CHRISTINE KEELER
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Cell Mates

17/6/2022

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We are still nervously waiting for the Criminal Case Review Commission to respond to my mother’s case. So no news on the campaign just yet, but it is around the time that they promised some sort of update, if not their answer, so fingers crossed.

I did want to talk about a friend of my mother’s, Libby Crawley, as I have recently been asked to comment on what I remembered about her and her friendship with my mother. Libby’s grandson is Wes Streeting, the Shadow Secretary of State for Health and Social Care of the United Kingdom and I think people may find this connection interesting. Wes Streeting has even talked about it himself, how his grandmother shared a cell with Christine Keeler and how they became friends.

Libby and my mother met in prison and became good friends.

When I was very young I remember visiting Libby’s house in the East End with my mother, but I was very young, and I remember Libby as a person less then I remember the fondness with which my mother spoke of her.

When my mother talked about Libby, she did so with pride.

They both felt that a lot of the women in prison with them in the early 1960s were there because of the men in their lives. They both sensed there were sad stories and miscarriages of justice all around them.

My mother told me how Libby was in prison because “the police couldn’t get her man, so they got her, to punish him”. Libby was pregnant and went on to have her daughter in prison, and none of it felt fair.

For my mother going to prison was almost an escape from the microscope she was living under, but her prison sentence became a growing shame through her life knowing that a great injustice had been done to her.

My mother, who had been the victim of abuse and violence, was sent to prison for lying about who was present when she was assaulted. She told the truth about being assaulted but went to prison because two men wanted to be kept out of any publicity.

According to my mother, Libby shared a strong sense of right and wrong, maybe magnified by their time in prison. Libby went on to help people in her local community of Tower Hamlets, became a campaigner and joined the Labour Party. My mother went on to work for the charity Release, but found it difficult to get other jobs as, with a perjury conviction, she was branded a liar - she would be asked to leave when they found out who she was.

Years later I remember my mother telling me that Libby was sick, and I asked her if she had spoken to her or was going to see her. “I don’t know,” she said, using such a sad tone that I wasn’t sure if she was really answering my question at all.

Personally I don’t know the facts around Libby’s conviction in 1963, but I know this from my mother’s own story. At that time the judges and the courts sometimes seemed to punish people not because they were guilty of anything but because they believed it was important that people were seen to be punished, regardless of their guilt.




1 Comment

Online documents

30/3/2022

0 Comments

 
The application documents went off to the CCRC (Criminal Case Review Commission) last week, and for anyone who is interested, and for complete transparency.

They are available online for review.

CCRC application docs
Fingers crossed

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Big pack post day!

22/3/2022

1 Comment

 

A quick video blog this week, to announce a new phase on the journey to clear Christine Keelers name. We have all the paperwork going out today to the CCRC (Criminal Case Review Commission).

Fingers crossed.


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The pack of paperwork, about 250 pages, might not look like it from here.
1 Comment

Happy Birthday

21/2/2022

10 Comments

 
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Taken 1964 - on her release from prison by Ray Bellisario.
My mum, Christine Keeler was born on 22 February 1942, so today she would be 80 years old. I can’t imagine my mum at 80, I wonder, would she be even more cantankerous?!

The truth is she wasn’t very well in her last years and that’s probably why I can’t imagine her at 80, but birthdays are a celebration. They are a time to mark achievements and tell stories, a time to think back and look forward.

We have some great news regarding all the work we are doing to clear my mother’s name. We have received an update from the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) saying that, after reviewing the evidence we gave them, they are willing to consider my mother’s case!

Right now we are busy pulling together the paperwork. I am also delighted that our legal team has grown as we are joined by Dr Rebecca Helm, a Senior Lecturer in Law at University of Exeter. Rebecca is helping answer some questions that the CCRC have asked and over the next week or two we will hand over our full submission that I will of course publish here.

This week, I caught myself doing something I saw my mother do. She would sometimes say, “It’s all there, I’ve written it down!” She would be tired or exasperated, it was a complicated story to tell, and honestly, a lot of the people she spoke to had their own fixed ideas about the story, about her, before they had even asked her a question.

With all the newspaper interviews I’ve done, none have ever mentioned this website. On every interview I’ve done I’ve asked, “Mention the website. All the information, all the proof, is online,” but they never do. As I had that thought, I heard my mother’s voice: “It’s all there, I’ve written it down,” and I had a good laugh.

It is different for me. I’m neither tired nor exasperated. In fact I’m happy to tell my mother’s story to anyone who wants to listen.

Happy birthday, Mum.
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Raising a glass - whisky was my mums drink of choice
10 Comments

Happy 2022 and the work goes on.

9/1/2022

5 Comments

 
Happy New Year

I thought it was time for another update and maybe share some stories and thoughts.

I and others passionately believe it was wrong that my mother went to prison in 1963, and this year, work continues to clear my mothers name. In 2021 we asked the then Secretary of State for Justice Robert Buckland, to consider a royal pardon for Christine Keeler.


In September there was a cabinet reshuffle and Dominic Raab took over the role as the new Secretary of State for Justice. Soon after his appointment we received a letter, the Pardon could only be considered if all other legal avenues had been attempted and it was their view we should go the CCRC (Criminal Cases Review Commission) first.

The CCRC (Criminal Cases Review Commission) are an independent body tasked with investigating alleged miscarriages of justice. So I am happy that my mothers case is with them, in fact just before Christmas they confirmed that they had all our information and it is currently under review. Hopefully we will have an answer early in the the new year.

If the CCRC decide that my mothers case may have been a miscarriage of justice, it would be much more significant, it would mean her conviction could be expunged.

In that trial in 1963, my mother wasn’t the only woman punished and sent to prison. Paula Hamilton Marshall also went to prison, and for exactly the same reason as my mother, she had not lied about witnessing my mother being assaulted, but she had lied about there being two more witnesses to my mothers assault.


Another wrinkle being, Paula was a new mother with a 9 month old baby, and she was still sent to prison.

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I can’t be sure, but it is possible that Paula’s baby was at the flat the night my mother was assaulted this may explain why Olive Brooker, the housekeeper was there, because I always thought that Olive was really helping Paula as she was a new mum. It wasn’t mentioned in court so I may well be wrong.

My mother always thought it was particularly cruel for any mother with young children to be sent to prison. Unless of course their crime was particularly heinous. My mother remembers there being lots of woman in prison with young families and how cruel it was.

Just recently, Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting was interviewed by Nick Robinson for the BBC and he talked about his Nan Libby, and that she had shared a cell with my mother.
Link to interview
She did!


I had no idea Libby, my mums old friend was his Nan, until I heard the interview. They went on to be friends long after they left prison and I have memories of her from when I was very young. She was politically very active, a socialist to the core, and was one of the woman I met as a child, who was around my mother, that showed me that belief, conviction and integrity had nothing to do with someones gender.

It doesn’t matter what your politics, its a nice story, I can’t help but imagine how proud Libby would have been to see her grandchild become Shadow Health Secretary. I think my mum would have argued it was in the genes.

I note Wes said in the interview that his Nan always thought my mother shouldn’t have gone to prison, what a wonderful woman.
5 Comments

Pardon application update - newsflash

24/10/2021

9 Comments

 

Newsflash


I have a response form the Ministry of Justice regarding our application for a pardon for my mother, Christine Keeler.

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It is actually quite a nice letter, explaining, before they would consider a pardon we should go to the “Criminal Case Review Commission”. The CCRC are an independent body who investigate possible miscarriages of justice, so it makes sense that we would be directed here as we are arguing so strongly that my mother was actually innocent. We thought this was always a possible outcome, or next step.

I have now pulled all the documents together and sent them on to the CCRC asking if they would consider my mothers case for investigation. I think because we have argued my mother was in fact innocent

So people are taking this seriously.

My mother was sent to prison for lying about who was present when she was assaulted, (there were more people who saw and confirmed that she was beaten up in the street) She did not lie about being attacked…they put a victims of an assault in prison and it was wrong.

So I look forward to hearing from the CCRC and then taking the next steps.
9 Comments

Kissing and Telling

16/7/2021

4 Comments

 
The application for my mother’s pardon was sent in on 14th June 2021 and is available to read on on the campaign pages on this website.

It is very detailed and leaves no doubt that my mother was assaulted by Gordon on 18th April 1963 and, as the victim of crime, it was wrong that she was sent to prison. It’s filled with evidence that shines a new light on that part of history.

The Ministry of Justice has received the application and have said they are going through the review process. I believe lots of you have emailed or written to the Ministry to show support for Christine’s pardon, so thank you. If you haven’t yet, please go to the campaign page, where there are instructions about how to give your support.

Campaign page

In August 1963 John Hogan sold his story to The People, the article had the snappy heading of “Christine Keeler is a shameless slut”. John Hogan could now tell the world that he had been working as a butler for Christine. Some of his duties seemed to include bringing her up cups of tea in bed, sometimes an extra cup for a lover who might be there too, allegedly once John Profumo.
John Hogan also claimed that Christine did not wash, her feet were so dirty he had to tell her to get them clean, had disgusting nicotine stained fingers and that she left her clothes on the floor where they fell.

John Hogan told The People how how she had such a voracious sexual appetite that on Stephen Ward’s say-so she would pick up homeless men and drag them back to her flat for sex, and his story went on to lament the suicide of Stephen Ward who, he said, was an innocent man in all of this.

Mandy and Christine were the real monsters in his eyes.
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Extract from the Denning report regarding Hogan
John Hogan was paid £600 for his story, according to Lord Denning, and he wasn't a butler, he was a carpet cleaner. The idea that Christine had a butler in 1962 is ludicrous. She was broke, in fact she was always broke and never had any money, that is until June 1963 when the News of the World newspaper gave her £23,000 for her story.

Maybe some of the men around her resented her sudden fortune, felt they should have their share, as her success was their property.

Robin Drury had an axe to grind with Christine. Robin was Christine’s manager and had been trying to get a book written, “Christine’s Story”. He had a good friend who would write the story for £15,000 (£100,000+ in today’s money). She was being conned and she knew it, so she pulled out of the book deal and fired him.

They had recorded a tape for the book while everyone was drunk and high, and Christine insisted that Robin destroy the tape. She watched him burn it in an ashtray - Robin did put a tape in the ashtray and burn it, it just wasn’t Christine’s tape.

According to Christine, Robin now turned to straight blackmail: he had the tape and wanted £10,000 or he was taking it to the police.

Robin was bankrupt and desperate for money so, after being turned down by Christine, he took the tape to the police and started selling his story to the press.

By the beginning of October 1963, Robin Drury, Christine’s ex-manager, was selling his story, talking about orgies and the lies Christine had told. He said Christine had said on the tape that she wasn't assaulted by Lucky Gordon and that on that night there were two other West Indian men who witnessed it all. He said that Christine had picked up another woman for an orgy and she had beaten her up - it was all nothing to do with Gordon. And the newspapers printed every word

The press had a new story, there was proof Christine was a liar and Gordon was an innocent man, or so it seemed. However, Robin Drury was lying.

Of course in court the tape recording was thrown out, rambling drunk and high people talking rubbish is not admissible but, asked in court, the police did assert, “The tapes confirm that Gordon assaulted her”.

John Hamilton-Marshall was a friend of both Stephen Ward and Lucky Gordon. He went to the police and said he had been in an altercation with Christine on the same night that Lucky assaulted her. All through August 1963, John was also selling his story for money in The People and the Daily Express, telling them he was responsible for all her wounds and injuries.

