Stephen Ward

The son of Canon Arthur Evelyn Ward, Canon of Rochester Cathedral, Stephen Ward was a fashionable London osteopath and talented portrait artist. Ward had qualified to practice as an osteopath from Missouri.

Something of a social butterfly, Ward appeared to survive on the largess and patronage of the rich and powerful of his time.

“I know a lot of very important people and am often received in some of the most famous homes in the country,” said Ward, “Sir Winston Churchill and many leading politicians have been among my patients”.

As a portrait artist and has had members of the Royal Family and politicians sit for him. “Prince Philip, The Duke and Duchess of Kent and Lord Snowden have been among my sitters.”

The 50 year old Ward also had an interest in young girls of humble origin. “I like pretty girls,” he is reported as saying at the time of his trial. “I am sensitive to their needs and the stresses of modern living.” Ward introduced these pretty girls to many establishment figures in Britain during the 1950s and early 60s.

Ward introduced Christine Keeler, then a feisty, but impressionable teenager, into a world which she had never before encountered, which was peopled with the rich and famous, aristocratic, charming and powerful men, all eager to meet her and take her out.

Keeler, and later Mandy Rice-Davies moved into Ward’s Wimpole Mews flat. The relationship was platonic with Keeler, but not so with Rice-Davies, to whom Ward at one time proposed marriage. In the fallout of the Profumo scandal Ward was charged with 'living off the earings of prostitutes'. It is claimed he was the scapegoat in the scandal, but Profumo was forced to resign and the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan lost the next election to Harold Wilson’s Labour Party.