The 1938 Hyde Park Hotel robbery trial broadcast the notion that a new type of modern man had appeared—the playboy. Few men embraced this role, but the playboy was not as marginal a figure as one might assume. Indeed, the evidence suggests that this evocative persona appeared as a result of changes in British culture, particularly in gender and class relations. References to the playboy—in effect a new cultural category—popped up in literature, film, and political discourse. Such was the power of the concept that, despite the condemnation of moralists, young men began to call themselves playboys. What did the word “playboy” mean? What did it stand for? The discussion of the playboy often tells us more about the preoccupations of his critics than the playboy himself. Those who worried about modernization in particular found him to be a useful vehicle for the expressions of their cultural concerns. Historians have produced insightful surveys of early twentieth-century society’s fear that women’s sexual attitudes and behaviors were changing.1 Tracing the discussion of the playboy allows us to follow purported shifts in what it meant to be a man in 1930s Britain.
Today the term “playboy” is so closely associated with Hugh Hefner’s magazine that it is difficult not to assume that it always meant the well-off, well-dressed man who pursues personal pleasure, who is, or at least has fantasies of becoming, a seductive womanizer. This privileging of his sexual side is a fairly recent development. In the seventeenth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “playboy” simply meant a boy actor. Ben Jonson in Love Restored (1612) referred to the “rogue play-boy that acts Cvpid.”2 By the nineteenth century it could mean a man who shirked responsibilities and sought pleasure. In Ireland it also meant hoaxer or trickster; the teller of tall tales. J. M. Synge in his classic comedy, Playboy of the Western World (1907), popularized the use of the word in English, but the French translation—Le Baladin du monde occidental (The buffoon of the Western world) gives a better sense of the main character’s personality. Christy is a lucky, irresponsible lout to whom villagers attribute a romantic past. Women hail him: “You’re the walking playboy of the western world.” He is not the seducer but rather the happy recipient of their mistaken affections. He is still a “boy” and portrayed as rather dim: “[I]t’s great luck and company I’ve won me in the end of time—two fine women fighting for the likes of me—till I’m thinking this night wasn’t I a foolish fellow not to kill my father in the years gone by.”3 In Ireland “playboy” was a translation of buachaill báire, literally meaning a hurling player, and by extension “a young man who plays games with those around him and scores points off them.”4
Between 1919 and 1924, Egmont Arens, a fixture of New York City’s Greenwich Village artistic scene, published a small magazine titled Playboy: A Portfolio of Art and Satire. Contributors included writers Djuna Barnes, E. E. Cummings, Ben Hecht, and D. H. Lawrence; artists Georgia O’Keeffe and Rockwell Kent; and photographer Alfred Stieglitz. In the first number Arens made it clear that he was using the word “playboy” in the traditional sense that stressed playfulness. “Our America is ingrown with Seriousness. Our Art pulls a long face and strikes a pose. Our connoisseurs find their inspiration across [the] sea in faded thoughts of other generations.… PLAYBOY is to be a passing record of those who are ALIVE NOW. A Portfolio of Youth. A vessel of Adventure. A magazine given over to Joyous gestures. A Companion of Laughter. A Minstrel of freedom.”5 For most, “playboy” had more negative connotations, meaning a man who, because of his immaturity or lack of seriousness, could not or would not be a productive adult male. In 1923, D. H. Lawrence damned a popular novel as “pretty piffle—just playboy stuff.”6 In Mazo de la Roche’s novel Whiteoak Harvest (1936) a character states, “No matter how hard I worked I was looked on as a sort of playboy who couldn’t do a man’s job.”7 Journalists who described William Orpen as “the Playboy of painting,” L. P. Jacks as “the Playboy of the philosophical world,” or Jack Jones as “the Playboy of Parliament” were referring to these men’s apparent playfulness and lack of seriousness; they were not implying their cynicism or promiscuity.8 Americans employed the term more widely than did the British, but they also maintained for some time the same stress on immaturity.9 When, in one of his famous fireside chats Franklin Delano Roosevelt attempted to whip up patriotic fervor, he asserted, “From Berlin, Rome, and Tokyo we have been described as a Nation of weaklings—‘playboys’—who would hire British soldiers, or Russian soldiers, or Chinese soldiers to do our fighting for us.”10
Given its pejorative coloring, the British avoided using the term when reporting on the pursuits of Edward, the Prince of Wales. “David,” as his friends called him, led a louche life that had all the markings of the classic interwar playboy.11 A pampered child who as a youth dropped out of Magdalen College, Oxford, and served briefly in the army, he became in the 1920s an idle man-about-town, a habitué of nightclubs. The deferential British press would not refer to his womanizing despite the fact that those in elite circles knew he had had a string of mistresses, including Freda Dudley Ward, Thelma Furness, and Wallis Simpson.12 The American press felt no such compunction. When the New York Times described him as “maturing,” it expressed the hope that a more serious individual was replacing the “sportsman and the royal playboy.” In 1935 the paper was less confident. “The Prince of Wales will be 41 in June. His playboy days—a decade-full of magazine articles have assured us—are over.” In 1936 the Washington Post reported that the forty-one year-old bachelor, once a “world playboy,” was now king.13
If new models of masculinity emerged in the early twentieth century, so too did new models of femininity. Writers in the interwar decades who spoke of changing gender expectations were primarily talking about women. The Great War, which had required thousands of women to enter the masculine world of factory work, shattered the notion of separate spheres. Commentators who sought to reestablish old gender norms argued that women were duty bound to give up their jobs and return to their domestic duties. Working-class women regarded such demands as unfair. Many could not hope to be wives and mothers given that so many young men who could have been their mates had died in the trenches of northern France.
In April 1928 the government lowered the voting age of women from thirty to twenty-one, which in creating the “flapper vote” established the political equality of the sexes. Young women raised the ire of the judgmental in adopting fashions that reflected a desire for independence. “The post-war fashions showing off women’s figure as free, young and slim with short hair and skirts, the wearing of cosmetics, smoking in public, the vogue for dancing, were all part of the new image.”14 In fact, women were marrying at an ever younger age. In a new world of romantic consumerism they were supposed to marry for love, though the press continued to announce that upper-class parents had “arranged” the marriages of their daughters. The propertieds’ greatest fear was that their child would make a “mésalliance”—that is, marry someone they considered socially inferior.
Experts set sexual standards. Some women’s magazines called for sex education to rescue the naïve from the ignorance that the Victorian social purity movement had inculcated. Marie Stopes in her books and lectures boldly set out to eroticize marital sex while the writers of the tabloids’ “agony aunts” columns instructed women on how they could maintain romance in their marriage. Such advice only appeared to add to the domestic duties of those wives who regarded intercourse as chiefly ensuring male pleasure.15
With the 1930s slump, family size fell to an all time low. Pronatalists blamed women. Though Stopes, who had established the first London birth control clinic in 1921, claimed some of the credit, larger cultural forces were at play.16 Given the rising cost of children, the big family was no longer economically viable. Even the Anglican Church admitted in 1930 that contraception might play a positive role in marriage. In 1937, Alec Bourne’s challenge to the law against abortion led a judge to rule that to protect the life of the mother doctors had the right to take all measures necessary.17 Those who opposed any form of fertility control trotted out the insulting argument that chaos would soon result as fear of pregnancy was all that prevented many women from plunging into a life of promiscuity. A “bad girl” won her label by her sexual activity, a “bad boy” by his criminal behavior.
