Paedophile Information Exchange

1978-1983: Architects of PIE infiltrate Islington gay youth group to lobby MPs directly with Heath & Mandelson’s help

In 1978 Peter Righton and PIE Manifesto author Micky Burbidge team up to exert control over grassroots gay youth groups, establishing the umbrella Joint Council for Gay Teenagers (‘JCGT’)
Righton & Burbidge take control of the London Gay Teenage Group (‘LGTG’) liaising with the Greater London Council and ILEA for official recognition and relocating the LGTG to Islington, Manor Gardens Community Centre
In 1980 Chair Edward Heath and his Youth Affairs Lobby (‘YAL’) meet with Burbidge and the LGTG
With the assistance of YAL Liaison member the British Youth Council (‘BYC’) and its Chair Peter Mandelson, Burbidge gets to take a group of gay teenagers to lobby a group of cross-party MPs directly with Clement Freud MP (Lib), Charles Irving MP (Con) attending with 4 Labour MPs
By 1982 JCGT and PIE’s Micky Burbidge have been invited to meet with Islington Councillors Bob Crossman, Sandy Marks, Derek Hines and Keith Veness at a Gay Groups meeting – the access to Councillors lobbying groups had was later deplored by Council Chief Executive Leisha Fullick in her report Modernising Islington
JCGT teamed up with the National Association of Youth Clubs (NAYC) to form GYM (Gay Youth Movement) in time for GYM to campaign for the defendants of the second PIE trial during September-October 1983

1978: Righton & Burbidge devise an umbrella steering group to infiltrate gay youth movement

The backlash against Tom O’Carroll’s publicity stunts such as the public meeting to debate the age of consent in September 1977 did much to paralyse PIE. Mindful of the advice of Dutch MP and lawyer Dr Brongersma, Peter Righton and Michael Burbidge began to change direction, leaving behind the paedophile pride PR of O’Carroll and Hose. Instead Righton and Burbidge focused on energising and organising a gay youth movement supportive of paedophile rights, working with and through regional gay youth groups.

A London Gay Teenage Group (‘LGTG’) had already been established in 1976, for under 21s by under 21s, meeting at Grapevine on Holloway Road. Burbidge and Righton got together to find a way to exert control over a few gay teenage groups that already existed nationally, but particularly focused on the LGTG in Islington, as this was where Burbidge lived and Righton worked.

They came up with the idea of the Joint Council for Gay Teenagers – a permanent umbrella body that would gather any organisations dealing with gay young people under Burbidge’s wing – and influence.

October-November 1978: Peter Righton & Michael Burbidge co-found the JCGT

The first meeting of the ‘Conference on Young Gays’ committee with Burbidge and Righton had taken place on 7 October 1978. At the second meeting on 25 November 1978, (at Grapevine at 296 Holloway Road, London N7) the suggested title of ‘Joint Council for Gay Teenagers’ was adopted.

“Nettie – for information – M”, JCGT 2nd Meeting Agenda 25 November 1978, Burbidge wishes to update PIE Member #70 Nettie Pollard with JCGT developments, LSE/ HCA/ JCGT

Righton spoke at the JCGT second meeting on how to develop relationships with relevant professions involved in the welfare of young people – such as social workers and teachers – in order to achieve JCGT’s aims.

“To counter the sexual and emotional fulfilment of gay teenagers by countering the bigotry that denies them the right to it.”
Draft aim of Burbidge & Righton’s Joint Council for Gay Teenagers, 25.11.78

Burbidge kept Nettie Pollard (PIE member #70) in the loop on how he and Righton were progressing with establishing the National Joint Council for Gay Teenagers. Copies of JCGT minutes in archive are addressed to Nettie in Burbidge’s handwriting.

During this period Burbidge was also active in lobbying for the legal defence of PIE by meeting with Dutch youth parliamentary people (as introduced by the British Youth Council), at Burbidge’s Department of Environment offices to discuss options for Dutch support to report back to CAPM. CAPM’s third meeting was attended by (Lord Justice) Adrian Fulford, (Islington Chair of Social Services Committee) Sandy Marks, and two PIE members and NCCL Gay Rights Committee members Nettie Pollard and Tom O’Carroll. As Burbidge was already keeping Pollard appraised of how far progress was being made in pushing his pro-paedophile rights agenda in the gay youth movement, particularly in Islington, it is unsurprising he would document his attempts to network on behalf of CAPM.

1979-80: Burbidge’s booklet ‘I Am What I Am’ lobbies MPs on abolishing the age of consent

Burbidge co-drafted a booklet with which to lobby MPs on the age of consent fronted by gay teenagers. – “I Know What I Am”. While gay teenagers were happy enough to aim for parity in the form of a reduction of the age of consent for homosexual males to 16 – the PIE luminary steering the JCGT was intent on using the opportunity to lobby MPs on the age of consent to argue for its abolition.

For anyone aware that Burbidge was also the co-author of PIE’s response to the Home Office CLRC in 1975, JCGT’s position on the abolition of the age of consent would have come as no surprise.

Burbidge’s “I know what I am” concluded unequivocally in arguing for the abolition of the age of consent, stating that “the only civilised answer… would be to remove consensual sexual acts altogether from the realm of the criminal law.”

The two polarised ideological extremes of the revolutionary socialist stance of gay is good and gay paedophiles are equally as good vs the right-wing christian evangelism of all gays are bad but can be good with enough aversion therapy and prayer meant it appeared as if there was no one in the centre, campaigning for an equal age of consent AND the protection of children from abusers looking to exploit teenagers and children sexually.

LGTG, ILEA and the GLC

Around May-June 1978 Mary Whitehouse’s National Festival of Light (NFOL) Nationwide Bulletin reported their objections to ILEA’s discussions with LGTG. The language used was pejorative (gay youth should be encouraged to integrate to become ‘normal’=’heterosexual’ or mixed youth clubs and to allow gay youth groups was not only socially divisive but also ‘morally corrupting’), and featured alongside a request for funding from christian fellowships to place adverts offering evangelical counselling to those who “struggle painfully with a homophile nature.”

In 2017 the former Chair of LGTG, Steven Power, wrote for School’s Out of Burbidge’s support. The stress and confusion about whether Power would be privately prosecuted by Mary Whitehouse and the National Festival of Light played well for Burbidge, during two especially crucial years of campaigning prior to the first PIE trial of January 1981.

During 1978, Gay News was in the process of appealing their sentence to the Court of Appeal. This Bulletin shows that Whitehouse was concerned to block official recognition or funding from the Greater London Council to London Gay Teenage Group

“I was up for ‘conspiracy to corrupt public morals’ (section 5(3) Criminal Law Act 1977). If prosecuted, I faced a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison” … “I was next. But with significant support from a variety of donors, including some prominent MPs, we sought a Queen’s Council (sic) ruling which established the right of young people to meet regardless of their sexuality. A number of people supported me, including Micky Burbidge of Icebreakers, politicians, and others involved in the LGBT community. Without them I would have ended up in prison.”
OUTburst magazine / School’s Out UK Official Guide to LGBT History Month February 2017 p54-55 ‘A Brief History of the London Gay Teenage Group’ by Steven Power

It’s unclear as to what Steven Power was persuaded by Burbidge and others to be in fear of at the time – in another place he talks of Law Lords (as opposed to Queen’s Counsel being paid for a legal opinion) ruling on his case, although he was not prosecuted.

Bearing in mind Power was only 17 at the time who was telling him he was going to be next to be prosecuted? Was Power being used as a human buffer / potential test case fodder by manipulative older PIE luminaries in their forties working through the gay youth movement in Islington such as Burbidge?

OUTburst magazine / School’s Out UK Official Guide to LGBT History Month February 2017 p54-55 ‘A Brief History of the London Gay Teenage Group’ by Steven Power

Young People, Inequality and Youth Work
edited by Tony Jeffs, Mark Smith p.115 ‘Sexuality & Youth Work Practice, Peter Kent-Baguley

Young People, Inequality and Youth Work
edited by Tony Jeffs, Mark Smith p.116 ‘Sexuality & Youth Work Practice, Peter Kent-Baguley

PIE’s Manifesto objectives

The PIE Manifesto of November 1975 had proposed a “new non-criminal legal framework for determining whether a child’s consent to sexual activity could have been communicated to an older partner, and for prohibiting the older partner from continuing the sexual activity”.

Just as Burbidge’s PIE Manifesto written 5 years earlier had proposed “the abolition of ages of consent, and the removal of consensual sexual activity at all ages from the criminal law”, Burbidge’s 1980 JCGT booklet “I Know What I Am” sought “to remove consensual sexual acts altogether from the realm of the criminal law.”

Both had been written and submitted to the Home Office, the former as ‘Evidence on the law relating to and penalties for certain sexual offences involving children – For The Home Office Criminal Law Revision Committee’ aka ‘The PIE manifesto’ and the latter in response to a Home Office Working paper on the age of consent in relation to sexual offences.

As Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins had set up the Policy Advisory Committee to advise the Criminal Law Revision Committee to review the law on sexual offences. It was in response to Jenkins’ creation at the Home Office that Burbidge addressed the PIE Manifesto and JCGT’s I Know What I Am.

PIE’s faith in Local Authorities and Islington Council’s ‘tradition’/’family secret’

Burbidge and Hose envisaged paedophiles as liberated from the constant fear of prison and all its horrors, with all complaints of sexual assaults on children routed through a new council complaints system. As Burbidge and Hose struggle with setting out a process by which the Local Authority will determine children’s consent to sexual activity with an adult without it become a mock trial or kangaroo court, they find themselves granting local authorities the power to issue injunctions and prison sentences with no right of appeal.

PIE’s proposed legal framework, with its tiered age groups raising rebuttable presumptions of capacity to consent to sexual activity with adults, was to be administered and judged entirely by a Local Authority (council) complaints system. PIE wanted to grant local authority employees the right to act under Children and Young Person’s Act / Children’s Acts powers.

Instead of the police it was to Local Authorities complaints that unwanted sexual activity with children was occurring should be made and it was Local Authority employees as ‘administrators of the Children’s Acts’ who would decide if and how to act to protect the child. Note, PIE defined the issue as “could have been communicated” — the Local Authority would now be the judge of a child’s capacity to consent, which would be presumed possible for all children of 4 years and older. Only for babies and toddlers up to the age of 3 would there be a rebuttable presumption of incapacity to consent.

For PIE to achieve partial implementation of this particular manifesto aim at a local level only three things had to happen:

(1) A council (local authority) had to agree to deal with all allegations of sexual abuse against an employee without involving the police.

(2) Local branches of Trade Unions such as NALGO and NUPE had to be persuaded to adopt a non-discrimination clause including the term ‘sexual orientation’ which pro-paedophile activists would argue to be interpreted as inclusive of all sexual minorities

(3) Pro-paedophile rights activists had to gain positions on the council to ensure policy remain either neutral or positive to pro-paedophile objectives, formally or informally

Interestingly, by 1992 Islington social worker Dr Liz Davies noted NALGO’s response to her as:

“11.5 Although I went to my union NALGO for representation they did not support me and at one time were threatening. The branch secretary called my home number late one night and demanded I meet him outside the union office and that I came alone. Of course I was scared by the call and did not go.”
Personal correspondence with Dr Liz Davies

After 1977, when the legislative change objectives of PIE as a pressure group were proving difficult to obtain public support for and then the Protection of Children Act had whizzed through Parliament suddenly banning indecent images of children, local lobbying at local authority level intent on influencing council policy opened up places for paedophiles where the degree of local community acceptance created a welcoming climate for sexual offenders against children.

Islington Councillor and Deputy Council Leader Valerie Veness (1974-1986) went on to work as Jeremy Corbyn’s political assistant for 17 years between 1991-2008
Valerie’s husband Islington Councillor Keith Veness (1982-1986) was Corbyn’s electoral agent from 1984-1992
Keith Veness recruited Sandy Marks to the Labour party in 1975 and is currently campaigning for her suspension to be lifted following Morgan QC’s Review determining Marks was more likely than not a Fallen Angel and involved with Conspiracy Against Public Morals, campaigning for PIE

In July 1984 Valerie Veness, Islington Council’s Deputy Leader stated that the ‘traditional’ approach of the Council when an employee was suspected of a criminal offence was for the Chief Executive, Leader and Chair of the Personnel Committee to decide whether to involve the police or deal with the matter as an internal disciplinary concern.

In February 1993 Tunnard & McAndrew’s first report into Islington Council’s failings of its children in care wrote of the Council’s “Family Secret” where staff suspected of criminal offences were allowed to move on with references rather than being investigated by police.

These two pieces of information almost a decade apart tell us that Islington Council had developed an informal policy (or a ‘tradition’ or ‘Family Secret’) of not involving the police where council employees were suspected of criminal offences.

If this ‘tradition’ or ‘Family Secret’ applied to residential staff accused of sexual offences against children as council employees, the number of abusers who found positions with Islington in residential childcare would have been extremely difficult to remove, until the Evening Standard expose of October 1992 led to an exodus of staff almost overnight.

PIE Manifesto, September-October 1975, co-authored by Islington resident and civil servant Michael Burbidge and PIE Chairman 1975-1977 Keith Hose

Only if an abuser, having already abused a child and been subject to a restraining order preventing further contact with the child, breached the order and contacted their victim would they be subject to a fine and/or imprisonment.

