ABSTRACT
Reinforced by clauses regulating importuning in the Vagrancy Acts 1898 and 1912, the 1885 Act cast a wide net over men who became ever more nervous about their vulnerability to exposure – the standard epithet repeatedly applied was, in Weeks’ words, the ‘blackmailer’s charter’. The Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, appointed in 1951, is also said to have egged prosecutions along, and he had undoubtedly promised ‘a new drive against male vice’ that would ‘rid England of this plague’. Formally and informally, the social problem of homosexuality was for the most part subterranean in the first half of the twentieth century, apprehended through half-truths and generally little discussed. The Wolfenden Committee had been established in 1954 by Sir David Maxwell Fyfe and the Conservative Government in part to stem what was deemed to be the unwelcome impact of unwholesome publicity about trials for indecent and unnatural offences under the 1861 and 1885 Acts.
