Drafted the night before this note consisted of a set of instructions which were to prove both unreasonable and unworkable

Drafted the night before, this note consisted of a set of instructions which were to prove both unreasonable and unworkable. The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition started to go wrong at a very early stage. September 18, 1914, to be precise, at St Pancras Station in London. Sir Ernest Shackleton had arrived to bid farewell to his Ross Sea party as they left to join their ship the Aurora in Tasmania.

When, in the 1970s, she thought of restarting her acting career, she lacked both the confidence and support of her husband. Her notebooks show that the marriage was unhappy even before the scandal. “I love dancing,” she wrote in a list of grievances addressed to him, “and yet not for a long while have you done anything except dance with me while casing the dance floor.”His father’s remorse, David Profumo estimates, was genuine, but it was remorse for having lied to the Mother of Parliaments. “I feel that, a few years after his Fall, [my father] had pretty much forgiven himself for his sexual infidelity.” Indeed he was, his son believes, to repeat it.

She left her son a letter to be opened on her death, mourning the pregnancies she didn’t carry to full term. She struggled more publicly to cope with a Down’s Syndrome son at a time when such children were locked away and never spoken about. They had lives before and after the spotlight fell on them in the early 1960s. Hobson made her name in the 1940s in films such as Kind Hearts and Coronets and on stage in The King and I. She was starring in that production when she married Profumo; a rising Tory politician of Italian ancestry. He insisted she gave up the day job to become a political wife.She got scant reward for her sacrifice for, by this account, she, rather than Profumo, suffered most – in silence and in private – after she decided to stand by her disgraced man.