Charles Cammell (father of Donald Cammell, who made the cult film Performance) was an associate editor of The Connoisseur, the art and antiques journal, and he was an admirer of Crowley's poetry. After meeting at Gwen Otter's they became friends, drinking and eating occasionally at El Vino's and the Café Royal. It was through Cammell that Crowley found his lodging on Richmond Green. Cammell lived across the Green on the Little Green at number 4 Fitzwilliam House, a more modern 1930s building in red brick.
Crowley sometimes went over to Fitzwilliam House – probably trying to cadge a free dinner, says underground filmmaker and Thelemite Kenneth Anger – and on at least one occasion Cammell had him round with the Reverend Montague Summers, the witchcraft and demonology writer remembered for books such as The History of Witchcraft and Demonology (1926) and The Vampire in Europe (1929); he also lived in Richmond at 4 Dynevor Road. Summers was a bizarre figure in his own right, affecting eighteenth-century clothing, and he was so High Church that religion was a kind of fetish.
Summers was also ultra-reactionary in his politics and is remembered for his fire-and-brimstone hatred of witches and Satanists, associating them with communism and anarchy. It was less well-known in his lifetime that he was a former practising Satanist himself, of a distinctly 1890s-ish persuasion.1 It was Summers who conducted the first Black Mass in Britain for which there is any real evidence, and later than one would imagine, in Eton Road, Hampstead, on Boxing Day 1918.
In public Summers disapproved of Crowley, but in private things had been more cordial. Dining with Summers in 1929, Crowley recorded “The most amusing evening I have spent in decades!” (they seem to have talked about Crowley's plans for a universal sex-appeal perfume called ‘It’).2 He was less effusive about seeing him at Fitzwilliam House with “Mrs Forbes” – a reference to Summers's secretary-companion Hector Stuart Forbes – and noted only that the sherry was indifferent.
There was also a Continental restaurant called Valchera's, just along from Richmond Station and handy for the Green, where Crowley dined on a couple of different occasions with Cammell and Summers (separately). I can dimly remember it in the 1990s with thickish – possibly velvet – café curtains, and I regret not going in when I had the chance. Symptomatic of the way London has changed, the building is now the Richmond branch of McDonald's.
Like so many of Crowley's friendships, especially if money was involved, his relationship with Cammell ended badly. He bought a quantity of expensive hand-made tweed from Cammell's wife Iona but failed to pay for it, instead writing “Ha Ha” in his diary and selling it on to other people in smaller batches. When she asked for the money he became abusive, and that was the end of friendship with the Cammells.
Under no illusions about Crowley (“No sense of honour, friendship or virtue of any kind”), Cammell nevertheless wrote a fair and even affectionate 1951 memoir of him, Aleister Crowley: The Man The Mage The Poet.