In 1960, heterosexual sodomy was illegal. But it was central to the plot of the third version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that was on trial at the Old Bailey for being obscene. Oddly, the prosecution counsel, Griffith-Jones, made only a slight reference to it, saying, somewhat unfortunately: “Not very easy, sometimes, not very easy, you know, to know what in fact he is driving at in that passage.”
In his commentary on the 50th anniversary edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in 2010, Geoffrey Robertson QC, who wrote your obituary of Lord Hutchinson of Lullington (15 November), wrote that “Ignorant of the facts as well as of the facts of life, Griffith-Jones failed even to recognise Lawrence’s paean to anal sex.” According to Robertson, “Under the 1959 Act, purple passages, even on the subject of heterosexual buggery (still the ‘abominable crime’), no longer necessarily meant a guilty verdict. Jurors had to ask themselves the commonsense question of whether publication as a whole would do any harm, and if so, whether its literary merit might redeem it.” But the point is, this was not tested in the trial. No witnesses were examined on the issue and it is not clear how many understood they were defending a book that centred not only on promiscuity, adultery and the use of particular words, but on illegal acts that could draw severe prison sentences.
In 2015 Thomas Grant wrote in Jeremy Hutchinson’s Case Histories that “Jeremy was fully alive to the meaning of the passage, and raised it as a potential stumbling block at a pre-trial conference with Gerald Gardiner and Penguin’s principal witnesses … They all three dismissed Jeremy’s fears as unfounded … the important thing, as Jeremy put it, was that Griffith-Jones ‘didn’t twig it’.” And so the law progressed. The 2001 film Bridget Jones’s Diary was probably the first to celebrate the legalisation of heterosexual sodomy in a scene between Bridget and Daniel.
Sue Roff
Cellardyke, Fife
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