LGBT historian Rictor Norton Reviews :The Abergavenny Witch Hunt

'Gross Indecency' in South Wales : A review by Rictor Norton ( Journalist and respected LGBT historian ) of “The Abergavenny Witch Hunt: An account of the prosecution of over twenty homosexuals in a small Welsh town in 1942” by William Cross (Published by the author through Book Midden Publishing, Newport, NSW, 2014) (£12.00 paperback, 310 pages, illustrated). In 1942 police began rounding up homosexuals in the small Welsh border town of Abergavenny. By the end of the year, one young man had thrown himself under a train, two more men tried but failed to kill themselves, and 24 men had been brought to trial on charges ranging from corrupting youths to buggery and homosexual relations between consenting adults, i.e. "gross indecency". Fourteen of the men, their lives effectively destroyed, were given prison sentences ranging from twelve months to ten years' penal servitude. As a result of the scandal, for many years afterwards, Abergavennny was the butt of coarse jokes: throughout South Wales, "a man had only to bend over to tie his shoelace for someone to say, 'You wouldn't do that in Abergavenny'." William Cross has scoured the legal records and newspapers and assembled an exhaustive chronicle of how this "vice ring" came into being, and how its members were hunted down in a virtual "witch hunt". Cross has used the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to previously unopened files in the National Archives to reveal a story that is full of both human interest and sociocultural significance. To some extent this was a circle of predatory homosexuals who exploited the boys and young men over whom they had some control. Although all of the "victims" participated with consent, some of the youngsters undoubteldy feared losing their jobs if they did not comply with their employers' wishes, and some of the abused boys were below the present legal age of consent, so some of the men would have been convicted and perhaps labelled pedophiles even today. But most of the victims were young men acting as "trade" for some economic benefit to themselves, and most of the cases today would not be prosecuted because they involved adult males engaging in consenting sexual relations in private. At the centre of the circle was the town's cinema, the Coliseum, and its 43-year-old manager George Rowe. He was charged with committing "gross indecency" with some seven 15- to 17-year-old youths, most of whom he employed as page boys at the cinema. Abergavenny was shocked by the revelations of the private life of a man respected for his charitable activities and for raising funds for the war effort. Rowe seems to have been an opportunistic "groomer" of youths needing employment. The evidence given by the Coliseum page-boys soon revealed a wider network of Rose's acquaintances, and a circle of men who used the services of a particular 15-year-old page-boy who became a police informant. After being arrested, Rowe tried to hang himself and also took poison, but he survived – only to have the crime of attempted suicide added to the list of charges against him. Youths who were not below the age of 16, such as an 18-year-old factory worker, were prosecuted (and convicted) as participants in the sexual offences. Rowe had shared his boys with another "sexual predator", a 31-year-old clerk named Holly, who passed the youths on to yet other men. Eventually, besides the youths, the police uncovered a network of homosexual men who knew one another, including a farmer (age 20), an RAF airman (age 28), a hairdresser (27), a clerk (31), a hotel porter (22), an actor (27), an electrical engineer (19), a paper mill worker (18), a miner (28), two chefs (39 and 49), a railway worker (49), a cafe assistant (27), a factory worker (18), a grocery store manager (50), a bank clerk (39), a window dresser (43), and others. Cross follows each case in the order in which it was prosecuted at the committal proceedings and then at the trial. This is not necessarily the clearest way of telling the story, though admittedly it can be very confusing to unravel all the inter-relationships of the men and youths involved. If Cross's method is not altogether statisfactory, there is nevertheless no doubt that he has presented us with all the data, well supported by documentation, and we can choose to re-analyse it if we wish. Many of the stories are of compelling interest. Some of the men had been friends and lovers over the past few years, and some were even living together as a couple when they were charged with abusing one another. Most of the men were not married. Nearly all of them were openly part of a homosexual network rather than furtive solitary haunters of public toilets. Some of them collected and exchanged photographs of naked men and even shared typewritten erotic stories, an indication of the kind of gay subculture that was emerging outside large cities such as London. An accomplished