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? 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!
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. Merry Christmas everybody, may you love and may you be loved too.
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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: 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. 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
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 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. 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. ForewordI 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. Thank you
Please remember- any support for our campaign is really appreciated 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. Introducing new audio blog extra!!
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 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. 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.
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. 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. “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 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. 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.
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. I’ve tried to make these blogs about the human being who was once Christine Keeler, and how she wasn't always a perfect human being, but she was human. I think it is important because sometimes when you know someone it can help explain the difficult choices they make. I have met a lot of people who are critical of the choices other people make, and critical of the choices Christine made. In fact I’m sure I was pretty critical of her a million times as I was growing up with her. One thing I have learned is that people can only make choices when they have options open to them. When they don't have any options then they are not really making choices at all. I think Christine found herself in this position many times in her life. Friday nights were movie nights and Christine and I would go over to her old friend Dennis Evans for the evening. Dennis had a video player, so Christine would cook us dinner before we would all settle down and watch the movies Dennis had picked up from the local video store. I have spoken before about how bad a cook Christine was. We mostly had spaghetti bolognese for dinner and on one occasion Christine experimented with a dessert, her take on rice pudding: Christine’s Rice Pudding supriseAn amount of rice (any rice you have) One can of evaporated milk An amount of sugar that feels right Boil quickly because you are in a hurry It didn't taste anything like rice pudding, it tasted like hardwood pellets in a runny sweet sauce and even now if I close my eyes I can still taste it. Thankfully she didn't do desserts again, but I did catch her eating her rice pudding dish on more than one occasion later and it didn't look like she had improved on the recipe. Dennis was a Professor of Chemistry at Imperial College. He was kind, generous and extremely logical. Christine had met him in the mid sixties - she said they met at a party and Dennis was sitting in the kitchen with a notepad and pen. Dennis stuck a needle in his arm and passed out, when he came too Christine asked him what the hell he was doing and he explained how he was “doing a study on the effects of ketamine for a paper he was writing”. Our movie nights started in early 1980, video nasties were in the news and Chris and Dennis both wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I would have been 10 maybe 11 and Dennis was quite happy that I had a logical enough mind and would know they were just films with actors and it was all make-believe. We all talked about it and it was decided I was probably old enough to watch anything.
The films were always after dinner, so Chris and Dennis could relax and “let their hair down.” Both had a few drinks, and then they would pass commentary on how ridiculous the storylines were. They saved the most contempt for Indiana Jones films as they were completely beyond belief. Christine also hated the films where an old actor had a young girlfriend: “Why would she even look at that old man...yuk,” she would scream at the film, but George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was faultless! By the end of the night with the movies watched, Christine would get Dennis to put some music on his new CD player, the future of music. He said it was better than playing old vinyl records, but I think that was because the CD Player had a remote control and he could skip to the next track without getting up. At the time there weren’t even that many CDs out as it was such new technology, so we would listen to Grace Jones, The Kinks and always finish on Christine's favourite Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture. In the early hours and with the adults a bit drunk, Chris and I would leave for home. It wasn’t a long walk across London - Cathcart Road, down Edith Grove to the World’s End Estate - but at that time London was pretty deserted and past the Fulham Road there was a derelict old house. I dreaded that part of the journey after all the horror films and we both quickened our steps. I was worried about zombies or werewolves jumping out and I’m sure Chris was afraid of monsters jumping out as well. On those walks home I was between ages, too young to hide behind my mother but not yet old enough to be her protector. A few years earlier, some time in 1979, we had walked the same streets one night. I was much younger, far too young to be my mother's protector. The Omen was going to be on television that night, I was maybe eight years old and I had convinced my mother to let me stay up and watch it. I knew my mother would sit right next to me and if it got too scary she would still cover my eyes with her hand, the trouble was this always made any film scarier as now you could only imagine the horrors on screen and that was always worse.