The popular press debated every aspect of the young woman’s life—her sexuality, fashions, vocations, and entertainments.18 Its view of women was riddled with contradictions. It wanted them to be modern, yet respectful of traditions.19 It denigrated those who insisted on working outside the home, while at the same time it lauded efforts by business and government to recruit thousands of women into white-collar work. Despite having lectured women that their natural place was in the home, conservative papers like the Daily Mail applauded women flyers and sports car drivers who risked their lives in international competitions. Movies and novels presented young women with similar dilemmas. Were they to identify with the passive, innocent girlfriend or the active, knowing gold digger? Who would they fantasize about: the dutiful, dependable gentleman or the irrepressible playboy?
The playboy, both in reality and as a fantasy figure, represented an evolution or devolution in masculine identity.20 In the nineteenth century, experts from a variety of fields responded to the disturbing social changes accompanying industrialization and urbanization by making extreme claims for sexual incommensurability. In the 1930s the ideal English woman was still the wife and mother. The ideal English man came from a good family and attended a good public school. In both institutions he learned the values of restraint and self-control.21 He became a productive, thrifty, and rational citizen. In presenting the breadwinning worker or ex-soldier as hero, the most popular British films and novels of the interwar period reinforced this message, linking masculinity, economy, and nation.22 True manliness was necessarily manifested in physical fitness and patriotism.23 Conservatives denounced the dangers of unregulated desire and exalted the need for physical and psychological discipline. They played off the manliness of the gentleman against the effeminate “other”—be it the woman at home or the subject native abroad.24
Commentators assumed that the individual man’s self-control was the basis of social stability.25 This was an old idea. What was new was the unprecedented importance the twentieth-century middle classes accorded the domestic sphere. Bourgeois men increasingly accepted love and sexual passion as the foundation of marriage, which, with the advent of birth control, was no longer necessarily linked to procreation.26 Stopes won international fame for both defending contraception and stressing the duty of men to sexually satisfy their spouses. Middle-class masculinity accordingly was marked by a decline in naked aggressiveness and a turn to the comforts of the suburban home, a shift reflecting in part a reaction to the bloodletting of the First World War.27 But what emerged in the early twentieth century as the “traditional” style of British masculinity—based on respectability, reserve, and decorum—was challenged in the interwar years by the advocates of individuality and unabashed hedonism.28 Journalists presented the playboy as adhering to more adventurous modes of behavior and so acting as a dashing counter to domesticity. They presented Lonsdale as an international arms dealer, Harley as an associate of American gangsters, Wilmer as a knuckle-duster-wearing tough, and Jenkins as a West End sophisticate.
Those who noted the appearance of the playboy took it as a given that he was the offspring of a consumerist culture. The Victorians had assumed that men were producers and women consumers. Those who adopted this separate spheres argument asserted that a man’s sense of self-worth derived from his productivity. In creating or making goods he provided for the needs of his family and his community. Theorists conversely coded consumption as feminine and necessarily antithetical to healthy masculinity. Political economists asserted that consumption posed a real social danger. Just as doctors claimed that men who spent too much of their “vital fluids” undermined their health, economists warned that bankruptcy awaited a nation addicted to overexpenditures.
“Gay nights in the West End.” Peter Jenkins, Mayfair Boy (London: W. H. Allen, 1952)
The heroic model of man as producer slowly declined, and the nineteenth-century hard, disciplined style of masculinity gave way to the more flexible twentieth-century male consumerist model.29 The evolution first occurred in the United States, but in Britain the same process of young men becoming more open about their role as consumers took place.30 Initially, conservatives lampooned male domesticity and the consumerism with which they assumed it was entangled. Comic publications such as Punch portrayed housebound, middle-class husbands as effeminate weaklings. Their status as “real men,” satirists asserted, declined as their interest in tawdry consumer goods grew.
Despite such sniping, a generation of thinkers called for a reappraisal of consumerism. Discovering that in a modern economy demand was as important as supply, that having increased numbers of purchasers was essential to the smooth functioning of the market, economists begrudgingly began to revise their view of the consumer. By the 1920s the stimulation of demand lauded by Keynes began to challenge Malthus’s call for thrift.
The middle classes had, of course, long demonstrated their status and identity by conspicuous consumption. Writers justified men’s greater visibility in the market by insisting that there were still important gender differences in buying patterns. Women’s consumerism was focused on the home, the domestic, whereas men made purchases for public use—guns, motorcars, and property. Women, argued misogynists, were preoccupied by flighty fashions; men bought goods for reasons of utility and practicality.
The advent of modern masculinity was closely aligned with the emergence of this consumer culture. Whereas the heterosexual masculinity of the Victorian was based on a belief in the primacy of character and restraint, his twentieth-century counterpart performed his masculinity through his physicality and personality. His choice of consumer goods played a central role in this performance. A man now expressed his masculinity by demonstrating good taste. This concern manifested itself in men paying more attention to their appearance, a preoccupation stereotypically associated with women. Indeed, the dandy and the fop blurred gender boundaries. Moralists particularly condemned homosexuals for their purported penchant for display and effeminacy, attributing to them the supposed female traits of self-indulgence and irresponsibility. Commentators located the playboy—known for his excesses, for playing rather than working—in this borderland. He emerged at a time when society was redrawing the lines between the public and the private. He could be viewed as a follower of the new model of masculinity that was progressive inasmuch as in embracing “feminine” consumerism it blurred the conservatives’ sharp lines of sexual incommensurability. At the same time his lifestyle was patently narcissistic and exploitative. Only members of the middle and upper classes could afford to play the role.31
A sociologist notes: “Ironically, though, it was during the 1930s—a decade that saw the most severe economic depression in American history—that the ‘consuming male’ took fuller form.”32 Similarly, in England the same years that saw record-high unemployment also witnessed elite males’ unprecedented interest in fashion and appearance. Those who continued to exalt hard work and postponement of gratification as the hallmarks of masculinity claimed that they were countered by increasing numbers of young men—dandies, men-about-town, playboys—only too ready to parade their narcissism and hedonism.
