Cash for Honours E-Book

Andrew Cook

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2008

Beschreibung

The book uncovers the involvement of the Secret Service and how Maundy Gregory exploited sensitive information that enabled him to gain access and influence to pillars of the establishment. It reveals for the first time the contents of the recently de-classified secret file held on Gregory and his activities by the Vatican and exposes the circumstances surrounding Gregory's 1933 arrest for selling honours and the deal he was offered by Cabinet Ministers to quit the country in return for a light sentence and a pension for life.

Leseprobe

CASH FOR HONOURS

CASH FOR HONOURS

THE STORYOF

MAUNDY GREGORY

ANDREW COOK

First published in 2008

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

© Andrew Cook, 2008, 2013

The right of Andrew Cook to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 9621 4

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

1 The Visitors

2 A False Start

3 The Phoenix Rising

4 Not a ‘Sahib’

5 Breakthrough

6 A Vanishing

7 Ups and Downs

8 Gathering Storm

9 New Opportunities

10 The Rot Sets in

11 The Dangerous Mr K

12 Keeping up Appearances

13 Uncle Jim

14 Acting Fast

15 Downfall

16 Nemesis

17 Open Verdict

18 Sanctuary

Appendix 1: Enquiry Agent

Appendix 2: A Brief History of the Honours System 1905–2007

Appendix 3: The Asquith Peerage List 1911

Appendix 4: Lloyd George Peerages

Appendix 5: Baronetcies

Appendix 6: Fees on Account

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

I am greatly indebted to members of Maundy Gregory’s family (Anna-May Gregory, Benjamin Gregory, Elizabeth Gregory, Gwen Gregory and Viola Gregory); William Lloyd George (3rd Viscount Tenby and grandson of David Lloyd George); Professor Derrick Pounder (Senior Home Office Forensic Pathologist and Head of Forensic Medicine, University of Dundee); Rosalind Rodway (granddaughter of Superintendent Arthur Askew); Julian Thomson (grandson of Sir Basil Thomson); Elaine Quigley (British Institute of Graphologists); and Norman Shaw (grandson of Harry Shaw). I would also like to thank the many heirs and descendents of those ennobled during the period 1917–1924, too numerous to mention here individually, whose generosity in making available family papers and records has been invaluable to my research.

I am also grateful to Bill Adams; Jordan Auslander; Dmitry Belanovsky; Dr Luca Carboni (Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Rome); Lord Clark of Windermere; Anne Clarke (Special Collections, Birmingham University Library); Brian Enstone; Lynda Fagan; Dr Nicholas Hiley; John Hodgson (Special Collections, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester); Helen Langley (Bodleian Library, University of Oxford); John Lidstone; the late Eileen McCormick; Lindsay Simitar; Bina Sudra (Parliamentary Archives); Phil Tomaselli; Graham Salt; Jane Walsh (British Library Newspapers); and John Wells (Department of Manuscripts, Cambridge University Library).

A special thank you also goes to Alison Clark; David Cook; Monica Finch; Ingrid Lock; Hannah Renier; Jill Thew; Chris Williamson and Daksha Chauhan. Finally, my gratitude must be expressed to Jacqueline Mitchell and Jane Entrican at Sutton Publishing for their help and support in this project.

Preface

Had it not been for his arrest and conviction under the 1925 Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act in 1933, the name of John Arthur Maundy Gregory would today be unknown to history, rather than being a byword for political corruption and the sale of honours. This sullied reputation has been further blackened over the past four decades by suggestions that Gregory was a possible double murderer into the bargain.

Whenever the issue of cash for honours is discussed today, the names of Maundy Gregory and Lloyd George are held up almost as warning placards. History has not only overlooked Gregory’s equally successful rival, Harry Shaw, but has failed to bring to book the other political leaders of the day who in reality eclipsed Lloyd George in terms of honours sales and political chicanery. Their reputations today remain spotless and polished.

Furthermore, it would now appear that contrary to the accepted version of Gregory’s frequently told story, his arrest may not have been an accident of fate, the result of hubris or of ill luck on his part, but the result of a concerted and ruthless attempt by a group of highly placed individuals to monopolise and control the honours market.

Nearly a century of falsehood and fantasy has obscured the reality of Maundy Gregory’s life. Like his one time acquaintance ‘Ace of Spies’ Sidney Reilly, Gregory was something of a Walter Mitty character, concocting a host of tall stories about himself that have only served to muddy the water still further. To piece together an accurate account of his mysterious life and to establish the reality behind the honours racket of the early twentieth century, it has been necessary to cast aside the myths and fantasies and to return to primary sources.

The ability to draw on a host of newly uncovered material has helped immeasurably in this task.

CHAPTER ONE

The Visitors

A wealthy provincial supplicant – an elderly, complacent, white-haired, wing-collared manufacturer, say, of socks or sewer pipes – visiting the tall, narrow, old house that was 38 Parliament Street in the 1920s, might find it a discomfiting experience. Power was implicit in the very location, within yards of the Houses of Parliament, Scotland Yard and the Home Office. Westminster Abbey, whose Archbishop still mattered, was across the Square. This was the political hub of an Empire which still covered a third of the world’s inhabited land.1

Inside No. 38, respectful attendants wore uniform which identified them as messengers from the House of Commons.2 The visitor was escorted up to the first floor, where he would sit in an ante-room, a sombre and claustrophobic chamber with a gothic stained-glass window, reading back numbers of the Whitehall Gazette and awaiting his audience with the great eminence.

