The Times Saturday Review - UK (2020-11-14)

the times | Saturday November 14 2020 1GR saturday review 15

Adam’s apple”, who sat down with them

uninvited and started nattering about a

wild party she and Röhm had attended

together a few days earlier. Delmer told

Röhm that he was shocked by the wait-

ress’s lack of discretion in talking about a

former client, but Röhm testily replied: “I

am not his client. I am his commanding

officer. He is one of my Stormtroopers!”

That type of “degeneracy” was ended

with the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.

The “Glamour Boys” were among the first

to see where Hitler was taking the country;

not only that, they also felt they had skin in

the game. Nicolson’s homosexual friend

Kurt Wagenseil, a translator of “degener-

ate” works by Jean Cocteau and André Gi-

de, was dispatched to a concentration

camp without trial in November 1935.

When Cazalet played in the men’s sin-

gles at Wimbledon in 1933 — he was MP

for Chippenham at the time — he became

friends with the German tennis star and

anti-Nazi Gottfried von Cramm. He told

Cazalet that “the only thing which

might save me is my sport. The better

I play the more they will be afraid to

catch me.” Sporting prowess was

not enough. In 1938 Von Cramm

was jailed for “sexual perversion”.

While their first-hand know-

ledge of German repression

pushed them against appease-

ment, the Glamour Boys became

a tighter group when Chamber-

lain and his machine tried to crush

the opposition, Bryant argues. Their

secret lives made them vulnerable to

the threats of the whips and the smear

and innuendo of the press, especially the

vituperative periodical Truth, which had

secretly been bought by Ball for his black

propaganda. They had to unite to protect

themselves.

Bryant does a creditable job of describ-

ing the parliamentary manoeuvres of the

late 1930s, but for a bigger picture of the

politics of this period Tim Bouverie’s

recent Appeasing Hitler is superior. Bryant

is best, though, when he lets his riah down

and camps it up a little by describing 1930s

and 1940s gay culture.

During the phoney war, he tells us, the

basement bar at the Ritz hotel became

popular with gay officers. When the poet

Louis MacNeice visited what became

known as the “Pink Sink”, he commented,

not unkindly, that the bar was “noisy and

crowded with officers in uniform, but all of

a peculiar kind, shimmying their hips and

speaking in shrill or velvety voices — ‘My

dear! My dear! My DEAR!’ ”. Regulars

included a high-up from the War Office

whose passion for young officers earned

him the nickname “Colonel Cutie” and the

nightclub hostess and singer Edomie

Johnson, “the buggers’ Vera Lynn”.

Cazalet was in charge of what must have

been the fruitiest military unit since the

Band of Thebes. The 83rd Light Anti-

Aircraft Battery at Sevenoaks included

Nicolson’s former lover, the writer James

Pope-Hennessy, the aristocratic society

photographer and gossip columnist Bro-

drick Haldane and Roland Pym, who

“painted a sub-Whistler mural in the HQ

featuring Victor and others in Napoleonic

costumes astride a mound of Lewis guns”.

Haldane recalled that Cazalet was always

in a rush; he would dash off in his Rolls-

Royce after inspecting the troops, with an

excuse such as: “I have to hurry. I’m having

tea with Queen Mary.”

Nonetheless, as Bryant says — and as a

former Anglican vicar, he will have a feel

for such things — discretion mattered:

“Keep them guessing and never make the

implicit explicit; you could jest about fair-

ies and nancies, you could camp it up, but

you absolutely had to maintain the fiction

that this was all a joke.” It was a disaster

when the truth could not be escaped. One

of the saddest parts of the narrative con-

cerns Paul Latham, Conservative MP for

Scarborough and Whitby, who had enlist-

ed in the 70th Searchlight Regiment of the

Royal Artillery. However, an incriminat-

ing letter from a pick-up was discovered.

Knowing he faced court martial and ruin,

he drove his motorbike at full speed off the

road. He survived — and was charged with

13 counts of disgraceful conduct with three

Royal Artillery gunners and a civilian

alongside a charge of attempted suicide.

Latham resigned his seat before he was

found guilty; he was cashiered and impris-

oned for two years. What stupid and cruel

laws were inflicted on gay men.

Two quibbles about this fascinating book.

I found myself grinding my teeth every time

Bryant described these men as “queer”. His

explanation is that “queer was regularly

used in a pejorative sense during this

period, so I have decided to own it and used

it in a non-pejorative sense to include all

men who had same-sexual feelings or lived

outside the heterosexual norms of the day”.

