An insight into literary censorship in the UK, c. 1951

I was recently re-reading William Cooper's Scenes from Married Life (1961), set in 1951. The narrator/protagonist, Joe Lunn, has significant similarities to Cooper, being a temporary Civil Servant in a department concerned with scientific research, and a novelist who has already enjoyed some modest success.

(I don't actually greatly recommend this novel, which is not on a par with Cooper's Scenes from Provincial Life (1950) about a group of young people, yes, in the provinces, in the few months just after Munich.) 

One episode, of interest to the historian of literary censorship and pertinent to the question I raised here, occurs some considerable way into the narrative. Joe is thinking that, if his new novel earns him a bit of money, he and his wife might contemplate having children. And then he hears from his agent who has been told by the publisher, Courtenay, that 'He thinks it's wonder. But he can't publish it.... He thinks it's improper.'

This leads to Joe have a series of conversations with Courtenay and the firm's solicitor, which do rather suggest the kinds of conversations that took place. Courtenay explains, 'We've just  heard that the Home Office is going to start getting interested.... Apparently they're just about to open a new drive.... The Home Office, or the Director of Public Prosecutions, can set the standard more or less where they like. Since the was everybody's noticed that it's been going down. Now they're going to put it up.... It's got us publishers worried. Definitely worried.'

He recommends that Joe talk to the firm's solicitor about how to 'tone the thing down so as to get by with it'.

The solicitor explains the law of Obscene Libel (whether the tendency is to 'deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such influence'). He suggests that Joe's novel, which depicts characters making love when they are not married and and with 'no likelihood of their generating children thereby' would produce a 'dominant effect' of  'shock, of outrage, in some persons who might read it'. However, he does concede that it is largely a matter of isolated passages that might be altered and that this accomplished, the book should be publishable.

What is notable is that this process takes place in conversation: over lunch with Courtenay, and in the solicitor's office. This makes one wonder how far this is something that one might even trace in publishers' archives, if it was happening as verbal hints, and possibly even meaningful expressions.