Gay London

Poets, Tarts, Cheese

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Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese is one of those carefully time-locked London pubs where one is invited to experience a idealised ‘heritage’ drinking experience. The Cheese was rebuilt after the Great Fire and escaped the Victorians, the Blitz and post-war redevelopment and has survived into the 21st century as an authentically preserved/recreated old London boozer. The building is genuinely old, and its basement bars may once have formed part of the crypt of a Carmelite monastery. All right, the interior is a re-creation, as the pub was burned out in World War 2, an incident caused by a careless electrician rather than the Luftwaffe. At time of writing, the only beer on offer in the Cheese is Sam Smith’s, a rather dense, tawny ale brewed in Yorkshire; its main appeal is that it is remarkably cheap, but it is perhaps no coincidence that Samuel Smith Brewery Co. currently lay claim to several other historic London pubs: these include the legendary Fitzrovia hangouts The Wheatsheaf and The Fitzroy Tavern, and The Princess Louise in High Holborn.

Y.O. Cheese has a glut of writers associated with it, from Samuel Johnson (allegedly) and Charles Dickens, up to Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. It remained a writers’ pub even in the 1980s, a hangout for those journos who still worked on Fleet Street even as the newspapers began to leave. But my focus today is the 1890s, when The Cheshire Cheese was home to The Rhymers’ Club, an austere flower of the Aesthetic movement which met in the pub from the 1890s up to 1904. The likes of Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons, Richard Le Gallienne, Ernest Rhys and other tremulous young men would meet once a month in a top floor room and share new poems over drinks and clay pipes. (They usually met at the Cheese, but not always; other venues, including The Cafe Royal, were sometimes used for the Club’s purpose.) The group aimed at the creation of a literary salon in the contemporary Parisian style (with Stephane Mallarme and, in particular, Paul Verlaine as their lodestars), but the decidedly mixed ability of the poet-members means that The Rhymers’ Club is remembered for its ambition rather than any lasting corporate accomplishment. But there were some real talents, notably Dowson whose great ‘Cynara’ poem made its debut before the poets of The Club in 1890. The Cheshire Cheese was where Wilde came to hear John Gray, the model for Dorian Gray and quite possibly Wilde’s lover, read some lines of verse. And it was through Rhymers’ Club member Lionel Johnson that he first met Lord Alfred Douglas, a meeting that he may have regretted later. (In Richard Ellmann’s great biography of Wilde, Douglas is described as ‘even better looking than John Gray, and even less talented.‘)

The Wilde connection has probably, retrospectively, elevated the company somewhat; visiting poet Arthur Lynch characterised the Rhymers as ‘a small assemblage of poetically pious young men’, and went on to observe that on the occasion he visited the club he felt that the only real outcasts present were himself and the waiter. And the tendency of the original members who survived past 1900 and into old age to mythologise their own pasts is glimpsed in this excerpt from the memoirs of Richard Le Gallienne, here ‘fresh from Liverpool’, describing a visit to Lionel Johnson’s rooms in Grays Inn shortly after meeting him for the first time at the Cheese:

‘I hope you drink absinthe Le Gallienne – for I have nothing else to offer you.’
Absinthe! I had just heard of it. As a drink mysteriously sophisticated and even Satanic. […] I had never tasted it then, nor has it ever been a favourite drink of mine. But in the ‘90s it was spoken of with a self-conscious sense of one’ s being desperately wicked, suggesting diabolism and nameless iniquity. Did not Paul Verlaine drink it all the time in Paris! – and Oscar Wilde and his cronies, it was darkly hinted, drank it nightly at the Café Royal.

As it happened, Johnson was Lord Alfred Douglas’s cousin and was of the view that Oscar had corrupted ‘Bosie’ a sentiment Johnson committed to verse in a poem dedicated to Wilde, To The Destroyer Of A Soul. The poem opens with the line: ‘I hate you with a necessary hate.‘ Wilde made no comment on the poem; but Johnson, who was both an alcoholic and a midget, was waspishly characterised by the great dramatist thus: ‘Every morning at 11 o’clock you can see him come out of the Café Royal and hail the first passing perambulator.’ 

