The Fatal Englishman (37 page)

While Jeremy Wolfenden’s sexual life in London and Oxford was reaching its rackety peak, his father was chairing a Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution. The Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, outlined two problems. The first was that there was too much brazen soliciting by prostitutes in London: innocent passers-by had to be protected. The second was the feeling that homosexuality was on the increase and that
something should be done to stop it. The Government thought that the two subjects should be considered by the same committee and were ready for the same treatment. The homosexual problem was not, like soliciting, thought to threaten the public directly; it was said by the Home Office to be an ‘unnatural vice’ that degraded the individual and society. It also led to crime in the shape of blackmail.

According to Jack Wolfenden, most people were unaware that homosexuality existed. Of the few that knew about it, most thought it distasteful, and only a handful were tolerant. Buggery was illegal anyway, whether the second party was a man or woman. Lesbian activity had never been against the law, while the Act that made any gross indecency between men an offence was a legislative accident – a spin-off from a hastily passed bill introduced by Labouchère in 1885 and designed to protect women and girls. Certainly the law was due for reform; though whether trying to stamp out the practice altogether was the Home Secretary’s best response was open to doubt.

Jack Wolfenden never found out why he had been chosen for the job. At first he worried about his children. ‘What,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘might they have to put up with in comment from their contemporaries if their father got involved in “this sort of thing”?’ What indeed? Jack Wolfenden was being disingenuous, since he had known for sure for at least two years (longer if he was informed of the incident with the first year scholar) that his elder son was devotedly homosexual. But he accepted the Home Secretary’s offer and set about forming a Departmental Committee (it was not a Royal Commission, because such commissions publish all evidence, and the Wolfenden Committee felt it might lose the evidence it wanted if it was not ‘off the record’). It says a great deal for Jack Wolfenden’s personal ambition that he was prepared to risk it. It is difficult to imagine more than forty-eight hours lapsing in today’s press before the first story – ‘Vice Man’s Son is Gay’ – appeared in print. Jeremy had never made a secret of his sexual life; he was a famous figure in the small world of Oxford, and an active one in the larger sphere of London: his preferences were known about by hundreds, perhaps thousands of people. Either Jack Wolfenden had an overmastering desire to
chair the committee or a deep trust in the tact and voluntary discretion of the British public.

Jeremy Wolfenden used to say that his father wrote him a letter at this time which went roughly as follows: ‘Dear Jeremy, You will probably have seen from the newspapers that I am to chair a Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution. I have only two requests to make of you at the moment. 1) That we stay out of each other’s way for the time being; 2) That you wear rather less make-up.’

The Vice committee met, like Winston Smith and his rats, in Room 101. Their deliberations took two years and the Report was not published until 3 September 1957. Its main recommendation was that homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence. There was outrage in the press: John Gordon in the
Sunday Express
called the report ‘The Pansies’ Charter’; the
Daily Express
called it ‘cumbersome nonsense’; even the
Evening Standard
thought the recommendations ‘bad, retrograde and utterly to be condemned.’ The Government, which had commissioned Wolfenden from a feeling that homosexuality ought, in its own words, ‘to be curbed’ was now in difficulty. In November 1958 Rab Butler, then Home Secretary, opened a debate by saying that any change in the law regarding homosexuality might be regarded as conferring some sort of tacit approval; on the other hand he was happy to implement Wolfenden’s tame new legislation for fining prostitutes more heavily, and this became law the following year.

As for the homosexual law reform, the Government did what it did best: it did nothing. Labour friends told Jack Wolfenden they would have done the same. In 1960 a free vote on an Opposition motion to implement the recommendations of the report was heavily defeated. In 1965 Lord Arran set the business in motion again in the Lords; in 1967, on the initiative of Leo Abse MP, the Commons did the same. In the summer of 1967 the Sexual Offences Act came into effect, almost ten years after the Wolfenden Committee reported.

Jack Wolfenden personally abhorred homosexuality: he thought it was a disgusting abomination. However, he viewed the recommendations of the Committee as a philosophical
exercise. He could not find any respectable reason for a government to interfere with the private behaviour of its adult citizens. His suggestion that homosexuality be decriminalised was a victory for intellectual process over personal distaste; it was a vindication of the disinterested mental disciplines of Oxford PPE.

