Evan Morgan ( Viscount Tredegar) and the ‘True Cross’ of Christ

 

AN EASTER STORY  FROM WILLIAM CROSS

       Riverside, California, Evan Morgan's retreat  in the 1920s

                           

Hon. Evan Morgan in the 1920s

 In the late 1920s  the Hon. Evan Morgan [1]  ( later Viscount Tredegar)  was in Riverside, California as a guest of Frank A Millar [2] the proprietor of the Mission Inn hotel.

Evan’s visit made such an impact that it features in a book published about Frank Millar and the Mission Inn:

The book declares that:-

There was the incident of the visit of the Honorable Evan Morgan, son of Baron Tredegar of England.”  [3]

Several tall stories are told of how Evan acquired a piece of the ‘ True Cross’ on which Christ was crucified, including  one ludicrous yarn of Evan making the find in the Holy Land (  he did  visit Jerusalem at least once ). Another ridiculous romp mentions Evan hiring a whole carriage of a train passing through Turkey to convey the relic back to  his home in Britain.

In  fact the real story of Evan’s precious possession relates to a reliquary of St John on the Cross at Mission Inn.

“ Mr Morgan had arrived at the [ Mission]  Inn on a trip around the world. Wandering among the crosses of the collection, he came upon a reliquary of St John of the Cross. Mr Morgan’s Catholic sympathies were pronounced, and St John was his patron saint; he went to the curator, saying that he wished to buy this cross. The curator told him courteously that nothing in the cross collection was for sale.

“I must buy it.” The Honourable Evan Morgan repeated. “ You must let me buy it.”

Impressed by the absence of any mention of price or inclination to bargain, Mr Borton, the curator promised to lay the matter before Mr Miller. Mr Miller replied that he was sorry, that nothing in the cross collection could be sold.

Mr Morgan now cried.  “Please tell Mr Miller that I will pay anything he wishes, but I must have the cross.”

This word he followed with a personal letter to Mr Miller, repeating the wish to have the cross at any price, and enclosing three papal rings, whose settings were exquisite intaglios cut in amethyst and topaz. Sitting before an open fire in his cowled monk’s dressing gown of brown burlap, Mr Miller dictated his reply.

My DEAR FRIEND:  I cannot find it in my heart to traffic in anything which you value as manifestly you this cross. Take it, with my appreciation of you.

I am returning the three papal rings, which I am sure that you value more than I would know how to do.

Sincerely yours, 

FRANK  A MILLER”[4]

Another  teller of the same tale suggests that on Evan’s visit to Riverside he  “ secured a relic of the ‘True Cross’  in exchange for a Cross which he [ Evan] procured from the Belgian battlefields and had blessed by the late Cardinal Mercier”. [5]

 An Extract  ( with additional text ) from the book “Evan Frederic Morgan : Final Affairs Financial and Carnal” By William Cross ISBN-13: 978-1905914241

Contact William Cross, by email

williecross@aol.com

---

[1] Hon. Evan Frederic Morgan ( 1893-1949). The last Viscount Tredegar of Tredegar Park, Newport, South Wales, UK

[2] Frank A Miller( 1858-1935) . Owner and developer of Mission Inn Hotel

[3] Gale, Zona. ‘Frank Miller of Mission Inn.’  D Appleton-Century company. (1938).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Advocate ( Melbourne), Vic. National Library of Australia. 18 August 1927. NB Désiré-Félicien-François-Joseph Mercier (21 November 1851 – 23 January 1926) was a Belgian Cardinal of theRoman Catholic Church. He served as Archbishop of Mechelen from 1906 until his death, and was elevated to thecardinalate in 1907. Mercier is noted for his staunch resistance to the German occupation of 1914–1918.

SECRET FEAR BY REGINALD UNDERWOOD: A QUEER TALE FROM FORTUNE PRESS IN 1943

A  BOOK REVIEW  FROM  WILLIAM CROSS

                                             OF "SECRET  FEAR"

BY REGINALD UNDERWOOD (1943)

A RARE TITLE FROM FORTUNE PRESS 

   

                                                            THE  BOOK COVER 

 

This crime curio  offers, as the publisher’s own  publicity  declares, a queer plot that is  a far cry from others stories of the same genre at the time of its writing ( i.e. 1943). The  comparable titles are “ a little jaded by the ever-sinister Nazi"  or of the image of the  conventional  cloak and dagger detective, murderer or thief.

Secret Fear is  a  very hard to get  war time novel by  the prolific Reginald Underwood from the notorious FORTUNE PRESS.

