The Sexual History of London (38 page)

Perhaps Marthe's loyalty to Gino derived from the fact that the Messina family had come to dominate London's sex trade by the 1940s. Gino had arrived in London in 1934, having heard that the city offered opportunities to the enterprising criminal. He had received an excellent training in the sex trade from his father, who had trafficked women in Alexandria, Egypt. Despite their Sicilian surname, the Messinas maintained that they were of Egyptian and Maltese descent. Gino had shrewd business instincts and soon realized that London's sex trade was chaotic, and that fines for prostitutes were comparatively low; the penalty for soliciting cost little more than a parking ticket.
³⁶

Within a year, he had built an empire in the West End and his brothers – Salvatore, Carmelo, Alfredo and Attilio – had come over to join him. On paper, the family business appeared to be legitimate; the brothers described themselves as antique dealers and diamond brokers and if pressed replied that they were in the ‘import' trade. What they actually imported was women, sourced from the continent and further afield. As these women had their own passports and had arrived in Britain of their own volition, the Messinas could not be convicted of trafficking. And no expense was spared in tempting girls to throw in their lot with the brothers. One prostitute, taken out to dinner and sweet-talked by Gino, described him as a perfect gentleman.
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By 1950, the Messinas were running 500 girls in the West End. ‘We Messinas are more powerful than the British government,' Attilio Messina told the press. ‘We do as we like in England.' In 1947, the Messinas' grip on the trade was challenged by Carmelo Vassallo, a Maltese pimp, and during a violent encounter Gino slashed Vassallo's face with a razor, which earned him two years in jail. He celebrated his release by spending £10,000 on a two-tone Rolls Royce. Hefty backhanders to the police also assured immunity from prosecution, until the legendary crime reporter Duncan Webb of the
People
began to investigate allegations of leaks from Scotland Yard to Alfredo Messina. On 3 September 1950, the
People
carried a front-page lead on prostitution, containing all the information necessary for a police investigation into corruption, including names, dates, photographs and interviews with over one hundred prostitutes. Edna Kallman was one such woman. At thirty-nine, she had been working for the Messinas for ten years and was ill and exhausted. She told police that Attilio had hired a maid to watch her and enforce the ten-minute rule. When Edna complained about her working conditions, Attilio retorted that she was lucky to have the work. ‘I could get a seventeen-year-old who would work harder than you,' he told her, ‘and I could fuck her as well!'
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Superintendent Guy Mahon of Scotland Yard set up a task force and engaged in such an aggressive campaign against the Messina brothers that, by the end of the 1950s, Alfredo Messina had been imprisoned on bribery and prostitution charges. Attilio Messina was sentenced to four years' imprisonment after being caught illegally attempting to re-enter the country in April 1959. The remaining Messina brothers fled abroad. Gino and Carmelo resurfaced in Belgium; subsequently arrested, Gino was sentenced to six years while Carmelo was deported to Italy, where he died in 1959. The authorities had investigated the tangled roots of the Messina family tree and discovered that the brothers were not, as they claimed, Maltese, but Sicilian. In true gangster fashion, Gino continued working. A journalist visiting him in his Belgian jail found him signing cheques for rent and taxes on his London properties, which, according to the
Sunday People,
were still being used for immoral purposes. Meanwhile, the remaining brother, Salvatore, had disappeared, and was the only Messina never to be brought to justice.
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The Messina brothers' brutal methods were typical of the London underworld in the mid-twentieth century. The next generation of gangsters, the Krays, inherited the Messinas' empire and ensured its survival through a terrifying reign of intimidation and violence. But, as we will see in the next chapter, London's sexual underworld was about to change yet again.

When the Director of Public Prosecutions turned to the jury during the Chatterley trial and demanded, ‘Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?' he demonstrated extraordinary arrogance in his ignorance of popular opinion and modern life. The disastrous attempt to ban Lawrence's novel represented the last desperate attempts of the establishment to police artistic expression and popular culture. It was a losing battle, and those waging it were soon to lose credibility themselves; in the wake of the Chatterley trial, the government and high society faced a series of scandals and revelations which made
Lady Chatterley's Lover
appear positively tame by comparison.

In this journey into London's sexual history, I will look at the Chatterley trial and its consequences, the high-society scandals of the 1960s and 70s, the links with organized crime, and subsequent developments in the sex industry, including the prostitutes taking control of it and the recent phenomenon of ‘Belle de Jour', a call-girl who posted an account of her exploits on the internet, and her many imitators.

But first, let us revisit the Chatterley trial and try to understand, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, what all the fuss was about.
Lady Chatterley's Lover
(1928) was Lawrence's most famous novel but far from his best. The narrative follows the relationship between Constance, a sex-starved young aristocrat whose husband was crippled in the First World War, and Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on her estate. Lurking beneath the tsunami of swearing and coital grunts was Lawrence's genuine moral message: the book is a plea for physical and spiritual intimacy between couples, rather than brutal animalistic sex or a retreat into lofty celibacy. Not for nothing was Lawrence's alternative title ‘Tenderness'.

