First published in full in Florence in 1928, Lawrence’s most notorious novel was available for the law-abiding in expurgated form from Heinemann, the publishers of his collected works. Bolder spirits smuggled in unexpurgated editions, printed and published on the Continent, but these were regularly intercepted by Customs; between 1950 and 1960 nineteen different printings had been referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions, seventeen destruction orders had been issued by magistrates, and a London bookseller had been prosecuted for selling an edition printed in Sweden.
Penguin had published thirteen Lawrence titles since the war, and it was decided to publish a further seven, including Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in 1960, to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of their author’s death. F. R. Leavis, the most influential academic critic of the day, had acclaimed Lawrence as the only major novelist of recent times and the last exemplar of the Great Tradition, and although, as it turned out, Leavis thought Lady Chatterley’s Lover his least impressive novel, to reprint a batch of the novels made good sense in literary as well as commercial terms. Alewyn Birch of Heinemann had told Lane that although the police had several times enquired about the possibility, they had no intention of publishing an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley, so Penguin had the field to itself. At an editorial meeting John Curtis wondered aloud which edition Penguin would be publishing: no easy matter, since Lawrence had written three versions, the last of which was most heavily peppered with four-letter words. ‘I remember AL looking up with those piercing eyes of his,’ he recalled, ‘but on this occasion his face also revealed a surprised glance: for it was apparent that up until this moment he had not taken this issue on board.’ Lane may have stumbled inadvertently into what was to prove the most sensational episode of his career, but once the alternatives had been pointed out he was adamant that Penguin should publish the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley.
Interviewed on the subject some years later, Lane declared that ‘there’s a time in a publishing firm, especially when things are going well, when to chuck a jemmy in the works is a very good thing because it gives everyone a lift’, and publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover appealed to his sense of mischief, even though his own tastes tended to the puritanical. ‘My own view has always been to refuse to give way on anything I have published on grounds of politics, religion, morals or what have you,’ he told Dick. ‘I don’t see myself in the role of crusader,’ he claimed, ‘but I thought that if ever a book had been designed to be a test book for the Act, this was it.’ The ‘Act’ was Roy Jenkins’s Obscene Publications Act, passed the previous year: the prosecution of Lady Chatterley’s Lover under the terms of the Act was to become the most celebrated trial in publishing history, and its publication one of the milestones marking the way from the sober, strait-laced Fifties to the permissiveness of the Swinging Sixties.
Until the passing of the Act, obscenity was still a common-law offence, and was defined in terms laid down by Lord Chief Justice Cockburn in 1868, viz. ‘Whether the tendency of the matters charged… is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.’ Enforcing the law was a random and variegated business. In the 1940s the Metropolitan Police thought up the ‘disclaimer’ system, used to dispose of books which no one would dream of defending on literary grounds – no summons was issued, there was no hearing before a magistrate, and the offending articles were taken away and burned – and until the passing of the Act most supposedly obscene publications were dealt with by destruction orders or the occasional prosecution followed by a trial, either before a magistrate or before a judge and jury Egged on by a zealous Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, a latterday Joynson-Hicks, and by worrying stories in the Press about the unmentionable things to be found in imported American horror comics and pulp fiction, prosecutions reached a new high in the mid-Fifties. In 1954 alone, 167,000 books and magazines were destroyed; local magistrates vented their fury on the postcards of Donald McGill; copies of Madame Bovary, Moll Flanders and the works of J. P. Sartre were consigned to the flames, the victims of local destruction orders; a magistrate in Swindon ordered the incineration of The Decameron; Customs officers confiscated Pepys’s Diary and Tristram Shandy when not riffling through travellers’ suitcases in search of Olympia Press editions of works by Henry Miller and Frank Harris. Bearing in mind the fate of Zola’s first English publisher, Henry Vizetelly – prosecuted in 1889 for publishing La Terre, he died in prison – Penguin worried about including Germinal and Rabelais in Penguin Classics before deciding to run the risk.
Most of the publishers involved were fly-by-night outfits or unabashed pornographers, but mainstream practitioners became alarmed when, in 1954, some of their more respectable colleagues received summonses and were hauled into the dock. Mrs Webb of Hutchinson was charged with the publication of a novel entitled September in Quinze; she and her fellow-directors were fined £500 apiece, the Recorder of London declaring it essential to ‘take a very solid stand against this sort of thing, and realize how important it is for the youth of this country to be protected, and that the fountain of our national blood should not be polluted at its source’. A. S. Frere of Heinemann was the next to be put on trial after Walter Baxter’s The Image and the Search had been excoriated by John Gordon in the Sunday Express: some said that Lord Beaverbrook was taking his revenge on Frere for refusing to publish a book attacking the Windsors. The prosecution was led by a florid Old Etonian, Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC, later described by Roy Jenkins as ‘that indefatigable scourge of the impure’: he asked the jury, in language that would soon become familiar to Lane and his fellow-defendants, When Christmas comes, would you go out and buy copies of the book and hand them round as presents to the girls in the office – and if not, why not? The answer is that it is not the type of book they ought to read.’