“In the event of breaches of prohibition, fines or terms of imprisonment could be applied.”

So despite promising to liberate paedophiles from the fear of prison, the PIE Manifesto had merely argued for moving the seat of decision making away from the police to the Local Authority, cutting the Director of Public Prosecutions (1985 onwards CPS) out of the decision to prosecute also, apparently granting councils the power to impose prison sentences en route!

The faith that paedophile rights activists had in the will and ability of Local Authorities to become the sole adjudicators of whether children were being sexually assaulted en masse must have been incredibly strong to suggest placing all this unaccountable power as some form of a kangaroo-court in their hands (right of appeal anyone?)

What gave Islington resident Burbidge his deeply-held belief that were local councils to become solely responsible for adjudicating on the capacity of children to consent to sexual activity with adults they would exercise their power to the benefit of paedophiles is unclear.

Where “sexual activity with a child of this age occurs”, e.g. babies and pre-schoolers 0-3 years old (note there is no subject in this sentence such as a paedophile assaulting a child, sexual activity just spontaneously happens), a complaint should be made to the Local Authority who employs “administrators of the Children’s Acts” who could then seek a civil injunction/restraining order imposed by the “administrators of the Children’s Acts”. If the Local Authority fails to prevent the adult from contacting or assaulting the 0-3 year old child again, the Local Authority get to step in and take the child into care.

Local Authorities already had designated officers and members with delegated Children’s Act powers, the officers working in the Social Services Department as Social Services Directors (SSDs), Assistant SSDs and senior social workers all had certain delegated powers as did elected members (councillors) serving on the Social Services Committee of the Council.

Only where a Local Authority could promise never to involve the police in an allegation of sexual offences committed against children and investigate and adjudicate themselves, could the criminal law be almost kept at bay in the same way as if paedophilia had been decriminalised through legislative reform. Changing legislation at a parliamentary national level to decriminalise sexual assault and rape of children became secondary to PIE’s objectives.

Where possible, through a combination of change in policy and practice by local authorities, communities of paedophiles fought for the space to breathe and grow in confidence and pride, supported in small localised safe havens.

Note: Burbidge & Hose are only interested in establishing rebuttable presumptions of capacity to consent

Burbidge’s evidence of harm of is drawn from a single anecdote from a client of one of his counselling group ‘Icebreakers’ – using a paedophile client’s one-sided account of his relationship with a 16 year old boy.

PIE’s “new safeguard” was giving the ability to the Local Authority “administrators of the Children’s Acts to issue a prohibition injunction preventing further and continuing “sexual activity” (now surely capable of being defined as sexual assaults and rapes even according to PIE’s crime-free lexicon) with the child.

It was with a very clear strategy that Micky Burbidge and Righton had started making inroads into Islington’s gay teenage group, plotting a path to Parliament and a direct and public platform from which to pressure politicians over the age of consent.

April-July 1980: JCGT’s success Burbidge goes to Parliament with the help of Mandelson and Heath

Burbidge’s triumphant if little-reported arrival in the House of Commons with an entourage of teenagers was facilitated by the Youth Affairs lobby, an early version of the Youth Parliament, chaired by Edward Heath MP, with the help of a YAL Liaison Group Committee member – the British Youth Council, chaired by Peter Mandelson.

Notes for Jo Richardson MP, Chair, Youth Affairs Lobby-JCGT presentation to MPs

Notes for Jo Richardson MP on the joint JCGT and YAL presentation at the House of Commons billed Burbidge as the main author of the JCGT response to the Home Office Working paper on the age of consent in relation to sexual offences — titled “I Am What I Am”.

On 11 April 1980 representatives from JCGT met with a Liaison Group from the Youth Affairs Lobby (‘YAL’), the Chair of which was Edward Heath MP. As a result of that meeting, YAL felt very strongly that they should assist with getting Michael Burbidge’s group access to Parliament. The next meeting with more MPs was originally scheduled to take place on 20 May 1980 at 5.30pm.

The YAL was chaired by Edward Heath MP with Liaison Group Membership of the British Youth Council (BYC)

Former national President of the National Union of Students (1975-1978) Sue Slipman, aged 30, had taken up a position as an area officer with the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) while she also served on Heath’s Youth Affairs Lobby Liaison Committee as a volunteer.

Steven Power, former Chair of the LGTG attended the first meeting with YAL as the LGTG youth worker and in 2017 he wrote of Edward Heath MP attending this first meeting on the age of consent

By July Burbidge’s group had the access to lobby MPs directly that Edward Heath and his Liaison Group from the Youth Affairs Lobby had felt so strongly about.

7 July 1980: Burbidge’s audience of MPs at the House of Commons

Gay News covered JCGT’s next event at Parliament where Burbidge was able to publicly apply pressure to MPs – it was the first time a lobby of MPs had been called together on homosexual rights, not by a gay group, but by the “non-aligned” Youth Affairs Lobby. More than 30 people attended – a delegation of about 15 from the JCGT and its supporters appeared in the photo posed for outside the House of Parliament. Burbidge was hopeful that through changing direction and organising for pro-paedophile rights within the gay youth movement further access to lobbying MPs would be possible:

“After the meeting, Micky Burbidge, a member of the Joint Council for Gay Teenagers and co-ordinator of the lobby, said: “The next step is that there should be a meeting of interested MPs to work out what we can do now.”
YOUNG GAYS DEMAND ACTION, GAY NEWS, July 1980

Notes prepared for the YAL/JCGT Lobby Presentation gave Jo Richardson MP a brief introduction to each attendee

Any MP known by the Paedophile Information Exchange members to have a sexual interest in either
(a) children under the age of 16 ; and/or
(b) young men aged 16-21
was now in danger of being publicly put under pressure to abandon their hypocrisy and give support to abolishing the age of consent or at the very least parity for the age of consent with heterosexuals.

11 July 1980 letter from Michael Burbidge giving his views on which MPs should be invited to the JCGT Lobby Meeting

Throughout 1979-1980 Burbidge and the JCGT had been trying to find a way in which they could publicly raise the issue of gay youth and the need to abolish the age of consent by sending a deputation to the door of the Home Secretary (at the time Willie Whitelaw)

Burbidge felt that if he could just gather together the MPs who had shown the most interest, David Steel, Joan Lestor, Frank Allaun, Neil Carmichael and John Wheeler, he could capture their interest and gain their support for JCGT.

Despite the success of having achieved an audience with MPs, their response was disappointingly unfair in relation to their own private lives, and for some individual MPs we can now see it was outrageously hypocritical in view of their own sexual preferences.

As indicated by Burbidge’s last paragraph in his update to JCGT Members above, the JCGT were being offered support for a two-step approach to achieving parity of age of consent – equality with heterosexuals – but the MPs could offer little else.

Burbidge and his JCGT entourage met with 6 MPs: 4 Labour, 1 Liberal and 1 Conservative and 1 future Labour MP: Peter Mandelson, who was then the Chair of the British Youth Council.

Only one of the MPs noted as attending is female – the Chair, Jo Richardson MP (Lab: Barking).

Through her close involvement with the NCCL Jo Richardson MP had become the go-to representative for ideas on how to lobby for paedophile rights in Parliament. Richardson’s biddable responses to Nettie Pollard’s requests are recorded in NCCL Minutes, whether it be complaints that press reporting on criminal trials involving PIE was prejudicial or the impact of the protection of children bill by outlawing paedophile positive imagery (otherwise known as images of child sexual abuse), Richardson was always willing to see if there was a way she could assist.

In 2012 Nigel West wrote that Richardson had been named in 1985 by Oleg Gordievsky when he’d defected – she had been identified as a “confidential contact” of his embassy. West asked “But were they simply “agents of influence” peddling the Kremlin line on any particular topic, or something more sinister?”

If you consider the inside track Richardson had on which MPs in the Commons to speak to for a positive approach to issues concerning paedophiles, even as an “agent of influence” pushing for the normalisation and decriminalisation of paedophilia in plain sight, Richardson’s role throughout 1974-1984 with regards to PIE is deeply sinister and was surely treated as a threat to national security. Was Richardson under the same kind of surveillance by the Special Branch as activists of all kinds have found in the impetus to launch the Spy Cops Inquiry?

Clement Freud (Lib: Isle of Ely) In June 2016 it was revealed that Freud’s name had been given to Operation Yewtree in 2012 and that at least three women had come forward to report rapes and sexual assaults by Freud against them as children during the 50s, 60s and 70s. As a heterosexual ebephile sexually interested in grooming and molesting females aged 10+ Freud was particularly susceptible to pressure had it been known he’d moved a young girl he was sexually abusing from the age of 10 into his house as an au pair to his children. Telegraph

Ian Mikardo (Lab: Tower Hamlets, Bethnal Green, Bow) was criticised for his threats to block the Protection of Children Bill two years earlier. Richardson was very much his protege having started life as Mikardo’s secretary to the Tribuneites

Allan Roberts (36) (Lab: Bootle): At the time of meeting Burbidge and his group, Roberts was a recently elected MP just over a year in his seat, having failed to get elected in 1974 in [ ]?. A senior social worker with Lancashire County Council, (initially trained as a teacher at Didsbury Teacher Training College and Manchester University) and a former teacher in primary and secondary schools, Roberts had experience in and connections to the professions Peter Righton had identified as so important in supporting JCGT in their aims back in 1978.

As Chair of Manchester Housing Committee, while a councillor, Roberts also had strong opinions on housing which echoed the views of Burbidge. In his Tenants (Consultation) Bill of 1982, which failed, Roberts embraced everything Burbidge could have hoped for in an attempt to legislate for tenant democracy and to enshrine in law the right of tenants to take over the management of estates (with government funds).

The year after attending Burbidge’s parliamentary lobby the News of the World revealed Roberts had attended a party in Berlin’s Buddy Club (organised by the Motorcycle Leather Club), at which he had donned a dog collar and been whipped by a man in SS uniform before a crowd of S&M enthusiasts . The man who had paid his medical bill when he had required medical treatment for the whipping was none other than Charles Irving MP – his fellow attendee at the JCGT Parliamentary Lobby orchestrated by Burbidge and Heath.

Charles Irving (57) (Con: Cheltenham since October 1974) As above Irving had paid for Roberts medical bills in Berlin. A large eared broad faced millionaire hotelier from Gloucestershire, Irving’s attention to detail in hosting would serve him well managing the House of Commons Select Committee on Catering 1979-1992. A discreet adviser to the Conservative Group for Homosexual Equality for years, in 2014 Irving was alleged of having been involved with a clique of Conservative MPs who sought out young men and teenagers to sexually exploit. [July 2014, Mirror]

July 1982: Islington Council invites JCGT to the table

In July 1982 the nominally National “Joint Council for Gay Teenagers” was invited to a roundtable “Gay Groups Meeting” convened by Islington Councillor Bob Crossman.

Crossman had been outraged that the toilet on Richmond Avenue had been reported as unsafe for children and demanded that if more resources were given to gay groups gay men wouldn’t have to “wave their penises at each other” in toilets in order to meet one another. No mention was made of that fact this particular public toilet was located not far from the Hemingford Arms, a well known gay pub, but also where PIE held meetings upstairs. The Richmond Avenue toilets were often used by children playing in Barnsbury Gardens.

“One reason why gay men go into lavatories and wave their penises at each other is that it is the only way some people in the population have of meeting other people and making friends.”
Bob Crossman on concerns for safety of children visiting Richmond Avenue public toilets, Islington Gazette 11.7.82

The Gay Groups Meeting Crossman convened was as a direct result of his demand that more resources be provided to gay and lesbian organisations. A number of the invitees to the Council’s Gay Groups Meeting were of the same view as the Fallen Angels, the pro-paedophile rights group Councillor Sandy Marks had been involved approximately 18 months before becoming elected, namely that paedophile rights to liberation such as the abolition of the age of consent should be embraced by and campaigned for within the mainstream gay rights movement.

Hailed as a PIE supporter by PIE chairman Steven Adrian Smith, Eric Presland, was invited to the meeting by Cllr Bob Crossman and met with Cllr Sandy Marks and Cllr Keith Veness. Veness, who was soon to become Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral agent for the next 9 or so years, has since defended Sandy Marks’ various denials of her involvement with Fallen Angels and following her suspension has demanded her reinstatement to Islington North Constituency Labour Party. In September 2017 in the Islington Tribune a friend of Sandy Marks observed she was being made the fall guy for those who shared her pro-paedophile views. However, with Marks’ return to a complete denial of involvement to Morgan QC’s review of November 2018 it remains to be seen whether Islington Council can follow through on a commitment to understanding the politicisation of paedophilia within the Council.

Eric Presland ran Consenting Adults, an Islington based mixed gay community theatre group putting on a weekly drama workshop. The year before attending the Islington Council meeting Presland had contributed a chapter on “Whose Power? Whose Consent?” in a book edited by North American Boy Lovers’ Association (NAMBLA) luminary Daniel Tsang on “The Age Taboo: Gay Male Sexuality, Power, and Consent”.