Announced by the Press  in their “ Summer and Autumn Titles” for 1943,   as a striking “thriller”   the author  is better  known for his other Fortune Press delights including the frolicsome  relationship teaser,   “Flame of Freedom”, the  racy gay classic “Bachelor’s Hall “ and the torrid story of illigitimacy   “An Old Maid’s Child”. Yes, Secret Fear  is a  whole new departure in the literary career  of dear old Reggie Underwood.

The  book’s “Contents of  Chapters” gives ample warning of the nature of the storyline to come, with  stark headlines  including “ An  Inexplicable Burglary”;  “ Murder?”; “ Terror Finds The Doctor”;  A Strange Death”;  “An Appalling Ordeal” ; and “Escape”.

The action kicks off in Bruges in Belgium, in order to introduce the central character, 40-year-old  Roderick Farne, MA, a shy,  English  ex-schoolmaster, freed from having to seek  employment  in a profession he detests, after having gained a modest inheritance and, with it,  a taste for  travel and exploring the world at large.

Farne is drawn into this  mystery-suspense- vendetta, with the origin of the apparent “Secret Fear”,  set around concerns for the well being of  some old acquaintances of  his back in England. 

Quite whether Farne’s  informant in Bruges, Tom Smeathers a creepy ex- Butler to a rich family in Farne’s past life is an honest broker is part of the mystery, mayhem and murder that unfolds.  Mr Smeathers appears to have plenty of  secrets, and a odd ball and strange wife who keeps the dangerous company of men in the shadows.

Farne’s friends in England  are apparently in mortal danger  from the  evil intent  of a mother and child killer, a  heavy drinking aristocrat,  Clive Lowick.   This wretch is  believed  to be quite mad and, “cruel as hell”, he has  spent several  years in Dartmoor  prison and  upon his release from there was ordered abroad, to Canada.  It seems that Lowick was done out of his inheritance and  the family pile was left by his wealthy father to an old doctor and not to him, so on this count he is seething with anger and bitter as a lemon.

Trouble is the villainous  Lowick is  now back in England looking for revenge, and the line up of his would targets for revenge starts with the old butler in Burges,  and hot favourites by a mysterious  stranger ( possibly cavorting with the ex-Butler’s wife)  against  the old family doctor and his beautiful  daughter,  these being the close friends of Farne.  In fact Farne has  quite a notion for the doctor’s alluring  daughter, although no talk of romance has been exchanged between them.

The damsel in distress is  one Adele Burfield,  who was once promised in marriage to an older, effete,  English  Lord,  named Ploughdon, but for some reason or other she  remains single.  Adele is living with her father in a  quaint little cottage, having sold the Lowick family pile ( that was previously inherited)   and oddly it seems the doctor  is no longer  a rich man and has been the subject of a recent burglary that  has dumb founded and unsettled them all.   

Farne takes on the role of detective to investigate a  growing spiral of  conflicting  threads in  the relationships  and  he is soon deeply embroiled in  endeavouring to solve  a  trail of crime,  robbery, deception, lies, false Wills  and  multiple murders in search of the  truth.  What a jolly  good chap he is, and he seems to enjoy this quest.

Add to the mix a element of the supernatural, of controlling, fiendish females and there you have it to try to keep up and  unscramble.

A quite different,  honest and refreshing  storyline from the usually salacious,  middlebrow, gay-themed fictional flirts  from Reginald Underwood, who keeps up the  pace of Farne’s scrutiny of events,   and lays on the reader exhilaration fairly well, albeit  there is some muddling and the narrative  is  a bit short on the detail on character development. But we get hooked  as Farne tramples across the Midlands and back in Bruges looking for testimonies and answers to the riddles.

And, in the end  cleverly, and unexpectedly Underwood pulls it all off  in exposing the “Secret Fear” or fears of  almost all the key players  and with this some further gasps.

Farne is no Sherlock Holmes or Poirot, but  he is still a steady handed sleuth albeit  in the making. 

Is there a resolution and happy ending,  I won’t spoil it! That said : the only copy of the book is on my  book shelves albeit looking for a new, loving home. 

William Cross, FSA Scot

Enquiries   email :

williecross@aol.com

 

A  BOOK REVIEW  FROM  WILLIAM CROSS

                                             OF "SECRET  FEAR"

BY REGINALD UNDERWOOD (1943)

A RARE TITLE FROM FORTUNE PRESS 

A TALK ON RONALD FIRBANK : A TELLER OF FAIRY TALES FOR GROWN UP PEOPLE

 

“The Firbank Beneath My Foot”
A Tribute to Ronnie Firbank
In an illustrated  talk by  William  Cross, FSA Scot
 
Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank 1886-1926

  “A teller of fairy tales for grown up people”

Ronnie Firbank was born in London in 1886, but his passport recorded an address of St Julians, Newport, Monmouthshire.  His paternal grandfather Joseph Firbank ( 1819-86) made his pile from the railways and lived at St Julians House, Newport where he revelled as  High Sheriff of Monmouthshire.  Ronnie’s  father ( Sir)  Joseph Thomas Firbank, (1850-1910) was old Joseph’s eldest son, and sometime an MP. Ronald’s mother, Jane Harriette Garrett, was of Irish descent. 