It was another lie. We show in our pardon documents that John Hamilton-Marshall’s allegations were not corroborated by anyone else. He had a criminal record and had recently lied under oath in the Stephen Ward trial.

Unusually, he was given immunity from prosecution for what he would say in court, and even the prosecution admitted he was a tainted witness whose testimony was not “evidence that one or more injuries to Keeler were caused by him and not by Gordon”

John was Paula Hamilton-Marshall’s brother and Paula was a witness who supported Christine's account of the assault that night. So John would have known his testimony could end up causing his sister’s conviction.

He said after her trial, "I did it for Stephen Ward. Paula was for Christine and I was for Stephen. But it all seems rather pointless now."

Of all the elements to this story, I have found John’s lies and exaggerations the hardest to grasp. Why would he step forward and do so much damage, for money, resentment or vengeance for the death of Stephen Ward or any of the three?

I recently asked Douglas Thompson, co -author of my mother’s autobiography, for his thoughts on what John did. Douglas told me a story of a serial killer in the US. A child had gone missing and the police had thrown up checkpoints and were screening all cars. A father and daughter pulled up. They talked to the police and were waved on, without the police searching their car. This was a father out for a drive with his daughter, so the police assumed that he could not be the man they were looking for, but in the boot of that car was his next victim. The Police didn’t appreciate that a murderer would take his child for a drive with his victim in the boot.

I’m not suggesting John was a serial killer or anything that awful but I think it illustrates people are beyond understanding.

Through June 1963, before Stephen’s trial, members of Parliament, protected by parliamentary privilege, destroyed Christine’s reputation, lining up to call her a prostitute.

Both John Hamilton-Marshall and Robin Drury were friends of Stephen Ward and both went to the police with their stories in the same weekend, the 6th and 7th of July 1963, days after Stephen Ward’s committal proceedings and only a few weeks before his trial.

I’ve been asked if I think there was a conspiracy to punish my mother, I still remember my mother saying.
“If you want to keep a secret, tell no one” and “keeping secrets is the hardest thing in the world”

Still I think people deliberately stepped up to destroy her, or just make money…Or maybe it was just the way women were treated in 1963.
4 Comments

The Campaign

25/5/2021

3 Comments

 
I know on this website some of my spelling can be “experimental” or to put it another way, wrong, and sometimes I write sentences that don't flow very well when you read them.

So thank you dear reader for your patience... and notice I didn't dare mention the grammar on this page,, I still cant understand why Oxford felt they needed their own comma! 

Hopefully what you are hearing is my voice, its a little bit dyslexic its a little bit malapropic, but its my voice. I recently wrote a piece that proved far too long, I tried to rewrite it and managed to make it even longer, I think this highlights how complicated this story is. 

Obviously the piece was heavily edited, but I thought, here would be an ideal home for my overly long edition.
In July it will be 60 years since the beginning of that chapter in our nation’s history known as the ‘Profumo scandal.’ An affair, in which my mother, Christine Keeler, had a starring role, and is credited with the fall of Harold Macmillan’s government.

The story of that affair is well known: Christine Keeler met John Profumo, the Secretary of State for war, at a summer pool party at Cliveden. She found herself the focus of the world’s press two years later when her relationship with the Tory MP became public knowledge. At the same time, there had also been a drunken night with a Soviet attaché called Yevgeny Ivanov. The scandal was a cocktail prompting feverish claims of espionage and sex parties amongst society’s elite.

What is less well known, however, is the consequences for my mother after being frontpage news around the world. Her name and reputation were tainted, which ensured she was the innocent victim of a subsequent, miscarriage of justice. In December 1963, six months after Profumo’s resignation, she was sentenced to nine months in jail for lying under oath about an entirely different case.

By April 1963. Christine had been tormented by a jazz singer Aloysius ‘Lucky’ Gordon, for 18 months. He had abused, assaulted and, according to Christine, even raped her on two occasions. He was now calling and threatening her – in today’s language, he was stalking her.

On the morning of 18 April 1963, as she was leaving her friend Paula’s house in Westminster for an evening of dancing, Christine was attacked by Gordon. In full view of Paula and two of her friends, he hit and kicked my mother. Paula called the police and Gordon fled. The two men who had witnessed the attack, Rudolph Fenton and Clarence Camacchio, wanted nothing to do with it. Both were West Indian and afraid of the police. They also were married and had criminal records, so they hid in a bedroom when the police arrived. Christine was pressured to say they weren’t there.

When the assault went to court, my mother denied under oath that the two men were witnesses to the attack. Gordon even admitted that he had hit her and was quickly found guilty. His criminal record for violence against women was disclosed and he was sentenced to three years in prison.

Then a few weeks later, a tape emerged of Christine admitting there were two more witnesses at the assault. They were found and interviewed and, even though they confirmed the assault, Gordon’s conviction was overturned in record time. My mother was arrested.

My mother’s barrister, the celebrated Jeremy Hutchinson QC, said of talking with her: ‘It was the voice of a person who had lived many years longer than her twenty-one years and who seemed to have grown entirely weary of life. It was a voice which had lost any joy in life.’

In court there was no disputing that she had been assaulted by Gordon, The police gave evidence of the terror Christine was subjected to by Gordon. All witnesses gave evidence that Gordon assaulted her – even the prosecution accepted that she had been attacked.

What this demonstrates is that, in 1963, it was more important to punish Christine for lying about who witnessed her assault then punishing the man who assaulted her.

In Parliament they were calling her a slut and a prostitute, and in the newspapers it was now the men selling stories for money that destroyed her reputation, It was the end of a hellish year; Christine had been in four very public court cases in 1963: Johnny Edgecombe, Lucky Gordon, Stephen Ward and now her own and she just couldn’t fight anymore. After seeing what had happened to Stephen Ward at his trial, she knew that the system was against her, as what chance did she have? Therefore, on the second day of the trial she pleaded guilty to perjury and obstructing justice and was sentenced to nine months in prison.

As I was growing up, Christine say to me “I should never have gone to prison, Seymour” but the story was complicated and she found it very difficult to explain.

So it wasn't until December 2019, shortly before the BBC was set to release a six-part drama about my mother, that the show’s executive producer, Kate Trigg, phoned me. She said the drama would tell Christine’s story up to her going to prison. It occurred to me that nobody had really done that before and I remembered my mother’s sense of injustice at what had happened to her

In the last line of her will, she wrote: ‘It is my wish that [Seymour] will look after my rights and reputation and do what he can to make sure that the truth is told about events of which I took part during my life.’ I think this is what she meant so I started to piece together what actually happened through books, court documents and newspaper clippings. I didn’t need to rely on just my mother’s account, as everything I needed was was there; in 1963, Christine Keeler couldn’t move without there being a record.

I had the help of Desmond Banks, her long-time friend and solicitor, and together we worked on a timeline of the tragic events, and built a website to tell her story. Then in August last year, I was contacted by a lawyer, James Harbridge, who wanted to help. He had looked at the website and he thought I was right – this was a miscarriage of justice.

Since then he has worked pro bono on the case and now, with the help of a Felicity Gerry QC, we have drawn up our petition for mercy for Christine.

The artist Caroline Coon, a friend of Christine’s, said ‘The most beautiful woman I had ever seen; she took your breath away. Every man who met her wanted her and those who couldn’t have her wanted to punish her.’

All the men around her, honourable or not, didn’t care about the danger she faced from Gordon and she had asked them all for help.

In last year’s BBC drama, people watched a woman being accosted and assaulted by a man he who then assaulted her in the street, they watched as he was released and she was sent to prison.

Her story is another terrible example that the system that does not protect women from violence, and sadly this is still true today. There is a myth that woman lie about being assaulted and in the year to March 2020, just 1.4% of rape cases recorded by police resulted in a suspect being charged: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-48095118

There is a awkward truth: sometimes victims lie, but it’s true that they can be intimidated, coerced or afraid. Sometimes they lie to protect somebody or just to spare their last shred of their dignity. The victim may not even think it is a lie – my mother didn’t. Sometimes the victim can only see the one truth - that they were assaulted and nothing else mattered. Being raped or even a punch in the face it is all very personal.

My mother was coerced in to a lie on oath about there being two witnesses to her assault, but there was no malice in her lie. Christine’s two witnesses would later corroborate her story, that she was assaulted, so denying they were there would not have changed the outcome of the trial, was not material and therefore was not perjury.

The criminal justice system failed my mother in 1963 and it is still failing women today.

I hope that 2021 is the year we see this miscarriage of justice reversed and her reputation restored.

3 Comments

Mother’s Day

13/3/2021

2 Comments

 
It’s Mother’s Day in the UK today and I was struggling to remember a Mother's Day with my Mum. Did I get her card and make her breakfast? I just can’t remember.
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​I do remember the first cup of tea I ever made her. I was probably about six years old and had seen tea made a hundred times. I felt very grown up when she said yes and I went off to the kitchen. We used a tea strainer to make tea, it was the 1970s - add a teaspoon of tea leaves in the strainer and pour the boiling water over into the cup then add the milk and two sugars. That was how she took her tea. As it was the first cup of tea I had ever made, I wanted to make it special, so I added a pinch of salt for extra flavour.


She took a few sips and asked, “What is that strange taste?” I told her how I had added a pinch of salt for extra flavour and she just started to laugh. “Oh god! That’s why it tastes awful!” and she was laughing so hard, tears were rolling down her face.


It’s not a Mother’s Day story, it is a tea story and there was a lot of tea in the 1970s. At about the same time my mother had some toilet water, and after going to the loo I would go and find that bottle of toilet water and then pour some into the basin before flushing.


My mother asked me, “Why do I keep finding my perfume in the toilet?” 
“That’s your perfume? I thought it was for the toilet” 
“You’ve been putting my perfume down the toilet?” 
She was laughing again and I learned that Eau de Toilette is another name for perfume and not, in fact, toilet water. 


The perfume wasn't a Mother’s Day gift from me. In fact I don’t remember ever buying a Mother’s Day gift. 


A few years later, when I was about 17, just after the film “Scandal” hit the screens, my mother was taken to a fancy restaurant, for an interview. When she got back it was late and she was a little bit tipsy but always thinking of her son, she had brought me back a “doggy bag”, some of the food wrapped up in a napkin. 


“It was delicious, Seems, I had to save you a bit.” At 17 I was always hungry so I was delighted - that is until she opened the napkin. “It was some of my starter, a beautiful steak tartare.”

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Steak tartare
​If you don’t know, steak tartare is raw steak with chopped onions, all covered in a raw egg, one of the worst meals you could put to one side and save for later.  After several hours in her handbag, it looked and smelled like dog food.


“Go on, have some, it is delicious.”


The look and smell of the steak tartare made me never want to eat food again, but because Chris was a little tipsy, not wanting to eat this ‘dog food’ wrapped in a napkin was insulting to her. She had gone to all the trouble to bring me back a little doggy bag. She told me, “I had to get the journalist to distract the waiter while I put the napkin in my bag.”


She told me I was ungrateful for not eating the food - “If you’re not going to eat it, then I will!” and off she went to get a fork. After one bite, she said, “Don’t eat that, it’s gone off, yuk!” and she ran off to spit it out. We laughed so hard she started coughing, that deep smoker’s cough.


The fancy restaurant meal that night wasn't a Mother’s Day treat from me.


