An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (47 page)

The People
on 7 July, under the headline ‘THREE MINISTERS NAMED IN JUDGE’S PURGE’, noted of Denning: ‘His probe may lead to a purge of public life generally, with a view to excluding the risk that politicians who “sin” in private will be blackmailed by enemy agents.’ Scotland Yard and Special Branch officers, under Commander Arthur Townsend, were enquiring ‘into the private morals of public men’ in parallel with Denning. ‘They are compiling a dossier covering homosexual practices as well as sexual laxity alleged against civil servants, Service officers and MPs.’ A Special Branch man supposedly told
The
People
: ‘the Russians jump at the chance of exploiting any moral weakness’. Startling information, he added, was pouring in.
³³

In the second week of June 1963, some days after Ward’s arrest, there was a meeting at the Athenæum club in Pall Mall. All of the men who attended held responsible jobs; most had been Ward’s patients; some knew him socially too. Each of them had been asked by Ward’s solicitors if they would appear at the Old Bailey to testify to his good character. Each wanted to know what the others had decided. One of those present was a high-ranking Foreign Office man, who twenty years later spoke non-attributably about the Athenæum discussion. ‘On the one hand we liked and respected Ward and we wanted to help him. On the other, if we were seen to be involved in such a sordid case in no matter what role, then we would be ruined. We decided that if Bill Astor, Ward’s oldest friend and patient, was not going to give evidence on Ward’s behalf, then we could also decline.’ They felt that Ward’s legal team would not subpoena them lest, ‘in order to save our own skins, we turned hostile. We’ve all had to live with our decision. For my part I can’t tell you of the moral awfulness of abandoning a friend when he needs you most, and a friend, moreover, who was completely innocent of the charges against him.’
³⁴

The risks to Ward’s acquaintances in coming forward in his defence were real. Vasco Lazzolo, the portrait painter, who had known Ward since 1946, agreed to give evidence on his friend’s behalf. He was threatened by Chief Inspector Herbert that if he did so, the police might visit his studio, plant some pornography and arrest him.

On Friday 28 June, Ward’s committal proceedings opened at Marylebone Magistrates Court. He was charged with eight violations of the Sexual Offences Act of 1956, including brothel-keeping, procuring, living off the earnings of prostitutes, and abortion offences. This was a preliminary hearing before a magistrate to determine whether the prosecution had enough evidence to justify sending the accused for trial in a higher court. The defence case was not heard at all. Whereas in France examining magistrates hear the prosecution’s case
in camera
, in England the hearings can be fully publicised – with prejudicial publicity in lewd cases like Ward’s. The charges involving abortion and brothel-keeping, together with the initial procuring charges, were dropped before Ward’s trial three weeks later; but the prejudicial damage had been done. Reports of the magistrate’s hearings created two opposed impressions. ‘The first was of ineradicable grubbiness,’ wrote Sybille Bedford, ‘a feeling that Ward might well be a procurer, a ponce, a pimp, and that … the fellow was untouchable with a barge pole. The other impression was that the actual evidence against him was inconclusive and of tainted origin; in fact that the prosecution case was thin.’
³⁵

The prosecution was led by Mervyn Griffith-Jones, a tall, imposing man who, as prosecuting counsel in the
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
obscenity trial three years earlier, had asked the jury whether it was a novel that they would wish to be read by their ‘young sons, young daughters, because girls can read as well as boys’. Was it, he continued, a book that they would leave lying around the house: ‘a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’
³⁶
He had no thought that the jury might not have servants, or that if they did, the servants had minds of their own to decide what to read. At Ward’s committal proceedings Griffith-Jones showed that he felt sullied by the case by refusing to speak directly, except in court questioning, to any of the prosecution witnesses, including the police. Nor did he let them speak to him. All contact was delegated to junior counsel, Michael Corkery. He addressed the court in the tones of a public school bully, using his privileges as counsel to humiliate anyone who thwarted his case, interrupting witnesses in mid-sentences, scorning their testimony. His voice was cold, rasping and stiff. His testy arrogance and sardonic morality at the committal proceedings deterred witnesses from volunteering to speak in Ward’s defence at the criminal trial. The police opposed bail by claiming that Ward might vanish or interfere with witnesses. It was widely reported that the magistrate set bail at the high figure of £2,000, which intensified the notion that Ward was an arch-villain from whom society needed protection.

