Edward John
Barrington Douglas-Scott-Montagu, 3rd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu (20 October
1926 – 31 August 2015), was an English Conservative politician well known in
Great Britain for founding the National Motor Museum, as well as for a pivotal
cause célèbre in British gay history following his 1954 conviction and
imprisonment for homosexual sex, a charge he denied.
Edward
Douglas-Scott-Montagu, 3rd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu, age 10 (Beaulieu Palace
House)
Montagu was
born at his grandparents' home in Thurloe Square, South Kensington, London, and
inherited his barony in 1929 at the age of two, when his father John died of
pneumonia. He held his peerage for the third longest time (86 years and 155
days) anyone has held a British peerage (the others being the 7th Marquess
Townshend at 88 years, and the 13th Lord Sinclair at 87 years). His mother was
his father's second wife, Alice Crake (1895–1996). He attended St Peter's
Court, a prep school at Broadstairs in Kent, then Ridley College in Canada,
Eton College and finally New College, Oxford.
He served
as a lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards, including service in Palestine before
the end of the British Mandate. On coming of age, Lord Montagu immediately took
his seat in the House of Lords and swiftly made his maiden speech on the
subject of Palestine. He read Modern History at Oxford, but during his second
year an altercation between the Bullingdon Club, of which he was a member, and
the Oxford University Dramatic Society led to his room being wrecked, and he felt
obliged to leave.
Activities
Lord
Montagu gained an interest in motoring from his father – who had commissioned
the original "Spirit of Ecstasy" mascot for his Rolls-Royce – and
with his family collection of historic cars this led him to open the National
Motor Museum in the grounds of his stately home, Beaulieu Palace House,
Beaulieu, Hampshire, in 1952.
From 1956
to 1961 he held the influential Beaulieu Jazz Festival in the grounds of Palace
House; this was a leading contribution to the development of festival culture
in Britain, as it attracted thousands of young people who, from 1958 on, would
camp out and listen and dance to live music.The 1960 festival saw an
altercation between modern and trad jazz fans, in a very minor riot that became
known as the Battle of Beaulieu.
Montagu
founded The Veteran And Vintage Magazine in 1956 and continued to develop the
museum, making a name for himself in tourism. He was chairman of the Historic
Houses Association from 1973 to 1978, President of the Institute of Traffic
Administration from 1973 to 1974 and chairman of English Heritage from 1984 to
1992. Whilst there he appointed Jennifer Page (later of the Millennium Dome) as
Chief Executive in 1989.
In the 1999
reform of the House of Lords, Montagu was one of 92 hereditary peers who
remained in Parliament. In 2007, he was Vice-Commodore of the House of Lords
Yacht Club.
He gave a
notice of his intention to retire from the House of Lords on 17 September 2015,
but he died before that.
Sexuality
Montagu
knew from an early stage of life that he was bisexual, and while attending
Oxford was relieved to find others with similar feelings. In a 2000 interview
he stated, "My attraction to both sexes neither changed nor diminished at
university and it was comforting to find that I was not the only person faced
with such a predicament. I agonised less than my contemporaries, for I was
reconciled to my bisexuality, but I was still nervous about being
exposed."
Trial and
imprisonment
Despite
keeping his homosexual affairs discreet and out of the public eye, in the
mid-1950s, Montagu became "one of the most notorious public figures of his
generation," after his conviction and imprisonment for "conspiracy to
incite certain male persons to commit serious offences with male persons,"
a charge which was also used in the Oscar Wilde trials in 1895, which was
derived from a law that remained on the statute books until 1967.
In old age,
Montagu reminisced about it in these terms:
In the cold
war atmosphere of the 1950s, when witch hunts later called the Lavender Scare
were ruining the lives of many gay men and lesbian women in the United States,
the parallel political atmosphere in Britain was virulently anti-homosexual.
The then Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, had promised "a new drive
against male vice" that would "rid England of this plague." As
many as 1,000 men were locked up in Britain's prisons every year amid a
widespread police clampdown on homosexual offences. Undercover officers acting
as "agents provocateurs" would pose as gay men soliciting in public
places. The prevailing mood was one of barely concealed paranoia.
On two
occasions Montagu was charged and committed for trial at Winchester Assizes,
firstly in 1953 for having underage sex with a 14-year-old boy scout at his
beach hut on the Solent,[9] a charge he always denied. The American Institute
of Public Relations had just voted him the most promising young PR man when he
was arrested. Although he enjoyed the support of his close family and a wide
variety of friends, for a year or so he became "the subject of endless
blue jokes and innumerable bawdy songs".
