[5] For most of the late 1920s and 1930s Herring lived in a large new apartment at 1 Irvine Court, Porchester Terrace, to the north of Hyde Park, sharing it with his mother, a maid and a chauffeur.
When the lease expired in September 1937 Herring's mother, Clara Helena Williams, née Spillman (1869-1940), with maid and chauffeur, moved to a new home in Eastbourne, where she lived until her death in 1940.
[6] In June 1937 Herring moved to 52, Upper Cheyne Row, in Chelsea, sharing it until early 1938 with a friend, Johnny Cole, a 22 year old former soldier in the Grenadier Guards.
[7] He began his writing career with a whimsical, fictional travelogue set in Andorra, The President’s Hat (1926) whilst also undertaking editorial work and introductions for a series of new editions of English comedies of manners for the highly reputable publisher Macmillan, starting with The School for Scandal in 1927.
His talent was attractive enough for him to be contracted to the literary agency Curtis Brown, and his second book, the satire Adam and Eve at Kew, or, the Revolt in the Gardens, written in late 1926, would eventually appear in early 1930 with illustrations by the fashionable young artist Edward Bawden.
He also became London Correspondent for the film magazine Close Up, contributing 38 feature articles between late 1927 and 1933, making him the journal's third most prolific contributor behind the editor Kenneth Macpherson and Oswell Blakeston.
He was a regular contributor of talks about the cinema for the BBC and was published several times in The Listener, including two specially commissioned pieces, which were rare in a journal whose content had to be almost wholly the transcripts of earlier broadcasts.
The first issue [16] featured articles by Mary Butts, Murray Constantine, H. D., Havelock Ellis, Kenneth Macpherson, Lotte Reiniger, and Gertrude Stein, besides contributions by Sergei M. Eisenstein, André Gide, Horace Gregory, Osbert Sitwell and Eric Walter White.