female impersonator had joined theatrical circles in Cardiff and elsewhere in hopes of finding other men similar to himself. A search of some of the men's flats turned up powder puffs and cosmetics, bottles of scent, and jars of vaseline. Some interesting details also emerge about the life of straight "trade". For example, two teenagers shared a luxury flat in London, where they provided sexual favours to the owners of the flat and their guests. The several 18-year-olds who were prosecuted had obviously been very active in making themselves amenable to the Abergavenny "vice-ring". Most of the youths received cigarettes and alcohol and small sums of money, and some of them engaged in small-scale blackmail. On the final afternoon of the trial, after a very few men had been acquitted or discharged, the remaining eighteen men surprised the Court by pleading Guilty. So many youths had become police informers on condition that they would not be prosecuted themselves, that any defence would have been hopeless. The jury was therefore dismissed, and all that remained was the sentencing. As each man came up for sentencing, he asked that many other offences be "taken into consideration" – their activities had been much more extensive than those on the charge lists. The counsel for the defendants mainly tried to mitigate the sentences while acknowledging the offences. For example, the defence counsel for one man who faced seventeen charges, cross-examined the youths (aged 16 to 18) and got them all to acknowledge that they had never raised any objections to such practices, which they fully consented to. The judge had a reputation for hard sentencing. One man, Holly, collapsed in court when he heard that he faced ten years' penal servitude. Another man was also sentenced to ten years, one to seven years, one to six years, two to five years – felt to be unusually harsh in many people's opinion. Those men who were most severely punished were men whom the court perceived to be unrepentant congenital inverts (in the understanding of the day). One man who said he had consulted a psychiatrist and had striven to overcome his homosexuality was treated very leniently by the court and simply bound over on the promise of good behaviour, while another man who said that "homosexuality was practised in other countries and that there was no harm in it provided that it was mutual" was given ten years' penal servitude. Similarly, a female impersonator was given five years' penal servitude. One 18-year-old, who was involved with many of the men, said he had no homosexual tendencies, but had been led astray by effeminate men he met in public houses – the judge put him on probation for two years so he could have a chance to make a man of himself. One very effeminate 22-year-old hotel porter, whom today we might perceive as a transgender individual, was given fifteen months' imprisonment to stiffen his character. One of his partners, a 40-year-old hotel chef who was also markedly effeminate, was given seven years' penal servitude, even though he hadn't corrupted anyone who was not already homosexually inclined. (He was convicted on 6 cases of gross indecency, and asked that an additional 26 cases be taken into consideration.) Many soldiers (mostly aged 25 to 30) stationed in the army town of Brecon close to Abergavenny also had sex with these men, but virtually none of them were prosecuted or even called in evidence. There are suggestions that the "witch hunt" ended when it became obvious that the military would be brought into disrepute. Cross's attitude to these men is mixed: although he argues that the witch hunt resulted in many gross injustices, he nevertheless seems to have little sympathy for many of the men. I feel that Cross has uncritically accepted the discourse of the law, and too often uses the terms "abuse" and "corruption" and "molested" where I would have been more careful to use neutral terms to simply acknowledge that sex between males had occurred. The ideology of "abuse" too often obscures the fact that full consent was given. To call someone a "sexual predator" or "serial abuser" is rather unfair when their "victim" was a blackmailer or in effect a prostitute who actively solicited sex. It is downright ludicrous to describe an effeminate 22-year-old hotel porter as the "target of abuse" of a 37-year-old effeminate hotel chef, who regularly got it on together. Cross says that several of the men "can be seen as much older men with voracious instincts, craving sexual activities with each other and with a predatory side for corrupting and seducing younger men and with a particular proclivity for abusing Indian soldiers", and even that one man's contracting syphillis "was the price he paid for his debauchery" – there are so many sex-negative clichés to unpick here! This really does seem to be a prejudicial way of describing sexually active gay men. Cross in fact wholeheartedly approves today's much more liberal law and attitudes