A soft voice.

‘Mr Maundy Gregory is ready to see you now.’

Maundy Gregory, whose name was so often whispered between very rich men, proved to be not particularly tall and rather chubby, with a beaming smile. He wore an expensive suit, a tie which signalled quiet affluence, and brilliantly polished shoes. He would take his place behind a large desk with three telephones and a bewildering bank of switches and tiny lights, and gaze benignly down upon his seated guest; there was something of the bishop in his demeanour, something that inspired respect, and wonder too, as the gold and pearl cufflinks flashed and Mr Maundy Gregory, his eyes knowing but sympathetic as the guest spoke, would remove a rose diamond the size of a pebble from his inner pocket and turn it thoughtfully between his plump, beringed fingers. He listened; he returned a few confidences, he hinted at social opportunities as yet undreamed of – perhaps an invitation to luncheon with a Lord, or a King – and the interview would be interrupted by a call from the Palace, or Number 10. The guest’s uncomfortably intimidated feeling turned slowly to awe; then, to trust and growing confidence. At last he had found the captain who could navigate him through unfamiliar social waters. And when the visitor was visibly puffed up with his own good judgement, Mr Gregory would broach a proposition.

The mise en scène was everything. Long ago, before the Great War, Maundy Gregory had been a theatrical producer. He understood that first impressions mattered; that opulent packaging inspires confidence. The buyer must have faith that Maundy Gregory alone could deliver the goods.

Hence the telephone calls from Number 10. Few people knew Gregory well; one who did was Mr Pengelly, his accountant, and years later he would say that the Chief had looked all over London for a house called Number 10 so that he could dupe his clients into thinking that these calls came not from his home, but from the Prime Minister, across the road in Downing Street.

Maybe the house came first, and the number was a bonus. For Maundy Gregory would never look ‘all over London’ for a house; he was truly at ease only in Mayfair, St James’s and Soho (and he certainly never wanted to see Southampton again). But 10 Hyde Park Terrace, which fell just a quarter of a mile north-west of his golden triangle, was Maundy Gregory’s perfect bolt-hole. It was a pale stucco mansion on the Bayswater Road, set behind area railings, with bay windows overlooking Hyde Park. It stood just a few minutes’ walk from Marble Arch. From a wide entrance hall, stairs ascended to a dog-leg turn at a half-landing, and upwards to grand reception rooms. Beyond the windows facing the park, a pretty iron balcony ran across the entire width of the first floor. More stairs rose to a second halflanding and a second floor, where Maundy Gregory had his private quarters. Above this were separate stairs to third and fourth floors, originally intended for children and servants but now unoccupied.3

On the ground floor, enjoying views across the road to the leafy Park at the front, and from another tall bay window giving onto the lawn at the back, lived Mrs Edith Marion Rosse, now in her fifties. She had been Gregory’s closest friend since his days in the theatre.

Although it stood on the less fashionable north side of the Park, their neighbours at Hyde Park Terrace included a Member of Parliament, one of the Harmsworth dynasty, and several people of title. Snobbery and late-Georgian charm were not, however, the main attraction.

Maundy Gregory must have private access. He kept a personal taxi, with a driver who worked only for him. Secrecy befitted the man who was said to have run Britain’s spy network during the Great War, who used black blotting paper lest his jottings should be read, who was said to own a West End club and to be a millionaire, and to have covert political interests which might yet change the course of European history. Later he would be accused of murder; later still, of two murders, and the framing of a man hanged for treason.

The house next door to the east was on the corner of Albion Street. A short walk up Albion Street, on the left, was Albion Mews West. The Mews extended behind 10 Hyde Park Terrace. Maundy Gregory could emerge from his cab in the Mews, quietly cross his own garden, and climb the back stairs of the two-storey extension and the last short flight to his private apartments without being noticed either inside or outside the building.

On a Friday evening early in February 1933, Chief Inspector Arthur Askew, of the detective branch at Scotland Yard, had almost certainly spotted Mr Gregory’s taxi turning into the Mews. He and a police sergeant strolled around to the front portico.

The door-knocker boomed throughout the house. No-one inside would be in any doubt about the portent of this visit. Only policemen and bailiffs can convey their intentions so clearly from the other side of a door.

The summons that Askew intended to issue to Mr Maundy Gregory was even more significant than he knew. On the face of it, it was the result of a complaint to the police by a member of the public. Chief Inspector Askew had no reason to suspect that for MI5 and the Chairman of the Conservative Party, this knock on the door would represent the outcome of four years’ work, a couple of aborted attempts to remove Maundy Gregory from his post as Purveyor of Honours to the rich, and the final defeat of high-level opposition. People in high places had been trying to get rid of Mr Gregory for a long time. They had tried, they had failed, and they had watched in frustration as Mr Gregory’s activities became more dubious with every passing year.

For others in positions of power, though, Askew’s rap on the door would represent a threat. If Maundy Gregory talked, and if Maundy Gregory came to grief, so would they. He had always, until now, received protection; but the system seemed about to fail them. Anything might happen.

Nearly eighty years later, a serving Prime Minister has been asked to help the police with their enquiries. At 10 Downing Street the repercussions of Maundy Gregory’s predicament may seem only too familiar. For Maundy Gregory was an honours tout; and Tony Blair’s Government is also suspected of having offered peerages in return for hard cash.