Ronnie was educated at Uppingham School, Rutland, and tutored privately, notably by Rollo St Clair Talboys (1877-1953).  He learned several languages, travelled abroad and later attended Trinity College, Cambridge from 1906-9, where he was a contemporary of the war poet Rupert Brooke and Oscar Wilde’s son, Vyvyan Holland. The family homes were at Newport, Chistlehurst and London. 

There were two brothers, but Ronnie’s closest kin was a younger sister, Heather.  Both  of them shared a bizzaire shyness, strange foibles and eccentricities.

Known by his family as “Arthur” ( Artie) he  was a sickly child, spoilt by his mother, he converted to Roman Catholic in 1907. 

In adulthood  Firbank  “cut a  figure as a rich, shy and utterly fastidious dandy”. He frequented the Café Royal and the Eiffel Tower (two fashionable London restaurants). He was thought of as a very clever young man with a flair for art  and history. But he was an insecure loner who curled up in a chair, in his own thoughts.  He was tolerated and indulged by his artistic and literary contemporaries including Evan Morgan, Augustus John, Nancy Cunard, E M Foster, Wyndham Lewis, Alvaro Guevara and Aldous Huxley. Augustus John, Wyndham Lewis and Alvaro Guevara all painted Firbank’s portrait. Every visual image of Ronald Firbank differs in an extraordinary  way.  Augustus John said it was impossible to do his portrait as he wanted to “ look over my shoulder”.  

Ronnie’s  books were published at his own expense from 1915-1926. They are  “long sustained and complex epigrams..”. This is a list of his main titles & dates published:  1905: Odette  d’ Antrevernes ; 1915: Vainglory; 1916 : Inclinations; 1917 : Caprice; 1919: Valmouth;  1920 :The Princess Zoubaroff; 1921:  Santal; 1923: The Flower Beneath the Foot;  1924: Prancing Nigger (aka Sorrow in Sunlight);  1926: Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli. 

His “ Letters to His Mother”, Dearest Baba,  are also in print.

Some Opinions on Firbank

“ I always think of Ronald Firbank as an unhappy man who luckily for him, had the power of expressing himself through his books”.   Vyvyan Holland.
 
“ He was like a dipping strand of willow with a nerve of steel, and that “ something” floating bending but unbreakable in him is, of course, the integrity of the good artist.”  Nancy Cunard
 
Ifan Kyrle Fletcher had Newport links with Firbank. He  wrote an early Memoir of him . “ While others thought of vice and virtue, he ( Firbank) was concerned about vulgarity and elegance.” 
 
 “ …..the reclusive dandy-novelist Ronald Firbank, a man so consumed by shyness that he once spent a dinner party hiding under the table.”   D J Taylor ( 2009)
 

Ronnie travelled extensively to write, with much of his work compiled in France, North Africa, Italy ( in particular Rome), Haiti, USA and London,  his publisher was Grant Richards.

Firbank  is buried in Campo Verano, Rome’s largest Catholic Cemetery. A white marble ground slab in Section 38  records :

 “RIP : PRAY FOR THE SOUL OF  ARTHUR ANNESLEY RONALD  FIRBANK WHO ENTERED INTO REST ON 21^ST MAY 1926   FAR FROM HIS COUNTRY”

 AND THEREBY HANGS A TALE REVEALED IN THE TALK    

Ronnie's Grave in Campo Verano, Rome, by Monty Dart 

                      Blue Plaque for Ronnie 33, Curzon Street Mayfair, London

For more information, please contact William Cross, FSA Scot 

      Thanks to Monty & the late Tom Dart, Tony Friend & Ian Burge, Alan Smith, Digory Firbank & Ronnie Firbank

 

Ronnie Tried To Join The Swiss Guards 

                

                  Will cleaning up Ronnie's Grave in Rome's Campo Verano 

Email For  WILL CROSS

 williecross@aol.com

Phoebe and Mags Worthington of "The Mews" Belgravia :Last Tails: "A Love That Dare Not Speak its Name"

LAST TAILS FROM PHOEBE AND MAGS WORTHINGTON OF "THE MEWS" BELGRAVIA

TIME SETTING : LONDON 1948 

“A Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name”

                                  Romeo and Ronaldo : Love Hurts

On the London katwalks East End and West End rarely tolerated interplay across one another’s turfs. Romances between the East and West End families were frowned upon; in fact it was downright forbidden under Dr Dolittle's law.

