But what of the people forever damned by Profumo’s indiscretion? During his trial, Ward saw the world of glamorous women, high society and political discussions that meant so much to him implode. And his suicide has meant that his version of events was stymied. But is his part in the story at an end? Perhaps not.
Most people might imagine that everything there is to know about Ward’s trial is out there in public, just as the trial itself was. However, much of what went on behind closed doors before the trial happened is just as important to those who might wonder why Ward was arrested and charged with offences under the Sexual Offences Act in the first place. The official transcripts are also still sealed, despite it being what newspapers at the time called the ‘Trial of the century’. The eight-day court case gardened massive public interest, with crowds gathered outside and standing room only in Court No. 1. And it continues to intrigue, disappoint and anger many today.
The main players of the trial included Judge Sir Archibald Marshall, who was a Cambridge-educated Cornish-born Liberal Party politician, while the prosecuting counsel was Mervyn Griffith-Jones, a tall and imposing lawyer adept at cases involving morality, since he had acted as prosecuting counsel in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial three years earlier. He famously asked the jury if they would like their own young children (and wives or servants!) to read such a book.
Ward’s barrister, who was not a QC, was James Burge, one of Ward’s patients. He fought the case on three grounds: that the police efforts in building the case were out of all proportion to the offence, that it had been prejudiced by widespread publicity and that the prosecution was based on moral outrage and not evidence.
However true this was, it wasn’t enough. Scottish journalist and Panorama presenter Ludovic Kennedy has argued that James Burge was unable to compete with the prosecuting counsel Mervyn Griffith-Jones, explaining that Burge was in fact a very nice man, and far too nice to be pitted against Griffith-Jones.
Kennedy wrote several books that questioned convictions in a number of notable cases in British judicial history and penned The Trial of Stephen Ward in 1964. He attended the trial in person and said Griffith-Jones approached the trial as if he was the ‘guardian of private morals’ for the state, rather than a Crown prosecutor focused on criminal actions.1
Griffith-Jones ended his closing speech to the jury by saying that they might find Ward thoroughly immoral because he was getting girls for himself and his friends, and if that was proved, then it was in the public interest to return a guilty verdict.2
Eminent QC Geoffrey Robertson was at the forefront of a long-running campaign to get Ward’s conviction overturned, calling it modern British history’s ‘worst unrequited [sic] miscarriage of justice’. In December 2013, Robertson sent an application for Ward’s conviction to be overturned to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC).3 In the book version of the appeal, Stephen Ward Was Innocent, OK: The Case for Overturning His Conviction, Robertson argues that Ward’s trial should never have happened in the first place, that it was unfair and that the CCRC should refer the case back to the court of appeal.
The first question to ask is: why was Stephen Ward on trial?
In his report, Lord Denning suggests that Ward came to the notice of the police via anonymous communications. He goes on to suggest the police then examined the situation to see if there was anything to investigate, found there was and took statements that formed the case against Ward.4 The findings led to him being arrested and brought to trial.
But if Lord Denning believed this, he may not have been correctly informed. Robertson says Ward was nothing more than a scapegoat chosen by Sir Henry Brooke, who was the Home Secretary at the time. It was Brooke who summoned Roger Hollis, the head of MI5, and Sir Joseph Simpson, the Police Commissioner from Scotland Yard, and insisted that Ward was charged. It was not an investigation started by the police in the normal manner. Consequently, Ward’s phones were bugged, he was put under surveillance and Ward’s patients, friends and acquaintances were approached and questioned in an attempt to dig up dirt to form a case. Known local prostitutes were also interviewed and Keeler was questioned twenty-four times. By the end of the investigation, the police had interviewed 140 witnesses, for what was an apparently simple case of pimping. A massive amount of care and attention, and resources, went in to securing this one particular conviction.
But why did Brooke want a scapegoat? Because the pressure from Opposition politicians and the press had raised security concerns and made the establishment look untrustworthy. Ward knew about Profumo’s relationship with Keeler, and how Ivanov was connected to both. He knew Profumo had lied to his government too. But once disgraced, Ward’s word would be worthless. Ward’s ‘promiscuity’ made him an easy target for the police.
