In February, 1961, Ward and Christine Keeler moved to 17
Wimpole Mews in Marylebone. According to Christine Keeler’s autobiography, The Truth at Last, Anthony Blunt and Roger Hollis, the
Director General of MI5, were regular visitors to the flat. She should know and
she was right.
It was Blunt who carried out the ‘clean-up’ operation after
Ward’s arrest, wandering in to the Museum Street Gallery in Holborn one
afternoon in July 1963 and purchasing, via a banker’s draft, all of Stephen
Ward’s sketches then on display in the gallery. These works revealed nothing in
themselves; however, they betrayed the extent of the circles in which Ward
moved.
Princess Margaret by Stephen Ward
The sketches were of extremely prominent people and were a
virtual ‘who’s who’ of the infamous Thursday Club; of whom both Blunt and Ward
were members as were Prince Philip and his uncle, Louis, Lord Mountbatten.
Indeed, Ward supplied the girls for the Thursday Club.
The Duke of Edinburgh by Stephen Ward
These sketches, as well as documents and photographs, would
find their way into the hands of the Russian KGB and, it is said, contained ‘material which was devastating for the
British Royal Family’.
Knowledge of this cache, coupled with his 1945 trips to
Germany to retrieve sensitive information sent to Kaiser Wilhelm and to Adolf
Hitler by prominent royals, enabled Anthony Blunt to avoid the same public
skewering that befell Ward or, indeed, Blunt’s fellow Cambridge spies.
Besides which, who knows how much material was still
available by the time the exhibition opened? In the book I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels by Albert Metzler the author recalls
that the Ward exhibition had been organised by a pornographer named Freddie
Reid and that:
‘Before opening there would be a private sale and the public could come
in on the Monday after. There was a stream of limousines to Museum Street that
week as the great and good bought compromising pictures of themselves at high
prices. It is a joy to think that they may have included some responsible for
blacklisting the man now blackmailing them’.
Not all of Ward’s material though was obtained by Anthony Blunt
for Ward shrewdly, or so he believed, deposited some of his archive with his
solicitor David Jacobs.
I suspect some of you may be thinking that all of this is
bordering on the unbelievable, well, let us examine some of the circles within
circles and how they all interconnect.
The aforementioned David Jacobs, who represented Ward at his
trial, was somewhat of a solicitor to the stars given that he also worked on
behalf of celebrities including Brian Epstein, Diana Dors, Judy Garland and
John Vassall. The importance of these names shall be revealed as we go, but
first, let us start with Vassall.
William
John Christopher Vassall was, according to Wikipedia, ‘a British civil servant who spied for the Soviet Union under pressure
of homosexual blackmail’. Prior to embarking upon his civil service career,
however, Vassall, the son of an Anglican vicar, had been a photographer for the
RAF. Vassall had been lured to a KGB arranged party in 1954 where he indulged
in some sort of ‘compromising activity’ with another male.
This activity was secretly photographed and the classic
‘honeytrap’ was sprung. Vassall was now entirely in the hands of his KGB
tormentors and would go on to provide a steady supply of high-class,
confidential material for his Soviet paymasters. This work would prove
lucrative; indeed lucrative enough for him to be able to purchase a luxurious
flat at Dolphin Square, near the River Thames in Pimlico in London, from where
he would throw lavish parties.
Dolphin Square was at one time home to some 70 MPs and 10
Lords and its other notable residents have included Princess Anne, Harold Wilson and David Steel as well as the
odious fascist Oswald
Mosley. MI5 would take full advantage of Dolphin Square’s facilities and
use it as a deluxe pied-Ã -terre for its undercover agents. Generally undercover
agents could expect to find themselves having to blend in to just about any
environment, so it is telling in the extreme then that MI5 felt the best place
to locate them was at the very heart of the great and the good of the British
Establishment! The MI5 operative, MP and journalist Tom Driberg reported back
all his secrets to MI5 top-cheese Maxwell Knight – codenamed M - via a flat in
Dolphin Square.
