When Reporters Cross the Line

by Stewart Purvis

  There had been no other guests because her husband had later told her that he had wanted ‘to test my reactions’. She added that they were ‘frightfully well educated … and very retiring, shy’.

  Just to make quite sure that everyone understood what Mrs Pugh-Pugh had said, counsel for the tribunal asked her, ‘You say they were, in fact, ladies?’ ‘No,’ she replied, ‘they were gentlemen but dressed as ladies.’ Asked how she knew she replied, ‘Because at one time my husband said to one of them, “My wife does not normally see eye to eye with this, old boy.”’435 That had fixed it in her mind.

  She was asked if she had met any of the guests before. She had: ‘One night I was in and my husband brought a gentleman in and he went straight into his study. My husband was very nice, mind you, but he was very difficult, I would say that.’ Shortly after he called her in ‘and he introduced me to Mr John Vassall. We went into the lounge. We had a brandy and a coffee…’ and afterwards Vassall left.

  Between a year and eighteen months later at another party she ‘recognised, after a lot of hilarity, that one [guest] was Mr Vassall’.436 She revealed that his name was ‘Brenda’. ‘I thought what an awfully ugly name it was. They usually took beautiful names, like Suzanne and Dolores, but Brenda was such an ugly name.’437 That would have been either in 1944 or 1945. She never knew the names of other guests.

  During her testimony Mrs Pugh-Pugh revealed herself to be bad with dates.

  In December 1955 the Colonel died. But it was only in 1958 that Mrs Pugh-Pugh decided to sell his effects and to use the proceeds to pay for a holiday in the south of France for herself and her daughter. That was when she came to meet Vassall again.

  She remembered placing a classified advertisement in The Times, in June or July 1958. She remembered the wording: ‘Theatrical boots and shoes for sale, extra high heels, large sizes’. She used a pseudonym, Major Duval, to avoid embarrassment.

  She remembered receiving a letter of interest from John Vassall, as well as a letter from Bude. The tribunal did not trouble itself looking for the advert that she claimed to have placed.

  Mrs Pugh-Pugh told Radcliffe that she sold ‘a pink satin corset’ to the man she recognised as Vassall, as well as a book. He had called to look at the stock in person, but they did not talk over old times, as there was not time. He spent £5.

  She also sold two albums containing erotic photographs to a ‘well-known’ gentleman who lived in Widemouth Bay, Bude. They included one or two photographs in which Vassall was dressed as Brenda.438 At one stage Radcliffe thought about trying to recover the albums to see whether the photos were still inside, but never pursued it.439

  Vassall’s counsel, Kenneth Richardson, emphasised that Vassall denied ever having bought women’s clothing from her. He fired off a series of questions which rattled Jeanne Pugh-Pugh. She showed that she couldn’t remember dates very well, nor could she tell people’s ages. How then could she ever be sure – or persuade the tribunal – that she had ever sold women’s clothing to Vassall? The strain began to tell.440

  When his turn came to cross-examine her Foster’s QC declined, saying, ‘I had hoped at one time it might help Mr Foster, but I must concede it seems to go to quite different matters.’ He added, ‘Even if Your Lordship were kind enough to allow me to put questions, I do not think I should desire to do so.’441 His surprise witness had lost credibility and everyone knew it.

  It was left to the Attorney-General to administer the coup de grâce. He challenged her handwritten sale notes, which included John Vassall’s £5 purchase. They could have been written at any time he said: they were all in the same hand and ink colour; there was no way of determining whether they were contemporaneous with the sale. They were not credible evidence.

  Radcliffe delivered his view of her testimony:

  I think Mrs Pugh-Pugh’s evidence, which I would assume was well intended, leads us nowhere. It does not help us with regard to Mr Foster’s source, and it does not in any way suggest that Mr Vassall’s activities, whatever they may have been, were such that they were before the public eye. But if you wish to call Mr Vassall, you may do so.442

  If the tribunal had made any attempt to find the Times advert it would have struggled. A search through the newspaper has failed to find it. But, intriguingly, Jeff Hulbert has found that an advert with wording suspiciously close to Mrs Pugh-Pugh’s was published in the classified section of the paper on 8 July 1947, eleven years before the date that Mrs Pugh-Pugh had remembered. It read, ‘THEATRICAL SHOES, mostly large: extra high heels; no coupons, write PO Box B 448, Willing’s, 352 Gray’s Inn Rd, WC1’.443 If the sale had been conducted at that time it would have been so much closer to her claimed meetings with Vassall and his appearance would have been fresher in her mind, making her ability to identify Vassall after all those years less of an issue.

