Wheatley prided himself that his customers included “three Kings, twenty-one Imperial, Royal and Serene Highnesses, twelve British Ducal Houses, the Archbishop of Canterbury and a score of millionaires.” It was a subject he loved to expand on: “Kings of Italy, Rumania and Egypt; a score of Princes (including his present Majesty King George VI); another score of Ambassadors and Dukes. Rajahs and millionaires, cabinet ministers and film stars all came to buy those lovely things in which I specialised.”
Wheatley’s wares were expensive, but they were costing him a great deal of money to stock: for an exceptional port he was paying £350 per pipe (cask); “a price which far exceeds anything ever paid by any other merchant.”
*
On May 3rd 1929 a woman named Joan Pelham Burn had come into his office to order champagne for a ball, and Wheatley had got to know her socially because she was Bino Johnstone’s sister. Joan’s appearance was entirely in tune with Dewhirst’s prediction, which always impressed Wheatley. He had even seen Wheatley meeting her in a wood-panelled room – his wood-panelled office, in some retellings – although this was not unlikely, since Wheatley was leading a rather wood-panelled life.
Joan had been married twice, and had four children, Bill, Jack, Diana, and Colin. She was divorced from her first husband, Scottish Baronet William Younger, and had lost her second, Captain Hubert Pelham Burn, in a car crash. Joan and Wheatley became friends, went out regularly to venues such as the Savoy, and the old Quaglino’s, and went into business together with a firm called The Burn Trading Company. This supplied restaurants with equipment, from carpeting to china and cutlery, and could take advantage of Wheatley’s restaurant contacts such as Vecchi.
He had been planning to do this for some time, and his strategic plan was to attain a drinks monopoly, supplying so many key restaurants that he could dictate terms to his own suppliers, rather in the way that the big commercial lending libraries had been able to make or break publishers.
Gradually Wheatley and Joan fell in love. The Noel Coward song ‘I’ll See You Again’ from Bitter Sweet became the theme song of their relationship, and it was a great thrill for Wheatley when they met Coward while selling drinks and cigarettes at the 1929 Schneider Trophy seaplane race. They had Coward to lunch, and he later signed Wheatley’s books.
As their relationship deepened, Wheatley’s demands on Joan increased. With his lifelong tendency to ‘state his case’ in writing – as he wrote to her, “I am able to put my ideas (not more grammatically – dear me no but perhaps more clearly) on paper” – he explained his feelings and worries:
Am I unreasonable? Of course I am, because I have no earthly right to expect anything except that which you choose to give me – but it does raise my horrid complex – not jealousy … but the feeling of which I spoke to you … that the more one gives the less one gets, one becomes accepted.
“I am capable of such unutterable devotion to you,” he wrote. He was putting his cards on the table, but was he doing the right thing?
Does it pay? Such experience as I have had goes very definitely to show that it does not – the reaction of the women is “Oh why can’t he be sensible, the man is becoming just a bore.” – Are you different from the rest – Oh how I pray to God you are.
They were now a couple, although this didn’t stop Wheatley from taking advantage of the prostitutes available when he visited Madrid with Bino that November, where he found himself in the most luxurious maison de rendezvous he had ever seen, with a sunken marble bath en suite to his bedroom. He also noticed the hatred that many Spaniards had developed for the monarchy. When Bino’s Spanish friends showed them the Royal Vault under the Escorial Palace, filled with dead kings, they pointed to the last vacant space and said emphatically “Alfonso Thirteenth; then finish.”
Wheatley had been consulting another soothsayer, a blind woman, and she told him that he should make his position clear to Joan in every respect, which he did. He was leading “this farce of married life,” but he had been slow to end it because he was depressed, “and again because it is repugnant to me to cause anybody of whom I have been fond, and who is a good friend, pain.” Altogether
I am tied up … I have been unhappy for a long time now about this hopelessly unsatisfactory home life of mine but if I thought about it at all, it was to feel with a certain amount of cynicism that most people’s home lives were not particularly jolly anyhow, that mine was no exception, and that in the future, one had at least, a wife who was certainly fond of one in a friendly kind of way – a child who would be no worse for having a father present as he grew up – and for the rest, – one took an interest in developing one’s business – in art and literature, and knew that women more or less desirable would surely come along and from time to time provide interludes from which one would derive a certain pleasure – it never occurred to me that I might fall in love.
