In the spring of 1960, Randolph Churchill, son of the wartime Prime Minister, ricked his back while lifting a bundle of snowdrops out of his shooting brake. Physicians examined him, radiologists x-rayed him, pharmacists supplied analgesics, but he remained in acute pain. Finally he resorted to an osteopath, who diagnosed his trouble in five minutes and cured it in ten. ‘Osteopaths,’ Churchill wrote in his News of the World column, ‘do not make extravagant claims for themselves and do not guarantee cures; but the best of them think that they can be of some help in nearly every ailment and disease save tuberculosis and cancer.’ He criticised the General Medical Council which, ‘like the Boilermakers Union, is a closed shop, and would like to keep the nation’s illness in their own hands whether they can cure it or not’. Churchill’s story drew nearly 300 letters from patients praising osteopathy and another ninety enquiring about the practice.1
The principles of osteopathic medicine had been founded in the 1870s by a doctor on the American frontier called Andrew Still. All diseases, according to Still, result from abnormalities in or near the joints: the body contains natural antidotes, which can use the nerves and bloodstream to cure physical diseases, but these antidotes are nullified if the skeletal framework is distorted. Still’s cures were based on manipulation of what he called ‘lesions’ in bones, muscles, joints, ligaments caused by injury, infection, physical strain or nervous stress.
England’s pre-eminent practitioner of osteopathy, Herbert Barker, acquired a busy practice in London by calling himself a ‘manipulative surgeon’ rather than using the old title of bonesetter. He accepted that surgery, anaesthetics and medicines were required to treat many conditions, but succeeded in helping hopeless patients whom orthodox surgery had failed. Although Barker was denounced as a quack by the medical hierarchy, which insisted that the healing arts were the exclusive prerogative of people who had undergone training in teaching hospitals, a grateful nation gave him the accolade of knighthood in 1922. ‘He had the gift of healing,’ it was written after his death. ‘He believed firmly in himself, he exuded confidence, and his personality was striking. He willed his patients back to normal life, and he did not leave them alone until they were cured.’2
The British Medical Association resented osteopathy’s claim to be a separate science, and defeated the osteopaths’ application for statutory recognition in 1935. Hospitals would therefore not appoint osteopaths to their staff, and there was no free osteopathy available under the National Health Service. Instead, a voluntary register of osteopaths was established (with 300 names by 1960). Established practitioners had more fee-paying patients than they could manage. Physicians sent cases of fibrosis, neuritis, sciatica, slipped disc, frozen shoulders, locked ankles, arthritic knees, backache, tennis elbow and flat feet to osteopaths. The patients, after undergoing manipulation and paying their fees, reported good results.
Osteopathy became a modish form of cosseting. Lady Brenda Last in Evelyn Waugh’s novel A Handful of Dust (1934) went up to London from her husband’s gothic seat ‘for a day’s shopping, hair-cutting or bone-setting (a recreation she particularly enjoyed)’, and planned her adultery with a second-rate snob while lying ‘luxuriously on the osteopath’s table, and her vertebrae, under his strong fingers, snapped like patent fasteners’. Barker felt that many diseases or pains had an element of temperament, nerves, diet or habit in their cause, and therefore urged osteopaths to foster close practitioner-patient relationships: every patient ‘must be treated as a personality and not as a “case” – every treatment being different because every patient is different’.3
Stephen Ward was attracted by the osteopathic tradition of cultivating personal contacts with patients. He aspired to Sir Herbert Barker’s influence, although like Barker’s his skills were excluded from the medical mainstream. His position was that of a gifted, ingratiating outsider.
Ward was born in 1912 at Lemsford vicarage in Hertfordshire. The village of Lemsford stands on the edge of the park surrounding Brocket Hall, then the country seat of a Canadian railway millionaire called Lord Mount Stephen. Ward was the middle of three sons of a country clergyman who had married the daughter of an Anglo-Irish landowner. There were coronets in the remoter branches of his family. On his mother’s side he was descended from Irish lords called Castlemaine. The traveller Wilfred Thesiger, himself the heir-presumptive of Lord Chelmsford, was his first cousin. Ward attended a public school called Canford, newly opened in 1923 in a sprawling Dorset house which had been the seat of Lord Wimborne. The school’s Latin motto ‘Nisi dominus frustra’ could be irreverently translated as ‘Without a Lord everything is in vain’, which might have suited Ward in certain moods.
