Lady Sibell recalled that although her father liked Evelyn very much [when they met in Italy in 1932], he could be irritated by his lack of grace: ‘Father told me once: “I wish Mr Waugh would not genuflect because he does it so clumsily”.’
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| — | Mad World by Paula Byrne |
From Paula Byrne’s ‘Mad World’
Alec Waugh’s book about 1931, A Year to Remember, gives a detailed account of the scandal and its impact on his brother. He explicitly states that the events of that summer inspired Brideshead Revisited. Refusing to name the peer, even in 1975, the year of the memoir’s publication, Alec decided to call him Lord Marchmain:
In real life Lady Marchmain was the sister of a prominent Duke, and the case was being brought because of a quarrel between her husband and her brother, at her brother’s instigation. A groom for whom Marchmain had formed an attachment many years before was to be cited. The case was never brought because the King intervened. He could not allow a man who had been his own representative to be exposed to scandal. But the case was only dropped on the condition that Marchmain left the country.
Of Hugh, also not named, he writes: ‘His younger son was very good looking, very charming. He was also a very heavy drinker.’ Alec remembered that the wealthy and distinguished bisexual expatriate writer Somerset Maugham, who knew the family well, made the connection between Hugh Lygon and Sebastian Flyte in New York in 1945: ‘We all know, of course, who Sebastian was. A charming boy. He drank himself to death.’ Hugh had stayed with Maugham in the south of France.
Before recounting the story of the Beauchamp affair, Alec Waugh told of another encounter that took place in the summer of 1931. It involved W. Somerset Maugham and a young playwright called Keith Winter, who was a friend of Evelyn’s and Balfour’s. Winter was taken to the Villa Mauresque, where Maugham resided. Various other guests came and went, but Winter spent the night with Willie Maugham, teaching him a new sexual trick with his fingertips. Maugham was reminded of the boys he had enjoyed in Bangkok. Winter hoped to be taken up as Maugham’s new paramour, but Maugham dropped him unceremoniously. And the moral of the story? Winter (also unnamed in Alec’s memoir) went on to become a well-known writer, married with three children, a presenter for the BBC, a member of the Savile Club, a lecturer in American universities. Alec Waugh’s message is clear: promiscuous homosexuality is not in itself an impediment to success in life. As with Alec’s own disgrace at Sherborne, it was the discovery and not the act that did the damage. Boom’s big mistake was to get busted.
Gosspis and sneers circulated in high society [about lord Beauchamp]: ‘Well, you must expect anything from a man that has his private chapel decorated like a barber’s pole and an ice-cream barrow’.
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| — | Mad World by Paula Byrne |
From Paula Byrne’s ‘Mad World’
The grounds [to accuse lord Beauchamp] were: ‘THAT the Respondent is a man of perverted sexual practices, has committed acts of gross indecency with the male servants and other male persons and has been guilty of sodomy.’
The following paragraphs then lay out the litany of evidence that had been gathered by Westminster, Buckmaster and their detectives:
[When Lord Beauchamp was accused, it is said that his wife, ‘TOMO’] had no idea what ‘homosexuality’ means: ‘Benny tells me it’s because he’s a bugler’, was her alleged response.
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| — | Mad World by Paula Byrne |
From Eton he [William Lygon, later the 7the Earl Beauchamp, Hugh’s father] went on to Christ Church, Oxford, as was the custom for the family.
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Mad World by Paula Byrne
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His [William the 7th earl’s] children noticed that he rarely mentioned his own childhood, school or Oxford days, and only visited his old governess, who lived in an almshouse in the village, out of duty.
— Madresfield by Jane Mulvagh
Gay For Today celebrates the incredible variety, contribution and existence of gay men throughout our culture and recent history.
There are entries about Willian and Hugh Lygon, Brian Howard, Harold Acton, and, naturally, Stephen Tennant.
Earl Beauchamp - #19
By mando maniac
