Battersea Library

William lived through the final decades when sex between men was a criminal offence, and into the years after the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, which partially decriminalised homosexuality in England and Wales. His diaries move across that divide, and show how limited that new freedom could still feel in everyday life.

His writing returns repeatedly to Nine Elms, which in the 1960s was a hard, industrial stretch of riverside — dominated by gasworks, railway lines and buildings already scheduled for demolition. For William, it became a place of hidden encounters, where brief meetings might happen out of sight, sometimes followed by hope, sometimes by disappointment. He often writes about these moments indirectly, in cautious or dreamlike language, and at other times with greater physical detail. What comes through most clearly is not excitement, but the constant presence of risk.

That fear appears sharply in an episode he records from a visit to the country in the early 1970s. After drinking in a village pub, he follows a man outside and the two have a brief sexual encounter. Pleasure is immediate, but it is quickly replaced by panic. He becomes overwhelmed by anxiety about what might happen if he were discovered, or if the man spoke about it. After such moments, he repeatedly turns back to drawing and observing the world around him, using art as a way of steadying himself after fear and shame.

This movement between sexual risk and artistic refuge runs throughout the diaries. After long shifts at work and solitary evenings, he often turns deliberately to sketching and painting, particularly landscapes and natural scenes from trips to the countryside, often in Kent. He also painted cityscapes, including views of Battersea rooftops and Albert Bridge, as well as portraits and powerful self-portraits. He wrote plays and novels too, but his diaries suggest that painting brought him greater confidence and occasional public recognition, including submissions to the Royal Academy exhibitions.

His diaries also place him firmly in the everyday geography of the borough. He writes of waiting in vain for a date who never arrives at Battersea Park Station, which he describes as a bleak place to be left alone. He mentions regular visits to pubs such as the Wheatsheaf and the Latchmere, where he might talk with familiar faces or drink quietly by himself. And in one entry he notes taking a painting he had sold to Johnson’s on Lavender Hill to be framed — the same street where his diaries are now kept, many years later, in Battersea Library.

William was acutely aware of how much he revealed on the page. In later life, rereading his earlier diaries, he writes that he is “slightly appalled” by how openly he once recorded sexual experiences. He wonders whether leaving such things out would have made the diaries easier to live with — and also whether it would have made them untrue. Elsewhere, he admits destroying parts of earlier diaries because he felt they were “too licentious” to keep. Writing, for him, carried its own risks.

The final years recorded in his diaries are marked by illness and ageing. He writes about impotence following surgery, about hospital examinations, and about watching the inside of his body on medical screens. Even then, he continues to draw. One of his last drawings, titled Illness (1997), hints at his own body slumped on a bed, observed with the same unsparing attention he once turned on the world around him.

William died in 1998. What remains is a detailed, vulnerable record of a life lived largely in the shadows, now preserved in the borough where he worked, waited, wandered and made his art. At Battersea Library, his words and drawings continue to speak — quietly, but with remarkable clarity — about what it meant to live, desire and grow older as a gay man in this part of south-west London across the second half of the twentieth century.