to homosexuality, so it is a pity that he is not more sensitive to the language he uses. The book is self-published and exhibits some of the drawbacks of not having benefited from the attentions of a professional copy-editor: irregular spacing of words and punctuation, odd layout, unnecessary repetition, and occasional errors of grammar and spelling – my favourite malapropism is the statement that someone "is not of fey" with police procedures, when he means "not au fait". The book is also rather confusing in its organisation. A survey of law reform from the 1950s onward is given before we launch into the 1942 case, and a complete list of all 24 men involved in the 1942 case (with details of their ages and occupations etc.) is given before we are given a general overview of the case – throwing the reader into the deep end at the beginning. Then 26 pages later this list is repeated verbatim once we get into a review of the committal proceedings. Finally, much of the material from the committal proceedings is repeated when we review the actual trial proceedings. The story is well placed within its historical context, with a brief history of the laws relating to homosexuality in Britain and psychiatric attitudes to what was considered to be "arrested development"; some comments on the social disruption caused by military life up to 1942; and some speculation about the effect the Abergavenny case may have had on the eventual decriminalisation of homosexual offences. For example, the well-known literary editor Joe Ackerley sent a famous letter of protest about the prosecution to The Spectator, a letter which was ghosted by the famous novelist E. M. Forster. The Abergavenny case and other prosecutions such as the Lord Montagu case of 1954 prompted the Wolfenden Committee to prepare its famous Report urging law reform, which eventually took effect in 1967 – long overdue, as Cross ably demonstrates. To obtain a copy of the book e-mail williecross@aol.com The book is also available on Amazon. Rictor Norton is a freelance writer and blogger who maintains a remarkable web site on the history of homosexuality. He is a former editor of Gay News.

Review on Good Reads by Tim Pendry of The Abergavenny Witch Hunt

Book Review on THE ABERGAVENNY WITCH HUNT. Self published but no less useful for that - indeed, although there are disadvantages (one or two lapses in editing, design infelicities and a structural approach which we will come on to), self-publishing enables new and important material to come into the public domain. What William Cross has done is provide the raw data (unusual in itself) about a rather unpleasant incident in British social history that allows us to make up our own mind about its meaning, sandwiched between acute and humane analysis and an excellent series of notes. This incident was the prosecution of over twenty homosexuals in a small Welsh town in the middle of the second world war. It is a foot-note in the long and grim story of gay persecution in the UK before the 1960s but an important one. I am not convinced by the speculative attempt to pull Evan Morgan, Viscount Tredegar, into the story but Cross seems to have an almost obsessive research interest in this aristocrat and his circle. The appendix (for that is what it is) does not detract from the whole. However, the benefit of having the full raw data creates the structural problem. The book is analysis and data but not always easy to read narrative or analysis of the raw data itself. He leaves much of the interpretation to us. I tend to approve of this because I find a lot of narrative history to be half-truth by selection but most readers will not find it helpful so it loses a GoodReads point. They want an easy read and not to have to do the researchers job for them - fair enough up to a point. The problem of narrative in history is the same as the 'story' in journalism. We like stories and stories are fiction. Making facts easy to digest and culturally palatable immediately partly fictionalises them. Most journalism and history is, in fact, part-fiction. Although not a set narrative (but Cross writes clearly), his account (other than the speculation around Tredegar) sounds true to me. One learns more about the actuality of 'gay' life in mid-twentieth century Britain from Cross than from many others in this field. And what do we learn? Obviously that homosexuals were treated appallingly in British Imperial Christian culture, not from malice (at least in most cases) but from ignorance and prejudice. This much we knew. What this book pinpoints is the complexity of that culture with its internal contradictions that are not easy to see in simple black and white terms. The evidence tends to show that this ignorant and prejudiced culture still expressed itself in terms that were far from sadistic and often moderated through a kind of random if judgmental compassion that inherited the unthinking instincts of the wider culture. Nasty authoritarian