Major Michael Augustus Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers (27 May 1917 – December 1999) was a West Country landowner who gained notoriety in Britain in the 1950s when he was put on trial charged with buggery.
A West Country landowner and conservationist of colourful antecedents, his great-grandfather was Lt-Gen A.H. Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers, whose ethnographic collection, donated to Oxford University in 1883, formed the basis of the Pitt Rivers Museum named after him.
[2] In the summer of 1953, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu offered his friend Peter Wildeblood the use of a beach hut near his country estate.
[6] Pitt-Rivers spent much of his wealth on a lifetime of travel, financed by selling the most productive land from the Rushmore estate he inherited in Dorset.
The role of Pitt-Rivers in the 1967 decriminalisation of homosexuality was explored in the 2007 Channel Four docudrama A Very British Sex Scandal,[10] and the 2017 BBC film Against The Law.