Some comfort could be drawn, however, from the acquittal of Secker & Warburg, the original publisher of the novel that had made ‘Monty’ Woodhouse’s Ghanaian interlocutor so indignant. A keen young policeman on the Isle of Man had spotted a copy of The Philanderer in a local bookshop, and the firm’s managing director, Fred Warburg, received a summons. Warburg elected for trial by jury, which was more expensive and, potentially, more punitive than appearing before a magistrate; but whereas Mrs Webb and A. S. Frere had suffered the indignity of appearing in the dock, Mr Justice Stable allowed the defendant to sit in the well of his court at the Old Bailey, alongside his solicitor. Malcolm Muggeridge and Graham Greene hovered in the corridors outside, primed to give evidence on Warburg’s behalf, but neither was called to the witness-box. Mr Justice Stable’s summing-up, printed in full in the Penguin edition of the book, suggested that, at last, the tide was beginning to turn in favour of a more liberal view of such matters. He had already told the jury to take the book home and, rather than concentrate on the purple passages, to read it as a whole. They must, he told them, consider the meaning of obscenity in terms of the modern day: and the fact that a book was not suitable for a fourteen-year-old girl did not necessarily mean that to make it available to adults should be a criminal offence.
As a direct result of the 1954 prosecutions, the Society of Authors set up a Committee to look into the vexed issue of obscene publications: A. P. Herbert was in the chair, C. H. Rolph, the pseudonym of a policeman turned campaigning journalist, acted as Secretary, and the members included V. S. Pritchett, Walter Allen, Sir Gerald Barry, Roy Jenkins, H. E. Bates, A. D. Peters, Herbert Read, W. A. R. (Billy) Collins and Norman St John Stevas. Stevas was given the job of drafting a bill based on their deliberations, and this was presented, unsuccessfully, as a private member’s bill, by Roy Jenkins and Lord Lambton in 1955. Four years later Jenkins tried again, and the Obscene Publications Act passed into law.
The Act provided a new test of obscenity, and allowed a defence of the public good. The work in question had to be considered in its entirety; expert witnesses could be called to prove that the work could be published ‘for the public good on the ground that it is in the interests of science, literature, art or learning’; there was a time limit on prosecutions; booksellers, widely regarded as the most vulnerable link in the chain, were given the defence of ‘innocent dissemination’; the penalties for the guilty, hitherto unlimited, were restricted to a fine or three years in prison; and publishers were given the right to appeal against destruction orders.
All this was well and good, but the Act had yet to be tested out on a serious work of literature. As Lane readied himself to publish lady Chatterley, the Act had been cited in over forty prosecutions – all of them confined to such works as The Ladies Directory, a guide to prostitutes and their services, or self-evident pornography like Heaven, Hell and the Whore. In 1958, however, George Weidenfeld had bought the British rights in Nabokov’s Lolita, bravely preempting a long line of other publishers who were waiting for Roy Jenkins’s Bill to become law. Gerald Gardiner, a future Labour Lord Chancellor and a passionate devotee of free speech, had masterminded Weidenfeld’s campaign, and was determined to outwit Sir Theobald ‘Toby’ Mathew, the Director of Public Prosections. A letter was sent to The Times in support of publication, signed by a long list of eminent writers, academics and public figures, Allen Lane among them; Weidenfeld sent a copy from the very modest first printing to the DPP, and told him that unless he heard to the contrary he would publish by October 1960. Some nerve-racking days intervened, but eventually Weidenfeld was summoned to the phone, in the middle of a party, and told that the book would not be prosecuted. The celebrations became more frenzied than before, and the firm went on to sell over 200,000 copies in hardback.