For Romeo who hailed from London E3 and Ronaldo of London SW1 their enduring romance was especially damned.

It was a ‘love that dare not speak it’s name’, first kindled by a chance encounter in a bomb shelter in the blackout a few years before. It was doomed as it was against nature, illegal under all laws, codes, and healthy living, and for three long years their dangerous liaisons had to be kept a close secret.

But the two lovers had a plan…. they had conjured up a way of ensuring they could live in peace happy ever after and finally escape from the shadows.

However, a gang of ruffians from Limehouse had heard of the odd couple that wanted to challenge the natural order of things, and followed their trail to a rooftop in Belgravia, near “The Mews” where Mags Worthington was roused from her slumbers…….. What followed, one wonders?

THE RESOLUTION

Mags Worthington  challenged the Limehouse ruffians. 

Whilst the chaos and commotion on the roof was taking place  Ivor, a Russian sailor and fishmonger  from Billingate Fish Market  was making a delivery to "The Mews" kitchen to Olga (The  Cook at  "The Mews") and Nastasha ( the Ukranian kitchen maid).

Natasha  threw a pail of dirty water at the ruffians, and succeded in disorientating them.

Ivor’s familiar, Maschwitz, (pictured below), went immediately to support Mags and together they cleared the way for Romeo and Ronaldo to effect their escape.

                                                            Maschwitz

Some said the  lovers caught a midnight train to another city, others said  they were seen boarding a sailing boat to France, (or was it the Baltic), some said  they went  to  North Africa,  where  Dr Dolittle’s law was much less draconian.

Others mused  that the truth was quite romantic,  that they stowed away on board  the ‘Orient Express’ from London Victoria Railway Station  en route to Venice. Italy. 

Some said they became Gondoliers on the Grand Canal.

  

Grand Canal, Venice            

FROM " LAST TAILS FROM PHOEBE AND MAGS WORTHINGTON OF      "THE MEWS" BELGRAVIA  AND HOW PODGE GOT THE CHEESE."

COPIES OF THE BOOK ARE AVAILABLE DIRECT FROM WILL CROSS AT £12.00 ( UK POSTAGE INCLUDED) OR A BIT MORE ON EBAY 

THE BOOK IS THE THIRD AND LAST IN THE SERIES CONCERNING THE ADVENTURES  OF TWO DARN CATS, THEIR FRIENDS AND THEIR ENEMIES

LAST TAILS CONTAINS OVER  30 LONG, SHORT AND TALL TAILS.

120 PAGES  WITH OVER 90 ILLUSTRATIONS, MANY OF THEM IN COLOUR

FOR INTELLIGENT ADULTS AND OLDER CHILDREN (OVER 16) 

VERY LIMITED NUMBERS OF COPIES

PLEASE CONTACT WILL CROSS BY E-MAIL

williecross@aol.com

 

 

The overlooked genius of Ronald Firbank By Alan Hollinghurst

 

The overlooked genius of Ronald Firbank

By Alan Hollinghurst

From "The Spectator Magazine" – 10 November 2023

This week English Heritage has put up a blue plaque to the novelist Ronald Firbank, and I know, from 40 years of going on about Firbank, that not everyone who sees it will have heard of him. He falls into that intriguing and important category of blue-plaque subjects who are not household names, but whose work was path-breaking, and influence enduring. Each plaque that goes up is the result, first and foremost, of advocacy by a member of the public, and after that of strong support from the deciding panel, on which I sat for six years. We ended up each time rejecting the majority of the proposals, and it was a happy day for me, an almost unexpected breakthrough, when Firbank was proposed five years ago, and the panel readily accepted him. Acceptance has not always been his lot.

In person he was both extremely shy and a Wildean dandy who wore make-up and painted his nails.

Why does he merit this honour? I think for three reasons: his own remarkable work, his literary influence, and something more diffuse but equally important, his defining presence as a queer icon. Firbank wrote seven radically original novels and one full-length play. His first novel, Vainglory, published in 1915, is the first true modernist novel in English, and the most original since Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy 150 years earlier. Plot is largely suppressed and what remains is glimpsed obliquely through a montage of fragments of talk and passages of lyrical description; the effect is both aesthetically dazzling and unnervingly like life, action caught in cinematic jump cuts and conversation sampled as if by a roving microphone.

