The Diary of A Dining-Out Man

From Virtual Victorian

From a volume of Bentley's Miscellany (London, 1841)- this piece by Albany Poyntz (i.e. Catherine Gore) other contributors to this volume included Ainsworth, Crowquill, Ingoldsby & Longfellow. She also wrote A World of Wonders (Richard Bentley, London 1845) - a polymathic work refuting popular superstitions with  chapters on Pope Joan, Wild Women, Sybils, Monstrous Births and Ventriloquism etc.,. The full text can be found at Project Gutenberg.

Catherine Gore (1799 - 1861) is best known for her many "silver-fork" novels, which depicted fashionable high society. In 1830, she published her first silver-fork novel, Women As They Are, or Manners of the Day, and then went on to write many more books in this popular genre that provided her with a considerable income. There is much on her at The Corvey Novels Project (Nebraska) She was known as a bright conversationalist, an attribute that also displayed itself in the dialogue in her novels. Her writing is often compared to Jane Austen's, particularly her descriptions of the "heartless society mother" in various novels. In this piece The Diary of A Dining-Out Man, which she writes as 'Albany Poyntz' the extreme worldliness of tone prefigures Saki. It is a world she would have known - she was herself at one time very rich but was swindled out of £20,000, and had to write several more society novels to recoup.

DIARY OF A DINING-OUT MAN.

BY ALBANY POYNTZ.

  So, here we are in the season again. — Goodness  be praised ! — Those country houses take too much  out of a man, in return for what he extracts from them. It is well enough in those where one has  the ear of the house, as well as the run of the house, — remaining a fixture, while successive parties of guests appear and disappear; for the  same bon-mots and good stories serve to amuse his  Grace on Friday, which were tried upon the country-neighbour party with success, the preceding Monday, — as inoculation was attempted upon criminals, before the royal family were submitted to the prick of the lancet. More particularly when the whole set has been renovated. It is a bore to have some single gentleman, or stationary souffre douleur cousin,

Oliver Messel and ‘Bobo’ Sigrist in the famous Suite he created

It’s got a toilet seat shaped like a scallop shell, a grand double bedroom and more rococo swags, flat columns and baroque touches than a wealthy thespian could wish for. It’s where Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton spent their honeymoon in 1964.No wonder American A listers, like Sylvester Stallone, Tom Cruise and Michael Jackson, have demanded it. We are talking about the Messel Suite, which is all yours for a mere £2,950 a night.

This photo, retrieved from a pile of press shots issued by the Dorchester itself, shows its creator, Oliver Messel, arguably the greatest stage designer from the thirties to the sixties, sitting alongside the twenty-two year old Frederika ‘Bobo’ Sigrist, heiress to the Hawker-Siddeley fortune. It was taken on 28 June 1962 on the occasion of her mother’s marriage to British public relations chief Sir Berkeley Ormerod.

Messel and Sigrist, in an artfully arranged pose, may first have met through their shared association with the millionaires of Mustique. Messel lived in a Barbabos beach house named Maddox, which he had totally transformed and decorated to his own designs , while Sigrist  was part of the Bahamas jet-set. A year after this photo was taken, she married Irish film producer Kevin McClory, who was responsible for the James Bond films.

Communist attack on Cliveden Set 1938

Found in the Chips Channon collection a pamphlet produced by the Communist Party of Great Britain attacking his friends in the Cliveden set. Produced in an edition of 10000 in March 1938 it also has much on the Spanish Civil war - they demanded 'immediate assistance for Spain...the withdrawal of Hitler and Mussolini's armies and airplanes..protection of all shipping in Spanish Republican ports.' Channon himself is attacked along with Lennox Boyd 'open pro-Fascists who got ministerial posts.' The first page reads: 

Cliveden House at Taplow, Buckinghamshire, country home of Lord and Lady Astor, meeting-place of powerful secret diplomats. Week-end parties at Cliveden House have made and broken British Cabinet Ministers. Decisions taken there have brought Europe to the verge of war. Friends of Hitler and enemies of the people are welcome there. Many of the “National” Government’s betrayals of peace have begun with a Cliveden week-end party. The Cliveden set  . . . their power reaches through British banking, transport, journalism- through Britain’s Parliament, across the seas to International Fascism. But their power can be broken. . . .

'The Astors are a very wealthy American family..'

Cliveden was, of course, to be back in the news 24 years later with the breaking of the Profumo scandal in 1962.