Another Dolphin Square resident, and fellow Thursday Club member,
was the photographer Anthony Beauchamp and he, like Vassall, was also fond of
throwing the odd soiree, or two, from within its gilded environs. Beauchamp was
the husband of Sarah
Churchill who was the daughter of Britain’s wartime leader Sir Winston
Churchill who, in turn, had been a client of Dr Stephen Ward and his healing osteopathic
hands. Moreover Beauchamp had been the appointed keeper of the Thursday Club
records, which included numerous drawings, notes and pictures capturing the sordid
shenanigans of the clubs illustrious members.
Beauchamp and Churchill
Beauchamp also photographed Vicki Martin who was one of
Ward’s early protégées and who had been engaged to the Maharajah of Cooch Behar
before she died in a dreadful car crash. Martin was also the best friend of
Ruth Ellis, who had embraced infamy herself when she became the last female to
be hung in Britain. Ellis was yet another member of Ward’s extraordinary stable
of girls and we shall return to both Vicki Martin and Ruth Ellis in due course.
Anthony Beauchamp, however, would commit ‘suicide’ in 1957 after overdosing on
sleeping tablets.
A recurring theme throughout this narrative will be the
alarming insouciance the dramatis personae displayed toward their own
mortality. Far more than can be coincidental will die, supposedly, at their own
hands.
But back to Dolphin Square; that we have established was
synonymous for its resident’s wild parties, its A-list clientele and its
convenient proximity to the Palace of Westminster; however, one might even
conclude that it was also a hub for all that was sick and perverted about the
more powerful movers and shakers of the twentieth century.
Indeed, this conclusion may gain further validity when we
factor in that two of its more famous ex-residents include my old friends
Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. Now whatever else Chrissie and Mandy
may have been, powerful movers and shakers they were most certainly not. So,
why were they there?
Well, somebody else who was also most certainly not a mover
or a shaker but yet also knew the interiors, and ceilings, of Dolphin Square
intimately was one Hannah Tailford.
 |
| Hannah Tailford |
Tailford was a west London prostitute who had been attending
parties at the Square since 1962; she would die, just two years later, in ‘64 after
having seemingly falling victim to a serial killer who the press later christened
‘Jack the Stripper’.
As with the papers pertaining to the Profumo scandal the documents concerning
the Stripper killings also remain unavailable for public scrutiny. These will
remain under lock and key until 2050. Anyone would think someone had something
to hide!
Back in 1888 the dim and murky alleyways of London’s East
End had reverberated with shock and horror to a series of gruesome unsolved
murders. The victims, all brasses* of various ages and states of road-worthiness,
died beneath a volley of frenzied, slashing knife strokes that shocked both prince
and pauper alike. In the process the world gained a bogeyman of unparalleled
fame and the legend of Jack the Ripper was born. Saucy Jack ushered in the modern
era of the serial killer.
*Brass –
Cockney rhyming slang meaning brass door = whore.
By the late ‘50s and early ‘60s another whore killer stalked
London’s streets; though this time it was the byways of the west, rather than
the east that were his deadly domain.
Whilst attracting plenty of column inches at the time these
killings would never share the kind of legacy that had been bequeathed by their
Victorian counterpart, however, the similarities did incline the gentlemen of
Fleet Street to append their stories of the slayings with a friendly sobriquet,
or three. Hence the attacks became known as the Jack the Stripper murders, the
Hammersmith nudes or the Thames torsos.
With the dubious benefit of hindsight the killer’s reign of
terror is now generally believed to have begun with the death of one Elizabeth
Figg. Figg was found sitting under a tree at Duke’s Meadow in Chiswick, on
the north side of the River Thames, in 1959. She looked just like she was
sleeping but, on closer inspection, it was discovered that she was dead and had
been strangled. This one fact, when combined with the proximity of her lifeless
carcass to the river, and the reality that she had been a prostitute would be
enough to deposit her name on to the list of Stripper Killer victims once the
bodies of Gwynneth Rees and Hannah Tailford had subsequently been discovered in
‘63 and ‘64.
