1963: The Profumo scandal
At the height of the cold war in the early 60s, as the established order was challenged as never before, Britons paid rapt attention to a sordid little affair which involved a cabinet minister, a showgirl and a Soviet naval attache. Derek Brown looks back on 1963
Derek Brown
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 10 April 2001
That old rogue Larkin was out by a few years of course, but he captured perfectly the mood of the early 1960s. It was an era in which anything was possible and nothing was safe; a time when the established order was being challenged, subverted, and ultimately buried.
The Chatterley ban was indeed one of the first shibboleths to evaporate. In August 1960 Penguin was prosecuted for publishing one of DH Lawrence's lesser works, Lady Chatterley's Lover, notable only for its use of the f-word and some sublimely silly sex scenes. The trial was farcical - at one stage the jurors were invited to consider whether they would be happy for their wives and servants to read such a book - and the outcome rarely in doubt. When Penguin was given the go ahead to publish, there was minor pandemonium: the initial print run of 200,000 copies sold out on the day of issue, November 10, at the then rather stiff price of 3s 6d (17.5p).
Several more sensations were to unfold before - to follow Larkin's conceit - the Beatles' first LP. 1961 saw the first publication of a little magazine trying to revive an age old tradition of political and social satire. It was called Private Eye. In the same year, and the same spirit, a group of Cambridge graduates - Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller - brought their irreverent revue, Beyond the Fringe, to London's West End.
In 1962 satire burst out on television, with the late night show That Was The Week That Was, or TW3 to its aficionados. It thrived by debunking religion, politics, royalty and sex, attracting a colossal audience of some 12m viewers - almost as many as the other TV sensation of the age, Coronation Street - making presenter David Frost a national celebrity, and giving the BBC governors some sleepless nights.
The mood of iconoclasm spread even to the Palace of Westminster. In 1961 a young and ardent Labour MP, Anthony Wedgwood-Benn, was barred from the House of Commons after winning a byelection at Bristol South-east, on account of having inherited a viscountcy. Tony Benn, as we now know him, went on to campaign successfully for peers to be allowed to renounce the titles - and, in his case, to shear several syllables off their names as well.
The mood of the day was embodied in the explosion of pop culture. Towards the end of 1962 there was a surge of interest in a new group - they were not called bands then - from Liverpool. It wasn't so much the music at first which caught the public eye (their first single, Love Me Do, barely scraped into the Top 20), but rather their bizarrely long hair. The following year, curiosity became craze, and the Beatles were on their way to their first LP.
The political context
Some commentators have compared the convulsions of the early 1960s, leading up to the election of Harold Wilson's first Labour government in 1964, with the sweeping aside of the Thatcher-Major years and the accession of Tony Blair in 1997. The analogy is tempting: both events involved the ending of long periods of unbroken Conservative government, and the promise at least of a new era. But it is a false comparison none the less. What happened in 1997 was a change of management and style. In 1964, the upheaval was much more fundamental.
At the start of the decade, the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, was still basking in the glow of his 1959 near-landslide election victory, with a Commons majority of over 100. The cartoonists called him Supermac, and political writers were addicted to the adjective "unflappable". Urbane, patrician and when the occasion demanded utterly ruthless, he seemed scarcely threatened by a Labour party wracked by left-right dissent.
But Supermac was not invincible at all. There was rising discontent in the country and in the Tory party over Britain's lacklustre postwar economic performance. Japan and Germany were booming, while the UK's hidebound economy was bedevilled by inflation and dreadful labour relations. Belatedly, the government lumbered towards an application to join the European Economic Community, universally known as the Common Market, but the nation was less and less enamoured by ministers who seemed to represent a bygone age.
Rising discontent led to a series of resounding byelection defeats for the government, most sensationally at Orpington in Kent in March 1962, when a Tory majority of nearly 15,000 was turned into a majority of 7,800 for Jeremy Lubbock of the suddenly resurgent Liberal party. Macmillan, hitherto unflappable, began to flap like a wet hen. Four months after Orpington, in one of the most ruthless political bloodlettings of modern times, he abruptly sacked and replaced seven senior ministers - one-third of the entire cabinet. It was instantly dubbed 'the night of the long knives'. Supermac became Mac the Knife.
Conservative disarray, meanwhile, was being mirrored by Labour consolidation. For much of the 1950s, the party had been convulsed by ideological wrangling, most notably over the issue of nuclear disarmament. Hugh Gaitskell, who had taken over the leadership from the last Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, was politically all but hamstrung by the internecine strife. But the new decade, with its intangible but unmistakable sense of change, brought a new sense of purpose - and opportunity - to the party. By the time Aneurin Bevan, the leading leftist scourge of the establishment, died in 1960, the party was reinventing itself as a movement for change.
Harold Wilson, seen as a pragmatic leftist, first challenged Gaitskell for the leadership, unsuccessfully, in November 1960. But he and his generation of Labour leaders - George Brown, Jim Callaghan, Denis Healey - were honing a new style of politics which looked to the challenges of the future, not the ideology of the past. That their time was coming, they had no doubt. But they could not have known that their ascent to power would be hastened by a scandal more sensational than any in modern British politics.
Tarts, toffs and traitors
Even today, in our peculiar society, we get excited when ministers and other public figures are caught with their pants down. In 1963, the very notion was deeply, deliciously shocking.
It was still mostly a pre-pill, pre-promiscuity age, when unmarried pregnancy was a matter of deep family shame, and backstreet abortionists thrived. The tabloid newspapers were already brash but not yet sex-crazed, and were by and large polite to politicians. But when the storm broke, it was not simply driven by sex; there was a deep, dark context of rank treachery.
Since the early 1950s, when diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean fled to their paymasters in Moscow, the chattering classes had speculated about the existence of a "third man". The brave new world of the 1960s did nothing to curb the tittle-tattle; indeed, as the cold war intensified, the issue assumed ever more menacing implications.
In 1961 George Blake, another ex-diplomat, was given a record 42-year prison sentence for spying for the Russians. Sensationally, he was said to have been brainwashed by communists while in captivity in Korea. Even more sensationally, he was to escape from jail after serving only five years.
The cold war was at its coldest, and the Soviet Union was at the zenith of its power, launching the first man into space, and defying the world by supervising the construction of the Berlin Wall. America's apparent impotence, meanwhile, was underlined by the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
In 1962, the Cuban missile crisis brought the world terrifyingly close to nuclear annihilation.
Close to the peak of the crisis, a 38-year-old Admiralty clerk and the son of a vicar, William Vassall, was jailed for 18 years for spying for the USSR. He had been recruited by the KGB in a homosexual "honey trap". In July 1963 the government named Kim Philby, former Foreign Office colleague of Burgess and Maclean, as the "third man". But even that huge revelation was subsumed in a greater sensation now gripping the nation.
For months, rumours had circulated about the private life of John Dennis Profumo, secretary of state for war. Educated at Harrow and Oxford, he was a quintessential high Tory who had achieved cabinet rank after serving in a number of junior posts. He was married to the film star Valerie Hobson, and moved effortlessly in the highest of society.
In the deferential spirit of the 1950s, the rumours may have been restricted to salon gossip. Now, in the new age of iconoclasm, the whispers were amplified in the media. That Was The Week That Was scored a telling blow with a splendid parody of the old music hall number, She was Poor but she was Honest. The words of the new version went: "See him in the House of Commons / Making laws to put the blame / While the object of his passion / Walks the streets to hide her shame."
The "object of his passion" was a young woman whose name is now embedded in British political folklore: Christine Keeler.
Keeler, unlike Profumo, had had an extremely undistinguished life. Born in 1942, she left home at 16 after an unhappy childhood in the Thames Valley, and gravitated to London where she found work of a sort at Murray's cabaret club. There she met and befriended another showgirl, Marilyn "Mandy" Rice-Davies. Soon, both young women had drifted into the racy circle around Stephen Ward, a fashionable West End osteopath and socialite.
Keeler's relationship with Ward was both torrid and rocky. They broke up several times, but he seemed to exercise an almost centripetal force on her, and always she drifted back. Soon both young women were celebrated players, albeit with bit parts, in Ward's sexual circus.
Not all the action was centred on Ward's Wimpole Mews flat, equipped with two-way mirrors and other aids to lubricity. Soon, Keeler and Rice-Davies were circulating in more exalted milieux, including Lord Astor's country mansion of Cliveden. It was there that John Profumo first laid eyes on her. A brief but passionate affair ensued, and tongues began to wag.
Even then, it might have been brushed under the carpet in the time honoured English way, but Profumo made a fundamental error: he lied to the House of Commons. In March 1963 he told the chamber that there was "no impropriety whatever" in his relationship with Keeler. Ten weeks later he appeared before MPs again to say "with deep remorse" that he had misled the House, and would resign.
What brought Profumo down even more than his deceit of the Commons, was the startling revelation that Keeler had also slept with Eugene Ivanov, the naval attache at the Soviet embassy. It was that detail which captured world attention, notably in the United States, where the FBI compiled a detailed report called Operation Bowtie.
In Britain, Profumo's downfall naturally caused a huge sensation, inflated by the establishment's crude and cruel attempts to find scapegoats for its own embarrassment. As usual, official wrath was turned on those least able to defend themselves. Stephen Ward was prosecuted for living on immoral earnings. On the last day of his trial, he killed himself with an overdose of sleeping tablets.
Keeler was also tried and imprisoned on related charges. Rice-Davies, who escaped prosecution, earned a dubious immortality when, during the Ward trial, she was told that Lord Astor disputed her version of events and replied: "He would, wouldn't he?"
Less than two months after Ward's tragic and mysterious death, an official report was produced by Lord Denning, master of the rolls. It was a hot number: hundreds queued to buy a copy when it was released at midnight. But there were few juicy bits in Denning's findings. He criticised the government for failing to deal with the affair more quickly, but concluded that national security had not been compromised. And, to the dismay of the reading public, he failed to identify the man who, naked except for a mask, had served at Ward's dinner parties. There had been rumours that the "man in a mask" was a cabinet minister but Denning, who interviewed him, denied it.
There it ended, though it never really went away. The 1989 movie, Scandal reignited some of the controversy, and Christine Keeler raked over the embers in her autobiography, The Truth At Last, published early in 2001. In it, she revived some of the more startling claims made at the time - though alas she was unable to offer convincing new evidence to back them up. She claims for example, that the then MI5 chief, Sir Roger Hollis, was a Soviet spy; and that Stephen Ward ran a spy ring which included Hollis and Sir Anthony Blunt, who was surveyor of the Queen's pictures. Blunt was indeed revealed as a long-time Soviet agent in the 1980s, around the same time that Hollis, the object of numerous rumours, was officially cleared.
Now 58, Keeler has consistently said that successive governments have hushed up the truth of the sordid, sensational Profumo affair. Her only new (and unverifiable) claim, is that the cabinet minister made her pregnant.
