Lois Ina Sturt 1900-1937
LAST COPIES FOR SALE OF
LAST COPIES FOR SALE OF
An album of sexually
explicit verses and jokes
From the Collection Of
Lois
Ina Sturt and Reggie Pembroke
Compiled by William Cross, FSA Scot
The
material comes from the collection of Lois Sturt and Reggie
Pembroke, two minor aristocrats and
sometime lovers. The ditties are what these two central characters laughed and sniggered about before, during and
after making love.
The lovers
read them out to each other in bed
whilst they drew breath, enjoying an accompanying cigarette and a glass of bubbly before returning to
love-making.
Transcribed
from the records in the National
Library of Wales
When the affair started in 1919-20 Lois was aged 19, not ‘under age’,
the age of consent for heterosexuals at
the time was 16. [ii] Reggie was a
39- year-old married man.
The
relationship lasted several years. It staggered along after the
open-secret lovers were reported by
informants to Reggie’s wife and Lois’s mother.
There were several long gaps in the romance, sometimes of months at a time during the
years it lasted. It was finally fizzling
out by 1925 and was over by the end of 1926. [iii]
To add a whimsical interpretation to this quaint
and curious legacy of Lois and Reggie
there’s an array of adjoining cartoons,
photographs and drawings with the verses. These images are mostly taken from contemporary sources of the same time.
Lois and Reggie in 1926
Reggie Pembroke was a Peer of the Realm, an Earl, a
landowner, a soldier and politician. He was one of several men Lois
favoured for having sex. Lois was the daughter of a Baron (an English Lord);
her mother was an Earl’s daughter.
Neither Lois nor Reggie maintained exclusivity or
fidelity during their affair. Reggie was handsome, self-centred, vain, a womaniser and a chronic gambler. Although Lois was still a teenager and
unmarried, described as “more
attractive than beautiful” [iv], she was
an experienced lover and adored seducing older men. Mature men were
more grateful than her clumsy male contemporaries, especially the 1920s crop
of ‘Hooray Henrys’.
The time setting for the smutty material
is the period c.1919-1925, after the horrors of the Great War. That was the age of the vulgar
limerick and the saucy French postcards that were both humorous and rude. Lois
and Reggie’s crop of poems etc celebrates
British smut.
Women’s rights were won in part in 1918 with an
extension of the franchise and the war
between the sexes was played out in all kinds of spheres. In the verses etc.
both sexes are equally lampooned.
Contact the compiler William Cross, by e-mail for further details. The book is available on Amazon and e bay.
williecross@aol.com
[i] Reggie was
forever inventing new ways of addressing Lois.
[ii] The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 raised
the age of consent for heterosexuals to 16.
[iii] There is a
photograph in this book of Lois and Reggie taken together at a racecourse in
November 1926 indicating they were still
happy to be seen together. Reproduced above.
[iv] Attributed.
Daily Mirror Review of one of Lois’s films.
