An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (48 page)

Ward’s trial opened at the Old Bailey on 22 July and closed on 31 July. The judge, Sir Archie Marshall, was a plump little man with a vain bustle and long experience of criminal cases in the Midlands. He rejected an application for an adjournment until September so that the defence might be better prepared, because he said it was in the public interest to have an early trial. ‘We at the Bar are men of the world,’ he declared while intervening in the cross-examination of Ronna Ricardo – upon which Ludovic Kennedy commented that this was a common delusion of judges: ‘theirs is one of the most cloistered of all the professions.’ Lawyers of Marshall’s generation, and Denning’s, stubbornly adhered to creeds that were sundered from real human experience.
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There were five charges: three of living off the immoral earnings of Keeler, Rice-Davies and the two other women; and two of procuring. Griffith-Jones’s opening address (delivered with harsh, cold fervour) made assertions that exceeded the evidence that he later brought. He also made assertions involving matters about which Ward was not being prosecuted. He proceeded by innuendo, posturing, and distortion. He dealt in unfounded inferences and reckless characterisations. He liked a righteous wallow in indignation. He seemed to threaten witnesses that they would be branded as sexually corrupt, and deserving of social ostracism and professional ruin, if they did not reply in the terms that he wished. Yet repeatedly they gave responses that seemed the oppo-site of what he expected. The trouble appeared to be that the witnesses had been chivvied into falsehoods in their police statements so many months earlier that they could not remember what they were supposed to say. The overall impression of the prosecution case was of startling inconsistencies which Griffith-Jones knocked aside.

Ludovic Kennedy, who attended the trial, wrote that Griffith-Jones assumed the role not merely of state prosecutor of criminals, ‘but as the state guardian of private morals … acting as a sort of Establishment front-man for an ethos which few people besides himself any longer believed in’. This, perhaps, accorded with Henry Brooke’s hopes when he initiated the police investigation of Ward four months earlier. Griffith-Jones’s cross-examinations gave Kennedy the impression ‘not that Ward had committed a single obvious crime which cried out for justice, but rather that the prosecution were trying very hard to elicit facts which would bring Ward’s activities into the compass of a recognised crime’. The prosecution case depended upon ‘uncorroborated statements by proven liars: it was a hotchpotch of innuendoes and smears covered by a thin pastry of substance. It was a tale of immoralities, rather than crimes.’
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The two-way mirror in Rachman’s flat had been smashed by Rice-Davies, and there was no such mirror in any of Ward’s flats. Yet one was repeatedly mentioned by Griffith-Jones in order to emphasise Ward’s association with vice. The jury was given the impression that Ward’s claim to have helped MI5 was a fantasy. Griffith-Jones exploited the fact that Rachman was now a national hate-figure to state categorically but falsely that Ward had introduced Keeler to the slum landlord (in truth, they had met by chance while flat-hunting), and to suggest that Ward was responsible for Keeler becoming Rachman’s kept woman.

Amidst the welter of extraneous material, contradictory allegations and inconsistent accusations from palpable liars, Griffith-Jones scored two hits. Keeler testified that she had been introduced by Ward to a man called Charles, who lived in a house off Park Lane. She claimed to have forgotten Charles’s surname (which was Clore) despite pressure from counsel and judge to remember it. He had given her £50 after ‘intercourse’. Some of this money she had used to repay a loan from Ward.

The more damaging episode involved a story which Rice-Davis produced under police pressure after her arrest on the concocted television-set charge when she was desperate not to return to Holloway prison. She said that while visiting the Marylebone High Street coffee bar with Ward they met a man who became her short-term boyfriend. In court he was referred to as ‘the Indian doctor’. In fact the man was a Ceylonese confidence trickster known as Emil Savundra, who had once been extradited from England to serve a prison sentence in Belgium, and by 1963 was masterminding a grandiose insurance swindle which resulted in a long prison sentence in 1967. Rice-Davies said that Savundra left between £15 and £25 after each visit to Wimpole Mews – a total over £100. Griffith-Jones alleged that Ward got £2 or £3 from each visit. It is striking that neither Clore nor Savundra were called to corroborate, amend or deny these stories.