Firbank was a master of omission. ‘I think nothing,’ he wrote, ‘of filing 50 pages down to make a brief, crisp paragraph, or even a row of dots.’ Ellipsis, at the level of the sentence and of the whole book, were central to his art, which represented a jubilant but purposeful throwing out of the baggage and conventions of the Victorian novel. Here, and in the three largely English-set novels that followed (Inclinations, Caprice and Valmouth), he often feels closer to the poetic experiments of Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’ and ‘Portrait of a Lady’ than to other contemporary fiction. The novels published in the 1920s – The Flower Beneath the Foot, Sorrow in Sunlight and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli – are his major achievement, and all set abroad, in a Balkan capital, a Caribbean island and a Spanish cathedral city. They build on the revolutionary groundwork of the earlier books, but are bolder, clearer and more sharply satirical.

Vainglory came out in April 1915 – not a good moment for such an adventure, and it seemed to set a pattern for the ignoring and deploring of Firbank’s subsequent fiction. But if sales were tiny in his lifetime, the effect of his work on writers of the next generation was revelatory. Evelyn Waugh wrote the first serious critical essay on Firbank in 1929, and his acute understanding of Firbank’s method bore fruit in the novel he was starting at the time, Vile Bodies, the first part of which reads like a direct transfusion of master to pupil. The fragmentary design the older writer had pioneered proved prophetically apt for the depiction of a disoriented post-war world. The setting of Henry Green’s Living, a Birmingham factory, could hardly be less Firbankian, but an envious Waugh saw that he had organised his plot in ‘exactly the way Firbank managed his’.

The line of influence proliferates – you see it in many of Noël Coward’s plays, in Ivy Compton-Burnett and Muriel Spark. Joe Orton wrote pastiche Firbankian novels – as did (jointly) the American poets John Ashbery and James Schuyler in A Nest of Ninnies. Angela Carter wrote a very good radio play, A Self-Made Man, about Firbank, and Brigid Brophy produced a lesbian novel, The Finishing Touch, in the master’s manner, as well as the formidable Prancing Novelist, still the most detailed and passionate study of his life and work. The late Barry Humphries was a lifelong Firbank fanatic and collector, and Firbank’s exceptional interest and absorption in female dress and accessories clearly found an echo in the creator of Dame Edna.

I was introduced to Firbank by my Oxford supervisor John Bayley, when I was starting out on a thesis about the hidden gay tradition in English fiction (in 1975 still an unexplored area). I felt at once I had entered an intensely individual world, whose very artifice gave voice to desires and intuitions never touched on in other novelists of the time. The formal experiment was inseparable from the moral one, a sustained and glittering act of subversion. Camp, high camp, was part of it, but the wit and the melancholy were deeper and, again, more individual.

The formal experiment was inseparable from the moral one, a glittering act of subversion

Firbank in person was both extremely shy and a Wildean dandy who wore make-up and painted his nails and drew attention wherever he went with his undulating walk. In his work too he has the paradoxical boldness of the shy – he vibrates with his own irrepressible selfhood. Already in the 1930s ‘Firbankian’ was a byword for gayness of a performative and orchidaceous kind. As his titles hint, what concerned him was the workings of whim, caprice, libido. Nothing interested him less than the conventional marriage-plot. His world view is from the start daringly queered, and pervasively feminised – the sexuality of the books is frequently lesbian, but with an increasingly defiant depiction of male gay desire. When I wrote my own first novel in the mid 1980s, I knew I couldn’t emulate his style, but I brought him in as a kind of patron saint of gay culture.

Blue plaques marking residences often cast light on the odd shape of a life. When Firbank moved into 33 Curzon Street with his recently widowed mother and younger sister, he was 25. His education had been patchy: a term and a bit at Uppingham, private tutors at home and abroad, three years at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, without ever sitting an exam. He’d published two Wildean short stories in 1905, but in 1911 the career that lay ahead of him was unimaginable: the war (totally exempted from service, he spent four years in painful isolation in Oxford, sustained mentally by writing three novels), and then after the war a few nomadic years in Italy, France, North Africa, the Caribbean, before his early death in Rome in May 1926.

 

A BOOK REVIEW OF "RECORD OF A BAFFLED SPIRIT: A LIVERPOOL CHILDHOOD 1947–1973" MICHAEL KEYTON

 You Can Take The Boy Out Of Liverpool,

But You Can’t Take Liverpool Out Of The Boy.

Record of a Baffled Spirit: A Liverpool Childhood 1947 – 1973

By Michael Keyton ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8851564499 Published 2023

 

In the 1960s we kept a long stay holiday caravan near an old windmill at Carnforth in Lancashire and I recall visiting cousins at Southport during hot summers that never seemed to end.

