That winter Wheatley and Joan went to Egypt, travelling in the quintessentially Thirties luxury of a flying boat. It had twenty or so seats arranged in pairs, padded and adjustable with footrests like dentists’ chairs. Passengers could get up and walk around – there was plenty of space – and the view from the slow, low-flying plane was superb. Wheatley thought it was like looking down on a map.
Wheatley saw the Pyramids and they were shown into a tomb by a French archaeologist they met, where Wheatley saw a mummy, and representations of the soul double or ka, as in his novel The Ka of Gifford Hillary. In the temple at Karnac he saw a figure of the god Set, and claimed to feel “a definite sense of evil, although I sensed nothing of that kind in any of the Tombs of the Kings.” The only problem Wheatley had in those was in the tomb of Thotmes III, where he was three hundred feet under ground when his “filthy Arab guide” threatened to make off with the only light unless Wheatley gave him some baksheesh.
Given the routine xenophobia of Wheatley’s work, he had an interesting experience when he went to Greece on this same holiday. He had already written a filthy Greek into his short story ‘Athenian Gold’ (“I say nozings – you maka me present, eh?”), where the narrator thinks “I should just love to have hit him in the middle of his oily face.” Wheatley had never met any Greeks, and he had a surprise when he discovered what decent, dignified, intelligent people they actually were, “proud of their lovely country and its magnificent contribution to civilisation” and wanting their guests to understand and enjoy it too. What is more, they had a lot of respect and liking for Johnny Englishman. Wheatley regretted ‘Athenian Gold,’ and later dismissed it as “more than usually unlikely”.
In Egypt, meanwhile, the Wheatleys had an introduction to “Russell Pasha”, Sir Thomas Russell, head of the Egyptian police and founder of the Camel Corps. Through him, Wheatley met Count Laszlo Almasy, the original for Michael Ondaatje’s English Patient (although quite unlike the Ondaatje character, he was a gay Nazi). Solo desert travel was so dangerous that it was usually regarded as foolhardy and bad form, but Almasy was engaged in a series of lone explorations. Wheatley believed he was looking for treasure, but this seems to have been a bluff; in fact, unknown to Wheatley, Almasy was probably exploring for small oases, laying the basis for a desert expertise that led Rommel to give him the Iron Cross.
Nevertheless Almasy’s cover story, filled in by Russell Pasha, provided Wheatley with the germ of a future book, The Quest of Julian Day. After the Persian king Cambyses conquered Egypt, the Persian army marched across the desert with a fabulous loot in gold. Unfortunately they were dependent on Egyptian guides who misled them, and after a week’s march into the wastes they were lost. The entire expedition perished, and the treasure is somewhere out there to this day.
*
The Spanish Civil War had been under way since July 1936, with the left-wing Republican side (the former coalition government, fallen into chaos) having widespread support in Britain against the right-wing Nationalist side (rebellious and eventually victorious) led by General Franco. Nancy Cunard’s questionnaire, published as Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, found about 125 authors for the Republicans, sixteen neutral, including H.G.Wells and T.S.Eliot, and only five for Franco, notably Evelyn Waugh and Arthur Machen.
There would have been six if Cunard had asked Wheatley (“he had my vote every time … To me it was inconceivable that any sane person should wish to see Spain in the hands of the Communists.”) Wheatley’s position was rare among writers but not as isolated as that might suggest. Conservatives generally agreed with him, and Churchill, who later described himself as neutral, had written in his Evening Standard column that Franco’s forces were “marching to re-establish order” in opposition to a weak Leftist government that “was falling into the grip of dark, violent forces coming ever more plainly into the open, and operating by murder, pillage and industrial disturbance.”
Wheatley was particularly proud of his Spanish Civil War novel, The Golden Spaniard, based on Dumas’s Twenty Years After, when the four musketeering friends were divided by civil war in seventeenth-century France. In Spain, “Quite naturally the Duke would be in sympathy with the Spanish Monarchists, and Richard, as a staunch supporter of the best Conservative tradition, would be with him; whereas Simon, the Liberal Jew, and Rex, the Democratic American, would equally naturally espouse the cause of the Spanish Socialists.”
