Wheatley’s postbag always swelled after his occult books. Shortly after Jugg was published he received a letter from a woman who claimed she had been present, in 1934, at a Black Mass held in Brighton with the specific intention of bringing about the death of King Albert of Belgium. The following day, in a climbing accident, he had indeed died.
Another unwanted letter arrived in January 1949, in a House of Commons envelope. It was a brief handwritten note from Sir Waldron Smithers, Conservative MP for Orpington, and it simply told Wheatley he wanted to see him in London, suggesting the Central Hall of the House as a place to meet.
Wheatley’s curiosity was evidently not piqued by this somewhat peremptory letter (he may well have guessed what it was going to be about), and it seems to have put his back up. He waited a couple of weeks before replying, and wrote
I have your letter, opening “I want to see you.” Your brevity suggests that you are a very busy man. I most certainly am, and in these days I rarely come to London.
Unless urgent business requires my presence there, I shall not go up again till I have finished the book on which I am now engaged – which should be some time in March.
Wheatley also asked for some indication of what Smithers wanted to see him about. Smithers wrote back more formally, this time typed and on House of Commons notepaper. What Smithers really wanted, he said, was to find out if Wheatley had any concrete evidence of Black Magical practices, with facts, places, and names. If he did, then Smithers was going to pass it on to the police so that firm action could be taken.
Wheatley was not particularly keen to be questioned about this, and in fact he must have known that however useful it might be for potboiling and propaganda, there was an embarrassing shortage of Satanic practice in Forties Britain.
The occult revival of the Sixties was still in the future. Kim Philby’s 1940s reports to his Russian masters had been padded with unreliable material, including the assertion that RAF officers in London were being induced to part with information by German spies who had them “under the influence of drugs, alcohol, sexual orgies or Black Mass”, but this was just Wheatley-style invention.
Wheatley had not kept in touch with Aleister Crowley, who had recently died, in 1947, a heroin addict in a Hastings boarding house. Louis Wilkinson had declaimed Crowley’s ‘Hymn to Pan’ at the funeral, and this had scandalised the local council, who promised to take “all necessary steps” to prevent anything of the kind from happening again.
Gerald Gardner’s witchcraft “revival” was yet to make itself felt. There were a few respectable esoteric groups such as The Society of the Inner Light, and some provincial offshoots of the Golden Dawn were still soldiering on, but all this was a long way from Black Magic.
Far from being a rampant menace to everything we hold dear, Black Magic was largely confined where it belonged, safely between the covers of Wheatley’s own books. He let the correspondence with Smithers lapse.
*
Justerini and Brooks had commissioned Wheatley to write a company history for their 1949 bi-centenary. They had been at the same address – No.2 Pall Mall – since they began, and Wheatley celebrates the firm as an enduring British institution, “like a little rock of Gibraltar”.
In the course of the book it survives fire and bombs, as well as the “black year of 1780”, when the wine merchants had to put up their shutters and reach for their flintlocks during the Gordon Riots: “Had it not been for the King’s firmness this week of anarchy might well have developed into a revolution.”
The riots left over eight hundred dead, and – like Dickens in Barnaby Rudge – Wheatley’s account shows his fear of the “rabble” and the “lawless mob”. He sees the Riots as preventing later revolution in Britain: “the middle-classes of London profited by the lesson. They had seen for themselves the bestial excesses of which a drunken mob was capable, and realised the danger of supporting the wave of anti-monarchical feeling which was already sweeping Europe”. The ideas of Rousseau were all very well, but “the King stood for law and order.”
After the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, trouble again broke out on the continent when Karl Marx – probably not a figure Justerini’s expected to find in their company history – issued the Communist Manifesto in 1848, the year of revolution across Europe. In April 1848 Justerini’s shutters went up again, as Chartists paraded across London armed with iron pikes fashioned from spear-topped railings, but Britain (already constitutional, and far ahead of the Continent in social legislation) escaped lightly. Her people were not in sympathy with the rioters, “and serious trouble was avoided”.
Amid all this upheaval and reaction, Wheatley gives a detailed account of changing tastes in middle-class British drinking, including the discovery of whisky (formerly despised), the arrival of cocktail and sherry parties, and the practice of having a drink before dinner. “In Victorian times people never drank anything before eating, for fear of impairing their palate for the wines that would accompany the meal”, but the early twentieth century saw the rise of the aperitif: “Perhaps it was the nerve-strain of the war which led to a great increase in the consumption of spirits and the general desire to put away not one but several drinks before dinner”.
The book is completed by numerous recipes, including cherry brandy, which Wheatley used to make at Grove Place (pricking each cherry twenty times), “peach bola,” and the eighteenth-century drinks ratafia and negus: it also included two new cocktail recipes from Wheatley and Alfred Hitchcock.
Wheatley made a solid job of The Seven Ages of Justerini’s, while perhaps casting the scope of the book wider than Justerini’s expected, with everything from the Black Hole of Calcutta to Darwinism. It shows an impressive knowledge of British history, and at heart it is a celebration of quality and continuity.
*
Anthony Wheatley – no longer in the Army, having contracted tuberculosis in Germany and been invalided out – had meanwhile met and fallen in love with Annette Webb, a vivacious and attractive woman who was the daughter of a military scientist, and in 1949 they were married. Confectionery and chocolates were always bound up with affection for Wheatley, and before they drove off on honeymoon, Wheatley told Anthony that when they reached the hotel in Dover, en route to the continent, they should enquire about a package. It proved to contain a big box of chocolates from Charbonnel et Walker, a magnum of vintage Veuve Clicquot and a copy of Wheatley’s latest book, The Rising Storm.
