The British Establishment went into the Old Bailey to save the nation from sex. And came out with its trousers round its ankles.
November 2nd, 1960.
Sixty-six years ago today.
Court Number One at the Old Bailey.
Twelve jurors. Nine men. Three women.
A High Court judge. A formidable prosecuting barrister. A distinguished team of defence lawyers. And a little orange Penguin paperback that had caused more alarm in respectable Britain than a battalion of burglars.
The book was Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
The charge was obscenity.
And the question was whether the British public could be trusted to read it.
Well, some members of the British public, anyway.
The others were apparently to be protected from it.
Especially the servants.
Ah, the servants.
We’ll come to them.
Because it’s probably the servants who lost the prosecution its case.
But first, let’s go inside the courtroom.
It’s November 2nd. The jury has been out for three hours.
The judge is Mr Justice Laurence Byrne. A devout Roman Catholic, a man with fifteen years’ experience on the High Court bench.
The prosecution is led by Mervyn Griffith-Jones. A powerful-looking fellow, an experienced Old Bailey prosecutor with a strong sense of right and wrong. And, by all accounts, an equally strong sense that he knew which was which.
For the defence, Gerald Gardiner, one of the most accomplished barristers of his generation, assisted by Jeremy Hutchinson and Richard Du Cann.
In the dock, metaphorically speaking, is Penguin Books.
And behind it all stands the ghost of a man who’s been dead for thirty years.
D. H. Lawrence.
The jury returns.
The foreman announces the verdict.
Not guilty.
Two words.
And with those two words, a piece of Victorian Britain that had somehow survived into 1960 takes a considerable knock.
But to understand what happened in that courtroom, we need to turn the clock back.
Not thirty years.
Thirty-two.
To Florence, Italy, in 1928.
And a desperately ill English novelist.
David Herbert Lawrence.
Born in a Nottinghamshire mining town. The son of a coalminer. A writer whose work had repeatedly collided with the authorities.
His novel The Rainbow had already been prosecuted for obscenity in 1915. The authorities had ordered copies destroyed.
Lawrence was no stranger to trouble.
Indeed, he seemed almost constitutionally incapable of avoiding it.
If there was an established convention, a pious assumption, a respectable opinion, Lawrence was likely to go straight at it.
Preferably with both boots.
By the late 1920s, though, his greatest enemy wasn’t a policeman or a censor.
It was tuberculosis.
His health was deteriorating terribly.
And there’s something enormously moving about what happened next.
Because this man, whose body was failing him, sat down to write a novel about the body.
About love. Desire. Tenderness. Sexual intimacy. The extraordinary business of being alive.
He wrote the final version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in just five weeks.
Five weeks!
And the story?
An aristocratic woman, Constance Chatterley, married to Sir Clifford Chatterley, a wealthy landowner paralysed by a war wound.
Sir Clifford can no longer have a sexual relationship with his wife.
Connie falls in love with the gamekeeper.
Oliver Mellors.
The lady of the manor and the gamekeeper.
A crossing of class boundaries as well as sexual ones.
And there’s a fascinating possibility here.
One of Lawrence’s friends was Lady Cynthia Asquith, an aristocratic beauty married to the son of the former prime minister H. H. Asquith.
Her husband had returned from the First World War suffering from shell shock.
Some have suggested that Lady Cynthia helped inspire Connie Chatterley.
It’s not established. But the parallels are intriguing.
And Lady Cynthia herself died in March 1960.
Seven months before the Old Bailey trial.
Another ghost in that courtroom.
Now, Lawrence didn’t merely write about sex.
He wrote about physical life in a world increasingly dominated by machines, industrialisation and rigid social conventions.
His gamekeeper belongs to the working class. His heroine belongs to the aristocracy.
And the novel asks whether two human beings can discover a genuine connection in a society determined to keep them apart.
But it also contains some words that polite England preferred not to utter.
Or see in print.
And Lawrence used them freely.
Very freely.
The novel was privately published in Florence in 1928, with help from a bookseller called Pino Orioli.
But back in Britain?