By the time the law was passed in 1967 Jeremy Wolfenden was dead. For the whole of his adult life his father’s report was either in progress or lying in a heavy pile, ticking powerfully, on a shelf in the Home Office.

Meanwhile, there was the All Souls exam. As the candidates stood waiting to go in Wolfenden remarked to David Marquand: ‘You realise I’ve been competing with these people all my life, since I was seven.’ He didn’t mind competing, though, because he always won. Most of the candidates had flu, but contrived to make it a reasonably pleasant social experience.

Wolfenden sent a ripple of panic through his fellow-competitors when he strode out of one exam after half an hour. He handed in a single sheet of paper only two-thirds full. The question was ‘Liberty, equality, democracy – three beautiful but incompatible ideals.’ Wolfenden did not write an essay, but merely jotted down a string of aphorisms. He won a prize fellowship.

All Souls gave Wolfenden a base in Oxford with few teaching obligations in return. He would go back to Oxford at the weekends and hold soirees long into the night. It was on one such occasion that Colin Falck noticed that the conversation had taken a peculiar turn. Beneath the banter Wolfenden apparently had a serious purpose: he was attempting to recruit Falck to the Secret Intelligence Service.

Both of them were drunk and the approach was made obliquely, but Falck was quite certain what Wolfenden was suggesting, and quite certain that he was serious: even when drunk he had an inner mental gyroscope that kept him balanced. The man that Falck should go and see, said Wolfenden, was Robert Zaehner, someone to whom he had already gone to considerable lengths to introduce Falck. He was Professor of
Eastern Religions and Ethics and a fellow of All Souls. Born to Swiss parents but raised in England, he was a short, fair-haired man with very thick glasses who, despite his myopia, had managed to join the Army as a press attaché and had been in Teheran from 1943 to 1947, returning to be acting counsellor in 1951-2, before settling in at All Souls for the rest of his life. Falck understood that Zaehner had been Wolfenden’s own Oxford conduit to SIS, even though initial contact had been made in the Navy. Falck declined, and nothing more was said of it. His impression was that Wolfenden thought it all a game: he had himself signed up as an anti-boredom measure and because he was quite certain he could keep two steps ahead of any plodder from British Intelligence.

He was fascinated by a man called Whitaker Chambers, a Communist agent who left the Party to become a writer on
Time
magazine and later named Alger Hiss to the House Un-American Activities committee. Wolfenden saw playful applications of such duplicity to university life and was drawn to the idea of ‘respectable’ (frequently Old Etonian) diplomats playing a double game. It was connected to his feelings about his homosexuality, which had required him to assume to some extent a false role in society, and to his pleasure in walking the fine line of acceptable revolt. His enthusiasm for espionage extended to the novels of Ian Fleming, of whom he was an early admirer.

Meanwhile younger undergraduates such as Brian Wenham and David Murray, a handsome Canadian Rhodes scholar, joined the inner circle and enjoyed the combination of drink, flirting and shocking conversation. Wolfenden never seriously contemplated a career in Oxford. He was too impatient to live a life like Bruce McFarlane’s; something like A.J.P. Taylor’s might have been within his grasp, but there was the question of his homosexuality, which he neither wanted, nor knew how, to conceal.

In London
The Times
appointed him Night Foreign News Editor, which he enjoyed because
‘The Times
is nicer when there aren’t quite so many old men in the building, and when it is actually in the process of being a newspaper, and not just an institution, which is what it is in the daytime … I’m doing so
much work one way and another, what with
The Times
, and teaching, and two books I’m supposed to be writing (which don’t get anywhere very fast) … I must say I rather look forward to going abroad, if and when I get the chance … The attractions of England are strictly limited, especially when half the people in it
aren’t
in it, because they’ve gone abroad, or else are in a state of congenital depression (usually justified).’

