive and corrupting immorality’.
Lord Jowitt, following this with a calm and reasonable speech, said that when he had been Attorney-General 95 per cent of all blackmail cases had a homosexual origin. We must not make the mistake of trying to make our criminal law cover the same ground as the moral law: adultery was a great evil, but no-one would suggest that it should once more be made a criminal offence. He congratulated the Government on their courage in setting up a Committee to investigate the law.
Lord Vansittart and Lord Ammon supported Lord Winterton. Lord Ritchie of Dundee said that he regretted their ‘emotional’ approach to the problem. As far as the private actions of adults were concerned, he believed that public opinion generally would be glad to see an end to prosecutions.
Lord Brabazon of Tara said that ‘a recent case’ had had curious repercussions. That the police should question one of two guilty men for more than 10 hours in order to get him to turn Queen’s Evidence and promise him immunity in order to convict the other might be all right in foreign countries, but was very much against public approval here. The result was that, instead of public condemnation going against the condemned, it had gone against the police for their methods. That had been a very shocking and terrible thing. ‘If the law is such as to encourage over-zealous police departments to indulge in those sorts of methods,’ declared Lord Brabazon, ‘it is time for the law to be changed.’
The Times headlined its report of the debate: ‘PEERS ENDORSE INQUIRY INTO HOMOSEXUALITY. POWER OF PUBLIC OPINION.’ The Daily Mail, it may be noted, curtailed all the speeches except that of Lord Winterton, which it reported in full under the headline: ‘SEX VICE: VETERAN PEER SPEAKS OUT’—a fair example of the Daily Mail technique of telling its readers rather less than half the truth.
Mr. John Gordon, whose column ‘Current Events’ enlivens the Sunday Express, added his voice to that of Lord Winterton.
‘An emotional crusade,’ he wrote, ‘seems to be developing to legalise perversion, and even to sanctify perverts ... STUFF AND NONSENSE. Perversion is very largely a practice of the too idle and the too rich. It does not flourish in lands where men work hard and brows sweat with honest labour.
‘It is a wicked mischief, destructive not only of men but of nations. Those who are raising sentimental howls in its defence would do Britain a better service by lending their support to stamping it out.’
When I read this tirade, carefully copied out on toilet-paper, I laughed as I had not done for months. ‘The idle rich’? When convicted homosexuals include seven times as many factory workers, and twice as many farm labourers, as men of independent means? ‘Lands where men work hard’? What about the Scandinavian countries, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland and Germany, in none of which it is considered necessary to carry out periodic witch-hunts against homosexual scapegoats?
As for ‘emotional crusades’ and ‘sentimental howls’, it was pretty obvious which side in this controversy was being most emotional, and howling the loudest. The posturings of Lord Winterton were the most ludicrous of all, with his claim that none of his friends had been homosexuals, because for years he had been a close friend of Lawrence of Arabia.
It was not until many months later, however, that I discovered the full extent of Lord Winterton’s hypocrisy. During the second reading of the Criminal Justice Bill on November 27th, 1947, he had drawn attention to the fact that the bill contained no reference to homosexual crime.
I think his words on that occasion are worth repeating. He said: ‘I would draw attention to two gross anomalies. One is the very inadequate penalties for cruelty to children. The other is that the penalty for unnatural vice between male persons is too high. Only comparatively recently, I understand, has that been a crime under English Law. I think that the present penalty was largely introduced as a result of the obstructions on another Bill by Mr. Henry Labouchere. I understand that there is no penalty for Lesbianism....’
One morning I looked out of my cell door—I had been moved to the fourth floor by now—and saw, standing on the landing below, a man whose face was vaguely familiar. Was he someone I had known in Fleet Street? Or in the RAF, or perhaps at school? Then I realised who he was. The man, standing there in prisoner’s uniform, was the warder who had said to Edward Montagu during our first days at Winchester: ‘It might happen to anybody.’ It had happened to him.