Instead of an English university after Canford, Ward went abroad (like Bill Astor) to improve his foreign languages. He was in Hamburg in 1929–30, where he did translation work for the local office of the Shell Oil Company, and then worked as a Paris tourist guide to fund his French lessons. In 1934 he went to study at the osteopathic training school which had been established forty years earlier at Kirksville, Missouri. This interest in osteopathy may have been spurred by his father’s lifelong spinal affliction, which gave him the look of a hunchback. Stephen Ward’s qualifications entitled him to practise as a physician in the USA, but were not recognised by the British Medical Association. Henceforth he used the prefix of doctor. (At his trial the prosecution addressed him with wintry scorn as ‘Doctor’, as if the title were bogus.)
In 1939, Ward enlisted in the Royal Armoured Corps as a private. Later he transferred to the Royal Army Medical Corps, where the refusal of the military authorities to recognise his American medical degree aroused his abiding resentment. He served instead as a stretcher-bearer. After demobilisation he set up an osteopathic practice in Cavendish Square, behind Oxford Street, in 1947. His first important patient, Averell Harriman, was the US ambassador. Harriman’s recommendations, and a spreading reputation, brought rich and eminent patients to Ward’s consulting rooms: the oil multi-millionaires Paul Getty and Nubar Gulbenkian; Winston Churchill, and his politically inexorable son-in-law Duncan Sandys; other politicos, including Eden, Gaitskell, Rab Butler and Selwyn Lloyd; King Peter of Yugoslavia, Prince Christian of Hanover, the Maharajah of Baroda; film-stars including Elizabeth Taylor, Ava Gardner, Frank Sinatra and Danny Kaye.
Ward was voluble with a rich, resonant voice. He was a sympathetic if inquisitive listener, who combined calculation with impetuosity. At best he seemed charming, kind, plausible, carefree and indiscreet; but he was too sure of his powers of pleasing. One of his patients, an ambassador’s wife, Lady Gladwyn, ‘disliked his jaunty conceited manner’, but acknowledged the efficacy of his techniques. The Daily Telegraph editor Sir Colin Coote, whose lumbago was cured by Ward’s ‘healing hands’, found his consultations ‘completely normal’. However, as he informed Downing Street confidentially in June 1963, ‘Ward chattered incessantly during treatment, so much so that I thought his political views, though childish, might be dangerous.’ He consulted David Floyd, the Telegraph’s special correspondent on communist affairs, who ‘assured me that MI5 knew all about him and, I gathered, actually received reports from him’.4
Like all show-offs, Ward loathed being alone. There was nothing self-sufficing about him. His working life and off-duty activities were ruled by a need for company that reflected his fear of solitude. He had an overweening need to win people’s esteem. His marriage in 1949 failed after six weeks: his wife, the daughter of a textiles company director, was not typical of his taste in women. Young women with well-educated parents seldom attracted him. Instead he preferred ‘girl-spotting’ in Oxford Street or coffee bars, and picking up slim-hipped, improvident gamine types, whom he called ‘alley cats’.
Vanity, flirting, impudence, fickleness, irresponsibility and indolence were traits that Ward found attractive in women. For some years he lived in a studio flat atop Orme Court near the Notting Hill Gate end of Bayswater Road. It was not, then, a smart address. He let women stay there, without the aim of taking them to bed, because he liked their clutter of underwear, stockings and make-up. Christine Keeler lived with him at Orme Court in a companionate way without sexual activity between them. Their alliance should have been fleeting; but by mischances and indiscretions, their fates became fettered together like those of Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde. There was an adolescent tinge to Ward’s obsession with sex. Innuendo amused him. With his white Jaguar, his name-dropping and his fantasies of influence, he was a licentious Walter Mitty: Ward might have said, in Gide’s words from The Immoralist, ‘the lowest instinct has always seemed to me the most sincere’.