Lane may have been ready to test the Act, but he was equally anxious not to spend time in prison. His decision to press ahead received a welcome boost when, in 1959, an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley was, at last, published in New York: and, as with Ulysses, where America led, Lane might safely follow. With the approval of Frieda Lawrence and Laurence Pollinger, the literary agent to the estate, Knopf were the publishers of the expurgated edition, and formally controlled the volume rights, but three years after Frieda’s death, Barney Rosset of Grove Press decided to go ahead with an unexpurgated edition, with a preface by the poet Archibald MacLeish and an introduction by Mark Schorer, a respected academic. Rosset sold a large number of copies to a book club, and since this involved sending copies through the post he became liable to prosecution under the so-called Comstock Law, which declared it a federal offence to send obscene material through the US Mails. The Post Office seized twenty-four cartons of books, and although Rosset was found guilty his appeal was upheld by Judge Bryan and he was free to publish in the States. The fact that he had no rights in the book left him at the mercy of paperback publishers eager to cash in. Within eight days of Judge Bryan’s decision Pocket Books had brought out an unexpurgated edition of their own; they were followed by Dell, Pyramid and New English Library, and a vicious bookshop battle ensued.
In January 1960 the board of Penguin agreed to publication, and Laurence Pollinger accepted an advance of £1,000. It was decided to print 200,000 copies, with an August publication date; later on, to counter suggestions that Penguin was cashing in on pornography, Hans Schmoller pointed out to Michael Rubinstein, Penguin’s assiduous solicitor, that such high expectations were far from unique: Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, first published in Penguin in 1948, had sold 321,000 copies, The Woman of Rome 715,000, the Odyssey 965,000, Clochemerle 430,000, One of Our Submarines 350,000 and Room at the Top 190,000. Hazell, Watson & Viney agreed to print the book, but although they produced a dummy copy, proceedings ground to a halt when a compositor complained to the Head Reader. After an acrimonious board meeting, the firm reluctantly withdrew: they had, a director later explained, been left paying the bills after Night and Day collapsed in 1937, and were reluctant to run the risk again. Help was to hand in the form of Sir Isaac Pitman, who told Lane and ‘Rab’ Butler that he would be more than happy to print the book ‘as a matter of principle’, though he would be using Western Printing Services, run by Anthony Rowe, rather than the firm that bore his name. Since WPS had printed Ulysses for The Bodley Head, Pitman’s intervention lent continuity to the proceedings.
Lane’s resolve to press ahead with publication was matched by an equal determination on the part of the authorities to prosecute. Pitman told Lane that ‘Rab’ Butler had written to say that he, for one, would welcome publication, but he may well have been a lone voice in both the Government and the Conservative Party. A month after Penguin had decided to go ahead, the Attorney General, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller (waggishly referred to as ‘Bullying-Manner’), was asked in the House of Commons whether he could give Penguin an assurance that they would not be prosecuted should they decide to publish, and replied with an emphatic ‘No’. The Government claimed later that the decision on whether or not to prosecute was entirely a matter for the Director of Public Prosecutions, and had nothing to do with the Attorney-General, but although this was formally the case, the evidence suggests otherwise.
The DPP’s attention had been drawn to the book by advertisements in the trade press, and by a letter from the Chief Constable of Peterborough. Sir Toby Mathew’s nephew told Anthony Rowe Mat his uncle was determined to prosecute; Mathew sought the advice of the Senior Treasury Counsel, who suggested that he should initiate proceedings under the Obscene Publications Act. Maurice Crump, Sir Toby’s Deputy at the DPP, informed Mervyn Griffith-Jones that the Department was reluctant to act as a censor of new books, but ‘in the case of an old-timer like Lady Chatterley’s Lover the situation is different’: he advised against announcing a decision about whether or not to prosecute ‘for fear of creating a precedent and thereby acting as censors’, but thought its likelihood could ‘be percolated to the publishers through the Home Office’. After reading the first three chapters on the train to Southampton, Me Attorney-General told Sir Toby that ‘if the remainder of the work is of the same character, I have no doubt that you were right to start proceedings’; the Solicitor-General, who had also dipped into the book at Sir Reginald’s suggestion, helpfully weighed in on Me side of prosecution.
Readying his ammunition, Sir Toby passed a copy of Lady Chatterley, imported from the Continent, to Mr Crump in the DPP, and asked him for his views. Mr Crump thought it in essence a ‘trashy novelette’, and took exception to Lawrence’s failure to tell the reader about Connie Chatterley’s everyday life – ‘whether she rode, hunted, played tennis or golf… She is little more than a female body into whose acts of love-making we are invited to pry.’ And the same could be said of her lover, the gamekeeper Mellors: how, Mr Crump wanted to know, ‘did he spend his time when not game-keeping? Did he visit the local? Read, smoke, garden, do good works?’ Mr Crump was equally severe about Lawrence’s prose. ‘Not only is his characterization poor, but it is in places also inaccurate or ungrammatical.’ He was particularly incensed by the fact that ‘the necktie Chatterley was wearing on p. 14 is described as being “careful”. “Drive a careful car” might be a slogan for Mr Marples, but it would hardly earn him a prize for literature’ – ‘Ernie’ Marples being Harold Macmillan’s cheeky-chappie Minister of Transport, who had recently opened Britain’s first stretch of motorway, and was much concerned with improving the national standard of driving.
