Founded in 1820, and bearing a reassuringly regal title, the Royal Society of Literature had included Yeats, Conrad, Beerbohm, Buchan, Maugham, Kipling, Eliot, and Wodehouse among its many Fellows. Churchill had recently become one, in 1947, and Montague Summers had been elected back in 1916: “a distinction,” he wrote bitchily, circa 1948, “in those days not so generally awarded as it is to-day.”
Wheatley’s friend Gilbert Frankau, author of the once celebrated novel Peter Jackson, Cigar Merchant, was also a Fellow, and in March 1950 Frankau wrote to the RSL Secretary, Miss Rudston Brown, nominating Wheatley for a Fellowship: “As a writer”, he added, “Mr Wheatley needs no recommendation. It is not so widely known that he served as a volunteer in both wars.” He chased this request up a few months later, and Rudston Brown mentioned that since Wheatley didn’t know he was being considered for membership, his feelings couldn’t be hurt whatever happened. Frankau’s further reply introduces an unfortunate and delicate note: “I quite understand the position. Privately, Dennis and I are such very good friends that I told him I’d put his name forward.”
Neither Frankau nor Wheatley could have foreseen the difficulties ahead, which might have been more likely from a gentleman’s club. Gaining membership of a gentleman’s club could be a hazardous procedure. Candidates had to be proposed by one member, seconded by another, and – crucially – not objected to by any others, hence the custom of the anonymous “black ball”. Members of the club would place white or black balls into a bag when a candidate was up for membership, and if even a single black ball was found, he was rejected; a custom which could lead to long-pursued feuds and vendettas. Unsuitable, oiky, nouveau riche candidates could even give rise to a bag that looked, as one writer puts it, “like a helping of giant caviar.” Worse still, the member who proposed them would then feel honour bound to resign.
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Wheatley had already had problems trying to get into a club. He had joined the Savage in the mid-Thirties, but found it socially undistinguished (many of its members were writers, a number of them also in the Paternoster). The club he pined to join by the end of the Thirties was Boodles, and he made typically strenuous efforts to get in, canvassing the support of members he knew. These efforts culminated in an alarmingly forward letter to the Chairman, Mr Bagge.
“You may, perhaps, recall giving me lunch at Boodle’s about a year ago,” writes Wheatley. He then recalls a conversation with a friend about clubs: “I remarked that mine, the Savage, interested me so little that I never went into it from one year’s end to another; but that there was one club to which I would really like to belong – Boodle’s – on account its lovley [sic] house, charming atmosphere and excellent food.” He concludes “there should be no difficulty about the letters necessary to support my candidature. But it occurred to me that since you are the Chairman of the Club, if you cared to write a line saying that I am personally known to you, that would be of the very greatest assistance.”
What Sir Picton Bagge thought of this we don’t know, but we hear no more about Wheatley and Boodles.
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Wheatley’s “Qualification” on the RSL application form was filled in as being the author of The Forbidden Territory, Mediterranean Nights “and numerous thrillers”, but this was not good enough. The application was turned down by the RSL Council. “As his name was only a suggestion”, the Secretary wrote to Frankau – evidently having forgotten Frankau’s earlier letter – “and Council was to consider the suggestion before Fellows approached their nominees, there will be no unpleasant duty before you, nor will anyone’s feelings be hurt.” But there was an unpleasant duty before Frankau, and Wheatley’s feelings were hurt. Frankau now felt he had no alternative but to resign.
The Secretary urged him not to, and to nominate Wheatley again, since the earlier rejection was not a judgement on Wheatley but merely meant that they were unfamiliar with his work. If Frankau would re-nominate him – slightly more formally, with two other Fellows seconding the proposal – then he would be reconsidered. Frankau agreed to withdraw his resignation temporarily, but added that unless Wheatley was made a Fellow by the end of the year, he would have no alternative.
Different clubs suit different people, and in January 1951, while Wheatley was having his troubles with the RSL, Labour minister Aneurin Bevan dined at White’s club one evening as the guest of Wheatley’s friend Sir John Slessor (Chief of Air Staff and Marshal of the RAF; Wheatley had worked with him during the War and wrote him in to They Used Dark Forces). White’s is often thought to be the most prestigious of the gentleman’s clubs, and Wheatley would eventually become a member.
