The Worcester was a three-masted warship from the Napoleonic era, with rows of cannon hatches still visible along each side. It was now a Nautical Training College, moored off Greenhithe on the Kent coast, and its function was to train future Merchant Navy officers, with a few boys each year receiving commissions in the Royal Navy.
A boat came out from the Worcester to bring Wheatley and his father on board, where they had their interview with Captain Wilson Barker. He was a frail-looking man with a pointed beard and “fiercely upturned” waxed moustachios, of the kind then sported by the Kaiser. Wheatley spent the next four years in terror of him.
Wheatley’s father explained that Wheatley needed discipline, because he would one day inherit a quarter of a million pounds. Captain Barker was not pleased with Wheatley Senior’s grasp of what the ship was about, and told him sharply that the Worcester was to be regarded as the equivalent of a good public school, not some kind of penal establishment.
This was the first Wheatley had heard about this quarter of a million (around fifteen million today). It was money which, in the event, would never materialise – he finally inherited £12,000, and not until the Fifties – but the thought of it must have shaped his attitudes and sustained him through his teens.
Wheatley went to Da Silva’s tailors, near London Bridge, for a uniform. He liked his uniform, particularly his “mess kit” – a short, navy blue “bumfreezer” jacket, and a white waistcoat with gold buttons – because he thought it attracted girls at dances. Given parity of looks (and of course “address”, or social class, as he characteristically notes) how could boys in school uniforms compete?
*
For all that, life on the Worcester was “not far short of Hell” for new recruits. New boys were known as “new-shits”, and had to go through the ritual of “new-shits singing.” Just before the first half term the boys would assemble in the gym, with the prefects sitting on stage, and the rest sitting on stepped tiers, like a theatre.
The assembled company sang “What shall we do with a drunken sailor,” over and over, beating time with whatever was to hand, creating a noise Wheatley remembered as “a surge of deafening sound and excited sadism.” The new shit then had to crawl on his stomach towards the stage, while a gauntlet of sixth termers hit him with knotted ropes, holding him back by the ankles if they felt like it. Having finally reached the stage and clambered up, new shits then had to sit on a stool and entertain the company with a song, until the Cadet Captain yanked the loose leg out of the stool. The first part of the ordeal was over.
The audience would then give a thumbs up or down by shouting “Walk!” or “Crawl!”. If it was “crawl”, the victim had to go through the gauntlet again to get back to the other new shits, but if he was thought to have shown a good spirit, it was “walk” and he could walk back. Wheatley had chosen a song calculated to please the crowd, “All the nice girls love a sailor”, and he walked back.
Wheatley understood the rationale behind this performance as a way of taking surly or truculent new boys down a peg, while someone who had shown willing and had “the makings of a good chap” might get off lightly. In addition to his choice of song, Wheatley knew he had made no enemies, and was glad of it. For most of his life, he writes, he “avoided trouble, like a chameleon, by assuming as quickly as possible the colour of my background.”
The Worcester was like a nautical public school. There was fagging, but no matron, and boys slept in hammocks instead of beds. Like many places where people are cooped up together, Wheatley remembered it as “a pretty savage jungle”.
Wheatley only had one real fight in his time there, with a Glaswegian boy named Mack, who liked to creep up behind someone who was reading a book and snatch it away from them, running round the ship with it. “I was one of the people this horrid little tough singled out to torment”, says Wheatley. Mack had a tough appearance, with close cropped hair. One day Wheatley was so goaded into anger that he agreed to fight Mack, only to regret it immediately. As the boys crowded round to watch, Wheatley realised he had let himself in for something horrible.
Wheatley took up a defensive stance and waited, when for reasons best known to himself Mack suddenly lowered his head and ran at him like a cannonball. Wheatley was able to hit him repeatedly in the face, until they were separated. Wheatley had won, which increased his status, and he never had any more trouble. Throughout his life Wheatley developed a strong sense of himself as lucky, and rarely more so than here, with a public victory over a tough looking adversary who proved not to be so tough after all. He could hardly have done better if he had hired such a person to put on an act.
