A Gay PC – When Being Gay Wasn't PC

Stephen Bourne remembers E M Forster’s lover, who befriended the Bloomsbury Group and inspired Dixon of Dock Green

Hardly any documentation exists about ‘Lily Law’. That was the gay slang for police officers who were homosexual and served before the 1967 Sexual Offences Act partially decriminalised homosexuality.

An exception is PC Harry Daley’s autobiography, This Small Cloud, published posthumously in 1986. Humorous, endearing and self-deprecating, Daley acknowledged himself as a champion of the underdog and the oppressed. His ruthless self-improvement led to his book, a rare record of working-class gay experience. In it, Daley (1901-71) is refreshingly indiscreet about his homosexuality and life as a London bobby on the beat.

Regrettably he doesn’t discuss the love affair he had with the celebrated novelist E M Forster (1879-1970) – who has just featured in the Sky Arts programme E M Forster: His Longest Journey.

In fact, because Daley fell out with Forster, he avoids mentioning the friends he made in London’s literary and artistic world of the famous Bloomsbury Group in the 1930s.

Daley was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, in 1901 into a close-knit, working-class family. His father, the skipper of a fishing smack, was lost at sea in the Lowestoft shipping disaster of 1911.

Daley’s older brother, known as Joseph, served in the First World War and was tragically killed in action just a few days before the war ended. When the family moved to Dorking in 1916, Daley worked as a grocery delivery boy but he craved the bright lights of London. He spent his weekends in the metropolis, exploring theatres, cinemas, art galleries and concert halls. He was 24 when he decided to join the GU Metropolitan Police and make London his permanent home.

In his autobiography, Daley describes himself at this time as ‘sexually both innocent and deplorable; honourable if not exactly honest; trusting; truthful; romantic and sentimental to the point of sloppiness’.