When
prosecutors failed to achieve a conviction, in what Montagu has characterised
as a "witch hunt" to secure a high-profile conviction, he was
arrested again in 1954 and charged with performing "gross offences"
with an RAF serviceman during a weekend party at the beach hut on his country
estate. Montagu always maintained he was innocent of this charge as well
("We had some drinks, we danced, we kissed, that's all").
Nevertheless, he was imprisoned for twelve months for "consensual
homosexual offences" along with Michael Pitt-Rivers and Peter Wildeblood.
Role in
LGBT history
Unlike the
other defendants in the trial, Montagu continued to protest his innocence. The
trial caused a backlash of opinion among some politicians and church leaders
that led to the setting up of the Wolfenden Committee, which in its 1957 report
recommended the decriminalisation of homosexual activity in private between two
adults. Ten years later, Parliament finally carried out the recommendation, a
huge turning point in gay history in Britain, where anal sex, a form of "buggery",
had been a criminal offence ever since the Buggery Act 1533.
Lord
Montagu of Beaulieu with his first wife, Belinda, whom he married in 1958
Lord
Montagu of Beaulieu and his second wife, Fiona, on their wedding day in 1974,
by Allan Warren
In 2000,
when his autobiography appeared, Montagu broke down in tears when it was
suggested to him that the reform of the law on homosexuality would be his
monument. In a 2007 interview, when asked if he felt that he and his
co-defendants had been instrumental in the decriminalisation of homosexuality
in Britain, Lord Montagu said, "I am slightly proud that the law has been
changed to the benefit of so many people. I would like to think that I would
get some credit for that. Maybe I'm being very boastful about it but I think
because of the way we behaved and conducted our lives afterwards, because we
didn't sell our stories, we just returned quietly to our lives, I think that
had a big effect on public opinion."
Personal
life and death
In 1958,
Lord Montagu of Beaulieu married Belinda Crossley, a granddaughter of the 1st
Baron Somerleyton, by whom he had a son and a daughter before the couple
divorced in 1974:
- ·
Ralph
Douglas-Scott-Montagu, 4th Baron Montagu of Beaulieu (born 13 March 1961)
- ·
Hon
Mary Montagu-Scott (born 1964), married with issue to Rupert Scott (who took
the surname Montagu-Scott, 4th son of Christopher Bartle Hugh Scott, 12th of
Gala)
In 1974, he
married his second wife, Fiona Margaret Herbert, with whom he had a son:
- ·
Hon
Jonathan Deane Douglas-Scott-Montagu (born 11 October 1975).
Fiona, Lady
Montagu of Beaulieu, was born in about 1943 in Southern Rhodesia (now
Zimbabwe), the daughter of Richard Leonard Deane Herbert, of Clymping, Sussex.She
attended school in Switzerland, and following her education, she worked as film
production assistant. She is a director of Beaulieu Enterprises and a trustee
of the Countryside Education Trust. She serves as an international advisor to
the World Centre of Compassion for Children, led by Nobel Peace Laureate, Betty
Williams, as well as a Trustee of Vision-in-Action, led by Yasuhiko Kimura. She
additionally serves on The World Wisdom Council, alongside Mikhail Gorbachev,
former head of state of the Soviet Union.She was appointed the first global
ambassador to the Club of Budapest.
Montagu
died after a short illness, on 31 August 2015 at the age of 88, at his Beaulieu
Estate in the New Forest. He was survived by his three children and two
grandchildren.
Memoirs and
documentary film
For nearly
half a century, Montagu steadfastly refused to speak publicly about the
conviction, instead focusing his energies on the National Motor Museum and
other activities. However, in 2000, he finally broke his silence with the
publication of his memoirs, Wheels Within Wheels, of which two chapters are
devoted to the story of his trial and imprisonment. In interviews, he has stated
that by publishing his story, he wanted to "put the record
straight",[9] because he "felt it was important to get it
accurate."
The story
of Montagu's trial is told in a 2007 Channel 4 documentary, A Very British Sex
Scandal, and the 2017 BBC drama-documentary Against The Law.
In April
2013, the Newport Beach Film Festival, at Newport Beach, California, screened
Lord Montagu, a documentary by Luke Korem on Montagu's life and
accomplishments.The film was also shown at the Napa Valley Film Festival in
November 2013.
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