An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (11 page)

The aluminium factory at Banbury was, in machinery, techniques, and organisation, unlike anything known in the town before. Previous Banbury industries had been associated with farming products or agricultural tools. Employees were used to small workshops where the ‘gaffer’ was always visible; but the aluminium managers were, although based locally, often away in Canada, Switzerland, Wales or London. The factory stood ‘in green fields beyond the town, surrounded by ten feet of barbed wire, immaculate flower beds, orderly bicycle ranks, and lines of neatly parked cars’, reported local sociologist Margaret Stacey. ‘The huge white, green-roofed, hangar-like building, with its strange-shaped chimneys and tubes, and its unpredictable noises, seems like something from a different world.’ There might be no one visible outside except the guard at the gate, but inside up to 800 men and women toiled. At six in the morning, two in the afternoon, and ten at night, the shift changed, and another 700 to 800 men and women took their places. ‘Working life,’ wrote Stacey, ‘is out of time with home life, with wives’ cooking, shopping and sleeping, and with the children’s school life, out of time too with the social life of other people.’
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The Second World War was a vivid memory in Banbury and Stratford: indeed it created masculine bonds everywhere. ‘Possibly it was because neither of us had long been out of the forces, but there was an instant rapport between us,’ recalled David Waxman, a physician who met ‘Peter’ Rachman in 1949. ‘In those days, it was still like a brotherhood. You felt akin to anyone who had been in the services.’
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The kinship created by war was richly evoked in a film,
The League of Gentlemen
, released in 1960. A group of ex-army officers, shunning the women who have humiliated, scolded, manipulated and bored them, unite in masculine camaraderie and military discipline to rob a million pounds from a City bank. The common fund of memories was drawn on in Granada Television’s comedy series
The Army Game
, which gradually became dominated by Bill Fraser playing Sergeant Major Claude Snudge and Alfie Bass playing his stooge, the sly, imbecilic Bootsie. From the autumn of 1960 (running until 1964) Granada screened a spin-off of
The Army Game
called
Bootsie and Snudge
. An average of 17 million people watched its Friday night slot during April and May 1961. Snudge had become the porter of a Pall Mall club with Bootsie as his dogsbody. They carried, wrote a critic, ‘the ambivalent, equivocal and sometimes almost flagrantly – though, I suppose, always sublimated – homosexual relationship between these two monsters as far as possible, exploiting all conceivable nuances’.
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Wartime affinities were enduring. Attlee and Macmillan were the only Prime Ministers in three centuries to have been seriously wounded in battle. The experience imbued them with compassion and fortitude. Young officers in the trenches, living at close quarters with the men of their platoon, so Macmillan wrote in old age, ‘learnt for the first time how to understand, talk with, and feel at home with a whole class of men with whom we could not have come into contact in any other way’. His war record helped him in the Tory leadership, for until the 1960s to have had ‘a good war’, and especially to have been wounded, rightly commanded respect. Macmillan’s limp proved his patriotism. He despised those who (for whatever reason) had avoided active service. ‘The trouble with Gaitskell is that he has never seen troops under fire,’ he told a dining club of Tory MPs who had been elected in 1959. Three months into Wilson’s premiership in 1965 he commented: ‘It seems strange that a man who claimed exemption (as a civil servant or the like) at twenty-three and took no part in the six years war, can be PM. We certainly are a forgiving people.’
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This was an era when people still saluted as they passed the Cenotaph in Whitehall. ‘Rank insubordination’ was a phrase that some laughed at, and others recognised had a valuable meaning. A question of precedence arose when Profumo’s wartime senior commander Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis dined at Cliveden in 1962. The moment came for the men to leave the dining room to join the ladies. ‘By age and distinction,’ recorded a fellow guest, ‘there was every reason for him to go out first, but he didn’t immediately do so, since as an earl his rank was below that of the Marquess of Zetland’s. While he hesitated to go, there was a respectful silence, everyone looking towards him with quiet admiration and, by a slight inclination of the head, inviting him to lead the way. A hardly visible expression of pleased assent passed over his face. He went out as it were imperceptibly, as if it just happened that he went out first.’ As late as 1978, Lord Denning came within an ace of being disbarred from appointment as Deputy Lieutenant of Hampshire on the grounds that his military service in 1917–19 had been spent in the ranks.