The Morning Post saw Communistic tendencies in Wheatley, while the Daily Worker accused him of being a Fascist. The New Statesman slipped in a further allegation, noting that although Wheatley “judiciously divides his sympathies … The sadistic touch, the specialité de la maison, is provided in a rape – perpetrated by the Reds.”
The Thirties were highly aware of sadism. It was also in the New Statesman, just a little later, that John Betjeman wrote ‘Cookery for Sadists’ (“Slash some turnips with a sharp knife, rub salt, curry powder and cayenne into the cuts and truss them tightly”). There was a new attention to psychopathology and its jargon, an awareness of brutality on the Continent, and a sadistic new sensationalism in American-style hard-boiled writing: Julian Symons credits Peter Cheyney with pushing the boundaries and “exploiting the public taste for cruelty … Lemmy Caution is the first ‘good’ man in crime fiction to torture for pleasure.” No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939), a book Wheatley owned, was another landmark in the tendency, featuring the abuse of a female captive by a criminal gang.
Wheatley’s work does have a sadistic streak and he was predictably interested in spanking (“lots of girls enjoy a playful hiding sometimes”) or technique Anglaise as it is known in France. Roger Brook flagellates a Russian woman with an umbrella, of all things, but Wheatley knew from his reading of Tombe’s Havelock Ellis that Russian women enjoy being beaten. The dash of sadism in Wheatley – the prospect of a girl being Satanically deflowered on a bed of nettles, for example – is usually buffoonish stuff compared to the more sophisticated and unpleasant sadism in Ian Fleming, but it is sufficiently there to qualify Wheatley for the “three S’s” that Cyril Connolly saw as the winning formula of the James Bond books: Sex, Snobbery and Sadism.
*
Wheatley felt it was time to create a new character. Julian Day – the name, as in the Julian Calendar, makes him a counterpart of Gregory and the Gregorian Day – is a young man caught in a scandal which ends his career in the Diplomatic Service and his timely dreams of “one day averting another world war as Britain’s youngest yet most brilliant Ambassador.” Perhaps through Bill, Wheatley was now taken with the glamour of the “Varsity.” In addition to a baronetcy, Julian has a Double-First, and he was “the best man with an epee in my year at Oxford.” Along with the treasure Wheatley had learned about in Egypt, The Quest of Julian Day (1939) has a Monte-Cristo style revenge theme, but perhaps Julian was too embittered, or just too smug: the public didn’t take to him.
Characters like Julian Day and Swithin Destime, out of the Buchan and Sapper stable, were now dated (“that’s – devilish sporting of you” says Swithin to Tyndall-Williams, one of our men in the Istanbul embassy). A new style of thriller came in with Eric Ambler’s 1939 The Mask of Dimitrios, which was realistic and no longer relied on the clean-cut gentleman hero grappling with proletarians and foreigners.
If Wheatley was dated he hardly noticed: his career was going great guns, and while working on Julian Day he had got into Who’s Who. Largely on the strength of the Crime Dossiers, he was described as a “novelist and inventor …” The Dossiers were continuing, and when Wheatley went to Egypt he had left J.G.Links to finish The Malinsay Massacre, about the murder of a Scottish baronial family. It was weaker than the previous two, and Wheatley was particularly annoyed by the photographs, which he felt were taken in insufficiently baronial locations.
A fourth dossier in the summer of 1939, Herewith the Clues!, about the murder of a London night club owner by an IRA gang, descended into self parody. Boasting on the cover that it had “Five times as many clues as in any of the previous dossiers,” it also emphasised the (frankly minor) celebrity of the people who posed for the photographs as if this was another technical innovation. It flopped.
There was a postscript to the Dossiers early in the War when William Butlin, later to be Sir Billy, offered Wheatley a generous fee to write a Dossier mystery featuring a Butlin’s holiday camp. These were still new, the first one having opened at Skegness in 1936, and provided economical holidays for the masses. Given the luxury appeal and snobisme of Wheatley’s work, and his later attribution of his success to “never mentioning the kitchen sink”, Wheatley’s reply was almost inevitable. Butlin’s was too much like taking the kitchen sink on holiday, and he declined.
