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

Title Page RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES An English Affair Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo

Dedication Dedication Dedication Epigraph Overture PART ONE: CAST Chapter 1 Prime Minister Chapter 2 War Minister Chapter 3 Lord Chapter 4 Doctor Chapter 5 Good-Time Girls Chapter 6 Landlords Chapter 7 Hacks Chapter 8 Spies PART TWO: DRAMA Chapter 9 Acting Up Chapter 10 Show Trials Chapter 11 Safety Curtain Picture Section Footnotes Notes Index Acknowledgements Also by Richard Davenport-Hines Copyright About the Publisher For Jenny, Christopher and Hugo, and never forgetting Cosmo

Epigraph Epigraph Epigraph Overture PART ONE: CAST Chapter 1 Prime Minister Chapter 2 War Minister Chapter 3 Lord Chapter 4 Doctor Chapter 5 Good-Time Girls Chapter 6 Landlords Chapter 7 Hacks Chapter 8 Spies PART TWO: DRAMA Chapter 9 Acting Up Chapter 10 Show Trials Chapter 11 Safety Curtain Picture Section Footnotes Notes Index Acknowledgements Also by Richard Davenport-Hines Copyright About the Publisher 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

Overture

PART ONE: CAST

Chapter 1 Prime Minister

Chapter 2 War Minister

Chapter 3 Lord

Chapter 4 Doctor

Chapter 5 Good-Time Girls

Chapter 6 Landlords

Chapter 7 Hacks

Chapter 8 Spies

PART TWO: DRAMA

Chapter 9 Acting Up

Chapter 10 Show Trials

Chapter 11 Safety Curtain

Picture Section

Footnotes

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

Also by Richard Davenport-Hines

Copyright

About the Publisher

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.