Cliveden House on the Berkshire/Buckinghamshire border was built in 1666 by the 2nd Duke of Buckingham, as a gift to his mistress. In the 1890s, the stately home first passed into the Astor family when William Waldorf Astor bought the property for $1.25 million. In 1906, his son Waldorf Astor took ownership when he received the Italianate mansion as a wedding gift after marrying Nancy Langhorne. While the house was eventually deeded to the National Trust in 1942, the Astor family continued to live there.
By 1961, the 3rd Viscount Astor, William, more often known as Bill, and his third wife, the former model Bronwen Pugh, often entertained at the property, Bill having inherited the house and the title of viscount on his father’s death in 1952. Bill was particularly pleased with the installation of a heated outdoor swimming pool he had overseen, paid for with prize money when his horse named Ambiguity won the Epsom Oaks.1 In her book, Mandy Rice-Davies describes how the magnificent parklands surrounding the house were home to the nation’s premier collection of rhododendrons2 along with magnificent sweeping lawns and great oaks.
Over the weekend of 8 and 9 July that year, Bill and Bronwen, who was five months pregnant at the time, played host to several influential guests. These included Field Marshall Ayub Khan, the President of Pakistan, who was en route to meeting President Kennedy in Washington. Others there over that weekend included Lord Mountbatten, his daughter and son-in-law Pamela and David Hicks, Sir Robert Lancaster, his son the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster and his wife, government economic advisor Sir Roy Harrod, Lord and Lady Dalkeith, the former Polish countess Sophie Moss, a fashionable interior designer named Derek Patmore, and artist and set designer Felix Kelly. It was this weekend that John Profumo and his wife were on the guest list for the first time, and while others came and went for various lunches and dinners, the Profumos stayed the whole weekend. It was a weekend that would change the course of history.
Within the estate and a mile along the River Thames was a property called Spring Cottage. Rice-Davies says it was a gabled residence that was built on the riverbank with a top floor that stuck out so that it extended over the river itself.3 Bill Astor had let out the double-fronted cottage to osteopath Stephen Ward since 1956. Bill suffered from crippling migraines and neuritis and had used Ward since 1949 after the two had been introduced by Astor’s half-brother Bobbie Shaw. Since Bill particularly liked to be treated after hunting on Saturdays, it was useful to have Ward so close by.4
Knightley and Kennedy say that Astor and Ward had grown close over the years and that Ward was a frequent guest at Cliveden and that Bill’s second wife, Philippa Astor, looked on Ward as a friend too. When Ward took over Spring Cottage, it had been dilapidated and damp and the garden was a wilderness. Ward spent his weekends turning the place into a home with his then girlfriend Margaret Brown, a successful model. The friends that visited Ward mucked in, making do with the limited facilities the cottage offered. These exciting people drew Astor himself to the cottage, since he cut a lonely figure and had little else in his life. But it was a reciprocal arrangement, as in return for entertaining him at the rental property, Astor would invite Ward and Brown to the parties at the main house, where Ward would often sit near Nancy Astor as they got on well together. Astor also allowed friends to use Cliveden for private parties, and Ward would be invited to these events too.5
Ward was also hosting a party at this cottage that weekend in July, and it had been established that Ward and his guests could use the pool of the main house. Alongside Sally Norie, Ward’s girlfriend at the time, one of Ward’s guests on the same the evening that the Profumos visited the big house was Christine Keeler. Keeler’s name is now synonymous with scandal, with the film of her relationship with John Profumo (or Jack as she and his social circle referred to him as) being titled exactly that.
But who was Christine Keeler, and how did she become the girl at the centre of one of the most notable scandals in British history?
