Edward Douglas-Scott-Montagu, 3rd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu
Edward Douglas-Scott-Montagu, 3rd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu (born 20 October 1926) is the founder of the Beaulieu National Motor Museum in Hampshire. He identifies publicly as being bisexual. He sits in the House of Lords as a Conservative, having been selected in the 1999 reform of the House of Lords, as one of 92 hereditary peers to continue in the House of Lords.
He attended St Peter's Court School and Ridley College in Canada, Eton College, and New College, Oxford. He served in the Grenadier Guards, including service in Palestine before the end of the British Mandate.
He kept his homosexual affairs discreet and out of the public eye, but in the mid-1950s, Lord 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" or “buggery”. On two occasions Lord Montagu was charged and committed for trial at Winchester Assizes, firstly in 1953 for allegedly taking sexual advantage of a 14-year-old Boy Scout at his beach hut on the Solent, a charge he has always denied [1].
Lord Montagu, a 28-year-old socialite and the youngest peer in the House of Lords, was imprisoned for 12 months in 1954. He was one of three men convicted of "conspiracy to incite certain male persons to commit serious offences with male persons" alongside Peter Wildeblood, the diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Mail and Michael Pitt-Rivers, a Dorset landowner [2].
The prosecution provoked a wave of sympathy from the press and the public, many of whom felt it amounted to little more than an unedifying witch-hunt. It was the first time since Oscar Wilde in 1895 that this law had led to a conviction [3]. The case led eventually to the Wolfenden Report, which in 1957 recommended the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the United Kingdom.
Modern references
Lord Montagu’s story is told in the Channel 4 documentary A Very British Sex Scandal.
External links
http://www.kemglen.talktalk.net/stradivarius/OurHistory.html
References
- ↑ http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23404322-lord-montagu-on-the-court-case-which-ended-the-legal-persecution-of-homosexuals.do “Lord Montagu on the court case which ended the legal persecution of homosexuals” London Evening Standard 14.07.07 accessed 19/09/11
- ↑ http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23404322-lord-montagu-on-the-court-case-which-ended-the-legal-persecution-of-homosexuals.do “Lord Montagu on the court case which ended the legal persecution of homosexuals” London Evening Standard 14.07.07 accessed 19/09/11
- ↑ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-468385/Lord-Montagu-court-case-ended-legal-persecution-homosexuals.html
