By Maggie Hall
Maggie is a former Chair of Brighton Humanists, a member of the Humanists UK Dialogue Network, and a Humanists UK School Speaker. She is also a retired teacher of speech and drama. Here she looks back at some key legal reforms of the last century which helped to create more tolerant moral attitudes in Britain.
I first learned about homosexuality when I was about fifteen years old – in the early 1960s. I was watching a film on TV with my mother. The film was called Victim and starred one of my favourite British film actors, Dirk Bogarde. He played a successful barrister named Melville Farr, an upstanding, well-respected professional with an apparently happy marriage and a thriving London practice. But this clearly decent and respectable man seemed to be being persecuted in some way. At one point the words "FARR IS QUEER" appear on his garage door. I could not understand what Farr had done to deserve this treatment, so I asked my mother. Fortunately for me, my parents were very broadminded considering the mores of the time, and she explained quite simply that there are some people who, instead of falling in love with someone of the opposite sex, do so with someone of their own sex. This was a completely new idea to me. I remember pondering it for a moment, but I still found myself confused. Surely people can’t help falling in love? Why should someone be persecuted for who they love? This, of course, was exactly the point being made by the film. Made in 1961, Victim is now considered a British classic, and it has been credited with helping to liberalise attitudes towards homosexuality in Britain.
Liberalising reform
The middle of the last century was a period of extensive liberalising reforms in Britain, marking a distinct change in moral attitudes from those of previous centuries. Homosexuality was partially decriminalised with the introduction of the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which implemented the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report of a decade earlier. Until then, consensual male homosexual activity could be prosecuted, and court cases were covered by the tabloid press, rendering the participants vulnerable to blackmail, which was the central theme of Victim. However, the decriminalisation only applied to adults over 21 in England and Wales. Further reforms took place to extend legalisation to Scotland and Northern Ireland and to reduce the age of consent in England, Scotland and Wales to sixteen and in Northern Ireland to seventeen, in line with the legislation for heterosexual relationships. Civil Partnerships for same sex couples were introduced in England and Wales by the Civil Partnership Act 2004, followed by similar legislation for Scotland and eventually Northern Ireland: they were later extended to opposite sex couples. Same sex marriage has been legal in England, Wales and Scotland since 2014, and in Northern Ireland since 2020.
The case of Oscar Wilde
The first law to specifically outlaw anal sex was The Buggery Act of 1533, which made “buggery” punishable by death, whether committed with "mankind or beast". Walter Hungerford, 1st Baron Hungerford, was the first person to be executed under the Act in 1540. The last men to be executed for homosexual acts were James Pratt and John Smith in 1835. “Buggery” ceased to be a capital offence in England and Wales when the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 downgraded the punishment to life imprisonment, with Scotland following suit in 1889. However, a provision under The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 criminalised “gross indecency”, meaning that in practice the “buggery” law was extended to criminalise any sex act between men, which remained the case until the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. Oscar Wilde is the best-known person to be convicted under the 1885 Act. The harsh physical conditions of his imprisonment broke his health, and he died in Paris at the age of 46.
Censorship
Censorship came under scrutiny after the high profile and unsuccessful prosecution of Penguin Books under the Obscene Publications Act 1959 for the publication of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, followed by the abolition of the role of Official Censor in the Theatres Act 1968 and the conversion of the British Board of Film Censors into the British Board of Film Classification in 1984.
Censorship legislation goes back in time much further than the Obscene Publications Act. Edmund Curll was convicted in 1727 under the common law offence of disturbing the King’s peace for the publication of Venus in the Cloister or The Nun in her Smock, a piece of erotic literature translated from French. This was the first obscenity conviction in Great Britain and set a legal precedent for other convictions.
Contraception and abortion
On 4 December 1961, the contraceptive pill was made available for the first time through the NHS, but it was mainly prescribed to older, married women who already had children. That changed in 1974 when family planning clinics were allowed to prescribe the pill to single women – a controversial decision at the time, since many people were worried that this could lead to sexual promiscuity or "free love". Abortion was made legal in certain circumstances in 1967.
Concerns around birth control in ancient times centred more around how to achieve it rather than whether it was desirable. Documentary evidence indicates that attempted methods included the use of honey, acacia leaves and lint to be placed in the vagina to block sperm. None of these methods are likely to have been very effective. The first reliable form of contraceptive was the condom, which only became widely available in the early twentieth century. Since medieval times, the Catholic Church has considered any attempt to prevent a pregnancy as immoral, although many of its adherents are known to ignore the Church’s teachings on the issue. Today the only method acceptable by the Church is still “natural family planning”, which means abstinence or “fertility awareness” (“rhythm method”).
The Malthusian League, founded in the UK in 1877, became the first organisation to advocate birth control and for the removal of penalties associated with promoting it. Based on the ideas of The Reverend Thomas Malthus, it was founded during the "Knowlton Trial" of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, who were prosecuted for publishing educational material about methods of birth control. The first permanent birth control clinic was founded in the UK in 1921 by Marie Stopes. The National Birth Control Association, later to become the Family Planning Association, was founded in 1931 and did much to establish scientific methods of investigating and approving safe and reliable methods of contraception. Largely as a result of campaigning by feminist pioneers such as Besant and Stopes, taboos about sex were gradually weakened. The advent of the contraceptive pill, as already discussed, represents a watershed moment in the empowerment of women to control their own fertility.