Christine had brought me with her to meet a man called Michael and he sold cannabis. We didn't see Michael often, he wasn't a friend. Michael lived at the top flat in one of those big houses just off the King's Road, I think it was a small studio flat but it did have throws and big tie-dyed pillows everywhere, there was a large futon bed and the whole place smelled heavily of joss sticks. Michael was one of those adults who never looked at me and I didn’t like him. Chris would sometimes buy a small amount of cannabis, that was her thing. “Seems everybody has something for recreation,” she would say, “I don’t really go out.” When we arrived, something was wrong and Michael was agitated. “What is he doing here?” he said, and he was pointing at me. I could smell the joss sticks and their incense was making me feel a little sick, but the look in Michaels's face made me feel quite afraid. I grabbed my mother’s hand. I could feel the sudden danger in her. “I just wanted to get a little something. We’ve got to get back.” Christine manoeuvred us out of the door and at the same time she handed him some money. I didn’t understand what happened next and I can’t clearly remember, but Michael was angry and I couldn't see a reason why. He snatched the money from Chris, grabbed his coat and barged past us, slamming his door shut. Christine stood there in a seething rage before we followed him down the stairs. She was dragging me in her wake, calling his name. I remember how fast he walked ahead of us and how Christine dragged me along with her. Michael walked the streets always 20 feet ahead of us, speeding up when he needed to. I don’t remember other people on the roads that night but it was cold, dark and getting later and later, I was worried we were going to miss the film. We followed Michael for what seemed like hours with Chris calling after him, “Michael stop being silly’ and, “You’ve got my money.” Then suddenly he stopped and we could catch up. There was a cold look in his face, it was contempt, and he threw her money on the pavement, pushed through us again and walked off up the street leaving Christine to shout after him. I remember her having to get down on her knees to pick up her money. When we got home we had missed the first half of The Omen, a fishbowl had just smashed in slow motion and she didn't cover my eyes through as we sat through the film. I asked her why Michael was so angry and she said, “He thought I’m something I’m not and I think he hated me for it. People can be like that” We didn’t see Michael again. I recorded a podcast this week and I talked a little bit about Stephen Ward and how James Norton and John Hurt both played him with such charm and charisma and what a credit it was to them. I also talked about meeting John Hurt with Christine. It really started in around 1980 and I was about nine, my reading and writing was well behind where it should have been and I was being failed by my school along with a lot of other inner city children. Christine and I were living in a council estate and were desperately poor,the past couple of years had been very difficult for Christine. “I wasn’t living, I was surviving,” she later said. I think Christine was getting more and more worried about me. I would go out with friends and hang around on the estate and she was worried about my future. So one day she asked me if I wanted to meet my father. It was a short walk from the eleventh floor flat at the World’s End Estate to his four storey house in a wealthy part of Chelsea, less than a mile, but it was a world away. My mother had left him when I was six months old, they went through an extremely long and acrimonious divorce, so much so that I was made a ward of court because they had both managed to make each other look so bad through the legal process that the High Court were deemed a better guardian. On meeting me for the first time in many years, my father was also concerned about my level of education,so he paid for me to go to a boarding school in Kent. Staying at the school would get me away from any distractions on the council estate and maybe even to get me away from my mother after that bitter divorce. At half terms and holidays I would travel back to the council estate in Chelsea with Chris. I think it broke her heart sending me to school, but it was an opportunity for me that she never had. A few days before I was sent to the new school in the countryside I was with Chris in The World’s End pub near where we lived. We didn't often go to pubs but at that age my job was to sit quietly in the corner with a fizzy drink. One of the locals who called himself a real gangster told us he had been to prison for robbing banks. He also told me, “When you get to this new school, the boys will probably tie you up and rape you, it’s just what happens at these places. When you have money you send your kids away to be raped, they think it makes them men” I was terrified. “It’s ok” he continued “When you get there, you need to figure out who’s the top dog, who’s in charge, and you need to take them out, just walk up to them and bang! butif they are a big fucker, wait till they are asleep, then take them out.” There was a long pause: “Do that, they won’t come near you” I asked Chris what she thought and she said she was going to call the school and ask them to make sure I wasn’t raped by the other boys. I was very nervous when I arrived at St Michael’s prep school and immediately homesick. The housemaster looked down at me and said,“I’ve spoken to your mother, and we will take care of you.” I remember he was smiling - I can’t imagine the conversation they had had. So on my first night, when everyone was asleep, I stabbed a boy in the arm with a compass. It worked, in fact I don't think anyone spoke to me for the first week, but I wasn't tied up and raped. In fact I never did see any boys tied up and raped. I do remember in our dorm, behind an old wardrobe was a name carved into the wood from on an old boy It said “John Hurt” and a date that I can’t remember. We all knew that was the actor John Hurt as he was a famous ex pupil and we all knew he had the Alien burst out of his chest in the Ridley Scott movie, some of us had even seen it. We would talk about it when the lights went out at night to try and scare the boys who hadn’t seen it. Many years later John Hurt would star in Scandal, the 1989 film about the Profumo affair. He played Stephen Ward and was very good in it, he was charismatic and likeable, the hero of the story. To promote the movie Scandal we went to America and Christine was on chat show after chat show, but she wasn't alone. John Hurt was doing a lot of the shows with her. One morning we all jumped into limousine and were on our way to either another chat show or the airport to fly off and do a chat show in another city. It was a long way from the council flat in Chelsea. There were four of us in the back the seats, which faced each other: Christine, John Hurt, his partner and myself. Christine was in a great mood, she wasn't tired that morning. She had begun to get into a new routine and had got over the initial nerves of doing interview after interview and I think her adrenaline had kicked in.