Ivanov also bitterly disputes that Ward was a pimp. He thought the accusations were outrageously untrue, but that they successfully distracted the public’s attention from important individuals who did not want to be involved in a public scandal, referring to Ward as a scapegoat, and the behaviour of those who did not support him as that of traitors. He goes on to say that the authorities killed Ward because they were afraid of his revelations, that Ward knew too much about things that must never be revealed.5 A smokescreen of sexual intrigue at Ward’s trial worked in two ways, it discredited Ward and provided a distraction from political inadequacy.
So, what are the arguments for Ward’s conviction being overturned? Robertson provides many.
For Robertson, one of the most important points is the role Christine Keeler played in the trial. Namely that the evidence she gave in the Ward case could not be trusted as she was later proved to be a perjurer at Gordon’s appeal hearing. There it was shown that she had lied to police about the presence of Fenton and Comacchio at the scene of her attack, and also about John Hamilton-Marshall assaulting her during an argument before Gordon arrived, possibly being responsible for some of the injuries she claimed Gordon caused. No doubt Keeler did this to ensure the arrest and conviction of Gordon, whom she was understandably scared of, and to protect her friend’s brother and the men Fenton and Comacchio, who both had their own reasons for not wanting to be involved in a police case. The police may also have encouraged Keeler to present as strong as case as possible, to make their work in convicting Gordon easier. There was no doubt that Gordon was a violent criminal who needed to be caught and convicted. The police knew about the role Hamilton-Marshall had played in Keeler’s injuries, as he confessed to them himself around 6/7 July. The police were not accused of concealing this evidence at any point.
Being proven to be a perjurer in the Gordon case made the statement Keeler gave to the police for the Ward trial unreliable and put her credibility as a witness in doubt overall. In truth, many of the witnesses for the prosecution had been ‘encouraged’ one way or the other to help the police in their enquiries. Keeler’s perjury conviction, however, set her apart as a proven liar.
Ward’s trial had already begun when the appeal over Gordon’s conviction was being held. The police team on both Gordon’s case and the Ward trial included Detective Sergeant John Burrows. As the Gordon conviction fell apart, it was obvious before the Ward summing up on 30 July that Keeler’s statement could now be considered incorrect. However, the jury was not told exactly why Gordon’s appeal had been upheld, which Robertson says was a deliberate non-disclosure. Robertson goes as far as to say that the Lord Chief Justice told Ward’s prosecutor and the Old Bailey judge hearing the case that the fact Keeler lied in the Gordon case did not mean she had lied in the Ward case too. The judge also directed the jury to disregard the overturning of the Gordon conviction as they decided Ward’s fate. This behaviour, Robertson says, unfairly undermined Ward’s defence.6
Ultimately, after the Ward trial was over, Keeler was successfully prosecuted for perjury. And while this fact could not have been presented at the time of the Ward trial, it could have been grounds for appeal after Ward’s conviction, meeting all the legal technicalities that the law requires, says Robertson.
Robertson also notes that both Keeler and Rice-Davies had been in discussions with newspapers to sell their stories and this likely affected both what was said and what was reported. It’s also likely that a conviction for Ward would make the stories of more interest, and perhaps more valuable, and certainly less likely to bring with them the risk of libel.
A second reason the Ward conviction should be overturned, according to Robertson, is that the proceedings began not with a complaint to or action by the police but with a demand from the Home Secretary Sir Henry Brooke. It is a rule of our constitution that ministers may not direct the police in operational matters. Therefore, Robertson argues that it was an abuse of process for a government minister to initiate a case against Ward for political reasons.7
To support his argument, Robertson points to evidence contained in the leaked minutes of a meeting held on 27 March 1963. Robertson argues Brooke directed the Met Police Commissioner to begin the investigation into Ward after MI5 informed him that there was not enough evidence to convict Ward under the Official Secrets Act. This ‘unconstitutional’ move to find something with which to charge Ward allowed for the tapping of Ward’s phone, a watch on his home and the intrusive questioning of all of Ward’s clients, acquaintances and friends. There have also been allegations that Rice-Davies was coerced by a spell in Holloway for a driving licence charge, and that another witness, Ronna Ricardo, who was interviewed nine times, was told her baby would be taken away from her and that her younger sister, who lived with her at the time, would be sent to a remand home.8 Ricardo later said she was intimidated into agreeing that Ward asked her to bed visitors to the Bryanston flat.9
Ward was convicted of ‘pimping’, which assumes that Keeler and Rice-Davies were prostitutes. Both women and Ward denied they were, and although they may have received money from boyfriends they did, and perhaps crucially did not, have sex with, they fell outside the legal definition of a prostitute. Rice-Davies also already had a weekly income of £80 from boyfriend Peter Rachman. However, politicians had labelled Keeler and Rice-Davies as such, and those opinions had been repeated in the press. The public, led by this, believed the women to be working girls, which explains the hostile treatment they received at the hands of the crowds outside the Old Bailey.
