An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (8 page)

Macmillan’s appointment of a Scottish earl, Home, as Foreign Secretary in 1960, and of his wife’s nephew, the Duke of Devonshire, to the Commonwealth Relations Office in 1961, provoked the anti-Establishment pundits to fume (although neither man failed at his post). The Tories traditionally believed that the tests of experience and of time were sound guides, but after the 1959 election victory appeals to tradition were no longer winning. Instead, Tory leaders had to place themselves as the people best able to manage change. By 1962, Macmillan was trying to identify his party as the modernisers and Labour as retrogressive: Marples’s disastrous transport policies and Britain’s ill-fated application to join the Common Market were at the forefront of this strategy.

In July 1962, the
Observer
journalist and former gossip columnist Anthony Sampson published his
Anatomy of Britain
which, on the basis of interviews with political, business and official leaders, presented public life as amateurish, caste-ridden, dithering and cowed. His bestseller operated by the technique of the prewar fellow-travellers who compiled Union of Democratic Control pamphlets: genealogical tables revealing distant, unsuspected cousinhoods; Venn diagrams of overlapping company directorships and schematic representations of power relations all tending to suggest there was a loose conspiracy by undemocratic, debilitated and incompetent fuddy-duddies. Sampson had a priggish belief that people should be spurred hard by overriding moral purposes; in an earlier generation he might have been a disciple of Frank Buchman’s Moral Rearmament group. He seemed to idealise men who worked exorbitantly long hours, scorned holidays and judged themselves virtuous for spreading stress in their offices.

Sampson’s book chimed with the clashing cymbals of opinion-making in 1962. Jack Plumb, the son of a Leicester shoe factory worker, was a communist in the 1930s, a Bletchley Park codebreaker during the war, a Cambridge history don from 1946 and an avid, frustrated crosspatch with a beady eye for the main chance. ‘Your time is coming,’ his lifelong confidant C. P. Snow promised him in 1960, ‘one can smell it in the air.’ Initially Plumb resented tradition: in 1962, for example, he decried the privileged readers of history books as ‘those who had nannies, prep-schools, dorms, possess colonels and bishops for cousins, and now take tea once a year on the dead and lonely lawns of the Palace’. In time he proved the very model of an anti-Establishment skirmisher who, once his enemies were routed, annexed their domains of influence and adopted their style and amenities which he had all along irritably envied. Soon he had a rectory in Suffolk and a
moulin
in France, ingratiated himself with philanthropic millionaires and smart noblewomen, looked cocksure in the private apartments of palaces, became a conspicuous member of Brooks’s, figured until the last moment among the peers in Harold Wilson’s notorious resignation honours list, performed a clumsy political somersault in the hope of prising a coronet from Margaret Thatcher.
⁵⁴

Richard Crossman was another opportunistic rhetorician where modernisation and class distinction were concerned. Reviewing Sampson’s
Anatomy of Britain
for the
New Statesman
, he pretended that political and economic power was more irresponsibly concentrated than at any time in living memory. ‘Never in our island history have so many been fooled by so few,’ he claimed. ‘An irreverent attitude to top people is the yeast that makes democracy rise. Without it a free society soon degenerates into a starchy oligarchy, an indigestible complex of collusive interest groups which can only be broken up by subjecting it to constant investigation and public exposure.’ Hostile analyses of the Establishment were class-war waged with polysyllables: a device to get one crowd out of power, and another in; to usurp one set of authority figures, and install a different lot. Anti-establishment critics masqueraded as street-fighting egalitarians, but in truth they were jostlers for place in the corridors of power.
⁵⁵

