I

Michael Rubinstein's letter to Martin Jarrett-Kerr placed the monk in a moral dilemma: his conscience prompted him to testify, but he feared that the press would distort his personal opinion and present it as the official view of his religious order and the Church of England, causing offence to church members and alienating supporters of the community. Jarrett-Kerr felt compelled to testify as he had already expressed the opinion in print nine years earlier (albeit under the pseudonym Fr William Tiverton) that ‘Lawrence can teach Christians lessons they should have known but have forgotten’.Footnote ⁹ Jarrett-Kerr started to read the works of D. H. Lawrence while studying for a BA in English Language and Literature at Brasenose College, Oxford, during the early 1930s. His friend Frederick Tomlin, whose critical essay had been cited by T. S. Eliot in After strange gods while still at school, convinced Jarrett-Kerr of Lawrence's importance. From his private reading – modern literature stopped in 1900 according to the English Department – Jarrett-Kerr developed an abiding respect for Lawrence.Footnote ¹⁰ His interest in Lawrence prompted him to obtain a copy of the unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley's lover, which a friend smuggled from Paris to Oxford for him sometime in 1935.Footnote ¹¹

Jarrett-Kerr did not find the time to read Lawrence seriously until 1936 as literary interests came second to religious concerns during his student days. The son of a senior officer in the Indian Army, Jarrett-Kerr arrived at Oxford from Cheltenham College in 1931 as an evangelical Anglican and a Conservative party supporter. Living away from home for the first time, Jarrett-Kerr found himself challenging and overturning his views about religion and politics.Footnote ¹² Conversations about life in the coal-mining communities of South Wales during the 1920s with Gordon Phillips, a close friend at Brasenose, initiated a move from conservatism to socialism. Phillips influenced his rejection of evangelicalism in favour of Anglo-Catholicism too, but the decisive influence on his religious beliefs was the Anglo-Catholic thinker Austin Farrer.Footnote ¹³ Farrer taught Jarrett-Kerr theology when he stayed on for a diploma after graduating with a second class degree in English. During this year Jarrett-Kerr decided to train as a priest and secured a place on the ordination course at Westcott House, Cambridge. Like many would-be priests with a strong social conscience, Jarrett-Kerr wanted to work in one of the depressed areas. Happily for Jarrett-Kerr personal vocation and ecclesiastical need coincided and he found himself curate of St Peter's, Thornaby-on-Tees, in 1936.

Jarrett-Kerr had time to read Lawrence during his four years at Thornaby:

Reading Lawrence did not occupy all of Jarrett-Kerr's leisure. He also found time to reflect on his vocation while riding out to cremations and he became convinced that he was called to a life of celibacy and simplicity. In 1940 he entered the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield in the West Riding of Yorkshire to try his new-found vocation and was professed in January 1943. He lived at Mirfield until 1945 and was busy throughout these years with Sunday preaching, missions to troops and doing interregnums for local parishes.Footnote ¹⁵

Jarrett-Kerr returned to his critical interest in Lawrence while working at St Teilo's Priory, which was a hostel run by the Community of the Resurrection for male students at the University College of South Wales in Cardiff, and the College of the Resurrection at Mirfield, a theological training college run by the Community. This resulted in his first work of literary criticism, D. H. Lawrence and human existence, which a hostile, but perceptive, reviewer dismissed as an attempt by Jarrett-Kerr to justify his liking for Lawrence by the application of Christian principles.Footnote ¹⁶

Placing the novel in the context of Lawrence's other writings, most importantly his Apropos of Lady Chatterley's lover, Jarrett-Kerr understood Lawrence's intent to have been to reassert the importance of sex within a loving relationship against those moralists who separated mind from body and placed the mental and spiritual above the physical aspects of love. He felt that ‘In all this Lawrence seems to me much closer to the Christian view of sex, properly understood, than were many of his opponents.’Footnote ¹⁷ Lawrence's artistic vision was a useful corrective to the ‘strain in Catholic as well as Protestant teaching which has reduced sex to a mere implement’.Footnote ¹⁸ Jarrett-Kerr acknowledged the failings of the novel when it came to characterisation and dialogue, failings he attributed to Lawrence's use of realist techniques to produce a symbolic drama.Footnote ¹⁹ He also didn't shy away from discussing Lawrence's intention to use the novel to advance a pagan vision of relationships or the contradictions inherent in his defence of fidelity and anti-promiscuity in a book about an adulterous affair.Footnote ²⁰

D. H. Lawrence and human existence did not come to widespread public attention when it was published in 1951 and was savagely reviewed by practitioners of the new criticism which eschewed moral approaches to literary criticism. In a foreword, the Anglo-Catholic poet, critic and publisher, T. S. Eliot, who had previously acknowledged that Lawrence's ‘vision is spiritual, but spiritually sick’, supported Jarrett-Kerr's more positive assessment. Even though he had rejected the manuscript for publication with Faber & Faber as the firm was not publishing books about Lawrence, Eliot agreed to write a foreword because he liked the book and thought it should be published. Eliot's critical reassessment of Lawrence drew the ire of the prominent literary critic F. R. Leavis who held Eliot responsible for the neglect of Lawrence. In a ‘review’ of D. H. Lawrence and human existence, Leavis attacked Eliot for changing his mind about Lawrence, admitting Lawrence's literary talent and sincerity while continuing to deride his moral sense, and took issue with this Christian appropriation of Lawrence. Having dismissed Jarrett-Kerr's book as a work of literary criticism, Leavis viewed ‘with the gravest distrust the prospect of Lawrence's being adopted for expository appreciation as almost a Christian by writers whose religious complexion is congenial to Mr Eliot’.Footnote ²¹ This hostile response from the doyen of the new criticism did not demoralise Jarrett-Kerr, who shared Eliot's view that ‘literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint’.Footnote ²²

