for schoolgirls”. All this was
very jolly but it was not the cartoonists who caused the most raucous laughter to echo down the decades. It was the prosecuting counsel, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, who accidentally bowled himself out in his opening speech on the first day of the trial. Under the impression that he was really on a roll, he put to the jury the most clunkingly inapposite question in legal history: “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” He got his answer: the amusement of the three women and nine men on the jury – and not in a good way. While the rest of the country was chortling, Penguin’s lawyers were making a serious point: the recent Obscene Publications Act meant that naughty bits alone should not cause a book to be banned. As a campaigner for that legislation and a witness for the defence, the late Norman St John-Stevas (Lord St John of Fawsley) explained to me much later: “The changes that had been introduced allowed for the first time the book’s literary value to be taken into account.” The most fervent witness was probably
Richard Hoggart, lecturer and author of The Uses of Literacy. He was mocked in a headline as the ‘potty prof’ but was later played by David Tennant in a BBC docu-drama about the trial. Accepting this was by no means Lawrence’s
finest work, Hoggart aimed straight for the stumps to counter the prosecution’s references to pornography; he came up with another ‘p-word’, praising the novel as ‘puritanical’ in its call for honesty between consenting adults. Griffith-Jones appealed to the umpire, or judge, that this could hardly apply to a lady having an adulterous relationship, whereupon Hoggart bowled him a googly by bringing up the lovemaking scene featuring Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost. This was one of the bold strokes that won the match. When the judge asked the jury on the sixth
day if they believed the novel to be obscene and thus likely to deprave and corrupt its readers, after three hours of deliberations the answer turned out to be: Lady Chatterley is innocent. “Why was the prosecution so incompetent?”
muses Steve Hare, Penguin’s historian. “It was partly down to arrogance. Had they put together a decent prosecution case, it is possible that the defence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover would have failed.” The test case had been won. Publishers had
(mostly) got the director of public prosecutions off their backs. “It was the harbinger of a whole host of liberal measures,” notes Robertson. It was not just a new freedom for the written word but also part of the liberation of theatre, film, gay rights and divorce. And Lawrence’s novel was serialised on Radio 4. In the Book at Bedtime slot, of course.
theJournalist | 17
Looking back to:
1960
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