It seems every day more people are stepping forward and offering to help with the campaign, which is wonderful, and any help is gratefully accepted. I am finding myself getting a little nervous now and thinking what would happen if her pardon is rejected or why it would be rejected. I guess these are all understandable fears, but I also realised it’s because the story of getting my mother a pardon is not just my story. In fact it hasn’t been for a while, as more and more people get involved, more people become invested. 


I sometimes sense the same nervousness in the people around me, the people who are working on this so hard to get her pardoned. I’m sure that is a good thing because sometimes being nervous reminds us when things are important.


Today is Mother’s Day, so we do something in recognition of the women who brought us into the world, and this week I wanted to tell you stories about my mother that could equally have been stories about any mother, stories that show a mother’s love.


If you are lucky enough to be with your mother today, why don't you tell her that you love her and maybe make her a cup of tea? But don't put any salt in the tea, it makes it taste yuk. 


Happy Mother’s Day, Mum.
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Mum
2 Comments

International Women’s Day

6/3/2021

4 Comments

 
Today is International Women’s Day, 8th March 2021, a day where we can: “Celebrate women's achievements, raise awareness against bias, and take action for equality.”

Of course there may be some men reading this who are feeling a little left out - they can put International Men’s Day in the diary, it is 19th November each year.

This year International Women’s Day (IWD) is asking people to choose to challenge #ChooseToChallenge. I think this means that we need to do more than just think about bias and equality, we need to challenge it when we see it, and I think we see it everywhere.

By December 1963 Christine was tired and beaten so she pleaded guilty to perjury and was given a nine month sentence. As it is International Women’s Day I wanted to talk about one of the reasons Christine was so beaten down and why she felt fighting was hopeless. To help illustrate some of the hate being thrown at Christine at the time, some of the ‘bias’ she suffered, I wanted to share how she was being talked about by MPs in the House of Commons.

21 March 1963

Mrs Barbara Castle:
...the Press is at this moment pursuing the question of where Miss Christine Keeler has gone, the missing "call girl", the vanished witness.
Mr R T Paget:
What do the rumours amount to? They amount to the fact that a Minister is said to be acquainted with an extremely pretty girl. As far as I am concerned, I should have thought that that was a matter for congratulation rather than inquiry.

17 June 1963

Mr Harold Wilson:
Saturday's papers told of an opportunist night club proprietor who had offered Miss Christine Keeler—or should I refer to her as Miss Christine Keeler Ltd. - a night club job at a salary of £5,000 a week, and I say to the Prime Minister that there is something utterly nauseating about a system of society which pays a harlot 25 times as much as it pays its Prime Minister, 250 times as much as it pays its Members of Parliament, and 500 times as much as it pays some of its ministers of religion.
Mr Nigel Birch:
I must say that he (Profumo) never struck me as a man at all like a cloistered monk; and Miss Keeler was a professional prostitute...


...an active, busy man and a professional prostitute.
On his own admission, Profumo had a number of meetings with her, and, if we are to judge by the published statements, she is not a woman who would be intellectually stimulating. Is it really credible that the association had no sexual content? There seems to me to be a certain basic improbability about the proposition that their relationship was purely platonic. What are whores about?
Mr George Wigg:
But today, when it suits the purpose of the Conservative Party, the privilege of this House can be used to describe a woman as a professional prostitute, and, in addition, we have Lord Hailsham, in the security of his great office and having the privilege of using the B.B.C., describing her as a woman of easy virtue.
Mr Charles Loughlin:
On this question of mistresses, surely there is just a subtle difference between a mistress in the accepted term and a dirty little prostitute?
Viscount Lambton:
[Mr Birch] said that she was not a very literary woman. There have been from time to time great literary prostitutes, but I think Miss Keeler was a prostitute who was basically used for prostitution. …....the Secretary of State for War had been in close contact over a period of time with a spy, with a semi-Soviet agent, and with a girl in the prostitution racket.
Mr B T Parkin:
Is no one in the House today going to say a word of compassion for the poor little slut who is at the centre of all this? ...surely we need a little compassion to consider how these wretches get into the state that they do. It was not that she was short of someone to call her "Darling".
It maybe commonplace
in certain strata of society.
There are many others like her. How much better it would have been if there had been some older man, a relative, who had been able to say, "Darling, come home; darling, it is not worth it; darling, what are you fighting against?"
Sir Richard Glyn:
[Mr Birch]...said, Mr. Profumo was unlikely to be meeting what he described as a prostitute for social purposes....There were few people in the country and very few people in this House—and I believe that there was no one in the Government —who, on 22nd March of this year, were aware that Miss Keeler could have been properly described in this way.

There was some strong language used in Parliament, and I think it helps illustrate her worth in their eyes and helps give a flavour of why Christine would chose to plead guilty, if only just to get away from it all.


Christine, who had never been arrested or even in trouble with the police, is assassinated in Parliament. Is it any wonder that a few weeks later Stephen Ward was found guilty of living off the immoral earnings of both Christine and Mandy.


In the spirit of International Women's Day, I call out Parliament for their discriminating treatment of Christine Keeler in 1963.


My wife/partner, Lorraine, was talking about one of her memories of Christine, it was soon after they met, so around 2001 for a short time we all lived together. Lorraine remembered how one night Christine was talking to her about her story and she just said a little mournfully “You know, Loz” - Christine called her Loz - “I should never have gone to prison”.


And she shouldn’t have.


As it is International Women’s Day I should quite rightly take this opportunity to thank the women who are helping in our campaign to pardon Christine Keeler.


Thank you to:

Mum, Chris - for her love, for being my mother, for raising me, for keeping me safe, and for the confidence she gave me through her love.

​Felicity Gerry QC - Our barrister for Christine’s pardon
https://www.felicitygerry.com

Hannah Marsh - Just started on the campaign, marketing and communications consultant
http://www.marshworks.co.uk

Julie Otter - A friend who has always been there for support and inspiration.
https://ocdistilling.com/blogs/news/ocd-brand-story

Fionn Wilson - A passionate supporter of Christine, who wanted to reframe our understanding of her and would go on to curate the ‘Dear Christine’ exhibition
https://www.fionnwilson.co.uk

Kate Trigg - Producer of “The Trials of Christine Keeler,” the drama that gave oxygen to this campaign.

​Amanda Coe - The writer of “The Trials of Christine Keeler,” for the sympathetic telling of her story.

Tanya Gold and Tara Hanks - who have both championed Christine.

Kacey Ainsworth - for her support and kind words.

My Partner - Lorraine, who has supported and pushed me all the way on this campaign and helps me understand the bias and discrimination in Christine’s story.

My Daughter , Daisy, who is on her own journey to change the world and who is so proud of her grandma Chris.
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Gangsters and Crooks

28/2/2021

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As I write this we are coming to the end of February, the days are getting warmer and the first daffodils have come out. Christine’s campaign is now gathering speed, and we are working away on what is a more final draft of her petition for mercy.

I am also working away on a new page on the website that shows the legal timeline, the trials and court cases that surrounded the story that raged through the whole of 1963. It occurs to me that only now do we have the language to understand Christine’s story, and only now is there an appetite to understand it.

I looked up the word Gangster, I wanted to check its meaning and it is simply: a criminal who is in a gang. I think today it has a more nuanced meaning and when people get called a gangster it doesn't always mean that they are a criminal in a gang.

Christine met all sorts of gangsters Bobby McKew, who was a good friend of Stephen Ward was one of them. According to Christine it was Bobby who introduced Stephen to ‘The Indian doctor’ Emil Savundra, another famous crook.

Bobby McKew was himself an interesting man. When he came to London from Ireland he was associated with the infamous Billy Hill gang. Was Bobby always a gangster? I think in later years he called himself a crook not a gangster.
There was Johnny Bindon who was the inspiration for Vinny Jones for his part in ‘Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’. Christine had originally been introduced to Johnny in the mid sixties when she was dating Freddy, the Kray Bothers’ nephew. London was small enough for everyone to rub shoulders in the end. Johnny Bindon followed an acting career and appeared as a thug in lots of films from the 60s and 70s and Christine and Johnny always remained friendly.
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johnny Bindon - Actor
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In the 70s and 80s Johnny and Chris would drink in the same watering holes through south west London. Sometimes I would be dragged along and be given a glass of cola and a packet of crisps and left in a seat in the far corner of the pub. The Man in the Moon or The Water Rat on the Kings Road or Finch’s on the Fulham Road.

When Johnny was out, he was the centre of the universe -famously he had a pub party trick to show off the size of his penis, he could balance 5 half pint glasses along its length. He was magnetic and a huge personality, Johnny had a rare charisma that made him immediately likeable. If I caught his eye he would give me a little wink that would make me smile.

Johnny said to me, “Your mum is a great woman, she’s a survivor,” in a proper London accent.

Everybody knew about his affair with Princess Margaret, even I knew and I was a child. People would say he was very decent not to talk about it ... And yet everybody knew.

Christine once said to a friend that she “really respected Princess Margaret being with Johnny.” I overheard and asked her what she meant? She looked awkward and changed the subject.

In 1971 there was a famous robbery at Lloyd’s Bank in Baker Street and safety deposit boxes where emptied;there was film about the robbery starring Jason Statham 2008. It was rumoured that one of the boxes had compromising pictures of Johnny Bindon and Princess Margaret, but I’m not sure that the dates work for that to be the case.

All of Johnny’s charm and charisma did hide one truth, he was capable of immense and lethal violence. He was charged and acquitted of the murder of John Drake, pleading self defence. It was also rumoured he ran protection rackets in the west end. I was a child and didn't see any of that.

Christine never seemed uneasy in his company or any of the men like Johnny.

Christine met The Kray Brothers at the height of their powers in the mid sixties when she was dating their nephew Freddy. She knew who they were and what they were capable of, but she said, “I had no fear of them”.

The Krays tried to give her sage financial advice: “If you have any money Christine, you should invest with us, in property in Spain.” Christine wasn't the invest money type, or having any money to invest type either.

Years later, in the early 1970s she felt she needed protection. She had left my father and wanted a minder, some muscle to frighten him off if he came near her. Johnny Bindon introduced her to a local hard man called Ginger. Christine wasn’t going to be anyone’s property any more.

When we moved to the World’s End Estate, Ginger and his family happened to be neighbours and I was friends with his youngest son. I remember Ginger was always well dressed, suit and tie, then one day my friend’s dad came home, not from the pub, but from hospital, Ginger had had the life kicked out of him by Johnny Bindon.

I was far too young to know the details but my memory of seeing my friend’s father, back from hospital, lying on their couch, was that he was all smashed to pieces, covered in wires that seemed to be holding him together. They said he was lucky to be alive.

Johnny Bindon died of AIDS related syndrome in 1993.

I don’t want to paint the picture that this was Christine’s life, because it wasn’t, these were just some of the colourful people that she met. Christine didn’t have a boyfriend who would wear a sharp suit and could have the life kicked out of him by another angry man. She would have hated that. Christine met all the characters in London because she was Christine Keeler.

The newspapers have said that Jonny Bindon was an ex-boyfriend of hers, but I’m not sure that is true or rather I never heard that until I read it in a newspaper. It seems every man Christine ever met is called an ex-boyfriend.