types tended to grab hold of the legislative process to make changes regardless of the lack of interest and even compassion of the 'masses' and then impose draconian laws on a judicial system that then tried to square it with human reality. There is no doubt that an underground sexual culture must tend to viciousness - the anxious, frightened and those with most to lose will be deterred from their instinctive practices but the hard and sociopathic cases will not. As a result, the continuum from consensual sex between adults back into grooming and exploitation of young poor working class males (ephebophilia shading into paedophilia) meant that we are dealing in this book not just with some standard alleged witch hunt against gays. We are dealing with what would be recognised as a paedophiliac network embedded within a gay culture and there is much to learn from this about the sociology of sex and the law, what happens when the State hunts as a pack and how things can go wrong. The overwhelming lesson is that sexual culture is incredibly contingent on a wider cultural set of assumptions about what is right and wrong. Observation today of Greater Syria, Moscow and Uganda tells us as much. We, in the West, seem currently to have settled on the notion of consent and the reasonable notion that minds that are not fully developed cannot be said to be consenting minds. This allows us to bring homosexual (and indeed bisexual and polyamorous) relationships into the mainstream as simply private matters, while ensuring that we have laws that protect at least under-16s from exploitative grooming (even if appallingly enforced). But we all know that in the UK this is a bit of an arbitrary fix and, as more liberal interpretations of consent are under siege and on the wane, conservative models are placing the system under pressure by extending exploitation upwards into consensual sexual trade. The decisions about what is a private matter in sexual relations thus remain fluid in time and somewhat arbitrary even today. Even the 16-age limit in the UK is an arbitrary fix which other cultures refuse to pull into the ambit of the criminal law. In the Abergavenny Case, we have an enormous range of individual stances - the uncertain and lonely vulnerable lad unsure of his identity, the manipulative sociopath and the victim of rape and this extends up in time to 21 as much as down to 14/15. The same range of attitudes to sexuality probably applies to young women in the current grooming cases so deeper questions lie in at what stage do young people take rights over their own bodies and lives and what actual (rather than presumed) harms are involved. This is all too sophisticated for the blunt instrument of the law and English and Welsh practice has tended to try to treat the powers it has as reserve powers and not inquire too deeply into private life lest it uncover the sheer scale and unmanageability of things. This has two effects. The first is that horrible things as well as a great deal of freedom carry on as if there was no law. Administrators and coppers muddle through - with dreadful consequences when they get it wrong as they have done over child abuse. The second is that, every now and then, there is a political or moral panic or some unfortunate case is forced on the Establishment and 'justice has to be seen to be done'. Some show trial or investigation becomes necessary 'pour encourager les autres'. In the last two decades, this has degenerated into 'law enforcement for the cameras' - camera crews watching doors being beaten down by troops of armoured men when a knock on the door by a local copper would have sufficed - and sudden surges of draconian idiocy. It started with the asinine 'tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime' that resulted in kids being neglected to get better records of property crime in northern cities - what a disaster New Labour was! - and ends with Cameron denying evidence on drugs harms. This is, in short, a mid-twentieth century system out of its depth, administratively incompetent and unable to see the wood for the trees. William Cross' book helps us to see that a system that was inhumane but sort of worked is now in its final degenerate stage. A lot of the problem comes from the flip dark side of the social revolution of the 1960s and 1970s that enabled marginal populations like the gay population their freedoms and which undermined the cultural primacy of the 'Establishment'. No one will face the facts that the human condition is complex, that the millions of people in a modern State will act in diverse ways if they are free to do so and that the State, shorn of its terror and monoculture, has to find new ways to administer this. At the moment, every activist and NGO or lobby group drives Government this way and that to place more and more demands on a second rank administrative service hobbled by procedures and processes driven by rights legalism. Yet there is not, fact, the