Not so fast, Mr Lawrence.
There was a gentleman in charge at the Home Office.
Sir William Joynson-Hicks.
Known to friends, enemies and practically everybody else as Jix.
Jix!
A splendid name for a man who regarded himself as a bulwark against moral disintegration.
He worried about nightclubs. About public indecency. About books. About the dreadful things that might happen if people were allowed to read the wrong sort of literature.
During his time as Home Secretary, imported copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover were seized.
And in 1929, the police confiscated the unexpurgated typescript of Lawrence’s poems Pansies.
That same year, the police raided an exhibition of Lawrence’s paintings in London.
Yes, paintings.
It wasn’t enough to keep an eye on what he wrote.
They had to keep an eye on what he painted.
Lawrence was making himself thoroughly objectionable to respectable England in more than one medium.
He died in France in March 1930.
Forty-four years old.
And here’s an important point.
He never lived to see the publication of his complete novel in Britain.
Never lived to see that Old Bailey courtroom.
Never lived to hear those two words.
Not guilty.
But the book survived.
And it circulated.
Smuggled copies came in from the Continent.
People borrowed them, passed them around, concealed them.
There’s even a little London footnote I particularly like.
Villiers Street.
That short street running down from the Strand to Embankment station.
Back in the 1930s, a radical bookseller called Ronald Kidd ran a tiny bookshop there.
The Punch and Judy Bookshop.
And among the books available to its customers was an unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Kidd later founded the National Council for Civil Liberties.
Today we know it as Liberty.
I’ve walked down Villiers Street hundreds of times.
But now there’s another reason to give it a second look.
A tiny bookshop. A forbidden novel. A future champion of civil liberties.
All tucked away just off the Strand.
That’s London.
It keeps giving.
And perhaps the most delicious irony of all is that while official Britain was trying to suppress Lawrence’s novel, some of the most exalted members of the Establishment were reading it themselves.
Let me take you into the royal household.
Queen Mary, wife of King George V, is lent a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by Lady Cynthia Colville, one of her ladies of the bedchamber.
Not Lady Cynthia Asquith, incidentally. A different Cynthia.
There’s a certain amount of Cynthia going on in this story.
Now, King George V is apparently none too pleased about this literary adventure.
He scolds.
But then he’s discovered reading the book himself.
And what’s His Majesty’s explanation?
Well, it’s his duty, apparently, to acquaint himself with the temptations to which his subjects might be exposed.
Of course it is.
An onerous duty.
But somebody at Buckingham Palace has to do it.
And I fancy His Majesty was extremely conscientious in the discharge of that responsibility.
Now move forward to 1960.
Thirty years after Lawrence’s death.
A year earlier, Parliament had passed a new Obscene Publications Act.
The legislation was associated with Roy Jenkins, the young Labour politician who had pushed for reform.
And it introduced a crucial principle.
A book should be judged as a whole.
Not condemned simply because somebody had found an objectionable paragraph on page 47.
And the publication of a work could be defended on the grounds that it served the public good.
Its literary merit mattered.
Its artistic purpose mattered.
Its overall meaning mattered.
Enter Penguin Books.
And Sir Allen Lane.
Lane had founded Penguin in 1935. His great achievement was to make good books available to ordinary people at affordable prices.
Literature for everybody.
Not merely the well-heeled.
Not merely the university-educated.
And not merely the people with sufficiently large drawing rooms.
Penguin was already publishing Lawrence.
So why not publish the complete Lady Chatterley’s Lover?
The full text.
Uncut.
At three shillings and sixpence.
An affordable paperback edition.
Two hundred thousand copies were prepared.
And suddenly the authorities had a decision to make.
The Director of Public Prosecutions was Sir Theobald Mathew.
Now, here’s an interesting complication.
Mathew didn’t particularly like the idea of his office censoring literature.
He’d said so.
He recognised the distinction between public and private morality.
But he also believed he had to respond to what he understood to be public opinion.
He hesitated.
Then authorised the prosecution.
The Attorney-General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, backed the decision.
So we have a publisher determined to test a new law.