I never saw Christine afraid of any of these men. She was only afraid of Gordon. These hard men or London gangsters didn’t frighten her at all. Maybe she had already used up all of her fear.
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CIA, FBI, MI5 and the BBC

20/2/2021

4 Comments

 

We were driving down to Southend-on-Sea on the Essex coast. Christine lived there for a short time but I can’t quite remember the dates. I remember it was summer, some time in the late 1990’s and Christine really wanted me to move down to Southend with her. I was living in a small studio flat in London, it was very pokey and she hated the idea of me being there. Her idea was to get a flat in Southend and we could both live near the sea and near family. Christine had some family in Southend, her aunties Betty and Pam both lived there with their grown-up children. Christine’s aunts were both nearly the same age as her, they grew up together, they went fishing on the Thames together, they were close.

We went down to look for a flat to rent, I think with a copy of Loot, a pink newspaper that advertised all the rentals. There was one that had caught her eye, it was only a few streets away from her Aunty Betty. It was bigger than she needed so I asked why she needed the extra bedrooms and that is when she told me about her plan: “You can come and live here too and get out of that horrible flat.” We then had a very frank conversation about how I wasn’t moving to Southend - I was in my late twenties.

Driving back to London, through the East End she told me about her friend who had lived nearby who had died a few years ago. “They killed her, Seems,” she said. “Mariella Novotny, she knew too much and she was murdered, she was going to write a book about everything, but they killed her and stole her address book, it was the CIA or MI5 or someone, but they wanted to silence her... she knew too much.”

Mariella Novotny was right at the centre of the Stephen Ward story. According to Christine she was born Stella Capes and changed her name, because as Christine said, Mariella Novotny “had more of a whiplash ring to it”.

In 1960 she married Horace Chapmen-Dibben, a rich nightclub owner and antiques dealer. Hod Dibben (as he was known) was also a good friend of Stephen Ward.

Mariella lived the most extraordinary life. In December 1960 she went to New York with a new lover, Harry Alan Towers, a film producer. Mariella had plans on being a famous actress. There were sex parties with the East Coast elite, even, apparently the Kennedys, according to Mariella. She was soon sleeping with men and giving money to Towers, but by March 1961 she was arrested for prostitution. In a statement to the FBI she claimed that Alan Towers was a Soviet agent providing information to the Russians to compromise prominent individuals. The FBI investigation was called the Bow Tie case.

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Mariella with an FBI agent and under arrest in 1961
Mariella jumped bail and with a false name made her way back to London, where she returned to hosting sex parties for the well connected. 

Alan Towers pleaded not guilty to all charges and also jumped bail but made his way to Eastern Europe. The FBI soon dropped the charges and Towers returned to London to enjoy a long career producing a vast number of movies, but there was always a question mark as to whether he had been a Soviet spy.

Dibben and Mariella hosted sex parties, this time for the elite in London, like the infamous ‘Feast of the Peacocks’ sex party that had the mysterious man in the mask.

Christine told me years later that lots of people were wearing masks.

Mariella did an interview with The News of the World in 1963, and it’s a cracking read even now.
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Mari Ella tell all ‘almost’ in the News of the World June 1963
In 1973 she wrote a book called ‘Kings Road,’ talking about famous lovers. Later in the 1970s she helped investigate police corruption, even working undercover. In 1980 Mariella announced she was going to write a book about her amazing life and all of her encounters. “It is going to be dynamite,” she said.

The book never arrived and three years later she was found dead at home in bed. The coroner called it ‘death by misadventure,’ a drug overdose. Apparently a few days later her flat was burgled and her notes, files and diaries disappeared.

Christine maintained she was murdered for the secrets she knew and because the book she was writing would have embarrassed people in power. Christine believed Mariella was pivotal to those events in 1963, “because of all she knew and the power of blackmail”.

Both Mariella Novotny and her husband Hod Dibben gave evidence to Lord Denning for his report. What had they to say? Well, you will have to wait until 1st January 2048 when that part of the report is declassified.

Mariella lived the most extraordinary life, I really haven’t done her justice on this blog, in fact there is a book on its way about her: The Novotny Papers: 'A Bit Vulture, A Bit Eagle' by Lilian Pizzichini. I do hope it is dynamite!

Mariella’s Wikipedia is almost entirely blank.

This week there was some publicity because I was asked to go on the BBC’s Woman’s Hour to talk about the pardon for Christine. The show had run over so there was a little pressure on time, as I found out that Woman’s Hour is not actually an hour long, but much closer to 45 minutes. 

Interviews are always nerve wrecking because you never quite know what angle they are going to come at you with.

38:30 minutes in and Emma Barnett, the presenter, said they were going to play a clip of my mother’s interview they had from 2000. There was no prior warning and I didn’t see it coming, honestly it took the legs from under me. When you lose a parent hearing their voice again brings them back, they are in the room or on the telephone with you, that is a by-product of loss. It was particularly emotional because Christine talked about how much she loved me, and how I had understood her. It was very moving and as you can hear on the interview my voice did get stuck in my throat.

After the interview lots of people got in touch to ask if I knew the BBC were going to play the clip of my mother. No, that took me by surprise. I had no idea.

In the clip Christine was really emotional about how people could just lie about her, she talked about being called a ‘gobbler’ in the newspapers, ‘gobbler’ meaning exactly what you imagine. Christine talked about how horrific that was her. People could say anything they wanted about her; it made her feel worthless, it made her feel less than human. I heard the exasperation in her voice and it took me right back to her sadness and her frustration because people could say anything they wanted to Christine and they could even say it to her face, because she was a convicted perjurer. 

That is why.
4 Comments

Bad Jokes

12/2/2021

2 Comments

 
In this part of the world we are still in a lockdown. Outside it’s still winter, the days are short and it’s turned much colder, but the forecast is that the cold snap will end soon and I am beginning to notice that the short days are finally getting longer.


We have been very busy, in fact by now I feel that I have read every newspaper article from 1963. There is a surprising amount online. The Times have their whole archive online as does The Observer and The Guardian. You can also find The Mirror and ahost of local newspapers like The Belfast Telegraph all at your fingertips. They all have opinion pieces, interviews or court reporting and they all help build up a detailed picture of what happened to Christine in 1963 as she went from court case to court case.


Christine spent a phenomenal amount of time in court in 1963. In January she gave evidence at the preliminary hearing against Johnny Edgecombe - famously she was out of the country before the actual trial in March. In April she was back in court, this time because of the Gordon assault, again in May and again for Gordon’s trial in June.


In June she was at the preliminary hearing of Stephen Ward’s case, then in July the trial itself, and September, October and December she was back in court, this time charged with perjury and conspiracy to obstruct the course of justice.


At the beginning of 1963, Christine was still 20 and she would spend that year at the centre of four high profile court cases and all under the scrutiny of the world’s media. I can’t imagine how mentally exhausting that must have been.


Christine could be excellent company. When I got married in Scotland all our friends,along with Christine, travelled up to Edinburgh the day before, and that night Christine stayed up holding court and entertaining everybody with funny stories, most of which were embarrassing tales about me. I am just pleased she didn't give the best man speech! But on the day of my wedding she was tired, tetchy and much less fun.


I have lots of friends who tell stories of spending an evening with Christine in hysterics as she regaled them with anecdotes - she could be good fun. Like most of us, Christine struggled to remember jokes, she could never remember the punchline, or maybe she couldn’t remember the set up, but she loved stories that made her laugh and the ruder the jokes the better. 


Christine loved telling the three men and the fridge joke. If you haven’t heard it, there are three men walking up the stairs to heaven and they ask each other how they died.


The first man says, ‘I was so convinced that my wife was cheating on me, I left work early and rushed home to catch her at it, but when I got there she was in bed on her own. I was so wrong and I felt like such an idiot that I picked up the fridge and threw it out of the window, but the handle caught my belt and I fell out of the window with it!’


The next man gives him a long hard stare and says, ‘There I was walking up the street and this damn fridge fell on my head!’


The last man says ‘Well, there I was, minding my own business, sitting in this fridge...” 


Christine would fold up laughing at this joke.


Christine liked the great Irish comic Dave Allen and would let me stay up late to watch his show. I remember she loved the way he said the word ‘fart’. I have been living in Ireland for about 15 years and talked to people from all over with all the different Irish accents but I think everyone says the word ‘fart’ the same way, just like Dave Allen said it.
Dave Allen
When I was at school I heard my first Christine Keeler joke. By then there weren’t that many, they were already out of fashion by the time I went to school. One of my friends said to me, “Here’s a joke my dad tells: Christine Keeler walks into a fishmonger.” Now my friend had no idea who my mother was, we were young kids at school and we didn't waste our time talking about our parents. “The fish monger says to her ‘pound of fillet?’ and Christine Keeler says, ‘I bet you a pound you don’t.” I never said it was a good joke. 


When I told my friend Christine Keeler was in fact my mother he was mortified and this story ended with me consoling him, but I realised even then that of course there would have been jokes about my mother, she had been famous, and of course there would be jokes like that. I would be naive to think anything else.


Just a few years ago a very good friend contacted me, he was all excited as he had just been told a Christine Keeler joke. He was working with an older man who had no idea of the connection between him and me, and he told him the joke out of the blue. 


My friend couldn’t wait to tell me.


“Now you won’t get upset?” He was being polite because he was a good friend so he was going to tell me the joke if I wanted to hear it or not.


“Christine Keeler gets her toe stuck in a bath. Mandy Rice-Davies does everything she can to help Christine get the stuck toe unstuck, but after a long time of pulling and pushing at the toe, they decide to call a plumber because the toe won’t budge.


Before the plumber arrives Mandy grabs a tea towel to cover Christine’s top half and finds a bowler hat to cover her lower area so Christine wouldn’t be naked when the plumber arrived. The door bell rings and in comes the plumber. He takes a good look at Christine in the bath with the tea towel over her top half and the bowler hat covering her lower area and then he points at the bowler hat and says, ‘I won’t be able to get him out of there’.”


We both laughed.
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2 Comments

Don’t Listen to the Words

24/1/2021

9 Comments

 
I was asked, not too long ago, if there was any way I could prove that Christine was not a prostitute - if, for example, I had old tax returns showing her income from modelling or something like that. The very idea of the Christine doing a tax return makes me smile and I think the question was less about proving my mother wasn't working as a prostitute and more about finding a piece of evidence to show that Stephen Ward couldn’t have been living off her immoral earnings. No, I don't have her tax returns because of course she didn’t do tax returns, but equally it’s obvious Stephen Ward wasn't living off her immoral earnings.

I have spent a lot of time researching the events around Christine being assaulted in April 1963 and the follow up trials for her application for mercy and there is an amazing amount of hard information out there in press and court records and it’s quite easy to find. 

Going through these court records you can trip over some interesting exchanges that add more colour to the wider story. For example Paul Mann, who was a bridge playing friend of Stephen Ward, was called by the prosecution to give evidence at Christine’s preliminary hearing at Marylebone Magistrates’ Court on 28 October 1963. He was questioned about a trip to Spain with Christine in March earlier that year, and he was asked whether he was trying to sell a photo of somebody famous pictured with Christine. The famous person in the picture remained unnamed, but Paul Mann was allegedly asking for £2000 to hand it over, a huge amount of money in 1963. We can only wonder who was the man in the picture. (Press record pictured)
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​I like this piece from the court case, because at one stage Paul Mann was asked what his business was that took him to Spain, he answered, “That is my business.” The barrister then asked, “Do you refuse to answer that question?” and he said, “I refuse to answer.” I have never been asked a question in court, so it never occurred to me you can tell the court to mind its own business!

I think back now and Christine had lots of sayings she would throw out and most of them would drive me crazy.

“Never listen to the words in a song, just listen to the music.” She used to say this one a lot and it used to drive me crazy. 

“The words are part of the song” I would argue. 