1983: JCGT disbands; Old Fogies forms

At last Righton and Burbidge had produced the kind of front the National Association of Youth Clubs (NAYC) could work with publicly and together NAYC and JCGT organised an annual conference for the Gay Youth Movement. Once GYM was established as an independent group of its own JCGT announced their disbandment in summer 1983. However within 6 months it was felt appropriate to set up an organisation called the Older Friends of Gay Youth (The Old Fogies) to inter-relate with GYM.

At a GYM weekend workshop in Southampton at the end of November 1983 planning for an Easter conference was underway. Jimmy Savile with his long connections to NAYC and sexual interest in children, was to be invited to sit on a panel with other celebrities.

By the time of the second trial of PIE defendants during September-November 1983, Righton and Burbidge’s infiltration of the Gay Youth movement had proved so successful Gay Youth magazine (GYM’s magazine) had its support for PIE declared on the front page with accompanying obligatory cartoon.

How far PIE’s luminaries succeeded with their attempts to persuade Islington to rally to support PIE during its second trial after CAPM and Fallen Angels’ failure of 1981 remains to be explored in more detail.

But by November 1983 Chapel Market traders were organising a petition against PIE which Council Leader Margaret Hodge signed. If the majority of Islington’s Councillors appeared unaware their borough was being targeted by PIE, Islington’s residents were attempting to alert them.

Conspiracy Against Public Morals: Paedophilia & Public Morals (October 1980)

CAPM eventually published their planned pamphlet on ‘Paedophilia and Public Morals’ (P&PM) in late October/ early November 1980, a few weeks after Tom O’Carroll published his book on the ‘radical case’ for paedophilia. P&PM had taken longer to get out due to a delay in raising £2,000 to print and distribute the pamphlet, and then problems in persuading their distributor to actually distribute it. In Fallen Angel Tim Brown’s view the glossy A5 covered booklet superseded the Fallen Angels Manifesto of April 1980 “Corrupting Children” in priority of publications for the IGA’s Information Secretariat to assist with getting distributed to IGA membership.

Eighteen months under Thatcher and CAPM’s fear of a right wing populist backlash against gay liberation, women’s and children’s liberation was that the PIE trial would provide the perfect reporting storm for the press, led by the News of the World, to whip the public into a fury, demanding punitive action from politicians.

However, the pamphlet had been finalised before Private Eye first broke the news of Sir Peter Hayman in their first Beast of Berlin column. Their failure to consider how Hayman’s involvement may impact on the court ordering reporting restrictions to apply or other aspects preventing better publicity for their cause was extremely politically naive.

“The CAPM pamphlet covers much of the areas ignored by O’Carroll. Written by a collective of paedophiles and other gay men, it gives a detailed account of the development of law on children’s sexuality in Britain and relates it to a theory of patriarchy in capitalist society.”^⁠Gay Noise no 6 Thursday 23^rd October 1980,p.4

“CAPM disagreed strongly with the approach Tom adopted, and were trying to publish a leaflet which would give the “true” radical case. CHE had been asked to help with the distribution of this leaflet.”^{⁠ CHE Executive Committee minutes 25 October 1980}

“Campaign moves into full swing

Paedophilia and Public Morals is the title of the new 60 page pamphlet soon to be published by the Campaign Against Public Morals (CAPM). With only three and a half months to go before the show trial of PIE members at the Old Bailey publication of this pamphlet is a bold initiative on the part of CAPM members.

Without kowtowing or apologising, the pamphlet sets out to provide a basic framework for an informed public debate on patriarchy and the suppression of children’s sexuality. Concentrating at some length on the role of pornography and the manipulation of medical model of paedophilia this pamphlet will play an important part in the battle for a positive restructuring of the way the women’s movement, the gay movement and the socialist left views the position of children in general and child/adult sexuality in particular.

The members of CAPM feel that it is only by mounting the most widespread debate will lit be possible to organise tangible displays of support on the streets during and after the PIE trial; a trial that will be used, make no mistake, against all homosexual men and women.

Already the International Gay Association has committed itself to an international support campaign – but it is we who will translate it into action. It is up to Gay Noise and its writers, readers and supporters, the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association, the Scottish Homosexual Rights Group, Gay News — in fact the entire gay movement — to take up and support the initiative of CAPM. For more information, and to send messages of support, large sums of money (while Lotte’s back is turned) and requests for CAPM speakers, contact CAPM BM 1151 London WC1V 6XX”^{⁠ Gay Noise No 4 Thursday 25th September 1980 p2.}

By the time of the first trial in January 1981 PIE had gone from questioning whether the Fallen Angels were Heaven Sent? to calling them ‘Risen Apes’ in a scathing update. Denouncing them as a ‘small handful of political theorists and hydrophobic feminists’ who ‘took control during last year of CAPM’ PIE declared ‘This clique of leftover intellectuals have spent the remainder of the year working to achieve those (CAPM’s) aims by a series of hysterical and vicious attacks on PIE, and in particular on Tom O’Carroll…in their own booklet PAEDOPHILIA & PUBLIC MORALS – replete with “sexist pin-ups” – and elsewhere. It is clearly their aim to use the trial as a vehicle for their own naive political ends, whatever the cost to the defendants.” PIE clearly identified the Fallen Angels Collective as having taken over CAPM, at some point during July 1980-October 1980, to publish “their own booklet”, as set out below.

“The Campaign Against Public Morals (CAPM) exists to defend the PIE defendents (sic), and alert people to the dangers surrounding that trial. This pamphlet has been written to encourage some debate around the key political issues of the trial. To this end, certain arguments and positions have been put froward (sic) which are the view of the particular authors and the basis for the unity of the campaign as a whole. Involvement in CAPM does not necessarily mean agreement on such questions as the Age of Consent, the right of children to an independent income or other such questions. The authors believe however that these are vital to be argued for.” [P&PM, p.59]

PIE Bulletin (January 1981) p.3

A far cry from six months earlier when PIE had awaited news of Fallen Angels’ IGA lobbying developments with ‘keen anticipation’.

PIE Periodical (July 1980) p.4 ‘Heaven sent support?’

However following O’Carroll’s imprisonment, an article by new PIE Chairman Steven Adrian Smith giving an overall favourable review to CAPM’s Paeodophilia & Public Morals, it appears some form of a rapprochement was in process between PIE proper and its radical socialist revolutionary Angels:

“It is a pity that CAPM, in common with people such as Roger Moody and the editors of GAY NOISE (a welcome newspaper giving extensive coverage to paedophilia and the PIE trial), have pitched their arguments exclusively towards a very narrow, albeit very active band of the political spectrum — the radical left, an audience to which Tom O’Carroll’s book was specifically not addressed, and the many valid and important assertions they make will consequently be lost on a wider readership.” (‘Public Morals: Weaponry of Repression’ by Steven Adrian, Magpie No. 15 Spring 1981, p.16)

“Finally, it should be noted that visually the booklet has been put together with great imagination. The selection of illustrations and graphics which amount to half the content of the book displays an inventiveness and resourcefulness which are sorely needed in MAGPIE. To draw an unfair comparison, Tom O’Carroll’s book is presented in an austere and formidably academic format which is hardly calculated to inspire one to read it, the CAPM booklet is visually exciting and attention grabbing and is cleverly designed to draw one into the text. A pity then that the text is peppered with more typographical errors than commas.” (‘Public Morals: Weaponry of Repression’ by Steven Adrian, Magpie No. 15 Spring 1981, p.22)

Certainly by 1986, PIE defendant John Parratt (Warren Middleton) and Fallen Angel Tim Brown were still on friendly enough terms for Middleton to thank him (formerly of CAPM) in the foreword to Betrayal of Youth.

Paedophilia & Public Morals Front page [Qn: Is this a child’s writing & drawing or are either faked by an adult to look as if by a child?]

p.2 – 3 (inner cover)

Introduction: The Show Trial & The Populist Offensive

p.5

CAPM cannot say too much about the content of the charges:

“This is not out of coyness. It is because the rest is sub judice and we would be in legal trouble ourselves if we were to go into them in any more detail. We will however endeavour not to avoid the many controversial issues which are likely to come out at the trial, even if we cannot specify the context in which they come up.”

CAPM considers the PIE trial will be a “show trial”

The popular press led by the News of the World will report on the PIE trial relentlessly and unfavourable, whipping up public fury which in turn will place pressure on an already right-wing populist government under Thatcher, a year into her first term.

“The present government have merely made a virtue out of necessity. For the significant period prior to taking government, the Tatcher/Joseph wing appreciated the climate and adopted an aggressive ‘right populist’ stance. In the run up to the elections they seized every opportunity to champion the bigotry of the people against each other. Once in government they have continued this approach escalating the already existing internecine warfare. Classic examples of this have been their stand on immigration and on social security ‘scroungers’.”

p.6

On why the Fallen Angels are defending PIE when they don’t agree on politics:

“We are not defending the five because we agree with their politics. Many of the arguments in this pamphlet run counter to what some of the defendents (sic) believe. We are not defending them because they are wonderful right on people with inpeccable (sic) revolutionary socialist credentials. We are defending them because they are on the front line where they are likely to receive the fiercest blows of a generally barbaric offensive. This we cannot tolerate.” (P&PM, p.6)

p.7

Chapter 1: Patriarchal Power & The Oppression of Children

pp. 8 – 9

pp.10 – 11

“In the 80’s this is all in flux again. The welfare state is being significantly dismantled. Women are bein driven out of the labour force to be full time mothers again. Capital cannot afford the national extended family. The definition of childhood has however remained much the same. For a period it was not defined so much in terms of the mother. Now it will be again. Either way, children are at the bottom of the patriarchal pile. What is important however, is that in this period the state has to intervene directly to re-establish the centrality of motherhood. It will do this by raising the question of ‘vulnerable children’. It will attack all expressions of autonomous actions by children. It is in this context that the question of the age of consent is so important, a question which will be forced upon us by the coming show trial.”

Commenting on an article press cutting on a BBC2 Horizon programme ‘A touch of sensitivity’ discussing research of the effects of a mother’s touch on growing children, CAPM asks:

“Can the state entrust to woman the socialisation of children, while avoiding any emotional/physical contact that might imply sexuality?”

pp 12 – 13

Chapter II: Control, Protection & Corruption

pp 14 – 15

CAPM try to avoid defining ‘Women under the age of 13’ as children, female children or girls, preferring to use the term ‘Women’ which means adult female [p.14]. Even female babies, all female children, must be referred to as ‘women’. This causes them linguistic difficulty and is shown up by their need to refer to the Indecency with Children Act: “c) Women of any age may legally consent to non-penetrative sexual relations with men, but in practice a charge of Indecency with Children would be brought.”

pp 16 – 17

“Take the famous ‘theory of maternal deprivation’. This ‘theory’ created by pseudo-scientists and propagated by the media, claimed that children would grow up deprived and hence deviant if separated from their biological mother. Hence mothers should not go out to work etc. While an ideology of protection, its function was clearly the control of women and children. It was to discourage women from entering the waged labour force and to define their role as full time mother, which not only oppressed women, but strengthened the repressive role of the nuclear family on children.”

pp 18 – 19

pp 20 -21

“The PIE trial is going to be a noisy trial. The DPP and the police have the chance to legitimate the law through ideology of protection, just like in the Angry Brigade case, only this time its the ‘protection of children’ which is at issue. If they can get away with this, the law will be applied more generally against gay organisations, lesbians and men, just as the conspiracy laws were applied against Trade Unionists in the early seventies, after the Angry Brigade trials. The gay and lesbian movement cannot afford to make the same mistake that was made in 1972.”

pp 22 – 23

“Chapter III: Paedophilia

“The popular image of paedophiles is contradictory, but always hostile and condemning. In fact these images are intimately related to the contradictory attitudes adults have towards children and child sexuality. On the one hand, paedophiles (women and men) are seen to be marauding, predatory males, prowling around the streets, spitting blood, lust and perversion and in search of innocent children to corrupt, deprave, rape and destroy.

The contrasting stereotype is of the failed macho who cannot ‘pull the birds’, who hasn’t grown up and can only identify emotionally and sexually with someone of equal ‘immaturity’, but one whose age matches the supposed ‘maturity’ process.”

…

“Perhaps these images lie behind some of you who are at present reading this pamphlet. Perhaps you are thinking that only men are paedophiles because paedophilia is about harming children.” *

* “Just as homosexuals have adopted the word ‘gay’ amongst many others, so some paedophiles have suggested ‘kind person’ as a positive description of paedosexuality. It at least has the advantage of being equally applicable to women paedophiles as well as to men.”

pp. 24 – 25

“The first thing which we must state categorically is that there is a massive inequality of power between adults and children, this is incontrovertible and is one of the central theses of this pamphlet. It must also be the case that this power structure will tend to be reflected in paedophile relationships. Those paedophiles who attempt to dispute this have missed the point and cannot analyse the cause of their own harrassment by the state.”

CAPM take a sideswipe at PIE and the five defendants awaiting trial as blind to the cause of the state’s action by them.

“However the mere fact that a particular relationship tends to reflect a general oppression tells us very little about the place the relationship has in that structure of dominance. If we were to outlaw all those human relationships which reflect an oppressive structure in this society we would end up banning every human, interaction, sexual or otherwise! We have to ask whether such relationships add or detract from the overall oppression. Given the family, the school, the police, social workers etc, are paedophiles just another brick in the wall imprisoning children? We say determinedly NO. They are a crack in that wall.”

pp. 26 – 27

“Finally, there is quite a different kind of argument advanced in radical circles. This is the ‘physiological’ argument. Namely that sex with prepubescent children in physiologically harmful. This argument says more about adult orientated concepts than it does about physiology!

