That such a coup could have taken place unnoticed was shock enough; that Dr Haggard could have been party to it defied belief. But it had and he was. His master stroke had been to change the postal address of the building. Wilkinson House occupied a corner site and one side of the house abutted on Upper Maltgate, a busy and noisy commercial thoroughfare. Here, down a steep flight of steps and across a gloomy area, was situated the old tradesman's entrance through which postal and most other deliveries were still made. Dr Haggard requested that his house be henceforth known as 21A Upper Maltgate. There was no difficulty, and it was as 21A Upper Maltgate that the premises were licensed to be used as a cinema club while the vigilantes of the Square slept and never felt their security being undone.

But once awoken, their wrath was great. And once the nature of the entertainments being offered at the Club became clear, they launched an attack whose opening barrage in the local paper was couched in such terms that applications for membership doubled the following week.

Legally the Club was in a highly defensible position. The building satisfied all the safety regulations and the Local Authority had issued a licence permitting films to be shown on the premises. The films did not need to be certificated for public showing, though many of them were, and even those such as Droit de Seigneur which were not had so ambiguous a status under current interpretation of the obscenity laws that a successful prosecution was most unlikely.

In any case, as the Wilkinson Square vigilantes bitterly pointed out, Haggard clearly had strong support in high places and they had to content themselves with appealing against the rates and ringing the police whenever a car door slammed. Most of them hadn't known whether to raise a radical cheer or a reactionary eyebrow when WRAG, the Women's Rights Action Group, had joined the fray.



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