The Old Bailey was besieged by mobs. There were police constables, crime reporters, foreign correspondents, press photographers, taxi men, law clerks with heavy files; but supremely, an ugly, screeching mob. ‘Going out of the main entrance of the Old Bailey,’ wrote Rebecca West, who covered the trial for the
Sunday Telegraph
, ‘was to walk into one vast leer, a concupiscent exposure of dentures, the significance of which was quite clear to anyone who had been caught in one of the crowds who mobbed Christine Keeler in her car. She was a pitiful spectacle, sitting in terrified dignity, her face covered with a pancake make-up which levels out the natural toning of the skin, and her determination to make a good show levelling her features to the flatness of a mask. First, the photographers surrounded her, then they fell away, and their place was taken by women, mostly old or in late middle-age, and they were without exception ill-favoured and unkempt, and elderly men of the unprosperous sort. Their cries and boos expressed the purest envy.’ West was shocked that this old rabble was jealous of Keeler’s rackety vulnerability.
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The trial was slow-motion horror. As the injustices proceeded, the philosopher A. J. Ayer came as near to publishing a protest as anyone could without risking Marshall summoning them for contempt of court. His article, headed ‘Morality 1963’, was published in
Punch
on 31 July. It began: ‘We do right to be concerned with public morality. It is our chief, indeed almost our only protection, against tyranny and exploitation.’ Then, in carefully oblique terms, he addressed the Ward trial. ‘Among all the forms of official wickedness, the perversion of justice outrages us the most. Not that the egoism or even the stupidity of a poli-tician, or the corruption of a civil servant, may not do more harm.’ Yet the palpable injustice when scapegoats like Dreyfus, Sacco and Vanzetti were prosecuted should arouse ‘more resentment than a naked exercise of tyranny, just because it makes a mockery of the law. One of the most appalling features of totalitarian purges is that they are made to masquerade as trials.’ The parallel was clear if implicit.
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A travesty of justice was about to occur in the Court of Criminal Appeal. During Ward’s trial, Keeler said repeatedly that her April injuries had been caused by Lucky Gordon. When Gordon’s denial that he had caused her injuries was put to her, she replied: ‘The man is mad. Of course they were.’
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She repeated her denials that Camacchio and Fenton had been present in the flat. This was the second time she had lied on oath about these matters. Once she had been set on this course by the police, she could not retreat. However, Robin Drury, a sidekick of Ward’s who briefly convinced Keeler that he should become her business manager because he had held the same job for the lyricist Lionel Bart, had in May tape-recorded ten hours of her (sometimes stoned) reminiscences with a view to ghosting a book. When their agreement fell into acrimonious disarray, he offered these tapes, in which she revealed that Fenton and Camacchio had been in the Hamilton-Marshall flat when Gordon arrived, to Peter Earle of the
News of the World
, who baulked at his price of £20,000. The tapes reached a young man named Alex Wharton and a freelance hack twenty years his senior called Alastair Revie.

Wharton was an energetic youth (born in Scunthorpe in 1939), who as a teenager had sung in the earliest production of the musical
Fings Ain’t Wot They Used To Be
, and had been part of a hit duo called The Most Brothers, performing in a basement coffee bar in Old Compton Street that was run by an Australian wrestler. At the age of twenty he became a boy-prodigy producer with Decca Records, for whom he created a string of hits; later he managed the band The Moody Blues. In the summer of 1963 it was thought that this lively youngster was so attuned to the spirit of the age that he might help to present a saleable Keeler memoir. Revie was a ghost-writer (responsible for the melodramatic junkie memoirs of Barry Ellis,
I Came Back from Hell
) whose trashy novel
That Kind of Girl
was published in 1963 with the strapline: ‘Her Sin Was Ignorance – Her Reward Was Shame’.

Wharton and Revie, from worlds that were fearsome and incomprehensible to Griffith-Jones and Marshall, came near to wrecking the ruthless pomposities at the Old Bailey. Revie not only heard Drury’s tapes, but met John Hamilton-Marshall, who told him, as he also told solicitors representing both Ward and Gordon, that he rather than Gordon had been Keeler’s assailant in the Devonshire Place flat. Revie informed Wigg that Keeler had committed perjury during Gordon’s trial. Wigg passed Revie’s letter to the Attorney-General, Sir John Hobson. At Hobson’s instigation, Scotland Yard obtained Drury’s tapes a week before Ward’s trial opened, and began transcribing them. The police, who during Gordon’s trial had protested that Camacchio and Fenton were untraceable, now found them easily. Camacchio made a statement exonerating Gordon from the attack on Keeler; Hamilton-Marshall reiterated that he was the man who hit her; and other evidence pulled the frame apart. Gordon was granted leave to appeal by Lord Parker of Waddington, the Lord Chief Justice.

