Notes

The abbreviation MEPO used in the notes is Records of the Metropolitan Police Office, National Archives, London.

Introduction

1. “Writer Fryniwyd Tennyson (Jesse) Harwood Writes to Her Friend GBH,” Apr. 1, 1938, Huntington Digital Library, http://hdl.huntington.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15150coll7/id/5823 (accessed Sept. 16, 2015).

2. Jesse also published novels, plays, a war memoir, and several books on popular criminology. Joanna Colenbrander, A Portrait of Fryn: A Biography of F. Tennyson Jesse (London: Deutsch, 1984).

3. F. Tennyson Jesse, Murder and Its Motives (London: Heinemann, 1924), 18.

4. William M. Meier, Property Crime in London, 1850–Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 21.

5. Lucy Bland, Modern Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); John Carter Wood, The Most Remarkable Woman in England: Poison, Celebrity and the Trials of Beatrice Pace (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). See also Mary Hartman, Victorian Murderesses: A True Story of Thirteen Respectable French and English Women Accused of Unspeakable Crimes (London: Robson Books, 1977).

6. Douglas Hay et al., eds., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Pantheon, 1976).

7. Derby Evening Telegraph, June 2, 1938, 1.

8. David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 19.

9. Billie Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 24; Lesley Hall, Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality 1900–1950 (Cambridge: Polity, 1991).

10. Michael Roper and John Tosh, eds., Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (London: Routledge, 1991); John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

11. Patrick McDevitt, “May the Best Man Win”: Sport, Masculinity, and Nationalism in Great Britain and the Empire, 1880–1935 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body: Beauty, Health and Fitness in Britain, 1880–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Paul R. Deslandes, “The Male Body, Beauty, and Aesthetics in Modern Britain,” History Compass 8, 10 (2010): 1191–1208.

12. Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1983); Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

13. Carrie Pitzulo, Bachelors and Bunnies: The Sexual Politics of Playboy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

14. R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

15. On homosexuality as a form of marginalized masculinity, see Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), and Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

16. Martin Francis, “The Domestication of the Male? Recent Research on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century British Masculinity,” Historical Journal 45, 3 (2002): 637.

17. John Buchan, Three Hostages (1924; reprint, London: Thomas Nelson, 1946), 102.

18. Kate Macdonald, “Hunted Men in John Buchan’s London, 1890s to 1920s,” Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 7, 1 (March 2009), www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/march2009/macdonald.html (accessed Aug. 28, 2015).

19. Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Ellen Ross, ed., Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford: Peregrine Penguin, 1984); John Marriott, Beyond the Tower: A History of East London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); Mort, Capital Affairs; Jerry White, The Worst Street in North London: Campbell Bunk, Islington, between the Wars (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

20. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963), 12.

21. Luis L. M. Aguiar and Christopher J. Schneider, eds., Researching amongst Elites: Challenges and Opportunities in Studying Up (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012).

22. Times, Jan. 4, 1938, 5.

23. Tom Jeffrey and Keith McClelland, “A World Fit to Live In: The Daily Mail and the Middle Classes, 1918–1939,” in Impacts and Influences: Essays on Media Power in the Twentieth Century, ed. James Curran, Anthony Smith, and Pauline Wingate (London: Routledge, 2013), 27–52.

24. Adrian Bingham, Family Newspapers: Sex, Private Life and the British Popular Press 1918–1978 (Oxford University Press, 2009), 131; Bland, Modern Women on Trial, 214–225.

25. Times, Dec. 24, 1937, 9; Dec. 31, 1937, 9; Jan. 14, 1938, 11; Feb. 19, 1938, 17.

26. Evening Standard, Feb. 15, 1938, 5; Daily Express, Feb. 16, 1938, 15; Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 1; Daily Mirror, Feb. 19, 1938, 3.

27. Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Interwar Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 230, 232.

28. D. L. Le Mahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 228–229.

29. Ibid., 236–252.

30. This has been a theme of the work of Lucy Bland and, in particular, Matt Houlbrook’s recent Prince of Tricksters: The Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

31. On flappers, see Bland, Modern Women on Trial; on homosexuals, see Houlbrook, Queer London.

32. “Cato,” Guilty Men (London: Gollancz, 1940).

33. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Susan Carol Rogers, “Good to Think: The ‘Peasant’ in Contemporary France,” Anthropological Quarterly 60, 2 (1987): 56–63.

34. Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 1.

Part I. The Crime

1. Daily Mail, Dec. 3, 1929, 8.

2. George Orwell, “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” in The Collected Essays (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 3:212–221; Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969).

3. Ken Worpole, Dockers and Detectives: Popular Reading, Popular Writing (London: Verso, 1983).

4. Jeffrey Richards, “The British Board of Film Censors and Content Control in the 1930s: Images of Britain,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 1, 2 (1981): 95–116; Christine Grandy, Heroes and Happy Endings: Class, Gender, and Nation in Popular Film and Fiction in Interwar Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 188.

5. Adrian Bingham, Family Newspapers: Sex, Private Life and the British Popular Press 1918–1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 131.

6. Critics commonly attacked the ethics of such journalists. “If they are ‘star’ or ‘feature’ reporters, they have become keyhole Boswells prying on the boudoir activities of film actresses or the bottle-party eccentricities of a Mayfair playboy.” Cooperative Review 13 (1939): 26.

7. Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 222.

1: The Robbery

1. The 1938 London telephone directory lists Bellenger’s address as 11 Lytton Grove, Putney SW15.

2. In 1934 Prince George, Duke of Kent, went to Cartier to choose a sapphire engagement ring for Princess Marina. Daily Mail, Sept. 13, 1934, 11.

3. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 20, 1937, Statement of E. Bellenger; MEPO 3/902, Jan. 5, 1938, Statement of E. Bellenger taken at Beaumont House; see also Times, Dec. 22, 1937, 12.

4. Anthony Masters, Inside Marbled Halls: Life Above and Below Stairs in the Hyde Park Hotel (London: Sidgwick, 1979).

5. Who Was Who (London: A & C Black, 1936), www.ukwhoswho.com/view/article/oupww/whowaswho/U48320 (accessed Jan. 15, 2017).

6. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 20, 1937, 9:25 p.m., Metropolitan Police Telegram.

7. Etienne Bellenger had written on the subject; see “Gems are the Best Investment,” Daily Mail, June 4, 1936, 14.

8. One account mistakenly states that Bellenger was hit with “a large ornament that was in the room.” A. E. Bowker, Behind the Bar (London: Staples Press, 1951), 248.

9. Times, Jan. 28, 1938, 4; Daily Telegraph, Feb. 16, 1938, 6, 7.

10. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 20, 1937, Statement of Henrietta Gordon; MEPO 3/902, Dec. 27, 1937, Statement of Henrietta Gordon. Gordon described a teddy bear coat as having thick short hair, wide lapels, and a belt.

11. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 20, 1937, Statement of Enrico Laurenti.

12. Ibid.; see also Times, Jan. 14, 1938, 11.

13. Gordon had her enemies at the hotel. One presumably was the writer of an anonymous letter—signed “Fair Play”—sent to the Westminster Police Court magistrate. The writer claimed that Mrs. Bellenger had come to the Hyde Park Hotel to reward those who had helped her husband. She gave a “present” to Netta (Henrietta Gordon), the chambermaid. Indeed, Netta had been boasting of her need now to go to Lloyd’s Bank. The writer asserted that these actions should be exposed as criminal, as it was against the law to approach a witness. See MEPO 3/902, Jan. 6, 1938.

14. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 21, 1937, Statement of Dr. Victor Constad.

15. MEPO 3/902, Jan. 6, 1938, Statement of Nils Lovold Eckhoff. Eckhoff operated on Bellenger to repair the fifteen wounds that had resulted in the severe fracturing of his skull.

16. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 20, 1937, Statement of E. Bellenger. Bellenger stated that “Hambro” had pimples.

17. Times, Dec. 22, 1937, 12.

18. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 20, 1937, Statement of Reginald Sidney Kelly.

19. Ibid.

20. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 20, 1937, Statement of Enrico Laurenti.

21. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 20, 1937, Statement of James Clarke.

22. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 20, 1937, Statement of J. W. Sloan.

23. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 20, 1937, Statement of William Peter Jefferies.

24. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 20, 1937, Statement of Reginald Sidney Kelly.

25. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 20, 1937, Statement of Henrietta Gordon.

26. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 20, 1937, 9:25 p.m., Metropolitan Police Telegram

27. Police Gazette, Dec. 21, 1937, 1.

28. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 20, 1937, “P. L. Hambro & and 2 Others. Wanted for robbery to prejudice of messers CARTIERS, at the Hyde Park Hotel.”

29. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 21, 1937, Deputy Chief Constable to Commissioner.

30. For the argument that there was a need for an “air police,” see H. L. Adam, C. I. D., Behind the Scenes at Scotland Yard (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1931), 178.

31. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 21, 1937, Information Room.

32. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 21, 1937, Jack Davies letter.

33. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 22, 1937, Anonymous letter dated Dec. 21, 1937.

34. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 22, 1937, Statement of Cyril Smith; see also Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 5.

35. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 23, 1937, Oxford City Police: Arthur Rolphe review of case for Chief Constable.

36. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 22, 1937, Statement of Mitre Hotel pageboy. Ladbroke 0707 was the number of a Miss B. Levensberg (probably Levenberg) of 50 Oxford Gardens, London W10.

37. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 29, 1937, Chief Inspector Leonard Burt overview.

38. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 23, 1937, Chief Inspector Leonard Burt.

39. Robert Fabian, Fabian of the Yard (London: Naldrett Press, 1950), 38.

40. MEPO 3/902, Jan. 6, 1938, Evidence to be given by Thomas H. Smith, Moreton-in-Marsh station, Gloucestershire Constabulary.

41. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 24, 1937, Gloucestershire Constabulary.

42. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 22, 1937, Report of Inspector Robert Fabian.

2: The Investigation

1. George Dilnot, The Real Detective (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1933), 3–7, 34.

2. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 20, 1937, Statement of E. Bellenger. See also MEPO 3/902, Jan. 5, 1938, Statement of E. Bellenger taken at Beaumont House.

3. His most famous cases are included in Frederick R. Cherrill, Cherrill of the Yard: The Autobiography of Fred Cherrill (London: G. G. Harrap, 1954). See also Fredrick R. Cherrill, The Finger Print System at Scotland Yard (London: HMSO, 1954).

4. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 29, 1937, Statement of Frederick Cherrill.

5. Burt reviewed his most sensational cases, including those of the traitors Lord Haw-Haw (William Joyce) and John Amery, in Leonard Burt, Commander Burt of Scotland Yard (London: William Heinemann, 1959); see also Rupert Allason, The Branch: A History of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, 1883–1983 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1983), 124–125.

6. Dilnot, The Real Detective, 231–233.

7. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 21, 1937, Statement of John Lonsdale taken at the Central Police Station, Oxford.

8. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 21, 1937, Statement of Peter Martin Jenkins taken at the Central Police Station, Oxford.

9. MEPO 3/902, Jan. 6, 1938, Evidence given by Thomas H. Smith, Moreton-in-Marsh Station, Gloucestshire Constabulary.

10. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 22, 1937, Statement of John Lonsdale taken at the Gerald Street Police Station.

11. Detective Sergeant Tapsell wrote up the confession that Burt witnessed. Tapsell played a small part in one other noteworthy case. In 1935 the wife of a Norfolk magistrate, shocked by Naomi Mitchison’s novel We Have Been Warned (1935), alerted Scotland Yard. Tapsell drew up a report for the director of public prosecutions on the morality of the book. “(Page) 274 describes carefully the seduction of a man, hitherto moral, by a Russian woman,” he warned, and “(Pages) 487–88 contain a discussion between a man and wife as to whether she can get rid of a pregnancy by an abortion.” The DPP was interested, but John Simon, the home secretary, had the case shelved in the name of artistic freedom. Daily Telegraph, UPI News Services, Oct. 3, 2005.

12. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 22, 1937, Statement of David Wilmer taken at the Gerald Street Police Station.

13. Times, Jan. 7, 1938, 9.

14. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 22, 1937, David Wilmer Further Statement.

15. Times, Jan. 7, 1938, 9.

16. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 22, 1937, Jenkins statement.

17. Robert Honey Fabian, a detective inspector of C Division, was involved in many famous criminal cases, including the 1947 Alec de Antiquis murder. Retiring shortly thereafter as detective superintendent, he became a well-known crime writer, contributing to the popular BBC TV drama series Fabian of the Yard (1954–1956). Martin Fido and Keith Skinner, eds., The Official Encyclopedia of Scotland Yard (London: Virgin, 1999), 135.

18. The use of informers was cloaked in secrecy. For a brief reference to a police informer fined for receiving stolen property, see Times, Dec. 2, 1938, 16.

19. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 22, 1937, Robert Fabian report. A police reporter stated that in fact Etienne Bellenger recognized two of his assailants from photographs that Superintendent John Sands brought from Scotland Yard’s Criminal Record Office. Evening Standard, Dec. 21, 1937, 1.

20. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 21, 1937, Statement of Robert Harley.

21. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 24, 1937, Detective Inspector Percy McDouall Statement.

22. Given that Fabian took liberties in all of his accounts, they have to be treated with caution. For example, he tells the story of a robbery very similar to the Hyde Park Hotel case. He states that in 1926 “Augustus Wiley,” using a big car and an expensive hotel room to pose as a maharajah’s representative, swindled a jeweler. The real story was that Edward Russell Watts, claiming to work for “an exalted personage,” convinced a Regent Street jeweler to bring to his hotel a £14,500 pearl necklace. Saying that he had to make a phone call, he took the pearls and fled via a back exit, going by cab to Croydon, where he chartered a plane for Paris. He mailed most of the jewels to a woman and returned to London claiming that he had been drunk. The judge, finding that he was still sober enough to carry out a skilled robbery, sentenced him to thirteen months in prison. Times, Sept. 14, 1926, 11; cf. Robert Fabian, Fabian of the Yard (London: Naldrett Press, 1950), 55–59.

23. Fabian, Fabian of the Yard, 186–188. He also asserted that he caught Wilmer thanks to a “good guess.”

24. MEPO 3/902, Jan. 10, 1938, Statement of Peter James Kearney taken at 50 A Curzon Street. He was also present on December 21 when officers searched the room and took possession of a pack of cigarettes of a certain brand. His name is given as Peter James Curie in the Times, Jan. 14, 1938, 11.

25. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 22, 1937, Robert Fabian report.

26. Cecil Bishop, From Information Received: The Reminiscences of Cecil Bishop (London: Hutchinson, 1932), 39, 40, 42; see also Dilnot, The Real Detective, 119, and Howard Vincent, A Police Code and General Manual of the Criminal Law (London: Butterworth, 1924), 70, 130.

27. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 29, 1937, Chief Inspector Leonard Burt overview; MEPO 3/902, Dec. 22, 1937, Harley Statement.

28. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 22, 1937, Robert Fabian report.

29. News Chronicle, Feb. 19, 1938, 1, 3, 5.

30. News of the World, Feb. 20, 1938, 13; Trevor Allen, Underworld; The Biography of Charles Brooks, Criminal (New York: R. M. McBride, 1932), 152.

31. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 29, 1937, Chief Inspector Leonard Burt overview.

32. Times, Jan. 7, 1938, 9.

33. Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, Jan. 7, 1938, 10.

34. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 22, 1937, Robert Harley further statement. Some pages pertaining to the night of Dec. 20, 1937, are missing.

35. The prosecutor Vincent Evans stated that the press, in publishing photos of the four accused, might have prejudiced the ongoing identification process. Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, Jan. 7, 1938, 10.

36. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 27, 1937, Kelly statement taken at Gerald Road Police Station.

37. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 28, 1937, Jefferies statement.

38. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 27, 1937, Further statement of Enrico Laurenti.

39. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 28, 1937, Statement of J. W. Sloan.

40. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 28, 1937, Further statement of James Clark.

41. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 27, 1937, Henrietta Gordon statement.

42. Times, Jan. 14, 1938, 11.

43. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 21, 1937, Statement of Clifford Perkins, Hall Porter, New Clarges Hotel.

44. MEPO 3/902, Jan. 10, 1938, Statement of Mrs. Greta Vaughan; Times, Jan. 14, 1938, 11.

45. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 31, 1937, Police to Department of Public Prosecution. In handing over the file the police stressed Lonsdale’s ties to Dorset and his likely knowledge of the Hambro family.

46. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 31, 1937, Burt’s seventeen-page summary of the case for the Superintendant of Criminal Investigation Department.

47. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 29, 1937, Statement of Frederick Cherrill. Cherrill compared the prints on the bottle to those of Wilmer and Jenkins in Brixton Prison. Times, Jan. 21, 1938, 9.

48. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 31, 1937, Burt’s summary.

49. Times, Dec. 24, 1937, 9.

50. Times, Dec. 31, 1937, 9.

51. Times, Jan. 7, 1938, 9.

52. Times, Jan. 28, 1938, 4.

53. The information that the Imperial Fascist League activist John Ridout provided the police is discussed in chapter 10.

54. MEPO 3/902, Jan. 18, 1938, Detective Constable W. Chamberlain and Detective Sergeant Heathfield of Kent County report to Commissioner.

55. MEPO 3/902, Metropolitan police telegrams, Jan. 20 and 21, 1938. Cappel was at Charterhouse from 1934 to 1937. According to the informer, Tony Wheeler was Cappel’s partner in crime.

56. MEPO 3/902, Jan. 24, 1938, Letter from Burt to the Superintendant.

57. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 30, 1937, Horst Robert Leopold Bonsack statement. See also Bonsack, Horst Robert Leopold (known as Godfrey Bonsack), Germany, Interior Decorator and Antique Dealer, Flat 17, 51 South Street, London W1, 19th September 1966, in “List of Aliens to Whom Certificates of Naturalisation Have Been Granted by the Secretary of State,” London Gazette, Oct. 25, 1966, 11492.