The 1967 Abortion Act made abortion legal until the point of 28 weeks’ gestation (a typical human pregnancy lasts for approximately 40 weeks). Doctors were now responsible for deciding if a woman met the conditions laid down in the Act. The law applied to England, Wales and Scotland, but was not extended to Northern Ireland until 2019. It has been amended several times, and the limit is now 24 weeks. Prior to the Act coming into force it was estimated that between 50 and 60 women died each year from unsafe illegal abortions.
Liberalisation of divorce
In England and Wales, prior to the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, divorce was administered by the ecclesiastical courts and in practice was really only available to the wealthy, since the annulment of a marriage could be achieved only by an expensive and complex process, or even an Act of Parliament, entailing a very public examination of the intimate details of a couple’s marital relationship in the House of Commons. The 1857 Act moved the jurisdiction for divorce law away from the ecclesiastical courts to the civil courts, widening its availability to those who could not afford the proceedings for annulment or the promotion of a private Bill leading to an Act of Parliament. The Matrimonial Causes Act 1923 enabled women as well as men to bring adultery as a sole ground for divorce. Previously this option was only available to men, and women had to provide additional grounds. A further Act in 1937 added the grounds of cruelty, desertion and incurable insanity. Further reforms continued, leading up to the Divorce Reform Act 1969 allowing “irretrievable breakdown” as a ground without the need for either side to prove “fault”. Further refinements of the law have continued, and today a divorce can be applied for if the marriage has lasted one year and, on the basis of a statement from each of the parties, has irretrievably broken down. Evidence of fault or separation no longer needs to be provided. Society’s attitude to divorce in Britain is now overwhelmingly liberal, although the Roman Catholic Church still opposes it.
Anti-discrimination law
As a child being brought up in a very cosmopolitan area of post-war London, I went to school with the Windrush Generation of immigrants from the West Indies (see endnote). My fellow pupils also included children of many other ethnicities: Polish, Cypriots (both Greek and Turkish), Irish, and Jews, some from various parts of Africa and Asia, and probably others that I’ve forgotten about. To me they were just other kids, and thanks to those liberal-minded parents of mine I took home friends of all sorts of ethnic backgrounds, all of whom were made to feel welcome at our house. However, even then I was well aware that this was not necessarily the norm.
The social attitudes of the past strongly privileged white males over other ethnicities and genders, who were routinely viewed as of lesser value. Discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity was evident in housing, public facilities and employment. Two Race Relations Acts (1965 and 1968) made such discrimination illegal. The Equal Pay Act 1970 meant that employers could be subject to legal action if there was evidence that a woman was being paid less than a male colleague for equal work or work of the same value. Direct or indirect discrimination on the basis of sex was outlawed by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 and the scope of anti-discrimination law on the basis of race and ethnicity was expanded under the Race Relations Act of 1976.
There is currently a trend to view the 1950s, and even the 60s and 70s, with nostalgia, especially for those not old enough to actually remember them. Certainly, there are things I miss about those times. Children were not closely guarded as if in constant danger, so I was free to play in the street until sunset in the summer. The only screen I ever looked at was a tiny black and white one in the corner of our living room, and that was only on for a limited time and didn’t exist at all until I was about eight or nine years old. A phone was a thing that lived in a red box on the corner of our street and only to be used in emergencies. All grown-ups were either aunties or uncles, even if they were unrelated friends of your mum and dad. If they were neighbours or local shopkeepers, and certainly if they were your employers, they would be addressed as “Mr, Miss, or Mrs So-and-So”. Employees were addressed in the same way. I felt very important when, in my first job, I was addressed as “Miss Finch” (my single name). However, I greet any expression of a desire to return to those days with a wry smile. Would anyone really want to live in a society where people could be locked up for who they loved? Would they be happy for women to be viewed as fit only for domestic servitude with few opportunities and freedoms under employment or matrimonial law? Would it be acceptable to have to choose between an unplanned or physically dangerous birth or putting oneself or a female relative in the hands of a back street abortionist? Would they think it OK for people to be denied accommodation or employment due to their race or ethnicity? Would window signs declaring “no pets, no blacks, no Irish” be acceptable? Would they be happy to be told what they could or couldn’t read, listen to or view?
It has to be acknowledged that things in this country are far from perfect. There is still homophobia, racism and inequality, but, that being said, I believe I have lived through a particularly significant period of shift in moral and ethical values, which is reflected in the liberalising legal reforms of the recent past. This shift continues as activists and campaigners push for changes in the law on such issues as Assisted Dying, the legalisation of humanist weddings and legislation to force our government to pay attention to environmental issues, including the shocking loss of biodiversity and the climate crisis.
Although the scope of this article is necessarily limited to social attitudes in my own country, it should never be forgotten that in many countries homosexuality is still illegal, women are still not considered to be equal in value to men, contraception is unavailable or unaffordable, legal abortion is non-existent, racism is the norm and divorce is still illegal in two states – the Philippines (home to 155 million people) and the Vatican. With all its faults, I am thankful that I live in a country and in a time when such illiberal moral and ethical attitudes are largely a thing of the past.
Endnote
The Windrush Generation refers to the group of Caribbean immigrants who arrived in the UK between 1948 and 1971, named after the ship HMT Empire Windrush, which brought the first significant group of Caribbean immigrants to the UK in 1948. This generation played a crucial role in helping rebuild post-war Britain but faced significant challenges and discrimination.
References and further reading
Book: A Dirty, Filthy Book: Sex, Scandal, and One Woman’s Fight in the Victorian Trial of the Century (about Annie Bessant and Charles Bradlaugh), by Michael Meyer, (Ebury Publishing)
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