As we sat in the back of the car Christine was telling John about how wonderful her son was and I was sitting there hoping the world would swallow me up. Christine was always telling people how wonderful her son was, it was so embarrassing at seventeen. She was telling him about what a good actor her son was, I was in a youth theatre at the time and Christine was so proud. “He is a really good actor,” praised my mum. “He can make himself cry, just like that,” and she turned to me and said, “Go on Seymour, cry, show him - just start to cry”. It wasn’t lost on me that this was John Hurt who had been nominated for an Oscar for The Elephant Man. I was really embarrassed - John Hurt had had the Alien from Alien burst out of his chest, and at seventeen this felt worse. “There’s nothing worse than a doting mother,” I said under my breath. John Hurt leant forward, looked me right in the eyes.“Oh yes there is,” he said, “a mother who doesn’t care”. A very quick blog post that some may find interesting.
It’s a list of Lucky Gordons crimes from the Daily Mail press cutting library. I think it is interesting as it highlights some of his later crimes against women, such as the attack on Daniella Perkins with a screwdriver in 1973. It also has Christine’s scribbles all over it, this was one of her habits, any piece of paper, inside of a book, anything - she would scribble notes all over it. It’s been another busy week with more research done and we have already started contacting experts to help with the next step in the campaign. There is still a lot of work to do but it is getting exciting. With everything in the news and talk of vaccinations I was thinking about a story Christine used to tell people, about the time I was desperately sick in 1975 after I was given the smallpox vaccination. The smallpox vaccine was one of the first to be developed, using science that goes all the way back to 1796, it is a ‘live vaccine’ and that means you are given mild similar pox called vaccinia virus and as your body learns to fights off this vaccinia virus it also builds immunity to smallpox because the two viruses are so similar. In fact this vaccine worked so well that smallpox has been eradicated all around the world, saving millions of lives. After I was given the smallpox vaccination I was very unlucky and got very sick, developing full blown vaccinia virus with a rash all over my body and a high fever. Christine took me to her doctor who gave her some very stark news. Doctor Green was a heavy set man with lots of curly black hair that he wore like a big wig. He sat behind a large mahogany antique desk, one of those with a green leather top and he told Christine that I was very ill, indeed I may not live through the night! Her son’s situation was quite desperate and there was nothing anyone could do, Christine needed to keep a close eye on me until the fever had broken, and then he sent us home. I remember my mother sitting at the end of my bed that night, opening and closing windows to ventilate my room, keeping me cool but not too cold. Christine would tell people about that desperate night and how afraid she was for her son’s life that night. How she watched over me and that correctly ventilating the room probably saved my life. When I was older I asked her why wasn’t I sent to hospital, if I was that sick why were we sent home? “I’m not sure he was a very good doctor” Christine replied. A year or two after the ventilated room we went to see Doctor Green again, his curly black hair now with a few waves of grey. I can’t remember exactly why we were there but at the end of the visit Christine mentioned how hard it was to get me to go to bed at night. “I can give you something for that,” he said as he scribbled out a prescription. “Give him just half a tablet a night” Christine bought the tablets and that night I had half of one and fell asleep for about 14 hours. Understandably Christine was very worried and asked Professor Dennis Evens what he thought, he was a chemistry professor who was a great friend of hers. “Oh no Chris, that’s Valium. That doesn’t sound right, and that is a very big dose of Valium. I don’t think you are meant to give that to children”. We stopped seeing Doctor Green and, as for the Valium, “I’ll have those to help me relax,” Christine said. Many years later Christine had brought a flat in Bruce Grove, in north London, I had moved in to help her fix it up so it would have been around the year 2000. Christine would have been in her late fifties. The flat needed a lot of work and we were stripping walls, painting and even dealing with damp around one of the windows with Christine holding my belt as I leaned out of a second floor window with a silicon gun. One morning I was late for work, I can’t remember why, and Chris said, ”Jump in the car, I’ll drop you off.” We were in a hurry and when we got to the top of the stairs on the landing, she slipped. Christine was a few steps behind me so I was able to stop her from falling too far but she had already bounced down a few steps. She stood up said she was fine and we carried on jumping in the car and she dropped me at work. It was a few hours later I got the call from the hospital: my mother wasn’t very well. When I arrived, Christine was still in accident and emergency. She was sitting up in a bed with pads on her chest and wires everywhere, checking her heart and with a mask on for oxygen. Christine told me when she got home she couldn’t breathe, and that she had really hurt herself coming down the stairs, it had knocked all of the air out of her, but didn’t want to say. The hospital had done tests and they had found scarring on her