An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (25 page)

The Macmillan years were characterised by an unprecedented consumer boom and retailing convulsion. England ceased to be a nation of shopkeepers, and became a nation of multiple retailers. Grocery shops provided self-service counters, supermarkets proliferated and retail chains came to dominate high streets. Some developers, such as Wolfson and Clore, were retailers too. They were aggressive modernisers overturning the habits and values of traditional business.

Margaret Stacey noted that, during the 1950s, in the Profumos’ nearest market town, Banbury, traditionally minded shopkeepers did not open branches in the town’s outlying districts, where there were only ‘corner shops’ or Co-op branches. Banbury’s drapers, ironmongers and grocers had capital for expansion, but not the urge. They were sure of their social position and neighbours’ approval. They felt no compulsion to make a show. Their reputation in Banbury as ‘nice people’, in Muriel Spark’s phrase, mattered more than making as much money as possible. In delegating to branch managers they would forfeit personal contacts, which they prized, between ‘gaffer’ and employee, and between shopkeeper and customer. If the expansion failed, the shopkeeper’s business would succumb, and he would lose his standing in the town. If he prospered, he would outclass his peers, and be cast adrift socially: his acceptance in richer strata would be slow. It was men with these gently self-limiting values whom Wolfson and Clore, mercenary rebels or freebooters, were putting out of business.
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Anthony Sampson in 1962 named five men as the foremost corporate raiders whose takeovers had made them ‘the heads of colossal empires’ within the previous ten years: Isaac Wolfson, Charles Clore, Hugh Fraser, Cecil King and Roy Thomson. Of these, Wolfson, though he was at Cliveden during the weekend when Profumo met Keeler, had no part in the Affair. Cecil King, however, figured in it. Clore was the ‘Charles’ who featured in Stephen Ward’s trial. Although Keeler later denied that she had sex with him, a different tale was told in order to convict Ward. Walter Flack, Clore’s co-director at City Centre Properties, was also numbered among Rice-Davies’s protectors. Perec Rachman, who kept both Keeler and Rice-Davies, is the third property dealer who featured in the Profumo Affair – most infamously of all, as it proved.

Charles Clore’s parents had shifted to London to escape the anti-Semitism and russification of their native Latvia. He was born in 1904 in Mile End. He nearly drowned as a small boy, and thereafter was scared of getting out of his depth: literally, for the swimming pool at his country house was only chest deep and he always donned waterwings in it. Figuratively, too, he kept on land that was under his control. He stood apart as a child, always neat and unruffled, never joining the boisterous street games of his East End boyhood. When young he worked in his father’s textile business and lived with his family at 18 Elm Park Avenue, Tottenham. In 1928 he became licensee of the Electric Palace Cinema in Cricklewood, and two years later of the Super Cinema in Walthamstow.

Next he became licensee of the Prince of Wales Theatre, which had a prime site between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square. In 1934 he was nominally responsible for staging a revue there,
Sourire de Paris
, a licentious slapstick in which plumbers interrupted a honeymooning couple, and men shoved a pretty girl behind a curtain and emerged flourishing her corset and knickers. The reactionary prudes of the Lord Chamberlain’s Department insisted as conditions of the revue being staged on the non-suggestive pronunciation of the surname Winterbottom, and the deletion of a scene in which a man blew a raspberry at his wife, together with all mention of the Marquis de Sade. After the play had opened, the official censor George Titman attended a perform-ance. ‘It was a tawdry and vulgar entertainment and quite unworthy of a West End Theatre,’ he reported; a comedian produced ‘a very decided “raspberry”, made with his hand and mouth … I consider it gross impertinence to include this filthy noise’. At the Lord Chamberlain’s instigation, Clore was convicted on 21 February 1934 and fined £16 with nine guineas costs, for breaching the censorship regulations. ‘The average Englishman finds vulgarity and filth repugnant,’ fumed the magistrate who fined Clore after warning that the reputation of all London theatres was injured by this ‘disgusting stuff’. Although Titman privately wrote that ‘during these proceedings, Mr Clore has behaved in an exemplary manner, and I believe his concern at being in conflict with the Lord Chamberlain to be genuine’, the affair of the blown raspberry was preserved in Metropolitan Police files, where it was treated as if Clore had been convicted of obscenity. A few months later, Scotland Yard received an anonymous letter denouncing Clore for ‘attempting to procure chorus girls … for immoral purposes’, but detectives found no evidence to support this allegation.
