6) For the Public Good – Key Trials (ii) 1960-76
The prosecution of Lady Chatterley’s Lover at the Old Bailey in November 1960 has long since passed into British pop-cultural folklore, and is now the one Dirty Book trial that practically everybody has at least vaguely heard of. Entire books have been written about the case (and several radio and TV dramatizations broadcast), to the extent that there is really very little new to say about it, and the present account will confine itself to the basics. DH Lawrence (1885-1930) wrote three versions of Chatterley over the late 1920s, the last being the strongest in terms of content, and for thirty years the most notorious book of its generation was thus published solely on the continent (initially in 1928). The uncut version was eventually dramatically tried and acquitted in America in July 1959, and the immediate lesson was obvious: there was a quick fortune to be made in the UK for the first British publisher with the guts to follow suit.
Allen Lane of Penguin decided the risk was worth taking, and the firm’s unexpurgated Chatterley was first announced in the Bookseller in January 1960 as a standard 3/6 paperback. Penguin’s usual printers flatly refused to handle production however, and discreet enquiries to the Attorney General on the likelihood of a prosecution were met with bland shoulder-shrugging: the firm would just have to take their chances. Lane cautiously responded by formally ‘publishing’ the book in early August via a dozen copies sent direct to the DPP, and Penguin were accordingly summonsed at Bow Street two weeks later. It was all very gentlemanly – Penguin unprovocatively froze distribution of their stock until after the trial, and in view of this responsible attitude the DPP correspondingly only prosecuted the company itself, rather than Lane personally as director (which as we have seen was previously the norm, and carried the attendant threat of prison).
The trial took five days, between Oct 21st and Nov 2nd, before Mr Justice Byrne, who was scrupulously even-handed in his approach. Griffith-Jones prosecuted and Gerald Gardiner defended – a rematch of the second Image and the Search trial six years earlier. The defence called 35 witnesses and apparently had another 35 in reserve. The prosecution called none, Griffith-Jones relying on the self-evident obscenity of the work in question, and at the time this was not an unreasonable attitude. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – an account of a passionate sexual affair between its aristocratic heroine and her common-as-muck gamekeeper – goes far, far beyond anything previously published in English. In addition to the twelve lengthily-described sexual ‘bouts’, Lawrence boldly uses the previously absolutely-forbidden Anglo-Saxon ‘four-letter words’, which Griffith-Jones obligingly totted-up for the jury: there were 30 fucks or fuckings, 14 cunts, 13 balls, 6 shits, 6 arses, 4 cocks and 3 pisses. As far as the prosecution were concerned, there could never be any excuse for language of this sort in print:
“You may think that one of the ways in which you can test this book, and test it from the most liberal outlook, is to ask yourself the question when you have read it through, would you approve of your young sons, young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife and servants to read?”
This last rhetorical flourish produced visible mirth among the jurors, five of whom had apparently experienced some difficulty reading the Oath.
Byrne summed-up very fairly (though he reinforced the point that the author’s intent was legally irrelevant, and was plainly unimpressed by the number and quality of the expert witnesses: “these days the world seems to be full of experts”). The jury of nine men and three women could hardly stand against the apparently unstoppable tide of the progressive times however, and after a retirement of three hours returned a verdict of Not Guilty, to a burst of applause from the public gallery. By the end of 1961 Penguin had sold in excess of two million copies, and Lane’s gamble had quite clearly paid off.
The trial’s impact was explosive – Chatterley essentially freed serious literature in England. The obvious next step was to free non-serious literature, but nobody at the time appears to have appreciated exactly what a bumpy road this would inevitably lead down. Emboldened by the new permissive atmosphere, Mayflower brought out an unexpurgated paperback of Fanny Hill in Nov 1963 which was promptly seized from a bookshop on Tottenham Court Road (actually run by Gold brothers David and Ralph, later to become major figures in the UK glamour-magazine market). The Golds were summonsed at Bow Street in December, and Mayflower were aghast to discover that the trial would be Summary only (before magistrate Sir Robert Blundell) – although as publishers they could help with defence costs etc, it was the Golds rather than Mayflower who were actually being charged, and a Guilty verdict could set off a string of similar local prosecutions up and down the country.