58. MEPO 3/902, Feb. 4, 1938, Governor of Brixton Prison to Scotland Yard.

59. MEPO 3/902 C600457, Amounts given to each officer.

60. MEPO 3/902, Mar. 1, 1938, CID report to Superintendent of Scotland Yard.

61. MEPO 3/902, Feb. 24, 1938, Leonard Burt’s report.

62. MEPO 3/902, Mar. 11, 1938, Report to the Commissioner.

3: The Suspects

1. Daily Mail, Feb. 19, 1938, 9.

2. Toronto Globe and Mail, Feb. 19, 1938, 15.

3. But see Times, May 15, 1919, 15.

4. London Gazette, May 15, 1903, 3112.

5. See Times, Jan. 27, 1921, 13, on the marriage of his only daughter.

6. At age eleven he was at Stubbington House School, Crofton, Hampshire.

7. Canada census 1916, Census Place: Alberta, Macleod, 34, Roll: T-21952, Page: 2, Family No.: 27.

8. London Gazette, Jan. 15, 1915, 492; Supplement to the London Gazette, June 8, 1920, 6419; see also National Archives, WO 339/39840 Lieutenant John Claude Jardine Lonsdale, The Dorsetshire Regiment, 1915–1920.

9. Lonsdale’s kinsman, C. J. Lonsdale, had a more predictable career: Radley College Officer Training Corps, Christ Church College, Oxford University BA (1931), on the executive of the Oxford Carleton Club (Conservative Party), and enlistment in the King’s Rifles (1935). Times, Feb. 11, 1930, 8; Apr. 30, 1930, 11; July 22, 1931, 14; Oct. 16, 1931, 19; Oct. 30, 1931, 6; Mar. 9, 1935, 23; May 24, 1938, 19; Nov. 26, 1943, 2. In 1938 he was living in Leicester. The Radleian 569 (Feb. 1938): 5.

10. Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 5. Marilyn Miller was one of the most popular musical stars of the 1920s and early 1930s. Among his many tales, Lonsdale claimed to have fought a duel in France over some woman, possibly Miller.

11. “A soldier who wishes to leave the Army within three months of joining it has a right to purchase his discharge, but after three months, and after the country has spent a very large sum in making him efficient as a soldier, the case is different.” HC Deb 17 Nov. 1920 vol. 134 cc2040. To be bought out could cost at least £35.

12. Times, Nov. 17, 1933, 20; Nov. 22, 1933, 9; Feb. 21, 1934, 9; London Gazette, Nov. 21, 1933, 7542; Feb. 20, 1934, 1158.

13. Times, Feb. 19, 1938, 17; Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 2.

14. MEPO 3/902, Jan. 14, 1938, Cox and Kings Insurance Ltd to Burt.

15. Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, June 17, 1936, 6.

16. Swindon Advertiser and North Wilts Chronicle, June 27, 1936, 5.

17. Times, June 17, 1936, 4; Ottawa Journal, July 4, 1936, 18.

18. I can find no evidence of such a company ever existing.

19. Ottawa Journal, July 4, 1936, 18.

20. The lesson was drawn that one had to be careful about what one said about the affairs of others. At the time the British newspaper press could not openly discuss the Prince of Wales’s affair with Mrs. Wallis Simpson. Indeed, Ernest Aldrich Simpson, her second husband, sued a woman who said he was paid not to oppose Wallis’s divorce suit. Straight Times, June 29, 1937, 18.

21. On the marriage arranged between Leslie Beuttler, only son of Lieutenant-Colonel V. O. Beuttler, and Pamela, daughter of late commander Blake of the Royal Navy and Lady Twysden, see the Times, Oct. 9, 1936, 17.

22. Times, May 1, 1936, 19.

23. Swindon Advertiser and North Wilts Chronicle, June 27, 1936, 5.

24. Times, June 27, 1936, 17; Nottingham Evening Post, June 27, 1936, 5. The following year, Ursula, the elder Blake daughter, married John Henry Spencer, only son of the late Commander H. Spencer, RN. Times, Jan. 11, 1937, 21.

25. Patrick Glenn Zander, Right Modern: Technology, Nation, and Britain’s Extreme Right in the Interwar Period (London: Proquest, 2011), 273.

26. Argus (Melbourne), July 2, 1938, 10.

27. MEPO 3/902, Nov. 30, 1937, Rudolph Slavik to Procureur; MEPO 3/902, Dec. 24, 1937; MEPO 3/902, Jan. 8, 1938; MEPO 3/902, letter from Paris police (Feb. 8, 1938) describing the plight of Rudolph Slavik, barman.

28. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 28, 1937, Scotland Yard to Paris police; MEPO 3/902, Jan. 12, 1938, Letter and report of Paris police regarding Lonsdale and Élie Lévy; MEPO 3/902, Dec. 28, 1937, L’Inspecteur Général to The Commissioner of Police. MEPO 3/902, Jan. 8, 1938, CID to Chief Inspector, notes that the French had issued a warrant for Lonsdale’s arrest on Dec. 10, 1937, for swindling a diamond ring worth 85,000 francs. The CID also stated there was no record of Souriat Chardanoff, née Chakoff, aged twenty-four, having been in Britain.

29. Élie Lévy escaped France with an unauthorized Salvadoran citizenship certificate, Jan. 11, 1944. Photo Archives, US Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Unauthorized Salvadoran citizenship certificate issued to Élie Lévy (b. January 29, 1890 in Paris), his wife Berti (née Hirsch) Lévy (b. March 15, 1903 in Cologne) and their children Gerard (b. June 16, 1929), Yvonne (b. September 22, 1931) and Eliane (b. November 15, 1937) by George Mandel-Mantello, First Secretary of the Salvadoran Consulate in Switzerland and sent to their residence in Marseilles.” Élie Lévy arrived in Switzerland on May 13, 1944, along with Berthe Lévy-Hirsch, Gerard, Yvonne, and Eliane. See http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1169122 (accessed Oct. 12, 2015).

30. Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 3.

31. Times, Jan. 19, 1935, 8; see also www.ukwhoswho.com/view/article/oupww/whowaswho/U244542 (accessed Aug. 2, 2014).

32. See the Times, May 27, 1958, 10, on death, in Paris, Ontario, of Brigadier E. R. G. Wilmer.

33. Sussex Agricultural Express, July 22, 1910, 9.

34. On the death of Marjory Wilmer, see the Times, Jan. 4, 1947, 1.

35. Evening Telegraph, Dec. 15, 1938, 3.

36. Cheltenham Chronicle, May 11, 1935, 2; Gloucestershire Echo, Jan. 29, 1937, 6. The police made a point of Wilmer’s status in labeling his file “Nephew of Lady Horsburgh-Porter.”

37. Times, Apr. 30, 1935, 19.

38. She was living at 20 Victoria Grove when her husband died. Times, Feb. 8, 1940, 11; July 3, 1940, 1; May 23, 1942, 1; Mar. 30, 1951, 6.

39. On F. C. Wilmer awarded the Oundle school certificate and a cadetship at Sandhurst, see Times, Jan. 16, 1933, 8; Dec. 22, 1934, 4.

40. Born Oct. 1913 in Chelsea to Mrs. Wilmer, née Worsley. England and Wales Birth Registration Index, vol. 1A (1913): 704, line 90.

41. Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 2.

42. Information provided by Elspeth Langsdale, Oundle School archivist; Times, Feb. 19, 1938, 17; Archivleiterin, Universitätsarchiv Heidelberg; Service immatriculation et mobilité, Université de Neuchâtel.

43. News of the World, Feb. 20, 1938, 13.

44. Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 1.

45. Times, Feb. 19, 1938, 17.

46. Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 3.

47. Times, Oct. 18, 1935, 1. Wilmer’s parents were living at 20 Victoria Grove, W8.

48. Evening Telegraph, Mar. 18, 1938, 4; Argus (Melbourne), July 2, 1938, 10; Times, Nov. 2, 1939, 2.

49. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 22, 1937, Wilmer further Statement.

50. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 23, 1937, Newbury police to Scotland Yard; MEPO 3/902, Dec. 29, 1937, Newbury police to Scotland Yard.

51. Daily Mail, Feb. 19, 1938, 10.

52. Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 3.

53. Times, Feb. 19, 1938, 17.

54. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 23, 1937, Hampshire Constabulary reports to Scotland Yard on Wilmer’s scuffles.

55. Peter Martin Jenkins, Mayfair Boy (London: W. H. Allen, 1952).

56. “Great Marlborough Street Area,” Survey of London, vols. 31–32: St James Westminster, part 2 (1963): 250–267. Jenkins’s partner was Harold Cobb.

57. Montreal Gazette, Feb. 19, 1938, 12. His mother was Evelyn Jane Elder O’Brien.

58. Gerald Walter Jenkins, the eldest son, born at Harrow in 1910, worked as an accountant at Lester Parry and Company, also housed at 11 Great Marlborough Street. He married Clarrie Elizabeth, daughter of John William Motley, at St. Paul’s Church, Portman Square, the Reverand J. Lowry Maxwell officiating. They lived at 18 Queensborough Terrace, W2. Times, Mar. 7, 1949, 7; July 29, 1950, 6; MEPO 3/902, Dec. 23, 1937, Oxford police.

59. Information kindly provided by Angharad Meredith, Archivist, Harrow School.

60. Times, Feb. 8, 1935, 25. Walter Martin Jenkins died Dec.12, 1934.

61. After his father’s death, Jenkins lived for a few months with Sir Ernest Graham-Little, a leading dermatologist and Independent MP representing the University of London. Jenkins, Mayfair Boy, 38.

62. Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 5.

63. Jenkins, Mayfair Boy, 66. On pajamas worn by both men and women as evening attire, see Mary Louise Roberts, “Samson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Women’s Fashion in 1920s France,” American Historical Review 98, 3 (1993): 657–684.

64. Jenkins, Mayfair Boy, 53. And for a tabloid’s assertion that Jenkins was the best looking and most “effeminate in manner” of the accused, see News of the World, Feb. 20, 1938, 13.

65. Jenkins, Mayfair Boy, 45.

66. Ibid., 57.

67. Times, Feb. 19, 1938, 17. A “life interest” refers to a person given an interest in a property and/or other assets for life or for a shorter period of time. When that interest ends, the interest “reverts” (passes) to other specified persons. Those other specified persons are said to have a “reversionary interest” in the property and/or other assets.

68. Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 3.

69. An Eleanore Foster was born Nov. 3, 1909, in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Passenger records show her sailing from New York City to San Diego in Nov. 1935; from San Francisco to New York City, July 14, 1936; from New York City to Southampton, May 31, 1937; from Le Havre to New York City, Oct. 14, 1937; and from Le Havre to New York City, Oct. 10, 1938. New York Passenger and Crew Lists, 1925–1957, https://familysearch.org/search/collection/results?count=20&query=%2Bgivenname%3Aeleanore∼%20%2Bsurname%3Afoster∼%20%2Bgender%3AF&collection_id=1923888 (accessed Jan. 15, 2017).

70. Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 1, 3. Journalist and biographer Ralph Hewins, who was a friend of Jenkins, wrote of his pursuit of an heiress. See Daily Mail, Feb. 19, 1938, 10.

71. Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 2.

72. Ibid., 5

73. News Chronicle, Feb. 17, 1938, 1.

74. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 20, 1937, Description of Harley: “30–35, 5ft 10in hair brushed back brown, medium bld; dress, dark suit, light brown teddy bear overcoat (buff colour), no hat.” Harley sometimes went as Michael Paul Robert Harley.

75. Times, Jan. 12, 1920, 15, Obituary of Colonel H. Kellett Harley, DSO, 7th Hussars, www.ukwhoswho.com/view/article/oupww/whowaswho/U197551 (accessed Aug. 20, 2014). His clubs were Whites and Cavalry. The family liked to believe they were descended from Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, minister to Queen Anne.

76. Unfortunately, the same year he was declared insolvent due to bad investments.

77. England and Wales Marriage Registration Index 1A (1899): 1002, line 166; Divorce Court File: 9174, National Archives, Records, 1908, J77/961/9174.

78. England and Wales Marriage Registration Index, 1A (1910): 930 line 152.

79. Known also as Patrick Dennis, he died in 1980 in Westminster, London. England and Wales Death Registration Index 15 (1980): 2261 line 44.

80. The 1911 census shows one-year-old Peter Harley living with H. Kellett Harley.

81. He attended in 1935 the Bowring Toms dance, the St. Andrews Ball, and served as sub-warden of the Sherborne House Club for boys in Southwark. See Times, May 21, 1935, 19; Dec. 10, 1935, 19; June 13, 1938, 8.

82. London Gazette, June 9, 1949, 2826; June 12, 1958, 3535; Jan. 1, 1962, 45.

83. Jacintha Buddicom, Eric and Us (London: Frewin, 1974), 58.

84. Kevin Ingram, Rebel: The Short Life of Esmond Romilly (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985).

85. Margaret Morley, Larger Than Life: The Biography of Robert Morley (London: Robson Books, 1979).

86. Montreal Gazette, Feb. 19, 1938, 12; San Bernardino County Sun, Feb. 20, 1938, 3.

87. James S. Kempling, “Birth of a Regiment, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry 1914–1919” (MA thesis, University of Victoria, 2011); MEPO 3/902, Jan. 12, 1938, Sergeant Tapsell to Chief Inspector, Information on Harley in Canada sought by cable from Officer in Charge of Records, Department of National Defense, Ottawa (“Defensor”); telegram from Ottawa, Canada, indicating that Harley served three years from October 1929 in the Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry. He listed as next of kin his mother, Mrs. E. T. Harley of 18 Parkhurst Road, Bexhill, Sussex.

88. Ottawa Citizen, Mar. 1, 1938, 1; Winnipeg Free Press, Feb. 19, 1938, 2.

89. For a photo of Mrs. Robert Harley in court dress before her marriage, see Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 5.

90. Times, Aug. 24, 1938, 13. Wheler served on the North West Frontier in 1917, was attached to the Indian Army between 1918 and 1920, and was recalled by the army in 1940. A game farmer between the wars, he served in the Kenya Police Reserve throughout the Mau Mau Emergency of 1953.

91. New York Times, July 27, 1936, 21. Michael Robert Harley arrived in New York City on the Europa in the summer of 1936 and returned to North America in the fall on the Empress of Britain. New York Passenger and Crew Lists, 1925–1957, https://familysearch.org/search/collection/results?count=20&query=%2Bgivenname%3A%22michael%20robert%22∼%20%2Bsurname%3Aharley∼%20%2Bgender%3AM&collection_id=1923888 (accessed Jan. 15, 2017).

92. Times, Jan. 22, 1937, 1. On the 1937 birth of Valerie P. Harley in Battle, Sussex, to a Mrs. Harley née Whightwick [sic], see England and Wales Birth Registration Index, vol. 2B (1937): 43 line 126.

93. Portsmouth Evening News, July 29, 1938, 9.

94. See photo of Robert Paul Harley dining out with a group of unidentified friends, circa 1935. Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 1.

95. Toronto Globe and Mail, Feb. 19, 1938, 15.

96. Evening Telegraph, Feb. 19, 1938, 4.

97. Winnipeg Tribune, Dec. 23, 1937, 1; Times, Feb. 19, 1938, 17.

98. Sir William Traven Aitken was a Canadian-born British journalist and politician who wrote for the Evening Standard and was an MP for fourteen years, He was a nephew of Lord Beaverbrook (William Maxwell Aitken), owner of the Evening Standard and the Daily Express.

99. On the riots in Winnipeg, see Brian McKillop, “A Communist in City Hall,” Canadian Dimension, April 1974, 43–46, and Daily Mail, Feb. 19, 1938, 10.

100. Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 1.

101. Gerald Kersh, Night and the City (1938; reprint, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1946), 120.

102. Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 3.

103. Evening Telegraph, Feb. 19, 1938, 4.

104. MEPO 3/902, Jan. 19, 1938, Miss Woolrich letter.

105. The case is reminiscent of the emergence of the concept of “affluenza.” In December 2013, the lawyers of a wealthy sixteen-year-old who had killed four people in a Texas drunk-driving accident successfully argued that his parents had indulged him to such a degree that he could not be held responsible for his actions. He purportedly suffered from “affluenza,” an inability to appreciate the consequences of bad behavior. New York Times, Dec. 30, 2015, A3.

4: The Trial

1. James Agate, Ego 3 (London: G. G. Harrup, 1938), 295.

2. Chicago Tribune, Feb. 18, 1938, 8.

3. Daily Sketch, Feb. 16, 1938, 11; Ottawa Journal, Mar. 8, 1938, 6.

4. Times, Jan. 28, 1938, 4.

5. Times, Feb. 10, 1938, 11.

6. In R v Sussex Justices, Ex parte McCarthy ([1924] 1 KB 256, [1923] All ER Rep 233).

7. George Buchanan McClure was prosecuting counsel to the Treasury, 1928–1942, and judge of the Mayor’s and City of London Court, 1942–1953, and as such presided at Peter Martin Jenkins’s 1945 trial.

8. Henry Elam, called to the Bar, Inner Temple, in 1927, served at the West Kent Quarter Sessions 1947–1953; Court of Quarter Sessions, Inner London, 1953–1976; and as a circuit judge, 1971–1976. He represented the Wolfe brothers in the complex 1933 Leopold Harris fire insurance fraud trial. See Angus McLaren, “Smoke and Mirrors: Willy Clarkson and the Role of Disguises in Interwar England,” Journal of Social History 40, 3 (2007): 597–618.

9. Daily Telegraph, Feb. 16, 1938, 6, 7.

10. Times, Feb. 16, 1938, 18.

11. Ibid.; Daily Telegraph, Feb. 16, 1938, 6, 7.

12. Daily Telegraph, Feb. 16, 1938, 6, 7.

13. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 29, 1937, Statement of Frederick Cherrill.

14. Robert Jackson, The Chief: The Biography of Gordon Hewart, Lord Chief Justice of England, 1922–40 (London: George G. Harrup, 1959), 319. The exchange is reminiscent of the role that gloves played in the 1995 O. J. Simpson trial in Los Angeles.

15. Daily Express, Feb. 17, 1938, 8, 9.

16. Times, Feb. 17, 1938, 9.

17. Daily Telegraph and Morning Post, Feb. 17, 1938, 6.

18. Ibid.; Evening Standard, Feb. 17, 1938, 13. For a photo of Toby Barry, see Daily Mail, Feb. 17, 1938, 7.

19. Times, Feb. 17, 1938, 9.

20. Times, Feb. 16, 1938, 18.

21. Daily Telegraph and Morning Post, Feb. 17, 1938, 6.

22. Times, Feb. 17, 1938, 9.

23. Aberdeen Journal, Feb. 17, 1938, 9.

24. Daily Telegraph and Morning Post, Feb. 17, 1938, 6.

25. Times, Feb. 17, 1938, 9.

26. Ibid.

27. H. Montgomery Hyde, Norman Birkett: The Life of Lord Birkett of Ulverston (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1964). William Arthur Fearnley-Whittingstall, QC 1949 and Recorder of Leicester from 1957 on, later represented the Soho pornographer Paul Raymond.