And Profumo himself? Remarkably, he is still with us at 86, though friends say he is very frail now. It's nearly four decades since his humiliating fall from grace; years which he has devoted largely to charity work in London's East End. He has also remained true to his tribal code of honour, having never uttered a public word on the events which shook the nation in 1963.
The aftermath
The Profumo affair was no passing sensation. It all but brought down the Macmillan government and it almost certainly finished Macmillan himself as prime minister. In October 1963, less than a month after publication of the Denning report, the prime minister resigned citing ill health. There were no party elections in those days, and the mantle passed to the most improbable of candidates, the 14th Earl of Home.
The Tory mandarins - known as "the magic circle" - were desperate to keep out the obvious successor, Rab Butler, who was on the liberal wing of the party. They preferred the Old Etonian, cricket-loving laird, who was only too happy to oblige, quickly using the recent legislation sparked by the Anthony Wedgwood-Benn affair to renounce his ancient title and transform into being plain Sir Alec Douglas-Home.
It very nearly worked. Weeks after the installation of the new prime minister, the upheaval was subsumed in the global shock of the assassination of John F Kennedy. A year later, in October 1964, Sir Alec called a general election. The polls were against him and so were the satirists, who simply could not take seriously the cadaverous-featured drawling aristocrat. But the country was not so sure: the economy was looking up, the hugely respected Hugh Gaitskell had died and been replaced by the wily Harold Wilson, and Labour had been out of office since 1951.
In the end, that last point almost certainly swung the election. The slogan "13 wasted years" was drummed home again and again, and found resonance with an electorate who knew they were living in a new age; one that was no longer represented by the Tory old guard who had propelled an earl into Downing Street.
The result was close, though. Labour won 317 seats, the Conservatives 303, and the Liberals nine. Taking the Speaker and deputies into account, Wilson had a Commons majority of just four, to support him in his promise to deliver Britain into a new age.
Accidental Heroes of the 20th Century - 35: Christine Keeler, Call Girl
Saturday, 10 April 1999 in The Independent
Arguably the least enduring aspect of the so-called Profumo Affair was that it helped nail the coffin lid on 13 years of Conservative government. We've lived through other political cycles since then, and now more easily appreciate that these come and go in fairly predictable patterns. Scandal is a symptom of decline - not a cause.
John Profumo, Harold MacMillan's Minister of War, resigned in 1963 after lying to the House of Commons about his affair with "society girl" Christine Keeler. "Procured" for Lord Astor's Cliveden set by society osteopath Stephen Ward, the 17-year-old Keeler was first spotted by Profumo climbing naked out of the swimming pool as Profumo and his wife, the actress Valerie Hobson, took an evening stroll. There is something almost classical in the encounter - like the Greek god Alpheus's first espial of a river nymph. This was a cautionary tale - but Profumo was presumably too enraptured to remember his Ovid.
It might have ended with Profumo's prompt resignation in 1963 had not the authorities decided to make a scapegoat of Stephen Ward. It was at Ward's trial for living off immoral earnings that Christine Keeler and her co-witness Mandy Rice- Davies came into their own.
There is no doubt that Rice-Davies, not Keeler, was the folk heroine of the trial. Her artless replies to cross-examination de-lighted the public, and her answer on being told that Lord Astor denied having an affair with her - "Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?" - has passed into daily usage. Blonde and brunette, Keeler and Rice-Davies became inseparably linked, although Keeler, at the time and since, has publicly disassociated herself with the "call girl" Rice-Davies.
So what happened to elevate Keeler to the status of heroine? After all, life wasn't very generous to her after Profumo. A nine-month stretch in Holloway for perjury and two divorces led to a poverty-stricken life in a public housing project by the time Joanne Whalley-Kilmer portrayed her in the 1989 film Scandal.
But the thing is, the film was principally about Keeler - not Rice-Davies, who was played in a lesser role by Bridget Fonda. Something had happened between 1963 and 1989 and that thing was a photograph. The famous shot of a naked Christine Keeler astride a black plastic Arne Jacobsen chair - the chair's back keeping her decent - is often misattributed to David Bailey or Terence Donovan. It was in fact taken by the Hong Kong-born snapper Ewis Morley in an upstairs room at Peter Cook's Establishment Club in Soho during the summer of 1963.
The photograph was meant as a publicity still for a projected film about the Profumo affair. "She only agreed to strip after we cleared the room of all attendants and turned down the lights," remembers Morley. "I even offered to turn my back." Keeler always claims she kept her pants on.
Morley remembers a wide-eyed, naive young woman - the exact opposite of everything that the photograph conveys. This became an instant icon of the emergent Swinging Sixties - defiance and liberation in one posture. Popsies as Pop Art. Fallen women were no longer brushed out of sight - they were a fashion statement.
The photograph's potency has endured - shorthand for modern, sexually independent women - and has been reconstructed in advertising campaigns as diverse as the Citroen Saxo and granary bread. Kylie copied it, Joe Orton satirised it, and the pose is a veritable cliche in men's style mags. Last year in Glasgow, the Spice Girls even recreated the pose on stage - giving Christine the ultimate accolade. The progenitor of Girl Power.
Christine Keeler 1963, Lewis Morley (Australian, born 1925), Gelatin-silver print
The urban myth that the photograph of Christine Keeler astride an Arne Jacobsen chair was taken when she was a model is false in more senses than one.
First, the chair used in the photo turns out to be a copy of the original. The hand-hold aperture cut out of the back was a ploy to avoid the legalities of copyright. Secondly the photograph was taken, not on a modelling session, but at the height of the revelations regarding the exposure, of the going ons, of the War Minister and a young female, caught up in an affair which became known as 'The Scandal' or 'The Profumo Affair'.
Photographer Lewis Morley recalls the photo session which led to the creation of a modern icon:
'This photograph was one of a series of publicity shots for an intended film which never saw the light of day. It was not until 1989 that a film of the 1963 happenings was released under the title Scandal. The photographic session took place in my studio, which at that time was on the first floor of the "Establishment" , a satirical night club, part-owned by Peter Cook of "Beyond The Fringe" fame. The satirical sketches took place on a small stage on the ground floor of the club. The Dudley Moore Trio played Jazz in the basement.
'During the session, three rolls of 120 film were shot. The first two rolls had Christine sitting in various positions on the chair and on the floor, dressed in a small leather jerkin. It was at this point that the film producers who were in attendance demanded she strip for some nude photos.
Christine Keeler 1963, Lewis Morley (Australian, born 1925), Gelatin-silver print.
Christine was reluctant to do so, but the producers insisted, saying that it was written in her contract. The situation became rather tense and reached an impasse. I suggested that everyone, including my assistant leave the studio. I turned my back to Christine, telling her to disrobe, sit back to front on the chair. She was now nude, fulfilling the conditions of the contract, but was at the same time hidden.
'We repeated some of the poses used on the previous two rolls of film. I rapidly exposed some fresh positions, some angled from the side and a few slightly looking down. I felt that I had shot enough and took a couple of paces back. Looking up I saw what appeared to be a perfect positioning. I released the shutter one more time, in fact, it was the last exposure on the roll of film.
'Looking at the contact sheet, one can see that this image is smaller than the rest because I had stepped back. It was this pose that became the first published and most used image. The nude session had taken less than five minutes to complete. It wasn't until I developed the film that I discovered that somehow I had misfired one shot and there were only eleven images on a twelve exposure film. How this came about is a mystery to me.'
Johnny Edgecombe, who has died aged 77, fired the gunshots that precipitated the Profumo affair of the 1960s, which brought down the Conservative government of the day and led to Labour's narrow election victory in 1964.
04 Oct 2010 in The Telegraph
Edgecombe, a dope-dealing drifter, was the lover and minder of Christine Keeler, the young nightclub "hostess" who was also the mistress of John Profumo, Secretary of State for War. This irregular state of affairs might never have become public knowledge but for Edgecombe's decision to seek a showdown with Christine Keeler 10 days before Christmas in 1962, following her decision to end their live-in relationship.
Keeler had sought sanctuary at the Marylebone flat of her "mentor", the society osteopath Stephen Ward, where at lunchtime on December 14 an agitated Edgecombe leapt out of a minicab clutching a pistol. When Keeler refused to see him, he attempted to charge down the front door, and then fired several shots at the lock.
He was only one claimant to her affections. As well as Profumo, Keeler was also sleeping with Yevgeny Ivanov, a spy based at the Russian embassy in London under diplomatic cover as assistant naval attaché. Furthermore she had become involved with a vicious Jamaican drug dealer called Aloysius "Lucky" Gordon, who was jealously infatuated with her. When she ended this last affair, Gordon had assaulted her in a London street and held her hostage for two days while wielding an axe.
As a result Edgecombe confronted Gordon in a Soho club and sliced his face with a knife, inflicting a wound that needed 17 stitches. Fearful of reprisals from Gordon, he then asked Keeler to help him find a solicitor so he could surrender himself to police. But Keeler, jealous that Edgecombe (the man she called "the Edge") had taken another lover, refused to help him and said she planned to give evidence against him in court. This decision led him to plot her murder, and thus to the exposure of the whole Profumo story.
When Edgecombe arrived at Ward's Wimpole Mews flat and fired at the front door, it gave the still-deferential newspapers of the day the chance they had been looking for to dig deeper into rumours about Keeler and Profumo that had been circulating in Fleet Street for some time. An apparently motiveless shooting in a quiet London street would normally have attracted little attention; but Edgecombe's appearance in court the following day made the front page of The Daily Telegraph.
Keeler, already threatened by the pressure she had been put under to extract nuclear secrets from Profumo, was left feeling even more vulnerable after what Bernard Levin called Edgecombe's "Sarajevo-like" volley of shots. Three months later, when she failed to turn up at Edgecombe's trial, the dam of press reticence about the case finally burst. On March 15 the Daily Express, signalling the extent of the gathering political storm, ran the banner headline "WAR MINISTER SHOCK" alongside a large picture of Keeler under the heading: "VANISHED".
John Arthur Alexander Edgecombe was born on October 22 1932 in St John's, the capital of Antigua, the youngest of eight children. His father, a sailor known as "Captain Johnny", owned a schooner running gasoline for Esso from Trinidad to Antigua, and his small son often accompanied him until, in 1942, he took American citizenship and disappeared.
The 10-year-old Johnny junior stayed with an uncle in Trinidad, but ran away after only a few weeks, hustling for food and shelter. After returning to Antigua, he sailed as a pantry boy aboard HMS Prospector, carrying sugar to the Tate and Lyle refinery in Liverpool.
From Liverpool he moved to Cardiff, where he slept at a seamen's mission in the Tiger Bay dock area and smoked his first joint. "Within days," he remembered, "I had a full time job smoking dope." He appeared to have had no formal education, and his teenage years floated past on a cloud of marijuana.