Of many London addresses, 27 Oakley Street in Chelsea was the longest lasting. It was a flat inhabited at various times by Kit Lambert, Philip French and his Swedish wife Kersti, Michael Sissons, Godfrey Hodgson and his first wife Alice Vidal, Sally Hinchliff, Michael Connock, a
Financial Times
journalist later caught in a ‘honey trap’ by Polish secret police, and a respectable but high-living lawyer called David Edwards. On quiet days Wolfenden would return from
The Times
at about midnight and would do the crossword in the next day’s paper with his cousin. The days were seldom quiet. The drinking was riotous and so was the sex; Wolfenden often came home with a black eye or bleeding lip from some rough encounter. Anthony Page would use the house to rehearse John Arden’s
Live Like Pigs
when there was no room at the Royal Court.

Gay life in London revolved around well-known clubs, such as the Rockingham or the Arts and Battledress, which was situated in an alley between the Strand and St Martin in the Fields. They were essentially pick-up joints that would be especially crowded on Friday and Saturdays nights. Compared to the defiantly ‘out’ discos of London today, or the bars that sprang up in Manhattan in the 1970s, these were genteel places: there were no shaved heads, nipple rings or dungeons, but men dressed in suits, cavalry twills and cravats. Attached to this scene was a more sardonic, queeny world that did not appeal to Wolfenden – ‘the shallow emotions and the casual, treacherous, cynical sort of love I now associate with the homosexual underworld in London … an atmosphere in which sordid homosexuality is the only practicable form of self-expression … the catty cynicism of the queer bars and camp little flats in Earl’s Court Road.’ He always wrote of his own sex life as though it should be, however anguished or
sordid, a source of entertainment and laughter – a major bulwark against the tide of boredom.

Wolfenden’s work in the office was well regarded and in 1960 he was sent to Paris as number two to
The Times’s
main correspondent Frank Giles. He had an apartment in the Avenue Kléber in the grand but dreary sixteenth
arrondissement
, between the Etoile and the Eiffel Tower. It could have been comfortable, but he never bothered to furnish it. He wrote in September:

So here I am, working in Paris. There is, especially under the present regime, a great deal of rather silly and chauvinistic
panache
– Gardes Républicaines on every staircase, huge invitations for the slightest function, and more unnecessary bits of paper with photographs on them than I have ever seen. But the police are on the whole friendly and even cynical about all this (provided you do what they say … otherwise they just hit you), and the natives, though pretty arrogant, and speaking French in an intimidating sort of way…are on the whole better disposed than their rulers.

For the last three weeks I’ve been working like a black, because my boss [Frank Giles] chose this time to take his holiday, quite regardless of the fact that the French were all coming back from theirs, and everything was starting to liven up … Otherwise my life has been full of people passing through on the way south, fugitive sex, and then the Gare de Lyon the next morning; followed by the same people coming through a couple of weeks later on the way north, horribly brown (I’m beginning to feel positively
green
after looking at all my friends), spending a night telling me all about the sex they’ve been having in the meantime, and then the Gare St Lazare the next morning …

Had an extraordinary lunch with Nancy Mitford the other day; I was rather tired and preoccupied, and in one of my most savage Angry Young Man moods, so did not take at all kindly to sipping a single glass of Dubonnet for twenty-five minutes while she and three other queens analysed in minute detail the seating plan for the General [de Gaulle] ‘s dinner for Lord Gladwin.

I live a very quiet life, if only because if one lives and works on the Right Bank there is no real reason ever to go to the Left Bank, and vice versa.

This is a peculiar, in fact a ridiculous and self-destructive, attitude for him to have taken. The Left Bank of Paris was between two of its great periods. The heyday of Sartre and de Beauvoir was over; the Left had split and crumbled over the Soviet invasion of Hungary; Existentialism, which had had such a bearing on the way Wolfenden saw himself, had also passed its fashionable high point. But while it paused to gather itself for the revolutionary activities of 1968 the Left Bank was still a place of genuine intellectual excitement as well as of conversation, posing and drink: it is hard to think of anywhere that should have appealed more to Jeremy Wolfenden. But he was not interested. He worked long hours in the office, which was in the rue Halévy, beside the Opera, then went back to his flat to drink. David Murray, the former Rhodes scholar from Oxford, was living in Paris at the time and used to force Wolfenden out to a play or a film in the evening, but this only postponed the drinking. Wolfenden did not speak particularly good French and showed little interest in the place or the culture; nor was he journalistically stretched. Murray, who had known Wolfenden well at Oxford, believed that he was depressed.