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Profumo’s son David, who was born in 1955, recalled seeing war-wounded fathers of his school friends – men wearing eyepatches, those who kept an empty sleeve pinned to their jacket, the father whose face was gruesomely disfigured despite all the skill of plastic surgeons. Public men especially needed to show that they had had ‘a good war’. Jack Profumo had fought in the battle of Tunis and the invasion of Sicily; as the youngest brigadier in the British Army he had been second-in-command of the British Military Mission in Tokyo. He was still on the military reserve in 1963. The Labour candidate who stood against him at Stratford-on-Avon in 1950–51 had been awarded the Military Cross after the Battle of the Somme in 1916; his Labour opponent in 1955 had served in the Royal Navy; while Joe Stretton, the fifty-year-old Labour candidate for Stratford-on-Avon in the 1959 general election, a Co-op worker and councillor in Rugby, had war service with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in Italy and Austria.

‘Funny how the war was a historical watershed,’ mused the Labour MP Wilfred Fienburgh in 1959. ‘Every date, every age, had to be translated into terms of how many years before or after the war.’ When a man over forty saw a pretty young woman, his calculations were framed by the war: that she was just born when it started, suckling when he paraded for his first rifle drill, toddling and talking when his fighting started, and entering primary school when he was de-mobbed.
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One wonders if Profumo had comparable thoughts about Christine Keeler, who was a swaddled infant when he was fighting in Italy and not yet at school when he first met his wife.

Profumo’s great task as Macmillan’s Secretary of State for War was to manage the abolition of National Service, and to return the army to a body of professional volunteers. His political adversary, Colonel George Wigg, jibed that this required him to massage the army’s recruitment figures so as to prevent any necessity of reviving conscription. Under the terms of the National Service Act of 1947, all eighteen-year-old men were obliged to serve in the armed forces for eighteen months (raised to two years after the outbreak of the Korean War). More than 2 million youths were called up (6,000 every fortnight): the army took over a million; there were thirty-three soldiers, or twelve airmen, for every sailor. After discharge, conscripts remained on the reserve force for another four years, and liable to recall in the event of an emergency. Although the abolition of National Service was announced in 1957, conscription continued until 1960, and the last conscripts were not released until 1963. Some suspected that the government would be obliged to introduce selective service by ballot, which opponents denounced as tantamount to crimping during the American Civil War. Others regretted the retreat from notions of individual obligations and service to the state.

By 1963 there had never been so many ex-soldiers and ex-sailors in British history. Many people respond well to being drilled: in England, millions of people were respectful of authority, conformist, glad of regular pay and communal amusements. ‘Only a fool could resent two years National Service as a waste of time,’ wrote the art connoisseur Brian Sewell, who was conscripted in 1952. ‘Bullying, brutality, intimidation and fear were among its training tools with raw recruits, victimisation too, but even these had their educative purposes, and were the stimulus of resources of resilience that had not been tapped before.’ Many young men, unlike Sewell, seethed at the regimentation and sergeant majors’ bullying. With two by-elections pending at Colne Valley and Rotherham in 1963, nearly 700 servicemen tried to escape from the armed services by standing as parliamentary candidates. The government reacted by appointing a panel, chaired by David Karmel QC, to winnow the men. Only twenty-three of the 700 applied to Karmel for interview. A single one was approved: ‘Melvyn Ellingham, twenty-four-year-old REME sergeant, yesterday became the first
Army Game
by-election candidate to win his freedom.’ He had joined the army aged fifteen, and had two years still to serve as a £14 8s a week electronics technician. ‘I’m for the Bomb,’ he told the
Daily Express
, but ‘against the Common Market. I think a united Europe would only aggravate world tension.’