Determined to try to find his missing father, he hid on a ship bound for Galveston, Texas, but on arrival was arrested and put back on board for the return trip. When he docked at North Shields, magistrates jailed him for 28 days as a stowaway. Drifting to London on his release, Edgecombe found lodgings in Maida Vale, and – posing as an African prince – persuaded a series of jewellers to show him expensive rings which he and two accomplices proceeded to steal.
The scam soon landed him back in prison, and he served a three-month sentence. Putting his then girlfriend on the street, he combined the trade of pimp with that of running what he claimed was London's first shebeen, an illegal drinking and dope den, from a rented flat in Colville Terrace, Notting Hill, owned by the notorious 1950s slum landlord Peter Rachman.
There he met and first crossed "Lucky" Gordon, who threatened to tip off the police about the shebeen. Edgecombe closed it down, and drifted into the jazz scene, driving musicians like Tubby Hayes, Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie to provincial gigs and back to London overnight. He moved on to dealing dope, mainly to black American GIs who arrived in London at weekends from their bases flush with cash. In September 1962 he met "a very foxy chick" called Christine Keeler and moved into her flat in Sheffield Terrace.
At the Old Bailey in March 1963, Edgecombe was acquitted of assaulting "Lucky" Gordon, but jailed for seven years on the lesser charge of possession a firearm outside Wimpole Mews. A week later Profumo told Parliament that there had been no impropriety in his relationship with Christine Keeler; 10 weeks later he admitted lying, and resigned from the government. For his part, Edgecombe complained of his "unjust" treatment at the hands of the Establishment.
He maintained his conviction had been racially motivated, and served more than five years of his sentence before being released. "The British people wouldn't wear a situation where a government minister was sleeping with the same chick as a black guy," he said.
On his release Edgecombe became a jazz promoter, ran a club called Edges, and found work as a film and television extra. His highly unreliable memoirs, Black Scandal, appeared in 2002.
Johnny Edgecombe, who died on September 26, is survived by two daughters from his marriage to Vibeke Filtenborg, a Danish au pair, and by a daughter by his former partner, Jane Jones.
Scandal (1989) is a British drama film, a fictionalised account of the Profumo Affair. Starring Joanne Whalley as Christine Keeler and John Hurt as Stephen Ward, personalities at the heart of the affair, the film details the scandal which in 1963 rocked the government of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and may have contributed to the defeat of the ruling Conservative Party at the following year's general election. The cast also includes Ian McKellen as John Profumo, Britt Ekland as Mariella Novotny, Bridget Fonda as Mandy Rice-Davies, Leslie Phillips as Lord Astor, and Roland Gift as Johnnie Edgecombe.
The film's theme song "Nothing Has Been Proved" was written and produced by Pet Shop Boys and sung by Dusty Springfield.
The film was screened out of competition at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival.
Christine Keeler: Double exposure
Christine Keeler's notorious affair with John Profumo never seems to lose its charge. The scandal that rocked Sixties Britain has already been made into a film, and now it's to become both a play and a musical. Alice Jones reports
Tuesday, 23 January 2007 in The Independent
From the Wicked Witch of the West to Sister Wendy, these days no life story is immune from the musical treatment. Next in line for an all-singing, all-dancing biographical treatment is Christine Keeler, the 19-year-old model at the heart of the notorious Profumo affair which rocked the Conservative government in 1963. While the heady mix of sex, politics and spies was made into a film, Scandal, in 1989 starring Joanne Whalley as Keeler and Ian McKellen as John Profumo, A Model Girl will be its first musical outing.
As the first modern political sex scandal, the Profumo affair paved the way for countless tawdry tales about the private lives of politicians. From David Mellor and John Major, to David Blunkett and John Prescott, not to mention the Liberal Democrats, affairs of the heart have often eclipsed home affairs in the House of Commons. But in 40 years nothing has come close to the glamour and drama of the Profumo affair, immortalised by Lewis Morley's nude photograph of Keeler astride the sensual curves of an Arne Jacobsen chair.
The young showgirl was introduced to the upper echelons of society by the osteopath Stephen Ward at Lord Astor's country estate, Cliveden, in 1961. She went on to have affairs with Profumo, then Secretary of State for War and, at the same time, Evgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché. The tangled web ended in Keeler's imprisonment, Ward's suicide and Profumo's resignation, and heralded the beginning of the end for Harold Macmillan's government. It also ushered in a whole new era of sexual permissiveness and miniskirts, the birth of pop music and Beatlemania and new rules of engagement for the media as private lives were made public property for the first time.
"Great musicals are often set against the backdrop of historic watersheds," says Richard Alexander, the writer of A Model Girl. The story of a politician censured for lying about his affair provides a "useful contrast" with the current trend for spin and deception, while the media coverage at the time planted the seeds for today's pervasive and invasive celebrity culture. "If this happened today," says Alexander, "Christine would be in the Big Brother house."
Alexander has been working on the script for five years, attempting to establish some truths amid myriad reports on the scandal. "Everybody's autobiography differs. Christine - who has written three - differs with herself," he says. Of the main players, only Profumo, who died in March last year, maintained his silence. Alexander delayed the completion of his play until a biography written by the disgraced politician's son, David, was published in September. "[Profumo] never commented but I felt he might have told David. In fact he remained his totally charming, inscrutable self and told his son nothing."
Alexander's "investigative crusade" took him to the National Archives Office and forced him to navigate the vagaries of the Freedom of Information Act. He discovered that records pertaining to Stephen Ward's trial would not be released until 2045, and MI5 notes on the case were still heavily redacted, regarded as "too sensitive" to this day.
As news of his quest spread, however, he began to "get calls at strange hours of the night" from eye-witnesses. From these he has pieced together a new version of events which promises to raise some intriguing questions. Why was Ward investigated by more than 50 police for the relatively minor offence of living off immoral earnings? What happened to Ivanov?
The action will unfold via a swinging soundtrack of flugel horns and Hammond organs, composed by Marek Rymaszewski. The title song, "A Model Girl", has Ward crooning to his new protégée, "There's no one in Who's Who, who won't fall for you", over a breathy, doo-wop chorus of "ooh my baby".
In the role of Keeler, director Ruth Carney has cast Emma Williams, previously known to musical lovers for her squeaky-clean Truly Scrumptious in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. "She brings the innocence that Keeler has to have," says Carney. "Audiences will see how that innocence has matured since she was 19 and playing Truly Scrumptious, in the same way that Keeler matures throughout the piece."
Williams isn't fazed by her move into a raunchier role. "It's not all about sex," she protests. "A lot of it is having to establish what was acceptable and what wasn't and to understand that women were not really allowed to enjoy sex. She was the first of a new generation."
The 23-year-old actress has read biographies but has been unable to run her interpretation by the woman in question. "She hasn't been forthcoming and I have to respect that and step away," she says. "I hope that she might come and see the show and she will find my interpretation respectful and truthful." Keeler, now 64 and living in London under an assumed name, has been sent drafts of the script, but to no avail. "She made some attempts via her lawyers to say Profumo was her copyright," says Alexander. "But you can't copyright history."
Just two weeks after A Model Girl opens in Greenwich, Keeler opens in Highgate, with Alice Coulthard in the title role. Unlike the musical, this project has Keeler's full approval, being based on her 2001 autobiography, The Truth at Last. The actor Paul Nicholas, business partner of producer David Ian, bought the rights to the book, having spotted its theatrical potential. "I think Christine just wants to put it out there and let it lay to rest. She's had to live with being Christine Keeler for a long time and it's not easy," he says.
Although Keeler will feature an early 1960s soundtrack of Shirley Bassey, Adam Faith, The Platters and Ritchie Valens, it is a straight play written by Gill Adams, who spent many hours consulting Keeler. "I wanted to get under the skin of the woman - we'd talk about make-up, how she felt when she wore certain clothes, the sexuality of a young girl realising she is beautiful and growing up during such an exciting period." Adams "felt like a detective" as she wrote and her script promises revelations of its own. "The relationship between Ward and Keeler will be the surprise more than anything else."
It is, to all intents and purposes, Keeler's play. "She drives the story right from the start. It wasn't easy for me - she approved every single word, down to the last letter," says Adams.
With not one but two plays dedicated to her story, Keeler's theatrical hour has finally arrived. As for Lembit: the Musical! with songs by the Cheeky Girls - it can only be a matter of time.
Macmillan to publish Christine Keeler's confession
By Catherine Milner, Arts Correspondent in The Telegraph
10 Sep 2000
An autobiography by Christine Keeler, the party girl whose revelations almost brought down Harold Macmillan's Conservative Government in 1963, is due to be published by Macmillan publishing house, the company he once ran.
Christine Keeler: the book is said to include 'sensational' revelations
The book, which will cast new light on Britain's biggest political scandal since the war, includes new confessions by Miss Keeler, 57, about her pillow talk with John Profumo, then the War Secretary, as well as Yevgeny Ivanov, the Soviet attaché with whom she was also sleeping.
It is being published early next year by Macmillan, which Harold Macmillan ran with his brother Daniel before he entered politics. David Macmillan, who is director of the publishing house, and his brother Alexander, Lord Stockton, who is President of the company are the grandsons of Harold Macmillan.
The book, the contents of which are secret, has been written by Miss Keeler with Douglas Thompson, a biographer. It includes intimate photographs taken by Miss Keeler which have never been seen before. A publishing insider involved with the book said: "Keeler now thinks she can tell everything. "It is not just sex but a detailed account of everything that went on. It will make disturbing reading for some people."
It is said to focus on Miss Keeler's bitterness towards Mandy Rice-Davies, her one-time friend and party girl who was involved in exposing the scandal. Miss Rice-Davies, when told that her allegations had been denied by Lord Astor, a key player in the drama, famously coined the rebuttal: "He would, wouldn't he."
The 500-page book is said to include "sensational" revelations which Miss Keeler will elaborate on this Wednesday when she revisits Cliveden, Bucks, to attend a publishing seminar organised by Macmillan. The house was the family home of the Astors during the scandal, and it was there, in 1961, that Miss Keeler was introduced to Profumo by the osteopath Stephen Ward, having stripped naked by the swimming pool.
Last year she went back to Cliveden and described the experience as "sad". She blamed Ward for making her name a "sullied dishcloth". In a television interview, she said: "Stephen dared me to take off my swimsuit and I did. Then all of a sudden Bill Astor and Jack Profumo came out and Jack started chasing me and Bill put the floodlights on.
"I do think that the things I did might have endangered national security. But I was set up. I went to prison. I suffered dearly for the wrong I had done. I must admit I wasn't interested in Jack Profumo, but Stephen had other plans. He could do anything with me. I was just a kid. Betrayal was Stephen's life."
In March 1963 Profumo lied to the Commons, denying an affair with Miss Keeler. MPs feared that state secrets might pass via her to the Russians. Three months later Profumo confessed and resigned his seat. Macmillan resigned the following year on health grounds. Miss Keeler, now married, lives in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex.
