An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (21 page)

Sabrina’s Palladium run coincided with the public breaking of the Profumo Affair: she was knocked out of the photoshoots by Christine Keeler. It coincided, too, with the climax of the murder trial of a nightclub owner who had shot his wife, a case that provided some background noise to the Profumo Affair, and similar judicial bias as the Ward trial. This sad, squalid story was eloquent of young women’s muddled aspirations, marital incompatibility, the legitimisation of male violence to discipline unruly wives, and men’s angry fright at suggestions of sexual inadequacy.

In 1960, Christine Hughes, the petite, semi-literate or dyslexic nineteen-year-old daughter of a Saltdean confectioner, eloped with a man in his late thirties, Harvey Holford, owner of the Whisky-A-Go-Go coffee bar and the Blue Gardenia nightclub in Brighton. Journalists raised a hue and cry, which tracked them to Scotland. Her parents took legal action to prevent her marriage, but relented when she became pregnant. The Holfords’ daughter, Karen, was born in 1961. Holford looked impressive, motoring through Brighton in a scarlet Pontiac Parisienne, but his bride’s pleasure in married life soon waned. Marriage for her, as for Dorothy Macmillan, meant restrictions, demands and routines. In 1962 she and a hairdresser friend, Valerie Hatcher, left on a summer holiday together.

Without his wife in the kitchen, Holford, as he piteously told the all-male jury at his trial, was forced to subsist on Shredded Wheat and fishcakes. The lustrous summer heat made her voluptuous. In Paris she slept with a Swiss barman, in San Remo with a German drummer. After being ejected from her hotel for taking two boys, whom she had met on the beach, back for the night, she shifted to Juan-les-Pins. There she met Richard Reader Harris, a Conservative MP, who took her for a spin in his Bentley convertible.

