Christine Keeler

I seem to remeber John Profumo resigned and subsequently did a lot of charitable work, am I right?

I remember the case very well as I'd just left school. My friend and I had a holiday at my aunt's in London and we went to see the Old Bailey. We thought we might see Somme if the people going into court. Stephen Ward's suicide was on the front of my aunt's paper.
I felt sorry for her as well. Mandy RD did do better but died a few years ago of cancer.
The mention of the 90+ year well known gentleman is one of the stories that will emerge in years to come when all involved are long gone.

I suppose you are referring to women of my mother's generation. I never actually heard my mother condemn either CK or MRD. She did issue warnings about men who were not to be trusted and led women astray. Perhaps some women were more understanding than others. I think she was warning me that women needed to protect them selves. Girls like them were sometimes referred to as "good-time girls", but the idea that they weren't really having a good time was always there.

Yes, and his wife Valerie Hobson stayed with him .

Easy now to blame the wicked men and sympathise with the women. The men had affairs and sex parties with these girls who were seen by women as temptresses. I remember women complaining that the girls were called call-girls, hostesses etc but should be called whores. So men had no regard for these girls because their wives, mothers, sisters and grandmothers had not a scrape of understanding or sympathy for prostitues

Not so sure things are that different now with all the stories going around but I guess today she would have been able to make her fortune as a 'celebrity' afterwards. She was so young RIP.

I saw a recent photo of her just last week and it was very sad - she looked almost like a bag lady. Sad too that she had been ill for the past few years. Is seems unfair to me that she is always thought of as a prostitute whilst groupies and celebrity WAG's (also in it for the cash and fame) are seen by some as admirable.
I never knew that she had already lost a baby before the Profumo affair, I think it makes her even more vulnerable.

I am sure she could have been used and abused in much less salubrious company, she did at least get some creature comforts out of it all. She sold her story to the papers and lived the high life for while.

Like everyone else she made choices and she was not the only victim. It is sad she ended up as she did but according to her family, 'she was loved' so maybe he later years were coloured by more poor choices.

At least she had a life lived to the full.

According to the BBC obituary, she was sexually abused as a teenager both by her mother's lover and his friends, for whom she babysat.

Just commented on her death to my 40 year old son - who didn't have a clue who I was talking about!

Even here in Oz the Profumo Affair was front page news for weeks in the early 60s. As others have commented Christine Keeler was just a teenager when she was sucked into this world and pimped out to the rich and wanna be famous. I recall lots of early teen schoolyard sniggering. We didn't have a clue what it was all about. All pretty horrid and sordid in retrospect but the story had all the necessary elements of drama - sex, scandal, pillow talk, suicide, politics, spies, people in high places, falls from grace and lives, political careers and marriages ruined. Wait for the mini series.

Does anyone else remember this rhyme that circulated schoolyards at the time?
Half a pound of tuppeny Rice,
Half a pound of Keeler,
Put them together and what have you got,
One dirty Sheila.

Here is a page with some Entertainment celebrities age 90 and older Take your pick.

Probably not Doris Day, she is no gentleman. Probably not any of them

Not Harry Belafonte, I refuse to believe he was less than almost perfect, and I fancied him ?

What a sad picture of CK in todays papers she lloks so down trodden.
All the MPs the men concerned should hang their heads in shame and things have not changed within those circles from that day to this.

The contrast between the photo taken then and the recent one shown in todays press are quiet remarkable.
We all age and sadly 'middle age spread' is common but it's hard to believe it's the same person.

Sorry glamma cross posts

At least there are no spelling mistakes in your post nina

I don’t think she looked like a ‘bag lady’ in the more recent photos as an earlier poster said. What would many of us look like snapped in an unguarded moment, carrying 3 Sainsbury’s bags full of shopping, when we have just popped-out from gardening or whatever. Many of us were beautiful when we were young and look in the mirror, wondering what the hell happened! RIP Christine Keeler.

Do any of us look now as we did when we were nineteen

I am a couple of years older than CK, and was a postgraduate student at the time of the Profumo affair. I don’t think we despised Keeler or were particularly shocked. We just though she was a different sort of person, mixing with men who were also very different from the decent men we knew. It was all another world, sleazy but with a very faint aura of glamour.

As Phillip Larkin said, sex began in 1963 - Profumo affair, Rachmann scandal in which MRD was involved and Lady Chatterley. I was 13 and it was all absolutely thrilling. CK was so abused and the chair photo is iconic. In an 80s film Profumo, Joanne Whalley was in the same pose for the film's poster.

Sandra Paul is the 60s model married to Michael Howard, not PM but I think briefly Leader of the Opposition.

I have to say I haven't heard of most of these! and I'm not that young.

I remember reading about ms Keeler in the sixties was fascinated by the story and also the film which came out in later years.
Someone said on the news this morning that if that had happened now. She would probably have a manager, sponsors and probably gone on I’m a celebrity get me out of here.
How times have changed.

I remember Dad talking about Christine Keeler one day in the car to Mum (I was 11 or 12). She was scandalised and told Dad never to mention that name again in front of the children. Of course I immediately made it my mission to find out more, but it was so difficult in those days. No internet and the TV and Dad's newspaper had the whole thing in a sort of code. One of the teachers heard us girls trying to figure it out at school and told us we would get a detention if we were heard talking about it again! Honestly thinking back it was a different world in the early 1960s and difficult now to comprehend the scandal. I do think CK was badly treated. She was a young girl riding the wave of the so called 'free love' vibe about at the time, but sadly utterly exploited.

I was 20 in 1963, and remember the Profumo affair very well. What stuck in my memory was Stephen Ward committing suicide and how, being hounded to death, as I saw it, by the press seemed so awful.

nigglynellie
Ah, but was he 'pushed' or did he 'jump'
I know what I think