The Crown:
What was Prince Charles really like as young boy – and why did he hate his time
at Gordonstoun?
The Crown
season two explores the relationship between Prince Philip and his son Charles
as he is sent away to school – but what's the history behind the drama?
Prince
Charles is at the heart of the second season of The Crown on Netflix as the
heir to the throne grows up. Find out more about the history of Prince Charles
and his time at school, along with who plays him in the Netflix drama, below.
What was
Prince Philip like as a young man?
Discover
the real history behind Netflix’s The Crown
What was
the Suez Crisis and why did it bring down Prime Minister Anthony Eden?
The Crown
season 2: was Prince Philip unfaithful?
Who plays
young Prince Charles in The Crown?
The Crown -
young Prince Charles with the Queen Mother and Princess Anne
In The
Crown’s second season, young Prince Charles and Princess Anne are actually
played by two different sets of child actors. The roles are re-cast halfway
through as the children age.
The first
Prince Charles we meet in season two is played by Billy Jenkins. He also
starred in season one and has also appeared in the TV series Humans.
The second
Prince Charles is played by Julian Baring, who takes over the role to deliver
an emotional performance in episode nine as we take a deep dive into Philip and
Charles’ father-son relationship.
Did Prince
Philip force Charles to go to Gordonstoun?
Yes, and it
didn’t go very well.
Charles had
an unusual – and unhappy – education. In his early years the prince thrived as
he was educated at home by his governess Catherine Peebles (“Mipsy”), who later
described him as dreamy and thoughtful. However, at the age of eight it was
announced that the Prince would attend school: he was sent first to Hill House
School in London and then transferred to Cheam School, the oldest private
school in the country.
Cheam was
not a big success, as he struggled to fit in and make friends. Reportedly a
sensitive child, Charles was deeply homesick and attached to his teddy bear.
However, his headmaster Peter Beck later told Radio Times: “Educationally he
was a very hard-working and able boy, very lucid in spoken and written work.
Some of his written work was very good indeed.”
As the
prince came towards the end of his years at Cheam, the Queen and her husband
had to decide where to send him next. Philip was keen for his son to follow in
his footsteps and attend the school where he had spent his formative years:
Gordonstoun, a remote school in north-east Scotland.
Not
everyone was keen. Charles was very close to his maternal grandmother, the
Queen Mother, who appreciated his sensitive nature and encouraged his interest
in music, art and culture. The Queen Mother wrote to Elizabeth urging her to
intervene and keep him closer to home.
Arguing
that he would be “terribly cut off and lonely in the far north,” she wrote in a
letter on 23rd May 1961: “I suppose he will be taking his entrance exam for
Eton soon. I do hope he passes because it might be the ideal school for one of
his character and temperament.”
But the
Duke of Edinburgh won the debate, arguing that Eton was too close to Windsor and
London and the boy would have more privacy from the press in Gordonstoun. He
had taken responsibility for family decisions, while his wife concerned herself
with affairs of state – and the Queen let him make the decision. So Philip, a
qualified pilot, ceremoniously flew his son to an RAF base in Scotland and then
drove the rest of the way.
Was Prince
Charles miserable at Gordonstoun school?
Gordonstoun
was completely wrong for Charles. Where the athletic and confident Philip had
thrived, Charles was absolutely miserable. He later referred to his years at
Gordonstoun as “a prison sentence”, calling the school “Colditz in kilts”.
Each day
started with a run (whatever the weather) and then a cold shower. The kids
slept in dormitories on hard bunks, with the windows open all year around, and
older kids were free to enforce discipline on the younger students.
According
to his fellow school friends, Charles was relentlessly bullied. His
contemporary Ross Benson reported: “He was crushingly lonely for most of his
time there. The wonder is that he survived with his sanity intact.”
With a
Prince at the school, the rules became stricter (no drinking, no smoking, less
freedom), and the boys took that out on poor Charles. Anyone who tried to be
his friend or even talk to him was teased with slurping sounds for sucking up
to him. On the rugby field he was a prime target.
Charles
wrote in a letter home in 1963: “The people in my dormitory are foul. Goodness,
they are horrid. I don’t know how anybody could be so foul.” In another, he
told his mother: “I hardly get any sleep in the House because I snore and I get
hit on the head all the time. It’s absolute hell.” In response, the Duke of
Edinburgh sent his son stern letters urging him to be stronger and more
resourceful.
As we see
in The Crown, the young prince was guarded by the detective Donald Green, who
did his best to be unobtrusive. Green became a friend and father figure, until
he was sacked for letting 14-year-old Charles order a cherry brandy on a school
trip – in the presence of a tabloid reporter. Charles was devastated to lose
his one ally.
Still,
Charles stayed on at Gordonstoun, eventually becoming Head Boy and earning two
A-levels: History (grade B) and French (grade C).
The Queen
and her husband also sent Prince Andrew and Prince Edward to Gordonstoun.
What was
Prince Philip’s relationship like with his son Charles?
The
penultimate episode of The Crown is enough to have even the most ardent
republican weeping as we see the gulf of understanding between father and son.
Prince Philip, failing to respect the ways his son is different from him and
love him for the boy he is; and Prince Charles, unable to live up to his
father’s expectations and constantly unable to please him.
Prince
Charles later spoke openly about his difficult relationship with his father,
most notably to Jonathan Dimbleby for an authorised biography in the early
1990s during the wreckage of his separation from Diana.
He spoke of
a father who was a tough disciplinarian with a forceful personality, whose
harsh words had forced him to retreat into himself. Friends who were authorised
to speak to Dimbleby for the book described Prince Philip “belittling” and
“bullying” his son.
In his
younger years, Charles idolised his father and sought to please him, taking up
his sports like polo and even (some observed) starting to walk like him, with
one arm behind his back.
Later there
was more anger, and as biographer Sally Bedell Smith notes, he has continued to
complain about his years at Gordonstoun well into his sixties.
The Crown
season 2 is available on Netflix now
The Lonely
Heir: Inside the Isolating Boarding School Days of Prince Charles
Growing up,
Prince Charles struggled to please his parents and to fill a role that was
against his nature. In an adaptation from her new book, Sally Bedell Smith
chronicles the brutal bullying the heir endured at school, and the unlikely
place in which he found solace.
Before the
stroke of midnight on November 14, 1948, Prince Charles Philip Arthur George
officially became public property. While his 22-year-old mother, Princess
Elizabeth, rested in her bedroom suite in Buckingham Palace, her newborn heir
was brought to the vast gilded ballroom by the royal midwife, Sister Helen
Rowe. Under the 46-foot-high ceilings—juxtaposed with the monarch’s massive
throne draped in red-and-gold embroidered velvet—the infant was swaddled in
white blankets and placed in a simple cot for viewing by the royal courtiers
who served his grandfather King George VI and his grandmother Queen Elizabeth.
“Just a
plasticine head,” observed Major Thomas Harvey, the Queen’s private secretary.
“Poor little chap, two and a half hours after being born, he was being looked
at by outsiders—but with great affection and good will.”
Charles was
hemmed in by high expectations and scrutiny from the start—unlike his mother,
who had 10 relatively carefree years of childhood. It was only when her father
unexpectedly took the throne, in 1936, on the abdication of his older brother,
King Edward VIII, that Princess Elizabeth assumed her position as next in line.
In
December, four-week-old Charles was christened beneath the ornate dome of the
Music Room at Buckingham Palace. The Archbishop of Canterbury doused the little
prince with water from the river Jordan that had been poured into the gold Lily
Font, designed by Prince Albert and used for all of his and Queen Victoria’s
children. Delighted with her firstborn, Elizabeth breast-fed him for two
months, until she contracted measles and was forced to stop. Yet she was often
away from Charles in his infancy, spending as much time as she could with her
husband, Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, an officer in the Royal Navy, who was
posted to Malta in October 1949. She managed to celebrate her son’s first
birthday, but afterward she was abroad, and separated from her son, for long
intervals.
Prince
Philip scarcely knew his son for the first two years of the boy’s life, though
on his return from overseas duty he did take the time to teach Charles to shoot
and fish, and to swim in the Buckingham Palace pool. When Prince Charles hit
bottom after his separation from Diana, in 1992, he unburdened himself about
the miseries of his youth to Jonathan Dimbleby, who was writing an authorized
biography. Dimbleby noted that, as a little boy, Charles was “easily cowed by
the forceful personality of his father,” whose rebukes for “a deficiency in
behaviour or attitude . . . easily drew tears.” While brusque, Philip was
“well-meaning but unimaginative.” Friends who spoke with Charles’s permission
described the duke’s “belittling” and even “bullying” his son. Charles was less
harsh about his mother, but his opinion had a bitter edge. She was “not
indifferent so much as detached.”
Nearly two
decades later, in 2012, Charles tried to make amends in a TV documentary
tribute to the Queen on her Diamond Jubilee. Home movies depicted an idyllic
childhood at the family’s country estates at Sandringham, in Norfolk, and
Balmoral, in Scotland. Footage of Prince Philip teetering on a tricycle and
zooming down a slide on the Royal Yacht Britannia contradicted his reputation
as a tetchy martinet, and scenes of the Queen romping with her children were
meant to dispel the notion of her being distant and unaffectionate.
Charles was
sensitive from the start, and his finely tuned antennae were susceptible to
slights and rebukes. During one luncheon at Broadlands, the home of Philip’s
uncle Louis Mountbatten, the guests were served wild strawberries. Charles,
aged eight, methodically began removing the stems from the berries on his
plate. “Don’t take the little stems out,” Edwina Mountbatten said. “Look, you
can pick them up by the stems and dip them in sugar.” Moments later, his cousin
Pamela Hicks noticed that “the poor child was trying to put all the stems back
on. That was so sad, and so typical of how sensitive he was.”
As Philip
watched these traits emerging, he worried that Charles could become weak and
vulnerable, so he set about toughening him up. Asked in an interview when he
was 20 years old whether his father had been a “tough disciplinarian” and
whether he had been told “to sit down and shut up,” Charles answered without
hesitation: “The whole time, yes.”
More often
than not, the duke was a blunt instrument, unable to resist personal remarks.
He was sarcastic with his daughter, Anne, as well. But Charles’s younger
sister, a confident extrovert, could push back, while the young prince wilted,
retreating farther into his shell.
When
Elizabeth became Queen, her dedication to her duties meant even less time for
her children. She relied increasingly on her husband to make the major family
decisions. Neither parent was physically demonstrative. That lack of tactile
connection was achingly apparent in May 1954, when the Queen and Prince Philip
greeted five-year-old Charles and three-year-old Anne with handshakes after an absence
of nearly six months on a tour of Commonwealth nations. Martin Charteris,
Elizabeth’s onetime private secretary, observed that Charles “must have been
baffled by what a natural mother-son relationship was meant to be like.”
