EDWARD JOHN BARRINGTON DOUGLAS-SCOTT-MONTAGU, 3rd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu, born on this date (d: August 31, 2015), was a British aristocrat and Conservative politician, best known for founding the National Motor Museum, as well as for a pivotal cause célèbre following his 1954 conviction and imprisonment for alleged homosexual activity, a charge he denied.

Montagu was born at his grandparents’ house in Thurloe Square, South Kensington, London, and inherited his barony in 1929 at the age of two, when his father John died of pneumonia. He held his peerage for the third longest time (86 years and 155 days) anyone has held a British peerage (the others being the 7th Marquess Townshend at 88 years, and the 13th Lord Sinclair at 87 years). His mother was his father’s second wife, Alice Crake (1895–1996). He attended St Peter’s Court, a prep school at Broadstairs in Kent, then Ridley College in Canada, Eton College and finally New College, Oxford.

After the end of World War II in Europe in 1945, Lord Montagu was called up for National Service and commissioned into the Grenadier Guards as a Lieutenant. He was stationed with the 3rd Battalion in Palestine from 1945 until 1947, performing internal security operations before the end of the British Mandate.

Montagu knew from an early stage of life that he was bisexual, and while attending Oxford was relieved to find others with similar feelings. In a 2000 interview he stated, “My attraction to both sexes neither changed nor diminished at university and it was comforting to find that I was not the only person faced with such a predicament. I agonised less than my contemporaries, for I was reconciled to my bisexuality, but I was still nervous about being exposed.”

On two occasions Montagu was charged and committed for trial at Winchester Assizes, firstly in 1953 for having underage sex with a 14-year-old boy scout at his beach hut on the Solent, a charge he always denied. While supported by his family and innumerable friends, he became “the subject of endless blue jokes and innumerable bawdy songs”.

When prosecutors failed to achieve a conviction, in what Montagu has characterised as a “witch hunt”, he was arrested again in 1954 and charged with performing “gross offences” with an RAF serviceman during a weekend party at the beach hut on his country estate. Montagu always maintained he was innocent of this charge as well. “We had some drinks, we danced, we kissed, that’s all”. Nevertheless, he was imprisoned for twelve months for “consensual homosexual offences” along with Michael Pitt-Rivers and Peter Wildeblood. The latter received 18 month sentences.

Brian Sewell said in 2012, “Edward Montagu was unlucky, really deeply unlucky, rather than anything else. It was a time when the then Conservative government was witch-hunting, as it were; was determined to stamp out what it regarded as this foul disease… It was a hell of a scandal at the time.”

Unlike the other defendants in the trial, Montagu continued to protest his innocence. The trial caused a backlash of opinion among some politicians and church leaders that led to the setting up of the Wolfenden Committee, which in its 1957 report recommended the decriminalization of homosexual activity in private between two adults. Ten years later, Parliament finally carried out the recommendation, a huge turning point in gay history in Britain, where anal sex, a form of “buggery”, had been a criminal offence ever since the Buggery Act 1533.

In an interview in 2000, coinciding with the publication of his autobiography, Montagu was reduced to tears at the suggestion that he would chiefly be remembered for his role in the decriminalisation of homosexuality. In a 2007 interview, when the issue was again raised, Montagu said, “I am slightly proud that the law has been changed to the benefit of so many people. I would like to think that I would get some credit for that. Maybe I’m being very boastful about it but I think because of the way we behaved and conducted our lives afterwards, because we didn’t sell our stories, we just returned quietly to our lives, I think that had a big effect on public opinion.”

In 1958, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu married Belinda Crossley, a granddaughter of the 1st Baron Somerleyton, by whom he had a son and a daughter before the couple divorced in 1974.

For nearly half a century, Montagu steadfastly refused to speak publicly about the conviction, instead focusing his energies on the National Motor Museum and other activities. However, in 2000, he finally broke his silence with the publication of his memoirs, Wheels Within Wheels, of which two chapters are devoted to the story of his trial and imprisonment. In interviews, he has stated that by publishing his story, he wanted to “put the record straight”, because he “felt it was important to get it accurate.”

The story of Montagu’s trial is told in a 2007 Channel 4 documentary, A Very British Sex Scandal, and the 2017 BBC drama-documentary Against The Law.