When the government minister John Profumo married the film-star Valerie Hobson on New Year’s Eve, 1954, a crowd of about fifty bystanders gathered on the pavement in Pont Street, outside St Columba’s Church, in Chelsea. Boys on rollerskates, London coppers, and two chimney sweeps made it resemble a scene from Mary Poppins. The bride, who was given away by the debonair financier Gerard ‘Pop’ d’Erlanger, wore a grey suit of vicuna, a new material from Paris, with a high collar and cuffs of sapphire mink. A grey silk bonnet was perched over her red hair. Among the fifteen guests was Leslie Mitchell, the suave-voiced broadcaster who announced the opening of the BBC television service in 1936 and of Independent Television in 1955.
The Profumos flew away on their honeymoon that evening, so spoilt by fortune that the head of Heathrow ordained that free champagne should be provided for them and fellow passengers on their Paris-bound aircraft. Next morning, as their car left the Ritz hotel in Paris, with a motorcycle escort from the US embassy revving its engines, the duty manager hastened out with the MP’s pyjamas, which had lain unworn beneath his pillow all night. The Department of Transport gave them the number plate PXH1 (‘Profumo Times Hobson equals Number One’) and a few years later the Foreign Office issued them with passports numbered 3 and 4. Jack Profumo and Valerie Hobson were a golden couple for press photographers, hotel managers and the image-conscious.
They had met exactly seven years earlier at a fancy dress ball held at the Royal Albert Hall to usher in New Year’s Day, 1947. He was dressed as a policeman, she as Madame Récamier (the nineteenth-century Paris hostess commemorated by a type of daybed). She was twenty-nine, with a string of film successes behind her, and stoically married to an inveterate womaniser. He was thirty-one, temporarily out of Parliament, but already with five years’ experience as a Conservative MP.
The Profumos were a legal and mercantile family on whom the King of Sardinia bestowed a barony in 1843. The third baron settled in England, became a naturalised British subject and in 1877 founded the Provident Life Association, which made a fortune for his descendants. The Provident enabled lower-middle-class men who could never afford to buy a house outright to take out an endowment assurance policy, pay a small weekly premium and build up a sum which would be held as a deposit when, after five years, they were entitled to borrow several hundred pounds representing the total cost of a house. Their debt would be paid off over twenty-five years.
The grandson and eventual heir to the Provident money and Italian title was born in 1915, and in 1928 started at Harrow School, perched on a hill in Middlesex, ten miles north of London. ‘While everybody knows that Englishmen are sent to public schools because that is the only place where they can learn good manners,’ Rebecca West wrote in 1953, ‘it unfortunately happens that the manners they learn there are recognised as good only by people who have been to the same sort of school, and often appear very bad indeed to everybody else.’ There was no school of which this was truer than Harrow. It had its private vocabulary (a boy was called a ‘Torpid’ until he had turned sixteen or completed two years), arcane rules (boys in their first year had to fasten all three buttons on their jackets, one button in their second year, and thereafter none), special costumes (top hats for all boys on Sundays, a red fez with tassels for football players) and other rigmaroles. ‘We lived rather like young Spartans; and were not encouraged to think, imagine, or see anything that we learned in relation to life at large,’ John Galsworthy recalled of his years at Harrow. ‘In that queer life we had all sorts of unwritten rules of suppression. You must turn up your trousers; must not go out with your umbrella rolled. Your hat must be worn tilted forward; you must not walk more than two abreast until you have reached a certain form … you must not talk about yourself or your home people, and for any punishment you must assume complete indifference.’ Giles Playfair, who was a pupil shortly before Profumo, emphasised Harrow’s ugliness (‘the stone floors and staircases, the dark subterranean passages, the dirty blue paint peeling off the walls, the ill-conditioned bed sitting-rooms and the wholly unattractive sanitary accommodation’) and philistinism (‘“He jaws about poetry”, they said, and quite tirelessly and mercilessly, by a process of mental cruelty, they saw to it that I paid the penalty for my indiscretions’). Playfair felt degraded by the fagging system, especially at mealtimes, when he had to assist one irritable butler and two kitchen youths with dirty collars and greasy hair in serving eighty hungry boys.1
Harrow School, when Profumo arrived in 1928, was pervaded by militarism, veneration of the dead and sombre pomposity. Memories of the Great War, which had ended ten years earlier, still overshadowed the school. Almost three thousand Harrovians had served, 690 were wounded, and 644 (twenty-two per cent) killed. A huge ‘War Memorial Building’ was erected amidst a range of old school premises: its ‘silent emptiness,’ wrote Christopher Tyerman in his superb history, ‘appropriate for the hollow anguish and grief caused by the losses’; but its location like ‘implanting a dead heart in the school’. There was no forgetting Harrow’s Glorious Dead for the school chapel was lined with plaques commemorating hundreds of them. The chaplain appointed in Profumo’s time had the Victoria Cross, and joined the Officer Training Corps like other masters. There was army drill, in full khaki, twice a week plus military exercises on Sunday mornings. The soldierliness embedded in the weekly timetables, the rituals of conformity, the zeal of masters in promoting notions of duty and service, exceeded anything that the Edwardians would have desired. The OTC commander was such a martinet in the 1920s that boys protested: despite newspaper coverage of their mutinous discontent, the OTC remained compulsory for Harrovians until 1973.2
The headmaster of Harrow School in Profumo’s time was Cyril Norwood, who began his career teaching in grammar schools and was nicknamed ‘Boots’ by Harrovians because his manners seemed common. Masters and pupils thought him abrasive, over-confident and self-publicising. His morality, like that of other weak men masquerading as strong, was stubborn and unimaginative. ‘His appearance was sallow and plebeian,’ recalled Playfair. ‘His manner was cold and severe … he never welcomed contradiction or allowed his will to be flouted. He was a bad listener.’ When recruiting a new master, in 1929, he sought a good cricketer in holy orders.3
Norwood published books with such titles as The English Tradition of Education. He saw public schools as a training ground for the hierarchies of adult life. ‘It is the business of everybody to obey orders: it is expected that the orders will be reasonable, but they are there not to be criticised but obeyed.’ If obedience to orders was the first principle of Norwood’s universe, conformity was the basis of his public school code. ‘Everyone sees the sense of rules, and the happiness of everyone is found in carrying them out, or conforming to them loyally.’ Norwood’s Harrow instilled a smooth-mannered duplicity. It taught boys to show outward deference to people for whom they felt little respect. It rewarded them for giving a pleasant smile while conforming to rules that they inwardly scorned. It assured them that compliance to higher authority was the essence of English racial superiority. ‘There is an inherited system of morality, which represents the experience of the race, the rules which our ancestors have found to govern the game, and there is a racial character, a setting towards some ideals and not others, towards qualities and types of pursuit which appeal to Frenchmen, and not Englishmen, or to Englishmen, and not Frenchmen.’
A boarding house was a model for the outside world, and its rules – which upheld violence, but punished sex – were applicable there, too. ‘It is proper that a House Captain should have the right to cane,’ Norwood insisted. ‘Caning is not felt by English boys to be a degradation, and it is not so looked upon. It is a quick and effective way of dealing with “uppishness” and insubordination. Nevertheless, if a Housemaster discovered that his captain was making free use of the