Elizabethans

10

THE BALLAD OF STEPHEN WARD

From disguised princes in medieval stories visiting smoky cottages to the Tudors’ upwardly mobile bureaucrats or Restoration rakes and whores interlacing frantic fingers in London parks, British society has always included bold migrants across the fiercely policed barriers of class division. But by the middle of the twentieth century a mixture of working-class self-confidence, rising up, and the dilapidated condition of the tax-ravaged upper classes, starting to look down, meant that social mixing was happening on a new scale.

This is why the Profumo scandal of 1963 remains such a reliable staple of modern British history. But the most interesting figure in it is not Christine Keeler or Rice-Davies; not Profumo himself, not even Ivanov. It is the shadowy man Stephen Ward around whom the rest of the cast of politicians, spies, call girls and super-rich aristos swirled. We will never properly know his side of what happened, because he committed suicide while standing trial for living off immoral earnings. The phrase about him that recurs endlessly, in books and on the internet, is ‘socialite osteopath’, or sometimes ‘osteopath and artist’. That barely scratches the surface. With his weak face, large and hypnotic eyes and lank hair, he stares out of press photographs as if he’s yearning to be loved or yearning at the very least to be understood.

There was a doomy masochism about Ward. He was the son of a quiet vicar and a flamboyant Irishwoman who was sent off to a boarding school, where he was unjustly accused of hitting another boy and thrashed in front of the rest of the school – even though ‘everybody knew’ he had done nothing. This was an incident which seems to have stayed with him throughout his life. Ward himself felt that this was, in essence, also the story of his involvement in the Profumo affair, calling it ‘a political revenge trial … Someone had to be sacrificed and that someone was me.’ The great contemporary critic Ken Tynan entirely agreed: ‘Society created him, used him, ruthlessly destroyed him, and then closed ranks around his body.’

This is a story also about sexuality and – that slippery, loaded word – decency. Lord Denning, the judge employed by the then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to report on the affair, bluntly described Ward as ‘a really wicked chap … the most evil man I ever met’. Mervyn Griffith-Jones, the prosecution barrister, described him as ‘this filthy fellow’ who had slithered up ‘from the very depths of lechery and depravity’. And listening agog to racy tales of ‘swingers’ (a word brightly redolent of 1963 but in fact in use in England since the 1540s) and sadomasochism, the jury was easily persuaded. One juror tracked down by the authors Phillip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy, told them:

most of us had already made up our minds when we heard about all the perversions and sex. You have got to remember that we weren’t as liberal-minded as we are today. It was all very disgusting to us. But some of us find it odd because Stephen Ward didn’t look like what he was supposed to have done. It was all a bit beyond our comprehension, these two-way mirrors and whippings and things …

So who was this ambiguous, lecherous, shadowy martyr? The first thing is that Stephen Ward was not simply an ‘osteopath’. He had a proper, full medical degree from a university in Missouri, where modern osteopathy was born. A genuinely talented healer, he had studied osteopathy before and during the war, when his patients included many British soldiers but also Mahatma Gandhi. The second thing to say is that he was not simply a ‘socialite’: he was one of the best-connected men in London in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As an osteopath and an amateur artist, he was friendly with the Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Margaret, the Duchess of Kent and other members of the royal family.

His political friends included not just John Profumo, the War Minister, but also Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan, Anthony Eden and the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell. Ward knew and treated a wide range of the richest people in Britain, including the plutocratic Astors. Among his show-business friends were Frank Sinatra, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Ava Gardner, Sir Malcolm Sargent, Sir Thomas Beecham, Sophia Loren, Kenneth More, Jack Hawkins and Peter Sellers. He was thick with most of the powerful figures in British newspapers, and well known to important artists of the period, key London ambassadors and members of the European royal set. To call him a socialite is like calling Turner a chap who messed around with watercolour.

