This novel is based on a number of real people and events but it should be noted that the murder plots and all conversations – bar a few lines when Bryan proposes to Diana and when Diana and Tom talk in Venice about the Nazis (with the kind permission of Anne de Courcy) – are entirely imagined by me, the author.
The death of Dorothy Martin at the Guinness dance at 10 Grosvenor Place in June 1928 was a real, tragic event. Dorothy and her friend Elizabeth Tipping were housemaids, sent to bed at midnight by the housekeeper. On the servants’ landing, they had tried to view the party by going on to the glass skylight, which broke. Dorothy fell thirty feet and died almost instantly, Elizabeth was badly injured. The inquest recorded an accidental death.
Dora Carrington was an artist who was known to be in love with the writer Lytton Strachey; she was married to Ralph Partridge, who had also had an affair with Lytton. The three of them lived at Ham Spray House, close to Biddesden. After Lytton’s death, Dora asked Bryan for the loan of a gun to shoot the rabbits but instead turned the gun on herself. He was much distressed at what he felt had been his own hand in the incident. It had also happened that Diana had been very sick the first weekend she went to stay at Ham Spray House, and rumours had begun that Dora had poisoned her food out of jealous spite (Lytton liked Diana very much) but Diana never agreed that this had been the case.
Evelyn Waugh, initially a good friend of Nancy’s, had become very close to Diana in the wake of his divorce. He dedicated his novel Vile Bodies to her and Bryan. Sadly, after her son Jonathan was born, she and Evelyn seemed to fall out and were never friends again in quite the same way.
The incident of Luke’s arrest was based on events surrounding PC Reginald Handford, a plain-clothes policeman suspected of manipulative practices in arresting homosexuals in public urinals in 1927. After a court trial, he was ultimately found not at fault but there was ‘tacit condemnation’ of police operations in urinals and the agent provocateur method. Before the trial, Handford made fifteen arrests in eighteen months; in the following five months he made none, claiming that he was concentrating his efforts on suspected persons and pickpockets instead (from Queer London).
The story of Rose Morgan planning to run away with the little girl Muriel was based on Rose O’Grady and eleven-year-old Muriel Dunsmuir, who went missing in 1929 from Lytton Hall in Putney. Muriel’s father had died three weeks previously and she and the maid planned to run away to start a dance act. Muriel’s aunt had been married to the couturier Molyneux, though the two were found after three days in Ireland.
The character of Lady Boyd emerged from an understanding of the divide between the generations in the aftermath of the First World War. Those who had been brought up in the Victorian and Edwardian eras were bewildered if not angry at what they saw as the fast-paced, loose morals of the men and women who embraced the changes that the 1920s brought. The clashes – whether expressed theoretically or violently – between the class, gender and political divides were not easily resolved against a background of increasing global economic pressure. Quick developments in technology, culture and fashion all had an impact on each other as well as on politics, which became increasingly extreme at each end of the spectrum. We all know how that ended…
In June 1932, Diana and Mosley declared their love for each other at Diana’s birthday party, though Mosley told her he would never leave his wife. In October 1932, Mosley launched the British Union of Fascists, with himself as leader. The following month, Diana told Bryan she would be leaving him, and in January 1933 she moved into a flat with her boys. Mosley remained married to his wife Cimmie until she died in May 1933, shortly before Diana’s divorce came through. Mosley and Diana married in Goering’s drawing room with Hitler present, in October 1936.