The Trials of Radclyffe Hall by Diana Souhami

Author:Diana Souhami [Souhami, Diana]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Crime, recent
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2012-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

Goaded by an hour of his insults, Radclyffe Hall called out, ‘I protest. I am that writer.’

Biron: I must ask people not to interrupt the Court.

Radclyffe Hall: I am the authoress of this book.

Biron: If you cannot behave yourself in Court I shall have to have you removed.

Radclyffe Hall: It is shameful.

Which indeed it was. He was telling her that her efforts at openness were obscene, that her book should be burned, that she should be condemned by all decent people, that no one should be allowed to defend her. She had sought martyrdom and she had got it. Sir Chartres Biron was her Pontius Pilate, mean-minded, dishonourable and powerful.

It had been punishing for her to sit and listen in silence to this defamation of her life and work. In a public lecture two months later she said she could not let this slur on Toupie Lowther and her army sisters pass. She had, she said, written of them with ‘so much respect that it all but amounted to reverence’.

I had written of them as I believed them to have been, pure living, courageous, self-sacrificing women facing death night and day in the service of the wounded. Yet that old man sought through his preposterous statement to bring shame, not only on me as an author but upon the women of the British Empire. My friends it was too much. I could not endure it so I got up and called him to order. He threatened to have me taken from the Court as though I were one of those habitual drunks with whom, no doubt, he is accustomed to dealing. But once again I called him to order and I noticed that he did not repeat his insult to the splendid war workers.

Radclyffe Hall had said in her book that in the ambulance unit there was ‘many a one who was even as Stephen’. For Sir Chartres Biron that translated into filthy disgusting vice-ridden perverted debauchees. Years later in a diary entry, Una referred to how John had in fact scorned Toupie’s friends and the ‘perpetual sexual carrying on between members of the same Army Unit’ and how she ‘gave Chartres Biron the lie so vehemently’. It was clear from their social meetings that Toupie was surrounded by lesbians from her army days. It was also clear from her war record that the ambulance unit she managed was efficient.

To Biron’s thinking, a lesbian of good character was a contradiction in terms. He did not want to hear about their contribution to society. He did not care whether they were born like it, became like it, acted out of compulsion or choice, were promiscuous or monogamous, clever or stupid. They should all be eradicated, in his view. Referring to when Stephen Gordon’s mother throws her from the house, he said it was ‘not an unreasonable conclusion under the circumstances’. The stocks and gibbet might have been too kind. He found references to God in the book ‘singularly inappropriate and disgusting’.

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