CRICHEL BOYS

Sub-titled 'Scenes From England's Last Literary Salon' the book is a Who's Who of the arts in post-war Britain and a rich, luscious account of a charming, kind and generous group of people. In 1945, Eddy Sackville-West, Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Eardley Knollys purchased Long Crichel House, an old Dorset rectory with no electricity and inadequate water supply. In this improbable place, the last English literary salon began. The Visitors' Book attracted such names as Nancy Mitford, Benjamin Britten, Laurie Lee, Cyril Connelly, 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. 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 book brings a fine balance between nostalgia and commemorates the privileged world long since vanished and the problems caused by having four neurotic personalities intermittently at large under a single roof. The trio were later joined by the literary critic Raymond Mortimer and members became one another's surrogate family and their companionship became a stimulus for writing. Yet there was more to the place than just a 'prose factory' than what critics variously referred to as a group of 'gentleman-aesthetes'. The book unveils a missing link in English literary and cultural history and we relish the details of the central characters who are of course homosexual or bisexual, but there is nothing here to surprise or disturb apart from croquet on the lawn, music and literary debate. 354pp, paperback, photos.