  But Willing’s was the publisher of press directories, it was not Major Duval. The ad cannot be directly linked with Mrs Pugh-Pugh and shall have to remain a coincidence.

  So as Mrs Pugh-Pugh’s evidence was dismissed Foster’s last chance to escape a stay in jail evaporated.

  The day before Mrs Pugh-Pugh’s testimony Vassall had admitted purchasing women’s underclothes – but not in the open in the West End – instead by post. He said he sometimes wore them in his Dolphin Square flat, but never in public.444 Of course, he could have worn them under his suit in public, but no one would ever have known. In his witness statement Foster had only said that Vassall had bought women’s clothing in the West End, it was his newspaper that had said that Vassall ‘sometimes wore women’s clothing on West End trips’, but it was Radcliffe who added the layer of meaning that Vassall’s activities ‘were such that they were before the public eye’.

  More witnesses

  It was now Desmond Clough’s turn, and over the last weekend of January 1963 another surprise witness came forward. This time it was credible: an Admiralty press officer who might have been Clough’s source, although he had not realised it at the time. With undoubted sighs of relief in Fleet Street and in Radcliffe Desmond Clough was freed from the threat of prison.

  On 31 January Foster made one more appearance before Radcliffe. He was recalled to answer more questions, but was not asked to name any sources and did not refuse to answer anything.

  The next day, Friday 1 February 1963, Reg Foster stood with Brendan Mulholland in the High Court before Mr Justice Gorman. A High Court judge since 1950 and a lifelong bachelor, Sir William Gorman had heard some noteworthy cases, including one of Viscount Stansgate’s actions that would see him becoming plain Mr Anthony Wedgwood Benn.445 At the beginning of the year he had sentenced James Hanratty to death for the A6 murder. At its end, sandwiched between Vassall and Radcliffe, he had sentenced a female civil servant, Barbara Fell OBE,446 to two years’ imprisonment for passing Foreign Office files to a Yugoslav press attaché.447 To make way for the contempt hearings Gorman broke off from a libel case involving Odhams press.

  In both their cases Mr Justice Gorman satisfied himself that the tribunal’s request was proper and then cut to the chase. Would they name names? No they would not, both said. Well, in that case, he would move on to the second task, which was to punish them for their refusal. The judge declared with regret it was his solemn duty to commit each to prison. They would have a short period of reflection, but if they both persisted they would serve three months and six months respectively.448 There never was any reflection. Both stuck to their guns and remained tight lipped and went first to Brixton prison and then to an open prison. But there was one final act. On 8 February the Radcliffe tribunal held a surprise 45-minute public session. Three witnesses had been identified who might be able to help Brendan Mulholland. Radcliffe told the assembly that he wanted to hear the evidence ‘in full in case it should assist Mr Mulholland to assist us in the inquiry…’449

  The witnesses had evidence about the claim that Vassall had been nicknamed ‘Auntie’. Of the three, one was a clerical officer coll
eague of Vassall, Patrick Delahunty. The others were Delahunty’s acquaintances. They had spoken to him outside a pub shortly after Vassall’s arrest. The other two remembered Delahunty telling them that in the office Vassall was known as ‘Miss Vassall’ on account of his effeminate appearance. Pressed by Mulholland’s counsel, Delahunty admitted that occasionally he had referred to Vassall as ‘Miss’. But that was as far as it went. Delahunty was probably fearful of disciplinary action for speaking about his work. Mulholland’s QC was invited by Radcliffe to ponder whether the testimony would be helpful to Mulholland. But he considered it would not help because it ‘did not deal with his sources of information’ and there was no evidence that he had ever met any of the three. So all hope for Mulholland flickered out, too.

