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

 

Aubrey Herbert: Remembering The Man Who Was Greenmantle

 

Remembering Aubrey Herbert At The Centenary

Of His Death

                                  Aubrey Nigel Henry Molyneux Herbert 

                                                    1880–1923

Aubrey Herbert died 100 years ago today, 26 September 1923, five months after his revered half-brother Porchy - George Herbert,  5th Earl of Carnarvon- the discoverer with Howard Carter of the Tomb of Tutankhamun.

 

Despite being born near blind Aubrey overcame his medical condition to lead a full life, but ironically died after a botched operation to restore his sight resulted in blood poisoning.

 

A very fine and courageous man, one of the last adventurers, an accomplished traveller, expert on the Middle East ( especially of Turkey and the Balkans) and a notable politician before and after the Great War.

 

John Buchan modelled the character Ludovick Gustavus Arbuthnot better known as ‘Sandy’ Arbuthnot the side kick of the famous Richard Hannay (of ‘ The 39 Steps’ fame) around Aubrey Herbert in the superb spy novel “ Greenmantle”.

 

A friend of Albania, as was his dear mother, Elizabeth, 4th Countess of Carnarvon, he argued for that small nation’s independence – and was offered the country’s crown - twice.

 

His sister in law Almina, 5th Countess of Carnarvon treasured and adored him and was secretly in love with him. In 1911 she vigorously campaigned for him to win as the Member of Parliament for South Somerset & she nursed him at Highclere Military Hospital in WW1 and saved him from the near death wounds he’d received in battle.

 

A master of disguise ( just like Sandy Arbuthnot) best illustrated at the outbreak of the First World War, when Aubrey joined the Irish Guards- despite his near blindness - by simply buying himself a second lieutenant's uniform and falling in as the Regiment boarded their ship for France.

 

Aubrey’s legacy remains – with surviving descendants ( produced with a formidable wife, Mary Vesey, who lived until 1970) and there’s a good biography of him by his granddaughter Margaret Fitzherbert under the title “The Man Who Was Greenmantle.”

Aubrey's Herbert line is almost certainly  the TRUE succession blood line to the title "Earldom of Carnarvon" since the 6th Earl of Carnarvon was the son of Prince Victor Duleep Singh. 

Aubrey Herbert was a friend of TE Lawrence ( of Arabia fame) and when Aubrey was re-elected to his Somerset Parliamentary seat in 1922 Lawrence quipped

 “ I note your re-election by your usual absurd majority which of course you would get if you declared yourself a Bolshevik or a Wee Free or a Prohibitionist or a Mormon.”

 

We shall not ever see his like again.

 

William Cross, FSA Scot

William Cross is the biographer of Almina, Countess of Carnarvon and several books on the Carnarvons of Highclere Castle.

 Contact him by email

williecross@aol.com

THE MAN WHO WAS GREENMANTLE

Aubrey's Effigy & Tomb At Brushford Church, Somerset

Shirley Bassey: The Early Years Of A Welsh Musical Legend: A Talk By William Cross, FSA Scot

 

SHIRLEY BASSEY FEATURES ON A ROYAL MINT COIN

                                               TWO DIVAS

An illustrated talk, from Newport writer William Cross , who first took a close interest in Shirley when he was researching Cliff Gordon, a long  forgotten Welsh producer/  actor /playwright,  the man who first discovered Bassey and gave her a break into show business.

 

Will mainly  considers Bassey’s singer’s early years and her rise to fame, he appraises her early musical hits including her famous songs from the James Bond series of films and looks a little deeper beneath the surface into Shirley's private life, her controversial men friends, lovers and fiends and some of the tragedies that remain a grim shadow upon the life and times of a great Welsh performer who is now a Dame and a great survivor in a tough and merciful industry called show business.

The daughter of a Northern girl named Eliza Jane Metcalfe and a West African sailor, Henry Bassey, the legendry Welsh singing star Shirley Bassey was born in Bute Road,  Cardiff in 1937. The family later moved to Splott.

Despite an initial set back, and real life of working in a dreary 9 till 5 job in a packing factory, Shirley was spotted performing in a working men’s club by Welsh showman and actor Cliff Gordon. He gave the 16-year-old singer from Tiger Bay, a role in two mid 1950s touring shows “ Memories of Jolson” and “ Hot from Harlem”. These shows went all around the UK in 1953-4.

 London producers soon noticed Shirley’s talent. She appeared in the West End of the capital in “Such Is Life” at the Adelphi Theatre in the Strand and in several Night Club Cabaret spots, including the famous Albany Club in Soho. The press also took a shine to the new singer and Shirley was identified as a potential star by the powerful London agents, Jack Hylton and Joe Collins .

 

In the space of the next few years Shirley Bassey became a household name with top 20 hits and literally stopped the show with guest appearances in the UK and in several places overseas, including Sydney, Australia and on the Ed Sullivan Show in USA.

 

Recording contracts gave her further success. She toured widely and made many TV shows, summer shows, and guest appearances including seasons at the London Palladium, Las Vegas New York and Hollywood.