I do not believe though that Figg ever met the Stripper Killer;
however, her demise provides a neat introduction to a series of killings that
are highly pertinent to this little tale and the stories of these poor
unfortunates will be weaved into the narrative from here on in.
Now little Betty may have been partial to a Figg Roll* in
the back of a motor in return for a handful of shekels, however, the girl wearing
no knickers under her blue and white dress found propped against the willow
tree by the Thames shared little in common with the other victims, other than
she was a prostitute who had been strangled.
*Fig Roll –
biscuit based item of confectionary used in a childish attempt by the author to
utilise a euphemistic pun as a form of sophisticated humour – it is not!
So, let us return to Hannah Tailford. Just four weeks prior
to her death she had attended one of these Dolphin Square parties in the
company of a man named Andre
Padoux who worked at the time at the French embassy in London. Padoux is
now an author on Yoga and Tantric mantras and is a so-called master of sex
magic.
Padoux’s tantra mantra
Whilst our Hannah, to be fair, was just a low-grade,
low-class whore whose usual place of employment was the back seat of a Ford
Zodiac; so just what was she doing in such high company and within such luxurious
surroundings? Was she instructing the Gallic love god in the finer arts of the
wow-him powwow or the torrid tidal wave? Was she bollocks!
When Tailford’s bloated corpse washed up in the Thames it
was discovered that she had consumed a large quantity of the rivers fetid water
– meaning she was alive when she entered it - this being despite the fact that
her soiled knickers had been stuffed, unceremoniously, inside her mouth. Moreover,
these knickers bore traces of semen as did her vagina and rectum. She had,
according to the autopsy, been strangled and had lost some teeth; however, the
cause of death was recorded not as strangulation but as drowning.
We do not know where Hannah had been for her final bunk up;
however, I guess the location of Dolphin Square, right next to the Thames from
where Hannah’s body was later dragged, is just coincidental right?
One can only speculate as to what she had been participating
in immediately prior to her death, and in due course we shall do just that; however,
given that she was known to attend parties at Dolphin Square, and given that one
such party had taken place just a few weeks prior, and that we know these
parties were attended by professional photographers like Anthony Beauchamp and self-declared
sex gurus such as Padoux, and given that we know that Dolphin Square was home
to both spies and the secret services, one possible speculation is that she had
been involved in, to some extent, the procurement of compromising photographic and/or
cinematic materials for the purpose of blackmail. This speculation gains further
validity when it is considered alongside the claim of one of the leading authors
on the ‘Stripper’ murders, Brian McConnell, who stated in his book Found Naked and Dead that Hannah had had
access to a photographic studio and developing equipment in Victoria in London.
Brian McConnell was a contemporary of another investigative
author on the ‘Jack the Stripper’ murders; a guy named David Seabrook. Indeed
his book Jack of Jumps was an
enormous help to me in my researches. In 2009 Seabrook was discovered dead in
his flat, having quite possibly been murdered. At the time of his death he was
writing a biography of the show-business lawyer David Jacobs! One can only
speculate as to what little pearls of historical wisdom Seabrook may have been
about to go public with concerning Jacobs. Circles within circles.
Jacobs, as we know, had acquired a reputation for
representing the rich and famous; he had worked on behalf of Marlene Dietrich, Judy
Garland, Liberace and the Rolling Stones as well as the clients already mentioned.
He did not, however, represent the Kray twins despite their rumoured plea for
his assistance following their 1968 arrest for murder.
The Krays did, though, know Lord Boothby. In 1964 Boothby
successfully sued the Sunday Mirror newspaper
for publishing a photo entitled ‘A Peer and a Gangster’, in which we see
Boothby, Ronnie Kray and petty criminal Leslie Holt sitting on a settee having
a cheeky smoke.
From Kraydle to grave: the gangster
and the peer
For the uninitiated amongst us the Kray Twins were
underworld crime barons who specialised in extracting money with menaces,
principally by running so-called protection rackets from the pubs and clubs of
their native East End of London. However, as their reputation began to precede
them their extortion techniques expanded; as did their social circle.
