An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (17 page)

A showdown came in December 1961 when Ward provoked a furious row with Philippa Astor’s sister-in-law, Deirdre Grantley, an Oxford-educated young woman. Deirdre Grantley’s Hungarian mother Judith Listowel was a staunchly anti-Soviet exile who edited a weekly magazine,
East Europe and Soviet Russia
. Just before Khrushchev’s visit to London in 1956, Lady Listowel had launched a press campaign intended to embarrass the Hungarians into releasing her young nephew to travel to freedom, and in November that year, during the Hungarian uprising, she smuggled herself across the border from Austria. More recently, in 1961, the CIA had inspired the Bay of Pigs invasion of Castro’s Cuba. It was therefore rash of Ward to denounce the Hungarian freedom-fighters and the anti-Castro insurgents in scathing terms at the Cliveden dinner. Lady Grantley was angered, and Bill Astor, who had vivid memories of the refugees whom he had helped at Andau, lost his temper and stalked from the room after telling Ward that if those were his views, he should go and live elsewhere. Under Bronwen Astor’s calming influence, Bill relented in his threat that Ward must vacate Spring Cottage; but Ward, who feebly protested that he had only meant to indicate that he disliked violence, was not invited to dine at the main house again.

Ward made mischief in upper-class company, and worried about the good opinion of his social inferiors – neither of them traits of a conventional snob. According to Keeler, he seemed proud to be ‘a maverick, which I found strange for all the time he also wanted to be part of the in-crowd, especially the high and mighty’. His cliquishness, she added, ‘wasn’t about money, but the way you wore your hat, who your tailor was’. Ward, so Coote complained, ‘would continually drag well-known people into his talk, and refer to them by their Christian names – sometimes the wrong one!’ His class-consciousness about his patients matched the mischievous Robin Hood forays in his social life. Ward’s outlook differed little from the social self-awareness, the insecurities and compensatory striving, of the medical profession generally, which led to doctors’ wives having a reputation as crashing snobs. Medical families had a more precarious social status than legal families, because their standing in communities reflected their patients’ standing.
¹³

During the 1950s the medical profession became less respected and more openly criticised than at any time in previous history. It was partly that professional authority had been weakened by the formation of the National Health Service in 1948. Physicians found that after being ‘nationalised’, they were answerable to ‘a vast, impersonal, remarkably uninformed machine with a predilection for having its million and one queries answered in triplicate’, as was lamented in 1954. The taxpayers who funded the service felt they could make new demands of their physicians. ‘Since everyone was forced to pay a whacking great weekly premium for medical insurance, nearly everybody, not unexpectedly, thought they might as well get something out of it … so the stream of importunate demanding free chits to the dentist, free wigs, postal votes, corsets, milk, orange juice, vitamin tablets, pensions, invalid chairs, beds, water cushions, taxi rides to hospital, crutches, bandages, artificial limbs … dogged us wherever we went.’ Patients, especially less sick ones, were disrespectful to physicians, whom they treated as functionaries trying to cheat them out of their rightful entitlements. General practitioners were paid according to the number of patients listed in their NHS practices, and found that if they did not prescribe, or over-prescribe, what their patients wished, their patients would transfer to other doctors’ lists. This was a particular problem with housewives seeking amphetamines or barbiturates.
¹⁴

The medical profession was hit by the creeping iconoclasm of the 1950s. ‘The mood today is to criticise everything,’ Harold Macmillan wrote in 1957. ‘It may pass, but I have never known the press and the public so sensitive or so hypercritical. I think it is because they are all so terribly well off. English people never seem to show their best except when they are in great trouble.’ Sir Arthur Porritt, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, felt the injustice of physicians being less esteemed than in earlier generations. The trouble, he complained in 1962, was that few physicians could any longer master all aspects of medicine, which weakened medical authority so far as some patients were concerned. Physicians, Porritt emphasised, faced duties that nobody else carried. ‘A doctor’s stock-in-trade is life and death. People tend to forget that he has a heavier responsibility than any millionaire, property dealer or business tycoon.’
¹⁵