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The psychic air of mid-twentieth-century England was thick with bad memories. Pat Jalland, in her history of English grief in a century of world wars, quotes from the memoir of J. S. Lucas, a private in the Queen’s Royal Regiment who, like Profumo, served in the gruelling campaigns in Italy. Before the action at Faenza in 1944, when Lucas was aged twenty-one, he was reunited with his friend Doug, beside whom he had fought in Tunisia. Doug had just asked him for a smoke when a mine exploded. ‘My hand was still opening the tin of cigarettes,’ wrote Lucas, ‘and even as I ran to where he lay, my mind refused to accept the fact of his death. One moment tall, a bit skinny, wickedly satirical, and now – nothing – only a body with a mass of cuts and abrasions and a patch of dirt on his forehead … I felt sure that some part of his soul must be hovering about. But he had gone – forever … between asking for a fag and getting one.’ That night at Faenza, in freezing cold, after heavy losses from shelling, the remnants of Lucas’s company took shelter, but he was too hungry and agitated for sleep. ‘Before my eyes there passed, in review, a procession of the mates I had lost – faces of chums who had gone in Africa, below Rome and in the battles above Rome. But most clearly I saw those who had died that day. Doug reeling backwards as the concrete mines exploded and Corporal Rich’s gentle eyes as he turned away with a goodbye “
ciao
”. The whole assembly of these dead comrades stood in a sombre semi-circle around me as if they were waiting and watching until the time should come when I joined their ghostly company.’ Next day Lucas was sent to the base psychiatric hospital at Assisi. There the medical officer strove to convince him that, although his grief and battle exhaustion were justified, his shame was not.
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A Midlands teenager remembered visiting Portsmouth during the 1950s, and being told that ‘Before the War’ this bombsite had been a chemist’s, or that hole had been a draper’s … ‘Before the War – Before the War’ was the sad, weird incantation of the times. All the youth could see were ‘stumps of shops, office blocks, houses, streets, piers, just stumps’. The sole undamaged residue of ‘Before the War’ was swaying wires above the streets, between the rubble and stumps, for trolley-bus power lines survive bombardment and blast. He also visited his mother’s family in Cambridgeshire. ‘There was the uncle who was half-blown to bits in the First World War, shouting and grunting meaningless sounds as he loaded hay on a truck, and then limping across and shaking my hand and screaming and laughing, and I was very frightened and people said it was a shame, and that he was very intelligent, and couldn’t help it, and how it wasn’t his fault.’
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There were widows and spinsters so lonely that they could fill their teapots with tears. In 1958 the novelist John Braine described eating poached eggs on toast in a London tea shop. The middle-aged woman next to him, ‘pale and drab in a skimpy cotton dress clinging to her scraggy body’, wore no wedding ring. When she was young, he thought, ‘some British general, breathing heavily, would have at last worked out the meaning of attrition and would have issued the order which deposited her future husband screaming on the barbed wire or drowning in the mud, and which left her, forty years later, eating a roll and butter and drinking a glass of orangeade, with dreadful slowness, alone in a London tea shop’. Later he glimpsed the woman again. ‘She was walking very slowly, her face a mask of misery, peering from side to side as if looking for help.’
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One night in 1963 another novelist, Frederic Raphael, struck up a conversation with two men on the late train from London to Colchester. The more loquacious, at first, was a reporter. He had been a warrant officer in the war, was captured by the Germans, and escaped three times. During one burst from captivity, he said, ‘he had killed an Austrian forest ranger whose boots he wanted. After killing him, he discovered the boots were the wrong size.’ The second traveller, returning from a dinner at the Society of Chartered Accountants, said little for a time, except to praise the
scampi bonne femme
. ‘Finally he broke out: “Have you ever seen a man’s face when he knows he’s going to die? I have. And if you’ve seen it once, you don’t want to see it again”.’ He had been a RAF navigator in an aircraft which had a forced landing on an airfield in an area north of Rome held by the Germans. The RAF men knocked out one German who attempted to detain them, and shot the other dead with his own rifle. ‘I’ll never forget the look on his face; not pretty. When he knew we were going to kill him. You can’t describe it. It’s just a thing you never forget. Thank God I wasn’t the one who had to pull the trigger. I’ll never forget the shot. Loudest thing I ever heard in my life.’ The German, he added, ‘had been a decent chap and shared cigarettes with the man who killed him.’ The reporter found Christmas unbearable. The frivolling children made him think of the bombs he had dropped which had incinerated children. Still, he opposed nuclear disarmament, and would drop the H-bomb himself if ordered to. ‘Oh yes,’ said the accountant, ‘so would I.’
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