It was Jarrett-Kerr's dual commitment to D. H. Lawrence and literary criticism from a Christian standpoint which was to shape his decision to appear for the defence at the Lady Chatterley trial. As a celibate priest and a member of the Community of the Resurrection with wide ranging academic, social and political interests, Jarrett-Kerr possessed a rare vocation within the Church of England, which his superiors encouraged him to express through the community's educational work in the UK and South Africa. Jarrett-Kerr's university teaching gave him the time and confidence to write works of literary criticism, and translate works of literary criticism and theology from French. He came to see himself as engaged in a dialogue with secular intellectuals in the universities and the literary world, understanding their views while explaining those of the Church to them and vice versa whilst seeking common ground between their humanism and his Christian humanism. This ‘peculiar vocation’, as Superior Jonathan Graham termed it, was not always understood by the brethren who had difficulty in discerning the purpose underlying his scholarly activities which, when compared to the work of his contemporary Trevor Huddleston, seemed a personal indulgence. Huddleston's fight for dignity and fairness for non-whites was a more obviously Christian vocation than trying to advance the cause of Christ amongst poets, writers, critics, publishers and readers through articles in Scrutiny and Essays in Criticism.

Accommodating Jarrett-Kerr's ‘peculiar vocation’ was not always easy for the Community of the Resurrection. Raymond Raynes and Jonathan Graham, successive superiors, worried that his attempts to understand and appreciate the moral values underpinning the works of non-Christian writers such as Lawrence might be interpreted by both supporters and critics of the community as condoning them. The existence of Anglican religious orders was controversial and opponents from within the Church were all too ready to look for opportunities to discredit the religious. Refuting criticism of the community's involvement in the anti-apartheid struggle and its Anglo-Catholicism created enough difficulties for Raynes and Graham who did not want Jarrett-Kerr to open up yet another front at home. In 1951 Raynes insisted that Jarrett-Kerr publish D. H. Lawrence and human existence under a pseudonym, much to the annoyance of its publishers Rockcliff. The community could not be seen to endorse such views for fear of alienating some of its supporters.Footnote ²³ Their support for traditional teaching about sexuality, fear of secularisation, distrust of the liberal establishment and limited knowledge of the literary and artistic worlds reinforced their cautious approach to Jarrett-Kerr's work.Footnote ²⁴ There was also the unspoken fear that Jarrett-Kerr was more interested in academic life and English literature than preaching the Gospel.

The possibility of Jarrett-Kerr propounding his views about Lawrence at a high-profile trial alarmed Jonathan Graham as Jarrett-Kerr could not use a pseudonym to conceal his identity. Fr Martin Jarrett-Kerr, cr, not the anonymous priest who wrote D. H. Lawrence and human existence, would appear in the witness box and have to convince the popular press that he did not speak for the community. Replying to Jarrett-Kerr's letter about Rubinstein's request, Graham tried to persuade him not to give evidence. Graham was not convinced of the integrity of Penguin Books and was concerned that Jarrett-Kerr was being used for commercial ends. He also felt that Jarrett-Kerr might hurt the community and its reputation if he said that the publication of Lady Chatterley's lover was for the public good:

Graham went on to say that Jarrett-Kerr, with his ‘peculiar vocation’ to the literary world, must be prepared to offend the literati ‘by demonstrating that the welfare of souls is more important to him than the literary reputation’ of Lawrence. Finally, Graham asked Jarrett-Kerr to reconsider his comparison of Lawrence with Shakespeare in his letter to Graham: Was it accurate? Did it not weaken his case as Lawrence paled in comparison to Shakespeare?

The letter from his superior exacerbated Jarrett-Kerr's moral dilemma. The rule of the Community of the Resurrection permitted members of the community to express personal opinions that might harm the community if they felt morally compelled to do so only after serious reflection:

Unable to censor Jarrett-Kerr, Graham urged him to consider his position carefully and raised the issue of scandal. In Christian moral theology scandal is something that provides occasion and incitement to sin of another. Thus, misrepresentations of Jarrett-Kerr's views in the ‘Gutter Press’ could encourage people to read the book uncritically and expose themselves to ‘imaginative accounts of sexual experience’ that might incite readers to commit sexual sins. Graham's letter compelled Jarrett-Kerr to examine his conscience and consider whether he should appear for the defence and run the risks of imperilling souls, grieving the brethren and other Christians and harming the reputation and work of the community and the Church.

To resolve his moral dilemma, Jarrett-Kerr turned to casuistry, a popular topic with mid twentieth-century Anglican moral theologians who attempted to apply Christian principles in novel circumstances such as those brought about by the development of artificial means of birth control. Jarrett-Kerr had to consider whether it would cause more harm to the Church and the community if he appeared at the trial and ran the risk of scandalising practising Christians or did not appear and confirmed the anticlerical prejudices of ‘the educated’. Jarrett-Kerr considered alienating ‘the educated’ the more serious of the two risks, because he felt that the educated had longer memories than the non-educated and were ultimately more influential in their role as opinion-formers. Jonathan Graham's letter forced him to re-examine his conscience.