This social circle brought them into contact with Boothby,
who was, at that time, involved in a long running affair with the wife of the
then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. It is rumoured that Boothby was also, or
had been, having an affair with the Queen Mother. True or not, and however
utterly repellent the mental image that conjures up may be, Boothby had clearly
‘never had it so good’. His association with the Krays seems to have provided a
heaven made relationship for both the bisexual Ronnie Kray; as Boothby
introduced him to the stiffer-lipped, old-school-tie kind of homosexual, and
Boothby; as Kray returned the favour by providing the peer with an endless
supply of far younger, more working-class, bits of rough.
This, in time, developed into a scene in which Boothby
became a regular at orgies thrown by the twins in the East End at which Boothby
abused both the Kray’s hospitality and a never ending supply of rent-boys,
runaways and care home residents. It has been said that Boothby used to enjoy
lying under a glass-topped table whilst young boys took a dump on it from
above. It makes a change, I suppose, those Tory bastards are usually the ones
shitting on everyone else!
Stephen Ward once told me all of the kids at the Dr Barnardo’s
home he worked at for free as a councillor had been sexually abused at some
time. But anything untoward at Dr Barnardo’s stopped when Heywood (Johnny)
Jones rose in the ranks and took over. Johnny ran a tight ship, suffered no
excuses and was very hands-on, often doing surprise inspections. He even sacked
a few people.
No wonder his co-workers called him ‘The Sergeant Major’.
That was the nicest name he was called, others used different terms.
Johnny Jones lived around the corner to me, in the poorest
street in what was a fairly well to-do town in south-east London. Everyone knew
him, he was a nice man when not suffering one of his ‘black-moods’, but then he
would sit in the dark in the front room and avoid people. He had his pride.
I knew his son, we were only months apart in age and we used
to kick a ball about together and were in the same cub pack, so I often
visited. You probably knew him better as David Bowie.
I liked Johnny, despite his problems he was one of the good
guys, and I was thus, at a suitable age, invited down to Dr Barnardo’s; Johnny driving
me there in the tiny Fiat 500 two-seater that came with the job. It was where I
saw a man I’d seen before at the Harley Street practices and at Leonard
Cheshire’s care-home. It was the aforementioned Stephen Ward who used to help
Leonard and Sue Ryder for free too. He used to hypnotise the kids and dig out
the problem and try to deal with it. “No
point in pushing it deeper, that’s short-term, these things usually surface
sometime and can cause even worse problems. Better to try and deal with it now,
with a young, unformed, mind.”
Of course at the time I thought this was perfectly
honourable and charitable, I was only a child myself, but re-reading an old
newspaper article, years later, did make me question his motives.
‘Dr Ward…had full
control over my mind’; so said Christine Keeler, in court and under oath no
less!
What, exactly, did she mean by that? I now believe that Ward
was trained by the CIA to be a mind-control agent. Ward spent four years living
in the United States in the thirties; it was where he trained to be an
osteopath and gained his Dr prefix. Also, Ward was never a stretcher-bearer Corporal
during the war as it says at Wikipedia,
but was, in fact, seconded to military intelligence.
Everybody in intelligence during the war operated under a
false name and identity so as to stop the Nazis kidnapping relatives and
forcing Intel people to work for them. So it was with Ward. He was a Lieutenant
in rank and, after being seconded to work with Sir Archie McIndoe
during the Battle of Britain helping with the burned pilots, he worked on a
secret programme for the USA, called Project
Monarch. This involved mind-control, remote viewing and other weird stuff.
Ward was good at that sort of thing. Keeler often said ‘Ward controlled her’.
She wasn’t understood, but she was saying it as it was, Ward could work her
like a puppet just by looking at her.
I now wonder if he ever had control over me. I certainly
don’t think so, but then I was never sure what was really happening in those
sessions up at Harley Street. It was after those sessions that Ward started
sketching and photographing me.
