Sieska Cowdrey, Patric Dickinson (Clarenceux King of Arms), David Kynaston, Gina Thomas and Richard Thorpe have provided me with written materials that helped in the writing of this book. Mark Amory, Horatia Harrod and Anna Vaux, as review editors of the Spectator, Sunday Telegraph and Times Literary Supplement, have sent me books that have informed my own. So, too, have the memoirs that I received as a judge of the J. R. Ackerley Memorial Prize: I thank my fellow judges, Georgie Hammick, Peter Parker and Colin Spencer, for recruiting me to their counsels. The late Colin Matthew and Sir Brian Harrison, as successive editors of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, revived my boyhood interest in the Profumo Affair by commissioning me to write entries on Henry Brooke, Charles Clore, Jack Cotton, Perec Rachman, Emil Savundra, Stephen Ward and Edward Sugden (the abortionist who provided the pills that killed Ward).
Kind friends – Miranda Carter, Edward Davenport and Alexander Games – read draft chapters of this book with lynx-like attention. Each of them made shrewd, vigilant and imaginative suggestions which I have gratefully adopted. As they have more arduous and demanding lives than mine, the time they allotted to me was especially generous. My editor at Harper Press, Martin Redfern, let me run on a long leash, but brought me sharply to heel when I went too far. His combination of easy tolerance and sharp curbs make him a delightful employer.
I thank the Hon. Rupert Carington, on behalf of the Carington family, for permission to quote from the diaries of the Marquess of Lincolnshire; the executors of the Literary Estate of Lord Dacre of Glanton for permission to quote from the writings of Hugh Trevor-Roper; Lord Gage for a letter sent to him; and the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas at Austin, for extracts from Sybille Bedford’s unpublished account of Stephen Ward’s trial, ‘The Worst We Can Do’. Other extracts are reproduced from the archive of the late Harold Macmillan, Earl of Stockton, by kind permission of the Trustees of the Harold Macmillan Book Trust. Lord Astor has agreed to my quotations from his father’s letters, and was generous in correcting a few nuances and details after reading the manuscript draft of chapter three.
Parts of this book were researched or drafted in the London Library, where the amenities remain, as ever, indispensable. I am grateful to Jeremy Lewis, the biographer of David Astor, who was proprietor of Twentieth Century, the quarterly seminar magazine which I found on the open shelves of the London Library, and which proved so informative. Richard Astor has kindly acceded to my use of his father’s unpublished correspondence.
When the possibility of writing a book about the events of 1963 was only dimly imaginable, I had conversations with several bystanders of the Profumo Affair, who had witnessed events at Cliveden, Notting Hill or elsewhere. As these talks were social or informal, it is better not to name my informants or to provide the sources for certain details. However, it is right to thank Nicolas Barker, the late John Grigg, Dominic Harrod and my kindest boyhood mentor, Alan Walter Pearce (1925–95), who all described to me incidents that are recounted in this book.
I am grateful to the Bodleian Library, Oxford (papers of the Marquess of Lincolnshire, the Earl of Stockton, Earl Winterton, the Earl of Woolton, Viscount Crookshank); British Library (papers of Sir Edward Hamilton and the Earl of Cromer as Lord Chamberlain); Christ Church, Oxford (papers of Lord Dacre of Glanton); Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin (Sybille Bedford typescript); House of Lords Record Office (papers of Lord Beaverbrook); King’s College, Cambridge (papers of Lord Annan); the National Archives (Assizes records, and Directorate of Public Prosecutions, Home Office, Metropolitan Police, Premier’s and Security Service files); Reading University Library (papers of Viscountess Astor); and Trinity College, Cambridge (papers of Lord Butler of Saffron Walden).
The working papers of the Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, which are an important source for this book, were first released by the Home Office to the National Archives as the result of my representations in the late 1980s. My book Sex, Death and Punishment (1990) was the first to quote them. I mention this as other writers have since claimed to have been the first to use this material, or even to have obtained its release. The police file on Charles Clore quoted in these pages was opened (with timid redactions) following my application under the Freedom of Information Act. The redactions in the dossiers on Rachman held in the National Archives are equally silly: one chunk of blackened text, for example, tries to protect the reputation of Rachman’s ‘winkler’ Norbert Rondel (1927–2009), an ex-rabbinical student who once bit off a pimp’s ear in a fight and gouged one of his eyes. It was at his gambling den, the Apartment in Rupert Street, that Rondel organised the Spaghetti House robbery in Knightsbridge in 1975 during which restaurant staff were held hostage for 122 hours. Rondel, who was acquitted at trial as the result of jury-nobbling, became a secondhand car dealer, grew the beard of a shaman, and liked to stand on his head.
Hundreds of words would be needed if I was sufficiently to thank Jenny Davenport and Christopher Phipps, who together incited and honed my writing of this book. Nothing would be possible without them: Phipps, additionally, has compiled an index for which every discriminating reader will be grateful.
Kensington & Le Meygris, May 2012