Jarrett-Kerr decided to write to close friends, literary critics and church experts in social work, as well as senior figures in his community and the Church, seeking their opinions about his dilemma. Apart from the bishop of Llandaff, Glyn Simon, the superior of the community, Jonathan Graham and the community's Visitor, Archbishop Michael Ramsey, none of Jarrett-Kerr's correspondents had ecclesiastical authority over him as priest and brother. In the letter Jarrett-Kerr first laid out his personal opinion as to whether the unexpurgated novel should be published:

My personal view is that

1. (i) Lady Chatterley is not an ‘obscene’ book, in the sense of that word as defined by the present law, though portions of it could, taken out of context, give the impression of obscenity.

2. (ii) The free circulation of the book would in the long run help to deliver it from the misuse of it which at present results from its being banned, and being therefore sought out and read for the wrong purpose.

3. (iii) It is important, not only for the sake of Lawrence's memory, but for the public good to realise that Lawrence's general teaching about sex was healthy and valuable; that he was a profoundly serious, as well as a great, novelist. So long as the book is banned, it is hard to convince people of this.

4. (iv) It is questionable whether the standards of ‘purity’ or ‘decency’ by which the ban on the book has hitherto been maintained are in fact necessarily Christian. At least, standards of this sort vary considerably in different parts of Christendom.Footnote ²⁷

Then Jarret-Kerr asked his correspondents for their opinion on three issues:

1. (a) Do you consider the book ‘obscene’, and if not, would you be happy to see it, in a paperback edition, obtainable at c. 5/ – on any bookstall – for your children (if any) to read?

2. (b) Whatever your answer to (a), do you think that harm would be done to the Church if a priest of the Church appeared to testify in favour of publication? That is to say, do you think that the kind of publicity such an appearance might be given in the ‘gutter press’, plus the general uncertainty of standards in the general public, dictates extreme caution in the matter?

3. (c) If your answer to (b) is ‘Yes’, do you think, on the other hand, that the Church's reputation might suffer, among the educated, by being accused of ‘suppression’, ‘puritanism’, ‘insensitiveness to great literature’, etc?Footnote ²⁸

In writing this letter and soliciting the views of respected Anglicans, Jarrett-Kerr followed the advice of contemporary Anglican theologians versed in casuistry who told Christians with a doubtful conscience to seek out weighty opinion. The possessor of the doubtful conscience should accept this opinion and act accordingly. The doctrine of probabilism, a system of casuistry advocated by most contemporary Anglican theologians, suggested that a single opinion from an authoritative source was sufficient in such cases.Footnote ²⁹

Reading the letter it is unclear whether Jarrett-Kerr was genuinely seeking guidance to resolve a doubtful conscience or looking for external support in his attempt to persuade his superior to condone his appearance at the trial. The phrasing of the question about the harm not appearing at the trial might cause and its placing as the third and final question would lead the respondent to give the answer Jarrett-Kerr wanted. But it is impossible to determine whether this was his intention or not. The decision to seek the opinion of thirty senior Anglicans rather than one spiritual adviser or director could be interpreted as looking for support to bring to bear in his argument with Graham. One notable omission from Jarrett-Kerr's list of correspondents, when taken together with the points about the structure of the letter and the number of correspondents, tends to support the conclusion that Jarrett-Kerr, consciously or unconsciously, wanted confirmation of his decision. He did not send a copy of the circular to the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Geoffrey Fisher, the head of the Church of England and the Anglican communion. One would have expected Fisher to have been on Jarrett-Kerr's list, but his conservative moral instincts were well known. In fact, once the trial ended Jarrett-Kerr wrote to the archbishop to dissuade him from denouncing the book as obscene.Footnote ³⁰

II

If one turns to the replies to the circular letter, the selective nature of Jarrett-Kerr's sample of opinion becomes apparent. As he told Eric James twenty-five years later, he chose to write to ‘a few people whose judgement I respected’. With the exception of the Jungian psychologist Dr Edward Bennet and the literary critics Professor Harry Moore and Professor Lionel Knights, all of his correspondents were active members of the Church of England. Ten of twenty-five respondents to the circular letter, contributed to Frontier, the quarterly journal of the ecumenical organisation Christian Frontier Council which encouraged new thinking about Christian responsibility in modern society, to Prism, ‘a kind of Anglican Crossbow; or a holy Encounter’ according to one of its editors, and to the left-leaning political weekly Time and Tide.Footnote ³¹ Several others involved themselves in the social ministry of the Church of England through church bodies such as the Moral Welfare Council, the Marriage Guidance Council and the Social and Industrial Council, as well as ecumenical organisations such as the Student Christian Movement and the Christian Frontier Council. All Jarrett-Kerr's correspondents wanted the Church to engage with wider society and represented what one of the editors of Prism referred to as ‘the lively and authentic voice of forward-looking Anglican opinion’. They were united in their desire to engage with people outside the Church and in their belief that this entailed some measure of church reform.

There was a remarkable consensus of opinion amongst Jarrett-Kerr's correspondents. Of the twenty-five respondents to his letter, seventeen believed that the unexpurgated text should be published, two did not want the unexpurgated text published, while the views of the remaining six are unclear. A majority of respondents felt that Jarrett-Kerr should appear at the trial: sixteen correspondents encouraged him to take the witness stand, two tried to persuade him not to give evidence and seven did not express an opinion. The letter-writers were well-informed: fifteen of them had read either an illegally imported copy of Lady Chatterley's lover or an advance copy of the proposed Penguin paperback edition. One cultured individual had read a French edition of the novel bought some years earlier in Cheltenham. Six admitted that they hadn't read an expurgated or unexpurgated edition of the text. It is unclear whether the remaining four correspondents had read an edition of the novel or not.

