Another Nickel In The Machine

That there was corruption in Soho in the late sixties and early seventies was an open secret amongst journalists, lawyers and the police themselves; although not many vaguely knew the extent of it.

While the Soho porn industry was steadily proliferating, seemingly untouched, there was an extraordinary ferocious police assault against, what they thought as, politically subversive ‘obscenity’ and apologists for the ‘alternative society’.

In 1970 Eugene Schuster’s London Arts Gallery was raided by the police. The gallery was closed down and Schuster was charged under the Obscene Publications Act. This wasn’t particularly abnormal at the time but this particular closure garnered an extraordinary amount of publicity because the show was entitled The Bag One exhibition -- featuring 14 ‘intimate and erotic’ lithographs by John Lennon that depicted himself and his wife, Yoko Ono, in various sexual poses.

Soon after the closure the Director of Public Prosecutions received a letter from a member of the public, a Mr PFC Fuller. The letter warned that if the court case went ahead art collections throughout the country could potentially be in trouble, including even the Queen’s. In his letter Fuller wrote;

Whether it was Mr Fuller’s letter that changed the direction of the proscecution we don’t know, but at the last minute, the police decided to file charges against Schuster under an obscure 19th Century law instead of the Obscene Publications Act. Not surprisingly on April 27th 1970 the case was thrown out by the court under a technicality.

In the same year as the gallery closure and after it was accused of losing touch with their younger readers, the satirical magazine Oz reacted by inviting actual schoolchildren to edit a forthcoming May 1970 issue -- quickly becoming known as the Schoolkids Oz. The magazine’s offices had already been raided several times by the The Obscene Publications Squad (known colloquially at the time as The Dirty Squad) but the bringing together of schoolchildren, and what some considered obscene material, soon led to arrests of Oz’s actual editors and subsequently the infamous Oz obscenity trial in 1971. The magazine’s defence lawyer, the late John Mortimer QC announced at the opening of the trial

However according to the prosecution at the trial the magazine;

At the conclusion of what became the longest obscenity trial in British legal history, the “Oz Three” editors, Richard Neville, Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis were found guilty and Neville and Anderson were sentenced to an incredible 15 months in prison. Dennis was given a lesser sentence because the judge, Justice Michael Argyle, considered that Dennis was “very much less intelligent” than Neville and Anderson.

Soon after the verdicts were announced the three men were taken to prison and had their heads shaved. It was an act that caused an even greater stir on top of the already considerable public outcry surrounding the trial and verdict.

A great number of people started to wonder why art gallery owners and satirical magazine editors were being arrested when there seemed to be any amount of hardcore pornography available in West End’s Soho. As a recent victim himself of the Dirty Squad, John Lennon lent his support to Oz and released Do The Oz to help their cause.

When the Oz obscenity case went to appeal -- the defendants famously appeared wearing long wigs -- it was alleged by Geoffrey Robertson, one of the defence counsels, that the lord chief justice, Lord Widgery, sent his clerk to Soho to buy the hardest porn he could find. Compared to the material with which he returned, Oz magazine paled in comparison and the original convictions were quickly quashed.

The Conservative Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling, asked Detective Chief Inspector George Fenwick, at the time in charge of the Obscene Publications Squad, exactly why the porn barons in Soho seemed to be operating with somewhere close to impunity. Fenwick explained to Maudling;

“It is an unfortunate fact of life that pornography has existed for centuries and it is unlikely that it can ever be stamped out.”

Maudling was shocked with this explanation, or what was rather a lame excuse, and he quickly initiated a major corruption inquiry. The Government and the judiciary were slowly coming to the conclusion that there was more than the odd bad apple in the Metropolitan police.

In 1972 Maudling appointed Robert Mark to be the new Commissioner of the Metropolitan police. To the old guard he was a provincial outsider. Mark had the reputation as a ‘Mr Clean’ and had nicknames such as ‘The Manchester Martinet’ and ‘The Lone Ranger from Leicester’.

In Soho at the time it was impossible not to notice the porn shops, they had proliferated greatly in the last few years, and unusually for stores at the time they were open seven days a week. The windows were filled with garish displays of soft-core magazines and books but with notices implying, often correctly, that there was a wider range of harder material to be found inside.

In the same year as Mark’s appointment the Sunday People exposed a connection between James Humphreys (who openly ran two strip clubs and was one of the biggest operators of pornographic bookshops in Soho) and Commander Kenneth Drury. They had both enjoyed a luxurious two week holiday in Cyprus accompanied by their wives, all paid for, of course, by the Soho pornographer. Drury was hopelessly compromised and with concocted a story that he was in Cyprus looking for the train robber Ronnie Biggs.

Humphreys quickly realised the danger of appearing as a police informant and announced that Drury had set up the whole thing. After a police raid at his house a diary of Humphrey’s was found in a wall safe and it unbelievably detailed payments to seventeen different policemen. The policeman included senior policemen such as Bill Moody -- Head of the Obscene Publications Squad but also, incredibly, his superior Commander ‘Wally’ Virgo -- a man who had overall control of nine squads including the Flying, Drugs and the Porn Squad.

It was estimated that James Humphreys and his fellow porn barons were paying an extraordinary £100,000 a year to corrupt policemen to enable them to continue selling porn unimpeded. Indeed it came to light that Humphreys had been so worried that Drury’s expensive lifestyle would give everything away, he had supplied him with expensive slimming drugs and a rowing machine to keep his weight down.

The delicately balanced house of cards the corrupt policemen had built, soon came tumbling down. Initially there were just the usual discrete early retirements and resignations but eventually there were two major corruption trials and George Fenwick, Bill Moody, Wally Virgo and Kenneth Drury were all given between ten and fourteen years in prison in 1977. Mr Justice Mars Jones after Fenwick’s trial said:

“Thank goodness the Obscene Publications Squad had gone. I fear the damage you have done may be with us for a long time.”

After the second trial Mars-Jones said it revealed:

“corruption on a scale which beggars description.”