Charles was
indulged by his maternal grandmother, the Queen Mother, and visited her
frequently at Royal Lodge, her pale-pink home in Windsor Great Park, when his
parents were away. As early as age two, he would sit on her bed playing with
her lipsticks, rattling the tops, marveling at the colors. When he was five,
she let him explore Shaw Farm, in the Windsor Home Park. She also opened up a
world of music and art that Charles felt his parents didn’t adequately
appreciate. “My grandmother was the person who taught me to look at things,” he
recalled.
As heir to
the throne, he made an inviting target for school-mates, who ridiculed his
protruding ears.
She never
hesitated to give her grandson the hugs he craved. She encouraged his kind and
gentle nature—the eagerness to share his candy with other children, and, when
choosing sides for games, to select the weakest first for his team. “Her
protective side clocked in on his behalf,” said her longtime lady-in-waiting,
Dame Frances Campbell-Preston. At the same time, with the best intentions, she
fueled the young prince’s tendency to self-pity, which fed one of his strongest
traits, known as “whinging”—the more pointed British word for whining.
II. “OUT
FOR A DUCK”
Charles’s
early home-schooling was supervised by Catherine Peebles, his sensible
Glaswegian governess, nicknamed “Mispy,” who felt compassion for his
insecurities and his tendency to “draw back” at the hint of a raised voice.
Eager to please, he plodded diligently through his lessons but was easily
distracted and dreamy. “He is young to think so much,” Winston Churchill
remarked after observing Charles shortly before his fourth birthday.
One book
that caught the prince’s eye and helped hone his sense of humor was Hilaire
Belloc’s Cautionary Verses, a volume of poetry about the consequences of bad
behavior. It brimmed with quirkiness and bizarre characters—a precursor to the
sketches by the Goons and Monty Python comedy troupes, two happily subversive
influences in his life. But by the time he was eight, the Queen and Prince Philip
had decided that he needed the company of children in a classroom, making him
the first heir to the throne to be educated outside the palace.
Early in
1957, he arrived in a royal limousine at Hill House School, in Knightsbridge,
London. For all his parents’ efforts to put Charles in a normal
environment—taking the bus to the playing fields and sweeping the classroom
floors—he had difficulty mixing with the other boys. A newsreel of the school’s
“field day” of sports competitions that spring showed a solemn prince
introducing his parents to his classmates, who obediently bowed.
Charles had
ability in reading and writing, although he struggled with mathematics. His
first-term report noted that “he simply loves drawing and painting” and showed
musical aptitude as well. But after a mere six months, his father transferred
him to Cheam School, in Hampshire, where Philip himself had been sent at the
age of eight. Although it was founded in 1645, the school had a progressive
tilt, avoiding the exclusive atmosphere of other preparatory boarding schools.
Charles was
just shy of his ninth birthday but considerably more vulnerable than his
father. He suffered from acute homesickness, clutching his teddy bear and
weeping frequently in private. “I’ve always preferred my own company or just a
one to one,” he has said. As heir to the throne, he made an inviting target for
school-mates, who ridiculed his protruding ears and called the pudgy prince
“fatty.” He fell into a routine that included weekly letters home—the beginning
of his passion for written correspondence. In the tradition of the time, he
braved beatings from two different headmasters for flouting the rules. “I am
one of those for whom corporal punishment actually worked,” he grimly recalled.
Charles had
a fragile constitution. He suffered from chronic sinus infections and was
hospitalized for a tonsillectomy in May 1957. Later that year, when he was
bed-ridden at school with Asian flu, his parents didn’t visit him. (Both had
been inoculated, so there was no fear of contagion.) Instead, before leaving
for a royal tour of Canada, in October, the Queen sent him a farewell letter.
The Queen and Prince Philip were again on tour, in India, when Charles came
down with measles, at age 12.
Physically
uncoordinated and slow as well as overweight, Charles had no talent for Rugby,
cricket, or soccer—the prestige schoolboy sports. During vacations he joined
local boys who lived near Balmoral for cricket matches. “I would invariably
walk boldly out to the crease,” he recalled, “only to return, ignominiously, a
few minutes later when I was out for a duck”—that is, having failed to score
any runs. Elizabeth had taught Charles to ride, starting at age four. He was
timorous on horseback, while his sister, Anne, was bold. Mostly he feared
jumping. Anne’s equine prowess pleased her mother, and Philip saw a kindred
spirit in her confidence and fearlessness.
Charles’s
loneliness and unhappiness at Cheam were painfully obvious to his family. In a
letter to Prime Minister Anthony Eden at the beginning of 1958, the Queen
wrote, “Charles is just beginning to dread the return to school next week—so
much worse for the second term.” She knew that Cheam was “a misery” to her son,
according to a biography of Charles by Dermot Morrah, which was sanctioned by
the royal family. Morrah observed that the Queen thought her son was “a slow
developer.”
Asked as he
was approaching his 21st birthday to describe the moment he first realized as a
little boy that he was heir to the throne, Charles replied, “I think it’s
something that dawns on you with the most ghastly inexorable sense . . . and
slowly you get the idea that you have a certain duty and responsibility.” He
did, however, experience an unanticipated jolt in the summer of 1958 while
watching the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in Cardiff, Wales, on
television with some school-mates in the headmaster’s study at Cheam. Suddenly
he heard his mother declare in a recorded speech that she was naming him the
Prince of Wales—a mortifying moment for a shy nine-year-old boy who wanted
desperately to be seen as normal and already carried the burden of his six
other titles. Even as a very young boy, he was marked out as different.
The most
important experience at Cheam was Charles’s discovery that he felt at home on a
stage—a helpful skill for a public figure. For his role in a play about King
Richard III, called The Last Baron, he spent hours listening to a recording of
Laurence Olivier in a production of Shakespeare’s Richard III. It was November
1961, and once again his parents were abroad, this time in Ghana. In their
place, the Queen Mother and Princess Anne watched the heir to the throne
perform as Richard, the 15th-century monarch famous for his deformity.
“After a
few minutes on to the stage shambled a most horrible looking creature,” the
Queen Mother wrote to her daughter, “a leering vulgarian, with a dreadful
expression on his twisted mouth; & to my horror I began to realize that
this was my dear grandson!” She added that “he acted his part very well” and
that “in fact he made the part quite revolting!”
Charles
formed no lasting friendships during his five years at Cheam. The Queen Mother
made a strong pitch to his parents for him to continue his education at Eton
College, the ancient boarding school near Windsor Castle. She knew that Philip
had been pushing for his own alma mater, Gordonstoun, located in an isolated
part of northeastern Scotland. In a letter to the Queen in May 1961, the Queen
Mother described Eton as “ideal . . . for one of his character &
temperament.” If he went to Gordonstoun, “he might as well be at school
abroad.” She pointed out, quite reasonably, that the children of the Queen’s
friends were at Eton.
But Philip
doubled down on the value of a rough-and-tumble education, arguing that
Gordonstoun would be the best place for his timorous son. The Queen sided with
Philip, sealing Charles’s fate.
III. THE
PRISON OF PRIVILEGE
The Queen
did not accompany her husband in May 1962, when he delivered Charles to
Gordonstoun. A certified pilot, Philip flew Charles to a Royal Air Force base
in Scotland and drove him the rest of the way. With a 17th-century gray stone
building at its center (built in a circular design, according to legend, by Sir
Robert Gordon so that no devils could fly into corners), the campus had an
undistinguished collection of seven pre-fabricated wooden residences that had
previously been used as R.A.F. barracks. The prince was assigned to Windmill
Lodge with 13 other boys, the start of an ordeal that he viewed as nothing less
than a “prison sentence.”
The
school’s founder, Kurt Hahn, was a progressive educator who had been a Rhodes
scholar at Oxford and ran a school in southern Germany called Salem. Hahn, who
was Jewish, fled to Britain after Hitler came to power. He established
Gordonstoun in 1934, with Prince Philip among the first students. The school’s
motto: “There is more in you.”
Hahn sought
to develop character along with intellect. He promoted Plato’s idealistic
vision in The Republic of a world where “philosophers become kings . . . , or
till those we now call kings and rulers truly become philosophers, and
political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.” Contemplating
his future reign, Charles would identify with the philosopher king, a notion
later encouraged by well-meaning advisers who championed the idea of an
“activist” monarch who would impose his wide-ranging worldview on his subjects.
Physical
challenges at Gordonstoun were at the heart of building character. The testing
began with the boys’ attire (short trousers throughout the year) and the living
conditions (open windows at all times in the grim dormitories). The day began
with a run before breakfast, followed by a frigid shower. “It was a memorable
experience, especially during the winter,” recalled Somerset Waters, a
school-mate of Charles’s. The prince nevertheless became so accustomed to the
morning ritual that as an adult he continued to take a cold shower each day, in
addition to the hot bath drawn by his valet.
Hahn aimed
to create an egalitarian society where “the sons of the powerful can be
emancipated from the prison of privilege,” an ethos that suited Philip when he
was there. His assertive personality and Teutonic sensibility helped him adjust
to the school’s demands. He was also a natural athlete who served as captain of
both the cricket and hockey teams. Charles had neither his father’s resilient
temperament nor his relative anonymity, and he lacked the physical prowess to
command respect. Encumbered by his titles and his status as heir to the throne,
he was singled out as a victim from his first day. “Bullying was virtually
institutionalized and very rough,” said John Stonborough, a classmate of
Charles’s.
In 1963,
tabloids picked up the “cherry brandy” incident; Charles was devastated when
his friend and mentor, Donald Green (in circle, left), was fired.
The
housemaster at Charles’s dorm was Robert Whitby, “a truly nasty piece of work,”
recalled Stonborough. “He was vicious, a classic bully, a weak man. If he
didn’t like you, he took it out on you. He was wrong for Charles.” Whitby, like
the other housemasters, handed over the running of the houses to senior boys,
who imposed a form of martial law, with ritualized psychological and physical
abuse that included tying boys up in laundry baskets under a cold shower. Few
students would walk with Charles to meals or class. Those boys who tried to
befriend the prince were derided with “slurping” noises. Many years later
Charles complained, with evident anguish, that since his schooldays people were
always “moving away from me, because they don’t want to be seen as sucking up.”
As at
Cheam, he was taunted for his jug ears, which his great-uncle Earl Mountbatten
unavailingly urged his parents to have surgically pinned back. During
intra-house Rugby matches, teammates and opponents alike pummeled Charles in
the scrum. “I never saw him react at all,” recalled Stonborough. “He was very
stoic. He never fought back.” At night in the dormitory, the bullies tormented
Charles, who detailed the abuse in anguished letters to friends and relatives.
Charles
found one escape at the nearby home of Captain Iain Tennant and his wife, Lady
Margaret. She was the sister of a childhood friend of the Queen’s, David Airlie
(the 13th earl). Tennant was chairman of Gordonstoun, so he could extend the
privilege of weekend visits, when Charles would “cry his eyes out,” said Sir
Malcolm Ross, who served as one of the Queen’s longtime senior advisers. “Iain
and Margy really saved him from complete misery,” said David Airlie’s wife,
Virginia.