  When Foster and Mulholland went to prison there was an outcry. This was in contrast to five years earlier, when reactions had been muted after two student reporters had been jailed for Official Secrets Act offences. The pair had published an article about British eavesdropping on the Russians in Isis, the Oxford University journal.450

  Foster and Mulholland’s union, the National Union of Journalists, lobbied for their release. In Parliament questions were asked by the opposition. The journalists, who were driven separately to prison – in Foster’s case by a Sheriff of London’s officer in a Renault Dauphine saloon – began their first night behind bars where, one newspaper report had it, the inmates got extra sugar in their cocoa before lights out. Both launched appeals which were rejected by the Court of Appeal and permission to appeal to the House of Lords was refused.451 At the open prison Reg Foster played in the football team (in goal) and tended the garden. They both got full remission, although for a time that was touch-and-go. Reg was released on 7 May 1963 after sixty-one days. Brendan Mulholland was freed on 6 July. In his case his experience gave him the material for his first novel, Almost a Holiday, which maybe with a degree of unintentional irony, was published by the Prime Minister’s family firm in 1966.452

  Report

  While the two men were in prison Lord Radcliffe published his report to Parliament. The report said, ‘(Mr Mulholland) refused to give the names of … two different persons.’453 Over the space of several pages it detailed Mulholland’s failure to deliver ‘the name of the person from whom he said he obtained his information about’454 Vassall’s alleged sponsors, or protectors, within the Admiralty. It also noted he was ‘unable to tell the name of the second alleged sponsor or to establish that he existed’.455 The first sponsor Mulholland had identified as Vassall’s former public school headmaster. He had subsequently become an Admiralty civil servant and denied the accusation, which Radcliffe accepted.

  When it came to Mulholland’s claims about Vassall’s activities while visiting Galbraith’s Scottish home, Radcliffe said, ‘We regard his conclusion of fact as altogether unfounded; and we must add that, after hearing Mr Mulholland, we were far from satisfied that he had ever obtained any significant information at all from the informants he spoke of.’456 Of Foster’s reporting he said that ‘vague and unsupported suggestions that it was his practice to wear women’s clothing in the West End remained wholly without substantiation’.457 Mrs Pugh-Pugh’s secret evidence was not mentioned in any way.

  When Foster was released from prison, the Sketch covered his return to civilian life. But it also printed an editorial that delivered a stinging attack on Radcliffe, whose report was being debated in Parliament as Foster walked through the prison gates. The paper accused Radcliffe of dismissing evidence that, it said, would have kept Reg out of prison. The paper said that ‘many people have forgotten why he was there’. He was in prison ‘because Mr Foster refused to say “what type of source” told him Vassall bought women’s clothes’. The fact that Vassall wore women’s clothes had been confirmed by Radcliffe.

  But the paper also said that it had been ‘confirmed too by a Colonel’s widow, Mrs Jeanne Pugh-Pugh’. She had told Radcliffe how ‘she herself sold women’s clothes to Vassall’, the paper said. Mrs Pugh-Pugh, an unlikely defender of press freedom, came out into the open. ‘On Monday she came forward and revealed her name … “to put right the wrong done to Mr Foster”,’ the paper said.

  But Radcliffe’s report had rejected Foster’s and Mulholland’s allegations because they ‘were not backed by “any other acceptable evidence”’.458 The paper told its readers that neither she nor her evidence were even mentioned in Radcliffe’s report. But it added that Radcliffe had no difficulty in accepting Vassall’s words alone ‘on much weightier issues’.

  This emphasis on Mrs Pugh-Pugh and her evidence rather contrasted with the downbeat tone of Foster’s counsel at the secret hearing when he, perhaps unwisely, conceded, ‘I had hoped at one time it [her evidence] might help Mr Foster.’

  The Sketch sternly warned its readers: ‘Remember, Lord Radcliffe and his colleagues are not infallible.’ There were, it said, ‘a number of assertions in their report which are open to serious question’. It concluded: ‘They made a mistake about the authenticity of Mr Foster’s report.’ He had emerged as ‘a journalist whose professional accuracy has been doubly confirmed’.

  But as the dust settled the story was quickly forgotten because it was overtaken by other events and, indeed, a bigger scandal. There was no cry of ‘foul!’ The politicians debating the report focused on other targets. Reg settled back into handling crime stories.

