It is difficult to think of an equivalent of Horace Roye in today's climate, when the celebrity image is so carefully controlled and the concept of the nude photograph is so mediated by politics and fashion. Difficult too, when looking back at Roye's photographs, to think that they were ever considered daring or even dangerous, with their clean-limbed girls tastefully posing in the great outdoors. Roye, always helped the police when they were investigating obscene pictures, but nevertheless, Roye came into conflict with the new morality of the 1950's, when he was prosecuted for failing to retouch or airbrush out the pubic hair of a model called Desire in his anthology Unique Editions Number One (1958). He successfully defended himself in court, arguing that the representation of beauty should be untrammeled by prudery. Though acquitted, he moved to Ireland to avoid the controversy, but found himself in an even more unforgiving sexual milieu.

Roye told his own story in Unique Verdict: the story of an unsuccessful prosecution (1960) and, in many ways, it was his artistic swansong. His kind of photography was rapidly going out of fashion, as the voluptuousness of Dors was replaced by the waifishness of Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy. Women's liberation would only begin to be a force in the next decade, but the idea of the pin-up, however tastefully presented, was rapidly losing currency. Always adaptable, Roye became a property developer on the Algarve coast of Portugal. Well known for his right-wing views, he supported the Portuguese dictator Salazar, and, after the revolution of 1974, felt that his position in Portugal was untenable. On his return to England, he found a country which he hardly recognized, in which the social order was changing rapidly, and in which photography had become a sober and almost puritan art form. There was certainly no place for Roye's innocuous nudes in mid-1970's Britain and before too long he was traveling again, this time to the Kasbah in Rabat, where, with his third wife, Marilyn, he settled for the rest of his life. In 2002 at the age of 96, Roye was stabbed to death by an intruder at his home in the Kasbah of Rabat, Morocco.