Lady Chatterley trial - 50 years later

Dominic Sandbrook worries that since then nothing is deemed to be 'obscene’ - 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.
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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”.
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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.