In addition to being negotiating secretary of the National Union of Fire Officers, Harris was a director of John Bloom’s company, Rolls Razor. Bloom was a boom tycoon who had been making a fortune in washing machines and had introduced competition to the retail of household durables. Washing machines offered emancipation to women from drudgery (one of the Hotpoint models was called ‘the Liberator’). The lower-middle-class housewife Mavis Parkinson, in Angela Thirkell’s novel of domesticity
Close Quarters
(1958), wept with relief when she won a washing machine in a raffle. The novelist Elizabeth Taylor in 1961 described a television advertisement in which a packet of soap powder, capering on tiny legs, sang a ditty before diving into a washing machine, after which a head of jostling bubbles appeared, singing too: images that were both patronising and promised salvation. Until Bloom, manufacturers did not compete on price, but spent large advertising budgets claiming high performance or technical innovations to justify the cost of their products. Some washing machines during the 1950s cost an average of six weeks’ wages. Bloom supplied cut-price washing machines on hire purchase terms, and undermined Retail Price Maintenance: around seventeen per cent of households owned a washing machine in 1955; twenty-nine per cent in 1958; and sixty per cent in 1966.
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Christine Holford, Hatcher, Harris, Bloom and another couple went together to the casino at Cannes, then to Harris’s rented summer home at Cap Ferrat. This was subsequently depicted as a luxurious villa, but was in fact a scruffy, sparsely furnished peasant cottage. According to widely publicised accounts, Bloom took Christine Holford upstairs to the only bedroom, while Harris slept downstairs on a sofa. Bloom’s version is more plausible. According to him, six people sat up talking, drinking and dozing together until dawn. Christine Holford regaled them with stories of her bad marriage. She took no one to bed, but made breakfast for all six of them. Weeks later, Bloom continued, he met Holford for the second and last time – for tea in Harris’s house in Montagu Mews (just east of Bryanston Mews West where Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies had lived in town with Rachman). They were shocked by her appearance: her hair had been shorn, her face was puffed like a football, and dark glasses failed to hide black eyes. Her husband, she said, had found her summer diary, dragged her to the edge of a cliff, threatened to hurl her off, and then beat her. ‘There was little either of us could do to comfort her,’ Bloom recalled. ‘Her marriage was a disaster, and that was that. I never saw her again.’ She was murdered a few weeks later.
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Holford’s testimony at his trial was intended to devalue the woman he had killed, and secure a verdict of manslaughter rather than murder. By his account, his wife, after returning to England in August 1962, was obsessed by Bloom’s wealth. ‘She told me he had made £4 million in four years. She said he was so rich that in one day when his shares were up threepence, he made £75,000. She said: “Think what he would have made if they had gone up 1/6d”.’ Bloom would install her in a Monte Carlo apartment or Mayfair house, she added. Holford referred to the recent suicides of Marilyn Monroe and the actress Patricia Marlowe. ‘I said: “There are two women who had everything in the world that money could give them, but they did not have their happiness … You would be like a diseased animal waiting in the room for him to use you.”’ Holford and his barrister made a virtue of the fact that in cuckolded anguish, on 14 August, he had battered his wife with his fists – inflicting extensive cuts and bruises, a nosebleed and black eyes – before cropping her hair, later explaining it was ‘the standard treatment in Germany for a loose woman’. After this brutality he attempted reconciliation, giving her a primrose-coloured Ford Anglia costing £440 for her twenty-first birthday in September, and taking her for a slap-up evening to hear Frankie Vaughan sing at the Talk of the Town cabaret restaurant.
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In an appeal to the jurymen’s chauvinism, Holford testified that his wife boasted that ‘foreigners were marvellous lovers especially Germans’. When he asked her confidante Valerie Hatcher why she thought his wife had slept with Bloom, she quoted Christine’s remark: ‘Such a big one for such a little man.’ This ‘shattered’ him, he said. Holford, who worried about his potency, had been prescribed by his physician a desensitising ointment Nupocain, which was supposed to curb premature ejaculation, although it could hardly reduce the anxiety that triggered his poor performance. His wife’s manner when they discussed sex was ‘scornful and yet somehow triumphant’, he testified. ‘I felt like something that had crawled from under a rock.’ One night ‘she undressed and lay down first and said: “Come and show me how good you are”.’ But when he thought of her lying ready for Bloom, ‘I just could not feel anything … I did not feel like a man.’ On a later evening, when he spoke of his civil action against Bloom for enticement of his wife’s affections, he claimed: ‘She said, “Don’t be ridiculous you can’t fight a millionaire and an MP.” She said, “You are getting out of your class, little man … he could buy and sell you a million times over”.’ After he called her ‘a slut’, she retorted that now her shorn hair had grown back, she was going to Bloom: ‘He has got a bigger one than you, little boy … You can stop crying about Karen [their daughter] because she is not yours.’
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Holford snatched a gun from a cupboard and shot her six times through the jaw, right temple, left ear and genitals.

While awaiting trial for murder Holford sued Bloom for alienating his wife’s affections: the diversionary antics of this civil action softened the public mood before his criminal trial. ‘Holford’s wife was accosted in the South of France by a man known as Reader Harris [and] was taken to a villa where the enticement took place,’ his counsel told the Court of Appeal. But when counsel added that ‘Bloom devoted himself exclusively to Christine Holford, telling how rich he was,’ Lord Justice Sellers interrupted. ‘What has that got to do with a jury any more than a judge?’
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The police, assuring Bloom that his name was being introduced to raise tactical confusion, declined to call him as a witness in the murder trial. They preferred a simple case to go to court because it made a conviction likelier; the defence repeatedly smeared the dead woman and Bloom, and the prosecution was complicit in this. These were familiar tactics: the prosecution in the Vassall espionage trial of 1962 accepted statements from the defendant which simplified the case, but were surely untrue; Lord Astor, Charles Clore and Emil Savundra – men with whom Keeler or Rice-Davies claimed to have gone to bed – were not called to testify in Ward’s trial in 1963 because their evidence might have made the accusations and denials too complex for a jury.

