Michael Mason

Christianity, in a literal sense, is not true. And every adult citizen, of either sex, is entitled to a vote. In modern Britain both these views are very widely believed. Our society is a secular and democratic one, with secular and democratic ideas running so deep that it is impossible to imagine them being dislodged – impossible to imagine, for example, that any political group that wanted to restore a supreme authority to the Church and to abolish universal suffrage could make the slightest headway. But how can this be? Didn’t the Britain of only 150 years ago have a completely different set of values? How can a reversal of attitudes so extreme and apparently permanent have come about?’

Among the people who almost certainly took comfort from the tone of the national discussion of events in Cleveland in the summer of 1987 were three middle-aged men from a housing estate in Congleton, Cheshire. As emerged in their trials earlier this year, these men had repeatedly been making sexual assaults of the most extreme sort on very young members of their families, sometimes in a spirit of revolting cruelty. One man had raped his sobbing five-year-old daughter, as she was held down by her mother, and buggered his three-year-old son. The other two had indecently assaulted and buggered children between the ages of five and nine. It is reasonable to suppose that these men would have applied the Cleveland affair to their own situation quite thoroughly. While sexual assaults on children are no doubt sometimes unpremeditated, the literature is full of cases where the activity is a highly conscious project, often the project of a lifetime, even when the behaviour that is planned is of the most cruel and selfish variety. Men do, in real life, get married in the spirit of Humbert Humbert – sometimes with much younger and more defenceless targets in view than Lolita. They do – pace the incredulity expressed about certain diagnoses of Dr Marietta Higgs – deliberately get themselves accredited as fit to foster children with the intention of abusing their charges. In the case of Congleton it appears that some fifteen other adults may also have been involved in child sex: it was a ‘sex ring’ – a vague expression which is nevertheless surely correct in its implication of group commitment to a particular sexual practice.’

Iain McCalman has written a major book on a minor subject. It would not be fair to the considerable achievement of Dudley Miles in his life of Francis Place simply to invert this formula: but Place’s life is a major subject, and this treatment of it – the first in almost a hundred years – does leave a sense of possibilities not explored. The enterprise in any form, of course, involved a crushing weight of primary research: there are more than two hundred and ninety volumes of Francis Place papers in the British Museum. Mr Miles found working through them ‘arduous’ if ‘fascinating’. Because of their great bulk he took ten years to finish his biography (having, in a manner worthy of Place himself, worked simultaneously as a night security guard – even now his main employment is said to be ‘as a computer manager and commercial researcher’).’