Sense of justice

When the first of what was to become a series of international war crimes tribunals was mooted in the closing years of the Second World War, the four Allied nations the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France were each allowed to appoint two judges and one prosecutor. Hartley Shawcross, Britain’s leading prosecutor at the 1945 Nuremberg trials of Germany’s Nazi leaders, was assisted by a team including two men (not one of the four countries appointed women to any of the posts) whose legal judgements were to become notorious in postwar Britain: Mervyn Griffith-Jones and David Maxwell Fyfe. As their ‘double-barrelled’ names imply, both came from privileged backgrounds that earned them educations at such establishment institutions as Eton, Cambridge and Oxford, as well as more or less distinguished military careers. Maxwell Fyfe was to become a leading Tory politician.

Griffith-Jones has gone down in history not for his unassuming performance in Nuremberg, but for a series of toe-curling statements at the 1960 trial of Penguin Books for publishing a supposedly obscene paperback version of D. H. Lawrence’s 1920s novel Lady Chatterley’s lover. It seems he began by telling bemused jurors that the book induced ‘lustful thoughts in the minds of those who read it’, and then asking them ‘when you have read it through, would you approve of your young sons, young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’

In a Britain where sexual emancipation was about to explode in its full glory, Griffith-Jones’s antediluvian references to ‘girls being able to read as well as boys’, and to husbands being entitled to decide what their wives or servants (!) should or should not read, wrecked the prosecution’s already flimsy case from the very outset. Penguin Books were duly acquitted, and the book became a best-seller (though apart from a large number of hitherto unprintable ‘four-letter words’ it added little or nothing to the achievements of English literature).

But on to Griffith-Jones’s fellow prosecutor David Maxwell Fyfe – whom a German woman interviewed at the time of the Nuremberg trials supposedly thought to be Jewish, and ipso facto unsuitable to be prosecuting Germany’s Nazi leaders, on the grounds that ‘no-one but a Jew would ever call his son David‘ (a telling commentary on how little racial and religious bigots actually know about the targets of their venom).

Maxwell Fyfe’s cross-examination of the Nazi leader Hermann Göring – who only escaped his deserved punishment by taking cyanide on the eve of his execution – is said to have been very impressive; and one might then think that the Scottish lawyer would have gone down in history as a leading figure in the promotion of human rights. But not as far as I’m concerned.

After PM Winston Churchill appointed him home secretary (Brit-speak for ‘minister  of the interior’) in 1951, Maxwell Fyfe set about making the lives of Britain’s male homosexuals even more miserable than they had already been since the 1885 ‘Labouchère amendment’ to the country’s criminal law, whereby sexual contact between men – even holding hands or kissing in public – became automatically punishable by imprisonment. Maxwell Fyfe went on record as saying he refused to be known as ‘the man who made sodomy legal’. In the 1950s he presided over a series of British ‘show trials’ in which men ‘caught’ breaking the Labouchère amendment, including the now only recently pardoned Alan Turing (see my early posts AMT – a man tormented), were sentenced to long terms in prison, and the prurient press made hay with it (including an article in a prominent paper headed How to spot a homo). This was the sociopolitical atmosphere in which I grew up, even before I began to realise I was gay, and before anyone had so much as mentioned the possibility to me – it was only when I reached puberty that the truth dawned on me, and the fear began to set in.

Maxwell Fyfe did all this not out of ignorance, but out of hatred – perhaps an even deeper hatred than he had felt for the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. He referred to people like me as the vilest in the world – luckily I did not read his revolting words until much later, but they surely influenced many of my then compatriots, certainly including my own parents.

Hoping that a parliamentary inquiry would finally suppress the ‘scourge’ of homosexuality – what he called ‘this male vice, this plague’ – he helped set up the committee that produced Britain’s 1957 Wolfenden report. To his dismay, it decided that the best thing was to decriminalise homosexuality, just as most of continental Europe had long since done – and ten years later, on 27 July 1967, Britain finally introduced legislation doing precisely that. I had just turned 15. Maxwell Fyfe had himself died six months earlier to the day – and good sodding riddance. He and his kind were the greatest scourge, and I’m sad to see his name on the illustrious list of Allied judges and prosecutors of Nazi leaders whose crimes had likewise included persecution of homosexuals – which remained unmentioned at Nuremberg. Indeed, it is only quite recently that they have begun to be regularly included on the list of German (and, let it not be forgotten, Italian) crimes against humanity committed during the Second World War.