One cannot emphasise too much the huge cultural differences between 1933 and 2007. The British today are cynical. We are not surprised. We expect scandal; and the protagonists survive. In 1933 the pyramid of society was even more bottom-heavy than it is now, and circumstances and attitudes were very different. The powerful political, financial and social élite had been badly shaken by what could happen to élites, as in Russia in 1917. The economy depended on protecting capital, the generation of which depended in great measure on willing labour. The political system was protected by discretion, which was protected by mass deference, which depended on respect. Socially, that respect depended in large part on maintaining the ignorance of the masses.

Millions had gone to war because they believed what their ‘betters’ told them. When the soldiers came back, the social order did change – but slowly. The rich were not as rich as before, yet they were still rich enough to expect deference. Politicians were protected by a huge mandarin class. In all but a very few cases, their background and education set them apart from the man on the Clapham omnibus. Journalists did not snoop into their affairs; ordinary people would have been shocked. The growing middle class employed obedient servants just as the landed gentry did; and the peerage and the politicians and the mandarins were so distant as to seem almost superhuman. The millions at the bottom of the heap still stood up respectfully when the National Anthem was played at the end of every cinema performance. Children in the 1920s waved flags and had a holiday on Empire Day.

Scandal must not be allowed to approach the ruling class. And if it did, the rulers would find someone to sacrifice.

CHAPTER TWO

A False Start

Half a century before, Arthur John Maundy Gregory – this man of mystery and insidious power by 1933 – had possessed neither wealth nor influence. He was the second son of an impoverished High Anglican vicar and his well-born wife. Handsome but stern, old Reverend Gregory wore a biretta, a soutane and a heavy beard. When he first arrived at St Michael’s, Southampton, the whiff of incense about the new vicar had been as the whiff of sulphur to the scandalised congregation. They never did become entirely reconciled to his theatrical, crypto-Catholic style.1 But like his better-known son, the vicar proved thick-skinned, and stayed.

The family remained poor, by Mrs Ursula Gregory’s standards: she had to manage with only a maid, a cook and a nurse when the boys were small. Michael arrived in 1873, Edward in 1875 and two more sons, Arthur and Stephen, followed at two-year intervals.2 For a late-Victorian family, this was not a large brood, and there was enough money for their education.

Michael Gregory, his oldest brother, died in March, 1882 at the age of nine.3 He had been attending a prep school at 9 Hereford Square, South Kensington, just around the corner from their uncle, Arthur Wynell-Mayow, who lived in the Cromwell Road. Their uncle was there when little Michael died of ‘acute bronchitis’ after a ten-day illness. Arthur would have been only seven and may have been at the same school. His feelings are unknown, although he was cruelly teased at his next school as a cry-baby.

When he was about ten, Arthur was sent to board at Banister Court, a school which had been installed in a mansion outside Southampton to educate the sons of officers on P&O ships. There he met a contemporary of his older brother Edward, a boy called Harold Davidson whose father was also a local parson.4

Gregory, the stronger of the two characters, loved to produce and write plays; Harold Davidson, the cleverer, loved to take part. Sadly, every other aspect of young Harold’s time at Banister Court was unhappy. He was small (boys called him Jumbo) and weak, and too kind-hearted to endure what was quite a tough school, and was removed to the Whitgift School when he was thirteen. Arthur learned to survive. He and Harold would meet again later.

He left Banister Court at eighteen having passed Oxford Entrance,5 and enrolled as a non-collegiate student at the university in order to study for Holy Orders. Extra-collegiate and studying theology, he was not in the vanguard of social or intellectual life. He boarded with a Mrs Johnson at 81 Iffley Road and passed unnoticed.6

Quite what he – or his father – thought he could do for religion was unclear. What religion could do for him would not become apparent until thirty-five years later. In the meantime, he developed his superstitious side. These were the late 1890s, when occultism, Spiritualism, table-tapping, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism and The Order of the Golden Dawn were in vogue and Aleister (‘do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’) Crowley was about to publish Arcadia. There was much whispering of shamanism, ancient truths hidden in long-forgotten languages, secret brotherhoods, and so on.

Uneducated in science, and haunting second-hand bookshops in search of mystery and conspiracy, Arthur came to reject his father’s beliefs in the most public way possible. In 1898 back in Southampton he wrote and produced a successful play called Self-Condemned whose hero, a sometime priest, rejects High Anglican ways and all the Church stands for. He rejects the theatricality of the service and the hypocrisy of the vows, knowing that behind the religious façade humanity is forever fallible.

His father, by now a sick man, was hurt; the more so since at the first performance he saw priceless mediaeval artefacts from the parish church used as props, without so much as a by-your-leave.

Gregory ignored these protests. He was twenty-one and his play was much admired, for genteel Southampton audiences in those days cared about the issues it raised. He took Self-Condemned on tour. In the less rarefied atmosphere of the industrial north, it was a flop. It folded suddenly. Those who had depended on him for a living did not get paid; penniless actresses had to make their way home somehow.

There was nothing for it. A.J. Gregory must face reality. He was unqualified to make a living in the theatre and without even meagre parental support, he would be destitute. In despair, he returned to Oxford for his final year of theological study.

