By VennerRoad, 31st Jan 2015
Sir Peter Hayman (1914-92) has been branded a paedophile and worse. But was he?
Sir Peter Hayman
The ongoing nonsense about paedophile rings in high places: the alleged involvement of Home Secretary Leon Brittan, torture and child murders at the notorious Elm Guest House, etc, may have no substance at all, but like most myths, these tall tales contain a grain of truth. Certainly Elm Guest House was used for sordid sexual practices, notwithstanding the denials of its former owner.
However, there is one name that has been positively linked to depraved sexual practices, that of Sir Peter Hayman, but who was he? The Oxford-educated Hayman was a career diplomat, and a married man with two children. He came to the attention of the police after leaving a package on a London bus in October 1978; this is said to have contained “paedophilia-related materials” – a term that is at best vague. When police called at his Bayswater apartment they found 45 diaries describing six years of “sexual fantasies” concerning children and activities with prostitutes, articles of female clothing and obscene literature.
Conspiracy cranks have made much of this, but it resulted in no prosecution, although such revelations would obviously have caused him much embarrassment at the time. In 1984, he was convicted of an act of gross indecency, and fined. This appears to have been cottaging or some such, a regular practice of homosexuals, and one that some engage in even today in spite of they’re now being able to conduct their affairs openly and without fear of official persecution. Interestingly, the 1995 obituary for Geoffrey Dickens in the Independent reports that Sir Peter was “sent to jail after being convicted of paedophiliac practices.”
If this correspondent had bothered to do some proper research he would have realised that Hayman had merely been fined, and that no children were involved. A short report of his conviction appeared in the Times for May 17, 1984. If the mainstream media cannot report accurately on such a simple matter, what price the alternative media where the bulk of this conspiracy garbage is peddled by people who are long on lurid speculation but short on facts?
It is true that Sir Peter was a member of the Paedophile Information Exchange, and in view of his (unspecified) collection of “paedophilia-related materials”, it seems likely that he had a genuine interest in lowering the age of consent so that men (overwhelmingly homosexuals) could have sex with the young, but there is another possible explanation, one which the conspiracy crowd do not appear to have even considered. While it is unlikely in the extreme that paedophile rings have infiltrated the establishment, it is more than likely that at the time, the establishment infiltrated them, and P.I.E. was most definitely a paedophile ring.
Many people reading conspiracy articles have no idea what it was like to live in a pre-Internet world. Today, photographs and film of depraved and illegal sexual practices are transmitted to the other side of the world in the blink of an eye, but in the 1970s and before, trade in this sort of material was extremely risky, and no doubt expensive. Although P.I.E. was set up openly, the organisation and its supporters ran quickly into formidable opposition; leaving aside the usual manufactured media frenzy, there was genuine public outrage.
In the summer of 1978, leading members of P.I.E. were raided, prosecutions followed, and although the organisation continued until 1984, it was effectively finished. There appears to be circumstantial evidence at least that these raids were related to the earlier business with Sir Peter Hayman.
But for his subsequent conviction by Reading magistrates, it would be tempting to suggest that rather than being a paedophile, Sir Peter was a plant, an undercover agent if you will. He may have been regardless of that, or he may have passed on information to the authorities anyway when he realised that some of the men with whom he was rubbing shoulders were not content simply to fantasise about having sex with the young. There are of course undercover agents of the police and sundry government agencies working inside other organisations, including legal ones, as the Mark Kennedy revelations and subsequent scandals have demonstrated. As long as they don’t step over the line from intelligence gatherers to agents provocateurs, we should not be too alarmed at this, but whatever, the full truth about Sir Peter Hayman will probably never be known.
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