The trial took place over four days in Feb 1964. Griffith-Jones was prosecuting in what would turn out to be his final obscenity case – later that year he was appointed an Old Bailey judge. Jeremy Hutchinson led for the defence, and called several expert witnesses in support of his central arguments that (1) the book contained a great deal of valuable c18th historical detail, and (2) was a joyful celebration of wholesome (unkinky) sex. But there were two significant difficulties. First, Griffith-Jones had only recently finished prosecuting the late Stephen Ward (dead via a fatal overdose taken on the last day of his trial), and the scandalous revelations of the Profumo affair had temporarily sent Britain into one of its periodic moral fits. Second, prosecution lessons had been learned from Chatterley: Griffith-Jones shrewdly seized upon the the (quite atypical) flagellation episode and hammered away at it relentlessly. Blundell needed only “two minutes’ reflection” to find the book Guilty, and the Golds’ 170 seized copies were ordered forfeit.
Mayflower’s 1970 reprint, and a pile of contemporary Luxor Press classics
There was plenty of subsequent uproar in Parliament but Mayflower pragmatically felt an Appeal would be an expensive waste of time, and instead cautiously brought out a ‘revised’ (ie expurgated) edition with an identical cover-design now printed in green rather than the original’s orange. Eventually in 1970 they quietly reissued the uncensored text again (this time appropriately in purple), even though this was – theoretically – still illegal.
One (still largely unsung) beneficiary of the Mayflower trial was Charles Skilton (1925-2004), who started out as a minor publisher after the War, initially reprinting Frank Richards’ classic Billy Bunter novels to notable success. Spotting the potential of a Banned (but conveniently out of copyright) book, Skilton swiftly brought out his own edited edition of Fanny Hill under his new Luxor Press (1963-76) imprint, cannily failing to point out this was just as cautiously-cut as the neutered Mayflower reprint. It went on to be a bestseller, and Skilton immediately grasped the commercial possibilities of marketing erotica which stayed within the law but somehow contrived to imply it was rather naughtier. Under editor Leonard Holdsworth, Luxor went on to publish dozens of mixed (fiction and non-fiction) titles over the next decade in a uniform 7″x5″ format which was slightly larger than the standard paperback and additionally featured distinctive bright-yellow covers that became a trademark. These were typically sold in sleazy newsagents and station bookstalls rather than High Street chains like WHSmiths etc, and went on to make their publisher a fortune. Skilton ended up buying a huge country house in Surrey known (at least behind his back) by the rest of the book-trade as ‘Fanny Hall’ – he entertained lavishly, and his parties there have been fondly recalled by visiting US porn-men. He retired to Banwell Castle, Somerset in 1976, then Whittingehame House, Edinburgh in 1988, proving that not everyone involved in Dirty Books automatically comes to a sticky end.
In contrast to the downmarket Luxor, the most significant of the ‘respectable’ boundary-pushing 1960s publishers were Calder & Boyars. John Calder (1927-2018) had entered publishing back in 1949 with a determinedly left-field, avant-garde list, but the company’s glory years were 1963-75 when in partnership with the like-minded Marion Boyars (1927-1999) he offered some of the decade’s most provocatively scandalous (if manifestly literary) titles. Some were prosecuted, some not, but all seriously aggravated the authorities post-Chatterley.
The first major rumpus was over Henry Miller’s semi-autobiographical Tropic of Cancer, which had been considered unpublishable in Britain since its covert appearance in Paris in 1934. Calder announced he would bring out a complete edition in early 1963, and the Home Office promptly tied itself in knots trying to decide whether or not to prosecute. DPP Toby Mathew eventually referred the matter to the man who was by now the acknowledged authority, and on 2nd April Griffith-Jones replied with the following confidential memo:
“In my opinion the book Tropic of Cancer is not obscene within the meaning of Section One… It is an unpleasant and disgusting book, but the manner in which it is written is quite unlike any other book which has been the subject of proceedings over the last few years, in as much as, in my view, there is no tendency in this book to encourage in the reader conduct of a kind similar to that of the characters described nor to give rise in the reader to any prurient thoughts.
