Wednesday 21 September 2016

Wimpole Muse - An introduction

Who I am is not relevant, however, there comes a time in one’s life where something so important, so intrinsic and so relevant to modern culture falls into one’s lap that you are left with simply no alternative but to react.

Now is that time.

I have been in touch with our author for a couple of years now, after I initially became intrigued with a series of, largely anonymous, comments that had been placed on websites pertaining to, or referencing, the so-called Profumo Affair. The author and I had exchanged a few emails but we had never met so you can imagine my surprise when I received a message from him containing a manuscript and a request.


I have done nothing to this manuscript save convert it into a blog format which I now present to you.

It contains detail and information about the Profumo scandal that can only have come from an insider and from someone who had an intimate relationship with the Establishment scapegoat, and mind-control practitioner, Dr Stephen Ward. However, the dirty linen emanating from this caper extend far further than a few soiled bed sheets in west London; its tentacles expand across oceans and continents to reveal fascinating insights into a range of subjects including:

The Cambridge Five ring of spies
The Process: Church of the Final Judgement
Ruth Ellis – the last woman to be hanged in the UK
The Jack the Stripper murders
The Baker Street Robbery

Furthermore our author reveals how a state-sponsored mind-control operation was initiated in the UK and across the Atlantic where it would encapsulate such luminaries as Charles Manson and David – Son of Sam - Berkowitz.


Journey with me to London’s own version of Laurel Canyon and on a trip out of your mind!

Click HERE to read on


Chapter 1 - Confessions of a teenage pornstar

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers...” Henry V – William Shakespeare


Mandy Rice-Davies is dead. I just heard it on the news and now I stand here in total shock. That little bundle of bouncing, blonde bawdiness that taught me so much in my, ahem, formative years is gone. It is just me and Christine Keeler left now.

Instantaneously I am transported back over fifty years and 10,000 miles from the blinding glare of an Australian summer to my childhood years spent in a grey and damp old London Town. Back then I was at the heart of a scandal. Slap-bang in the middle of a sensation that would bring down a government, launch the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and propel the names of Christine Keeler, Mandy Rice-Davies and Stephen Ward into the stratosphere.

Mandy’s passing is the prompt I need to finally commit my memories to print before I too pop my clogs. Me? You won’t have heard of me, so, perhaps a little introduction is in order.

My name is not important but you can call me Sven. I was privileged to have grown up in Bromley in south London as a lad. Well, actually it was Widmore Green to be precise and, as this is the story of my life then I guess I should be.

My Dad was a Major in the elite Norwegian Royal Guards who had married a lovely Scottish lass during the war and at the end of hostilities they both returned to Oslo, where I was born. Dad was also a close friend of the then Crown Prince, but later King, Olav of Norway.

When we returned to England in ’51 I spoke no English and, whilst some of my friends might claim I still can’t, this situation was quickly resolved by my attendance at the Ol’ Tin Hut school in Nightingale Lane before I moved to another ex-military establishment in Bromley (I forget the road) and then the newly-built St. George’s Primary in Tylney Road before going on to Quernmore Secondary in London Lane. In 1963, just as the shit hit the fan, we emigrated again, this time to Australia, but it is my adventures in London that I wish to share with you all.

For anyone unfamiliar with the ‘official’ details of the, so-called, ‘Profumo affair’ I suggest you click the conveniently provided blue link.

Before we commence upon this glorious romp through the Establishment’s pseudo-history of the 1960s and I fill you in on the reality, I should perhaps warn you that the cast list is somewhat extensive and, therefore, potentially confusing.

I will, wherever possible, provide you with a photograph as an aide memoir, so, here’s one of me. If not I have endeavoured to provide as many external links or Wikipedia profiles of the individuals concerned as I can; likewise I have tried to provide links to my source material.
The author: back in the day, obviously!

I am also rather fond of the odd colloquialism, or two, and so I will also do my upmost to explain any curious turns of phrase, slang or any other euphemisms that I may employ.

Back in 1963 the staid and distinctly decrepit world of little old England erupted in shock and scandal when it emerged that the then Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, had been caught with his pants down shagging someone who was, most definitely, not his wife. The Tory minister, who had been banging Christine Keeler for months, further compounded these sexual indiscretions by then lying to the House about the nature of his relationship with Chrissie as he sowed the seeds of his, and his Government’s, destruction along with his own wild oats.