*
As at Dulwich, Wheatley’s modus operandi of schoolboy survival included forming a secret society. With three other boys he formed a little band modelled on Dumas’ three musketeers, with the motto “All for One and One for All.” As ever, Wheatley identified himself with D’Artagnan. When they were allowed on shore they would hold conclaves in secluded spots and pore over Wheatley’s copy of Collingridge’s Self Defence. In the interests of greater secrecy they used invisible ink, and like miniature Masons they had their regalia (scarlet with silver braid) and “secret signs of recognition.”
The boys also owned a number of weapons, including French army surplus bayonets. These sword-like items were supplied by Gamages, and had to be smuggled on board hidden down a trouser leg, which made walking difficult. Wheatley and his chums liked to pore over Gamages’ catalogue, and around this time he acquired his first sword cane.
These were a lifelong enthusiasm, and the adult Wheatley knew how to use even the short variety to maximum effect: it was the swift jab, under the chin and straight up. In due course he acquired (among others) a silver mounted Malacca swordstick, which he found particularly comforting when he was abroad, venturing “into dubious night haunts.”
*
Cold added to the ordeal of life on the Worcester, rowing ashore in winter and scrubbing decks with chilblains. Wheatley found the food a particular trial. Spoilt at home by his mother, he was now eating hard ship’s biscuits, and “meat so bad that at times it actually stank.” Wheatley’s mother would send him pots of dripping to replace butter, and he was grateful for this at the time. It was only years later that he decided she could have sent him jam and cake as well.
His craving for sweet things was as bad as ever. A boy named Hobson was particularly well supplied with “tuck”, and when he went down to his chest for Petit Beurre biscuits at morning break, Wheatley would loiter like a dog. Hobson knew why he was there, and with a “contemptuous smile” he would toss him a biscuit. Wheatley knew he should have had the strength to refuse this demeaning ritual, but he never could. And when he got his biscuit, he used to make it last as long as possible, nibbling the little points off first, then eating the corners, one by one, until it was all gone.
*
Back home, his father’s financial bad luck forced him to sell Wootton Lodge and buy a modern semi-detached in Becmead Avenue, a suburban road near Streatham High Street. This was good luck for Wheatley, because he acquired a lifelong friend in the girl next door, Hilda Gosling, a rather fat only child. Since his little sister was much younger, Wheatley felt he was virtually an only child himself, and that he and Hilda were almost like brother and sister.
Wheatley was quite taken with Hilda’s physical solidity. If it was a “matter of physical strength,” he assured her, “I think you could assert yourself with 9 out of 10 average girls being very well endowed in that way and I must say I can’t exactly imagine you knuckling under to any body myself.” Apologising for his terrible writing, he writes “Please forgive me the frightfull writing and spelling I am afraid it is shocking especially beside your own … but still if I can’t plead that I am younger than you I can at least say you are Bigger than me.”
Wheatley would include “spicie bits” [sic] in his letters at Hilda’s request, like the seaside postcard-style story of the woman in the shoe shop who asks the assistant (struggling to get a boot on her foot without a shoe horn, and looking up her skirt) if he has the horn, to which he replies “Gaw bless yer Miss not alf I ain’t.” Wheatley had qualms about putting these in writing (“don’t you think they are rather dangerous on paper but anyhow for God’s sake don’t get this caught”), and Hilda had even more. He replies to her “I quite agree with you that it is best not to put those little spicie bits in black and white, but as you asked for them I thought you would think me a fearfully unsporting bounder if I diddent send them” [sic].
Before returning to the Worcester, Wheatley wrote
I am now employed in laying in a great stock of provisions, for going to Greenhithe at this time of the year is like accompanying Amundsen to the South Pole … I am leaving my town house at about one o’clock tomorrow and am running down to my country seat (Bow-Wow).
H M S Worcester
Off Greenhithe
Kent
For a rest cure having gone Rag-Time Barmy
Above all, he was anxious she should continue to write back: “Write to me again soon won’t you my Mother doesn’t mind at all I hope yours dosent, and when you get buried at a place like the Worcester you so much look forward to letters as the only way you know that there are other people existing as well as yourself.”