He was struggling through his penultimate term when the Reverend Gregory died, on 1 March 1899. The obstacle to Gregory’s ambition was now removed. There was a little money as a buffer against rejection, but not enough to launch him or his two surviving brothers in life. Edward began work as a junior accountant. Stephen, two years younger than Arthur, left for the South African War.

Arthur Gregory did not return to the university. His pitch for stardom was reinstated and with it, the possibility of freedom. He could now aim at a career on the stage, with its atmosphere free of moral censure. At first he earned a paltry living as a drawingroom entertainer, playing the piano and relating amusing stories at gatherings in private homes, while he sought work in the theatre. By this time – it was around 1900 – he was friendly with a family called Loraine who lived in Lyndhurst, in the New Forest not far from Southampton. The young sisters were as stage-struck as Gregory was, perhaps because of a family connection to Harry and Richard Loraine. Harry Loraine was an actor-manager, and Richard, his son, had been a popular young leading man with Ben Greet’s Woodland Players and a big West End hit before leaving to fight in the Boer War. He returned to the stage later before becoming even more famous as an aviator.

Gregory was twenty-three, smartly dressed, charming and babyfaced, with a strong sense of the effect he could make if he tried. The Loraines enjoyed his company and he theirs; he had the actor’s gift for anecdote; and the Loraines eventually lost him to a Ben Greet touring company.7

Greet, then in his forties, had been running theatre companies for over twenty years and would go on to found the Shakespeare Company at the Old Vic. Gregory now knew that a solid training in repertory theatre was necessary for his credibility. He set out as a very junior touring actor, spear-carrying and understudying, sewing on buttons and taking the ticket money, and increasingly being given small parts to play in provincial towns.

Romantic leads were ten a penny, but young Gregory was well organised, determined, endlessly resourceful, good-humoured and didn’t panic. He was ambitious and he could persuade temperamental people to carry out instructions. All these qualities got him a permanent job as manager of a burlesque theatre in Southampton. At the same time, he advertised himself as an agent for playwrights. Whether he discovered any new talent seems doubtful. In any case he was soon on the move again. He went to work for a cynical Irish-American showman called Kelly, who taught him to sell himself, rather than his professional talents; this is what people would buy.

After still more jobs for more impresarios, getting better parts all the time, he landed permanent work as a stage manager with a Frank Benson company in the north of England. His keenness and efficiency impressed everyone. He was earning £5 a week – a decent sum, in those days – and it was enough to bring out the showman in him. He acted the part of company manager, with a fresh flower in his buttonhole every day, a dapper suit and starched collar.

He had been in the job for about three years when it dawned on Benson, or his accountants, that Gregory’s much-praised ingenuity and industriousness were devoted largely to his own ends. As the underlings in the company already knew, he was skimming off some of the profits for himself. He left Benson under a cloud.

It was now 1906; he was twenty-nine, knew his trade, and had landed in London for good. For several years he had taken rooms, when necessary, in Bayswater and Kensington. This time he was to find a small flat-cum-office at 18 Burleigh Mansions, at the south end of the Charing Cross Road between two theatres, Wyndham’s and the Garrick. His aims were to make money and put on plays, in that order.

As for his image, he had not yet settled on the urbane and cultivated persona he would later adopt. He preferred to present himself as an American-style, fast-talking, fast-acting tycoon. The Era reported ‘Mr Maundy-Gregory is a firm believer in the hustling principle, and thinks nothing of dictating in the train forty or fifty letters to his American manager, who types them all on the journey.’ Who the American manager was, nobody knows. Gregory’s business was a touring repertory theatre, and this he ran successfully – up to a point.

That point was arrived at with his ambitious pantomime, Little Red Riding Hood. After opening in Ipswich on Boxing Day, 1907, with a cast of sixty, it resulted in Gregory’s appearance in the Magistrates’ Court. Enthusiastic reviews in the local paper had given rise to a summons under the Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act. Little Red Riding Hood was an accomplished actress, but she was only seven, and to comply with the law she must be at least eleven.

Gregory gave not a fig for the magistrates. The following week in Peterborough the child appeared again, but not on the stage. Dressed in a Dutch girl’s costume, she stood up and trilled By the Side of the Zuyder Zee from one of the boxes.

The typical con-man knows in his bones that world is full of suckers and that for every person who isn’t taken in, a hundred will fall for anything. The Peterborough police were of the astute minority. They prosecuted, and the girl’s mother took her out of the show once and for all.

For Little Barbara, this wasn’t the end of it. She was determined to get back to work, and her mother was perfectly happy to let her. The following Christmas, under another name and claiming to be eleven, she had a great success on stage in a pantomime at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Haymarket, with Ellen Terry in a starring role. When this came to the notice of Maundy Gregory he sent a woman to see the girl’s mother. He knew, was the message. He knew she was eight and he knew she was using a false birth certificate. A sum was mentioned which might help him forget about it. The mother sent the woman packing. It is the first known instance of Maundy Gregory as a blackmailer.

He had two or three plays running at the time, but bookings were sporadic. Maundy Gregory was a young man about the West End; he was seen at the Café Royal and the Café de l’Europe; he didn’t venture north to the Bohemian haunts of the Eiffel Tower in Fitzrovia or west to the gambling clubs of Mayfair, but frequented only the show folk in theatreland. Inevitably, therefore, he ran into an old friend from school.

