7 minute read
Historical Holidays & Gay Getaways
Recovery, relaxation or recreation? With illustrations by Tracy Gilchrist, Alf Le Flohic looks back at queer icons who visited our queer streets to heal, hang loose or have a ball
Brighton has long been one of the places that people like us come to when they want to get away for a little. For centuries in fact. Sometimes it’s been for recovery purposes, sometimes simply to relax, and of course we all like a little recreation from time to time.
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Firmly in the recovery category are our first couple of visitors: author Marie Corelli and her constant companion Bertha Vyer. They stayed at the King’s Hotel (139–141 King’s Road) in 1899, while Marie recuperated after a serious operation.
She wrote The Master Christian during her stay there. It concerns the immorality of priests and features the second coming of Christ as a street urchin called Manuel. Seriously.
An eccentric character, she pretended she could speak Italian and insisted any photographs of her were touched up to keep her forever 21. Her writing was just as quirky, mixing weird science, religion and romance.
In her first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds, the soul of a female pianist explores other realms by ‘personal electricity’. Her books also frequently featured erotic descriptions of female beauty and to quote the same novel: “I embraced her fondly, and our lips met with a lingering sisterly caress.”
Marie Corelli
Bertha was a talented painter in her own right, but gave this up to support Marie’s career. Marie was one of the UK’s most successful writers before World War 1 – indeed, Queen Victoria was said to be a fan.
However, she later became a figure of fun – author EF Benson acknowledged her as the inspiration for his 1920s comic character, Lucia. And Oscar Wilde from Reading Gaol is quoted as saying: “Now don’t think I’ve anything against her moral character, but from the way she writes she ought to be in here.”
Our second couple is author Radclyffe ‘John’ Hall and sculptor Lady Una Troubridge. While Marie and Bertha may have been simply loving companions, John and Una were as ‘out’ as you could be in the 1920s and ‘30s.
Radclyffe Hall is famous, or should that be infamous, for her 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness. Its open portrayal of the butch lesbian life of Stephen Gordon caused uproar and it was banned in the UK. Amusingly that made everyone want to read it and copies were smuggled in from France.
On August 2, 1932, they began a two-month stay at the Royal Crescent Hotel at 100–101 Marine Parade. They were living in Rye at the time but were having a break in Brighton as Una was recovering from a hysterectomy.
When John wasn’t pushing Una along the seafront in a bathchair, she was writing a collection of short stories entitled Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself. Miss Wilhelmina Ogilvy is a nononsense middle-aged spinster who prefers to be called William – I’m sensing a theme here.
There are, of course, times you just need to relax, unwind, and spend some alone time with your new lady friend. In February 1944, the painter and stylish gender-rebel Gluck checked in to the Beaufort Hotel at 21 Brunswick Place with their new journalist chum Edith Shackleton Heald.
Gluck had been a very popular artist in the 1930s – the Queen had attended one of their exhibitions – but they had fallen out of fashion by this time.
Edith had just helped Gluck organise a ‘oneman show’ of their paintings at Steyning Grammar School before they came to Brighton. It was to be their last exhibition aside from the retrospective towards the end of their life.
They enjoyed a week’s holiday on the coast, visiting the local area and having tea at the Royal Pavilion. Gluck was getting over their long-term affair with the married philanthropist Nesta Obermer, who lived in Plumpton. Apparently, Nesta called Gluck on the phone every night during their stay at the hotel, which sounds decidedly awkward!
But Gluck and Edith’s blossoming relationship survived that experience and later that year they moved into Chantry House in Steyning. They remained there together for the rest of their lives.
Gluck
It was the Grand Hotel (97–99 King’s Road) that housed our next couple of guests. Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, and poet Lord Alfred Douglas (aka Bosie), arranged a discreet rendezvous there in October 1894.
Prior to this, Wilde had been staying in Worthing along with his wife and two young sons, where he’d been writing his soon-to-be hit comedy The Importance of Being Ernest.
Lord Alfred Douglas
Unfortunately, the chill session he’d organised with Bosie didn’t quite go as planned, as Bosie caught the flu. Wilde pampered him until he was well enough for them both to transfer to another hotel. Then Wilde fell ill. Bosie threw a frightening tantrum, abandoned Wilde and checked back into the Grand Hotel.
On October 16, Wilde’s 40th birthday, he was still unwell but received an envelope from Bosie. It was a letter saying he had charged all his hotel expenses to Wilde and “when you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting”.
Oscar Wilde
This was roughly six months before Wilde would be publicly humiliated and imprisoned for ‘gross indecency’, or to quote one of Bosie’s poems – “the love that dare not speak its name”.
On a lighter note, Brighton has seen its fair share of sauce over the centuries.
On August 23, 1826, landowner Anne Lister checked into the Royal York Hotel (41–42 Old Steine) with her lover Mariana Lawton.
In her hometown of Halifax, Anne was sometimes referred to as Gentleman Jack because of her masculine appearance. (Yes, it’s the same one from the recent BBC series.)
Anne and Mariana found themselves stranded in Brighton for three days while they waited for a boat to take them to France. They took a turn around the recently opened Royal Suspension Chain Pier, and sauntered along the seafront to the Kemptown estate, which was still under construction.
Anne has become famous these days for the diaries she kept which detailed all of her activities. And I mean all! They included passages written in code, which when translated in the 1930s revealed her romantic and sexual relationships with other women.
You’ll be pleased to hear there were coded entries for their stay in Brighton. “Good kiss last night. Got into bed again this morning for half hour and had another kiss.” I’m assuming the word kiss is a euphemism, but that might just be my filthy mind.
Almost 150 years later, in the summer of 1967, influential ‘60s playwright and fan of a good scandal Joe Orton stayed in Shoreham with his lover, Kenneth Halliwell. They were staying with theatre producer Oscar Lewenstein for the weekend to discuss Joe’s new two-act farce What the Butler Saw.
On Friday, July 28, Joe and Kenneth took a walk along the beach despite the spitting rain. Joe’s diary records: “We had to clamber over innumerable breakwaters which were thick with slime and grime. As we approached the power station our nostrils were assailed by a terrible stench. The sea frothed and bubbled with the rain and an overpowering smell of chemicals, rotting seaweed and the dung of countless birds met us. ‘This is a terrible way to spend our leisure’ Kenneth said.”
The rain continued all weekend. On the Sunday Joe left his companions at the cinema in Brighton in favour of cruising the cottages. He called in at the gents’ public toilets that used to be situated on St Peter’s Place behind St Peter’s Church.
He began talking to a tall man. Having groped each other, the man offered the services of another figure skulking in the corner of the lavatory. To quote from Joe’s diary again: “He made a motion to the dwarfish creature, rather as someone would call a taxi. The dwarf sucked me off while the other man smiled benevolently.”
And on that happy ending… I think we’ll conclude our trip down Brighton’s memory lanes.
About Tracy Gilchrist
The Hove-based artist originally created the illustrations accompanying this piece for another of Alf Le Flohic’s projects and they were featured in a booklet for a ‘gay walkabout/tour’ around Brighton. She now primarily works in painting, and will be part of a group exhibition at Brush in the North Laine in December. Her most successful works tend to be wildlife art and she has collectors in New York, Denver, Connecticut, Netherlands and all over the UK.
