Wheatley’s overdue departure from improbable ‘lost race’ tales and stories of wartime intrigue arrived with a new hero in the person of Roger Brook, a British agent during the Napoleonic era. If Sallust was Tombe, Roger Brook was an ideal version of Wheatley, and the Georgian ambience of Grove Place reinforced his identification.
Decor had always been important to Wheatley (he was, after all, the man who not only put a rug in his World War One billet but managed to wallpaper it) and the uxorious dedication in the first Roger Brook novel involves a very English blurring of the distinction between cottage and stately home: “For my darling wife JOAN:”
This, my first historical novel – inspired by “Cosey Cott”, which she has done so much to make the smallest stately home – with all my love.
Along with Grove Place, Wheatley bought in to the mid-twentieth-century ideal of Regency, as in the historical fiction of Georgette Heyer, the paintings of Anna and Doris Zinkeisen (all crinolines, uniforms, carriage rides and bow windows), and what was for many years the packaging of ‘Quality Street’ confectionery. Like the slightly earlier passion for bygone coaching inns, a related look could be seen on Christmas and other greeting cards well into the Sixties and Seventies, with a richness of decanters, model cannons, leather-bound books and the rest.
The first Brook novel, The Launching of Roger Brook, opens in 1783 with the bookish Roger still at school, confronting a bully named Gunston who is insulting Brook’s mother and her Jacobite sympathies. Contrary to the received wisdom of schoolboy fiction, Gunston is not a coward, or the sort of bully who caves in when stood up to. He is genuinely tough, and he is just about to give Roger a thorough pasting when another boy, “Droopy Ned”, steps in to save him. Droopy, more properly Lord Edward Fitz-Deverel, son of the Marquess of Amesbury, is a strange boy, possessing natural authority and a wisdom beyond his years:
In an age when blood sports occupied nine-tenths of the thoughts and leisure of every English gentleman, Droopy Ned made no secret of the fact that he abhorred bull-baiting, fox-hunting and cock-fighting; he also displayed an aloof disregard for all schoolboy crazes, ball games and field sports. Instead he concerned himself with strange expensive hobbies, such as the collecting of antique jewellery, the study of ancient religions and experimenting on himself with eastern drugs …
Clearly admired by his author, Droopy Ned is an archetypal Wheatley character with similarities to the Duke de Richleau, showing Wheatley’s lifelong faith in connoisseurship and aristocracy. This love of all things upper-class is itself vulgar, as any really competent snob could point out, and it is likely that had Wheatley had a less suburban background he might never have developed it.
Young Brook lives at Lymington, in a Georgian house with high ceilings and tall, white-painted windows, giving a fine view of the Isle of Wight across the sea. Attached to the house is the remnant of an older dwelling (“a low-roofed building faced with old red tiles which was now used as the kitchen quarters”) which in the twentieth century was to be occupied by the Wheatleys’ live-in couple, Captain Georges Pigache and his wife Betty.
Late in life, Wheatley was the subject of a film, and at one point he pulls down an indistinct character figure from his collection of Napoleonic figurines and holds it, saying “And this is Roger Brook; he was born here at Lymington.” Wheatley’s fond, indulgent little joke is like a jump of seventy-odd years back to Charlie, the doll who nearly suffocated.
Period detail is applied with a trowel, and Roger finds his father having a jovial drink with none other than Lymington MP Edward Gibbon (“I’ve read all three volumes that Mr Gibbon has so far published and am athirst for more”, says another member of the party). We have already been invited to notice the kitchen beams “festooned with hams, tongues and flitches of bacon, while the table could hardly be seen for joints, game, pudding-basins and vegetables” – rationing was still in force when Wheatley wrote that – and now in the dining room we see the main table (“a good modern one made only a dozen years before in Mr.Chippendale’s London workshop”), with its highly-polished surface reflecting a somewhat Christmas-cardy spread: “a brave array of china, glass, gleaming silver, white napery, crystal bowls of fruit and filigree baskets holding bonbons, comfits and candied peel …”
Young Brook has a pleasant face, and in due course he will “play the very devil with the women”. It is not too far-fetched to think that one of Wheatley’s main associations for the name Roger was “rogering”. Towards the end of his life, he bemoaned the amount of sex in modern fiction: “some of these modern novels are too explicit. They have chaps doing absurd feats, rogering everyone. It’s impractical. You can’t roger that many women, even in your youth.”
Despite Roger’s endless liaisons the love of his life is an independent and amoral older girl named Georgina, another name with clear associations. The adventures of rogering Roger and Georgian Georgina eventually ran to twelve volumes over twenty-seven years of Wheatley’s life, covering the period 1785–1815, with the court of Marie-Antoinette, the French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, Napoleon’s campaigns in Egypt, and Roger’s missions to Turkey, Persia, India, Brazil, the Caribbean, America, St.Petersburg and almost everywhere else that Wheatley went on his travels. Wheatley put his heart into the Roger Brook series.
George Macdonald Fraser, author of Flashman, was generous enough to say that the Roger Brook series “makes James Bond seem like an infant gurgling in his play pen”. But the Brook books are flawed by their unconvincing direct speech, and they have an uncertain ‘feel’ for the period, although they have a staggering amount of facts about it. As Anthony Lejeune has noted, Brook is prone to say “Talleyrand, tell me what’s been happening”, after which several pages of straight history will follow.
Wheatley prided himself on the fact that his books were educational, and within a certain idea of history they unquestionably were. Wheatley’s taste in history is not unlike that of the old-school English critic John Bayley, as expressed in Bayley’s novel George’s Lair, where George finds he “only really cared for dates, personalities and battles, or details about armour and archery. That was not the way it was taught now, and he was expected to interest himself in social and economic trends …”
Wheatley’s research for the Brook series was extremely thorough, from Edward King’s Old Times Re-visited on the Borough and Parish of Lymington, Hants to Burgo Partridge’s History of Orgies. As well as standard works of reference such as the Dictionary of National Biography (“invaluable”) it included twenty-four books on Napoleon alone, six on Pitt, three on Talleyrand, and many others.
Wheatley was enjoying himself with Brook, and his next novel, published in 1948, was another Brook story, The Shadow of Tyburn Tree, in which Brook goes on a mission to Russia after the mysterious death of Georgina’s husband makes it imperative for him to leave England. While in Russia he becomes the lover of Catherine the Great, and finally returns to England and Georgina just in time to save her from being hanged.
Meanwhile, Wheatley had written one of his strangest works, in durable ballpoint on the back of a pencilled Roger Brook manuscript. It was his message to posterity, buried in a bottle.