A Director of Public Prosecutions reluctant to become a literary censor.
And an Attorney-General eager to see a conviction.
All heading for the Old Bailey.
The trial opens on Thursday, October 20th, 1960.
And here’s where things begin to get wonderfully English.
The prosecution is led by Mervyn Griffith-Jones.
Now, we must be fair to him.
He was no fool.
He’d helped prosecute Ruth Ellis in 1955. He knew his business.
He was an experienced, highly capable Crown counsel.
But on this particular occasion he produced a question that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
He asked the jury to consider whether they would approve of their children reading the book.
Fair enough.
Whether they would have it lying around their homes.
And then he asked:
“Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?”
Your wife.
Or your servants.
Good heavens.
There it is.
The whole class structure of pre-war Britain suddenly rising up out of the courtroom floor like an enormous, dusty, moth-eaten drawing-room sofa.
Your wife or your servants!
As though the country were still divided into those who chose the books and those who polished the furniture.
And remember.
The novel itself is about an aristocratic woman crossing the class divide to have a relationship with a working-class man.
The prosecutor had walked straight into Lawrence’s central theme.
And put his foot in it.
C. H. Rolph, a former police officer turned journalist who later edited the trial transcript, remembered the reaction.
The question had a visible and risible effect on the jury.
In other words, they were amused.
Not terribly promising when you’re trying to secure a criminal conviction.
Now the prosecution faced another problem.
Witnesses.
The defence had them coming out of its ears.
Novelists. Critics. University academics. Publishers. Clergymen.
The Crown?
One police detective, to establish the seizure of the book.
And that was about it.
The prosecution had tried to find distinguished people willing to testify against Lawrence.
Not much luck.
Two people approached by the Crown actually ended up giving evidence for Penguin.
Meanwhile, Penguin’s lawyers had contacted hundreds of potential supporters.
Among those opposed to the prosecution were Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot, Bertrand Russell, John Betjeman and Kingsley Amis.
But there was one notable refusal.
Enid Blyton.
The creator of the Famous Five.
Enid hadn’t read the novel.
But her husband had said no.
There you are.
The Famous Five could solve mysteries, outwit smugglers and discover secret passages.
But apparently even they weren’t going anywhere near Lady Chatterley.
Not without permission from Mr Blyton.
Now the defence gets going.
And the procession of witnesses is extraordinary.
Thirty-five in all.
Including E. M. Forster.
The author of A Room with a View, Howards End and A Passage to India.
One of the greatest English novelists alive.
Jeremy Hutchinson, the young barrister assisting Gardiner, has the pleasure of calling him.
“I call Edward Morgan Forster.”
And his first question?
“I believe you have written some novels.”
Some novels!
Well, yes, Jeremy.
As a matter of fact, he has.
A few.
Enough to be getting on with.
And the prosecution doesn’t even cross-examine him.
Then there’s Richard Hoggart, the literary scholar.
Hoggart argues that Lawrence’s language, shocking though it may initially seem, is essential to what the novelist is trying to do.
He explains that the repeated use of those forbidden words gradually changes the reader’s response.
They cease to be merely shocking.
They become part of the novel’s language and meaning.
Griffith-Jones grows impatient.
And snaps:
“You are not at Leicester University at the moment.”
Hoggart refuses to be rattled.
A lecturer calmly explaining literature.
A prosecutor growing increasingly exasperated.
And twelve ordinary citizens watching it all.
But if the literary witnesses made the prosecution uncomfortable, the clergymen were something else again.
Enter the Bishop of Woolwich.
John Robinson.
A bishop!
Defending Lady Chatterley’s Lover!
Robinson argued that Lawrence was trying to portray sexual intimacy as something sacred.
He even spoke of holy communion.
And when asked whether the novel was suitable for Christians, he declared that Christians ought to read it.
Well!
I imagine a number of ecclesiastical eyebrows shot up so sharply they nearly displaced their mitres.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, was not amused.
After the verdict he rebuked Robinson.
And the Archbishop hadn’t even read the novel himself.
One churchman has read it and recommends it.
