![]() The same year Lord Berners took up residence with his well-born 28-years-younger lover, the so-called "Mad Boy" Robert Vernon Heber-Percy, at Faringdon House, a family home where the couple for the next eighteen years held court for prominent aristocrats and artists, including Nancy and Diana Mitford, Sir John and Lady Penelope Betjeman, Siegfried Sassoon, Harold Acton, Gertrude Stein, Elsa Schiaparelli, Igor Stravinsky, Salvador Dali and H. (Cecil Beaton was so appalled by this he tried to buy and destroy every copy of the book.) In 1932 he privately published The Girls of Radcliff Hall (a play on the name of the groundbreaking lesbian author), which naughtily portrayed himself and some of his famous friends, including Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel, as lesbian schoolgirls. Lord Berners was a dilettante artist, composer and author, a flamboyant aesthete, a practical jokester and cheeky homosexual. Perhaps in Britain dotty aristocrats are a dime-and-dozen, if you will (inherited money and titled privilege can produce some strange results), but when it came to eccentricity surely English bon vivant Lord Berners was a pearl among potty princes. Lord Pastern and Bagott in Swing, Brother, Swing (1949), by Ngaio Marsh "I've taken it up seriously, Lord Pastern continued. epitaph (self-composed) of Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners (1883-1950)
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