Mr Crump was not the only literary critic whose opinion was sought. Yellowing back numbers of literary magazines were scoured for hostile reactions to the book from T. S. Eliot and Lord David Cecil, but little use was made of their views; anxious to secure the services of hostile witnesses, the DPP approached Helen Gardner, an Oxford don and an authority on the metaphysical poets, and Noël Annan, the Provost of King’s, Cambridge: to Sir Toby’s disappointment, both wrote back to say they would welcome publication (‘Snub No. 2,’ Mr Crump scribbled in the margin of Annan’s letter). An official also visited John Holroyd-Reece, now resident at Chilham Castle in Kent, and came away more confused than ever. Holroyd-Reece claimed that although Lawrence himself had asked him to publish Lady Chatterley, he had refused to do so since it was not ‘up to the standards of the books he was accustomed to publishing’, while the four-letter words were ‘completely unnecessary and indeed distasteful, and were merely put in to annoy Frieda’; but for all that he supported its publication. ‘While Mr Holroyd-Reece is an extremely interesting and knowledgeable person to talk to, he makes it almost impossible to get a word in edgeways,’ the exhausted official reported back; Holroyd-Reece, who also happened to be Michael Rubinstein’s godfather, sent a full account of the meeting to Lane, typed up on sheets of virulent yellow paper.
Michael Rubinstein was convinced that Penguin could produce ‘a most formidable company of witnesses’ to speak out on the novel’s behalf: he thought it unlikely that a jury would find it obscene, but if they did Lane would face no more than a nominal fine. Jeremy Hutchinson and Richard du Cann produced a list of potential witnesses, and Rubinstein set about writing to some 300 eminent writers, academics, churchmen and public figures to drum up support. Bill Williams, in the meantime, was duplicating Rubinstein’s efforts and receiving, for the most part, welcome letters of support. Aldous Huxley wrote from California, declaring Lady Chatterley ‘ an essentially wholesome book’, and offering to come over at his own expense if needed as a witness; whatever the views expressed earlier in After False Gods, T. S. Eliot said he would ‘regard its suppression as deplorable’; Bertrand Russell regarded any prosecution as ‘wholly regrettable and misguided’; John Betjeman pronounced Lawrence to be ‘one of the most outstanding novelists of this century’, and Lady Chatterley one of his best; Harold Nicolson admitted that ‘What really enrages me about this prosecution is that it should be brought against Penguin Books who, of all publishers, have conferred the greatest benefit on the present generation of readers and promoted the circulation of the best in English literature.’ Stephen Spender, John Lehmann, Tom Driberg, Melvin Lasky, Kingsley Amis, A. J. Ayer, J. B. Priestley and Rupert Hart-Davis assured Williams of their support, but not all were convinced. Graham Greene thought it ridiculous to prosecute, but confessed that ‘I find some parts of the book rather absurd, and for that reason I would prefer not to be called in case I was forced into any admission harmful to the Penguin cause’; Compton Mackenzie hoped that Penguin wouldn’t be involved in a ‘tiresome case’, since ‘I don’t think Lady Chatterley’s Lover is worth it’; Evelyn Waugh remembered the book as being ‘dull, absurd in places and pretentious’, while its author ‘had very meagre gifts’; Victor Gollancz read it with ‘unutterable boredom’, but ‘could not imagine a more deplorable piece of topsy-turveydom than that Lady Chatterley should be condemned and the really vile Lolita get through’; after expressing amazement at having been approached in the first place, Enid Blyton revealed that she had never read it, and that ‘my husband said NO at once’.
With both sides flexing their muscles, Lane paid a visit to Scotland Yard before leaving in early August for his villa in Spain. Despite a predictable lack of support from W. H. Smith, subscription orders were nearing the 200,000 mark; all this was highly encouraging, but, with prosecution threatened, Penguin felt it would be wrong at this stage to involve booksellers, who could hardly plead ‘innocent dissemination’ if caught stocking so notorious a work. The ingenious Rubinstein suggested that twelve copies should be made available to the police at Penguin’s High Holborn office: this would constitute ‘limited publication’, and the matter could be resolved before Penguin proceeded to ‘full’ publication. With Lane away, it was agreed that Bill Williams and Hans Schmoller, as directors of the company, would be responsible for the handing over. Detective Inspector Monahan duly turned up at the Penguin office, and Bill Williams handed over the twelve copies, one or more of which would be passed on to the DPP; no sooner had he done so than he had an attack of cold feet – what would his colleagues at the Arts Council think of it all? – and asked Inspector Monahan to replace his name with Schmoller’s in the record. Schmoller, who combined devotion to the firm with a nervous disposition, wrote for the record a meticulous, minute-by-minute account of the proceedings in his immaculate italic hand, and carefully stored it away in the files.
