The Problem of Homosexuality - Privately Circulated 1954 Church Report

CHURCH OF ENGLAND MORAL WELFARE COUNCIL. The Problem of Homosexuality: An Interim Report. Produced for the Church of England Moral Welfare Council by the Church Information Board, 1954.

First edition. Marked on the upper wrapper “Private - Not for publication” and “For Private Circulation only.”

Octavo pamphlet. Original printed wrappers, priced two shillings and sixpence to the front cover. 27 pp., including statistical tables of offences known to the police in England and Wales. Foreword by the Lord Bishop of St Albans, Chairman of the Church of England Moral Welfare Council.

A scarce and historically important Church of England report on homosexuality, produced by “a group of Anglican clergy and doctors” at a moment when legal, medical, moral and theological attitudes were beginning to be formally reconsidered in Britain. The foreword states that the report was intended to stimulate informed comment ahead of a fuller study, and the introduction makes clear that the group had spent over a year examining the legal, theological and moral issues involved.

The report is especially significant in relation to the wider context of the Wolfenden Committee and the movement toward homosexual law reform. Contemporary scholarship records that the Church of England Moral Welfare Council’s submissions anticipated and encouraged the Wolfenden recommendations, with The Problem of Homosexuality forming part of that pre-Wolfenden debate.

This copy comes from the library of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Portal of Hungerford, wartime Chief of the Air Staff and a senior public figure in post-war Britain. Its presence in Portal’s library places the pamphlet within the reading world of Britain’s governing and administrative elite at a point when church, law and state were beginning to re-examine one of the most controversial social questions of the period.