Once the scandal broke in 1963, most of these people dropped him, or pretended they’d never known him. The drawings he had made of the Duke of Edinburgh and other royals were mysteriously bought off the walls before his first West End exhibition opened, we must assume on behalf of the royal family. But before all that, while he was on the up and fashionable, Stephen Ward was almost ludicrously well plugged in. He had magical fingers.

So what about his seedy side? Ward’s biographers believe that he himself did not have a strong sex drive, but rather that he got a kick out of bringing on vulnerable girls. He liked to educate them in the ways of the world, polishing and helping them, and then to introduce them to powerful men. He used them to weave a web of influence. Following George Bernard Shaw’s character, who educated Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, friends called it Ward’s ‘Henry Higgins syndrome’. So he was able to introduce Lord Astor, Profumo and the spy Yevgeny Ivanov to women with whom they then had affairs.

The distinction between ‘young and promiscuous women’ and sex workers, and between ‘making introductions’ and living off the earnings of prostitution, can be narrow. The blurring of this line would destroy Stephen Ward. Yet any suggestion that he was a sainted victim is also ludicrous. At different times of his life he certainly enjoyed sex, and he certainly knew many prostitutes. Just as he revelled in mixing with the rich and famous, so he got a kick from mixing with West Indian drug dealers, gangsters and prostitutes in the poorer parts of West London. Prince Philip one day, the jazz singer ‘Lucky Gordon’ the next. In Britain’s mid-century class system, Ward was both balloonist and deep-sea diver. He travelled vertically.

And that was the nub of the issue because, for goggle-eyed newspaper readers, what was most striking about the Profumo scandal was that it mashed together the grandest and most pompous men with cheeky, sassy young working-class women like Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. It showed up the former and it raised up the latter. While stodgy, socially conservative middle-class readers trudged about their daily business, the upper classes and the wilder fringes of the working classes were, it appeared, behaving just as ‘badly’ as each other. Perhaps there was nothing new in this: in Queen Victoria’s time, Lord Randolph Churchill famously said that ‘the aristocracy and the working class are united in the indissoluble bonds of a common immorality’.

Rather like the Gloucestershire racecourse during the Cheltenham Gold Cup, the world of the Profumo affair was one in which the middle classes and their values were virtually absent. The nobs and the disreputable kids were having far too much fun and it simply wasn’t fair. Peers of the realm had urges, it appeared, just as earthy – and often dirtier – than anyone cavorting in a drug-addled Notting Hill club. Sex was coming out into the open. (Seven years later Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper would print its first topless Page 3 girl.)

It now seems, however, that the scandal was, in truth, more serious than was widely understood at the time. Politically, Ward meant well. He had been working with MI5, and doing his naive, deluded best to bring the Americans and the Russians together during the most dangerous period of the Cold War. In October 1962, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis, Ward’s friend the Russian naval attaché Ivanov, who was working for Soviet military intelligence, suggested on behalf of the Kremlin that Britain host a summit in London between President Kennedy and the Soviet Premier Khrushchev. The then Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home felt that this was an attempt to drive a wedge between Britain and the United States and didn’t like the idea; and it was, in any case, overtaken by events as the crisis played out.

There was a more malign and dangerous side to Ivanov’s activities. In his history of Soviet intelligence, the historian Jonathan Haslam relates how Ivanov, introduced by Ward, got invitations to Jack Profumo’s London home, overlooking Regent’s Park. There, allowed to wander at will by Profumo’s wife, the actress Valerie Hobson, Ivanov used a Minox camera to photograph key Western secrets, including details of experimental high-altitude hypersonic aircraft, as well as contingency plans for Western battle groups after the Berlin Wall went up in August 1961. Haslam writes: ‘Had a conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact broken out at that moment, Soviet knowledge of these plans would have enabled them to inflict severe damage on Western conventional forces that held the line in Berlin.’ Also revealed were the top-secret plans for the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe: ‘These were matters of considerable importance for NATO during a period of heightened international tension …’

Thus the Profumo affair, which in theory centred on whether or not the War Minister had lied to Parliament (he had) and the sexual shenanigans at Lord Astor’s grand country house Cliveden, went to the heart of Western security. This may explain, in what now looks like a rigged trial, the government’s desperation to have Stephen Ward convicted for living off the earnings of prostitutes and sent somewhere ‘safe’, where he could name no more names. By safe, the security services, the political elite and the judiciary meant prison. Ward, swallowing handfuls of pills, chose to make an abrupt exit to somewhere even more secure.

