We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
“AN ENGLISH AFFAIR – Sex, Class and Power in the Age of
Profumo” by Richard Davenport-Hines (Harper-Collins, $NZ24:99 ); “THEY EAT
HORSES, DON’T THEY?” by Piu Marie Eatwell (Harper-Collins, $NZ36:99)
I do my
best to keep on top of the latest books, but so many of the wretched things are
published that some get away on me. Here are two that were released over six
months ago, but that I got around to reading only in my long summer holidays.
The first, Richard Davenport-Hines’ An
English Affair, was widely reviewed in New Zealand. I don’t recall seeing
any reviews of the second, Piu Marie Eatwell’s They Eat Horses, Don’t They?
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Subtitled Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo,
Davenport-Hines’ An English Affair
(350 pages of text and copiously end-noted and referenced) is a dyspeptic and
debunking account of the Profumo Affair
What was the Profumo Affair?
As it all happened in 1963, when
I was eleven years old, I have only the vaguest of recollections of it from
that time. It was something that grown-ups talked about, it seemed to be about
very bad people in England who were written about in the newspapers, and a
couple of years later I can remember a few lame schoolboy jokes shared in the
playground. (Q: “Why are members of
parliament selling their yachts?” A: “Because
they’re all getting keelers.”) Of course, some years on, I picked up the
official story, which went like this: the War Minister (John Profumo) in Harold
Macmillan’s Conservative government had an affair with the call-girl Christine
Keeler who was also sharing her bed with a Soviet diplomat. Therefore this was
a serious “security breach” as the Soviet diplomat could be having state
secrets passed on to him as pillow talk with the call-girl. These bonking
parties had apparently been brought together by a Dr Stephen Ward, who was a
sleazy figure who procured girls for the gentry and well-to-do playboys – in
effect, he was a pimp. When questioned about his behaviour in the House of
Commons, John Profumo denied having had any relationship with the call-girl,
but later he was forced to admit that he had lied to the House. Big scandal.
Harold Macmillan’s government fell at the next election. Oh yeah, and Christine
Keeler had a blonde, loud-mouthed friend called Mandy Rice-Davies who was also
on the game and who often fronted up to reporters making tart comments about
the whole thing. The only one-liner anybody remembered from the affair was when
Mandy Rice-Davies was told that a minor aristocrat, the viscount William Astor,
denied her claim that he had slept with her. She said “Well he would, wouldn’t he?” This line was taken as indicative of a
new scepticism about “official sources” and what the ruling classes had to say.
Since then, it has often been quoted with approval by journalists.
So that, in a nutshell, was all I
ever knew (or wanted to know) about this fifty-year-old scandal, though as a
film reviewer I did see Michael Caton-Jones’ 1989 film Scandal, which depicted Stephen Ward (played by John Hurt) as a
saintly and persecuted man and Christine Keeler (played by Joanne Whalley) as a
naïve sweet young thing who happened to sleep with a number of men.
This whole affair has been raked
over in books many times, often with the intention of telling us that Stephen
Ward was completely innocent and the affair was, in effect, much ado about
nothing. In An English Affair, Richard
Davenport-Hines argues that it was a put-up job from first to last, but for
him, the Profumo Affair is mainly the a peg on which to hang his views about
British society at the time.
The first two-thirds of the book
(to be precise, up to Page 245 of its 350 pages) don’t deal directly with the
affair at all, but are a systematic analysis of the leading people involved and
the social classes to which they belonged. First the prime minister and his war
minister and the groups they moved in, where sexual morality was pretty lax and
caused no scandal to those in the know – Macmillan’s marriage was essentially a
ménage a trois as his wife Dorothy
had a 30-year affair with the Tory MP Robert Boothby. Profumo was a long-time
womaniser and before he married his wife he insisted she have an abortion as he
didn’t want the scandal of her having a child too suspiciously soon after they
were married. Documenting each case, Davenport-Hines essentially gives us in
these chapters an account of who was sleeping with whom among the privileged
classes, without any eyebrows being raised. The privileged classes, by the way,
included Labour as well as Tory MPs, and many of those who later used the
Profumo Affair to destroy Macmillan’s government.