28. Evening News, Feb. 17, 1938, 9; Times, Feb. 18, 1938, 20.

29. A similarly orchestrated theft was described in George Dilnot, Getting Rich Quick: An Outline of Swindles Old and New, with Some Account of the Manners and Customs of Confidence Men (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1935), 174–176.

30. Gloucestershire Echo, Feb. 17, 1938, 1.

31. Daily Express, Feb. 18, 1938, 17.

32. Hull Daily Mail, Feb. 18, 1938, 1.

33. Times, Feb. 18, 1938, 20.

34. A. E. Bowker, Behind the Bar (London: Staples Press, 1951), 248.

35. Times, Feb. 18, 1938, 20.

36. Daily Mail, Feb. 18, 1938.

37. Evening Standard, Feb. 17, 1938, 1, 4, 12.

38. Fredman Ashe Lincoln later became Master of the Bench of the Inner Temple and chairman of the Association of Jewish ex–Service Men and Women. An active member of the Conservative Party, he encountered within it explicit anti-Semitic prejudices. His brother was the solicitor Ellis Lincoln. Times, Oct. 22, 1998, 29.

39. Times, Feb. 18, 1938, 20.

40. Evening Standard, Feb. 17, 1938, 1, 4, 12.

41. Times, Feb. 16, 1938, 18.

42. Daily Express, Feb. 18, 1938, 17. His full answer was that Lévy gave a ring to a man who gave it to a woman who sold two rings to Lonsdale, but he himself never dealt directly with Lévy.

43. Following the war, Christmas Humphreys led the prosecution in several famous criminal trials, including those of Ruth Ellis and Timothy Evans. His memoir, Both Sides of the Circle: The Autobiography of Christmas Humphreys (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1978), mostly concerns his interest in Buddhism.

44. Times, Feb. 16, 1938, 18.

45. Daily Worker, Feb. 18, 1938, 3.

46. Times, Feb. 18, 1938, 20.

47. The authorities took precautions to keep Jenkins and Wilmer away from Harley.

48. Times, Feb. 19, 1938, 17; Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 15.

49. Times, Feb. 19, 1938, 17.

50. Gerald Abrahams, According to the Evidence: An Essay on Legal Proof (London: Cassell, 1958), 159.

51. Evening Telegraph, Feb. 19, 1938, 4. Given Harley’s admission that he had hidden rings, which he knew were stolen, the judge instructed him that he should plead guilty to receiving. On February 17, Harley did change his plea on receiving to guilty, which the jury formalized. Times, Feb. 18, 1938, 14; Jackson, The Chief, 319.

52. Times, Feb. 19, 1938, 17.

53. “Writer Fryniwyd Tennyson (Jesse) Harwood Writes to Her Friend GBH,” Apr. 1, 1938, Huntington Digital Library, http://hdl.huntington.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15150coll7/id/5823 (accessed Sept. 16, 2015).

54. The enterprising were placing bets on the total number of years of imprisonment the judge would dole out. Daily Mail, Feb. 19, 1938, 6.

55. Lonsdale’s argument was that all he did was discuss the idea of obtaining jewels by false pretenses or on credit; he did not conspire to rob. Mr. Justice Humphreys asked how Lonsdale could not be a conspirator when he suggested the hotel room be checked before the actual means of stealing were determined. Ashe Lincoln responded that there was a difference between stealing and false pretenses. Mr. Justice Charles conceded that the judge could have been clearer on this point, but there obviously was a conspiracy: it was inspired by Lonsdale’s story, and his subsequent behavior incriminated him. Times, Feb. 26, 1938, 14; Mar. 23, 1938, 4; “Accessory before the Fact,” Journal of Criminal Law 2 (1938): 219–221.

56. Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 2.

57. Daily Mail, Feb. 19, 1938, 9.

58. Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 1.

59. Ibid., 3.

60. “An Old Maidstonian” and “Prison Food,” Men Only, May 1936, 48–51; Sunday Graphic, Feb. 20, 1938, 9; News of the World, Feb. 20, 1938, 13.

61. Evening Telegraph, Feb. 19, 1938, 4.

62. Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 1.

63. Hull Daily Mail, Apr. 7, 1938, 13.

64. Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier (London: Chronicle Books, 2007), 313. On Bellenger’s fear that Britain did not recognize the danger posed by Germany, see his articles “A Frenchman’s View of the Crisis,” Daily Mail, Apr. 3, 1936, 14, and “I Say France Is Right,” Daily Mail, Apr. 27, 1936, 12.

65. Jackson, The Chief, 321.

5: The Aftermath

1. Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (1928; reprint, London: Everyman’s Library, 1993), 161.

2. Times, July 8, 1939, 13. Even before his release, journalists were exploiting Lonsdale’s notoriety. See the report in an Australian newspaper: “The first news John Christopher Mainwaring Lonsdale, one-time Mayfair ‘man-about-town,’ will hear when he comes out of prison shortly, will be the secret marriage of the girl to whom he was once engaged. She is attractive 25-year-old Miss Evelyn ‘Moon’ Wolsley, popular debutante of 1933, who has been married in Paris to M. de Garzuly, 45, member of the Budapest Foreign Office.” Newcastle Sun (NSW), Apr. 27, 1939, 6.

3. Aberdeen Journal, July 8, 1939, 5. A year earlier he had penned “I Have Been a Fool: Confessions of John Christopher Mainwaring Lonsdale,” Empire News, Feb. 20, 1938, 1; Aberdeen Journal, Feb. 19, 1938, 5.

4. On Nicholas Sidoroff, see England and Wales Death Registration Index 18 (1974): 1054 line 88.

5. Times, Sept. 12, 1938, 9.

6. Ottawa Journal, Oct. 8, 1938, 17.

7. Ibid.

8. Matthew Sweet, West End Front: The Wartime Secrets of London’s Grand Hotels (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), 225–226.

9. Ottawa Citizen, July 22, 1939, 9.

10. Ibid., 229–230.

11. Pat O’Leary, “Stella Lonsdale aka Simone de Lavalliere aka Michael aka …,” www.conscript-heroes.com/Art08-Stella-Lonsdale-960.html (accessed Sept. 8, 2015).

12. Nigel West, The Guy Liddell Diaries: Volume I: 1939–1942 (London: Routledge, 2005), 191. And see p. 199 regarding Lonsdale’s sister, the actress Diana Vernon, being a good friend of Stella’s.

13. One intelligence officer, while cloaking her identity, recalled she was “quite ravishing.” J. M. Langley, Fight Another Day (London: Collins, 1974), 179.

14. Sweet, West End Front, 217–218.

15. West, The Guy Liddell Diaries, 203, 214.

16. Home Office: Defence Regulation 18B, Advisory Committee Papers. Detainees. LONSDALE, Stella Edith Howson. See also HO 45/25745, National Archives, London.

17. MEPO 3/902, Oct. 5, 1946, RMH forwarding of Fabian’s report to Sir Frank Newsam at the Home Office.

18. A. W. Brian Simpson, In the Highest Degree Odious: Detention without Trial in Wartime Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 217; Bradley W. Hart, George Pitt-Rivers and the Nazis (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 168–171.

19. David Renton, “Rivers, George Henry Lane Fox Pitt- (1890–1966),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, May 2005) www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/75512 (accessed Dec. 1, 2014). His eldest son, Michael Pitt-Rivers, gained notoriety in Britain in the 1950s when he was put on trial charged with buggery. His younger son, Julian Pitt-Rivers, a social anthropologist, attacked his father’s racialist views.

20. Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers, a father of modern archaeology, left part of his vast ethnology collection to Oxford, and the rest to his own private museum in Farnham, Dorset, where it was controlled by his eccentric grandson, George. Before dying in 1966, George willed his estate to Stella. Needing money to support herself and her lover, Raoul Maumen, “a conman from Marseille,” Stella sold much of the collection to private buyers. She married Maumen, as French citizenship allowed her to export art pieces to France. See Nicholas Shakespeare, Bruce Chatwin (New York: Random House, 2010), 180–183.

21. On Walton’s marriage, her presentation at court, and her London University BA in English, see Times, June 26, 1935, 19; June 27, 1935, 11; July 26, 1935, 20.

22. Times, Jan. 25, 1950, 8; Edinburgh Gazette, Jan. 27, 1950, 47; London Gazette, Jan. 24, 1950, 442.

23. London Gazette, Aug. 3, 1956, 4506.

24. Peter Jenkins, Mayfair Boy (London: W. H. Allen, 1952), 76.

25. Ibid., 83–90.

26. Jenkins wrote a friend that he was allowed to take German and shorthand classes but was afraid that on his release his friends would not rally round and that “I shall still have that abominable ‘Mayfair Playboy’ attached to my name as well.” Daily Mail, Apr. 20, 1938, 9.

27. There were reports that Jenkins joined the army on his release but soon deserted. See Milwaukee Sentinel, Apr. 16, 1944, 21.

28. Manchester Guardian, Jan. 28, 1942, 6; MEPO 3/902, Oct. 5, 1946.

29. Times, Oct. 30, 1941, 2; Mar. 13, 1942, 2; Toronto Globe and Mail, Nov. 1, 1941, 7; Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption, 1939–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 185–189; Jenkins, Mayfair Boy, 111–113.

30. “Admiral Sir Francis Murray Austin, Born 1881; m Marjorie Jean Stewart, d of late Maj.-Gen. J. Stewart S. Barker, RA, CB; two s; died 19 June 1953. Served European War, 1914–19; Rear-Admiral in Charge and Admiral Superintendent, HM Dockyard, Gibraltar, 1932–35; Vice-Adm. and retired list, 1936. Club: United Service. Address: 8 Cardinal Mansions, Carlisle Palace, SW1.” See www.ukwhoswho.com/view/article/oupww/whowaswho/U234247 (accessed Aug. 2, 2014). See also Times, Jun 22, 1953, 8.

31. Times, June 7, 1945, 2. The Times always referred to “Mrs Gillian Austin.” Popular papers called her “Mrs Jill Austin.”

32. Jenkins, Mayfair Boy, 132–133.

33. Curtis-Bennett made a specialty of taking on difficult cases. In 1945 he defended both Jenkins and the traitor William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw); in 1950, atomic spy Klaus Fuchs; and in 1953, serial killer John Christie. Times, July 24, 1956, 8. He was the son of Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett, who defended Edith Thompson.

34. Daily Mail, June 2, 1945, 12.

35. Times, June 7, 1945, 2.

36. Jenkins, Mayfair Boy, 142.

37. MEPO 3/902, Oct. 5, 1946.

38. Jenkins, Mayfair Boy, 156.

39. Ibid., 159.

40. Times, Sept. 14, 1948, 2; Oct. 16, 1948, 3; Daily Mail, Oct. 16, 1948, 3.

41. Jenkins, Mayfair Boy, 176. For the account of an Australian convict who knew Jenkins when he was “doing bird” (in Cockney rhyming slang “doing bird” means “doing bird lime” or “time”), see Margaret Wentworth, Hellbent: Ces Waters and Me: A Tale of Trust and Treachery (Chippendale, NSW: Kerr, 1998).

42. Daily Mail, Nov. 20, 1952, 3. Asserting that a Sunday newspaper was hounding him, in 1952 Jenkins changed his name by deed poll to “Peter Trowbridge.” Here he will continue to be referred to by his birth name. Manchester Guardian, Apr. 15, 1955, 9.

43. Daily Mail, Aug. 21, 1959, 7.

44. Daily Mail, Oct. 17, 1959, 7. A Peter M. Jenkins, age forty-nine, died September 1965, in Chelsea; England and Wales Death Registration Index 5A (1965): 614 line 131.

45. Examiner (Launceston, Tasmania), Oct. 29, 1938, 25.

46. People, July 2, 1939, 17.

47. Daily Mail, Feb. 21, 1938, 12.

48. MEPO 3/902, Jan. 6 1938. On Blacker-Douglas’s social life, see Times, July 20, 1933, 15; July 25, 1933, 17; Sept. 27, 1933, 13; Mar. 1, 1938, 19; June 2, 1939, 7. On the death of his father in France on Dec. 13, 1943, see Times, Apr. 4, 1944, 1. On his marriage, see Times, May 24, 1948, 1.

49. Timothy Travers, How the War Was Won: Command and Technology in the British Army on the Western Front, 1917–1918 (New York: Routledge, 1992), 6.

50. Times, July 2, 1934, 19; Mar. 28, 1934, 17. On her marriage, see Times, Jan. 11, 1939, 13.

51. Since she was still a minor the appeal was formally made by Hilary’s guardian. Divorce Court File: 3840 (Appellant: Hilary Inez Elizabeth Wilmer; Respondent: David Wilmer), Records of the Supreme Court of Judicature and Related Courts, National Archives.

52. Evening Telegraph, Mar. 18, 1938, 4; Times, Mar. 19, 1938, 4; Daily Mail, Mar. 19, 1938, 5.

53. Cavendish Morton’s photographic portrait of Patrick Gamble as a child is in the National Portrait Gallery.

54. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 22, 1937, David Wilmer further statement.

55. Times, Aug. 3, 1918, 9. Henry Reginald Gamble was for fourteen years vicar of Holy Trinity, Sloane Street (which had a large influential West End congregation), in 1916 Canon of Westminster, and in 1918 Dean of Exeter.

56. Daily Mail, Oct. 29, 1935, 16.

57. Times, Oct. 29, 1935, 5. Marter and Lady Mercy married in 1936.

58. “Romance in the Clink; or, What’s to Become of London’s Playboy Raffles?” American Weekly, Apr. 16, 1944, 5.

59. MEPO 3/902, Oct. 5, 1946, RMH writes Sir Frank Newsam at the Home Office.

60. “Captain Paul Phillimore, son of the Rev. Arthur Phillimore, was married on Wednesday to Miss Augusta Tredcroft, daughter of Colonel and the Hon. Mrs Tredcroft, of Glen Ancrum, Guildford.” Tablet, Apr. 14, 1917, 12.

61. Times, Mar. 11, 1936, 19; May 4, 1936, 21; May 28, 1936, 19; May 7, 1937, 11.

62. “BEAUMONT, Baroness, 11th in line cr 1309. Mona Josephine Tempest Fitzalan-Howard; née Stapleton. Born Broughton Hall, Skipton, 1 Aug. 1894; e d of 10th Baron and late Ethel Mary, d of Sir Charles H. Tempest, 1st and last Bt of Heaton; m 1914, 3rd Baron Howard of Glossop; four s four d. Roman Catholic; died 31 Aug. 1971.” Who Was Who, www.ukwhoswho.com/view/article/oupww/whowaswho/U152156 (accessed Sept. 17, 2015).

63. Daily Mail, Nov. 13, 1937, 11; Times, Nov. 12, 1937, 19.

64. New York Post, Mar. 3, 1939, 19; for the subsequent engagement of Richard Michael Allye Clifton, son of John Talbot de Vere Clifton of Lytham Hall, Lytham St. Annes and Annamary Corbet-Burcher, owners of purportedly the finest Georgian house in Lancashire, see Times, Aug. 4, 1943, 7.

65. Times, Feb. 9, 1939, 17; Mar. 1, 1939, 19; Daily Mail, Mar. 7, 1939, picture gallery.

66. Daily Mail, Apr. 16, 1940, 7.

67. During the Dunkirk evacuation a Gilbert Eric Graham Cockburn of the Royal Irish Fusiliers was reported as missing. It was later established that he was killed in action. Times, July 23, 1940, 1. It is easy to confuse him with Pamela’s husband, Gilbert Alastair William Graham Cockburn. On the latter’s involvement in a long-running libel action, see Times, Apr. 12, 1956, 14; May 2, 1956, 1; and Daily Mail, June 22, 1957, 5.

68. London Gazette, July 21, 1944, 34427; Jan. 10, 1947, 245.

69. England and Wales Marriage Registration Index 1A (1945): 659, lines 78, 89, 99.

70. Daily Mail, Feb. 19, 1938, 9.

71. A Parisian paper quoted the Star’s account of Harley’s punishment: “Harley a subi son châtiment virilement. Toute la prison l’admire pour son courage.” Le Populaire, Mar. 3, 1938, 5.

72. Frances H. Simon, Prisoners’ Work and Vocational Training (London: Routledge, 2005), 5–6.

73. Times, May 15, 1940, 3; Daily Mail, May 15, 1940, 8; Evening Telegraph, May 15, 1940, 5.

74. Daily Mail, Feb. 22, 1938, 9; see also Hull Daily Mail, Feb. 21, 1938, 1, and Gloucestershire Echo, Feb. 21, 1938, 1.

75. See, e.g., Milwaukee Sentinel, Apr. 16, 1944, 21; American Weekly, Apr. 16, 1944, 5; San Antonio Light, Apr. 16, 1944, 41; World’s News (Sydney), July 22, 1944, 4.

76. The Electoral Register in 1946 had a Robert Paul Harley and a Dorothy E. Harley living in Kensington at 9b Penywern Road, SW5; in 1948, at 35 Philbeach Gardens, SW5.

77. MEPO 3/902, Oct. 5, 1946.

78. George Orwell, “Raffles and Miss Blandish” (which first appeared in Tribune, Aug. 25, 1944), in The Collected Essays (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 3:214.

Part II. The Context

1. King’s Counsellor: Abdication and War: The Diaries of Tommy Lascelles, ed. Duff Hart-Davis (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), 110. Lascelles, who served Edward from 1920 to 1928, wrote up this summary in 1943.

6: Pain

1. H. Montgomery Hyde, Norman Birkett: The Life of Lord Birkett of Ulverston (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1964), 466.

2. Mail (Adelaide), Feb. 19, 1938, 3.

3. San Bernardino County Sun, Feb. 20, 1938, 3.

4. For the legal community’s noting that corporal punishment was “brought into prominence recently by the flogging of the ‘Mayfair men,’ ” see Solicitor: A Journal for Solicitors and Their Managing Clerks 5 (1938): 74.

5. On life in the Scrubs, see H. W. Wicks, The Prisoner Speaks (London: Jarrolds, 1938), and Richard Griffiths, “Anti-Semitic Obsessions: The Case of H. W. Wicks,” Patterns of Prejudice 48, 1 (2014): 94–113.