lungs. “Emphysema or something,” she said. It was the first time she seemed fragile to me, and this time I had to make sure she took her tablets and rested in bed. Christine didn’t like being looked after or being told what to do, so it was not long before she was up and about. Looking back I think something was different and her breathing was never the same. Twenty years later I wonder what Christine would say about the website and all the work people are doing to clear her name, all the people trying to look after her now. It has been a very busy week. We now have a first draft of Christine Keeler’s “Petition for Mercy”. When looking at the transcripts from the original trial, police records, and newspaper reports from her later trial, I think there is a powerful argument that Christine should not have gone to prison on 1963. Pulling all the different stands together has needed a talented legal mind and I must say I would not be here without the humbling help I continue to receive. People can indeed overwhelm you with their kindness. I am still asked why am I bothering to do this, “Isn’t it not enough that the BBC drama was nice about your Mum?” people have asked. In truth I have lots of reasons, like the grandiose: I believe it’s important for history to understand Christine’s motivation through much of the Profumo scandal. My closest friend told me this week that he thinks I am actually doing all this for me, as a last act of love. My daughter, Christine’s granddaughter, told me about a boy who this week said to her, “Everyone knows boys are more important than girls. Girls don't matter, my Dad told me” Nearly 60 years later, it’s like 1963, girls don't matter. That was Christine Keeler’s story in 1963. Lucky Gordon thought he owned her. The two witnesses to her assault felt no obligation after seeing a woman attacked in the street. John Hamilton-Marshall thought it was perfectly acceptable to talk about beating a woman. Stephen Ward posted bail for Lucky Gordon on the morning of her attack and he knew the danger Gordon posed to Christine. All the men in that 1963 story thought woman were not important - they all thought boys were more important than girls. I have lots of reasons for doing all of this. Back In January 2019 I wrote a foreword for the touring exhibition Dear Christine - A tribute to Christine Keeler. The exhibition was curated by the quite amazing Fionn Wilson and there is a page on the website dedicated to its art, music and poetry. I like the idea of Christine Keeler being an inspiration for art and creativity, In fact I can’t think of a greater tribute than that. When I wrote this forword I was in a different place - my mother’s death was still quite raw, articles and stories threw pity at her and not understanding. I was still mourning. It was the first time I had sat down to write anything about Christine. It was all too personal, even the flowers in this story were part of a silly argument we had had. ForewordAnd here I find myself writing about my mother. It’s been over a year since she passed, and in that time she has never been far from my thoughts.
Like it or not, my mother is a sixties icon. She was terrifically famous in the early sixties, in fact, world famous. It’s not easy to appreciate just how big a story the scandal was, now that we look back. There’s a famous picture of her sitting on a chair, a chair that people now call a “Keeler chair” and she sits back to front on it in what is now called the “Keeler pose”. It is very strange to me that a picture of my mother sitting on a chair could be so famous. She changed her name to Christine Sloane, so I never even met Christine Keeler. I grew up in the seventies where it was mostly just me and my mother, a single parent. I remember there being a lot of love, she was a warm and devoted mother who made a point of making sure I always knew I was loved. I’m not sure you can say a better thing about a parent. There were very few men in her life while I was growing up, and I’m sure she was probably lonely. We were poor, crushingly poor. I think we were wealthy when I was very, very young, but in the early 1970s something changed and that all went away - I think a lot of her friends did as well. We stayed in squats, the odd friend’s house and eventually a council flat. Being as poor as we were made the idea that my mum was famous frankly ridiculous, so I think it was only when the film Scandal hit the screen that I began to understand how massive the events of the early 1960s had been. There was a cost in so many ways and she paid a price for all that fame. She could be sad, she could be angry or frustrated, but in all my life I never saw her afraid, even when she was sick. She was no coward. All of that was more than 50 years ago and today there is an art exhibition and, honestly, I’m not sure what she would make of it all. Like all of us, she was still a bit vain and didn’t like pictures where she wasn’t young and beautiful. She could be dismissive of art when she didn’t like it or didn’t understand it, but she could always appreciate beauty in nature and life. I have a painting up in the hall of three sunflowers - she brought it as a gift from a thrift shop ten years ago. I think a proud parent probably put it in the shop, because it is terrible, but there was something about it that she liked. For her, the three sunflowers meant family (Me, my wife and our daughter) and family meant something beautiful. So, as terrible as it is, I have it on my wall to remember her. I think she probably understood art better than me. I’d like to thank everyone who is paying tribute to my mother. She was a very brave woman. Thank you.