The playboy, as a rebellious figure, at first glance seemed out of place in the depression of the 1930s.33 Yet in some ways his appearance was not that surprising. For more than a century each generation had produced its counters to the advocates of male diligence, thrift, and self-discipline. Osbert Sitwell pointed to London’s “long line of fops, macaronis, dandies, beaux, dudes, bucks, blades, bloods, swells and mashers.”34 The Mayfair playboy was part of this tradition of dissident, nonproductive masculinity.35
The Hyde Park Hotel robbers personified this self-indulgent style of masculinity. Jenkins offered in his autobiography a picture of himself as a disciple of Cecil Beaton.36 A well-connected, Harrow-educated society photographer who knew how to flatter his wealthy subjects (even those who thought him a “pansy”), Beaton presented indolent masculine beauty as worthy of celebration. Nevertheless the dramatist Noël Coward—“the playboy of the West End stage”—was the one person who did more than anyone to popularize this style of masculinity. Indeed, it has been suggested that Coward first invented himself as the “languid decadent.”37 The 1920s were, for the social elite at least, a welcomed age of frivolity after the carnage of the Great War. Coward made himself “the embodiment of glamorous, dissipated, slightly shocking ’20s chic.”38 The 1930s saw the appearance of two of his wittiest comedies, Private Lives (1930) and Design for Living (1932). His string of successful plays influenced the way men dressed and talked. According to Cecil Beaton, “Hearty naval commanders or jolly colonels acquired the ‘camp’ manners of calling everything from Joan of Arc to Merlin ‘lots of fun,’ and the adjective ‘terribly’ peppered every sentence. All sorts of men suddenly wanted to look like Noël Coward—sleek and satiny, clipped and well groomed, with a cigarette, a telephone, or a cocktail at hand.”39
All the characters in Coward’s plays are idlers. Their virtues consist of being charming, economically independent, and good-looking. Orson Welles, in reviewing Coward’s This Happy Breed, labeled the playwright a “Mayfair playboy” and charged him with being guilty of “perpetuating a British public school snobbery.”40 Other critics said that in search of publicity, Coward self-consciously played the role of the indolent playboy. He sought to defend himself, claiming that he was the victim of reporters’ vivid imaginations: “My metamorphosis into a ‘Mayfair Playboy’ many years later was entirely a journalistic conception.”41 It did not really matter which account was true. Thanks to him the playboy had become a subject of public debate. One journalist went so far as to accuse Coward of creating the sort of culture in which young men would assume that their need for money gave them the right to steal. “Some years ago Noel Coward wrote a satiric sketch for a C. B. Cochran revue, entitled ‘Children of the Ritz.’ Into it he put all the ennui, the soul destroying boredom and ‘laisser-faire’ which in part was responsible for the destiny of the four young Mayfair men sentenced at the Old Bailey for their part in the £13,000 Hyde Park Hotel jewel robbery.”42
Because Coward thought that the Lord Chamberlain’s Office would not allow Design for Living’s depiction of a ménage à trois, he did not stage it in London until 1939. At the same time, the British Board of Film Censors welcomed films about playboys, but only as long as they eventually saw the evil of their ways and were rehabilitated.43 Just such characters appeared in many of the American films that swamped Britain in the 1930s. Some in Britain worried that their failure to produce their own matinee idols was another symptom of the decline of British manliness. In 1934 Film Weekly asked, “Why is it that British leading men, with very few exceptions, are either too old or too effeminate? Have we no young men who are good to look at without being sissies?”44 In September 1937 the Yorkshire Evening Post reported that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had been looking for vigorous young men to act as undergraduates in the film The Yank at Oxford, but few regular extras proved to be sufficiently young and virile.45
Comic writers who made the Mayfair man the butt of their humor adopted a lighter tone. According to George Mikes, “In the old days the man who had no money was not a gentleman. Today, in Mayfair, things are different. A gentleman can have money or borrow money from his friends; the important thing is that even if he is very poor he must not do useful work.… Always be drunk after 6.30 pm.”46 In Nancy Mitford’s Highland Fling (1931), Walter’s days are occupied with taking his fiancée to Cartier to buy a large emerald and arguing with her over which nightclub to attend. Thinking of marrying, he has the radical idea of getting a job. “Besides, why shouldn’t I do some work? If you come to think of it, lots of people do.”47 But he finds that with all the taxis he has to take and meals in town he has to eat, working is too expensive, and he gives it up.
Alarmists took a more pessimistic view. Journalists referred to “Mayfair’s worst four hundred,” meaning the scroungers and gigolos who lived off friends, filled bars, and seduced heiresses. The press claimed this soft generation of lounge lizards (male sexual predators), film fans, and effeminate young men had to be hardened and strengthened.48 In Richard Aldington’s novel Death of a Hero (1929) the reader is told that in the army one met real men, “not boudoir rabbits and lounge lizards.”49 In the 1930s a university rector challenged his students “to bear themselves as becomes a hardy and historic race. The day of the lounge lizard, of the years of the joy ride and cocktail are drawing to their close. Enough of languor and decadence.”50
“Glamorous days on the Riviera.” Peter Jenkins, Mayfair Boy (London: W. H. Allen, 1952)
Given the humiliation and heartbreak suffered by millions of unemployed men and women during the economic slump, some protested that writers and journalists were paying far too much attention to the minor problems of a pampered few. In The Rock Pool (1936), Cyril Connolly portrayed the squalid lives of a colony of moneyed young people. In his review of the novel, George Orwell gave Connolly good marks for candidly describing their “drinking, cadging and lechering.” Nevertheless he primly concluded that the author was besmirched by the material he handled. “Even to want to write about so-called artists who spend on sodomy what they have gained by sponging betrays a kind of spiritual inadequacy.”51
Such fulminations reflected the unhappiness felt by some in the face of the appearance of what they regarded as a “less manly” model of masculinity.52 A crop of sexually ambiguous leading men—Fred Astaire, Cary Grant, William Powell, Leslie Howard, and Ronald Colman—dominated the cinema.53 The new style of masculinity had some of what were taken to be “feminine” traits, such as self-indulgence. English dandyism had long been associated with a consumerism that the middle classes usually coded as feminine.54 Moralists raised the alarm that men, in interesting themselves in fashion, were becoming “la-di-da-ish” or “effeminate.”55 There was a certain irony in that Coward—a homosexual—cultivated an androgynous look in dress and self-presentation that was taken up by young heterosexuals.
One manifestation of their demand for information on clothes and fashion was the appearance in 1935 of Britain’s first men’s magazine, Men Only.56 Starting out with the assertion “We don’t want women readers,” the magazine initially ran short essays on predictably masculine subjects such as beer, dogs, and motorcars, but some may have detected an effeminacy in the advice column “The Well-dressed Man” and the risqué cartoons. The editor attempted to scotch such suspicions by including photographs of female nudes. The first to appear was John Everard’s “Gretel,” in the June 1937 issue. To the magazine’s surprise and delight it was deluged with letters asking for more. Thereafter it regularly ran “artistic” black-and-white pictures from such pioneering nude photographers as Everard and Horace Roy. Readers would insist, of course, that they bought the magazine mainly for its articles.57
Even before journalists coined the term “Mayfair playboy,” they had familiarized their readership with the type. In 1931, Trevor Allen referred to the effeminate loafer who sponged off friends and occasionally (like Harley) made money by passing on information to the police or the press.
An elegant young man of the “mother’s spoilt darling” type, who moves in Mayfair when he is not in Soho: stylishly dressed with a touch of effeminacy in his make-up, and all the talk of the cocktail parties and the flashier clubs of the Bright Young Things. There is some mystery about his origin; he is supposed to derive from a good family on the shady side! He certainly has an entree to the lighter side of Mayfair which he puts to good—or bad—use in sundry ways. The Underworld has its liaison officers who “tip it the wink” or retail it a spicy bit of scandal for a consideration. What happens to the casual bit of information after he has retailed it is of no importance to him. He just pays one or two pressing bills—usually the tailor’s—and goes to another cocktail party or gets an invitation to the Opera or the Ballet or a fashionable First Night. Nobody asks him how he lives, for he moves in an Overworld in which everyone has money of some sort, somewhere, without having to work for it or explain its source. So long as he can keep on friendly terms with his tailor and his laundry he need not worry about much else. If he cannot afford to buy the smart society weeklies he can cadge them from a friend or run over them at a friend’s house, see them he must, but he would never condescend to be seen entering a public library.58
Allen fell back on the mother-blaming trope to explain the emergence of the playboy; others used it to explain homosexuality.59 The two characters tended to blur in the public’s imagination.
