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The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

Diana Souhami

TO SHEILA

I have felt awkward about what to call Radclyffe Hall. Christened Marguerite, she preferred to be known as John. Neither seemed quite right and Radclyffe Hall sounds like a residential college. I have slipped from one name to another with attempted nonchalance.

Radclyffe Hall was dyslexic. In quotation from her manuscripts and letters I have kept her idiosyncratic spelling.

To avoid cluttering the text with footnotes sources of quoted material are given at the end of the book by page number and opening phrase. These notes start on page 384.

CONTENTS

Private Matters

MARGUERITE

1  The Fifth Commandment

2  Sing, little silent birdie, sing

3  Come in kid

4  The pearl necklace she gave me

5  Sporks, poggers and poons

JOHN

6  John and Ladye

7  If I can fix something for Ladye

8  Roads with no signposts

9  Chenille caterpillars

TWONNIE

10  The eternal triangle

11  A very grave slander

12  A grossly immoral woman

RADCLYFFE HALL

13  Octopi

14  Octopi and chains

15  How to treat a genius

16  Books about ourselves

STEPHEN GORDON

17  Something of the acorn about her

18  She kissed her full on the lips

THE TRIAL OF RADCLYFFE HALL

19  Aspects of sexual inversion

20  Depraved practice

21  Sapphism and censorship

22  A serious psychological subject

23  I have read the book

24  Depress! Repress! Suppress!

25  The freedom of human beings

THE MASTER OF THE HOUSE

26  An awful shock

27  Just Rye

28  Give us a kiss

SAME HEART

29  The intolerable load

30  A trois

31  How long O Lord, how long

32  His name was Father Martin but she called him Henry

OUR THREE SELVES

33  An empty fiction

34  Never mind Una

35  The rain pours down, the icy wind howls

36  At the Wayside

37  John’s Calvary

MY JOHN, MY JOHNNIE

38  Mine for ever

39  He is my occupation

Image Gallery

Books and Notes

Index

About the Author

PRIVATE MATTERS

In January 1998 the British government released into the public domain papers about the ban, seventy years earlier, of Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness. My book was in manuscript but I was keen to see this new material. Radclyffe Hall and her solicitor Harold Rubinstein had kept all notes, letters and transcripts about the trial, but I wanted to find out what the law makers and enforcers had written in private to each other.

At the Public Record Office London I saw this new release. More pieces of the jigsaw fitted into place. The quality of bigotry of Stanley Baldwin’s government was there in memoranda. It surprised me to see that this bigotry was endorsed by the post-war Attlee government too. Many files though were empty and marked ‘retained by the Home Office’. I phoned their Record Management Services and asked why. I was told the material was sensitive, that it was not in the public interest for it to be released and that to do so would impede national security.

In an incredulous letter I explained that it was important to me to see these papers. ‘Even if they add detail’, I said, ‘as I suspect they do, to evidence of homophobia and manipulation of the law by that particular administration, is it in the public interest, at this stage, for such details to be withheld?’ The Department replied that it would look again at the extracts. Two months later I received a letter. The material was being retained ‘in the interests of national security’. The matter, I was told, would be reviewed in 2007.

I suspected these private memoranda would inspire scorn. All the evidence I had, showed that the Home Secretary of the time Sir William Joynson-Hicks, the Lord Chancellor Lord Hailsham, the Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Archibald Bodkin, his deputy Sir George Stephenson, the Chief Magistrate Sir Chartres Biron, the Attorney General Sir Thomas Inskip, were determined to secure a conviction and ban this book. They manipulated the law to this end and to avoid any process that might serve the interests of the defendants.

Lesbianism was not to be mentioned. The subject was inadmissible. Radclyffe Hall referred to a ‘conspiracy of silence’. It is taking a long time to break this silence. I wrote to the current Home Secretary Jack Straw, to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, to my constituency Member of Parliament Karen Buck. I asked them to help me get sight of these papers. I am indebted to them, to James Cornford, to Andrew Ecclestone at the Campaign for Freedom of Information and to Anya Palmer at the Stonewall lobby for gay and lesbian rights.

A week before my book went to press I was allowed to see the contentious papers. I was pleased to amend my text. I now include details of how the Home Secretary issued warrants to the Post Office requiring them to intercept mail addressed to the book’s Paris publisher, of how he squashed opposition from the fair-minded Chairman of the Board of Customs Sir Francis Floud, and of how the Director of Public Prosecutions schemed to indict the London publisher Jonathan Cape and the book’s distributor Leopold Hill.

This saga apart, I am full of thanks for help given me over access to source material. I am grateful to Alessandro Rossi-Lemeni, son of the opera singer Nicola Rossi-Lemeni. In his basement in Rome were two trunks containing Una Troubridge’s diaries from 1931 to 1943, autobiographical pieces by Radclyffe Hall, her lecture notes, and fragments of unpublished manuscripts.

In the autumn of 1996 I worked on these papers in a Rome hotel in a room with a terrace that looked out over the roofs of the old city. Future researchers will have formal access to them. They have now been shipped to the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas. They form an important addition to their Radclyffe Hall collection. The Center already held her letters to Evguenia Souline with whom she fell in love in 1934, and all papers concerned with the American trial of The Well of Loneliness. My thanks to the librarians there and in particular to Pat Fox.

Alessandro Rossi-Lemeni also enabled me to retrieve 140 more of Una’s diaries lost