by A. N. Wilson
To many people, these voices of ‘trendies’ from the South Bank must have been very surprising. The Church of England had just been living through several decades which could be seen with hindsight to be its apogee, its glory days. Writers such as Rose Macaulay, John Betjeman, W. H. Auden, Dorothy L. Sayers and Charles Williams had been conspicuous members of this Church. The Queen had been crowned in a religious ceremony in which all the dignitaries were bishops and clergy of the Established Church, all of them men, many of them distinguished intellects.
Moreover, in the 1950s, the Church had been at the centre of one of the definitive political dramas of our times, namely the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. It was no accident that those Englishmen who spearheaded resistance to apartheid should have been Anglican monks who were rooted and grounded in a faith in the Incarnation, a belief that, since God chose to be man, there could be no distinction between people on account of gender, ethnicity or social status. A book written by one of these High Church monks, Trevor Huddleston’s Naught for Your Comfort, published in 1956, had been enormously influential in opening the eyes of the world to the grievous state of things in South Africa.
It would seem that a Church which could field saintly prophets such as Raymond Raynes and Trevor Huddleston in South Africa, scholarly theological faculties such as could be found at the older universities, as well as bishops in the palaces and on the benches of the House of Lords, could not be in a stronger position. Yet the publication of Honest to God made many people wonder how much the Church any longer believed, and whether they really belonged to it.
Most parishes in the land continued to have a parson, who was allowed to live in a parsonage. However, from the 1960s onwards the Church pursued a policy of selling off its vicarages and rectories. The downward trend of church membership was relentless. On Easter Day 1939,10 percent of the population went to Communion. It had fallen to 6.5 percent in 1960 and 5 percent in 1968. Though some people continued to use churches for weddings and funerals, the numbers of those bringing children to be baptised as a matter of course plummeted. Within a decade of Honest to God, the churches in England were all huddling together, having discovered ‘ecumenism’. Some of the Churches, such as the Methodists, were in serious danger of dying out altogether unless they merged with a larger body. In the coming decades, the Church would make various efforts to delude itself that the secularisation of the West was not terminal. There would be pockets of evangelical revival. Churches pursuing a Billy Graham style of religion would attract congregations in several hundreds, as opposed to Nicolas Stacey’s 50 or 100. Such ‘happy clappy’ churches looked crowded, but a crowd of 250 or 300 was nothing compared to the tens of thousands, the millions, who never went near a church. After the decision to ordain women to the priesthood there was a temporary halt in the decline of ‘vocations’ but many of those ordained were women in their twilight years, and it would seem likely that their arrival on the scene put off as many potential worshippers as it attracted. Even in the strange opening decade of the twenty-first century, when the peoples of the world turned more and more to religion, they did not turn to the Church of England. One of the most striking features of life in our times, in Britain, and in Western Europe generally, has been the decline of institutional Christianity–most especially in the Church of England and the Church of Rome. Societies define themselves historically in terms of tribal loyalty, in caste systems and in the shared cultic activities of religion. This would remain the case in Britain at certain key times of year, or at certain moments of national self-awareness. Royal funerals, or ceremonies for the remembrance of the slain in war, could continue for very many in Britain to summon forth a collective religious emotion, even if the ‘religion’ was of a kind difficult to classify in philosophical or theological terms. The life of the parish church, however, its weekly services and activities, completely failed to touch the average British citizen during this period. Indeed, accurately considered, Britain after the 1960s became a secular state. These things happened gradually, and there was perhaps no one defining moment. But surely something very like a defining moment was the televising of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga on BBC in 1967. So completely gripped was the nation by the unfolding drama week by week that many vicars and their congregations abandoned Evensong, never to revive it. In ‘Quires and Places where they sing’, to use the old phrase, the service was still repeated daily, in cathedrals and colleges, to a prodigious variety of beautiful musical settings. But the familiar Sunday evening ritual in parish churches, with a few gathering to sing the evening hymns, and to hear again the prayer to Lighten Our Darkness–that was now over.