Lane had barely stepped off the aeroplane in Málaga before Michael Rubinstein rang Harmondsworth to say that Richard du Cann, one of the barristers he had briefed on Penguin’s behalf, insisted that any further distribution of books should be halted at once: the matter was now sub judice; no review copies should be sent out, and copies sent out to booksellers and wholesalers should be returned at Penguin’s expense. A summons was served at Harmondsworth, and received on behalf of the company by Ron Blass, the warehouse manager; Hans Schmoller’s nerves were further shredded when Leonard Russell revealed in the Sunday Times that the book was due to be published on 25 August, that Scotland Yard had asked for copies, and that Penguin would mount a sturdy defence if prosecuted. Anxious at being left in charge at such a critical moment, Schmoller and Bill Williams cabled their leader in Spain: ‘LEGAL ACTION IMMINENT STOP ADVISE YOUR IMMEDIATE RETURN.’ Lane came back to find his colleagues holding an emergency board meeting in the library at Silverbeck and ready to concede defeat, but he had no intention of giving up the fight. Rubinstein wrote to ask whether any of the Penguin directors had a criminal record (Lane had to confess to a driving offence), and whether anyone knew what Lawrence meant when he had Sir Clifford Chatterley say, ‘If a man likes to have his wife, as Benvenuto Cellini says, “in the Italian way”, well that is a matter of taste.’
Much time was spent, on both sides, worrying about how and whether copies of the book should be provided to the jury and other interested parties. It was agreed that eight copies could be set aside for those members of the Press who would be covering the trial, on the strict understanding that these would be returned at once should the prosecution succeed, and Rubinstein suggested that these should be bound in jackets from other Lawrence titles in Penguin: all, including Lady Chatterley, had a uniform look, with Schmoller’s vertical orange bands and, in between, an engraving by Stephen Russ of Lawrence’s emblem of a phoenix rising from the flames. Journalists were known to be hardened cynics and men of the world, but others were more vulnerable or easily corrupted. Mr Simpson of HMSO was reluctant to have copies made for the jury and members of the court since ‘the copying process would have to be undertaken by a staff composed mainly of young girls’, and he recommended instead that Mr Crump should acquire Continental editions via the Swiss or German police; Mr Crump’s particular worry was that if the prosecution failed the book would then be ‘offered openly and persuasively to every child or teenager who has 3s. 6d. in his or her pocket. This is a fearsome thought.’ A Lady Chatterley that was on sale to discerning and well-heeled men of the world for a guinea or 30s. was a very different matter from a cheap edition which could be bought by the young and the hoi-polloi. Penguin could not have been more cooperative throughout. ‘Normally one would not expect the publisher to volunteer any assistance to the prosecution,’ Mr Simpson remarked to Mr Crump, ‘but one gets the impression that the publishers have invited, or at least welcomed, these proceedings to be instituted.’
With publication suspended for the duration, the trial began on 20 October at the Old Bailey: it was the second case, after The Ladies’ Directory, to come before a judge and jury under the provisions of the Act. Court No. 1 had poor acoustics, and according to Mollie Panter-Downes, who was covering the case for the New Yorker, ‘the whole place sighed and croaked and groaned disconcertingly at every footfall’. The judge, Mr Justice Byrne, was, according to Miss Panter-Downes, a ‘lean figure in a close grey wig that oddly simulated a bristling crew cut’. A devout Roman Catholic, he was felt to favour the prosecution case; for some reason his wife, equally ill-disposed, sat alongside him throughout, raising her eyebrows as yet another literary man (or woman) shambled into the witness-box to give evidence for the defence. The judge’s copy of the offending work was carried into court in a specially made silk bag, with the more shocking passages heavily underscored in purple ink. The jury consisted of nine men and three women; Lane and Hans Schmoller were allowed, like Fredric Warburg before them, to sit in the well of the court, and from the Press box Mollie Panter-Downes observed Lane to be ‘a compactly-built grey-haired man with a quietly pugnacious expression’.