Under the Sexual Offences Act of 1956, a man who was ‘habitually in the company of a known prostitute’ had the onus of proving that he was not living off her earnings. Ward faced three counts of living on earnings of prostitution: from Keeler, when she had lived at Wimpole Mews from June 1961 to July 1962; from Rice-Davies, when she had been his lodger at Wimpole Mews during September to December 1962; and from two prostitutes, Vickie Barrett and Ronna Ricardo, who had visited Bryanston Mews between January and June 1963. Another section of the Sexual Offences Act criminalised those who introduced a man to a woman aged between sixteen and twenty-one if sexual intercourse ensued.

During cross-examination by Griffith-Jones at Marylebone Magistrates Court, Keeler testified that during a meal at the Brush & Palette restaurant with Ward, they had seen a nineteen-year-old called Sally Norie with a youth. The two couples started talking and flirting: Keeler paired with Norie’s boyfriend, while Ward later went to bed with Norie. Ward’s counsel interrupted this evidence, as it was extracted by Griffith-Jones, with a jibe and a protest: ‘Even a honeymoon would sound obscene in the hands of my learned friend,’ he said of Griffith-Jones. ‘Here is a case where a man, looked at in its worst context, asked a girl he was with to give him an introduction to another girl. Then it is suggested that they made love. It is said that this is a criminal offence. We must not take leave of our senses.’ He then asked the magistrate, ‘How can it be a criminal offence for two persons, if they choose, to enter into an intimate relationship?’ The magistrate replied, ‘If one introduced someone knowing it was for the purpose of intercourse, it becomes procuring.’
³⁷

‘Everyone is lying to grind his own axe,’ a battered but impenitent Ward told Dominic Elwes, who stood bail for him. ‘Every witness who does not give the answer the police want is tampered with … Every motive I had is twisted. All I have left between me and destruction is a handful of firm friends, the integrity of the judge and the twelve men on the jury. God alone knows what will happen. I know that one day the truth will eventually come out. And the truth is very simple: I loved people – of all types – and I don’t think there are very many people the worse for having known me.’
³⁸

Bill Astor’s Cliveden friend Maurice Collis visited Feliks Topolski’s studio under an arch on the South Bank after the committal proceedings. ‘When we were seated over a vodka,’ Collis recorded, ‘we got talking, as was inevitable, on the Ward case which literally has set the whole word buzzing, as it has all the elements of a popular shocker, as presented by the press, with spying and leakage of vital secrets to Russia, orgies, a broken Minister, prostitution, organised vice, flagellation, voyeurism, the threatened fall of the Conservative government, all with the sauce that a noble lord, very rich, owner of racehorses, a great mansion, a wife famous formerly as a model, and a name which for a generation or more has been news on account of his mother’s wit and eccentricities, had been mixed up in the imbroglio.’ Topolski recognised the Ward prosecution as a stunt: ‘His was not a real case of living on immoral earnings, arranging abortions, maintaining a brothel. When the laws were framed they had not in view men like Ward, but underworld racketeers.’ Topolski felt sure that if the police succeeded in securing Ward’s conviction on any charge, it would be a miscarriage of justice.
³⁹

Bill Astor, too, believed that the prosecution evidence was so weak that Ward would be acquitted. He wanted to speak, but his lawyers advised against volunteering evidence. Neither prosecuting nor defending counsel called him during Ward’s trial. When Collis commiserated on his ordeal, Astor replied with a sigh: ‘The only thing to do is to keep up one’s dignity, go on as before and not engage in a public slanging match with those women. After all, I don’t live like that, Maurice. Hundreds of people know exactly how I live, what my interests are, how I occupy my time, what I do in the public service, what my private life consists of. We are being pestered by the press, spied on; the press helicopters are the worst, hovering over the house.’
⁴⁰

On 1 July, Edward Heath, the Lord Privy Seal, confirmed that Kim Philby had been the Third Man. After David Astor’s
Observer
then revealed that Philby had been appointed as its Beirut correspondent at the Foreign Office’s request, the
Daily Mirror
launched a new fusillade:

Hardly a day goes by without some fresh revelation of how the Old Boys work in high places to keep the Old Boys in high places. Don’t worry, Old Boy, if you’re found out – there are buckets and buckets of surplus whitewash in Whitehall, and your friends will see you through …

Look at what happened to Maclean. Working for the Foreign Office in Cairo he was as soused as a herring, involved in wild and disgraceful episodes which no business concern would tolerate for a second in its messenger boys.