One of the contentious issues facing the Macmillan administration on its formation in 1957 was doctors’ pay. Discontent on this issue festered into the 1960s. In their protests about remuneration, physicians were subliminally asking to be restored as objects of respect before the NHS masses. The
News of the World
headline ‘THESE DOCTORS MAKE ME ANGRY’ was an example of the denigration. It headed complaints in 1960 about the difficulty of winning compensation for blunders when the medical world acted as a self-protecting Establishment and closed ranks at the first whiff of an action for medical negligence. ‘By all means let us salute the devotion of thousands of those who treat us in our infirmities. But isn’t it time they realised that they are increasingly the paid privileged servants of the citizen, not the fellow conspirators of a secret vocation. A new professionalism, a new outlook on responsibility to a tax-paying, better-educated public, is stirring all around us. It’s time it reached the doctors.’
¹⁶

The British Medical Association reacted to the changed public mood by upholding a severe, restrictive morality in its official dealings. Throughout the BMA’s memorandum to the Wolfenden committee on homosexuality and prostitution, when referring to sexual activity, the word ‘indulgence’ was used instead of ‘pleasure’. ‘The proper use of sex, the primary purpose of which is creative, is related to the individual’s responsibility to himself and the nation,’ the BMA asserted, meaning that sex without the possi-bility of pregnancy was improper, and probably shameful. ‘At the present time doctors observe their patients in an environment favourable to sexual indulgence, and surrounded by irrespon-sibility, selfishness and a preoccupation with immediate materialistic satisfaction. There is also no lack of stimulation to sexual appetite. Suggestive advertisements abound on the street hoardings and in the Underground; provocative articles and illustrations appear in the daily and, especially, the Sunday newspapers; magazines and cheap novels with lurid covers frequently provide suggestive reading matter; and the erotic nature of many films and stage shows is but thinly veiled.’

The BMA offered far-fetched explanations for the perceived epidemic of homosexuality: ‘Many men see in homosexual practices a way of satisfying their sexual desires without running the risks of the
sequelae
of heterosexual intercourse. They believe, for example, that there is no danger of contracting venereal disease in homosexual activity. Other men adopt homosexual practices as a substitute for extra-marital heterosexual intercourse because there is no fear of causing pregnancy or emotional complications as in the life of a woman.’ Male homosexuality aroused, perhaps even deserved, public hostility, the BMA testified, because of the propensity of its practitioners in ‘positions of authority to give preferential treatment to homosexuals or to require homosexual subjection as an expedient for promotion. The existence of practising homosexuals in the Church, Parliament, Civil Service, Armed Forces, Press, radio, stage and other institutions constitutes a special problem.’ Sexual acts between men were ‘repulsive’, in the diagnosis of the BMA. ‘Homosexuals congregating blatantly in public houses, streets, and restaurants are an outrage to public decency. Effeminate men wearing make-up and using scent are objectionable to everybody.’ The physicians concluded that if ‘degenerate sodomists’ persist in their debauchery despite repeated imprisonment, ‘it would be in the public interest to deal with them in the same way as mentally deranged offenders’.
¹⁷

This was the morality of the BMA at the time when Ward was ‘girl-spotting’ in Oxford Street, enjoying women’s stockings hanging over chairs in his flat, and revelling in the lazy caprices of the girls he befriended. Although he aspired to the prestige of the royal physician Lord Evans, and the influence of Macmillan’s medical adviser Sir John Richardson, his destiny lay with the blaring headlines associated with the murderous physicians, Crippen, Bodkin Adams and Shipman. During 1963 he was victimised by politicians, framed by policemen, deserted by patients, betrayed by girlfriends, reviled by lawyers, and smeared by Lord Denning. For a while, osteopathy fell in reputation to the level of quackery which claimed to cure warts by rubbing them with toads. It was three years only since Randolph Churchill had ricked his back lifting a bundle of snowdrops, but it seemed another age.