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Clore in 1939 led a syndicate that paid £250,000 to buy the London Casino, a cabaret restaurant with a revolving circular dance floor, in Old Compton Street, Soho (now the Prince Edward Theatre). Reporting this deal,
The Times
described Clore as ‘a well-known dealer in property’. In official papers he called himself, on the basis of owning the Token Construction Company, a government building contractor. His purchase for £120,000 of the Dowager Countess of Seafield’s 50,000-acre Balmacaan estate in Inverness-shire led to parliamentary questions in 1943, and a request by the Secretary of State for Scotland for a confidential Scotland Yard investigation of this ‘land speculator’. The request was handled by Sir Norman Kendal, Assistant Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, who shortly before the German invasion of Poland in 1939 had cancelled an official visit to the Nazis which would have included a lecture on policing methods by SS-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich and a tour of the Dachau facilities. (‘I am more sorry than I can tell you to miss seeing you and all my other friends,’ Kendal wrote to Heydrich’s deputy, ‘but we must hope for better luck some other time.’) Little surprise, then, that Kendal characterised Clore to the Chief Constable of Edinburgh, for the Secretary of State’s information, as ‘an unscrupulous Jew upon whose word no reliance whatever can be placed’, and reported a hotchpotch of hearsay, before concluding, ‘anyone having any dealings with him must keep both eyes wide open’.
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After D-Day in 1944, Clore began buying commercial sites. His company directorships proliferated. He was targeted in further anonymous letters to Scotland Yard and the Director of Public Prosecutions (‘Clore is a Jew of the worst type who flagrantly flouts the laws and traffics generally in black market business,’ began one denunciation, eighteen months after the enormity of the Holocaust was known); but police enquiries found no grounds to prosecute him.
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It was Clore in 1953, rather than, as has been claimed, Siegmund Warburg in 1958, who masterminded the first-ever hostile takeover, in which a controlling shareholding in a public company was bought on the open market with the intention of ousting the company’s management and board. Clore’s target was J. Sears’ Tru-Form Boot Company, which owned 950 footwear shops, and several factories. Stealthily, he bought Sears shares, through nominees, and accumulated a secret ‘warehoused’ holding. Then, without prior consultation with the Sears directors, at a time when their company’s shares were valued at about fourteen shillings, and yielded an income of about fourpence a share, he offered forty shillings in cash for each share, combined with an alternative offer whereby the shareholders could retain twenty per cent of their equity interest. Shareholders who took this option did well. There was a furious battle, with much retaliatory newspaper comment, all of which Clore relished. The Sears directors tried to rally their shareholders’ support with the assurance that over £6 million could be raised by selling properties. As the properties were valued in Sears’s books at £2.3 million, irritated shareholders voted for Clore, who got control of seventy per cent of the equity. He sold the freeholds of the shoe shops to insurance companies at a large capital profit, but continued to sell shoes from them. After the Sears deal, Brendan Bracken traduced Clore as one of ‘the invading Israelites’.
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Contested takeovers suited the brutality of Clore’s character. ‘The phrase “takeover bid”,’ said the Labour politician Anthony Crosland in 1954, ‘conjures a picture, half-glamorous and half-repellent, of tough, astute and immensely rich financiers coolly gambling on the Stock Exchange for stakes that are measured in millions of pounds.’ It was a moot question, thought Crosland, whether to call such men the ‘apotheosis of the spiv’ or the ‘best type of merchant adventurer’. Either way, they repudiated traditional notions of respectability and trampled accepted codes of behaviour. Their bounds seemed illimitable. In 1963, in a satirical song about parvenus, Michael Flanders and Donald Swann sang: ‘Hell has just been taken over by a friend of Charlie Clore.’