Moreover, even if the book should be considered by some to be ‘obscene’, I think it is extremely doubtful whether a conviction would ever be obtained. In its curious style I find it to be well written – better written that Lady Chatterley’s Lover – and with considerable humour so that the question of its literary merit would present difficulties. The author is apparently well-recognised as a writer of distinction. It would appear that in the event of a prosecution there would be no shortage of distinguished ‘experts’ ready to speak on behalf of the book. For these reasons I advise that no criminal proceedings be instituted”.
Tropic of Cancer thus appeared unhindered despite a storm of ensuing protest in the press, but Calder & Boyars were less fortunate with their roughly simultaneous release of Cain’s Book by Alexander Trocchi, another semi-autobiographical (but this time contemporary) account of a rebellious drug-taking ‘beat’ living a squalid existence on a boat on the Hudson river in New York. It had a generally favourable reception (Trocchi, originally from Glasgow, was very much a literary man of the moment), and seemed to have escaped censure, when (along with a random selection of 48 other novels) it was seized in Sheffield during a Feb 1964 raid. The trial at Sheffield Crown Court took place in April, Calder telling the jury the novel was “one of the most important books written by a British author that has an affinity with the beat movement, which is a revolt against conventional values”. The jury seemed to like conventional values however, and needed a mere forty minute retirement to declare the book obscene, meaning all copies in the city were forfeit.
This was not necessarily commercially disastrous – ‘Banned in Sheffield’ had a certain ring to it – but Calder nevertheless Appealed, losing again in December when Lord Chief Justice Parker upheld the conviction with the following highly significant judgement: “This book – the less said about it the better – concerns the life or imaginary life of a junkie in New York, and the suggestion of the prosecution was that the book, highlighting as it were the favourable effects of drug-taking, so far from condemning it, advocates it, and that there is a real danger that those into whose hands the book comes might be tempted, at any rate, to experiment with drugs and get the favourable sensations highlighted by the book… there is no reason whatever to confine depravity and obscenity to sex”.
This dramatically broadened the definition of obscenity, opening a door in which it was frequently not so much the book’s actual content (eg incidence of four-letter words) that mattered, as the lifestyle it advocated. Cain’s Book thus led directly to the notorious ‘political’ obscenity trials of the early 1970s – International Times (1970), Little Red Schoolbook (1971), Oz (1971) and Nasty Tales (1973) – in which a sequence of ‘alternative’ hippy-magazines were mercilessly persecuted, partly as a cover to distract from the wholesale corruption within Scotland Yard’s Obscene Publications (‘Dirty’) Squad, who were then (as we shall see later) discreetly running Soho’s real pornographers like a well-organised fiefdom.
Calder & Boyars followed Cain’s Book with William Burroughs’ even more explosive The Naked Lunch in October 1964, priced prohibitively high at 35 shillings (roughly twice the cost of a standard hardback), and very carefully distributed. As Calder himself explained in a 1965 interview: “By refusing the book to wholesalers and supplying only the most respectable booksellers, we made it extremely difficult for the police to seize [Naked Lunch] and bring it in front of local magistrates… in fact it becomes impossible, providing we print small editions and scatter them thinly around the country, to prevent publication of the book except by taking it to the Old Bailey and this the DPP is not willing to do as there is obviously no official confidence in a jury”. However the following year the company came badly unstuck with the toughest item of them all: Hubert Selby Jr’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, the final ‘serious’ (ie critically recognised, identifiable single-author) book ever prosecuted in Britain.