Ward was charged with living ‘in part’ on the earnings of prostitutes, but the judge was incorrect when he told the jury that this could mean just a tiny fraction of any money they made as a sex worker. The judge was actually required to direct the jury on what ‘in part’ meant but failed to do so. In fact, Robertson argues that the jury should have instead been informed that they could only convict Ward if he was living mainly or significantly on the earnings of prostitutes.
In his cross-examination of Ward, Burge asked the defendant about his annual income. Ward replied that he was earning about £4,000 from his osteopathy practice and another £1,500 or so from his drawings. This would give him a total yearly income of between £5,000 and £6,000. Burge also asked if Ward would really need to carry on working as an osteopath and artist if he was, as the prosecution suggested, procuring women for such powerful and wealthy men. Ward said he would not.
In his book The Naked Spy, Ivanov says that the year he met Ward was a fruitful one for Ward, with his friend’s fortunes visibly improving. It was the year Ward had his first solo exhibition at Leggatt Bros, a gallery in Duke Street. Ward had treated Hugh Leggatt for backache and the dealer and gallery owner was so pleased that he had offered Ward his own exhibition. Knowing that portraits of well-known people would be a better offering, Ward gave himself six weeks to sketch any VIPs he could, starting with Paul Getty. Ivanov says Ward sketched Harold Macmillan, Sir Winston Churchill, Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, Chancellor Derick Heathcoat Amory and Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell. Ward also drew Rab Butler, Nubar Gulbenkian, Sophia Loren, Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, A. P. Herbert, Stanley Spencer, Sir John Rothenstein, Lord Shawcross and Mylène Dymengeot. Clearly, Ward’s career was at a high point.10
It was also made clear in court that Keeler lived at Ward’s flat for a very low rent, and that she often borrowed money from Ward, ate food provided by him and used the facilities in his flat such as the telephone. Ward’s earnings were established to be far more than Keeler and Rice-Davies, and in fact, it was the case that the young women more often than not lived on Ward’s larger and more reliable earnings, paying him some money to only ever partly cover their use of his home as and when they could.
Philip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy, the authors of An Affair of State (1987), also pointed out in their book that while Griffith-Jones successfully proved that Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies took money from men they had sex with, in Christine’s case it was as little as £50 from Charles Clore, £20 from Profumo and around £100 from Major Jim Eynan, who she met, not through Ward but while she was working with Rice-Davies at Mayfair’s 21 Club. They also showed that while both girls at some point gave money to Ward, both girls often owed Ward – one way or another too – and usually far more money than they ever paid him. It was therefore the judge’s misinterpretation of the phrase ‘living in part’ and his misdirection of the jury to consider that meant Keeler and Rice-Davies giving Ward a little bit of money here and there to partly cover rent and household bills constituted him ‘living off’ them that would allow the jury to find him guilty of the charges.
Overall, Robertson says the evidence wasn’t enough to prove a link between any money Keeler or Rice-Davies gave to Ward and the money earnt from their alleged prostitution.11 This insufficient evidence should have meant that Counts 1 and 2 were withdrawn from the jury, and that Counts 4 and 5 should never have been put before them. Robertson reminds us that a trial judge has a duty to stop an insufficient prosecution regardless of whether the defence has realised and asked for this to happen.
Robertson also believes that the judge made a serious error in his summing up of the case, telling the jury twice that the fact that none of Ward’s friends were prepared to vouch for him on the stand was significant.
