3 PIE Founders Righton Coulson & Dunn help launch NUS Gay Rights Campaign [20.10.1973]

On Saturday  20th October 1973, 12 months prior to founding the Paedophile Information Exchange two of its earliest members — Peter Righton – #51 and Dr Michael Coulson – #2 — came together to help the National Union of Students (NUS) launch its Gay Rights’ Campaign at its inaugural conference in Bristol.

In the audience of the Anson room, ready to join the afternoon’s workshops to inspire a new generation of University Gay Society leaders was Ian Dunn, another pivotal PIE founding member (and partner of Dr Michael Coulson) and, although no individual names are given, Hull University’s Sexual Liberation Society is listed as sending delegates. Keith Hose, who would become PIE’s first Chairman mid-1975, was the contact point in 1972’s first edition of Gay News for the SLS at Hull.

Almost a year to the day before the first advert for PIE would appear in Gay News, Bristol University’s Student Union President Trevor Locke had managed to gather in one room at least three, (Righton, Coulson and Dunn) if not four (Keith Hose) pro-paedophile activists who would shortly become PIE’s leading lights.

 

NUS Gay Rights Conference, October 20th 1973, Trevor Locke’s 2nd Edition, September 1973

 

Although Trevor originally billed Righton as speaking on behalf of ACCESS on the topic of ‘Counselling homosexuals’, by the 3rd and final edition of the delegates’ pack Righton’s title appeared as ‘Head, Children’s Centre, National Children’s Bureau’

 

While the CHE Legal Reform Committee was seeking students studying Law or Sociology (Locke’s area of study) to assist with their work, Locke was keen to offer his own legal assistance to students directly: “Additionally if you are in trouble with the law please contact me as I might be able to help you.”

 

 

 

Locke’s offer of support for those in trouble with the law was much appreciated by Peter Chapman, a 45 year old Bristol man charged with indecent assault on a 15 year old boy. Chapman wrote into Gay News to thank him and report he had received a £50 fine appearing at Bristol Magistrates’ Court on 3 December 1974.

Gay News No 63 Jan – Feb 1975

Although Locke had pencilled in a lawyer to speak on Law Reform to the NUS Conference, at some point during September/early October it was decided that Edinburgh University’s Professor of Sanskrit Dr Michael Coulson (1) would speak on law reform, and Coulson raised an important point about how it would be achieved:

“The removal of legal injustices towards Gays can only be achieved by Parliamentary enactment, and that is only possible if MPs want it. In the last resort, therefore a law reform campaign is a campaign of pressure upon MPs, whether in their private capacity or as members of a government.”

 

 

Did other PIE members agree with PIE Member No 2 about placing pressure on MPs in their private lives before his abrupt suicide in October 1975?

 

 

(1) Further reading on PIE Member No. 2: Dr Michael Coulson, Professor of Sanskrit at University of Edinburgh, Chairman of Scottish Minorities Group (responsible for campaigns and lobbying) and Ian Dunn’s first adult relationship, who commits suicide on 16 October 1975 and in a PIE Newsletter obituary is revealed as PIE member No.2

 

With compliments from Ian Dunn & while you were out, Tony Smythe called

Throughout Grey’s correspondence it is clear he places pressure on various people at various times to write letters to the press, as part of his eminence gris role in shaping others to shape public opinion and acceptance of paedophilia. It’s unclear whether Joy Blanchard, David Astor’s former secretary at The Observer, was blackmailing Grey from the moment he brought her to the Albany Trust with him on his appointment in 1962, and/or whether Grey’s ‘achilles heel’ concerned under 21s or under 16s, but Joy was to exert a tight control over him (as she’d boasted to Doreen Cordell) until the onset of a non-malignant brain tumour in 1968.

In the wake of Grey’s autumn 1976 visit to Edinburgh and Dunn’s Scottish Minorities Group (SMG) where he met Thatcher’s future Lord Advocate Lord Rodger, (then working as the Clerk to the Faculty of Advocates), Ian Dunn who had co-founded PIE over 2 years previously endeavours to demonstrate to the Trust his public support for their work on paedophilia. See below –  10 January 1977 ‘Albany Trust – With compliments, Ian Dunn’. Grey’s plans for Ian Dunn to assist with forming a Scottish branch of the Albany Trust are still percolating following Ric Rogers, Albany Trust’s Youth Worker’s visit to SMG shortly after Grey.

 

 

 

Three years later, in March 1981, Antony Grey writes to Tony Smythe, to ask him to reply to The Times and Ronald Butt’s article of 26th March captured on Spotlightonabuse here ‘The Questions Unaswered in the Hayman case’. Butt had stated MIND as a ‘pressure group in receipt of government money and support’ was being one of ‘most guilty of conniving at the attempt to make the pedophile ‘movement’ respectable.’

