Strip Search of Mandy Rice-Davis in Prison, 1963.

[BendOverPlease]

Here’s another historic account for you. Mandy Rice-Davis was a young model caught up, along with fellow socialite Christine Keeler, in the 1963 UK political scandal ‘The Profumo Affair’. Both girls participated in upper-class sex parties, which included Government Minister John Profumo and a senior naval attaché from the Soviet Embassy, dangerous stuff in the cold war era. The two girls started to tell their stories to the eager press and had to be silenced by the Government.

So to deter her from going any further, a corrupt Scotland Yard officer was used to arrange for her to be softened up by a spell in Holloway women’s prison, on a fabricated petty theft charge. To quote from Mandy’s autobiography of the same name:

I was remanded in custody, which as the court was going into recess, meant nine days in Holloway Jail before my case could be heard.

First there was the depersonalising process of being removed from freedom and locked away. Then came the indignity of the search, the body search (what was I supposed to be smuggling in?) and to submitting to the strange ritual of the shaving of pubic hairs. This was the ultimate violation. ‘Touch me and I’ll scream bloody murder.’ I said I would do my own shaving, thank you very much. They did not insist, and later I discovered that they did not even have the right to inflict this on remand prisoners.

It’s not clear if they gave her a cavity search, but it seems likely given they were going as far as to shave off her pubes, which could secrete rather less drugs or weapons than what lay between her legs. I don’t think pubic shaving at admission happens even now, despite the explosion of drug use & smuggling in modern prisons. So it’s hard not to assume it was more to humiliate/dehumanise inmates especially in the more innocent time of 1963.

As for doing it without justification to a naive remand prisoner (i.e. temporary, unconvicted) of little threat to them, perhaps the stripping, searching and humiliating of a famous glamorous model was a malicious (if not sexual) perk of the job for the hardened, unglamorous female guards who processed these fallen angels.

As ever, the question of how detached those in authority can be, hangs unanswered.

[mikey22]

Excellent find!

And she was indeed lovely in her day:




Definitely worth a "close look"...

[BendOverPlease]

I was just thinking I should have added a picture, you did one better! She was indeed stunning when young, no wonder those in high office were forgetting there wives and jobs to enjoy her company. Mandy also gave us the now universally quoted "Well he would, wouldn't he?" retort to Lord Astor's lawyer's court room denial of any hanky panky.

In some ways this story illustrates the dilemma we Strip Search fans all face: Yes we feel for her humiliation, but who wouldn't have wanted to have shaved off her pubes?!