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Modern Notoriety · London, Greater London

Murray's Cabaret Club (where Profumo met Keeler's world)

The Soho supper club where showgirls in feathers were forbidden to move — and where the teenage Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies met Stephen Ward, the introduction that set the Profumo affair in motion. Discretion was the house rule; history had other plans.

StatusDocumented history
DateKeeler danced here 1959–61
The peopleChristine Keeler, Mandy Rice-Davies, Stephen Ward, Percival Murray
The site16–18 Beak Street, Soho (site)
Coordinates51.51250, -0.13722 (confidence 4/5)

The story

Murray's Cabaret Club at 16–18 Beak Street, Soho, ran from 1913 and worked on a hypocrite's formula: the showgirls appeared topless, but under the Lord Chamberlain's rules a stage nude was forbidden to move. Stand still in a "tableau" and you were Art; shift your weight and you were Obscenity — the same "if it moves, it's rude" rule that governed the Windmill round the corner. The girls walked bare-breasted to position, froze, then sat with wealthy patrons afterwards as hostesses for five pounds a time.

It was here, in 1959, that seventeen-year-old Christine Keeler met the osteopath Stephen Ward, who took her up and drew her into a world far above her own. Here too she met Mandy Rice-Davies. From this Soho basement ran a straight line to Cliveden, to a cabinet minister's bed, and to the fall of a government — though the club itself traded on, a "visual brothel" of champagne and frozen nudes, until 1975.

More stories at this spot

The chair

The single most famous image of the 1960s in Britain is Lewis Morley's 1963 photograph of Christine Keeler, apparently naked, sitting astride the back of a chair. The nudity was a compromise — she had not wanted to pose nude, and the chair-back hid everything. The photograph outlived the scandal, the government and Keeler herself, endlessly imitated, forever fixing a wronged young woman as the era's emblem of sex.

Sources

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