STRANGE DEATH OF THE ENGLISH EUPHEMISM

Brian Masters argues that we are no

more perverted than we used to be. It's just that newspapers no longer hide the truth

A FUTURE social historian given the task of examining the nature of sexual offences which came before our courts in the peri- od, say, between 1980 and 1993, or at least the manner in which they were reported in the press, might with reason conclude that the English suddenly discovered huge vari- eties of experience which their habitual decorousness had previously denied them. Cases in which a gentleman consents to having his penis nailed to a plank for fun, a dolphin is allegedly masturbated, incest within one family is committed on such a complicated scale, involving grandparents, uncles and cousins, that nobody can work out who is related to whom, nor in which way, suggest an unprecedented explosion of vice. Men now apparently routinely rape their wives, and infants are violated at weekends. Can it really be that we have become a nation of fiends?

Fortunately, this unpalatable reflection is not supported by analysis of the longer term. While it would be otiose to pretend that these things do not really happen, it is wrong to imagine they are happening for the first time Minority aberrant behaviour is, after all, a constant in life. What has occurred is that the reporting of such cases is more candid now than at any time this Century, and press collusion with the courts !n disguising degradation by wrapping it up a code-word or euphemism has all but disappeared. Judges and lawyers have long been reluctant that the general populace should know what they were about. Sir Edward Coke, the 17th-century Lord Chief Justice, said that the ancient Britons wrote their law in Greek, 'to the end that their disci- Nine might not be made common among the vulgar'. Exclusivity was promoted by the evolution of jargon designed to obfus- cate the matter at issue, and the one sub- ject which needed above all to be so smothered that it was unrecognisable was that relating to any aspect of sexual con- duct. It was deemed too delicate to expose to the vulgar, lest perhaps they should understand better than was for their good, and so a whole panoply of Latin terms was devised to describe what men and women did to and with each other. By the 19th century the system was beginning to falter, and secrecy was seri- ously undermined by the passing of the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, which made divorce subject to judicial process and therefore easier to obtain. (Before that, one had to go through a private act of parliament, available only to the wealthy and well-connected, and adultery itself was identified by the delicious euphemism criminal conversation.) It was also easier to report, and Queen Victoria was horrified by the salacious detail to be found in some newspapers. Even the police column on page 11 of the Times provided a regular feast for those with an appetite for mild prurience. The Queen wrote in anguish to the Lord Chancellor that these divorce cases were 'of so scan- dalous a character that it makes it almost impossible for a paper to be trusted in the hands of a young lady or boy'. She hoped that something might be done to banish from the breakfast-table newspaper reports which were worse than French novels, and whose effect 'must be most pernicious to the public morals of the country'.

The Lord Chancellor tried to introduce a measure to placate the Queen, but failed. Nevertheless, the divorce courts did contrive to cover the piano legs somewhat. In 1866 Captain George Cavendish divorced his wife on the grounds of adul- tery, and letters from her lover were given in evidence. They described exotic prac- tices all right, but they were for the most `Fancy a game of chess, you bastard?' part comprehensible only to a scholar who knew what cunnilingus, urinam bibendi, fae- ces devorandi, and delicias omnium corporis partium meant without having to look them up. Presumably it was the educated classes, not the vulgar, who were glued to their newspapers.

Divorce cases continued to be reported in detail until after the first world war, when the so-called Russell baby case, which began in 1922, proved too much to take. It occasioned enormous public inter- est owing to the peculiar defence of Christabel Russell that her husband was father of her child despite their never hav- ing had proper intercourse. The child was conceived, it was said, by fecundatio ab extra, or, if it makes it any easier, intercru- ral congress. The court found in her favour, but Parliament soon afterwards passed leg- islation prohibiting the publication of details in divorce proceedings. Adultery was generally called 'misconduct', but evi- dence for it must remain hidden. That which even Edgar in King Lear euphemisti- cally described as doing 'the act of dark- ness' was to remain in darkness as far as the reading public was concerned. The courts continue to be cautious in their admission of frank evidence, and if a peti- tion for divorce is made with the claim that the marriage was never consummated, the wife may be said to have lived tamquam soro rem .