On this particular evening White’s air of respectable calm was ruffled when the Honourable Denzil Fox-Strangways, who was drinking in the bar, was alerted to the fact that there was a Socialist on the premises. Fox-Strangways had been prone to erratic behaviour since the War, and although lamed from wounds he left the bar at once and caught up with Bevan on the club steps, which he attempted to kick Bevan down. He was forced to resign, but fortunately he was also a member of Brooks’s, handily placed just across the road.
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Frankau filled out another nomination form for Wheatley on Boxing Day 1950, this time proposing his ‘Qualification’ as “Probably the most widely read adventure-story writer of his generation”. Once again, Wheatley was not elected. This time the Secretary added what was clearly intended to be the conciliatory suggestion that the Council would welcome Wheatley as an ordinary member. Frankau resigned.
The members of the Council who rejected Wheatley, deciding that his work did not qualify as “published work of value to the literature of the country,” included Charles Morgan and, curiously enough, Louis Wilkinson, the man who had read ‘Hymn to Pan’ and passages from The Book of the Law at Crowley’s funeral. Of all the committee members, Wilkinson is the most likely to have had an attitude of informed derision towards the author of The Devil Rides Out, with its Crowley-inspired villain. Wilkinson’s presence on the Council raises the picturesque possibly of what Wheatley would no doubt have interpreted as a fellow traveller of Satanism operating behind the scenes.
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George VI was very ill, and knowing how much the King liked his books, Wheatley had sent him an advance copy of his latest novel in the autumn of 1951, to read during what was to be his final illness; he received a letter of thanks from Sir Michael Adeane, the King’s Equerry, which he framed. Perhaps unfortunately, the book was entitled The Man Who Killed The King.
On the sixth of February 1952, the King died. A friend of Wheatley’s wrote from London: “Everyone is most depressed, all theatres closed, even the BBC, and the general feeling seems to be sadness at losing an elder brother who really worked himself to death.”
In due course Dennis and Joan were very pleased to attend a ball at Hampton Court, given by Officers of the Household Brigade, at which Queen Elizabeth was present, just a couple of days before her official coronation. This was the coronation which Wheatley had feared in 1947 he might never see. A few years later, at a Coldstream Guards cocktail party organised by Jack Younger on the polo ground at Windsor, Wheatley was even more gratified to be presented to the Queen in person.
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In 1954 – Gilbert Frankau meanwhile having died in 1952 – Wheatley tried once more for Fellowship of the RSL. This time he had the support of Lord Birkenhead (Chairman of the Council, no less) and his ‘Qualification’ was more carefully honed. Now there was no mention of “numerous thrillers”, and instead the emphasis was on History, the most gentlemanly of subjects and the grandest genre in classical painting. Wheatley was the author of “Charles II, a Biography, Red Eagle, a biography of Marshal Voroshilov, The Man Who Killed The King, and other historical adventure novels”. And now, at last, Wheatley was elected. “Would you be kind enough”, he wrote to the Secretary, Mrs Patterson, “to express on my behalf to the Council at its next meeting how sensible I feel of the great honour they have done me.”
Having been elected, Wheatley was required to turn up in person to sign the Roll. Unfortunately, however, he had to postpone this, because he was going for a brief holiday in Germany, so he would present himself after Easter. The Society assured him that this was not a problem, and that there were suitable meetings after Easter on April the twenty-second and May the thirteenth.
Wheatley’s friend Eric Gillet was giving a talk at the Society on May the thirteenth, so this would clearly be a good time to attend. However, it then transpired that Diana was to return from America on that day with her two boys. The Society then suggested a subsequent meeting on June the tenth, which included a poetry reading. William Younger was a poet, so Wheatley decided to come that evening with Bill as his guest. May the thirteenth came and went, however, and still No.1 Hyde Park Gardens had seen nothing of Wheatley. His assurance to the Secretary on the twenty-fifth of June now has an almost plaintive note: “short of some entirely unforeseen circumstance, I really will present myself at Hyde Park Gardens at 4 o’clock on Thursday next, the 1st of July.”
And this time he did. After all the trouble involved in gaining entry, Wheatley’s membership of the RSL was uneventful to say the least, although he did donate copies of his books to the library. Perhaps its most poignant feature is the fact that Gilbert Frankau never lived to see it. Years later, after Wheatley’s own death, the Secretary asked Mary Lutyens, the wife of Joe Links, if she would write a short obituary of Wheatley for the Society’s report. Lutyens was glad to do so, and she asked for more details of Wheatley’s membership. The reply was brief and a little barren: “I have very little to tell you about his Fellowship as he never lectured to us and he did not often come to meetings.”