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Modern Notoriety · London, Greater London

Stephen Ward's flat, Wimpole Mews

Ward's Marylebone flat was the hub where aristocrats, showgirls and diplomats mingled; the shots Johnny Edgecombe fired at its door on 14 December 1962 dragged the Profumo affair into open court.

StatusDocumented history
Date1962–63
The peopleStephen Ward, Christine Keeler, Johnny Edgecombe
The siteNo. 17 Wimpole Mews, Marylebone (Stephen Ward's flat)
Coordinates51.52070, -0.14930 (confidence 4/5)

The story

17 Wimpole Mews in Marylebone was Stephen Ward's flat, and Christine Keeler lived there. It was here, on 14 December 1962, that the affair finally broke into the open — not through espionage but through a gun. Johnny Edgecombe, one of Keeler's former associates, came to the door, was refused entry, and fired shots at it.

The shooting dragged Keeler into the courts and the press, and once reporters began investigating, the whole story unravelled: the minister, the Russian, the osteopath. Within months Profumo had lied to the Commons (22 March 1963), confessed and resigned (5 June), and the Macmillan government was mortally wounded. Ward, tried as a scapegoat for living on immoral earnings, took a fatal overdose before his verdict. The quiet mews address gives no sign that the modern British political sex scandal was, in effect, invented at its door.

More stories at this spot

"He would, wouldn't he?"

At Stephen Ward's 1963 trial, Mandy Rice-Davies was told that Lord Astor denied having slept with her. Her reply — "Well, he would, wouldn't he?" — was so perfectly deflating of aristocratic denial that it entered the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. In one line, a teenage showgirl punctured the whole establishment presumption that a lord's word would naturally be believed over a chorus girl's.

The sealed papers

Lord Denning's 1963 inquiry gathered a mass of material on the affair, and much of it — along with files from Ward's trial — remains locked away, some of it embargoed for decades on the grounds that it contains "sensational" personal matter. Campaigners including the barrister Geoffrey Robertson have argued for its release, believing it could show Ward's conviction was improperly secured. The state that scapegoated him is still, sixty years on, keeping its own counsel.

Sources

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Documented history

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