H. Montgomery Hyde

Harford Montgomery Hyde (August 14, 1907 – August 10, 1989), born in Belfast, was a barrister, politician (Ulster Unionist MP for North Belfast) and author from Northern Ireland and early campaigner for homosexual law reform, losing his seat as a result.

Background

Born on 14 August 1907, on the Malone Road, Belfast, Hyde was schooled in England at Sedbergh, a Quaker boarding school in Yorkshire. His father, James Johnstone Hyde was a linen merchant and Unionist councillor for Cromac. Hyde had great pride in his family's connection to the Irish linen trade. Although his mother came from a Protestant Home Rule background, all were involved in the 1914 UVF gun running, the 7-year old Harford being a dummy casualty for first aid practice. He attended Queen's University, Belfast where he gained a first class history degree, and then Magdalen College Oxford and a second class law degree. He was a distant cousin of Henry James.

He was married in 1939 to Dorothy Mabel Brayshaw Crofts (divorced 1952), in 1955 to Mary Eleanor Fischer (dissolved 1966) and finally to Rosalind Roberts Dimond.

Early career

Hyde was called to the Bar in 1934 working briefly in London and on the North East circuit. His first salaried employment was with the 7th Marquess of Londonderry whose wife Edith was a famous London political hostess and whose influence on Ramsay MacDonald was held by some to be suspect. From 1935-9, Hyde was librarian and Private Secretary to the Marquess in his ‘appeasement’ period, hired specifically to research the family papers and write its history. His works on the family included Londonderry House and its pictures (1937), 'The Rise of Lord Castlereagh', a book which remains very highly regarded, and 'The Londonderrys: A Family Portrait'.

Lt. Col. Hyde, as he became, and was so addressed throughout most of his parliamentary career, had a good war, mostly in intelligence but he continued writing and publishing. He joined the British Army Intelligence Corps in 1939 serving as an Assistant Censor in Gibraltar in 1940. He was then commissioned in the intelligence corps (MI6) and engaged in counter-espionage work in the United States under Sir William Stephenson, Director of British Security Co-ordination in the Western Hemisphere. He was also Military Liaison and Security Officer, Bermuda from 1940 to 1941 and Assistant Passport Control Officer in New York from 1941 to 1942. He was with British Army Staff, USA from 1942 to 1944, attached to the Supreme HQ Allied Expeditionary Force in 1944, and then seconded to the Allied Control Commission for Austria until 1945 as a legal officer. After the war, he became assistant Editor of the Law Reports until 1947 and was legal adviser to the British Lion Film Corporation, then managed by Alexander Korda, up to 1949. And in 1948 he published The Trials of Oscar Wilde, a precursor of three more Wilde books.

Politics

Hyde had planned a parliamentary career since the 1930s and actively scouted for seats however the war intervened, postponing an election until 1945. He then applied for the South Belfast Unionist candidature and was unfortunate enough to miss the nomination by one vote. Five years later, North Belfast was to select him . He could have expected to hold his seat for a quarter of a century or more. In the event, he represented the constituency for just nine years. His maiden speech was on the uncontentious subject of the unenforceability of Northern Ireland maintenance orders in Great Britain, and the consequent problem of border hopping husbands.

He was a UK Delegate to the Council of Europe Consultative Assembly in Strasbourg from 1952 to 1955, majoring on simplifying European visa and border controls. He was also an incessant traveller, a visit in 1958 to East Germany and Czechoslovakia getting him into difficulty with political exiles when he lamely defended himself saying, “there are terrible things going on. Cultural matters are a safe subject in common.”

Hyde was Ulster Unionist MP for Belfast North, elected in 1950,and re-elected in 1951 and 1955.

He was deselected by his party in 1959 after arguing in favour of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the debate about implementing the Wolfenden Report on 26 November 1958, a debate he had been most prominent in seeking. Indeed Hyde was the most vocal of any MP in the 1950s about homosexual law reform.