In 1953–54, Ward acquired a lethal enemy called John Lewis, who had inherited control of a business called Rubber Improvement, and was a hard-driven businessman in a hurry to make millions. Lewis had been elected as a Labour MP in the 1945 general election, later declaring himself a supporter of ‘full Socialist planning and control of the world’s resources’. His chief parliamentary interventions concerned industrial research and development and controls on scarce materials such as rubber (although as a steward of the Boxing Board of Control, he promoted television sports); but he came to be shunned in the parliamentary party. He achieved fleeting front-page fame by his road-hog behaviour in a Hyde Park traffic jam, which led to a parliamentary investigation in 1951. After losing his seat some months later, Lewis abandoned politics for money-making. He treated his young wife Joy abusively, and was brazen in his pursuit of starlets: ‘I’ve screwed every pretty girl in London,’ he crowed. One night, after a drunken row, Joy Lewis fled their flat overlooking the Regent’s Park, and took refuge with Stephen Ward. Lewis failed in his attempt to cite Ward in his ferocious divorce, but denounced him to the Inland Revenue, informed the Daily Express that he was running a Mayfair call-girl racket, and made anonymous telephone calls to Marylebone police station decrying him as a procurer of women to rich patients. The police found no evidence to support Lewis’s unhinged calumnies, but these accusations lay on file, and were a pointer when the police were instructed to investigate if criminal charges could be brought against Ward in 1963.5
The osteopath’s caprices were invisible to his patients. ‘I had no inkling of the shady side of Stephen Ward,’ wrote Coote. ‘Indeed, if I had been asked whether he had one, I should have guessed that he was not interested in girls.’ William Shepherd MP, meeting him for the first time in 1962, similarly assumed that Ward’s preference was for youths. Ludovic Kennedy, who watched him on trial in 1963, commented: ‘ageing men who look half their years are often fairies; and one wondered whether within this screaming hetero, a homo was not struggling wildly to be let out’. A profile in the Observer reported that Ward’s girl-chasing was so showy that several acquaintances suspected that his Casanova complex hid ‘latent homosexuality or impotence’.6
The power and prosperity of Ward’s patients defined his status as a practitioner. The fact that his fees were paid by a deposed Balkan monarch, the American oilman who was reported to be the richest man in the world, by Winston Churchill and Hollywood actors, elevated him. He was what his eminent patients made him. His ill-starred destiny proved to be ruled by one practitioner-patient relationship above all others – that with Lord Astor.
In 1949 Bill Astor injured his back in a fall while hunting with the Whaddon Chase. He consulted Ward, who alleviated the pain and persuaded him that he would feel better for an osteopathic massage after every outing in the hunting field. When Ward later cured a bout of neuritis, he was brought into the train of Astor’s largesse. Ward was careless about money, and started borrowing from Astor – £1,250 in 1952, for example. It would be harsh to characterise him as a sponger, but fair to call him a presumptuous charmer. Astor introduced Ward to his half-brother Bobbie Shaw, whose joy of life as a young man had been wrecked by guilt, ostracism and imprisonment because of his homosexuality, and who by the 1950s was a miserable drunkard. Shaw’s gratitude to Ward took a submissive form. Once, when Ward was tending Shaw for a poisoned arm, David Astor felt that his half-brother needed pharmaceuticals, not osteopathy. Shaw was chary of annoying Ward, who required his patients to trust him without demur, but agreed to consult a physician if Astor telephoned Ward to explain. Ward’s reaction was thorny when Astor broke the news: he was always aggrieved when his relations with patients were disrupted by outsiders.