“Don’t listen to the words! It’s just somebody else’s story that mostly don’t make sense anyway, just feel the music.” We would argue about this often and she was convinced that she was absolutely right, the lyrics to songs were not necessary and she couldn’t understand why I couldn’t understand that.

One day after she had dropped that expression again I said, “What about opera? If you don't listen to the words you don't know what’s going on”

“Seems,” - she would call me Seems -”they are singing in a foreign language, so you won’t understand it anyway!” she replied. “Anyway, I’ve been to opera and you do understand it without the words.” She might have had a point about opera I didn’t actually know enough about it to argue with her.

She had another expression that used to get under my skin. “Whatever someone says, apply it to themselves.” Christine would throw this expression out when somebody had said something nasty about someone and every time I would ask, “What does that mean?” When I got older and I would put an ‘even’ in my question “What does that even mean,” because this expression drove me crazy.

She would explain, “If somebody says something horrible, then really they are talking about themselves. If someone calls you a liar, it’s because they are a liar”.

“That makes no sense,” I would argue. “If I called you a mad old woman, does that mean I am the mad old woman?” 

She would laugh at that and say, “I may be mad, but I’m not old,” but she would say same expression the next time anyone had something nasty to say.

She also used to say, “What people say doesn't matter, it’s what people do that matters”. As a young man I didn't understand this either and I would argue, “What about all the beautiful things people have said or written? They matter”.

Lots of people have written books and opinion pieces on my mother’s life, some of which are better than others, but it does strike me that so many books and opinion pieces have been written by people who clearly didn’t do even the most basic research. 

Christine would get really angry if people who told the story of her life and were wrong with any detail. For her it was an unforgivable act. You might think you are right, or you may even be mistaken but for Christine there was no excuse. For my mother, truth was real and tangible, it could be hard to find, it could take a lot of work to get at it, but it was something you could almost touch.

Christine made some scathing private notes about things people had got wrong when telling her story, in her eyes it was not about poor research or misremembered an event, in her eyes it was an unforgivable lie.

So Christine used to tell me, “What people say doesn't matter, it’s what people do that matters,” and for her I think she had a point. Maybe all of these little expressions meant the same thing, sometimes people lie and there are even some people that lie a lot and sometimes people tell stories they think are true.

So don't believe what one person says, if it’s important, do the research, find the proof.

​Lastly a quick reminder about the campaign to pardon Christine, and why we are doing it.
In 1963 Christine Keeler famously went to prison
Not because she had made up an assault - because she didn’t
Not because somebody else had slapped her earlier that night
Not because a drunken conversation was recorded
But because she denied that two witnesses were there when she was assaulted

So why does it matter?
It is time to forgive my mother, so as to better understand our history, or for her family, or just because she was a human being.

It is time to free Christine Keeler
9 Comments

One Regret

17/1/2021

5 Comments

 
This week Christine got her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a record of national figures who have helped shape Great Britain. I think you get your mention a few years after your death, so I am again reminded of the story Christine would tell me about what Stanley Baker said to her. Stanley Baker, probably best known for his starring role in Zulu, said, “Christine, you are the most famous person here, we’re all actors and we will be forgotten, but you, Christine, you are in the history books forever.”
 
We have just finished another draft of the pardon document and are really pleased with how it is shaping up. So fingers crossed it won’t be too long, but these are strange times.
 
Some memories are much harder than others to write down and share but they are just as important as they paint a more rounded picture of our lives. This year I wanted to talk more about the price that Christine Keeler paid.
 
It wasn't long after Christine was released from prison she met James Levermore. She said he was sweet with a great personality, he was educated and chose to work as a labourer in the outdoors. They fell in love, a whirlwind romance, and in 1965 they were married at Reading Registry Office. It was a normal wedding, her family all came too. Her mother and step-father, her grandmother and one of her aunties, who being more or less the same age as Christine, was like a sister. Of course the press were there too, so maybe not an entirely normal wedding.
 
Christine wanted to start afresh, she would play the part of a wife and play the part of being happy and maybe even for a time she was. A few months later she was pregnant with my half-brother James and things started to come apart. At the hospital she went into a panic, in fact a complete meltdown. “You are trying to kill me,” she said to the doctors.
 
One of the team that night in the maternity ward was West Indian and maybe because of the drugs they gave her something snapped, maybe she thought Gordon was there or maybe she thought it was a friend of his, but that night going in for her Caesarean section she was terrified they were going to kill her.
 
Christine went home with her new baby and played the part of a new mother and housewife but something was wrong, she was desperately unhappy. She was struggling to bond with her son Jimmy. She said, “I didn't feel he was mine at all.” 
 
Christine then became convinced that her husband was going off with other women, because, why would any man want to be with Christine Keeler! She was so insecure, she would secretly follow him to work to make sure he wasn’t seeing other women. Her suspicions and insecurity destroyed her marriage. 
 
The marriage was over and her husband James left. Christine had a three month old baby who was a stranger to her. Her mother stepped in and offered to help, she would look after Jimmy until Christine felt better. They used to call it the baby blues but now we call it post-natal depression and it is surprisingly common. I don't know if it was linked to the bad experience when Jimmy was born or finding herself trapped or maybe it was everything, but Christine was very sick.
 
Jimmy never came to live with Chris, her mother would always find a reason to extend his stay. She would tell Christine, “You’re not settled enough to look after a child,” or, “The baby is holding my marriage together”. So days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months and months turned into years.
 
Five years later Christine remarried and Jimmy still wasn't with her, and then I was born. I had moved around so much inside Chris that my umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck, so it had to be an emergency C-section. Christine used to tell me that the doctors asked, “If it’s a choice, who do we save: the mother of the baby?” and Christine told me she said, “Save my baby,” and, no, I don’t really believe that story, but she never let me leave her side. So maybe it’s true!
 
I met her mother, my grandmother, only a few times. I stayed there for a week one summer when I was seven; according to Christine they didn't want me back again, I was too much hard work and it upset Jimmy. 
 
The last time we saw either Jimmy or Christine’s mother was at the Worlds End Estate in 1988. I can’t remember how it came up, but Christine was saying, “At least tell him I bought your house for you.” I think Christine wanted to show Jimmy she had done something for him. She wanted to show him she wasn't “just a bum”.
Then we argued some more because Christine’s mother talked about all the “black faces” in London and how frightening she found it. I was only 16 or 17 and said, “That’s what Hitler would have said,” and they left and we never saw them again. I have sometimes wondered if I was the one who went too far that night.
 
Christine sent them birthday and Christmas cards and even tried to call them over the years, but it was done. 
 
Looking back, strangely, I have no recollection of ever talking to my grandmother, of ever making eye contact or being hugged. I always thought she was a cold woman.
 
I once asked Christine if she had any regrets, she thought about it for a while and said, “My cat, Thomas, I took him to the vet too late. I think he suffered and I blame myself for that’ 
 
Now I am a parent and I think to myself, of course that’s what she would say to her son. Of course she had regrets, but what else could she say? 
 
Jimmy was her one major regret.
5 Comments

Bread Maker

9/1/2021

5 Comments

 
Happy 2021!!

I do hope that this year is better than last year for everyone, and I must admit I look forward with optimism. We have vaccines rolling out across the world, where I live in the northern hemisphere the winter solstice has passed and each day is longer than the last. 2020 saw many stories come to an end and chapters close and it is my hope that 2021 brings healing peace and a coming together.

I also want to see a pardon for my mother for her crime of being attacked by a man who had a history of violence against her, in fact just a history of violence. I am currently working on a family statement to be added to our application for pardon, it has been James Harbridge’s idea to talk a bit about the personal and family impact of my mother’s conviction in 1963, to write a victim impact statement type of thing. It’s been much harder and more emotional than I thought, but does focus the three reasons why what we are doing is so important: To correct the story that is our history about those events, for her family, and most importantly for her, because she was a human being.

When I was a child I had a toy gun, it was a Luger, or that was what was written down the side. It was painted black metal and quite a lot of the paint had chipped away so it looked mottled with silver. There was no grip - it had broken off on its travels, so it was awkward to hold and a very sorry looking toy. I remember the toy gun because on more than one occasion Chris held it in her hand and told me or told friends, “This is a real gun to protect me from Lucky Gordon, if he comes here I will shoot him”.

This story doesn't end with ‘and It was a real gun!’ It is not that type of story, but hopefully it illustrates how I grew up understanding that Gordon was a real threat. There is another thing the story illustrates that is harder to write, because I can’t tell you that my mother always knew herself that it was just a toy gun. Fear is a strange partner.

In these blogs I have talked a lot about my mother’s humanity, something that I always felt was missing from the story of Christine Keeler. It is harder to talk about the price that my mother paid for being Christine Keeler. All stories have context and Christine Keeler was quite damaged by what happened to her in 1963 - that much must be obvious to anyone, but it is also true that my mother always loved me and did all any mother could do to keep me safe. I plan to talk about this more on the blog.

I have been doing a lot of reading on perjury in the English courts, how it is used and what it means. I believe that the charge of perjury was used as weapon against my mother, a tool to punish her, and to mangle the words of Mandy Rice-Davies “I would say that, wouldn’t I?”

In 2015 Andy Coulson, the ex-editor of The News of the World, was charged with perjury, and he was acquitted. Mr Coulson had lied on oath but in Judge Lord Burns’ view, “Not every lie is perjury,” and the lie did not change the course of the trial. Link
There are not that many perjury cases, over the last 100 years they average out at 150 per year - Link

​
But I do wonder how many of those charged with perjury are women, women who have claimed they have been assaulted or raped. It’s interesting research and there seem to be a number of people doing the same research raising real concerns about how historically the courts have ‘aggressively’ prosecuted woman with perjury where their initial assault charges couldn’t be proved.
Katie Baker has written a few articles on the subject, here is one on buzzfeed - Link
Woman Against Rape have run a six year campaign with concerns about the use of perjury against the victims of abuse.

If rape, stalking and physical assault is really about power, as is often claimed, isn’t the ultimate show of power seeing your victim go to prison for what you did to them?I wonder how powerful Lucky Gordon felt when Christine went to prison.

I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to think that perjury was used to punish my mother, In fact I don’t think she would be the only victim of this weapon, even now.

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I will leave you with another story to show how Christine had power taken away from her and how that can impact those around her. A long time ago in the early 1990s I did some bookkeeping work for Freddie’s Model Agency, invoices and payments, things like that. One morning I went up to their stairs and in the hall as you entered their upstairs office was a huge three metre tall poster of a model sitting in that chair in that pose, made to look just like my mother. It was an advertising campaign for bread with the slogan, “It tastes great with nothing on”. It featured one of their models and putting the poster up was a deliberate gesture to embarrass me or maybe to embarrass my father, as the owners were friends.

As mortified as the young me was to be confronted by that massive poster at my place of work, it could still be taken as just good fun. I did know that Christine would not have received a penny from a campaign like this, and seeing her used always stung me a bit.