Later, on exercise, I found him walking alone. I gave him two ‘roll-ups’ and a matchstick split in four, for which he was just as grateful as I had been on my first day in prison. He told me that he had been convicted of carnal knowledge of his own daughter aged twelve. The judge at Winchester had expressed sympathy with him, and sentenced him to three years’ imprisonment. On the day after he arrived at the Scrubs, the Governor made him a ‘Red Band’—that is to say, gave him privileges which other prisoners had to wait months or even years to acquire.
This news enraged Charlie, Vic, Jimmy and Dan, who rightly or wrongly, believed that the man had been given this post in return for a promise to inform on any other prisoners who were breaking regulations. It enraged me, too, when I contrasted his treatment with that of Ron.
Ron was a 22-year-old farm labourer from a small village in Sussex. He had committed sexual offences with several small boys, had been found out, and was persuaded by the police, in the usual way, to plead guilty. He was quite stupid and was, in fact, described in court by the police as having a mental age of 12. During the questioning, he told the police that he had been seduced, when he was himself a small boy, by a gardener who was still living in the village. The gardener was also arrested, and he, too, pleaded Guilty. They both came up before the same judge for sentence, at Lewes Assizes.
Judges frequently justify savage sentences by telling the convicted man that his crime has ruined a human life, by causing his victim to become a homosexual for the rest of his days. I do not think this theory is true, but it is one which judges employ. The judge in this case apparently took this view, because he sentenced the gardener to seven years’ imprisonment.
He then turned to Ron. One might have expected some leniency for the victim, for this illiterate farm-boy with a mental age of 12, whose parents had promised to try to help him and whose employer had agreed to take him back. The judge gave him five years.
As so often happens, Ron and the gardener were both sent to Wormwood Scrubs. When I last saw them they had been there for a year, seeing each other almost every day. Neither of them had been offered any help during that time by psychiatrist or doctor. One day, an Assistant Governor, a man who professed to be a Christian, visited Ron in his cell.
‘Well,’ he asked, ‘have you made up your mind to change your habits when you get outside?’
‘How can I?’ said Ron. ‘Every day I see the man who started it all. I keep on remembering. Sir, can’t I be sent somewhere else, so that I can get away from him?’
The Assistant Governor smiled. ‘That’s all part of the punishment,’ he said.
The arrival of summer was signalled by a blaze of purple irises which bordered the exercise yard. The prisoners in ‘C’ Hall were allowed to pick them and place them in polished Harpic tins on their dining-tables, but ‘D’ Hall, under the austere and hygienic eye of Mr. Cockayne, remained undecorated. On sunny days the heat
in the Tailors’ Shop was overpowering; the windows could only be opened by lifting them bodily out of their frames, and we were still wearing the same clothes, grey flannel, thick woollen socks and heavy shoes. Every evening, by the time I returned to my cell, I was coated with a sticky mixture of sweat, dust and cinders. I used to strip and stand in my metal wash-basin, sponging myself with a rag soaked in cold water and trying not to dirty my scrubbed floor.
Every Thursday morning we were marched off to the Bath House, a one-story building divided into cubicles and containing about thirty bath-tubs. The water was copious and hot, and the ‘screw’ in charge did not hurry us unduly. Bath-day was therefore an event to look forward to. For some reason there were no plugs in the baths and the first thing we had to do was to find a piece of shirt-tail, wring it out in Dettol—the only disinfectant, incidentally, in the prison was this tin of Dettol in the bath-house—and stuff it into the plug-hole. Then we took off our clothes, wrapped a towel round us and went to collect a clean shirt, underwear and socks from a store-room supervised by a prisoner. There was always a good deal of argument about this, because the shirts were invariably un-ironed and often had large holes in them, like the socks, while the underwear was of the most eccentric shapes and was usually devoid of buttons.
It was a lordly experience, to sink into a deep, hot bath and watch the prison dirt detach itself from one’s body and form a grey, scurfy line along the sides of the tub. The tablets of soap with which we were provided had been manufactured, I think, from boiled-down fragments and had a peculiar, limp consistency, but Dan Starling, whose earnings amounted to five shillings a week, used to present me from time to time with a tablet of Lux toilet soap from the canteen. I had never noticed before that Lux soap had such a powerful perfume; in contrast, I suppose, to the usual prison smells it seemed as pungent as a bowl of hyacinths.
Against the Law Page 15
