Notes Introduction 1. Times, 27 May 1954, p. 3; Rupert Croft-Cooke, The Verdict of You All (London: Secker and Warburg, 1955), pp. 150–1; David Kynaston, Family Britain 1951–57 (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), p. 391; Matt Cook, ‘Queer Conflicts: Love, Sex and War, 1914– 1967’, in Matt Cook (ed.), A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex between Men since the Middle Ages (Oxford: Greenwood, 2007), p. 171; Manchester Guardian, 27 May 1954, p. 4; 25 June 1954, p. 2; Daily Mail, 27 May 1954, p. 5. 2. Home Office and Scottish Home Department, Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (London: HMSO, 1957) [hereafter Wolfenden Report], subsections (ss.) 1–2. 3. Brian Harrison, Seeking a Role: The United Kingdom, 1951–1970 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), p. 239; Chris Waters, ‘Disorders of the Mind, Disorders of the Body Social: Peter Wildeblood and the Making of the Modern Homosexual’, in Becky Conekin, Frank Mort and Chris Waters (eds), Moments of Modernity: Reconstructing Britain 1945–1964 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1999), pp. 137–8; Chris Waters, ‘The Homosexual as a Social Being in Britain, 1945–1968’, in Brian Lewis (ed.), British Queer History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), chap. 9; Michal Shapira, The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chap. 6. 4. John Wolfenden, Turning Points: The Memoirs of Lord Wolfenden (London: Bodley Head, 1976), p. 130. See also Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 1–3; Peter Wildeblood, AWay of Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1956), p. 65; ‘Homosexuality, Prostitution and the Law’, Dublin Review, 230, 471 (Summer 1956), 59. 5. For example, Stuart Hall, ‘Reformism and the Legislation of Consent’, in National Deviancy Conference (ed.), Permissiveness and Control: The Fate of the Sixties Legisla- tion (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1980), p. 8; Tim Newburn, Permission and Regulation: Law and Morals in Post-War Britain (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 49–50; Jeffrey Weeks, The World We Have Won: The Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 45–8; Richard Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Postwar London (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. 83–4. 6. Wolfenden Report, appendix I, tables I and II, pp. 130–1. 7. Times, 22 Oct. 1953, p. 5; Sheridan Morley, John Gielgud: The Authorized Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), pp. 266–72. Gielgud’s conviction figured promi- nently in a Lords’ debate on homosexual crime instigated by Earl Winterton on 19 May 1954 (Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, Lords, 5th ser., vol. 187 (1954), cols. 744, 756–7, 759, 766). 8. Times, 26 Jan. 1953, p. 3; 21 Feb. 1953, p. 3. 9. Patrick Higgins, Heterosexual Dictatorship: Male Homosexuality in Postwar Britain (London: Fourth Estate, 1996), pp. 65–7. 10. Peter Wildeblood, Against the Law (London: Phoenix, 2000; 1st edn, 1955), parts 1–2; Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, Wheels within Wheels: An Unconventional Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000), chap. 8; H. Montgomery Hyde, The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1970), pp. 216–24. 11. Croft-Cooke, The Verdict of You All, pp. 26–7, 134, 151; Wildeblood, Against the Law, pp. 69–70; Morley, John Gielgud, pp. 275–6. 277 278 Notes 12. Higgins, Heterosexual Dictatorship, pp. 249–56; Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 34–6; Wolfenden Report, ss. 130–2. 13. Alan Sinfield, Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 235–8; Cook, Gay History, pp. 153, 169–70. 14. Adrian Bingham, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press 1918– 1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), chap. 5; Adrian Bingham, ‘The “K-Bomb”: Social Surveys, the Popular Press, and British Sexual Culture in the 1940s and 1950s’, Journal of British Studies, 50, 1 (Jan. 2011), 156–79; Lesley Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1880 (London: Palgrave Macmillan; 2nd edn, 2013), pp. 142–3; Cook, Gay History, pp. 169–70. 15. ‘A Social Problem’, Sunday Times, 1 Nov. 1953, p. 6. See also Sunday Times, 28 Mar. 1954, p. 6. The Sunday Times’s call for action was echoed by Dr Donald Soper, President of the Methodist Conference, who urged the setting up of a Royal Commission on homosexuality (Times, 6 Nov. 1953, p. 5). 16. Derrick Sherwin Bailey, ‘The Problem of Sexual Inversion’, Theology, 55, 380 (1952), 47–52; Church of England Moral Welfare Council, The Problem of Homosexuality: An Interim Report (Oxford: Church Information Board, 1954); Timothy Willem Jones, Sexual Politics in the Church of England, 1857–1957 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), chap. 6; Matthew Grimley, ‘Law, Morality and Secularisation: The Church of England and the Wolfenden Report, 1954–1967’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 60, 4 (October 2009), 728–32. 