En route to Southport by road I suffered claustrophobia inside a long concrete and metal tube that appeared on the AA Route map as “The Mersey Tunnel”.

Finally exiting the grim, unnaturally- lit white-lined chicken coop there was only a human settlement called Birkenhead until we reached the end of the long canopy to view the most glorious waterfront at Liverpool, the City of “ The Liver Birds”, “The Beatles” and the Titanic’s White Star Shipping Line.

Here at Harland and Woolfe’s shipyards ( twinned across the water with Belfast) they built the doomed liner of 1912, and whose riveters, dockers and stevedores tolerated their rivals in the shipyards at Govan and Clydebank on Clydeside that built the majestic Queens.

Liverpool sucked me in whole, like Jonah’s whale, I gasped for air. But it was terrific to come out of semi-consciousness into the shadow of huge buildings like overhanging cliff tops, and the great River Mersey on which the City stands, with its ferry boats, sailing ships and sea and ocean going cruise ships bobbing and plying along mechanical birds up and down and across the waves, it smelt good too as it was just like the whiff of Glasgow’s Broomielaw.

Excuse my childhood ramble. Why write of childhood? Well because it matters, it’s the ultimate blue print to excuse ourselves – unfrocked, stripped of the veneer that attaches as we learn about real life and takes the licks and knocks. It’s innocence and guilt in one, it’s who we are, where we’ve been, who we have been close to, who and what we’ve hated, and not least an elegy on those who have been an influence or a set back to our past life.

The tag line of “ Memory is Everything” makes it gel. Childhood memories are the stuff of the shrink’s couch, and explain proclivities, moods, faults, monsters; it often celebrates pride in our heroes and heroines, what blood lines made us what we are and ultimately how we made ourselves or how we adapted. The genealogy carries the DNA, we do the rest to confound it all. If a story line has any truth then we hang up all the triumphs and disasters out to dry, all the nitty- gritty but if wise only offer up a careful selection of our experiences. It helps understand these years when the jigsaw pieces are reassembled.

This is the case here, compiled in some style, by Michael Keyton.

With the necessary touches of sentimentality coupled with a mastery of revealing history ( living it, and, of course, this fella is also well known for teaching it) he offers sweet and bitter rambles from his childhood, and quite a bit of his journey beyond.

“ A Liverpool Childhood” , 1947-1973 is a psychedelic trip with Michael flashing his writers wand, and conducting his own band, the Keytons of Aintree. This tribute is often accompanied by sound tracks from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and with an expose of all the great layers and sinews from Northern life.

First impressions in getting a hard copy of the book ( kindle is way beyond my ken) was that it was a very tactile publication and it was good to finger over its covers and edges.

Later came the judgement upon reading it, of gorging on its delights, envious of it being such a terrific feat memory by a septuagenarian, and that this dotage is the best period in anybody’s life to recall one’s childhood.

The book’s been a great escape from the present bombs and inclement weather and it reeks of so many memories of childhood held in common, it shines like a magic lantern across its 288 pages with fabulous photographs of the Keyton- Parr etc families and their faces and places and cast iron cladding.

The City of Liverpool is renowned for the sly and amusing tickles of its denizens, the scousers, and these fine people of the Mersey ripple through Keyton’s various ages of man, but when he roams away from his bedrock to engage with his life’s influences to other places including time in Swansea, Aberystwyth, and Newport, South Wales, and to North Africa and Europe, Liverpool is still in the shadows. I was excited by an adventure involving a most extraordinary fleecing by a policeman in Morocco, I felt empathy with him being penniless on a escape through Spain back to England, so many similar accounts of himself are revealing, readable and amusing.

No matter where you spent your childhood or development years you’ll find nostalgia here paved with gold, often laced with real ale, with as many Madelaine moments in the food count as in Monsieur Proust.

Tripe and onions in milk touched a nerve end. We endured the relentless chewing of that family fixture with champit ( mashed) tatties on Clydeside.

As you get stuck inside this time tunnel of Mr Keyton’s past, it’s almost as long as that caged one previously navigated through – since our hero spent much of his childhood held down hard by claustraphobic forces that clung over him ever finishing his childhood, with a confusion of religions, of the infinite rituals of Roman Catholicism v the rest, blue rosary beads indeed; also on being held captive by nuns with snooker cues, and a set back of serious illness that confined him to a prolonged period in a hospital ward where treatment included penicillin injections in the bum, with only the relish of eating sausages and sipping Vimto as a god send for coping with the ordeal.

