Another Quiet Hero Bites The Dust

[endure]

Antony Grey: campaigner for homosexual rights

The late Lord Arran said of Antony Grey that he had “done more than any single man to bring this social problem to the notice of the public”. The “social problem” was the persecution of homosexuals, and Antony Grey liked to reply that, for his part, “Lord Arran had done more than any married man”.

“Antony Grey” was a pseudonym that he assumed in 1962 when there were real dangers of police attention for any campaigner for gay rights. His actual name was Edgar Wright. He was responsible for guiding the 8th Earl of Arran, hereditary Scottish peer and newspaper columnist, who led the campaign in the House of Lords, Leo Abse, proposer in the House of Commons, and Roy Jenkins, as Home Secretary, through tortuous parliamentary sessions that resulted in an Act which stated that “nothwithstandng any statutory or common law provision, a homosexual act in private shall not be an offence, provided that the parties consent thereto and have attained the age of 21”.

The Act ended the rule of section 11 of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, known as “the blackmailers’ charter”, which had sent Oscar Wilde to jail in 1895 and in tandem with the Vagrancy Act of 1898 had made it illegal for male homosexuals to so much as flirt with one another.

Grey was born in Wilmslow, Cheshire, the only son of a half-Syrian mother, Gladys, née Rihan, and a chartered accountant, Alex Wright. Never an “obvious homosexual”, he came out to his parents when he was 32, after finding the partner who was still with him when he died. Aware that the news deeply pained them, though they did make plain their liking for his partner, he always warned young gays not to be self-indulgent about coming out but to be watchful of their family’s needs.

Winning a place at Magdalene College, Cambridge, he studied history and left aged 20 with a degree and already determined “to do whatever I could to fight the iniquitous laws which had destroyed the genius of Oscar Wilde and brought untold misery to many thousands of otherwise blameless men”. His first real job, apart from a brief stint on the Yorkshire Post, was in 1949 as a researcher, and in due course lobbyist, for the British Iron & Steel Federation, later dissolved into British Steel, while reading for the Bar. His employers were contesting the steel nationalisation plans of the Attlee Government and he said that he learnt the techniques of lobbying that he applied in the 1960s in the Commons and Lords on behalf of homosexuals from trying in the 1950s to keep famous regional companies from losing their independence.

Grey stayed at the federation for 12 years. The opportunity to fulfil his vow to redress the injury to Oscar Wilde and others came at last in 1962 when his voluntary work for the Homosexual Law Reform Society led to an offer of the paid post of secretary, which he held for the next two decades. He augmented his small stipend with a Saturday subbing job on The Observer, whose proprietor-editor David Astor supported the cause of homosexual law reform. He nearly did not receive the secretaryship because the first trustees, who included the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes, married to J. B. Priestley, were frightened that a homosexual would be too vulnerable in so high profile a post.

In the quarter-century 1931-1955, when Grey was growing up, British police pulled in 26,676 men from Ulster and Shetland to the Isle of Wight on charges of consensual adult homosexuality.

Victory came with the Royal Assent to the Sexual Offences Act on July 27, 1967, freeing gay men from prosecution under certain rigorous qualifications, including that participants must be over 21. It has been the task of subsequent pressure groups, including the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, the Gay Liberation Front and Outrage, to amend the law and attitudes further.

It was to address the healing needed that in 1958 the Homosexual Law Reform Society created the Albany Trust — named for Hawkes’s and Priestley’s set in Albany, the Piccadilly chambers owned by Peterhouse, Cambridge, where the start-up meetings were held — as a charity to help homosexuals and any persons suffering from intolerance, persecution or social injustice. Grey ran the Albany Trust as well as the Homosexual Law Reform Society, retiring as its director in 1977.

In his later years he qualified as a therapist and ran a blog, Anticant, chastising bigotry. He served on the executives of the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty) and the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.

He was hurt in later life by a historical revisionism that with little knowledge of the true anguish of the 1950s wrote him off as a trimmer and compromiser who gave away too much to get the admittedly imperfect 1967 Act through. His nom de plume became so much a part of him that in the end only his relatives and partner and very oldest friends called him “Edgar”. It was itself a salute to compromise, for he believed there were “very few black-and-white issues in life” and so chose to be called Grey.

A different cause of dismay in the concluding months of his life was the suggestion in two biographies that, as he put it himself, he had been conducting a “lower middle-class” campaign in the 1950s and 1960s, having no conception of how much homosexuality the upper classes got away with despite the law. This hidden freedom at the top at last explained, he thought, why (with the exception of E. M. Forster, who gave the Homosexual Law Reform Society £5,000) the “rich queens” wouldn’t put a penny to his efforts.

In I995 the Pink Paper gave him an award for lifetime achievement, and in 2007 Stonewall, the modern lobbying group, made him its Hero of the Year. He was the author of several books, most prominently Quest for Justice (1992) about the 1967 Act, and Personal Tapestry (2008), a more intimate memoir. In 1962 he was co-author of a History of the British Steel Industry. A tribute to him, Souvenirs of Sirmione, was published this year. He is survived by his partner of 49 years, Eric Thompson.

Antony Grey (A. E. G. Wright), campaigner for homosexual rights, was born on October 6, 1927. He died on April 30, 2010, aged 82

[Ijustwannateach]

Thanks for keeping us up-to-date about so many of these figures. Kind of amazing to think that the era of intolerance was so close- within the lifetimes of many members of this forum- and yet now so far that its activists are passing away.

[endure]

When I was at school I had a Saturday job in a local tailor shop. One of the guys who worked there had actually spent time in prison because a vicious neighbour reported him to the police. That was in 1963 - only 47 years ago.

[catmac]

Thanks for that update, Endure. It brought back some painful memories of those dreadful times, but I also remember with pride my involvement with him in the HLRS and the Albany Trust, and sitting in the Strangers' Gallery when the Sexual Offenses Bill was passed by the House of Commons.

As you said, it seems so long ago and the world was so different then.

[phayao]

The change he brought to the lives of thousands of British men and women is the best monument in history to this GREAT MAN.