Douglas Thompson is the author of “Clint Eastwood” and “Madonna v. Guy.”

Stephen Ward: Scapegoat

They All Loved Him … But When It Went Wrong They Killed Him

By Douglas Thompson

John Blake Publishing Ltd

Copyright © 2014 Douglas Thompson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78219-760-7

Contents

Title Page,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Preface: TIME’S ARROW,
Prologue: OLD SCHOOL TIES,
BOOK ONE: TARTS, TOFFS AND TROUBLE,
1. DOCTOR IN LOVE,
2. DOCTOR AT SEA,
3. DOCTOR IN THE HOUSE,
4. DOCTOR IN HEAT,
5. DOCTOR ON THE MOVE,
6. DOCTOR IN CLOVER,
BOOK TWO: SEX, SPIES AND SECRETS,
7. DOCTOR SUGDEN,
8. DOCTOR ON CALL,
9. DOCTOR AT RISK,
10. DOCTOR FEELGOOD,
11. DOCTOR DOOM,
BOOK THREE: DEATH BY SNOBBERY,
12. DOCTOR IN THE SWIM,
13. DOCTOR STRANGELOVE,
14. DOCTOR IN DOUBT,
15. DOCTOR OF DIPLOMACY,
16. DOCTOR SAVUNDRA,
17. DOCTOR UNDER THREAT,
18. DOCTOR IN THE FRAME,
19. DOCTOR IN THE SPOTLIGHT,
20. DOCTOR IN THE DOCK,
21. DOCTOR ON TRIAL,
22. DEATH OF THE DOCTOR,
23. DOCTOR’S INQUEST,
Postscript: DOCTOR ON STAGE,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,
BIBLIOGRAHY,
INDEX,
Plates,
Copyright,

CHAPTER 1

DOCTOR IN LOVE

‘YOU CAN DO ANYTHING YOU PLEASE HERE, SO LONG AS YOU DON’T DO IT ON THE STREET AND FRIGHTEN THE HORSES.’

Mrs Patrick Campbell, George Bernard Shaw’s choice as the original Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion, 1910

‘Don’t you ever fuck?!’

Startled, Dr Stephen Ward looked over as more questions were launched towards him on the chilly late-evening London air.

‘Just like to look? Window shopping? Bastard!’

The quizmistress, a Miss Bloody Mary, was gesturing towards Ward, marking him out to her three friends standing companionably with her outside The Dorchester hotel in Mayfair in 1952. These were ladies, girls really, but aged by Max Factor panstick and boredom, to whom Mrs Patrick Campbell’s axiom was altogether alien.

Only moments earlier, Stephen Ward and Michael ‘Dandy Kim’ Caborn-Waterfield had left Princess Margaret and her regal entourage at The Milroy nightclub atop Les Ambassadeurs at 5, Hamilton Place. Now, different ladies were in waiting.

At first, it was all a little embarrassing. The two men were taking a couple of enthusiastic Rank Cinema starlets back to Caborn-Waterfield’s apartment for romantic improvisation. The interruption made it clear the working girls had recognised Dr Ward. Though the incident might have been shrugged off as unpleasant at most, it turned nastier, potentially deadly.

The street girls, like most throughout Mayfair and Soho, were controlled by the Messina Brothers who ran vice in London’s most lucrative patch with ruthless efficiency, big cars, loud voices and suits to match. Sharp razors, jangling bicycle chains, noisy street battles, quiet police pay-offs and silenced witnesses. Salvatore, Carmelo, Alfredo, Attilio and Eugene Messina saw their work as simply a corporate extension of the white slavery enterprise pursued by their Sicilian-born father Giuseppe at the turn of the century. They were hands-on, personally patrolling their street network, in turn paternal and intimidating. Work was their life and, appropriately in their case, vice versa. They took it extremely seriously; anything or anyone who threatened their game, their profit, was ferociously dealt with. No one complained, especially not the police, who were extremely well rewarded in cash and kind.

The pitch outside The Dorchester was 24-hour prime. The ‘mugs’ were upmarket, usually safe and generous. The girls, who were on a flat rate, fought for it, not for the money but for their comfort, especially in the winter months when their outfits were only good for temptation.