6. Times, Feb. 28, 1938, 11; Daily Mail, Feb. 28, 1938, 13.

7. Evening Telegraph, Mar. 1, 1938, 1.

8. Times, Feb. 25, 1938, 9.

9. Times, Mar. 4,1938, 7.

10. Montreal Gazette, Mar. 2, 1938, 1; Glasgow Herald, Mar. 2, 1938, 7.

11. Dundee Courier, Mar. 2, 1938, 7.

12. The IP story appeared in American papers such as the Bluefield (WV) Daily Telegraph, Mar. 2, 1938, 1; Ogden (UT) Standard-Examiner, Mar. 1, 1938, 3; and Altoona (PA) Tribune, Mar. 2, 1938, 1.

13. Le Populaire, Mar. 3, 1938, 5.

14. Times, June 21, 1932, 5; Jan. 25, 1935, 6; Feb. 16, 1937, 13.

15. Report of the Departmental Committee on Corporal Punishment, Cmd. 5684 (London: HMSO, 1938), 52–54. In 343 cases between 1925 and 1934, 9 floggings were halted and 4 men needed to be hospitalized.

16. As the Home Office would not allow the taking of a new photograph of the triangle, the paper used an old one by Philippe Millet from L’Illustration. See Sunday Pictorial, Feb. 20, 1938, 3. For a 1926 first-person account of a Canadian lashing, see Jack Black, You Can’t Win (Blacksburg, VA: Wilder Publications, 2010), 171–175.

17. San Bernardino County Sun, Feb. 20, 1938, 3.

18. Times, Feb. 4, 1930, 11; Feb. 6, 1930, 15. His inquest jury returned a verdict of “temporary insanity,” insisting that Spiers’s objection was not to flogging but to his long sentence.

19. Times, Nov. 30, 1934, 4.

20. Times, Dec. 7, 1934, 7; Dec. 12, 1934, 7.

21. Toronto Globe and Mail, Mar. 2, 1938, 13; Mar. 14, 1938, 15.

22. Kingston Gleaner (Jamaica), Mar. 25, 1938, 35.

23. Times, Feb. 16, 1938, 18.

24. On the end of flogging in the British navy in 1881, see Isaac Land, “Customs of the Sea: Flogging, Empire, and the ‘True British Seaman’ 1770 to 1870,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 3, 2 (2001): 169–185.

25. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).

26. Youths continued to be birched, but here we restrict our discussion solely to the punishment of adults. But see Cyril Burt, The Young Delinquent (London: University of London Press, 1925); S. F. Hatton, London’s Bad Boys (London: Chapman & Hall, 1931), Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (London: Macmillan, 1983), 261n92; Stephen Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels: An Oral History of Working-Class Childhood and Youth, 1889–1939 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), 220–223.

27. Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885–1914 (London: Penguin, 1995), 298.

28. McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity, 13–36; Raymond L. Gard, The End of the Rod: A History of the Abolition of Corporal Punishment in the Courts of England and Wales (Boca Raton, FL: Brown Walker Press, 2009).

29. In a satiric novel a Scot notes: “If you assault a man in England and bash his teeth down his throat and kick him in the stomach, that’s just playfulness and you’ll get fourteen days in the jug. But if you lay a finger on him and pinch his watch at the same time, that’s robbery with violence, and you’ll probably get eighteen strokes with the ‘cat’ and about three years in Dartmoor.” A. G. MacDonell, England, Their England (London: Macmillan, 1933), 11–12.

30. A. Crocker and S. Pete, “Letting Go of the Lash: The Extraordinary Tenacity and Prolonged Decline of Judicial Corporal Punishment in Britain and Its Former Colonies in Africa: Part 1,” Obiter 28, 2 (2007): 272.

31. Report of the Departmental Committee on Corporal Punishment, 130. Robbery with violence dropped from an annual average of 199 (1898–1903) to 73 (1931–1935), but the percentage of those found guilty of the crime who were flogged rose from 11.2 to 44.4 percent.

32. For the argument that the committee played down the extent of corporal punishment since it wanted to end it, see Gard, The End of the Rod, 102.

33. Mr. Justice Roche repeated the story that the lash put an end to garroting in Liverpool. Times, Feb. 8, 1930, 7.

34. Report of the Departmental Committee on Corporal Punishment, 84–85.

35. J. V. McAree “Official Report Condemns Flogging,” Toronto Globe and Mail, Apr. 22, 1938, 6.

36. Report of the Departmental Committee on Corporal Punishment, 74.

37. Ibid., 57; see also E. Lewis-Faning, “Statistics Relating to the Deterrent Element in Flogging,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 102, 4 (1939): 565–578.

38. Evening Telegraph, Mar. 18, 1938, 3.

39. Spectator, Mar. 25, 1938, 3.

40. Spectator, Feb. 25, 1938, 18.

41. Ian Gibson, The English Vice: Beating, Sex and Shame in Victorian England and After (London: Duckworth, 1978), 181.

42. Cicely M. Craven, “Flogging: The Last Chapter But One,” Howard Journal 5, 2 (1938): 102–107.

43. George Benson and Edward Glover, Corporal Punishment on Indictment (London: Howard League for Penal Reform, 1931); George Benson, Flogging: The Law and Practice in England (London: Howard League for Penal Reform, 1931) and Flogging: The Law and Practice in England, rev. ed. (London: Howard League for Penal Reform, 1937). On his earlier Corporal Punishment Abolition Bill, see Times, Feb. 12, 1930, 8.

44. HC Deb 16 Nov. 1938, vol. 341, cc964.

45. The Cadogan committee found that Canada stood out with an average of 130 floggings a year (1932–1936). Report of the Departmental Committee on Corporal Punishment, 150.

46. E. Roy Calvert and Theodora Calvert, The Lawbreakers (London: Routledge, 1933); New Statesman and Nation, Feb. 26, 1938, 319.

47. Spectator, Mar. 11, 1938, 431.

48. HC Deb 7 Apr. 1936 vol. 310 cc2611; see also Linda Mahood, “ ‘Give him a Doing’: The Birching of Young Offenders in Scotland,” Canadian Journal of History 37, 3 (2002): 439–457.

49. Maxims for Revolutionists is an appendix to Shaw’s play Man and Superman (1903) and is supposedly a revolutionary manual written by John Tanner, the play’s main character.

50. Gibson, The English Vice.

51. Henry S. Salt, The Flogging Craze: A Statement of the Case against Corporal Punishment (London: George Allen, 1916), 80.

52. Ibid.

53. George Bernard Shaw, Misalliance, in Collected Works (London: Constable, 1930), 13:56.

54. Ogden Standard-Examiner, Mar. 1, 1938, 3; see also Lisa Z. Sigel, Making Modern Love: Sexual Narratives and Identities in Interwar Britain (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 166–169.

55. C. Gordon Clunn to the New Statesman and Nation, Feb. 26, 1938, 323–324.

56. New Statesman and Nation, Mar. 5, 1938, 361.

57. Report of the Departmental Committee on Corporal Punishment, 110.

58. Times, Nov. 30, 1938, 7.

59. Times, Nov. 6, 1931, 10.

60. Times, Dec. 16, 1930, 16.

61. Times, Mar. 4, 1932, 11.

62. Times, July 1, 1932, 9.

63. Times, Nov. 30, 1938, 7. Moore was an admirer of another animal lover, Adolf Hitler. See Moore’s article “The Blackshirts Have What the Conservatives Need,” Daily Mail, Apr. 25, 1934, 2.

64. Report of the Departmental Committee on Corporal Punishment, 91–92.

65. HC Deb 1 Dec. 1938 vol. 342 cc694.

66. Dundee Courier, Feb. 19, 1938, 6.

67. Times, Jan. 3, 1939, 7.

68. Times, Jan. 10, 1939, 17. In 1881 Parliament ended flogging in the army, but it was only suspended in the navy. Clive Emsley, Soldier, Sailor, Beggarman, Thief: Crime and the British Armed Services since 1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 20.

69. Spectator, Jan. 6, 1939, 7.

70. Spectator, Mar. 4, 1938, 366.

71. F. Mead, “Corporal Punishment,” National Review, Sept. 1938, 359.

72. Sunday Times (Perth, WA), Apr. 17, 1938, 1.

73. Spectator, Mar. 4, 1938, 366.

74. Robert Armstrong-Jones, “Corporal Punishment,” Nineteenth Century, Aug. 1938, 215. Robert Fabian would continue this tradition of belittling psychological interpretations. “They seem to think these days that because your nanny patted your bottom when you were two, it entitles you to run a razor over someone’s face when you are 22.” Daily Mail, Oct. 29, 1962, 6.

75. F. Mead, “ Corporal Punishment,” National Review, Sept. 1938, 355–360.

76. The article first appeared in the Daily Telegraph and Morning Post, Mar. 8, 1938, 15, and was reprinted in the Kingston Gleaner (Jamaica), Mar. 25, 1938, 35.

77. Evening Post, Aug. 5, 1939, 7.

78. It was a given that liberals opposed the lash. Malcolm Muggeridge recalled, as a neophyte, asking a Manchester Guardian colleague: “What’s our ‘line’ on corporal punishment? The journalist replied: ‘The same as capital, only more so.’ ” Malcolm Muggeridge, “The Great Liberal Death Wish,” Imprimis, the Monthly Journal of Hillsdale College 8, 5 (May 1979).

79. Evening Telegraph, Mar. 18, 1938, 3.

80. New Statesman and Nation, Mar. 5, 1938, 361.

81. Times, Mar. 18, 1938: 17.

82. Spectator, Mar. 4, 1938, 347; see also “The Press and the ‘Cat,’ ” New Statesman and Nation, Mar. 5, 1938, 364, and J. D. A., “The Case against Flogging,” Spectator, Feb. 25, 1938, 314–315.

83. Spectator, Mar. 18, 1938, 471–472. On the elite’s distaste for the sensationalism of the popular press, see D. L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 110–112.

84. Only men were involved in such contests. The whipping of women had been ended in 1820 (1 Geo. 4, c. 57).

85. Gard, The End of the Rod, 105.

86. HC Deb 1 Dec. 1938 vol. 342 cc672.

87. Ibid., cc694.

88. Times, Mar. 12, 1946, 5.

89. HC Deb 15 July 1948 vol. 453 cc1560.

90. Evening News, July 23, 1948; Daily Mail, July 24, 1948, 3.

91. See 11 & 12 Geo. 6, c. 58.

92. Gibson, The English Vice, 182.

93. Though appointed by the Labour government, Lord Goddard, the Lord Chief Justice, espoused the line that in the absence of flogging, gangsterism and violence flourished. He was a peculiar man, and it has been claimed that “[i]t was the task of the Lord Chief Justice’s clerk, Arthur Harris, to take a spare pair of the standard striped trousers to court on sentencing days. When condemning a youth to be flogged or hanged, Goddard always ejaculated.” Penguin Encyclopaedia of Crime (London: Penguin, 1996), 574.

94. Times, Mar. 10, 1950, 8.

95. Manchester Guardian, Mar. 18, 1950, 6.

96. Robert Fabian, “Only the ‘CAT’ Holds Back the Brutes,” Empire News, July 11, 1954, 6. In addressing the Anti-Violence League, Fabian indulged in the most violent fantasies. “Today a criminal can grind his heel in your face, slash you across the face, wipe a bicycle chain around your neck or wipe a sleeve lined with fishhooks down your face, and you must not lay a hand on him.” Sunday Times, July 16, 1961, 4.

97. According to some accounts the men were not as repentant as Fabian claimed. “One of the Mayfair men became popular at parties where he took off his shirt to show the scars which would be there for life.” Alan Jenkins, The Thirties (London: Stein & Day, 1976), 168.

98. Paul Lawrence, “Fabian, Robert Honey (1901–1978),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Sept. 2010), www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/77433 (accessed Nov. 24, 2014).

99. Grassroots Conservatives were so preoccupied by fears of hooligans and the need to give blackguards “a taste of their own medicine” that in 1960, despite government reluctance, a report was prepared for Rab Butler of the Home Office on the possible reintroduction of corporal punishment. Of the 3,500 letters the Advisory Council received, 77 percent were for flogging and 17 percent against. Nevertheless, the council concluded that the Cadogan committee was correct in finding such punishments ineffective, and the case was closed. Corporal Punishment: Report to the Advisory Council on the Treatment of Offenders (London: HMSO, 1960).

7: Masculinity

1. See, e.g., Lesley Hall, ed., Outspoken Women: An Anthology of Women’s Writing on Sex, 1870–1969 (London: Routledge, 2005).

2. OED Online, www.oed.com /view/Entry/145481?rskey=OOD6xZ&result=1 (accessed Aug. 29, 2015).

3. John Millington Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (New York: Mercier Press, 1990), 22, 40. For the observation that “[w]e have almost entirely lost the literature of roguery, the life of which has been prolonged in Ireland by the tradition of disrespect for foreign law,” see V. S. Pritchett, “The End of Gael,” The Complete Essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1991), 121.

4. David M. Kiely, John Millington Synge: A Biography (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1994), 165.

5. Playboy: A Portfolio of Art and Satire 1 (1919): 5.

6. D. H. Lawrence to John Middleton Murry, Sept. 17, 1923, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 500. The Times referred to Irish Republicans’ dream of a united Ireland as “playboyism.” Times, Aug. 5, 1924, 11.

7. Mazo de la Roche, Whiteoak Harvest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1936), 160.

8. Times, Jan. 7, 1933, 9; Oct. 7, 1933, 13; Daily Mail, Nov. 3, 1928, 10.

9. Temple Bailey, “Playboy,” Good Housekeeping 105 (Dec. 1935): 44–46, 197–203; Richard Connell, Playboy (New York: Putnam’s, 1936).

10. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “On the Progress of the War,” Fireside Chat 20, Feb. 23, 1942, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=16224 (accessed Jan. 17, 2017).

11. A batch of letters written by the Prince of Wales to his mistress Freda Dudley Ward revealed, according to the New York Times, “a man alarmingly spoiled, relentlessly misogynistic, caustically racist, and determined to avoid his ordained role in life at all costs.” New York Times, June 8, 2003, 9.7.

12. “Mrs S.,” wrote one courtier, “was no isolated phenomenon, but merely the current figure in an arithmetical progression that had been robustly maintained for nearly twenty years.” Alan Lascelles, King’s Counsellor: Abdication and War: The Diaries of Tommy Lascelles, ed. Duff Hart-Davis (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), 113; Philip Ziegler, King Edward VIII: The Official Biography (London: Collins, 1990), 150.

13. New York Times, May 24, 1931, SM 2; Apr. 28, 1935, BR3; Washington Post, Jan. 21, 1936, 1. His brother, Prince George, Duke of Kent, a bisexual playboy who died in a 1942 plane crash, had been targeted by extortionists. See Angus McLaren, Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 121.

14. Leonore Davidoff and Belinda Westover, “ ‘From Queen Victoria to the Jazz Age’: Women’s World in England, 1880–1939,” in Our Work, Our Lives, Our Words: Women’s History and Women’s Work, ed. Leonore Davidoff and Belinda Westover (London: Macmillan, 1986), 28.

15. Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher, Sex before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England, 1918–1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 328; Lesley Hall, ed., Outspoken Women: An Anthology of Women’s Writing on Sex, 1870–1969 (London: Routledge, 2005), 101–102.

16. McLaren, Twentieth-Century Sexuality, 51–52.

17. Bourne challenged the law against abortion by notifying the authorities that he had terminated the pregnancy of a fourteen-year-old girl whom a group of soldiers had gang-raped. Barbara Brookes and Paul Roth, “Rex v. Bourne and the Medicalization of Abortion,” in Legal Medicine in History, ed. Michael Clark and Catherine Crawford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 314–343.

18. The censorious were particularly appalled at the idea of women drinking to excess. A judge described the tipsy victim of one robbery as “loathsome,” while the reviewer of the comedy Kicking the Moon Around wrote that the otherwise excellent film had one flaw: “The scene showing Pepper coming in drunk is an unfortunate episode, as it will certainly prove distasteful to some.” Daily Mail, July 6, 1939, 5; Monthly Film Bulletin, Jan. 31, 1938, 66.

19. Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Interwar Britain (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004); Lucy Bland, Modern Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 106–107.

20. On the argument that the history of masculinity focuses on such desires, see Graham Dawson, “The Blond Bedouin: Lawrence of Arabia, Imperial Adventure and the Imagining of English-British Masculinity,” in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800, ed. Michael Roper and John Tosh (London: Routledge, 1991), 118–119.

21. M. Collins, “The Fall of the English Gentleman: The National Character in Decline, c. 1918–1970,” Historical Research 75 (2002): 93. The architect Edwin Luytens referred to the “masculine repose” of his chimneys. See Gabriel Koureas, Memory, Masculinity and National Identity in British Visual Culture, 1914–1930 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 42.

22. Christine Grandy, Heroes and Happy Endings: Class, Gender, and Nation in Popular Film and Fiction in Interwar Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014).

23. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, “Building a British Superman: Physical Culture in Interwar Britain,” Journal of Contemporary History 41 (2006): 595–610, 600–601.

24. Praseeda Gopinath, Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities after Empire (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2013).

25. For newspapers’ assertion that the modern woman’s brother was anemic, weary, feminine, bloodless, and “an exquisite without masculinity,” see D. J. Taylor, Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation, 1918–1940 (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007), 53.

26. On the important point that “[w]hat is fascinating, if perhaps frustratingly ambiguous, is that the promotion of and resistance to romantic ideals in popular culture occurred simultaneously,” see Stephen Brooke “ ‘A Certain Amount of Mush’: Love, Romance, Celluloid and Wax in the Mid-Twentieth Century,” in Love and Romance in Britain, 1918–1970, ed. Alana Harris and Timothy Willem Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 84.

27. Laura King, Family Men: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Britain, 1914–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991).

28. The American male consumer became fully formed during the economic boom of the 1920s and was an established figure by 1933, when Esquire magazine was launched. See Anna Gough-Yates and Bill Osgerby, eds., Action TV: Tough-Guys, Smooth Operators and Foxy Chicks (London: Routledge, 2001).

29. For Barbara Ehrenreich the traditional middle-class masculine breadwinner’s ethos of thrift and family-based respectability gave way in 1950s America to the new Playboy ethics, which was more in step with the demands of an economy increasingly based on commodity consumption. Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1983), 170–171.

30. Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

31. Bill Osgerby, Playboys in Paradise: Masculinity, Youth and Leisure-style in Modern America (New York: Berg, 2001). It is worthy of note that in 1936, Hutton of Northampton advertised his newly designed crepe sole footwear as “Playboy shoes.”

32. Bill Osgerby, “A Pedigree of the Consuming Male: Masculinity, Consumption and the American ‘Leisure Class,’ ” Sociological Review 51, 1 (2003): 65. See also Tom Pendergast, Creating the Modern Man: American Magazines and Consumer Culture, 1900–1950 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000).

