the jolly roger
- and sent a dozen to the Director of Public Prosecutions, who duly took Penguin to court. At the trial Penguin and their chief defence counsel, Gerald Gardiner QC (later Lord Chancellor), produced thirty-five wit- nesses for the defence, including Dame Rebecca West, who said the book was a beautiful allegory, although one of its faults was that Lawrence had no sense of humour; E.M Forster, who said he had known Lawrence personally and thought highly of him, and com- pared him to Blake and Bunyan; Richard Hoggart, senior lecturer in English at Leicester University and author of The Uses of Literacy, who insisted Lawrence’s intentions in writing the book had been ‘puritanical’ rather than licentious; and Dr John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich (later the author of Honest to God ), who maintained that Lawrence had sought to portray sexual relations as something sacred, an act ‘almost of holy communion’. The prosecution by contrast failed to persuade any noted writer or academic to testify on their behalf in favour of censorship: they apparently thought of Rudyard Kipling, unaware that he had died in 1936. One suspects that Kipling would in any case have declined to appear, as did T.S Eliot, 13 and Enid Blyton, who said she would love to help Penguin but had never read the book, adding not only that there would be something ‘slightly comic’ about her appearing but also that her husband had ordered her not to: ‘I’m awfully sorry but I don’t see that I can go against my husband’s most definitive wishes in this’. As John Sparrow, barrister, bibliophile, polemicist and Warden of All Souls, Oxford, later wrote in a famous essay in Encounter ( Regina v Penguin Books Ltd: An Undisclosed Element in the Case , February 1962), the prosecution missed a trick by not drawing attention to Lawrence’s veiled reference to anal intercourse – or as Sparrow put it, ‘buggery’ - when Connie Chatterley and Mellors experience ‘a night of sensual passion, in which she was a little startled and almost unwilling’ but none the less ‘let him have his way’ in ‘burning out the shames….in the most secret places’.
13 . It is sometimes asserted that Lawrence based the character of the cuckolded Chatterley upon T.S. Eliot.
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