On Trial Portillo's State Secrets

1,000 of history under one roof.

The National Archives - a treasure house of secrets.

The records of extraordinary times and people.

These files are this nation's story, our shared past.

Documents housed here were highly classified,

intended for the eyes of only the privileged few,

protected from your sight for decades...

but not now.

I've been granted special access to files once kept hush-hush.

I'll unearth amazing tales from our hidden history.

Forget what you've been told,

these documents tell the truth.

Coming up in this programme...

On trial, the magazine that found itself in the dock

and the moral campaigner who put it there.

Last Thursday evening, we sat as a family

and we saw a programme that was the dirtiest programme

that I have seen for a very long time.

Psychic or fraudster?

The last woman to be jailed under the witchcraft laws.

People came forward and said that

they had shaken hands with the spirits

and described exactly what they had seen.

It was quite extraordinary and, in a way, impressive.

And the Church of England's shameful secret,

the files that reveal its role in slavery.

These pages bear the musty smell of their 200 years

and, also, the stench of hypocrisy.

In matters of the law, one question has been asked

since biblical times -

does God need our protection?

Do I have the right to be offensive about your religion?

During most of our history, laws forbade blasphemy.

But, as our society became more secular,

most of those fell by the wayside.

So, it seemed astonishing and anachronistic

when the veteran campaigner Mrs Mary Whitehouse

brought a private prosecution

for the common law offence of blasphemous libel

against the magazine Gay News for a poem that it published in 1976.

# It's fun to stay at the YMCA, it's fun to stay at... #

Mrs Whitehouse made a formidable enemy.

The teacher from Warwickshire

had come to prominence a decade earlier

with her moral crusade against the BBC,

which she accused of broadcasting filth.

Her Clean Up TV petition attracted half a million signatures.

We recognise that the period between six and 9:15

is a period for family viewing.

Well, I think we're being palmed off.

Because, last Thursday evening,

we sat as a family and we saw a programme that started at 6:35

and it was the dirtiest programme

that I have seen for a very long time.

But the founder of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association

had concerns beyond broadcasting standards,

including the fall in religious observance.

All of them, I think, are objecting to the blasphemy.

The reason why God and the Virgin Mary hadn't had any more children,

except Jesus Christ, was perhaps because they were on the pill.

And there was the rise of the so-called permissive society.

As a teacher responsible for sex education,

I had it laid upon me to give children sex education

based on chastity before marriage and fidelity within it.

But this poem outraged her most.

It also presented her with her greatest challenge...

to defend God in a court of law.

It was called The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name.

It is an erotic fantasy about a gay centurion,

who takes Christ's body down from the cross

and it's about what he does with the body next,

and it is accompanied by an illustration.

Even by 21st century standards, it is pretty strong stuff.

So strong that, even today,

I couldn't read it on television.

But, back in 1977, Mary Whitehouse wanted to go further

than merely getting it banned.

She launched a private prosecution against Gay News

for blasphemous libel.

It would be the first trial of its kind for 50 years.

In his summing up, the judge laid out the terms of the debate.

"There are some who may think that permissiveness has gone far enough

"and that this poem has gone beyond what is permissive.

"There are others who may think that there should be no limit whatsoever

"to what may be published."

The trial lasted six days.

Inside, high-profile witnesses gave evidence for the defence

and outside, there were protests from both sides.

Press freedom!

Please take a copy of the offending poem

for why the Gay News is in court!

You have blasphemed my Lord Jesus Christ in that court! You have!

The decision was for the jury...

..but the judge made it pretty clear on which side he came down,

as the documents reveal...

"If you were asked to read it aloud to an audience of fellow Christians,

"would you do it?

"And if you did, could you do it without blushing?"

Well, perhaps not surprisingly with a summing up like that,

the prosecution was successful.

The editor Denis Lemon and Gay News were found guilty

and Lemon was given a nine-month prison sentence,

suspended for 18 months.

Mary Whitehouse viewed this verdict

as a watershed victory for Christian values.

After the trial, she declared,

"I'm rejoicing because I saw the possibility

"of Our Lord being vilified.

"Now it's been shown that it won't be."

For those on the other side, it was a clear defeat.

Gay News was a rallying point for a community that, in the 1970s,

was still marginalised.

Among them was a young man,

who'd become, first, a keyboardist in the band The Communards

and later a Church of England vicar.

# I can't survive

# I can't stay alive without your love, no, baby... #

My first contact with the gay scene,

I was a 16-year-old gay teenager in Stratford-upon-Avon.

As you can imagine, the opportunities to range widely

across gay culture were rather limited.

But I could get Gay News - and I did.

It used to arrive in a plain, brown envelope at my digs

and I would read it and follow the trial there.