9
Profumo and After
On a blazingly hot summer’s day in 1961, Nancy Astor stepped off the train at Didcot, into the back of a waiting taxi. It was a regular arrangement that the old lady should take the fast train from London, and the slightly longer drive to her magnificent country seat, Cliveden, rather than taking the stopping train to Taplow. Nancy Astor, who had been born in Danville, Virginia, in 1879, had married, aged eighteen, an alcoholic named Robert Shaw. Six years later, she divorced, and married William Waldorf Astor. (‘I married beneath me–all women do.’) Her extreme puritanism (she was an eager convert to Christian Science), her driving ambition, her old-fashioned American tendency to take a matriarchal view of the world, all made her the ideal candidate for that historic role–the first woman to sit as a British Member of Parliament (Conservative) at Westminster. The Astor millions helped, too. She had children, remarkably enough, given her repugnance for the human body and its functions. Bobbie Shaw, the son of the first marriage, grew up to be something of a liability, a homosexual alcoholic who was obliged to leave the Royal Horse Guards for being drunk on duty. Two years later, in 1931, he had been arrested for importuning and imprisoned for four months. It was with some alarm that one of her Astor sons heard that the old lady was writing her memoirs. It would, he blurted out, be too horrifying to tell the truth. In her Edwardian-Virginian voice, Nancy asked, ‘What do you mean–horrifyin’?’ ‘Because you are so possessive. That’s why we are all cases of arrested development; though I admit that Bobbie is the only one of us actually to have been arrested.’
Nancy Astor’s husband, the second Viscount, died in 1952 and was succeeded by their son William (born 1907), a much-married Conservative MP. He inherited not only the 1916-created (purchased from the newly created Prime Minister Lloyd George) peerage, but also Cliveden, one of the most beautiful Victorian houses in England. Sir Charles Barry designed it in 1850, on the perfectly sited ruins of a seventeenth-century ducal residence. From the balustrades (which survive from that Duke of Buckingham’s house) the eye looks down the thickly wooded banks of the Thames. In the foreground a perfect Italianate garden has been made, with flat lawns and parterres divided from one another by stone steps as each swoops downwards to the lush valley below. On the level of the house is a magnificent pavilion, and behind one of the garden walls, in what must have been a kitchen garden, is a swimming pool which even in the English climate makes a sun trap of Italianate degree.
To this beautiful place, on a beautiful summer’s day, the Dowager Viscountess returned, since, of course, she had ignored the convention that Dowagers move out of the big house when their husbands die. She was still in residence at Cliveden, arresting her sons’ development, just as she had been since she ‘married beneath her’. To this place she had returned after winning her Commons seat–Plymouth–for refreshment and repose. Here, as the 1930s unfolded, and the Conservatives failed to address any of the issues which worried her–poor housing, poverty, drunkenness, bad education–she had uttered her despondent cry, ‘I sometimes wonder whether I joined the right party.’ (After the 1929 election, she had tried to get the fourteen other women MPs to join a Women’s Party–under her leadership, naturally.) Here, too, as the 1930s passed by, she entertained those who came to be known by the contemptuous nickname (it was Evelyn Waug
h’s cousin, the communist Claud Cockburn, who coined it) ‘The Cliveden Set’. Cockburn’s idea had been that in the beautiful setting of Cliveden, upper class and rich politicians, journalists and men of influence met to plan the policy of appeasing Hitler–even of subverting the processes of democracy to bring in a government which positively favoured the European dictatorships. All sorts of politicians fetched up at her dinner table. One night, in 1930, a young Conservative called Frank Pakenham found himself seated beside the firebrand Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Labour), Oswald Mosley. Mosley expounded the view that cometh the hour, cometh the man. He said that after the dullness of such-and-such had emerged Gladstone; after the tedium of Lord Derby’s ‘Who? Who?’ Cabinet had sprung the dynamic Disraeli…‘And,’ added Mosley, his eyes agleam, ‘after Ramsay MacDonald…’
Pakenham thought the ambition of this young–thirty-five-year-old–politician touching; could Mosley not see, what was obvious to Pakenham–that no political party would risk choosing as Prime Minister a man of such promiscuous sexual habits?