Another hasn’t read it and is furious.
You really couldn’t invent a better piece of ecclesiastical theatre.
But let’s not make the mistake of assuming that every intelligent critic of Lawrence was a narrow-minded puritan.
Some thought the defenders of the book were going much too far.
One journalist, Michael Welch, was particularly scathing about the religious interpretations.
He thought that if the novel had any supernatural flavour, it came not from Christianity but from the tradition of witchcraft.
Witchcraft!
Not holy communion.
Quite a difference.
And that raises an important point.
You could support the right to publish Lady Chatterley’s Lover without thinking it was a masterpiece.
You could defend freedom of expression while believing some of Lawrence’s admirers were talking through their hats.
The question before the jury wasn’t whether they liked the novel.
Or whether they agreed with its philosophy.
Or whether they wanted a copy on the bedside table.
It was whether Penguin had committed a criminal offence by publishing it.
And now, just before we reach the verdict, there’s one more witness I want you to meet.
Bernadine Wall.
A young Cambridge graduate from Ladbroke Grove.
West London.
She’d read the censored version of the novel.
And the complete version.
And she could see the difference.
When asked about Lawrence’s language, she explained that the supposedly shocking words had held no surprises for her.
“I knew all of them at that time.”
Wonderful.
The prosecution is trying to protect the young from words they already know.
And here’s a young woman calmly telling the Old Bailey that the forbidden vocabulary is hardly news to her.
By now the prosecution has rather a lot on its plate.
But I’ve saved one of my favourite details.
The judge’s wife.
Lady Dorothy Byrne.
She sat beside her husband during the proceedings.
And she’d been doing a bit of homework.
She’d read the book and carefully marked the passages that might cause concern.
She made notes.
Page numbers. Descriptions. Little guides to the more inflammatory material.
A sort of domestic concordance to the naughty bits.
And she’d sewn her husband a special bag in which to carry the novel to and from court.
Blue-grey damask.
With a ribbon tie.
Imagine it.
One of the great legal battles over freedom of expression in twentieth-century Britain.
And the presiding judge is carrying the offending evidence to the Old Bailey in a little fabric bag made by his wife.
I think it’s glorious.
And here’s the best part.
The bag survives.
So does the annotated book.
They’re preserved in the Special Collections at the University of Bristol.
An actual physical relic of the trial.
Not merely a story.
A real book.
A real bag.
A very English solution to an embarrassing practical problem.
After all, one wouldn’t want His Lordship seen wandering about the City carrying an indecent paperback.
Especially not without a proper cover.
Now.
Back to November 2nd.
The jury has heard the evidence.
The learned counsel have made their closing speeches.
The judge has summed up.
The question is not whether the book is shocking.
Not whether it contains words that respectable people avoid.
Not whether it might upset somebody’s aunt in Tunbridge Wells.
The legal question is whether it is obscene under the Act.
Whether it tends to deprave and corrupt its likely readers.
And if so, whether publication is justified for the public good.
The jurors retire.
Three hours pass.
And then they return.
Not guilty.
Penguin Books is acquitted.
Now, I want to be careful here.
It’s tempting to say that this verdict single-handedly created the Swinging Sixties.
But that would be too neat.
Too easy.
Britain had already been changing.
The jury’s decision was partly a recognition of changes that had happened.
And partly an encouragement to changes still to come.
Nevertheless, November 2nd, 1960, is a landmark.
Eight days later, on November 10th, the Penguin edition goes on sale.
Price?
Three shillings and sixpence.
And Penguin’s publicity trumpets:
“Now YOU can read it.”
Well, yes.
You and everybody else.
Two hundred thousand copies sold on the first day.
Within a year, more than two million.
Queues outside London bookshops.
Copies disappearing almost as soon as they reach the shelves.
There’s something almost comically self-defeating about the whole prosecution.
The authorities had spent years trying to prevent people reading the novel.
And now they’d provided it with the greatest publicity campaign a publisher could dream of.
You couldn’t have bought advertising like that.
And the opposition wasn’t finished.
The day after the acquittal, the matter was being raised in the House of Lords.