And so, Gay News was my sort of point of contact

with a wider community of people, where it wasn't simply about sex,

often sex obtained by slightly unattractive means,

it was about a community of people with a set of beliefs,

who had a certain investment in an idea of personal freedom

and a vision of a society that would be, in some ways, liberated.

Part of a wider programme, you know,

to do with sexual equality, racial equality and so on.

And so...that was something I rallied to.

As a leading figure in the Nationwide Festival of Light group,

Mary Whitehouse held mass gatherings in Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square...

..always capable of making a rousing speech.

The whole world has a problem of moral pollution

and, once again, Britain has the chance today

to give leadership to the whole world.

Often her addresses focused on the rise of the gay movement

but, despite enjoying obvious support,

she didn't speak for all Christians.

I think she gave voice to a particularly poisonous and nasty

and also illegitimate set of beliefs,

a sort of set of prejudices against gay people, in particular,

which I found very objectionable

and something worth fighting against.

So, I think Mary Whitehouse was a sort of figurehead

for a set of feelings and beliefs and opinions,

and also ways of intervening in the public's fear,

that represented a challenge to people like me.

The judge at one point says that the jury should, as one of their tests,

think about whether they'd be willing to read it aloud

to a Christian audience.

If they did read it aloud, could they do so without blushing?

Did that strike you as a reasonable summing up

on the charge of blasphemous libel?

I'm just trying to imagine reading it

to my mother's union meeting on a Thursday afternoon!

I don't think they're quite ready for that,

although they are, in fact, more broad-minded

than I give them credit for.

But it's a different sort of thing. I think anything can be said...

We may need to brace ourselves to hear it.

It may be something we don't want to hear

and it may, indeed, outrage us fundamentally,

but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be said and shouldn't be heard.

Mary Whitehouse won a battle but not a war.

The crime of blasphemous libel has been abolished.

People marched to defend the right to give offence.

But, as a campaigner, she earned a place in history.

It was an era of powerful figures

and Mary Whitehouse was such a figure, I think.

In a way, she wasn't that dissimilar

to Margaret Thatcher in the political world.

She was this kind of iron lady, if you like,

and she was someone against whom we could rail

and against whom we could direct our vituperation and our anger.

And, having said that now,

I always thought there was a certain pathos to her, too,

and that feeling of pathos increased as history went its way.

For centuries, kings and queens in the British Isles

asserted that they derived their authority from God.

So, those who practised witchcraft

could be seen as not only heretical, but also subversive,

guilty of a capital offence.

On occasion, fear of what they could do

would provoke a mass routing out or witch hunt.

Laws against witches...

That sounds like a throwback to our primitive past.

But here, in the archives, I've a document that raises a question

with a surprising answer.

When was a woman last imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act of 1735?

In the 18th century? In the 19th century?

I was astonished to learn from these files

that it was during the Second World War.

Her name was Helen Duncan

and she was known for a rather unusual talent,

to produce ectoplasm from her mouth.

Some observers thought it took the form of dead loved ones.

Others were merely reminded of a white sheet.

Like many other mediums, she travelled the country,

holding seances and claiming to talk to the dead.

But, during the Second World War,

her supposed skill to see what others couldn't

brought her into conflict with the state.

In 1941, Helen Duncan held a seance in Portsmouth.

Here, she conjured the spirit of a dead sailor,

who had, apparently, served on the battleship HMS Barham,

which had been sunk by a German U-boat.

But news of that sinking was, at that point,

still a highly classified state secret,

not to be released for fear of damaging British morale.

The authorities were alarmed and took action to silence her.

She was arrested during one of her seances

by Royal Naval volunteer reservists.

One of them here, Stanley Raymond Worth,

he says that,

"Another reservist, Cross, gave the chair in front of him

"a violent push forward and leapt forward.

"I switched on my torch and illuminated the scene.

"I saw him grasping the prisoner,

"who seemed to be trying to get rid of a piece of white material,

"which she was pushing away from her,

"but it fell to the floor."

"The seances were conducted with a dim, red light.

"But almost immediately,

"the white bulb was replaced by a member of the audience,

"which illuminated the room.

"When the light came on, Cross said to me,

"'Did you get the sheet?'

"I replied, 'No. It's gone into the audience.'

"Mrs Duncan said, 'Of course it's gone. It had to go somewhere.'

"At no time did she deny that it was a sheet."

And so, maybe in an attempt to shut her up,

she was taken to the Old Bailey and tried for witchcraft.

The authorities had considered charging her with vagrancy

but, fearful that she might blurt out other military secrets,

they sought a way of putting her in prison.