funds for such a system. The Soviets could not handle this problem of the human condition - our very nature - and yet they could print money and order people around at will. The Fascists just took the dark side and directed it outwards. Our establishment, quite rightly (as the Fiona Woolf case has shown) is now surplus to requirements, our political class is despised and at sea and our administrators are asked to do more than is humanly possible and then are frightened by the risk of failure into inaction. Take paedophilia. NGO lobbyists pushed a single policy (so typically because NGOs think in simplicities) of hunting down those who downloaded kiddy porn, largely to create a 'strategy of fear' for those who remained. The police, reasonably, followed the law, did their best and used their very limited resources to undertake intelligence-based policing to round up networks. Taking kiddy porn off the internet is a 'good' but it is not a strategy against organised crime which is what this is. It now transpires that the fear factor only works on non-dangerous males dabbling on the internet, that something like 60,000 people are still looking at these images and that only something like 2% have been apprehended and sentenced at huge cost. Worse, about 30% of those charged are judged informally by law enforcement as actually not dangerous to children but their lives have been ruined. They do time because they are idiots (which is not really a crime per se) and because others like them need to be terrorised. If we postulate that the sociopathic predators and dangers to children are so committed to their ways of life that they will become increasingly devious within their networks and create counter-measures, then it sounds to me like the dangers are getting worse. This single issue approach is like concentrating on bringing down celebrities for the tabloids instead of going deep into the state's own care home system, the public schools or into the churches (oh, no, never touch the churches) to root out organised child abuse. There is much in William Cross' book to give us food for thought in this context - for welfare state, read warfare state. The imperial system seemed oddly tolerant of public school sexual exploitation while a theme of military homosexuality runs through the book. In other words, in dealing with 'sexual crimes' we seem to have learned nothing since 1942 - we have not learned to define the harm, we have not learned the difference between harms and we have evaded investigating institutional structures that promote crime. The strategy remains one of evasion and fear - targeting scapegoats, failing to frame laws on evidence, failing to invest funds in strategic law enforcement, using cultural terror as an instrument of policy and allowing policy to be dictated by passionate activism. The bottom line on our current crisis (paedophilia) is still that of consent and of vulnerability. We have to face the fact that we have tens of thousands of people driven, like homosexuals a century earlier, by sexual urges but, because of the harms and unlike homosexuals, who need to be contained in a dynamic, aggressive but feasible and (I believe) humane way. We also have to face the fact that we have pockets of mostly migrant but also underclass males with an instinctive view of women as 'things' and we also need to deal directly and immediately with the harms involved in an evidence-based way. Again, Cross' book is suggestive - homosexuals had many different atitudes to their own 'condition' (seen as not much better then than paedophilia) and no doubt modern abusers are much the same. However, if we had had a serious understanding of harm in 1942, no consenting adult would have had to go to jail and every adult guilty of sexually molesting or grooming someone immature would have been dealt with solely on that basis in a draconian way. Things seem to be better now because at least we understand that the harm to the young is proven but the language is still absurdly based on moral disgust and not on an evidence-based commitment to protecting all young people instead of running down those who disgust us. This creates a simulacrum of that underground that existed for homosexuals in the first half of the twentieth cetury, a world of misery, loneliness, desperation and fear but also of increased viciousness and exploitation. An evidence-based policy on child abuse would evade nothing - not the minor public schools, not the care system, not the churches and, above all, the most evaded of all and yet the largest source of abuse in society, the family. So, this self-published book on local history acts as a window on our own times, a reflection on how far we have not progressed. The re-telling of the story of the gay trials of 1942 is welcome in that context. Tim Pendry lists his intersts in books/ book genres as : british, crime, cultural-studies, history, psychology, public-policy, sexuality-erotica and twentieth-century.