During the 1950s, efforts started to attempt reform of the law. Following the prosecution of several notable publishers, the Society of Authors formed a committee (with Norman St John-Stevas as legal advisor) to recommend reform of the existing law, submitting their proposals and a draft bill to the Home Office in February 1955. Instead of the wholesale reform the Society hoped for, the government instead chose limited reform through the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955 dealing with horror comics, which kept the Hicklin test but required that the work as a whole be examined. The Society and sympathetic Members of Parliament then attempted to introduce a Private Member's Bill, but this was quashed by the ensuing general election. Another Private Member's Bill was successfully introduced in March 1957 and sent to a committee. Composed of a mix of censors and reformers, the committee's recommendations were mixed, consisting of both conservative (further powers of search and seizure for the police) and liberal (the use of expert evidence attesting to the work's artistic merit) proposals.