Witnesses quickly became adept at inventing their own circumlocutions, which mocked the very euphemisms they had been encouraged to use. lady Colin Camp- bell, suspected of having an affair with a 19th-century Duke of Marlborough, declared, 'We have only been having a talk about Gladstone.' Miss Savidge, a young telephonist spotted under a tree in Hyde Park with the MP Sir Leo Money, did even better. 'She stated that she and Sir Leo were discussing matters of industrial eco- nomics, in which she had been for a long time interested.'

Nor was it only in matrimonial matters that anodyne phrases prevailed. The 1885 act relating to sex with a girl under the age of 16 described the offence as 'unlawful carnal knowledge'. (Incidentally, a statute in the reign of Henry 11 fixed the age of consent at ten, which presupposes that sex- ual contact with young girls, even perhaps with girls under ten, was then common, if it had to be prohibited by law.) Rape was known as 'criminal assault', and a 'serious offence' was so distasteful that one was meant to enquire no further. The pages of the News of the World (known in legal cir- cles as the judges' trade paper because it provided a handy guide to sentencing poli- cy) were replete with 'serious offences' in the 1950s and provided boys of my genera- tion with many a perplexing Sunday morn- ing. The long-defunct university courts offered one of the most extravagant recorded euphemisms when a Daisy Hop- kins was convicted in 1891 at Cambridge

for 'walking with a member of the universi- ty' and sentenced to 14 days in gaol. The Lord Chief Justice quashed the sentence on appeal on the (to us) obvious grounds that it was unreasonable to infer from the language used in the charge that she was a prostitute.

Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph con- trived to maintain its respectability while competing with the News of the World for nudges and winks. 'Serious offences' (com- mitted usually by headmasters or clergy- men) popped up almost weekly in its pages, and when something even more subtle had to be intimated, the courts obliged with the choicest circumlocutions. A Lambeth labourer, convicted of 'carnal knowledge' of a girl of 13, had been denied sex by his wife for years; this was conveyed by the nice phrase that his married life was 'without domestic bliss'. (By 1992, the cli- mate had changed so dramatically that the newspaper was able to report the libel case brought by Jani Allan against Channel 4 with hardly an evasion, and what used to be snippets on page nine now swallowed up the whole of page three. Miss Allan's sexual history was laid before us, the type of contraceptive she used was announced, and her performance with Mr Terre'blanche, observed through a key- hole, was related to the detail of his green underpants and large naked bottom in movement. Miss Allan's alleged remark to a friend that he was 'a great lay but a little heavy' would have been unthinkable in print — let alone in the Daily Telegraph 20 years earlier.) When it came to homosexual offences, the degree of concealment resulted in utter confusion for even the most dedicat- ed fan of the Sunday papers. How was one to know the difference between 'soliciting' and 'importuning' for an immoral pur- pose? What was one to make of the evi- dence, given by a policeman when a Member of Parliament appeared before magistrates in 1953, that the defendant was observed in a public lavatory to 'look in the direction of their persons'? No won- der Professor Derek Jackson, the Oxford physicist, claimed that he always peed in the street when in London. 'You may be fined a few pounds for committing a nui- sance,' he said, tut in a public lavatory you risk two years in prison because a policeman in plainclothes says you smiled at him.' Even the policeman who made this kind of arrest was generally known by the substitute term of an agent provocateur, mischievously defined by A.P. Herbert as 'an official spy who causes an offence to secure a conviction'. Since the -British would never admit to anything so nasty, they artfully borrowed its French clothing.

A measure of our innocence in 1953 was the publication of the word 'homosexual' with a hyphen; it had rarely been seen in print outside learned medical journals.