Most of Jarrett-Kerr's correspondents did not consider the book to be obscene and thought that it should be published. Most agreed with the Warden of Student Movement House, Frank Glendenning, that ‘the so-called daring passages in Lady Chatterley are fairly tame stuff and in fact are dull these days!’Footnote ³² John Lawrence, editor of Frontier, developed the point further, noting that ‘If people want dirt they can get much better dirt in the form of various publications now freely sold which I would like to see banned.’Footnote ³³ The general consensus of opinion was that maintaining the ban on the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley was indefensible when ‘obscene’ books and magazines such as Aldous Huxley's novel After Many A Summer and the men's magazine Reveille were freely available. Nevertheless, several of those supporting publication found the novel's racier passages disturbing and did not feel the book should be available to all in a cheap paperback edition.

In a letter written after reading the advance copy of Lady Chatterley's lover, Prior Andrew Blair told Jarrett-Kerr that he had been ‘devouring her at all hours of the day and night’ and had passed the book to another monk instructing him not to let it ‘go into circulation or be lent to the Abbess of Burnham’ for fear of the moral havoc it might cause among the nuns of the enclosed religious order of the Society of the Precious Blood.Footnote ³⁴ Valerie Pitt, an English lecturer at Woolwich Polytechnic and radical critic of the Church, worried that Lady Chatterley's lover, unlike most erotic literature which gratified and stimulated male readers, also aroused female readers: ‘This work has the curious feature of arousing the female – in the love passages that is – and it could I think, in an empty or tired mind obsess a women with sexual images.’Footnote ³⁵ A postgraduate student at Liverpool University considered the sex scenes disturbing too:

The same student also felt that Lawrence's portrayal of sex was not true to the reality of ‘normal sex’ as ‘there are many who would not have intercourse in the light, even though long married. And a couple rightly resent those who observe their caresses’.Footnote ³⁷

Worried about the effect that reading the unexpurgated text might have on women, the young and the ill-educated, most respondents regretted that the first edition of the unexpurgated text would be a cheap paperback but agreed with Robin Denniston, publisher of Prism, that the argument ‘O.K. in vellum and not O.K. in paper can be rather easily shot down’.Footnote ³⁸ Although John Lawrence of Frontier felt that it would have been better to have had ‘a clothbound edition first’, he agreed with Denniston that opposing its publication in paperback was indefensible. Lawrence resigned himself to the fact that the notoriety of the book would ‘arouse a certain amount of morbid curiosity’, but felt that it would ‘wear off very quickly’.Footnote ³⁹ Lionel Knights agreed that the novel would ‘inevitably be read for the wrong reasons’, but he felt it would offer ‘a contrast to the genuine pornography … that lies about on every bookstall’.Footnote ⁴⁰ According to John Lawrence, ‘If anyone bought Lady Chatterley for dirt and then had the patience to read it all through, I think he would probably be brought to a more serious and healthy view of sex at the end.’Footnote ⁴¹

The youth worker and adult educationalist Leslie Paul responded quite differently to the other letter-writers as he did not share their pessimism about the efficacy of legal moralism. Paul posed the question, ‘What happens when the Secondary Modern School boy uses f… in his essays with the intention of challenging the master, and defends himself because it's in a book he just bought? There are some roaring boys who ache daily to do this kind of thing.’ Paul felt ‘that society has to have standards, that conventions are not stupidities but answer some deep need of society as to how to behave in ways that make life tolerable’. He encouraged Jarrett-Kerr to think about the bigger issues: ‘what is most profitable is to try to discover what they are rather than promote the piecemeal break down of such standards as we have left’.Footnote ⁴²

Opinion was more divided when it came to the issue of which might be the more damaging strategy, the appearance or non-appearance of a clerical witness. Some of those who looked favourably on publication dismissed the risk of misrepresentation altogether, and went so far as to describe the trial as a teaching opportunity not to be missed. Robin Denniston felt that ‘in a major public issue like this the Church really should be represented, as so easily though a mixture of caution and general dither, its case could go by default’.Footnote ⁴³ Others considered that the beneficial impact of a clerical witness's evidence on the Church's reputation with the educated, assuming that the evidence was considered and knowledgeable, outweighed any harm misrepresentation of that evidence might cause readers of the popular press. Valerie Pitt spoke for many when she wrote:

Those in favour of Jarrett-Kerr giving evidence felt that he should model his testimony on that of Dr Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Study Secretary of the Church of England's Moral Welfare Council, before the Wolfenden Committee. In 1952, during one of the periodic moral panics about homosexuality, Sherwin Bailey wrote an article for the February issue of the journal Theology outlining a Christian response to ‘The problem of sexual inversion’ in the light of scientific research. Having received a large number of letters about his article, Sherwin Bailey persuaded the Church's Moral Welfare Council to establish a study group to examine the issue more closely. Their interim report, The problem of homosexuality, circulated widely, being mentioned several times during a House of Lords debate. It added to the mounting pressure on the Home Secretary to appoint a committee to consider reforming the law relating to homosexual offences. The Home Secretary succumbed to public pressure and appointed a departmental committee, under the chairmanship of Sir John Wolfenden, to which the Moral Welfare Council submitted oral and written evidence. This evidence, which Sherwin Bailey later edited for publication, weighed heavily with members of the committee, influencing the final report, and did much to improve the image of the Church in liberal quarters.Footnote ⁴⁵

Sherwin Bailey had faced a similar moral dilemma to Jarrett-Kerr before writing his article for Theology and he encouraged Jarrett-Kerr to appear at the Lady Chatterley trial.

