‘Against the Law’ by Peter Wildeblood

In 1954 five men were arrested in London and charged for the crime of committing homosexual acts some two years earlier (involving, apparently, no more than some dancing and kissing at the end of an evening of rather boring conversation).

Peter Wildeblood (1923 – 1999), a young journalist, was one of the five and he was further charged with conspiring to incite another man to commit a serious offence, namely a sexual act with him – evidence being found in what were essentially rather sweet love letters. Lord Montagu and his cousin Michael Pitt-Rivers were the two others, hence ensuring the maximum imaginable press interest.

The subsequent trial featured only three of the men who were originally charged because the others turned Queen’s evidence in return for immunity from prosecution. These two gave evidence on oath at the trial and thus helped to secure the convictions.

Peter Wildeblood was sentenced to eighteen months in prison which he served first at Winchester and then completed at Wormwood Scrubs. This memoir tells the whole story, the bulk being a description of the trial and the period spent in prison.

On the first page the following is stated by way of introduction:

‘I am a homosexual. It is easy for me to make that admission now, because much of my private life has already been made public by the newspapers. I am in the rare, and perhaps privileged, position of having nothing left to hide.’

That was a very brave statement to make in 1955 when this book was published. This was not only because homosexual acts between men, however consensual in nature, were illegal at this time and would remain so for more than a decade more, but more because the social stigma was huge and in making this ‘admission’, Wildeblood was knowingly saying something that would make it impossible for him to resume his profession following his release from prison. Instead he wrote this book which made a significant contribution to shifting (or starting to shift) public attitudes.

The book is very well-written and reads like an accomplished work of fiction. In many respects it is no different from the many more recent prison books that have been written by prominent people who ended doing time ‘inside’ (Jeffery Archer, Denis McShane, Jonathan Aitkin, Cardinal Pell etc) and wrote compelling diaries or memoirs about it.

Because so little appears to have changed in this world over the past seventy years (food, exercise hours, rules on talking to other prisoners etc), it all feels very contemporary, until suddenly as if someone throws a bucket of cold water over you, mention is made of a condemned man's cell in quite a matter of fact manner.

The lack of self-pity, along of course, with any admission whatsoever of moral guilt, gives this book terrific power. It serves as a reminder about how very recently being in a same-sex relationship was widely seen in the UK as unthinkable, unnatural and wholly unacceptable from a social perspective, creating a situation in which hundreds of thousands of men were forced either to be very lonely or live double lives. Blackmail was common as was suicide. The 1950s saw a major increase in the number of convictions as ‘the moral majority’ enjoyed one of its periodic moments in the sun.

This book also serves to demonstrate how very rapidly social attitudes can and do change completely once momentum behind changing them gathers pace and the arguments are good.