*
In October 1937 Wheatley had met the last of the figures who would shape his occult world view, Joan Grant. She became famous after her 1937 novel Winged Pharaoh, supposedly based on her memories of a previous incarnation in ancient Egypt. Other books dealt with her past lives not just in Egypt but the Holy Land and pre-Columbian America. Wheatley had always had a leaning towards belief in reincarnation, but his friendship with Grant intensified it.
Reviewing Winged Pharaoh in the book trade paper Current Literature, Wheatley recommended it to “those who are interested in things of the spirit but not necessarily members of any church” because it had “an inner message which makes it one of the most important books for our time.” Three decades later he still felt it had “as much wisdom and light in it as in any sacred book of East or West.” The Grant worldview became almost a religion for Wheatley. At the end of his tether with Diana, he warned her:
Then there is the greater future. You believe in Winged Pharaoh. This time you have been given many blessings and, whatever you may think, a very easy path … If you continue Selfish, Lazy, Loose in your mind and entirely self-contained you will be throwing it all away.
You won’t get such a good deal next time …
Wheatley could be ingenious in his arguments for reincarnation, which he believed had been central to every great religion until Jewish monotheism suppressed it. Christ’s words that “the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children, even unto the third and fourth generation,” must refer to His own belief in reincarnation:
Is it conceivable that so gentle and sweet-natured a man could possibly have meant that an unborn child should suffer because his grandfather had been a brutal rogue? His meaning was that everyone is the father of his next incarnation… .
Wheatley first met Grant at a cocktail party, shortly before the publication of Winged Pharaoh. He got to know her better in the following year, and she would probably have told him her Aleister Crowley story. When she was seven, a visitor came to see her mother; “a kind of human toad,” as she remembered him. He poured fulsome compliments over Joan’s older step-sister Margery, who was around twenty, and outstayed his welcome after tea.
Finally “the Toad took his black pearl tie-pin from his purple satin cravat and stuck it into Margery’s arm. He pretended it was an accident and blotted the bead of blood with his handkerchief … Margery was too terrified to shriek, but when he tweaked out a strand of her hair she squeaked “Mother!” She was so frightened she sounded like a mouse.”
“Now,” said the toad, “you are in my power, for I have your blood and your hair,” at which point Grant’s mother, who had re-entered the room without him noticing, broke the spell and threw him out. “What a very disagreeable man,” she said.
Joan left her husband, Leslie Grant, for Charles Beatty, and he too became a friend of the Wheatleys. Dennis and Joan often went to stay with Charles and Joan at his old mansion, Trelydan Hall, and despite Wheatley’s life-long insistence that he had never been present at a magical ritual, it was here that he witnessed something very like one, ‘The Ceremony of the Roses.’ Charles sprinkled Joan’s naked body with rose petals and made a series of passes over her, invoking the ‘Powers of Light’. Joan then went into a trance and began talking from one of her Egyptian incarnations.
These trances were a standard practice of hers when she composed her books, and the Wheatleys saw them many times. Romantic novelist Barbara Cartland was wont to do something similar: “Lying on her sofa in a darkened room, which she used to call ‘the Factory’, she tapped into her romantic dreamworld and dictated a fresh chapter every afternoon to her faithful secretary Mrs Eliot.”
Wheatley had mixed feelings about Charles: he admired Charles’s devotion to helping those in distress, through which he eventually lost Trelydan Hall, and came to feel “I have met only one living saint – Charles Beatty.” On the other hand, he also felt that Charles’s devotion to rituals and symbols actually had a damping or wearing effect on Joan Grant’s imagination, and perhaps even “ruined the natural psychic link that she undoubtedly had with Powers of Good.”