The defence team consisted of Gerald Gardiner, assisted by Jeremy Hutchinson and Richard du Cann. A tall, austere-looking figure, Gardiner was renowned for the clarity of his intellect and his cold, dispassionate delivery. He had only joined the defence at the last minute, and was already acting on behalf of Randolph Churchill in a slander case against the mustachioed Tory MP Sir Gerald Nabarro, who had accused him of cowardice for attacking Sir Anthony Eden over his handling of the Suez crisis; and while the jury was settling down in the court-room to read Lady Chatterley – despite defence pleas about the hardness of the seats, the embarrassment of reading such a work in public, and the problem of slow readers, Mr Justice Byrne had refused to allow the jury to do their reading at home, and three days had to be set aside for the business – he nipped across to an adjoining court-room and concluded his business there. Jeremy Hutchinson remembered Lane as a ‘perfect’ client, never complaining and more than happy to murmur ‘Over to you…’; and after it was all over, Lane, true to form, asked him whether he might be interested in a senior post at Penguin Books.
The prosecuting counsel, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, proved to be the most memorable character in the case: not surprisingly, since he had much in common with Sergeant Buzfuz and other barristers of the rubicund, sarcastic and orotund school. Tough, pompous and likeable, according to Jeremy Hutchinson, he was genuinely outraged at such a book being made available at a cheap price: asked by a colleague how he decided whether or not to prosecute, he declared that ‘I put my feet up on the desk and start reading. If I get an erection, we prosecute,’ so he must have found Lady Chatterley’s Lover inflammatory, and all the more dangerous in paperback. ‘The prosecuting counsel is a bit fearsome,’ Lane told Harry Paroissien: Mollie Panter-Downes observed that he had ‘the sort of well-boned good looks – full-chinned and brought into period by his wig – that you often see in English eighteenth-century family portraits of country squires and their spaniels regarding each other with mutual satisfaction’, while Sybille Bedford, doing a comparable job for Esquire, noted ‘high cheek-bones, a florid colour, a strong jaw and a thin mouth’, and ‘a voice quivering with thin-lipped scorn’.
However deep his disapproval, Griffith-Jones’s opening speech was, in Montgomery Hyde’s opinion, ‘scrupulously fair’. He began by explaining the new Act, telling the jury that if they decided that Lady Chatterley was not obscene, and unlikely to ‘deprave and corrupt’, they must decide in its favour; if, on the other hand, they thought it was obscene, they must then decide whether publication could be considered to be in the public good, bearing in mind the views of the expert witnesses produced by the defence. That duty done, Griffith-Jones rose to rhetorical heights. ‘Would you approve your young sons, young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book?’ he asked the jury, in words that doubtless haunted him for the rest of his career, and achieved instant fame well beyond the court-room. ‘Is it a book you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’ The reference to servants had, in C. H. Rolph’s opinion, ‘a visible – and risible – effect on the jury, and may well have been the first nail in the prosecution’s coffin’, and would be nimbly exploited by Gerald Gardiner in his closing speech for the defence. As yet undaunted, Griffith-Jones then summoned his one and only prosecution witness – Detective-Inspector Monahan, who confirmed that he had taken receipt of twelve copies of the book from Hans Schmoller and served a summons on Ron Blass a week later, and briskly departed the scene.
After an opening speech for the defence, in which Gerald Gardiner made much of how Allen Lane had left school at sixteen and of his desire to make good books available to ordinary people, with special reference to Pelicans, the Penguin Classics, the Penguin Shakespeare and the Shaw Million, the thirty-six expert witnesses for the defence were summoned for cross-examination. They were, in Richard Hoggart’s opinion, reassuringly un-bohemian, consisting as they did of ‘eminent and elderly men of letters, none of whom would frighten a jury with farouche manners or beliefs’, and ‘equally elderly lady dons, impregnable in tweed costumes and sensible shoes’; and the first to be called was indeed a lady don, the same Helen Gardner whom the DPP had tried to enlist in their cause. The Bishop of Woolwich famously declared that this was a book that all Christians should read, a remark that provoked mirth and banner headlines in the popular press. Eager to hold the book up to ridicule while at the same time exercising his histrionic gifts, Griffith-Jones read out what Malcolm Muggeridge later declared to be ‘the most hilariously fatuous dialogue ever to be written in the English language’ (‘Sir Malcolm gave a little squirting laugh, and became Scotch and lewd. “Honour! How was the going, eh? Good, my boy, what?” “Good!” “I’ll bet it was! Ha-ha! My daughter, chip off the old block, what! I never went back on a good bit of fucking, myself. Though her mother, oh, holy saints!” He rolled his eyes up to heaven. “But you warmed her up, oh, you warmed her up, I can see that. Ha-ha! My blood in her! You set fire to her haystack all right!”’). ‘Do you think any future generation reading that conversation would get anything approaching an accurate picture of the way in which Royal Academicians conducted their conversation?’ Griffith-Jones asked Graham Hough of Cambridge University, but although Hough conceded that this was ‘the one utterly, disastrously bad passage in the book’, he would go no further than that.