When Parker was chosen by Macmillan in 1958 it had been expected that he would prove to be a lenient influence. As a barrister, though, he had been a Treasury counsel, and was therefore predisposed towards the government. When criminal appeals came before him he so often increased rather than reduced prison sentences that barristers advised clients not to risk the Court of Criminal Appeal. In 1961 he sentenced the spy George Blake to forty-two years’ imprisonment. When the Profumo Affair came under his influence, he evinced a ruthless, prim malice which he believed served the public good.

On Tuesday 30 July, the day that Griffith-Jones made his closing address at Ward’s trial, three judges at the Court of Criminal Appeal, sitting an hour earlier than usual so that few onlookers were in attendance, took just nine minutes to set aside Gordon’s conviction. Gordon had been sent to prison for seven years only six weeks earlier. The reasons for his swift release were suppressed by the judges who made the decision. Keeler had, of course, perjured herself, under police pressure, at Gordon’s trial. Yet Lord Parker emphasised when delivering the court’s judgement that this was based on the new evidence from Camacchio, Fenton, Hamilton-Marshall, Revie and others and that the court did not hold that Keeler’s evidence was untruthful: indeed that she may have been speaking the truth. As her evidence was contradicted by everyone else, this was unlikely.

Parker and his fellow judges read the witness statements, but not aloud. They neither asked the witnesses to testify nor said in court what the new witnesses had revealed. They thus concealed Keeler’s extensive perjury from the public. If the court had revealed the new evidence, and Parker had then maintained that Keeler might be telling the truth, he would have been scorned. The Lord Chief Justice’s decision was taken by shorthand writers, checked and revised by him, then sent by special messenger from the Court of Criminal Appeal to the Old Bailey.

This exceptional proceeding – this corrupt, contemptible sequence of events – was undertaken by Parker in order to undermine Ward’s defence. It enabled Griffith-Jones to say during his final address: ‘Gordon’s appeal has been upheld. That does not of course mean to say that the Court of Criminal Appeal have found that Miss Keeler is lying. As I understand it from the note I have, the Lord Chief Justice said it might be that Miss Keeler’s evidence was completely truthful, but in view of the fact that there were witnesses now available who were not available at the trial, it was felt that the court could not necessarily say that the jury in that case would have returned the same verdict as they did if those two witnesses had been called. That is all it amounts to.’ Nevertheless, once Ward was convicted, Keeler was tried for perjury in the Gordon case, and sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment. As she had been told to perjure herself by Marylebone police officers, this was hard justice; but what does it say of the justice of Parker of Waddington?

In his closing address, Griffith-Jones indicted Ward for moral turpitude rather than immoral earnings. ‘The evil,’ he insisted, ‘goes very deep.’ He spoke of ‘this doctor, so-called’; harked on Rachman’s two-way mirror; and referred to the defendant as a man who plunged ‘the very depths of lechery and depravity’. In words that struck hard, he suggested that there was a patriotic duty to convict: ‘Members of the jury, you may think that it is in the highest public interest to do your duty and return a verdict of guilty.’ Griffith-Jones had an overpowering effect, as a juror told Knightley and Kennedy over twenty years later. ‘He called Stephen Ward a thoroughly filthy fellow, and we all knew he must be a thoroughly filthy fellow. Then a string of girls was paraded through the court, and we really didn’t know what was going to come next.’
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The judge’s summing-up was hostile to Ward, as his interruptions had been during the trial. He instructed the jury that the Appeal Court’s decision in the Gordon case was extraneous, and must not influence the Ward case, and again quoted Parker’s crafty wording which seemed to uphold Keeler’s reliability as a witness. He pitched phrases like ‘sink of iniquity’ and ‘filth and vice’, applying them to newspaper coverage, but in a way that reflected on Ward. The evidence showed that Ward had subsidised Keeler and Rice-Davies from his earnings as an osteopath rather than taking their earnings from prostitution. Neither woman, indeed, was a common prostitute, street-walker or call-girl. Marshall’s summing-up nevertheless directed the jury that Keeler and Rice-Davies came within the legal definition of prostitution: he used a loose interpretation which criminalised tens of thousands of unmarried women who did not share his notions of shame.