How Lady Chatterley broke support for Obscenity Act

The government's embarrassing defeat in the 1960 Lady Chatterley's Lover trial caused a marked loss of enthusiasm for the recently introduced Obscenity Act, documents released yesterday by the National Archives reveal.

A little over a year after the 1959 Obscenity Act came into force a Home Office report, compiled after the trial, appears to cast doubt on the decision to use the Act to prosecute Penguin Books for publishing an unabridged version of the D H Lawrence novel.

The document, produced a month after a jury had unanimously found the publishers not guilty after just three hours' deliberation, was an assessment of the case as a first test of the Act.

It found the outcome of the trial, which had caused unease in Parliament, was in line with the principles of the Act. "Parliament decided that the application of the test of what can properly be published, laid down only last year after the most exhaustive discussion, should be left to a jury; it is not for Parliament now to complain of their judgment," it said.

Several hand-written annotations on the document seem to suggest there was some disagreement as to the outcome of the case.

Next to a line saying "it would not be proper to discuss the reasons for the [Director of Public Prosecutions'] decision to prosecute" is a note which reads: "This is balls".

Later the line "the director's action has enabled an authoritative ruling to be obtained" is annotated with the words: "This is balls too."

It is unclear who made the notes, however.

The document goes on to outline the response that the government and public bodies had received after the trial. The Home Office received about 30 letters ("not a large number having regard to the publicity that attended the case") and the Attorney General, Sir Richard Manningham-Buller, received a meagre two letters, one asking whether an appeal was possible and the other wondering whether the book's obscene words could now be used with impunity.

The trial appears to have revealed a gap between the government's attitudes towards public morality and the attitudes of the public itself.

A day after the jury delivered its verdict, bookshops were besieged by people wanting to buy the novel. Penguin sold 200,000 copies, its entire first run, in the first day and sold 2 million copies in six weeks.