With her partner, Julie Mullard, Renault had left England in 1948 to live in South Africa, emigrating, as she later acknowledged, 'in a burst of released claustrophobia after that dreadful winter when it froze for three months and there was no heating and we couldn't find anywhere to live'.

If not a calculated response to the impact of this campaign, with its multiple arrests, trials and jail sentences, Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953) was unquestionably fuelled by the author's anger and despair in the face of prejudice. A rival paper, The Sunday Pictorial, launched a three-part series under the headline 'Evil Men', alerting its readers to the presence of 'male degenerates infesting the West End of London', whose 'influence is exerted in important spheres of national life'. The News of the World, noting that 'this particular form of vice is ever tightening', praised the visionary solicitude of the Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyffe, in declaring that 'I have a duty to protect people, especially the youth of this country'. The iniquitous clause of the Criminal Law Amendment Act which had sent Oscar Wilde to the treadmill half a century earlier could now be enforced with renewed vigour, its notoriety as a blackmailer's charter becoming considerably enhanced in the process.Ī requisite sense of the nation's moral fibre under threat was bolstered by compliant elements of the national press. Since the war itself had done much to facilitate homosexual encounters, it was easy enough to victimize men who had sex with men. Menaced by Cold War espionage or else bewildered by post-war urban crime, the Home Office during the 1950s cast about for a soft target through which to validate the operational effectiveness of the judiciary and police.

The Charioteer by Mary Renault