“You knew what can take place,” Rex Batten, a gay male who stayed in London at the time, told the BBC’s Witness History in 2010 “You knew the situations that had shown up, individuals that remained in prison for a year, 2 years, three years. Did you desire that? The response was no.”
Maxwell Fyfe’s intensive suppression caused a number of top-level males being prosecuted for homosexual practices, including Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing in 1952, the recently knighted actor Sir John Gielgud in 1953, and the Traditional peer Lord Montagu of Beaulieu in 1954 These cases had, subsequently, created substantial press protection and shamed the establishment.
In setting up the board, Maxwell Fyfe aimed to locate new ways to control these instances efficiently, to ensure that they would certainly stop creating press rate of interest and public debate. As Sir John went to pains to make clear to the BBC on the day the report was launched in 1957, the board’s remit was not to judge the principles of such behaviour. “We’re concerned primarily with public order and not with private morality,” he told the BBC’s Godfrey Talbot.
Harsh charges for sex workers
From 1954, Sir John chaired the committee of 4 ladies and 11 men, whose know-how varied from the law, medication and faith to the Lady Guides, the UK’s biggest organisation for women and young women. Over the course of 3 years, they heard evidence from the cops, psychoanalysts and religious leaders, in addition to the testament of some gay males whose lives had actually been impacted by the law. Among the people they talked with was The Daily Mail’s former royal correspondent Peter Wildeblood, that had been convicted of so-called “gross lewdness” alongside Lord Montagu. They did not, nevertheless, take proof from any kind of sex workers.