Sidney Fox's Crime

The true story of a young gay man who was hanged for the murder of his mother. Sidney Harry Fox was the illegitimate son of a railway signalman. He and his mother Rosaline were a devoted couple. Sidney was a forger and a fraudster and a pathological liar who in the course of his life went to prison six times, while she was a Red Cross nurse who was kept by men. Sidney was also a handsome and seductive rent boy with well-placed clients, including three members of the House of Lords, senior army officers, a Justice of the Peace, and a suspected spy who enjoyed being flogged by guardsman of the Household Cavalry. Sidney had long supported his mother on his earnings from prostitution. At the age of twenty-one, Sidney became embroiled with a notorious jewel thief and possible male lover, and later with a married Australian woman who conspired with him to defraud her father, a wealthy merchant. He was later suspected of trying to murder her, by gassing her while she slept in their flat