There was space for four, maybe five, ladies making evening offers along the stretch of wall by the banqueting doors to The Dorchester. Below were the hotel kitchens, the hot air drifting up and escaping through metal grilles, agreeably warming the goods.

There were some screeching cat fights and also confrontations between the Messina brothers or their thugs from the Tottenham gang with other ponces trying to move their girls into the spots. Young man-about-town Michael Caborn-Waterfield witnessed much of it: ‘I’d taken a flat at 60, Park Lane, which is on the same block as The Dorchester; if you’re coming down from Marble Arch it’s the last turning on the left and then it’s The Dorchester. It was two-way traffic and just a walk up and down, and it’s where Stephen got himself into a stupid little fix with the Messina brothers.

‘My flat was on the first floor and the sitting room overlooked Park Lane and my bedroom window was out onto Aldford Street; along with Shepherd Market, it was a treasured pitch.

‘Before I met Stephen at the bar of “Les A” [Les Ambassadeurs] in 1952, I’d noticed from time to time, usually between 10pm and midnight, a XK120 grey drophead Jaguar sailing by down Park Lane and the driver was slowing. He was kerb-crawling these girls.

‘His car was very chic, people didn’t have them. It was only seven years after the war. The girls all thought he was a very monied man and also he was a very attractive man. But he was just looking at them – he never stopped and never did business. I knew all the girls – they had a key to my flat and they never took any liberties. They used to hide my money because they were afraid the “dirty debutantes” I mixed with would take it.’

Caborn-Waterfield, who talks the way Cary Grant looked as though he should – slow, soft and suavely – set the scene: ‘I’d met Stephen with Paul Adam, who was the bandleader at The Milroy, and we’d become good chums. London was truly a village, the same faces everywhere. Paul was one of Princess Margaret’s favourites – he always had a special number for her – and it was a lively place. The starlets used to have dinner with the producers and then make excuses and escape upstairs to us in The Milroy. One night there were two new girls and I said to Stephen: “Let’s take them back to my place, chat them up.” As we were walking up with these two, Bloody Mary stepped out from her pitch and the other girls and started screaming at Stephen. There was a hell of a row. I said: “Come on, girls, he’s a friend of mine.”

‘I had little influence. They screamed: “He’s a dirty fucking bastard!”

‘It all became nasty and one of the ponces came along, a young one who grafted for the Messinas. He got into it and he’d taken Stephen’s car number and was going to make trouble.

‘Stephen was kerb-crawling – he was voyeuristic and he wasn’t performing. He wasn’t short of money. He didn’t have a back up of money but he had a bloody good income. The Messinas would have roughed him up – they murdered without conscience. We had galvanised dustbins and the lids became weapons in the fights, being swung around like the bicycle chains. But if they wanted to send a message they would cut someone, scar their face. It was the Messinas’ sort of advertising. Invariably, when there’s money and villains around, there’s always problems. Stephen was fearful of that sort of thing, any sort of physical confrontation.

‘To help Stephen, I got a message to the Messina brothers to tell them Stephen was a friend of the Duke of Edinburgh. The Messina brothers didn’t want that level of aggravation; there were some people they couldn’t pay off.’

It was a solid connection and timely. On 8 February 1952, the Duke’s wife, the Princess Elizabeth, formally proclaimed herself Queen following the death two days earlier of her father, King George VI. Despite the viral nastiness of the Messina brothers, that fact, said Caborn-Waterfield, constituted ‘enough clout to make them back off’.

Stephen Ward’s 40th birthday was on 19 October 1952, and by then he himself was a prominent character in London’s high society, albeit a waste of a good time for Bloody Mary. He was also fortunate that the much-liked and connected socialite Kim Waterfield knew the ‘crusading’ newspaper reporter Tommy ‘Duncan’ Webb, who was tapped into all that happened in London: ‘I told Tommy one of the girls had a thing for Stephen and felt rejected, and that’s how it happened.’