*
Back on the Worcester, Wheatley was growing used to the routine. He never shone academically, and was at one stage at the bottom of his form. His spelling may have been a factor, since he seems to have been dyslexic. His reports slowly lose hope, from “Ought to work at spelling in holidays” in 1909 to “spelling still atrocious” in 1912. As an adult he owned a number of dictionaries, but had difficulty checking words because his spelling was so bad he couldn’t find them.
As well as Dumas and Baroness Orczy he was now reading Stanley Weyman (he owned a twenty-five volume set as an adult), E.Phillips Oppenheim ( John Buchan’s favourite writer), Rider Haggard, and William Le Queux. He also read boy’s papers and serial magazines such as the Strand, Pearsons, and less remembered papers like The Red, The Royal, The Windsor, and The Story Teller.
Wheatley’s only academic distinction was the Scripture Prize, an unlikely award given his animus against Christianity. He chose Scripture as one of the safer subjects, to bolster his overall performance (unlike, say, mathematics, which he felt could go wrong on the day). He won a copy of John Masefield’s Sea Life in Nelson’s Time and later wrote in it “Used by me when writing my Roger Brook novels. One could never have expected a prize for Scripture to come in so useful.”
Wheatley left some vivid pen-portraits of his peers, which not only show how he saw them, but how they saw him. Ramage, for example, was “rather a Brickey” (i.e. he was “common”). He was mean too, and “never joined in any scorfs” [sic], which was a mark against him, given that scoffing had such sacramental importance for Wheatley. When Wheatley walked past, he heard Ramage shout
“Oh don’t you know I’m Dennis Wheatley. I am the Gun hand what. I ought to be a PO only I’m not, the old man’s mad or I should be.” [my emphases]
(The Gun hand cleaned the brass on the 4.7 cannon, which was a privileged job, and the Old Man was the Captain). Ramage evidently found Wheatley affected, and no wonder: on being mocked like this he went back to Ramage, “bowed smiled and said I should have much pleasure in giving the Honourable gentleman a walk in the tier” (a formal fight or duel). “My conduct was, of course, straight out of Dumas”, says the adult Wheatley.
Avery was another slightly “common” boy, who had never had the benefits of Miss Lupton working on his accent, and was therefore known as “Ivery from Sarthend.” Avery’s problem was an over-friendly manner, which could seem ingratiating. Wheatley’s friend, “Squeaker” Stephens, said “he’s not a bad chap Dennis old man and if he does suck up it is only in his nature you know”. Consequently, writes young Wheatley, “I was never rotten to him and used to let him in his cringing way call me Old Dennis.”
Jews were seen as a very distinct ethnic group in Edwardian times, and given the ambivalent depiction of Jews in Wheatley’s work his picture of Robert Goldreich (a “wily Jew”) is particularly interesting, and one of the liveliest in its own right. Wheatley could barely create Dickensian characters like this in his fiction.
Robert was quite a wit and used to keep us all amused he always used to call me Mr Wheatley sir and everyone was Mr to him he was always extremely polite to anyone who was anyone always used long words and could argue a cube round, he was a great stamp collector but would do you when swapping if he possibly could, once he was swapping with Robson and he accidentally swept some stamps off the desk onto the deck then carefully put his foot on some he wanted then picked up the rest and calmly apologised as the clumsiest devil unhung – he always demeaned himself – Robson however saw the dodge and he said Oh Goldreich I think one blew under your foot and removed the object and discovered three nice stamps below it. Goldreich however was not in the least dismayed said Oh Mr Robson sir how can I ever express how sorry I am that the clodhopping supporters of this unfortunate body should have dirtied these most beautiful and interesting specimens of yours, however I wouldn’t have you lose by my clumsiness I will give you a shilling for these three although I have somewhat spoilt the faces I thank you Mr Robson sir. The latter gentleman however seeing that the specimens were not spoilt as Goldreich had taken care not to put his foot heavily upon them and the fact of the three being worth about 1/9 he declined the offer with due thanks.
Wheatley also remembered Goldreich buying some tuck for the other boys with their money, but only buying half the amount and keeping the difference; the other boys were younger, and didn’t question Goldreich. Nevertheless he and Wheatley were friends, until they fell out over a younger boy whom Wheatley had a crush on; more about that later.