Beatty was an interesting man in his own right, and one of his formative experiences caught Wheatley’s imagination. He was the nephew of Admiral Beatty, the hero of Jutland – later Viscount Borodale – and when the Irish Troubles began, Admiral Beatty sent Charles to defend the ancestral home at Borodale, County Wexford. The big houses in the area were being burned down, and Charles lived at Borodale alone for months, living in one room with a supply of tinned food: a scenario like the paranoid sieges Wheatley enjoyed so much in Charles Hope Hodgson books such as The House on the Borderland.
Beatty spent much of his time at Borodale meditating in the lotus position, and put the months to use in a study of Buddhism and mythology. Writing as Longfield Beatty, he published a book, The Garden of the Golden Flower, a study of myths, and in later life inclined towards Jungianism.
*
Always sensitive to decor, Wheatley compiled a folder of eight ‘Ideal Home Mystery Rooms’ for the 1938 Ideal Home Exhibition, in which readers were invited to guess which famous person each room belonged to, with a £200 first prize (about £10,000 today). In the course of it he met Baroness Orczy, whose Scarlet Pimpernel stories had meant so much to him as a boy.
Wheatley had given a number of talks on Black Magic in the late Thirties and in 1939 he gave one to the Eton Literary Society. His stories were smoothly in place by now; the man who went mad raising Pan; the woman given to the Devil in a pact when she was a child; the exorcism that drove a heap of maggots into a joint of meat; and his own experience with the man on the stairs as a child. “Mr Wheatley,” reported the Eton Chronicle, “ended with an earnest appeal not to dabble in black magic.”
Wheatley enjoyed being invited to Eton, and he particularly admired the way the boys were given a degree of freedom to run it themselves. The most important thing was to be popular, which didn’t strike Wheatley as pernicious; to him it was another instance of the importance of being a “good fellow.”
In the same week Wheatley appeared on an ‘Authors versus Publishers’ wireless quiz, where the authors’ team included Pamela Frankau, Louis Golding and Peter Cheyney, and on a very early television broadcast with Tom Driberg, Lord Donegall, and Lady Eleanor Smith. The producer offered a copy of Who’s Who as a prize for the best performance, won by Lady Eleanor, only to take it back as soon as the programme finished, saying it was just a gambit for the viewers.
Lady Eleanor wasn’t having that; she seized the book saying it was now rightly hers and she was going to sell it, at which point Wheatley gave her a pound. Wheatley’s pleasure at this bargain was barely dented when Tom Driberg trumped the pair of them, in his supercilious public-school drawl. “Silly of you, Dennis,” he said; “Waste of a pound. You should have made the office buy you one; they always do for me.”
*
The office Driberg had in mind was probably the Sunday Graphic, where Wheatley (“Noted Author and Man About Town”) wrote the ‘Personalities Page.’ This was only part of his journalistic output: he also wrote ‘Men, Women and Books’ in Current Literature, and pieces for various other papers including the Mail and the Evening Dispatch, on subjects such as the Bacon Shakespeare controversy and ‘Crime as a Science’. In the latter, which bears a similarity to his conspiracy-oriented views on occultism, Wheatley revealed that there were “schools on the Continent” where “forgery, safe-blowing, confidence tricks, white slave traffic, and black mail, are learnt under the tutorship of experts.”
Wheatley used his columns to promote friends such as Joan Grant, and he also let his house be used as a venue for talks on reincarnation by two associates of hers, a Mr Wyeth and Mr Neal. In this same period he was also promoting Jacques Penry on physiognomy, the old-style reading of character from the face in a manner akin to palmistry. In a sense physiognomy – something also associated with old-style bad novelists, where a strong chin might denote bravery, a retroussé nose innocence, and so on – completed Wheatley’s pre-Enlightenment beliefs, along with numerology and the rest. With the world drifting onwards to war, Wheatley seemed to be drifting backwards to the Middle Ages.
Along with friends and even family – Wheatley got plenty of mileage out of Diana – Wheatley’s columns included trivia of a distinctly Thirties kind. After an anti-Nazi joke about the difficulties of dentistry in a country where no one is allowed to open their mouth, Wheatley reported “Anglo-Saxon stock is going up in Germany”: Hitler had announced that English girl Marian Daniels was the best dancer he had ever seen. “Here are the measurements of Hitler’s ideal girl,” Wheatley told his readers:
Height 5’4”
Bust 32 ½”
Hips 37”
Waist 25”
and she wears size 5 shoes with 2½” heels
*
War was now clearly on the cards: after the Munich Agreement and “peace in our time” in September 1938, Hitler seized the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.