In the first place, there is no way a child will consent to do something which is physically hurtfull. The child will scream the house down! There is no need to legislate against the possibility of some mistaken consent, as the possibility simply does not exist. In the second place there is a tacit assumption that all sexuality is orientated towards penetration and/or orgasm. This is a very adult notion. There are plenty of other expressions of genital sexuality and it will be precisely those other ways which are included in the substance of a consenting paedophile relationship in these cases.”

CAPM think it is impossible for paedophiles to make a mistake as to the consent of a child to sexual activity so there is no need to legislate against the possibility of mistaken consent. How could CAPM be so sure? The idea that paedophiles wish to have penetrative sex with children is dismissed by CAPM as (a) the product of a dirty mind and (b) negated by CAPM’s assertion that paedophiles in the majority choose ‘other expressions of genital sexuality’. How would CAPM know?

“In summary then, we do not see that paedophilia adds to the oppression of children; rather the reverse. We do not therefore support the existence of any anti paedophile legislation.”

Chapter IV: Three Sides of the Coin

“Reprinted in the pamphlet are two articles and a letter, the first of which appeared in the American pamphlet Growing Up Gay. It’s written by a young lesbian called Sky, who left home at 15 to come and work with the American organisation Youth Liberation.”

pp. 28 – 29

pp. 30 -31

p. 30 Letter written to the Leveller (which didn’t publish) – A man writes about being 10 and having a relationship with a 24 year old school teacher at primary school.

At the end of Allan’s letter a cartoon of a blackboard declared ‘children’s power means paedophilia now!’

p. 31 Interspersed with headlines:

“Girl, 12, lured ‘shy’ man to bed’

‘Judges free ‘victim’ of sex temptress, 11″

‘Sex temptress aged 12 made advances he couldn’t resist’

‘Court hears of schoolgirl temptress”

CAPM appears to view men who have sex with 11 and 12 year old girls as blameless, their anger is reserved for the child protection ‘racket’ which sends the girl into care:

“Note the similarity between the reporting of these cases and that of rape against women. Whilst it is OK that the men should get off, it is the girl who gets sent into care. Patriarchal age of consent laws receive eloquent expression through the mouths of judges and magistrates.” [p.31]

pp. 32 – 33

pp 34 – 35

pp. 36 – 37

The news cutting at the bottom of page 36 (see above) is concerning the case of William Pate, a Finsbury Park man who was a sadistic abductor and rapist of young boys. During 1978 a cross-party group of MPs had successfully campaigned for his release.

pp. 38 – 39

pp. 40 – 41

pp. 42 – 43

pp. 44 – 45

“Our case therefore adds up to a demand for the abolition of the age of consent in conjunction with major changes to rape laws. There are obviously special considerations that should be taken into account in terms of the trial of rapists of young children. It might be thought that a child of five would be unable to withstand cross examination in the witness box before a conviction can be secured, but freed of adult pressure, children of all ages are quite capable of deciding what constitutes rape. It is after all a violent and painful experience, and one way of alleviating unpleasant and unneccessary pressure, would be to have the court run by children. If it s a case of justice for children, then it is they who should be instrumental in its procuration. Many adults claim children to be incapable of such action. Those same adults who claim children are innocents in need of protection also call for a ‘short sharp shock’ to deal with those nasty youth who disobey adults. If five year old children can take on the militarily superior forces of the occupying British Army in the streets of Belfast, or Apartheid in the ghettos of Soweto, then the only people who have anything to fear are the oppressors.”

pp. 46 – 47

pp. 48 – 49

pp 50 – 51

PIE’s Practice

CAPM critique of PIE was that instead of seeking alliances with the sexual political movements and the left it was focused on demanding “a series of reforms” through:

(a) “rational argument”; and

(b) “vigorous lobbying of the powers that be”

“Blinded by its optimism towards the state and their attachment to the most awful kinds of publicity, they were unable to perceive that from the state’s point of view, they were easy meat.”

p.50 Gay News front page covering ‘The Vilest Men in Britain’ Sunday People headline with ‘They used deceit to smash men’s lives’

pp. 52 – 53

“Clearly then, pornography and obscenity laws play an important role in the way in which the state brings cases against paedophiles. This applies to the coming trial of the PIE five. Despite the fact that none of the defendants have been accused of playing any part in the production or distribution of pornogrpahy, pornographic material will play a central part in the trial, both at the level of evidence and media coverage.

Pornography is distinguished from other representations of sexuality by its function rather than by its content of social effects. This function is to make profit from the production and/or distribution of images by virtue of their powers of sexual stimulation. Clearly pornography is not restricted to illicit magazines or blue films. It is to be found in the popular press, on advertising hoardings, films on general release, television and so on. Sexual stimulation is a central motif of the market place.

This transformation of a part of human existence and activity into a commodity, a saleable object, is clearly reprehensible. It stands condemned along with capital as a whole, by virtue of the part it plays in dehumanising social relations.

Pornography material can, however, have social effects which go beyond those defined by its function as a commodity or vehicle for commodities. These effects are determined by the relationship between the particular images and the hierarchical sexual power relations which exist in society. Thus there is a vast difference between the social significance of straight porn, gay porn, paedophile porn and the precise nature of the representations involved.

The significance of straight porn, for the consumption of heterosexual men has been well documented by the Women’s Movement. Its role in reinforcing male dominance is unquestionable and there much evidence to suggest that its incidence can be directly correlated with that of rape. There should be nothing very surprising about this.

So now we come to the question of paedophile pornography. To start with a distinction has to be made between those pornographic representations of children produced for general popular consumption and those which are produced for people conscious of being paedophile.

The former is more rampant than people admit and normally untouched by the state. From films like Pretty Baby and Little Darlings through ads like Elliot boots, to a million, apparently ‘innocent’ adverts adorned with pretty children. The danger lies in the fact that the sex objects are presented simultaneously with the social taboo on child sexuality and paedophilia.

Pornographic material designed specifically for paedophiles, is of course, illegal. While it does not share the same dangers as does the daily barrage of ‘normal’ child pornography, it remains sexist and negative. When consumed by adults it is not essentially subversive even if it conflicts with the value of the status quo. Nevertheless it must be pointed that adult consumers of this material cannot be regarded in the same light as adult gay or straight porn consumers. Sex between adults is legal to a point. The motivations of these consumers is therefore immediately suspect. The charge of unquestioning sexism is immediately suggested and is (probably) justified. For paedophiles, pornography may represent the only assertion of identity, the one confident statement in an otherwise silent world, that child-adult sex can be a reality. It is a disgraceful tragedy that the porn merchants have a monopoly of the paed-positive expression, and that this is therefore grounded in commodity sex objectification.” [Chapter VII Pornography – pp. 53 – 55 – underline emphasis mine]

p.54 – 55

Two birthday cards are placed opposite one another with the comment “‘Nuff said”: A 5 year old’s birthday card and a birthday card saying “Happy Birthday Stick to Sex…it keeps you young!”

pp 56 – 57

“Right to an Independent Income

Over the past few years, many feminists have argued strongly for the rights of prostitutes. We unreservedly support this position. It is natural to ask whether or not these arguments can be extended to women how earn a living by posing for pornographic magazines and films, and if also, whether they apply to children.

The feminist defence of prostitutes has never been defence of prostitution. However, given the nature of this society, where women are expected to be sex objects with no autonomy, being house slaves into the bargain, and perhaps earning pin money from sweated labour as well, the life prostitutes takes on a different complexion from that of the institution of prostitution. Prostitutes demand money for services rendered, exercising some control over their sexuality even if that control is constructed wholly within the context of the market. They are using their sexuality to gain a degree of autonomy, of independence, potentially sabotaging the financial structures of male privilege.

It seems to us that the very same argument applies to women who sell their images to porn merchants. But it might be countered that by appearing in porn, those women are betraying all women in general; by participating in an operation which degrades women and encourages sexist attitudes and behaviour. In fact that argument can be used against prostitutes too. The men who use prostitutes have their sexist attitudes and behaviour reinforced. The fact that prostitutes are known to exist reinforces the predatory assumption of men in general.

Ultimately in this society, survival involves complicity between the oppressed and the oppressors; wages labourer and capitalist, the claimant and the state etc. The question is how, in the process of survival, do the oppressed obtain some autonomous space from which they can potentially challenge that social order? By being a housewife, by being a prostitute, or by being a pin up? All involve complicity with the oppressors, but the latter two, at least have the merit of establishing a relatively large independent income.

If these arguments are acceptable, then it is difficult to see why they don’t apply to children. Legally, children are not supposed to have any independent income whatsoever. It is crazy therefore to condemn the child prostitute or porn poseur, to say that those children should be in care or whatever. These children have struck out for independence. Of course, it is abhorrent that these are the only routes open to them. That only goes to show how oppressed children are at present.

Now there are grave dangers in this argument, of course. The logic might appear to lead towards a complete acceptance of child labour. Though we believe that the abolition of child labour in the 19th century to be the result of ruling class interest rather then genuine philanthropic liberalism, we have no wish to advocate a Dickensian world. Children should not have to be prostitutes, pin ups, or chimney sweeps to obtain an independent income. Money for material needs of children is available without there being child labour to make up for it. It is presently channelled through the family, either from the adult wage or by the state. It should be directly available to the child. The problem then, is not lack of resources but the capitalist social order, a problem whose familiarity faces all people. In the meantime however, we support any attempts by children to obtain an independent income.”

[Despite quoting statistics which said of 450 PIE members only 14 were women CAPM refuse to acknowledge that the majority of self-identifying paedophiles were also ‘predatory’ men]

pp. 59 – 60

“The Campaign Against Public Morals (CAPM) exists to defend the PIE defendents (sic), and alert people to the dangers surrounding that trial. This pamphlet has been written to encourage some debate around the key political issues of the trial. To this end, certain arguments and positions have been put froward (sic) which are the view of the particular authors and the basis for the unity of the campaign as a whole. Involvement in CAPM does not necessarily mean agreement on such questions as the Age of Consent, the right of children to an independent income or other such questions. The authors believe however that these are vital to be argued for.” [P&PM, p.59]

Outer back cover

Little Angels? A letter to Socialist Challenge from Fallen Angel Tim Brown (October 1979)

The entire issue of Socialist Challenge can be found here . In 1986 Tim Brown would be thanked by Warren Middleton (John Parratt), PIE Executive Member, in the foreword of his book ‘Betrayal of Youth’ as ‘Tim Brown (formerly of CAPM)”. This letter was published during the month after Brown had attended the third meeting of Conspiracy Against Public Morals with Sandy Marks, Nettie Pollard (former NCCL Gay Rights Officer) and Barry Prothero (the then current NCCL Gay Rights Officer) who was Brown’s housemate at Davenant Road, N19 at the time.

Little angels?

In an article generally favourable to kids, David Holland’s “Whose Consent?” (20 September) was remarkably weak on paedophilia, To say that ‘cross generational sex is a side issue…’ (rather a silly euphemism for paedophile sex, aren’t sexual relations between a girl/boy of 16 and woman/man of 60 cross generational?) is plainly incorrect. Daughter/father relationships, lesbian/feminist custody cases, and child/mother relationships all in their various ways proclaim the prolific nature of paedophile relationships.

I find it amusing that David Holland should quote Lewis Carroll or Peter Pan as a ‘little angels idyll’ in contrast to the ‘savage’ attacks on children’s sexuality taking place outside the playhouse. Both J.M. Barrie and Carroll were paedophiles, and tolerated as such as the medium by which the Victorian middle classes came to terms with the existence of, and their cravings for, sexual children. Under age sexuality was recognised and wrapped up in a cloying innocence. Embedded in Peter Pan is the image of the paedophile as an immature adult, ‘the person who never grew up’, and that image embodies many deep felt – but denied – fantasies that adults have for children.

Paedophiles are adults who love children. The number of adults who love children is immense. But the number of paedophiles…?

Well, just stop for a moment and muse over parent/child relationships. Pretty mundane, you might say. But if I were to turn up on your doorstep dear (adult) reader, and strike up a similar relationship with ‘your’ child, how long would it be before I was being carted off to the local nick with perhaps ten years (or much more) inside after the court case?

And what if dear ‘little x’ decided to go to Paris with me for a dirty weekend? Or forever? So much for biological parenthood. (This paragraph constitutes a Conspiracy Corrupt Public Morals, so please regard it in a hypothetical light… until it happens.)

Show me an adult who is not a paedophile. Then I’ll join Mary Whitehouse and believe in immorality. Sex with children is wonderful and can be highly recommended to all SC readers. (Oops! Another Conspiracy to Corrupt.) Children are wonderful they should not be subjected to any kind of guilt trip or legal shit about their bodies and their sexuality. It is theirs and nobody else’s. Tim Brown, London N19

Fallen Angels: Paedophilia – Summary Submission to the ILGA Conference, Barcelona 1980

In their shorter paper the Fallen Angels want to persuade ILGA’s Second Annual Conference they must overcome a crucial barrier to “the emergence of an effective sexual-political practice” between adults and children. The Fallen Angels view themselves as here to provide a corrective intervention to the gay rights and women’s liberation movements on their support for paedophiles.