Poor Chrissie, who’d had more pricks than a smack addicts veins, was about to become an inadvertent icon of the sixties; the Lewis Morley image of her sat naked, astride a chair, becoming perhaps the defining image of the decade.

christine keeler, profumo affair, dr stephen ward,
Christine Keeler

Back in those far-flung days Chrissie had been a busy girl; as well as two black west London hustlers, and Profumo, she had also been simultaneously shagging a Russian naval attaché called Captain Yevgeny (Eugene) Ivanov. Perhaps not unsurprisingly given that this was the height of the Cold War, the world wanted to know what little pearls of national security the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, may have revealed to Chrissie when he lay back and smoked his post-coital ciggie. Loose hips sink ships and all that, don’t you know.

The story really went stratospheric though when the good denizens of Fleet Street claimed that Chrissie, and her pal Mandy Rice-Davies, were actually a pair of two-bob slappers being pimped by a society portrait artist and osteopath named Stephen Ward who was also a commie sympathiser hell bent on bringing down the British Establishment.
That, like so many things connected to the scandal, is total and utter bullshit.

The Profumo affair was the biggest cover-up in global history, and Stephen Ward became its global scapegoat. The ripples and fall-out from the scandal extended way beyond the narrow confines of 1960s London. Its true scope and enormity would shock even the most ardent conspiracy theorist: it encompasses not just Ward, but all his girls and how he controlled them; its connections with the JFK assassination; of how the hippie movement was created as an instrument of generational control; the invention of a non-existent serial killer; of phoney spies and royal conspiracies. All to protect a secret!

A secret I will reveal to you.

But all in good time; first, a little background detail is in order.

I knew Mandy Rice-Davies very well actually. I dated her in 1961 and ‘62, ‘borrowing’ her from Peter Rachman, the slum landlord, who I knew via Stephen Ward. Her name was actually Marilyn Davies-Rice but her stepfather preferred his name first. Once we found out what was wrong with her – she’d been abused all her life by the aforementioned paedophile stepfather - and initiated a cure, she calmed down into a lovely little lady that everyone liked and she finally convinced Rachman that she was the girl to spawn his kids. He then taught her Hebrew, business management and economics (helped by Rachman’s then wife, Audrey, who had several degrees. Theirs was a business marriage, she was gay).

peter rachman, stephen ward, profumo affair, krays, mandy rice-davies,
Phoney Rachman

Rachman, like Profumo, is another whose name has entered the social lexicon; Rachmanism having become a euphemism for rogue landlords who let their tenants shoddy, undesirable and, in some cases, uninhabitable dwellings. In fact, Rachman’s tenants were not unhappy with their accommodation; Rachman being prepared to let his properties to anyone with a penny-piece in their pockets in an era otherwise dominated by the ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs’ agenda.

By the way, the little fat guy you think of as Peter Rachman was, in fact, his double; an ex-paratrooper living on borrowed time (wounded in the war) from the East End who had Polish neighbours as a boy and who spoke some Polish. The real Peter Rachman was in fact tall, dark, and very handsome, 6 feet 5 inches tall in his stockinged feet; he had to bow his head in our living-room to avoid hitting the ceiling! Mandy fell madly in love with him at first sight. She only came up to his navel, which led to many a ribald comment!!!
peter rachman, mandy rice-davies, profumo affair, krays, stephen ward,
Phoney Rachman and Mandy: Many say this was his best side!

The real Peter Rachman, Ilan Ram’el, was a rich art-student from Lvov who was planning on buying a tile factory when the war started. Peter loved designing and making tiles. He served under Menachem Begin during the war as well as with Vladek Sheybal - the actor in From Russia with Love - and the three survived the massacre of the Polish Army at Katyn in 1943 as they were out slitting German throats and stealing their food supplies. 

Peter then decided Begin had to be gotten out of Europe and to Israel and so led them west to Britain, where he had family friends. But when they got ambushed on the way Peter offered himself up to allow Begin to escape, and thus spent nearly two years in a concentration camp, surviving only by “doing things that shamed me”. Unfortunately, for him, some of the inmates survived too and there was a death sentence placed on Peter’s head. He got to England before the Poles found him. “I saw the inmates were walking dead, they had given up. Well, I wasn’t going to do that. Somebody had to survive to tell of the atrocities that went on in Poland, and the camp. So…”


I expect you may be struggling to believe some of what I have just told you, well hold on to your hats folks, because you won’t believe a l lot of what I am about to reveal, but that’s history for you. What was it Napoleon once said: “History is a lie agreed upon”.