The first police bulletin sent out after the December 21 assault on Bellenger succinctly described the suspects: “All effeminate in manner.” Why had the Hyde Park Hotel staff so portrayed the four young men? It was not just because they were good looking and smartly dressed or had brilliantined hair and good teeth. Reginald Sidney Kelly, the receptionist, said of Jenkins: “He was exceptionally well dressed and walked and spoke rather effeminately.” Henrietta Gordon agreed: “He was definitely like a pansy boy—a proper ‘Sissy.’ ”60 Yet for what it is worth, we know that the four all pursued women and all married, some several times. The truth is that we do not know their sexual orientations. It is nevertheless revealing to recall that in this time of shifting styles of masculinity some might mistake the sophisticated man-about-town for the homosexual. Both were known by their purported penchant for display and effeminacy. Both were the butts of comedians who sought to win cheap laughs from working-class audiences in condemning effeminacy as dirty, unmanly, and indecent.61 The press followed suit in referring to the floggings of the “effete” felons.
Why would some think the Mayfair playboys were gay? Many regarded a man’s attention to fashion as a marker for homosexuality.62 The tabloids noted which men appeared in court wearing brown suede shoes.63 According to Robert Graves this was a fashion adopted by “the ‘Pansy’ or the homosexual beauty.”64 Wilmer had his hair waved. This new style obviously disturbed some because commentators felt obliged to write that men who had their hair waved were not necessarily effeminate.65 Others regarded Harley’s sporting a garish teddy bear coat as a provocation.66 The alcoholic novelist and London dandy Julian MacLaren-Ross, who also flaunted a “teddy-bear coat,” recalled being challenged by his mates in the army: “What kind of pansy would have the neck to go round in such a get-up.”67 The rougher sort had difficulty in understanding that one could be flamboyantly turned out yet otherwise still be conventionally heterosexual.
How did one explain the apparent paradox of society regarding playboys as being both effeminate and nonetheless sexual predators who posed a threat to women? The implication that effeminate men were only a fortuitous step or two away from homosexual activity tapped into the old notion that homosexuals were sexually insatiable, based on the assumption that homosexual relations, being a deviation from the real thing, were not “satisfying” and therefore required constant repetition or fresh encounters.
Of all of the Hyde Park Hotel robbers, Peter Jenkins went furthest in discussing male sexuality. He devoted the chapter of his autobiography entitled “Do You Believe in Fairies?” to a discussion of homosexuality. Suggesting that it was due to a hormone deficiency, he argued that it required a medical remedy; persecution only increased misery. He declared that he knew a good deal about “queers” and was trying to learn more about lesbians. Wanting to visit a lesbian club he was told he would have to pass as gay, so a female friend “got busy on my rugged features with the contents of her vanity bag.” He claimed that he was “disgusted” by the makeover, but it worked. Though some women at the club recognized him, they did not raise the alarm as they must have thought—mistakenly, of course—that he, too, had “queer tastes.”68
Jenkins went so far in attempting to distance himself from “queers” that he raised the very question—what was his sexual orientation—he was seeking to finesse. He was more candid in his autobiography’s concluding chapter, where he explained that it was only because of the companionship of a young man that he had survived his years in Dartmoor Prison. “Fortune favoured me in one respect only during my stay at Dartmoor—my friendship with a young ex-sailor and budding artist, who was my constant companion during two years of infinite suffering, and who was a continual source of encouragement to me in this work.” Jenkins lauded George’s creativity and brushed aside the idea that he was a hardened felon. He had been led astray. “He is just a young man who foolishly strayed into crime after the excitement of the war had abated and he could no longer use that outlet for his adventurous young spirits.”69
It was, of course, not simply the playboy’s effeteness that bothered commentators. It was the threat that he posed to women. The nervous regarded his appearance as a symptom of a broader crisis in gender relations manifested in changing standards of sexual behavior. Although the British press of the 1930s would not describe the Prince of Wales as a playboy, it increasingly employed the word when accounting for a subset of idle and seductive males. In England the use of the term spiked in the late 1930s, thanks to the notoriety of the “Mayfair playboys.” During the trial of the Hyde Park Hotel robbers, and years later, all four of the accused not only embraced this persona; they played a part in creating it. This character became a new recruit in the sex wars. Moralists stressed the sexual aspects of the playboy, using the term interchangeably with bon vivant, womanizer, Don Juan, and Casanova. The anxious used him as a sort of scare figure, citing him as the cause of many of the current problems encountered in courtship, marriage, and divorce.
Sali Löbel, a Romanian actor and dancer, and leader of the Every Women’s Health Movement, divided men into categories:
I don’t know which is the worse—the playboy or the cad? I think the cad has it—for the worse. You know the playboy quickly—he just plays—and makes little pretence at anything else. When he has money he spends it freely, when without he spends someone else’s. He is lavish when he loves you, and he can love, BUT does not love you long. He is indolent, self-centered, and entirely vain, though the latter failing makes him fastidious, his saving grace. Yes—he has a saving grace! He is the despair of those who bore him and the despair of the woman who is unfortunate enough to want a permanent alliance with him. But it all just passes over his immaculate head—for his egoism builds no other world but his.70
Her advice was simply to avoid him.
The trial of Harley and his confederates gave commentators the occasion to denigrate not just four felons but the social milieu from which they emerged. An article entitled “ ‘Mayfair Men’ Still at Large,” which appeared just after the Hyde Park Hotel robbers were locked away, expressed the hope that their punishment would serve as a deterrent for other young men and as a warning to young women. The latter had to be alerted that they were at risk of falling prey to such “pests.” Unfortunately, many had a weakness for bad boys. “The modern girl, being what she is, insists on her own latchkey and a great deal of freedom. She thinks that she is an excellent judge of character. Maybe she is, and yet time and again she is prone to prefer the more exciting company of these Mayfair men to the worthy if duller friendship of young men who work in their father’s offices, or at any rate, work.”71 The playboy’s “slick sophistication” appeared to be an irresistible lure for debutantes and innocent youths. These layabouts, the article asserted, hung out at nightclubs and bars, passed bad checks, and trawled for rich girls. They had no manners, avoided work, and sponged on their friends. The worst drifted into criminality, though most did not go beyond “second rate pilfering, mild blackmail, confidence tricks, dud cheque changing and eternal borrowing.”72
Accounts of the Mayfair playboys almost always noted that Wilmer and Harley succeeded in courting, marrying, and then abandoning debutantes. The question was posed: if playboys could ensnare, exploit, and cast aside women who came from good families and had been presented at court, who was safe? In the summer of 1938, under the headline “They Are Called ‘Young Mayfair’: One Meets Delightful Cads in Society London,” by “Ex-Deb,” an Australian newspaper carried the following warning:
MOTHERS, beware! If you have a daughter who is going to London, or perhaps one who is there now, you cannot be too careful. Your daughter is going to be launched in “society” by one method or another. The question is, in just what society are you going to launch her? … From just such a set as this came the four young Mayfair men of the Bellinger [sic] jewel robbery, so much featured in the English newspapers. These four young men, all of good family and education, were sent to gaol for long stretches, with strokes of the “cat” thrown in. One of them, David Wilmer, had previously deserted his 18-year-old wife just before the birth of their child, but this fact did not come out in the newspapers. From this same set came another young man (Hervey), also in headlines some months ago. He was the son of one of the members of the House of Lords, a retired British Minister abroad. He (the son) was an amusing creature, immensely popular with parents and chaperones. All the same, he went bankrupt at the age of 21, to the tune of £124,000, gunrunning in Spain.73