  There is no evidence that coming out into the open caused Mrs Pugh-Pugh to suffer any legal sanction, which is surprising given Radcliffe’s uncompromising warning to her. But then neither the paper nor she revealed any of the specific details and so were probably safe enough. She lived for another twenty-seven years secure in the knowledge that she had played a small but significant part in those events. She died in 1990 aged eighty-eight.

  Brendan Mulholland left Fleet Street just around the time that his first novel hit the bookshelves and went to work in a newly created news agency in Plymouth, which had been set up by a former leading Fleet Street crime reporter, Rodney Hallworth. He died in 1992 aged fifty-eight. Reg carried on working as a freelance crime reporter until he was well into his seventies, but he never completely put away his notepad and pencil. He died in 1999 aged ninety-five.

  Fifty years after Mulholland and Foster left jail what are the hindsight verdicts on the two men and the judge who effectively tried and sentenced them? Even while the two men were still alive rumours about the credibility of their reporting were given some substance by Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls. He was one of the judges who heard Foster’s and Mulholland’s appeals. He implied that for all anyone knew they might have made their stories up and because they wouldn’t let anyone know their sources they themselves could never be checked. In one of those flurries of logic for which Denning was both loved and hated in roughly equal amounts he had put his finger on one of the crucial points.459 It was a point seized upon by government supporters who repeated it under the cloak of parliamentary privilege when Vassall and Foster and Mulholland were debated.

  Macmillan’s unofficial biographer D. R. Thorpe quoted correspondence with veteran Fleet Street columnist Anthony Howard: ‘An opinion widely held in Fleet Street was that Mulholland and Foster were in an impossible position, as they had no sources to reveal.’460 Over the succeeding years, veteran Fleet Street crime reporter Rodney Hallworth, who later worked with Brendan Mulholland, came to the view that the two men had made up at least some of the facts.461

  In Reg Foster’s obituary in The Guardian, Matthew Engel put it more obliquely: ‘He may have had a genuine scoop, or may just have used his freedom of expression. I think we had better leave it like that.’462

  The first person to go public in unequivocal terms was the author Richard Davenport-Hines, in his 2013 book on the Profumo affair. He said, ‘The truth is that they did not want to admit that they were liars who had invented their stories. Everyone knew it.’463 But Davenport-Hines didn’t name those who ‘knew it’. Daily Mail columnist
Geoffrey Levy wrote in reaction that Mulholland’s daughter Katherine was shocked to discover her father branded a liar. Levy quoted a former Mail journalist and great friend of Mulholland’s, Graham Lord: ‘He’s calling Brendan Mulholland a liar and a phoney martyr as a matter of cold fact without presenting evidence, chapter and verse, to back it up. And I know he is wrong.’464 But equally he offered no evidence; and that is the nub of the problem: there is no conclusive evidence.

  But there are important issues arising. The first is why Mulholland and Foster were selected for prison out of all the reporters who appeared before Radcliffe.

  Several other reporters escaped jailing because either their sources or their information could be verified by other means: Percy Hoskins (Daily Express), Sidney Williams (Daily Herald), Tom Tullett, Hugh Saker and Barry Stanley (all Mirror Group newspapers), and Ian Waller (Sunday Telegraph). Most of them had felt at the time that they came close to sharing Foster and Mulholland’s fate.

  Mulholland had not revealed his source for saying that Vassall was known as ‘Auntie’ among civil service colleagues. He could not produce hard evidence for that nickname but Radcliffe was told by a last-minute witness that Vassall had been called ‘Miss’.465 But Mulholland had not revealed other sources, which bothered Radcliffe more: the person who told him that Vassall had protective sponsors within the Admiralty, or indeed who the second sponsor was. And there were also those details about what Vassall did when he travelled to Galbraith’s Scottish home to deliver papers, and who told him.

  Similarly Foster could not prove the line in the Sketch that said Vassall had worn women’s clothes in the West End, but the inquiry heard that Vassall admitted buying and wearing women’s clothes. Mrs Pugh-Pugh’s evidence of Vassall wearing women’s clothes at parties in Central London was dismissed unmentioned, but why would the widow of an army officer in Herne Bay make up such a story, revealing her late husband’s transvestism, and why would she risk imprisonment by faking documents?