FIVE

Good-Time Girls

‘A procession of downtrodden wives, bullied mothers, cast-off mistresses; the jilted, the enticed, the abandoned; harlots, doormats, birds in gilded cages.’ This was how women were pictured by a dress-shop saleswoman in Elizabeth Taylor’s 1951 novel,
A Game of Hide-and-Seek
. Richard Crossman, who in 1954 married his third wife, a young Oxford graduate in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, used to say complacently to visitors in front of her: ‘If you’re going to marry, you want to marry either an alpha girl or a doormat:
I
married a doormat.’
¹

Although young women had few direct, open routes to independence, some managed to find oblique, discreet ways of asserting themselves well before the social and sexual convulsions of 1967–68. Women at the time of the Profumo Affair had been subjugated by domestic constraints, sexual assumptions and judicial oppression which they resisted with stealthy opinions, defiant conduct and wayward impulses. For every overbearing masculine voice trying to punish female independence, or devalue women’s opinions, there were less audible voices insisting with obstinate integrity that they would not do as the men said. It was from the social
milieu
of the 1950s that Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies emerged: two ‘good-time girls’ who refused to be doormats.

The spirit of these times was represented by the Sexual Offences Act of 1956. This far-reaching legislation was prepared in committee, and passed unanimously without a word of debate in either the Commons or the Lords. It covered eventualities that were hard to imagine (Section 1 specified that a man committed rape if he induced a married woman to have sexual intercourse with him by impersonating her husband), and showed the hidden stresses of the period by criminalising activities that many people thought inoffensive. Section 23 (which was invoked after the arrest of Stephen Ward in 1963) created the criminal offence of procuration of a girl under twenty-one. This provision meant that if someone introduced a male to a woman who was over the age of consent (sixteen), but under the age of twenty-one, and the pair subsequently had a sexual romp, then the introducer had committed a criminal offence. Introducing a man to such a girl at a party or in a pub, or joining in his bantering chat-up, could be the prelude to a criminal offence if they later had sex together (anywhere in the world). By the early 1960s most university undergraduates, and much of the population under twenty-five, were criminals if the law was interpreted as it was in the charges levelled against Ward. As this law remained in force until 1994/95, many readers of this book will have committed the crime of procuration.

This provision of the criminal law – silently enacted so far as the public or press were concerned – was a Maginot Line in defence of what was called young women’s ‘virtue’. It was the work of legislators who were middle-aged or elderly, and overwhelmingly male: indeed women were excluded from membership of the House of Lords until 1958. It remained an exorbitant challenge for English women to have self-reliant lives. They were subordinated to men, and expected to feign gratitude for their subjugation. Valerie Hobson and Bronwen Pugh, for example, were required by their husbands, Jack Profumo and Bill Astor, to abandon shining careers after their marriages, and thereafter to chirp prettily like songbirds in gilded cages. Women were promised influence and masculine protection, though not the comprehensive respect of men, if they accepted roles that were secondary, insincere, compliant and manipulative. At times it seemed that the alternatives posed for women were to settle for a patronising bore as a husband, or to be venturesome and risk being hurt by the sort of predatory lechers who exploited Christine Keeler.

An article headlined ‘HOW TO GET A HUSBAND’ from the
Sunday Pictorial
of 1962 reveals the prevalent attitudes:

Let’s suppose … that you have been dating a single man for some time. Gradually, and in an irresistible, gentlemanly manner, he is taking the initiative. Even if you would like the experience yourself, you probably feel deep down inside that intercourse out of wedlock would be wrong.

So the questions that dash through your mind are:

IS this really necessary to win him?

WILL he respect me more afterwards – or less?

DOES he really intend to marry me, or is he stringing me along?

Many a man does not want to marry a woman with whom he has had a pre-marital relationship. If he was taught in his early life that ‘nice girls’ don’t surrender before marriage, he might find himself losing respect for the woman who gives in – in which case his reaction might be one of disgust. Worse still, he might feel that he would never be able to trust such a woman. Yet this same man will exert all manner of persuasion to engage the woman in going all the way. So it’s up to her to set the pace and offer resistance, if she has her limits.