Havelock-Allan was a practised and calculating philanderer. When he met Valerie Hobson, he was engrossed with Enid Walker, wife of Count Cosmo de Bosdari. He was pursuing an affair with the actress Kay Kendall, fresh from the flop film musical London Town, when ten years later Hobson met Profumo. Having married Havelock-Allan in 1939, Valerie Hobson soon became pregnant and self-induced an abortion by drinking a bottle of gin, hurling herself from a chair and taking a boiling-hot bath. This is one experience that she shared with Christine Keeler, who once tried to induce an abortion with the aid of drugs and knitting-needles. In 1944, Hobson gave birth to a son, Simon, who was diagnosed as having Down’s syndrome: a physician offered to give the baby a fatal injection of meningococcal meningitis, but she declined. It is indicative of attitudes in 1944 that the Education Act of that year deemed children with Down’s to be ‘ineducable’ and excluded them from schooling. Simon Havelock-Allan spent most of his boyhood in institutions, and did not speak until he was sixteen. It is not surprising that after such lonely sorrows Valerie Hobson was regarded as prickly and aloof in the film world.
Two of her screen successes were playing aristocrats in films about men escaping from their class. She played a chilly beauty, Edith D’Ascoyne, in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), the comedy in which a fastidious shop assistant, played by Dennis Price, murdered a succession of his remote cousins in order to escape penury and inherit the dukedom of Chalfont. The murder victims (female as well as male) were all played by Alec Guinness. Edith D’Ascoyne, the widow of the second murder victim (killed in a booby-trapped photographer’s darkroom), unknowingly marries her husband’s killer (most of the deaths are attributed to accidents). ‘A kind of British comedy we hadn’t dared to dream about – urbane, satirical, witty, sophisticated,’ Cyril Ray greeted it. Hobson played Lady Chell in The Card (1952), the film adapted by Eric Ambler from Arnold Bennett’s novel. It again starred Alec Guinness, this time as a wide-boy who rises in the world by impertinence and charm. ‘Miss Valerie Hobson as Lady Chell performs with great spirit the unladylike tasks set before her,’ reported a reviewer. ‘Her ride in a runaway mule-cart gives new life to that moribund and fishy tribe – the film aristocrats.’8
Valerie Hobson, who was attracted by dashing coureurs de femmes, fell for Profumo as swiftly as she had for Havelock-Allan. His vitality was exciting and, as she later wrote, his interests differed from any she had known: ‘politics (above all), girls, horses, parties, holidays in the sun, practical jokes, Society gossip, aeroplanes (which he flew himself) and, above all, fun’.9 She did not want her first foray in adultery to be with him, or to be spoilt by self-conscious guilt, so she first went to bed with another married admirer, probably Whitney Straight, a motor-racing driver and managing director of BOAC (British Overseas Airways Corporation). Shortly after, she and Profumo began their secret affair. The subterfuge of intrigues, he found, intensified the sex.
Hobson became pregnant by Profumo during the summer of 1949. When she told him of the pregnancy as they stood on the battlements of Chenonceaux castle, he reacted lovingly but took it for granted that she would have an abortion. This time, instead of a horrific, self-induced abortion, she underwent the medical procedure known colloquially as a D and C (dilation and curetting) at a nursing-home in Hendon. This second abortion made her suspend the affair. A general election was looming, and her lover could not jeopardise his political prospects by being named in a divorce case involving an actress.
Profumo was elected with a safe majority as Tory MP for the newly created constituency of Stratford-on-Avon in 1950 (his parents’ house, Avon Carrow, lay in the constituency, where his unmarried sister still lived). Two years later he succeeded Reginald Maudling as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Civil Aviation, Alan Lennox-Boyd. In the Civil Aviation ministry he enthused about helicopters, and wanted to foist a heliport on Londoners. Subsequently the Civil Aviation and Transport ministries were merged under a single minister, John Boyd-Carpenter – ‘spring-heeled Jack’ as he was nicknamed. The two parliamentary secretaries of the united department were, Boyd-Carpenter recalled, ‘Hugh Molson, cautious, precise, reliable, a little inflexible on the ground transport side, and John Profumo, lively, quick and adroit – the best company in the world.’10 There are politicians who run on full throttle in their race for power; there are overwrought firebrands obsessed with principle; and breezy types who scoot along on charm. The latter get people to like them, put them at their ease, recognise their faces, mollify their feelings, nod encouragingly at their remarks, and make apt replies. This was Jack Profumo.