… for a long time now I have regarded myself as almost an old man – my youth was so full and so hectic, and it has long since gone. It did not surprise me yesterday when Miss Craven looked at me with her poor blind eyes and said, – You are a man of about 45, I should suppose – How terribly near to 50!
He was 33.
… the war put ten years on my generation – and now when I thought I was past love – I’m just down on my knees – full of shame that I should have monkeyed with life as I have, yet filled with the understanding which monkeying with life over a long period gives, – that now I have met someone superbly different, and I am filled with undying gratitude that you should feel I am sufficiently unsullied to give me your hands and your lips.
He also explained to Joan that on the business side he was seriously undercapitalised: “actually the whole thing is based on borrowed money … given a few years, I may be secure and reasonably well off … on the other hand – a few really big bad debts – a sudden calling in of loans by the bank – and then! Where should I be?”
Wall Street had crashed in October, an event which took a while to catch up with Wheatley, but already he returned from Spain to face business problems. He had over expanded, taking on too many staff and venturing into schemes which looked good on paper.
Wheatley’s last push for the luxury market was his catalogue At The Sign of the Flagon of Gold, a beautiful gold-on-black covered production from the spring of 1930. This was themed around ‘Old Masters, Old Brandies and a few Great Wines’; the Old Masters being reproduced engravings of Van Eyck, Holbein, and Durer, among others. The original engravings, “for many years in the possession of His Imperial Majesty The Tsar,” could be viewed at Wheatley’s offices. Wheatley captioned each picture with a smattering of art history (“… may be said to have been the founder of the Flemish school … One of the greatest of the early masters, he lacked somewhat in composition, but his heads, which were copied from nature, are charming …”1).
Drinks on offer included a Chateau d’Yquem from 1870, and a brandy which had been repeatedly ordered by no less than two English dukes. Wheatley therefore called it Ducal Brandy and, while allowing the dukes to remain unnamed, appended a note from his accountants, Messrs Carter, Clay and Lintott, to confirm that they had examined the books and that dukes were indeed buying.
Most impressive of all was the 1789 Champagne Brandy and the 1830 Cognac, the latter having been Tsar Alexander’s, and now being sold by Wheatley at twelve guineas a bottle (about five hundred pounds today). Both of these had been served at the Inaugural Luncheon of the Gourmets’ and Connoisseurs’ Circle. This was organised by none other than Mr Stambois the rare brandy importer, whose letter of gratitude to Wheatley was reproduced in the catalogue. Writing from Marlow Lodge, Buckinghamshire, for all the world like a disinterested country gentleman, Stambois wished to place on record the fact that all the brandies served were from Mr.Wheatley’s “remarkable stocks,” omitting to mention that he was supplying them to Wheatley in the first place.
The Gourmets’ and Connoisseurs’ Circle held its first Luncheon on November 13th 1929; if the name is anything to judge by, it might be seen as a slightly more vulgar and ostentatious forerunner of Andre Simon’s Wine and Food Society, founded in 1933. “How this fat, rather tattily dressed, little Polish Jew succeeded in getting to know the people he did I have no idea”, Wheatley wrote of Stambois. This first lunch was presided over by Lord Decies, who had had a distinguished military career and won the DSO with the Somaliland Tribal Horse. Diners enjoyed pheasant, remarkable brandies, and Imperial Tokays from 1763 and 1837.
Before long Stambois persuaded Wheatley to host a dinner for the Circle at his shop. Thirty guests, dressed in white tie and tails, sat down to plover’s eggs followed by roast sucking pig, and the evening was a great success. Guests included painter Sir John Lavery; Harry Preston, hotelier and boxing promoter; and Wing Commander Sir Louis Greig, who was to play an important role in Wheatley’s life.
