The Trials of Radclyffe Hall by Diana Souhami (surface ebook reader .TXT) 📗

larky man, enjoyed the nonsense of it, but there was no way he could focus Fox-Pitt’s mind. He brought the case to a conclusion. The jury was confused. It found that Fox-Pitt had used the words ‘grossly immoral’, but thought that he had meant them to apply to Radclyffe Hall’s psychical research paper and not to ‘unnatural vice, unchastity, or sexual immorality’. She was awarded £500 damages with costs.

‘Home to a much relieved and happy evening’, Una wrote in her diary. Next day was Saturday and they stayed in bed late together and read the massive newspaper coverage of the case in The Times, the Daily Sketch, the Daily Mirror. ‘Wealthy spiritualist wins £500 damages in Slander Suit’; ‘Feda and MVA Lady Troubridge’s Dead Cousin’; ‘Lord Chief Puzzled’; ‘Laughter in Court’; ‘Strange Slander Suit’; ‘The Spirits of the Dead’, were some of the headlines. John and Una had tea with the Visettis, then went on to dinner with Gabrielle Enthoven and ‘Brother’ – Toupie Lowther. Una said she thought Toupie was a hermaphrodite. They played the gramophone and John and Brother danced.

Fox-Pitt did not pay the £500. Radclyffe Hall had cleared her name in court, but at a price. Publicity was wide but cheap and sardonic. The press enjoyed the joke of it all, the sexual innuendo, the frolics of lesbians, the antics of the upper classes with time on their hands. They did not address Radclyffe Hall’s courage in bringing the slander suit, or any wider issues of sexual politics. The Lord Chief Justice had tried to steer the court toward some sort of analysis of sexual morality. Fox-Pitt would have none of it, though his views were clear.

He appealed against the verdict and a retrial was ordered. Sir George Lewis advised Radclyffe Hall to let things rest. ‘It was futile spending so much money and enduring more odious publicity when Fox-Pitt would never pay a penny.’ After several adjournments and the passing of time, the case withered away.

Society now knew that Radclyffe Hall was a lesbian. In the mind of the establishment she stood convicted of sexual immorality, gross indecency, unchastity and the rest. Fox-Pitt and Troubridge were two more of the enemies she had made. They were the kind of enemy that lies in wait. She had more than tweaked the tiger’s tail. Within months a Conservative MP, Frederick Macquister, proposed that a clause ‘Acts of Gross Indecency by Females’ be added to the Criminal Law Amendment Act which so sensationally indicted Oscar Wilde. Macquister thought that female morals were declining and that lesbianism threatened the birth rate. His clause was passed by the House of Commons then debated in the House of Lords. Lord Birkenhead warned: ‘You are going to tell the whole world there is such an offence, to bring it to the notice of women who have never heard of it, never dreamed of it. I think this is a very great mischief.’ The insult of silence on the matter was thought best. Existing laws could be tailored in order to indict.

After the trial, John was ill for a fortnight. Though she liked to appear invincible, she coped badly with stress. Phoebe Hoare wrote that her husband Oliver now forbade her to have anything to do with John. John stayed in bed with Una, who read aloud Ben Hur, Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde. On 17 December Una cropped her beloved’s golden hair and made her more of a man. Ladye had liked the softer look, but Ladye had had her day. Christmas brought ‘evidential proof’ of John’s commitment to Una. She said Una could be buried on one of the shelves in the Highgate mausoleum alongside herself and Ladye. ‘I feel I can never be really unhappy again’, Una wrote in her diary. She went to mass and thanked God that such love and a roof over her head were infinitely assured.

RADCLYFFE HALL

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Octopi

Chip Chase, large, castellated, with turrets and mock battlements, was a snook cocked at Troubridge. Una’s daily diary entries began ‘John and I’, the order of merit as understood by both. ‘Were we comfortable!’ she wrote. Comfort mattered greatly to them. It coloured their vision of paradise. Within months they created what seemed a settled home. They had a maid, a cook, three house servants, two gardeners and a full-time secretary. The antique oak furniture was polished daily with beeswax and turpentine, there were flowers in all the rooms in thick glass vases, log fires burned.

Servants came and went with terrible rapidity. A bilious attack or a burned pudding and they were out within the hour. As one secretary put it, ‘Miss Hall had a fiendish temper which was exacerbated by Lady Troubridge, everyone except Lady Troubridge it seemed being in the wrong.’ Both had a sharp eye for specks of dust on the Cromwellian clock or the Dole cupboard and a sharp tongue for the housemaid. Tradespeople had to meet exacting standards too. ‘It behoved everyone to keep in with the couple as they were good customers and generous!’

John and Una’s bedrooms interconnected. They got into each other’s beds for reading aloud at night, morning breakfast and the rest, but they slept alone. ‘Why in the name of wonder should anyone in any conceivable circumstances wish for a bedfellow’, Una wrote. ‘Nothing has ever led me to believe that comfortable repose can really be achieved with one’s head pillowed upon another’s breast or with someone else’s head riding upon one’s bosom.’ And John said that not since she was twenty had she ‘wanted to spend a whole night of sleep with a woman’.

Her study was on the ground floor. French windows led to the garden. Files and books, meticulously ordered, lined the walls. She worked at an oak refectory table, on which was a globe of the world, a silver mounted horse’s hoof and her seal ‘La Verité Me Guide’. In a corner was a shrine to Ladye of a candlelit