I liked the first wail of the budding author at birth, competing with the vendors announcing the arrival of the Christmas turkeys and how he held back the inevitable sighs caused by an absentee dad, the “disciplinarian” Cyril, constantly at sea, and of Michael and his brother missing him. But hurrah, they score at being raised by a splendid mother, May Parry, whose “ black curls bounced and red lips smiled”, and who provided love and wisdom enough for two parents.

Alongside the darling buds of May are perched a motley crew of intergenerational relations giving support and opposition to equal the Boswells of Dingle. I especially related to the author’s regrets too, at the loss of a boyhood friend, Owen, or not ever knowing personally his parental grandparents, Sergeant John Keyton ( a Welshman) killed in the Boer War and John’s widow Bridget, who died a few years before Michael was born. But these folk are all vividly recorded and Keyton’s touching coverage of them enriches the narrative. I also enjoyed the encounter with an autistic aunt called Doris, what a hoot, she should be reposted as a heroine by the author in one his future books.

Released from hospital incarceration to seek a stint in the normal world there are the new struggles of Keyton’s schooling with the harshness of the divide caused by passing or failing the 11 + exam, of coping with the disappearance of a yellow haired would-be seductress named Gabrielle, of even yet more incarceration of challenging years downcast in a unholy Catholic Secondary Modern School and leaving there scarce half undone, unfinished to find any unattractive job.

But Keyton was ( and is) not one to accept a dead end outcome. He proves in some wonderful mid- book Chapters entitled “Mabel Fletcher Technical College” and
“ Bloody Minded Cooks” that whilst inside the growing boy is annoyance at making a duff choice at being a cook is emerging a hungry adult with ambitions to establish himself for employment and in not least perfecting the ultimate recipe for jam buns.

Keyton makes friends easily, he draws in both sexes and shares many of his past friendships, passions and loves. Some early ones distracted him more than others, like Toni with an alluring striptease to shock the readers using the Liverpool Central Library. But one gets the impression that Keyton coped well with such temptations, his student life was enjoyed to the full beer barrel, including flirtations with a friend Ken and Marx, Lenin and Trotsky and a frenzy with an American Barbie doll named Debbie in wild scenes from inside the famous Liverpool Cavern Club.

The paths to glory after Catering College and sorting out the inevitable extra paper credentials ( City and Guilds and GCEs and bar) from study at an Northern Institute, dubbed “a portal both magical and human” all eventually enable Keyton to study for an MA degree at Swansea University, to rank an expert on the Victorian writer Anthony Trollope and take up a long career in “ God’s Own Profession ” of teaching in Secondary Schools.

Two intriguing what might have beens stand out that could have changed the story, one of Michael rejecting a handsome job offer to go to London as a trainee catering manager at Lyon’s Restaurant, and another to enrol at McGill’s University in Canada.

I’m glad Michael snubbed these offers and established himself as a glorious Mr Chips in his late lamented grandfather, Sergeant John Keyton’s native Wales, even if he remains – in his own words - only “ a grubby scouser”.

William Cross

2 November 2023

FORTUNE PRESS: A BOOK REVIEW OF "SHEPHERD MARKET" BY LESLIE ROBERTS

                Forgotten Novel From The Era Of The Bright Young Things

Published  By The Fortune Press

A BOOK REVIEW BY WILIAM CROSS, FSA SCOT

“Love is an indecent sport”  

“ Woman is the Huntress, and Man the Quarry”

Book Title : Shepherd Market by Leslie Roberts   

                                                            Shepherd Market : Late 1930s

                       

“ Shepherd Market” -the title of the book and its setting- is an enclave between London’s  Piccadilly and Curzon Street once  known  as  being  a part of the  early to- mid 20^th century’s  extraordinary low-life  corner of   Mayfair  hosting a smattering of  cheap lodgings in a space  inhabited by criminals,   spivs, prostitutes  and theatrical bohemians. 

The book was banned as  “Indecent” in Ireland,  but  praised  by several  British and overseas critics  as a  first novel by  a new author,  a Nottinghamshire-London  journalist, Leslie Roberts.

The Author’s style is neat, humorous (often campy), but he offers a good mix of  maverick characters and wit on par with  Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies”  and the mad hatters in  Nancy Mitford’s  romp “ In The Pursuit of Love”. It’s an  easy read and a  novel  overlooked featuring a few lost lambs  of  both the  black and white wool type  in the pre –WW2 London Town and in the aftermath of the extravagances of  the era of the  Bright Young People Brigade. 

A rollicking,  riotous, ridiculous tale,  quick paced throughout in a  story about   a young man, Paul Onion who has ambitions  to escape  municipal  mediocrity  and  establish  a name for himself as a writer and a poet.