33. Martin Green, Children of the Sun: A Narrative of “Decadence” in England after 1918 (New York: Basic, 1976).

34. Osbert Sitwell, Great Morning (London: Macmillan, 1948); see also Punch, May 25, 1938, 580–581. Thomas Burke listed Swell, Johnny, Masher, Blood, K’nut, and Gigolo. Daily Mail, Apr. 6, 1934, 10. One might add boulevardier, exquisite, lady-killer, lounge lizard, and man-about-town.

35. See Daniel Statt, “The Case of the Mohocks: Rake Violence in Augustan London,” Social History 20, 2 (1995): 179–199; Peter McNeil, “Macaroni Masculinities,” Fashion Theory, 4, 4 (2000), 373–403.

36. Jenkins, Mayfair Boy, 66.

37. Philip Hoare, Noël Coward: A Biography (Chicago: Chicago University Press,1995).

38. Terry Castle, Noël Coward and Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). See also Laura Doan, Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 238n77.

39. Cecil Beaton, The Glass of Fashion (New York: Doubleday, 1954), 153.

40. Orson Welles, cited in Gene D. Phillips, Beyond the Epic: The Life and Films of David Lean (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006), 65. The play was written in 1939, performed in 1942, and filmed in 1944.

41. Coward Plays: 4: Blithe Spirit; Present Laughter; This Happy Breed (London: Bloomsbury, 1990), xiv.

42. Nell Murray, “Mayfair’s Spoiled Young People,” Sunday Mail (Brisbane), Mar. 20, 1938, 45.

43. Andrew Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema (London: I. B. Taurus, 2001); Grandy, Heroes and Happy Endings, 177–198.

44. Cited in Michael Williams, Ivor Novello: Screen Idol (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 40.

45. Yorkshire Evening Post, Sept. 18, 1937, 5.

46. George Mikes, How to Be an Alien (London: Andre Deutsch, 1946), 22.

47. Nancy Mitford, Highland Fling (New York: Vintage, 2010), 13.

48. Western Daily Press, Nov. 15, 1937, 7.

49. Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero (London: Hogarth Press, 1984), 253.

50. Aberdeen Journal, Mar. 4, 1937, 6.

51. George Orwell, An Age Like This: 1920–1940, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 1:226.

52. Adrian Bingham, Gender, Modernity, and the Popular Press in Interwar Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004).

53. D. Todd, “Decadent Heroes: Dandyism and Masculinity in Art Deco Hollywood,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 32, 4 (2010): 168–181.

54. Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 74.

55. On middle-class worries about the feminization of British society, see Light, Forever England, 118.

56. Jill Greenfield, Sean O’Connell, and Chris Read, “Fashioning Masculinity: Men Only, Consumption and the Development of Marketing in the 1930s,” Twentieth-Century British History 10, 4 (1999): 466; see also Harry Cocks, “ ‘The Social Picture of Our Own Times’: Reading Obscene Magazines in 1940s Britain,” Twentieth Century British History 27, 2 (2016): 171–194.

57. Men Only, Dec. 1935, 13; Jan. 1938, 10.

58. Trevor Allen, Underworld; The Biography of Charles Brooks, Criminal (London: R. M. McBride, 1931), 258–259.

59. Psychoanalytical explanations of how smothering mothers putatively made sissified men were more common in the United States than in Britain. On such “limp and querulous” men, see Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (1942; reprint, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1955), 208.

60. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 20, 1937, Statement of Henrietta Gordon.

61. Peter Bailey, “Fats Waller Meets Harry Champion: Americanization, National Identity and Sexual Politics in Interwar British Music Hall,” Cultural and Social History 4, 4 (2007): 495–509.

62. Justin Bengry, “Courting the Pink Pound: Men Only and the Queer Consumer, 1935–39,” History Workshop Journal 68, 1 (2009): 12. Harry Raymond, the famous blackmailer of homosexuals, was described as a handsome playboy in the Mirror (Perth) Jan. 8, 1938, 2; also see McLaren, Sexual Blackmail, 108–120. For a scabrous poetic presentation of an aging gay playboy, see “The Playboy of the Demi-World: 1938,” in William Plomer, Collected Poems (London: Cape, 1973), 119–120.

63. Daily Mail, July 7, 1939, 7.

64. Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Weekend: A Social History of Great Britain 1918–1939 (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 217; see also John Worby, The Other Half: The Autobiography of a Spiv (London: J. M. Dent, 1937), 165; Taylor Croft, The Cloven Hoof: A Study of Contemporary London Vices (London: Denis Archer, 1932), 63.

65. Yorkshire Evening Post, Feb. 6, 1937, 7.

66. In 2012 a 1934 teddy bear coat sold at auction for £20,400. “ ‘Teddy’ coats were all the rage in the 1930s when, despite the Depression, fashion was influenced by the escapist glamour of the ‘golden age’ of Hollywood.” Daily Mail, Oct. 19, 2012.

67. Philip Hoare, “I Love a Man in a Uniform: The Dandy Esprit de Corps,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture 9, 3 (2005): 275.

68. Peter Jenkins, Mayfair Boy (London: W. H. Allen, 1952), 120–129.

69. Ibid., 173.

70. Sali Löbel, Glamour and How to Achieve It (London: Hutchinson, 1938), 20. On the bankruptcy of Löbel’s Every Women’s Health Movement, see The Times, June 1, 1940, 11.

71. Times, Feb. 21, 1938, 12.

72. Daily Mail, Feb. 21, 1938, 12.

73. Argus (Melbourne), July 2, 1938, 10.

74. The code mothers purportedly used when exchanging information on eligible young men included NSIT (Not Safe in Taxis) or MTF (Must Touch Flesh) or VVSITPQ (Very Very Safe in Taxis Probably Queer). See Fiona MacCarthy, Last Curtsey: The End of the Debutantes (London: Faber & Faber, 2006), 71.

75. Sarah Churchill, Keep on Dancing: An Autobiography (London: Littlehampton, 1981), 60.

76. Times, Sept. 17, 1936; New York Times, Sept. 16, 1936, 27; Sept. 17, 1936, 25.

77. Mary Soames, A Daughter’s Tale: The Memoir of Winston Churchill’s Youngest Child (New York: Random House, 2012), 52–53.

78. When Churchill was told that though he had many burdens, they weren’t as great as those of Hitler and Mussolini, he purportedly replied, “Ah! but Mussolini has this consolation, that he could shoot his son-in-law!” His barb could have been directed at either Vic Oliver or Duncan Sandys. Cecil King, With Malice toward None: A War Diary (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1970), 267.

79. Churchill, Keep on Dancing, 68–69.

80. Entry for Sept. 17, 1936, in Diary of Robert Graves 1935–39 and Ancillary Material (University of Victoria, 2002), http://graves.uvic.ca/graves/site/index.xml (accessed Jan. 15, 2017).

81. According to a police informer, Stewart Cappel and Tony Wheeler were criminal associates. On Wheeler, see Graves’s account: “Then to Spotted Dog in Burton Mews. Met Pat Moran and Tony Wheeler. Tony Wheeler hardboiled, married, speaking against Jenny living alone without a ‘background’—‘you’d only get a chap like Pat if you wanted to marry.’ ” Entry Nov. 24, 1936, Diary of Robert Graves; see also MEPO 3/902, Jan. 20, 1938, Metropolitan police telegrams 20 and 21 Jan. 1938.

82. Entry Dec. 1936, Diary of Robert Graves; see also Richard Perceval Graves, Robert Graves: The Years with Laura 1926–40 (New York: Viking, 1990), 261–264, and Miranda Seymour, Robert Graves: Life on the Edge (London: Doubleday, 1995), 247–248.

83. Entry Dec. 23, 1937, Diary of Robert Graves.

84. Daily Mail, Feb. 21, 1938, 12.

85. Dover Express, Jan. 26, 1940, 8; Times, Jan. 19, 1940, 5; Mar. 12, 1940, 3.

86. Times, Jan. 19, 1940, 5.

87. Daily Mail, July 16, 1932, 7; July 19, 1932, 5; Mar. 16, 1936, 10; Times, Apr. 20, 1936, 17; Daily Mirror, Feb. 3, 1939, 13.

88. D. J. Taylor, Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation, 1918–1940 (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007).

89. Times, Oct. 20, 1932, 4.

90. See, e.g., “Motorist Killed. Narrow Escape for the Hon. Elizabeth Pelly. Mr. Gordon Russell, of Good Trees, Cowden, Kent, was killed yesterday in a motor accident near Maidstone.” Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, July 6, 1931, 8.

91. Ottawa Journal, Aug. 24, 1940, 19; Lincoln Evening Journal, Feb. 13, 1939, 2; Monthly Film Bulletin, Jan. 1, 1941, 46; Jan. 1, 1938, 196; New York Times, Apr. 30, 1932, 19; Times, Oct. 6, 1943, 6.

92. MEPO 3/902, Jan. 18, 1938, Detective Constable W. Chamberlain and Detective Sergeant Heathfield of Kent County to Commissioner. See also MEPO 3/902, Metropolitan police telegrams Jan. 20 and 21, 1938.

93. MEPO 3/902, Jan. 24, 1938, Burt report on Miss Cappel; Daily Mail, Dec. 24, 1937, 7.

94. Times, June 8, 1939, 9; June 9, 1939, 9; June 20, 1939, 11; June 28, 1939, 11; July 5, 1939, 18; July 7, 1939, 16; July 11, 1939, 9.

95. James Burge defended Stephen Ward during the Profumo scandal, but he was best known for having been the barrister on whom John Mortimer based the character of Horace Rumpole. Guardian, Jan. 16, 2009.

96. Times, July 21, 1939, 8.

97. Daily Mail, July 27, 1939, 5; Times, July 25, 1939, 4; July 26, 1939, 4; July 27, 1939, 16.

98. Times, July 27, 1939, 16.

99. Dundee Courier, July 27, 1939, 7. The judge was presumably thinking of the May 1939 scuffle in a Turkish bath between Charles Smirke, the Aga Khan’s jockey, and Derek Piggott, stepson of Sir Max Bonn, a wealthy American-born merchant banker and Jewish philanthropist. When the case came to court, Smirke’s barrister succeeded in portraying Piggott as a well-known Mayfair playboy who lounged around West End bars. Daily Mail, May 23, 1939, 13; Dec. 1, 1939, 4.

100. Times, Nov. 10, 1944, 7; Nov. 2, 1945, 1.

101. Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce: England, 1530–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 99–100.

102. Beverley Nichols, News of England (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1938), 163.

103. Fresno Bee, Apr. 21, 1936, 3.

104. Daily Mail, Apr. 16, 1936, 13; Daily Times, Apr. 22, 1936, 3; see also Australian Women’s Weekly, Sept. 26, 1936, 35.

105. “The following announcement appears today as an agony advertisement: To all whom it may concern.—I, Paul Vincent Desgrand Mitchell, hereby give notice … (I am) not responsible for my wife’s debts. Ann Mitchell, residing at the Splendide Hotel, Piccadilly.” Evening Telegraph, Jan. 12, 1938, 1; Times, Jan. 12, 1938, 1; Walter Winchell, “On Broadway,” Syracuse Journal, Feb. 7, 1938, 7.

106. Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Queensland), May 13, 1938, 5.

107. Times, July 28, 1938, 16.

108. Times, Dec. 22, 1938, 9. Mallory, an artist’s model, who did not have a “good family,” was to be supervised by a probation officer. See Times, July 30, 1938, 9; Aug. 8, 1938, 7; Sept. 17, 1938, 12; Jan. 12, 1939, 12.

109. Daily Mail, May 5, 1938, 13.

110. Mitchell was identified as a private and Jenkins as a signalman in the Royal Engineers. Daily Mail, Oct. 8, 1940, 3; Nov. 14, 1940, 3; Hull Daily Mail, Oct. 23,1940, 6.

111. Yorkshire Evening Post, Dec. 16, 1938, 15. For a photo of Leggi, see Daily Mail, Dec. 17, 1938, 3.

112. Leggi arrived in New York City on Mar. 4, 1938, aboard the U.S. liner Washington and returned to Plymouth on May 10, 1938. New York Passenger and Crew Lists 1938, https://familysearch.org/search/collection/results?count=20&query=%2Bgivenname%3A%22sylvia%20doris%22∼%20%2Bsurname%3Aleggi∼%20%2Bgender%3AF&collection_id=1923888 (accessed Jan. 15, 2017).

113. Dundee Courier, Dec. 1, 1938, 7; Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, Dec. 1, 1938, 3; Times, Dec. 1, 1938, 16; Dec. 17, 1938, 4.

114. Blood tests, which were beginning to be employed in British courts to determine paternity, were not helpful in this case. See “Blood Test Ends Paternity Claim,” Daily Mail, May 17, 1938, 11; Times, Dec. 17, 1938, 4.

115. Skeffington was not called as a witness but admitted through his counsel, B. B. Gillis, that he had slept with Leggi. Gillis, while representing Harley in the 1938 Hyde Park Hotel trial, had savagely cross-examined Jenkins.

116. Note that in 1938 both Wilmer and Harley approached Reginald Thomas Philip Bennett of Speed and Company, solicitors, for an alibi.

117. Yorkshire Evening Post, Dec. 16, 1938, 15.

118. Pat Thane and Tanya Evans, Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 78.

119. Times, Dec. 17, 1938, 4; Evening Telegraph, Dec. 16, 1938, 1. The boxer Max Baer was described as the “playboy of New York” because of several breach-of-promise suits brought against him. Daily Mail, May 15, 1934, 16.

120. Times, Mar. 15, 1939; Mar. 23, 1939, 1; Nov. 3, 1938, 17.

121. Times, Apr. 22, 1939, 4; Nov. 15, 1939, 3; Evening Telegraph, Nov. 14, 1939, 2. Skeffington succeeded his father in 1956. A member of the Carlton, Turf, and Royal Yacht Clubs; master of the Ashford Valley Fox hounds; and lord of Chilham Castle (Kent), he was the classic dotty peer. His speeches in the Lords were regarded as “bizarre.” Times, Jan. 9, 1993, 15.

122. Judicial Statistics stopped including breach of promise suits in its reports in 1922 as courts now rarely compensated for emotional injury. See Ginger S. Frost, “ ‘I Shall Not Sit Down and Crie’: Women, Class and Breach of Promise of Marriage Plaintiffs in England, 1850–1900,” Gender and History 6, 2 (1994): 224–245; Daily Mail, Apr. 21, 1937, 11; Saskia Lettmaier, Broken Engagements: The Action for Breach of Promise of Marriage and the Feminine Ideal, 1800–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 178–179.

123. HC Deb 5 Feb. 1937 vol. 319 cc1957.

124. McLaren, Sexual Blackmail, 176–179.

125. Daily Express, Feb. 15, 1935, 11.

126. Since she was still a minor the appeal was formally made by Hilary’s guardian. Divorce Court File: 3840 (1937), J77/3736/3840, National Archives, London.

127. Evening Telegraph, Mar. 18, 1938, 4; Times, Mar. 19, 1938, 4; Daily Mail, Mar. 19, 1938, 5.

128. Daily Mail, Feb. 22, 1938, 9; see also Hull Daily Mail, Feb. 21, 1938, 1; Gloucestershire Echo, Feb. 21, 1938, 1.

129. O. R. McGregor, Divorce in England: A Centenary Study (London: Heinemann, 1957).

130. Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 396; see also Colin S. Gibson, Dissolving Wedlock (London: Routledge, 1994), 85–98.

131. Daily Mail, Mar. 17, 1937, 13; see also Nov. 26, 1936, 11.

132. Bryan Guinness provides a fictional portrait of his failed marriage to Diana Mitford and the dreary divorce proceedings that resulted when she left him for Oswald Mosley in Singing Out of Tune (London: Putnam, 1933).

133. British censors banned four films dealing with collusive divorce and A. P. Herbert never succeeded in obtaining permission for the filming of his novel Holy Deadlock. Jeffrey Richards, “The British Board of Film Censors and Content Control in the 1930s: Images of Britain,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 1, 2 (1981): 34–35.

134. Times, Mar. 11, 1937, 4; Daily Mail, Mar. 17, 1937, 13.

135. Noting the Byzantine complexities of divorce law, a solicitor in the novel states: “Whenever I explain certain sections of the law my clients conclude that I must be mad or drunk.” A. P. Herbert, Holy Deadlock (London: Methuen, 1934), 29. Because of his concern for pub workers, Lady Astor (a prohibitionist) called Herbert the “playboy of the drink world.” Daily Mail, Mar. 7, 1936, 8.

136. Daily Mail, Nov. 23, 1935, 6. See also Reginald Pound, A. P. Herbert: A Biography (London: Michael Joseph, 1976), 135–148.

137. Times, Oct. 27, 1938, 4; Daily Mail, Dec. 14, 1939, 3. And on the tensions between modern marriage and traditional restraints, see Frank Mort, “Love in a Cold Climate: Letters, Public Opinion and Monarchy in the 1936 Abdication Crisis,” Twentieth Century British History 25, 1 (2014): 30–62.

138. Daily Mail, June 11, 1938, 11.

139. S. E. Karminski was the author of Some Aspects of the Development of English Personal Law in the Last Century (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1963).

140. Times, July 30, 1938, 3.

141. Evening Telegraph, Feb. 6, 1939, 5.

142. Ralph G. Martin, The Woman He Loved (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), 199–202.

143. Daily Mail, Apr. 17, 1939, 6.

144. MEPO 3/902, Dec. 22, 1937, Wilmer further statement.

145. Times, Nov. 2, 1939, 2.

146. Daily Mail, Nov. 7, 1939, 1. Shortly thereafter Hilary and Gamble married in West Ashford, Kent. See England and Wales Marriage Registration Index 2A (1939): 4847, line 139.

147. Times, Nov. 2, 1939, 2.

148. Films that followed some variant of the reformist plot with the hedonist finally seeing the evil of his ways include It Happened One Night (1934, dir. Frank Capra), No More Ladies (1935, dir. Edward H. Griffith), You Can’t Beat Love (1937, dir. Christy Cabanne), For You Alone (1937, dir. Robert Riskin), The Playboy (1938, dir. Walter Forde), Love Affair (1939, Leo McCarey), Millionaire Playboy (1940, dir. Leslie Goodwins), and Heaven Can Wait (1943, dir. Ernst Lubitsch).

8: Crime

1. Patrick Hamilton, The West Pier (1951; London: Kaye & Ward, 1974), 120. Gorse is a social climber and, unlike the Mayfair men, has to work at passing for upper-middle class.

