aristocrats. But in fact it was appearance, intelligence and style that mattered more to him. His motto was ‘not only to have proper and properly cooked food but to have only either intelligent, beautiful or well-bred people to eat it’. Theinn was furnished like a home rather than a hotel, filled with Georgian and early Victorian furniture and fine china. As a gentleman innkeeper, he was exactly the sort of man Evelyn admired: rude to those he despised, determined to maintain the standards of a better age. On the publication of his first novel, Decline and Fall , Waugh sent a copy personally inscribed to ‘John Fothergill, Oxford’s only civilising influence’. Fothergill chained it up in the loo and said that it was ‘the best comedy in the English language’.
In 1924, Elmley held a twenty-first birthday party at the Spreadeagle for sixty young men, including all members of the Hypocrites’ Club. It doubled as a wake for the demise of the club, which had been closed down by the proctors after complaints by the neighbours about riotous behaviour and noise. They went down from Oxford in a fleet of hearses. Elmley, dressed in a purple velvet suit, provided the champagne. Harold Acton made a speech about the beauties of the male body; Evelyn got silently drunk; Robert Byron (wearing lace) passed out and the evening ended in dancing, persimmons thrown against the wall, and couples (all male) having sex in the hearse. In his memoirs, Fothergill noted the impressive amount of champagne that was consumed. Among his abiding memories were Terence Greenidge looking ‘quite mad’ and after-dinner dancing that reminded him of ‘wild goats and animals leaping in the air’.
Evelyn enjoyed heavy drinking because it made him uninhibited. He later acknowledged to his first biographer, Christopher Sykes, that he experienced an acute homosexual phase at Oxford. For the short time it lasted, his homosexual activity ‘was unrestrained, emotionally and physically’. This was not at all unusual for male students at Oxford. There were few women at the university (undergraduettes were kept in purdah with the exception of eight weeks) and other heterosexual relationships were frowned upon because they usually meant consorting with the undesirables of the town. Some of Evelyn’s friends went up to London for sexual experiences, coming back on the last train, which was known as the ‘fornicator’. But in the main, homosexual encounters were more common.
Homosexuality was considered by many to be a passing phase, which young men would grow out of once they had left Oxford and begun to meet young women. In those days it was chic to be ‘queer’ in the sameway that it was chic to have a taste for atonal music and Cubist painting. Even old Arthur Waugh acknowledged as much: ‘Alec called on me the other day with a new friend of his, a sodomite, but Alec tells me it is the coming thing.’
‘Everyone in Oxford was homosexual at that time,’ said John Betjeman, who was there. Though homosexuality was illegal, many senior members of the university, most notably the flamboyant don Maurice Bowra, actively encouraged it, sometimes acting as go-between in setting up assignations for their pupils. Tom Driberg enjoyed soixante-neuf with a young don in the rooms where more cerebral tutorials were supposed to take place. The Hypocrites’ Club was the epicentre of what would now be called the university’s gay scene. According to Sykes, who knew Waugh extremely well, Evelyn was never shocked by homosexuality and remained very interested in the subject. He was, after all, ‘interested in all things which shed light on human character’. But later in life he would worry about his son discovering his past indiscretions.
In the spring of 1924, Evelyn informed his old school friend, Dudley Carew, that his life had become ‘quite incredibly depraved morally’. Drunkenness at the Hypocrites was part of the story, but hardly sufficient to
In 1924, Elmley held a twenty-first birthday party at the Spreadeagle for sixty young men, including all members of the Hypocrites’ Club. It doubled as a wake for the demise of the club, which had been closed down by the proctors after complaints by the neighbours about riotous behaviour and noise. They went down from Oxford in a fleet of hearses. Elmley, dressed in a purple velvet suit, provided the champagne. Harold Acton made a speech about the beauties of the male body; Evelyn got silently drunk; Robert Byron (wearing lace) passed out and the evening ended in dancing, persimmons thrown against the wall, and couples (all male) having sex in the hearse. In his memoirs, Fothergill noted the impressive amount of champagne that was consumed. Among his abiding memories were Terence Greenidge looking ‘quite mad’ and after-dinner dancing that reminded him of ‘wild goats and animals leaping in the air’.
Evelyn enjoyed heavy drinking because it made him uninhibited. He later acknowledged to his first biographer, Christopher Sykes, that he experienced an acute homosexual phase at Oxford. For the short time it lasted, his homosexual activity ‘was unrestrained, emotionally and physically’. This was not at all unusual for male students at Oxford. There were few women at the university (undergraduettes were kept in purdah with the exception of eight weeks) and other heterosexual relationships were frowned upon because they usually meant consorting with the undesirables of the town. Some of Evelyn’s friends went up to London for sexual experiences, coming back on the last train, which was known as the ‘fornicator’. But in the main, homosexual encounters were more common.
Homosexuality was considered by many to be a passing phase, which young men would grow out of once they had left Oxford and begun to meet young women. In those days it was chic to be ‘queer’ in the sameway that it was chic to have a taste for atonal music and Cubist painting. Even old Arthur Waugh acknowledged as much: ‘Alec called on me the other day with a new friend of his, a sodomite, but Alec tells me it is the coming thing.’
‘Everyone in Oxford was homosexual at that time,’ said John Betjeman, who was there. Though homosexuality was illegal, many senior members of the university, most notably the flamboyant don Maurice Bowra, actively encouraged it, sometimes acting as go-between in setting up assignations for their pupils. Tom Driberg enjoyed soixante-neuf with a young don in the rooms where more cerebral tutorials were supposed to take place. The Hypocrites’ Club was the epicentre of what would now be called the university’s gay scene. According to Sykes, who knew Waugh extremely well, Evelyn was never shocked by homosexuality and remained very interested in the subject. He was, after all, ‘interested in all things which shed light on human character’. But later in life he would worry about his son discovering his past indiscretions.
In the spring of 1924, Evelyn informed his old school friend, Dudley Carew, that his life had become ‘quite incredibly depraved morally’. Drunkenness at the Hypocrites was part of the story, but hardly sufficient to
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