[1] His father was a merchant and stockbroker who was generous benefactor to the Royal Free Hospital[2] became High Sheriff of Kent and was knighted in 1938.
At St Cyprian's, he met the future painter Cedric Morris, started collecting manuscripts from local bookshops and won the Harrow History Prize.
Reginald Bollond, the central character, unwittingly attracts the attention of a series of homosexuals, including a cocaine dealer who wants to set him up as a rent boy.
He wrote "A Life of Thomas Chatterton" – the promising poet who committed suicide at an early age – in 1930 and produced various works of poetry which were published in collections.
John Wain in his own autobiography "Sprightly Running", recalled of the neurotic poet that he emerged from Oxford with a backward looking, almost Johnsonian determination to dig in and cherish the old values while the tide of modernism swept over him.
He described him as a disconcerting friend, with a taste for rather cruel or sinister jokes and recorded some strange miserly habits such as reusing old Christmas cards.
His editor Rowland Watson quotes a letter recording a beating by an assistant master at his Prep school (a good-looking Bristolian).