Reviewing an anti-war book, Danger Spots of Europe by Bernard Newman, Wheatley agreed with Newman that “the greatest force for good or ill in the world today is Propaganda.” He managed to incorporate it into his topical board game, Invasion, which had the dual message of re-arming while staying out of war if possible. It was played as a game of strategy across a Europe featuring place names such as Kitsch, Cliché, and Ersatz, along with Wurstanworse, Wuntzbit and Twyceshi, while the character of Angleland was suggested in places such as Dolittle, Flanelhurst, Fogey-on-Booze, and Blimps Bluff. A betting system was suggested in the rules, with the pool to be divided between the winners, but “To be logical, as no country ever makes anything out of a war, the contents of the pool should go into a charity box.”
Wheatley bent his newspaper columns to the task. Supporting an Appeasement-oriented politician named Sir John Simon, Wheatley told readers “How amazingly young Sir John Simon looks! That doubled my interest in a prediction recently made by my favourite astrologer. He tells me that Sir John’s stars mark him out as more likely to succeed to the premiership than any other leading statesman.”
Never one for the visual arts, Wheatley singled out “a fine dynamic painting of the famous 3.7 anti-aircraft gun in action” for praise at the Royal Academy, and he used his column to run a food hoarding competition: “Don’t wait for emergency and start hoarding. Do it now. I laid in my iron rations at the time of the Abyssinian crisis, and I have been urging all my friends to do the same since.” The housewife who sent in the best list of “iron rations for the home” won £3 worth of her chosen items. “Few mentioned chocolate,” said Wheatley, “but I recommend it.”
Wheatley had an amusing confirmation of media power through his column, when he and some other journalists, reporting a dance, agreed to invent a beauty named Ermintrude Wraxwell. Offers immediately starting coming in from agents and film companies: “had we named a real girl, we could have made a fortune for her.”
*
Home Secretary Sir John Anderson, remembered for Anderson bomb shelters, formed a panel of celebrity speakers to tour the country raising volunteers for the Territorial forces, Air Raid Wardens and nursing. The panel included various sportsmen, actor Charles Laughton, writer Ralph Straus, and Wheatley. Characteristically – like the questionnaires he sometimes put in his novels – Wheatley asked readers for help with these speeches in his newspaper column: “I am anxious to have unofficial tips on best lines that will appeal to audiences – three guineas for best suggestion.” In the event Wheatley’s speeches went down well, and he closed them by leading the audience in what must have been an emotional rendition of ‘Land of Hope and Glory.’ Two million volunteers were raised by Anderson’s panels in three months.
Wheatley focused on the dangers of political extremism, Fascist and Communist (“I do not suggest for one moment that these extremist parties should be suppressed. To attempt to do so would be the negation of the freedom that we stand for. But I do suggest that it is in our vital interests to see to it that their numbers grow as little as possible.”) The important thing, said Wheatley, was for his listeners to remain free to vote for whichever party they thought would serve the interests of the country, “and so ensure yourselves of a continuation in your freedom of choice of government and the certainty of a healthy opposition which will preserve our liberties.”
In private, as we shall see, Wheatley had more mixed feelings about democracy than this might suggest. Historically, the promotion of democracy by people without left leanings had arisen largely in opposition to Bolshevism and later Fascism. Before that it was a less universally positive word, and an observer at a socialist meeting in the nineteenth century described a meeting of “characteristically democratic men with dirty hands and small heads, some of them obviously with very limited wits.”
Wheatley managed to knock off one more thriller before war broke out, Sixty Days to Live. The sixty days are those remaining before a comet hits the earth and a tidal wave finishes off the entire human race; entire, that is, but for a Surrey squire and three young couples who happen to include a film star and a millionaire.
