Great Britain: A Moral Post-Mortem

• Share

All his life Stephen Ward had been surrounded by people, a few of them, perhaps, his friends. In death last week he attracted only curiosity seekers, several hundred strong. Nine days after swallowing a massive overdose of Nembutal, Stephen Ward—liar, drug user, pornographer, libertine and convicted pimp—was cremated in the London suburb of Mortlake. Though his solicitor had asked that no flowers be sent, there was a wreath of two hundred roses from, among others, Playwrights John Osborne and Arnold Wesker, Critic Kenneth Tynan, Novelists Angus Wilson and Alan Sillitoe, Jazzman Acker Bilk (who later withdrew his name). With the flowers came a note: "To Stephen Ward, victim of British hypocrisy." Explained Tynan: "British society created him, used him, and ruthlessly destroyed him. The Establishment has closed its ranks around its body."

This preposterous attempt to make a hero of Stephen Ward fitted in with the scatterbrained, left-wing politics of most of the signers, Britain's Angry Middle-aged Men, who used him to demonstrate that the Establishment and British society in general are rotten. Amid all this sudden sympathy for Ward it almost became necessary to recall what he had really been like. A top London crime reporter, who knew him long before the case broke, summed it up. He said Ward had corrupted the innocent, worsened the already bad, toyed with people's lives for the fun of it, dallied with whores so grubby that even Christine Keeler "could not bear to look at them." To many he was "a central figure of evil." Ward, added the Guardian, was not a victim of hypocrisy, but a "victim of his own impulses, which led him into many squalid crimes, not all of them mentioned in the official charge sheet. There ought to be compassion for a doomed criminal, but no support for any myth about his being a 'martyr,' and nothing but contempt for those who try to encourage such a myth."

Highest Duty. Yet the uneasy feeling persisted that somehow Ward had been made a scapegoat, and that his case and the public's reaction to it carry a disturbing message about British law and morals. Nothing could be more revered, solemn and self-righteous than the British judiciary, but there is now a growing consensus that the Ward case has put in question its vaunted independence from politics.

Ward's hasty arrest and trial raised the troubling implication that he was prosecuted mainly because he threatened the existence of the government. Under oath, Call Girl Ronna Ricardo said that the police had put her up to making damaging false statements about Ward. To a newspaper reporter last week, Prostitute Vickie Barrett admitted that she had perjured herself when she claimed on the stand that she had whipped men for money in Ward's flat; later she denied her denial.