Richard Le Gallienne all aesthetic and hand-coloured in the 1890s.

The Cheese was convenient for Rhymers’ Club stalwart Arthur Symons, who had digs in Fountain Court just off the Strand, rooms that Symons shared for a while with W.B. Yeats. Yeats left an account of an evening at Fountain Court when Dowson dropped in accompanied by a prostitute known in the poet’s circle as ‘Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’. She was called that because she charged more if she was fully made-up and well turned out. In Yeats’s account, ‘Penny Plain’ wearying of some insufferable bore’s pontificating, took all her clothes off and sat by the fire, unnerving the pompous ass who was holding court but delighting Dowson and his energetically heterosexual pals. She delighted in telling the young lions of her sexual adventures, one of which involved an old man whose fetish was to see her strangle a pair of pigeons, which he would bring to her in a little basket. She interspersed her anecdotes by disappearing into a bedroom with a writer or two, only Yeats and Symons refraining from sampling the delights on offer. Penny Plain must have appreciated the company: by this time many of the prostitutes who worked the Strand were wary of coming into the Temple, as they considered the resident writers and law students to be dangerous lunatics. By a charming coincidence, Symons’s next-door neighbour in Fountain Court was Henry Havelock Ellis who was at that time busy writing his pioneering study Sexual Inversion. (According to a friend of Ernest Dowson’s, Penny Plain didn’t do too badly in life; she ended up married to a rich brewing magnate.)

Lionel Johnson: doomed, ‘Decadent’, and short.

The Romantic ’90s, as Le Gallienne’s memoir has it, seemed to come to an abrupt end with Oscar Wilde’s arrest in 1895, followed by the deaths of many of the protagonists of London’s ‘Decadent’ or ‘Symbolist’ movement. Johnson lived just long enough to write a memorial poem for Dowson on his death in 1900, but was himself dead just two years later, dying in the most unfortunate – albeit appropriate – circumstances. Broke and seriously alcoholic, he suffered a drink-related stroke in a Fleet Street pub. By the time Ezra Pound visited the Cheese for a valedictory event in 1910, the Rhymers’ Club seemed to represent an idea of poetic expression that was totally moribund, and Pound demonstrated his modernist credentials by eating two red tulips during a recital by Yeats. In his poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Pound satirised the elder poets associated with the pub and the Decadent scene as a whole:

For two hours he talked of Gallifet; Of Dowson; of the Rhymers’ Club;

Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died
By falling from a high stool in a pub …

Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels …

I have, in the company of a couple of other Dowson aficionados, visited the private room at the top of the Cheese where the Rhymers used to meet. No longer panelled and lit by candles, it’s just a room for hire in a pub, done out in standard 21st century catering décor. No chance of summoning the ghosts of the great dead now. You can, however, eat dinner in the ground floor grill room – where the Rhymers had their chops before adjourning to the top floor – which retains the atmosphere of 17th century inn, even if the interior is a reconstruction following the 20th century pub fire. And Samuel Smith’s should be congratulated for the sensitivity of their management of these historic pubs. The problem is that the loving restoration reinforces the sense of theme park, that creep of ‘Heritage’ (a tainted word if ever there was one) that imprisons London. The ghosts of the past are marooned amongst the tourists and the centre of town is closed off to the truly louche and experimental. The Fitzroy Tavern and the Wheatsheaf can never be what they were in the 1920s and 40s; and where would The Rhymers’ Club meet today? A loft in Peckham or Dalston, probably. Except they’ve probably already moved to Margate. Or Folkestone.

Haunted

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Lithograph by Charles Keeping for ‘The Mezzotint’ from the 1972 Folio edition of M.R. James Ghost Stories.

‘The whispering in my house was more persistent tonight.’ – from The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral by M.R. James.