What a lot of people may not realise is that these two witnesses, Fenton and Camacchio, both confirmed that Lucky Gordon had assaulted her. So Christine went to prison because she denied that the two witnesses were at the scene of crime, two witnesses who would have supported her story anyway. Take an extreme example. You are attacked in the street then thankfully a stranger comes to help and the attacker runs away. The stranger, for whatever reason, doesn’t want to get involved. So when the police arrive you tell them what happened but you also say, “It was just me and nobody else was here.” Six months later you are the one in prison. My mother used to tell me, “I was the first person to go to prison for not saying there was a witness who saw a crime,” and I bet she was the only person.
Once a week he would get his state payment and he would spend it all on a small amount of luxury food like smoked salmon, olives and taramasalata and sometimes he would visit us and we would eat. I think that made him happy. Then one day Merid was watching a TV show, it was a show about Ethiopia and man came on claiming to be Merid Beyene, the grandson of Haile Selassie the last emperor of Ethiopia, claiming to be him. Christine told me Merid asked for help, for somebody to confirm he was the real Merid Beyene but nobody would help, because that was all secret: “We can’t tell anyone we rescued an Ethiopian prince” Then in 1991, not long after, Merid died of a heart attack. Christine seemed to think the pressure of losing his identity, of not being believed, was probably too much. All these years later and thanks to the internet, with a little research I found some newspaper articles that covered his death but tell a different story: “He escaped the persecution of the royal family in the 1974 coup because by chance he was out of the country at the time. I can’t tell you which story is true, the one Merid told Christine, or the one in the papers. It occurs to me what if this isn't Merid’s story anyway? What if it’s the imposter’s story! So remember the next time you are at the deli counter of your supermarket and there’s slight man in cheap shoes buying olives, he could be a down on his luck prince.
In 1976 Chris and I went to Brazil. Chris was always more comfortable bringing me everywhere with her and that meant I went with her to see a famous healer who had ‘magic hands’, he could reach into somebody’s body and pull out whatever poisons were making them sick and not leave a scar or even a mark on their body. It was all really exciting, there was lots of noise and flashing colours all around and a thick sweet smell in the air. It was nighttime and there was a crowd of people in a circle watching the man with the magic hands, he was wearing white. I remember Christine holding me tight.
Somebody was lying on a table in front of the man with the magic hands who was standing above them. Then with all the noise and the thick smell in the air he seemed to reach into their stomach and rummage about. There was a small pool of blood around his fingers as he was working and then he pulled out a piece of grisly flesh, lifted it up and showed everyone. It was disgusting. That night left me with a strong and vivid memory that I could never forget. Chris would often tell friends the story and when I was still very young. I asked her what she thought about that night. “It was all rubbish, he had some giblets or something in his hand before be started - I could see them,’ and then she said, “Wish you had seen it.” There was a pause, everything slowed down, I remember thinking through what she had said. “I was there,” I told Chris. I was there. I remember the smells, the colours, the little pool of blood around the wound, there not being a wound after he had wiped away the blood, but she told me how she couldn’t take me, and how there was no way they would let children go to that sort of thing. “Then where was I?” I said. “Don't know where you were, but you can’t have been there?” She said. It doesn't change the story if I was there or not, one of us just forgot a little detail, and I was only five. Anyway, I was there and I always won at Scrabble. I have spent the last week going through the October 1963 press cuttings about Christine Keeler’s preliminary hearing for her trial for perjury, reading the differing stories the men connected to the trial told either the police, the press or the court. In truth I am left feeling a bit unsettled by all the mendacity and malice. I don't want to upset anyone when I write this blog, but Christine’s life involved rape and sexual violence. Growing up with Christine Keeler as my mother was mostly normal, getting up in the morning, sitting around watching television in the evening, but sometimes even just sitting around watching television could unlock something important about Chris and the person she was and hold a mirror up to what she went through. One night watching a TV movie in 1986 is still with me today. It’s a film called Easy Prey and it stared Gerald McRaney who I recognised from detective show I liked called Simon & Simon, he played the part of Christopher Wilder, a serial killer known to have raped 12 women and murdered eight but there were probably many more. The film focused on one of his victims, Tina Marie Risico, who was 16. Wilder posed as a photographer looking for models and tricked the young Tina into his van, abducting and raping her. Tina’s response to the situation saved her life, she didn’t fight, she remained calm. It was so unlike the other women who had screamed, cried or fought, the women Wilder had gone on to murder. There