Such sensational accounts reflected the fears that many wealthy parents must have felt at a time when young women were demanding more freedoms.74
In some of the more louche social circles he frequented, David Wilmer met two adventurous young women with famous fathers: Jenny Nicholson, the daughter of the poet Robert Graves, and Sarah Churchill, daughter of the future Conservative prime minister. In the eyes of their distressed families the two young women, in seeking to lead independent lives as chorus girls, were meeting—at drinking bouts and wild parties—too many unsavory men like Wilmer. Their parents were clearly not happy with their daughters revealing their navels and singing, “How low can a chorus girl go, before she is called a so-and-so?”75 The Churchills’ worst fears came to pass when twenty-two-year-old Sarah fell in love with Vic Oliver (Victor Von Samek), an Austrian-American comedian who was seventeen years her senior and appeared in the same C. B. Cochran review, Follow the Sun. When they eloped, her close friend Jenny, described by the tabloids as a “London cabaret girl,” told the press that they were sailing aboard the Bremen to New York City where they planned on marrying.76 Her brother Randolph Churchill, who voiced the family’s concern about both the age disparity and the fact that Oliver’s divorce of his first wife had not yet been finalized, pursued them. Much to Churchill’s regret they wed on Christmas Day 1936.77 The marriage only lasted a few years.78
Sarah had given a letter explaining the situation to her mother, which she asked Jenny to deliver.79 When Jenny gave the story to the press, the Churchills were understandably angry. To make amends, Robert Graves aided her in writing an apologetic letter.80 The men with whom the eighteen-year-old Jenny was associating equally distressed him. Pat Moran, her lover, gave her gonorrhea and possibly got her pregnant. Graves met Moran and his friend Tony Wheeler at the Spotted Dog, a Mayfair pub, in November 1936.81 The hardboiled Wheeler warned Graves that Jenny was at risk. In December, Graves told Nancy Nicholson that Jenny had been pressured by Moran, who “deliberately tried to force marriage by blackmail.”82 A year later Graves’s brothers called to warn him that Jenny might be linked to the Hyde Park Hotel affair. His diary entry for Thursday, December 23, 1937, reads: “John and Philip both rang me up (inspired by Charles, I suppose) about Jenny’s alleged connexion with David Willmer [sic] & the other 3 who did a jewel robbery-with-violence in a Knightsbridge hotel. Jenny has not had anything to do with them for months.”83 Which, of course, means that earlier she did socialize with them. The journalist Patrick Rankin lamented that young women were strangely attracted by the slick sophistication of such Lotharios. He claimed that a mere four days before he was arrested, Wilmer had called him to ask for the address of his niece.84 Rankin was pleased to report that he had refused to help.
Jenny Nicholson’s lover, Patrick Moran, was an old boy of Cheltenham College. He described himself as a journalist, but the police knew him as a Mayfair playboy. His name appeared in the press in December 1939 when he was charged, along with John Topham (educated at Rugby and Cambridge), with stealing a £350 mink fur coat from the actress Diana Ward (also known as Diana Colgrave). Found guilty of conspiring to defraud a pawnbroker, Moran, age twenty-four, was sentenced to ten months in prison. His twenty-year-old fiancée, Elizabeth Mary Saunders, like Jenny Nicholson a “show girl,” was bound over.85 Moran had four previous convictions for motoring offenses and passing bad checks. A police officer testified: “I know him as a Mayfair playboy and I have seen him almost nightly in clubs and hotels. He is an associate of well known Mayfair men, some of whom are serving long sentences of imprisonment.”86
Little is known of Moran’s friend Tony Wheeler. As noted in chapter 3, a police informer claimed that Charles Anthony Wheeler was a criminal associate of Stewart Cappel, but Wheeler seems to have done little more than indulge in the sort of vandalism not untypical of young men of his class. The members of Oxford’s infamous Bullingdon Club in effect institutionalized such loutish behavior. Along with two old Etonians, Wheeler was arrested and charged in 1932 with having thrown bricks through the windows of the Imperial Service College in Windsor. As his only defense was that he had been drunk, the court found him guilty of malicious damage and levied a fine of £30 plus costs. Having given up such escapades, in 1936 he made a most advantageous marriage. His bride, Edith Dawkins, was the daughter of Major Arthur Dawkins and Lady Bertha Dawkins (née Bootle-Wilbraham), who from 1907 to 1935 had served Queen Mary as Woman of the Bedchamber. The dowager queen herself topped the list of those giving wedding presents.87
Moralists who wanted to portray the dangers posed by male “pests” could do no better than point to the fates of Jenny Nicholson and Sarah Churchill, but the cautionary tale of the inevitable unhappiness that resulted when independently minded young women pursued unreliable young men was often told. When Wilmer’s wife divorced him, the two witnesses who testified on Hilary Wilmer’s behalf were Elizabeth Pelly and Betty Patricia Cappel. Elizabeth Pelly was the granddaughter of Queen Victoria’s secretary and the indulged daughter of Arthur Augustus William Harry Ponsonby, who, as Baron Ponsonby, led the Labour opposition in the House of Lords from 1931 to 1935.88 She married John Denis Cavendish Pelly in 1929 and divorced him in 1932 after he admitted committing adultery with a “woman unknown.”89 The classic “Bright Young Thing” of the 1920s, Elizabeth Pelly had by her endless partygoing, excessive drinking, and deadly car crashes attained celebrity status. She was loved by the tabloids and inspired Evelyn Waugh to sketch out the character of the self-destructive Miss Runcible in his novel Vile Bodies (1930). Less than a year after testifying at the Wilmer divorce proceedings Elizabeth died of alcohol poisoning.90
When a Canadian paper announced Pelly’s death it referred to her as London’s “playgirl number one.” North Americans used the term “playgirl” from the 1920s onward. An American paper described a murdered young woman in 1939 as a “Mayfair play girl,” whereas the British press simply called her a prostitute. Film commentators might label as a “playgirl” any woman manifesting a degree of independence. She could be a hard-bitten gold digger like Kay Francis in Play Girl (1941, dir. Frank Woodruff) or a woman trying to save a man from a gold digger like Barbara Stanwyck in Breakfast for Two (1937, dir. Alfred Santell); an independent young woman like Margaret Lockwood in The Lady Vanishes (1938, dir. Alfred Hitchcock); a “wild and wealthy” socialite like Joan Crawford in Letty Lynton (1932, dir. Clarence Brown); or a worldly wise Mayfair young woman like Anne Crawford in Millions Like Us (1943, dir. Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder).91
The newspapers were full of stories about Elizabeth Pelly’s antics. Relatively little was known about Betty Cappel aside from the fact that she was the daughter of Commander Norman L. Cappel of the Royal Ulster Rifles and that her brother had been at Charterhouse School from 1934 to 1937. The police noted that Betty, about twenty years of age, and her brother Stewart, eighteen, were friends of the four Mayfair men. She visited Wilmer and Jenkins in Brixton Prison on January 14 or 15, 1938, a few weeks before their trial.92 Wearing a diamond bracelet and earrings, Hilary Wilmer also came to see her supposedly estranged husband. Interestingly enough, Cappel gave as her home address 26 Basil Street, Knightsbridge, which was the same as Hilary Wilmer’s.93
The second time Betty Cappel came to the authorities’ attention was in June 1939 when the police charged her, along with Paul Mitchell (a friend of Jenkins) and Harold White, with conspiring to defraud and forging a check for £630. The crown decided to regard Cappel as Mitchell’s dupe, and she in turn testified as a witness for the prosecution.94 Despite her admitting that she cashed the incriminating check, Mitchell, a well-known twenty-three-year-old Mayfair playboy, gallantly insisted that Cappel had nothing to do with the fraud. At the same time, James Burge, his lawyer, sought to blacken the reputation of the victim of the criminal conspiracy, a Mr. Sutherland.95