Exactly where were his friends? Davenport-Hines says at least one suffered from police intimidation when he offered to give evidence for Ward’s defence. Society portrait painter Vasco Lazzolo said Chief Inspector Samuel Herbert threatened to plant pornography in his studio12 when he came forward. Lazzolo had first met Ward at the Slade during the war, when the art school had been relocated from London to Oxford. Lazzolo took the stand any way, and consequently faced several damaging allegations of impropriety.
The reluctance of others to identify themselves as one of his associates was more likely a result of the scandal they’d be embroiled in if they did rather than any reflection of Ward’s character, but in any case, it is not acceptable to ask juries to speculate. Robertson calls this a ‘palpable misdirection’.13
The judge was also wrong not to direct the jury on Ward’s previous ‘good character’. It seems that Mr Justice Marshall was conflicted by Ward’s open admission that he enjoyed promiscuity and equated this with a certain type of individual. He was biased and thus told the jury Ward was a person of bad character. However, Ward had no prior criminal convictions, making it less likely he was engaged in criminal behaviour and more likely to be telling the truth. The judge felt that Ward’s good character was effectively cancelled out by the bad, or what he considered, immoral, lifestyle he admitted he enjoyed. The judge equated Ward’s promiscuity with an increased likelihood that Ward would be involved in sexual offences.
Robertson argues that the judge was wrong not to give a corroboration warning to the members of the jury. Not only were the testimonies of the key witnesses likely influenced by the fact that the women had sold their stories, but Ward’s trial also positioned Keeler and Rice-Davies as prostitutes. As such, in the eyes of the law, the women were accomplices in the crime and therefore their evidence could not be simply accepted as fact. Instead, in such an instance, independent testimony was needed. The judge should have instructed the jury that they needed the evidence of Keeler and Rice-Davies corroborated by a completely independent source (and not that their separate evidence corroborated each other’s statements, for example).
There is also the problem that Ward’s conviction relied on Keeler and Rice-Davies being defined as prostitutes, particularly as the 1958 Sexual Offences Act used at the time contained no statutory definition of what this meant. Both women denied that they were prostitutes, and the evidence showed that while they did have sex with men, it was because they wanted to, rather than as a business transaction. Some of the men Keeler had relationships with, like Gordon, Edgecombe and Howard-Jones, were far from high rollers. Keeler slept with men she found attractive, even if that attraction was based on power and influence rather than a notion of romance. Rice-Davies was also not earning money by sleeping with men via a financial arrangement. She was the ‘kept’ mistress of Rachman, whom she genuinely had feelings for, and later looked to replace that relationship with one with Emil Savundra. Rice-Davies decided she did not want to continue seeing Savundra despite there being a financial incentive to continue to do so. If she were a prostitute sleeping with men for money, she would not have done this. While the jury may have found the lifestyle of Keeler and Rice-Davies distasteful, the women were not accepting cash for sex as a business deal.
If Keeler and Rice-Davies were prostitutes, under the law at the time, Robertson also points out that it was also up to the prosecution to prove that Ward ‘knowingly assisted’ sex work, supplying goods or services (in this case, his flat) for that purpose. No evidence was supplied to prove to the jury that Ward allowed the girls to flat share with him only because they were going to use the accommodation to earn money from sex. Instead, Ward was shown to be unaware Profumo had given any money to Keeler and Ward did not know Eynan and was therefore not aware of any arrangement between him and Keeler regarding money. Ward denied he had arranged sex for money to take place at Wimpole Mews between Keeler and ‘Charles’, as per the charge, and there was no evidence that Ward knew any money Keeler gave him to cover rent or other expenses came from such an encounter. Similarly, Rice-Davies stayed at the flat rent-free for a time and her parents stayed at a much-reduced rent, while they looked after her following an attempted suicide. Any money that Rice-Davies passed on to Ward to cover food or telephone use may have come from the money she received from Rachman and not from Savundra.
Robertson says that the judge was wrong to proceed with the trial after Ward’s suicide. Both counsels requested an adjournment and, using the discretion he was afforded as the judge, Marshall could have delayed proceedings, since there was no deadline to heed. Typically, trials should proceed with the defendant present, with the judge charged to ensure that happens where possible. Proceeding after a suicide attempt may also mean that the jury believes this means the defendant is more likely guilty.
