Modern Notoriety · Taplow, Buckinghamshire
Cliveden (the Profumo pool)
At Cliveden's walled-garden pool on the weekend of 8–9 July 1961, War Secretary John Profumo, 46, encountered nineteen-year-old Christine Keeler. Her exact state of undress is disputed; their subsequent affair and Profumo's lie to Parliament helped bring down a government.
The story
On the weekend of 8–9 July 1961, Lord Astor was giving a grand dinner at Cliveden, his Italianate house above the Thames in Buckinghamshire. Stephen Ward, who rented a cottage on the estate, was throwing a smaller party at the walled swimming pool — and among his guests was Christine Keeler, then nineteen. When John Profumo, Secretary of State for War, aged forty-six, wandered down from the house, he found her at the pool and was captivated. A brief affair followed.
Sixty years of retelling have embroidered the scene into deliberate seduction; the documented core is simpler — a middle-aged minister, a teenage showgirl, a summer night. What made it history was the other guest that weekend: Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché, also involved with Keeler. Yet Lord Denning's 1963 inquiry found no security had been breached. The pool survives, at what is now a luxury hotel; the "scandal" it is sold on was never really about spying at all.
More stories at this spot
- Astor set society scandals
- Stephen Ward's cottage on the estate
- Mandy Rice-Davies / Lord Astor 'He would, wouldn't he?'
Sources
- Cliveden House
- BBC News
- Encyclopaedia Britannica
- BBC News (Keeler obituary; Ward papers)
- The Spectator (William Astor, first-hand account)
- Lord Lexden / Geoffrey Robertson (Ward scapegoating)
- The Justice Gap (posthumous pardon campaign)
Nearby on the map
Chalk caverns dug a quarter-mile into the hill for Sir Francis Dashwood's infamous brotherhood, whose motto — 'Fais ce que tu voudras', do what thou wilt — presided over banquets, blasphemy and 'nuns' hired from London. The deepest chamber, the Inner Temple, sits below the parish church: sinners underground, saints above.
Documented historyHot spotBohemian & LibertineMedmenham Abbey (the Monks of Medmenham)Medmenham, Buckinghamshire · EnglandThe riverside sham-gothic abbey where Dashwood's order first met, its door inscribed with Rabelais's 'Fais ce que tu voudras'. Contemporaries whispered of mock rites and masked ladies arriving by barge; the truth was scandalous enough that every account since has struggled to separate orgy from embellishment — this entry says so plainly.
Documented historyRoyal LiaisonFort Belvedere (Edward VIII & Wallis Simpson)Sunningdale, Surrey · EnglandThe country retreat where the King's affair with the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson deepened, and where he signed the Instrument of Abdication in December 1936 — love versus the crown.
Documented historySpotted an error, or hold a better source? Write to marquis@marquisdemayfair.com — corrections are made, never defended. Our methodology.