A few weeks later, Lord Teviot was demanding that writings of this kind be banned.
For all time.
For all time!
“What are we coming to?” he asked.
And Lord Boothby, taking a rather more cheerful view of the country’s prospects, thought Britain was going in the right direction.
There you have it.
Two London buildings.
The Old Bailey and the Palace of Westminster.
In one, twelve citizens had delivered their verdict.
In the other, their lordships were still arguing about what the nation ought to be allowed to read.
And I think that’s the heart of the story.
Because Lady Chatterley’s Lover had always been about more than sex.
It was about class.
About power.
About the relationship between human beings and the institutions that organise their lives.
And in 1960 those questions escaped from the pages of Lawrence’s novel and walked straight into an English courtroom.
The prosecutor asked whether the servants should be allowed to read it.
The jury said Penguin had committed no crime by publishing it.
The servants, as it happened, would soon be able to buy their own copies.
At three and six a throw.
And so would everybody else.
Now, before we leave, a quick look at what happened to some of our principal characters.
Gerald Gardiner would become Lord Chancellor.
Jeremy Hutchinson would become one of the most celebrated criminal defence advocates in the country.
And Mervyn Griffith-Jones?
Three years later he’d be back at the Old Bailey, prosecuting Stephen Ward in the Profumo scandal.
That trial would end not in laughter and celebration, but in tragedy.
And there’s another curious detail.
The formidable Griffith-Jones was an accomplished painter.
His group portrait of himself and his fellow judges hangs, or at least has hung, on the judges’ staircase at the Old Bailey.
There’s a certain satisfaction in that.
The barrister whose words became one of the most famous blunders in British legal history left a picture of himself inside the building where he made them.
But let’s give the final thought to Lawrence.
Because we’ve had our fun.
The servants.
The bishops.
Enid Blyton’s husband.
The judge’s little bag.
But Lawrence was a serious writer.
And there’s something deeply poignant about this dying man in Italy, writing a passionate celebration of physical life.
A man who’d spent years fighting illness, fighting convention, fighting the authorities.
A man who wrote about intimacy while his own body was failing him.
He never knew what would happen at the Old Bailey in 1960.
Never knew that his book would become a symbol of freedom of expression.
Never knew that hundreds of thousands of ordinary people would queue to buy it.
But he knew what he wanted to say.
That life in the body matters.
That love matters.
That intimacy matters.
That our time here is fleeting.
And that we ought not to be ashamed of being human.
In the end, perhaps that’s what the jury understood.
Not necessarily that Lawrence was right about everything.
Not that the book was perfect.
But that the public could be trusted to read it.
To judge it.
To argue with it.
To make up their own minds.
And there’s a wonderful way of measuring the distance Britain travelled that day.
In the 1920s, copies of Lawrence’s novel were being seized as they came into the country.
By November 1960, Londoners were queueing to buy it.
And you know what?
I rather like the thought of one of those customers, clutching that orange Penguin paperback, making their way down Villiers Street towards the Embankment.
Past the place where Ronald Kidd had once sold forbidden books.
Something that had been illicit was now ordinary.
A paperback.
Three shillings and sixpence.
A book you could take home.
And yet London, if you know where to look, still remembers the extraordinary battle that made that possible.
The Old Bailey.
Villiers Street.
The bookshops of Charing Cross Road.
The House of Lords.
One city.
One book.
And a country discovering that the world wasn’t going to end because the servants could read it.
Word of the Day
Unexpurgated.
It means complete. Uncut. Not censored. Nothing taken out because somebody thinks it offensive or unsuitable.
The word comes from the Latin expurgare, meaning to cleanse or purify.
And there’s the delicious irony.
To expurgate a book is, quite literally in its linguistic origins, to purify it.
As though words were dirt.
As though literature needed disinfecting.
Well, on November 2nd, 1960, twelve jurors at the Old Bailey decided that Penguin could publish Lawrence’s novel without giving it a good scrub first.
Unexpurgated.
A lovely word.
And a rather wonderful victory.
London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
See you tomorrow.