A gay PC – when being gay wasn’t PC
Stephen Bourne remembers E M Forster’s lover, who befriended the Bloomsbury Group and inspired Dixon of Dock Green
Hardly any documentation exists about ‘Lily Law’. That was the gay slang for police officers who were homosexual and served before the 1967 Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalised homosexuality.
An exception is PC Harry Daley’s autobiography, This Small Cloud, published posthumously in 1986. Humorous, endearing and selfdeprecating, Daley acknowledged himself as a champion of the underdog and the oppressed. His ruthless selfimprovement led to his book, a rare record of working-class gay experience. In it, Daley (1901-71) is refreshingly indiscreet about his homosexuality and life as a London bobby on the beat.
Regrettably he doesn’t discuss the love affair he had with the celebrated novelist E M Forster (1879-1970) – who has just featured in the Sky Arts programme E M Forster: His Longest Journey.
In fact, because Daley fell out with Forster, he avoids mentioning the friends he made in London’s literary and artistic world of the famous Bloomsbury Group in the 1930s.
Daley was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, in 1901 into a close-knit, working-class family. His father, the skipper of a fishing smack, was lost at sea in the Lowestoft shipping disaster of 1911.
Daley’s older brother, known as Joseph, served in the First World War and was tragically killed in action just a few days before the war ended. When the family moved to Dorking in 1916, Daley worked as a grocery delivery boy but he craved the bright lights of London. He spent his weekends in the metropolis, exploring theatres, cinemas, art galleries and concert halls. He was 24 when he decided to join the
Metropolitan Police and make London his permanent home.
In his autobiography, Daley describes himself at this time as ‘sexually both innocent and deplorable; honourable if not exactly honest; trusting; truthful; romantic and sentimental to the point of sloppiness’.
In his 1978 biography of Forster, P N Furbank describes the young policeman as ‘plump, curly-headed, genial and rather cocky in manner: very intelligent, with a taste for music and opera, and a brilliant raconteur. He was homosexual and made no secret of it; indeed he was wildly indiscreet. His closest friends, and lovers, were mainly criminals.’
At work, Daley was open about his sexuality. Wendy Moffat, another Forster biographer, describes his fellow officers making a ‘clear distinction between the behaviour of one of their own and the “nancy boys” brought into the station on charges of soliciting. These men were routinely harassed and humiliated. Their faces were rubbed with toilet paper to detect make-up.’
Meanwhile, says Moffat, Daley
‘endured oblique slights: a knothole in the main office wall was graffitied to look like an anus, and “love from 308” – Daley’s badge number – was pencilled below. But, on the whole, Daley was let be.’
In 1925, on his Hammersmith beat, Daley encountered J R Ackerley, whose acclaimed play The Prisoners of War, set in the First World War, was then running at the Lyric, Hammersmith. Censors had failed to identify the homosexual theme of the play. Ackerley went out to fetch a milk bottle from his doorstep and came back inside with young Daley whom he had found walking the beat. The homosexual theme of Ackerley’s play had intrigued Daley and the two men enjoyed a long-lasting, intimate friendship.
When Ackerley became a talks producer at the BBC, he arranged for Daley to give a series of talks about his life as a policeman and the work of Lowestoft fishermen.
As the ‘human face’ of the British bobby in these BBC radio broadcasts, including Children’s Hour (1929) and While London Sleeps (1929), Daley may have inspired the writer Ted Willis to create PC, later Sergeant, George Dixon, the friendly copper who pounded the beat in BBC TV’S popular drama series Dixon of Dock Green (1955-1976).
It was in the summer of 1926 that Ackerley introduced Daley to Forster and they became lovers. It turned out to be a troubled relationship.
Ackerley and Forster introduced the young policeman to members of the Bloomsbury Group, including writers, intellectuals and artists.
In 1931, wearing his uniform, he was painted by the artist Duncan Grant. Daley, it turned out, was too indiscreet for the closeted Forster and the Bloomsbury Group. Forster was so alarmed by Daley’s lack of discretion, and his friendships with rough lads from the criminal underworld, that the couple broke up in 1932.
In This Small Cloud, Daley relates how, during the London Blitz, at the police station and section house in Soho’s Beak Street, officers were looked after by Mrs Fisher, a Jewish publican’s wife. He describes how her ‘motherly hands’ made nice things for the officers to eat, and they grew fond of her.
‘How can Hitler and Mosley have made such headway when there must have been Mrs Fishers all over the world for everyone to see?’ he writes.
Terrorised by the air raids, the Fishers were invited by Daley to share the officers’ reinforced basement. However, some of the officers, described by Daley as ‘Fascists’, complained, and the Fishers were forced to go to the public air-raid shelter. An angry Daley confronted his fellow officers about this, and soon found himself unpopular.
As the London Blitz intensified, Daley found himself at the centre of it. ‘When all available firemen and ambulances were engaged on the big disasters,’ he recalls, ‘we managed without help as best we could – one bomb, one copper.’
He writes movingly about the young policemen he befriended at the Beak Street section house who were given permission to leave and join the armed services: ‘The first away were killed almost as soon as they could be trained… An atmosphere of horror now developed, with our friends gaily saying goodbye … news of their death following almost automatically.’
In 1941, Daley moved to Wandsworth. By then he had been promoted to sergeant. He recalls, ‘Wandsworth was full of lively, good-looking people who thought nothing of telling policemen to go and get stuffed… It was a marvellous place and I couldn’t see myself making many arrests here.’
But the horrors of the Blitz were never far away. Daley describes how a landmine killed 27 women and children in a surface shelter. He found himself at the scene, holding a handbag, which was heavy with congealed blood. Daley discovered that it contained a sailor’s address and a note that said, ‘If anything happen to me, let my son no.’
Daley retired from the Metropolitan Police in 1950 and joined the merchant navy as a master-at-arms. He died in 1971; his ashes were scattered on Box Hill.
In the days when gay officers had to conceal their sexuality, Daley was an exception, happily engaged in unlawful acts while upholding the law. At the same time, his colleagues made fun of him and acted as agents provocateurs against homosexuals.
A fitting testament to Daley’s popularity with the public came from a Gypsy traveller. During an altercation with two policemen, he told them that all coppers were bastards. He added, as an afterthought, ‘Except Sergeant Daley.’
‘He was an exception, happily engaged in unlawful acts while upholding the law’