Rex concludes his entertaining interview with some Festival of Britain ribaldry and a promise to get all his memories down on paper.

In this extract Rex announces that he's writing a book, to be called 'Rid England of this Plague', which he hopes will show that 'gay' Britain before the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, was, despite the purges and police harassment, an enjoyable place where fun could be had - and he thinks it's important that younger people should know that.

His book will contain many humorous anecdotes from his childhood in Dorset to his arrival in London as well as documenting stories from the lives of real people. One of those concerns his partner, who was cruised by an American Air Force airman, in full uniform, at the Irish House pub.

Another topic will be the site of the Festival of Britain, which became a trendy place not only to visit but also to pick up other gay men. The Festival Gardens in Battersea likewise became a popular cruising ground, visited, as Rex recalls, by the playwright, Terence Rattigan who was described as 'sweeping down the steps'.

Rex also records how the police, during a raid on his home, failed to spot the significance of the many Health & Efficiency magazines that were lying about in his flat.

Teacher, actor, author and tour-guide, Rex was born in 1928, in Dorset. His father was a village butcher, and his mother was a housewife. Having his first homosexual experience when he was nine or ten, Rex went to school in the sea-side town of Weymouth, where he had several more encounters with sailors and men in public lavatories.

Aged 19, Rex began a relationship with an older man, a debonair and cultivated ex-officer, who was part of the 1930s 'country house set', and who also introduced him to the word 'homosexual'. On moving to London, Rex lived with a new partner, John. Meanwhile, the well-set 'country gentleman', back in Dorset was arrested and later convicted for 'corrupting young men'. Rex was also drawn into the police investigation but escaped their close attention.

Rex attended RADA, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, along with John (later Joe) Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, both of whom he knew and liked, though he lost touch with the pair before they became famous (Orton was later murdered by his lover, Halliwell, in 1967). Rex had a few bit-parts in films and worked as a freelance writer for BBC Radio, though for most of his life, he was a teacher His partner John worked for J. Sainsbury's, as did Rex for a short while, though John stayed on at the company.

Rex penned an autobiographically based novel called 'Rid England of this Plague', the title of which is a quote from a 1953 statement from the then Home Secretary, David Maxwell Fyfe, who promised to eradicate homosexuality from Britain. In his later years, Rex was involved with the 'Friends of Nunhead Cemetery' conservation group, becoming a committee member and the author of many of their publications. Rex died in 2017.

The Montagu trial took place in Winchester in 1954. On trial were Lord Edward Montagu, the owner of the Beaulieu estate in Hampshire, West Country landowner Michael Pitt-Rivers and the Daily Mail journalist Peter Wildeblood. They were accused of performing ‘gross offences’ and ‘conspiracy to incite male persons to commit serious offences with male persons’, after two RAF airman were coerced by the police into turning Queen’s Evidence against them. Found guilty, Montagu was jailed for 12 months while Wildeblood and Pitt-Rivers were sentenced to 18 months each.

Despite salacious details of the case being splashed across the press and lapped up by a scandal and sensation hungry public, the effect of the trail was to bring the issues of both homosexuality and the law into the public arena, kick-starting a gradual conversation, through the Wolfenden Report, and the movement towards the law being partly liberalised with the Sexual Offences Act in 1967.