‘The emergence of an effective sexual-political practice’ appears to refer to the lack of inclusion for paedophile rights and children’s rights by the gay rights and women’s liberation movements. Without paedophile rights and children’s rights (defined as two sides of the same coin by the Fallen Angels) there can be no cohesive ‘sexual-political practice’

This ‘barrier’ to including paedophile rights had been created by:

(A) a more general/overall failure to develop a critique of adult-child relations,^⁠ and of the historical construction of the ‘adult’ and the ‘child’ coupled with^⁠

(B) the reluctance of the gay movement to establish solidarity with young people in their struggles against ageism^⁠

So the Fallen Angels took it upon themselves to call the Gay Movement to account, their final three sentences underlined concluding their case.

“The question is whether gay complicity in the oppression of children and pedophiles is to persist”
“The ILGA must acknowledge adult-child relations as crucial to the development of a coherent sexual politics.”
“We demand the right to form alternative relations with kids – on their terms, and to affirm the erotic in those relations.”

The age of consent should not be accepted as related to puberty in any sense.

“What we are saying is that the gay movement can no more accept physiological maturity as determining sexuality than it can afford to accept biological gender as determining social destiny.”

p.1

“It is no longer sufficient to take refuge in the denial that the origins of homosexuality are anything but imponderable or irrelevant. Our gayness is invalidated through the concepts of childhood and of the corruptibility of children. It is time we asserted the validity of the choices and refusals we made as children. It is high time we began to defend the right of all children to sexual self-determination.”

A recurrent theme for the Fallen Angels (appearing in CAPM Paedophilia & Public Morals and their longer submission to ILGA, as well as Tim Brown’s individual writings) was that despite CAPM asserting PIE’s female membership as at only 14 in total amongst 450 men, women are the most isolated of paedophiles and that they as mothers, lesbian or heterosexual, can be paedophiles too. Women should make common cause with paedophiles because it would assist with breaking down expectations of and stereotypes surrounding women and motherhood which hold back women’s liberation.

1. Mother and Child

We want to suggest ways in which paedophilia bears on women’s struggles: –

i) ‘Legitimation’ of children’s sexual desire (i.e. pre-genital). In opposing male penetration sex. In opposing the ’tyranny of orgasmic sexuality’

ii) In breaking down the male image of the woman as mother. In asserting the sexual component in mother-child relations

iii) In understanding the structural role of the mother in reproducing social gender divisions, and the whole sex-gender system

iv) In examining how age of consent laws do not ‘protect’ children, they operate to isolate ‘promiscuous’ girls and justify their ‘treatment’.

v) In denying the corruptibility of children. (Concern for the fate of male children – and the laws are mainly intended to insulate boys – requires that the ‘overbearin’ or ‘possessive’ mother be invented, virtually acknowledging the sexuality of women, and that she be guilty, by a kind of active negligence, of what the male paedophile achieves by direct intervention, the corruption of the child.

Fallen Angels consider that the gay movement has have drifted from its early inclusion of paedophile rights as gay rights. They are holding a self-righteous mirror up to the gay movement and accusing them of hypocrisy: “gay men have effectively betrayed children, they have betrayed their own childhoods, and they have betrayed the possibilities of the early gay movement.”

The Albany Trust’s lacklustre victory in only achieving partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967 with the age of consent set at 21 is perceived as ‘selling-out’ — not for failing to achieve parity with the heterosexual age of consent — but for any age of consent being imposed at all.

“In frantically disassociating themselves from ‘child-molestors’, once the price of toleration had been made clear to them (in Britain through the 1967 Act), and in their anxiety to deny the characterisation of homosexual desire as infantile or fixated, gay men have effectively betrayed children, they have betrayed their own childhoods, and they have betrayed the possibilities of the early gay movement. The hypocrisy of that betrayal is demonstrated by their subsequent selective appropriation of pedophile culture, by the images of children still typically reproduced in gay male press, and by the continuing fetishising of youth. The child survives only in the form of the youth whose submission to the strong man amounts to the assertion of the patriarchal principle unalloyed.

Gay men have disassociated themselves from those who would prey on little boys; unfortunately it is not so easy for those of us who are male pedophiles to disassociate ourselves from those gay men who aspire to be ‘good’ fathers and ‘good’ teachers, whose complicity in the oppression of children, in fulfilling the paternal or didactic functions, cannot be neutralised by any alternative practice within those established roles. But there are no doubt gay men who are sincere in denying any interest in children. How else could that particular strain in gay male culture have arisen, that celebration of gayness as hedonism and the unrestricted pursuit of pleasure, had not a substantial number of gay men been prepared to abandon to women — alone and together — the task of re-examining child-rearing practices and the painful exploration of alternatives?”

The Fallen Angels’ own commitment to male paedophiles providing child care is reflected in their call to Conference (which was passed) to provide a men-only staffed creche at the next IGA meeting.

3. The Child Protection Racket

The Fallen Angels criticise the National Children’s Bureau (where astonishingly Marks is briefly a Director from 29 November 1994 – 1 July 1995 for 7 months) for, in their view, increasingly denouncing the Women’s Movement and joining sides with the reactionary moral forces who ‘adopt the ideology of protection to defend the institutions of control’ under the guise of what the Fallen Angels call ‘the Child Protection Racket’.

“3. The Child Protection Racket: The racket is not confined to the emergent or growing organisations expressly concerned with the protection of youth; it also involves longer established groups who are similarly prepared to adopt the ideology of protection to defend the institutions of control. In Britain, where for example the National Children’s Bureau and ‘Families Need Fathers’ increasingly denounce the Women’s Movement as posing the principal threat to the family and to the child, the co-ordination between reactionary moral forces is perhaps particularly disturbing, but we are aware of parallel development internationally. It is important to remember that these groups are not anxious to end the general exploitation of child labour nor of course to challenge the oppression of children without existing institutions, but simply to isolate and eradicate what they see as posing a threat to the existing mode of exploitation.”

Five members of the Pedophile Information Exchange in Britain, who have already barely survived a virulent campaign of denunciation from the yellow press, are now facing charges under an archaic conspiracy law, not because they have committed any offences ‘against’ children — in fact the police are overlooking several substantive offences in order to obtain witnesses to the supposed conspiracy — but because the existence of a pedophile organisation cannot be tolerated. But even the existence of self-identifying pedophile groups has not deflected antagonism from the gay movement. It seems evidence to us that any effective interventions by gay people in support of the child’s autonomy and contrary to orthodox socialisation, contrary to the rigidification of gender roles let alone straight sexuality, will be deemed by the right a corrupting and depraving interference . And yet, to secure the objectives of gay liberation we make such interventions.”

The Fallen Angels viewed the press exposes of PIE as ‘a virulent campaign of denunciation from the yellow press’ and claim knowledge of inside information of prosecution witness deals with ‘police overlooking several substantive offences’ to provide statements as to the ‘supposed consiracy’.

Before demanding “the right to form alternative relations with kids – on their terms, and to affirm the erotic in those relations” Fallen Angels finish by attempting a rebuttal to three criticisms made of paedophilia:

“i) Pedophilia is dismissed as inevitably exploitative, given the power of adults over children. But, given that power, we insist that adults examine their existing relations with children, and the ways in which all adults rationalise their own pedophilia, while dismissing and silencing the child’s eroticism.

ii) Pedophilia is ageist and obsessive. But this is patently absurd – unless gayness is seen as ageist and obsessive. Pedophilia is expected to account for its origins, but a minimum account of the ‘origins’ of homosexuality must involve coming to terms with the forms of pre-genital desire, of non-reproductive sex, which entails a challenge to the differentiated sexualities of adult and child

iii) Integrating pedophile demands is likely to be too costly to the gay movement. But how can an effective strategy be formulated in opposition to the whole sex-gender system and the reproduction of capitalist patriarchal relations, if we persistently evade the adults responses to, and construction of, the child’s sexuality.”

IGA Conference April 1980: The Fallen Angels take PIE’s fight to Barcelona

Building on the articles published in May 2017 by the Islington Gazette, this post (and others to follow) give further detail on the documents Fallen Angels produced. First read (and watch) below:

In 1994 the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) would eventually vote to remove three paedophile rights groups (from the US and Netherlands) from their ranks. The UN had threatened to revoke ILGA’s NGO status and funding along with it. But 14 years earlier it had been a British group of pro-paedophile rights activists calling themselves the Fallen Angels that had first demanded IGA (as it was then) defend paedophiles rights and abolish the age of consent.

In April 1980 at the IGA’s second annual conference the Fallen Angels had a choice of sessions to attend at which they could raise their arguments for gay and women’s rights campaigners to back paedophile rights before attempting a push in plenary for an overall vote. At the time, five PIE Executive Committee members were awaiting trial and had handed in their passports as part of their bail conditions and so were unable to appear in person to rally international support.

Eight months’ prior to the IGA Conference in Catalonia, a PIE legal defence campaign had formed almost as soon as the arrests had taken place. Future Fallen Angel Tim Brown, then of the London Gay Activists Alliance, wrote a lurid defence of paedophiles titled “Caged Anger. The Prosecutions of Paedophiles.” and circulated it at the CHE Annual Conference.

With sufficient promotion by various individuals at CHE’s Annual Conference (held over the August Bank Holiday in Nottingham) the movement to defend PIE’s Executive Members blossomed into the Conspiracy Against Public Morals (CAPM – also referred to by members as the Campaign Against Public Morals Committee) but divisions over publicity and campaigning style between the PIE defendants and the more militant members such as Fallen Angels would eventually lead to PIE denouncing the Fallen Angels.

Some members of the Angels had their roots in the Gay News Defence Fund and its successor Gay Activists Alliance which meant they wanted to focus their energies on public demonstrations and ‘zaps’, which jarred with the reporting restrictions placed at the three PIE committal hearings and the legal advice to the accused to defend the case on a civil liberties basis: freedom of association and speech for paedophiles. Here’s a letter from Tim Brown to Socialist Challenge written shortly after CAPM’s third meeting.

The IGA newsletter covering the Conference provided a report from the Workshops – one specifically on Pedophilia and Age of Consent and others on Political Action (Pending & Forthcoming).

To support their proposals to conference they circulated 3 documents:

A summary submission “We demand the right to form alternative relations with kids – on their terms, and to affirm the erotic in those relations.”
A 10,000 word paper entitled ‘Corrupting Children: Children, Paedophilia and the struggle Women’s and Gay Liberation’ (blog post to follow shortly)
’Tots on the March’ – the London Gay Activists Alliance submission to the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure (RCCP) dated August 1979, signed off with “Gay love and paedophile kisses, or paedophile love and gay kisses to the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure, from the London Gay Activists Alliance.” (blog post to follow shortly)

The Angels won the support of conference to call for the abolition of age of consent laws as oppressive and for the discussion on ‘pedosexuality’ (as paedophilia was now being called to further enhance its legitimacy as a sexual orientation rather than a paraphilia or child abuse) to progress within the member organisations to report back to the IGA Information Secretariat run by Edmund Lynch in Dublin.

p.14 PLENARY SESSIONS

6. Workshop C2: Pedophilia and Age of Consent

After reports from the Women’s Caucus’ discussion on the subject and from the Workshop the meeting discussed on the following draft resolution, which is an amended resolution as put forward by F-48 and COC:

1. Believing that all individuals should have the right to sexual self-determination irrespecitve of gender or age;

Considering that age of consent laws operate to oppress and not to protect;

This Conference calls for the abolition of all such laws.

Note: the concept of self-determination requires and demands laws to ensure that no individuals are coerced into sexual relations against their will.

2. Considering that paedophilia is, within member organizations, seen as a very complicated, highly emotive subject with far-reaching implications, about which is it not easy to reach a simple consensus;

Considering that our opponents use arguments concerning pedophilia against the idea of homosexual liberation;

Considering the possible consequences of a legal age of consent for the development of a gay and lesbian identity;

Considering that the legal use of the concept of ‘age of consent’ is often a fiction because it suggests that real consent cannot be given under a certain age;

Considering the need, especially for women, for protection against sexual violence;

Considering the place liberation of pedosexuality takes in the whole of sexual liberation;

Considering our distinctive ability, derived from our experience of oppression as gay men and lesbian women, to contribute to the discussion of the liberation of pedosexuality

3. It is resolved to continue discussion on the subject within IGA and to ask members to pursue a discussion on pedophilia within their own organization. Member organizations are requested to teel (sic ) the Information Secretariat (or other member-organization) directly of results of discussions and actions.

Bill George (COC/CHE) proposes to insert the word ‘fictitious’ before ‘age of consent’, discussion about this resulted in the line:

‘Considering that the legal use…’ Considerations of the draft-resolution are accepted.

Discussion of 1 “Believing…’ Shane Enright (SHRG) proposed this recommendation be for the study of the question of age of consent. David Russell (NGRC- NZ/COC) proposed: This Conference urges member-groups to study whether or not to adopt the policy of abolition of all such laws” The Chair then proposed a straw-vote on “Whether or not to study and adopt the policy…”

The proposal was supported with a large majority, four people voted against and Peter Ashman (CHE) asked to record in the minutes that CHE voted against. It was resumed that COC will gather information and sent it out in order to continue the discussion on pedophilia.