Finally, Robertson argues that the judge didn’t secure a fair trial for Ward,14 because of the prejudicial publicity immediately before the trial. Initially Ward had been charged with offences involving abortion and brothel keeping. Despite these charges being dropped, the public perception of Ward had been affected by association with them. The scandal of Profumo’s denial of an affair with Keeler in the House, and then his resignation from the government, coloured people’s opinions and scandalised the country. Ward was labelled as a traitor and Keeler and Rice-Davies as prostitutes. Angry crowds gathered outside the Old Bailey as the trial started, which was just nineteen days after the committal. The speed at which the case came to court meant that the media furore didn’t die down before Ward took the stand. Marshall rejected a defence application to have the trial postponed.
There was also the problem that the principal witnesses stood to make money from media deals, perhaps encouraging embellishments and distortion of the truth either by the witnesses, or those ‘managing’ them and their potential incomes. It appears the judge didn’t warn the jury about convicting on the evidence presented by those with a financial incentive to see Ward convicted.
All these grounds for appeal would be clearly shown in the trial transcripts, which are made available for both appeals and for public purchase. However, Robertson says that in the past when two notable authors, Ludovic Kennedy and Wayland Young, were penning books on the Ward trial and asked for a copy of the transcripts, the Lord Chief Justice refused them without giving a reason. He also notes that the transcript of the evidence or summing up of the Ward trial is not available for reading at the National Archives either, making it unique, since it is the only public trial in British history subject to this ‘enforced secrecy’.15 Even today, the file is still officially closed until 2046.
Keeler called Ward’s trial a ‘farce’, with the case against him consisting of lies, half-truths and circumstantial evidence.16
In the witness box for two hours and thirty-eight minutes, Keeler says that says she had taken sedatives at the time of the trial.17 She also says she was coerced into signing her statement and that there was no ‘sex for rent operation’18 going on. In fact, she was deeply hurt when she had to testify against Ward.19
When Rice-Davies attended the Old Bailey, she says she wasn’t ready to see Ward in the dock, and that it came as a shock. Ward appeared with his broken glasses tied together with string, she says.20 Previously she had thought that the case against Ward would come to nothing, and that if they needed her for the prosecution, the case must be weak. Beforehand, Rice-Davies had heard that Ward was confident of the outcome, but her evidence didn’t come across as she’d imagined, and that you couldn’t tell it was the result of coercion.21 She left the courtroom knowing that the ‘trap was closing’, since she’d heard completely false evidence being given.22 It was during her time on the stand that when challenged over his denial of the affair she claimed to have had with Bill Astor, she replied, ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ a phrase that later featured in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.23
At the trial, Rice-Davies says that when she saw Ward, her courage left her completely, and that it was a court case in which the ‘accused was guilty until proved innocent’.24 She felt Marshall disliked Ward, while the prosecuting counsel, Griffith-Jones, insulted him. Rice-Davies says she hated Griffith-Jones, who was cold and better suited to a Victorian melodrama.25 She also thought that the witness Vickie Barrett was obviously suspect to everyone except the judge and admits that she’d underestimated the seriousness of events. She wanted to stand up and scream, but when she heard the summing up, Rice-Davies knew hope was lost.
Only half of the judge’s summing up was complete when the court adjourned on 30 July 1963, after which Ward committed suicide. He was dead by the time the verdict that he was guilty of living off the immoral earnings of Keeler and Rice-Davies came through.
When David Profumo asked his father what he thought about Ward, he replied he was ‘badly served’ in the end.27
In September 2017, the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) decided it would not refer for appeal Ward’s 1963 conviction for living on the earnings of prostitution. The CCRC said that available records provided no evidence to support claims by Ward’s representatives that the trial was politically motivated and an abuse of process because it was instigated by the government. The Commission did find considerable merit in both Keeler’s later conviction for perjury, and the claim that media coverage may have prejudiced the trial.28
Despite this, the CCRC said it was using its discretion not to refer the case, although if Ward were still alive, it might have done so. The appeal was hampered because an original transcript of the judge’s summing up could not be found, which Geoffrey Robertson QC, representing the family, said was ‘mysterious – suspicious, almost’. He referred to the summing up as ‘wretchedly biased’.
The Commission maintained that there was no public interest in the case after fifty-four years and it could bring no personal benefit to Ward so long after he had died.29