was something about young Tina and Wilder decided to take her with him, to keep her alive. Either the film or Christine explained how this young girl had already been a victim of abuse. The blurb on IMDb says of the story, “A young girl with Stockholm Syndrome becomes a companion of a dangerous man posing as a photographer to pick up his victims” That wasn't the film we watched, that wasn't the film Christine watched, the film she so passionately identified with. Wilder goes on to abduct another young girl, Dawnette Wilt. In the film young Tina tries to tell her not to fight, let him do what he wants: “You need to survive”. I don't remember this being a story of a girl with Stockholm Syndrome, it was the story of a girl who wanted to survive. As the film come to an end, the police are closing in and catch their man, at an airport or train station and Tina survives. That was when Chris started her lecture. I had heard it before, but this time we had watched a film as an example I could follow. “Seymour, that girl was clever, she’s alive. Seems, - She used to call me Seems - if some man takes you and throws you into to the back of his car, just survive. If he is going to rape you, let him, don’t get murdered, it’s just sex...’ She laughed as she said it, but it was one of those strange laughs that people use when they are sad or afraid. “If someone is going to put their dickie in you and you can’t stop them, then survive, you only have one life, and there are people who say ... men who say fight until you are dead, and Seems, that’s bullshit.” I was a 14 year old boy, becoming a man, and found it difficult to identify with her words. At the time we were living at the Worlds End Estate and there was a neighbour across the way, he had always made Chris feel a little uneasy. He always appeared at his front door when Christine was coming or going with plenty of small talk: “Morning, nice day, do you think it will rain?” Then one morning when I was at school and Christine was on her own, there was a knock on the door, it was the neighbour, and as Christine opened the door he tried to force his way in. Chris told me “He was going to rape me and I knew it, but I shouted, OH MY BOYFRIEND!” “It stopped him just a second, and he looked over my shoulder down the hall, and I pushed him back and slammed the door in his face” Within a few months he was in prison for another sexual assault, and we would never see him again. It was only then she told me about what had happened. I asked her if she had called the police. “No, you wouldn’t understand” As for the film we watched, I’m not sure how close it was to the real story of Christopher Wilder and young Tina Marie Risico, and I haven’t seen that film since I was 14 with Christine and I’m sure I won’t watch it again. I did a little reading on the story and 16 year old Tina gets a bad press about helping Wilder abduct his next victim, but can you imagine what that was like for her, being that young girl afraid for her life who doesn't have the power to change the road she found herself on. Are we still blaming the victim for surviving? Because that wasn’t the film Christine and I watched. I can’t be sure how many times Christine found herself in the situation where she just needed to survive. I know Lucky Gordon raped her on two occasions and I have a memory from when I was very young of a boyfriend pinning her down beating her while she begged, “Not in front of my son.” Today I have a daughter, Christine’s granddaughter, what do I tell her? Contributor “DC” poses the question - was this picture of Christine Keeler taken by Stephen Ward just as she was getting ready to meet Profumo?
The blogger behind the “Wimpole Mews blogspot“ claims to be the person Christian is looking at. https://wimpolemuse.blogspot.com/?m=1 There are lots of conspiracy theories around the profumo story, it is one of the reasons why the story is still talked about today: Why are Lord Denning’s papers on the Profumo scandal still secret and closed until 2048? Who was the Man in the mask at the feast of the peacocks orgy? - Mandy Rice-Davies said it was Dr Savundra. Mandy wasn't even there, but Christine was. Chief Inspector Samuel Herbert and his mystery £30,000 a number that sloshes through the story - was this really MI5 hush money? The deaths of woman connected to the affair? Like Christine used to tell me “There is only one way to keep a secret, tell no one” The campaign to get my mother a pardon rumbles on and I hope to report progress soon. Again I would like to thank everyone for their continued support. I found an old notebook of mine from sometime in the mid 1990’s. I had decided that I was going to help Chris write her book. Chris had been working on the story again as she wasn't happy with the previous versions. There was the 1983 Nothing But... that she had worked on with respected journalist Sandy Fawkes. Now I only vaguely remember Sandy, but when I was ten she became the most interesting person I had ever met. It was one of those nights when the adults were all talking and I would sit and just listen. When Sandy was travelling around America, she had met a good looking guy in a bar, "a cross between Robert Redford and Ryan O'Neal." They had had sex and then traveled together for the next few nights. Days after they parted company she saw the same man on the news and watched in horror as the story of serial killer Paul John Knowles (The Casanova Killer) unfolded. After his arrest he confessed to 35 murders, 20 of which were eventually linked to him. Sandy went on to write about her experience in Killing Time and again in Natural Born Killer.