But Sherwin Bailey, and Jarrett-Kerr's correspondents, who thought the testimony of a clerical expert would do more good than harm, did not acknowledge the differences between the role of the expert in the policy-making process and the role of the expert at a criminal trial. Sherwin Bailey presented his oral and written evidence to the Wolfenden Committee in private, while Jarrett-Kerr would be questioned publicly: he would have no control over the lawyers' questions or the press coverage of his evidence.

Those correspondents opposed to or wary of a priest giving evidence in open court considered the risk of misrepresentation in the popular press to be a serious one. At issue was the ‘scandal of the weak’. They held a pessimistic view of the popular press and its readers. No matter how well-intentioned, careful and considered his evidence, the popular press would distort Jarrett-Kerr's words, giving the impression that the Church endorsed the book without qualifications. This might lead the ‘weak minded’ to conclude that the Church condoned extra-marital sex. The BBC producer Robert Walton imagined the mass market dailies leading with the headline ‘MONK DEFENDS OBSCENITY’ the day after Jarrett-Kerr gave evidence. He felt that ‘It would be desperately unfair and yet it is very likely to happen.’Footnote ⁴⁷ Gordon Dunstan, Sherwin Bailey's successor at the Moral Welfare Council, shared Walton's opinion.Footnote ⁴⁸ Neither man expressed themselves as forcefully as Glyn Simon, bishop of Llandaff, who having read an advance copy of the Penguin edition of Lady Chatterley's lover and concluded that the novel would be an occasion of sin for many readers, tried very hard to persuade Jarrett-Kerr not to testify. Simon wrote three letters to Jarrett-Kerr warning him that his appearance might be scandalous and emphasising the gravity of the sin. But citing Adolphe Tanquerey's discussion of scandal in Synopsis theologicae dogmaticae and the warning in St Matthew's Gospel that ‘whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged around about his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea’ did not convince Jarrett-Kerr, who sent a draft proof of evidence to Michael Rubinstein on 6 October.Footnote ⁴⁹

Perhaps the most important response to the circular that Jarrett-Kerr received and the once that convinced him to despatch the proof of evidence was a letter from the archbishop of York, Michael Ramsey. Ramsey was the Church of England's leading Anglo-Catholic, a highly-respected theologian and the Mirfield Visitor. Here was the authoritative voice Jarrett-Kerr needed to trump the objections of his superior and his bishop. Ramsey did not disappoint. Like most of Jarrett-Kerr's correspondents, Ramsey could not see the sense in banning Lady Chatterley's lover when people interested in ‘smut’ could ‘get a large amount of such stuff anyhow’. More important than this in his view was that ‘Christians who want to pass a literary plus moral judgement must do so according to their consciences’ and ‘that if they are to consider whether to restrain the rest of their conscience on account of considerations about the “impression” given by the Church, then I would say that the Church's danger is of giving an “impression” of being condemnatory and unimaginative far more than of it giving an impression of condoning laxity of standards’. If Jarrett-Kerr's literary and moral judgement of the book led him to conclude that it should not be banned then he did not ‘feel there is any point of Christian or “ecclesiastical” values for dissuading you from doing so’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Jarrett-Kerr should obey his conscience and not the wishes of his immediate superiors in the church hierarchy. Twenty-five years later it was Ramsey's letter that Jarrett-Kerr remembered most clearly, but he also drew strength from the consensus of opinion amongst the respondents to his circular.Footnote ⁵¹ The trial and its aftermath revealed that this consensus was built on shaky foundations.

III

Although Jarrett-Kerr committed himself to appearing for the defence, he followed the advice of Brother George Every, an Anglican monk, church historian and poet, ‘to dodge the cameras and leave the high lights’ to others.Footnote ⁵² In his letters to Rubinstein, he suggested the names of potential clerical witnesses while presenting himself as a ‘diffident and muddled’ man who would ‘make a poor kind of showing in the witness box’. After talking with him over the phone, Rubinstein realised that Jarrett-Kerr was a keen supporter of the defence but one who would be a reluctant witness at the trial. Rubinstein had already expressed concern that two references to the ‘pornographic passages’ of Lady Chatterley's lover in Jarrett-Kerr's critical study might play into the hands of the prosecution. The unequivocal endorsement and naïve enthusiasm of a bishop better suited the defence strategy of persuading the jury to acquit Penguin Books. If the great and the good saw nothing wrong in the book then who needed the considered judgement of an unknown monk. The solicitor therefore arranged for Jarrett-Kerr to be called to give evidence at the Old Bailey on Tuesday 1 November, the fifth day of the trial, but in the event Rubinstein telephoned the day before to tell him not to bother travelling to London as the defence intended to call their last witness later that day.Footnote ⁵³ Having resolved to appear for the defence, Jarrett-Kerr, like T. S. Eliot whose evidence might also have given a more balanced appraisal of the novel's merits, did not appear.