Ivanov, in his ghost-written memoirs, was briskly dismissive of any suggestion that Stephen Ward was himself an agent:

Frankly, a less suitable candidate for intelligence work would have been difficult to imagine. Ward was simply a loose cannon careering wildly across the deck of contemporary intelligence, demolishing the carefully assembled plots and counter-plots of each side indiscriminately. Far from being the ‘thoroughly filthy fellow’ or the ‘wicked, wicked creature’ painted … at his trial … Ward was merely a tremendously insecure fantasist, eager to please both sides for his own self-glorification.

However, in those same unreliable and highly entertaining memoirs, Ivanov reveals just how open to spies London in the early 1960s had become. This self-described Russian ‘fox in the henhouse’ recounts a detailed argument with Winston Churchill, for instance, and conversations with the Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Margaret.

And he, at least, understood the true tragedy of Stephen Ward – that this was a scandal of class and belonging, as much as one of sex. Ward, said Ivanov, worked for nobody and lived by his own rules, constantly trying to create a reputation for himself in medicine and in art:

but his every attempt met a wall of rejection, at school, where he was ordered to keep silent about a crime committed in his presence; in the army, where his superiors used his medical skills but did not admit this officially; and in his family life … His tragic life was a protest against a society which he loved but which rejected him again and again. He climbed to considerable heights in his life, but there were also a number of falls. His main problem was that he could not find a foothold …

It took a Russian spy to see the thing clearly.

The Profumo scandal would help destroy Harold Macmillan’s government. It revealed the crumbling morality of the establishment, and the ruthless willingness of powerful men to exploit young women, a constant from the beginning of written history right through to the early decades of the twenty-first century. All the ingredients for the scandal were there beforehand: Ward was simply the catalyst which made them blow up. At the time the British were sold a false account, which went no further than the misleading of Parliament and romps by a swimming pool. Jack Profumo went on to redeem himself with good works in London’s East End.

Stephen Ward died the victim of corrupted and perjured evidence and a vindictive prosecution. The central role of Britain’s secret services remained hidden. So did the genuine and serious loss of secret information to the Soviet Union. So, almost certainly, did the identity of many of Ward’s close friends: today parts of the official archive remain closed, even to professional historians. The final part of this famous affair that has not, perhaps, received its full due is the racial aspect: part of the problem with Ward, in the eyes of the British establishment of the time, was that he was mixing with West Indians in a particularly volatile part of London.

11

PUNISHMENT BY ACQUITTAL

The Mangrove Restaurant in All Saints Road, in Notting Hill, West London, dished up rich, spicy food of the kind its owner, Frank Crichlow, remembered his mother serving when he was brought up in Trinidad. Frank was a large, bearded, genial figure whose regular customers included a wide selection of bohemian London life. He served Black Power radicals, literary voyeurs and the hipper celebrities of the age. Among his customers from 1968 to the early 1970s, he could count the rock legends Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley, the singer-activist Nina Simone, Diana Ross and the Supremes, Sammy Davis Jr, the actress Vanessa Redgrave, the novelist Colin MacInnes and the Caribbean Marxist intellectual and cricket fanatic C. L. R. James. It was an acquaintanceship list almost as varied as Stephen Ward’s. And indeed, among the occasional visitors to the Mangrove were many of the fringe players in the Profumo drama, including Christine Keeler … and Ward himself.

