Peter Wildeblood

Peter Wildeblood (19 May 1923 – 14 November 1999) was an Anglo-Canadian journalist, novelist, playwright and gay rights campaigner. He was one of the first men in the UK to publicly declare his homosexuality.

Peter Wildeblood was born in Alassio, on the Italian Riviera, in 1923. He was the only child of Henry Seddon Wildeblood (b. 1863), a retired engineer from the Indian Public Works Department, and his much younger second wife, Winifred Isabel, née Evans, the daughter of a sheep rancher in Argentina. He was brought up in his parents' cottage near Ashdown Forest. His mother was considerably younger than his father, and Wildeblood later wondered if that had affected his development.

Wildeblood won a scholarship to Radley College and then went up to Trinity College, Oxford, in 1941, but dropped out after ten days because of ill health. Soon afterwards, he volunteered for the Royal Air Force and trained as a pilot in Southern Rhodesia. However, after a series of crashes, he was grounded and instead became an RAF meteorologist, remaining in Southern Rhodesia for the rest of the War. After demobilisation, he resumed his place at Trinity College, where he gravitated towards a homosexual circle in the theatre and arts.

After Oxford, Wildeblood turned to journalism, writing for the Daily Mail's regional office in Leeds, then in Fleet Street itself, first as the royal correspondent, then as its diplomatic correspondent. At this time, Wildeblood began an affair with an RAF corporal called Edward McNally and wrote him a series of passionate love letters. It was these letters which proved a crucial part of the evidence leading to Wildeblood's later conviction for conspiracy to incite acts of gross indecency.

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