Donald West
Psychiatrist and criminologist who made one of the first serious academic studies of homosexuality
DONALD WEST, who has died aged 95, was an eminent psychiatrist and criminologist whose best known work, Homosexuality, published in 1955, well before decriminalisation, and even before the publication of the Wolfenden Report, had a significant influence on the public debate.
The book (also published in the US under the coy title The Other Man), was the first serious study of the subject, and its contention that most homosexuals were “ordinary individuals capable of contributing to society given a chance” provided enormous comfort to gay people of the time.
West argued for tolerance and decriminalisation, but his cautious and academically detached, often negative, account of what he referred to as a “problem” made him persona non grata with more radical liberationists of the 1970s – particularly as West himself was gay, and pursuing an “unattached, promiscuous lifestyle”, as he eventually admitted in an autobiography, Gay Life, Straight Work, in 2012.
In one typical passage of his earlier book, West described the exotic guests at a glittering homosexual party, but added “their relationships are brittle and fickle and beneath the protective social gloss many are frustrated and unhappy.” No doctor, he wrote, should advise a young homosexual without a “grave warning … about the frustration and tragedy that so often attend this mode of life”.
But as West pointed out, he had taken a huge risk at a time when homosexuality “could only be discussed in muted terms appropriate to a dreaded and scarcely mentionable disease”, and when a large part of the medical profession, including his superior, the Maudsley forensic psychiatrist Peter Scott, were of the opinion that homosexuality was a pathological condition of the psyche that could be treated with various forms of “deconditioning” including electric shocks and hormone therapy.
“It would,” he recalled in an interview, “have been quite impossible for me to say that I myself was gay. I had to pretend otherwise … The book had to be written in a very distant style, referring to
‘them’ instead of ‘we’ … and I was lucky that nobody exposed me.”
Donald James West was born in Liverpool on June 9 1924 and brought up in Crosby, the only child of John, a former labourer who worked for Cunard, and his religious, puritanical wife Jessie, who died when Donald was 11. His father then married his mistress.
Donald won a scholarship to the private Merchant Taylors’ school in Crosby, and went on to read Medicine at Liverpool University, where he became interested in psychology, qualifying as a doctor in 1947.
Surprisingly perhaps, his first job was as the research officer of the Society for Psychical Research, a field in which he published an introductory book, Psychical Research Today (1954), before his insistence on subjecting people’s claimed experiences of paranormal phenomena to experimental examination led him to be asked to seek alternative employment.
In 1951 he started training in psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital under Sir Aubrey Lewis, Frederick Kraupltaylor and Peter Scott, also spending a short period at the Marlborough Clinic, Hampstead.
Knowing he himself was gay, West was attracted to studies of the psychological problems of sexual and social outcasts – an interest he was able to pursue after his appointment in 1960 as an assistant director of research at the newly established Institute of Criminology at Cambridge.
The following year he started the Cambridge longitudinal study in delinquent development, in which he was joined in 1969 by David Farrington, a survey of 411 London boys aged eight in 1961 who went on to be interviewed at intervals through their lives. Books arising from the study include Who Becomes Delinquent (1973); The Delinquent Way of Life (1977), and Delinquency, Its Roots, Careers and Prospects (1982).
Other books by West included The Habitual Prisoner (1963); Murder Followed by Suicide (1965); The Young Offender (1967), Sexual Crimes and Confrontations (1987) and Male Prostitution (with Buz de Villiers, 1992), a survey of London rent boys.
West became a Fellow of Darwin College, and held a personal professorship in Clinical Criminology, also running an outpatient clinic at Addenbrooke’s Hospital as an unpaid honorary consultant psychiatrist. He remained in Cambridge until his retirement in 1984, serving as Director of the Institute of Criminology for the last three years.
A founding member of the Parole Board in the late 1960s, in the 1980s he served as a member of the Mental Health Act Commission, and he was sometimes called as an expert witness in criminal trials.
Most controversially, in 1997 he was a defence witness for Roger Pellicci, who was on trial for murdering Neil Anderson. Pellicci claimed in his defence that he was suffering from a rare condition called “homosexual panic”, which had caused him to lash out after Anderson made a pass at him.
“With Pellicci,” West told the court, “there was plenty of evidence to suggest that he had a great complex about homosexuality and had reacted violently in previous situations … And it was known that he was very sensitive about his masculinity and felt that people believed him to be a homosexual.”
Pellicci was convicted of manslaughter, not murder, and served just three and a half years in prison.
For more than 40 years West was in a relationship with the art historian Pietro Raffo, who died in 2000. Subsequently he entered a civil partnership with Vicenzo, who survives him.
Donald West, born June 9 1924, died January 31 2020