17. Gordon Westwood [Michael Schofield], Society and the Homosexual (London: Victor Gollancz, 1952); Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect, pp. 118–19. 18. Rodney Garland [Adam de Hegedus], The Heart in Exile (London: W. H. Allen, 1953); Matt Houlbrook and Chris Waters, ‘The Heart in Exile: Detachment and Desire in 1950s London’, History Workshop Journal, 62 (Autumn 2006), 142–63. Mary Renault’s novel The Charioteer (London: Longman, 1953) also attempted to do the same work. 19. National Archives [TNA], CAB 129/66/10, memo by Home Secretary, 17 Feb. 1954. 20. CAB 129/66/10, memo by Home Secretary, 17 Feb. 1954; CAB 128/27/11, cabinet con- clusions, 24 Feb. 1954; CAB 195/11/94, Cabinet Secretary’s notebook, 24 Feb. 1954; CAB 128/27/20, cabinet conclusions, 17 Mar. 1954; CAB 129/67/12, memo by Home Secre- tary, 1 Apr. 1954; CAB 128/27/29, cabinet conclusions, 15 Apr. 1954; Justin Bengry, ‘Queer Profits: Homosexual Scandal and the Origins of Legal Reform in Britain’, in Heike Bauer and Matt Cook (eds), Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 169–77. Note that, in a memo of 17 Feb. 1954 (CAB 129/66/11), the Scottish Secretary did not think that prostitution or homosexual offences in Scotland were serious enough problems to justify an inquiry. 21. Wolfenden, Turning Points, pp. 133–4. The interviews were recorded in shorthand and typed up more or less verbatim, including ‘casual remarks’ and ‘other little imperfec- tions’ that would have been edited out of a published document. The typescripts were ‘not intended in any way to provide a permanent record of our proceedings. They are provided only for the convenience of the members, and are intended merely to assist them in recalling what has been said by the witnesses appearing before them’ (TNA, HO 345/12: W. Conwy Roberts, secretary to the committee, to Wolfenden, 29 Oct. 1954). 22. Robert Rhodes James, Robert Boothby: A Portrait of Churchill’s Ally (New York: Viking, 1991), pp. 369–70; Liz Stanley, Sex Surveyed, 1949–1994: From Mass-Observation’s ‘Little Kinsey’ to the National Survey and the Hite Reports (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995), pp. 199–200; Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 1977), p. 164. 23. Jeffrey Weeks, ‘Wolfenden, John Frederick, Baron Wolfenden (1906–1985)’, Oxford Dic- tionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb. Notes 279 com/view/article/31852 [hereafter ODNB online], accessed 11 Apr. 2013. In a radio panel discussion on the Midland Home Service the previous November, Wolfenden had already called for a Royal Commission to investigate homosexuality. See BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham [hereafter BBC], Behind the News, TX 11/11/1953, p. 10. 24. Wolfenden, Turning Points, p. 132; Paul Ferris, Sex and the British: A Twentieth-Century History (London: Michael Joseph, 1993), p. 158. 25. See his remarks in TNA, HO 345/15, 15 Dec. 1955, QQ4127, 4138, 4140, and in HO 345/16, 31 Jan. 1956, Q4526. 26. Sebastian Faulks, The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives (London: Hutchinson, 1996), p. 221. 27. Faulks, Fatal Englishman, pp. 240–1. See also Philip French, ‘We Saw the Light, but Too Late for Some’, Observer, 24 June 2007. 28. Higgins, Heterosexual Dictatorship, pp. 9–10. 29. Roger Davidson and Gayle Davis, The Sexual State: Sexuality and Scottish Governance, 1950–80 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), p. 54; Glasgow Herald, 8 January 1982, p. 4 (I am grateful to Jeff Meek for this citation); Jeff Meek, ‘Scottish Churches, Morality and Homosexual Law Reform 1957–1980’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 66, 3 (July 2015), 599. 30. ‘Cohen, Mary Gwendolen (Mrs Arthur M. Cohen)’, Who Was Who (online edn, Oxford University Press, 2014), http://www.ukwhoswho.com/view/article/oupww/ whowaswho/U163351, accessed 1 Aug. 2014. 31. ‘Curran, Desmond’, Who Was Who, accessed 1 Aug. 2014; Desmond Curran, ‘Sexual Perversions’, Practitioner, 172 (Apr. 1954), 440–5. 32. Angela Cunningham, ‘Demant, Vigo Auguste (1893–1983)’, ODNB online, accessed 11 Apr. 2013. 33. Stephen Sedley, Godfray Le Quesne, ‘Diplock, (William John) Kenneth, Baron Diplock (1907–1985)’, ODNB online, accessed 11 Apr. 2013. 34. ‘Linstead, Sir Hugh (Nicholas)’, Who Was Who, accessed 1 Aug. 2014. 35. ‘Lothian’, Who Was Who, accessed 1 Aug. 2014. 36. Eileen M. Bowlt, Justice in Middlesex: A Brief History of the Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court (Winchester: Waterside Press, 2007), pp. 71–2. 37. Ross Cranston, ‘Mishcon, Victor, Baron Mishcon (1915–2006)’, ODNB online, accessed 11 Apr.