Mr. Burge—have you been to more bottle parties apart from Smokey Joe’s (the nightclub)? Yes, three or four. Questioned as to what he did in Paris when he went there with Mitchell, Sutherland said he met a girl from the “Folies Bergère” at a bar and danced with her. Mr. Burge—Is it true that you were having a “binge”? No. I am suggesting that you were not such an innocent young man as you would lead us to believe: I suggest that you hang around as many bottle parties in the West End as you can. No.96
Cappel was represented in court by the skilled barrister Derek Curtis-Bennett. He depicted Cappel as an innocent, dark-haired girl blinded by her love for Mitchell—a touching portrayal that the press rebroadcast. Mitchell’s lawyer argued in turn that his client was blinded by the bright lights of Mayfair, a view summed up in the Daily Mail headline: “23, ‘Ruined by West End Life.’ ” According to Burge, Mitchell “had been living the life of a Mayfair playboy, with its cocktail parties and bottle parties. He had made genuine efforts to get work, and he had endeavored, without success, to obtain a commission in the R.A.F.”97 The judge was not sympathetic. He noted that the two accused men had both gone to good public schools. They now chose to associate with fellows who lived by their wits, and at best were “share-pushers” and at worst con men. Alluding to the Hyde Park Hotel robbers, the judge reprimanded Mitchell for being “an associate of four young men who were recently convicted at the Central Criminal Court.”98
Portraying Mitchell as “a Mayfair playboy, an associate of undesirable characters and frequenter of doubtful nightclubs,” the judge made it clear that he was more disgusted by the life that the accused led than by the crimes he had committed. “We have had constant talk of Turkish baths, where apparently some of them sleep, of meetings in bars in London, and of cocktail parties.”99 He sentenced Mitchell to twenty months in prison. He directed the jury not to convict Cappel. Having apparently learned her lesson, she returned to her family and, unlike Elizabeth Pelly, had the time to salvage her reputation. In November 1944 the press reported that “a marriage had been arranged” for Betty Patricia Cappel, elder daughter of Commander N. L. Cappel, and Flight Lieutenant John Blackford, only son of Air Commodore D. L. Blackford, RAF, British Embassy, Washington. A year later the Times announced that a son had been born to Mrs. John D. Blackford (née Betty Cappel).100
For centuries British wealthy families had attempted to protect rich heiresses from ruthless adventurers.101 The playboy was in some ways simply the twentieth-century incarnation of such schemers. The popular writer Beverley Nichols joked about it, in claiming that in the 1930s a young man asked him if he knew any rich women. “I observed him with disapproval. I naturally assumed that he wished to become a gigolo. Times were so bad that this was a profession which, it was rumoured, was shortly to be officially recognized by the universities.”102 In fact the young man was a dress designer looking for customers.
Like many other good-looking con men, Peter Jenkins targeted wealthy women. He had hopes in 1937 of marrying up by wedding the wealthy American actress Eleanore Foster. The tabloid press of the 1930s was full of such stories of heiress hunting. Paul Mitchell, a friend of Jenkins, described in the papers as a “young sportsman,” pursued the Hollywood film star Mary Carlisle in London and then, by 6,000-mile telephone calls, after her return to California. She was quoted as saying “she hardly knew him and couldn’t very well marry a stranger.”103 At the very least Mitchell forced himself on public’s attention by his public courtship. In April 1936 one tabloid wrote, “Mayfair Man off to Hollywood—to Propose.” Journalists reported that the contradictory accounts of his success had the screen colony “dizzy.”104
That gambit having failed, Mitchell turned his attentions to Anne Godwin Turner. He later admitted that he only married her for her money. Anne was equally hardheaded. She was to inherit £15,000, payable on her wedding day. As both were minors in July 1936, they had to forge the consent of their parents in order to marry. Once they left the registry office, Anne took off her wedding ring and gave Paul £1,500. He went abroad and did not see her again for four months. By 1938 he was once again penniless and living with his mother.105 He had not only lost a small fortune on the Stock Exchange, but he was under probation in connection with a share-pushing scam.106
Anne had been equally reckless. After having gone through £8,000 to £9,000 pounds in the space of two years, she began to write bad checks. In July 1938 she was found guilty of obtaining credit and clothing by false pretenses—that is, by issuing eighty-seven bad checks. As a condition for being placed on probation she had to enter a Church of England home for girls.107 On December 21, however, she was before the courts once more. She and Patricia Mallory, a twenty-three-year-old drug addict, pleaded guilty to obtaining two coats by fraud. Three days earlier they had absconded from a church home in Spelthorne, Surrey. F. Ashe Lincoln, Anne’s counsel, succeeded in making the case that she had already suffered a good deal in marrying a scoundrel and dissipating her inheritance. The judge agreed that since she had a good family in Jersey who could look after her, she was a suitable case for probation.108 The courts were less sympathetic when it came to dealing with her mercenary marriage. In May 1938, Anne, now twenty-two, launched a summons for a separation from her husband on the grounds of cruelty and desertion. She had Peter Jenkins subpoenaed as her only witness, and the police brought him to London in handcuffs. Though smartly dressed in a double-breasted light blue suit, he failed to impress the court. Anne was disappointed to find that her summons was rejected. That she had to call on someone as notorious as Jenkins to appear as her sole witness spoke to the weakness of her case.109 Nevertheless, Paul Mitchell appears to have held a grudge against Jenkins. In October 1940 at a party presumably held to celebrate Jenkins’s release from prison, Mitchell struck him with a champagne bottle. Jenkins ended up in hospital; Mitchell was sentenced to a month in jail.110
Dedicated readers of the trials of Anne Turner could only conclude that this young woman’s rebelliousness was the cause of her misfortunes. If she had only followed the dictates of her parents, all would have been well. Associating with a well-known playboy was her first mistake. She had only herself to blame for the loss of her inheritance and her reputation. Ironically, she was left yoked to the unreliable young schemer who was supposed to have aided her in gaining her freedom.
Jenkins played a key role in yet another trial that revealed how playboys used and abused young women. In December 1938, Sylvia Doris Leggi sought an affiliation order at Clerkenwell Police Court against John Clotworthy Talbot Foster Whyte-Melville Skeffington, twenty-four, son and heir of Lord Massereene and Ferrard. He was the epitome of the wealthy young man-about-town. He had attended Eton, owned estates in Ulster and England, and loved fast cars—he drove in the 1937 Le Mans Grand Prix—and pretty women. Leggi testified that she met Skeffington on November 16, 1937, at a cocktail party at the Florida nightclub. She was working as a photographer’s model at the time. He swept her off her feet, giving her £10 a week for lodgings, buying her a £169 silver fox coat, and sending her letters in which he called her “my sweet white nymph.”111 But by the end of the year the relationship had soured. They quarreled at Christmas while in Paris. In March 1938, Leggi followed him to New York, where she discovered that she was pregnant.112 When she told Skeffington he threatened that if she caused trouble there would be consequences. Frightened, she signed a note in April freeing Skeffington of any responsibilities. In August 1938 she gave birth to a baby girl at the Royal Bucks Hospital, in Aylesbury, and in December—despite her earlier promise—was demanding financial support from “the only man in the world” who could be her baby’s father.113 The tabloids loved the story, a typical headline reading, “Viscount’s Heir Sued by Girl.”