Hyde contributed a half-hour speech to that debate and covered both aspects of the Wolfenden report. He concluded by demanding equality for the homosexual and the prostitute. Earlier he quoted a letter from a consenting adult who had been gaoled and released, only to be informed on again, losing his new job. He pointed out “three popular fallacies that have been exposed by the Report”; that “male homosexuality always involves sodomy”; that homosexuals are “necessarily effeminate” and that most relevant court cases “are of practising male homosexuals in private.” Only one hundred men a year, he said, were convicted of sex in private with consenting adults. Hyde's reform efforts at decriminalising homosexuality in England and Wales were not to be successful for another ten years. It took 25 years for the same to happen in Northern Ireland.

In later life, he became somewhat disillusioned with the cause of Irish Unionism.

He famously moved a motion in Westminster calling for a tunnel to be constructed between Co Antrim and the Scottish coast. He spent 40 minutes outlining its advantages. Echoing Jules Verne, he pronounced: "The dreams of yesterday are the realities of today".

Academia

He was an extension lecturer in History at the University of Oxford in 1934, and Professor of History and Political Science at the University of Lahore from 1959 to 1962.

He also wrote a number of biographies of legal and political figures and books on spying, notably Room 3603 (1962) about Sir William Stephenson and the wartime efforts of British Security Coordination. He also wrote a biography of the British spy Amy Elizabeth Thorpe Pack Brousse with the British Security Coordination code name "Cynthia". Hyde also wrote extensively on the Oscar Wilde trials and Wilde's immediate circle, on the trial of Sir Roger Casement, and on T. E. Lawrence.

Works

• Judge Jeffries, (Harrap, 1940); 2nd ed., Butterworth & Co (1948)
• Carson, (Heinemann, 1953)
• The Strange Death of Lord Castlereagh (Heinemann, 1959)
• Sir Patrick Hastings, His Life and Cases, (Heinemann, 1960)
• Famous Trials: Oscar Wilde, (Hodge, 1948), enlarged ed, Penguin (1962)
• The Quiet Canadian: The Secret Service Story of Sir William Stephenson, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1962 [later released as Room 3603: The Story of the British Intelligence Center in New York during World War II, Farrar Straus and Company, New York, 1963].
• Norman Birkett, the Life of Lord Birkett of Ulverston, (H Hamilton, 1964)
• Cynthia - the Story of the Spy Who Changed the Course of the War, (H Hamilton, 1965)
• Lord Reading, The Life of Rufus Isaacs, First Marquess of Reading, (Heinemann, 1967)
• The Love That Dared not Speak its Name, (Little, Brown, 1970)
• The Other Love: An Historical and Contemporary Survey of Homosexuality in Britain London: Mayflower Books Ltd, 1972
• Solitary in the Ranks: Lawrence of Arabia As Airman and Private Soldier, (MacMillan Publishing Company, 1978) ISBN 0-689-10848-6
• The Londonderrys, a family portrait, (H. Hamilton, 1979), ISBN 0-241-10153-0
• Secret Intelligence Agent (Constable, 1982), ISBN 0-09-463850-0

Further bibliographic works

Hyde titles not included in the above list.

• The Rise of Castlereigh
• The Russian Journals of Martha and Catherine Wilmot (Co-author with Marchioness of Londonderry)
• The Empress Catherine and Princess Dashkov
• Air Defence and the Civil Population (co-author with G F Falkiner Nuttall)
• Londonderry House and Pictures
• Princess Lieven
• Mexican Empire
• A Victorian Historian: Letters to W E H Lecky
• Privacy and the Press
• John Law
• The Trials of Oscar Wilde
• Mr and Mrs Beeton
• Cases that Changed the Law
• The Trial of Craig and Bentley
• Stalin, the History of a Dictator (New York: Harford Ltd, 1971).
• United in Crime
• The Trial of Sir Roger Casement
• Simla and the Simla Hill under British Protection: 1815-1835
• An International Casebook of Crime (co-author with John H Kisch)
• Henry James at Home (London: Methuen, 1969)