Better to use the Witchcraft Act of 1735,

which provided for custodial sentences

against those who fraudulently claimed to have witches' powers.

It's a paradox that she had to be shut up

for fear that she could sense national secrets,

but was tried as an obvious fraud.

It was a circus, which privately appalled even Winston Churchill.

The sensational trial came to the attention of the Prime Minister,

who was moved to write a minute...

"What was the cost of this trial to the state?

"Observing that witnesses were bought from Portsmouth

"and maintained here in this crowded London for a fortnight

"and the recorder kept busy with all this obsolete tomfoolery

"to the detriment of necessary work in the courts."

Signed WSC, Winston Churchill.

The trial took place over 70 years ago,

but I've found someone who witnessed it.

Professor Donald West was a young psychic researcher,

who attended the courtroom day after day.

Did you attend with any preconception

as to whether Helen Duncan

was genuinely possessed of spiritual powers

or whether, perhaps, she was a fraud?

Well, at that time, erm...

..I had no really fixed opinion.

Certainly, listening to all those people who came forward

and said that they had shaken hands with the spirits

and described exactly what they had seen and so forth,

it was quite extraordinary and, in a way, impressive.

Do you have a memory, an image in your mind

of Helen Duncan, the defendant, appearing in the dock?

Oh, yes.

She was certainly not a pretty woman -

plump and very dour-looking -

and that's about it, I think.

And, of course...

..she didn't give evidence,

so one didn't hear her arguing the case.

Despite a string of witnesses saying that Helen Duncan was genuine,

the jury found her guilty of fraud under the Witchcraft Act.

Her sentence - nine months in jail.

Did you have a feeling about the verdict and the sentence?

Did it cause any emotion in you?

I was, really, at the time...

I didn't quite know what the jury would decide.

It wasn't surprising but...

you know, if it had gone the other way,

in view of all those witnesses,

I wouldn't have been surprised, either.

But now, of course, I can see that

the jury naturally believed the policeman,

rather than all these crazy people who described impossible things.

And is it your conclusion, then, that people were so deceived?

Oh, I'm sure of that, yes.

And I am also sure that...

..Mrs Duncan did commit many frauds.

So, Helen Duncan was legally determined to be a trickster

and imprisoned at a time when keeping secrets was vital to winning the war.

And yet, a big question remains...

if she was a fraud,

how did she know about the secret of HMS Barham sinking?

An historian of witchcraft may provide an un-mystical answer.

She arouses suspicion because she mentions the fate of HMS Barham,

a battleship that has been sunk, but that is a secret.

How on earth could she have known?

Well, the Spiritualist movement sometimes say that

the only way she could have possibly known,

because it was a secret, the only way she could have known

is because she had contacted the spirits of the dead.

Well, who knows?

But there is a more prosaic story behind it,

which is that the government did actually inform the families

of those who had died on the Barham that it had gone down,

but they were told not to say anything.

Well, this is a Portsmouth ship

and we're talking about nearly 900 men, that's 900 families,

say ten people in a family and their friends

and you multiply it up.

It's plausible that, maybe, almost immediately,

20 to 30,000 people in England knew that Barham had been sunk.

So, given that Helen Duncan is a sensitive medium,

by which I mean she's listening out for information all around her,

she's in Portsmouth at that time,

I think it starts to seem quite, not just plausible, but even likely

that she would have heard that the Barham had been sunk.

The date of Mrs Duncan's arrest is significant...

1944 -

the year in which the D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied France

would be launched.

When the motto was -

"Loose lips might sink ships."

Do you think that plays a part in Helen Duncan's fate?

I think it does.

Obviously, this is a matter of intense sensitivity,

the greatest seaborne invasion in the history of the world

and, obviously, the turning point in the war to open up the second front.

So...

But around this planning for D-Day,

inevitably, there is going to be intelligence work that might be,

you know, very high-level against German spies

but also low-level, too,

and just against people who were shooting their mouths off.

-And she's an intelligent woman with extraordinary antennae.

-Yeah.

She's a blotting paper that absorbs information

and she's wandering around the South of England,

-which is where most of the activity is.

-I think that's it in a nutshell.

Mrs Duncan was the last woman to be imprisoned under the Witchcraft Act.

In 1951, Churchill's government made sure

that there would be no more "tomfoolery"

when it repealed the laws.

And in 1956,

Helen Duncan passed over to the other side.

The courts of law give us the chance to judge innocence and guilt.

But is guilt reduced or removed by the passage of time?

That's the question raised by our next document.

For more than 300 years,

European merchants forced Africans onto slave ships

and transported them across the Atlantic Ocean,

and Britain played a huge part in this human trade.

