An English Affair. Richard Davenport-Hines

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СКАЧАТЬ was adopted at Surbiton, where the Tories had a safe majority and the anti-divorce vote could be discounted. Eden proved that a divorced man might become Prime Minister; but survivors of the divorce courts were still not nominated as either Aldermen or Lords Mayor of London. Macmillan thought that Eden took ‘a risk’ in appointing Oliver Poole as chairman of the Conservative Party in 1955 (‘like most Conservative leaders nowadays he is a divorcé’) although on becoming Prime Minister he replaced Poole with another divorcé, Hailsham. As late as 1957, he felt that Profumo’s brother-in-law, Lord Balfour of Inchrye, was precluded from a colonial governorship because he had been divorced.¹⁸

      After six years there was sparring as well as glamour in the Profumo marriage. Valerie Profumo compiled a list of reproaches which suggest how tedious her husband’s roaming eye had become. She resented his assumption that all pretty women, or preferably ‘girls’, were ‘fair game’ for him. ‘You will stretch any manners, at any time, to do this – not quietly and discreetly, but laughing and showing off and behaving like an adolescent,’ she complained. ‘The way you kiss women you hardly know “goodbye”’ was another irritation. So, too, was the tailoring of his trousers (‘surely there must be some way of concealing your penis’). He seldom stopped scoping the room, she protested, even when they were dancing together.¹⁹

      Despite his flirting at parties and buoyancy at the despatch box, Profumo did not sparkle as a public speaker. The conventionality of his opinions was evident in his respectably prosaic speech at his adoption meeting at the Hippodrome in Stratford before the 1959 general election. Perhaps he judged his constituents aright. The local newspaper allotted more space to reporting that the Marquess of Hertford had served hot-dogs in the grounds of Ragley during a barbecue, at which a hundred accordionists played around a camp fire near the lake, than to reporting the speeches of Lords Mills and Balfour of Inchrye at Profumo’s campaign meetings. ‘Election? What election?’ the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald editorialised. ‘Hardly a poster seems to raise its head on the hoardings; in villages one or two can be seen, but it seems as if the Indian Summer’s soporific spell has bewitched elector and candidate alike, for hardly a voice can be heard raised in anger, let alone politics.’ The Conservatives made their headquarters in an Edwardian villa called the Firs. There a band of volunteers worked more quietly than a hive of bees, answering enquiries, addressing envelopes, and despatching posters. The Labour Party’s nerve centre in Central Chambers was even quieter, for the candidate and his agent went to solicit votes at factory gates as constituents arrived for work in the early morning, toured villages during the day, and addressed meetings at night. ‘Both sides have adopted the “whistle-stop” technique, but their loudspeaker vans seem to have a muted sound, as if they are loth to disturb the householders from “Emergency Ward Ten” or “The Archers”. Sundays, by tradition, are rest days (one wonders if they vary much from other days).’²⁰

      All this typified Profumo’s constituency, with its prosperous villages stretching south towards Oxfordshire. Avon Carrow, the Profumo house, lay in the parish of Avon Dassett, near Kineton, midway between the spa town of Leamington and the market town of Banbury. Strong support for Profumo burst from the Banbury hinterland when crisis overwhelmed him in 1963. Banbury was a town which, more than Stratford, reflected the weakening traditions and eroded identity that accompanied provincial England’s rising prosperity in the 1950s.

