An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo
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Authors: Richard Davenport-Hines
Tags: #Social Science, #Anthropology, #General, #Biography & Autobiography, #History, #Social History
RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES
An English Affair
Sex, Class and Power in the
Age of Profumo
For Jenny, Christopher and Hugo, and never forgetting Cosmo
Though most English men and women cannot ‘let themselves go’, they love to think and read about people who do throw off inhibitions, either with sex or violence – provided they are punished.
Geoffrey Gorer, ‘This is the English’,
The People,
30 September 1951
Snobbery – of all kinds – and prurience are the two most obvious vices of this country.
‘Anatomy of Hysteria’,
Spectator
, 15 November 1957
One thinks immediately of all the dreary little snobberies, the triviality, the emptiness, the susceptibility to stupid vogues. How drab and provincial we have become! How enslaved to gimmicks! English inventiveness and energy, which used to be an example to the world – have they dried up altogether, or is it simply a bad period we are going through? The two great inventions of the English, their political system and their literature, both seem at the moment rather dwindled and shabby. The parliamentary two-party system has become, whether temporarily or forever, a mere contest between public relation outfits, with professional ad men in the back room.
John Wain, ‘The Month’,
Twentieth Century,
July 1959
CONTENTS
Also by Richard Davenport-Hines
In May of 1963, when I was nine, Miss Vera Groom, the old spinster who taught me English, asked her class to name a noun beginning with a vowel. There was a new word that I was proud of knowing. I had discovered it from the cook’s
Daily Express
. I raised my hand, and in response to a nod from her cried out ‘Orgy!’ Miss Groom trembled: she gripped the edge of her desk; her face flushed with blood; her skin turned puce. ‘You are a foul boy,’ she said, and sent me to be caned by the headmaster.
A few days later Mr Wilcox addressed the school. It was the year
Dr No
sold 437,000 copies in paperback. Warner Wilcox was then in his early forties, but seemed old to me. Like many headmasters of his time, he was both overbearing and anxious. Dark-browed, stern, conscientious, he had a jolly wife who could not soothe his pent-up tension. When he rebuked his school, he would spring up and down on his heels, as if he was going to bound forward into the boys and start cuffing them. ‘It has come to my attention,’ he said in a storm of tense heel-jerks, ‘that boys are bringing James Bond novels into school. I will not have them on the premises. They are
sad-is-tic
novels’ – he pronounced each syllable of sadistic lingeringly before ending his speech with a savage roar – ‘and I will thrash any boy who is found in possession of one.’ As soon as I could, I asked a chauffeur what ‘sadistic’ meant. If he knew, he did not say.
Then in June came prize-giving – ten days after John Profumo’s resignation as War Minister, I estimate, and two days before the momentous House of Commons debate on that resignation. The prizes were distributed, and a rousing speech was made by a friend of Wilcox called Renée Soskin. Mrs Soskin was a mother of six. She ran both a farm in Bedfordshire and an import-export business, which she had inherited when her husband died during his morning press-ups a year earlier. Her sister was political editor of the
Observer
, the Sunday newspaper for progressives, and Mrs Soskin, a humane, plucky, helpful woman, was Liberal parliamentary candidate at the 1964 general election for that most high-minded London suburb, Hampstead. She had, indeed, appeared on television promoting Liberal policies for the family, in a party political broadcast for the 1959 general election. A Conservative columnist had called her ‘a most intelligent and remarkable lady almost capable of converting me to Liberalism’.
1
From the prize-giving podium Renée Soskin praised Mr Wilcox, Mr Potts, Mr Lorimer-Thomas (little did she know about Mr Lorimer-Thomas) while I daydreamed. Then she began to praise fee-paying schools, and I was jolted to attention. ‘Private schools are more indispensable than ever,’ she thundered at the climax of her peroration, ‘at this time of Deplorable Breakdown of Public Morals.’ The phrase rattled round the hall: ‘Deplorable Breakdown of Public Morals’. The adults rustled and glanced at one another. I sensed from the sumptuous indignation in nice Mrs Soskin’s voice, and all the silly looks that the adults were exchanging, that ‘Public Morals’ meant pompous hypocrisy, and that I wanted their breakdown.
I suspect that on that June afternoon it became inevitable that I would write one day about the sexual oppression, guilt and bullying, the whitewashing and blackballing, the lack of irony and absurd confused anger of ‘Jack’ Profumo’s England. The London half-world of Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler, or rather of their protectors, was the world in which I grew up. My grandparents lived in Bryanston Square, two minutes’ walk from Marble Arch. My mother lived in Montagu Mews West, which lay between Bryanston Square and Montagu Square. On the other side of Bryanston Square lay Bryanston Mews West. It was in a flat there, occupied by the slum landlord Perec Rachman, that the two-way mirror was installed through which steamy voyeurs – perhaps including the osteopath Stephen Ward – watched couples performing on a bed. Ward, the scapegoat of the Profumo Affair, spent the night before his show trial opened at the Old Bailey in a friend’s flat in Montagu Square: tabloid newspapers blared that he slept in blue silk pyjamas with a pink curtain in a gilt frame behind the bed. This, indeed, was soft living. Another block to the south-east was Portman Square, where Paul Raymond of Raymond’s Revuebar bought the penthouse which he shared with the glamour model Fiona Richmond. Ringo Starr, whom Raymond employed as his interior decorator, rewarded him with a panoply of James Bond gadgets and
parvenu
glitziness.