Preston was an exceptionally tough cockney who made his fortune from the only recently respectable sport of boxing – legalised in 1925 – and had since become well known for his charity work. He seemed to know everyone, from Arnold Bennett and Arthur Machen to Sir Louis Greig and the Prince of Wales, and his passport had been “good fellowship”, an idea which became important to Wheatley. Being a “good fellow” could transcend class and forgive politics.
Sir Louis Greig was Gentleman Usher in Ordinary to the King, and Equerry to the Duke of York, later to be King George VI. He was a man of great charm from a relatively ordinary background. Although he was far from being a committed fascist, he was to be a regular attender at Sir Oswald Mosley’s January Club. Whereas the British Union of Fascists had a largely working class membership, the January Club – sometimes seen as a ‘front’ group brokering fascism to the more influential classes – was a more Establishment group for the broadly sympathetic discussion of the various varieties of fascism, bringing together people who were “interested in modern forms of government”; with hindsight a rather chilling phrase.
*
Joan was keen that Wheatley should leave Nancy, and in the Spring of 1930 he moved out. Joan found him a flat at 11 Manson Mews, just round the back of her own flat at 48 Queen’s Gate. Meanwhile the slump was beginning to bite, and Wheatley’s over-expanded and under-capitalised business was starting to feel more and more precarious. When a friend suggested he should try upmarket bootlegging to ‘dry’ America, Wheatley was excited by the idea and gave it a go. (“Oh yes,” he wrote of his rum-running in a Thirties newspaper column, “I’ve seen life.”)
In fact Wheatley’s career as a bootlegger amounted to very little. He took Joan – still in separate cabins – and samples of his wares. Having travelled from New York to Miami by train, and been shocked by the state of America’s black population in the shanty towns they passed through, Wheatley established a base at Nassau, in the Bahamas, where he was advised to store his wares in a shed. The shed was duly broken into, and everything stolen. Wheatley returned home with nothing but a bad case of sunburn.
As the slump bit harder, Wheatley had to start sacking his staff. Norman Penzer’s job had for some time amounted to smoking Wheatley’s cigars, and making coffee laced with brandy. Monty Sternberg and others also had to be laid off (and it was now Wheatley tried to sack the tenaciously parasitical Bino, who laughed and refused to go) but this was not enough to save the business.
Gordons Gin would now only deal with Wheatley on a cash basis, and his tailors and hatters were asking for their money. Most embarrassingly of all, Dulau’s, the rare book firm with whom Wheatley had enjoyed such a good relationship, were threatening legal action.
Wheatley’s mother was wealthy, but she was little help. That summer she had married Sir Louis Newton, whom Wheatley felt had always been against him; now Sir Louis showed Wheatley a “Cheshire cat” smile and made smooth noises about throwing good money after bad. Sir Louis’s son Sidney was Wheatley’s lawyer, and he advised Wheatley to declare himself bankrupt.
It was now that the people Wheatley remembered as his “Jewish friends” – Mervyn Baron, Frank van Zwanenberg, and J.G.Links – rallied round him. They urged him not to go bankrupt, and lent him a thousand pounds – about £40,000 today – to stave off his creditors. Wheatley’s book collection was now stored in his office, so Joe Links took it away to the furrier’s to prevent it from being seized.
Mervyn Baron had a contact with the firm of Block, Grey and Block, who were looking to expand, and the upshot was that their parent company, Fearon, Block and Co, bought Wheatley out. They swallowed Dennis Wheatley Ltd, Baron Wheatley cigars, and the Burn Trading Company restaurant suppliers, along with the premises, stock, and goodwill of 26 Audley Street, and in return they made Wheatley a director.
Bankruptcy had been averted, but Wheatley was not happy with the new firm. Having been his own boss, he was now the junior of eight directors. Nor was he even particularly solvent under the new arrangement, which paid him about a quarter of his former salary.