I used to live in a haunted house. Apparently. I never experienced anything. It was a tall, narrow house in Brockley, that much-bombed hinterland where London begins its slow creep into Kent. Friends and lodgers told me – independently – that they were spooked by a spot on the lower ground floor, a location that they described as ‘sad’ or ‘cold’. It was at the bottom of a staircase that descended from the hall to the kitchen, and one friend told me that, one night, when ascending to the hallway after a helping himself to another glass of wine from the fridge, he had a sensation as if something was trying to catch his foot on his way up the stairs. But I never felt anything like that. I do have queasy memories of encountering rodents down there in the middle of the night – and, on more than one occasion, weeping girlfriends belonging to one particular lodger – but nothing that falls into the purlieu of the uncanny. In fact, I have never had any experiences that would qualify as an engagement with the inexplicable. I would describe myself as an atheist who doesn’t believe in ghosts; perhaps that’s why I am so interested to hear stories from those who have stories to tell.

One of the people who noticed the eeriness at the bottom of my staircase was my then girlfriend, who has an impressive array of unsettling sightings to recount. One of these, ironically, also occurred in Brockley, twenty years beforehand, in another Victorian terraced house in one of the streets that swarm over Telegraph Hill. My ex (Katy) had been staying over after a party, sleeping on a small sofa in a room off the kitchen. Around three-ish – the North Pole of any given 24-hour period – she awoke to see a greenish shape in a corner of the room. The shape had the appearance of an emaciated woman and it was moving with a repetitive urgency. Katy describes it as resembling someone ironing clothes, but with in a manner that suggested rage: and the effect was that of malevolence. As she watched the shape grew larger but more diffuse, until it evaporated in a sort of haze. What is especially interesting is the connection between the activity the apparition seemed to suggest – laundry drudgery – and the location of the sighting: Katy was sleeping in what would have been the scullery. The next morning, Katy mentioned it to her host who blithely said, ‘Oh other people say they’ve seen that.’ She, like myself, clearly had not.

One of the most vivid stories of this type I ever heard was from a TV producer I met just once, at his office. (It is usually my experience to meet TV producers only once; but a brightly-lit media suite is the last place one would expect to hear an unnerving story.) A club in Shoreditch was the setting for this one: a large Victorian pub converted into a throbbing gay nightspot. The dance floor was in a large cellar that was always cold, resisting all attempts to raise the temperature. The landlord’s dog wouldn’t go down there, obviously. The person telling this tale had worked there as a barman whilst at college, so he was obliged to spend time in the basement. He said that on one occasion he heard, very distinctly, very close to his ear, a voice saying: ‘This one’s not afraid to be down here on his own.’ On another occasion, he went down to set up for the evening’s rave, got half-way down the stairs, switched on the light and, for a split second, saw a dance floor filled with faces staring up at him. One night a distressed clubber collared bar staff because he’d followed a man into the gents only to see his quarry disappear into a blank wall. As the chap telling the story dryly noted, ‘On some nights you weren’t sure how many punters down there were dead or alive.’ (I should point out, however, that the detail about the disembodied voice in someone’s ear appears to be straight out of the M.R. James story quoted at the top of the page.)

Interestingly, many of the stories I’ve heard have been told by people who were recounting an episode from their youth, or from a time of deep personal trauma. My younger sister recalls an incident from her teens, on a summer afternoon in our parents’ house in the Surrey hills. Dozing on a sofa in the heat of a hot day, she awoke to see what she described as a lilac cloud emerge from a doorway and move across the room before disappearing into a wall. My brother described an experience he had in the same house: in his case, he was woken in the middle of the night by sounds of a cocktail party coming from downstairs. He went down and stood outside the closed door to the drawing room (the same room where my sister’s cloud materialised) and listened to the sounds of a jolly party coming from within: the tinkling of glasses, a buzz of conversation, polite laughter … He steeled himself and opened the door; the room was, of course, empty. Both those stories may be no more than waking dreams; we’ve all had those. But a friend told me a more unsettling story. She had just moved to the UK from Ireland and was trying to make a life for herself in London; and her first job, weirdly, was as a security guard. Her initial assignment was to spend an afternoon guarding a deserted maternity hospital near Archway; and during her shift she became increasingly convinced that there was a presence following her on her patrols of the building. It turned out that every security guard got the creeps working that shift, and she’d been lumbered with it because she was a newbie. (This story that came to mind when watching the recent British film Ghost Stories, which contained an episode so close to my friend’s anecdote that I wondered if the film-makers had heard it directly from her.) Another person I know had some distressing and inexplicable experiences that coincided with a very traumatic episode in her life; but she still finds it hard to revisit that period so I have decided not to include her story here. In any case, it’s the one story of its kind that I am wary of recounting; and I don’t even believe in ghosts.