 

Shirley Bassey has now spent more than 60 years in show business and lives in Monte Carlo. Twice married with many admirers and famous hits Shirley Bassey’s life has been fast and furious, with a following of millions of fans.

 

In 2023 Shirley Bassey will appear on a series of British stamps and has already featured in a series of Royal Mint coins.

 

William Cross, FSA Scot (Will)  is the author of the controversial book “The Abergavenny Witch Hunt” (published in 2014) concerning the arrest and prosecution of 24 homosexual men and youths in the small Welsh market town in 1942. Cliff Gordon ( 1920-1964) was one of the men caught up in the proceedings.

 

Will Cross is currently writing a biography of Cliff Gordon.

 

 Here is a link for more details on Cliff Gordon

 

 

 https://twitter.com/WelshIcarus

 

 

You can also email Will Cross

 

 

williecross@aol.com

 

 

Cliff Gordon - A Forgotten Welshman

Prince Victor Duleep Singh and The Curse of the Carnarvons : A Talk from William Cross. FSA Scot

                                       Prince Victor Duleep Singh 

                      and The Curse of the Carnarvons

OR

The Countess and The Maharajah

Synopsis of a talk by William Cross, FSA Scot

Almina and Victor at Highclere, 1895

Almina Wombwell,  the 5^th Countess of Carnarvon (1876-1969)  was born in London on 14 April 1876, but her birth was not registered in England until four years later.  Christened Almina Victoria Marie Alexandra Wombwell later Herbert, finally Mrs Dennistoun, she termed herself Almina, Countess of Carnarvon.  Her mother was a pushy  Frenchwoman, her father probably English. Almina’s childhood was spent among the decaying vestiges of  the old French and Spanish  aristocrats living in exile.  Almina grew up in Paris, spoke fluent French and was later a debutante in the London Season of 1893.  She lived and loved for nine decades – married the 5th Earl of Carnarvon in 1895 and then the caddish Lt. Col Ian Onslow Dennistoun in 1923. Lord Carnarvon died in 1923 (in Egypt). Ian died in 1938 (in London). Almina was chatelaine of Highclere Castle (the back drop to TV’s Downton Abbey)  from 1895 until 1923. Every inch a Countess,  Almina spent a King’s ransom and died a horrendous death in Bristol in 1969.

Victor and George Carnarvon at Highclere, 1895

Prince Victor Duleep Singh (1866-1918) was born in London on 10 July 1866. He was the grandson of Maharajah Ranjit Singh of Lahore, the Lion of the Punjab and the founder of the great Sikh empire.   Victor’s father was also  Maharajah of Lahore, although he was brought up as an English gentleman, as was Victor.  The Duleep Singh family history is one that highlights the “horrors” of the British conquest of India. The prized  Koh-i-Noor diamond   was one of the Duleep Singh assets seized by Queen Victoria’s agents.

With his handsome half-Indian, half-European appearance,  his mother Bamba Muller was of German- Abyssinian descent, Victor (nick named ‘Tulip’) stood out as an attractive male figure in Society circles in  Victorian/ Edwardian days, he died in Monte Carlo in 1918.  Educated at Eton College, Cambridge University &  Sandhurst Miltary Academy, Victor’s closest life  long friend was George Herbert, 5^th Earl of Carnarvon, who married Almina Wombwell in 1895. George and Victors’s  youth and early adulthood were of the playboy type,  wild &  irresponsible, they were gamblers, risk takers. George’s health was blighted, leading to consequences that endure  for the Carnarvons to this day.   

     

Almina and the Carnarvon Heir, Henry, Lord Porchester, at Highclere 1899

                                                          

A secret truth –almost a curse- links the Countess Almina and the Maharajah Victor together,   a  legacy within  the  British Peerage  exposed in books and in a recent TV documentary.  William Cross, FSA Scot ( biographer of Almina),  was first to reveal the secret in his book “ The Life and Secrets of Almina Carnarvon” ( 2011).  In this talk Cross offers some of the latest evidence from his researches that still sends ripples through High Society.  In 2022 Will added further analysis of the whole story in his book “ More on Prince Victor Duleep Singh and the Curse of the Carnarvons : The Final Twists”.

 NB Will’s latest book is “ Lies, Damned Lies and the Carnarvons” issued for last year’s centenary of the discovery of Tutankhamun in 1922. 

Will Cross is a retired civil servant, writer & lecturer based in Newport, South Wales.  He is  the author of several books on Scottish history, on the Carnarvons of Highclere Castle, on Tutankhamun, and many on the Morgans of Tredegar House, Newport. Will  has had a long standing interest  on Society scandals and cover ups in the British aristocracy. Contact Will  directly about his books, talks etc,  at  58, Sutton Road, Newport, South Wales, NP19 7JF.  

E-mail Contact Welcome

willicross@aol.com

The  weeping figure of Almina,  in black, at the grave of Prince Victor Duleep Singh every summer at Monte Carlo.

“It was a duty undertaken out of respect and regard & perhaps a token of her love”   

The Story Has Not Ended…..

Photographs reproduced  by permission of the family of the photographer J W  Righton of Newbury, Berkshire