2. Margery Allingham, Crime and Mr. Campion (New York: Doubleday, 1937).

3. Matt Houlbrook, “Commodifying the Self Within: Ghosts, Libels, and the Crook Life Story in Interwar Britain,” Journal of Modern History 85, 2 (2013): 325.

4. Christine Grandy, “ ‘Avarice’ and ‘Evil Doers’: Profiteers, Politicians, and Popular Fiction in the 1920s,” Journal of British Studies 50, 3 (2011): 667–689.

5. Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

6. Daily Mirror, July 6, 1939, 5; Daily Mail, July 7, 1939, 7.

7. Times, July 7, 1939, 11.

8. Coop wrote anti-Labour government songs such as “The Left Honourables” for a postwar stage review. See Daily Mail, Dec. 7, 1946, 3.

9. Victor became the sixth Marquess of Bristol in 1960. See Daily Sketch, July 7, 1939; Michael De-la-Noy, The House of Hervey: A History of Tainted Talent (London: Constable, 2001); Marcus Scriven, Splendour and Squalor: The Disgrace and Disintegration of Three Aristocratic Dynasties (London: Atlantic Books, 2009), 65–95.

10. Daily Mail, May 27, 1929, 12.

11. Times, July 7, 1939, 11.

12. Daily Mail, Sept. 21, 1935, 9.

13. Scriven, Splendour and Squalor, 85–86; Times, Mar. 23, 1937, 5.

14. Daily Mail, June 25, 1937, 7.

15. Scriven, Splendour and Squalor, 86–87; Daily Mail, Oct. 12, 1940, 3; Anne de Courcy, “Curse of the House of Hervey,” Daily Mail, Apr. 14, 2001, 32–33.

16. Daily Mail, Apr. 18, 1939, 17; Times, Apr. 18, 1939, 7.

17. Pauline Daubeny, the twenty-six-year-old daughter of the White Russian Princess Nicolas Galitzine, was in the midst of divorcing her husband, Reginald Daubeny. Daily Mail, Apr. 22, 1939, 6.

18. Walter had gone to the same school as Prince Yurka Galitzine, Pauline Daubeny’s half-brother. Manchester Guardian, May 17, 1939, 14.

19. Times, May 2, 1939, 11; Daily Mail, May 10, 1939, 16.

20. Times, May 2, 1939, 11.

21. Daily Mail, May 10, 1939, 16.

22. In 1939 Eustace Hoey was fined for selling spirits without an excise license at the Nest nightclub. The magistrate said it was “a bad place, exercising a bad influence.” Ottawa Journal, Feb. 11, 1939, 20.

23. Daily Mail, May 2, 1939, 6.

24. For the story headlined “Robbed Woman was ‘Pretty Drunk,’ ” see Daily Mail, May 10, 1939, 16.

25. Scriven, Splendour and Squalor, 93.

26. Daily Mail, July 4, 1939, 3; Times, July 4, 1939, 4.

27. Daily Mail, July 6, 1939, 5.

28. Daily Mail, July 7, 1939, 7.

29. Times, July 7, 1939, 11.

30. A year later Michael A. V. Walter, twenty-one, married Mrs. Gabrielle Burley and was interviewed in her luxurious Park Lane flat. See “Gem Trial Man Weds Hostess,” Daily Mail, Mar. 23, 1940, 5.

31. Daily Mail, July 21, 1939, 4. See Sunday Dispatch, July 9, 1939, 5; July 16, 1939, 5; July 23, 1939, 5; July 30, 1939, 15; Aug. 6, 1939, 15.

32. Christopher Andrew, Defense of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2008), 217. The story of Hervey robbing a Mayfair jeweller is repeated in Ben MacIntyre, Spy among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

33. When he was released on license in 1941 Hervey established a film company, but the police (and Chief Inspector Fabian in particular) still viewed him with suspicion. Shunned by many of his peers, he could at least count on the support of the eccentric John Whyte-Melville Skeffington, a fellow member of the Monarchist League. Scriven, Splendour and Squalor, 95, 102.

34. P. G. Wodehouse, Quick Service (1940; reprint, New York: Overlook Press, 1968), 115.

35. P. G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season (1947; reprint, London: Everyman, 2001), 164.

36. Sydney Morning Herald, Aug. 20, 1937, 12. The Dame of Sark, Sybil Mary Hathaway, was the daughter of W. F. Collings, seigneur of Sark. Dick Beaumont was her son by her first husband, Dudley Beaumont. See Barbara Stoney, Sybil, Dame of Sark: A Biography (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1978), 119, 215–216.

37. Times, Aug. 27, 1937, 9.

38. Daily Mail, Sept. 3, 1937, 17.

39. Times, Aug. 5, 1939, 9.

40. Daily Mail, July 20, 1937, 10.

41. Hugh G. Edwards, “Confessions of a Mayfair Playboy,” Sunday Pictorial, Apr. 7, 1940, 18–19.

42. Times, May 5, 1939, 11. The Times only used the term “Mayfair Playboy” from 1939 on.

43. Daily Mail, Feb. 21, 1938, 12.

44. John Bowlby, “Forty-four Juvenile Thieves: Their Characters and Home-life,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 25 (1944): 116.

45. Times, Feb. 3, 1938, 13.

46. Adrian Bingham, Family Newspapers: Sex, Private Life and the British Popular Press 1918–1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

47. On aristocratic habits of indebtedness, see Margot Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

48. The essay first appeared in Passing Show, Feb. 23, 1929. See “Careers for Our Sons,” in The Essays, Articles and Reviews of Evelyn Waugh, ed. Donat Gallagher (London: Methuen, 1983), 47–52.

49. Dorothy L. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise (1933; reprint, London: New English Library, 1969), 22.

50. Ngaio Marsh, Surfeit of Lampreys (London: Collins, 1941), 31.

51. Times, Mar. 18, 1938, 11; Mar. 19, 9; Mar. 22, 13; Daily Mail, Mar. 18, 1938, 11.

52. Evening Telegraph, Jan. 20, 1938, 5.

53. Ottawa Journal, Dec. 19, 1936, 19. His mother (the well-known actor June van Buskirk) was quoted as saying: “It is a shame that such young men as my son, with good family connections, should be the prey of certain people.” Daily Mail, Dec. 3, 1936, 14.

54. Daily Mail, Dec. 13, 1935, 14. In 1926, when only nineteen, he married Dorothy, a dance hostess daughter of Kate Meyrick, the notorious owner of the 43 Club on Gerard Street. See Michael John Law, “Speed and Blood on the Bypass: The New Automobilities of Interwar London,” Urban History 39, 3 (2012): 490–509.

55. Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None (1939; reprint, New York: William Morrow, 2011), 55.

56. Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 161.

57. Wolfgang Sachs, For Love of the Automobile: Looking Back into the History of Our Desires (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 112–115.

58. Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (1938; reprint, London: Everyman’s Library, 1993), 122. In the 1920s the Jordan Motor Company of Cleveland produced a swanky roadster called the “Playboy.”

59. New York Times, July 16, 1937, 22; Times, Aug. 2, 1937, 8.

60. Times, Oct. 29, 1938, 9.

61. Derby Daily Telegraph, Nov. 18, 1938, 5.

62. Daily Mail, Nov. 18, 1938, 13.

63. Dover Express, Nov. 2, 1934, 8. Traffic laws caused unprecedented friction between the middle class and the police. See Clive Emsley, “ ‘Mother, What Did Policemen Do When There Weren’t Any Motors?’ The Law, the Police and the Regulation of Motor Traffic in England, 1900–1939,” Historical Journal 36, 2 (1993): 357–381.

64. Hull Daily Mail, Oct. 4, 1934, 12; Times, Oct. 4, 1934, 9.

65. Daily Mail, Nov. 18, 1938, 13.

66. Miller’s father also killed himself. See Daily Mail, Nov. 19, 1938, 9.

67. Times, Dec. 19, 1939, 4; Jan. 19, 1940, 5; Mar. 12, 1940, 3; Nottingham Evening Post, Jan. 16, 1940, 6; Gloucestershire Echo, Jan. 18, 1940, 1.

68. Daily Mail, June 29, 1939, 9.

69. Scriven, Splendour and Squalor, 101.

70. Times, July 7, 1939, 11.

71. Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, July 6, 1931, 8; Daily Mail, July 27, 1931, 5.

72. Martin Francis, The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

73. Times, Sept. 28, 1938, 13; Jan. 6, 1983, 12.

74. His wife, Amy Johnson, broke some of his records. They divorced in 1938, and she was killed in 1941 ferrying aircraft. His drinking led to his pilot’s license being revoked in 1953. James Mollison, Playboy of the Air (London: M. Joseph, 1937); Aberdeen Journal, Sept. 13, 1937, 10; Ronald Bythe, The Age of Illusion: England in the Twenties and Thirties, 1919–1940 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963), 83–102.

75. Daily Sketch, Feb. 18, 1938, 4.

76. David Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane: Militarism, Modernity and Machines (Hampshire: Macmillan, 1991), 47–49; Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 187; Mark Rawlinson, British Writing of the Second World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 61.

77. Empire News, Mar. 6, 1938, 5; Brett Holman, The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908–1941 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 2–3.

78. Daily Mail, Feb. 21,1938, 12.

79. Derby Daily Telegraph, Nov. 18, 1938, 5.

80. News Chronicle, Feb. 19, 1938, 1, 3, 5.

81. Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season (London: Croom Helm, 1973); D. J. Taylor, Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation, 1918–1940 (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007), 73; Stephen Graham, London Nights (London: John Lane, 1925) and Twice Round the London Clock (London: Benn, 1933).

82. The press made a few references to playboys’ use of drugs. One journalist noted: “It is hard to tell if they dope, as they boast they do.” Daily Mail, Feb. 21, 1938, 12. On the police cleanup of “Mayfair’s so-called ‘playboys’ ” with raids on night clubs and bottle parties and the impounding of the passports of those suspected of “peddling dope,” see Daily Mail, June 13, 1938, 2.

83. Blythe, Age of Illusion, 37.

84. Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 70–75; Horace Wyndham, Nights in London: Where Mayfair Makes Merry (London: Bodley Head, 1926).

85. On Halsey’s prosecution, see Times, July 8, 1933, 9.

86. Judith Walkowitz, Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 229–230.

87. Times, July 14, 1936, 13.

88. Daily Mail, Dec. 22, 1939, 3. See also Times, Oct. 1, 1935, 4.

89. Times Apr. 20, 1938, 12.

90. Allison Jean Abra, “On with the Dance: Nation, Culture, and Popular Dancing in Britain, 1918–1945” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2009), 204; Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens: Commercial Sex in London, 1885–1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 139–140, 160–161; Louise Settle, “The Kosmo Club Case: Clandestine Prostitution during the Interwar Period,” Twentieth-Century British History 25, 4 (2014): 562–584.

91. Amy Milne-Smith, London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in Late-Victorian Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 205.

92. The club was destroyed in the blitz of October 1940. Stephen Bourne, Mother Country: Britain’s Black Community on the Home Front, 1939–45 (London: History Press, 2010).

93. Sidney Theodore Felstead, The Underworld of London (London: John Murray, 1923), 1, 3, 14; also see Lucy Bland, Modern Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 55–101.

94. Daily Mail, Dec. 3, 1936, 17.

95. On Lonsdale, see Empire News, Feb. 20, 1938, 1.

96. Daily Mail, June 5, 1936, 9; Oct. 26, 1936, 13.

97. Daily Mail, Aug. 23, 1937, 9.

98. The Times, June 8, 1939, 9; June 20, 1939, 11.

99. Daily Mail, July 27, 1939, 5.

100. Daily Mail, Mar. 7, 1941, 1.

101. Daily Mail, Nov. 5, 1948, 1; Dec. 24, 1948, 3; Jan. 10, 1949, 3.

102. Daily Mail, Sept. 21, 1953, 5.

103. Stephen Knight, “Radical Thrillers,” in Watching the Detectives: Essays in Crime Fiction, ed. Ian A. Bell and Graham Daldfy (London: Macmillan, 1990), 176. The Raffles stories first appeared in the Strand Magazine and subsequently in an 1899 collection. Additional stories appeared in The Black Mask (1901) and A Thief in the Night (1905). Hornung ultimately made amends for Raffles’s misdeeds by having him die heroically in the Boer War.

104. E. W. Hornung, The Amateur Cracksman (Toronto: Morang, 1899), 40.

105. George Smithson, Raffles in Real Life (London: Hutchinson 1930), which was puffed in “Confessions of a Real Raffles,” Daily Mail, May 23, 1930, 5. On his last job, see his “Burglar’s Confession,” Daily Mail, July 28, 1923, 4. He claimed to have taken £50,000 of booty in his last twelve months and admitted to thirty-six breakings and entries from 1922 to 1930.

106. Eloise Moss, “ ‘How I had liked this villain! How I had admired him!’: A. J. Raffles and the Burglar as Transnational British Icon, 1898–1939,” Journal of British Studies 53, 1 (2014): 136–161.

107. Hornung, The Amateur Cracksman, 88.

108. Ibid., 44, 69.

109. “A Costume Piece,” cited in Colin Watson, Snobbery with Violence (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1971), 44–45.

110. While the adventure novelists declared their hatred of the effeminate, they felt free in a pre-Freudian age to laud male attractiveness. Bunny admitted his jealousy when Raffles flirted with a German girl. Roger Pocock described his rugged hero as having shoulders and thighs “all of gigantic strength and beauty, a sight that would have appealed to any athlete as beyond the loveliness of women.” Graham Greene spoofed these conventions in imagining Bunny in Reading Gaol with Oscar Wilde. Hornung, The Amateur Cracksman, 80, 262; Roger Pocock, The Blackguard (London: Ward, Lock, 1897), 6; Graham Greene, The Return of A. J. Raffles (London: Bodley Head, 1975).

111. C. J. Cutliffe Hyne, Honour of Thieves (London: Chatto & Windus, 1895).

112. Christine Grandy, “The Empire and ‘Human Interest’: Popular Empire Films, the Colonial Villain, and the British Documentary Movement 1926–39,” Twentieth Century British History 25, 4 (2014): 509–532.

113. Pocock, The Blackguard, 124.

114. The People, May 3, 1925, 15.

115. George Orwell, “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” in The Collected Essays (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 3:212–221.

116. M. Collins, “The Fall of the English Gentleman: The National Character in Decline, c.1918–1970,” Historical Research 75 (2002): 90–111. On the elite’s fear of cultural commercialization and Americanization, see D. L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

117. New York Times, Dec. 23, 1937, 13.

118. Times, Aug. 5, 1930, 8; see also Federico Pagello, “A. J. Raffles and Arsène Lupin in Literature, Theatre, and Film: On the Transnational Adaptations of Popular Fiction (1905–30),” Adaptation 6, 3 (2013): 268–282. For the observation that in the “1939 remake when the code was being strictly enforced, David Niven’s Raffles had to give himself up,” see Neil McDonald, “The Romance of the Jewel Thief,” Quadrant 56, 10 (2012): 96.

119. New York Times, Feb. 23, 1933, 20.

120. Times, May 4, 1936, 12.

121. Sigmund Freud, who arrived in London on January 6, 1938, asserted that the jewel box symbolized the female genitalia. Apparently no British film critic took up the idea. See Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 62.

122. Times, Jan. 10, 1938, 10. For a similar real life case, see “Convict Alleges Jewel Raid was ‘Staged,’ ” Daily Mail, Apr. 7, 1933, 9; “Judge Finds £13,000 Hold-Up a Fake,” Apr. 8, 1933, 7; “Broker Acquitted,” Sept. 22, 1933, 9.

123. Times, Mar. 30, 1936, 10.

124. Times, May 31,1937, 12.

125. Times, Mar. 25, 1940, 4. But on the censors’ defense of the police, see Christine Grandy, Heroes and Happy Endings: Class, Gender, and Nation in Popular Film and Fiction in Interwar Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 188.

126. On the assertion of Conservative MPs that attacks on jewelers by smash-and-grab raiders were attributable to “the growth of Socialist and Communist ideas of disregard for private property,” see Keith Laybourn and David Taylor, Policing in England and Wales, 1918–39: The Fed, Flying Squads and Forensics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 187.

127. For the argument that such films can “open up a certain cultural space within which contradictory subject positions and identities may be taken up, however provisionally,” see Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (London: Macmillan, 1987), 5.

128. Matt Houlbrook, “Fashioning an Ex-crook Self: Citizenship and Criminality in the Work of Netley Lucas,” Twentieth Century British History 24, 1 (2013): 1–30.

9: Class

1. West does not locate George’s behavior in its social context but simply attributes his failings to his innate character flaws. Rebecca West, The Modern “Rake’s Progress” (London: Hutchinson, 1934).

2. Chicago Tribune, Feb. 18, 1938, 9.

3. For the assertion that the trial revealed “a side of London’s social life so far only partly exposed,” see Daily Sketch, Feb. 19, 1938, 10.

4. Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 5.

5. Clovis (NM) News Journal, Apr. 24, 1938, 13; Times Recorder (Zanesville, OH), Apr. 24, 1938, 15.

6. Spokesman Review, Dec. 24, 1937, 18.

7. Times, Feb. 19, 1938, 13.

8. Times, Feb. 18, 1938, 20; HC Deb 21 Feb. 1956 vol. 549 cc177.

9. Clovis News Journal, Apr. 24, 1938, 13; Times, Feb. 16, 1938, 18.

10. Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Weekend: A Social History of Great Britain (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 56.

11. John Hilton, Rich Man, Poor Man (London: Allen & Unwin, 1944), 52; see also William D. Rubinstein, “Britain’s Elites in the Interwar Period, 1918–1939: Decline or Continued Ascendancy?” British Scholar 3, 1 (2010): 5–23.

12. G. D. H. Cole and M. I. Cole, The Condition of Britain (London: Victor Gollancz, 1937), 64.

13. Noreen Branson and Margot Heinemann, Britain in the Nineteen Thirties (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), 154.

