Lord Montagu of Beaulieu



Edward Douglas-Scott-Montagu, 3rd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu (born 1926) is best known as the founder of the National Motor Museum at his ancestral home at Beaulieu in Hampshire and for a notorious court case in the 1950s when he was sent to prison for homosexual activities. He identifies publicly as bisexual.

He was born in London, and went to school in Canada, followed by Eton College, and New College,Oxford. He served in the Grenadier Guards, including service in Palestine before the end of the British Mandate. He inherited his title at the age of two, and took his seat in the House of Lords in 1947; when the House of Lords was reformed in 1999 he was one of the 92 hereditary peers who were remain in the House, where he sits as a Conservative.

He kept his homosexual affairs discreet and out of the public eye, but 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" or “buggery”. On two occasions Lord Montagu was charged and committed for trial at Winchester Assizes, firstly in 1953 for allegedly taking sexual advantage of a 14-year-old Boy Scout at his beach hut on the Solent, a charge he has always denied.

Lord Montagu, a 28-year-old socialite and the youngest peer in the House of Lords, was imprisoned for 12 months in 1954. He was one of three men convicted of "conspiracy to incite certain male persons to commit serious offences with male persons" alongside Peter Wildeblood, the diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Mail and Michael Pitt-Rivers, a Dorset landowner.

The prosecution provoked a wave of sympathy from the press and the public, many of whom felt it amounted to little more than an unedifying witch-hunt. It was the first time since Oscar Wilde in 1895 that this law had led to a conviction. The case led eventually to the Wolfenden Report, which in 1957 recommended the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the United Kingdom.

Modern references
Lord Montagu’s story is told in the Channel 4 documentary A Very British Sex Scandal.