But the word also carries with it the brain-

melting silliness of queer studies. It feels ab-

surd to apply this loaded modern term to

the fox-hunting Cartland, brother of the

romantic novelist, or to the ultra-wealthy

Sassoon, however many times Noël Cow-

ard plunged into his pool at Port Lympne.

Though outsiders, they were hardly audi-

tioning to live on Planet Woke.

The second quibble is smaller. Some of

the time Bryant chattily dispenses with sur-

names, so we have Rob (Bernays) and Bob

(Boothby) bobbing along in the same sen-

tence, or, more confusingly, we have to con-

tend with two Ronnies (Cartland and Tree).

It’s perhaps a sign of how close Bryant,

the Labour MP for Rhondda, feels to his

Glamour Boys. He reminds us that there

are 23 shields behind the Speaker’s chair in

the House of Commons, one for each MP

who lost their life in active service during

the Second World War. Macnamara,

Bernays, Cartland and Cazalet made that

ultimate sacrifice, proving that grit and

glamour can go together.

In the 1920s Berlin

had become, in

WH Auden’s words,

‘a bugger’s paradise’

P

olitics is showbiz for ugly people.

Those rare politicians whose

faces don’t resemble lazily stirred

porridge have always been

viewed with suspicion by their

colleagues. For instance, the Tory enemies

of the dashing-looking Anthony Eden

attacked his suave appearance after he

resigned as foreign secretary in 1938.

Surely a fastidiously trimmed moustache

and a well-cut pair of trousers were the

marks of a flibbertigibbet?

Joseph Ball, the Conservative Party’s

infamous director of research and Neville

Chamberlain’s smear artist, came up with

the mocking moniker of “the Glamour

Boys” to dismiss Eden and his supporters,

a group of socially smart, youngish and of-

ten well-groomed MPs who broke with the

Tory policy of appeasing Nazi Germany.

Chris Bryant says of the phrase: “It

seemed to contain a compliment, but it

insinuated something disturbing. It sug-

gested that these men were vain and over-

ly fastidious, effete if not actually effemi-

nate, and easily distracted by glitter and

fashion. The implication of deviancy was

subtle, too.” As Bryant persuasively argues,

Ball’s imputation of perfumed poofery was

deliberate because many of the most

forceful critics of appeasement were

homosexual. Of the two dozen earliest op-

ponents of the doomed policy on the gov-

ernment benches, a third were gay.

The Glamour Boys focuses on MPs such

as Ronnie Cartland, Jack Macnamara, Har-

old Nicolson, Bob Boothby, Victor Cazalet

— all homosexual or bisexual, albeit gener-

ally discreet — who took on the Chamber-

lain machine from the backbenches, and

the ministers Philip Sassoon and Robert

Bernays, who opposed appeasement from

within. Many of them were long suspected

of harbouring musical inclinations. When

Cazalet reminded everyone that he was a

bachelor in a speech in 1930, the gossip

magazine Bystander miaowed that “as a

matter of fact, his double-breasted

beige waistcoat told one that”.

Bryant’s contention is that

their homosexuality was not co-

incidental to their opposition to

Nazi Germany. In the interwar

years Berlin had become,in

WH Auden’s words, “a

bugger’s paradise”. Unlike in

buttoned-up Britain, homo-

sexuality was much more open.

“In the dimly lit bars one might

see government officials and

men of the world of finance ten-

derly courting drunken sailors with-

out any shame,” the novelist Stefan

Zweig wrote of the city’s fleshpots, many

of which were visited by Bryant’s MPs.

This gay abandon even extended to the

Nazis for a time. Ernst Röhm, the leader of

Hitler’s Brownshirts, was an outrageous

queen. The journalist Sefton Delmer went

on a tour of night spots with the “sex-

hungry little major”; at the Eldorado,

Delmer was surprised by a waitress, “a

huge creature with a very prominent

The gay MPs who stood up to Hitler

These politicians

knew the Nazi threat

after living it up in

interwar Berlin,

says Robbie Millen

ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS LTD/MARY EVANS

glamour and grit

Harold Nicolson and wife

Vita Sackville-West

The Glamour

Boys

The Secret Story

of the Rebels Who

Fought for Britain

to Defeat Hitler

by Chris Bryant

Bloomsbury, 424pp; £

Gay or bisexual MPs Jim

Thomas (Anthony Eden’s PPS),

Bob Boothby and Ronnie

Cartland with Noël Coward