A Midlands teenager remembered visiting Portsmouth during the 1950s, and being told that ‘Before the War’ this bombsite had been a chemist’s, or that hole had been a draper’s … ‘Before the War – Before the War’ was the sad, weird incantation of the times. All the youth could see were ‘stumps of shops, office blocks, houses, streets, piers, just stumps’. The sole undamaged residue of ‘Before the War’ was swaying wires above the streets, between the rubble and stumps, for trolley-bus power lines survive bombardment and blast. He also visited his mother’s family in Cambridgeshire. ‘There was the uncle who was half-blown to bits in the First World War, shouting and grunting meaningless sounds as he loaded hay on a truck, and then limping across and shaking my hand and screaming and laughing, and I was very frightened and people said it was a shame, and that he was very intelligent, and couldn’t help it, and how it wasn’t his fault.’30
There were widows and spinsters so lonely that they could fill their teapots with tears. In 1958 the novelist John Braine described eating poached eggs on toast in a London tea shop. The middle-aged woman next to him, ‘pale and drab in a skimpy cotton dress clinging to her scraggy body’, wore no wedding ring. When she was young, he thought, ‘some British general, breathing heavily, would have at last worked out the meaning of attrition and would have issued the order which deposited her future husband screaming on the barbed wire or drowning in the mud, and which left her, forty years later, eating a roll and butter and drinking a glass of orangeade, with dreadful slowness, alone in a London tea shop’. Later he glimpsed the woman again. ‘She was walking very slowly, her face a mask of misery, peering from side to side as if looking for help.’31
One night in 1963 another novelist, Frederic Raphael, struck up a conversation with two men on the late train from London to Colchester. The more loquacious, at first, was a reporter. He had been a warrant officer in the war, was captured by the Germans, and escaped three times. During one burst from captivity, he said, ‘he had killed an Austrian forest ranger whose boots he wanted. After killing him, he discovered the boots were the wrong size.’ The second traveller, returning from a dinner at the Society of Chartered Accountants, said little for a time, except to praise the scampi bonne femme. ‘Finally he broke out: “Have you ever seen a man’s face when he knows he’s going to die? I have. And if you’ve seen it once, you don’t want to see it again”.’ He had been a RAF navigator in an aircraft which had a forced landing on an airfield in an area north of Rome held by the Germans. The RAF men knocked out one German who attempted to detain them, and shot the other dead with his own rifle. ‘I’ll never forget the look on his face; not pretty. When he knew we were going to kill him. You can’t describe it. It’s just a thing you never forget. Thank God I wasn’t the one who had to pull the trigger. I’ll never forget the shot. Loudest thing I ever heard in my life.’ The German, he added, ‘had been a decent chap and shared cigarettes with the man who killed him.’ The reporter found Christmas unbearable. The frivolling children made him think of the bombs he had dropped which had incinerated children. Still, he opposed nuclear disarmament, and would drop the H-bomb himself if ordered to. ‘Oh yes,’ said the accountant, ‘so would I.’32
These were the ruminative confidences and formative memories that family men shared when unbending on a late night train in 1963. Jack Profumo’s England cannot be understood without them.
The Astors began at Cliveden with a row. William Waldorf Astor, the New York plutocrat, smarting from the way that he had been traduced by American newspapers during his failed candidatures for the state assembly, settled in England in 1890. Three years later he bought Cliveden, an Italianate pleasure palace perched on a high spacious site above a bend of the Thames, with a magnificent terrace commanding a prospect downstream towards Maidenhead, rather than a short view of the opposite bank.
Immediately he was mired in ill-will. He quarrelled with Cliveden’s previous owner, the Duke of Westminster, over so paltry an object as the visitors’ book. The Duke denounced the Yankee to the Prince of Wales. Astor gave a sturdy defence to the Prince’s Private Secretary, for he was intent on buying his way into the Marlborough House set. In 1895, for example, when he joined the prince’s house party at Sandringham, he made a show of paying £1,000 for a pair of bay carriage horses from the royal stud. In appreciation of Astor’s outlay, the Prince of Wales, with the Duke of Buccleuch in tow, attended a house party at Cliveden.1
Astor’s prickliness ensured his unpopularity. Staying with Lord Burton at Rangemore in 1897, the Marquess of Lincolnshire noted of his fellow guest: ‘Astor is another instance of the utter inability of American men to get on in England. Here is a man with millions – probably the richest man in the country; and yet he is given to understand that, though he is tolerated on account of his wealth, he is of society and yet not in it.’ Astor had represented Ferdinand de Rothschild when Empress Elizabeth of Austria visited London, but her suite ‘refused to call him “Thou”, though he implored them to do so. Astor assumes a … scornful deference to Ladies to whom he is speaking. He evidently resents the way he is treated; but tries not to show it.’ Two years later, Lincolnshire met Astor at Lord Lonsdale’s racing stud in Rutland. ‘He is a social failure. Pompous & proud, with an aggressive air of mock humility … The boy (who is Captain of the Boats at Eton) is at present voted a Prig.’2
Astor bought a London evening newspaper, the Pall Mall Gazette, in order to enhance his social influence, and appointed as its editor a Society swell, Harry Cust. Astor’s aunt Caroline, a snob who had imposed the notion of the exclusive ‘Four Hundred’ on New York City, had inaugurated the custom among New York millionaires of publicising their parties and controlling reputations by issuing tit-bits of news about their guests to the social columns. Astor tried to foist this foolery on London. He gave Cust a list of names, headed by the Duke of Westminster, of people who were never to be mentioned in the Pall Mall Gazette, in the mistaken belief that the English nobility cared about being mentioned in newspaper Society paragraphs. At first this was mocked, but in 1900 it brought his social nemesis.
Sir Berkeley Milne, a naval officer in command of the royal yacht (whom the Prince of Wales dubbed Arky-Barky), was taken to a musical evening at Carlton House Terrace by an invited guest who assured him that he would be welcome there. Astor ordered the interloper from his house and inserted a paragraph in the Pall Mall Gazette announcing that ‘Sir A. B. Milne RN was not invited to Mr Astor’s concert.’ This upset the haute monde more than the Boxer rebellion in China, as Lincolnshire noted at a house party for the Prince of Wales and his mistress Alice Keppel: ‘HRH quite open-mouthed with fury: and vows he will never speak to him again.’ In retaliation for this royal ostracism, Astor called Mrs Keppel ‘a public strumpet’, and told people that King Edward VII (as the Prince became after his mother’s death in 1901) had been impotent for twenty years. He believed that the government wished to nominate him for a peerage in 1902, but that this was forbidden by the King, ‘who hated me’. Thereafter, he said, he never relented in seeking ‘to attain what Edward’s spite had withheld’.3
Cliveden was never a conventional English country house. It was not the centre of a great estate which gave the owner political influence and social prestige in the county. When in 1890 Lord Cadogan, who owned much of Chelsea but no landed estates, spent £175,000 to buy Culford in Suffolk, he acquired a house with 400 acres of parkland and 11,000 acres, and got his eldest son elected as MP for a nearby constituency two years later; and in 1893 the