London is the crucible of multiracial Elizabethan Britain. What was about to happen in Notting Hill was a story that could only have happened in the capital. But it’s important to remember that racial issues affected many other urban centres, from the Nottingham riots of 1958 when more than a thousand people fought using razors, knives and bottles, to the Bristol bus boycott of 1963, when black citizens fought for four months to overturn racial segregation which barred them from working on the city’s transport system. In each case, these are truly stories of the end of Empire. The Bristol boycott was led by Paul Stephenson, whose father was West African and his mother British, who had served in the RAF and later became that city’s first black social worker.

The Bristol story had national repercussions. It is widely thought that the bus boycott led to Britain’s first race relations legislation, relatively puny though that was, in 1965. This, in turn, was strengthened with the 1968 Race Relations Act, which made it illegal ‘to refuse housing, employment, or public services to a person on the grounds of colour, race, ethnic or national origins’ and created the Community Relations Commission to promote ‘harmonious community relations’. One of the targets of Enoch Powell’s so-called ‘rivers of blood’ speech, the 1968 Act also provides the background to the big legal struggle that was about to erupt in London.

The Metropolitan Police hated the Mangrove. Was it because it was flying the flag for successful black business in the heart of West London? Was it because, as Crichlow suspected, they disapproved of the mingling of black men and white radicals? At any rate, in the eighteen months from January 1969, there were no fewer than a dozen major police raids, overtly in search of illegal drugs. None were ever found yet drawing a blank never seemed to diminish police enthusiasm for another raid, another go. Slowly, bit by bit, Crichlow came to believe he was the victim of police harassment. His anger grew.

Frank Crichlow had arrived in Britain as one of the early migrants from Trinidad, in the same month as the Coronation. When he first settled in West London, he felt lonely and uneasy. There were very few other black people around, and the locals were far from friendly. Working out of digs in Paddington he was employed by British Rail before starting a moderately successful Caribbean band, a four-piece good enough to be broadcast on radio and television. But he wasn’t good enough, or at least enthusiastic enough, to stick at it. With the money he had raised, he then decided to start a café, the El Rio, in Notting Hill. John Profumo and Christine Keeler were among his customers.

By the summer of 1970, when he had been repeatedly raided for non-existent drugs and had his licence revoked for technical infringements, this relatively diffident, even shy man who was in fact strongly opposed to drugs, had had enough. With the help of a recently formed group, copying their more famous US counterparts, the British Black Panthers (who had been able to acquire a headquarters in Britain when the art critic John Berger donated to them half his winnings for the Booker Prize for best novel), Crichlow organized a protest march around a handful of local police stations. It was always going to be angry and noisy, but it wasn’t supposed to be a very big deal.

The banners attacking the ‘pigs’ were aggressive enough and there were ragged chants of ‘black power’, but those who took part estimated that only about 150 people were involved. The police responded with massed rows of constables in military formation, using snatch squads to haul out protesters and fling them into the backs of vans. The Mangrove demonstration was tiny compared to the major protests of the day against the Vietnam War, the industrial disputes of the time or indeed the urban riots of the late 1980s and early 1990s. But it attracted a barrage of prosecutions for riot, affray and physical assault on police officers. Nine black activists, seven men and two women, faced a variety of charges at Paddington Magistrates’ Court, where some of the police charges of incitement were immediately dismissed.

There then followed one of the longest trials in British legal history, at the Old Bailey. Two of the nine, Darcus Howe and Althea Jones-LeCointe, decided to defend themselves and demanded to be tried by an all-black jury. The legally trained Darcus Howe called in aid Magna Carta’s insistence on the right to judgment by a jury of one’s peers. In the decades that followed, Howe would go on to be one of the most familiar and consistent critics of British racism. In the past, he argued now, Welsh defendants had been allowed a Welsh jury, Italians a half-Italian one, and so on. He got nowhere; but then the defendants successfully challenged potential juror after potential juror until they got two black ones. The trial went on for fifty-five days in 1971, with a constant small Black Power demonstration outside, as the prosecution did their best to persuade the court that the Mangrove Restaurant was ‘a haunt of criminals, prostitutes and ponces’.