A crucial
day-to-day support for Charles was Donald Green, the royal bodyguard who, in
time, became a father figure. Green stood six feet five, dressed well, drove a
Land Rover, and seemed “slightly James Bond-ish” to the other boys. Green was
Charles’s one constant friend, although there was little he could do about the
abuse that occurred within the dormitories. This friendship, more readily made
than with Charles’s peers, set the prince’s lifelong pattern of seeking company
with his elders.
In June
1963, during Charles’s second year, he was sailing on the school ketch, the
Pinta, to the Isle of Lewis. The boys were taken to a pub in the village at
Stornoway Harbor, where the 14-year-old prince ordered a cherry brandy. “I said
the first drink that came into my head,” he recalled, “because I’d drunk it
before, when it was cold, out shooting.” Unbeknownst to Charles, a tabloid
reporter was present, and his foray into under-age drinking became banner
headlines in the tabloids as “the whole world exploded around my ears.”
Afterward, the Metropolitan Police fired Don Green, robbing Charles of an ally
and confidant. Charles was devastated, saying later that “I have never been
able to forgive them for doing that. . . . I thought it was the end of the
world.”
Charles had
middling success in his coursework—with the exception of his declamatory
ability—but he found a creative refuge in the art room presided over by a kind
and somewhat effete master in his 20s named Robert Waddell. The prince
gravitated toward pottery rather than painting—“like an idiot,” he later said.
Classical music served as a balm as well. His grandmother had taken him to see
a concert by cellist Jacqueline du Pré, inspiring him to take up the instrument
at age 14. “It had such a rich deep sound,” he recalled. “I’d never heard
sounds like it.”
Gordonstoun
nearly extinguished Charles’s budding interest in Shakespeare, as he and his
classmates “ground our way” through Julius Caesar for standardized tests. The
Bard came alive only after the arrival in 1964 of a new English master, Eric
Anderson—like the art teacher Waddell, also in his 20s—who encouraged Charles
to act in several of Shakespeare’s dramas. In November 1965 he played the lead
in Macbeth. His interpretation, said Anderson, evoked “a sensitive soul who is
behaving in a way that is really uncharacteristic of him because of other
forces.” Charles was excited about the prospect of his parents’ coming to see a
performance. But as he “lay there and thrashed about” onstage, he wrote in a
letter, “all I could hear was my father and ‘Ha, ha, ha.’ ” Afterward, he asked
Prince Philip, “Why did you laugh?” “It sounds like the Goons,” said his
father—a dagger to the heart of a young man so eager to please.
He
similarly disappointed Philip in team sports, although he did develop
considerable skill in the more solitary pursuit of fishing, along with
traditional upper-crust shooting. At 13, Charles shot his first stag, steeling
himself to the sight of the beast being eviscerated by servants on the hillside
at Balmoral.
In 1961, he
took up polo, eager to follow his father. “I was all for it,” said Charles. “At
least you stay on the ground”—as opposed to jumping over fences in fox-hunting.
By 1964, Charles was applying himself to the sport more seriously. That year,
he also started playing practice matches with Philip at the Household Brigade
Polo Club, on Smith’s Lawn, at Windsor Great Park. Still a censorious figure,
Philip nevertheless was idolized by Charles. The young prince began to mimic
his mannerisms—walking with one arm behind his back, gesturing with his right
forefinger, clasping his hands for emphasis, and pushing up the sleeve of his
left arm.
IV. “POMMIE
BASTARD”
With
renewed determination to give his son backbone, Philip made the unusual
decision to send him to Australia at age 17 for two terms in the outback at
Timbertop, the wilderness branch of the Geelong Church of England Grammar
School, in Melbourne. Other than a trip on the Britannia to Libya, at age five,
it was Charles’s first time leaving Europe.
Philip
assigned David Checketts, his equerry—an aide-de-camp entrusted with
logistics—to supervise his son’s stay Down Under. Unlike other royal advisers,
the 36-year-old Checketts was decidedly middle-class. The product of a
state-run grammar school, he had served in the Royal Air Force. His
down-to-earth manner put the uncertain prince at ease.
Charles and
Checketts arrived in Australia in early February 1966. They were greeted by a
daunting contingent of more than 300 reporters and photographers that the
prince endured with gritted teeth. At Timbertop he shared a bedroom and sitting
room with a handpicked roommate, Geelong’s head boy.
The prince
was liberated by the informality of a country where, as he quickly discerned,
“there is no such thing as aristocracy or anything like it.” For the first
time, he was judged on “how people see you, and feel about you.” Students and
masters treated him as one of them, and to his surprise he felt little
homesickness. He was mildly teased as a “Pommie,” Australian slang for
Englishman, but faced none of the sadistic hazing endemic at Gordonstoun.
The boys
did only a modicum of studying. Timbertop was all about physical challenges,
which Charles now embraced with surprising success. He undertook cross-country
expeditions in blistering heat, logging as many as 70 miles in three
days—climbing five peaks along the way—and spending nights freezing in a sleeping
bag. He proudly relayed his accomplishments in his letters home.
He
encountered leeches, snakes, bull ants, and funnel-web spiders, and joined the
other students in chopping and splitting wood, feeding pigs, picking up litter,
and cleaning out fly traps—“revolting glass bowls seething with flies and very
ancient meat.” It was a more physically testing experience than Gordonstoun,
“but it was jolly good for the character and, in many ways, I loved it and
learnt a lot from it.” On his own terms, in the right circumstances, he showed
his toughness and proved to his father that he was not, in fact, a weakling.
On weekends
he relished ordinary life with David Checketts’s family at the farm they rented
near the small town of Lillydale. He indulged his passion for fishing, helped
David’s wife, Leila, in the kitchen, played with their three children, and
watched television in his pajamas. In completely relaxed surroundings he
perfected his talent for mimicry by performing routines from his favorite
characters on The Goon Show, which to his “profound regret” had ended its run
on the radio in 1960. One of his best efforts was Peter Sellers’s falsetto
“Bluebottle.”
Charles
reveled in the sheer Goons silliness. (Seagoon: “Wait! I’ve got a hunch!”
Grytpype-Thynne: “It suits you!”) Later in life he would rely on a sense of
absurdity as an antidote to his oppressive surroundings. Goons humor, typically
British, was all about breaking the rules, which carried an extra frisson of
pleasure for the heir to the throne.
Charles
enjoyed his six months in Australia “mainly because it was such a contrast to
everything he couldn’t stand about Gordonstoun,” said one of his advisers,
recalling the bullying that had so tormented him. He also showed his mettle
during some 50 official engagements—his first exposure to crowds on his own. “I
took the plunge and went over and talked to people,” he recalled. “That
suddenly unlocked a completely different feeling, and I was then able to
communicate and talk to people so much more.” The Australians, in turn,
discovered “a friendly, intelligent, natural boy with a good sense of humor,”
said Thomas Garnett, the headmaster of Timbertop, “someone who by no means has
an easy task ahead of him in life.” When he left, in July 1966, his mates gave
him a rousing “three cheers for Prince Charles—a real Pommie bastard!”
V. SQUARE
PEG, ROUND HOLE
After an
extended summertime stay at Balmoral, Charles returned to Gordonstoun in the
autumn of 1966 for his final year. Headmaster Robert Chew named him head boy,
known by the Platonic term “Guardian.” Among the prince’s privileges as
Guardian was his own bedroom in the apartment assigned to Robert Waddell, “the
quiet alter ego of Gordonstoun,” in the view of Charles’s cousin and godson
Timothy Knatchbull, who later attended the school. “With his tittle-tattle and
his mini-snobbery . . . [Waddell] had the sort of mind of a Victorian matron.
He was a wonderful other pole of Gordonstoun, away from the sort of
knobby-kneed brigade.” Charles’s only lasting friendships from his five years
on the shores of the Moray Firth were with his older masters, Anderson and
Waddell.
After he
left with his parents for Balmoral at the end of July 1967, Charles obediently
said that Gordonstoun had taught him self-control and self-discipline, and had
given “shape and form and tidiness” to his life, although in fact he was
personally disorganized. Always a correct, dutiful, and seemingly mature figure
in the public eye, Charles nevertheless remained socially awkward and
emotionally immature, even as he appeared old before his time. Surprisingly,
his parents acknowledged to authorized royal biographer Dermot Morrah that the
Gordonstoun experiment had fallen short of their hopes, and that Charles was “a
square peg in a round hole.” Morrah wrote in To Be a King, his 1968 book about
Charles’s early life, that the school had driven the prince only “further in
upon himself.” Well into his 60s, Charles continued to complain about the
unhappiness he had felt at Gordonstoun. And as his cousin Pamela Hicks
observed, “he can never leave anything behind him.”
‘The assault changed me completely. I was a model student until that evening’: John
Rape, child
abuse and Prince Charles’s former school
One of
Scotland’s leading schools is facing claims by former students that they were
abused by paedophiles. Alex Renton reveals how the country’s archaic laws are
failing to bring them justice
‘The
assault changed me completely. I was a model student until that evening’: John.
Alex Renton
Sunday 12
April 2015 08.00 BST Last modified on Monday 13 April 2015 14.49 BST
It was the
happiest time of the school year. Kate, which is not her real name, and her
class of 12- and 13-year-olds would soon leave Aberlour House, their home for a
third or more of their lives. Next term most of them would start at the senior
school, Gordonstoun, a famously severe Scottish institution that Prince Charles
had once described as “Colditz in kilts”. Fifteen children, all boarders and
fresh out of exams, set off into the Scottish mountains for a week’s camping.
“Exped” is
one of Gordonstoun’s traditions, born of the unique vision of the school’s
founder, the educational innovator Kurt Hahn. A refugee from Nazi Germany, Hahn
is most famous for founding the Outward Bound movement. But before that, in
1934, he set up a revolutionary new school in a dilapidated stately home in
Moray, northeast Scotland. Schooling would include mountains, the sea, fresh
air and soul- stiffening adventures.
Gordonstoun
was a success, especially after Prince Philip of Greece, now the Duke of
Edinburgh, arrived. Other royals followed: five of the Queen’s children and
grandchildren went there, despite Charles’s complaints. By the 1970s it was
touted as a place for spoilt or wealthy children who needed toughening up –
Sean Connery and David Bowie’s sons went, and so did Charlie Chaplin’s
granddaughter. Physical punishment, strict discipline and cold showers were key
to Hahn’s approach to keeping children in line.
The school
was notorious not just for being tough, but for bullying. The novelist William
Boyd, who started boarding there aged nine, described his nine-and-a-half years
at Gordonstoun’s junior and senior schools as “a type of penal servitude”.
Smaller children were at the mercy of older ones and violence, theft and
extortion were common. As part of his initiation at Gordonstoun, Prince
Charles, aged 13, is said to have been caged naked in a basket and left under a
cold shower.