Harold Davidson’s time as a divinity student at Oxford had slightly overlapped with his, so it is possible that they had already renewed their acquaintance there. It is also true that before and during his studies Jumbo, like Arthur, had been a drawing-room entertainer and touring actor. But at 5ft 3, he was never going to be a leading man.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, they were working and living on the same patch – the colourful, slightly seedy strip of music shops and bookshops and theatrical agencies that occupied premises west of Covent Garden all the way from St Martin-in-the-Fields up to St Giles’.

Jumbo’s devotion to the Church had proved more enduring than Arthur’s. With twenty-seven churchmen in his family already, perhaps that was not surprising. In 1905 he had become a curate at St Martin-in-the-Fields. Inevitably he and Gregory would meet.

Jumbo was not yet the notorious figure he later became. Socially adept and quick-witted – he had been sponsored by the then Lord Wilberforce to study at Exeter College, and had been President of the Oxford Chess Club – he nevertheless had a boundless capacity for self-delusion. He recognised no scintilla of contradiction between his joyfully lubricious nature and his code of conduct as a parson. He had a passion for nubile young women, and since his post as curate was augmented by another as chaplain to the Actors’ Church Union, he had every excuse to visit girlish actresses in their dressing rooms.

Unfortunately neither of his ecclesiastical posts brought in much money and in 1906 Jumbo had married an actress he first encountered at Oxford. A family would shortly begin to arrive. Through his acquaintance with Gladys, the Marchioness Townshend, who incidentally had married into the peerage under false pretences, he was offered the living of Stiffkey in Norfolk. It came with a huge country rectory with plenty of room for all the babies that would result from Jumbo’s energetic visits home. And what visits they were; brief, and only on Sundays, for theVicar of Stiffkey quickly discovered that country life was not for him. He caught the last train up from Liverpool Street after Saturday midnight – sometimes even the first train on Sunday morning – conducted services, and scampered back to London on Monday first thing. He lived and breathed the West End.

He was a small whirlwind, and an inspiration to Maundy Gregory exactly when one was needed. Up to now, Maundy Gregory had failed to distinguish his work in the theatre from his search for backers. Both had been part of the same thing: hard graft. Jumbo unwittingly introduced him to a new way of doing business, in which one’s patron and one’s profession were clearly distinct. Vicars in those days must have patrons. Livings were in the gift of people with land and property. It followed that if the right people with land and property knew and were charmed by you, sooner or later a good living would inevitably come your way. It was a question of targeting, and research. In the search for a living, a Vicar must be a salesman. Once he’d got the living, he could do as he pleased.

J. Rowland Sales, who as a boy of nineteen had begun work for Gregory in 1908, recalled a pertinent conversation between Davidson and Gregory around this time:

Davidson (after surveying Gregory’s financial position): So you’re broke, down on your luck, reduced to sending out pierrots to play at the end of the pier – very good, we’ll soon put matters right. (He picks up the telephone, calls Wyndham’s Theatre, asks that a box for that evening’s performance be placed at the disposal of ‘J. Maundy-Gregory, the well-known theatrical producer, who will be entertaining the Duchess of Somerset.’)

Gregory (protesting): But I don’t even know the Duchess of Somerset.

Davidson:You will, my boy, you will. Like all the aristocracy, she’s simply mad about the theatre.

Gregory: But why should I entertain a Duchess I don’t know in a box I can’t pay for?

Davidson (pityingly): If you want to attract investors it’s important that you be seen in such company.8

When Maundy Gregory began to see life this new way, he realised the implications at once. An influential, wealthy connection could be used for anything. You didn’t have to tie it to a particular play or even to the theatre. The point was, to make the connection in the first place. And not just one connection – lots.

At first, Jumbo was the more successful networker – he did after all have more time, and the advantage of a clerical collar. He was able to give Lord Howard de Walden and Baron Carl von Buch a gentle push in the direction of Combine Attractions Syndicate Ltd 9, Gregory’s vehicle for putting on plays. Both became investors. Maundy also inspired his older brother Edward, the accountant, to join him in the business under his new hyphenated surname, Maundy-Gregory.

Maundy optioned a play called Cleopatra10 and embarked upon discussions with Ruby Miller. She was then at the height of her West End stardom and would take the lead.

When development fell through he had already had a better idea. Towards the end of 1908 Combine Attractions managed to get another show into the New Theatre for an initial two-week run. This was Dorothy, a musical comedy which had been a runaway success when it first opened in 1886.11 Its revival would feature, from the original show, Hayden Coffin, a tenor renowned for his big hit Queen of My Heart; a cast of sixty including other big names; and spectacular production values.

It opened in December, 1908 to resounding acclaim from audience and critics alike. At the New Theatre, it played to full houses. But at the end of its initial fortnight, the show must of necessity transfer to the Waldorf, at the wrong end of the Strand. And there was crippling competition after Christmas from two dozen pantomimes in rival theatres. Dorothy now faced evening after evening when the houses were respectable but not full.

The Syndicate was losing money. Maundy Gregory was biting his nails. It was allegedly Jumbo Davidson who, casting about for words of comfort, saw a Messina Benefit as a way to revive the flagging production. It wasn’t an original idea; every newspaper and department store was running some kind of appeal for the hapless victims of Messina. An earthquake estimated at 7.5 on the Richter scale had struck the Straits between Sicily and Calabria on 28 December, just after Christmas; a tidal wave engulfed the land; the death toll was estimated at 200,000.

