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
Dave T
1/7/2022 01:54:50 pm
Hopefully not long now Seymour .
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AuthorSeymour Platt - Son of Christine Keeler Archives
November 2023
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