Fired? Not on your life, Old Boy. Dear old Donald was given a rest until his hangovers cleared up, and then he was given another Foreign Office top job.

Look at jolly Jack Profumo – Harrow, Brasenose College, Oxford, fifth Baron of the late United Kingdom of Italy, and all that taradiddle. If Jack says he calls all his lady friends ‘Darling’ (including Miss Keeler) then why shouldn’t we believe him?

Once you’re in the gang they let you down gently. You’re given the benefit of the doubt. If you’re a cat that walks at night, even into the wrong bedroom, you’re given nine lives – like all the other Top Cats.

It is no use Mr Macmillan telling Mr Wilson, as he did in the Commons yesterday, that he must learn to distinguish between invective and insolence … This sort of wigging for people who aren’t in the Club is merely whimsical. But is it any good blaming Mr Macmillan any more? It is beginning to look as if the whole of the Tory Party approves of the cover-up, hush-up, keep-it-dark, Old Boys technique of getting in power and staying in power – and to hell with what the country thinks.

Such ebullitions were dispiriting for Whitehall mandarins, and indeed weakening for national governance. ‘It is a bore that the facts have not got across to the public; but I am afraid that the Press are determined to misunderstand or misrepresent whatever they can,’ Normanbrook wrote to Macmillan on 6 July. ‘I hope that all this will blow over when Denning has reported and the Ward trial is finished.’
⁴¹

With the Ward prosecution sub judice between the committal proceedings and trial, attention switched to Rachman, who could not sue: ‘an easy target’, said a Polish photographer who was pursued by journalists for pictures of the dead landlord ‘with his girls, his Rolls-Royce, and his big fat cigars’. On 8 July, Ben Parkin, Labour MP for Paddington, intervened in a debate on housing. Parkin, a sincere campaigner about slum conditions with a prurient interest in the street-walkers who were conspicuous in his constituency, now plunged into unscrupulous sensation. ‘All Fleet Street is full of the idea that he is not dead,’ he announced of Rachman. ‘It would be an easy thing to switch bodies – dead on arrival at Edgware General Hospital … a very good idea for a substitution and very useful, too – just ten days before all hell broke loose.’ Rachman, of course, had been alive and talking when he reached hospital, and could not have foreseen that ten days later Edgecombe would shoot up the Wimpole Mews flat: still less could he have substituted a dead body – even if, as gossip suggested at Daquise, the Polish restaurant where he played chess, he had a twin brother, who had conveniently died. ‘I
know
he’s dead,’ Parkin told a member of a Notting Hill tenants’ association, ‘but don’t tell anyone, and keep the rumours going, because if Rachman is dead, our case is dead too.’
⁴²

Much might be written on the frenetic press investigations of Rachman, bribes to unreliable informers, and racial prejudice intended to sustain tension before Ward’s trial. Police obtained signed statements from David Waxman, the Mill Hill physician who was treating him for heart disease, as well as Fortis Green ambulancemen, confirming that it was Rachman who died. The matron at Edgware Hospital said scornfully, ‘I do not permit body-switching in my hospital.’ On 16 July, Sir Charles Cunningham wrote to Sir Joseph Simpson stating that Brooke, the Home Secretary, had commented, after reading the file on Rachman: ‘He is now believed to be dead, but what about his business associates and his sponsors, particularly Colonel Sinclair of Farnham Common? Do the police keep themselves informed about that man’s other activities?’ These questions are a pointer to how the Home Office may have directed the Metropolitan Police’s attention to Ward after the latter’s colloquy in the Commons with Wigg became known.
⁴³