Introduction

Abstract

In May 1954 Gilbert Andrew Nixon, 37, a company director of a firm of manufacturing chemists from West Kirby, Cheshire, killed himself with cyanide in a gaol cell. He had just been sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment at Somerset Assizes at Wells on a charge of gross indecency. Fourteen other men, some with Taunton addresses, had also pleaded guilty to committing or attempting to commit unnatural acts and acts of gross indecency; nine of them received prison sentences, ranging from one to four years. During the Second World War Nixon had received the Military Cross in Sicily and had recently retired as a lieutenant-colonel from the Territorial Army. ‘It is a terrible thing’, said Mr Justice Oliver in passing sentence, ‘to see a man like you with a gallant military record standing as you are.’ As recorded in The Times,

The Judge said that it was an appalling thing for him that an ancient, historic, not very large town like Taunton should at one single Assize exhibit as many cases of homosexual crime as in the ordinary way he met with in a whole year. The answer, as he saw it, was not that the population of Taunton was more debased than other groups of the community, but that once that vice got established in any community it spread like a pestilence and unless held in check threatened to spread indefinitely.¹

Gilbert Nixon’s tragic end caused only a ripple in the national press. But it came amidst a period of intense introspection about homosexuality and the law among those hankering for reform and those, like Mr Justice Oliver, who wanted the ‘pestilence’ eliminated.