Moving on to the chapters on
“Bill” Astor and Stephen Ward, he depicts the first as amiable, naïve and a
supporter of good causes who had bad luck in his marriages; and the latter as a
harmless party-going type who had a string of influential clients for his
practice as an osteopath – but they all deserted him when he needed them. There
is no evidence that Ward ever ran a brothel or a service for supplying girls to
the rich. The most illuminating chapter for me was the one headed “Landlords”
about the property boom in London in the late 1950s and early 1960s; the
fortunes that were made by property developers with no social conscience and a
willingness to inflict architectural monstrosities on the city of London. And there
was the lower end of the property market, where slum landlords (Rachman et al.)
let and sub-let tiny and squalid rooms at exorbitant rates to immigrants who
had to accept them.
The chapter headed “Spies” makes
it plain that absolutely nobody in Britain’s intelligence service ever believed
the minor Soviet diplomat (Yvgeny Ivanov) had had an affair with Christine
Keeler, nor did any British spook think a security leak had ever taken place.
It seems that the British spy service did, at once stage, get Stephen Ward to
keep an eye on a Soviet diplomat, but that was as near as he came to causing a
“security breach”.
It’s in the two chapters headed
“Good Time Girls” and “Hacks”, however, that Davenport-Hines really lays out
his thesis about why the “scandal” happened at all. He characterizes Christine
Keeler and Many Rice-Davies not a prostitutes, but as a new type of young
woman, promiscuous and free with her favours and accepting gifts from men and
therefore “liberated” and deeply offensive to the conservative morality of the
time. In order to make this characterization more plausible, the author speaks
at length about the law’s punitive attitudes at the time towards both women and
homosexuals. Raucous, censorious editorials and opinion pieces about morality,
written at the time, are quoted at length to show what common attitudes then
were.
As for the “Hacks”, Davenport-Hines
outlines his thesis that the whole “scandal” was engineered by newspapers
intent on hurting Macmillan’s government and its allies. Chief was the Mirror group of newspapers, associated
with Cecil King and Hugh Cudlipp, which liked to pose as the defenders of
common decency and plain folks and therefore made a thing of belittling toffs,
squires, grouse-shooters, tweedy fox-hunters etc. (But, as Davenport-Hines enjoys
pointing out, the owners and editors of the Mirror
group were only too eager to grab the trappings of traditional privilege when
they were offered to them.). Following along was Beaverbrook’s Express group of newspapers, because
Beaverbrook had a long-standing feud with the Astor family. Once the hunt was
on, other newspapers joined in, never questioning the special agendas of the Mirror and Express groups that essentially fabricated the scandal out of next
to nothing.
Davenport-Hines’ account of how
the “scandal” played out (the last hundred pages of the book) is a woeful
chronicle of police intimidating and browbeating “witnesses” into giving the
evidence they wanted; a presiding judge (at the trial of Ward) who wilfully
suppressed all the evidence exonerating Ward; and finally the hysterical
“report” on the affair, written by Lord Denning and basically showing his
talent for privileged libel based on next-to-no evidence. Incidentally, the
author sees Harold Wilson, leader of the opposition Labour Party, as a
particular villain with his sanctimonious comments on the affair. He notes
that, for all the leverage the affair gave Labour, it only squeaked in at the
next election with the smallest of majorities (four seats).
On the whole, I find
Davenport-Hines’ version of events persuasive, and I have no quarrel with his
fundamental idea that the “scandal” reflected a set of values that are no longer
held. I also smirked along merrily as some of his obiter dicta, as when he refers to the 1962-63 BBC “satirical”
programme That Was The Week That Was as “[launching] its stars on their route towards Mayfair flats, columns in The
Times, ducal fathers-in-law, knighthoods and multi-millions” (p.214).
Then as now, popular media “satire” tends to mean shots taken at status and
privilege by people who simply aspire to the same status and privilege. The
generations of David Frost and Jimmy Carr aren’t all that different.