Holford described his wife as ‘a marvellous girl and mother until she met that bastard Bloom’, prosecuting counsel told Lewes Assizes. The star prosecution witness was Valerie Hatcher. ‘Washing-machine tycoon John Bloom dazzled twenty-one-year-old Christine Holford by the way he made love to her and by never-ending talks about his immense wealth,’ she testified (
pace
the
Daily Express
report). ‘In a whisper, Valerie dramatically told the jury at Lewes Assizes: “After her night with Bloom at a Cannes villa, Christine compared Bloom’s performance with her husband’s and said some pretty nasty things about her husband in the sexual sense.”’
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(As a reminder of the pressure for every man to be a super-stud, the
Express
’s serialisation of Ian Fleming’s
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
ran on the page following the murder trial reports.) Christine Holford’s last letter to Valerie Hatcher was read out in court: ‘Harvey said that I would be nothing but a high-class P and I would never be able to live with myself. It is very difficult because my feelings for Harvey are nil, gone, finished, kaput.’ Also quoted was another letter to Holford: ‘We can never be happy together and I would only end up being another Momma, cleaning and working seventeen hours a day.’
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Bloom was probably not her lover; but certainly to her he was the saviour of overburdened housewives.

The trial’s climax came when the wife-killer took the stand. ‘Yesterday, weeping club-owner Harvey Holford told the jury trying him for capital murder how he shot his twenty-one-year-old wife Christine – his “Princess”,’ reported the
Daily Express
. He testified that she repeatedly complained (the emotive word used in court was ‘taunted’) about his sexual technique. ‘Asked about love-making, Holford said in a low voice: “She seemed to become cold, frigid. She told me she did not think I satisfied her any more.”’
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The judge, Sir Geoffrey Streatfeild, was sympathetic to the defendant when summing up to the all-male jury. The dead woman, considered as a wife, was ‘an insincere, spoilt young child with but few tender sparks for him’, Streatfeild said. ‘Do you think you can really cast any stones at him for cutting off her hair?’ he asked the jurymen. ‘Who in the world in his right senses,’ he also asked, ‘would criticise Harvey Holford for bringing an enticement action against John Bloom?’ (It should be reiterated that Bloom had been discouraged by police from testifying: his denial of an affair would have convinced many auditors.) Streatfeild stressed Christine Holford’s comparison of the sexual prowess of ‘this millionaire washing-machine manufacturer’ with her husband’s swerves between premature ejaculation and impotence. He alluded to her jibe that Holford was underendowed compared with Bloom, an accusation, said the judge, ‘which for reasons of decency, I suppose, has not been printed in the newspapers and which preceded her death’. (This was no doubt Holford’s justificatory gloss for firing his gun at his dying wife’s genitalia.) ‘Can you imagine any words more calculated … to sear deeply into a man’s soul?’ Streatfeild continued: ‘Think of the contempt of the last words “little boy”.’ This belittling of the defendant as physically meagre, and pathetic in performance, was intolerable provocation, the judge instructed. ‘How would any man react when the wife goes out of the way first of all to mock his sexual capability, and then, true or not, tells him the child is not his?’
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The jurymen acquitted Holford of murder, but convicted him of manslaughter on grounds of both provocation and diminished responsibility. He was sentenced to three years, and paroled in 1964.

The questions of male sexual ineptitude and ignorance aired at Holford’s trial had seldom been publicly broached before the publication in 1948 of Alfred Kinsey’s
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
. The Home Office in 1953 was indignant at the ‘disgraceful furore’ raised by ‘the gutter press’ at the publication of Kinsey’s sequel,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
, which hinted that ‘the more a young girl allows herself to be lasciviously mauled, the better her chances of a happy marriage’: such passages might ‘encourage some youngsters to excess’. The chapter on masturbation was ‘hardly edifying’, but the most objectionable passage to the official mind was a section that might encourage ‘pre-marital coitus’ by stating that antibiotics provided ‘simple and rapid cures for the two principal venereal diseases’. Misinformation seemed preferable to the Home Office’s man: ‘Fear of disease is perhaps the most potent factor in restraining many young men from promiscuous immorality … and to remove that deterrent gratuitously (even if, which I doubt, the assumption is valid) seems to me to be monstrously irresponsible.’ The official concluded that parents would object to adolescents reading Kinsey’s reports, but that the government need not prosecute a treatise that was ‘long, technical and dull, and … expensive’.
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