Hellfire (eBook)

1

RIOTOUS ASSEMBLY

On the evening of 8 March 1924, a young nun was seen by the porters of Balliol College, Oxford, trying to pass in just as the gates were due to close. Balliol was an all-male establishment and visits by young women were rare, especially by those belonging to a religious order. The nun turned out to be an undergraduate called Arden Hilliard, the son of the college bursar. He was coming back from a fancy-dress party held at a drinking club on the outskirts of the university district. At the Victorian-themed event, members had dressed as the late queen herself, choir boys in vermilion lipstick, ladies in crinoline, flower maidens and Madame de Pompadour, the official mistress of Louis XV.

The Hypocrites Club, already known for its heavy drinking and raucous noise, was then closed down, mainly at the urging of Balliol’s dean, long an opponent. This was the end of a remarkable, if short-lived, institution which began sometime in 1921 – no one is quite sure when. The club’s motto, taken from the first line of Pindar’s Olympian Odes, was ‘Water is best’: ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ. Its members’ indifference to this advice gave the club its nickname.

In his autobiography, Evelyn Waugh wrote, ‘It seems that now, after the second war, my contemporaries are regarded with a mixture of envy and reprobation, as libertines and wastrels.’ This was just as true in the 1920s, and the annals of the Hypocrites Club would tend to support this perception.

The great majority of its members – all of whom were men – were upper gentry or bourgeois, along with a few of the bolder aristocrats. Most of them, in the later stages of the club’s existence, came from Eton. The Hypocrites were rich, or lived beyond their means. The most prominent example of the latter group was Waugh himself, who left Oxford heavily in debt. Many of them went on to be successful and prominent in later life. They included the ‘English Proust’, Anthony Powell, the author of the novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time; a cult modern novelist, Henry Green; a much-admired travel writer, Robert Byron, whose masterpiece The Road to Oxiana was compared in its influence to Ulysses and The Waste Land; and a political reporter whom Graham Greene called one of the two leading English journalists of the century, Claud Cockburn. His journalistic motto was ‘Believe nothing until it’s been officially denied’.

Tom Driberg, too young to be a member per se but a visitor who left a memorable account of an evening spent there dancing, founded Britain’s most famous gossip column, ‘William Hickey’. He was one of three habitués who became MPs. Three others became professors. Peter Quennell became a prolific author and reviewer, one of the founders of History Today. Alfred Duggan, described by Waugh as ‘a full-blooded rake of the Restoration’, sent down from Oxford, went on to have the most surprising career of all.

Other Hypocrites live on in the shadows of Waugh’s fiction. Two of the most prominent personalities, Harold Acton and Brian Howard, became the basis for one of his most brilliantly drawn characters, Anthony Blanche. Howard was also the model for Waugh’s Ambrose Silk in Put Out More Flags. Four Hypocrites influenced the character and circumstances of Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited. Gavin Henderson, the model for Lord Parakeet, who first appeared in Decline and Fall, converted his Rolls-Royce into an ambulance for Republicans wounded in the Spanish Civil War, and once addressed the House of Lords as ‘My dears’. Two regular visitors, and possibly members – record keeping was not one of the club’s strengths – jointly became Basil Seal, first encountered in Black Mischief.

The wealthy bluebloods and bohemians Waugh met at the Hypocrites Club didn’t just provide literary models: they became friends, enemies, rivals and lovers. If Waugh hadn’t passed into their world, Brideshead Revisited could not have been written. It was thanks to his membership of the club that the solidly bourgeois Waugh, from an unfashionable area of London, Golders Green, an unfashionable public school, Lancing, and an unfashionable college, Hertford, was able to gain an entrée into the aristocratic world he fell in love with and wrote about for the rest of his life. And very much part of this world were the Hypocrites’ mothers, sisters and female friends and cousins, some of whom found their way into Waugh’s fiction too. Less so into his bed, to his great frustration.

Of course, there is nothing unusual about a group of men living it up at university, on tick, or at their parents’ expense, and spending little time on their studies. Nor is there anything unusual in their remaining friends – or falling out – over fifty years, acting as each other’s best men or godfathers to their children or mourners at their funerals. Nor is there any great mystery about the later eminence of many members of the Hypocrites Club. Most did very badly academically at Oxford, and most deserved to. But the great majority of the Hypocrites were not, fundamentally, frivolous or idle individuals. They were, as Anthony Powell remarked, ‘a collection, most of them, of hard-headed and extremely ambitious young men’.

They were also highly intelligent and well educated – at least, up until the point when they arrived at the university and from the point they left. They were very well connected. They were self-confident, and far from diffident in pushing themselves forward, Robert Byron in particular. They acted as a mutual aid club, regularly praising each other’s work in reviews and puffing each other up in gossip columns. They were talented, some very much so. Why would they not succeed?

So, I do not suggest that the Hypocrites Club in some way catalysed these men’s future careers, in the startling way that being debagged set Paul Pennyfeather on a completely unexpected course in Decline and Fall. If there was something ‘in the water’, it went undrunk, despite the club’s motto.

But there is something about the Hypocrites Club that was special, or so it seems to me. So many of its members, different from each other in so many ways, set themselves apart from the prevailing ethos of their time. They were an awkward squad, certainly as young men, taking nothing at face value, impatient with the strictures of authority and outmoded social niceties. They shared a hatred of cant and received wisdom, and were always happy to rock the boat and bite the hand that fed them. They were pugnacious, to the point of being unhinged in the case of Byron and Waugh. They were not shy of causing offence, including to each other. Waugh was well known to be a bone-dry Conservative and ultramontane, to the point of self-caricature. Others, notably Claud Cockburn, remained firmly on the left.

The Hypocrites were born between 1903 and 1905. The last standing, Anthony Powell, died in 2000, at 94 years of age. All lived through the Great War, the party years of the ‘Bright Young People’, the Wall Street Crash, the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, Appeasement, the Nazi–Soviet Pact. All took part in the Second World War in one way or another, the majority in uniform. Most of them lived through austerity, the Cold War and the Swinging Sixties. All saw the decline of the aristocratic world familiar to their grandparents. Many were gay and lived through the years of odium and repression. The novels and autobiographies of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Henry Green, three of the most important prose writers of their time, the memoirs of Claud Cockburn and Harold Acton, the letters of others, and the reminiscences of dozens of people who knew them, give a compelling if idiosyncratic insight into the events and the times through which they lived.

The Hypocrites Club – Peter Quennell described it as ‘a kind of early twentieth-century Hell Fire Club’ – had its premises in a ramshackle building at 131 St Aldate’s, south of Christ Church. Anthony Powell remembered that it consisted of ‘two or three rooms over a bicycle shop in an ancient half-timbered house at the end of St Aldate’s, where that long street approached Folly Bridge, a vicinity looked on as somewhat outside the accepted boundaries of Oxford social life’. The building was demolished in the 1960s. Confusingly, two rival street numbers have been cited in various sources. Perhaps the large amounts of alcohol consumed at the premises fogged the memories of the diarists concerned.

Henry Yorke, who wrote novels as Henry Green, said that it ‘had its rooms in the slums of the town. The reason why it was out of the way in one of those back streets must have been that the members made so much noise. It was a drinking club but was more, in the terrific roar of its evenings, the quarrels the shouting and extravagance. It was a sign of the times.’ ‘I cannot describe the place any further because on all the occasions I went there afterwards I never was sober once.’ But Claud Cockburn, Evelyn Waugh’s cousin, sums it up most succinctly of all. The Hypocrites Club was ‘a noisy alcohol-soaked rat-warren by the...