14. Cole and Cole, The Condition of Britain, 61–63, 75.

15. Hilton, Rich Man, Poor Man, 87.

16. Bill Brandt, A Night in London (London: Country Life, 1938), 42–43.

17. Ross McKibben, Classes and Cultures: England 1918 to 1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 39.

18. Daily Mail, Oct. 20, 1919, 7.

19. Times, Mar. 11, 1933, 15.

20. Graves and Hodge, The Long Weekend, 56.

21. Times, Aug. 13, 1932, 5.

22. Sunday Mail (Brisbane), Dec. 17, 1939, 6.

23. Sunday Chronicle and Sunday Referee, July 9, 1939, 6.

24. Advertiser (Adelaide), Dec. 25, 1937, 12.

25. Lincolnshire Echo, Feb. 18, 1938, 1.

26. Daily Sketch, Feb. 16, 1938, 11.

27. Daily Mail, Dec. 24, 1937, 7.

28. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dec. 26, 1937, 2. But note that society women also attended the sensational trials of lower-class women like Edith Thompson. See Lucy Bland, Modern Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 103–104.

29. Paul Cohen-Portheim, England, the Unknown Isle, trans. Alan Harris (London: Duckworth, 1930), 117.

30. Graves and Hodge, The Long Weekend, 55–56.

31. Patrick Balfour, Society Racket: A Critical Survey of Modern Social Life (London: John Long, 1933).

32. McKibben, Classes and Cultures, 23.

33. She also had a sharp tongue. “When Somerset Maugham—whose homosexuality was never mentioned—left one of Emerald Cunard’s parties early, explaining, ‘I have to keep my youth,’ she retorted: ‘Then why don’t you bring him with you.’ ” Carol Kennedy, Mayfair: A Social History (London: Hutchinson, 1986), 219.

34. Branson and Heinemann, Britain in the Nineteen Thirties, 155.

35. Driberg, a Communist in his youth, later claimed that he deliberately exaggerated the decadence of the upper classes in order to fan the flames of class warfare. Tom Driberg, Ruling Passions (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977). See also Sarah Newman, “Gentleman, Journalist, Gentleman-Journalist: Gossip Columnists and the Professionalisation of Journalism in Interwar Britain,” Journalism Studies 14, 5 (2013): 698–715.

36. Balfour, Society Racket, 266.

37. Daily Mail, Aug. 19, 1932, 10.

38. Brian Howard was one of the inspirations for the character of Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. See D. J. Taylor, Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918–1940 (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007), 314, and Marie-Jacqueline Lancaster, ed., Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure (London: Blond, 1968).

39. Clarence Rook, Highways and Byways in London (London: Macmillan, 1902), 166.

40. Kennedy, Mayfair, 179.

41. Judith Walkowitz, Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 222.

42. Thomas Burke, English Night-Life (London: Batsford, 1941), 137–138.

43. E. F. Benson, The Freaks of Mayfair (London: T. N. Foulis, 1916).

44. John Buchan, Three Hostages (London: Thomas Nelson, 1946).

45. Michael Arlen, The Green Hat: A Romance for a Few People (London: W. Collins & Sons, 1924).

46. HC Deb 4 Dec. 1933 vol. 283 cc1310.

47. Kennedy, Mayfair, 190–191.

48. Daily Mail, Sept. 30, 1930, 9.

49. Graves and Hodge, The Long Weekend, 56. In the film The Man in Possession (1937, dir. W. S. Van Dyke), the comic Barnett Parker gave, according to the critics, a side-splitting portrayal of the Mayfair accent. Monthly Film Bulletin, Jan. 1, 1937, 82.

50. HC Deb 7 Apr. 1930 vol. 237 cc1802.

51. John Bull, Jan. 27, 1945, 8.

52. News Chronicle, Feb. 19, 1938, 8. In 1939 a writer of a letter to the editor asked why the papers described three young men who appeared in court as “Mayfair Men”: “He pointed out that all three lived somewhere else, and wanted to know why possession of gentility fixed a man’s geography.” Newspaper World and Advertising Review 2138–2163 (1939): 13.

53. Daily Mail, July 16, 1931, 9.

54. Most films about Mayfair were comedies. An exception was Mayfair Girl (1933, dir. George King), in which a young American woman is framed for killing a cad while drunk. Daily Mail, May 10, 1933, 5.

55. Mark Glancy, Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain from the 1920s to the Present (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 109–143.

56. Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in 1930s Britain (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 109–121, 172–173.

57. The film was based on the novel by J. C. Snaith, The Crime of Constable Kelly (London: Nelson, 1924).

58. Monthly Film Bulletin, Jan. 1, 1937, 54.

59. Monthly Film Bulletin, Jan. 1, 1938, 66.

60. Critics declared it “dull and vulgar.” Ibid., 95.

61. Ibid., 158.

62. For the view that the film was supposed to be light and gay but was in fact plagued by wooden dialogue, see Monthly Film Bulletin, Jan. 1, 1949, 115.

63. On American movies’ portrayal of the myth of a classless society, see Andrew Bergman, We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films (New York: New York University Press, 1971); and on British stereotypical views of America, see Sian Nicholas, “American Commentaries: News, Current Affairs and the Limits of Anglo-American Exchange in Interwar Britain,” Cultural and Social History 4, 4 (2007): 461–479.

64. Raymond Chandler pointed out that English, in England, was a class language. “The English writer is a gentleman first and a writer second.” Dorothy Gardiner and Katherine Sorley Walker, eds., Raymond Chandler Speaking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 82; see also Ken Worpole, Dockers and Detectives (London: Verso, 1983). For the argument that English viewers preferred American films for aesthetic rather than political reasons, see Jeffrey Richards, “Modernism and the People: The View from the Cinema Stalls,” in Rewriting the Thirties: Modernism and After, ed. Keith Williams and Steven Mathews (London: Routledge, 2014), 188.

65. Some reviewers felt that the film presented an idealized view of English undergraduates. Times, Apr. 1, 1938, 14; Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace, 316.

66. J. B. Priestley, English Journey (1934; reprint, London: W. Heinemann, 1949), 401.

67. McKibben, Classes and Cultures, 523–527.

68. Alan O’Shea, “English Subjects of Modernity,” in Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity, ed. Mica Nava and Alan O’Shea (London: Routledge, 1996).

69. Daily Telegraph and Morning Post, Feb. 19, 1938, 9.

70. “An older stereotype of the ‘hooligan’ was increasingly eclipsed by the more modern, and more dangerous, figure of the ‘gangster.’ ” Theodora Benson and Betty Askwith, Foreigners; or, the World in a Nutshell (London: Victor Gollancz, 1935), 111; Daily Mail, Feb. 19, 1938, 8.

71. San Bernardino County Sun, Jan. 16, 1938, 4; Times, Jan. 15, 1938, 7; Feb. 11, 1938, 7.

72. Times, May 20, 1942, 3. The judge ordered that one of the troopers be given twelve strokes of the cat. See also David Reynolds, Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942–1945 (New York: Random House, 1995), 146.

73. Bowker, assistant to Norman Birkett, recalled that all London was eager to witness the examination of the four youths coming from “respectable families.” A. E. Bowker, Behind the Bar (London: Staples Press, 1951), 249.

74. Deborah Cohen, Family Secrets: Living with Shame from the Victorians to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 8.

75. News of the World, Feb. 20, 1938, 13.

76. Sept. 19, 1932 entry from the unpublished diary of Arthur Ponsonby, cited in Taylor, Bright Young People, 271.

77. Catherine Horwood, Keeping Up Appearances: Fashion and Class between the Wars (London: Sutton, 2005).

78. Cole and Cole, The Condition of Britain, 312.

79. New York Times, Feb. 19, 1938, 6.

80. Cited in H. G. Woodward, “Mayfair Lepers,” Sign of the Times 65, 18 (May 3, 1938), 4, 14.

81. David Turner, The Old Boys: The Decline and Rise of the Public School (Hartford: Yale University Press, 2015), 185.

82. In addition, a degree of anti-Semitism fed on the belief that Jews were too intellectual and individualistic to immerse themselves fully in the athletics and arcane rituals so beloved by the schools. Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 377–378; Jeffrey Richards, Happiest Days: The Public Schools in English Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).

83. Graham Greene, The Old School: Essays by Divers Hands (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934), 9.

84. Alec Waugh, The Loom of Youth (London: Richards, 1917); H. G. Wells, The World of William Clissold (London: Benn, 1926); George Orwell, “Such Such Were the Joys,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 4:330–369.

85. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, The Old School Tie: The Phenomenon of the English Public School (New York: Viking, 1977), 210.

86. Horwood, Keeping Up Appearances, 122–123.

87. Daily Mail, Aug. 1, 1936, 7.

88. Daily Mail, Jan. 21, 1938, 7.

89. Daily Mail, July 15, 1935, 10.

90. Men Only, May 1936, 15–19.

91. “The Old School Tie,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmCNtG2HL4M (accessed Sept. 11, 2015).

92. The Times judged their mockery “admiringly affectionate.” Times, Aug. 19, 1969, 10.

93. Times, Feb. 19, 1938, 17.

94. Times, Aug. 5, 1937, 6.

95. Times, Mar. 11, 1933, 15.

96. Harold J. Laski, The Danger of Being a Gentleman and Other Essays (London: Allen & Unwin, 1939), 13–31.

97. Douglas Reed, A Prophet at Home (London: Cape, 1941), http://archive.org/stream/AProphetAtHome_27/prophet_djvu.txt (accessed Sept. 11, 2015). See also Tony Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice: Anti-Semitism in British Society during the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 99–100, and Julius, Trials of the Diaspora, 410–411.

98. Arthur Marwick, “Class,” in A Companion to Contemporary Britain, ed. Paul Addison and Harriet Jones (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 78; David Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 138.

99. Daily Mirror, Feb. 19, 1938, 3.

10: Fascism

1. Oswald Mosley, My Life (London: Nelson, 1968), 302; see also John Harvey, Men in Black (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 239–242.

2. See A. P. Herbert’s taunt: “I shall never be drawn by any political movement whose main idea seems to be to wear underclothes of a particular colour. As between the Black-shirts and the Redshirts, I am among those who cry, ‘A plague on both your blouses!’ In the old days a political party took its name from its ideas and ideals. Now we have leaders who name themselves after their lingerie—black shirts or blue braces, pink pants or dirty drawers.” HC Deb 10 July 1936 vol. 314 cc1606.

3. J. Baxendale and C. Pawling, Narrating the Thirties: A Decade in the Making, 1930 to the Present (London: Macmillan, 1996).

4. New York Post, Mar. 19, 1938, 2; New York Times, Mar. 20, 1938, 46; Times, Mar. 21, 1938, 14.

5. On Mrs. Trewartha (Esther Surle), see Daily Mail, May 23, 1922, 7.

6. Daily Mail, Aug. 21, 1923, 4; Times, Dec. 6, 1923, 15; Dec. 17, 1923, 15.

7. Times, May 28, 1926, 11.

8. Daily Mail, Apr. 26, 1924, 5; In 1927, Enid was given a three-year driving ban. Daily Mail, Sept. 10, 1927, 9.

9. Times, June 11, 1925, 13.

10. Times, Mar. 13, 1925, 17.

11. Times, July 31, 1926, 4.

12. Times, Oct. 7, 1926, 15; Mar. 3, 1927, 9; Nov. 2, 1927, 5.

13. Heather Shore, “ ‘Constable Dances with Instructress’: The Police and the Queen of Nightclubs in Interwar London,” Social History 38, 2 (2013): 183–202.

14. Daily Mail, June 7, 1928, 9.

15. Walkowitz, Nights Out, 212. As noted in chapter 8, Dorothy, another of Kate Meyrick’s daughters, married Edward Russell, Lord de Clifford, a supporter of Sir Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists.

16. His first wife, the Countess Kinnoull, went in the opposite direction. In 1928 she converted to Catholicism and used her enormous wealth to benefit the church. She financed the White Fathers’ missions in Africa, funded the Catholic Herald, and supported Franco’s anticommunist crusade. Like Evelyn Waugh, a defender of the traditional mass, she financially aided Archbishop Lefebvre’s campaign against modernism. “In Memory of Lady Kinnoull,” Regina Coeli Report 220 (Apr. 2010): 5.

17. Daily Express, July 24, 1929; New York Times, July 24, 1929, 52; Times, May 9, 1934, 7; Kinnoull said he would prefer an elected upper house to what was in effect a “Committee of the Conservative Party.”

18. On his driving offenses, see Daily Mail, May 14, 1932, 5.

19. Times, Mar. 7, 1934, 8.

20. Times, Nov. 17, 1932, 7; HL Deb 16 Nov. 1932 vol. 85 cc1350.

21. Times, Mar. 1, 1934, 7. Viscount Esher replied that the left was as bad as the right, and if he had to choose, he would opt for Oswald Mosley over Sir Stafford Cripps.

22. Times, July 7, 1933, 8.

23. Times, Dec. 2, 1936, 7; HL Deb 1 Dec. 1936 vol. 103 cc510–514; see also HC Deb 21 Apr. 1936 vol. 311 cc18–19.

24. Times, Jan. 26, 1937, 11.

25. Times, Nov. 20, 1936, 18.

26. See the leaflet “Food for the Spanish People,” Warwick Digital Collection, http://contentdm.warwick.ac.uk/cdm/ref/collection/scw/id/7788 (accessed Oct. 12, 2015); Ottawa Journal, Dec. 22, 1936, 15; Jim Fyrth, The Signal Was Spain: The Spanish Aid Movement in Britain, 1936–1939 (London: Lawrence & Wishart 1986), 244.

27. Daily News (Perth, WA), July 31, 1933, 5; Daily Mail, Mar. 21, 1938, 9.

28. Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1938), 102–103.

29. Jeremy Lewis, Cyril Connolly: A Life (New York: Random House, 2012).

30. Manchester Guardian, Dec. 17, 1925, 34.

31. HC Deb 2 May 1938 vol. 335, cc584.

32. Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, June 16, 1936, 9; Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, Mar. 18, 1938, 11.

33. New Statesman and Nation, Mar. 5, 1938, 365–366. In his essay “What Is Fascism?” (1944), George Orwell, agreed with Waugh that the word was overused. His conclusion was, however, less categorical. “Even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist.’ That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, 3:114.

34. Selina Hastings, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994).

35. Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh: The Early Years 1903–1939 (Toronto: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1986), 458.

36. A right-wing apologist for conservative Catholicism, Heygate attended the 1935 Nuremberg Rally with the nature writer Henry Williamson. Heygate committed suicide in 1976. Times, Mar. 20, 1976, 16.

37. Michael Davie, ed., The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976), 527.

38. See David Garnett in the New Statesman and Nation, Nov. 7, 1936, 735; Rose Macaulay, “Evelyn Waugh,” Horizon 14, 84 (Dec. 1946): 370; Martin Stannard, Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 188–190, 192–193.

39. Evelyn Waugh, Robbery under Law (London: Chapman & Hall, 1939), 17, 44, 75. On fascism, see Stannard, Evelyn Waugh, 458–460.

40. New Statesman and Nation, Mar. 5, 1938, 366.

41. Empire News, Mar. 6, 1938, 5.

42. James K. Hopkins, Into the Heart of the Fire: The British in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

43. Judith Keene, Fighting for Franco: International Volunteers in Nationalist Spain during the Spanish Civil War, 1936–39 (London: Leicester University Press, 2001), 46–47.

44. Michael B. Miller, Shanghai on the Métro: Spies, Intrigue, and the French between the Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 114; on British condemnations of the arms trade, see David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 26–26, and Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 191–194.

45. Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1938, 5.

46. Marcus Scriven, Splendour and Squalor: The Disgrace and Disintegration of Three Aristocratic Dynasties (London: Atlantic Books, 2009), 85–86; Anthony Haden-Guest, “The End of the Peer,” Observer, Jan. 22, 2006, magazine section, 32.

47. Such frauds were not uncommon. “In one instance the Madrid government paid eight million crowns for Finnish stocks that were totally obsolete.” Miller, Shanghai on the Métro, 116. Michael Corrigan, a friend of Victor Hervey, received a two-year sentence for defrauding a Chinese group seeking to purchase arms; see Daily Mail, Nov. 16, 1938, 16, and Jan. 31, 1939, 11.

48. Kent Trust Ltd. sued Lonsdale for the £230 due on a promissory note for £100 signed by Lonsdale and Victor Hervey. Accompanied to court by a warder, Lonsdale argued that the interest rate of 90 percent per annum was “harsh and unconscionable.” Kent Trust responded that both men were bad risks. Hervey, a bankrupt, was not sued, and Lonsdale bitterly noted that his partner was enjoying life in Paris: “The George V Hotel there [you will] always find him.” Ashe Lincoln’s assertion that Lonsdale was not heavily involved with other moneylenders did not help. Mr. Justice Asquith ruled that, as Lonsdale freely agreed to the loan, the interest rate was reasonable. He awarded the total amount, costs, and interest to Kent. Western Gazette, July 22, 1938, 14.

49. Times, Mar. 23, 1937, 5.

50. Gerald Howson, Arms for Spain: The Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War (London: John Murray, 1998), 219–220.

51. Edward Arthur Donald St. George Hamilton Chichester, sixth Marquess of Donegall, was a product of Eton and Oxford who for many years wrote a column for the Sunday Dispatch under the byline “Almost in Confidence.”

52. The Marquess of Donegall’s story in the Sunday Dispatch, Apr. 18, 1937, 1, was reprinted in many papers; see, e.g., Escanaba (MI) Daily Press, May 27, 1937, 26, and Toronto Globe and Mail, Apr. 21, 1937, 10.

53. Vapaa Sana (Free Press, Toronto), Apr. 21, 1937, 1, 3; see also Toronto Globe and Mail, Apr. 21, 1937, 10.

54. HC Deb 31 May 1937 vol. 324 cc654–657.

55. Daily Mail, July 10, 1937, 10.

56. John Sutherland Northcliffe, Stephen Spender: A Literary Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 227.

57. Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 419, 422.

58. In a review of H. G. Wells’s The Holy Terror (1939) Waugh reasserted that the “proletarian movement” represented by both fascism and communism posed a threat to traditional values. According to him, Wells “refuses to be misled by the preposterous distinctions of Left and Right that make nonsense of contemporary politics.” Spectator, Feb. 10, 1939, 234; Humphrey Carpenter, The Brideshead Generation: Evelyn Waugh and His Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), 312–313, 320.

59. Tom Villis, British Catholics and Fascism: Religious Identity and Political Extremism between the Wars (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 160.

60. Douglas Jerrold, Georgian Adventures (London: Collins Pall Mall, 1937), 354, 369–373.

61. Empire News, Aug. 20, 1939, 7.

62. Tom Buchanan, Britain and the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 88–89.

63. Phillimore was also president of the Central Landowners’ Association, which in 1943 heard the rural revivalist Rolf Gardiner call for a “conference of heirs of estates” to ward off “commissars and bureaucrats.” Times, July 31, 1943, 2.