Grey immediately wrote to Smythe (signing as his real name, Edgar, since he and Smythe had been friends for a long time previously “When are you coming round for that long-promised chat?”):

“No doubt you will be replying to Ronald Butt’s allegation (today’s Times) that you and MIND had promoted paedophilia by stealth. We seem to have arrived at the weird situation where anyone who ares to hint that not all pedophiles are sinister, sadistic, evil child-molsteors is promptly denounced for encouraging the practice of paedophilia. The drubbing which free speech, civil rights and common sense have taken over the PIE case is appalling. I always feared that Tom O’ Carroll was hellbent on opening this particular Pandora’s Box, and so it has proved.”

 

excerpt from Butt’s 26 March 1981 article, The Times

 

 

 

 

 

 

At 9.10pm one evening Tony called round to Antony Grey/Edgar Wright at 90 Uplands Road, Crouch End/Hornsey Rise and left an obliging if slightly sweaty message for Grey to give him a call and a message: “He’s v gratefull [sic] for your letter, but doesn’t think he can take more of this. Sends his letter for you to see.”

What was it Smythe didn’t think he could take much more of?

 

Oct/Nov 1976: Grey invites PIE co-founder to be Albany Trustee & meets Dr Rodger (later Thatcher’s Lord Advocate)

Antony Grey’s Report of his visit to Edinburgh 1-4 October 1976 for November 1976 Trust meeting

The Albany Trustees’ meeting of 24th November was momentous for reasons other than Antony Grey’s enthusiastic reporting of his October visit to the Scottish Minorities Group (SMG) in Edinburgh captured above. Grey had that very morning taken a call reporting allegations against the Trust contained in Mary Whitehouse’s speech to the Christian Lunch & Dinner Club, and  Angela Willans’ Woman’s Own agony aunt had been introduced to the meeting as a new Trustee, setting her eyes on the first circulated draft of Paedophilia: Some Questions and Answers at the same time as making the acquaintance of some of the other Trustees.

[See further – 24th November 1976 Albany Trust meeting: Sir Harold Haywood, the Albany Trust and PIE: Some questions, few answers on ‘Paedophilia: Some Questions and Answers’? ]

Events subsequent to Whitehouse’s allegations overtook Grey, busy as he was spurring on Sir Harold Haywood who was battling to get Whitehouse to even acknowledge delivery of a recorded letter threatening legal action and minimising Angela Willans’ resistance to publishing the Q&A Booklet under the Trust’s name. But in October 1976, he had been hopeful that the co-founder of the Paedophile Information Exchange, Ian Dunn, two years after it had been established, would come onboard as a Scottish Trustee and perhaps a Scottish branch of the Albany Trust would be established.

18th-25th January 1975: Letters regarding the Albany Trust’s links with PIE (The Times)

26th August 1975: Child-lovers win fight for role in Gay Lib (The Guardian)

26th August 1975: Legalise child sex – call (Sheffield Morning Telegraph)

28th August-15th September 1975: Guardian ‘London Letter’ column on PIE and related correspondence (The Guardian)

22nd January 1976: Who really wants a change in the age of consent? (The Times)

Spring 1976: ‘Paedophile Politics’ (Gay Left)

[All of the above had already appeared in the press before Grey’s visit to Edinburgh – see extremely useful post Spotlight on Abuse: The Paedophile Information Exchange: Timeline of Press Cuttings 1974 – 2014]

Concerns over links between the Albany Trust and Paedophile Information Exchange had already started to surface leading Rodney Bennett-England (future Chairman of National Council for Training of Journalists – but in 1974/1975 Chairman of the Trust prior to Sir Harold Haywood taking charge post-Playland Trial No 2) – to refute them publicly in a letter to The Times, barely seven months prior to Grey’s trip to Edinburgh. Grey was undaunted.

“Discussions with SMG lead me to suggest the formation of a Scottish branch of the Albany Trust, and the addition of one or two Scottish Trustees. Counsellor Ian Christie, who is a frequent visitor to London, would be eminently suitable as a Trustee and one or two others from among those I met (notably Ian Dunn) could also be considered. There is obvious potential for local work and also for fund-raising in Scotland.”

Ian Christie as mentioned in the Glasgow Herald, 15 August 1975

Grey’s detached observation of Dunn suggests they’d never met before. However in November 1973 Dunn had been invited onto the Council of Management of the Albany Society Ltd with Grey as Secretary and David Kerr former MP for Labour Wandsworth, and had accepted.

