In this Harrow School was a microcosm of English attitudes. ‘The English are filled with fear of themselves and their own impulses – and above all of other people’, the sociologist Geoffrey Gorer reported in 1951. ‘They fear their neighbours; they fear what people would say if they did something a little different from the rest. And this terror of other people’s opinions stifles originality and invention, and often prevents the English from enjoying themselves in their own ways.’5
The Profumo Affair, one might think, was Norwood-made. Jack Profumo learnt at school how to ape the fearful English version of good behaviour while bent on quietly enjoying himself in his own way. It is hard to imagine that he was ever a shame-faced boy. He discreetly pursued his courses with outward deference but private indifference to the school authorities’ moral shams. That morality – still less the empty, fretful orotundity with which it was expressed – bore little resemblance to the imaginations and experiences of any boys or men except the insufferably prim. It provided, though, the antecedent context for the scandals of 1963. Profumo’s belief that he could bluff senior ministers with his denial of an affair with Christine Keeler was learnt in the stupid humbug of Norwood’s Harrow.
Throughout the mid-twentieth century, schools like Harrow sent to Oxford, as Hugh Trevor-Roper lamented, ‘dim paragons of reach-me-down orthodoxy’. In 1933, Profumo, who was dyslexic, went to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read Agriculture and Political Economy – the least taxing of subjects. Brasenose was not a scholarly college. It was presided over by sozzled dons such as the epicurean Maurice Platnauer, ‘a particularly plump, peach-coloured and port-fed rat’, together with ‘a mountainous old man who drank a bottle of whisky a day’ called ‘Sonners’ Stallybrass, who peered ‘through glasses as thick as ginger-beer bottles and was forever veering away from Justinian’s views on riparian ownership to Catallus’s celebration of oral sex’ (the descriptions come from Trevor-Roper and John Mortimer). Jack Profumo had a dashing restless temperament that was well suited to Brasenose, although his carousals were never very boozy. The college luminaries preferred their undergraduates to achieve sporting Blues rather than first-class honours. Profumo, finding the rugby trials too bruising, took up polo, point-to-point riding and pole-vaulting, which earned him three half-Blues. Brasenose’s ethos resembled that of the RAF, wrote the college historian: ‘athletic, loyal, light-hearted, physically courageous’. Many Brasenose sportsmen, including Profumo, learnt to fly with the Oxford University Air Squadron (Profumo kept his own Gypsy Moth at a Midlands airfield). His son David describes him in early manhood as ‘part-daredevil and part-lounge lizard’.6
In March 1940, Profumo was elected in a by-election as Conservative MP for Kettering. Aged twenty-five, he was the baby of the House of Commons. When his father died three weeks later, he inherited a fortune, and became fifth baron of the Kingdom of Sardinia and third baron of the United Kingdom of Italy, but decided that to use his title would hinder his political career. His first vote in the House of Commons, on 8 May, was a momentous occasion. He was one of thirty-three Tory MPs, including Macmillan, who voted with Labour, rather than abstaining as sixty others did, in a vote censuring the Chamberlain government’s failure adequately to supply British troops in Norway. The Minister of Health spat on Profumo’s shoe. The Tory Chief Whip told him that he was ‘an utterly contemptible little shit’.7
As pilot officers, flight lieutenants and squadron leaders, Profumo’s generation at Brasenose were in the front line during the Battle of Britain – during which many of them perished. Profumo was not an aerial combatant, but served as an air intelligence liaison officer and then a general staff officer until he was posted abroad in 1942. He fought in the battle of Tunis, the invasion of Sicily and the conquest of Italy. He was attached to the staff of Field Marshal Alexander, for whom he liaised with the RAF and United States Army Air Force, and received both American and British decorations.
After losing his parliamentary seat in the Labour general election triumph of 1945, Profumo was promoted brigadier and spent eight months living in the British embassy in Tokyo as second-in-command of the British military mission in the Far East. He was said to have dislodged Enoch Powell from being the youngest brigadier in the British Army. It was at the end of 1946, back in England, and a prospective parliamentary candidate again, that he dressed as a policeman, went to a New Year’s Ball and met his future bride.
Valerie Hobson was the daughter of a dud. Her father – Commander Hobson as he liked to be called – devised great schemes, but lacked judgement, perseverance and luck. Once he was offered a chance to invest in a new substance for wrapping bread, called Cellophane, but was sure that housewives would never buy it. He dealt in bric-à-brac, opened a South Kensington bridge club and kept his family in precarious gentility at transitory addresses. One of his few successes was to renounce alcohol after years of unseemly tipsiness. He and his wife shifted about with their two daughters, staying in the spare rooms of patient relations, becoming paying guests in the homes of spinster gentlefolk, moving on within a year before their hosts tired of them. His public face was bluff optimism, but at home there was tetchy despondency.
Valerie Hobson was a plain child with monstrous teeth. But she matured into a beauty, went to RADA, and at the age of sixteen secured her first film part – for which she was paid £20. Three years later, in 1936, while taking part in a Shepperton Studios film called Eunuch, she fell in love with a spruce gallant named Anthony Havelock-Allan. Tony Havelock-Allan, too, had a background of feckless, unsettled indigence. At the time of his birth, his father had been managing director of the Northern Counties Spa Water Company, but losing that post in 1907, had tried to keep a wife and three children on an allowance of £200 a year from his elder brother (a Durham baronet). He tried to raise his income by becoming Master of the West Kent Foxhounds with the intention of running the hunt to his personal profit. Instead, after one hunting season, he went bankrupt in 1914. The second son of a bankrupt second son, Tony Havelock-Allan had to skip university, but studied gemmology at Chelsea Polytechnic after getting his first job with the Regent Street jewellers Garrard’s. He dallied in Weimar Berlin, met Ravel and Stravinsky during his stint as recording manager of a gramophone company, flogged advertising in Lord Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard to estate agents, and hired cabaret acts for Ciro’s nightclub (where the cocktails ‘Sidecar’ and ‘White Lady’ were invented). From Ciro’s, Havelock-Allan was recruited by his chum Richard Norton (afterwards Lord Grantley) to be casting director at the English branch of the Hollywood company Paramount Pictures, for whom he became a film producer in 1935.
Havelock-Allan was a practised and calculating philanderer. When he met Valerie Hobson, he was engrossed with Enid Walker, wife of Count Cosmo de Bosdari. He was pursuing an affair with the actress Kay Kendall, fresh from the flop film musical London Town, when ten years later Hobson met Profumo. Having married Havelock-Allan in 1939, Valerie Hobson soon became pregnant and self-induced an abortion by drinking a bottle of gin, hurling herself from a chair and taking a boiling-hot bath. This is one experience that she shared with Christine Keeler, who once tried to induce an abortion with the aid of drugs and knitting-needles. In 1944, Hobson gave birth to a son, Simon, who was diagnosed as having Down’s syndrome: a physician offered to give the baby a fatal injection of meningococcal meningitis, but she declined. It is indicative of attitudes in 1944 that the Education Act of that year deemed children with Down’s to be ‘ineducable’ and excluded them from schooling. Simon Havelock-Allan spent most of his boyhood in institutions, and did not speak until he was sixteen. It is not surprising that after such lonely sorrows Valerie Hobson was regarded as prickly and aloof in the film world.
Two of her screen successes were playing aristocrats in films about men escaping from their class. She played a chilly beauty, Edith D’Ascoyne, in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), the comedy in which a fastidious shop assistant, played by