*
Back home, Wheatley would go on shopping trips or museum expeditions with his mother. She would take him up to the West End, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Wallace collection, and various other sights. “I was devoted to her and she to me, so we spent many happy afternoons together either choosing her hats or sightseeing.”
Wheatley also attended Miss Trail’s dancing academy, where one of his fellow pupils was Ruby Miller, later to be a star. He learned the waltz and polka, as well as the newer one-step and two-step, which were gaining in popularity with the spread of American music. Wheatley would go dancing in Streatham with Hilda, to older music like The Merry Widow, or newer American numbers like The Bunny Hug, Everybody’s Doing It, and Alexander’s Ragtime Band. This experience came in useful when he went to Germany a couple of years later, where there was much more dancing, including the Turkey Trot and the Tango. In one his letters he asks Hilda if she can tango, hoping she can teach him.
Wheatley was indebted to Hilda for introductions to her female friends, and managed brief romances with several. He would also go out exploring South London with Douglas Sharp, partly with the object of trying to meet girls. They counted it a success if they even talked to any.
One Sunday in 1910 Wheatley and Douglas saw two girls on Streatham Common, on the edge of one of the Speakers Corner-style crowds that would listen to Socialists and religious cranks. The girls were wearing straw hats, one decorated with poppies and the other with cornflowers, and Wheatley was instantly besotted by the one in the cornflower hat, whom they named “Blue Hat.”
The girls were sisters, and they walked them home and met them again on the following two Sundays. By now, “the sight of this beautiful but silly face had entirely bewitched me … For the first time in my life I was in love.” The girls lived over a garage on a corner in Norbury, and Wheatley took to walking out there and hanging around in the hope of seeing Blue Hat.
Wheatley pined and dreamed and planned, and he continued doing this when his family went for a summer holiday to the Isle of Wight. Returning in September, he went straight down to stalk around the garage and perhaps “catch a glimpse of my divinity,” only to find the family had gone. The garage was empty, the windows above it curtainless. All his life Wheatley was tenacious and now, at thirteen, he wrote to the letting agent whose board was outside, asking where the family had gone. They couldn’t tell him, but they did give him the name and address of the landlord. Wheatley wrote again, but no luck.
“I had been living only for the time when I should see her again,” writes Wheatley, “… and for many months I was inconsolable.” Wheatley never knew what became of her. Fifty years later he wondered if she had become a chorus girl, fallen into the hands of “white slavers”, or died in the Blitz. “More probably she married some mediocrity and is still alive … her breathtaking beauty now only a memory of the past.”
Wheatley and Douglas also went to the newly popular movie house in Streatham, the Golden Domes, where they would watch afternoon programmes of silents with the likes of Harold Lloyd and Pearl White (now remembered for the classic 1914 serial, The Perils of Pauline, where she would be threatened with extraordinary perils of the ‘tied-to-the-railway-line’ variety, along with threats to her virtue and the fate “worse than death”, like the women in Wheatley’s books).
Wheatley would remember Douglas in a poem, after his early death, which recaptures one of their girl chasing adventures. In some ways Wheatley is an unashamedly unoriginal writer, a pastiche artist, and here the model is the lower-class comic monologue, and perhaps Kipling. Written on Wheatley’s business notepaper – advertising Moselaris, “Sparkling Natural Table Water” – it recounts their friendship (“One for both, both for one, and together” in Three Musketeers style) and the day they spotted two girls from the top of an omnibus.
They follow them into a cinema, despite Douglas’s warning (“Why, Flappers are legion in Streatham / And you’ve not even seen this girls face”), and when the lights come up
… the girls we were sitting next to
Were a most unpleasant sight
Just the type of girls that you might have seen
In Brixton on Saturday night
Then Douglas chipped me scornfully
In a brotherly kind of tone
Did you think to find in the threepenny seats
Girls you’d care to have known.
Loyalty, friendship and the Musketeers were never far from Wheatley’s mind, and nor were matters of class, price and quality.