Lawrence's graphic descriptions of sex meant he was no stranger to controversy. In 1915, police raided the offices of his publishers, Methuen, and seized and burned 1,011 copies of
The Rainbow
; in 1929, a book of poems,
Pansies
, was deemed so offensive that Lawrence had to withdraw twelve verses; an exhibition of his paintings was closed on the grounds of ‘indecency'; but this was nothing compared with the outrage following the appearance of
Lady Chatterley's Lover
, which, when it did not find a British publisher, was printed in Florence in 1928, and seized at customs when attempts were made to bring it into England. Imported copies inevitably got through, however, and were available upon application from booksellers prepared to risk a prison sentence (one bookseller went to jail for two months in 1955) and from the many ‘sex shops' which had sprung up in Soho.

Soho had replaced Holywell Street as the home of pornography, and while some of the magazines sold in the early days, such as Harrison Marks's
Spic and Span
, would be regarded as mild by modern standards, most shops had a back room specializing in hardcore material, gay and straight, and Olympia Press editions of classic erotica such as
Fanny Hill
,
The Story of O
and
The English Governess
. It was in these unlikely surroundings that the aspiring novelist or Cambridge don might track down an unexpurgated edition of
Lady Chatterley's Lover
.

When, in May 1960, Penguin Books proudly announced that they planned to publish a paperback of the novel, complete and unexpurgated, for 3s 6d (17.5p), the Director of Public Prosecutions, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, swung into action. He declared that the unexpurgated version was obscene and that ‘a prosecution for publishing an obscene libel would be justified. Indeed if no action is taken in respect of this publication it will make proceedings against any other novel very difficult.'
¹

The attorney general, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, had only to read the first four chapters before he agreed: ‘If the remainder of the book is of the same character I have no doubt you were right to start proceedings – and I hope you get a conviction.'
²
The solicitor general, Sir Jack Simon, reached the same conclusion.

Just as Jonathan Cape had done in the 1928
Well of Loneliness
obscenity trial, Penguin recruited a number of expert witnesses, in the form of eminent writers and academics. Under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, it was possible for publishers to escape conviction if they could prove that a work had literary merit. While thirty-five witnesses, including luminaries such as E. M. Forster, Richard Hoggart, Cecil Day Lewis and Raymond Williams, were prepared to testify to Lawrence's artistic genius, the prosecution desperately scrabbled around, intending to match the defence ‘bishop for bishop and don for don'. The DPP's office approached Sir David Cecil, an Oxford don who had dismissed Lawrence back in 1932 as a ‘guttersnipe', and Graham Hough, a fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge, who had deplored the number of four-letter words in the novel, but they refused to testify. Noel Annan, Provost of King's College, Cambridge, and Helen Gardner, Reader in Renaissance English Literature at St Hilda's College, Oxford, were also approached, but also refused to appear for the prosecution, Gardner replying by return of post that she was ‘unwilling to give any assistance to those who are desirous of suppressing the work of a writer of genius and complete integrity'. Gardner subsequently appeared as a witness for the defence.
³

The DPP's staff were reduced to a page-by-page analysis of the book looking for ‘filth' (an indispensable guide to any reader short of time but keen to find ‘the naughty bits'). A typical extract ran: ‘pp. 177–185. Connie goes to the hut the same day after tea. Intercourse unsatisfactory to Connie to start with but all right the second time (full details and four-letter words).' Under the heading ‘Gratuitous filth', the DPP's office had tried to keep a running count of the offending words. It notes on page 204 a ‘fucking', a ‘shit', a ‘best bit of cunt left on earth' and three sets of ‘balls'. At the trial, Griffith-Jones told the jury that the word ‘fuck' or ‘fucking' appeared no fewer than thirty times.
⁴

The trial of
Regina v. Penguin Books
opened at the Old Bailey on 27 October 1960. While the literary establishment turned out in force for the defence, the prosecution called only one witness: Detective Inspector Charles Monahan, the police officer to whom Penguin had ‘published' the book by sending him a copy. A major indication of just how ill-advised this prosecution had been was the moment when Mervyn Griffith-Jones rose to his feet and asked the jury: ‘Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around the house? Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?'
⁵

The jury took just three hours to return a verdict of not guilty. Lawrence's stepdaughter, Barbara Barr, summed up the popular response when she declared that ‘I feel as if a window has been opened and fresh air has blown right through England.' Within a year,
Lady Chatterley's Lover
had sold two million copies.

The verdict horrified the establishment. While
The Times
was appalled at the failure to produce witnesses for the prosecution, the Archbishop of Canterbury complained and fourteen Conservative MPs tabled an amendment to the Queen's Speech (due the following month) demanding the repeal of the new Obscene Publications Act. This collective handwringing proved futile; the trial had been an expensive waste of time and taxpayers' money and the authorities had misjudged the public mood.
⁶

 

This was just the beginning. Within three years, the establishment would be rocked by political and sexual scandals which would bring down the government and leave the highest in the land without so much as a fig-leaf to preserve their modesty. The first, in 1963, featured all the vital ingredients for a major sex scandal: high society, sexual perversion, prostitution, violence and espionage. One of its principal players, Stephen Ward, deserves a place in our narrative as one of the few male bawds.