‘The sequel to this may perhaps be reckoned highly conventional; but a sequel there is and so it must be produced.’ (M.R.James: A School Story.)

Regarding my old house, I later learned that it suffered bombing in WW2. The admirable site Flying Bombs And Rockets details all the bombsites in the greater London area, and it transpires that my street in Brockley had been hit by a V1 rocket in 1944. It totally demolished six houses, damaged a further forty-five houses and killed nine people. My house was clearly the one they could save: it was the last house in the Victorian terrace but had not been designed as such, and was conspicuously shored up with post-war concrete. I am not, as a rule, a superstitious person – but my sister’s comment about feeling that there was someone ‘trapped’ at the bottom of my staircase is too suggestive for comfort. And I don’t believe in ghosts.

All Yesterday’s Parties

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Bright Young Things and the proletariat: Elizabeth Ponsonby fourth from left, Cecil Beaton with pneumatic drill, next to Cyril Connolly.

‘It was an age of ‘parties’. There were ‘white’ parties in which we shot down to the country in fleets of cars, dressed in white from head to foot, and danced on a white floor lid in the orchard, with the moonlight turning all the apples to silver, and then – in a pale pink dawn – playing races with champagne corks on the surface of the stream. There were Mozart parties in which, powdered and peruked,  we danced by candlelight and then – suddenly bored – rushed out into the street to join a gang excavating the gas mains at Hyde Park Corner. There were swimming parties where, at midnight, we descended on some municipal baths, hired for the occasion, and disported ourselves with an abandon that was all the fiercer because we knew that the press was watching – and watching with a very disapproving eye.’ Beverley Nichols, All I Could Never Be (1949)

The Bright Young People were a phenomenon of the 1920s: well-connected if not actually aristocratic, sometimes rich, usually spoilt and occasionally stupid, they came to characterise the frivolity of the decade and have the capacity to irritate even at this distance. Treasure hunts, scavenger hunts, elaborate dressing up, themed parties, the affected speech (‘too sick-making’, etc.) were guaranteed to invoke the displeasure of their elders in proportion to the number of newspaper columns they filled. In many ways, their behaviour was an understandable reaction to the black-edged aftermath of the 1st World War, the assertion by a generation too young to have experienced hostilities that there was more to life than endless grief. And their coverage in the popular press was mostly indulgent – to begin with at any rate. They were good copy. They are also credited with inventing an important social innovation: the bottle party. (This is said to have been introduced by Loelia Ponsonby in 1926, the novelist Michael Arlen duly turning up with twelve bottles of pink champagne.)

The group are remembered mainly because their ‘antics’ fed into the early novels of Evelyn Waugh, and also those by Anthony Powell and Henry Green – none of whom were members of the set but detached, ironic observers. Other associated with the group included the historian Robert Byron and the artist Rex Whistler; and some in their orbit achieved success and social advancement by association. Cecil Beaton and William Walton both benefited by having their names on certain invitation lists. But the core ‘Brights’ seem to have been full-time party-goers. These include Brian Howard, acid wit, alcoholic and under-achiever; Stephen Tennant, aesthete, would-be novelist and lover of Siegfred Sassoon; and, of course, the fabled Mitford sisters, chiefly Nancy, who occasionally wrote novels, and the breathtakingly beautiful Diana, who ended up married to fascist leader Oswald Mosley. All of these individuals turn up as characters in Waugh’s novels, the exotic Stephen Tennant cited as one of several models for Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited. 

The Impersonation Party, 1927: the Right Hon. Stephen Tennant as Queen Mary of Romania, seated left, Brian Howard in drag, standing next to Elizabeth Ponsonby and Cecil Beaton, Harold Acton kneeling below, Tallulah Bankhead in tennis gear front, etc.

