If the national shock delivered by the Moors Murders had led to the restoration of the death penalty, Dad might have found himself in difficulties. He not only disapproved of the death penalty, implicitly on religious grounds, but said, after the event, that he would not have accepted appointment as a judge if he was required to pronounce it. Technically capital punishment was retained for a few specialized offences, such as treason, piracy with violence, and arson in naval shipyards, but it would be a scruple too far to expect him to decline preferment in case these virtually hypothetical crimes materialized in his court.
His principle wasn’t tested, since the black cap remained a historical item (he became a judge in 1969), but that doesn’t make his moral position unreal. It’s true that I never saw Dad undergo a real crisis of conscience, and his ambition seemed to lie close to the core of him, though I saw enough discrepancy of temperament in the last phase of his life not to be so sure. What’s the appropriately judicial phrase? To reserve judgment.
What Dad felt he learned from the Moors Murders case was that pornography was an actively corrosive force. The books Ian Brady read, the images he saw, inflamed and released an underlying inhumanity. It’s doubtful that even before 1966 he was in favour of sexual material being made freely available — I can’t see him approving of a world in which copies of Reveille and Titbits were brazenly displayed where minors could see them — but after that case his opposition became definite.
If conversation turned in that direction he would maintain that the last word on the subject had been spoken by Pamela Hansford Johnson in her book On Iniquity, which describes her change of heart on this issue from a liberal to a conservative stance, the catalyst being Ian Brady.
There was a sort of troubled open-mindedness in our household, the product I suppose of slightly different attitudes between my parents. I remember one evening when the BBC broadcast some footage of Oh! Calcutta! There was debate over whether we should watch it. We did. The images were of naked bodies frozen every few frames and allowed to overlap, producing an effect that soon became abstract (particularly on a black-and-white television) and we uneasily agreed they were beautiful.
I never got around to reading Hansford Johnson’s book in Dad’s lifetime. Perhaps he was only using it as a sort of barricade, to keep dissension at a distance. If I had read it and taken issue with its arguments, he might only have withdrawn behind another obstacle, though his withdrawals were usually feints and it was never safe to assume a lasting retreat.
The tone of On Iniquity is sometimes impossibly quaint:
Not so long ago, I raised a little storm by suggesting, in a letter to the Guardian, that it was not desirable for Krafft-Ebing [who wrote Psychopathia Sexualis, intended as a serious study] to be available in relatively cheap paperback edition on the bookstalls of English railway-stations …
Class seems to dog the discussion of censorship, just as it had at the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960, with Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC asking the jury: ‘Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or servants to read?’ The cheapness of a book, and consequently its availability to the lower orders, seems to be an important element in discussion of the issue.
As Hansford Johnson visualized it, ‘The walls of the police storerooms are almost bulging outwards with the pressure of tons upon tons of dirty books.’ Dad had a similar mental picture, but at least there were buttresses in place to keep those storerooms from exploding. Dirty books were being kept out of circulation by the proper authorities.
Everyone assumed that the smut was safe in its silos, the general public screened from contamination by thick bulkheads of probity. It was because Dad had such a high opinion of the police force in general that he regarded corruption there as the ultimate betrayal of trust.
In 1964 he had been commissioned to write a report investigating a particular set of allegations, that confessions had been extracted under duress. He found there to be some substance to the allegations. Dad was particularly proud of his report, in which he had tried to match the terse clarity of Lord Denning’s prose style, and felt vindicated when it was held up as a model of its kind. One newspaper suggested he would make a good candidate for Ombudsman, defender of the individual against the injustice of institutions. That office didn’t actually exist, but he was on some sort of spectral short list.
His 1964 report is another example of a publication that I didn’t read in his lifetime, and I have to admit I was disappointed when I did. It’s not impressive as a piece of writing, the language flat without being particularly correct (‘fortuitous coincidence’ turns up twice), but that’s hardly the problem. The whole thing seems an elaborate exercise in fence-sitting, stating that ‘allegations of violence, threats of violence and the “planting” of offensive weapons are not established beyond reasonable doubt’, before conceding that ‘the bulk of the evidence so disclosed tends to support’ the allegations made by the men in the case ‘and points to their innocence’. Perhaps because I heard Dad talk with such pride about his report, at a time when he loomed large over my world, I expected great things from it. I wanted to think he had laid down some definitive glory to mature over time, like the cellared ‘pipe of port’ he referred to from time to time, supposedly waiting for our twenty-first birthdays but never materializing. It may be that in historical context he was relatively open-minded about the possibility of the police going wrong. I feel a bit flat, that’s all.
It’s just the opposite of what went on in the ABC trial, where Dad, far from knuckling under, took a tough independent line. His report seems all too tepid and cautious. But why am I bothered? I passed from childish worship through disillusionment to fixed prejudice, and nothing could be more normal. It shouldn’t be hard at this stage to unearth a bit more nuance, except that the states of mind date from different epochs and exist on different scales. They don’t want to work together. It’s only in cop films that the clueless rookie and the hardbitten old-timer turn out to make a good team.
As a judge Dad became known, rightly or wrongly, for ‘hammering bent coppers’, a phrase whose separate parts come together to form a harmonious visual image. It was inevitable that his emotions would be deeply engaged when he was called upon to preside over the trial of members of London’s Obscene Publications Squad on corruption charges in November 1976. He found it appalling that those whose only function was to root out filth might choose to wallow in it.
As he described it, a newcomer to the squad would find an envelope full of money on his desk in the first week. When he asked what it was for, he would be told it was for moving expenses. The next week there was another envelope, after the contents of the first had been spent, and there was no longer any pretence about what it was for.