The Campaign for Homosexual Equality’s (CHE) refusal to vote for the age of consent as a fiction or embrace ‘pedosexuality’ was noted by attendees, and not just for the record at IGA. It would later cause ructions amongst CHE and a push back from within the ranks for a more paedophile positive approach from CHE’s reluctant Executive Committee who rightly feared embracing paedophile liberation would damage CHE’s legitimate campaigning for parity with the heterosexual age of consent.

Fallen Angels were particularly scathing of groups like CHE and Albany Trust who they regarded as ‘reformist’ for lobbying piecemeal reductions in the age of consent when they considered it as oppressive to paedophile liberation and children’s liberation, campaigned for by them as two sides of the same coin.

7, Workship D1: Political Action (pending) and Workshop D2 (forthcoming)

Tim Brown (Fallen Angels) proposed a motion on the PIE Trial; Accepted

Barry Prothero (GAA) called for demonstrations outside British embassies abroad when the European Court of Justice’s decision on the NIGRA case is announced.

Following Barry Prothero’s successful February 1980 application for the paid role of NCCL Gay Rights Officer (replacing Nettie Pollard, PIE Member No. 70 who’d been voluntary since the lapse of the Penthouse grant) he was attending the IGA Conference as a representative of NCCL and the London Gay Activists Alliance. He and Tim ‘Paedophile Love & Kisses’ Brown shared a house together at Davenant Road, where Fallen Angels listed its HQ as on the delegates address list.

It is the last proposal from the Fallen Angels that strikes me as the most chilling. They demanded that at the next IGA conference a creche should be provided, staffed only by men, for the full participation of women in the conference. Coming from a group

[p.15]

CRECHE FACILITIES

1. The Second Annual Conerence of the International Gay Association notes the complete failure of the organisation to provide adequate creche facilities for children, together with the male expectation that women would be responsible for those children that did arrive.

2. Conference therefore censures the organisations for their example of outrageous sexist and ageist behaviour against children and women.

3. Conference therefore contacts the organizations of the next IGA Convention:

a) To provide a creche which is attractive to children and which fully provides for their needs; so that all potential delegates are able to bring children with them to thenext IGA Conference;

v) That the responsibility for the creche must be that of only men, so enabliing all women to fully participate in the Conference

Fallen Angels

After some discussion, the Convention accepted Proposal 3, but did not adopt Proposals 1 and 2

P. 15 IGA

1971-1975: Ivor Street, Icebreakers and PIE

Ivor Street, Icebreakers and PIE

A key clique to emerge out of the explosion of energy and activism created by the Gay Liberation Front during 1970-72 was The Counter-Psychiatry Group, emulating US West Coast groups formed in reaction to gay men and women treated as if they had a medical or psychological condition which could be expunged or made heterosexual with ‘treatment’ such as aversion therapy. Icebreakers, a gay counselling/befriending group would emerge from the Counter-Psychiatry group during 1972, under the leadership of 35 year old sociologist and lead Housing Development researcher at the Department of Environment, Michael J Burbidge.

One third of the founding twelve members of the NCCL Gay Rights Committee established in September 1974 already knew one another through Icebreakers:

Micky Burbidge (PIE Manifesto co-drafter);
Keith Hose (first PIE Chairman);
Nettie Pollard (NCCL Gay Rights Officer responsible for PIE and PAL’s affiliation with NCCL and PIE member); and
Anna Duhig

“In London the group formed around Elizabeth Wilson, herself a psychiatric social worker with previous experience of the anti-pysychiatry theories and writings of RD Laing. The original lists of GLF members interested in the group survive and show twenty-eight names including Elizabeth, Mary, Jeffrey Weeks, Micky Burbidge and David Hutter, all of whom were to be centrally involved in its writings, actions and spin-off groups.” [No bath but plenty of bubbles: An oral history of the GLF 1970-73, Lisa Power, p.42]

“Version therapy (usually electric shock treatment) was such a major issue because it was the publicly accepted way of dealing with homosexuality. I knew that I was gay in 1962 and decided that I didn’t want to be. I read an article about a man who did aversion therapy for homosexuals and I wrote to him asking for therapy. He had a long waiting list, so nothing happened. Then I read a story in the paper about a man who had aversion therapy to make him fall out of love with the wrong woman and I suddenly realised that it was awful to think of switching off loving feelings by shock treatment. There had to be another way of dealing with it. That totally changed my mind and I decided that I wanted to be what I was, after all.” (Micky Burbidge, No bath but plenty of bubbles: An oral history of the GLF 1970-73, Lisa Power, p.93)

Nettie Pollard and Micky Burbidge

“I was in the Counter-Psychiatry Group with Micky and others. I helped to organise a conference at the London School of Economics in Autumn 1971 — Homosexual Oppression? Freedom? Mary McIntosh spoke on abolishing the age of consent and people from outside, like doctors, came along.” (Nettie Pollard, No bath but plenty of bubbles: An oral history of the GLF 1970-73, Lisa Power, p.97)

“My best friend who was called Jake read about it in the Daily Mirror in April 1971 and we went along. It was in Middle Earth. I was straight then. Bruce Wood was there and Ted Brown, Micky Burbidge. Elizabeth Wilson got up and told everybody about the Women’s Group and what they were doing…The second week I went, there was an argument about intergenerational issues. It was seen as an issue of solidarity — people wanted to help anyone oppressed by the state. I felt that I could identify with it even as straight, because it was about sexual liberation and not gay rights, it was involve with women’s liberation and gender roles and so on. There was lots of debate about what gay meant — did it conclude transvestites and transsexuals, anyone who didn’t fit in.” (Nettie Pollard, No bath but plenty of bubbles: An oral history of the GLF 1970-73, Lisa Power p.69)

“I knew some other gays through cottaging. People I met this way would ask ‘are you active or passive’ and there were a lot of self-denigrating attitudes. I was very relieved when I finally found out that you didn’t have to be one or the other. I saw a poster in Compendium for the first meeting and I thought it was incredible, I wanted to go but I was afraid to walk into a room full of openly gay people. It was Jeffrey [Weeks] who insisted I go to GLF, we were friends.” (Micky Burbidge) [No bath but plenty of bubbles: An oral history of the GLF 1970-73, Lisa Power p.24]

During 1971, at the height of GLF’s wave of liberation, Micky Burbidge could fill the neo-gothic rafters of All Saint’s Church Hall in Notting Hill with an outraged crowd, sickened to hear of electric shocks and chemical castration.

By 1972 the Counter-Psychiatry Group had become a regular Sunday evening meet-up at 24 Ivor Street, Camden, NW1, where Micky shared a house with a 24 year old Scottish soon to be drama student Angus Suttie and 27 year old Jeffrey Weeks.

“Counter-Psychiatry Group later after long vicissitudes went in different directions. Mary got involved in the Manifesto Group, so that was like the theoretical bit of the group. Some us, myself, David Hutter, set up a small group who produced the pamphlets…Another wing moved in to what became Icebreakers. We worked on Psychiatry and the Homosexual from September 1971 into 1972. The group moved around and part of the rota was Ivor Street where Micky, Angus and I lived at the time. One particular meeting, I remember, we discussed the way forward and I suggested the pamphlet. One subgroup formed to do that, another talked about the helpline which became Icrebreakers and we just evolved in different directions and went on meeting separately. The group as such faded away and its energies went into the subgroups.” (Jeffrey Weeks No bath but plenty of bubbles: An oral history of the GLF 1970-73, Lisa Power p.99)

screen-shot-2016-12-01-at-22-19-15

On occasion the Counter-Psychiatry Group would meet elsewhere, as when Nettie Pollard (who 2 years later would become a founding member of NCCL Gay Rights Committee alongside Micky Burbidge; and PIE member #70) hosted it at her home, as on Sunday 8th October 1972:

screen-shot-2016-12-02-at-09-33-52

In line with the Counter-Psychiatry Group’s thinking on and rejection of medical experts’ opinions on homosexuality, a new counselling/befriending group called Icebreakers began to emerge who believed there were no better or additional qualifications necessary to counsel gay people other than the counsellor being gay and out themselves. This put the group’s attitude to counselling at odds with the Albany Trust’s more conservative approach and Antony Grey’s emphasis on professionalism and concern to associate himself professional counselling bodies.

On Tuesday 7 March 1972 the first few members of a proposed Ice Breaking Group gathered at Micky Burbidge’s address at 24 Ivor Street to discuss how best to help the most isolated gay people to come out.

screen-shot-2016-12-01-at-21-47-30

1973-74: Phoney Bishop of Gleaves once housed Icebreakers

During 1973-1974 the Icebreakers crystallised into a collective of just over 20 gay men and 2 women on a rota answering a phone every evening between 7.30pm and 10.30pm. Keith Hose [PIE’s first Chairman] became a ‘prominent member of Icebreakers‘ and Anna Duhig, another founding member of NCCL Gay Rights Committee also joined Burbidge’s Icebreakers.

Surprisingly, considering Icebreakers had formed out of the GLF, the Icebreakers phone wasn’t at the GLF centre on Railton Road but instead was installed at one of the Bishop of Gleaves’ hostels on Branksome Road in Brixton [see further on the murder of Billy Two-Tone and TV documentary Johnny Go Home, Gleaves’ associate Malcolm Raywood as co-defendant with Charles Hornby in the Playland Trial].

Gay News

However, it soon became apparent that Gleaves was answering the phone himself and directing teenagers and young men looking for support from Icebreakers to come and stay at one of his hostels. Lambeth Council had started asking questions about a ‘male brothel run by priests’. Only 3-4 years previously in November 1970 had a group of men been found guilty of prostituting and sexually abusing children in a flat on Solon Road, moments from Branksome Road. Gay News reported Icebreakers had swiftly severed links with Gleaves and moved in to the South London Gay Centre on Railton Road, Brixton instead.

Gay News No 76 p.4 [1976]

By Icebreakers 3^rd year it reported it had received 4, 417 calls –

1 in 7 were women; [631] 14.2%

1 in 11 married or divorced; [402] 9.1%

1 in 9 were under 21; [490] 11%

Just under 1 in 20 were transvestites; [220] 4.9%

19 calls were from transsexuals; 0.43%

52 calls were from paedophiles = 1.18%

March 1975 Ivor Street, Camden: PIE’s London Inauguration

Three years after Icebreakers’ first meeting, the first official London meeting of PIE also took place at an address in Ivor Street. Michael Hanson resigned and a young graduate from Hull University who had led the university’s Sexual Liberation Society, Keith Hose, was elected as Chairman.

During autumn that same year Micky Burbidge and Keith Hose would work together swiftly to produce the Paedophile Information Exchange’s response to the Criminal Law Revision Committee consultation. Together Burbidge and Hose would propose the abolition of the age of consent and the decriminalisation of ‘consensual’ sexual activity with children. Despite deploring the trauma of courtroom appearances for children as a reason for decriminalisation, the civil system of injunctions they proposed to replace it meant children (with no distinction made for pre-verbal and non-verbal children in their lack of ability to voice consent) would still be required to give evidence in court, the only difference being that it would a civil court rather than a criminal court.

It is unknown whether PIE’s London inauguration gathered at Micky Burbidge’s address at no 24 on Ivor Street in Camden or whether there happened to be another house on this short street where a gathering of pro-paedophile activists would have been welcomed.

“It was Martin also, who along with Keith Hose presided over the PIE gathering at London’s Ivor Street in March – with the object of initiating London PIE meetings.”

PIE Newsletter (No.6) 1975, p.4

In just 2.5 years Micky Burbidge had nurtured Icebreakers into a small clique who met regularly for consciousness-raising sessions in between taking calls from mostly men and boys aged 14 to 70.

Within six months of Keith Hose’s election as PIE Chairman and PIE’s inaugural London meeting at Ivor Street, Burbidge wrote into the Guardian to defend Hose against John Torode’s London Letter column of 28 August 1975. Torode had obtained a copy of the PIE leaflet circulated by Hose at the Campaign for Homosexual Equality’s 3rd Annual Conference in Sheffield and commented:

“In short we are talking about poor, sad, perverted adults who take pleasure in having it off with children too young to know what they are doing and why. People who need medical treatment rather than sneering persecution, no doubt. But above all, people who need to be kept away from your kids and mine.”

The suggestion of paedophiles as needing medical treatment conflicted with Burbidge’s belief that the categorisation of paedophilia as a psychiatric disorder was as wrong as homosexuality’s categorisation as a psychiatric disorder and should be campaigned for alongside homosexuality under the umbrella definition of ‘sexual orientation’. Instead, Burbidge argued,

“The ‘harm’ which sometimes is associated with paedophilic (sic) relationships is real enough: it stems from the bigoted reactions of adults, from the hounding and interrogation of younger partners by the police and others, and from the intense feelings of guilt and anxiety which distort relationships.”

The Guardian, Letters to the Editor Sep 3, 1975 p10

On 3rd January 1976 Keith Hose, when writing to Mary McIntosh (a Home Office policy advisor) to offer an early copy of the PIE Submission to the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure he and Micky Burbidge had drafted, emphasised that mutual friends Jeffrey Weeks and Nettie Pollard had advised him to get in touch.