Calder & Boyars brought out Last Exit in January 1966 to generally positive if deeply traumatised reviews – a series of vivid snapshots of the low-life urban hell of the title city, the book’s squalid mise-en-scene and brutal sexual violence went far beyond anything previously seen. But it had obvious literary significance, and the authorities (as Calder predicted) declined to act. Infuriated by this official tolerance, in July a wealthy Tory backbench MP, Sir Cyril Black, decided to take out a private prosecution under Section Three (then still a possible, if extremely expensive, option) and applied to Bow Street Magistrates Court. Sir Robert Blundell (who had been unimpressed by Fanny Hill’s merits two years earlier) thought there was a case to answer, and issued a search warrant against a local bookshop. The case was heard at Marlborough Street in November before Leo Gradwell, who according to a contemporary account was “benign, genial, tolerant and humane, and repeatedly showed a wide knowledge of literature and art, and made some genuinely funny remarks”.
Counsel for Black was Michael Havers (later to become Attorney General himself) who uniquely fielded several prosecution witnesses, including H. Montgomery Hyde, Robert Maxwell, and David Holloway (Deputy Literary Editor of the Telegraph) – the defence mustered eleven of their own, led by Anthony Burgess. It was a close-fought contest, but Gradwell found the book obscene and passed sentence with unexpectedly severe comments: “I must tell you that this book in its descriptions goes beyond any book of a merely pornographic kind that we have seen in this court. One passage I am thinking of [the gang-rape death of prostitute Tralala] is more likely to deprave and corrupt than any of those cyclostyled horrors”.
The press were in uproar again: “Britain has made herself the laughing-stock of the civilised world” was a common theme. Although the only literal loss was the destruction of the three formally-seized copies, the decision meant no bookseller could now confidently stock the novel. Calder & Boyars decided not to Appeal (which would have put the case subjudice and stifled comment) and instead provocatively declared they intended to continue publication, asking new DPP Sir Norman Skelhorn (who had replaced Mathew in 1964) what he in turn intended to do about it. And thus prodded (and no doubt extremely reluctantly) in Feb 1967 Skelhorn declared he intended to prosecute, with an initial Marlborough Street reappearance (at which Calder & Boyars opted for trial by jury) in April.
The second trial began at the Old Bailey on 13th Nov 1967 and lasted nine days before Judge Graham Rogers, who controversially insisted on an all-male jury. There was a wide selection of prosecution witnesses, one of whom (Rev David Sheppard) made history by admitting the book had depraved and corrupted him – “I was not unscathed”. The defence brought on thirty of their own including some very distinguished names, but to no avail – after a five hour retirement the jury sensationally returned a verdict of Guilty. Judge Rogers (who if anything had been leaning towards the defence) showed his sympathy by imposing a comparatively small fine – £100 plus £500 costs – but by this point a horrified Calder & Boyars estimated themselves around £10-15,000 out of pocket, a disastrous sum for such a small firm.
John Calder and Marion Boyars on their way to the Old Bailey, Nov 1967
This time there was no option but to lodge an Appeal, heard in July 1968. John Mortimer appeared for Calder & Boyars, and managed to get the conviction overturned on a technicality – Rogers’ original summing-up had failed to properly put to the jury the ‘aversion argument’ of the defence, that the graphic detail of the book would generally lead to revulsion rather than prurient delight. However, the Appeal Court judges also hinted at what was becoming a widespread concern – that the 1959 Act was inherently self-contradictory. How could a book simultaneously deprave and corrupt AND yet also somehow be for the Public Good? Nobody really knew. For the time being though Last Exit was legal, and the Section Three loophole allowing private prosecutions was promptly closed, to prevent any further embarrassment.
Before continuing with this part of the story, we must first pause briefly to consider a very different, but equally influential, criminal trial which provoked such passionate debate about the limits of the permissible in Britain that uneasy echoes of it still linger today, over half a century later.
No honest discussion of pornography in England can really avoid mentioning the Moors Murders. The case is quite uniquely horrible and indeed the contemporary national reaction to it was a sort of stunned incomprehension: what can possibly have driven these people to behave like this? When the contents of Ian Brady’s library were made public during his and Myra Hindley’s trial in April 1966, it seemed as though at least part of the answer was staring everyone in the face.