Buggery and bestiality were so embar- rassing they were never identified as such, and even today the BBC remains so reti- cent that the words are not broadcast. In print, buggery would sometimes be called 'the abominable offence', even when it was so little abominated by the population. A young policeman on a new beat on the Suffolk/Essex border in the 1950s came upon a most astonishing sight in a remote village at the end of a road leading nowhere. He rubbed his eyes, reported to his sergeant, who would not believe him. Both men returned to the village to find men buggering one another quite openly against barns and trees at night. The case came to Essex assizes in front of Cecil Havers, with a young Frederick Lawton prosecuting, and no fewer than 17 ordi- nary, bewildered men stood in the dock together.

Bestiality was so taboo that it often escaped mention in the press altogether (just as people found sleeping on grave- stones remain anonymous because no one would believe it possible). Offences involv- ing animals are not at all uncommon in the more primitive parts of the country. A case in Cornwall which involved a man, a broomstick and a cow received perfuncto- ry and imprecise notice in the Cornish papers (like Sebastian to Charles lolling about in Oxford, 'I'm reading about a woman in Hull who's been using an instru- ment'). And another at Devon assizes, sad because the defendant, a farm labourer, had fallen in love with his cow and was dis- covered in flagrante by the affronted farmer, was passed over in silence; the young man had to stand on a box to reach his target, and there was no euphemism in the newspaper lexicon to cope with`that.

Thus, the decline of the legal euphemism is nowhere more apparent than in cases involving animals. The man accused of 'outraging public decency by committing a lewd, obscene or disgusting act' with a dolphin named Freddie last year found his behaviour openly described in every national newspaper. He was alleged to have masturbated Freddie with his knees and hand for about 20 minutes, while the animal lay in a classic mating position. The trial gave rise to much humour, only some of it unintentional. The defendant stated that a dolphin's 'Here's looking at Euclid.'

penis was like a flick-knife — 'he flicks it to and out at will' — while an erudite authon- ty on the dolphin personality called it 'the finger of friendship'. Counsel for the defence pointed out that men do not use their penis to greet one another or poll the supermarket trolley, whereas for a dol- phin it was a useful hook with which to tow human friends through the water. After acquittal, the defendant said that .his, reunion with Freddie would be a `magical moment'.

Mature, amused reporting of the dolphin case illustrates how far we have come since every charge with a sexual connotation was reduced to 'interfering with' the object of attention, giving rise to one fatuous head" line in a Newcastle paper — 'Girl Stabbed Fifty-Five Times But Not Interfered With, • We are now trusted to understand the frail- ties of human behaviour and to recognise the imperfections of our fellows without fainting with shock. The Lady ChatterleY, s Lover case marked a significant turning' point. Opinion in the bar mess was unani- mous that a conviction was inevitable because D.H. Lawrence had used the word `fuck'. Publishers of the book were instead acquitted, and the cult of euphemism, dulY began its descent into desuetude. Euphemism is an avoidance of truth, and thereby a dissembler. Deprived of its spun' ous protection, one may clearly see that the incidence of sexual offences is no greater now than it was 40 or a 100 years ago (with the sole exception of abuse of children by their parents, which is anyway still disputed except by assiduous and ignorant social workers and by busybodies who insist we were all abused by mum and dad but have forgotten it). We have simply learnt how to spell 'spade'. A judge once berated a wit' ness with the observation, 'He speaks as if the office of language were to conceal his meaning.' The witness would have been justified in replying that he had picked 111, the habit from his lordship. On the north- ern circuit some years ago, Mr Justice Phillimore was upset because a witness in 3 rape trial, when asked to describe what, happened, said, 'Then he got his prick out. `It is the duty of the prosecuting counsel in a case of this kind to instruct the witness in the proper anatomical language,' said Phillimore. Without the safety of 3 euphemism, the judge almost felt violated himself.

The decline of the euphemism is like a sudden eruption of clarity through the fog, and its effect can be enlivening. In a case

some years ago involving indecency in 3 public lavatory, the judge commiserated with the policeman who made the arrest, qt, must have been a very unpleasant duty.' `To tell you the truth, my lord,' he replied, 'when somebody came in for a good honest shit it was like a breath of fresh air.'

Brian Masters' book, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer, is published this month by Hodder and Stoughton at f14.99.