*
While Wheatley was on holiday with his parents at Lowestoft, he met a fattish man with a bald head. Over a few days this character befriended him, with his “fund of amusing stories”, and they would go for walks together, when he would buy Wheatley ice creams and sweets. He then invited the fourteen year old Wheatley up to his hotel room to see his collection of tie pins, of all things, which he must have been in the habit of travelling with. Having admired them, Wheatley was bidden to look out of the window at the sea front, and as he looked, the man pressed up against him from behind and slid a hand round to his crotch.
Startled and repelled, Wheatley was swiftly out of the room. He was too frightened of his father to mention the incident, but his bald friend, no doubt fearing he would, decamped hastily from the hotel, tie pins and all.
There was no female presence on the Worcester, not even a matron, and this had its consequences. Writing to Hilda about her own single sex school, Wheatley says “of course I suppose down at Greenwood the very sight of anything in trousers is a pleasure where you have so little opportunity of seeing any boys.” He continues:
I know what it was like on the Worcester we were all like a pack of Monks in a convent and if by chance any chaps sister happened to come down for the day on a half holliday we all used to rush to ships side to see her come up the gangway and then all run down below and put on clean collers deacent coats ect and come up and parade before her like so many peacocks who havent seen the sun for ages and in consequence have not been able to air their fine feathers, and when she went away she had the whole ships company to admire her go off in the boat to the shore and then each individual person felt at least for the next two days that she simply must have fallen in love with him.
Inevitably there was a romantic element in the boys’ lives with each other. As Wheatley explains it, older boys “took much younger boys under their special protection.” These little boys who had a “special friend” among the older boys were known as “jamoirs” or “jams” (seemingly garbled French, from “amour” and “j’aime”). In his autobiography Wheatley confesses that “it was common practice to take one’s jam to some dark corner of the ship in the evening to kiss and cuddle him.”
Wheatley’s jam was a boy named Ralph Dieseldorff, who lived with his widowed mother in Wimbledon; his father had died when he was an infant. He had blue eyes and blond curly hair, and he was German: Wheatley describes him as British-born of German parents, but in fact he was born in Guatemala, where his father had been a coffee planter, and he was still a German subject. Dieseldorff tended to wet the bed, or hammock, and the Worcester was not the place to do it. He was ribbed about his bedwetting, so Wheatley took him under his wing and protected him from jibes: “The result,” he says, “was that I fell in love with him.”
Goldreich made overtures towards Dieseldorff but was rebuffed, and revenged himself by writing “a lot of most insulting poetry about Dieseldorff and me” (writes the young Wheatley). Goldreich made everyone laugh with his Wheatley and Dieseldorff poems, and Wheatley challenged him to a fight. He was two years older than Wheatley, “with the strength of an ox and boxed well”, so it was lucky for Wheatley that he was too civilised to take him up on it.
Wheatley’s account of his relationship with Dieseldorff emphasises the idea that Dieseldorff was younger (“about thirteen”; “one of the most beautiful little boys I have ever set eyes on”; “helping him with his lessons … giving him the benefit of my experience”). This age difference is presented as the raison d’etre for the relationship, and almost the guarantee of Wheatley’s ‘normality,’ so it is interesting to discover that they were, in fact, about the same age; they were both born in 1897.
Dieseldorff was the cause of Wheatley’s most remarkable exploit on the Worcester, when he fell ill with appendicitis in the spring of 1913. This was extremely serious, with the prospect of death from peritonitis. Abdominal surgery had only recently become viable, with King Edward VII among the first to have his appendix successfully removed. Dieseldorff’s mother wrote to Wheatley to say that she had decided he must be operated on, and that Sir Alfred Fripp, the same surgeon who operated on King Edward, was going to perform the operation at Guy’s Hospital. Wheatley decided he must escape from the Worcester to visit him.
He recorded the event at the time in a letter to Hilda, explaining “as I happened to like him very much I thought I would go up and see him.” Wheatley was allowed ashore for German lessons at Dartford, but it was understood at Dartford railway station that Worcester cadets were forbidden to buy tickets for London. Wheatley therefore obtained an old mackintosh and a hat and packed them in a parcel before going ashore in uniform, walking and jog trotting the three miles or so Dartford. On the way he opened his parcel to change, “going behind a hedge in respectable uniform and ralleying out the most disreputable looking rogue in a dirty mackintosh and a slouch hat my dear Hilda you would of roared if you could of only seen me there it was the devil of a joke.”