The Rising Storm is the third of the Roger Brook series, bringing Roger into the French Revolution. The Brook series were becoming popular, and Wheatley resolved to include all major events of the period, carefully digested into what he called “history without tears”.
Wheatley proceeded to write one of his major achievements in this genre, and his own favourite among his books, The Second Seal, published in 1950. Set in 1914, it fills in the earlier life of the Duke de Richleau and deals with the events leading to the First War. De Richleau becomes involved with the Serbian “Black Hand” secret society, mixes with the Imperial Family in Vienna, goes to the Kaiser’s HQ at Aix, and is finally involved in the Battle of the Marne.
The Second Seal shows Wheatley’s nostalgia for the world before the First War and, as usual, there is a stronger romantic interest than in most male popular writers, as the Duke becomes a colonel in the Archduchess Ilona Theresa’s Hussars, falls in love with her, and marries her.
The Second Seal is a careful novelisation of its period, populated by real characters such as Generals Ludendorff, von Moltke, and Joffre. Wheatley used books by Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig for Viennese background, and for his history he used Churchill’s The Great War, Ludendorff’s War Memories, and many others, including the anonymous My Secret Service, written under the memorable pseudonym of “The Man Who Dined With The Kaiser”.
Wheatley later visited Bavaria, where he stayed for a few days with Dr Kurt Hahn. Wheatley admired Hahn, a German Jew who had founded Gordonstoun School, the Outward Bound courses, and the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme, among other things. Hahn is sometimes regarded as the greatest educator of the twentieth century, with his dictum “there is more in you than you think.”
Wheatley, of course, was particularly aware of Hahn’s royal connection, since Prince Charles and several other members of the royal family attended Hahn’s school. Wheatley was extremely gratified when he gave Hahn a copy of The Second Seal: Hahn apparently admired its historical accuracy, its fairness to Germany and Austria, and its readability, saying he would get two hundred copies for his students.
Wheatley was still writing two new books a year, but he was about to slow down a little; he still published two books a year through the Fifties, but the new formula was usually one new book and one omnibus edition of previous books.
Wheatley and Joan went to the South of France in 1950, staying in Nice, where Wheatley took an apartment for two months on the Boulevard des Anglais. As a guidebook, Wheatley brought The Coast of Pleasure: Chapters Practical, Geographical and Anecdotal on the Social, Open Air and Restaurant Life of the French Riviera by the publisher Grant Richards, who had died in 1948. Wheatley had known him slightly, remembering him as a charming man but not a very successful publisher (in fact he had published James Joyce, although he may not have been financially successful by Hutchinson standards; it was said of Walter Hutchinson that he had never read a book in his life but he knew how to sell them). Wheatley found Richard’s book useful, although it must have been dated by 1950. It was published back in 1928, but no doubt part of Nice’s appeal was that it didn’t change too much.
The Wheatleys had friends in Nice, Diane and Pierre Hammerel, and the Hammerels took them to see “The Cave of Bats”, which Wheatley was to use in To The Devil – A Daughter. Its unusual feature was that it was partly man-made, and possibly used by the Phoenicians when they dominated the Mediterranean, bringing with them what Wheatley thought of as their horrible Gods and Goddesses, such as Astarte (prototype of Astaroth, who figured in Jugg) and Baal, the latter also known as Moloch and associated with human sacrifices. As Wheatley later put it:
Wherever the Phoenicians went, they took their terrible gods with them, and the priests performed their magic by the spilling of blood and semen. Some years ago, when I was in Nice, a friend took me to see a Phoenician temple.
It was deep underground, its only entrance being a well-like cavity on a hill-top some miles outside the city. One shudders to think of the revolting rites that had taken place in those subterranean chambers.
Wheatley was always alert to the possibility of Evil, and he had another hair raising experience in Nice while he was in a night club. One of the cabaret turns featured an emaciated old man who recited a few indecent poems and then, as a finale, recited the Lord’s Prayer backwards. Some of the audience may just have thought this was a feat of memory, perhaps in bad taste, but its blasphemous aspect was probably intended to be part of its effect. Reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards is often held to conjure up the Devil, and any frisson of wickedness in the night club was probably not accidental, particularly in France, with its strong anti-clerical tradition running right through the literature of Satanism and Surrealism.
Wheatley, however, saw even more in this performance, and he put the man into To The Devil – A Daughter as a Satanist:
There is an old priest at Cagnes who has a pretty gruesome reputation, and a fortune-teller in Monte Carlo who does not stick to telling the cards. There is one man in Nice, too, who might know something – if only we can persuade him to talk. He is an elderly cabaret singer with a husky bass voice, and he does his act in a dirty little dive off the Place Massena. One of his stunts is to intone the Paternoster backwards.
In real life Wheatley believed the act contained a hint, to any interested parties in the audience, that they could contact him after the show:
Most of the audience took it, no doubt, as a feat of memory; but I felt certain that it was a covert invitation. Had I put it to him afterwards that I could pay handsomely for a wax image to be made, and that to be done which had to be done so that I could inherit from a rich uncle, I do not doubt he would have obliged me.
*
What has been described as the main period of Wheatley’s success – the “second quarter of the twentieth century”, according to American academic J.Randolph Cox – was coming to an end. But far from his time being up, he was going to become even more of a household name in the third quarter of the century.
And before that he was going to write a book that nobody was to know about: a book he remained unwilling to discuss for the rest of his life.