History is written by the powerful and they will only tell you what they think you should know. They will give you a load of old cobblers about it not being ‘in the interests of national security’ or some such old flannel, but these are events from over fifty years ago and the paperwork relating to the so called ‘Profumo affair’ is being kept under lock and key until 2046. Officially this is because it will then be over one hundred years since Mandy’s birth, but Mandy is now dead. So is Stephen Ward, so is John Profumo, so is Lord Astor, so just who are they protecting?

Hence this journal: There are only Chrissie and I left now and she won’t ever tell the whole story. She is too traumatised and besides, who would believe her? I doubt anybody is going to believe me either; hell this is the tallest of tall stories but I shall write this and leave it for posterity to judge.

I used to be Britain’s top teenage porno-star.

Yes, you did read that right. Nobody knows of me though, back in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s porno was kept very much under the covers as only very rich people had film projectors anyway. Most of these films were made to order, for a very specific type of pervert, and not sold under the counter and wrapped in a brown paper-bag like the top-shelf mucky magazines of the time.

That said, I did do a few photo shoots as well, but even these were only available for wealthy customers; your average hairy-arsed worker was barely earning enough to eat at the time, let alone to indulge in some top quality wank material. So all my starring roles will be gathering dust up in grubby lofts in Belgravia now; that’s why I can’t find anything yet. Found a few old girlfriends though. There were so many girls you can but recall only a few. Luckily a lot of them were glam-models for George Harrison Marks so pretty faces all-round and with tits so big you could get lost for a week! Oh, happy days. Sometime, somewhere, some piccies or a film will turn up.

Lately I’ve been out surfing the net for these glamour girls and watching so much porn that my eyes are popping out. A man could go blind doing this!

My first impression was that most of the guys and gals involved were a bit screwy, nobody deliberately fucks for a living on camera if they’re halfway sane. Mind you, I worked in the London theatres, the Mermaid and the Garrick, for a couple of years, ‘60-‘62, and a lot of stage/film/TV stars are a bit screwy too!

I’m out researching my murky past now, hence the porno-surfing. I’ve been in touch with a few people in the biz, so to speak, enthusiasts, collectors etc. You’d be surprised what some people are into for a hobby!

Nowadays I’m just an old git living on fading memories and I never earned a penny out of it; lunch and a free fuck was my payment and, whilst I’m not complaining, I thought now was the time to write down my recollections before they’re gone forever.

You won’t believe my tale; it’s so fantastic I struggle to believe it myself sometimes, but I’m going to tell it anyway.

It actually all started when I began helping out Harley Street doctors to research sexual development and what sex was. Only now I understand it wasn’t about research at all, it was all about money and control!

This had never been done before, you see, sex was a taboo subject even in medicine. The pill was on the way and they knew there was likely to be trouble and they wanted to pre-empt any problems; psychological mainly. I wound up doing sex-shows, photographs and films for a while. I now understand it wasn’t all research, someone was making money out of this and that someone was George Harrison Marks, the so-called ‘glamour photographer’ and film-maker.

I worked with Doctor’s Emanuel Miller (Jonathan Miller’s Dad) and Richard Asher (Jane and Peter Asher’s Dad), and Sir Raphael Cilento (Diane Cilento’s Dad). I have often wondered if it was a coincidence that they should all have successful and famous offspring or if it was a payoff for their ‘assistance’? Archie McIndoe was a silent partner, he agreed with the principle but daren’t be associated as he could be struck-off; his burn-patients always came first.

I began with the doctors in 1958 and I was to thoroughly lose my innocence in an occult ritual in a mere two years. It was a very quick apprenticeship! It began because we had a new neighbour that was a top orthopaedic surgeon (I forget his name, we always called him ’Doc’, originality not being a prevalent feature round my way!). He had a Harley Street practice and, like the others, taught med-students in his spare time.

He suddenly needed a ‘model’ to use; the boy he had having moved, and my Mum said yes to him using me. When I was up at Harley Street we used to have elevenses with the other doctors and often went to lunch together. Thus I met Stephen Ward, who wasn’t actually a doctor, officially, at least (long story, but he was actually the finest doctor I ever met, a genius) he was an osteopath. Ward wasn’t actually involved in our work, though he sometimes looked-in as he was interested. It was merely over tea and a chance remark that led us to the subject of hypnotism and me being asked to be the guinea-pig.