British ships carried around three million slaves

to America and the Caribbean

where they worked on plantations,

helping to build the wealth of the city of London.

The trade made many organisations rich

and I've discovered in the archives

that that includes a very surprising name.

"God Almighty has set before me the abolition of the slave trade."

So wrote the great reformer William Wilberforce.

And yet, during the 18th century,

there were slaves in the Caribbean who bore, branded on their chest,

the word "society".

This 1817 register of slaves in Barbados

reveals that society means

the honourable and reverent

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts -

the missionary arm of the Church of England -

and here is that society listed as owning some 400 slaves.

HYMN: All People That On Earth Do Dwell

Listed here, then, is every man, woman and child owned by the society.

We see that their ages range very considerably.

Kudjoe is 70 years old and he's working as a domestic.

It seems that Ben George can be set to work as a grass gatherer,

even though he's only ten years old.

Some slaves are still alive at a very grand age.

Here's Rita, who's 90 years old.

She's infirm. She's no longer working.

But, on the other hand, Orkoa and Quasheba,

who are both 80 years old,

are both still working as nurses.

The documents don't reveal the conditions

that some of the slaves would have endured.

12-hour working days in intense heat.

Punishments, such as the lash, or being put in leg irons.

For the slave owners, like the church,

it was the profit of the plantation that mattered.

These pages bear the musty smell of their 200 years...

..and, also, the stench of hypocrisy.

MUSIC: Djembe by Salif Keita

Today, we can still see the wealth in our capital

constructed on the foundations of slavery.

The Corporation of London had its seat in the magnificent Guildhall.

Sir William Beckford made a fortune from slave plantations in Jamaica

and was twice Lord Mayor.

Robert Beckford's ancestors worked under him.

Robert, what do you know of your own slave origins within your family?

The name was given as a brand to slaves on the west of the island,

where the Beckford family,

who were a slave-owning family based in England,

had most of their slaves.

So, although my name is Robert Beckford,

my real name would be an African name.

So, Beckford is, in essence, a slave name.

William Beckford, the Lord Mayor,

might have been focused on profit,

but the church added a moral purpose to slavery.

They recognised that slavery is problematic,

but they also recognised that these slaves,

the Africans come from this dark continent,

and therefore they need to be civilised.

And slavery, while not perfect,

provides an opportunity for bringing Africans into the body of humanity.

Does the Church of England

succeed with this mission of civilising the slaves?

It's a complete failure.

They failed to convert the numbers that they'd hoped to,

partly because Christianity provides a point of resistance for slaves.

How do you resist this terror?

Well, you refuse to take on their religion.

They'd brand slaves with hot irons as a sign of ownership

and they flogged them to death,

and they also sell them off when they can't work any more.

So they don't treat them any better than slaves on any other plantation?

That's what the historical documents suggest,

that the Church of England plantation

is no different to any other plantation.

# Glory, glory

# Hallelujah

# When I lay my burden down... #

The international slave trade was abolished in 1807...

..but it wasn't until 1833

that parliament outlawed slavery as an institution.

Compensation was paid,

not to the slaves

but to their owners.

Documents show that for freeing its slaves,

the church received nearly £9,000,

a fortune at that time.

We have, in Britain today,

a history of churches, of church buildings

that are built on the blood and sweat

and brutalisation of Africans.

It's irreconcilable, I would think,

with the heart of the Christian gospel,

a gospel of freedom and justice.

# Old pirates, yes, they rob I

# Sold I to the merchant ships... #

In 2006, the then Archbishop of Canterbury

apologised for the Church of England's role...

..but neither it nor the state has met calls to pay reparations.

How do we compensate fully for this past?

The argument is this.

Britain benefited historically, structurally, economically

from the slave trade

and many of the benefits are still with us,

in terms of the enrichment of the economy.

Caribbean nations and Caribbean people

were net losers from slavery,

so they now feel they should be compensated.

The Reparations Movement is not only about financial compensation,

it's also about a psycho-social healing.

The brutality and injustice of slavery

and the idea of white racial supremacy that underpinned it

are now hard to understand.

Whether this generation

is bound to pay recompense for past abuses is hotly debated.

# Redemption songs, all I ever have... #

Its historic actions clearly weigh

on the conscience of the Church of England.

# These songs of freedom... #

In the documents that I've studied today,

I was struck by Winston Churchill's exasperation

that Helen Duncan was imprisoned under a witchcraft law 200 years old.

Gay News magazine was, doubtless, astonished to be convicted in 1977

of the ancient offence of blasphemous libel.

It's nearly two centuries since the Church of England owned slaves,

but some campaigners would argue

that the passage of time is irrelevant

and that the former colonial powers should be atoning today

for the racist crimes of yesteryear.