Six months after Profumo’s re-election to Parliament, Valerie Hobson went to the opera with Havelock-Allan, let him stay the night and became pregnant. Shortly after her second son was born in April 1951, the couple agreed to divorce – perhaps to facilitate her marriage to a new suitor, the Marquess of Londonderry, a drunkard who swerved between self-pitying submission and ugly aggression. In conformity with the prevalent divorce laws, Havelock-Allan, with his long career of adulteries, had to contrive being caught with a woman in circumstances that seemed to provide proof of adultery, although the woman was a respectable stranger hired for the purpose. After the divorce was accomplished in 1952, Londonderry’s attentions became importunate; but Profumo instead bounded back into play. He and the newly freed Valerie Hobson announced their engagement in October 1954. Profumo, saddled with an Italian surname suggestive of women’s scents, cannot have helped his flighty reputation among the more wooden-headed MPs by marrying an actress.
Profumo insisted that his bride, who was then starring as the lead in the hit musical The King and I, must stop work after she married. She complied reluctantly, though in public she showed a brave front. ‘I am giving up all my stage and film work – everything,’ she told journalists when she married. ‘It is the happiest step I can possibly take, though don’t imagine I have not loved my profession. I know lots of men and their wives mix their careers: I want to be a hundred per cent wife.’11 Similarly, it was unthinkable for Bronwen Pugh, perhaps the highest-paid model in England, to continue her independent working existence after her marriage to Lord Astor in 1960. Both women were obliged by their husbands to uproot a flourishing career; but they were among the luckier women. Choices were far narrower for most others.
Hobson left the stage before the changes in dramatic taste associated with John Whiting’s Marching Song (1954), John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958), Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen (1959), Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker (1960) and Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar (1960). In the early fifties, younger playwrights deplored the theatre’s dependence on plays written by decorous novelists or verse dramas by Eliot and Fry. ‘Well, that marriage broke up,’ John Whiting mused in 1961. ‘Since then the theatre’s been sleeping around with journalism, reportage, propaganda, autobiography and the movies among other things. And the old whore’s produced some very odd offspring.’12 This edgy, ungracious, shop-soiled world was not for Valerie Hobson.
In 1948, Profumo obtained a lease from the Crown Estates of 3 Chester Terrace (telephone: Welbeck 6983), an elegant house designed by Nash overlooking the Regent’s Park. Nash’s terraces kept a battered look for years after the war; and were only restored in the early 1960s. After the Profumos’ marriage their house was revamped with a cool chic that reflected the frosty smartness of their lives. It had a forty-foot drawing room, lit by tall windows, with views of the park beyond. Stéphane Boudin, the Paris interior designer who later advised Jacqueline Kennedy on the redecoration of the White House, imprinted the drawing room with his light version of the Regency style. Side-tables were set on an Aubusson carpet and arrayed with treasures. David Profumo recalled pagodas carved from ivory, an Epstein head, and a bejewelled Fabergé bulldog. It was a special treat for him, when his parents had guests, to hide under the green velvet of one of the side-tables, and nibble rice crackers from a black japanned tin decorated with pink blossom on its lid. Overall, the boy’s upbringing was emotionally chilly.