So I was mortified by the poster and I had a vague sense of injustice, but I wasn't going to let anyone else see that, The one thing I can’t remember was who tried to give me a lesson on that poster and about that campaign. knowing full well who my mother was, they told me with some pride about this wonderfully clever idea, how it get around copyright and how unimportant that original model was, “You are just piggy backing, riffing, off a cultural icon, the picture that is not Christine Keeler, she was only a model and not even a very good one I hear”

I swallowed a lot of pride, that poster was on the wall every time I went there. If I had been older and braver I would have pointed out the obvious: “She so unimportant and yet you are still using her to sell your bread”

Incidentally, the model from the campaign, Helena de Bondt, sent me a kind message when Christine passed. So while some people think models are unimportant, at least some have their humanity.
5 Comments

The Sandwich of Destiny

19/12/2020

2 Comments

 
2020 is fast coming to a close. This year has meant turmoil for everyone, a lot of people have been financially and emotionally impacted by this pandemic, others have been luckier and just inconvenienced by this new normal. My family and I are looking forward to Christmas together and are hoping that nothing stops that from happening, that we all remain well and hoping that next year is better for everyone.
This time last year the BBC drama The Trial of Christine Keeler was about to air and our campaign to recognise that Chris should never had gone to prison was about to start. My life changed as I understood what Chris had asked me to do in her will: “To make sure that the truth is told about events of which I took part during my lifetime”.

Christine Keeler was not a prostitute and Christine Keeler was not a liar. Christine Keeler, and she would have hated me saying it, was a victim.

There are of course people who will say, “...but she was a liar, she lied on oath when she said two men did not witness a crime” but when those two men made it clear to Christine they wanted nothing to do with the police, when those two men washed their hands of any responsibility to help convict a man who had assaulted her, Christine had a terrible choice - either don’t mention the witnesses to the police or just don’t report the assault, those were her choices.

“Or just don’t report the assault” - and face yet another assault by Lucky Gordon, and next time it could be worse, what a terrible choice.

There is a story I was told recently by someone who interviewed one of the police officers who was there in 1963. When Christine was questioned in connection with Stephen Ward the ex-police officer said, “We knew Christine was a prostitute because at the end of the interview she took the uneaten sandwiches with her. That is something prostitutes do and that is how we knew”

If only she had left those sandwiches. Would our history be different today?
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​For some of us the world has changed a lot since 1963. Chris told me how they would eat a lot of vegetarian spaghetti bolognese, which was basically spaghetti and tinned tomatoes, and there were of course a lot of sandwiches. She saw an avocado in the early sixties and at the time she thought they looked like a very bad idea!


​​At the beginning of 2020 I went to an art exhibition dedicated to my mother, Dear Christine - A tribute to Christine Keeler, the brainchild of Fionn Wilson and a celebration of Christine. There was art, music and poetry, it was very beautiful. People said nice things about Christine and she would have said how she hated all the fuss and attention.
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By Fionn Wilson
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After the exhibition I went out with friends, including one of Christine’s old friends, Desmond Banks, and we had a few drinks, laughed together and had a glass of scotch, Christine’s favourite tipple. Thanks to the pandemic that would have been one of the last times I was out with friends. 

This website was published and lots of you sent kind messages and still do. A lawyer, James Harbridge, made contact and offered to help with Christine’s pardon, pro bono, and with lots of hard work he took a campaign page on a website and turned it into a legal document and so much more. 

Felicity Gerry QC has taken on the fight pro bono and by the end of 2020 I feel we have a chance of correcting a part of history, telling that ‘truth’ that Christine talked about in her will.

2020 has had its downs, but it’s had some ups.
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Merry Christmas everybody, may you love and may you be loved too.
2 Comments

Palm of the Hand

13/12/2020

2 Comments

 
It’s been an interesting week. More of you have come forward asking to help, which has been brilliant. Any help is much appreciated; even just telling friends about this really helps. It has also been a little frustrating at times, with one journalist telling me that the story I’m trying to tell is too complicated for their readers.

I was laughing the other day when reading through Christine’s original manuscript It was a comment about how tough her stepfather Ted was, when she was a child. She tells a story about falling out of a moving car and another one about pets being drowned, but the line that made me laugh was something she said Ted used to say to her: Ted used to tell me, “Wish in one hand and spit in the other, and see which one gets filled up first”.

It is a dark enough expression to use, the glass is definitely half empty with this expression, only this wasn't quite what Ted would say, it was:
“Wish in one hand and SHIT in the other, and see which one gets filled up first”
That was just Christine being polite, being a little discreet. I remember Christine speaking on the phone with a different voice, her telephone voice. That was the generation she was from, it is not lying, it is just not wanting to be rude.

A student reached out a few weeks ago asking about Christine’s campaign and they mentioned how after reading Christine’s Wikipedia page they where given no idea about Lucky Gordon and his history with Christine. It is true that her Wikipedia page glazes over some important aspects of her story and in some places is just plain wrong.

It is frustrating because I have made one or two changes on Wikipedia only to see them taken out again!
Here are some examples:
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Wikipedia Says: The exact length of the affair between Keeler and Profumo is disputed, ending either in August 1961, once Profumo was warned by the security services of the possible dangers of mixing with the Ward circle, or continuing with decreasing fervour until December 1961.
I wanted to add: Christine said that the relationship ended in December 1961 and, in his statement to the House, Profumo said he last saw Christine in December.
The Wikipedia author implies that Christine has lied about the length of the affair, maybe even exaggerated the affair and they have made an assumption about Profumo’s reaction to the warning.
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Extract from Profumos statement

Wikipedia says: ... Yevgeny Ivanov. According to Keeler, she and Ivanov had a short sexual relationship.
I wanted to add/change:
After an evening drinking vodka, Christine and Ivanov had a one-time sexual relationship - Ivanov confirmed Christine’s account in his 1992 book ‘The Naked Spy”.

The Wikipedia line implies that Christine lied about this. You will notice this as a trend throughout her Wikipedia page.

Wikipedia says: After her relationship with Profumo ended, Keeler was sexually involved with several partners, including jazz
singer Lucky Gordon and jazz promoter Johnny Edgecombe. There was considerable jealousy between the two men; in one quarrel on 27 October 1962, Edgecombe slashed Gordon's face with a knife.
This is all just wrong.

Starting with “Keeler was sexually involved with several partners.” It’s an uncomfortable line in itself, but with regards to a relationship with Gordon, it ignores all the evidence.

Christine always maintained that Lucky Gordon was never a boyfriend; in fact she stated that on two occasions he raped her. If you decide not to believe Christine there is still Johnny Edgecombe in his book ‘Black Scandal’ confirming the terror Christine had for Lucky Gordon. The police also confirmed that they had been called on a number of occasions because Gordon had “molested or assaulted” Christine. Testimony from Paula and Christine in Gordon’s trial in June 1963 and her trial in September shows the fear and intimidation she suffered at the hands of Gordon. There is no evidence to suggest Christine was ever in a consensual relationship with Gordon.
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Court reports taken from Christine’s trial Dec 1963
So this is what I wanted to change it to:

In October 1961 Christine met Lucky Gordon when buying cannabis for her and Stephen Ward. Christine alleges that Lucky Gordon, who had a record of violence against woman, started an 18 month campaign of intimidation and harassment and assaulted her on numerous occasions. In May 1962 Christine and Michael Lambton were briefly engaged. In Sept 1962 Christine met jazz promoter Johnny Edgecombe and they started a relationship. On 27 October 1962, while Christine and Johnny were out dancing, there was a dispute with Lucky Gordon that ended with Edgecombe slashing Gordon’s face with a knife.

Wikipedia says: On the 18th of April 1963, Keeler was attacked at the home of a friend. She accused Gordon, who was arrested and charged. At his trial, which began on the 5th of June, he maintained that his innocence would be established by two witnesses who, the police told the court, could not be found. On the 7th of June, mainly on the evidence of Keeler, Gordon was found guilty and sentenced to three years' imprisonment.

It’s just not true that Gordon said the two witnesses would establish his innocence, he just didn't say that. Gordon argued that although he had hit Christine, he wasn’t responsible for all of her injuries and that she had run into a door whilst trying to get away from him. The police doctor’s evidence was also key in Gordon’s conviction.

Wikipedia says: Ward's trial, which ran from the 22nd to the 31st of July 1963, has been characterised as "an act of political revenge" for the embarrassment caused to the government. He was accused of living off immoral earnings, earned through Keeler
and Mandy Rice-Davies, on the basis of the small contributions to household expenses or loan repayments the two had made to Ward while living with him. Ward's professional earnings as
an osteopath were a substantial £5,500 a year (£118,200 in 2019) at the time these small payments were made. After a hostile summing-up from the trial judge, Ward was convicted, but before the jury returned their verdict, he took an overdose of barbiturates and died before sentence could be passed. In the closing days of Ward's trial ...
As a point of interest I don't know where the source of Ward’s earnings as £5,500 per year comes from. Police records state £2,852 was his best year in 1962 and he had considerable expenses with that.
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Wikipedia says: Gordon's assault conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal when his missing witnesses were found and testified that the evidence given by Keeler was substantially false
What I wanted to change it to was: Gordon's assault conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal when his missing witnesses were found on the basis that Christine had lied about the two other men being present at the assault.

Wikipedia says: ... she was sentenced to nine months' imprisonment, serving four and a half months in prison.
This should say: serving six months.

The changes I wanted to make are supported with actual evidence. The entry is not complete, but I hope the changes tell the story more clearly and objectively. I also believe it removes some of the malice in the text. Lastly, it is Christine’s Wikipedia page, so it should tell her story. Maybe there are some people out there who just want to think that Christine lied about everything. Maybe some people who support Stephen Ward can’t hide a certain contempt for Christine and Mandy or maybe some people don't actually know the story as well as they think they do.


When I was young Christine would take the palm of my hand and tell me there was a big farm right there in my hand. She pointed to the field were they grew potatoes and where the cows were kept, and on my hand she would point at the farmhouse and a greenhouse for the tomatoes. Finally she would ask me, “What do you think is here, in the middle of the farm?” and she would point at the middle of my hand. “It’s a duck pond,” she said as a big drop of spit landed in the middle of the farm. It was gross but it was funny and sometimes that’s what families are.

But I am sure there are some people who will now say that Christine had a nasty habit of spitting at people.
2 Comments

Questions and Answers

6/12/2020

0 Comments

 
Just a big long audio blog today, answering some of the questions I have been sent.
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0 Comments

Anniversary

2/12/2020

4 Comments

 
Today is Christine’s anniversary, she died three years ago on the 4th December 2017. I thought I should post the foreword I wrote for the re-issue of her book - Secrets and Lies. I am sure some of you may have already seen it, but it was the first time I had written anything about Chris and some of it was taken from her eulogy so it seems apt.

Foreword

I never met Christine Keeler.

For me my mother was always Christine Sloane. She changed her name to get away from being Christine Keeler. In our house Christine Keeler was talked about in the third person ‘who would want to be associated with Christine Keeler?’. Christine Keeler would get the blame for lots of things that happened. Friends, family, relationships that had soured, that would be Christine Keeler’s fault.

I wanted to give a flavour of the person I knew, the human being and not the ‘Sixties icon, not the sex symbol and not the victim.

I was born ten years after the Profumo affair, and those events were always a part of our lives. Stories about some fabled ‘man in the mask’ who was at upmarket orgies, or the rumours of doctors and nurses with President Kennedy, or who was spying for the Russians. My mother always did hold her cards very close to her chest even from me. ‘If you want to keep a secret,’ she would say, ‘tell no one’.
My mother paid a high price for Christine Keeler, she went from riches to poverty, from all the adoration of men to loneliness. She called herself a scapegoat and when we bickered, I would call her a martyr on a cross.

Christine was a fantastic driver: she loved driving and loved driving fast. ‘Start accelerating as you’re coming out of a corner, get your speed up for when you straighten up,’ she used to tell me. That was a big surprise for the instructor on my first driving lesson.