Bernard Gillis, Skeffington’s counsel, responded by attacking Leggi’s morals, pointing out that within four days of their meeting she was going to country hotels with him and accepting his money. Gillis also produced evidence that at the Chelsea Arts Ball of December 30, 1937, Leggi told a friend she was out to get something big from Skeffington. Gillis’s central strategy, however, was not to deny that his client had intercourse with Leggi but to argue that so too did other men, in particular Peter Jenkins.114
Gillis called three employees of the Dorchester Hotel who testified that they recognized her as staying at their West End establishment with Jenkins, November 17–23, 1937. A Dorchester attendant recalled going “to valet” Jenkins and seeing Leggi dressing in the same room. A waiter and a reception clerk also saw them together. There was more. “It so happens that there was ample ground for fixing these two persons in the memory of the hotel staff,” said Gillis. “The reception clerk had the greatest difficulty, and very little success in collecting the bill.”115 The valet stated that Jenkins claimed the night after his arrival that he had lost his checkbook and would have to run a tab. In fact, Jenkins and Leggi ran off without paying their bill, and the hotel seized their luggage. Solicitor Reginald T. P. Bennett testified that on November 30 he acted for Jenkins in settling an account of between £50 and £70 at the Dorchester in order to have the luggage released.116 The luggage problem clinched the defense’s argument. Magistrate Kenneth Marshall dismissed Leggi’s appeal, cruelly adding: “I entirely agree that this is not a case of a young and innocent girl, but quite clearly an immoral girl.”117 The court refused to grant her an affiliation order. This was not a surprise; in 1936 there had been 24,895 “illegitimate” births, but only 4,349 women were successful in obtaining affiliation orders.118 Adding insult to injury the court awarded Skeffington fifteen guineas cost.119
A mere three months after the papers ran headlines such as “Girl’s Case against Peer’s Son Fails,” Skeffington married Annabelle B. K. Lewis, whose father, Henry D. Lewis of Combwell Priory, Hawkhurst, Kent, was a Jewish mining magnate and chairman of Lewis and Marks Limited, a South African mining company.120 The fact that a peer’s eldest son had been cited in a paternity suit did little to diminish his eligibility as a marriage candidate. Nor did a lack of common sense. In April 1938, Skeffington appeared before the Bankruptcy Court, which determined that he possessed £4,300 and owed £10,252. His debts largely stemmed from his having lost £16,000 in backing an unsuccessful theatrical play. He did not take the situation seriously, preferring to treat the proceedings as a joke. “The Official Receiver—Have you been bankrupt before?—Good heavens, no! I have not had time. I am only 25.”121
The Skeffington trial, to be fully appreciated, has to be placed in context of the shifting relationship of the sexes in the interwar years. The increased unchaperoned interaction of young men and women obviously alarmed traditionalists, but in the main observers applauded women’s growing independence. One sign of this was the decline in the number of women who sued men who had jilted them. “Modern Eve Scorns Claims for Breach of Promise,” declared the Daily Mail. But the same paper would report, under the headline “Traps for Men,” Conservative MPs’ claims that mercenary single women sought to attribute their pregnancies to wealthy men.122 These male MPs were concerned that the current marriage reform bill not only extended the grounds for divorce but also made provisions for assisting women seeking affiliation orders. In contrast, Irene Ward, a female Conservative MP, hailed these proposals. “I particularly welcome that Clause in relation to affiliation orders, because it must be obvious that the unmarried mother is in a particularly defenceless position in obtaining evidence of the means of the man concerned with her case.”123 Skeffington won his case because his lawyer successfully portrayed Leggi not as a weak woman deserving protection but as a modern manipulative, designing female—a gold digger.124 Such women “are seen bedaubed by every colour of the rainbow,” asserted a barrister in a 1935 court case. “In the hotels of the Continent and Mayfair, in the cabarets and night clubs of Europe, there are such people selling themselves for money, the sale being sanctified by formal marriage or not.”125
The Mayfair playboys were not only involved in cases of courtship and seduction; they also were entangled in the divorce law, which in the late 1930s was going through a major reform. Both Robert Harley and David Wilmer’s names continued to appear in the papers through 1938 due to their wives pursuing divorce proceedings against them. Hilary Inez Elizabeth Wilmer, of Basil Street, Knightsbridge, had launched her suit in 1937, but Wilmer had been arrested before it was completed.126 As noted in chapter 3, Wilmer had abetted his wife’s claim that he was an adulterer by providing her with evidence he had had relations with a woman in a London hotel. In March 1938, just as Wilmer was beginning his prison term, a judge granted Hilary a decree nisi and custody of their child.127 The decree nisi did not end the marriage. It simply indicated that the court agreed that the petitioner was entitled to a divorce and could apply for a decree absolute.
In the case of Harley, the newspapers reminded the public that he had married Freda Margaret Wightwick on March 22, 1936, in Battle, Sussex. The marriage was not a happy one. Freda left him in March 1937 after finding out that he was living with another woman. In February 1938, Harley’s solicitor, Emanuel Garber, visited him in Wormwood Scrubs to discuss how to respond to Freda’s suit.128 The press took an interest in this divorce case because it not only involved a notorious criminal but also was likely to be one of the first suits that would take advantage of the “hardship and depravity” clause of the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1937.