Ward applying his healing hands upon
me
I began modelling for him because he thought I was a good
subject. He liked my mother and we used to visit him sometimes, or he visited
us if he was lonely. Our medical work though had expanded drastically including
into, on many occasions, illegal research.
Ward was the front-man: Miller, Asher, Cilento, McIndoe and
a surgeon called ‘Doc’, the guy I started working for though I forget his real
name, were the main players but they had to be careful. They daren’t get
struck-off but Ward said he was expendable (he was interested, he needed a
hobby and he needed friends he otherwise wouldn’t have). Thus I spent time,
quality time, with Ward, often sleeping over.
I met loads of people he knew, George Harrison Marks
included. I met Beate
Uhse, the German woman fighter pilot who became Germany’s porno-queen who
was into some of the things my medical people were; sex education being one
aspect. I modelled with her and Mandy as Harrison Marks and Ward filmed a prototype
education film.
It luckily coincided with our research at that point, so we
were halfway there anyway, saving time. Ward asked me to ‘step over the line’,
so to speak, to help him make this film. As I knew and loved the couple involved
I didn’t hesitate. We saved their lives, well his certainly. I was promised a
girlfriend to fully research the project but they had a hard time finding the
right girl; a slapper from Soho or a Notting Hill strumpet wasn’t going to cut
the mustard, it had to be a girl I would normally fall for. And this turned out
to be Mandy Rice-Davies.
The doctors were quietly involved, of course, and as it
fitted in with the spider-web of research and projects they and a lot of other
people were involved in - the police and social-services, for example - the
film was later extended to be used as part of the sex-education curriculum in
schools. Profumo’s wife, Valerie Hobson, was involved and he absolutely knew of
it. We actually did four films together: three to practice on and get our hands
in, so to speak - though a fine photographer, Ward knew nothing of making movies
– whilst the fourth, and last, was in colour for the schools.
By this time the couple were okay, by the way; as such one
film would have sufficed. They invited me home for the weekend, to thank me!
Then we moved up to Ewhurst Manor in Borehamwood where
Harrison Marks shot a lot of his work. I recall Asher, Miller and Ward were
trying to help the owner Alec Clifford to deal with his war wounds. A lot of
psychology was needed there. I'd been here before.
Mind-control you see. Ward was working for the Yanks during the
war on what I think was called Project Monarch, latterly infamous as MK-Ultra, the Cold War
brainwashing scandal. This was started, as already mentioned, by the Tavistock
Institute after World War I as a means of trying to restore some peace to the
lives of the shell-shock victims.
They quickly realised though that there were other, more
sinister, uses for the dark arts. Using our past experiences and my input they
tried to devise a way to help Clifford. Apparently there were about 2,000 others
in Britain alone who had the same problem; it was an important job but highly
illegal. The legal, but barbaric, approach involved Dr William Sargent and
his ECT and deep-sleep therapy. Essentially you were strapped to a bed and
plugged into the National Grid. Believe me; you did not want that, it just fried
your mind.
I began by helping the medical men to train nurses and doctors
at 12 years old. There were many kids, not just me, but I only met two others.
They decided I was ‘suitable and flexible’ and asked me to help with their research.
Basically they were into learning how the brain worked, but
they were into other things too. Most of the time I didn’t know what they were
getting up to, it was all mixed up and above my head, but they fed me well!
They got into drugs as they knew it was becoming a problem,
the police wanted to train cops to deal with it, how to work out what drugs
they were on etc. They supplied the drugs and were observing the tests most of
the time.
The police, led by top-cops Joseph Simpson and Shirley Becke, used to
supply Doctor’s Emanuel Miller and Richard Asher with the drugs they wanted to
study, and used me as a guinea-pig! There would be several off-duty coppers
present to see the result and work out how to deal with an acid-head.
William
Sargent was different from the others, he was ‘an outsider’, the others
didn't let him in on all they were up too, but they needed his input occasionally.
They never spoke of it to me but they all did work for the
government at times. There was a sanatorium in Chislehurst that Ward
moonlighted at. It transpired they were into weird stuff like making people
madder than they already were. I know he was involved in ‘programming’ when he
worked there during the war, he told me.