One of the the most significant of the multitude of parties was David Tennant’s Mozart party, 29 April 1930, a do that was reckoned to have cost £3,000. David Tennant, brother of Stephen and son of the first Lord Glenconner, would now be described as a ‘scenester’, a man who had a feel for the times derived from impeccable connections and a fair bit of old money. Tennant was married to the young ‘queen of revue’, Hermione Gingold, and was founder and proprietor of the Gargoyle Club, a nightclub and cultural hothouse that lasted in Soho from the early twenties to the mid-fifties. Tennant  co-opted the defiance and costume of Don Giovanni by giving himself a lavish birthday party after returning from Canada in the wake of a business failure. Taking place just a few months after the Wall Street Crash, this entertainment was held within a chamber adorned with antique furniture and accessories, with music played by an orchestra decked out, like the five hundred attendees, in formal 18th century get-up (and conducted by the young John Barbirolli, no less). While the host appeared as Mozart’s dark anti-hero, another guest masqueraded as Beau Brummel with the original Brummel’s own cane as a prop. The climax of the evening was a surreal and ominous encounter as a group of party-goers emerged into Piccadilly and were photographed next to a group of workmen digging up the street. Amongst the revellers in the costume of the ancien regime posing next to bemused labourers were Cyril Connolly, Cecil Beaton and the most quintessentially bright of all the bright young people, Elizabeth Ponsonby.

Elizabeth Ponsonby, daughter of the Labour MP Arthur Ponsonby seems to have been the group’s lynchpin in their 1920s heyday. She was one of the sponsors of the famous ‘Bath and Bottle’ party in July 1928, at St.George’s Baths, Buckingham Palace Rd., where guests were instructed to wear a bathing suit and bring a bottle and a towel. Unlike some of the set, Elizabeth never wanted to do anything other than go drinking and partying; but she lacked the financial reserves to truly sustain a life of aristocratic frivolity. She was always good copy, turns up as ‘Agatha Runcible’ in Vile Bodies, lived cheerfully beyond her means – also the means of both her baffled husband and her long-suffering father. Elizabeth achieved apotheosis in tragedy, an event that also marked the end of the Bright Young era. This was a ‘White Party’ (everything painted white, white dress, etc.) held at a country house in Faversham, Kent, on a Saturday night in July 1931. Elizabeth went on her own, her increasingly exasperated husband Denis refusing to attend. At the party, Elizabeth found herself the object of affection of two men, both of whom seem to have had long-standing designs on her. A dance- floor quarrel ensued and events quickly escalated. Some time around 5 a.m., Elizabeth and one of her admirers drove off in a car that belonged to her other admirer, who then gave furious chase in a commandeered lorry. Unsurprisingly, this chase through Kentish lanes ended in disaster, as Elizabeth’s car skidded and overturned. Elizabeth was able to crawl out of the window, but her companion was crushed beneath the vehicle and died at the scene, whilst her pursuer was arrested for drink driving. In his book on ‘the set’, D.J. Taylor pinpoints the coverage of the ensuing inquest as the end of the media phenomenon of the ‘ Brights’.

Elizabeth Ponsonby died of the effects of alcoholism in 1940, at the age of forty, in her rented flat in Jermyn Street, a few doors from the Cavendish Hotel, scene of so many twenties’ parties. A respectful obituary appeared in The Times: D.J. Taylor suggests that her grieving father wrote it himself. Evelyn Waugh died, successful but disillusioned and prematurely old, in 1964. David Tennant died in 1968, in Spain, where he had lived for many years; the same year, Hermione Gingold was in Hollywood and Cecil Beaton was photographing Mick Jagger on the set of Performance. (The National Portrait Gallery held a Beaton exhibition last year, centred on his early career, but this major show was cruelly curtailed by Covid-19.) Stephen Tennant became a recluse on his family’s estate and lived long enough to watch a version of himself being played on television by Anthony Andrews in the famous eighties ITV Brideshead (which must be a bit like being embalmed whilst still alive).

Further reading: Bright Young People, D.J. Taylor, Children of the Sun, Martin Green.