254
DWIGHT MACDONALD
earth rose again and one's faith in the jury system was at least
momentarily revived.
The victory would have been impossible without the 1959
Obscene Publications Act-the work of a scholarly young Labour
M.P. named Roy Jenkins-which,
inter alia,
provides that expert
testimony may
be
introduced as to the qualities of a book. The
defense used this privilege liberally, presenting no less than thirty–
five witnesses including C . Day Lewis, E. M. Forster, Dame Rebecca
West, the Bishop of Woolwich, Canon Theodore Richard (Master
of the Temple), Raymond Williams (lecturer at Oxford and author
of
Culture and Society),
Stephen Potter, Dr. Helen Gardner of
Oxford, the King Alfred Professor of English Literature at Liver–
pool University, Sir Stanley Unwin of the publishing firm, Richard
Hoggart (lecturer at Leicester University and author of
The Uses
of Literacy),
the editors of
The Guardian
and
The Yorkshire Post,
Dr. Noel Annan (Provost of King's College, Cambridge), and Miss
Sarah Beryl Jones, Classics Mistress and Senior Librarian at the
Keighley Girls Grammar School in Yorkshire.
The prosecution called one witness- the policeman who had
bought a test copy from the publishers. The explanation I heard
was that this gave them last licks at the jury; if true this was one of
the many mistakes they made, for sounder strategy would have led
them to weaken rather than intensify the jury's memory of Mr.
Griffith-Jones. But I think it more likely they called no competing
experts because they couldn't get any to match the defense's line-up.
I was told, for instance, that the prosecution asked T. S. Eliot to
testify and that his response was to offer his services to the defense
if
they felt it crucial (which apparently they didn't).
This 35-0 lineup doesn't indicate the break-up of The Estab–
lishment but it does suggest there has been profound reshaping of
that venerable organism. The claim of the
Times
still to speak for
it, often challenged of late, was not strengthened by the agitated
editorial it printed the next day, which concluded:
What makes
Lady Chatterley's Lover
unique is that all the details,
circumstances and sensations of copulation are made explicit. Here,
too, it may be argued that LAWRENCE [in caps in
Tffiles]
is de–
scribing no more than what most adults, and nowadays many adoles–
cents, have experienced. [One wonders about that "most." Does