Simon Raven was rare among Sampson’s reviewers in resisting his thesis. The scolding theme of
Anatomy of Britain
was that ‘most educated Englishmen reserve their respect for old-fashioned institutions, such as Eton, Latin, the regimental system and Mr Macmillan, and refuse to recognise the demands of the New Age for such qualities as industrial efficiency and high-pressure salesmanship’, wrote Raven. He, however, wanted to be saved from despotic bores who resented people having placid, aimless moments. ‘While long-established English institutions tend to be illogical and wasteful, the values which they promote, however limited in their scope, are morally and aesthetically far superior to anything which the new world of admass tastes and applied science can show. If I want to spend my day writing Latin verses or watching cricket, as opposed to selling some beastly machine or rubbishy gimmick over a fat expense account luncheon, who is to say that I am not the better man for it?’
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Although Macmillan in 1963 headed a Cabinet with the youngest average age for a century, he was also the Prime Minister who kept his only television set at Birch Grove in the servants’ hall. Broadcasting, however, more than newspapers, showed the tendency of the times. ‘The formality of BBC official language used to be one of great reassurance; it spoke of order, like guards on trains,’ reflected Malcolm Bradbury, lecturer in English Language at Birmingham University, in the spring of 1963. ‘Now, in a wave of informality, even the news is changing. The names of contributors to newsreels are frequently mentioned (personal), announcers cough regularly and carefully do not, as they easily can, switch the cough out (informal), the opinions of people in the street are canvassed, though they frequently have none (democratic), and interviewers are aggressive and sometimes even offensive (vernacular). So, personal, informal, democratic and vernacular, becomes the new common speech for all things.’
⁵⁷

The challenge for Macmillan, as the protagonists of the Profumo Affair converged towards their crisis, would be to hold onto power in an age of common speech. His attendance at the Derby, the shoots at Swinton, quips about Boodle’s which were incomprehensible to ninety-five cent of the electorate, had rallied his parliamentary party after 1957, and brought a thumping electoral victory in 1959. But in the new informal, levelling and vernacular age, these poses made his government vulnerable.

TWO

War Minister

When the government minister John Profumo married the film-star Valerie Hobson on New Year’s Eve, 1954, a crowd of about fifty bystanders gathered on the pavement in Pont Street, outside St Columba’s Church, in Chelsea. Boys on rollerskates, London coppers, and two chimney sweeps made it resemble a scene from
Mary Poppins
. The bride, who was given away by the debonair financier Gerard ‘Pop’ d’Erlanger, wore a grey suit of vicuna, a new material from Paris, with a high collar and cuffs of sapphire mink. A grey silk bonnet was perched over her red hair. Among the fifteen guests was Leslie Mitchell, the suave-voiced broadcaster who announced the opening of the BBC television service in 1936 and of Independent Television in 1955.

The Profumos flew away on their honeymoon that evening, so spoilt by fortune that the head of Heathrow ordained that free champagne should be provided for them and fellow passengers on their Paris-bound aircraft. Next morning, as their car left the Ritz hotel in Paris, with a motorcycle escort from the US embassy revving its engines, the duty manager hastened out with the MP’s pyjamas, which had lain unworn beneath his pillow all night. The Department of Transport gave them the number plate PXH1 (‘Profumo Times Hobson equals Number One’) and a few years later the Foreign Office issued them with passports numbered 3 and 4. Jack Profumo and Valerie Hobson were a golden couple for press photographers, hotel managers and the image-conscious.

They had met exactly seven years earlier at a fancy dress ball held at the Royal Albert Hall to usher in New Year’s Day, 1947. He was dressed as a policeman, she as Madame Récamier (the nineteenth-century Paris hostess commemorated by a type of daybed). She was twenty-nine, with a string of film successes behind her, and stoically married to an inveterate womaniser. He was thirty-one, temporarily out of Parliament, but already with five years’ experience as a Conservative MP.

The Profumos were a legal and mercantile family on whom the King of Sardinia bestowed a barony in 1843. The third baron settled in England, became a naturalised British subject and in 1877 founded the Provident Life Association, which made a fortune for his descendants. The Provident enabled lower-middle-class men who could never afford to buy a house outright to take out an endowment assurance policy, pay a small weekly premium and build up a sum which would be held as a deposit when, after five years, they were entitled to borrow several hundred pounds representing the total cost of a house. Their debt would be paid off over twenty-five years.