Absurd as it is, it includes some compelling descriptions of a frozen England, anticipating Anna Kavan’s Ice, and the TLS judged it to be “an excellent book for war time.” Not everyone was so generous. Responding in the early science fiction fanzine Sardonyx to an American fan deprived of his regular fix of Wheatley, English writer Christopher Youd wrote:
Witness the anguish of Fred W. Fischer, who apparently dwells in the picturesque li’l burg of Knoxville, at being unable to obtain the works of Dennis Wheatley, a defect which makes me think more highly of the American publishing trade. The especial mention – “Sixty Days to Live” – is, my dear Fred, one of the latest and worst specimens of undiluted tosh to radiate from the well-known Wheatley pen. If, in America, you cannot reach Wheatley, thank once again the deity who created your native land. For we, in England, cannot get away from him … Wheatley, by the way, is another of our pseudo-Fascists, who, on Italian intervention, suffered a pseudo-change into patriots.
*
Diana was still a source of worry. Now eighteen, she had fallen in love with Brinsley Le Poer Trench, a charming man some ten years her senior who was the son of an Irish peer. His family were ancient and distinguished: one of his forebears had married the fourteenth-century witch Dame Alice Kyteler, who was accused of murdering three husbands and having relations with a demonic incubus named Robert Artisson – as in the Yeats poem ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’1 – while the fictional protagonist of H.P.Lovecraft’s story ‘The Rats in the Walls’ is a de la Poer descendant.
Brinsley had, at one time, had a large fortune, but his affairs were now in the hands of trustees. He was tall and handsome, and all accounts agree how personable he was: he was a distinguished but amiable individual, with a rather haunted, faraway expression and a taste for elegant braces.
In due course Brinsley and Diana wished to marry, which on the face of it might have pleased Wheatley. Wheatley was nothing if not class-conscious, and in that respect Brinsley – the son of the Earl of Clancarty, albeit only the fifth son – was certainly the real thing. Wheatley was impressed by the fact that Joan could trace her ancestry back to the time of the Norman Conquest, but Brinsley could do even better.
He could trace it from 63,000 BC, when beings from other planets first landed on the earth in spaceships. Most humans, Brinsley was to explain in later years, were descended from these aliens, who came from more than one planet: “This accounts for all the different skin colours we’ve got down here.” The majority of extra-terrestrials still out there were friendly, but Brinsley gathered that at least one group were hostile, and needed to be watched. Brinsley was eventually to reveal the existence of aliens living inside the earth, communicating with our surface world by secret tunnels erupting in places such as Tibet, and infiltrating agents among us in preparation for an eventual take-over. Many UFOs had in fact come not from outer space at all, but from this alien civilisation inside the earth, emerging from holes at the North and South Poles.
“I haven’t been down there myself”, Brinsley admitted, “but from what I gather they are very advanced.” When the time came, Brinsley was to be a gift for his Telegraph obituarist. Brinsley had once produced a photograph showing “a large circular blob” amid the ice of the North Pole, which he said was the entrance to an alien tunnel: “He remained adamant even when it was pointed out to him that he was looking at part of the camera.”
Brinsley’s eminence as a UFOlogist was still in the future, but somehow Wheatley felt he was not the man for Diana. Apart from anything else, he had no money, forcing Wheatley into the role of Victorian-style father. Brinsley’s intentions might be honourable, but how could he keep Diana in the style to which she was accustomed? All he had was a lowly clerking job at the Bank of South Africa.
Wheatley became angry when Brinsley announced that he wished to marry Diana. Diana arrived shortly after his outburst, insisting that she loved Brinsley and she wanted to marry him. Wheatley and Joan put forward their most sensible arguments, but finally they gave in, with the proviso that it should at least be a long engagement.
Brinsley took up lodgings in the house next door but one, and his charming presence was much in evidence at No.8 itself until at last, after almost a year, his status as one of the family became official. Brinsley and Diana, now twenty, were married by Wheatley’s friend Cyril ‘Bobby’ Eastaugh. As Wheatley gave the bride away he was filled with misgivings, even as he hosted the champagne reception at his house. Penniless, the couple went down to ‘Pen’s Porch’ – a cottage on Lady Carnarvon’s Highclere Castle estate in Hampshire which the Wheatleys had leased – for their honeymoon, before Brinsley was conscripted into the Artillery at Amesbury, and Diana took a small flat in the town to be near him.
