I Once Met… John Edgecombe
The six shots fired at Stephen Ward’s mews house in 1961 by Christine Keeler’s boyfriend Johnny Edgecombe became, as Bernard Levin wrote, the horseshoe nails in the Profumo scandal.
Edgecombe’s trial triggered Christine’s flight to Spain. Her confessions provoked denials. The trial of Dr Ward ensued. And so did the Tories’ downfall.
But what became of Edgecombe? I met him in 1989. We had lunch at Joe Allen and I wrote in my diary, ‘Man, he groovy!’
He told me about leaving Antigua in 1949, as a pantry boy on a Liverpoolbound cargo ship, his mother weeping on the quayside, his daddy piloting the schooner Perseverance. After many stowaway adventures, including spells in jail, from Texas to Tiger Bay, he landed in London. There he devised a neat game with two Jamaican pals. They would swagger into Bond Street jewellers, claiming to be African princes seeking to buy diamonds, ‘and a ring would disappear’.
Then he hit Notting Hill, ran a shebeen for Peter Rachman and lived with a hooker. ‘Everybody did!’ he assured me. ‘Any white chick who goes out with a black guy becomes a hooker.’ He explained, ‘If you had fancied me, the word get round you go with black guys, you can’t go back to family, you stuck. You become a hooker to survive.’
He’d met his nemesis Christine in 1962, when he was still hustling, driving jazzmen to gigs. One day, he was moseying along the Bayswater Road ‘hoping to score some dope and a beautiful chick’ when a taxi drew up and out spilled Christine. ‘The most attractive thing about her was her walk,’ he told me. ‘Chicks don’t walk nice any more. I like a nice chick who wiggles, who moves nice.’
They were together for three months. On Edge’s birthday, 22nd October, they were in a Soho club when Christine’s former boyfriend Lucky Gordon showed up. In the fracas, Lucky got cut. Christine and Johnny fled to her mother’s, but then fell out and she took refuge at Ward’s place. When Johnny came after her, brandishing a gun, she cowered behind the door. Shots rang out, but he discovered that ‘You can’t shoot a lock off a door like in the movies.’ His Old Bailey trial went ahead without its key witness and the ‘missing model’ (she’d flown to Spain), but in court the whole saga came out. ‘I on the front page,’ he told me with pride, ‘till the Train Robbers came along.’
He served five years and came out in 1967 to a different London: open-air rock concerts, love-ins, miniskirts, free love – all a cool dude could desire.
He married a Dane, and they set up a tea room in Tralee, County Kerry, improbably enough, with two daughters, Jasmine and Camilla. Then he had another daughter, Melody, and became an exemplary single dad.
He’d shown me the typescript of a novel. ‘I just want to make some bread and buy me a big boat,’ he said. ‘I tryin’ to escape even before Enoch make his offer!’ I wish I could tell him that Black Scandal, the paperback of his novel, is priced at £24 on Amazon – but he died
in 2010, aged 77.