A society osteopath who numbered Winston Churchill, Ava Gardner and Douglas Fairbanks Jr among his clients, Ward was a social climber who ensured a constant stream of invitations by supplying a steady flow of attractive girls to the establishment. Ward sought out pretty working-class girls, claiming to be ‘sensitive to their needs and the stresses of modern living'. As he roamed the cafés and bars of the West End looking for new recruits, Ward's technique would have been familiar to the wise old bawds of Covent Garden. And the rewards were considerable: a cottage on Lord Astor's country estate and admission to the highest ranks of society. Ward appeared urbane and charming on a superficial level, although the actress Diana Dors saw straight through him, and referred to him as that ‘slick society doctor among the jet set'.
⁷

In 1959, Ward met Christine Keeler at Murray's Cabaret Club in Soho. Christine, an ‘exotic dancer', was a beautiful 17-year-old with the face of a Madonna. Within weeks, she had moved into Ward's flat in Wimpole Mews and befriended another of Ward's party girls, Mandy Rice-Davies, whose lovers included the slum landlord Peter Rachman and Lord Astor.

In July 1961, Ward took Christine to a pool party at Cliveden, Lord Astor's country estate, where he introduced her to Sir John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, and his wife, the actress Valerie Hobson. Christine and Profumo enjoyed a brief liaison, although Profumo ended it after a few weeks. And that might have been the end of the matter but for an incident with a gun in December 1962. Christine had moved out of Ward's flat but had returned to visit Mandy, who was still living there. On 14 December, one of Christine's boyfriends, Johnny Edgecombe, a petty criminal, arrived at the flat in a jealous rage and tried to gain entry, firing at the door several times with a gun. As a result of Edgecombe's subsequent trial, Christine and Mandy's relationship with Stephen Ward and many rich and powerful men was exposed; there were juicy rumours in the Sunday papers about two-way mirrors, whips and canes, and kinky sex among the jet set, including allegations about a party in Bayswater attended by Keeler, Rice-Davies and Ward, at which a cabinet minister had served a dinner of roast peacock while wearing nothing except a mask and a bow tie…The man also had a card round his neck: ‘If my services don't please you, whip me.' Another rumour concerned a cabinet minister being fellated by a prostitute in Hyde Park, while further speculation included an orgy which involved eight High Court judges. ‘One, perhaps,' groaned Harold Macmillan to a colleague, ‘two, just conceivably. But eight – I just can't believe it.'
⁸

Quite apart from the affront to public morality of the Secretary for War engaging in sex with a call-girl, another aspect of the affair propelled it into a different league altogether. This was the revelation that, while sleeping with Profumo, Christine had also been involved with Yevgeny ‘Eugene' Ivanov, a senior naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy. It was the height of the Cold War and the security implications for Harold Macmillan's Conservative government were catastrophic.

The public lapped it up, and Profumo was forced to make a statement to the House of Commons. In March 1963, he told the House that there was ‘no impropriety whatever' in his relationship with Christine and that he would issue writs for libel and slander if the allegations were repeated outside the House. Christine, meanwhile, had become a celebrity; a photograph of her sitting astride a chair, with nothing but the plywood back to preserve her modesty, became an instant classic when it was leaked to the
Sunday Mirror.
Endlessly republished, copied and parodied, the photograph has come to epitomize the Profumo affair.

It must have come as something of a relief to Profumo when another scandal hit the headlines in May 1963. This also took the form of a photograph, but far more graphic and sensational than ‘La Keeler' posed on a chair. This photograph surfaced as the result of acrimonious divorce proceedings between the Duke and Duchess of Argyll, wealthy West End socialites. The Duke was divorcing the Duchess, a former Deb of the Year, on the grounds of her serial adultery, as revealed in her diaries and collections of photographs. One series of pictures in particular proved outrageous. Snapped in the bathroom of her home in Upper Grosvenor Street, Mayfair, these revealed ‘Marg of Arg' wearing nothing but a string of pearls, performing fellatio on an unknown man, his head not shown on the photograph. Other pictures depicted the same ‘unknown man' masturbating for the camera, with handwritten labels testifying to the different states of arousal, from ‘before' to ‘thinking of you', ‘during – oh!' and ‘finished'. There was wild press speculation as to the identity of ‘the headless man', including rumours that he was a government minister or a film star. Candidates for Marg of Arg's lover included the Defence Secretary Sir Edwin Duncan Sandys (son-in-law of Winston Churchill) and the American actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

The headless man was one of many. It emerged that during the course of her marriage Margaret had sex with over eighty men, including two cabinet ministers and two members of the royal family. When asked to explain her behaviour, Margaret maintained that she had never been the same since plunging forty feet down a lift shaft during the war, this experience triggering off an extraordinary neurological condition which left her without the sense of taste or smell but with a voracious sexual appetite. The judge's verdict was damning. He described Margaret as