Wheatley’s misgivings about the marriage proved to be well-founded, and it collapsed during the War. Through Wheatley’s own war work, Diana met and fell in love with an American academic working in intelligence, Professor Wentworth ‘Went’ Eldredge of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, and she obtained a divorce from Brinsley.
Wheatley liked Went, who later worked for the CIA, and he was relieved to see the back of Brinsley, who went on to unforeseen heights. Wheatley’s former son-in-law found work selling advertising space for a gardening magazine opposite Waterloo Station, while editing the Flying Saucer Review and founding the International Unidentified Object Observer Corps. It was said that Brinsley spent his working time selling space, and his spare time gazing into it. Brinsley Le Poer Trench became well known to UFOlogists, with a string of books. His work anticipated the ‘God was an astronaut’ thesis of Erich von Daniken, and he also became big in Japan. Mr Honda, the motor manufacturer, came to London to question him about UFO energy and its potential uses in the automobile industry.
Wheatley did not live to see Brinsley’s finest hour. After years of modest living in Kind Hearts and Coronets-style straitened circumstances, at last Brinsley’s ship came in. Some unexpected deaths in the family propelled him into the House of Lords, when he became the eighth Earl of Clancarty, Viscount Dunlo, Baron Trench, Viscount Clancarty, and Marquess of Heusden. Brinsley’s greatest triumph came when he instigated the House of Lords UFO debate in 1979, two years after Wheatley’s death (“Is it not time that Her Majesty’s Government informed our people of what they know about UFOs? I think it is time our people were told the truth.”) He was also instrumental in introducing the Flying Saucer Review into the House of Lords Library.
Before we take our leave of Brinsley Le Poer Trench, eighth Earl and sometime Wheatley in-law, with his elegant braces and his haunted look, the last word should go to John Michell, who wrote a gentle and respectful obituary of him in the Fortean Times: “Friends from all periods tell of his great kindness, and those who laughed at his beliefs were often disarmed by the simple courtesy with which he defended them.”
*
With war impending, Wheatley wanted the family to holiday in Ireland, but Joan insisted on the South of France. While they were there, Max Knight sent them a coded telegram: “Uncle has taken a turn for the worse and, if you wish to see him before the end, you should return home at once.” In the event it missed them: they were already on their way back, just in time.
Back at No.8, Wheatley began preparing as if for a siege. He had already deposited a “large black box, roped and sealed” with his bank for safekeeping. It contents are unknown. Perhaps every book should have an unsolved mystery within it, like a vault, and this is ours. Quite likely it was Wheatley’s personal archive and papers, containing things like his account of Tombe, in which case it held much of the present book.
He now asked Justerini and Brooks for empty champagne cases and built a half-submerged air raid shelter with them, packing them with rubble and making a protected space big enough for himself, Joan, the cook and two maids. Wheatley split his wine cellar into four, keeping a quarter, sending a quarter to Justerini’s for storage, and dividing the rest between Joe Links and Charles Beatty, who had places in the country. Wheatley had stocked up on food, and his greatest fear was food riots and public disorder in the aftermath of bombing. Characteristically, he was as fearful of mob rule as he was of the Germans: “I had planned to make my household, of myself, and five women, self-supporting until the Government had got things under control.”
Like families all over Britain, the Wheatleys – that day including Bill, Diana, and Colin – were gathered to listen to the wireless on the Sunday morning of the third of September 1939. Britain had given Germany an ultimatum to leave Poland, expiring at eleven, but there had been no response.
Consequently, said Chamberlain in his broadcast, “this nation is now at war with Germany.”
1 “There lurches past, his great eyes without thought /…/ That insolent fiend Robert Artisson / To whom the love-lorn Lady Kyteler brought / Bronzed peacock feathers, red combs of her cocks.”