In spring 1976 Angus Suttie, Burbidge’s housemate at Ivor Street, wrote an article for Gay Left (launched as “A Socialist Journal produced by Gay Men” the previous autumn): “From Latent to Blatant: A personal account”. Suttie’s partner and housemate Jeffrey Weeks, [then Chair of the Charing Cross Branch of the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staff (ASTMS)] had co-founded the journal.

‘The branch and Tony Kelly’ by Jeffrey Weeks, Letters to The Guardian ” 5 May 1976 p.12

In his personal account of coming out, Suttie wrote of the ambivalence he felt towards his sexually predatory scout master who molested him when he was only 10 years old; “to be gay or paedophile was to be a pariah and delight would be taken in making one aware of one’s outcastness”. For Suttie, despite recognising he’d felt no sexual attraction towards the scoutmaster as a 10 year old and that the experience was not ‘mutually pleasing”, the iniquity of society’s treatment of gays and paedophiles was suffered side by side.

“I at this time hadn’t reached puberty yet and all that was involved was tickling and stroking one another’s genitals, but on every occasion I felt dirty and guilty, so much so that I left the scouts and joined another troup. I had received enjoyment from the contact but I felt no attraction from the scoutmaster and I would think longingly of some of the other scouts with whom I would have much preferred a mutually pleasing sexual relationship.”

Perhaps for Weeks, it was the combination of his lifelong friendship with pro-paedophile activist Micky Burbidge with whom he lived for many years and his romantic relationship with Angus Suttie, which blurred his vision when writing of paedophilia ‘and its controversial, if contested, overlap with child sex abuse.’

Paedophiliac ‘relationships’ were only ever contested as not abusive by pro-paedophile activists arguing for the abolition of the age of consent and the decriminalisation of sexual activities children had ‘consented’ to. Unfortunately those activists or apologists never really got round to explaining how non-verbal or pre-verbal children could consent, or indeed, prove that they hadn’t, without a statutory age of consent to protect them.

Sexuality by Jeffrey Weeks, p.76, first published in 1986

1978: Tom O’Carroll writes to Antony Grey at Defence of Literature & Arts Society re ‘freedom of speech’

In 1978, during the passage of the Protection of Children bill through Parliament, and just as PIE were preparing to publish their Paedophilia: Some Questions & Answers and distribute the booklet to MPs pigeonholes in the House of Commons, Tom O’Carroll, Chairman of Paedophile Information Exchange and member of the NCCL Gay Rights Committee wrote to Antony Grey in his role on the Executive Committee of the Defence of Literature and Arts Society (‘DLAS’).

O’Carroll wanted to thank Grey for his support at the 1978 NCCL Annual General Meeting and “in relation to” the National Union for Public Employees. The NCCL AGM had taken place on 1-2 April at City University, a fortnight prior to O’Carroll’s letter.

“Dear Antony, I was pleased to see you the other day, and only regret that I had to dash off without having a chance to talk to you after the meeting. Allow me, however, to thank you very much for your support at the NCCL AGM, and in relation to NUPE etc.”

Motion. 39: Freedom of Discussion proposed by Nettie Pollard and Bill Forrester

At the 1978 AGM which O’Carroll and Grey had attended, PIE member Nettie Pollard had seconded a motion proposed by Bill Forrester to ask NCCL to condemn the protests against PIE’s meeting in September 1977:

“This AGM re-affirms the right of free discussion and freedom to hold meetings for all organisations and individuals doing so within the law.

In particular this AGM condemns the physical and other attacks on those who have discussed or attempted to discuss paedophilia and re-affirms NCCL’s condemnation of harassment and unlawful attacks on such persons.” [Bill Forrester and Nettie Pollard]

Tom O’Carroll was responding to an approach made by DLAS to David Grove, PIE’s Children Rights’ Campaign leader and keeper of the PIE mailing list.

In June/July 1976 edition of Understanding Paedophilia (PIE’s forerunner to Magpie) the ‘Magnificent Six’ had been announced, with the following people undertaking the following roles for PIE

‘It’s the Magnificent Six’, p. 7
New EC:
Keith Hose – re-elected to serve as National Chairperson for the coming year
Warren Middleton – re-elected as National Vice Chairperson/PIE Magazine Editor
Tom O’Carroll – elected as PIE General Secretary/responsible for the formation of local groups/PIE members’ contact service/Publicity [See further: Did NCCL’s trawl of List 99 radicalise PIE’s Tom O’Carroll? Palaver #6 October 1976]
David C Grove – elected as Director of PIE’s forthcoming children’s rights campaign/responsible for distribution of mail
Charles Napier – elected as Treasurer/responsible for recruitment of new members.
Peter Righton – elected as Organiser of prison-hospital visits/general correspondence and PIE befriending.
Want applicants for Legal adviser and Director of Research. [Ian Pace blog]

DLAS wanted an article from PIE on the ways in which their freedom of speech have been muzzled for the DLAS publication “Uncensored” Tom O’Carroll nominates Keith Hose to write this for Grey.

Three years later, in a letter to Tony Smythe, Grey wrote

“ 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.” [See further: With compliments from Ian Dunn, and while you were out Tony Smythe called March 1981 ]

Seemingly, a fear precipitated by Grey’s own invitation, adopting the role of a self-fulfilling prophet of doom while bearing in mind Grey’s ego couldn’t bear not to archive these writings publicly.

The Defence of Literature and the Arts Society (1968 – 1983)

The Defence of Literature and Arts Society attracted sponsors from “the great and good”:

Lords, charity directors, MPs, former MPs, lawyers and even doctors such as Dr David Stafford-Clark and Lords who were also Doctors such as Lord Winstanley (apparently a staunch supporter of everyone else’s freedom of speech bar Mary Whitehouse’s when he commanded Antony Grey to pursue her to the end of the road if not further! [Dec 1976: See further blog post here]

Francis Bennion, Parliamentary Counsel and Civil Liberties Barrister

One member of the Executive Committee who served alongside Antony Grey and Eric Thompson was Francis Bennion, Barrister and Parliamentary counsel, who had drafted the constitutions of Pakistan and Ghana, the Consumer Credit Act, the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, and the hugely successful reference book for lawyers on ‘Statutory Interpretation’. In 1968 he founded the Professional Association of Teachers.

On Francis Bennion‘s website : http://www.francisbennion.com/pdfs/non-fb/1983/1983-007-nfb-dlas-pamphlet.pdf

In 1979 Bennion wrote a review of G Parker Rossman’s book Sexual Experience between Men and Boys [Freethinker Vol.99 1979] [See further for Antony Grey’s meeting with Parker Rossman on his July 1979 trip to UK from the states and Rossman’s letter to Grey and more on George Parker Rossman’s 1971 arrest in the Long Island New York ring with Dr Morris Fraser ]

In 1983 Antony Grey and his partner Eric Thompson were still serving on the Executive Committee of the DLAS along with Michael Rubinstein (the solicitor who Sir Harold Haywood was dismayed at charging for his advice on suing Mary Whitehouse due to his “special interest in the Trust”).

Lord Beaumont of Whitley (former Albany Trust Chairman 1969-1972?) is also a sponsor.

Ben Whitaker (former Lab: Hampstead MP 1966-1970)

Ben Whitaker was the Chairman of the DLAS and had been Labour MP for Hampstead 1966-1970 during Wilson’s first term, at the same time Dr David Kerr, a fellow DLAS sponsor, had been Labour MP for Wandsworth Central.

NCCL AGM Ballot Papers 1978: Biographies for candidates standing for NCCL Executive Committee

Brian Sedgemore MP (Lab: Hackney South)

Sponsors included Brian Sedgemore MP (Lab: Hackney South)

See further for Mark Trotter, the Hackney Labour agent whose abuse of children left some victims with AIDS with a history of abuse in Liverpool:

Poisonous regime that betrayed the children (07.01.98)
Hackney’s tainted chiefs ‘will be axed’ (08.01.98)
The council officer told her friend: Don’t use Trotter as your babysitter. But the public was never warned (21.01.98) [Evening Standard, Stewart Payne & Eileen Fairweather]
MP’s attack on the man who helped expose Hackney abuser (04.02.98) [Evening Standard, Stewart Payne & Eileen Fairweather]

Ian Mikardo MP (Lab: East end, Bow, Poplar, Bethnal Green 1964-1987)

Ian Mikardo MP (Lab: Reading 1945–50, Reading South 1950–55, Reading 1955–59, Poplar 1964–74, Bethnal Green and Bow 1974–83 and Bow and Poplar 1983–87)

“… the progress of the Child Protection bill was threatened by MP Ian Mikardo, who blocked it to protest against tactics being used by the Conservative party to block Edward Fletcher‘s bill on employment protection, the Prime Minister, James Callaghan, stepped in to ensure that the Bill received the time required to become law.^{[1]” [Wikipedia: Child Protection Act 1978]}

On 12 May 1978 Auberon Waugh wrote ‘Save the Children’ for The Spectator when Mikardo was MP for Bethnal Green and Bow:

“After all the recent hysteria about the Child Protection Bill, when Mr Ian Mikardo was practically accused of supporting the vile trade in child pornography, we have at last been given a chance to examine the Bill as it ambles its way through its second reading in the House of Lords. To judge from press reaction, and from statements by various opportunist MPs, one might have supposed that child pornography was a new and hideous development which somehow escaped existing legislation on obscene publication and protection of minors, while threatening to corrupt a whole generation of British schoolchildren for the unscrupulous gain of these merchants in human misery . . .”

1974-75: Keith Hose’s concurrent NCCL-PIE roles

PIE was ‘officially’ formed in October 1974 by three co-founders from the Scottish Minorities Group not just Ian Dunn and Michael Hanson who have previously been identified in the press [see further: A 3rd co-founder of PIE?]

Keith Hose took over as Chairman in June at a meeting of the Executive Committee at Ivor Street, Camden, NW1 in June 1975 following PIE’s first AGM in March held in Edinburgh.

According to the NCCL Annual Report 74/75 on the work and membership of the Gay Rights Committee Keith had been serving on the NCCL Gay Rights Committee for the year of 1974 (see below) when he attended the event “First International Gay Rights Congress” organised by Ian Dunn and Derek Ogg for 18 -22 December. Keith attended (on behalf of NCCL GCR or on his own behalf?) and heard Frank Kameny of the US Mattachine Society speak calling for more militancy in the movement.

Six months later, while still a member of the NCCL Gay Rights Committee with fellow PIE member Nettie Pollard, Keith Hose concurrently held the office of PIE’s chairman. Michael Schofield who was on the NCCL GCR’s committee with Keith at the time had also been involved with the Albany Trust since 1968 [see further for Schofield’s telephone conversation with Dr Charlotte Wolff over Peter Righton’s attempt to take control of the Trust’s counselling case files in 1971]

See further for more information on the NCCL’s association with PIE’s second chairman after Keith Hose: Did NCCL’s 1976 trawl of List 99 radicalise PIE’s Tom O’Carroll?

PIE Newsletter No.6 [Published late July/early August 1975]

The Executive Committee of PIE met on 22 June 1975 when 23 year old Keith Hose stepped in as Chairman and Treasurer, with Warren Middleton as the new Vice-Chairman (newsletter production).

In July 2011 Warren Middleton (a.k.a John Parratt) John Parratt, 63, a former vice chairman of Pie, also known as Warren Middleton, was jailed for 12 months for having indecent images.

Interestingly, Parratt’s address in this 1990 Daily Star article is given as Harwood Court, Upper Richmond Road, Putney is just over a mile from Elm Guest House.

All the other original members of the Executive Committee had resigned leaving Keith as the the only real choice. Michael Hanson, a student at Edinburgh University, who had been a member of Scottish Minorities Group and founded PIE all while taking his final exams was leaving the country.

“Keith’s appointment was very much to be expected as he has vast experience of the ‘gay rights movement’ and is very well-known to prominent campaigners. A long serving member of the EC, Keith will be remembered by all those who came to the PIE London gathering in March. Like Michael, he is a dedicated campaigner and is completely open about his proclivities. Having substantial influence in the gay scene, he is also a prominent member of Icebreakers, and is a member of the NCCL Gay Rights Sub-Committee. Additionally, Keith will be remembered by many readers as the author of a highly intelligent article on paedophilia in ‘Quorum’ magazine. He has been the author of numerous other articles and has recently been featured in both ‘Time Out’ magazine and ‘Gay News’. He will shortly be writing a feature article on the aims of PIE and how our organisation is attempting to tackle the sexual problems of pedophiles – at the invitation of ‘Time Out‘.”

Warren Middleton (John Parratt) was a member of the British Library then engaged in research on the works of the Victorian Calamites.

1978: PIE raids, William Blake and Lord Margadale’s estate at Fonthill Wiltshire

Children of the future age

Reading this indignant page

Know that in a former time

Love! Sweet Love! was thought a crime

(A Little Girl Lost – William Blake from Songs of Innocence & Experience)

On 7 December 1977 Cyril Townsend MP had introduced his private member’s bill aimed at ‘preventing the exploitation of children by their use in the production of films or photographic material of an obscene of pornographic character’

HC Deb 07 December 1977 vol 940 c1404

Mr. Cyril D. Townsend, supported by Mr. Nigel Forman, Mr. Kenneth Baker, Mr. Peter Bottomley, Mr. Nicholas Scott, Mr. Hugh Dykes, Mr. Michael Alison, Mr. Richard Luce, Mr. A. J. Beith, Mr. George Rodgers, Mr. Ken Weetch and Mr. John Cartwright, presented a Bill to prevent the exploitation of children by their use in the production of films or photographic material of an obscene or pornographic character: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time upon Friday 10th February and to be printed [Bill 16].