At ten I just thought it was so cool. “What was it like?” “The sex?” she said And everyone laughed, because I was ten. I have Chris’s copy of Nothing But... and she has scribbled, underlined and made notes all the way through. She wasn’t happy with it, but she didn't have a lot of choices back then, she was broke. Then there was Scandal! the book that came out at the same time as the movie in 1989. I don't know if it was rushed, but it flies through the story, ends abruptly and Christine still wasn't happy. It wasn't right, bits were missing, people were missing, it just wasn't right. It didn't matter as the publishers went into receivership soon after its release and the book vanished. Sometimes it’s hard telling a story that nobody wanted to be connected with - you would always be afraid you would be sued, and indeed the publishers were sued or court cases threatened for mentioning names. In 2001 she went to print again with The Truth at Last, this time writing with Douglas Thompson, and she was much happier. Older, wiser, less easy to railroad. I remember we waited up all night for the papers to come out the next day so we could read the reviews. In 2012, after John Profumo died, they updated it and called it Secrets and Lies. The definitive and final version came out at the end of 2019. with more on Lucky Gordon's criminal record and a foreword from me. It has been said that Christine wrote four or five versions of the story, but that’s not true. It was always the same story, different only in small details. I have missed out the best one, the version that Christine and I worked in the mid 1990’s. I was going to write her story but I was clear with Chris, “This book shouldn’t focus on the past because, that’s all boring.” So I started taking notes: “Seems, [she used to call me Seems] I wake up 8am, working on film and on the book,” she said. I don't know what film this was. “I pop out to buy papers, have a coffee, read and bathe, and then I feed the birds. I like to pop out and do a bit of shopping, do a crossword in the evening and watch a true life film. I used to be a night owl, but in older age I’m buggered by 11pm” “Chris, you hate going to bed early!” I said. That’s as far as we got, I think we both gave up. There was a time in London when Christine knew everybody. After being released from prison in 1964, everyone wanted to meet her; she went to all the parties and even had affairs with the famous like Warren Beatty and Maximilian Schell. In fact Christine’s fling with Maximilian Shell ruined my memory of the 1979 film The Black Hole, when she told me how the baddie in it used to be a boyfriend. At nine years of age my mother’s old boyfriends were gross, but he had also been the bad guy, he was the mad scientist who tried to kill everyone - I was so embarrassed. She had an affair with George Peppard. Christine would say how maybe that could have gone somewhere, but he drank too much and she told me all of this after an episode of his TV show The A-Team. It was the early 1980’s, so I was young enough to be a bit disgusted. “Mum, he’s an old man with white hair” “We were all much younger then” It didn’t ruin The A-Team in the same way as The Black Hole had been ruined, after all he was a hero in the show. I didn’t tell any of my friends that Hannibal from The A-Team was an old boyfriend of my mother’s. I don't think any of them would have believed me, also I always knew that these were her stories and not mine to tell. At that time in London, the mid 1960’s, she knew everyone, Clint Eastwood used to drink in The Star Tavern in Belgravia, apparently “He was very quiet” and I am delighted she didn't say anything that ruined my enjoyment of the Dirty Harry movies! With movies, Chris always enjoyed a good horror film and the more ridiculous it was the better, such as when the young girl in the film would say, “I’m just going into the dark basement...on my own.” She would shout at the television “No, no you wouldn’t do that, it’s stupid,” laughing, and then when the young girl’s head would come rolling across the basement floor, “Stupid, see how stupid that was!” She loved it.