But, methinks, Davenport-Hines is
just a little too eager to exonerate Ward, Keeler, “Bill” Astor and their
crowd. He appears to be quite right in saying that they did nothing illegal and
nothing that offended public morality as it developed over the next half
century – or private morality as it was widely practised (especially by those
with money and power) at the time. But Ward’s friends still come across as a
rather sleazy bunch. This is a moral judgment on my part, of course. I am not
suggesting that anyone should have been prosecuted, and I can see the prurience,
titillation and sheer malice in the way events were whipped up by the press.
Still, we’re not talking about admirable people here. For Davenport-Hines, Mandy
Rice-Davies’ quip “Well he would,
wouldn’t he?” is a “slick evasion”
which is “still recycled by the lazy,
unscrupulous and prim” (p.278). This sounds a little prim on the author’s own
part.
Another niggle. In quoting
over-the-top opinion pieces and editorials, crude character assassinations and
sensational news stories from circa 1963, Davenport-Hines appears to be telling
us that these reflect the skewed morality of a past age. But as these media
phenomena are all still with us, and as most journalists’ views on the world are
still as superficial and band-wagonning as they were in 1963, my own conclusion
is that it is simply the targets that have changed.
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I must admit that my heart sank a
little when I first saw the title and subtitle They Eat
Now would They Eat Horses, Don’t They? be somewhere in the same ballpark? Mercifully
not. Eatwell’s book is not a piece Francophobia, but it is not a piece of
craven Francophilia either. An Oxford graduate and lawyer specialising in
international law, married to a Frenchman and now resident in France for over
ten years, Eatwell is rightfully scornful of Anglophone writers who spend a
year or two in Paris and then knock off books claiming expertise in all aspects
of French culture. They usually get it horribly wrong because they assume that
the tiny portion of Paris they have experienced is the whole of France.
Eatwell’s purpose is to demolish,
stereotype by stereotype, common Anglo-American misconceptions of the French.
Part One – are the French the
best cooks in the world with perfect cuisine? Answer: It depends on which
French you are talking about. Yes, they have terrific chefs, but also as many
mediocre eateries as fine ones and the average French family eats the same sort
of diet as people in other countries – meat and veg etc. Wine is habitually
drunk with meals only by a small minority.
Parts Two and Three – Are
Frenchwomen unassailably stylish and chic? And are the French obsessed with
sex? Answers: Frenchwomen range from the chic to the dowdy as much as women do
in any other country. On the whole, French people are more reserved about sex
and (according to sexology surveys) less interested in “novelties” than most
other Europeans are. And adultery is no more tolerated in France than it is
anywhere else.
Part Four – Is French plumbing
disgusting? No more than any other country’s. Does every French house have a
bidet? No.
Part Five – Are the French both
incredibly rude and copious smokers? No and not really.
And so on and so on. Having a son
who habitually describes French films as arty, talky, static and pretentious, I
was enlightened to see Eatwell’s statistics on the films the French really like
to see according to box-office figures (usually light comedies) and her
evidence that French critics themselves laugh at the static, intense ones that
win prizes at Venice, Cannes etc. As she says, most of the French literati see
such films as the equivalent of the English Merchant-Ivory “heritage” films –
middlebrow bait for awards.
They Eat Horses, Don’t They? is absolutely and definitely not an
apologia for the French way of life, about which Eatwell has the same mixed
feelings as any sane person does about the culture of any country. She can be
trenchant about French snobbery and the fact that France is more of a top-down
hierarchical society than England.
I found this an entertaining and
enlightening bedside book. And it is not mere op-ed stuff. Over 300 pages it
documents its opinions and it has a very thorough index.
Incredibly Puerile Footnote: When you have a book which so much is
concerned with food and gastronomy, and the author’s family name is Eatwell;
and when you have a book which touches so much on cheese, and the author’s
first name is Piu, you might be tempted to think the author’s name is a
pseudonym. Apparently not. Piu Marie Eatwell is of English-Asian descent and
I’ve seen nothing to suggest that isn’t her real name.
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