In 1936,
Hahn founded a preparatory school for Gordonstoun, to cater for children as
young as seven. The regime at Aberlour House was not much softer. In the 1970s
there was no central heating. Windows were left open at night: in the winter,
the children could wake up with snow on their blankets. The school was
separate, situated half an hour away, though Gordonstoun helped manage it. The
schools shared a uniform, school song and the motto Kurt Hahn had devised:
“Plus est en vous,” a contraction of a French phrase – there is more in you
than you imagine.
Mutual
respect, resilience and trust were the cornerstones of Hahn’s notions of how to
educate a child. His ideas have made Gordonstoun one of Britain’s most famous
public schools. But a series of complaints sent to me covering 40 years reveal
a dark alternative history. Not all of the stories can be detailed here. But,
too often to be excused, Gordonstoun and its junior school appear to have let
down the trust of parents and failed to respect the rights and needs of
children. Predatory paedophiles are a part of the history of many celebrated
schools in Britain. But Gordonstoun’s story is particularly urgent because
Scotland’s archaic laws around proving sexual assault dissuade victims from
coming forward. They can mean predators, who might be brought to trial, remain
at large and free to offend.
Kate
arrived at Aberlour House on a bursary in the 1980s. She was nine years old.
Initially she was bullied by other pupils for being poor and having a Scottish
accent. But by her last year at the junior school she was a prefect – a “colour
bearer”, in Hahn’s militaristic system. She was, she says, a perfect, docile
product of the educator’s ethos. “I was a really good girl, I didn’t misbehave,
I got on with my work. I was a good citizen,” she explains, a twist in her
smile.
The
lochside where the children camped saw the end of that Kate. What she says
happened beside it has tarnished her life: an assault by a serial rapist, the
trusted young teacher in charge of the expedition. Her most vivid memory of the
subsequent summer days in the Highlands is of the moment when she went to a
cliff-top, having decided to end her life. She was 12.
The exped
was led by a male teacher. “He was young and everyone thought he was cool. We
wanted to go,” remembers Kate.
Mr X, as we
must call him, was in sole charge of the trip. As the excited children got
ready in their dormitories at Aberlour House, he supervised the packing. He
told them – as other witnesses told the police – not to bother with bathing
costumes. “As a kid, I suppose, you just think – skinny-dipping! As an adult,
you go… What?”
The exped
set off in high excitement. “We got there, the banks of a loch, somewhere in
the middle of nowhere and he said there weren’t enough tents. So, we were a
tent short, which meant that somebody would have to sleep in his tent each
night. We’d have to ‘rotate’.”
“At
dinner-time we all had coffee and, a few of the girls, he filled their mugs
with alcohol. I think it was rum. I felt a bit giddy. In the tent, the first
night, it was me and two other girls. I remember being cold, wearing a jumper.
And he started touching me, when they were still in the tent. I didn’t know
what to do. I was totally frozen, scared. I pretended to be asleep thinking it
might stop. They left the tent, they were embarrassed, they knew what was going
on. So they went to sleep somewhere else and left me alone with him. They were
just in another tent, they must have heard everything. So they all knew it had
happened.
“I didn’t
know what to do. I didn’t do anything. I was terrified. I don’t remember much
but the pain, on my cervix… He wore a condom. What kind of a man takes a packet
of condoms on a school camping trip?”
She didn’t
confide in anyone. “It was awful. Five or six more nights. Nobody spoke to me.
I didn’t speak to anyone.”
For the
rest of the trip Mr X ignored her. One day, lonely and confused, Kate wandered
away from the campsite, contemplating suicide. “I got to the edge of the cliff,
completely on my own, in the middle of nowhere. I was going to do it, and then
I just thought, ‘No. Actually, maybe, I won’t do this.’”
Kate then
began to have an inkling that she was not the only girl targeted. “The girls
who were bitchy to me already were more bitchy, led by Jane [which is not her
real name]. She was, I realise now from what the police have told me, already
in a relationship with him. And the other girls were her gang.
“Later on,
X said he had to go down to the village for something. It was because one of
the boys had to make a call to his parents. He said to this other girl, Jane,
she had to come as well.”
This boy
remembers the event well. “He bought us two drinks each – half-pints or pints.
I’d never had alcohol in my life. I remember giggling about it with Jane. I
think now that I was there because it would have been weird for him to have
gone just with her, in a pub buying a 13-year-old drinks. It’s better if there
are two of you.”
The boy
believes that X’s relationship with Jane lasted a year or more. “Once I was
with her in his bedsit in the school, chatting with him. I left the room, but I
went back very quickly and the door was locked. When I knocked no one answered,
but I knew they were in there.” This was just one of several incidents when X
and Jane were in rooms alone, often with doors locked. “You don’t think much of
it at the time, but something lodges, because you do remember them as something
that wasn’t right – an adult and a 13-year-old.”
X continued
for at least another year at Aberlour. He would occasionally see Kate in a
corridor: “He was checking up on me. He used to say to me: ‘You’ll die before
me.’ I’ve no idea what he meant.”
At
Gordonstoun the following year, the bullying began. It was led by Jane and it
was rooted in the rape at the campsite. Girls would sing a song in Kate’s
hearing about “That night in the tent.” The rumours of what happened at the
campsite spread. Both she and Jane subsequently changed their names by deed
poll – not unusual for adults trying to rebuild themselves after childhood
abuse.
Now, Kate
can begin to understand the root of Jane’s antagonism. “I always had a feeling
there was something there – and now I realise the extent of what happened with
her and the reason why she bullied me so much. In some ways, she had it worse
than me. She considered herself in a relationship with him. I suppose she was
in love with him.”
When she
was 16, Kate’s father died in an accident. She had always been close to him.
When she was 14 she had tried to tell him about X. “I started by saying a
teacher made a pass at me and he freaked out. I didn’t tell him any more, I
didn’t want to hurt him.” His death hit her hard, and she ended up in hospital
after overdosing on paracetamol.
“I was such
a mess. Gordonstoun threatened to kick me out, after my father was killed,
unless I had psychiatric help.” After treatment, she returned to the school and
found that one thing had changed. The bullying, the gossip and name-calling
stopped. But now, in her 40s, with her own children, Kate is still dealing with
X’s assault.
“Just recently, I realised I’ve spent my whole
life trying to prove I’m not his victim. I’ve always said it has not affected
me. Not me, I’m absolutely fine. In actual fact it has given me some very
unhealthy patterns of behaviour, and also feelings towards myself. I only
realised this in the past year, on my own. I wanted to prove I wasn’t scared,
of men, of sex. All that stuff. I wasn’t going to be the classic rape victim. I
thought I had sorted it all out.”
There are
other stories, too. At the age of seven, John also started at the school one
summer in the 1980s. Kate remembers him: “Just the sweetest little boy.” He was
following a family tradition: his father went to both Aberlour and Gordonstoun.
John’s father remains a believer in Kurt Hahn’s philosophy of teaching trust
and self-discipline. He is a member of the fundraising committee of the Kurt
Hahn Foundation, which raises money for scholarships to the school.
Most of
John’s memories of Aberlour are of happiness and success. He wanted to board
and did well. He excelled at sport and passed the exams to go on to the senior
school with a commendation.
After a
year or two, a new teacher arrived to take charge of English. “An eccentric,”
says another student from that time, “a know-it-all and a show off”. Derek
Jones was a keen photographer and ran the photography club. Pupils remember him
wandering the school, a camera hanging down to his belly, his hands resting on
top. His wanderings took him to the sports changing rooms. Supervision of this
place was the matron’s job. Nonetheless, “Jones would often spend prolonged
periods around the changing rooms and in the shower room,” says John.
John got to
know Jones well after he was cast in the 1988 school panto. Late one night in
his final year, 1990, John left the dormitory seeking help. Two of his toenails
had been surgically removed after being broken in a rugby match that afternoon,
and the painkillers had worn off. Jones found him, took him into his bedroom
and said that he could provide some special, very strong painkillers so long as
John promised to keep it secret. “He told me if I told anyone he would get into
trouble, while he was only trying to do me a favour and help me.”
Half an
hour later, Jones assaulted John in his bed in the dormitory. After stroking
and patting the boy, he reached under the covers, pulled down his boxer shorts
and attempted to masturbate him. John, under the effect of the pills, tried to
push the teacher off him. He found he could not speak. After minutes of panicky
struggle, Jones stopped the fondling and put his head under the covers, turning
on a torch. John heard a camera’s shutter click and click again. He believes
Jones took half a dozen photographs.
After Jones
left the room, John struggled to get out of bed. It took a while, but
eventually he woke his best friend, Michael. He told him what had happened and
together the two 12-year-olds went to Jones’s room to confront him.
The
stand-off lasted an hour. Jones denied all. He said that John must have
imagined it, as a result of the pills. John and Michael demanded the camera and
the film rolls they could see on Jones’s desk. If nothing had happened, then
surely Jones wouldn’t mind them getting the films developed. The teacher
refused and eventually the boys, exhausted, went back to bed.
A few weeks
after the assault, John was driving with his mother. They were both listening
to a Radio 4 programme and a woman was talking of her abuse as a child. “I know
just how she feels,” said John.
The parents
took their child to see the much-liked headmaster, David Hanson. “I went with
John,” his father told me. “It was obvious that the headmaster believed him.
There was no reason not to. He referred the matter to Gordonstoun.” The police
were called and interviewed John and other pupils and members of staff. Jones
was sacked. John’s parents say that they were encouraged not to seek a
prosecution. Going into a witness box might be damaging for their son.
The school
promised that in return for co-operation over not insisting on prosecution, it
would ensure that Jones never taught again. “We accepted that,” says John’s
father. “It was adequate, because there was a categoric assurance, a cast-iron
guarantee that under no circumstances would Jones ever again teach children in
a school. He would be barred.” He adds that this pledge was repeated in a
letter from Gordonstoun’s then bursar, George Barr.
When John
returned to the school, Jones was gone, but things had changed. “There had
naturally been a lot of gossip among the pupils. I felt eyes in the back of my
head from other students. I remember being called a ‘homo’. I suppose in the
eyes of some children I must have been a ‘homo’ to have ‘allowed’ it to happen.
There was a fight arranged in the senior boot-room during break time and after
that I was no longer a ‘homo’. The remaining time there was happy.”
But as he
went on to the senior school, the wider repercussions of Jones’s assault became
apparent. The head boy and sporting hero of the junior school now kept his head
down. Crucially, his faith in adults was gone. “It changed me completely,” he
says today. “I was a model student until that evening. I became a nightmare. If
I was bored, I made mischief. I left Gordonstoun having failed my A levels, I
didn’t go to university. My life since school has involved drug use, alcoholism
and a distinct lack of belief and trust that those who say they will always be
there, actually will.”