The result of the trial delighted Jarrett-Kerr who felt ‘secretly rather pleased’ that he had not been called to give evidence. As well as avoiding scandalising ‘our dear pious Fraternity of the Resurrection’ composed of ‘old ladies in Worthing’, he had not made a fool of himself in the witness box.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, his evidence would almost certainly have mitigated the disastrous impact that the clerical witnesses' overly enthusiastic and ill-informed evidence had on the standing of liberal Anglicans within the Church and with the literary world. None of the Anglican clerics who appeared for the defence as experts in Christian ethics combined his talents as a theologian, literary critic and educator. Although the bishop of Woolwich, Canon Dick Milford, Prebendary Stephan Hopkinson and the Revd Donald Tytler had read Lady Chatterley's lover, they had not studied it closely and were not familiar with Lawrence's other work. Their evidence did not bear comparison with what Leslie Paul described in his response to Jarrett-Kerr's circular as the ‘sincere and well thought out’ evidence of the clerical witnesses before the Wolfenden committee. Their testimony came closer to the ‘naïve, enthusiastic but basically brainless utterances of obviously ill-informed clergy on subjects they feel compelled to “pronounce” about as though they were Delphic oracles’ and this did great harm to the image of the Church.Footnote ⁵⁵

Moral conservatives within the Church were the first to criticise the clerical witnesses. At the Canterbury diocesan conference, Geoffrey Fisher made a public statement in which he condemned Robinson for taking part in the trial, in particular his aside ‘insofar as adultery is an immoral relationship’ which made the seventh commandment (‘thou shalt not commit adultery’) relative, flatly contradicting church teaching. Robinson's testimony had made him ‘a stumbling block and a cause of offence to ordinary Christians’.Footnote ⁵⁶ In Fisher's view, Robinson had committed the sin of scandal and neglected his pastoral duties. His condemnation was predictable. The archbishop had used the same occasion a year earlier to condemn adultery as a sin and raise the question of whether it should be made a criminal offence.Footnote ⁵⁷ Expanding on these views in his diocesan letter for January 1960, Fisher felt that, as the social stigma attached to adultery waned, the Church needed to emphasise the sinfulness of adultery and the damage it did to the institution of marriage and to family life.Footnote ⁵⁸ A lead article deploring the trial's outcome in the Church Times reinforced the impression that majority opinion within the Church considered the novel to be obscene and opposed its publication.Footnote ⁵⁹

In February 1961 influential cultural critics began to pour scorn on the clerical witnesses' evidence. Three months after the acquittal, many of the readers of literary reviews like Encounter and the Times Literary Supplement, and political weeklies such as the Spectator and Time and Tide, had read the unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley's lover out of curiosity and formed their own views as to the merits of the novel. Many of these conflicted with the views of the defence witnesses. In the February 1961 edition of Encounter, the journalist Colin Welch dared to criticise the expert witnesses' assessment of the novel and the attempt to Christianise an essentially pagan writer.Footnote ⁶⁰ Two weeks later the Spectator published an essay by F. R. Leavis, who had refused to appear for the defence, in which he developed the reaction against what he dubbed the ‘new orthodoxy’. Leavis vented his spleen against the trial testimony which he felt had misread the novel and distorted Lawrence's literary reputation by heaping praise on one of his least successful novels. In the essay, Leavis revealed that he had written a letter to the Daily Herald criticising an editorial rebuking the archbishop for his censure of Robinson – the implication being that the archbishop had understood Lawrence's anti-Christian message.Footnote ⁶¹ The publication of an edited transcript of the trial did not improve the reputation of the clerical witnesses: an anonymous Times Literary Supplement review criticised the conduct of the trial, highlighting the ‘excessive panegyrics’ of the defence witnesses who seemed to be testifying to their ‘broadmindedness and high-mindedness’. The reviewer also questioned whether Bishop Robinson and others understood the significance of Lawrence's description of a ‘night of sensual passion’ involving anal sex which was referred to in the prosecution's closing speech.Footnote ⁶² The academic John Sparrow wrote an article for Encounter about the meaning of this passage, which he thought would have done much to weaken the defence's case if the prosecution had chosen to put it to the witnesses earlier in the trial, as its elliptical references to anal sex contradicted Lawrence's attempts to treat sex in a frank fashion.Footnote ⁶³ The TLS review, and Sparrow's essay, made the clerical witnesses appear disingenuous and morally lax or naïve. All four articles prompted debate in the letters columns which did little to redeem the reputation of the clerical witnesses.Footnote ⁶⁴

Such criticism of clerical witnesses, and of John Robinson in particular, both from within and without the Church, prompted Jarrett-Kerr to defend and explain their views in print. Jarrett-Kerr shared their views, which were largely based on their reading of his study of Lawrence, although he thought little of their testimony with the possible exception of Canon Dick Milford's views about the educational merits of the novel.Footnote ⁶⁵ After Fisher's public censure, Jarrett-Kerr wrote to Robinson offering to support him in the press.Footnote ⁶⁶ He also wrote to Rubinstein telling him of his plan to support the bishop. Rubinstein replied, expressing support and attaching a list of clerics who had helped the defence. The list included amongst others the names of the Methodist minister Donald Soper, the Dominican friar and religious writer Gerald Vann, the University of Oxford's Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology Vigo Demant, the University of London's Professor of Divinity Dennis Nineham and Dr Alec Vidler.Footnote ⁶⁷ The lead article in the Church Times gave Jarrett-Kerr the opportunity to write a long letter to the editor in which he expressed regret at the archbishop's rebuke and dissented from the leader. He explained how he had balanced the risk of the possible misrepresentation of his evidence in press reports scandalising ‘the general public’ against the risk of scandalising ‘those who consider Lawrence a great artist’ by not appearing. After serious deliberation he felt that the risk of not appearing was graver, as the general public would forget any controversy quickly while the educated would not. He then outlined his views about the proper relationship between literature and religion, developing an argument based on the distinction between natural law and divine law:

Jarrett-Kerr made much the same point in a letter that he wrote to Archbishop Fisher after learning that the House of Lords would debate the trial, but went further in expressing his opinion about the proper relationship between the Church and society. Jarrett-Kerr assumed that Britain was a post-Christian society and that the Church was a ‘curious and quaint survival’ in the view of 80 per cent of the population, for whom it was as interesting and irrelevant as ‘most of the specimens in the local museum’:Footnote ⁶⁹

Here Jarrett-Kerr merged two traditions of thought within Mirfield: the political pluralism of Charles Gore and Neville Figgis, which viewed the Church of England as one of several religious sects, and the religious inclusivism of John Illingworth, Denys Shropshire and Lionel Thornton, which acknowledged the presence of the Christian God in science, philosophy, arts and other religions.Footnote ⁷¹ The ‘inclusivist’ approach to belief systems other than Christianity also underpinned his response to criticisms of Robinson and the other clerical witnesses in the secular press.

Jarrett-Kerr intervened in the secular debate at its outset, writing a short response to Colin Welch's essay in Encounter. Contra Robinson, Welch maintained that Lady Chatterley's lover was not a book Christians ought to read, as Lawrence used his literary talent to persuade readers of the healthiness of phallus worship. He felt that ‘the people it is most likely to corrupt are those few who are going to read it “for the right reasons,” the earnest ones who will read it carefully with sympathy and respect, and who have sufficient intelligence and knowledge to grasp the point’.Footnote ⁷² In his response, Jarrett-Kerr proceeded to refute Welch's characterisation of Lawrence as a devotee of the tradition of witchcraft, preferring to label him a pagan writer from whose highly developed sense of the corruption of modern life Christians could learn. In a short postscript Jarrett-Kerr attempted to damp down the controversy caused by the misreporting of Robinson's remarks in open court about the sacredness of sex for Christians.Footnote ⁷³ He suggested that the bishop was here indicating ‘nothing more startling than the common Christian doctrine of intercourse as the consummation of the sacrament of holy matrimony’.Footnote ⁷⁴

IV

Jarrett-Kerr was not the only Anglican moved to defend Robinson and the other clerical witnesses at the trial. Several of his correspondents who wrote for the magazine Prism, a High Church Anglican monthly that aspired to be the voice of young radicals within the Church, rallied to defend Robinson and the others.Footnote ⁷⁵ Valerie Pitt, a regular contributor to Prism, sent the archbishop of Canterbury an open letter seeking practical advice on how to teach English literature in the light of his comments about the trial.Footnote ⁷⁶ Pitt also drafted a letter to the editor of the Church Times questioning the representativeness of the correspondence about the trial published in the paper and persuaded several others to sign the letter.

Five Cambridge theologians signed a letter printed in The Times expressing their regret that the archbishop of Canterbury should publicly rebuke a bishop for catching the ear of the nation ‘in a manner befitting a spokesman of the National Church’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Their shared indignation at Fisher's action cemented the relationship between the five signatories, Professor Geoffrey Lampe, Professor Donald MacKinnon, Dr Hugh Montefiore, Dr Alec Vidler and the Revd Harry Williams. It was the first collective statement from the group of theologians that came to be known as the Cambridge radicals and whose private discussions resulted in two important collections of essays, Soundings and Objections to Christian belief, which presented the ‘new theology’ to a wider audience.

The hostile reaction to Robinson's evidence at the Lady Chatterley trial had led Jarrett-Kerr and several of his correspondents to explain and defend the views of Anglican radicals in the press. In so doing Jarrett-Kerr found a new public platform as a regular contributor to Time and Tide, which took an interest in religious affairs after the owner and editor of Prism Timothy Beaumont bought it in 1960. Under Beaumont's ownership, Time and Tide tried to communicate the views of Christian intellectuals to secular intellectuals. This allowed Jarrett-Kerr, Pitt and others to air their views to a much wider audience than they could ever have hoped to reach through Prism. Jarrett-Kerr continued to develop his views about the issues raised by the trial. He wrote an article on recent developments in the theology of natural law for Prism and an essay on ‘Witness of the Church in an expanding world’ for the volume Mirfield essays in Christian belief in which he argued that the Anglican communion should adopt Lionel Thornton's ‘inclusivism’ in its dealings with other religions.Footnote ⁷⁸ These ideas fed into a book on The promise of a secular society for the Church Missionary Society's Christian Presence series. In this Jarrett-Kerr outlined contemporary secular humanism for his Christian readers and argued that Christians need not assume a hostile stance towards the attempts of secular humanists to define human nature, determine human goals and develop a secular morality, as this was consonant with the natural law tradition.Footnote ⁷⁹

The evidence at the Lady Chatterley trial of Robinson and the other clerical witnesses may have done little to advance their cause within the Church and the literary world, but the controversy surrounding Robinson's evidence alerted the news media to the debates within the Church and created opportunities for Anglican radicals to communicate their ideas to a wider audience during the early 1960s, opportunities that they grasped readily, dismissing any qualms that they might have about the risk of scandal and prompting their opponents within the Church to respond publicly. If Callum Brown is right to argue that discursive Christianity collapsed in the 1960s, it remains to be seen whether the public debates between conservatives and liberals on social and moral issues undermined the moral authority of the Church and hastened the process of secularisation. Robert Towler's study of the hundreds of letters that members of the public wrote to John Robinson as the Honest to God debate raged suggest that professing Christians ceased to accept Church teaching uncritically.Footnote ⁸⁰ Yet while fierce and divisive debates about homosexuality, divorce and contraception raged during the mid and late 1950s, these did not coincide with a dramatic collapse in Church membership.Footnote ⁸¹ Should we view the bishop of Llandaff's warning about the danger of scandal inherent in public debate as those of a latter-day Cassandra? Closer examination of media coverage of religious affairs during this period and a re-examination of unsolicited correspondence from members of the public to permissive and anti-permissive moralists would be important first steps towards answering this question.

