Book description
In March 1954 Peter Wildeblood, a London journalist, was one of five
men charged with homosexual acts in the notorious Montagu Case, as it
came to be known. Wildeblood was sentenced to eighteen months for
homosexual offences, along with Lord Montagu and Major Michael
Pitt-Rivers. The other two men were set free after turning Queen's Evidence.
In this book, first published in 1955, Peter Wildeblood tells the story
of his childhood and schooldays, his war service and university days,
his life as a journalist, his arrest, trial and imprisonment, and
finally his return to freedom. In its honesty and restraint it is
eloquent testimony to the inhumanity of the treatment of homosexuals in
Britain only a generation ago.
Probably the first book on homosexuality to reach a mass audience in
Britain, Against the Law had a direct influence on the Wolfenden
Committee, whose Report in 1957 recommended that homosexual acts between
consenting adults in private be legalised, proposals which were finally
passed into law in 1967. Born in Italy, Peter Wildeblood came to
London at the age of three in 1926. He won a scholarship to Oxford but
left to serve in the RAF 1941-46, returning to Oxford after the war. In
1954 he was a well-known London journalist when he was jailed for
homosexuality. After serving his prison sentence, he wrote a number of
novels, plays and television scripts.