One night in the early 1980’s she was all excited because she wanted us to watch a film on the TV called The Fearless Vampire Killers, made in 1967 by Roman Polanski and staring Sharon Tate. I loved the film. I was ten and it had vampires, beautiful young ladies and it was funny, but after the film Christine was a little sad: “The girl in that film used to be a friend of mine. When she lived in London we used to go to dinner parties and nightclubs, we were on the same scene together, and she was lovely, she was so nice.” Chris went on to tell me some of Sharon’s story, about Charles Manson and how she had been killed and her baby too, and how awful it was because she was so nice. Sharon Tate had moved back to America with husband Roman Polanski but on 8th August 1969, at their house in Beverly Hills, members of the Charles Manson ‘Family’ murdered Sharon, her unborn child and friends Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski and Abigail Folger. Her murder is thought of as a turning point in American culture, a moment in history. Quentin Tarantino recently made a connected film called Once Upon a Time in America, a fantasy “what if?” story, what if those killers went to the wrong house that night, and they were punished so Sharon Tate, her child and her friends survived, putting right a terrible wrong. I loved it, maybe a little bit because it was a light on Christine’s era when she had fun and the people she had partied with. While Christine liked a good horror movie, I’m not sure what she would have made of it. It is said that Christine became a recluse after 1963 and tried to hide from the scandal, but that’s just not true, she was at all the parties, making new and interesting friends, and everybody wanted to meet the famous Christine Keeler. Christine told me she was at a party with lots of famous actors, and Stanley Baker, from the 1964 film Zulu, said to her, “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.” Last week I posted my first blog, and the level of interest and quality of conversation took me by surprise and it made me feel a real sense of pride in this website. So thank you to all of you and the comments are really worth a read.
The Covid story rumbles on, bringing sadness and disruption but even with so much else going on I have had a number of people make contact to offer support or tell me their stories about the Christine they had met or knew. I have even Heard from people who want to help me to clear her name, as one old friend of hers put it “It haunted her all her life”. So we shall see. Of course there has been the odd person to reach out and let me know, how wrong I am, and how horrified they are that I am fighting for Christine and not fighting for Stephen Ward, who was after all the real victim. I understand the point, Stephen was indeed a victim, there were lots of victims, but sadly this argument tends to end with, “Well your mother did sleep around a lot”. Christine once said to me, or I was in the room when she said it to a friend, how she hadn’t been with that many sexual partners up to that fateful trial in 1963, she had boyfriends and the odd lover, but back then I guess a lot of people could only see see women as either Mothers, Daughters, Nuns or Prostitutes. When I was much younger, maybe 18, I found myself at a parents’ dinner party in Chelsea. I was asked by a middle aged sharp faced woman “I bet you think there is nothing wrong with prostitution” I was too young to understand that I was meant to be embarrassed, or that I was being insulted. Instead I said something along of the lines of: “As your birthday approaches do you have sex with your husband after to thank him for your present or before to get a better one.” Her husband nearly hit me. I’m glad I said it but I don’t really believe it, but it was something Christine had instilled in me. Sort of. I grew up at a time where Stephen Ward was the victim, and his trial was a pack of lies, but Christine was a prostitute, that part of the worst miscarriage of British justice was probably okay. As time went on, when Christine wasn’t being called a prostitute as often, they used new phrases like “Call Girl” or “Good Time Girl”, and I still have no idea what a ‘Good Time Girl’ is. This was Christine’s argument, “The truth is Seymour some men see ALL women as prostitutes, the Mothers, the Daughters, the Nuns” I was just too young to really understand. Keep safe The BBC drama finished at the end of February in the UK, and there does seem to be a change in the way we talk about Christine, there is more sympathy for the young girl caught in history back in 1963. Then something more important happened as a pandemic rolled across the world.
For me I was given the time to think about my mothers passing and how she would feel if she was still living in this new world. I was maybe grateful that she wasn’t here for Covid as in the end she suffered with her breathing, she would have been very vulnerable and scared. I was also given more time to think about my mothers place in history and her unfair treatment. I started this website not just to talk about why I think she shouldn’t have gone to prison but also to celebrate her and how she has inspired art and music but most of this time was spent on her timeline, what happened when, and what if anything it meant. I came across a Blog posted by a firm of solicitors in the North East of England it was about Christine and how the drama viewed her sentence for perjury as unfairly harsh, it was this solicitors view that her sentence was fair, Christine had lied and a prison sentence was to be expected. I wrote a polite and long email, I talked about the long history of violence and rape she had suffered from Lucky Gordon, I talked about how in the court transcripts there was no dispute that the crime had taken place, the only dispute was who was there. I talked about how unfair it was that such a young woman was forced to take a plea deal because public opinion was so against her and she had everything to lose. You may imagine a stuffy old solicitor writing this blog, about the importance of punishing those who commit perjury, but she wasn’t. A few months have past since my email and still no reply, this doesn’t mean I have won any argument, quite the opposite. I was taught, when people ignore you, its because they don’t care. I plan on updating this as often as a I can, talking about some of the more unpleasant questions I have been asked but also some of the great support i have been given. May you stay safe wherever you are, and all the best. |
AuthorSeymour Platt - Son of Christine Keeler Archives
November 2023
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