Friendship, Hugh Trevor-Roper noted in 1945, differed between the classes in England. In the lower classes it was expressed by doing helpful kindnesses for each other; in the middle classes it was founded on mutual respect; ‘in the world of fashion they simply adore men and women whom one would not dream of trusting round the corner’. Stephen Ward’s popularity was a prime case. Like many untrustworthy people, he had the gift of inspiring confidence. As Astor’s second marriage unravelled during 1956, he apparently used Ward as an intermediary seeking reconciliation with Philippa Astor. Perhaps in gratitude, Ward was allowed to occupy Spring Cottage, the half-timbered pseudo-Tyrolean hideaway – quaint or ugly depending on one’s taste – on the banks of the Thames at Cliveden. Cynthia Gladwyn recalled that on her sole visit, Spring Cottage was ‘dusty, untidy and rather sordid’, and that she was handed sherry in ‘a grubby glass’. Once Ward started using this riverside nook at weekends, he was more than ever in Bill Astor’s life. He became the Cliveden jack-in-a-box, always popping up and down from Spring Cottage. He would stroll to the main house, after luncheon at the weekends, massage his landlord’s back and give osteopathic manipulation to any guests who wished. Occasionally he was invited to dine. In April 1960, for example, he joined a party including Sir John Wolfenden, the university vice-chancellor who had chaired the official inquiry into prostitution and homosexuality. In reporting this dinner, Maurice Collis, who was another guest, described Ward (who had attended classes at the Slade School of Art) as ‘Bill’s great friend, and a most charming friendly man who, besides being a Harley Street specialist, is an amateur artist of talent’.7
Pamela Cooper, who took a course of treatment with Ward in London, found him amusing and ingratiating. ‘However,’ she recalled, ‘there was something not quite right about Stephen. He could not rest content as a good artist and excellent osteopath, and he presumed on Bill’s generosity. Many of Bill’s friends did the same – except that Stephen wasn’t really a friend.’ Her son, Grey Gowrie, enjoyed picnics at Spring Cottage as an Oxford undergraduate. ‘They were jolly, not orgiastic. There was a bit of innocent malarkey, swimming in the Thames, but nothing more.’ Jack Profumo, who had known Astor since they canvassed together for Conservative votes in Fulham in the 1930s, recalled in old age that after an introduction to Ward by Astor in the early 1950s, he had attended one of Ward’s cocktail parties, where he found several starlets. Profumo, who found the osteopath ‘charismatic’, described Ward’s role at Cliveden as ‘partly a Court jester, but also a go-getter of girls’.8
Ward’s preponderant extra-curricular activity was interfering in other people’s lives. He acted the part of a wizard casting sexual spells. ‘He was full of life, enthusiastic about everything,’ Christine Keeler recalled. ‘Stephen would always fill an awkward silence with a funny remark, would never put you down for telling a flat joke. He wanted everyone to be as carefree as he was, and was genuinely upset by drooping shoulders.’ His thick brown hair, strong jaw and well-toned body were, she thought, attractive: ‘when he smiled the whole of his face lit up, and he had the most mesmerising voice that I had ever heard which he used to make you feel important’. She accompanied him when, in June 1961, he moved from Orme Court into a first-floor flat in an unprepossessing little building at 17 Wimpole Mews, Marylebone. Wimpole Mews was a minute’s stroll from Ward’s consulting rooms at 38 Devonshire Street. It had the further attraction of a public house, where the publican had a special line in attracting pretty young women.9
The best summary of Ward was published in David Astor’s Observer a few days after Ward’s criminal trial for living on immoral earnings in 1963. ‘He was a compulsive exhibitionist who depended upon audiences to provide him with stimulus and confidence,’ the paper averred. ‘He was massively indiscreet, and loved showing off right up to the end. He liked to exercise his power over girls, and it may have been this, as much as sexual desire, that impelled him.’ Despite his financial and domestic disorderliness, he seemed sure of his professional competence and social influence. He fancied himself as an amateur psychotherapist who understood human foibles and could repair damaged psyches. He prized himself, too, as a subversive, who blurred class distinctions, brought unlikely people together, and introduced poor girls to rich men. Ward was not avaricious: he sought glamour and influence – not money. ‘It was this that made much of the prosecution’s case seem inherently implausible. To depict him as a straightforward ponce, using his flat as a commercial brothel, seemed out of keeping with Ward’s basic ambitions and the peculiar nature of his self-respect.’10