Did the household gods of the Astors remember this conversation thirty years later when Cliveden once more attracted the public attention? And do its three twentieth-century incarnations make Cliveden an emblem of how the country changed? In the thirties, the supposed scene of appeasement and sell-out; in the 1950s and early 1960s, the famous backdrop to scenes of Dionysian orgies; and in the 1980s and 1990s, a ‘luxury hotel’, a place for yuppies to burn off some of their excess money with elaborately cooked cuisine minceur, with individualised bath-robes, chocolates on the pillow and the peculiar air of unreality which such ‘luxury’ always superimposes?
But we have left Nancy Astor and the taxi driver, in the broiling sun of that afternoon in 1961. The driver crossed the gravel with her suitcase, entered the house by the front door–not something he would have done in one of the older houses in England–and into the large, dark, cool hall, an experience not unlike stepping into the scenes of one of the later novels of Henry James, where the tastes of Old Europe–heavy tapestry, polished ancient oak and cool stone floors–are sustained by American money. Nancy Astor thanked the man and drifted towards her apartments, but, before doing so, she told the man that he must go in search of refreshment.
‘Do not drive home without drinkin’ somethin’. If you want tea, go through that door–the green baize door in the corner, you’ll come to a kinda back door. Walk along–you’ll find the kitchen, say I sent you. Ask for a cup of tea, and you can take it out to the back and drink it in the garden.’
The man did as he was told, but he found the kitchen deserted and the back door open. There was, nevertheless, a teapot on the table, and so he helped himself to a cup, and, as instructed, he went out to the back of the house to find a bench to sit upon. Turning a corner by what looked like an outhouse or greenhouse, he found himself beside the swimming pool. He was not alone. Sitting around in the sunshine were about a dozen people, six young women of beauty, and six men. As he stared, and looked away, and stared again, the man felt a stab of incredulous horror. He crept away with his tea, and found a bench nearer the kitchen door. As he sat down he pondered what he had seen. Was it possible? Not only was it possible, it was unmistakable. He had just seen, sitting naked beside the pool in the company of what appeared to be a selection of tarts, a group of public men–a Cabinet Minister, a member of the Royal Family, and others–whom he had previously regarded as honourable figures, leaders, his social and political superiors.
The previous page is a blank, because that taxi driver, who told me the story, belonged to the old world. He named the men who sat around the pool, some of whom have never been named by the history books; but he only did so anecdotally. He never sold his remarkable story to a newspaper. What happened in the case of the Profumo affair, as it came to be known, was that hypocrisy, that last ragged garment with which the old governing classes could swathe themselves, was rudely snatched away. Matters which had never been mentioned in the press, unless they had been aired in court (hence the popularity, for News of the World readers, of lurid divorce hearings), could now be set down in print by newspapers prepared to risk the libel laws. Some time in 1929 David Lloyd George gave a dinner in a private room of a London hotel to which he invited a group of politicians supposedly at odds with one another. One of the younger men exclaimed, when he saw the guest list–‘This will lift the roof if it gets out.’ ‘Lloyd George replied with his ineffable dumpling expression: “My dear boy. If everything I have done in this hotel during the last forty years had got out, you have no idea how many times I would have had to retire from politics.”’1 A. J. P. Taylor thought six of the twentieth-century Prime Ministers (pre-1968) had committed adultery2–three presumably were Asquith, Lloyd George and MacDonald. The other three are harder to pin down. The point is, that although gossips and those in the Upper Ten [Thousand], as the Victorians called them, all ‘knew’ about such things, they were never aired in the newspapers. A distinction was maintained between the pleasures of private gossip and the baldness of public discourse.