He was a conflicted man, this vicar’s son, but also a man of determination and conviction: a devout believer, not in God, but in whichever road he travelled. Yesterday was never an option. By then, he’d gone a long way. As a boy, Stephen Ward always felt that ‘somewhere life must surely be exciting’. His father, the Reverend Arthur Evelyn Ward, was a scholar, a man who dwelled on history (he had a First in Modern History from Balliol College, Oxford) and was happiest locked in his thoughts and his library. He suffered from the spinal disease ankylosing spondylitis, which had bent him over ‘like a mole creeping among his books’, a neighbour recalled. When Stephen Ward was born in 1912, his father was the vicar of Lemsford, near Hatfield in Hertfordshire, and the family – Stephen, John and Raymond, twins Bridget and Patty – moved with the job: first, Holy Trinity Church in Twickenham, then St Matthias in Torquay, with his father eventually becoming Prebendary of Exeter Cathedral in 1934.

The Reverend Ward’s second son rebelled against the formality and conformity of not just religion, but also the pecking order of life. However, through his father, he learned and always believed that all humans are equal, irrespective ‘of their creed, colour, race or gender’. For Stephen Ward, everything was open to all. He was never keen on the Tenth Commandment.

His mother was, by all accounts, a delight, an engaging flibbertigibbet. Eileen (Vigors) Ward was from County Carlow, Ireland, and a family who had aspirations and achieved them in Law, the Church and the Army. She simply expected her son Stephen to follow the family tradition. From a young age, he grew tall and was slim and fit. Attractive in manner and look, he had a feline agility. Yet he was a disappointment to his academic father who could not understand his son’s failure to study. Ward first learned to deploy charm as a protective weapon in the family home.

His academic mind was never questioned but his application of it always was, first by private tutors, next at a Middlesex preparatory school and then at Cranford School, the former Dorset home of Viscount Wimborne, the English politician Ivor Churchill Guest, who had been Lord Lieutenant of Ireland at the Easter Rising in 1916. At Cranford, they knew more about Wimborne than about Stephen Ward. He was only remembered for being punished for fracturing a fellow boarder’s skull. He didn’t do that, and he never forgot it either but nor did he succeed at his lessons or on the playing fields. But he wanted to achieve and was sufficiently self-aware to acknowledge a distorted self-image to his friend Warwick Charlton: ‘I used to live in a sort of dream. I wanted to be good at everything. I wanted to pass exams brilliantly, to be noticed for my fine mind. I also wanted to be good at games. Alas, none of this happened. When it came to the point, an inbuilt and fatal laziness stopped me from putting everything I had into the effort. I never had any real idea of what I wanted to be, but I knew what I didn’t want: I most certainly did not want to follow in father’s footsteps.’

And he didn’t.

‘I wanted to travel and to meet people. I told my father that I wanted to leave school and get a job. He was puzzled. He never did understand me and now I had that all-alone feeling again, for I knew very clearly that I could never make him understand. To my surprise he overcame his doubts and agreed to my leaving school. I was an awkward nuisance and, after all, the Lord was always on hand to help out if things got too difficult. Now the cuckoo (I’m sure he thought of me as such) was really leaving the nest, and, although I sensed his alarm at my obvious lack of purpose, there was, I felt, almost a relief in getting me off his hands. I can’t say I greatly blame him for this.’

It was remarkable equanimity in a 17-year-old whose bespoke charm fitted perfectly. That calm demeanour never lost discretion at the jumps. Ward leaned towards a medical career but failed to secure a suitable college. Instead, he found himself rolling out rainbows of carpets in the City of London. He stayed with family friends and took a job (for 27 shillings a week) at the Houndsditch Carpet Warehouse, where he was to display what was for sale to wholesale buyers. He did that with some panache but his patience wore thinner than the carpets. After the seasonal rush, he suddenly announced that he was leaving to work abroad.

It was the winter of 1929 when he went to Germany. It was a shaky moment of European history, with Adolf Hitler becoming a whispered name and his party, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, invading right-wing politics. Ward arrived in Hamburg shortly before Christmas, and the new Nazi Party HQ, with a job as a translator for Shell Oil. He was not fluent in German but ‘an uncle used his influence’. His connections were impeccable, like his plausibility. He was part of the British Club in the city and mixed with the foreign embassy crowd, fondly with the daughter of the Swedish Consul. He played club tennis and attended cocktail parties. He learned fluency in diplomacy, how to be in exactly the right place in the room at the perfect time to light the cigarettes being held by the influential or attractive.