Smart London did not fully revive after the war until the Season of 1956. ‘For the first time since before the war, the British upper class has got the bit between its teeth’, reported the New Statesman in May of that year. ‘Not since the thirties has it consumed so much bad champagne and dubious caviar, trampled so much glass underfoot. After years of wartime equality, Crippsian austerity, servantless mansions, travel allowances, dividend restraint and triumphant bureaucracy, the Butler Boom is beginning to take effect: Society is scrambling shakily to its feet again and cocking a tentative snoot at the masses.’ It was revealing of the postwar pusillanimity that rich people enjoying good parties were thought provocative. Rich people should apologise for their wealth, the New Statesman averred, and should not be seen having fun. ‘The upper-class spending spree – of which the 1956 Season is the apotheosis – is a form of collective hallucination, a desperate attempt on the part of Britain’s financial and social élite to persuade itself that nothing has changed. Every all-night party, every case of champagne, every hamper of pâté de foie gras is one more proof … that the Labour Government was just a transitory nightmare, that equality is … receding into the remote distance.’ In the authentic tone of an envious killjoy, the magazine closed with a whiny question: ‘Is it too much to ask, just once, that the people at the top should set something other than the worst possible example?’13
The New Statesman prig disapproved of what he called ‘the leisured class’, and was tormented by the thought that somewhere people might be enjoying themselves. For the prim and pinch-lipped frowners, who often in these years seemed to constitute the majority, the only pleasure was in foiling other people’s enjoyment. ‘The workaday flavour of England today,’ wrote James Morris in 1962, ‘is dictated by the middle-aged, born out of the slough of war and depression, and empty of exuberance. Whose heart has not sunk, to see the elderly, grumpy, sweaty English porter crossly awaiting him at London Airport? Who has not heard the deputy assistant regional manager, with a gleam of his dentures and a hitch of his spectacles, reiterating his unshakeable conviction that it can’t be done? Who has not been testily reminded by a frumpish crosspatch in a frilly apron that coffee is only served in the lounge? Who has not felt the deadweight of that worn-out, disillusioned, smug, astigmatic, half-educated generation, weighing lumpishly upon the nation’s shoulders?’ This was the England against which the Profumos of Chester Terrace were in glamorous rebellion.14
In January 1959, Macmillan appointed Profumo as his Minister of State for Foreign Affairs. This promotion was resented by the Tory old guard, who mistrusted the ‘Eye-tie’ surname, thought him ‘a jumped-up opportunist’, and nicknamed him ‘the Head Waiter’. One venerable editor judged him an agreeable young man, whose ‘advance to ministerial rank had been rapid’ for such ‘a lightweight’. It is likely that Macmillan, who ranked most men by their attitude to appeasement, favoured Profumo as the youngest and bravest of the thirty-three rebels who had fatally wounded the Chamberlain government in the historic Norway vote of 1940. It is an irony of history that without the fall of Chamberlain, there would have been no Profumo Affair.15
As a Foreign Office couple the Profumos began a life of canapés and circuses. They attended official entertainments for foreign ambassadors and envoys at Lancaster House, state dinners and banquets for visiting heads of state at Buckingham Palace, tea with the Queen Mother at Clarence House. Apart from official duties, Valerie Profumo had a busy round of clothes fittings, appointments with hairdressers, and smart lunches. She preferred Italian couture, had an awesome array of stiletto-heeled shoes, and owned a skirt made from python skin. In the reshuffle of July 1960, Macmillan appointed Profumo as Secretary of State for War. The valiant anti-appeaser became one of three service ministers – Peter Carrington (Navy) and Hugh Fraser (RAF) were the others – under the Minister of Defence, Peter Thorneycroft. He proved a vigorous minister, who was a terrier in urging military needs in the interminable contentions over the allocation of expenditure between the three fighting departments.
Valerie Hobson had enjoyed the hectic glamour of Profumo’s Foreign Office job. The War Office was equally busy, but less smart, and the incessant official receptions began to become tiresome . Notoriously, the demands of ministerial office, parliamentary attendance and constituency duties made domestic absentees of politicians. ‘Goodbye Daddy, we hope you lose,’ shouted the three sons of Alan Lennox-Boyd as he left to fight the 1955 election campaign in Mid-Bedfordshire. Some MPs stayed working late at the House. Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, alone in his Commons room, beavered at legal papers until three in the morning, when other MPs had gone to bed. Profumo, however, may have been among the minority who used late-night sittings to provide alibis for their amorous adventuring. Although quite short in stature and with receding hair, he was an eager flirt who enjoyed the ruses that occurred in the amatory dusk of brief affairs. David Profumo suspects that, while Minister of War, his father had an intrigue with a woman in his own social set, although he was seldom drawn by intelligent, assertive women, preferring ‘the painted and, if not exactly the semi-professional, then the obviously fun-loving amateur’.16
