Hypocrites' Club
[3][2] Wanting to avoid dining in hall, Lloyd and his friends got together to raise the money necessary to rent two large rooms and a kitchen over a bicycle shop, formerly a medieval house, at 31 St Aldate's (other sources said 34 or 131).
[1] Members included: Hugh Lygon; William Howard, 8th Earl of Wicklow; Anthony Powell; Graham Pollard; Harold Acton; Robert Byron; Alfred Duggan; Mark Ogilvie-Grant; Arden Hilliard; Gavin Henderson, 2nd Baron Faringdon; David Plunket Greene;[2] Terence Lucy Greenidge; Raoul Loveday; Alastair Hugh Graham;[4] E. E. Evans-Pritchard;[6] Roger Hollis; Claud Cockburn;[7] Anthony Bushell; Brian Howard; Tom Driberg; Christopher Hollis; H. D. Ziman.
"[8] Robert Byron, who was the resident entertainer singing Victorian music hall, joined because it provided him a haven for like-minded "aesthetes.
Graham sent Waugh a naked photo of himself, leaning against a rock face, with arms outstretched, buttocks in full view, and with the text explaining the best way to drink wine: "You must tab a peach and peel it, and put it in a finger bowl, and pour the Burgundy over.
In 1939 his mother Kathleen Hilliard committed suicide jumping from the roof of a private nursing home where she was treated for mental illness.
In his autobiography To Keep the Ball Rolling, Powell, wrote of Hilliard: "[He] had come up to Oxford from Winchester, with a Balliol Exhibition, and an unmanageable burden of good looks.
Handsome, nice mannered, mild in demeanour, Hilliard, at first meeting, conveyed not the smallest suggestion of his capacity for falling into trouble.
He was one of the nicest of men, in certain moods content to live a quiet even humdrum existence; at other times behaving with a minimum of discretion, altogether disregarding the traditional recommendation that, if you can't be good, be careful.
[...] A vignette that remains in my mind of this early Balliol period is of being woken up one night to find Hilliard and Ponsonby standing by my bedside.
[14] In 1926 Hilliard undertook a trip to Corsica with Anthony Powell, just graduated from Balliol College; on the way back in Nice they met Hugh Lygon who was staying at W. Somerset Maugham's villa.
[15] After World War II, according to Powell, he took "an erratically charted course that had something of Jude the Obscure in reverse; erstwhile scholar who transformed himself into a rustic swain.
[16] Christopher Hollis wrote in his memoirs, Along the Road to Frome, that "the two centres of my social life that remain most vividly in my mind are the Hypocrites' Club and Offal luncheons.
They have succeeded in picking up a whole series of intellectual catch-phrases with which they proceed to dazzle their friends and frighten their acquaintances: and they are the only people I have ever met who have reduced rudeness to a fine art.
After Waugh published A Little Learning, Harold Acton wrote to him complaining he had revealed his homosexuality, while omitting Byron's, Balfour's, Howard's and Lygon's promiscuities.
Tamara Talbot Rice, one of the few women undergraduates at Oxford, remembered how John Fothergill let Waugh have rooms in the Spreadeagle at Thame at a special midweek rate so that he and Lygon could meet in private.
[11] Anthony Powell wrote: "Coming from different colleges, we used to lunch or dine several times a week at this inexpensive and ill-furnished club over a bicycle shop near Folly Bridge.
Though Waugh was friends with Terence Lucy Greenidge and Harold Acton, eccentrics and crazy, romantically he was attracted to fragile, beautiful boys like Alastair Hugh Graham and Richard Pares.
"[1] At the time undergraduate students were forbidden to drink in pubs and practicing homosexuality was illegal, therefore clubs like the Hypocrites' were places to do both in a safe environment.
[4] The "gay set" of the Hypocrites' Club listed Arden Hilliard, Hugh Lygon, Harold Acton, Mark Ogilvie-Grant, John "The Widow" Lloyd, Robert Byron, and Gavin Henderson.
[26][27] The cast members were: the same Evelyn Waugh, Arden Hilliard, Elsa Lanchester, John Greenidge (Terence's brother), Alec Waugh, John Sutro, the same Terence Greenidge, Septimus Nixon (real name Guy Hemingway), Derek Erskine, Michael Murgatroyd (real name William Lygon, 8th Earl Beauchamp), Archibald Gordon and Sibbald Malcolm.
[28] The absurd plot was about the Pope (Guy Hemingway) trying to convert England to Catholicism using Sligger (the Dean of Balliol, Evelyn Waugh).
Father C. C. Martindale of Campion Hall, a Catholic house in the University of Oxford, saw it and "laughed till his tears flowed".
[22] The club's mischief began to be noticed by the Oxford authorities when William Howard, 8th Earl of Wicklow, gave a supper party on the roof of a church.
On 8 March 1924 a Victorian fancy dress party was hosted at the club by Robert Byron and The Widow Lloyd as a protest.
[30] Balliol College and the Hypocrites' Club were the epicentres of what James Lees-Milne called "that scintillating generation... a mixture of the socially sophisticated and the enviably gifted... notably Twentyish and also alarming.
Robert Byron's biographer James Knox described Richard and his brother David as a "wildly irresponsible pair who had never experienced any form of parental control.