He looked older, naturally dressing the part, and his frame and features carried it off. Hamburg was a perfect place for him to further and develop his interests in the ‘ladies of the night’ unabashedly on parade along the Reeperbahn, the mile-long street of sex-on-offer in the St Paul’s district of Hamburg. There was no innuendo. It was all on show, held together by corsets and necessity.

Ward gossiped to his friends that his sex life kink started with the girls of the Reeperbahn. It was good fun – and good economics. He could pay for sex or get his thrills for free, looking at the girls pouting and posing and inviting in the windows of the red-light district: sex by window shopping. Ward adored Hamburg but there was a problem – he claimed a practical joke with his boss at Shell backfired – and he moved to France. His mother helped (behind his father’s back) by sending funds to Paris, which allowed him to study at the Sorbonne, at the university’s Cours de Civilisation. He found a job in the kitchens of a club, Chez Florence, but did more sketches of waitresses than dishes; he also mixed with those who arrived for the nightlife rather than the food. This led to more income as, between student classes, he escorted tourists – ‘It didn’t take long for me to realise that many of them were more interested in real girls than the Mona Lisa.’ He received more requests for visits to The Sphinx, a highly mannered brothel, than Notre Dame Cathedral. The Sphinx, renowned for its glamorous flexibility, with girls, naked bar necklaces or other carefully placed pearls, dancing with the customers, was known in Paris as ‘an expensive place to fuck’. And guests were expected to tip, most delighted to do so. If Ward had any surviving illusions about the ways of the flesh, they were abandoned by then: he’d gone all the way from basic farmyard to fantasy.

With winning understatement, he confided to a friend: ‘I often wondered what they’d think of me back in Torquay, if the parishioners could see the vicar’s son in a rather novel situation.’

They very nearly did, for Ward tired, as he did of so much, of Paris life subsisting on crushed packets of Gauloise and a budget. Always broke, waiting for money from home, he followed the money back to Torquay. Meanwhile, he had established a look that would remain with him: a white shirt with a collar a half-size more than he needed, grey slacks or dark suit trousers with a double pleat that accentuated his narrow waist but kept the cloth away from his body. Maybe he sprayed on affability for he reeked of it. Certainly, he was a leading attraction in 1932 for the younger set of Torquay. His mother’s indulgence of her favourite son, the cash and the MG sports car, a racy red number she bought him, got him top billing on the eligibility marquee.

There was a moment when he stumbled into possible stability. He became involved in a serious relationship with 18-year-old Mary Glover, daughter of a local businessman. She fell in love with him, but her parents were not so besotted. Ward had everything a girl could want except prospects. He called Mary ‘his Maggie’ – he always had to personalise girls, mark them out with his extravagant giftwrapping, and she would tell a friend: ‘I was absolutely fascinated by Stephen. He had enormous charm and all the girls were captivated by him but I knew he was faithful to me. One day, he asked me: “Maggie, when are we going to get married?” He never gave me an engagement ring but we both understood that, when he made good, we’d get married.’

But the ‘making good’ option was not leaping into Ward’s life, which, professionally, was going nowhere. His mother brought family connections into play. Her brother Edward Vigors, an Examiner of Standing Orders at Parliament in Westminster, introduced his nephew to his fellow Irishman Jocelyn Proby. Renowned for his kindness, Proby had a degree from the Kirksville College of Osteopathy and Surgery in Missouri. An enthusiast of osteopathic medicine, he persuaded Ward that he would be a success as a practitioner: ‘There is no doubt that Stephen had a very good brain – but no direction. Edward Vigors and I really hijacked him and sent him off to Kirksville. But we were so confident he’d do well that we agreed to pay his fees.’

(Continues…)Excerpted from Stephen Ward: Scapegoat by Douglas Thompson. Copyright © 2014 Douglas Thompson. Excerpted by permission of John Blake Publishing Ltd.
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