 

On 1 October Grey had attended a meeting with SMG at their headquarters (no longer Clyde Street –  address that appears on the earliest Paedophile Information Exchange Newsletters but at new Broughton Street HQ?) on psychosexual counselling, meeting with Ian Dunn (co-founder of the Paedophile Information Exchange), Jim Halcrow and Dr Alan Rodger.

Dr Alan Rodger (1944 – 2011) was then Clerk to the Faculty of Advocates, the English equivalent being the Inns of Court which barristers have to dine at, belong to and be called to the Bar by* – not yet Lord Justice or Baron Rodger of Earlsferry, a Justice of the Supreme Court of England and Wales, nor indeed yet Lord Advocate or any of the senior Scottish judicial posts he held. In 1972 he’d changed career route, leaving academia and his Fellowship of New College Oxford behind to move back to his homeland, Scotland, to qualify as an Advocate. By 1976, when Grey was discussing possibilities of a Scottish branch of the Albany Trust with Ian Dunn and the Scottish Minorities Group, Dr Rodger had just joined the Faculty.

A decade later he would become a junior government minister under Margaret Thatcher responsible for the running of the Scottish prosecution service – a point worth noting alongside Ian Pace’s detailed collations of material relating to:

Colin Tucker, steward to Fiona Woolf, Fettesgate and the Scottish ‘Magic Circle’ Affair, and Wider Networks – Part 1

Colin Tucker, steward to Fiona Woolf, Fettesgate and the Scottish ‘Magic Circle’ Affair, and Wider Networks – Part 2

A leaked police report had alleged that homosexual Judges, advocates, and lawyers may have been involved in a gay conspiracy to interfere with the course of justice.

The inquiry was ordered by the then Lord Advocate, Lord Rodger of Earlsferry, who then investigated the content of the report.

Judge & Jurist: Essays in memory of Lord Rodger of Earlsferry, OUP

 

*one of which – Gray’s Inn – had Canon Eric James, Peter Righton’s  friend, as its Chaplain

November 1972: Ian Dunn, PIE founder joins Albany Society Ltd Council of Management

One year prior to the formation of the Paedophile Information Exchange [Sept/Oct 1974] by Ian Dunn and Michael Hanson of the Scottish Minorities Group (SMG), Dunn is invited to be admitted as an Ordinary member at the Society’s third AGM.

Other familiar names are Albany Trustees –  Rev. Michael Butler (Deputy Director Samaritans), Dr John Robinson (Dean of Trinity College, Cam), Mr Rodney Bennett-England (future Director of the National Council for the Training of Journalists), Mr Michael Schofield and Dr Charlotte Wolff and the Trust’s Honorary Solicitor Ambrose Appelbe (who had guided Mandy Rice-Davis through the Profumo scandal, an odd coincidence considering it was Profumo as Warden who had secured Righton his premises for ACCESS at Toynbee Hall during his brief Chairmanship).

The Albany Society Ltd had first been established in 1968 as a fundraising arm and grant-making fund to keep finances separate from the Trust itself. This separation and use of an alternative legal entity also changed the nature of the duties the office holders have. Trustees have fiduciary duties to keep within Trust Deed and could not limit their liability whereas directors owe duties to shareholders and can limit liability. This decision of Antony Grey’s to revive the Albany Society Ltd as a vehicle of control over the Albany Trust would prove significant over the course of the next few years.

Following the difficulties over Michael De La Noy’s menacing Lord Beaumont and others for control of the counselling casework during 1971, Grey with Dr John Robinson seconding, swells the ranks of the Society’s ‘Council of Management’ with 21 or 22 new ‘Ordinary Members’.

Dr Charlotte Wolff proposed Dr David Kerr MP to be elected as Chairman of the Council of Management. Kerr had been Labour MP for Wandsworth Central 1964 – 1970, one of the surprise wins (from Conservative Deputy Chief Whip) for Labour allowing Harold Wilson a narrow majority. Antony Grey becomes Kerr’s Honorary Secretary.

Lord Beaumont resigns as do Martin Ennals, financier Mr Thomas Frankland, journalist Mr Hitti Malik, Master Baker Mr Kenneth Stoneley and (later to be QC) Keith Wedmore

Grey explained that the Albany Trustees felt it was appropriate to ‘activate Albany Society Ltd as the most effective vehicle for future work, and to appeal for all the Deeds of Covenant to be made with Albany Society Ltd.’ The immediate priority for the Society was to assist other counselling and befriending organisations in the National Federation of Homophile Organisations (NFHO) with education and training on counselling.