Brady was an enthusiastic reader of a certain species of dirty book, and – appreciating the somewhat prejudicial nature of his resulting collection – had cautiously kept most of it hidden in two large suitcases anonymously stored in Manchester Central’s left-luggage lockers. When the police retrieved these and catalogued the contents, they became a major element in the ensuing trial:
Sir Elwyn Jones: This is the diet you were consuming? Pornographic books, books on violence and murder?
Brady: Not pornographic books. You can buy them at any book stall.
Jones: They are dirty books, Brady?
Brady: It depends on the dirty mind. It depends on your mind…
Jones: Was your interest in them on a high medical plain?
Brady: No, for erotic reasons.
Jones: Of course. This is the atmosphere of your mind. A sink of pornography, was it not?
Brady: No. There are better collections than that in lords’ manors all over the country.
Fairly sharp under the circumstances, though the biting sarcasm did him few favours. There were about fifty mixed books and magazines involved, including:
– various fetish mags: Satin Legs and Stilettos / High Heels and Stockings / Paris Vision / Women in Bondage / Jailbait etc
– more mainstream ‘pin-up’ glamour mags: Penthouse / Wildcat / Swank / Cavalier etc
– Justine / The Perfumed Garden / Tropic of Cancer / Sexus (the latter Olympia Press?)
– Pleasures of the Torture Chamber by John Swain (Noel Douglas 1957)
– Cradle of Erotica by Allen Edwardes (Julian Press 1962)
– Kiss of the Whip by Edwin Henri (Walton Press 1961)
– Orgies of Torture and Brutality by Paul Gregson (Walton Press 1965)
– Sexual Anomalies and Perversions by Magnus Hirschfield (Encyclopaedic Press 1959)
…plus several books on Nazism (including a German-language Mein Kampf) and biographies of De Sade and Jack the Ripper.
Modern Fiction Ltd 1955 / Walton Press 1961 / 1965 / 1965 / 1964
Perhaps the key name here is Walton Press (c.1960-72) of 6 Morwell St WC1 This was run by Edwin Turvey (1902-1981), son of a Kilburn barman who by 1938 already had a two-year sentence for selling obscene magazines under his belt. His first wife Annie appears to have left him at this point, and between 1941-55 (together with Irene Taylor, later the second Mrs Turvey) he ran Modern Fiction Ltd at the Morwell St address, printing the sort of pseudo-American pulp fiction already familiar from Reiter and Carter’s output. By 1945 the couple were living in Walton on Thames, hence (presumably) the new company name once Modern Fiction finally bit the dust. Walton Press quickly built up what can only be described as a highly distinctive backlist:
*Kiss of the Whip by Edwin Henri (1961)
*Erotic Love Through the Ages by ‘Sardi’ (1962)
*Sane and Sensual Sex by Gilbert Oakley (1963)
*A History of the Rod and Other Corporal Punishments by Gilbert Oakley (1964)
*Man Into Woman by Gilbert Oakley (1964) – a fictionalised Trans biog
*Orgies of Torture and Brutality by Paul Gregson (1965)
*Astrology and Sex by Gilbert Oakley (1965)
*The Sex Jungle – a Casebook of Sexual Abnormalities by Peter Capon (1965)
*Sex and Sadism Throughout the Ages by Gilbert Oakley (1965)
*Symphony of Sex by ‘Sardi’ (1966)
*An Encyclopaedia of Sex Worship (4 vols) by A Scott Morley (1967)
*Lustful Turk by Anon (1972 – 6th printing)
… this is probably only a representative selection. None of these seem to have ended up in court, but when that ancient cliche ‘The Undergrowth of Literature’ is casually bandied about, this is surely what it looks like in practice.
The key book in Brady’s library however was undoubtedly a copy of the recently-paperbacked Justine, which as noted provoked a storm of controversy. De Sade’s brutally nihilist philosophy was problematic enough in the first place without the appalling realisation that someone, somewhere, might just be sufficiently damaged to try putting it into practice simply to spite society. Following the Moors trial both the Spearman and Corgi editions of Justine were quietly allowed to run out of print, and nobody dared try and publish De Sade again in Britain for a further 25 years. Even then, as we shall see shortly, there were problems.