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The developers were proud of being danger men. They were not public school boys trained by rules about the number of buttons that might be fastened on a blazer, or to venerate spurious traditions. They scorned, and in turn were despised by, the old guard. ‘For a long time there has been no fundamental change in the board,’ Sir John Hanbury-Williams, chairman of Courtaulds, mused in 1952. ‘There has been a Gentlemen’s Club atmosphere in the Board Room, and it is true to say that over the years this has spread to all Departments of our business. It is, in fact, part of the goodwill of the Company, which we must safeguard.’ Similarly, the financial coordinator of Shell who emphasised that profit was the prime end of business was told to ‘tone it down a bit’. One of ICI’s divisional chairmen said proudly: ‘We think of ourselves as being a university with a purpose.’ Another senior ICI man had an alternate corporate ideal: ‘We are very similar to the Administrative Class of the Civil Service.’ The military baronet who was Director General of the Institute of Directors described his organisation with satisfaction in 1962 as ‘a gigantic Old Boy network’. Men who thought like this were as much Clore’s prey as the Banbury shopkeepers.
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Clore acquired other shoe retailers, such as Dolcis (250 shops bought for £5.8 million in 1956), combining these into the British Shoe Corporation, which in the 1960s controlled almost one-quarter of the British retail shoe trade. His other acquisitions included the Mappin and Webb jewellery group in 1957 and Lewis’s Investment Trust (controlling Selfridges) in 1965. His property company, City and Central Investments, spent years acquiring land near Park Lane and obtaining planning permissions to build a skyscraper hotel, for which in 1960 Clore signed a contract with the American hotelier Conrad Hilton. One passer-by, who blanched at the hotel’s execrable design, commented in 1963: ‘I resent belonging to a society which gets, for instance, such things as London’s new Hilton hotel.’
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Early in Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, Clore and his wife were launched in London Society by Loelia, Duchess of Westminster, who oversaw the guest list of their first ball and coaxed the smart and worldly to accept Clore’s invitations. ‘They liked “Charlie boy” for his malapropisms and social gaffes, and they liked him even more when his French wife … left him to stand on his own unsteady social feet,’ wrote his friend George Weidenfeld, who ‘watched the interplay between the newly risen tycoon and his socially unassailable mentors with fascination and amusement. I loved Charlie Clore for himself and because he provided priceless anthropological source material.’ Soon, according to Beaverbrook, Clore ranked with Niarchos and Onassis, the Greek shipowners, as the social leaders on the French Riviera – besought at parties from Monte Carlo to Cannes. When approached in 1962 by the Society magazine
Queen
for a profile, he allowed them to photograph the prize cow of his Berkshire farm, but refused to be quoted: ‘I haven’t got a bad eye at ping-pong,’ was almost his only on-the-record remark. He had an imperious presence. ‘All his life,’ wrote Charles Gordon, ‘he had the feeling of divine right, that he was superior.’ His privileges had to be indisputable: he was resolved never to make amends. If he suspected that his staff served him less than the best, they were given a drubbing. It was unforgivable to serve him with pears for dessert: pears were ‘provincial – his most pejorative word’; for him only the choicest, out-of-season grapes would satisfy. ‘He worshipped at only one altar: money,’ Gordon continued. ‘His grasping for it was a form of gluttony, an appetite that was never satisfied.’
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Clore declared that he was always unhappy and had never known anyone who could truthfully say they were happy. His sexual pride and possessiveness were outraged when his wife left him in 1956. Thereafter he embarked on a libidinous rampage that lasted almost until his death. ‘His virility and his appetite for women unnerved many of his social and business acquaintances, leading them to accept a subordinate status in their personal relationships and therefore inferior terms in their business transactions with him,’ Gordon said. ‘He would always win. He would always get what he wanted. Not only all the money in the world, but all the girls in the world. Girls were for his pleasure, the taller and younger the better, and every night if possible, right into his seventies until his final illness. In his prime it was any girl of any social level. All that mattered was availability.’ Some businessmen, who wanted to make deals with him, procured girls for him. ‘His sexual will was indomitable. Some women were attracted by it; others fought it and succumbed; others were repelled by it.’ Dinner parties were ruined by his relentless groping of women sitting beside him, whom he had first met only an hour earlier. ‘He couldn’t wait; he had to have it now. He hadn’t the slightest concern for the sexual niceties.’
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