‘The house party assembled on Friday, August the second, for a long weekend taking in the following Monday, which was then the now defunct August Bank Holiday. The great and the good were all spilling out of London after the almost unbearable melodrama of the Stephen Ward trial. Though he once provided not the least sensational headlines in this most sensational of years, Dr Ward may have faded completely from some listeners’ minds, so perhaps a little potted history would go down well here as an entrée to the main course.
‘In March that year, John Profumo, the Minister of War (in those less mealy-mouthed days we had not yet invented Ministers of Defence) had resigned after it emerged that he had lied to Parliament when denying allegations of an improper relationship with a young woman named Christine Keeler. The impropriety was more than simply sexual. Miss Keeler was also alleged to have been the mistress of Captain Yuri Ivanov, a Russian naval attaché known by British Security to be an officer of the KGB. Such a link, however tenuous, between a Government Minister and an enemy agent, was clearly undesirable. But it was the lie to his colleagues that broke him.
‘The man who had introduced both Profumo and Ivanov to Keeler was a London osteopath and artist, Dr Stephen Ward, who besides manipulating the bones and painting the portraits of many highly placed people, also, it was alleged, provided more intimate services. Amid spiralling rumours of upper class debauchery on a scale to inspire a new Satyricon, Dr Ward was finally brought to trial at the end of July on three charges of living on the earnings of prostitution, and two concerned with procuring minors.
‘On Wednesday July the thirty-first, which seemed likely to be the trial’s final day, the court and the nation were shocked to learn that Ward had taken an overdose of sleeping pills the previous night and was critically ill. Despite this news, the judge summed up, the jury deliberated, and in mid-morning a verdict was delivered of Guilty on two of the immoral earnings charges, Not Guilty on the rest.
‘Sentencing was postponed till Dr Ward should have recovered. When the house party assembled two days later he was still lying unconscious in his hospital bed and it can scarcely be doubted that up and down the country there were many who prayed he would never rise from it.
‘I am not, of course, suggesting that there were any such among the arrivals at Mickledore Hall that day.
‘The house party fell some way short of that ideal constitution a fashionable host might have aimed at. Mickledore himself was unmarried, but his only “spare” guest was a man. Children were not usually included in such weekend gatherings, but Mickledore liked kids in the same way he liked dogs and the three couples who made up the guest list mustered eight between them, plus two nannies. And a final oddity; while the tradition admitted of, perhaps even encouraged, the inviting of a token American, this group had no less than three in it, or four if you counted one of the nannies.
‘But let’s get down to details.
‘The “spare” guest was Scott Rampling, a young US Embassy official, formally attached to the legal department though his subsequent career has been only loosely linked with legality.
‘The three couples were the Westropps, James and Pamela, plus their infant twins, Philip and Emily, in the care of their nanny, Cecily Kohler: the Partridges, Thomas and Jessica, plus their children Alison (three), Lætitia (seven), Genevieve (nine), and Tommy (twelve), in the care of their nanny, Miss Mavis Marsh: and finally, the Stampers, Arthur and Marilou, plus their nannyless kids, Wendy who was seven, and William who was eight.
‘That’s right. William Stamper, age eight. No coincidence. During that never-to-be-forgotten weekend at Mickledore Hall when the last of the Golden Age murders took place, I was truly there.
‘From a child’s viewpoint, the Hall was paradise. Inside there were attics full of marvellous junk. Outside there were woods, stables, a tennis court, an island with a lake and a couple of canoes, and a haunted folly. And there were only two rules; one, you didn’t go canoeing without supervision, and two, you became invisible and inaudible after six o’clock in the evening. Personally, I could have stayed there forever.
‘For most adults, however, a long weekend was probably quite enough. The atmosphere had something in it of a muscular public school. Non-stop activity was the order of the day, and slacking the unforgivable sin. My father loved it, perhaps because he worshipped the public school ethos with an apostate’s fervour. He should have been the perfect type of self-made Yorkshire businessman, forever advertising his humble origins and trumpeting his triumph over privilege and private education. Instead he used his growing wealth to purchase a place in the clubs and councils of the upper crust whose manners and mœurs he cultivated to the point of parody. Above all things he hated to be reminded that his growing business empire was based on the success of his first venture, Stamper Rubber Goods of Sheffield. I believe that in some areas of South Yorkshire condoms are still referred to as Stampers, and of course it was a mixed blessing for him to be awarded the upper class sobriquet of “Noddy”.
‘My mother was very different. Of the trio of American women present (the others being Pam Westropp and Cecily Kohler), she came from the “best” background, being a Bellmain of Virginia, no less, which was the nearest to aristrocracy my father dared aim at in his early years. Yet despite her breeding, she remained attractively unsophisticated, a wide-eyed innocent abroad whose unaffected enthusiasms often embarrassed my father, but no one else, for by knowing where her true home was, she was at home anywhere.
‘A very different type of American was Scott Rampling. Born in the urban sprawl of LA, he was a young man in a hurry to reach the rosy future he never doubted lay ahead of him. He had got to know Mickledore during one of his frequent visits to the Westropps in Washington and renewed the acquaintance when posted to London in ’sixty-one. After the events of that sensational weekend, he vanished from the scene and indeed the country with positively indecent speed, and the infrequency with which his name appeared in newspaper reports of the case and the trial suggests a considerable calling-in of cross-Atlantic favours.
‘The Partridges were as English as Rampling was American, to the manner and manor born. The family owned a goodly proportion of the North Riding, having preferred acres to earldoms as reward for their loyalty to the Stuart cause in the seventeenth century, and to the anti-Stuart cause in the eighteenth. It was not till Thomas’s retirement from active politics that a Partridge finally got a peerage, though as the noble lord says in his lively autobiography, In A Pear Tree, he would have preferred land if it had still been on offer. In nineteen fifty-five he had been elected Conservative member for the seat whose boundaries pretty well coincided with his own. By nineteen sixty-three he was a junior minister in the War Office, widely tipped for promotion in the next reshuffle. Then the sky fell in. He was too closely associated with his immediate master and long-time mentor, John Profumo, for comfort; his name kept coming up in the huge stew of rumours bubbling around Westminster all that spring and summer; and all poor Partridge wanted to do now was keep his head well below the rim of the cauldron.
‘His wife, Jessica, née Herdwick, fifth daughter of the Earl of Millom, was a formidably horsey lady with a great facility for breeding both champion chasers and handsome children. Her fifth (child, that is) was well on its way that weekend.
‘The Partridge nanny, Miss Mavis Marsh, had every qualification and quality then admired in her profession. In her mid-thirties, she stood about five feet four, but looked taller in her immaculate starched uniform because of her unyielding erectness of posture, a physical trait she extended into her attitude on matters of etiquette, expression, punctuality, probity, and even diet. You never left your crusts when Miss Marsh was at table.
‘The other nanny, Cecily Kohler, was quite different, more like a big sister than an agent of divine providence. She wore no uniform; indeed she even sometimes appeared in jeans, which were then not the universal garment they have since become. When she joined in our water sports, which as an expert canoer she often