64. Times, Mar. 24, 1938, 9; Mar. 30, 1939, 16.

65. Michael Walsh, The Martyrdom of William Joyce (Sussex: Historical Review Press, 2002), 3.

66. Richard Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club, and British Anti-Semitism, 1939–40 (London: Constable, 1998); Robin Saikia, The Red Book: The Membership List of the Right Club, 1939 (London: Foxley Books, 2010).

67. On Prince Yurka Galitzine, see the epilogue.

68. Reginald Daubeny, her first husband, was prosecuted during the war for talking about Operation Torch. Though not understanding the seriousness of leaking information about the Second Front, he was cashiered and sentenced to twelve months imprisonment. Pauline’s second husband (also a member of the Right Club), Colin Dennistoun Sword of the Gordon Highlanders, was reported missing in action in June 1940. Nigel West, The Guy Liddell Diaries (London: Routledge, 2005), 1:310, 2:14; Times, June 29, 1940, 1; Aug. 10, 1948, 1.

69. MEPO 3/902, Jan. 4, 1938, Philip John Ridout statement.

70. Leese was interned in 1940. See Robert Benewick, The Fascist Movement in Britain (London: Allen Lane, 1972), 44–45, and Richard Griffiths, “Anti-Semitic Obsessions: The Case of H. W. Wicks,” Patterns of Prejudice 48, 1 (2014): 94–113.

71. Times, Oct. 8, 1937, 11.

72. Sherman Kadish, “Jewish Bolshevism and the ‘Red Scare’ in Britain,” Jewish Quarterly 34, 4 (1987): 16–17.

73. Harry Defries, Conservative Party Attitudes to Jews, 1900–1950 (New York: Psychology Press, 2001), 135.

74. Portsmouth Evening News, Apr. 4, 1938, 12; Times, Apr. 5, 1938, 8.

75. Nicholas Mosley, Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley and Family, 1933–1980 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1983); Beverley Nichols, News of England (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1938), 261–267.

76. Matthew Worley, Oswald Mosley and the New Party (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

77. Colin Cross, The Fascists in Britain (New York: St. Martin’s, 1963), 145–150.

78. Villis, British Catholics and Fascism, 161.

79. Storm Jameson, In the Second Year (New York: Macmillan, 1936), 108.

80. Stephen Dorrill, Black Shirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (London: Viking, 2006), 15.

81. Before Mosley’s swing to the right, the Manchester Guardian in 1925 called the National Fascisti “Dangerous Play-Boys.” See Janet Dack, “ ‘It Certainly Isn’t Cricket’: Media Responses to Mosley and the BUF,” in Varieties of Anti-Fascism in the Interwar Period, ed. Nigel Copsey and Abdrzej Olechnowicz (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 143.

82. Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1975), 109.

83. Raymond Postgate, The Life of George Lansbury (London: Longmans Green, 1951), 252.

84. Julie Gottlieb, “The Marketing of Megalomania: Celebrity, Consumption, and the Development of Political Technology in the British Union of Fascists,” Journal of Contemporary History 41, 1 (2006): 40.

85. Daily Mail, Dec. 14, 1926, 9.

86. A. G. MacDonell, The Autobiography of a Cad (London: Macmillan, 1938), 245.

87. Harvey, Men in Black, 239–243.

88. Julie Gottlieb, “Body Fascism in Britain: Building the Blackshirt in the Interwar Period,” Contemporary European History 20, 2 (2011): 53.

89. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928; reprint, London: Penguin, 1967), 346, 347, 371; Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square (1941; reprint, London: Penguin, 2001), 128.

90. Mosley, My Life, 168.

91. Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, 164.

92. Anne de Courcy, The Viceroy’s Daughters (New York: Orion, 2012), 173–174; Nicholas Mosley, Rules of the Game (London: Secker & Warburg, 1982); for an intimate account of the life of a contemporaneous “playboy politician,” see The Duff Cooper Diaries, ed. John Julius Norwich (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005).

93. Douglas Goldring, Marching with the Times, 1931–1946 (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1947), 70.

94. Observer, Dec. 7, 1980, 11.

95. In the 1950 general election Jill Craigie called Randolph Churchill a “Mayfair playboy.” Western Morning News, Feb. 21, 1950, 5. Craigie was a documentary film director, screenwriter, and feminist married to the Labour Party MP Michael Foot.

96. Laura E. Nym Mayhall, “The Prince of Wales versus Clark Gable: Anglophone Celebrity and Citizenship between the Wars,” Cultural and Social History 4, 4 (2007): 529–543; Stephen Gundle, Glamour: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 151–153.

97. Julie V. Gottlieb, “Britain’s New Fascist Men: The Aestheticization of Brutality in British Fascist Propaganda,” in The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the Far Right in Britain, ed. Julie V. Gottlieb and Thomas P. Linehan (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), 98.

98. Adrian Weale, Roger Casement, John Amery, and the Real Meaning of Treason (New York: Viking, 2001), 97–110; David Faber, Speaking for England: Leo, Julian, and John Amery, the Tragedy of a Political Family (New York: Free Press, 2005), 190.

99. Daily Mail, Sept. 14, 1932, 3; May 27, 1933, 7; Dec. 19, 1936, 5.

100. Faber, Speaking for England, 200.

101. Daily Mail, Aug. 23, 1932, 11.

102. “Freely” is perhaps the wrong word. Whereas his father provided John with an allowance of £10 a week, his Nazi minders gave him £30 a week plus expenses. Weale, Roger Casement, 213. See also Horst J. P. Bergmeier and Rainer E. Lotz, Hitler’s Airwaves: The Inside Story of Nazi Radio Broadcasting and Propaganda Swing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 115–118.

103. Faber, Speaking for England, 519; Daily Mail, Nov. 20, 1942, 4; W. D. Rubenstein, “The Secret of Leopold Amery,” History Today 49, 2 (1999): 17–23.

104. Leonard Burt, Commander Burt of Scotland Yard (London: William Heinemann, 1959), 7; on the Amerys’ network of supporters, see Jimmy Burns, Papa Spy: Love, Faith, and Betrayal in Wartime Spain (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 311–318.

105. Faber, Speaking for England, 508.

106. See, e.g., Daily Mirror, Nov. 29, 1945, 3; see also Judith Keene, Treason on the Airwaves: Three Allied Broadcasters on Axis Radio during World War II (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2009), 44.

107. Rebecca West, The Meaning of Treason (New York: Viking, 1947), 215. On West’s concern to spare the feelings of the Amery family, see Bonnie Klime Scott, ed., Selected Letters of Rebecca West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 218–219.

108. Keene, Treason on the Airwaves, 77; see also Faber, Speaking for England, 502.

Epilogue

1. Hal Higdon, Leopold and Loeb: The Crime of the Century (New York: Putnam, 1975); Simon Baatz, For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Chicago (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).

2. Patrick Hamilton, Rope: A Play (London: Constable, 1929).

3. Hamilton’s characters repeatedly refer to situations and relationships as “queer.” On the portrayal of homosexuality, see Amy Lawrence, “Jimmy Stewart Is Being Beaten: Rope and the Postwar Crisis in American Masculinity,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 16, 1 (1997): 41–58, and Jordan Schildcrout, “Queer Justice: The Retrials of Leopold and Loeb,” Journal of American Culture 34, 2 (2011): 175–179.

4. Rope (1948), starring James Stewart and Farley Granger, was one of Hitchcock’s less successful films. David Sterritt, “Morbid Psychologies and So Forth: The Fine Art of Rope,” in Hitchcock at the Source: The Auteur as Adapter, ed. R. Barton Palmer and David Boyd (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011), 159–172.

5. Paul Willetts, ed., Julian Maclaren-Ross: Selected Letters (London: Black Spring, 2008), 10.

6. Eric Capon, “The Strange Case of Patrick Hamilton,” Theatre Today 3 (Dec. 1946): 6; Nigel Jones, Through a Glass Darkly: The Life of Patrick Hamilton (New York: Scribner’s, 1991), 157–158; see also Sean French, Patrick Hamilton: A Life (London: Faber & Faber, 1993).

7. Warwick Deeping, Portrait of a Playboy (London: Cassell, 1947), 4, 13.

8. Sax Rohmer, Hangover House (1949; reprint, London: Strauss, 2008), 99.

9. Mort, Capital Affairs, 56. Even during the war, Americans were so impressed by the comforts Mayfair offered British officers that they spoke of them countering the German Blitzkrieg with their own “Ritzkrieg.” New York Times, Jan. 17, 1944, 5.

10. Andrew Lycett, Ian Fleming (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1995), 9–11, 14–22, 28, 46–56, 99. According to Malcolm Muggeridge, British intelligence employed the same favoritism in choosing its secretaries. “They were girls of good family, the idea being (so very English) that coming from rectories or Roedean (a girl’s school) they would be less likely to betray secrets to the enemy. If they had come from humbler homes, the temptation might be greater.” Toronto Globe and Mail, June 4, 1965, 7.

11. Paul Johnson, “Sex, Snobbery, and Sadism,” New Statesman, Apr. 5, 1958, 430; Gopinath Praseeda, Scarecrows of Chivalry: English Masculinities after Empire (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2013), 154; James Chapman, “Bond and Britishness,” in Ian Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of James Bond, ed. Edward P. Comentale, Stephen Watt, and Skip Willman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 133.

12. Music hall audiences demonstrated their knowingness by laughing at such frauds. Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 109, 147; Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 42–44. The “spiv”—the flashy black market profiteer—represented this type in the 1940s and ’50s. See Mark Roodhouse, Black Market Britain, 1939–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 225–252, and Paul Elliott, “The Weak and the Wicked: Non-conscripted Masculinities in 1940s British Cinema,” in The Home Front in Britain: Images, Myths and Forgotten Experiences since 1914, ed. Maggie Andrews and Janis Lomas (London: Macmillan, 2014), 180–182.

13. On Profumo, see Gillian Swanson, Drunk with Glitter: Space, Consumption and Sexual Instability in Modern Urban Culture (London: Routledge, 2007), 48, and Mort, Capital Affairs. On Lucan, see Patrick Marnham, Trail of Havoc: In the Steps of Lord Lucan (New York: Viking, 1987), and Laura Thompson, A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan (London: Head of Zeus, 2014).

14. Steven Watts, Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 64. Founded in 1965, Mayfair was Playboy’s chief rival in the United Kingdom.

15. Elizabeth Fraterrigo, Playboy and the Making of the Good Life in Modern America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). See the similar crude consumerism in Fleming’s description of a villain’s lair having “the most expensive type of intercom” and “an expensive desk-lighter,” air that held “a slight expensive fragrance,” and secretaries who looked liked “assistants in the most expensive American beauty-parlors.” Ian Fleming, Dr. No (1957; reprint, London: Penguin, 2002), 173, 174.

16. Le Matin, Feb. 20, 1938, 3; Le Figaro, Feb. 19, 1938, 3; El Mundo (San Juan, Puerto Rico), Mar. 20, 1938, 15.

17. Alkmaarsche Courant, Jan. 22, 1938, 1.

18. Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Weekend: A Social History of Great Britain 1918–1939 (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 403.

19. Malcolm Muggeridge, The Thirties: 1930–1940 (1940; reprint, London: Collins, 1971), 300.

20. Daily Mail, Dec. 7, 1945, 2; Times, Dec. 10, 1945, 8. See also The Day Will Dawn (1942, dir. Harold French), in which a playboy journalist turned secret agent guides bombers to destroy a U-boat base. Times, May 6, 1942, 6; Monthly Film Bulletin, May 31, 1942, 57.

21. New York Times, May 29, 1946, 18; Nov. 14, 1946, 49. Rex Harrison made a career out of playing middle-class rogues; women were attracted by his louche charm while men envied his daring. Andrew Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 120.

22. Spicer, Typical Men, 9. On the war years as the “golden age” of British cinema, see James Chapman, Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005).

23. Times, Sept. 4, 1942, 6; Anthony Aldgate, and Jeffrey Richards, Britain Can Take It: The British Cinema in the Second World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), 187–217. A later critic states: “It now looks impossibly patronizing, the epitome of stiff upper lip as Coward’s captain graciously condescends to his forelock-touching crew like an indulgent auntie. Interesting chiefly as a reminder of the structures of snobbery and privilege in the services which were largely responsible for Labour’s postwar election victory.” John Pym, ed., Time Out Film Guide (London: Penguin, 2004), 577.

24. Toronto Globe, June 12, 1943, 14.

25. He left an estate of £105,349. Portsmouth Evening News, Nov. 3, 1942, 1.

26. Times, Jan. 1, 1944, 1.

27. He is buried at Banneville-la-Campagne, Calvados. See http://francecrashes39-45.net/page_fiche_av.php?id=5003 (accessed Sept. 17, 2015).

28. Daily Mail, Jan. 21, 1938, 7; Aug. 13, 1947, 3.

29. Times, July 29, 1944, 1.

30. Daily Mail, Nov. 18, 1938, 13.

31. Daily Mail, Mar. 16, 1949, 5.

32. Times, Aug. 13, 1942, 8.

33. Times, Oct. 21, 1942, 1.

34. He married Mrs. Renee Mayall in Secunderabad, India. Times, May 2, 1947, 1. Her father, Sir Clive Burn, was an Oxford cricket blue, steeplechaser, and solicitor employed as secretary to the Duchy of Cornwall; her brother, Michael Burn, journalist, commando, writer, and friend of the Cambridge spy Guy Burgess, wrote, Turned toward the Sun: An Autobiography (London: Michael Russell, 2003), where he mentions his sister Renee’s three marriages but says nothing about her husbands. F. C. Wilmer was her second.

35. Richard Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club, and British Anti-Semitism, 1939–40 (London: Constable, 1998), 156; Lorie Charlesworth, “2 SAS Regiment, War Crimes Investigations, and British Intelligence: Intelligence Officials and the Natzweiler Trial,” Journal of Intelligence History 6, 2 (2006): 13–60.

36. On the “low dishonest decade,” see W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939,” in Another Time: Poems (New York: Random House, 1940), 98.

37. Geoff Eley, “Finding the People’s War: Film, British Collective Memory and World War Two,” American Historical Review 105 (2001): 821.

38. Monica Charlot, “Mythes de guerre,” in La Société anglaise en guerre, septembre 1939–août 1945, ed. Jean-Paul Pichardie (Le Havre: University of Rouen, 1996), 131. When Mass Observation began its chronicling of everyday life in 1937, some labeled its investigators snoopers and “society playboys.” Mass-Observation, First Year’s Work, 1937–1938 (London: Lindsay Drummond, 1938), 63.

39. On the wartime coalition and consensus politics, see Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain, 1939–1945 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969) and The Myth of the Blitz (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991); Paul Addison, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War (London: Cape, 1975); and Kenneth O. Morgan, The People’s Peace: British History, 1945–1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). For a critique of this perspective, see Stephen Brooke, Labour’s War: The Labour Party and the Second World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), and J. Baxendale and C. Pawling, Narrating the Thirties: A Decade in the Making, 1930 to the Present (London: Macmillan, 1996).

40. Austin Vernon Mitchell, Election ’45: Reflections on the Revolution in Britain (London: Fabian Society, 1995), 12. Bruce, a Labour MP from 1945 to 1950, was in 1975 made a life peer as Baron Bruce of Donington.

41. Penny Summerfield, Women Workers in the Second World War: Production and Patriarchy in Conflict (London: Croom-Helm, 1984).

42. Though the King’s Regulations called for the expulsion of homosexuals from the army, senior officers could use their own discretion. John Costello, Love, Sex and War: Changing Values, 1939–45 (London: Guild Publishing, 1985), 157–158, 158–173 . On gay subtexts in films, see Stephen Bourne, Brief Encounters: Lesbians and Gays in British Cinema, 1930 to 1971 (London: Cassell, 1996).

43. Houlbrook, Queer London, 273–274; on the relationship of sexual reform and socialism, see Stephen Brooke, Sexual Politics: Sexuality, Family Planning, and the British Left from the 1880s to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

44. Sonya Rose, Which People’s War?: National Identity and Citizenship in Britain, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 151–197, and “Temperate Heroes: Concepts of Masculinity in Second World War Britain,” in Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, ed. Stefan Dudink et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 177–198.

45. Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse and Harold Marsh Harwood, London Front: Letters Written to America, 1939–1940 (New York: Doubleday Doran, 1941), 19.

46. Martin Francis, The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 17; for the argument that “[a]viation reinvented the glamour of war,” see Mark Rawlinson, British Writing of the Second World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 58.

47. For example, Squadron Leader John “Chips” Carpenter had “Chez Nina” inscribed on the side of his plane. Francis, The Flyer, 23.

48. For the argument that after the war some of those portraying the RAF pilot came to regard his charmingly debonair façade as veering toward “oiliness and spivery,” see Mark Connelly, We Can Take It!: Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Harlow: Longman, 2004), 104, and Francis, The Flyer, 5.

49. W. O. Bentley, My Life and My Cars (London: Hutchinson, 1967), 109, cited in Martin Pugh, “Bentley Boys (act. 1919–1931),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, May 2013), www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/101179 (accessed Nov. 5, 2016).

50. “Children of the Ritz,” from Words and Music (1932), in Noël Coward, The Lyrics of Noël Coward (London: Heinemann, 1965), 121.

51. See Matt Houlbrook, “Commodifying the Self Within: Ghosts, Libels, and the Crook Life Story in Interwar Britain,” Journal of Modern History 85, 2 (2013): 321–363.

52. By 1937 the economy was beginning to recover from the slump, though in the north of England unemployment rates remained high. On the complexity of the finely graded divisions within the classes, see David Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 139–140. In the south the standard of living actually improved due to the fall in prices in the 1920s and the salary increases of the 1930s. In an age of suburban house construction and electrification, those with jobs and income could take advantage of a range of cheap consumer goods, from motorcars to radios. Arthur Marwick, Britain in the Century of Total War: War, Peace and Social Change, 1900–1967 (London: Bodley Head, 1970), 216–220; Jill Greenfield, Sean O’Connell, and Chris Read, “Fashioning Masculinity: Men Only, Consumption and the Development of Marketing in the 1930s,” Twentieth Century British History 10, 4 (1999): 460.

53. Once Labour was in office after 1945 it suffered similar attacks. “The press regularly attacked Aneurin Bevan for his ‘champagne socialism’, dubbing him the ‘Bollinger Bolshevik’ and the ‘Playboy of the West End World.’ ” Mark Roodhouse, “The 1948 Belcher Affair and Lynskey Tribunal,” Twentieth Century British History 13, 4 (2002): 390.