A new phase of Ward’s career began with a gallery exhibition of his sketches of patients in 1960. He supplied the Illustrated London News and then the Daily Telegraph with further celebrity sketches. His sitters were as varied as Princess Margaret, the Dukes of Edinburgh and Gloucester, the Cypriot leader Archbishop Makarios, the hire-purchase washing machine tycoon John Bloom, John Betjeman and the comedian Terry-Thomas. Colin Coote commissioned Ward to draw ink sketches for the Daily Telegraph of protagonists at Adolf Eichmann’s war crimes trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Subsequently Ward complained to Coote that his scheme to sketch the Soviet Politburo had been baffled because he could not get a visa to visit Russia. In the hope of expediting the visa, Coote introduced him at luncheon at the Garrick Club to Yevgeny (‘Eugene’) Ivanov, the assistant naval attaché at the Russian embassy. David Floyd, the Telegraph expert on the Soviet bloc, also attended the lunch. ‘Though I only saw Ivanoff once again,’ Coote wrote, ‘Ward talked a lot about him – so much so that I thought he (Ward) might well be a homosexual. This impression was confirmed at a return lunch to which Ward invited me in a Mayfair restaurant and where Ivanoff was also a guest. As I do not like these gentry, I never went to Ward again for lumbago.’11
Ward’s hobnobbing at Cliveden was less easy after Astor’s re-marriage in October 1960. ‘I warned Bill about Stephen,’ Bronwen Astor told Peter Stanford. ‘From the first time Bill introduced us, I didn’t want him at my dinner table.’ In fact, he dined there only twice after she became Cliveden’s chateleine: for Boxing Day of 1960; and on 30 December 1961. On the first occasion, he was invited to dinner at short notice, because the Astors needed a single man to balance the sexes at the table, and charmed his hostess. Subsequently, at her husband’s prompting, she had one Ward treatment: the experience aroused her distaste. ‘His conversation was very intrusive,’ she thought. ‘He asked very personal questions.’ She decided not to repeat the experience.12
A showdown came in December 1961 when Ward provoked a furious row with Philippa Astor’s sister-in-law, Deirdre Grantley, an Oxford-educated young woman. Deirdre Grantley’s Hungarian mother Judith Listowel was a staunchly anti-Soviet exile who edited a weekly magazine, East Europe and Soviet Russia. Just before Khrushchev’s visit to London in 1956, Lady Listowel had launched a press campaign intended to embarrass the Hungarians into releasing her young nephew to travel to freedom, and in November that year, during the Hungarian uprising, she smuggled herself across the border from Austria. More recently, in 1961, the CIA had inspired the Bay of Pigs invasion of Castro’s Cuba. It was therefore rash of Ward to denounce the Hungarian freedom-fighters and the anti-Castro insurgents in scathing terms at the Cliveden dinner. Lady Grantley was angered, and Bill Astor, who had vivid memories of the refugees whom he had helped at Andau, lost his temper and stalked from the room after telling Ward that if those were his views, he should go and live elsewhere. Under Bronwen Astor’s calming influence, Bill relented in his threat that Ward must vacate Spring Cottage; but Ward, who feebly protested that he had only meant to indicate that he disliked violence, was not invited to dine at the main house again.
Ward made mischief in upper-class company, and worried about the good opinion of his social inferiors – neither of them traits of a conventional snob. According to Keeler, he seemed proud to be ‘a maverick, which I found strange for all the time he also wanted to be part of the in-crowd, especially the high and mighty’. His cliquishness, she added, ‘wasn’t about money, but the way you wore your hat, who your tailor was’. Ward, so Coote complained, ‘would continually drag well-known people into his talk, and refer to them by their Christian names – sometimes the wrong one!’ His class-consciousness about his patients matched the mischievous Robin Hood forays in his social life. Ward’s outlook differed little from the social self-awareness, the insecurities and compensatory striving, of the medical profession generally, which led to doctors’ wives having a reputation as crashing snobs. Medical families had a more precarious social status than legal families, because their standing in communities reflected their patients’ standing.13
During the 1950s the medical profession became less respected and more openly criticised than at any time in previous history. It was partly that professional authority had been weakened by the formation of the National Health Service in 1948. Physicians found that after being ‘nationalised’, they were answerable to ‘a vast, impersonal, remarkably uninformed machine with a predilection for having its million and one queries answered in triplicate’, as was lamented in 1954. The taxpayers who funded the service felt they could make new demands of their physicians. ‘Since everyone was forced to pay a whacking great weekly premium for medical insurance, nearly everybody, not unexpectedly, thought they might as well get something out of it … so the stream of importunate demanding free chits to the dentist, free wigs, postal votes, corsets, milk, orange juice, vitamin tablets, pensions, invalid chairs, beds, water cushions, taxi rides to hospital, crutches, bandages, artificial limbs … dogged us wherever we went.’ Patients, especially less sick ones, were disrespectful to physicians, whom they treated as functionaries trying to cheat them out of their rightful entitlements. General practitioners were paid according to the number of patients listed in their NHS practices, and found that if they did not prescribe, or over-prescribe, what their patients wished, their patients would transfer to other doctors’ lists. This was a particular problem with housewives seeking amphetamines or barbiturates.14