Stanley Baldwin is said to have insisted, in contradistinction to Macmillan’s hero Lloyd George, on forming ‘a Cabinet of faithful husbands’. He also declared that he wanted his Cabinet to have more old Harrovians than any other administration in history – two aims that were surely incompatible. Other premiers were indifferent to their Cabinet’s marital fidelity. There was ready acceptance of extra-matrimonial adventures – so long as the men did not get caught. One way to avoid jeopardising careers was to follow the Duke of Edinburgh’s advice: never to have an affair with someone who has less to lose by being found out. Men proved that they were real men by covering for one another. When Eden’s health broke after Suez, and he was ordered abroad by Sir Horace Evans, he chose to recuperate at a villa in Jamaica belonging to Ian Fleming. The approach to Fleming was made by Lennox-Boyd who, in order to preserve secrecy, asked if he might borrow the house for a holiday. Fleming concurred, and suggested that their wives should get in touch about the details. ‘Oh, you mustn’t tell Patsy,’ Lennox-Boyd insisted. ‘I quite understand, old boy,’ replied Fleming, who doubtless never knew that Lennox-Boyd was involved at the time with a male shop assistant at the Army & Navy Stores.17
It was divorce that mattered. When Nigel Fisher, MP for Hitchin, was sued for divorce by his wife in 1952, his resignation of the candidature was accepted by his local Conservative Association because Hitchin was a marginal constituency where a candidate who was the ‘guilty party’ might lose crucial votes. Instead, Fisher was adopted at Surbiton, where the Tories had a safe majority and the anti-divorce vote could be discounted. Eden proved that a divorced man might become Prime Minister; but survivors of the divorce courts were still not nominated as either Aldermen or Lords Mayor of London. Macmillan thought that Eden took ‘a risk’ in appointing Oliver Poole as chairman of the Conservative Party in 1955 (‘like most Conservative leaders nowadays he is a divorcé’) although on becoming Prime Minister he replaced Poole with another divorcé, Hailsham. As late as 1957, he felt that Profumo’s brother-in-law, Lord Balfour of Inchrye, was precluded from a colonial governorship because he had been divorced.18
After six years there was sparring as well as glamour in the Profumo marriage. Valerie Profumo compiled a list of reproaches which suggest how tedious her husband’s roaming eye had become. She resented his assumption that all pretty women, or preferably ‘girls’, were ‘fair game’ for him. ‘You will stretch any manners, at any time, to do this – not quietly and discreetly, but laughing and showing off and behaving like an adolescent,’ she complained. ‘The way you kiss women you hardly know “goodbye”’ was another irritation. So, too, was the tailoring of his trousers (‘surely there must be some way of concealing your penis’). He seldom stopped scoping the room, she protested, even when they were dancing together.19
Despite his flirting at parties and buoyancy at the despatch box, Profumo did not sparkle as a public speaker. The conventionality of his opinions was evident in his respectably prosaic speech at his adoption meeting at the Hippodrome in Stratford before the 1959 general election. Perhaps he judged his constituents aright. The local newspaper allotted more space to reporting that the Marquess of Hertford had served hot-dogs in the grounds of Ragley during a barbecue, at which a hundred accordionists played around a camp fire near the lake, than to reporting the speeches of Lords Mills and Balfour of Inchrye at Profumo’s campaign meetings. ‘Election? What election?’ the Stratford-upon-Avon Herald editorialised. ‘Hardly a poster seems to raise its head on the hoardings; in villages one or two can be seen, but it seems as if the Indian Summer’s soporific spell has bewitched elector and candidate alike, for hardly a voice can be heard raised in anger, let alone politics.’ The Conservatives made their headquarters in an Edwardian villa called the Firs. There a band of volunteers worked more quietly than a hive of bees, answering enquiries, addressing envelopes, and despatching posters. The Labour Party’s nerve centre in Central Chambers was even quieter, for the candidate and his agent went to solicit votes at factory gates as constituents arrived for work in the early morning, toured villages during the day, and addressed meetings at night. ‘Both sides have adopted the “whistle-stop” technique, but their loudspeaker vans seem to have a muted sound, as if they are loth to disturb the householders from “Emergency Ward Ten” or “The Archers”. Sundays, by tradition, are rest days (one wonders if they vary much from other days).’20
All this typified Profumo’s constituency, with its prosperous villages stretching south towards Oxfordshire. Avon Carrow, the Profumo house, lay in the parish of Avon Dassett, near Kineton, midway between the spa town of Leamington and the market town of Banbury. Strong support for Profumo burst from the Banbury hinterland when crisis overwhelmed him in 1963. Banbury was a town which, more than Stratford, reflected the weakening traditions and eroded identity that accompanied provincial England’s rising prosperity in the 1950s.