Grove Press 1966 and Barney Rosset, Grove’s US founder
Returning (with some relief) to our main thread of literary trials, the last major battle of the ’60s related to the underground Victorian classic My Secret Life by the pseudonymous Walter. This massive (4,200 page) anonymous sexual-autobiography was privately printed around 1888 in an edition of just 25 copies, and its true authorship is still contested (some scholars suggest the bibliophile Henry Spencer Ashbee is a possibility). Grove Press (qv) in America had published the complete eleven-volume set for the first time in 1966, and in late 1967 Arthur Dobson, a Bradford bookseller and publisher (whose shop was subject to regular visits from the local police) acquired sole UK rights. Dobson priced this deliberately high at £11 15s, but still managed to shift about 250 sets over 1968 before he was raided yet again at the end of the year. John Mortimer led for the defence at Leeds Crown Court in Feb 1969, assembling an impressive team of expert witnesses (this time distinguished historians) to argue that the book was a vital historical document. But Mr Justice Veale was unimpressed, and when the book was found Guilty fined Dobson £1,000 and sentenced him to two years in prison (later reduced on Appeal): “You were not printing My Secret Life to make it available to professors and students. You were deliberately proposing to make money out of the sale of filth because you thought it had money value”.
The Last Exit trial had shown that the ‘literary merit’ defence had effectively run its course, and the successful prosecution of My Secret Life similarly demonstrated that ‘historical interest’ (also invoked on Fanny Hill’s behalf) was a non-starter. The third option left was what might be termed the ‘therapeutic’ defence. This argued that sexually-explicit material was socially beneficial in that it led to masturbation, a safety-valve releasing otherwise unhealthy tension. In other words Pornography – which the 1959 Act had been expressly formulated to suppress – was itself for the Public Good. This novel argument would be pushed ad nauseam over the next few years, until the exasperated Law Lords ruled it inadmissible in 1977.
This essay is concerned with literary erotica – material consisting purely of the printed word. But by early ’70s non-illustrated dirty books were starting to look distinctly old hat. The British ‘glamour magazine’ revolution had begun in the mid-1960s as a result of both the liberalising 1959 Act and rapid technical advances in glossy colour printing. The inspiration was Hugh Hefner’s Playboy (launched obscurely in America in 1954), and a string of British imitations appeared from 1965 onwards: Penthouse (Bob Guccione 1965 – Guccione was working in London at the time, and contrary to popular belief Penthouse is a British magazine), Mayfair (Brian Fisk 1966 – Fisk was originally one of PR’s managers), Fiesta (RG 1966), Knave (RG 1968), Escort (PR 1970), Men Only (PR 1971) and Club International (PR 1972). RG is Russell Gay (1917-??), a veteran glamour photographer who famously discovered Norma Sykes a/k/a Sabrina in 1954 before selling-up in the mid-80s to retire to Monaco, while PR is of course Paul Raymond (1925-2008), a giant of Soho who surely needs little introduction here. A critical stage in this sequence was the appearance in 1975 of David Sullivan’s insolently-named Whitehouse, which soon began aggressively nudging the boundaries of forbidden hardcore in terms of its increasingly explicit poses. We can return to Mr Sullivan’s pioneering activities later.
Paul Raymond and Russell Gay – mirror-image Colossi of British jazz-mags
Keeping all this in mind, by 1975 – with decensorship at its height, expert-witnesses apparently prepared to defend almost anything, and the police having difficulty obtaining convictions on even the hardest of hardcore – prosecution of a simple non-illustrated book must have appeared highly unlikely. Remarkably however – as if merely to provide a final, definitive result – one dutifully took place, and in Jan 1976 there was one last high-profile showdown between the Law and the printed word.