Doctor’s Miller and Asher were the best guys in Britain and they couldn’t hypnotise me, so they were annoyed. Ward smiled at them and asked me if he could try. Voila, I was under his spell. Though they were very embarrassed the doctors were forced to ask Ward to do the experiment for them, and as it progressed over the months he became an integral part of the secret research we were slowly getting into. I didn’t really know Ward at this time; I only met him with the other doctors there. One day my doctor had a real patient come to him in dire trouble, and I was taken to Ward’s surgery for tea and a chat during her visit, Ward having no patients just then; he was rarely overworked, though it did happen. Ward was amusing company, we had lots to talk about, we liked each other, he having no family of his own and he obviously missed having somebody to care for, a son, and I became that substitute.


stephen ward, profumo affair, peter rachman, mi5, roger hollis,
Dr Stephen Ward

Ward got on well with my Mum too; so much so that I used to wish that they would marry. Sadly though, my mother already was, to my Dad, who was working abroad by this time. I later discovered that Ward was probably impotent; so no good to my Mum but she loved his company anyway. He was a really nice man and she used to visit him up in London quite often.

My work in Harley Street was always during the week, though sometimes my Mum would let me spend the night at Ward’s providing she had his telephone number for emergencies. PAD 8625, I remember it even now.

He had once raced cars and he took me to Brands Hatch, the racing circuit, where I met all the racing-drivers of that time, and got to sit in a few cars, too. Ward had been a fine racer, Stirling Moss once told me he sighed with relief when Ward decided he had to quit and think of a career, not being wealthy enough and being a mite too old to go pro: “You would have never have heard of me, otherwise,” Stirling said. “Stephen Ward could have been a big star of the ‘50s if he was just five years younger or had some money behind him.”

At the time I became involved in this medical research at Harley Street I had no idea about its background or beginnings. I now know that it all started with the ‘shell-shock’ survivors of World War I who came home from the trenches in a dreadful state and for which the Tavistock Institute was initiated to help to find solutions. Even in my time we were still working with war veterans, though these were of the World War II vintage. I remember one time when we were shooting some porn photos that there was this guy. He was a war-hero, a captain on a warship that ran into a German cruiser in the North Atlantic one stormy day when neither ships radar were working due to the freezing conditions. Surprised, neither backed-off.

The German ship was either sunk or was severely damaged, enough for the Navy to run them down. The British ship, however, looked like a corkscrew; blown apart, burning, half of the crew dead.

Despite being raked by shrapnel all over his body, his cock and one testicle blown-off, barely alive, the Captain lay in agony on what was left of his bridge and directed his sailors as to how to sail a ship scarcely afloat back into port, not resting for a second the entire time. He got a medal for that. Then his wife left him; “half a man as he was”, and he only ever saw his daughter when she wanted money. By the time I met him he was a successful businessman who was busily working himself to death. He was also going crazy. He still had an enormous sex-drive, but no cock.

The top psychiatrists of the day, the aforementioned Doctor’s Emanuel Miller and Richard Asher, aided by Stephen Ward, used me to find out how to give this man the orgasm he needed to relax. It’s all in the mind, you see. Tests with Ward (into alternative medicine) showed you could create orgasms using acupuncture but this wasn’t good enough, the poor man had to be able to do it himself, in his head.  

To this day I don’t how, or if, my work helped this guy and the others in the same boat; but it sure helped me!

One of the experiments we did was in ‘The Tank’ at a military establishment. They used to train agents and divers in there. Or so they said. It was a huge, heated, soundproofed water tank. They would throw you in naked and slam the door and turn out the light! Sensory deprivation. There was an air-line from the roof and a mouthpiece to breathe with so you didn’t drown. Then they gave you a weighted belt so you sank under the surface, floating as though weightless in space.

I was told by the Navy divers that I had what it took to be one. They used to read to me sometimes, Shakespeare mainly, through a loudspeaker. I was taught both under hypnosis and not (to see the difference) all his works, and Welsh!

They told me that they were testing to see if it was a good way to learn scripts, you see. I recall it came out all mixed up, not in the right order. I could only do bits of it and I needed reminding a lot. Thus they knew that the brain stores things in different places. But not why, and how?

It was all very interesting work and I enjoyed it. Far better than wearing short trousers and playing conkers with the other brain-dead kids!

Stephen Ward was involved with the war wounded as well. The first time I ever met John Profumo was after a visit to the Queen Victoria hospital in East Grinstead with Ward to see ‘his boys’, the burned Battle of Britain pilots he had worked with during the war. Ward never passed by without going in to say hello, though they never mentioned this in the media - and the other charity works he was involved with, Dr Barnardo’s, child abuse (with Valerie Hobson, Profumo’s wife, no less) Leonard Cheshire etc.