But Jumbo was connected. In no time he had filled the auditorium for a full dress evening performance in late January, with tickets at £10 a head bought by several Ambassadors and a socially prominent Princess, the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Mayor of London, and Countesses and Duchesses in glamorous gowns and diamond tiaras. Actresses curtseyed low to the Prince of Teck.

Thus did Maundy Gregory’s first experience of networking en masse, so to speak, emerge from the adversity of others. Presumably the Reverend Davidson had seen the Benefit as an opportunity to do good in the world while reaping welcome commission and boosting publicity. Maundy Gregory concurred about the publicity, but his plans for the income may have differed. The quantity of tents and blankets delivered to the Straits of Messina afterwards is not recorded. The £10 subscriptions rolled in; but nothing now could save Dorothy. After the matinée performance on the first Saturday in February, 1909, the musicians refused to play that evening unless they were paid. They would not be fobbed off with promises.

The foyer remained closed. From outside came an insistent, and rising, murmur of annoyance from evening theatregoers assembling in the cold. The musicians refused to enter the auditorium.

Gregory, for once, panicked. He rushed to the basement and threw the main switch. The entire building was plunged into darkness. As actors fumbled about backstage, cursing by candlelight, he appeared at the street doors of the theatre and regretfully informed the crowd that the evening performance was cancelled because of a power failure.

Nobody in the business was fooled. The stage papers reviled him. His brother dumped him. The actors and musicians were broke, hungry and out of work, the investors had lost money, and the electricity company angrily refuted any allegation that its service had failed.

Gregory disappeared. It was the end of his career in the theatre. Jumbo, the Vicar of Stiffkey, lost two thousand pounds; an amount equivalent to several years’ salary, and far more than he could afford. He was devastated.

CHAPTER THREE

The Phoenix Rising

Maundy had hired Dorothy’s unpaid orchestra, among the best in town, from the Gaiety Theatre. Its musical director was Frederick Rosse, well known as a composer of light music, who had recently married an actress called Vivienne Pierrepont. It was ironic that Maundy’s downfall should have been provoked by the orchestra, because Maundy and Fred and Edith (Vivienne’s real name) got on very well indeed.

Like him, they had already climbed a long way from their origins. Both were a little older than Maundy Gregory who was now thirty-one. They had married under Fred’s real name of Lichtenstein. German names were already attracting suspicion and although Fred had been born in 1867 in London, he was careful to use his stage name unless a contract required his signature. Musical talent and personal charm had propelled him from an immigrant home in the East End to the well-appointed flat at 6a Hyde Park Mansions, between the Edgware Road and the Old Marylebone Road where he now lived with Edith.1

Edith had been born Edith Marion Davies in 1873 and married Harry Sheppard, the purser on a cruise liner, in 1896. So far as we know, the Davies family of Edmonton had offered the world nothing notable to date, although all the girls seem to have married well. The 1901 census records Mrs Edith Sheppard staying alone with relatives in the north of England. Her husband had died at sea the previous year. This was a tragic loss to her and a life-changing one; afterwards she took up – or returned to – her stage career.

For most of 1909 and 1910 Maundy Gregory was not to be found, and if the Rosses knew where he was, they were not telling. For him it was ‘Goodbye, Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square’, while he considered his next move. If he never wanted to show his face in a theatre again, he was deterred by more than mere humiliation. He owed a lot of people money and would be better off lying low for a while.

There is no clue to his whereabouts. The single intriguing hint that he may have left London is scarcely credible. Many years later, when Gregory was old and far from home, a young Frenchman called Jean-Jacques Grumbach knew him:

Grumbach saw Gregory as a very kindly old gentleman, a little crotchety and set in his ways, a typical old bachelor, very fond of whisky. He spoke little of his past except to tell stories of his travels in the Far East.2

Either M. Grumbach was mistaken, which seems unlikely, or Gregory simply walked down to the Port of London and took the next boat to Shanghai, mentioned it to no-one for nearly thirty years; never showed any interest in travelling again; and never again left, willingly, his Mayfair/Soho/St James’s patch . . .

Or Gregory was spinning extraordinary stories out of what he had read or heard from others. This tells us a little more about him, or possibly about tall tales he listened to later in life.

Perhaps the Rosses, of whom Edith in particular was to a great extent self-invented, and who had both done well despite a lowly start, gave him the courage to turn his back on the past. When he became successful he kept very quiet about his years in the theatre. And from now on for the next several years he, too, made a subtle alteration to his name.

When J.M. Gregory, journalist, resurfaced in 1910 he hadn’t moved far. He may even have retained his Burleigh Mansions flat, because his new office was nearby at the north end of Charing Cross Road. It was at 9–15 Oxford Street, which is a late-Victorian office warren above an entrance to Tottenham Court Road tube station.

Somewhere, very probably in the course of raising money for the Messina disaster, he had come across the Keen-Hargreaves brothers. There were three of them, Baron Keen-Hargreaves and Harry being the only ones with whom he was concerned.