John
eventually got on with his life and became a successful businessman. But he was
not at ease: his sense that justice was not done back in 1990 exacerbated with
the worry that Jones might have preyed upon other children.
The stories
told here are not the only ones to stain Aberlour House and Gordonstoun. A
startling series of allegations, dating back to the 1960s, has emerged in
recent years. They’re not all ancient history. Kevin Lomas, a teacher at the
senior school during Kate and John’s time was jailed in 2008 for sexual
offences against young girls at a tutoring school he ran in Oxfordshire.
During the
16 years Lomas worked at Gordonstoun he had a reputation for inappropriate
sexual activity: he was known for his fumbling attempts to kiss the girl pupils
– “with tongue”. He, too, took children on exped. A Gordonstoun spokesperson
told us: “There is no suggestion that Mr Lomas committed any criminal behaviour
during his time at the school.” If there were, then or now, the school would
inform the police.
Such events
and others, coupled with the stream of recent stories about sex scandals and
cover-ups in celebrated public schools, sparked talk among Gordonstoun’s
ex-pupils. In 2013 some of them began a private Facebook group, discussing
things that had happened at the school, “that you don’t see in the brochures
and the class photographs”, as one of them put it. Rapes, of boys and girls,
were mentioned. Kate started to receive messages from girls she had known,
apologising for the gossip and rumours, for the bullying, and for not having
done more to help.
The group
eventually involved more than 100 ex-pupils. Acting in concert, they presented
the school with a list of demands: it should do more to address bullying and
sexual abuse, issue an apology to past victims and fund help for them and,
notably, promise in future to report any incidents to the police.
John
briefly joined the group, but left it, thinking the chatter was futile: “It was
mainly about bullying, old classroom rows.” But he had already decided that he
had to act on Jones: “I had a duty to make sure this bastard was not still out
there doing things to kids.” So in February 2014 he went to the police. Their
subsequent investigation stretched as far as New Zealand. Eventually, John was
told Derek Jones could not be brought to trial or offend again. He had died in
a car crash in Kenya, five years earlier.
But if that
was any consolation for John, it was spoilt by the shock of the other
information the officer – who has declined to comment – then handed over.
Despite Gordonstoun’s solemn assurances, Derek Jones had gone on to teach, and
potentially abuse, elsewhere. He had been forced to leave a school in Essex and
had then surfaced and taught in Kenya. It is unclear what happened in East
Africa, but former colonies there have provided a home for several predatory
paedophiles sacked from English private schools – some of whom have gone on to
offend again. Scottish police have identified both the Essex and Kenya school
where Jones taught, but have refused to name them to the Observer.
John’s
parents were horrified at the news. John’s father told me: “I trusted the
school. They said they’d make absolutely sure he’d never teach again. They
didn’t. And, if he did teach, that tells me someone at Gordonstoun must have
given him a reference.”
The school
told police that it could not find a copy of the letter the Gordonstoun bursar,
George Barr, sent to John’s father, promising Jones would not teach again,
because paperwork had been lost. It says that during this period, Aberlour had
separate ownership and management. But one ex-head teacher of Aberlour from the
time says that Gordonstoun staff were often involved in the junior school and
that the two shared governors. (Since 2002 Aberlour has been fully merged with
Gordonstoun). The school says it has co-operated with the police in its investigations
into Aberlour House, Jones and Mr X.
“When the
Facebook thing kicked off, says Kate, “my daughter had just turned 12. And I
thought: ‘You know, she’s still got gappy teeth!’ And I actually started to see
myself then differently, completely differently. For all these years I’d not
seen myself really as a child. My daughter brought it home to me that that is
what I was.”
Kate made a
formal complaint, which was dealt with by the same police team who addressed
John’s case. The subsequent investigation – again, Police Scotland won’t
discuss it – turned up impressive numbers of witnesses with evidence to support
Kate’s claim. Crucially, police also found Jane and interviewed her. She told
Kate, indirectly, how grateful she was that Kate had come forward. An arrest
was made and Mr X made his first appearance in court – a process which in
Scotland is private – to face allegations spanning four years.
For nearly
a year, Kate prepared herself for facing X in court. It was very hard: the
prospect of seeing him again was anguishing. She’d already had to identify him
in a police line-up. That had caused her near-collapse. A local policewoman was
made her liaison officer and became an emotional support; one of the things she
told her was that Jane had asked the police to pass on her thanks: “Getting X
to justice was the best thing that ever happened to her.”
“When [the
Procurator Fiscal’s office] rang me and said, ‘It’s all fallen apart,” I could
not believe it. They were so certain it was all going to happen, that it was a
done deal. I’d hung my hopes on the fact that it was. I was looking forward to
it even though it would be horrendous. I knew I’d be a blubbering mess in
court, but I wanted it and now it was taken away. I thought, how do I move
forward? I still don’t know how to move forward. I’m angry I allowed the whole
thing to dominate my life again. And now I know I haven’t got anywhere.”
Unfortunately the case was dropped when it became clear that Jane would be
unable to give evidence. Kate cannot help but feel bitter. “I want to have
compassion for her and at times I do. I know she’s been through an awful lot.
But it’s hard not to have dark thoughts.”
In truth,
what has dragged Kate back to the horrors of her school days is not Jane’s
inability to give evidence but an arcane piece of Scottish criminal law – the
principle of corroboration. Under it two independent witnesses or pieces of
evidence are needed to confirm the key facts of a crime – in this case the
identity of the alleged rapist and the fact of the rape. This is far from easy
with crimes that tend to take place in private, such as sexual assault and
domestic violence – and as a result, Scotland’s rates of reporting of rape and
convictions are among the lowest in the world.
Without
forensic or medical evidence, prosecuting Mr X demanded two victims – Kate and
Jane. The loss of Jane’s evidence was fatal to the case, because the offence
was in Scotland. If the allegation against X had concerned an event in England,
or almost anywhere else in the world, the case would, the Observer has been told,
have gone ahead without the need for corroboration. In England, also, John,
Kate and others who suffered at the school would be able to bring civil
compensation cases if their allegations were proven.
No official
is permitted to discuss the case of X, but we have established that a thorough
investigation was carried out, involving many of the people who were present at
the campsite as well as other teachers. Nothing other than the lack of a
corroborating witness, after Jane’s withdrawal, emerged that might have
derailed the case coming to court. The only consolation for Kate and Jane is
that there is no bar to the investigation being reopened.
There is a
simpler question for Gordonstoun and the 160 or more private boarding schools
currently facing allegations about sexual crimes committed against their pupils
– can they protect their children properly now? The Observer passed
Gordonstoun’s lengthy manual of “Child Protection Policy and Procedures” to
Mandate Now, a campaign group lobbying to make child-protection systems in
British institutions effective.
It examined
the document in the light of many others adopted by hospitals, schools, care homes
and social services and gave it a score of 4 out of 10. “It is verbiage,
containing a number of disturbing flaws, ” Mandate Now says. Reflecting the
point made by the Gordonstoun ex-pupils, the report fails, it says, to make it
clear that abuse or allegations of abuse need to be reported to an outside
authority. Without that safety net, in place now in most British schools,
cover-up always remains a possibility.
Gordonstoun
says this complaint is irrelevant because the analysis is based on English practice.
Its policy is based on Scottish government guidelines. A spokesperson said:
“Pastoral care at Gordonstoun is highly regulated and is at the heart of
everything that we do… Child protection is something we take very seriously and
we are committed to providing a safe and nurturing environment for all our
students. We have rigorous child-protection policies that have been developed
with guidance from expert agencies. The latest independent report into the
school… made particular reference to ‘the extremely positive health promotion
and child-protection procedures’ in place at Gordonstoun.”
The
response went on: “We want our students to take full advantage of all the
opportunities available to them and they can only do that if they are happy.”
That seems an admirable ambition – and a change of philosophy for Gordonstoun.
For all the talk of service, honour, compassion and self-sacrifice in Kurt
Hahn’s teachings, the great educationalist and his disciples seem to have put
less weight on the notion that, to learn and grow, children need to be happy. And
safe.
Some of the
names in this article have been changed
Prince
Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life – Deckle Edge, April
4, 2017
by Sally
Bedell Smith
NEW YORK
TIMES BESTSELLER • The life and loves of Prince Charles are illuminated in a
major new biography from the New York Times bestselling author of Elizabeth the
Queen—perfect for fans of The Crown.
Sally
Bedell Smith returns once again to the British royal family to give us a new
look at Prince Charles, the oldest heir to the throne in more than three
hundred years. This vivid, eye-opening biography—the product of four years of
research and hundreds of interviews with palace officials, former girlfriends,
spiritual gurus, and more, some speaking on the record for the first time—is
the first authoritative treatment of Charles’s life that sheds light on the
death of Diana, his marriage to Camilla, and his preparations to take the
throne one day.
Prince
Charles brings to life the real man, with all of his ambitions, insecurities,
and convictions. It begins with his lonely childhood, in which he struggled to
live up to his father’s expectations and sought companionship from the Queen
Mother and his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten. It follows him through difficult
years at school, his early love affairs, his intellectual quests, his
entrepreneurial pursuits, and his intense search for spiritual meaning. It
tells of the tragedy of his marriage to Diana; his eventual reunion with his
true love, Camilla; and his relationships with William, Kate, Harry, and his
grandchildren.
Ranging
from his glamorous palaces to his country homes, from his globe-trotting
travels to his local initiatives, Smith shows how Prince Charles possesses a
fiercely independent spirit and yet has spent more than six decades waiting for
his destined role, living a life dictated by protocols he often struggles to
obey. With keen insight and the discovery of unexpected new details, Smith lays
bare the contradictions of a man who is more complicated, tragic, and
compelling than we knew, until now.
Praise for
Prince Charles
“[Smith]
understands the British upper classes and aristocracy (including the royals)
very well indeed. . . . [She] makes many telling, shrewd points in pursuit of
realigning the popular image of Prince Charles.”—William Boyd, The New York
Times Book Review
“[A]
masterly account.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Thoroughly
researched and insightful . . . In this profile, it is clear [Smith] got inside
the circular barriers that protect the man and his position. The Charles that
emerges is, as the subtitle suggests, both a paradox and a creature of his
passions.”—The Washington Times
“[A]
compellingly juicy bio . . . Windsor-philes will be mesmerized.”—People
“Prince
Charles paints an affectingly human portrait. . . . Smith writes about
[Charles’s life] with a skill and sympathy she perfected in her 2012 biography
of Charles’s mother.”—The Christian Science Monitor
“Comprehensive
and admirably fair . . . Until his accession to the throne, Smith’s portrait
will stand as the definitive study.”—Booklist (starred review)
“[A]
fascinating book that is not just about a man who would be king, but also about
the duties that come with privilege.”—Walter Isaacson
“Sally
Bedell Smith has given us a complete and compelling portrait of the man in the
shadow of the throne. It’s all here, from the back stairs of the palaces to the
front pages of the tabs.”—Tom Brokaw