Linda Lovelace (1949-2002 – real name Linda Boreman) was a New York actress/model chiefly famous for starring in Deep Throat (1972), a cheap hardcore flick which became a smash-hit in America, ushering in a short-lived period of ‘porno-chic’ that briefly made her an international star of sorts. In 1973 Pinnacle Books in the US brought out her bestselling autobiography Inside Linda Lovelace (edited – ie ghost-written – by Douglas Warren), and a British edition was released in June 1974 by Heinrich Hanau Publications (of 59 Old Compton Street, Soho W1) in a run of 50,000 copies, of which about 38,000 had sold by the end of 1975. In August 1975 a copy was spotted for sale in a Brighton bookshop by Mr Hugh Watts (76), a retired barrister and secretary of the Worthing-based ‘Action on Abuse of Law’ group. Watts immediately wrote to the DPP Norman Skelhorn to complain that “any schoolchild could pick it up” and thus prompted Skelhorn inexplicably decided to prosecute. (To be quite fair, it has been convincingly argued that the action was in reality a misguided pre-emptive strike to try and keep the film itself out of Britain).
Heinrich Hanau 1975. The end of the line for Obscene Libel.
The trial opened at the Old Bailey on 19th Jan 1976 before Judge Rigg, and lasted for seven days. The prosecution was led by Brian Leary, who had previously proved cuttingly effective during the 1971 Oz trial (very much taking on the mantle of Griffith-Jones), and here made the obvious (and essentially incontestable) point that the book under consideration was completely worthless: “… debasing to life, without literary or artistic merit, and its only medical value was as material for masturbation, which is not for the public good”. He also poured rich scorn on the defence’s expert witnesses (‘Mortimer’s Travelling Circus’ as some had contemptuously dubbed them), pointing out that many had appeared in earlier trials and given exactly the same (virtually word-for-word) evidence.
In theory the defence faced an uphill task. Inside Linda Lovelace is a truly pathetic little book, appallingly written and completely intellectually vacuous. The opening section is rambling (frequently unconvincing) autobiography, followed by an account of Deep Throat’s production together with an ‘insider’ look at the New York porn-scene, then finally a slapdash amateur sex-manual. Confronted with material like this, John Mortimer’s only available strategy was to ridicule the prosecution itself: “A visitor from Mars would find us a very wonderful race, at this crisis in our economic existence, that we can spend thousands of pounds of public money and hear many thousands of words, all because a 22 year old has written a book which suggests that sex is a bit of fun!” A parade of defence witnesses testified to the book’s candour and integrity, and were all made to look very silly a few years later when it emerged that the author had (allegedly) been coerced into her pornographic career by a violently-abusive partner.
Summing-up on Weds 28th Jan, Rigg made the significance of the jury’s imminent verdict clear: “I know all of you are a good deal younger than me, and that is a good thing in a case of this nature – it might very well be that the view of somebody of my generation is far removed from that of a young person living in our modern society… It may very well be that there are books in circulation that are as offensive as this book – if it is indeed offensive – but that is irrelevant to your consideration. If this book is not obscene within the definition of the Act, it might well be difficult to imagine anything that would fall into that category”.
Despite this historic warning, after a five hour retirement the jury of nine men and three women returned a verdict of Not Guilty, and effectively freed English Literature in the process. If the patently worthless, illiterate sex-obsessed drivel of Inside Linda Lovelace was not obscene nothing could be, and the very notion of ‘obscene literature’ had, as one commentator later put it, become “as muddled a concept as obscene music or obscene architecture”. This attitude was formally endorsed by the landmark Williams Committee report on the Obscenity Laws in 1979, which recommended that “the printed word should be neither restricted nor prohibited since its nature makes it neither immediately offensive nor capable of involving the harms we identify, and because of its importance in conveying ideas”.
This basic legal position remains true today, and – while there have been a few subsequent blips which we can return to later – Lovelace essentially marks the end of the law’s 250-year struggle to control sexual writing in England. Despite this however, what might be deemed the tougher end of the market remained of dubious status for a further decade or so, and for the next part of this story we can jump back ten years (and jet across the Atlantic) to look at the newly-emerging source of illicit imports via a freshly liberated America…
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(7) Redrupped – The Yanks 1967-89