ABSTRACT
On a Friday evening sometime in 1954, John Wolfenden, later Lord Wolfenden, on boarding the sleeper train from Liverpool to London, perused the list of fellow travellers, ‘as one always does’ (Wolfenden 1976:129). He was entertained to find that one of his fellow travellers was a government minister, the Home Secretary, Sir Maxwell Fyfe. The subsequent brief encounter between these two men was described by Wolfenden in his autobiography in the following terms:
As the train left I wrote him a note suggesting that if it would save his time next week we might have some conversation now. His detective took it to him and came back with the reply that the Home Secretary would be very glad to see me straight away.