John Banting letter

Letter to the critic Raymond Mortimer from the artist John Banting (1902 -1972) from his White Rock Gardens, Hastings address (undated but late 1960s.) Discussing a high society book by Daphne Fielding and life in general. The book was almost certainly Emerald and Nancy: Lady Cunard and Her Daughter. (1968)

Dear Raymond and Paul – it is so reassuring (and so daunting) that you both look so splendid  still. I feel my face sliding with pink jowels but do not resent my filleted clown's nose (it is a change from the old one I had and bewildered strangers.) I hated the extracts from the book about Lytton – I hate all the necrophiliac messes.  They are not history they are gossiping provincial suburban muck.

Portrait of Nancy Cunard by John Banting

I am impatient for your review of Daphne's new book about the haute monde (and incidentally the 'weird' Nancy** whom we both loved). I refrain from boring you with my silly feelings about it – but all the anecdotes (fascinating -but who really cares that  the Prince of Wales thought that "cold salmon was common?" )  The complete exclusion of politics  and the arts is unfortunate for Daphne and places her upon a silly old fence as a gossip columnist.  Her several wild letters to me (never met her) are far better and one day she may make a book instead of trivial memoirs. She is just too commercial. She could be really good.

I feel ashamed to be amused by them  –  O Fuck I feel ashamed to be alive anyway. Please accept  (wishfully)  many enormous  paintings - of  all periods - and vast volumes and heavy chandeliers of Golconda diamonds (no crystal trash) pigeon blood rubies on rings and so on. And so many variegated regards John X

** Nancy Cunard, socialite, poet and rebel - a close friend. He shared her outrage at racial prejudice and stayed with her in Harlem, New York in 1932 and contributed to her Negro Anthology (1935).
He accompanied her on a three month visit to Spain during the Civil War (Oct. - Dec. 1937).

Gargoyle Club Members 1

Lucian Freud and Caroline Blackwoood

List of Gargoyle Club members compiled by Michael Law (a friend of Ivan Moffatt) in the late 1950s and found illustrated (as a hand-written list - hence some inaccuracies) in Michael Luke's David Tennant and the Gargoyle Years (1991) To quote from Michael Luke's 2005 obituary: 'This rooftop den was founded by David Tennant in 1925, high above the corner of Dean and Meard streets, and reached by a rickety lift whose dimensions were such that strangers entering it left as intimate friends at the top.

The Gargoyle Club was a theatrical arena for London society, high and low. The Moorish interior - its walls narcissistically mirrored with fragments of 18th-century glass and inspired by Henri Matisse (himself a member) - was described by Luke as "Mystery suffused with a tender eroticism". On its dance floor Augustus John, Dylan Thomas and Tallulah Bankhead conducted a rite of hedonistic alcoholic abandon while Noël Coward and Francis Bacon looked on, and Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean filled out membership applications...'

 Many more names to come (Writers, Poets and Politburo.) The full list pretty much covers  London society including boho and haute boho from 1925 -1965. Some of the names are now untraceable...


[Ladies etc.,] Joan Wyndham (Shivarg), Janetta Parlade, Caroline Blackwood, Mamaine Paget, Sally Belfrage, Barbara Skelton, Henrietta Moraes, Caryl Chance, Nora Sayre, Jeanne Campbell, Kitty Epstein, Natalie Newhouse (Newton) Margaret Lygon, Sarah Macmillan, Margaret - Ann Ducaine, Glur Dyson Taylor (Quennell) Josephine Lowry Carry, Suna Portman, Pamela Tellerson, Jennifer Fry, Sonia de Leon (Quennell) Venetia Murray, Jennifer Renwick, Tania Vinogradov (Hobson) Deidre Craig (Levi), Anne Dunn, Antonia Fraser, Anne Paget, Charlotte Starbussman, Patricia Cutts,Mary Keene, Louisa Morriss, Rosamund Fellows, Rita Wheatley, Dinora Mar (Mendelsohn)Vivien Talbot Brady, Ingrid Wyndham (Channon)


[Arts & Music] Freddie Mayor, Edward James, Tilly Losch,  Feliks Topolski, Matthew Smith, Francis Bacon, Michael Wishart, Douglas Cooper, Lucian Freud, John Minton, John Craxton, Constant Lambert, Alan Rawsthorne, Marion Leigh, Isabel Lambert, George Melly, Rodrigo Moynihan, Elinor Moynihan, John Moynihan, David Sylvester, Erica Bransen, Malcolm Arnold, John Heath Stubbs, Gwynneth John, John Banting, Hellen Lessore, Colquhoun & McBryde, Peter Palham, Mary & Rose Palham, Eduardo Paolozzi, Nina Hamnett, Robin Darwin, Bebé Berard.

Two in the morning at the Gargoyle (Virginia Bath)