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THISTLE GROVE, KENSINGTON:
Disapproval of the universe in general

Crowley had a repressive Christian upbringing: his family were Plymouth Brethren, and his father was an evangelist who refused to buy railway shares because there were no trains in the Bible. Nevertheless Crowley admired him, and during his lifetime young Crowley's sense of their religion was less about sin and stifling morality and more about being a member of a vanguard spiritual elite. Along with his later revolt against Christianity, this was another lifelong legacy.

The Crowleys had lived happily enough in Redhill, Surrey, but in 1887, when Crowley was eleven, his father died and his world changed. His mother Emily took him to live with her brother Tom Bond Bishop in Drayton Gardens (formerly Thistle Grove), Kensington, off Old Brompton Road. She had lived there before her marriage in the Bishop family house – their mother's – at number 71, now numbered 20. It was in this new household that Crowley's loathing of Christianity really set in (along with his time at the hateful Plymouth Brethren boarding school of the Reverend Champney D’Arcy, in Cambridge). Bishop was another evangelist, founder of the Children's Scripture Union and the Children's Special Service Mission. “No more cruel fanatic, no meaner villain, ever walked this earth”, says Crowley in his Confessions, and in an ‘obituary’ – published while Bishop was still alive – he writes “To the lachrymal glands of a crocodile he added the bowels of compassion of a cast-iron rhinoceros; with the meanness and cruelty of a eunuch he combined the calculating avarice of a Scotch Jew…”. And on top of all that, Bishop had “a horror of what he called sin which was exaggerated almost to the point of insanity.”

Built in the 1840s, Drayton Gardens is an attractive and classically Victorian street of terraced townhouses with Doric-columned portico front doors. But by the standards of 1880s London, Crowley considered it “nondescript… neither upper nor lower middle-class”, and more than that “The dinginess of my uncle's household, the atmosphere of severe disapproval of the universe in general, and the utter absence of the spirit of life, combined to make me detest my mother's family.” This was the mother who called him the Beast 666 when he was naughty.

Having earlier lived at 71 (20), by 1885 Bishop had moved to 43 (now 48). Crowley remembers the road as Thistle Grove,¹ and writes “The name has since been changed to Drayton Gardens, despite a petition enthusiastically supported by Bishop; the objection was that a public house in the neighbourhood was called the Drayton Arms.” To the likes of Bishop, and Emily Crowley, the very idea of a public house would have meant a den of iniquity, and been ‘common’ with it. Happily it is still there, splendidly rebuilt in 1891, on the corner with Old Brompton Road.

When Tom Bishop moved to Streatham, Crowley's mother followed, and took him to number 7 Polworth Road, in what was then a distinctly unfashionable suburb. This was more déclassé, and Crowley – who fully shared the prejudice against suburbs – refers to it contemptuously as “London's most suburban ‘subbub’”