Apparently fatherless,  Paul’s mother, a self-made woman, is his inspiration, as indeed is the Author’s mother is his own spark, with a book dedication   

 “For Her Pluck and Understanding And Naughty Sense of Humour”

The fictional Paul’s mother’s death frees up  the  cantankerous  youth  from a  likely life to come in chains and  dead end jobs in the dreary coalpolis of  Maidensmeadow,  this being somewhere in the Midlands.

The early part of the book describes the famous Nottingham Goose Fair, a target for quaint description by J B Priestley  as “ a crushing mass of gaping and sweating humanity".

 Paul Onion  is glad to  escape this hell hole.  A bright lad,  handsome, hugely  opinionated,  famed for  winning a  high school scholarship; he wont be  humoured or dictated to or be bogged down by lesser mortals  and  realises  his only chance of progressing  to  any height is  to move away from his barren roots and in so doing  changes his surname to the more romantic “ Lovelace” out of affection for a Cavalier poet.  

 Paul is soon catapulted  into  the wicked streets of London  where he has to grow up fast and furious  and stays  just well enough off  from the proceeds of his mother estate to survive all kinds of goodies, baddies, charlatans and creeps in a roll out of some dangerous power games, human and inhuman.

There’s a swirl of  irritation and even sadness as Paul often proves an irksome prude,  nervous  of sex,   a stubborn fellow,  but often  more canny than naive, and  frequently thankless when matched in a strange coupling cum-affair  with a gloriously  well written character, an actress- dancer,  a kept woman,  a fearless soul, constantly citing humorous aphorisms in much the same style  as movie legand  Mae West.   She is named Desiree, and occupies one of the flats at Mayfair Mews in Shepherd Market, with a maid and a sweet  little dog called “ Pompey the Little”.

This is hardly a  fine romance but they are locked together by fate. Yet, Paul insists from the word go of sleeping at a nearby hotel and  Desiree merely dubs  him her protege, but  they are clearly matched by the stars,  bounce well off each other  and their love-hate  topsy-turvy flings and adventures occupy most of the rest of the  storyline.

There is a  galaxy of  supporting characters, mainly from Desiree’s madcap stable of stage struck  friends and plenty of  fiends too, including  her Sugar Daddy, Sessel Cloud,  a rich, witty playwright  “who breeds decadent notions” and “ who is seldom sane by daylight”.  Sylvia Moon  a blonde “whose eye brows were arched in perpetual perplexity” who is engaged to Eric “ Lousy” Lancaster, a friend of Sessel Cloud “who keeps love birds and writes”. There’s also  Lesbia Capricorn ( as the name suggests of curious  sexual tastes /gender,  an exotic dancer, the star of a show called “ London Lies”,  written by Sessel.  The “Vile  cigar smoking Capricorn”  is always on the “whore path”.

Some of these people have charm, some are entirely  odious, all are in constant chaos but they do amuse and keep the humour and perversions flowing with dramas and tears aplenty.

Look out  for Denise Villers “God What Legs! Like a War Horse”,  for  a male ballet star named  Stallion  who danced for the Csar of Russia, and Earl Gay of Rape Royal in Sussex “a facetious old troll.” 

There’s a celebration of  Old London past decades, of  the famous Lyons Corner House and nights spent at the “ Curse of Ten” “ a cellar masquerading  as a palace, the most expensive rendezvous in Clarage’s Street”  and endless  Night Clubs, all hourly expecting a  Police raid to descend.

  The book unscrambles the tangled relationship between  the would be hero, Paul and the manic neurotic heroine, Desiree and  the story endures well into a series of skimpy follies and  dangerous frolics in London and Paris.

There are all the thrills and spills of the London Season,  of car racing pranks around the metropolis’ hot spots and well known locations,  in Desiree’s Silver Pelican,  grand drink sex, and drug parties given by a mysterious  Mrs Thursday , wife of the saintly Charles and  “ whose daughter Lucy  is mated with  a title”.

 Later  there’s a  well written floral  description of  going  by ferryboat  from England  to France and of the  splendid sights of Gay Paris with  hotel keepers like Madame Poiret who is foolish enough to stand up to challenge  Desiree. 

The physiological underbelly of the story is  of Paul Lovelace’s life and moral development from boyhood into manhood  and lessons to be learned of  a youth seeking out  fame and fortune, it  is a worth while read for adults.

From a witty, clever writer, good with dialogue.

Leslie Roberts (1905-66) :  One of the  Brighton Belles.

Copies of “Shepherd Market" are available from the reviewer and on Amazon and ebay  

 EMAIL WILLIAM CROSS

williecross@aol.com