When the St. Trinian's school library is being moved into the new building, the French Mistress (played by Carole Ann Ford) accidentally drops four paperbacks from a pile of books, and the camera zooms in on their covers: The Perfumed Garden, by Cheikh Nefzaoui; Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D.H. Lawrence; The Carpetbaggers, by Harold Robbins; and Fanny Hill, by John Cleland. All four are erotic classics with scandalous reputations, regarded (at the time) as suitable only for men - hence the joke of their being seen in a girls' school. The last three had had recent movie adaptations in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1955), The Carpetbaggers (1964), and Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1964); and the D H Lawrence novel had recently been the subject of a sensational criminal trial in London, in 1963, in which the publisher had been prosecuted for obscenity.