Divorce reform was much in the air in 1930s, though only a tiny percentage of the population was directly concerned. There were on average no more than four thousand divorces a year. Victorian divorce law had been glaringly inequitable, allowing a husband to divorce his wife simply for being unfaithful whereas a wife could only divorce her husband if in addition to having committed adultery he had engaged in bigamy, rape, sodomy, bestiality, incest, cruelty, or desertion.129 The 1912 report of a royal commission called for sweeping changes and a small step forward was made by a 1923 law that allowed the woman—like the man—simply to invoke the adultery of their spouse when seeking a divorce. Women petitioners increased from 39 percent in 1923 to 63 percent in 1925.130 Nevertheless, the law, in insisting that adultery was still the only sufficient cause for divorce, had the unintended consequence of rewarding hypocrisy and punishing candor. One party had to demonstrate guilt; the other innocence. Amicable separations were not allowed. The authorities did not accept desertion as warranting the ending of a marriage. Mr. Justice Swift cited the case of a couple separated for sixteen years, both of whom had happily made new partnerships. To regularize their situation—that is, to obtain a divorce—one of the spouses was required to commit adultery, or at least claim to have.131 As a consequence of such ludicrous requirements it was almost impossible for any except the well-off to obtain a divorce. Money was needed to pay for the solicitors, the detectives, the witnesses, the hotel staff, the anonymous third-party (usually a woman), and the associated court fees.132
The predictable result of such a law was collusion—the orchestration by the couple of a “hotel divorce,” in which a husband’s sexual misconduct was faked. But if a couple were found to have colluded, the divorce could be denied.133 The King’s Proctor had the unseemly task of seeking evidence that would deny a decree absolute to those who broke the restrictive rules. Even Wallis Simpson, the mistress of the Prince of Wales, was worried that the story she and her husband concocted when seeking a divorce between October 1936 and May 1937 might unravel. If couples were worried, judges were bored. Having to hear the same obviously prefabricated story over and over again, they declared themselves weary of such “fictions,” or what Lord Chief Justice Hewart called “rubbishy cases.”134
The success of A. P. Herbert’s comic novel Holy Deadlock (1934) reflected a heightening of interest in divorce reform.135 Herbert was elected in November 1935 as an Independent MP for Oxford University and elicited wide support in his campaign for liberalization of divorce law. The public was increasingly of the opinion that the institution of marriage was not honored but brought into disrespect by laws that trapped spouses in unhappy unions. Even the Church of England recognized the need for change.136 The bill that Herbert introduced in February 1936, after much amending, received royal assent in July 1937 and was in force in 1938. Cruelty, insanity, and desertion for three years or more were now included as grounds for divorce. Immediate divorce was available for cases of adultery by either party. As a sop to conservatives, the bill stipulated that divorce could only be sought after three years of marriage, but exceptions were allowed in cases of “hardship” and “depravity.” Sir Boyd Merriman, president of the Divorce Division of the High Court, claimed that the new law worked well, pointing out that that there had been 6,800 petitions in the first nine months of 1938, compared to 3,700 the previous. Alarmists regarded rising divorce numbers far less benignly, but petitioners often only sought the formalizing of an existing separation.137
It was in this changing legal climate that the Harleys came to court in July 1938. The press noted that with the easier rules a rush had been expected, but there were only 1,233 petitioners in the Trinity law sittings. (There were, however, twenty-six insanity pleas.)138 Freda, represented by S. E. Karminski, argued that given the misconduct of her husband she had no choice but to sue for divorce.139 Sir Boyd Merriman expedited matters. He permitted Freda to offer a written address rather than testify in person, and he allowed the divorce to proceed even though three years had not yet passed since her marriage.140 He presumably took the imprisonment of Harley into consideration in reaching his decision. Freda was granted a decree nisi with costs, and custody of her child. The decree nisi was made absolute in February 1939.141 The court dealt with the case in a matter of minutes and made no mention of the name of the woman with whom Harley committed adultery. She must have been someone of some importance, however, as Walter Frampton, holding a watching brief, represented her in court. Working with the solicitor Theodore Goddard, Frampton had two years earlier assisted Norman Birkett in obtaining Wallis Simpson’s divorce.142
Hilary Wilmer was not as lucky. In the spring of 1939 the papers reported that the King’s Proctor was intervening in the Wilmer divorce suit.143 The proctor only investigated a small number of petitions for divorce, but the majority of those examined were denied. When the case was heard in November, the proctor opposed having the decree nisi made absolute on the grounds that evidence had emerged indicating that Hilary had condoned her husband’s adultery and had herself slept more times with her lover, Patrick Henry Noel Gamble, than she had first admitted. Condonation was by law an absolute bar to divorce, and the Wilmers unfortunately appeared to have had an unusually amicable separation. Wilmer and Gamble seemed to be friends, and Wilmer had even named Gamble in constructing an alibi for the day of the Hyde Park Hotel robbery.144
The proctor was not concerned with the robbery. What triggered his disquiet was the discovery that Hilary and Gamble had a cottage at Henley-on-Thames, which they shared on occasion with Wilmer. Two servants claimed that the supposedly irremediably divided couple actually slept in the same bed a few times. The shocked judge opined that “nobody could deny that a situation in which a petitioning wife was dining, dancing, and merry-making with her respondent husband in the house of which another member of the party was paying expenses was not ordinary social intercourse.”145 Nevertheless he conceded that it would be cruel to tie her forever to a cad who never acted as a real husband and was now in prison. In contrast, Patrick Gamble was a gentleman who wanted to regularize their relationship by marrying her. The judge stressed that given the erratic behavior of the Wilmers, the King’s Proctor’s intervention had been completely justified, but he concluded that the court regarded the testimony of servants as unreliable and would accordingly demonstrate its mercy in not rescinding the decree nisi. A week later the decree was made absolute.146
The moral that the judge drew from the proctor’s intervention was not that the law was antiquated but that only by chance had Hilary escaped being compromised by her playboy ex-husband. She had been altogether too friendly with him. “No one,” declared the judge, “who was not a fool could fail to realize what a tremendous weapon she was putting into the hands of a man like that.”147
Although the handful of cases examined in this chapter can make no claim to be representative, they do provide some sense of the perspective commentators took in the 1920s and ’30s when accounting for many of the shameful situations in which risk-taking women found themselves. If the adventurous were sexually compromised, if they were seduced and abandoned, if some gigolo had only married them for their money, if even their recourse to divorce was lost, it was likely due, judges and journalists agreed, to their having been victimized by some cad, bounder, or playboy. Such an approach was not as fair-minded as it might first appear. Faulting women for their naïveté on the one hand while castigating men for their duplicity on the other allowed the censorious to individualize each problem and ignore the systemic nature of gender inequality. Women were doubly victimized, first by society and then by some man. The difference was that the playboy only posed the woman a potential or possible risk; the constraints of an inequitable society were inescapable.
The playboy represented a new style of hedonistic masculinity. There were of course continuities with other, earlier forms of dissident masculinity such as the rake and the cad. The chief difference was that the popular press had described the latter in condemnatory language, whereas it tended to pore over the exploits of the playboy with rapt attention, if not obvious envy. Young men who would have been insulted if called gigolos or womanizers proudly described themselves as “playboys,” which signified—not always truthfully—their dedication to worldly pleasures, success with women, amused indifference to middle-class counsels of restraint, and an apparently effortless ability to live well. In reflecting changing class and gender relationships, the playboy was a creation of interwar societal shifts. At the same time he was not simply a symptom of changing mores; he was both a cause and effect of the modernizing of British attitudes toward sexuality and consumerism.
The playboy of the 1930s might in some ways be regarded as the male counterpart to the flapper of the 1920s. The playboy was usually upper or upper-middle class, as were the Bright Young Things, but the flapper could in theory be from any class. The press portrayed both as seeking to free themselves from many traditional social restraints and candidly confessing to devoting themselves to the pursuit of pleasure. Both adopted an androgynous look, women by having their hair cut in a boyish crop, men by aping Noël Coward’s air of indolent sophistication. Of course, only a tiny number of upper-class men and women had the wherewithal to play such roles. The movies, mass-circulation newspapers, and popular novels were primarily responsible for constructing and popularizing these personae. Writing about the playboy offered one a way of broaching shifts in gender relations. For moralists his appearance signaled the danger of men choosing to be idle, effeminate consumers. Similar news stories warned that young women’s struggle for independence could result in their ending up as seduced chorus girls or the accomplices of thieves. In novels such as Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat (1924) and Norah C. James’s Sleeveless Errand (1929), the authors presented the emancipated woman as ultimately having to pay for violating gender norms. In a similar fashion, those who portrayed the playboy usually had him eventually repent for his prodigal past.148 The dissimilarity was that moralists had no difficulty in using the playboy character to warn young women of the dangers posed by men; they were far less successful in employing the flapper to make men wary of women. Major social changes might have undermined traditional gender expectations, but the sexual double standard still prevailed.