Lady Chatterley trial - 50 years on. The filthy book that set us free and fettered us forever

Fifty years ago this week, amid extraordinary international publicity, the Old Bailey was the venue for a trial that did more to shape 21st-century Britain than hundreds of politicians put together. The case of the Crown versus Penguin Books opened on Friday, October 21, 1960, when courtroom officials handed copies of perhaps the most notorious novel of the century, D H Lawrence’s book Lady Chatterley’s Lover, to nine men and three women, and asked them to read it. They were not, however, allowed to take the book out of the jury room. Only if Penguin were acquitted of breaking the Obscene Publications Act would it be legal to distribute it.

What followed, said one eyewitness, was a “circus so hilarious, fascinating, tense and satisfying that none who sat through all its six days will ever forget them”. But it was a circus that changed Britain forever. Though few then could have realised it, a tiny but unmistakeable line runs from the novel Lawrence wrote in the late 1920s to an international pornography industry today worth more than £26 billion a year.

Now that public obscenity has become commonplace, it is hard to recapture the atmosphere of a society that saw fit to ban books such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover because it was likely to “deprave and corrupt” its readers. Although only half a century separates us from Harold Macmillan’s Britain, the world of 1960 can easily seem like ancient history. In a Britain when men still wore heavy grey suits, working women were still relatively rare and the Empire was still, just, a going concern, D H Lawrence’s book was merely one of many banned because of its threat to public morality.

Antediluvian as the early 1960s might seem to us today, however, they seemed at the time an era of dizzying change. Only a year before the trial, Roy Jenkins had secured the passage of a new Obscene Publications Act, leaving a crucial loophole – the question of literary merit – through which works might escape prohibition. And in May 1960, Penguin saw its chance, announcing its plans to publish 200,000 paperback copies at just 3s 6d each, the equivalent of £3 today.

Most accounts of the trial present it as a simple clash between the repressive old Establishment on the one hand, and the youthful forces of progress and enlightenment on the other. But this is not really fair. Under Jenkins’s legislation, the Crown had no choice but to prosecute: as the prosecuting counsel, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, told the director of public prosecutions: “If no action is taken in respect of this publication it will make proceedings against any other novel very difficult.” And contrary to myth, much of the Establishment, if such a thing ever really existed, actually supported the publishers. Almost every newspaper in the country agreed that the trial was a waste of time: the Daily Telegraph thought that the police should be hunting down “absolutely filthy” pornography rather than wasting their time with D H Lawrence.

In many respects, the celebrated landmark trial was actually something of a farce. The defence team, led by Gerald Gardiner, a founder member of CND, lined up 35 distinguished witnesses convinced of the book’s literary merit, including E M Forster, Cecil Day-Lewis, Rebecca West and Richard Hoggart. The Bishop of Woolwich, John Robinson, the very prototype of a trendy Anglican clergyman, even told the court that Lawrence showed sex as “an act of holy communion”, and agreed vigorously when asked if it was a book that “Christians ought to read”.

By contrast, the Crown case was in trouble from the start. Although the prosecution drew up a long list of potential witnesses who might condemn Lawrence’s book as obscene, none of them agreed to testify. At one point they even considered flying over an American literary critic who had once condemned the book as “a dreary, sad performance with some passages of unintentional, hilarious, low comedy”, although they eventually abandoned the idea. Instead the prosecution team wasted time before the trial going through the book line by line with a pencil, noting down the obscenities: on page 204, for example, one “bitch goddess of Success”, one “––––ing”, one “s–––”, one “best bit of c––– left on earth” and three mentions of “balls”.

Poor Mervyn Griffith-Jones, a war hero awarded the Military Cross after his service in North Africa and Italy, was totally out of his depth. It was almost in desperation that, in high-Victorian style, he asked the jury: “Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” Once the words were out of his mouth, the case was lost.

On November 2, after just three hours’ deliberation, the jury acquitted Penguin Books of all charges. Almost immediately, the book became a best-seller. In 15 minutes, Foyles sold 300 copies and took orders for 3,000 more. Hatchards sold out in 40 minutes; Selfridges sold 250 copies in half an hour. In one Yorkshire town, a canny butcher sold copies of the book beside his lamb chops.

And yet there was another side to the story, often ignored by the history books. Outside intellectual high society, most ordinary people in 1960 remained deeply conservative, and the Home Office was flooded with letters of protest. In Edinburgh, copies were burned on the streets; in South Wales, women librarians asked permission not to handle it; from Surrey, one anguished woman wrote to the home secretary, explaining that her teenage daughter was at boarding school and she was terrified that “day girls there may introduce this filthy book”.

Although Philip Larkin famously wrote that sexual intercourse began “between the end of the Chatterley ban / and the Beatles’ first LP”, the truth is that Britain in the next few years remained a strikingly chaste and conservative society. It was in the early 1970s, not the 1960s, that the sexual revolution became a reality for most people, with millions of women taking the Pill, teenagers losing their virginity earlier and divorce, homosexuality and abortion becoming familiar elements of our social landscape.

In the long run, however, the end of the Chatterley ban was an enormously symbolic moment, representing the end of an era in which the state had regulated private morality as well as public behaviour. Other obscenity cases followed in the next two decades, but they all tended to have the same result: a triumph for liberation, a defeat for censorship. By and large, it is no exaggeration to say that after October 1960, the fetters were off.

Half a century on, the Lady Chatterley trial has become a cliché of the conventional Sixties narrative, a victory for youth and freedom against a repressive old order. But in a society where pre-pubescent girls stroll down the high street wearing T-shirts with the legend “Porn star”, I wonder whether its legacy is more double-edged. Britain in 2010 is unquestionably a much more open society; most of us would think it intolerable to return to a time when the state regulated what we could and could not write. Few of us, I suspect, would wish that the verdict in the Chatterley case had gone differently.

Yet will future generations judge that we used our new freedom wisely? I doubt it. As the frescoes at Pompeii remind us, erotica and pornography have been elements of almost every society since the dawn of civilisation. But you do not have to be Mary Whitehouse to question the way pornography has filtered into our cultural mainstream, or to feel uneasy about the way very young girls are portrayed as willing and available sex objects. Kicking against their elders, the reformers of the Sixties worshipped freedom and self-expression; as they saw it, discipline and self-restraint had manifestly gone too far. But 50 years on from the trial that changed Britain forever, living in a society where the bonds of community and courtesy have frayed almost beyond repair, we could surely do with rather more of Mervyn Griffith-Jones’s much-mocked puritanism. We might not be able to turn back the clock. But it is never too late to learn from the past.