The publicity surrounding the Black Magic Libel Case had a disastrous side effect; many of Crowley's creditors were reminded of his existence, and now had routes to find him.
The first creditor to weigh in was a moneylender, B.S. Rhodes Ltd of 13-14 New Bond Street. Crowley had borrowed £126 from them at a surprisingly reasonable rate of 5% annual interest, and with no repayment it had grown to £140.1 A bankruptcy notice was issued in December 1934, and on 14 February 1935 the case came to the Bankruptcy Court in Carey Street.
“Carey Street”, Crowley says, “is well-known to prosperous Hebrews and poor Englishmen, as the seat of the Bankruptcy buildings.” Today it is a pleasant old street off Chancery Lane with a good public house, The Seven Stars. The bankruptcy court that Crowley knew, built in the 1890s, was a long building that stretched along the western side of Carey Street reaching to the Strand, and it was bombed during the Second World War. Being “on Carey Street” (bankrupt) came to merge in the public mind with another more popular expression, “on Queer Street” (also bankrupt, before acquiring sexual associations; a corruption of Carey Street has often been given as the origin of the phrase, but it seems to pre-date the move of bankruptcy business to Carey Street in the 1840s).
Rhodes was the start of what turned out to be a flood of claims. Crowley, “author and psychiatrist”, owed legal fees to Kerman; legal costs to Constable publishers; £500 to another moneylender; personal debts to Pearl Brooksmith and Count Lewenhaupt (a friend who lived at 72 Ladbroke Grove); money to shirtmakers, bootmakers and tailors (including Rogers and Co., military tailors of New Burlington Street, who were due £535); wine merchants Block, Grey and Block (£170); several tobacconists; opticians Dollond and Aitchison; hotels including Rosa Lewis's Cavendish, the Waldorf, and the Savoy; and many others. There were 48 creditors. Crowley pointed out that as the author of some of the noblest prose in the English language, he could hardly be expected to have the talents of an accountant as well.
With no significant income, Crowley had relied on his gentlemanly air to keep spending, and not with any sense of fraudulence; he felt it was a right. He was affronted that Philip Morris tobacconists wouldn't sell him any more cigars just because he owed them £60: “Do they think they are doing me a favour in selling me cigars?”.
Taking the old Victorian-style disdain for tradesmen and their bills one stage further, he decided during the Second World War that “the refusal to count money” was laudable as “Naysaying to the spirit of the Jew, which has rotted the soul of mankind.”
Crowley's creditors eventually got 2d in the pound, some years later.2 He had been on and off Queer Street for a long time; effectively since his inheritance ran out. But from now on, and officially, to borrow a characteristically nice line from his later diaries,
I am what St. Francis of Assisi used to call “fucked on the financial front.”