Lord Montagu on the court case which ended the legal persecution of homosexuals

12 April 2012

Lord Montagu of Beaulieu is not convinced by those people who tell him that time is a great healer.

It has been 53 years since he was arrested for homosexual offences, put on trial in the full glare of the public spotlight and imprisoned for a crime that amounted to little more than a youthful indiscretion. But while much of Lord Montagu's personal bitterness has faded, it is clear that the passing of five decades has not lessened his extreme emotional distress.

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Rebuilding his life: Lord Montagu at his wedding to Belinda Crossley in 1958

'I've never spoken about it before,' he says, wiping at filmy eyes with a large white handkerchief. He takes a deep breath. 'It's difficult to bring it all back. One does find it very hard to talk about. I feel very emotional about it.'

It is, perhaps, unsurprising that the trial's impact should still be felt so keenly. The Montagu case of 1954 was a cause celebre that horrifed the Establishment and changed the course of British history.

Lord Montagu, then a 28-year-old socialite and the youngest peer in the House of Lords, was one of three men convicted of 'consensual homosexual offences'. But the prosecution provoked a wave of sympathy from the Press and the public, many of whom felt it amounted to little more than an unedifying witch-hunt.

The fall-out from the Montagu trial had a direct influence on the British legal system and, in 1957, a government committee recommended that homosexual acts between consenting adults in private be legalised. The proposals were made law in 1967.

Lord Montagu, now 80, is only now recalling the unhappy chapter of his life as Channel 4 prepares to broadcast a dramatic reconstruction of the trial.

The programme – A Very British Sex Scandal – has been produced to mark the 40th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality.

Lord Montagu has always insisted that he would not talk about the case, explaining that he abhors the notion of becoming 'a professional convict'.

But with the men accused alongside him now dead – the then diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Mail, Peter Wildeblood, and Dorset landowner Michael Pitt-Rivers – he has decided that it is the right time to speak out.

'I felt it was important to get it accurate,' he explains, from his green velvet armchair in the sitting room of his London flat overlooking the treetops around Marble Arch.

'I get a lot of people wanting to talk to me but I've promised not to. This is the first time and I feel very nervous about it. I could have done, I got offers of money from the Press to speak at the time. But I didn't. I never said anything.

'I didn't want to be a professional convict, like Lord Brocket or Lord Archer or [Jonathan] Aitken, who write about their experiences in prison as soon as they're let out. I think it's the wrong way to do it. If you ever want to recover yourself in the public's eye, you've got to do something else, you've got to achieve something.'

Indeed, for more than 50 years, Lord Montagu has been better known as the founder of the National Motor Museum, set up in the grounds of his stately home, Palace House in Beaulieu, Hampshire. He was also chairman of English Heritage from 1984 to 1992 and spends much of his time taking part in vintage-car rallies or organising jazz festivals.

Now he is physically frail and has to lean heavily on a walking stick to shuffle across the parquet floor of his sitting room. His face is gaunt, the papery skin stretched too tightly over his cheekbones. But his blue eyes are alert and observant.

Looking at him, it is hard to believe that for a period of time in the mid-Fifties, Lord Montagu was one of the most notorious public figures of his generation.

Although his background had been unremittingly conventional for a man with his aristocratic standing – Eton, then Oxford and a spell in the Grenadier Guards – he became a self-confessed bohemian who enjoyed affairs with both men and women.

'I am bisexual,' he says. 'To describe it any other way would be dishonest. I remember feeling that I didn't have to apologise to anybody. I am what I am.'

While working for a London public relations firm in his 20s, he met Wildeblood. 'He was an amusing person, with a good sense of humour,' Lord Montagu says. 'I found him entertaining and very worthwhile to be with.'

But it was a friendship fraught with danger. Montagu was engaged to the American actress Anne Gage while Wildeblood was gay – at a time when the political atmosphere was virulently anti-homosexual.

The then Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, had promised 'a new drive against male vice' that would 'rid England of this plague'.

As many as 1,000 men were locked up in Britain's prisons every year amid a widespread police clampdown on homosexual offences. Undercover officers acting as 'agents provocateurs' would pose as gay men soliciting in public places. The prevailing mood was one of barely concealed paranoia.

'People can't understand it now,' says Lord Montagu. 'They can't imagine the furtiveness. As someone said at the time, the skies over Chelsea were black with people burning their love letters.'

London, with its lively post-war social scene, provided an exotic demi-monde of underground gay clubs where telephone numbers could be exchanged discreetly between like-minded men. 'There was a sort of them-and-us situation. It was all very secretive,' he remembers. 'There were all-male dancing clubs and I would go to the theatre, to films. I had a double life in many ways.

'I would have four days in London and three days a week in Beaulieu, where I would have weekend parties. I was a bachelor and we had all sorts of parties. There would be shooting, fishing – all those sorts of activities.' But one of these weekend parties would prove to be his undoing.

In the summer of 1953, Lord Montagu offered Wildeblood the use of a beach hut near his country estate.