For Christine Keeler, the story behind the Profumo Affair starts with her job at Murray’s,6 a Soho cabaret club she began working at as a showgirl after she moved to London in 1959. The audience was largely wealthy and influential and was often made up of the aristocracy. It was also where she met Stephen Ward, who was a guest of a rich Arab, Ahmed Kanu, whom Keeler knew. Ward was to become her guru, and what she calls a ‘Svengali’.7
Keeler’s mother, Julie Payne, who was living with her own parents after being abandoned by her husband and Keeler’s father Colin, initially brought up Christine alone. Later, when she was about 4 years old, Keeler moved to two unheated converted railway carriages in Hythe End Road, Wraysbury, Berkshire, with her mother and her (eventual) stepfather Edward Huish. It was an uneasy relationship, and home comforts were sparse. There was no bathroom and no hot water in the home, lighting came from oil lamps and her mother cooked on a fire for several years until electricity was connected. She spent her days on her push bike and in the outdoors, being sent away to a Littlehampton holiday home aged nine because a school inspector decided she was malnourished.
She was aware of unwanted male attention from an early age. Knightley and Kennedy say that Keeler, in a tiny but homemade bikini, was the main draw for the many swimming parties the local youths had at abandoned gravel pits in the summer months. By the time she was 16, they tell us she had been ejected from more than one local pub for being intoxicated.
Despite being academically capable, Keeler was not encouraged to work hard at school and at 15 left to start the first of several office typing jobs, which she hated. At various intervals she tried modelling, appearing in Tit-Bits in 1958. Instead of office work, she switched to minding the home, freeing up her mother to go out to work to bring some money in instead. For several years, Keeler bounced between failed relationships and jobs, trying to find her place in the world. After a DIY abortion went wrong, when she was 16 Keeler gave birth to a baby boy in Old Windsor hospital. His father was an American serviceman stationed at the Laleham air base.8 The baby died at six days old. When she left hospital, and with relations with her parents at an all-time low, Keeler headed off to London, and after a spell in a gown shop and as a waitress, Keeler ended up at the members-only cabaret club Murray’s.
Nightclubs were an easy road to big profits for their owners, explains Davenport-Hines,9 and Oswald Murray opened Keeler’s workplace in Beak Street in the 1930s. It worked on a bottle party system to avoid the strict licensing laws that prohibited alcohol sales after 11.00 pm. Invited clientele would order ahead so that they could circumvent the rules. The club had a spot-lit revolving stage but as at the time the law required strippers to remain absolutely still, while some clothed employees did the dancing, others, like Keeler, would stay topless and motionless at the back. The club employed forty-five women, with hundreds more waiting to fill any vacancy.10
It was there at Murray’s, earning £8 10s a week, that Keeler met Ward.
In her book, Keeler describes how Ward, who was thirty years her senior, actively pursued her, although not for a romantic relationship, asking for her phone number and to meet up relentlessly. At one point, Ward even drove out to Wraysbury when she was on a trip home where he easily charmed her mother and stepfather into allowing her to head off to his cottage at Cliveden with him. Keeler admits that Ward was well connected and that through being friends with him she hoped she might find more modelling opportunities through his large and impressive social circles; however, she also, in hindsight, refers to him as manipulative. She was also well aware that Ward enjoyed having young, attractive women by his side more as a social lubricant than to enjoy their company. Many of Ward’s connections perhaps saw Ward as a way to meet and develop relationships with these women.
Knightley and Kennedy think Keeler may have looked on Ward as a father figure.11
Despite her misgivings when they first met, however, Keeler moved into Ward’s flat in Bayswater’s Orme Court and often spent the weekend at Cliveden with him too. She knew that Ward enjoyed the gossip of illicit relationships and the power afforded to him when he caught his friends and associates out for their indiscretions but she considered Ward a friend.12 However, after being coerced into to attending an orgy, and when Ward suggested they marry for convenience and companionship, Keeler instead moved out and started a relationship with the infamous London landlord Peter Rachman, whom Ward had introduced her to along the way and who owned a flat she and Ward had considered renting.
At just 17, Keeler moved into a flat in Bryanston Mews that Rachman owned. Rachman supplied Keeler with expensive clothes, paid for her hairdresser, bought her gifts and a white sports car so she could visit her friends. Rachman visited Keeler every lunchtime for perfunctory sex that she didn’t enjoy,13 insisting on a position that ensured she had her back towards him during intercourse.14 Much later, in her book Scandal, Keeler likened the way Rachman made love to the way someone might brush their teeth, with her simply playing the part of the toothpaste. Keeler also hoped the influential Rachman, with his contacts and his endless money to pay for clothes and haircuts and a professional portfolio, would help her modelling career advance.
