Edward John Barrington Douglas-Scott-Montagu, 3rd Baron
Montagu of Beaulieu (20 October 1926 - 31st August 2015) is a British Conservative
politician well known in Britain for founding the National Motor Museum,
as well as for a pivotal cause célèbre in British gay history, his 1954
conviction and imprisonment for homosexual sex, a charge he denied.
Lord Montagu was born in London, and inherited his barony in 1929 at
the age of two, when his father John Douglas-Scott-Montagu, 2nd Baron
Montagu of Beaulieu, was killed in an accident. His mother was his
father's second wife, Alice Crake (1895–1996). 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.
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.
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, 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.
Lord 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 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, Lord Montagu was one of 92 hereditary
peers selected to remain in Parliament pending further reform of the
upper chamber.
Lord 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."
Despite keeping his homosexual affairs discreet and out
of the public eye, 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," 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 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 Lord
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, a charge he has always denied. When
prosecutors failed to achieve a conviction, in what Lord 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, located
on Lord Montagu's country estate. Lord Montagu has 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.
Unlike the other defendants in the trial, Lord
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.
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."
In 1958, he married
Belinda Crossley,
a granddaughter of Savile Crossley, 1st Baron Somerleyton, by whom he
had a son and a daughter before their divorce in 1974:
Ralph
Douglas-Scott-Montagu (born 13 March 1961), 4th Baron
Hon. Mary Rachel Scott (born 1964)
In 1974, he married his second
wife, Fiona Margaret Herbert, with whom he has a son:
Hon. Jonathan
Deane Douglas-Scott-Montagu (born 11 October 1975), heir presumptive.
Fiona, Lady
Montagu, was born about 1943 in 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 the
state of the Soviet Union. She was appointed the first global ambassador
to the Club of Budapest.
His
sons are also in the line of succession to the Dukedom of Buccleuch and
the Dukedom of Queensberry.
For nearly half a century, Lord
Montagu steadfastly refused to speak publicly about the conviction. Lord
Montagu focused his energies instead 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, Lord Montagu has stated that by publishing his story, he
wanted to "put the record straight"[ because "I felt it was important to
get it accurate."
The story of Lord Montagu's trial is told in a
2007 Channel 4 documentary, A Very British Sex Scandal.
The
Newport Beach Film Festival in Newport Beach, California, screened Lord
Montagu, a documentary by Luke Korem on Edward Douglas-Scott-Montagu's
life and accomplishments in April 2013.
Lord Montagu, founder of
the National Motor Museum, died at the age of 88 on 31 August 2015. The
peer died peacefully at his home following a short illness.
Images of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu by kind permission of the
photographer, Allan Warren
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