Wildeblood brought with him two young RAF servicemen, Edward McNally and John Reynolds. The foursome were joined by Montagu's cousin Michael Pitt-Rivers.

What happened next depends on whose testimony you believe.

The airmen attested to dancing and 'abandoned behaviour'. Wildeblood said it was 'extremely dull'. Montagu maintains that it was all remarkably innocent, saying: 'We had some drinks, we danced, we kissed, that's all.' But the event was to set in motion an unstoppable chain of events. When, some weeks later, a group of Boy Scouts were camping on the Beaulieu estate over the August Bank Holiday, Lord Montagu reported a stolen camera to the local police.

To his astonishment, instead of them investigating the theft, he found that he was arrested, charged and put on trial for offences against one of the 14-year-old boys.

He was acquitted but it was, he says now, the start of a 'witch-hunt'. The director of public prosecutions appeared determined to secure a high-profile conviction and investigations into Lord Montagu's lifestyle continued.

Wildeblood's relationships – revealed by an RAF investigation into the airmen's private lives – provided the catalyst for a new trial.

Lord Montagu was in bed on January 9, 1954 when the police came to arrest him at 7am. 'I remember it very well,' he says. 'There was this crash-bang bang-bang on the door. The Press had been tipped off and were already there. One of the things they tried to take away was my visitors' book to find out who had been staying there but we managed to hide it from them,' he adds with a wink.

Lord Montagu, Wildeblood and Pitt-Rivers were charged with 'conspiracy to incite certain male persons to commit serious offences with male persons'. It was the first time this charge had been used since the Oscar Wilde trials in 1895 and it led to public criticism that the police were pursuing a McCarthy-esque purge of society homosexuals.

The eight-day trial in March at Winchester Assizes was a sensation. McNally, who had been leaned on to give evidence against the three accused, provided the prosecution with incriminating love letters written to him by Wildeblood. They were read out in court, full of the embarrassing endearments and sentimental language of a couple in love.

'Reading out the letters was the cruellest thing,' says Lord Montagu. 'The trial was horrific. Frightening. Terrible. Very traumatic. One was always being caught out, being asked trick questions.'

He recalls: 'Yes I did feel angry. I didn't feel I'd done anything wrong. I feel that I let down the family a little bit. My sister and my mother came to court and they were marvellous and supportive. But my grandmother didn't understand what was going on. She was born in the Victorian era.'

The publicity surrounding the case also cost him his engagement. He says: 'That was very much a sad situation. I seem to remember I was very honest with Anne. I didn't try to hide anything and she accepted that. She was a very lovely girl, very loyal and supportive to me but the situation got terribly difficult for her and she had no alternative. I haven't ever spoken to her about it since.'

Lord Montagu was the only one of the three to protest his innocence. Why? He looks at me curiously. 'Because I was,' he says simply. 'It was guilt by association.'

On March 24, 1954, all three of the accused were convicted. Wildeblood and Pitt-Rivers were sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment, Montagu to 12.

The police, anticipating a hostile reception outside the court, kept the three men in the cells for two hours after the verdict was read. But when they eventually emerged, they were greeted by cheers.

'I was amazed when the crowd cheered. It was rather comforting, actually,' Lord Montagu recalls.

Public opinion had reached a tipping point. The outcry in the aftermath of the convictions led to immediate movements to reform the law and the proposals of 1957 Wolfenden Committee eventually led to the legalisation of homosexuality.

Does Lord Montagu feel proud that he was instrumental in its decriminalisation? 'I am slightly proud that the law has been changed to the benefit of so many people. I would like to think that I would get some credit for that.

'Maybe I'm being very boastful about it but I think because of the way we behaved and conducted our lives afterwards, because we didn't sell our stories, we just returned quietly to our lives, I think that had a big effect on public opinion.'

Lord Montagu returned to his stately home to continue building up his motor museum and to the House of Lords where he remembers being thrown a lunch party by the Conservative peer Lord Brabazon.

'I did feel bitter for a while but I learned to rise above that. I just felt all the time that the better I could succeed in life, the better I could deal with it.'

He went on to marry twice – first in 1958 to Belinda Crossley, with whom he had two children, Ralph, now 46, and Mary, 43. In 1974 he married his current wife Fiona and he has a 31-year-old stepson, Jonathan.

He has found it difficult to explain his chequered past to his family. But last week, he took his two eldest children to a preview screening of the Channel 4 programme. 'I felt it was very important for them to see the film,' he says. 'I did talk to them specifically when they were about 17 or 18 but I haven't discussed it with them since.

'The film was very good. There were certainly tears on my behalf because it brought it all back. But they were so normal about it. They have been very sympathetic.'

It is clear that Lord Montagu's children embody the spirit of a different, liberal generation, brought up in a more tolerant society. It is a society that their father was instrumental in establishing, but the realisation is a bittersweet one. He was, he acknowledges, a man both ahead of his time and trapped by it.

'It would be more comfortable to have been born now,' he says quietly. 'I would have taken to it like a duck to water.'

A Very British Sex Scandal, Channel 4, Saturday, 9pm

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