When the Wolfenden Report was published 68 years ago this week, it pushed for decriminalising male homosexuality – but it also led to a crackdown on sex workers.

Sir John Wolfenden was unprepared for the backlash that his dry, academic 155-page government report would provoke. "All sorts of people said all sorts of things, and all sorts of people wrote all sorts of things on the pavement outside our house," he told BBC radio. "I have from one religious sect an official curse. Typed." He was surprised by how "violent" the press reaction was: "I didn't expect it to make as much splash as it did."

When The Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution – better known as the Wolfenden Report – came out on 4 September 1957, it flew off the shelves, selling out its first print run of 5,000 copies within hours. It also provoked a fierce public debate in Britain, contrary to what the government had hoped.

Home Secretary Sir David Maxwell Fyfe had been prompted to set up the committee by the government's discomfort with two issues. The first was the visibility of sex workers on London's streets, the second was the rising number of men arrested for homosexual acts, which were illegal at the time in the UK. This rise had been triggered by Maxwell Fyfe's own policy of the deliberate entrapment and arrest of gay men by the police.

"You knew what could happen," Rex Batten, a gay man who lived in London at the time, told the BBC's Witness History in 2010. "You knew the cases that had come up, the people who were in jail for a year, two years, three years. Did you want that? The answer was no."

Maxwell Fyfe's intensive crackdown led to a number of high-profile men being prosecuted for homosexual behaviour, including Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing in 1952, the recently knighted actor Sir John Gielgud in 1953, and the Conservative peer Lord Montagu of Beaulieu in 1954. These cases had, in turn, generated extensive press coverage and embarrassed the establishment.

In setting up the committee, Maxwell Fyfe aimed to find new ways to regulate these cases effectively, so that they would stop generating press interest and public debate. As Sir John was at pains to make clear to the BBC on the day the report was released in 1957, the committee's remit was not to judge the morality of such behaviour. "We're concerned primarily with public order and not with private morality," he told the BBC's Godfrey Talbot.

From 1954, Sir John chaired the committee of four women and 11 men, whose expertise ranged from the law, medicine and religion to the Girl Guides, the UK's largest organisation for girls and young women. Over the course of three years, they heard evidence from the police, psychiatrists and religious leaders, as well as the testimony of some gay men whose lives had been affected by the law. One of the people they spoke to was The Daily Mail's former royal correspondent Peter Wildeblood, who had been convicted of so-called "gross indecency" alongside Lord Montagu. They did not, however, take evidence from any sex........

© BBC