“You knew what could happen,” Rex Batten, a gay man who lived in London at the time, told the BBC’s Witness History in 2010. “You knew the cases that had come up, the people who were in jail for a year, two years, three years. Did you want that? The answer was no.”
Maxwell Fyfe’s intensive crackdown led to a number of high-profile men being prosecuted for homosexual behaviour, including Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing in 1952, the recently knighted actor Sir John Gielgud in 1953, and the Conservative peer Lord Montagu of Beaulieu in 1954. These cases had, in turn, generated extensive press coverage and embarrassed the establishment.
In setting up the committee, Maxwell Fyfe aimed to find new ways to regulate these cases effectively, so that they would stop generating press interest and public debate. As Sir John was at pains to make clear to the BBC on the day the report was released in 1957, the committee’s remit was not to judge the morality of such behaviour. “We’re concerned primarily with public order and not with private morality,” he told the BBC’s Godfrey Talbot.
Harsh penalties for sex workers
From 1954, Sir John chaired the committee of four women and 11 men, whose expertise ranged from the law, medicine and religion to the Girl Guides, the UK’s largest organisation for girls and young women. Over the course of three years, they heard evidence from the police, psychiatrists and religious leaders, as well as the testimony of some gay men whose lives had been affected by the law. One of the people they spoke to was The Daily Mail’s former royal correspondent Peter Wildeblood, who had been convicted of so-called “gross indecency” alongside Lord Montagu. They did not, however, take evidence from any sex workers.
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