She told me when she was much younger, she nearly raced at Le Mans, and after she was released from prison, she would speed round London in her Mini Cooper until the police gave chase. ‘They couldn’t catch me. They had to put road blocks up to stop me and when they did I would say:
‘I’m Christine Keeler and they would have to let me go because it would look like I was being victimised by the police after what Denning did to me.’

In the early 1990s she was living in Clapham and was asked for an interview on a TV show in Birmingham; I can’t remember the name of the show but it was on the BBC. She didn’t want to go but we were poor, and it was £250 cash. We both jumped in her battered old red Renault and flew up the M1. When we arrived, there was no cash. Suddenly, it was not the BBC’s policy to pay cash.
‘Christine you must understand it’s a live show, there is a presenter, a studio audience other guests: you need to stop being difficult and get on with it,’ one of the BBC production people told her. Chris wasn’t having any of it. No cash, no interview. It felt like a room full of hostile people all acting like she was being difficult or unreasonable. They turned to me: ‘Can you speak to your mother?’ She was told there would be cash for this interview, that cash would pay for the petrol back, for food, she was not being difficult, she was making the only choice left to her, she wasn’t rich and powerful with a world of choices.

The cash arrived just before the show went live, she puts on her make-up and did the show. On the way back to London the gear box on the Renault slipped on the motorway and she could only get the car into third. She had to drive from Birmingham to south London in third gear: ‘We can’t stop for anything, I won’t get it going again.’ She didn’t stop, she was a very good driver.

In the late 1980’s the film Scandal came out, and things got a little easier for a while. She had sold an option to make the film about five years before for a few thousand pounds, when we were very poor. They had six years to make the film or they would need to pay Chris more money to extend it and just before time was up production started. There was a lot of this through the years, people managing to not pay Chris in the nick of time, publishers going bust -- after everyone else was paid -- or ex-husbands not having to pay child support even when they lived in large houses and drove big, flashy cars.

I would have been about seventeen when Chris had been paid a few thousand pounds to go to the premier of Scandal and we both got to walk down the red carpet in Leicester Square. Bob Geldof and Paula Yates sat next to us in a cinema packed with 1980s celebrities. The Pet Shop boys and Dusty Springfield had a song [ ‘Nothing Has Been Proved’,1989] at number two in the charts in both the UK and US about my mother.

It all led to an American release for Scandal and in fact it did pretty well in America for someone, and it was one of the top UK movies there for a long time. We went all around America and she advertised the film. I remember we were in the Ritz Carlton on Central Park and watched the Hillsborough disaster on the news; 96 people died when they went to watch a football game and the Press where already blaming the fans. I clearly remember her saying ‘That’s crap, those bastards just let those people die, and now they are going to cover it up”. Decades later she was proved right. I think she understood how police, press and politicians worked.

Coming in to America through customs we were bickering, probably because I was a teenager. ‘Hold this’ she said and gave me a scrunched up tissue. She always had scrunched up tissues. I protested and we bickered more as she got our passports ready and we bickered past customs to a waiting car. ‘Give me my tissue back’ she asked and opened it and inside there was a small lump of cannabis. ‘I’m going to need this for my nerves,’ she said. She liked a smoke.

While in America we were contacted by a family living on a Native American reservation they were related on her father’s side and they were keen to make contact. Chris wasn’t very interested. I think she was a little embarrassed: it was a different time. We talked about it over the years, she seemed to think her father who had been put up for adoption and was originally Native American, I never did find out for sure.

Chris was a terrible cook. She would say: ‘I’m not a good cook, but I do have one or two dishes that I’m ok with.’ That was a lie for she was a terrible cook. One Christmas she put the small turkey in the oven, put the gas on low but forgot to light it. Half an hour later we could smell gas, she jumped up, opened doors and windows.

She had gassed the turkey, our Christmas dinner tasted of gas, and she had made some sort of gravy from its juices and poured this gas tasting juice over everything, and she started laughing. She was a terrible cook.
She used to laugh, really laugh, we played tricks on one another. I told her once you can get rid of dark under your eyes with just a dab of Deep Heat then rub it in. ‘You bastard’ she screamed her eyes streaming and both of us rolling around laughing. Don’t worry she would have got her own back with an equally devious prank.

Family and friends came and went, but I don’t think it was ever Christine Keeler’s fault, money would have been part of it, some friends and even family disappear when you lose all your money. We went on a trip to Brazil when I was five, she was doing interviews, so it was a working trip, whilst we were there everything seemed to change, all the money was suddenly gone, I even think we were stuck there for a while, but we came back to London things were hard for Chris, we stayed in friends’ flats, we even stayed in squats.

Chris had a great friend called Professor Dennis Evans, we stayed in his spare room for a while. Dennis used to keep exotic pets, scorpions, spiders and snakes, one morning he poked my head into our room and announced: ‘I’ve lost the scorpions, one is very nasty, so shake your shoes before you put them on’. We ended up in a council estate. Chris was in trouble with the tax man and there was no money. There are pictures of her around this time, and she is very thin, it wasn’t for fashion. When Professor Dennis Evans died of cancer many years later Chris didn’t go to his funeral, and afterwords she told me it was because she was so damn angry at him for dying.

I remember her mother, my grandmother, wasn’t a warm woman. When I was very young, six or seven we went to visit then where they lived in Berkshire. My brother Jimmy didn’t live with us but lived with her mother and stepfather and for me always had. They all lived in the house Chris brought her mother during better times. I was playing with the family dog, a collie, and her stepfather started pretending to set the dog on me: ‘Go on attack, go on boy.’

It was all clearly a joke. I was six and knew a joke when I saw it, but mother went mad. ‘Don’t threaten my boy, don’t joke around like that,’ she screamed and she shouted and really stood up to him. I didn’t know then all the pain he had caused her when she was a young girl. Then we saw less of them, then we didn’t see them at all.
Families sometimes break and sometimes mothers and fathers don’t have any love for their children, but I always knew my mother loved me, always.

The smoking took its toll and she died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease on my birthday, December 4, 2017. I posted a statement on Facebook and we told the Press, and all that media craziness started again, TV and newspapers wanting quotes and stories.

The BBC news called to say that although we, her family, had told them they didn’t have enough sources for the story that Christine Keeler was dead. They weren’t going to run it, but they could run the story if I came to their studio and did a live interview that night. Then they would report it. I explained that my mother has just died and the last place I wanted to be was on telly.

This moment in time didn’t belong to us, it belonged to the press again.
I went to see her laid to rest in the hospital. I was with my wife and my oldest friend Mark, and she lay there still and peaceful in a hospital gown. My friend leaned in and whispered: She would be so annoyed us standing here and her without her make-up on.’

I half expected her to sit up and laugh.
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Thank you

Please remember- any support for our campaign is really appreciated
4 Comments

Photos and pictures

29/11/2020

4 Comments

 
I hope this blog finds you well, and thank you for finding this page.

It has been another really busy week. I was interviewed by Kevin O’Sullivan on talk radio last Saturday, and by Ryan Tubridy on RTÉ radio on Tuesday morning. There were also some press interviews, and I wrote a piece for a magazine and all will be out soon. I am trying to get Christine’s Campaign out there.
Having a mild form of dyslexia the writing of blogs and articles takes a lot of time and energy. I find writing professional emails and letters straightforward enough, its mostly terminology or standard phrases that you just get used to typing out, but creative writing is much harder. So it only seems fair to thank any readers for their patience if they trip over my typos on this website. I am happy to be told about them and I do update them.

I get some readers’ questions about Chris and I wanted to answer some this week. I was asked about Christine and how she felt about being photographed as she got older, and it is a brilliant question because I think it says a lot about the person I grew up with.

I am often asked for personal pictures of Christine and family pictures and the truth is, there aren’t very many at all. We forget now how easy it is to take pictures, but when I was growing up, we didn’t have a camera, as they were expensive and film was expensive too.

I was given an old camera by a friend of my mother’s. It was in a brown leather case and had a heavy lens. It just needed film and I remember thinking it was very beautiful. I had recently met my father and he was very wealthy, so Christine suggested that next time I saw my father maybe I could ask him to get some film and the very next Saturday I was due to see him I took my camera with me to his large house in Chelsea.

I remember there were friends of his there when I showed him the camera and I told him I just needed film, but my father said something along the lines of - it needs film so he could see why I brought it now, but he was looking at his friends when he said it

and the grown ups gave each other knowing looks. It made me feel like the poor child from a council estate even though I knew it was a dig at Christine. I was very young but I felt humiliated, so I left the camera there and I never saw it again. Sometimes when a marriage breaks down it ‘salts the earth’ and the hate between two people colours everything.

Chris hated having pictures taken of her. She would put her hand in front of cameras and say “no no”. Part of that was about vanity. She would say “how old I look”.

We talked about getting old and she would say “I still feel eighteen, inside... but then I catch myself in the mirror!” And we would laugh and talk about covering all the mirrors in the house like the crazy old ladies in literature. “I’m not a crazy old lady” and we would laugh even more, because she was a bit.
Chris also said how she worried that personal pictures could just appear in the papers. She worried about that. At some stage she was betrayed to the press by nearly every member of her family, so Imagine the betrayal she would have felt if a picture taken by her son hit the papers? It would be too much. Imagine how I would feel if I betrayed her that way? We only once asked Christine for a picture and that was with her granddaughter a few weeks before she passed. She was so happy having that picture taken, talking to her about modelling shots and asking her granddaughter “What is your best side?” in a photo.

There are only a few pictures of Christine and I. A few photos from my wedding, press pictures from the movie Scandal, and one picture from when I was young that I have already posted on an earlier blog, and that is it. But thats ok I don't need anymore, I was there.

Just to let you all know we have released a campaign image to help with some of the costs in running this website and with Christine’s campaign. We also need help spreading the word about our campaign to pardon Christine so please let friends know, like and share posts. It all helps.

Thank you.
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4 Comments

The two policemen

22/11/2020

7 Comments

 

Introducing new audio blog extra!!

This weeks blog comes with an audio file - I read the blog and talk about it -

Its a Blog Extras! - I am also looking at posting a podcast along with the weekly blog.
This week has been both exciting and exhausting with The Times reporting how Felicity Gerry QC has been engaged to help to get Christine a pardon. I am so delighted Felicity accepted this brief and she comes with a wealth of expertise. Felicity has taken this project on pro bono as well as James Harbridge, a lawyer based in Dubai with 25 years dispute resolution experience.

James had contacted me through the website at the end of August asking to help, and for me he has been the real breakthrough. Hundreds of emails, WhatsApps and Zoom calls later we find ourselves able to tell people why Christine, both morally and legally, should not have gone to prison in 1963. I am so incredibly grateful to them both.

I cannot forget Desmond Banks, Christine’s friend and solicitor who has helped and guided me through this whole story. Desmond has been a great mentor to me since Christine passed away and has even taken on the burden of spell checking each of these blogs before they are posted, not an easy job.

It’s been a strange week and I have been talking to the press about what we are doing. I can’t lie - I was upset that The Times article referred to Lucky Gordon as an ‘ex-boyfriend’. Christine would have been incandescent with rage: “He was never a boyfriend,” she would say.

I don’t know where that started, the first reference to Christine and Gordon being in a relationship. I have been doing lots of research and I think it may have come from an interview Lucky Gordon gave to the Jamaican Observer (1989) where he claimed to be Christine’s boyfriend. That is the first time I see it mentioned and I don't need to tell anyone reading this that he wouldn't be the first stalker or rapist to say they were in a relationship with their victim.