Following PIE’s June 1978 AGM, on 13 June PIE had sent out an emergency bulletin to its members informing them PIE had been infiltrated by the News of the World and that police raids had taken place at Executive Committee Member’s houses. All of the material for the July issue of Magpie had been seized.

The emergency bulletin of 13 June is most likely the document below (although undated). Reportedly the police had seized a large number of PIE’s files “and we feel that they are determined and that it will only be a matter of time before they obtain a list.”

“It may be that people in positions of power and influence are using the possibility of a charge under the Obscenity Laws as a excuse for a witch-hunt against PIE and its members.”

If the above were true surely it would have been much more advisable for the police to hold tight to wait and raid during August 1978 once the Child Protection Act had come into force? Using the antiquated Obscenity Laws, ripe for reform and much criticised already, when the Act had been specifically drafted to create offences for which PIE members could have been charged with was, with hindsight, a strange decision and led to articles like Alan Rusbridger’s on ‘Why the DPP resurrected an ancient law to deal with pedophiles’ [Guardian, 14 March 1981]

Despite PIE and NCCL’s combined and best lobbying efforts to dilute or better still, derail the Bill’s passage through parliament, (one tactic being to publish to each MP the booklet drafted by the Albany Trust under Sir Harold Haywood’s chairmanship in April 1978) on 20th July 1978 the Child Protection Bill received royal assent, coming into force a month later.

The June bulletin signed off with the the first stanza of A Little Girl Lost by Blake.

In August PIE circulated the news bulletin below to advise members the act was in force and which kind of photos of children might be deemed ‘indecent’. The bulletin suggests a potential legitimate reason under the act for showing, possessing or distributing indecent photos of children would be psychiatrists showing patients images of child abuse as a form of aversion therapy.

And what of the significance of the Blake quote?

Blake had long been a friend and pupil of Richard ‘Dicky’ Cosway, who had been appointed Painter to the Prince Regent in 1785 – the only time this royal appointment was ever made. Cosway had created a craze for secret lovers to give presents to one another – borne of the Prince Regent’s secret marriage to Maria Fitzherbert [read more here] – miniature eye portraits.

“Cosway was not only a famous and fashionable painter; he was also a mesmerist and magician who practised arcana related to alchemical and cabbalistic teaching. There are reports of erotic ceremonies, the imbibing of drugs or ‘elixirs’, and ritual nudity. Blake was no stranger to the symbols or beliefs of a man such as Cosway – the manuscript of the poem he was now writing contains many drawings of bizarre sexual imagery, including women sporting giant phalli and children engaged in erotic practices with adults.” [Blake, Peter Ackroyd, p.210]

“When William Blake died in 1827, his widow Catherine appointed Frederick Tatham his literary and artistic executor. No sooner had Tatham accepted the position than he was, in the words of William Michael Rossetti, brother of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “beset” by “Swedenborgians, Irvingites, or other extreme sectaries”, and compelled to thrust “a gag into the piteous mouth of Blake’s corpse”. What these timid souls feared was that Blake’s remains would disclose his intense, frequently obsessive and occasionally pornographic interest in sex. Tatham’s job amounted to a full-scale expurgation of what Blake’s less unbuttoned followers considered obscene. Blake had left many drawings and manuscripts containing his most explicit sexual, religious and political expressions – all three were linked for him – and Tatham felt obliged to destroy these. The loss was irreparable, but some of the cover-up – literally – was less extreme. Joined by Blake’s friend John Linnell, on some works Tatham only erased the offending words or images. When this proved impracticable they resorted to a fig leaf. Blake’s original nude self-portrait for his Milton exhibited an erect and oddly blackened penis. One of Blake’s prudish descendants mitigated the shock caused by the poet’s proud member by drawing knickers over it. Thankfully, modern technology has restored much of this censored material, and what emerges is a vivid recognition that for Blake, sex was at the centre of his spiritual and domestic life.” [Why Mrs Blake cried by Marsha Keith Schuchard, Gary Lachman, The Independent, 12 March 2006]

What is little mentioned in connection with Blake is that he and Richard Cosway, along with others such as the landscape painter Loutherbourg (set designer at Drury Lane Theatre) were together conducting ‘magick’ rituals involving sex with children and much of what Tatham and Linell were trying to delete or obscure were Blake’s depictions of children engaged in sexual acts with adults.

William Blake and the Cultures of Radical Christianity By Robert Rix, published 2007

Why Mrs Blake Cried: William Blake and the Erotic Imagination By Marsha Keith Schuchard, published May 2013

In 1770 the child who Lord Byron called “England’s wealthiest son”, William Beckford, aged 10, inherited Fonthill on the death of his father Alderman William Beckford, Lord Mayor of London. In 1881 to celebrate his 21st birthday William threw a 3 day ‘ritualistic and magical celebration’ at Fonthill which sounds not dissimilar to a son et lumiere show combined with the sexual abuse of children, noted as he was for his pederasty as much as his aesthetic appreciation of art and his collections.

“In the autumn of 1781, shortly after being elected to the British Academy of Art as a landscape painter, Alsatian-born artist Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg was hired by the wealthy young aesthete William Beckford to prepare a private birthday spectacle at his mansion in Wiltshire. De Loutherbourg, who was also chief scenographer at Drury Lane theatre and the inventor of a recent commercial “moving picture” entertainment called theEidophusikon, promised to produce “a mysterious something that the eye has not seen nor the heart conceived.” Beckford wanted an Oriental spectacle that would completely ravish the senses of his guests, not least so that he could enjoy a sexual tryst with a thirteen year old boy, William Courtenay, and Louisa Beckford, his own cousin’s wife.

The resulting three day party and spectacle staged over Christmas 1781 became one of the scandals of the day, and ultimately forced William Beckford into decades of exile in Europe to escape accusations of sodomy. However, this Oriental spectacle also had a special significance for the history of Romantic aesthetics and modern-day cinema. Loutherbourg and Beckford’s collaboration provided the inspiration for William to write his scintillating Gothic novel, Vathek, and impelled Philippe himself into revising his moving-picture program in dramatically new ways. Ultimately this saturnalian party of Christmas 1781 constituted a pioneering experiment in applying the aesthetic of the sublime to virtual reality technology. It also led Loutherbourg to anticipate the famous nineteenth-century “Phantasmagoria” of French showman, Gaspard Robertson, by producing in 1782 a miniature Gothic movie scene based on the Pandemonium episode in Milton’s Paradise Lost.” [The Virtual Infernal: Philippe de Loutherbourg, William Beckford and the Spectacle of the Sublime, Ian McMalman, Romanticism on the net, 2007]

While at Trinity College Cambridge, (according to Robin Bryans in the The Dust has never settled (1992)) a 22 year old Antony Blunt had started the ‘vogue for the work and life-style of William Beckford’ [p.576] forming a ‘Beckford cult.’ In the February 1929 edition of The Venture (published at Cambridge for 6 issues until June 1930) Blunt heaped praise on ‘the dazzling architectural ensemble’ of Beckford’s Fonthill estate, calling it ‘artistically the best production of the Gothic revival’ while Bryans refers to it as ‘a vast neo-Gothic country house with a megalomaniac tower”. In 1934 Blunt started lecturing on art history at the Courtauld Institute, 20 Portman Square, where Queen Mary of Teck (the current Queen’s paternal grandmother) would attend to listen. Robin Bryans had this to say on Queen Mary and Blunt’s relationship:

“It was almost as if a conspiracy existed between the Russian spy and the dowager Queen, because they both knew perfectly well the homosexual history of newcastle men going up the white marble staircase at Clumber. Silently, they were aware of William Beckford’s escape to the Continent after buggering his schoolboy cousin, and the resemblance that incident bore to Queen Mary’s own husband who died with the famous words ‘Bugger Bognor’ for he, as the King of England, had been obliged to flaunt the authority of his own Attorney General by getting another bugger out of the country.” [p.199]

Clumber Park was the home of the Pelham-Clintons, Dukes of Newcastle (bearing in mind Peter Righton also had the name Pelham). Who had King George V broken the law for and assisted to flee the country to avoid prosecution by “his own” Attorney-General?

The Dust has never settled, p.148

p.576

p.397

p.199

p.476

p.149

Inspired by his birthday celebrations the following year he wrote “Vathek” and built Fonthill Abbey on the grounds of the estate, creating an ‘Arcadian idyll’ according to the sale particulars of 1829.

Fonthill History website http://www.fonthill.co.uk

James Morrison, MP for Ipswich Suffolk and a Victorian haberdasher called the ‘Napoleon of Shopkeepers’ (ever since he’d made a fortune stockpiling black crepe in time for William IV’s death), eventually bought the Fonthill estate in 1830 despite the decayed state of the Abbey. He restored and extended the grounds and passed the estate down the Morrison family until it reached Lord Margadale, the father of Sir Peter Morrison MP (Con: Chester 1974 – 1992).

A man who grew up in Hindon Wiltshire living near the Fonthill estate gives an account of seeing Lord Johnnie Morrison at the hunt one New Year’s Day in 1952-1953 and also has this to say about his son Peter:

“Morrison was father to Charles Morrison tory mp for Devizes and Peter Morrison tory mp for Chester. Johnnie himself was given the hereditary peerage of Margadale now passed to his grandson. Peter Morrison – who had no experience of life outside of the Fonthill estate, Eton and Tory party somehow managed to develop extreme right wing views on morality while flouting them in his personal life. Is it any wonder that a man from such a background would see his ‘droit de seigneur’ as young working class boys in care homes as an alternative to scullery maids?” [Sir Peter Morrison of Fonthill – I knew your family, Ian Bone, 8 November 2012 – with thanks to @LordBonkers for signposting]

Despite Barry Strevens, Thatcher’s former bodyguard informing her Morrison was holding ‘sex parties’ with under-age boys (presumably not at Fonthill with accompanying theatrical displays as tradition might have dictated), she decided to promoted him to Deputy Chairman of the Conservatives.

Sir Peter Morrison has also been implicated in the North Wales child abuse scandal by Rod Richards (former MP and ex-leader of the Welsh Conservatives) and in January 2015 allegations surfaced that he had raped a boy at Elm Guest House

Murder link to Thatcher aide accused of raping teenage boy [Telegraph 5 June 2015]

Former Minister says Thatcher aide pedophile preyed on boys’ home – and Hague should have known [Daily Mail 27 October 2012]

Thatcher’s bodyguard says he warned her about underage sex rumours about close aide amid claims senior ministers were named in dossier [Daily Mail 27 July 2014] which also named Rhodes Boyson and Sir Keith Joseph [more to post on Albany Trust’s financial requests to Neville Vincent in 1973/4 – Joseph’s cousin and from the family that Bovis was co-owned with]

Keith Joseph By Andrew Denham, Mark Garnett, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations Mark Garnett p.234

ibid, p.233

June 1975: Who was PIE’s ‘Man in New Zealand?’

In May/June 1975 Keith Hose took over as Chairman of PIE. Two of PIE’s co-founders from the Scottish Minorities Group, Ian Campbell Dunn and Michael Hanson, ostensibly handed the reins over to Hose, a recent graduate.

The third co-founder is as yet unknown. [For further info, or just more questions: Who was the 3rd SMG co-founder of PIE? ]

“PIE’s Man in New Zealand has sent us some information regarding the Crime Amendment Bill which seeks to allow homosexual acts between consenting adults from the age of 20. A proposed amendment to the Bill is to be made by Dr C A Wall, MP for Porirua. He seeks to introduce a punishment of up to 2 years in jail for anyone who claims to a person under the age of 20 that homosexual behaviour is normal. Yes, you have read that last sentence correctly. It is to be hoped that reason will prevail in the NZ parliament and the amendment which would have the 1984-type effect of muzzling not only individuals, but libraries, newspapers, social scientists etc etc will be defeated by any number of votes to one.”

The Dorian Society became established in New Zealand the year Antony Grey took over as Secretary to Albany Trust and through contact with Grey was transformed from a social club into a politically active organisation campaigning for law reform

“The Dorian Society (1962–88) was the first New Zealand organisation for homosexual men. It was primarily a social club and avoided political action. In 1963 it took the first steps towards law reform by forming a legal subcommittee that collected books and other resources. It also provided legal advice to its members. By 1967 it sought advice from the English Homosexual Law Reform Society and Albany Trust on the legislative changes occurring there. This led to a New Zealand society dedicated to law reform. Its first project was a petition, signed by 75 prominent citizens, presented to (and rejected by) Parliament in 1968.” [http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/culture/homosexual-law-reform/setting-the-scene ]

While the Albany Trust had support from the Anglican Bishops of Woolwich (Dr John Robinson) and Stepney (Father Trevor Huddleston) as well as Canon Eric James (later HM Chaplain to the Queen), Jack Goodwin the secretary of NZ HLRS was successful in securing the support of Eric Gowing, the Anglican Bishop of Auckland. [http://benloveshomosexualreform.weebly.com/key-groups-and-individuals.html ]