The Profumo affair changed all that, and if it made for a more exciting press, and a more candid atmosphere, it also was a key factor in the diminishment of British political life. Post-Profumo, British politicians were noticeably less intelligent. What intelligent person would choose to enter a sphere of life where it was deemed legitimate for the popular press–and, in time, all newspapers, and even the BBC–to publicise love affairs and sexual indiscretions? It is arguable that for those who were thrust into public life either by insatiable ambition (the politicians) or by the accident of birth or marriage (the Royal Family) the scrutiny was actually intolerable, a fact which is surely one of the explanations for the psychological oddity of so many late twentieth-century, early twenty-first-century politicians and royal persons. In an ideal world, corrupt standards in public life would be purged by exposure. Dishonesty, sexual depravity, financial irregularity by public figures would result in their disgrace, and replacement by those who were pure, lovely and of good report. In the imperfect world we actually inhabit, the elimination of double standards resulted in the weakening of any standards at all. But in the early 1960s there was a public mood of impatience with the Old Gang who had ruled Britain since the war. Macmillan’s pose as a remote Edwardian aristocrat was a source of as much irritation as admiration, and was the underlying reason for the vengeful moralistic public fury which led to the ruin of his Secretary of State for War, John Profumo.
The central figure in the story was Stephen Ward, an osteopath who practised in Wimpole Mews, the medical district of Marylebone. He had treated all manner of famous patients, including members of the Royal Family, Winston Churchill and his son Randolph, Nubar Gulbenkian, Danny Kaye, Sir Anthony Eden and Sir Malcolm Sargent. He had also–and here was how the tale began to unfold, treated Nancy, Lady Astor and her son Lord Astor. Ward was a frequent guest at Cliveden and, in return for a peppercorn rent, he kept a cottage on the estate as a weekend retreat.3
The osteopath was always surrounded by pretty young women, whom he was happy to introduce to friends. One of these was an extremely beautiful long-legged girl with long, rust-coloured hair who had begun modelling for Tit-Bits when she was fifteen (in March 1958), moved on to bare-breasted dancing at Murray’s Cabaret Club in Beak Street, Soho. ‘She was a nymphomaniac in the true sense of the term, in that she felt emotionally secure only when she was giving her body to someone…She once admitted that she would allow a man to use her in any way that pleased him as long as he did not want to kiss her on the lips.’4 Her name was Christine Keeler.
She moved into Ward’s flat, and became a regular visitor to the Cliveden cottage within days of meeting at Murray’s Cabaret Club. They never had a sexual relationship. He kept her amused with constant jokes, he impressed her by his famous contacts, he was her rescuer. Ward introduced her to the friends who looked to him as a purveyor of young women. Among them was a bridge-playing naval atta
ché at the Soviet Embassy, Commander Yevgeny Ivanov. Another who met Keeler during a hot weekend round the swimming pool at Cliveden in July 1961 was John Profumo, an Old Harrovian, recently elevated by Macmillan to the post of Secretary of State for War. Ward was in the perfect position to be a blackmailer, or an agent for the Soviet Union. He was neither. He had merely allowed a situation to develop whereby a Soviet naval attaché and a Secretary of State for War were sharing, albeit unwittingly, the same mistress.
Then a crisis occurred. On 14 December 1962 a young West Indian called Johnny Edgecombe turned up at Ward’s flat in Wimpole Mews and fired shots at the window. Inside were Christine Keeler and another of Ward’s girls, Mandy Rice-Davies. Edgecombe had come round with a gun because Mandy had displaced him in her affections with another West Indian, one Lucky Gordon. Edgecombe was put on trial for the attempted murder of Keeler, and for possessing a firearm with intent to endanger life. He was acquitted on the murder charge–Keeler having absconded–but when the court learned of previous convictions for ‘living on immoral earnings’ and theft and drug possession, he was sent down for seven years.
By now, the rumours of Keeler’s affair with Ivanov and Profumo was common knowledge. The satirical magazine Private Eye on 22 March, led the way with:
IDLE TALK
Reveals
Lunchtime O’Booze
Mr Silas Jones, a West Indian immigrant of no fixed abode, was today sentenced at the Old Bailey to twenty-four years’ Preventive Detention for being in possession of an offensive water pistol.
The chief ‘witness’ in the case, gay fun-loving Miss Gaye Funloving, a twenty-one-year-old ‘model’, was not actually present in Court. She has, in fact, disappeared. It is believed that normally, in cases of this type, a Warrant is issued for the arrest of the missing witness.