Michael Pitt-Rivers
Major Michael Augustus Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers (27 May 1917 – December 1999) was the cousin of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and great grandson of Lt-Gen A.H. Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers whose ethnographic collection formed the basis of the Pitt-Rivers collection at the museum in Oxford. He was convicted of consensual buggery in the 1953 trial with Beaulieu and Peter Wildeblood. Pitt-Rivers and were sentenced to 18 months in prison, Beaulieu for 12 months.
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[1]. The case led eventually to the Wolfenden Report, which in 1957 recommended the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the United Kingdom.
Modern references
Lord Beaulieu’s story is told in the Channel 4 documentary “A Very British Sex Scandal”