At the time of her temporary disappearance in March 1963, Christine Keeler lived at Flat 164, Park West, Edgware Road, three minutes’ walk from Bryanston Mews West, and a minute further from Montagu Mews West. For a time my father kept a leggy brunette in a flat in Park West. He took me there once in 1963, bounding up to the front door, which he opened with a flourish of his key chain. I asked him why he had a key to the woman’s flat. ‘I have a key,’ he replied with immense satisfaction, ‘that opens every door in London.’ He meant money. The Edgware Road flat was my induction into sexual deception, duplicitous lives and double standards. I have been standing on tiptoes, trying to peer into secret compartments, ever since.
The irritability of London motoring is a misery that I remember too well. My father bought his first car before driving tests had been devised. His school of motoring was Toad of Toad Hall’s. His spiritual home was the fast lane: he never felt more himself than when he was behind a steering wheel with his foot hard on the accelerator. As a Christmas treat for 1959, just after the M1 motorway had opened, he took me for a quick run north from Watford, which I believe may have turned into a dashing ‘fun-drive’ all the way to Rugby and back. Certainly I recall him saying on the interminable return journey that he would write to the Minister of Transport to complain that trees had been left standing beside the motorway, and might cast dangerous shadows by moonlight. He liked high-velocity travel to lay waste to the landscape.
The speed limit of seventy miles per hour was introduced as a temporary measure in 1965 to cope with enthusiasts like my father. Every few months he would take me to Jack Barclay’s car showroom in Berkeley Square. The salesmen were thin men with thin moustaches, sharp suits and sharper eyes. They stood apart from one another, idling by the polished bonnets and winged mascots, but were swift and implacable as they headed for their prey when a customer stepped inside the plate-glass windows: lone sharks, one might say. Sometimes my father drove a Bentley, sometimes a black Alvis. One thing all his cars had in common was no wing-mirrors. Wing-mirrors, my father often told me, spoilt the line of a car. They were effeminate. A good driver, a real man, did not need to look behind him. This creed led to several accidents, many altercations and, for me, one Copernican moment of political revelation.
On a Saturday during the summer after Miss Groom sent me to be beaten, and Mr Wilcox denounced the sadism of James Bond, and Mrs Soskin deplored the breakdown of Public Morals, my father sped me to Park Lane. It was August 1964, and we were in a black Alvis with the hood down. A year earlier workmen had finished converting the sedate old carriage road of Park Lane into a dual carriageway with four lanes on both sides. Old avenues of trees were felled, the eastern meadows of Hyde Park put under macadamised tar, and concrete burrows were excavated so that Mayfair businessmen could park their Jaguars in strip-lit subterranean hideaways. Thinking of Hollywood rather than Paris, Whitehall officials had wanted to foist the name of Park Lane Boulevard as a cosmetic to cover the scars of their vandalism. My father loved the swift new Park Lane as a reminder that England was finished with slowcoaches.
There were other signs of change. Sir Philip Sassoon’s great house overlooking the park had lately been torn down, and replaced by a monstrosity that housed the Playboy Club. The developer of the site, Jack Cotton, who lived on Park Lane himself, had, in a show of braggadocio, paid Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus architect, to advise on the redevelopment. Gropius’s inspiration, with which London was learning to live, was to assert the unyielding modernity of the new building by cladding it in concrete rather than the original plan of Portland stone.
We stopped at the Hilton hotel. Its thirty storeys and jutting gimcrack modernity had been opposed at planning stage by ‘stick-in-the-muds’ whom my father had rejoiced to see quashed. The hotel towered over the rest of Park Lane, and could be seen in its unwieldy disproportions from the far end of Kensington Gardens. It was the first building in London to overlook the gardens of Buckingham Palace, and this objection, too, had been quelled to my father’s pleasure. (Thirty years later I was to read the minutes of the Cabinet meeting at which Harold Macmillan’s government endorsed this encroachment on the Queen’s privacy: the justification given was that American holiday-trippers staying in the Hilton would bring badly needed dollars to revitalise the ailing English economy.) The site had belonged until 1956 to an old banking family, the Abel-Smiths, who had a mortgage on it. This was a period when debt frightened most people as a weir would scare steady ferrymen, but spurred a bold minority rather as the wide oceans excited fearless privateers. The Abel-Smiths had therefore sold their plot for £550,000 to a property developer called Charles Clore, who bedded Keeler, as it happens. Clore, who borrowed heavily, spent another £5 million turning the site into the Hilton. In the hotel my father and I went to the American coffee shop: he gulped scalding black coffee while I spooned my way through a banana split or knickerbocker glory. I cannot imagine why we were there: perhaps a rival for the brunette was in the offing.