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And Another Thing

Paul Johnson

Wednesday, 12th March 2008

Was Sir William Joynson-Hicks hair-brained?

The Letters of Lytton Strachey, which I have just been reading, are a mixed joy. Odd that a writer supposedly so fastidious in the use of words should have produced effusions in the 1920s using ‘divine’ or ‘divinely’ half a dozen times in a single letter, just like a Bright Young Person from Vile Bodies. On the other hand, they provide nuggets of discreditable facts, chiefly about the sexual tastes of the Great and the Good, such as the Labour Lord Chancellor, Jowett. He also relates how he himself was pleasurably crucified by the young Roger Senhouse, an elaborate business which involved making a blasphemous ‘cut’ in his side. More interesting, really, is the fact (new to me) that when, during the reign of moral terror set up by Sir William Joynson-Hicks in the 1920s, the police raided an art gallery showing D.H. Lawrence’s ‘obscene’ paintings, they also seized a drawing of Adam and Eve by William Blake. The woman owner of the gallery protested and the police gave it back to her. Strachey complained that this was bad tactics: if she had let the police take it away, and then announced the fact publicly, the authorities would have been covered in ridicule.

All very well, but how were policemen supposed to know what particular marks on paper or canvas would be judged obscene by the courts? I recall, in the late 1950s, a senior police officer telling me: ‘What we tell our lads is, look out for pubic hair. If it’s there, you can be pretty sure the courts will convict. If it’s not there, best leave it alone.’ Was this the reason, about this time, that the police acquired the nickname of ‘the fuzz’? Possibly, but there may be quite a different etymology. Certainly there is great confusion about pubic hair, especially on women. Why did the Greeks, followed by the Romans, eliminate it (habitually, though not in every case) in their statuary? It is generally believed that this is what misled Ruskin so disastrously. Accustomed to seeing classical statues of naked women, and never having seen a real one, he was shocked and alarmed on his wedding night, in Perth of all places, to see that his beautiful bride, Euphemia (‘Effie’) Chalmers Gray, a lawyer’s daughter, had masses of pubic hair (lawyers are notoriously hirsute). As a result, Ruskin was unable to perform, became ill, and the honeymoon was aborted. Eventually she divorced him on grounds of non-consummation, and she married the burly and randy Millais. If you want to know what she looked like, there is a superbly proud and ravishing likeness of her in Millais’s great picture ‘The Order of Release’.

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