Other defence witnesses included C. V. Wedgwood, Bill Williams, Roy Jenkins, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Potter, Noël Annan and Dilys Powell. Rebecca West gave forth ‘in singing tones, like a prophetess intoning from the walls of Troy’, while E. M. Forster, looking more mole-like than ever in a fawn gabardine mac, was barely visible above the rim of the witness-box; T. S. Eliot patrolled the corridors outside, waiting in vain to be called, and Sir Stanley Unwin was visibly put out when Griffith-Jones showed no interest in his views, dismissing him with a peremptory ‘No questions’. An over-confident Griffith-Jones had assumed that to ridicule and humiliate the expert witnesses would be an easy matter, but he could not have been more mistaken: and worse was to come.
Although some listeners were puzzled by his claim that Lady Chatterley was an essentially ‘puritan’ piece of work, it was widely agreed that by far the most impressive expert witness was Richard Hoggart: Sybille Bedford found him the ‘most quietly and fervently assured’ of all the witnesses, and considered his evidence, given on the second day, to be the turning-point of the trial. Years later, trying to explain why he had been chosen, Hoggart imagined Lane saying to himself, ‘I’m going to have someone for the defence who is not posh, not middle-class, not Oxbridge – a sort of sub-fusc university lecturer from the provinces, a sort of “ee-by-gum” character.’ Griffith-Jones did his best to patronize Hoggart – ‘The question is quite a simple one to answer without another lecture,’ he sneered at one stage, adding, ‘You are not at Leicester University at the moment’ – but Sybille Bedford thought his attempts at ‘gentlemanly superiority’ were thwarted by Hoggart’s ‘earnest and friendly’ answers. After it was all over, Lane commissioned an introduction to Lady Chatterley from her most persuasive advocate.
Although it has sometimes been claimed, presumably by those who neither followed the proceedings nor read the detailed accounts of the trial by C. H. Rolph and Montgomery Hyde, that he had been so unnerved by his cross-examination during the Whispering Gallery trial that he vowed never to appear in court again, and left Bill Williams to make the case on his behalf, Lane was called on the fourth day, following Raymond Williams, St John Stevas and the frustrated Sir Stanley Unwin: as Bill Williams remembered, ‘he was manifestly ill-at-ease and, indeed, declined to face the fast bowling as an opening bat and went in much lower down’. He told Jeremy Hutchinson how his ‘idea was to produce a book which would sell at the price of ten cigarettes, which would give no excuse for anyone not being able to buy it, and would be the type of book which they would get if they had gone on to further education’. Penguins were designed, in part, to provide ‘another form of education’ for ‘people like myself who left school when they were sixteen’; he had always wanted to ‘make Penguin a University Press in paperback’ and to that end he had published some 3,500 titles and sold about 250 million books in all. He was not, he declared, in the business of publishing expurgated editions of books, and only two novels – Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and a pre-war Penguin Special of The Good Soldier Schweik – had not been published in full. (In fact, the Penguin edition of Gide’s If It Die had appeared with two small cuts, the Penguin Classic Daphnis and Chloë had been mildly trimmed, and a wartime edition of J. Meade Falkner’s The Nebuly Coat had, to the distress of his admirers, been deprived of many of its architectural and topographical asides.) Griffith-Jones, whose interventions and cross-examinations had become increasingly sporadic as the trial wore on, tried to catch him out by referring to an article in the Manchester Guardian in which Lane had been quoted as saying that Lady Chatterley was ‘no great novel’, but his attempted ambush came to naught.
Despite a summing up by the judge which made plain his own views on the matter, the jurors brought back a verdict of not guilty. No sooner had the cheering died down than Gerald Gardiner sprang to his feet to ask that Penguin should be awarded costs amounting to some £13,000 in what had always been regarded as a test case (back in the summer, Mr Crump had reminded a colleague in Customs and Excise that ‘publication was by arrangement to provide the basis of a test case’). According to C. H. Rolph, Mr Justice Byrne ‘smiled, a little enigmatically, pushed back his chair’ and refused to make any order as to costs: but none of the expert witnesses asked for a fee, and with Lady Chatterley’s Lover selling in its thousands as soon as the verdict was announced – vast queues formed outside bookshops, and Western Printing Services were joined by two other printers, including Hazell’s, in rushing out batches of 300,000 copies of a book that went on to sell some 3 million copies – Penguin could afford to go without.