The grandson and eventual heir to the Provident money and Italian title was born in 1915, and in 1928 started at Harrow School, perched on a hill in Middlesex, ten miles north of London. ‘While everybody knows that Englishmen are sent to public schools because that is the only place where they can learn good manners,’ Rebecca West wrote in 1953, ‘it unfortunately happens that the manners they learn there are recognised as good only by people who have been to the same sort of school, and often appear very bad indeed to everybody else.’ There was no school of which this was truer than Harrow. It had its private vocabulary (a boy was called a ‘Torpid’ until he had turned sixteen or completed two years), arcane rules (boys in their first year had to fasten all three buttons on their jackets, one button in their second year, and thereafter none), special costumes (top hats for all boys on Sundays, a red fez with tassels for football players) and other rigmaroles. ‘We lived rather like young Spartans; and were not encouraged to think, imagine, or see anything that we learned in relation to life at large,’ John Galsworthy recalled of his years at Harrow. ‘In that queer life we had all sorts of unwritten rules of suppression. You must turn up your trousers; must not go out with your umbrella rolled. Your hat must be worn tilted forward; you must not walk more than two abreast until you have reached a certain form … you must not talk about yourself or your home people, and for any punishment you must assume complete indifference.’ Giles Playfair, who was a pupil shortly before Profumo, emphasised Harrow’s ugliness (‘the stone floors and staircases, the dark subterranean passages, the dirty blue paint peeling off the walls, the ill-conditioned bed sitting-rooms and the wholly unattractive sanitary accommodation’) and philistinism (‘“He jaws about poetry”, they said, and quite tirelessly and mercilessly, by a process of mental cruelty, they saw to it that I paid the penalty for my indiscretions’). Playfair felt degraded by the fagging system, especially at mealtimes, when he had to assist one irritable butler and two kitchen youths with dirty collars and greasy hair in serving eighty hungry boys.
¹

Harrow School, when Profumo arrived in 1928, was pervaded by militarism, veneration of the dead and sombre pomposity. Memories of the Great War, which had ended ten years earlier, still overshadowed the school. Almost three thousand Harrovians had served, 690 were wounded, and 644 (twenty-two per cent) killed. A huge ‘War Memorial Building’ was erected amidst a range of old school premises: its ‘silent emptiness,’ wrote Christopher Tyerman in his superb history, ‘appropriate for the hollow anguish and grief caused by the losses’; but its location like ‘implanting a dead heart in the school’. There was no forgetting Harrow’s Glorious Dead for the school chapel was lined with plaques commemorating hundreds of them. The chaplain appointed in Profumo’s time had the Victoria Cross, and joined the Officer Training Corps like other masters. There was army drill, in full khaki, twice a week plus military exercises on Sunday mornings. The soldierliness embedded in the weekly timetables, the rituals of conformity, the zeal of masters in promoting notions of duty and service, exceeded anything that the Edwardians would have desired. The OTC commander was such a martinet in the 1920s that boys protested: despite newspaper coverage of their mutinous discontent, the OTC remained compulsory for Harrovians until 1973.
²

The headmaster of Harrow School in Profumo’s time was Cyril Norwood, who began his career teaching in grammar schools and was nicknamed ‘Boots’ by Harrovians because his manners seemed common. Masters and pupils thought him abrasive, over-confident and self-publicising. His morality, like that of other weak men masquerading as strong, was stubborn and unimagin-ative. ‘His appearance was sallow and plebeian,’ recalled Playfair. ‘His manner was cold and severe … he never welcomed contradiction or allowed his will to be flouted. He was a bad listener.’ When recruiting a new master, in 1929, he sought a good cricketer in holy orders.
³

Norwood published books with such titles as
The English Tradition of Education
. He saw public schools as a training ground for the hierarchies of adult life. ‘It is the business of everybody to obey orders: it is expected that the orders will be reasonable, but they are there not to be criticised but obeyed.’ If obedience to orders was the first principle of Norwood’s universe, conformity was the basis of his public school code. ‘Everyone sees the sense of rules, and the happiness of everyone is found in carrying them out, or conforming to them loyally.’ Norwood’s Harrow instilled a smooth-mannered duplicity. It taught boys to show outward deference to people for whom they felt little respect. It rewarded them for giving a pleasant smile while conforming to rules that they inwardly scorned. It assured them that compliance to higher authority was the essence of English racial superiority. ‘There is an inherited system of morality, which represents the experience of the race, the rules which our ancestors have found to govern the game, and there is a racial character, a setting towards some ideals and not others, towards qualities and types of pursuit which appeal to Frenchmen, and not Englishmen, or to Englishmen, and not Frenchmen.’