I have so many questions for Chris that she can’t answer anymore.

This week Peter Sutcliffe, The Yorkshire Ripper, died and an old memory came back to me. We were living on The Worlds End Estate in London and I was still very young. One day coming back from school there were two men in suits who introduced themselves as police officers, for me it was all very exciting but sadly they left almost immediately after I arrived. I can’t remember if Christine was angry or upset but she definitely hadn’t liked the conversation she had with the police.

It was little later that day, when a friend of hers came round, and she was talking about how the police had seen her and warned her that she may be a target because this serial killer was killing prostitutes.

I was young and can’t quite remember all of the details about that day, Christine and I talked about it because I think I was a bit worried. The police still hadn’t caught him and it was on the television all the time. I do remember that she did say the police thought she would be a ‘trophy’ for this killer because of who she was.

Of course I was young and my memory isn’t clear and the police may not have been there because of the Yorkshire Ripper - it could have been some other threat who thought Christine would be a ‘trophy’.

I would love to ask her, along with a hundred other questions too, but most of all I would love to ask her if she wants a cup of tea and a chat.


If you would like to help I would be delighted to hear from you. Now I have to get the word out and drum up the publicity we need for Chris.

Thank you
7 Comments

You’re fired

13/11/2020

4 Comments

 
Don’t worry this is not about the American elections!


In 1989 I was about seventeen and I had a Saturday job working in an electronics shop on Tottenham Court Road. I got the job because two friends were already working there on a Saturday and they managed to get me in too. We would earn £20 for the day but as I was new I was started behind a counter where they sold a small selection of videos. While my friends were on the shop floor helping customers buy TV’s, microwaves or any other electrical gizmos and chatting during downs times, I was mostly bored and stuck behind the video counter with Taz.

Taz ran the video counter and some of the customers that came in only Taz was allowed to serve, that was one of the rules. There was also a box under the counter that I wasn’t allowed to look in, that was another rule. Taz was a bit over weight, unkempt and smelled a bit of spilt milk, so I didn't even want to look in any boxes he had under his counter.

My job was to clean, go get Taz’s lunch, clean again and deal with customers that Taz wasn’t interested in and then do some more cleaning. Amazing to think that back In 1989 a new release movie was really expensive, up to £50 or £60 which was a lot of money back then. Taz was making good money in his little department not to mention whatever went on from the box under the counter.

Then the film Scandal hit the cinemas and Taz immediately took a very different interest in me. The next Saturday came around and shortly after our shift had started my friends came over saying there was a big problem. The manager of the whole shop and Taz had pulled them aside because they had a problem with me! The Saturday before some Videos had gone missing, it added up to a lot of money maybe even a few hundred pounds, and they had seen me take them!

I was in shock, I didn't take any video’s...We didn’t even have a video player!

Then Taz was over “The manager is going to call the police”.
I was now in a panic.
“We might have a way out” Taz said with a long pause before he went on “Your Mum’s film... if you get us ten copies, we won’t call the police and you can even keep your job”
I tried to explain, I couldn’t get copies of the film, but Taz said “you need to speak to your mum then or we get the police involved, make her understand”

I hurried home and told Chris about my imminent arrest. At first she laughed but quickly became furious. She felt this was her all her fault “Don’t go back there, let them call the police...do they owe you wages?”
Suddenly Chris had me under firm orders to go back to get my days wages, and not forget to tell them “My mum says, How #¢$$#$#$#$ dare they try this ££#$##£## on my boy”
I asked Chris if she would come with me but she made herself more comfortable on the couch with a “No, you go”

I returned to ask for my days pay, but there were more threats of the police and lots of shouting. Taz was angry and I was fired, and everyone who worked there had never been so insulted by this family!. So I left without the days pay and never went back. When I got home Chris asked how it all went and I lied and said they paid me. I didn’t want her to know I had failed or to feel bad about it anymore.

There has sometimes been a price to being Christine Keeler son. An ex girlfriend who told me how disgusting she thought my mother was for selling ‘sex stories’ (I think what upset me the most was she felt it was acceptable to even tell me) Or after a particular wave of press interest in Christine I had a company director who just stopped talking to me for three months. I found it so difficult to do the job that I had to hand in my notice.

Recently there was a article in the Mail about my fight to clear Christine’s name, I made the mistake of reading the comments section, and that was all a bit painful. Of course being Christine’s son has had some wonderful advantages too: I have met interesting people, had some great adventures because of it and of course I had my mothers love.
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4 Comments

Taxi Driver

8/11/2020

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I hope everyone is well and for anyone stuck in a lockdown I hope it is not too isolating. I live in Ireland and we are going through our own lockdown but I have found this lockdown much harder than the first, as the days are much shorter and the novelty has well and truly worn off. It helps me to remember that one day this will all be behind us.

A podcast I am in came out on Tuesday called ‘So, I quit my day job’ where I talked to Cathrine Mahoney about Christine, the website and all the work that is being done. Its such a complicated story, I enjoyed the time that podcast gave me, so it is a long ramble but there are lots of stories and hopefully, it is entertaining, maybe even funny in places too.

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Listen free at ACAST

Website play Part 2
Website Play Part 1

Listen free at ITUNES

Itunes Part 1
Itunes Part 2

I have also updated the campaign page a little - here. I wanted to make it a little clearer. There is a lot more research that has been done that allows me to be much more sure about the events around that night and the court cases afterwards. With more research, any police culpability seems less important to Christine’s eventual imprisonment.
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I read Johnny Edgecombe’s book ‘Black Scandal’. As a principal in the story, Johnny’s contribution is important and Johnny’s account does paint a vivid picture of Christine’s fear for Lucky Gordon and he supports Christine’s account of rape and harassment at the hand of Lucky Gordon.
​
Johnny makes a few claims that I find hard to tie in with a timeline, but interestingly he does mention the taxi that took him to Wimpole Mews on the day he fired the gun at Stephens flat. When the BBC drama aired in January a lot of people commented on why the taxi driver just waited while watching a man shoot at the flat, but according to Johnny the taxi driver did wait and after firing the shots Johnny jumped back into the taxi and told the driver to “drive anywhere”. I wish I could find the Cabbies account from that day.

​Its not a long blog post this week, but there is a two hour extra to listen to, but one last thing that came to mind this week.

After being coerced, Christine denied two witnesses were at a scene of a crime. The witnesses would later, on oath, support Christine’s version of events, but Christine went to prison.

Whereas, for implying he had relations with Christine Keeler, John Profumo sued the English distributors of Tempo Illustrato, an Italian Magazine, and also brought a case against Paris Match. A legal lie that benefited his reputation and to a small extent benefited him financially, but there was no call for his conviction.
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“I could not believe a man would be so foolish, even it so wicked, as to sue for a libel he knew to be true.” - Prime Minister, Harold McMillan concerning John Profumo.

​This week has been very busy in furthering Christine’s story, her truth. The support that I continue to receive has been quite amazing and there is now new help and guidance that is truly inspirational. This week I found this journey even more emotional than at any time before, in a zoom call I felt the first wave of vindication for my mother and I won't lie, it brought a tear to my eye. Now for the hard part.

Thank you
0 Comments

Left and right

1/11/2020

2 Comments

 
​It’s been another very busy week with lots happening, some of which may even have made Christine’s story a little clearer. Work is continuing on Christine’s Application for Mercy and my continued thanks go out to everyone who is helping, if you have your own stories about Chris or even want to help, I would be delighted to hear from you.

It surprises me sometimes quite how much information is out there that covers those events in 1963, and sometimes it’s about getting events in the right order and at the right time, because when events happen sometimes tells its own story.

With so much in the news about the upcoming elections in America, I wanted to mention Christine and her politics. I must start by saying I do not wish to push any personal agenda, I would call myself a wishy-washy metropolitan liberal but Christine politics were her own and transcended any particular label, her politics were...complicated.

Christine was a life long Conservative voter. Christine, who brought down a Conservative government, voted for Thatcher, John Major any conservative when she could vote, I found this infuriating because if you sat down and talked to Christine about her views she would say, “You shouldn't have rich people We should distribute wealth amongst everybody. It is just not fair these rich people with their wars sending children to die...,” and then she would go to the ballot box and vote Conservative. I'm not saying that Conservatives want to send children to wars but they don't tend to campaign for a redistribution of wealth!

Christine's short marriage to my father didn't have any influence on her thinking, my father whose politics were a few steps to the right of Margaret Thatcher, but I have wondered if Stephen Ward influenced her politics having read his police interviews and Christine’s notes.

Through her life, Christine found it very difficult to find work away from the scandal, when she did find a job she would be let go as soon as they found out she was Christine Keeler and that happened more times than she made public. It was a different time and I think Christine would have found it impossible working in a shop or facing the public every day. You would need to be made of steel with what some people said to her but unfortunately, she was only made of flesh and blood. So Christine and I struggled on child allowance and the occasional piece of work she would get. Christine never claimed unemployment, she had her reasons, they were complex but it made us poorer than most.

”I think you have free food for the poor, even Marie Antoinette would give cake to the poor” she would say.

Christine was the most communist leaning Conservative you could ever meet.

I recently read a blog post about Christine from a publisher who workedwith her, Richard Glyn Jones; he talked about Christine being a life long Conservative. He said he asked her why and she replied, “Because people like me do better under the Conservatives.” I don't doubt she said it.
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Stephen Ward police interview 1963
I was thinking this week about how very hard it must have been for Christine to tell her story because some of her story must have been so hard to re-live. I have been reading through Christine’s personal manuscript and some notes she left, in her own words. I was reading through her account of first meeting Lucky Gordon in October 1961: Lucky Gordon tricking her back to his flat in St Stephen’s Gardens to see some jewellery he claimed he had stolen. They had walked up lots and lots of steps before arriving at his flat, where he shut the door and pulled out a knife.

It’s a very raw piece of writing, Christine was clearly in shock, still asking about the jewellery. Of the actual rape she says this, “With the knife in one hand, he had it off with me”, “After 19 hours I managed to persuade him to let me go”.

It is difficult to read, but how hard was it to write?

She was relying on memory and I have found in her story that although she tends to be right about an event, sometimes she might get a date wrong, not often, but sometimes. Now we have tools available like the internet and freedom of information they help take these events and put them in the right place, and sometimes that can changes story just a tiny bit.
Christine's account and other historians have said that John Hamilton-Marshall sold his story to the newspapers in early June, immediately after Lucky Gordon was convicted of assault, and John Hamilton Marshall told the papers that he was in fact responsible for the wounds Christine received that night in April 1963. This piece of history had led many to claim that Lucky Gordon probably didn't even attack Christine, or that the perjury she went to prison for was that she that had made the whole thing up.

This week I checked the newspaper archives and the first mention of John Hamilton- Marshall even casting doubt on Christine's story, was the Daily Herald of 8th July 1963 that says John Hamilton-Marshall made a statement to the police over the weekend. The same article also talks about Robin Drury making claims he has a tape and detectives are questioning him too. A coincidence it all happened in one weekend?
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Daily Herald from Monday 8th July 1963
When I was going through Christine’s manuscript I also found a few pages of research by Christine, talking about the Labour party through 1963 and how they regularly used Christine and the scandal to discredit the then ruling Conservative party. I realised that Christine had been politisised for that year, a weapon to hit the Macmillan government with until they lost the next election.

So maybe what Christine felt about politics was also a little more personal and not at all political.
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