36 Facts About Stephen Ward

Stephen Thomas Ward was an English osteopath and artist who was one of the central figures in the 1963 Profumo affair, a British political scandal which brought about the resignation of John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, and contributed to the defeat of the Conservative government a year later.

In 1945, Ward began practising osteopathy in London, and rapidly became quite prominent and fashionable, with many distinguished clients.

Stephen Ward resigned from his ministerial office, parliamentary seat and membership in the Privy Council.

The Stephen Ward family had a military and clerical background; the Vigors family were of Anglo-Irish stock.

In 1920, the family moved to Twickenham, where Arthur Stephen Ward served as the vicar of Holy Trinity Church, then in 1922 to Torquay in Devon, when he became the vicar of St Matthias.

Arthur Stephen Ward later became a Canon of Rochester Cathedral, and, in 1934, a Prebendary of Exeter Cathedral.

Stephen Ward was educated at Canford School, in the village of Canford Magna in Dorset, as a boarder, where he was punished for an assault on a fellow pupil after refusing to name the real culprit.

Somewhat lazy and a regular underachiever, Stephen Ward had few realistic career choices when he left Canford in 1929.

Stephen Ward moved to London, where he worked for a few months as a carpet salesman in Houndsditch before an uncle found him a job in Hamburg as a translator in the German branch of Shell Oil.

Stephen Ward spent four years there, completing a course that qualified him as a general medical practitioner in the US.

On his return from the United States, Stephen Ward set up as an osteopath in Torquay.

Later, Stephen Ward treated Winston Churchill's son-in-law Duncan Sandys, who recommended Stephen Ward to Churchill himself.

Stephen Ward now had sufficient status and recommendations to set up his own private practice, in Cavendish Square just off Harley Street.

Stephen Ward soon attracted a clientele from the worlds of politics, society, and show business, and his social life became absorbed into this milieu.

Stephen Ward befriended the cartoonist and socialite Arthur Ferrier, whose parties Ward attended regularly and where he mixed with, among others, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, later the Duke of Edinburgh but then a junior officer in the Royal Navy.

Stephen Ward enjoyed the company of beautiful women, but his relationships were often platonic.

Stephen Ward's preference was for the type he called "alley-cats", city girls he could impress and dominate.

In return, Stephen Ward introduced the shy Astor to his own world of nightclubs, parties, and girls.

Stephen Ward hoped to visit the Soviet Union to draw portraits of Soviet leaders; to help him, one of his patients, the Daily Telegraph editor Sir Colin Coote, arranged an introduction to Yevgeny Ivanov, listed as a naval attache at the Soviet Embassy.

Stephen Ward was later used by the British Foreign Office as a backchannel, through Ivanov, to the Soviet Union, and was involved in unofficial diplomacy at the time of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

In 1959, Stephen Ward met Christine Keeler, a 17-year-old showgirl who was working at Murray's Cabaret Club in Beak Street, Soho.

Stephen Ward stayed with him, on and off, for the next several years and often spent time at the riverside cottage.

Stephen Ward introduced Keeler to Profumo, who was greatly attracted to her and promised to keep in touch.

Stephen Ward, who knew the truth, at first supported Profumo; however, when he found himself the target of an aggressive police investigation and facing prostitution charges, he revealed his knowledge to Profumo's political masters and to the press.

Stephen Ward was committed for trial at the Old Bailey but was released on bail pending trial.

The thrust of the prosecution's case, in which Keeler and Rice-Davies were their principal witnesses, was that these payments indicated that Stephen Ward was living off their earnings from prostitution.

The prosecution case looked weak but Stephen Ward's perceived image had been tarnished in the committal proceeding.

The prosecuting counsel, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, portrayed Stephen Ward as representing "the very depths of lechery and depravity", while the judge, Sir Archie Marshall, adopted a similarly hostile attitude.

That evening, after writing numerous letters to friends and to the authorities, Stephen Ward took an overdose of sleeping tablets and was taken to hospital.

The method, apparently, was to encourage Stephen Ward to continue to take barbiturates until a fatal dose had been ingested.

The reporter Tom Mangold, one of the last to see Stephen Ward alive, dismisses the murder theory, while allowing that there are unexplained circumstances relating to Stephen Ward's death.

Stephen Ward laid most of the blame for the affair on Ward, an "utterly immoral" man whose diplomatic activities were "misconceived and misdirected".

Stephen Ward's successor was Lord Home who renounced his peerage and served as Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

Many commentators share Davenport-Hines's view that Stephen Ward was a scapegoat and that his trial was an "historical injustice" and while not in his text, the emotive term show trial appears as a chapter heading.

The human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, who has written a book on the trial, Stephen Ward was Innocent, OK, has campaigned for the case to be reopened on several grounds, including the premature scheduling of the trial, lack of evidence to support the main charges and various misdirections by the trial judge in his summation.

Stephen Ward appeared in the second season of the Netflix drama series The Crown in 2017, played by Richard Lintern.