The changes had begun when an aluminium factory started production there in 1933. A corset factory, employing hundreds of women, followed. Soon the cattle, sheep and horse markets, which had been held in the cobbled streets for seven centuries, were resettled across the river under a roof. The marketplace was given a tarmac surface on which cinema-goers could park their cars. A zebra crossing with Belisha beacons was sited by the historic Eleanor Cross, where previously children had played marbles. Long-haul lorries, vans, cars, coaches and motorcycles resembled barbarian warriors as they stormed past the Cross on the north-south road between London and the Midlands conurbation. This road, flanked by stone houses where professional people had once lived in pleasant intimacy, was now a fraught wasteland of dehumanising traffic, where spacious homes were shoddily converted into offices and boarding houses. In the High Street, the Red Lion inn had been demolished for a Woolworths, and the farmers who had done business at its bar had yielded to young mothers with prams. W. H. Smith stood on the site of the Fox, where the fights had once been bloody and blasphemous. A few family concerns survived, but most shops were branches of national chains, and run by managers: Montague Burton the tailor, Dewhurst the butcher, Charles Clore’s shoe retailers Freeman, Hardy and Willis were all there.21
The aluminium factory at Banbury was, in machinery, techniques, and organisation, unlike anything known in the town before. Previous Banbury industries had been associated with farming products or agricultural tools. Employees were used to small workshops where the ‘gaffer’ was always visible; but the aluminium managers were, although based locally, often away in Canada, Switzerland, Wales or London. The factory stood ‘in green fields beyond the town, surrounded by ten feet of barbed wire, immaculate flower beds, orderly bicycle ranks, and lines of neatly parked cars’, reported local sociologist Margaret Stacey. ‘The huge white, green-roofed, hangar-like building, with its strange-shaped chimneys and tubes, and its unpredictable noises, seems like something from a different world.’ There might be no one visible outside except the guard at the gate, but inside up to 800 men and women toiled. At six in the morning, two in the afternoon, and ten at night, the shift changed, and another 700 to 800 men and women took their places. ‘Working life,’ wrote Stacey, ‘is out of time with home life, with wives’ cooking, shopping and sleeping, and with the children’s school life, out of time too with the social life of other people.’22
The Second World War was a vivid memory in Banbury and Stratford: indeed it created masculine bonds everywhere. ‘Possibly it was because neither of us had long been out of the forces, but there was an instant rapport between us,’ recalled David Waxman, a physician who met ‘Peter’ Rachman in 1949. ‘In those days, it was still like a brotherhood. You felt akin to anyone who had been in the services.’23
The kinship created by war was richly evoked in a film, The League of Gentlemen, released in 1960. A group of ex-army officers, shunning the women who have humiliated, scolded, manipulated and bored them, unite in masculine camaraderie and military discipline to rob a million pounds from a City bank. The common fund of memories was drawn on in Granada Television’s comedy series The Army Game, which gradually became dominated by Bill Fraser playing Sergeant Major Claude Snudge and Alfie Bass playing his stooge, the sly, imbecilic Bootsie. From the autumn of 1960 (running until 1964) Granada screened a spin-off of The Army Game called Bootsie and Snudge. An average of 17 million people watched its Friday night slot during April and May 1961. Snudge had become the porter of a Pall Mall club with Bootsie as his dogsbody. They carried, wrote a critic, ‘the ambivalent, equivocal and sometimes almost flagrantly – though, I suppose, always sublimated – homosexual relationship between these two monsters as far as possible, exploiting all conceivable nuances’.24
Wartime affinities were enduring. Attlee and Macmillan were the only Prime Ministers in three centuries to have been seriously wounded in battle. The experience imbued them with compassion and fortitude. Young officers in the trenches, living at close quarters with the men of their platoon, so Macmillan wrote in old age, ‘learnt for the first time how to understand, talk with, and feel at home with a whole class of men with whom we could not have come into contact in any other way’. His war record helped him in the Tory leadership, for until the 1960s to have had ‘a good war’, and especially to have been wounded, rightly commanded respect. Macmillan’s limp proved his patriotism. He despised those who (for whatever reason) had avoided active service. ‘The trouble with Gaitskell is that he has never seen troops under fire,’ he told a dining club of Tory MPs who had been elected in 1959. Three months into Wilson’s premiership in 1965 he commented: ‘It seems strange that a man who claimed exemption (as a civil servant or the like) at twenty-three and took no part in the six years war, can be PM. We certainly are a forgiving people.’25