A celebratory party was held at the Arts Council, and the letters of congratulation flooded in. T. S. Eliot admitted to being ‘both disappointed and relieved’ that he had not been called; Julian Symons told Lane that his ‘stand was magnificently courageous’; Michael Rubinstein’s father, Harold, a well-known literary lawyer, suggested that ‘Michael has avenged his firm’s (and father’s) defeat thirty-three years ago, when The Well of Loneliness was banned under the old law’; anticipating those who saw the verdict as a preamble to the liberalization of the Sixties – Hugh Carleton Greene’s regime at the BBC, John Trevelyan’s labours at the British Board of Film Censors, the end of the Lord Chamberlain’s role as theatrical censor – John Braine wrote that ‘because you had the courage to do what you felt to be right as a publisher, you have made the lot of the professional writer – and, in particular, the professional novelist – a great deal easier. I for one shall always feel very much in your debt.’ The young seemed less impressed: Lane’s daughter Clare thought Lady Chatterley ‘all right, but a bit old-fashioned’; Max Hastings, still a schoolboy at Charterhouse, told his mother, Anne Scott-James, who had appeared as a defence witness, that all the boys had rushed out to buy a copy, ‘but I am sorry to tell you, Mummy, that now we have read it we all definitely think it should be banned’.
The Sunday Express, Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard were outraged by the verdict; The Times wondered why the prosecution hadn’t produced its own team of expert witnesses; fourteen Tory MPs put down an amendment to the Queen’s Speech demanding the repeal of the Obscene Publications Act. Nor did all academics agree with their colleagues about the virtues of the book. F. R. Leavis told Michael Rubinstein that he could ‘see no reason for Sir Allen’s knight errantry unless he had the golden fleece in view’, and refused to autograph Lane’s copy of The Common Pursuit, recently reissued in the new, larger-format Peregrine imprint, on the grounds that ‘I do not think Sir Allen Lane did a service to literature, civilization or Lawrence in the business of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’; more in a spirit of mischief than disapproval, John Sparrow, the Warden of All Souls, and the economist Andrew Shonfield wrote articles in Encounter suggesting that a passage from the novel quoted by Griffith-Jones in his concluding address referred, in fact, to an act of buggery, and that the jury might not have been so lenient had they been alerted to this. Nor were some members of the public happy about the outcome. ‘You are a disgrace to the name of Lane,’ wrote a correspondent from Bath; another, from Edgbaston, suggested that Lane should give his ‘tainted money’ to charity, and that ‘in this way you may lighten your sentence on the Day of Judgement’; a third cherished ‘a lurking feeling that whenever you now have occasion to mix with the better class of people, you will experience an uncomfortable feeling of being unobtrusively shunned’.
Shunned or not, Lane’s Christmas book that year, sent out to some 200 people, was a clothbound copy of C. H. Rolph’s account of the trial, later reissued in paperback. Sir Theobald Mathew was among its recipients: as were A. S. B. Glover, who quickly pointed out an error in the prelims, and Sir Stanley Unwin, who, commenting on Paul Hogarth’s drawings in the text, wished that ‘the portrait of myself was more recognizable. That kind of a drawing calls for a paper with more finish…’ Lane commissioned Stephen Russ to design a plate for his house in Spain, now renamed El Fénix in honour of Lawrence, and prepared to reap the rewards of Lady Chatterley’s Lover – a book he had taken on and published without any involvement on the part of Tony Godwin, who had only recently joined the firm, and whose own eagerness to extend the frontiers of permissible reading would, paradoxically, sour and destroy his relations with Lane.
The trial was a turning-point, and after it was over previously forbidden works like The Ginger Man and The Kama Sutra were finally published in this country. As John Sutherland has pointed out, a certain caution still prevailed: John Calder, a bolder publisher than most, issued Henry Miller’s ‘Tropics’ and William Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch initially as expensive hardbacks; the Mayflower paperback of Fanny Hill was pulped following a prosecution headed by Mervyn Griffith-Jones, but Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn was reprieved on appeal after a trial in which the seventy-seven-year-old Sir Basil Blackwell, called as a prosecution witness, confessed to having been depraved and corrupted by his reading of the work. Like it or not, Lane’s persistence had radically altered the climate of opinion in Britain.