The Crichel Boys: Scenes from England's Last Literary Salon

by Simon Fenwick

In 1945, Eddy Sackville-West, Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Eardley Knollys - writers for the New Statesman and a National Trust administrator - purchased Long Crichel House, an old rectory with no electricity and an inadequate water supply. In this improbable place, the last English literary salon began. Quieter and less formal than the famed London literary salons, Long Crichel became an idiosyncratic experiment in communal living. Sackville-West, Shawe-Taylor and Knollys - later joined by the literary critic Raymond Mortimer - became members of one another's surrogate families and their companionship became a stimulus for writing, for them and their guests. Long Crichel's visitors' book reveals a Who's Who of the arts in post-war Britain - Nancy Mitford, Benjamin Britten, Laurie Lee, Cyril Connolly, Somerset Maugham, E.M. Forster, Cecil Beaton, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson - who were attracted by the good food, generous quantities of drink and excellent conversation. For Frances Partridge and James Lees-Milne, two of the twentieth century's finest diarists, Long Crichel became a second home and their lives became bound up with the house.Yet there was to be more to the story of the house than what critics variously referred to as a group of 'hyphenated gentlemen-aesthetes' and a 'prose factory'. In later years the house and its inhabitants were to weather the aftershocks of the Crichel Down Affair, the Wolfenden Report and the AIDS crisis. The story of Long Crichel is also part of the development of the National Trust and other conservation movements. Through the lens of Long Crichel, archivist and writer Simon Fenwick tells a wider story of the great upheaval that took place in the second half of the twentieth century. Intimate and revealing, he brings to life Long Crichel's golden, gossipy years and, in doing so, unveils a missing link in English literary and cultural history.

Genres: Nonfiction

368 pages, Paperback

Published August 16, 2022

Reviews

[Trevor Harvey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This entertaining account of the lives of four men of letters who shared a house in Crichel, Dorset has one major drawback: the lack of source material on each of the owners.

In order to flesh out the book to a reasonable length, the author has to include biographical details about men and women who had visited Long Crichel House house or who had some connection with its residents. Thus, we get a few pages on Rose Macaulay on the basis that Raymond Mortimer knew her. There is a lot of detail about Eardley Knollys' National Trust colleague James Lees-Milne and his wife Alvilde.

The author has an annoying habit of referring to people by their first name only. In a book which contains a large cast of characters, many of whom make a fleeting appearance, this can be confusing.

Nevertheless, an enjoyable read.

[Justinas · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating collection of stories about a plethora (perhaps one too many) of charming characters. However, while not every story should be linear and straightforward, I found the format rather distracting and confusing. The author jumps from one character to the next, rapidly switches the time periods, and cycles through a selection of contexts (e.g. the war, the writing, the war again, the AIDS, and the war again, the travel, the writing, the war, the AIDS, etc etc.). This can work sometimes, but in this case it did not quite hit the spot, in my humble opinion.
Still a worthwhile read, though, if you’re into the subject itself.

[Karen-Leigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

As part of my Bloomsbury/Bright Young Things, English arts and letters trek through history...this house and the people who lived in it were great hosts of so many of the people I have already read about and who people other people's diaries and letters. It was a very interesting read considering I had already read the biographies of most of the individuals involved.

[Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful book! Can be confusing at times with so many characters involved, but the stories about them are worth the effort.

[Marguerite Kaye · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this thinking it would be one of the things I love, a biography of a house told through the characters who lived there, and in a sense it was. Long Crichel was bought by three men (a fourth joined them) just after the end of the Second World War, and they with their many, many friends used it as a country retreat until the 1980s. They were a clever, witty and artistic bunch including artists, poets, writers and critics, whose friend included the 'great and the good' of the post-war elite in the BBC, in Bloomsbury and beyond. The majority of them were gay, and most but not all were women.

So you'd think this would be a fascinating account. It should have been, but it really didn't work for me. I struggled to find any cohesion in the narrative, and that was my main issue with it. It jumped back and forwards in time, giving what felt like mini-biographies of every character, whether they played a small or large part, like the author was reading from the house visitor's book and then throwing them in. So I got no sense of how the whole coterie hung together, and there was no real sense of the relationship between the four men at the heart of the book, save in the vast (and I mean vast) excerpts from the diaries and letters. The author wanted to let them stand for themselves, I suspect, but I wish he had been more critical and made more attempt to make sense of it all.

My overall impression was, as I said, that I'd been reading the visitors book, and thank goodness for the list of main characters at the front which I kept returning to, because so often I was thinking, which one is that? What's more, though the subtitle is 'scenes from England's last literary salon' you didn't really get much of that. I didn't feel I got to know the house or how it operated, never mind get an insight (again, other than in letters and diaries) as to what it was like when they were there.

But my biggest regret is that the author didn't make more of the times that the main characters lived through. From the 1940s when being gay wasn't only utterly frowned upon but actually appalled some people, and being caught having gay sex was illegal, all the way through the Woldfendon Report and the long, overlong time it took to implement, and up to the Aids crisis in the 80s, these were very troubled and difficult and emotional times for gay men. These events feature, though they touched all of the main protagonists, there's no attempt to give the reader a real sense of how catastrophic, how world-changing they were. And I think that's very important for a reader, especially one who knows little about it. I am old enough, for example, to remember how terrified everyone was during the early years of Aids, and how horrifically biased the press was, but you don't get that in this book. It's not a book about Aids, but it's a book whose main characters were very much affected by it - as they must have been when the Wolfenden enquiry was underway - but it's very much played down.

This was a book written with love, with affection, and it's been done with a great deal of research - an impressive amount. Maybe my expectations of it were wrong, but it didn't work for me, sadly.

[Verity W · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a group biography of Eddy Sackville-West, Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Eardley Knollys who bought Long Crichel Rectory in the immediate aftermath of World War Two. Later they are joined by Raymond Mortimer to form a sort of surrogate family and literary Salon (per the author) that lasted across the rest of the century. I'd never heard of this before I saw the book, but they seemed adjacent to the sort of inter-war Bright Young Things set that I'm always fascinated by (and have read a lot about at this point) so I gave it a go. The big problem for me is that there's not actually enough to say about the core four (so to speak) so it has to expand out to the rest of their circle. And while that does include Nancy Mitford, Cecil Beaton, various Bloomsbury-set types, Benjamin Britten and more, in doing that there's a lot of jumping backwards and forwards in time as you get sections on various people and it starts to get very confusing. So not entirely successful, but not a disaster either. Almost the best thing about it for me was the passing mention of Gervase Jackson-Stops and Horton Menagerie - which is just down the road from where I grew up.

[Yllacaspia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I expected to love this book because of the subject matter but found it infuriatingly structured and poorly edited. Despite a fairly lightweight style, it was difficult to follow because of constant digressions and backwards loops in the timeliness. A passage about the response to AIDS in the 1980s runs into a paragraph about the Wolfenden report - before moving on to Section 28. It's as though the author ran out of time and hastily gathered his notes into an approximate timeline. Whoever edited it failed to pick up on the poor punctuation and frequent missing words.

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating portrait of a lost time and way of life for rich aesthetes. Really a mish mash of stories and period relevant gay culture newsworthy information strung together in sometimes dubious, but nonetheless notable and interesting to read about ways.

[Jasper · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed it, but it was structured so messily that it was very hard to follow any individual's story and it felt a lot like jumping around anecdote to anecdote and lacked any flow.

[Mr Martin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well written but sadly about a group of worthless entitled people. Only one of them comes across as a real person who'd give you the time of day.