This was an era when people still saluted as they passed the Cenotaph in Whitehall. ‘Rank insubordination’ was a phrase that some laughed at, and others recognised had a valuable meaning. A question of precedence arose when Profumo’s wartime senior commander Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis dined at Cliveden in 1962. The moment came for the men to leave the dining room to join the ladies. ‘By age and distinction,’ recorded a fellow guest, ‘there was every reason for him to go out first, but he didn’t immediately do so, since as an earl his rank was below that of the Marquess of Zetland’s. While he hesitated to go, there was a respectful silence, everyone looking towards him with quiet admiration and, by a slight inclination of the head, inviting him to lead the way. A hardly visible expression of pleased assent passed over his face. He went out as it were imperceptibly, as if it just happened that he went out first.’ As late as 1978, Lord Denning came within an ace of being disbarred from appointment as Deputy Lieutenant of Hampshire on the grounds that his military service in 1917–19 had been spent in the ranks.26
Profumo’s son David, who was born in 1955, recalled seeing war-wounded fathers of his school friends – men wearing eyepatches, those who kept an empty sleeve pinned to their jacket, the father whose face was gruesomely disfigured despite all the skill of plastic surgeons. Public men especially needed to show that they had had ‘a good war’. Jack Profumo had fought in the battle of Tunis and the invasion of Sicily; as the youngest brigadier in the British Army he had been second-in-command of the British Military Mission in Tokyo. He was still on the military reserve in 1963. The Labour candidate who stood against him at Stratford-on-Avon in 1950–51 had been awarded the Military Cross after the Battle of the Somme in 1916; his Labour opponent in 1955 had served in the Royal Navy; while Joe Stretton, the fifty-year-old Labour candidate for Stratford-on-Avon in the 1959 general election, a Co-op worker and councillor in Rugby, had war service with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in Italy and Austria.
‘Funny how the war was a historical watershed,’ mused the Labour MP Wilfred Fienburgh in 1959. ‘Every date, every age, had to be translated into terms of how many years before or after the war.’ When a man over forty saw a pretty young woman, his calculations were framed by the war: that she was just born when it started, suckling when he paraded for his first rifle drill, toddling and talking when his fighting started, and entering primary school when he was de-mobbed.27 One wonders if Profumo had comparable thoughts about Christine Keeler, who was a swaddled infant when he was fighting in Italy and not yet at school when he first met his wife.
Profumo’s great task as Macmillan’s Secretary of State for War was to manage the abolition of National Service, and to return the army to a body of professional volunteers. His political adversary, Colonel George Wigg, jibed that this required him to massage the army’s recruitment figures so as to prevent any necessity of reviving conscription. Under the terms of the National Service Act of 1947, all eighteen-year-old men were obliged to serve in the armed forces for eighteen months (raised to two years after the outbreak of the Korean War). More than 2 million youths were called up (6,000 every fortnight): the army took over a million; there were thirty-three soldiers, or twelve airmen, for every sailor. After discharge, conscripts remained on the reserve force for another four years, and liable to recall in the event of an emergency. Although the abolition of National Service was announced in 1957, conscription continued until 1960, and the last conscripts were not released until 1963. Some suspected that the government would be obliged to introduce selective service by ballot, which opponents denounced as tantamount to crimping during the American Civil War. Others regretted the retreat from notions of individual obligations and service to the state.
By 1963 there had never been so many ex-soldiers and ex-sailors in British history. Many people respond well to being drilled: in England, millions of people were respectful of authority, conformist, glad of regular pay and communal amusements. ‘Only a fool could resent two years National Service as a waste of time,’ wrote the art connoisseur Brian Sewell, who was conscripted in 1952. ‘Bullying, brutality, intimidation and fear were among its training tools with raw recruits, victimisation too, but even these had their educative purposes, and were the stimulus of resources of resilience that had not been tapped before.’ Many young men, unlike Sewell, seethed at the regimentation and sergeant majors’ bullying. With two by-elections pending at Colne Valley and Rotherham in 1963, nearly 700 servicemen tried to escape from the armed services by standing as parliamentary candidates. The government reacted by appointing a panel, chaired by David Karmel QC, to winnow the men. Only twenty-three of the 700 applied to Karmel for interview. A single one was approved: ‘Melvyn Ellingham, twenty-four-year-old REME sergeant, yesterday became the first Army Game by-election candidate to win his freedom.’ He had joined the army aged fifteen, and had two years still to serve as a £14 8s a week electronics technician. ‘I’m for the Bomb,’ he told the Daily Express, but ‘against the Common Market. I think a united Europe would only aggravate world tension.’28