After six months of being Rachman’s mistress, Keeler resumed an affair with an old boyfriend, but Rachman found out. The relationship with Rachman ended, Keeler returned to performing at Murray’s and moved back in with Ward, who was now living in Wimpole Mews. At work she became pals with Mandy Rice-Davies, the daughter of a policeman, who had worked at Murray’s since she left home in Birmingham when she was 16.
Later the new friends teamed up together, leaving Murray’s in the hope of finding fame and fortune, flat-sharing and concentrating on their social life, like any young girls would. Keeler reconnected with Ward and Rice-Davies became part of his circle too, having slept with Ward on one occasion but remaining friends. Ward also introduced Rice-Davies to Bill Astor. After another failed relationship ended and now that she was no longer flat-sharing with Rice-Davies, Keeler turned again to Ward for support. Keeler moved in to occupy the smaller of the two bedrooms there and their lives became entwined again.
Rice-Davies confirms there was never anything sexual between Ward and Keeler, instead saying that the two friends were exceptionally close, and that when together their eccentricities meant that they ended up behaving in a questionable and immature way.15
Ward and Keeler’s escapades together took them to Notting Hill, which in 1961 was a troubled area of London. Rice-Davies said the two friends liked to go to downmarket areas and that Christine needed to go the black clubs to obtain pot.16 While in the El Rio café buying drugs, Keeler gave her number to a West Indian called Aloysius Gordon, known as ‘Lucky’ because his parents had won £4,000 in a lottery the day he was born. She agreed to go on a later date with the man, who earnt a living singing at the Notting Hill and Soho clubs, if he brought along a black woman for Ward. The date went ahead but was cut short when Keeler felt worse for wear after smoking weed, and the next time they met up, Lucky, who had a long criminal record, held Keeler captive, raping her for twenty-four hours. Although she sweet-talked her way out of his flat, Keeler was far from free of Gordon, who began harassing her, and kept a constant watch on her wherever she went. In her book, Keeler explains that at this point she now believes Ward was deliberately putting her in danger by encouraging her connection with Lucky and used a later incident when Lucky assaulted Keeler at their flat to suggest to the police that Keeler was a regular drug user and a degenerate.17
However, at the time Keeler says was still unaware of how she was being manipulated, and continued to enjoy her time with Ward, including the weekend jaunts to the cottage at Cliveden. One such weekend, Keeler headed to meet Ward in his cottage, taking along a male friend and a picking up a female to make up the numbers along the way. It was 8 July 1961, and the hottest weekend of that year so far, and also the weekend the Profumos were being entertained by the Astors at the larger house. A chance meeting by the now infamous Cliveden swimming pool meant that John Profumo would meet Christine Keeler as she was skinny dipping there. A light-hearted game of grabbing the small towel Keeler had access to then ensued, until more guests arrived at the scene and Keeler made a hasty retreat back to Ward’s accommodation. Before she left, however, Ward and his guests were invited to the main house for drinks. Later that night, Profumo volunteered to give Keeler a personal tour of the house,18 using the opportunity to flirt.
When she wrote about the incident in her book, Keeler makes it clear that she later realised Ward had a clear plan to use her to find out about the Polaris missile programme through her intimacy with Profumo.19 She also believes that Ward was already using his connection with Bill Astor to discover details about the delivery of nuclear weapons to Germany, adding that on the weekend in question, Ward stole some letters he found at Cliveden.20 Keeler thinks on their return to London on the Saturday morning Ward began to put into motion a plan to further involve her in his work and use her as a way to cover his own tracks, making various phone calls to his spy ring contacts. The plan included a return to Cliveden on the Sunday, taking along a friend and Keeler’s love interest Noel Howard-Jones, as well as Soviet naval attaché Eugene Ivanov, who Keeler says was an intelligence office for the Russians that Ward was already working with. The party would be completed with two of Ward’s girlfriends.
Upon their arrival, Ward’s party made their way to the Astors’ swimming pool, where they would re-join the weekend guests from the main house. That day, Keeler seems to have caught the attention of two of the men present, one John Profumo and one Eugene Ivanov.