Gerald Yorke (1901-1983) was much on Crowley's mind through the early Thirties. Born in 1901 into a well-to-do family, he was educated at Eton and Trinity Cambridge, Crowley's old college, and was the brother of the novelist Henry Yorke, better known by his pen-name Henry Green. He had been an army officer and he was a serious cricketer, playing county cricket for Gloucestershire.
Yorke had a strange bereavement during his schooldays, as bizarre as it was tragic, when two other Eton boys put a curse on his much-loved elder brother Philip using a wax effigy, and Philip died (one of the boys was Eric Blair, later to write as George Orwell).
In his early twenties Yorke became interested in Crowley's work. At this point he was still based at the family's townhouse1 at 9 Mansfield Street (moving to 5 Montagu Square in 1938). Number 9 is a handsome, late 18thC neo-classical building in a terrace designed by the Adam brothers. Radio producer Lance Sieveking was brought here by Crowley in the Thirties, and (no doubt thinking of the pillared doorway, the fanlight above the door, and the railings in front of the house) he remembered it as “a perfect setting for anything to do with the great Black Magician. Number 9 was indeed just such a house as Dr Jekyll must have lived in, and, from time to time, Mr. Hyde.” 2
After reading Crowley, Yorke had contacted him, met him in Paris, and in 1928 joined the A∴A∴ as Frater Volo Intelligere. The upshot was that he became Crowley's business manager, agent, and trustee, overhauling the chaos of Crowley's affairs and getting him regularly funded with an allowance of ten pounds a week (far more than it sounds now).
For this he was soon rewarded with endless abuse in Crowley's diaries (“rat”, “skunk”, “utter shit”, “heartless cad”, “unspeakably treacherous swine” and so on) and an attempt to sue him for £40,000 (about three million today). This figure was optimistically calculated as the money Crowley would have made, around 1930, without Yorke's interference.
Yorke stopped managing Crowley in 1932 to travel in China and Tibet, and after studying Buddhism he briefly became the agent for the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso. But by the time he left for the East he had studied with Crowley for several years and had a good working knowledge of magic. In later life he knew the Rolling Stones, who came to his country house for tea. Politely declining Mick Jagger's offer of a tea-time joint, he said he had bad memories of being on a ‘magical retirement’ in Tunisia, in his old Crowley days: “Forced to smoke that beastly stuff for nearly a month”.
Remarkably, Yorke and Crowley remained friends. Yorke bore no grudge, keeping up an intelligent and unfazed interest in Crowley's work and collecting books, manuscripts and ephemera. The Yorke Collection is now in London's Warburg Institute. He has a further memorial in the superb volume edited by Keith Richmond, Aleister Crowley, The Golden Dawn and Buddhism: Reminiscences and Writing of Gerald Yorke.3