He was still saddled with personal debts, but Joan had an unearned income of about £40,000 at today’s values, and she was subsidising him. Nancy and Anthony were very unhappy that Wheatley had left them, and Wheatley can’t have been unmoved when Anthony wrote to say “please come back home Daddy, Mummy and I are crying.” Nevertheless he steeled himself to go through with the divorce.
On or about the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth of August, 1929, Wheatley was with a woman whom Nancy thought was called Sylvia (she was actually called Sybil Shore) at the Red Lion Hotel in Henley. On or about the nights of the 15th and 16th of February, 1930, he was in the Hotel Russell, Russell Square, with a woman unknown. Nancy filed for divorce on the grounds of adultery, but it seems to have been insufficient, and on or about the 22nd to 25th August 1930 Wheatley was at it again in Brown’s Hotel, Dover Street.
Finally the divorce came through, costing Wheatley £88/2/4 in legal fees. He then had to pay Nancy alimony, and later find the money for Anthony’s school fees, with which the Vintners Company gave him charitable help. It was a man facing a straitened financial future who finally married Mrs Hubert Pelham Burn at Buckingham Place Registry Office on the 8th August 1931, with a church blessing the next day at St. Ethelburga-the-Virgin in the City.
Wheatley was proud of Joan’s aristocratic lineage, which went back to the Norman Conquest and the de Talbots, and she was dimly related to most of the European monarchies. Joan herself seems not to have been free from a certain snobbery; “Come along Dennis, we’ll be late for the Duchess” was a not untypical exit line, which caused some amusement after the door had closed.
Old Nick Block, the only member of the firm that Wheatley liked, urged him to take six weeks off for his honeymoon, because of the strain he had been under. To raise the money, Wheatley hit on the idea of selling some of his erotica to a friend, Leah Barnato, who was married to former silent movie actor Carlyle Blackwell. Knowing her tastes, he went round to see her with an illustrated edition of Aretino and a valuable eighteenth-century set of the Marquis de Sade. She gave him a large cheque, and Wheatley’s honeymoon was on the road.
Going to Paris, they stayed at the Hotel St Regis on the rue Jean Goujon, which Wheatley remembered as the most delightful hotel he ever stayed in. From there they went to the coast, and in due course they went to see some of the claret families in Bordeaux, where they were lunched handsomely. One in particular, Ronald Barton of Barton and Guetier, invited them to stay.
Barton turned out to have been at Eton with the ubiquitous Bino, and Wheatley was impressed by the history of the firm. When the French Revolution had entered the Terror phase, the Barton of the day had to abandon his estate and flee back to Ireland to save himself from the guillotine. After the Napoleonic Wars intervened, it was a quarter of a century before he went back to see his former property, which he assumed had long been confiscated by the State. Instead he was welcomed by his faithful clerk, Guetier, who had kept the business going and carefully banked Barton’s money for him. Barton was so pleased he made Guetier a partner in the firm, which still exists today.
It was a lotus eating existence for the Wheatleys at Chateau Barton, with Krug before meals and Chateau d’Yquem afterwards. Unfortunately, however, they were marooned there by what seemed like revolution in Britain, because while they were in Paris the British Navy had mutinied at Invergordon. It was this which had caused them to accept Barton’s hospitality in the first place, because they found their money was almost worthless. Trotsky had already pronounced Britain to be ripe for revolution and, thinking it was now imminent, the French were reluctant to change British money.
Indirectly caught in the same slump that had done for Wheatley, the sailors had refused to obey orders after pay cuts. In retrospect the Invergordon Mutiny was a very reasonable affair, hardly worthy of the term mutiny at all, but at the time it caused a great shock and contributed to Britain being taken off the Gold Standard.
The Wheatleys returned home, where another crisis blew up. Accountants and lawyers were looking into the books, and Wheatley was accused of fraud.
1 On Jan Van Eyck.