Though I now deeply suspect his motives, I didn’t then. We had stopped off at Cliveden House for a quick cuppa when Lord Astor came down to invite Ward to a dinner that evening. I couldn’t go as it was a black-tie affair and I was in jeans, but Ward was in a suit that would pass muster. So I had tea alone in Ward’s cottage listening to the radio. At nine I walked up to the house, the guests were just leaving at this time and I was to have coffee with the Astor’s. People were still getting their coats on, so I waited outside. Profumo was coming out for a quick smoke and a stroll. He just said: “Hello, nice to meet you at last” before strolling off around the house to the cars as he waited for the women to get sorted.

Astor, who was a former naval intelligence man, had met Stephen Ward in 1950 when he treated the Lord after he had fallen from a horse. By 1956, Astor, so enamoured with Ward’s restorative powers, had gifted him the use of a cottage on the Cliveden Estate, for which Ward paid a peppercorn rent.

There is a photo of Chrissie on the internet that always reminds me of the second time I met Profumo; she’s sitting in a chair, dressed in a blouse and skirt, looking fab (as usual, she was a really lovely girl, far better in reality than in a photo) a glass table on her left, Ward’s briefcase behind her on the right. If the photo was bigger you’d see my duffle-bag next to his briefcase!


christine keeler, profumo affair, wimpole muse, stephen ward, mandy rice-davies,

I helped Ward set up this very quick shot, using only one light; she is looking up at me as he took it!

She had come out of her room ready for a date and Stephen was so taken with her beauty that he just had to take a picture. Then, as he was in the kitchen, taking out the now-finished roll of film, a horn hooted outside and she rushed back into her room to brush her hair again: “God, I look a mess!” A few seconds later John Profumo came up, agitated, “I’m double-parked! Where is she?” “Doing her hair...again”, I told him. He raised his eyes.

Then out she came with a warm smile and looking simply stunning. “Oh”, I quipped, “you CAN make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear!” Profumo laughed. Chrissie pinched my nose and wrinkled hers at me. “You’d better go before Stephen comes back in, I’m not supposed to have seen him”, I said, nodding at Profumo, adding I’d been told not to look out of the window. “Have a nice time, you two”. I got smiled at and they left.
So as you can now see I was at the very centre of events during the biggest scandal of the twentieth century.

Hopefully you are now beginning to realise that there was a lot never mentioned during the scandalous Profumo Affair? Why aren’t you asking why the entire anti-Ward agenda is on the top secret list until 2046? If Ward was, in essence, a mere pimp, a dime-a-dozen sleazebag, then this would not be worthy of a mention on the back pages let alone the expense of a huge trial in Crown Court.

No, he was the sacrificial lamb executed to spare the embarrassment of the so-called elite, the Establishment.

These same ‘fine’ people that used to rule us with the sword, before they realised this was self-defeating as they needed slaves to do all the hard work for them and devised religion to control us. This eventually began to lose its effect so they came up with the ultimate solution; rule us via our wallets.

They created the Industrial Revolution to force us to manufacture the goods we were then forced to spend our wages on. They moaned at how much we were costing, but omitted to say that they immediately took the money back again – and with interest! And we are so stupid we lap it up, ‘We’ve never had it so good’ forgetting the fact that we have to come up with the repayments every month or wind up starving in the streets. All we’re doing is making a few select families, dynasties, Masonic ones, richer by the minute.


Of course, though, there is a lot more to it than just pure greed and Ward was far more than a mere puppet; puppet master more like. Indeed MI5 once described Ward as being ‘the provider of popsies for rich people’, and they should know. Ward supplied the young girls in the same way the spy Anthony Blunt, or the gangster Kray twins, procured the young boys; on behalf of MI5 and for the express purpose of obtaining materials for blackmail.


Chapter 2

Chapter 2 - Dolphin Square

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.

stephen ward, profumo affair, anthony blunt, mi5, roger hollis,
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.

stephen ward, anthony blunt, profumo affair, wimpole muse, mi5,
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-à-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.

stephen ward, wimpole muse, ruth ellis, dolphin square, hannah tailford,
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, jack the stripper, wimpole muse, stephen ward, dolphin square,
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.

andre padoux, stephen ward, hannah tailford, jack the stripper, dolphin square,
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.

krays, boothby, stephen ward, wimpole muse,
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.

christine keeler, stephen ward, mind-control, wimpole muse,

‘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.

george harrison marks, stephen ward, wimpole muse,
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!