Wheatley bought his ticket successfully, arrived at London Bridge Station, adjacent to Guy’s, and saw his friend: “his mater was there as well and she insisted on taking me out to tea when we left him”. She treated Wheatley to a “simply ripping” tea of poached eggs and cream buns and saw him off in the train at London Bridge.
Wheatley put his tramp’s hat and mackintosh on again, but his troubles were not over. Getting out at the other end, who should he see but a short bearded figure in a Homburg hat coming towards him: it was Captain Wilson-Barker, the terrifying naval headmaster. “By George my heart was in my mouth how I thanked the Lord that I had on a squash hat … I pulled the thing right down over my eyes and held my handkerchief to my face blowing my nose violently he looked straight at me and as he passed he brushed my elbow and then he did not know me by George it was a narrow shave.”
Wheatley then ducked back to the hedge, transformed himself into the smart cadet, caught the boat back and reported to the Chief Officer as having returned from his German lesson. Affecting paganism in his old age, he comments “I have always believed that some fine old Pagan god, who does not believe in humility but does believe in audacity, gives his special protection to those who challenge Fate for not altogether selfish motives.”
In Wheatley’s autobiography it is Saturday not Wednesday, he cuts games instead of German, and he encounters Wilson-Barker not in Dartford High Street but Greenhithe station, travelling back to Dartford on the same train. But the core events are the same in both accounts, even if both tellings are lightly embroidered with the characteristic thrills and spills that were to become Wheatley’s stock in trade. Half a century later, Dieseldorff’ s mother has dropped out of the story, but Wheatley still remembers the poached egg: “just time to give myself a glorious treat – a poached egg on toast at Lyons teashop –”.
*
“You get such a ripping sensation when you know that if you are caught you will probably get the order of the boot”, he explained to Hilda, “or else a game room licking (that’s only used for the worst offences, you are strapped down to the horse in the gymnasium and they leather into you … there has only been one chap get it since I have been here, and I did not want to test it although that must be another ripping sensation)”.
Getting caught would have been serious. The same goes for Wheatley’s habit of creeping around the ship at night and stealing food. Having learned the rounds of the night watch, Wheatley had a space between midnight and two a.m., when he would sneak past the masters’ quarters in his dressing gown to steal food from their galley.
The pinnacle of Wheatley’s more respectable achievements came on his last Prize Day, when the ship was “dressed” with boys on the masts and rigging, for parents to admire from a nearby steamer. Dressed in full mess-kit, white waistcoat and all, Wheatley was one of two boys on the ends of the main-top-gallant yard, some hundred feet above the deck. Wheatley had learned the ropes in every sense, and by the time he was through with the Worcester he was something of an old hand, or indeed an old lag. With some cronies, he would arrive early at the beginning of term to get the comfortable new mattresses intended for issue to new boys, leaving them with the old ones.
Wheatley left the Worcester in April 1913, having done better than he expected in his final exams. His ‘Scholastic’ and ‘Seamanship’ performances were ‘First Class’ and his Conduct was ‘Good’, which in this case meant ‘Undiscovered’. “I have got my certifficates allright and a First Class too I am awfly bucked” [sic].
By then he was almost fond of the Worcester. When Hilda was leaving her school, he wrote
I expect you are now rejoicing that you have only about a month more school in your existence of course one always feels like that about the last term term but I expect you will be jolly sorry to part from everybody and everything the last few days I remember I even felt a little sorry when I had my last hours Practical Nautical Astronomy drummed into me … The one thing I regret about school is my friends I was in such an awfly deacent set and of course I am parted absolutely now …
*
As for Dieseldorff, he came back from convalescence the following term, and left the Worcester in December 1913 to join the British India Steam Navigation Company.
Wheatley’s father offered him three options: he could go to sea for life; he could go to sea for three years, then join the business; or he could join the business after spending three years in Europe, seeing how wine was made. He chose the third option, and in 1913 Wheatley went to Germany.