The Lady Chatterley debate had other consequences too. Writing articles and giving interviews in defence of the clerical witnesses concealed the differences between Anglican radicals and gave the impression that they were a strong and united force with ready access to the print and broadcast media. The Honest to God debate less than eighteen months later confirmed this view, and prompted moral conservatives within the Church to resist the new theology and new morality, polarising debate on social and ethical issues. Moral conservatives, who cannot have read the articles in Prism and Time and Tide too closely, did not see that the radicals consisted of two groups, the Liberal Anglicans, of whom Bishop Robinson was the most well known, who advocated a new morality based on situation ethics, and the liberal Anglo-Catholics, of which Jarrett-Kerr was part, who rejected situation ethics and looked to developments in casuistry and natural theology to determine the Church's stance on social issues.

The Lady Chatterley trial and debate weakened the fragile coalition of middle-aged and middle-class radicals that had coalesced around Prism. For most liberal Anglo-Catholics situation ethics was anathema after papal criticism of the new morality, making it important to note that Jarrett-Kerr did not explain or defend Robinson's remark about adultery in his article for Encounter. Twenty-five years later Jarrett-Kerr told Robinson's biographer Eric James that the two disagreed on so much that he found it ‘curious that John and I should have converged on D. H. Lawrence, whereas up to then we had diverged sharply’.Footnote ⁸² In 1960 Jarrett-Kerr and Robinson, an Anglo-Catholic radical and a Liberal Anglican radical, arrived at a similar position on the issue of literary censorship from very different starting points. A perceived Liberal Anglican takeover of the previously High Church Prism at the same time as the trial increased tensions within the radical coalition and stymied the emergence of a radical party within the Church. In a letter written to Jarrett-Kerr after the trial ended, Valerie Pitt told him that she was ‘ready to blast Robin [Denniston] and the others [the editorial board] for handing Prism over to Beaumont’:

But it was the ‘intellectually shoddy’ such as Bishop John Robinson and Kenneth Carey, Principal of Westcott House who with their controversial views grabbed the attention of the media, particularly that of the BBC. Robinson's attempt to reconstruct a national moral community on whose behalf the Church could speak through a process of doctrinal, ethical and pastoral reform chimed with the BBC's approach to religious affairs.

Not only did Jarrett-Kerr's ideas receive less attention in the media than those of Liberal Anglicans like Robinson, fellow Anglo-Catholics with influence over church policy did not share them. From the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s Anglo-Catholics exerted a strong and continuous influence on the Church's position on social and moral issues. Gordon Dunstan, the clerical secretary of the Moral Welfare Council (Council for Social Work from 1961 onwards) and an Anglo-Catholic trained at the Mirfield Theological College, acted as Geoffrey Fisher's unofficial adviser on contemporary ethical issues from 1955 to 1961.Footnote ⁸⁴ First as clerical secretary and then as secretary of the Church Assembly Joint Board of Study, Dunstan had a hand in most Church reports on social and moral issues during the period. Dunstan, one of Jarrett-Kerr's correspondents, opposed publication of Lady Chatterley's lover and did not think clerical witnesses should appear at the trial.Footnote ⁸⁵ When it came to contemporary ethical issues, Dunstan felt that the Church should use casuistry to determine its moral teaching while co-operating with secular bodies to forge moral conventions that non-Christians and Christians could agree upon and which would underpin the law.Footnote ⁸⁶ Dunstan's approach chimed with that of the Anglo-Catholic bishop of Exeter, Robert Mortimer. Dunstan was a member of the study group on divorce law, chaired by Mortimer, whose influential report made their approach to social and moral issues that of the entire Church. In the chapter on ‘The Church's concern with secular matrimonial law’ the group argued that it would ‘be unjust as well as socially disruptive’ to use the law to impose Christian standards of morality ‘in a modern plural society’. The Church should work with ‘secular humanists and others’ to make divorce law ‘as equitable and as little harmful to society as it can be made’. The authors of the report rejected the natural law approach to contemporary ethical issues. They argued that the experience of living in a modern secular society demonstrated that many of the laws of nature discernible to theologians owed more to faith than reason.Footnote ⁸⁷ Jarrett-Kerr's attempt to find a via media through merging the Anglo-Catholic traditions of political pluralism and religious inclusivism, prompted by the fallout from the Lady Chatterley trial, had failed.

The Church was dividing into three groups: first, the traditionalists resisting secularisation both within and without the Church; second, the conservatives who accepted that Britain was a post-Christian society, thought that the Church should acknowledge that it could no longer speak on behalf of the nation and that it should work with non-Christians to salvage parts of the old moral consensus that all could agree on; and, lastly, radical reformers, such as Robinson, who valued the Liberal Anglican notion of a national Church speaking on behalf of a national moral community, and felt that doctrinal, ethical and pastoral reforms would rebuild this community. In practice the traditionalist and conservative responses to secularisation abandoned the idea of a Church in favour of that of a sect, while the radical response, if accepted, would have completed the transformation of Anglicanism into a civic religion. There was no room for Jarrett-Kerr to develop his vision of a Church in a plural society.