Nostalgia

“He would say that, wouldn’t he?” Not only did I close the last post with a line that only 50 plus year old readers would be familiar with, but I accredited it to the wrong woman. It was actually Mandy Rice-Davies, a friend of Christine, who uttered the immortal line “He would say that, wouldn’t he? Mandy was in court and when the defence claimed that Lord Astor had never paid to have sex with her she uttered the memorable line. The quote entered the English language and basically says nothing objective comes from sources with a vested interest. Mandy Rice-Davies My older readers are now smiling with the memory and the younger ones are wondering what the hell I’m on about. Stay with me. A Sydney reader, Terry M. pointed out my error and started me Googling to refresh my memory. Ah! Now I remember. In 1962 Christine Keeler, a striking beautiful young woman, had run away from home at the age of 16 and become a showgirl at Murray’s cabaret club in Soho, London, where she was employed “to walk around naked”. John Profumo was the British Secretary of State for War, married to actress Valerie Hobson, educated at Harrow and Oxford and had everything going for him other than his pronounced zipper problem. Christine met Mandy Rice-Davies and Stephen Ward, a fashionable London osteopath ,who enjoyed sketching the rich and famous and the three of them often spent weekends at a cottage belonging to one of Ward’s friends, Lord Astor. So did Profumo. Getting better, isn’t it? Profumo and Keeler had a short but torrid affair that most probably would have been ignored by the press except Christine had also slept with Eugene Ivanov, a patriotic Russian who was a naval attach? at the Soviet Embassy – he was also a spy . . . Back in Albany, WA, aged 15, I was undergoing my penultimate year at high school. A task made very difficult by hormones and testosterone bubbling away forcing maths and English into the background while I tried to come to grips with girls. In 1962 we didn’t even know what a girl looked like sans clothes. There was a magazine called ‘Adam’ that had women in suggestive poses but all fully clothed. The only pictures available were hunted out in the school library under ‘Travel’. The odd National Geographic had pictures of foreign woman in various states of undress with a naked, upper torso shot here and there. There, I’ve said it. My sex education was based on the National Geographic magazine. It could be said that men of my age were terribly disadvantaged in that we spent years of our youth imagining woman to be built like PNG Marys. The suckling pigs threw us a bit, but we learnt to ignore that. Albany is a port and I do recall a couple of us talking to sailors on leave and one of them flashing a set of ‘dirty post cards’ The memory is dim however, as the flashing was just that, a flash, and that type of thing needs protracted study. And then along came Christine and that photo in the chair. It was sheer pornography to us as it was very obvious she was NAKED! The press filled in the gaps and we were never the same. WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

John Profumo has kept a low profile since the sensational events of the 1960s, mainly occupying himself with charity work. He was named Commander of the British Empire in 1975 for his charitable work. After the scandal broke, the Naval attach? Ivanov was called back to Moscow and never heard from again. Keeler lives quietly in North London, and says she still feels “bewildered” by what happened. Rice-Davies is a grandmother and lives in America.

Mandy Rice -Davies is also quoted as saying;

My life has been one long descent into respectability.

in connection with reports that she was on social terms with Sir Denis Thatcher, husband of ex-prime minister Margaret Thatcher. My problem with women, maths and English eventually resolved itself but not for some years. In my writings in another venue I recorded this in 1964

We had four days off early in 1964 and three of us chose to go to Sydney. For all of us, all boys from the bush, the thought of maybe a million girls in a 30 or 40-square mile paddock must clear up the virginity problem.

It didn’t.