Baron John Clarke Keen-Hargreaves liked to relate the legend of his barony and how he had inherited it, and his story was strongly linked to Messina. In 1860 his father Jack Keen, as a young hot-head, had been inspired by Garibaldi’s mission to conquer the Bourbon rulers of southern Italy and unite the whole country under the House of Savoy. He had been a leader of the English expedition that joined Garibaldi’s thousand-strong band of Redshirts (i Mille) when they landed in Sicily to reinforce uprisings at Messina and Palermo. Garibaldi and his men gained great victories, roared on via Naples to Rome, threw out the Pope and proclaimed Victor Emmanuel II the King. In recognition of his valour in battle Jack Keen was made a Lieutenant Colonel and later a Baron. He later tacked on his wife’s name. His oldest son, also Jack, in due course inherited the title.

Most of this was a pack of lies. In 1860 their father probably had been among the thousand Englishmen of whose urgent recruitment one of the organising Committee wrote that they ‘soon had a gathering, a gathering of a strange crowd, earnest men, men with selfish ends, men of good repute and not so good, the sort of mixture in all such enterprises.’3 The largest contingent, from London, was armed, equipped, and packed off by night train to Harwich to board a special steamer. Departure was delayed for the court-martial of one of their officers who, when forcibly turfed off the expedition, took out a warrant for assault and had his attacker hauled before the magistrate and fined five shillings. So they left in a shambles and got to Sicily too late to be any use.4 They paraded through the streets and were shipped home at public expense. Jack Keen was never made a Lieutenant Colonel or a Baron. He died in the Sick Asylum at Poplar in 1905, and is recorded as a 65-year-old ship’s clerk.

Whether Maundy Gregory knew that the second Baron Jack was bogus, we don’t know either. If he did, he must have admired his nerve. For in 1911 – the fiftieth anniversary of Garibaldi’s triumph – Baron Keen-Hargreaves would travel in style to Rome, leading a deputation of survivors of the English contingent, for an audience with King Victor Emmanuel himself.5 As the two men faced one another, maybe neither the King nor Baron Jack believed the old story. Or maybe both were happy to delude themselves. If Maundy Gregory had his doubts, another suspicion was now confirmed: you can be anything if you act the part.

And already he was an Editor. Jack and Harry – who by all accounts was both more charming and more amusing than his brother, though just as fond of actresses – provided both office space and backing for a weekly magazine called Mayfair and Town Topics. Baron Jack registered a company called Mayfair Ltd in October, 1910. J.M. Gregory is said to have pitched the original idea to the Keen-Hargreaves brothers, and this time he had a sure-fire proposition.

The costs and overheads of magazines are traditionally paid by advertising revenue and sales, in a ratio related to circulation, distribution and production costs. Mayfair by its nature would always have a limited circulation and rustling up advertising was timeconsuming and difficult with so much competition from Vanity Fair, Tatler and other society periodicals. But Maundy had thought of a new way to rake money in. You might call it personal advertorial. He would write puffs about rich men in return for a fat fee.

It worked. The timing was perfect; provincial high achievers of the new middle class were frustrated by being cold-shouldered in London. They wanted to find their way around socially, but nobody knew them, far less invited them to join a Club. This way, Maundy told them, they could appear on the page next to a Duchess. (Duchesses, he didn’t need to point out, would get into the magazine for nothing.) Everyone of substance read Mayfair when in Town, he assured them; it circulated in gentlemen’s clubs and the best hotels.

Cash was handed over and the articles appeared. For a cover price of sixpence the one or two thousand eager consumers of Mayfair bought a magazine illustrated in colour with cartoons of ‘Men of the Day’ – some of whom really were of interest (like the Marquis de Soveral, GCMG, GCVO, amusing, well-connected and one of the founders of The Other Club, or Sir Fitzroy Maclean the traveller); some who were royal, like King Manuel of Portugal, the Duke of Orléans and the Maharajah of Cooch Behar; and many others of whom nobody had ever heard, like T. Frame Thomson, Reginald Blair and W.A. Vernon. Very, very occasionally there was a woman, such as F.E. Smith’s great extra-marital love Miss Mona Dunn. But it was largely grateful nonentities from industry who came up with the cash.

There was more to this than initially appeared. It had been put to Maundy Gregory – by whom, we do not know, but the newspaper magnate and MP Horatio Bottomley, around 1910, is the likeliest person – that by ensnaring the vain and wealthy with free public relations in a magazine, he could put himself in a position to make them a further, and very special, offer.

Maundy was dazzled by moving in grand circles. He was politically ignorant but understood self-interest and had a weakness for anything as florid as a title. The very notion of royal patronage by title is mediaeval; a reminder of a gracious custom whereby the monarch rewarded outstanding conduct by bestowing a sign of respect. Maundy loved that kind of thing. What he had only recently discovered was that knighthoods and baronetcies may also be rewards for political favours, or for donations to political parties, for as we shall see, selling peerages was important to the Liberal Government at the time. Horatio Bottomley was a Unionist, but he was very thick with the young opportunist F.E. Smith, who had close Liberal friends like Winston Churchill.

Money did not cross Maundy’s chubby palm without quite a lot of it sticking. On 29 July 1910 he took a long lease on a summer villa, a kind of little wooden dacha, on Thames Ditton Island. How did he know about it? It seems likely that he had originally gone to ground there in the immediate aftermath of Dorothy. The Rosses had a house of their own there in 1916, and probably knew the area before he did; they could well have alerted him to the place.6

It would be deeply depressing in winter; close to the water, icy cold and damp, and like all the houses on the little island, lacking mains water or drains. But when the summer came, it was charming, and inspired Maundy to call it Vanity Fair. The Rosses visited him there and the three of them spent many happy hours messing about in boats. In the September of 1910, he protected himself from predatory creditors by putting it in Edith Rosse’s name.

