After a couple of years largely in Berlin, Crowley returned to London with Bertha “Bill” Busch in July 1932. Before settling in they had to visit Colney Hatch (more of that later) and they also spent eight days at the celebrated and rather louche Cavendish Hotel on Duke Street, just south of Jermyn Street, popular with ‘fast’ members of the upper classes and run by the formidable Rosa Lewis. She figures as “Lottie Crump” in Evelyn Waugh's novel Vile Bodies, and Crowley writes in his diary “Shifted our Vile Bodies to the Cavendish hotel.”
Lewis was not a woman to be trifled with, and she embarrassed Cyril Connolly at a wedding by shouting “Ere's the man wot owes me money!” After Crowley's stay ended with an unpaid bill, he and Bertha then took a flat in Albemarle Court, service flats at 27 Albemarle Street, off Piccadilly. This was near Crowley's old Mayfair haunts, joined to Bond Street by the Royal Arcade and just round the corner from Stafford Street and memories of Whineray. They were opposite the Royal Institution (“for the diffusion of mechanical and scientific knowledge”) with its impressively-pillared classical façade modelled on a Roman temple. It was here that Faraday had first demonstrated electromagnetism. A century earlier Bishop Berkeley, the idealist philosopher who believed the apparently material world existed only in the mind (and therefore figures in Crowley's A∴A∴ reading list – “The classic of subjective idealism” – and in Magick) had also lived on Albemarle Street.
While Crowley was here, on 17 August 1932, the bookshop Foyle's asked him to come and give a talk on ‘Magick’ in September, so on 2 September he consecrated a magical fuck to the task: “Opus 140. Success to 15 Sept. speech.” 1