1. Church of England Moral Welfare Council, The Problem of Homosexuality; Jones, Sexual Politics in the Church of England, pp. 176–82; Timothy W. Jones, ‘Moral Welfare and Social Well-Being: The Church of England and the Emergence of Modern Homosexuality’, in Lucy Delap and Sue Morgan (eds), Men, Masculinities and Religious Change in Twentieth-Century Britain (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 206–8; Grimley, ‘Law, Morality and Secularisation’, pp. 728–9; Grimley, ‘Bailey, Derrick Sherwin (1910–1984), Church of England priest and sexual ethicist’, ODNB online, accessed 30 Apr. 2013; HO 345/7, ‘The Homosexual, the Law, and Society’, preamble.
2. The Public Morality Council began life in 1899 as the London Council for the Promotion of Public Morality, with the aim of fighting vice and indecency. It largely represented the churches and an evangelical crusading zeal against sexual nonconformity, variously targeting over the decades street prostitution, unwholesome plays and films, queer spaces and morally deficient commercial venues in general. See G. I. T. Machin, Churches and Social Issues in Twentieth-Century Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 81; Houlbrook, Queer London, pp. 25, 78–9.
3. The first British ethical society, the South Place Ethical Society, was founded in London in 1888 at the instigation of Stanton Coit, a disciple of fellow American Felix Adler. Other societies swiftly followed, and by the mid-1890s the four London societies joined together in the Ethical Union. See Edward Royle, Radicals, Secularists, and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866–1915 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), p. 42; Stephen Law, Humanism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chap. 1.
4. This organization had its roots in late-Victorian moral reform societies. The White Cross Army, established by Ellice Hopkins in 1883 to recruit men for the cause of social purity, amalgamated with the Church of England Purity Society in 1891 to form the White Cross League. In 1939 this in turn amalgamated with the Archbishops’ Advisory Board for Moral Welfare Work to form the Church of England Moral Welfare Council. See Frank K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 215–16; Jones, Sexual Politics in the Church of England, p. 177.
5. Denmark was the first European country to introduce a surgical castration law for sex offenders, in 1929, and the other Scandinavian countries, Germany, Estonia, Latvia and Iceland followed suit in the 1930s and 1940s. Switzerland, the Netherlands and Greenland used castration without legislation. Britain and the Catholic countries did not practise surgical castration. See Louis Le Maire, ‘Danish Experiences Regarding the Castration of Sexual Offenders’, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 47, 3 (1956), 294; Nikolaus Heim and Carolyn J. Hursch, ‘Castration for Sex Offenders: Treatment or Punishment? A Review and Critique of Recent European Literature’, Archives of Sexual Behavior, 8, 3 (May 1979), 282–3.