The medical profession was hit by the creeping iconoclasm of the 1950s. ‘The mood today is to criticise everything,’ Harold Macmillan wrote in 1957. ‘It may pass, but I have never known the press and the public so sensitive or so hypercritical. I think it is because they are all so terribly well off. English people never seem to show their best except when they are in great trouble.’ Sir Arthur Porritt, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, felt the injustice of physicians being less esteemed than in earlier generations. The trouble, he complained in 1962, was that few physicians could any longer master all aspects of medicine, which weakened medical authority so far as some patients were concerned. Physicians, Porritt emphasised, faced duties that nobody else carried. ‘A doctor’s stock-in-trade is life and death. People tend to forget that he has a heavier responsibility than any millionaire, property dealer or business tycoon.’15
One of the contentious issues facing the Macmillan administration on its formation in 1957 was doctors’ pay. Discontent on this issue festered into the 1960s. In their protests about remuneration, physicians were subliminally asking to be restored as objects of respect before the NHS masses. The News of the World headline ‘THESE DOCTORS MAKE ME ANGRY’ was an example of the denigration. It headed complaints in 1960 about the difficulty of winning compensation for blunders when the medical world acted as a self-protecting Establishment and closed ranks at the first whiff of an action for medical negligence. ‘By all means let us salute the devotion of thousands of those who treat us in our infirmities. But isn’t it time they realised that they are increasingly the paid privileged servants of the citizen, not the fellow conspirators of a secret vocation. A new professionalism, a new outlook on responsibility to a tax-paying, better-educated public, is stirring all around us. It’s time it reached the doctors.’16
The British Medical Association reacted to the changed public mood by upholding a severe, restrictive morality in its official dealings. Throughout the BMA’s memorandum to the Wolfenden committee on homosexuality and prostitution, when referring to sexual activity, the word ‘indulgence’ was used instead of ‘pleasure’. ‘The proper use of sex, the primary purpose of which is creative, is related to the individual’s responsibility to himself and the nation,’ the BMA asserted, meaning that sex without the possi-bility of pregnancy was improper, and probably shameful. ‘At the present time doctors observe their patients in an environment favourable to sexual indulgence, and surrounded by irrespon-sibility, selfishness and a preoccupation with immediate materialistic satisfaction. There is also no lack of stimulation to sexual appetite. Suggestive advertisements abound on the street hoardings and in the Underground; provocative articles and illustrations appear in the daily and, especially, the Sunday newspapers; magazines and cheap novels with lurid covers frequently provide suggestive reading matter; and the erotic nature of many films and stage shows is but thinly veiled.’
The BMA offered far-fetched explanations for the perceived epidemic of homosexuality: ‘Many men see in homosexual practices a way of satisfying their sexual desires without running the risks of the sequelae of heterosexual intercourse. They believe, for example, that there is no danger of contracting venereal disease in homosexual activity. Other men adopt homosexual practices as a substitute for extra-marital heterosexual intercourse because there is no fear of causing pregnancy or emotional complications as in the life of a woman.’ Male homosexuality aroused, perhaps even deserved, public hostility, the BMA testified, because of the propensity of its practitioners in ‘positions of authority to give preferential treatment to homosexuals or to require homosexual subjection as an expedient for promotion. The existence of practising homosexuals in the Church, Parliament, Civil Service, Armed Forces, Press, radio, stage and other institutions constitutes a special problem.’ Sexual acts between men were ‘repulsive’, in the diagnosis of the BMA. ‘Homosexuals congregating blatantly in public houses, streets, and restaurants are an outrage to public decency. Effeminate men wearing make-up and using scent are objectionable to everybody.’ The physicians concluded that if ‘degenerate sodomists’ persist in their debauchery despite repeated imprisonment, ‘it would be in the public interest to deal with them in the same way as mentally deranged offenders’.17
This was the morality of the BMA at the time when Ward was ‘girl-spotting’ in Oxford Street, enjoying women’s stockings hanging over chairs in his flat, and revelling in the lazy caprices of the girls he befriended. Although he aspired to the prestige of the royal physician Lord Evans, and the influence of Macmillan’s medical adviser Sir John Richardson, his destiny lay with the blaring headlines associated with the murderous physicians, Crippen, Bodkin Adams and Shipman. During 1963 he was victimised by politicians, framed by policemen, deserted by patients, betrayed by girlfriends, reviled by lawyers, and smeared by Lord Denning. For a while, osteopathy fell in reputation to the level of quackery which claimed to cure warts by rubbing them with toads. It was three years only since Randolph Churchill had ricked his back lifting a bundle of snowdrops, but it seemed another age.