      The changes had begun when an aluminium factory started production there in 1933. A corset factory, employing hundreds of women, followed. Soon the cattle, sheep and horse markets, which had been held in the cobbled streets for seven centuries, were resettled across the river under a roof. The marketplace was given a tarmac surface on which cinema-goers could park their cars. A zebra crossing with Belisha beacons was sited by the historic Eleanor Cross, where previously children had played marbles. Long-haul lorries, vans, cars, coaches and motorcycles resembled barbarian warriors as they stormed past the Cross on the north-south road between London and the Midlands conurbation. This road, flanked by stone houses where professional people had once lived in pleasant intimacy, was now a fraught wasteland of dehumanising traffic, where spacious homes were shoddily converted into offices and boarding houses. In the High Street, the Red Lion inn had been demolished for a Woolworths, and the farmers who had done business at its bar had yielded to young mothers with prams. W. H. Smith stood on the site of the Fox, where the fights had once been bloody and blasphemous. A few family concerns survived, but most shops were branches of national chains, and run by managers: Montague Burton the tailor, Dewhurst the butcher, Charles Clore’s shoe retailers Freeman, Hardy and Willis were all there.²¹

      The aluminium factory at Banbury was, in machinery, techniques, and organisation, unlike anything known in the town before. Previous Banbury industries had been associated with farming products or agricultural tools. Employees were used to small workshops where the ‘gaffer’ was always visible; but the aluminium managers were, although based locally, often away in Canada, Switzerland, Wales or London. The factory stood ‘in green fields beyond the town, surrounded by ten feet of barbed wire, immaculate flower beds, orderly bicycle ranks, and lines of neatly parked cars’, reported local sociologist Margaret Stacey. ‘The huge white, green-roofed, hangar-like building, with its strange-shaped chimneys and tubes, and its unpredictable noises, seems like something from a different world.’ There might be no one visible outside except the guard at the gate, but inside up to 800 men and women toiled. At six in the morning, two in the afternoon, and ten at night, the shift changed, and another 700 to 800 men and women took their places. ‘Working life,’ wrote Stacey, ‘is out of time with home life, with wives’ cooking, shopping and sleeping, and with the children’s school life, out of time too with the social life of other people.’²²

      The Second World War was a vivid memory in Banbury and Stratford: indeed it created masculine bonds everywhere. ‘Possibly it was because neither of us had long been out of the forces, but there was an instant rapport between us,’ recalled David Waxman, a physician who met ‘Peter’ Rachman in 1949. ‘In those days, it was still like a brotherhood. You felt akin to anyone who had been in the services.’²³

      The kinship created by war was richly evoked in a film, The League of Gentlemen, released in 1960. A group of ex-army officers, shunning the women who have humiliated, scolded, manipulated and bored them, unite in masculine camaraderie and military discipline to rob a million pounds from a City bank. The common fund of memories was drawn on in Granada Television’s comedy series The Army Game, which gradually became dominated by Bill Fraser playing Sergeant Major Claude Snudge and Alfie Bass playing his stooge, the sly, imbecilic Bootsie. From the autumn of 1960 (running until 1964) Granada screened a spin-off of The Army Game called Bootsie and Snudge. An average of 17 million people watched its Friday night slot during April and May 1961. Snudge had become the porter of a Pall Mall club with Bootsie as his dogsbody. They carried, wrote a critic, ‘the ambivalent, equivocal and sometimes almost flagrantly – though, I suppose, always sublimated – homosexual relationship between these two monsters as far as possible, exploiting all conceivable nuances’.²⁴

      Wartime affinities were enduring. Attlee and Macmillan were the only Prime Ministers in three centuries to have been seriously wounded in battle. The experience imbued them with compassion and fortitude. Young officers in the trenches, living at close quarters with the men of their platoon, so Macmillan wrote in old age, ‘learnt for the first time how to understand, talk with, and feel at home with a whole class of men with whom we could not have come into contact in any other way’. His war record helped him in the Tory leadership, for until the 1960s to have had ‘a good war’, and especially to have been wounded, rightly commanded respect. Macmillan’s limp proved his patriotism. He despised those who (for whatever reason) had avoided active service. ‘The trouble with Gaitskell is that he has never seen troops under fire,’ he told a dining club of Tory MPs who had been elected in 1959. Three months into Wilson’s premiership in 1965 he commented: ‘It seems strange that a man who claimed exemption (as a civil servant or the like) at twenty-three and took no part in the six years war, can be PM. We certainly are a forgiving people.’²⁵

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