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The Crooked Mile - Part 6
 
PETER WILDEBLOOD - BURSTS OF FEELING
 
- a major might-have-been of British musical theatre
 
Peter Wildeblood was born in Alassio, Italy on 19 May 1923, and brought to England at the age of three. Much of his happy childhood was spent close to Ashdown Forest. He was educated at Radley and won a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, but left after ten days to join the RAF, serving in Southern Rhodesia. He was grounded and subsequently joined the Meteorological Branch until 1945 when he resumed his studies at Oxford. After university he worked as a waiter in a London hotel, and graduated to journalism. In 1950 he attracted good notices for a play about the North Rhodesia groundnuts scheme, Primrose and the Peanuts, seen at the Bedford Theatre in Camden Town. He joined the staff of the Daily Mail, becoming that paper's diplomatic correspondent. It was a steady, unremarkable progress, but in 1954 Wildeblood was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment for homosexual offences in what came to be known as 'The Montagu Case'. In the dock, Wildeblood admitted to his sexuality, and in 1955 published Against The Law, an autobiographical account of the controversy and an explanation of what it was like to be a homosexual. The book was also a powerful indictment of prison life. The Daily Telegraph considered it 'a very courageous, honest book which can do a great deal of good, even to the most prejudiced'.
 
Wildeblood's honesty, his argument that 'the right which I claim for myself, and for all those like me, is the right to choose the person whom I love'' had a profound effect on the British attitude to homosexuals. He was asked to brief the House of Lords, and gave evidence to the Wolfenden Committee, thus contributing to a great degree to the reformation of the law in 1967.
 
Wildeblood opened an afternoon drinking club in Soho where his clientele included prostitutes, pimps, gangsters and homosexuals. He began writing a book a year: A Way Of Life (1956) based on the exploits of his club; The Main Chance (1957) and West End People (1958). Elements of each of these found their way into The Crooked Mile, his best remembered libretto, in 1959. A subsequent musical, again written with Peter Greenwell, House of Cards, flopped in London in 1963. They worked together on a musical about a highwayman, which eventually materialised as a straight play by Wildeblood, The People's Jack, produced at Manchester. The critic Michael Billington thought it 'a musical from which all the tunes had at the last minute been whimsically removed'.
 
But Wildeblood's next career was his most commercially successful, as a producer (and writer) in television, his first appointment being with Granada, where he introduced a number of successful drama programmes. In the 1970s he joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, settling in Vancouver and becoming a Canadian citizen. After sixteen years, he retired to a wooden Edwardian cottage in Victoria, but in 1994 he suffered a devastating stroke which left him totally paralysed and speechless. His mind was unaffected and he learned to type using a contraption fixed to his face. 'After a lifetime of one-finger typing,' he told a friend, 'I think I can master one-chin typing.'
 
When asked in his last years if he minded the fact that his contribution to homosexual equality had been almost completely forgotten by the younger generation, Wildeblood replied:
 
'Here is a quotation I have found consoling: You can achieve anything you want if you don't mind who gets the credit.'
 
He died in Canada on 14 November 1999.

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