But I knew little about that sort of stuff otherwise.
What I do know is it’s not necessary to hurt or drug people
to brainwash them. Sargent had to, as he wasn’t blessed with the
psychic-abilities Ward, Asher and Miller possessed. They were all able to read
minds, perform telepathy and undertake deep hypnosis. I am not kidding, I know
because they were using this on me to get deep into my mind to understand how
it all worked.
Strangely, they all could do it but nobody knew how it
worked. It seems it was passed down by word of mouth over the centuries to
those who exhibited a talent for it. William Sargent wasn’t so blessed; he
could do hypnosis, but only at level 1, the one we all know about, the
end-of-the-pier-show type of thing.
With this psychic ability they could go down much deeper.
The command-lines needed to access the lower levels of your brain can only be
implanted via telepathy, to avoid harming the patient. It has to be done a step
at a time, giving the patient time to rest in-between, and more importantly,
the patient must be trained over time to accept this. You don’t go deep in one
go, first time, so to speak, as you will harm the patient trying that.
More importantly, coming back up is like a deep-sea diver
resurfacing, it must be done in stages, just like a diver does to avoid the
bends, to avoid guaranteed brain-damage.
But as you must be born with the ability only a few in the
world can do it, and they are usually very secretive about it as ‘certain
people’ would love to recruit them. But most of these people are men of compassion
and don’t want that.
Sargent was unaware his colleagues were much better than
him.
The Harley Street doctors were trying to work out how and
why all this worked. They knew it did, they could do it (the actual methods
having been passed down by word of mouth over the millennia) but wanted to
understand the mechanics of it. Enter muggins here.
I don’t know how it ultimately ended for Alec Clifford, the
ex-naval man at Ewhurst. My family emigrated to Australia taking me with them as
I was too young to stay and had no money. I hope it worked out well though.
I used to visit Ewhurst with Ward and run around in the
garden in nothing but my tight swimming-trunks, which caused some of the girls to
get a bit frisky. I was a young teenage boy and all the girls liked me, ahem.
The artists kept cameras in their bags, and when Harrison
Marks and his wife Pam Green
weren’t looking fired them up and slipped the girls a fiver. It was their
pocket-money! This is when I sometimes lost my trunks.
Only one in ten girls made it into the magazines that
Harrison Marks was producing. Stephen Ward took photos and did his usual
pencil/watercolours at Ewhurst.
Fun in the gardens at Ewhurst
George Harrison Marks and Stephen Ward were good friends.
Unfortunately, I can’t give a detailed account of a lot of my memories of him.
Too hard-core! The man I recall worked hard and drank hard. He often used to
dress like Zorro, the bandit-hat and cape bit. He hammed it up a bit too much.
But then so did Pam. They generally weren’t liked by the theatrical crowd I
mixed with because of this.
Now, let’s get it straight, both were very nice people
otherwise. But there was this barrier there. Pam used to come down for tea with
my Mum, once they got to know each other, having met at Ward’s. My personal
opinion is that she was rather lonely. I wonder what happened to her in her
childhood.
Something, I’m sure. She had no close friends, apart from Peter
Rachman, his wife Audrey, and Mandy. I recall they always went down to the Harrison
Marks’s for Christmas.
Harrison Marks was undoubtedly a good photographer, but a
crap organiser and businessman. Pam made him. A couple of times I was with them
alone at home, helping out in the garden usually.
They were very laid-back people. I recall talk that they
were spending far too much money on themselves and their opulent lifestyle, all
to the detriment of the business. When the time came to invest they didn’t have
the funds.
I recall Pam loved to cook for us all, and liked the girls
to stay the night, probably so she had some company and got a good chat.
Of course the Harrison Marks’ knew people. Showbiz is like
that; you must see and be seen, you must mingle with everybody who is everybody
no matter how famous you are or you will miss out on a lot of work otherwise.
Anyway, I am rambling on as I have a habit of doing. Perhaps
it is a side-effect of the experiments!