He was happy; rejoicing in his new financial security, he tootled off to Lyndhurst one weekend in a taxi. All the way in a taxi! – exclaimed the Loraines. Good times were here again, he confided gleefully. ‘Clean shirt every day now!’ When times had been hard at Burleigh Mansions, he’d been reduced to pinning a cardboard collar over the frayed edges of his shirt.

In his Mayfair period Maundy Gregory made many useful acquaintances. These included: Robert P Houston MP, a shipping tycoon whose fortune would, in due course be generously disbursed to right-wing causes by his widow; Sir Francis Hopwood, who would become his great friend Lord Southborough; Sir George Lewis, solicitor to King Edward VII; Sir Joseph Robinson, Bart., a South African mining magnate and numerous members of the Victorian beerocracy.

Maundy also dignified Arthur Newton, solicitor, as Man of the Day no. 574. Irony is not a quality one associates with Maundy Gregory, but what else could have prompted him to effuse in 1911:

Born three-and-thirty years ago to the actuary and manager of the Legal and General Life Association. . . he qualified for practice nine years ago; and in the last seven or eight years has made himself, by industry, and decent manners, till he has come to employ a considerable staff in Great Marlborough Street. . . He claims descent from that Sir Isaac Newton who was supposed to have been the only man to connect an apple with the fall –

The style, droopy with qualifiers and subordinate clauses, is all Gregory. It starts at the beginning (later, he would start before the beginning, preferably in times of antiquity) and goes on – and on, and on. The eulogy begins with a lie. Arthur Newton was not ‘three-and-thirty’. In 1911 he was at least, as everyone knew, two score and ten.7 It was true that his father was General Manager of the Legal and General and that he ran, until 1913, a successful legal practice in Soho. He was the solicitor of choice for almost every drunk and tart and gambler who appeared before the beak (coincidentally, another Mr Newton) at Great Marlborough Street Court from about 1885 onwards.

For Arthur Newton would do anything to get his client off, if his client paid him well enough. In 1889, in order to protect Lord Arthur Somerset from disgrace amid accusations about rent-boys, he put about a blatant lie that Prince Albert Victor, heir to the throne, had been involved.

In 1910, Arthur Newton colluded with Horatio Bottomley in a last-ditch attempt to lay a false trail to divert those who were about to hang Dr Crippen for murder. Crippen was Newton’s client then, and John Bull, Bottomley’s paper, printed a letter purporting to come from Crippen in his death cell at Pentonville, hinting that the condemned man was covering up for someone else. It was a fabrication. Just as Lord Arthur Somerset had been induced by Newton to imply that he was shielding Prince Albert Victor, so Crippen was painted as the heroic protector of an anonymous other – but Crippen’s letter must be a fake, since the man had had no opportunity to write it. Not only this; there was also a bogus letter from Chicago, apparently from Clara Crippen the murder victim – long since dead – to Crippen awaiting execution, hinting at a faked murder and therefore, a vindication of Newton’s client. It arrived at Pentonville before the hanging.8

Arthur Newton was suspended from the Rolls for a year from 13 July 1911 for the lying death-cell diversion ‘by’ Dr Crippen in John Bull. He went to ground. In July 1912 he resumed his practice.

In March 1913 he appeared at Bow Street charged with conspiracy to defraud a rich young Hungarian, was struck off and went down for three years’ penal servitude.

He was in trouble throughout his life. In the late 1920s he resurfaced as a contact of the obsessively self-justifying Lord Alfred Douglas, who had once been the lover of Oscar Wilde. By that time, Newton was running a snoopery called The Confidential Agency, in Oxford Street. And in the 1930s, when he was seventy-three, he was embroiled in an acrimonious divorce – not, glamorously, as co-respondent, but as someone who had misled one of the parties and cost her money. ‘Wherever Arthur Newton intervened, trouble followed.’9

Maundy Gregory appears to have got Newton’s number. When he wrote that he was thirty-three years old, he can surely not have been serious. But the article was paid for – almost certainly by Horatio Bottomley, who owed Newton a favour since the solicitor had effectively ruined his own career in taking all the blame for the Crippen Letter story.10

Horatio Bottomley, owner of the mass-circulation John Bull magazine, had been accused of conspiracy to defraud in 1893 and in 1908. He lived like a millionaire at the turn of the century and in 1911 was bankrupted (it was one of at least 211 petitions for bankruptcy ‘all dismissed’, he said airily, in his lifetime). He was a Member of Parliament, clever, articulate and amusing; he backed plays, musical comedies and revues at around the same time as Gregory; he successfully defended himself against allegations of swindling in 1901 and 1911. Colin Coote wrote ‘His face was a slab with a slit of a mouth, which opened to imbibe great quantities of champagne.’ Julian Symons perceptively noted that his popular appeal lay in his reputation as a womaniser, drinker and racing man – the sort of person poor men dreamed of being if ever they got rich.11

Gerald Hamilton, urbane, inveterate gossip and compulsive name-dropper who was allegedly the model for Mr Norris in Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains, knew Maundy Gregory in the late 20s. He knew everybody, if he is to be believed (which is uncertain): Casement, the Maughams, the Somersets, Kate Meyrick, Gertie Millar, the Tsar and Tsarina, Anna Virubova, André Gide, Aleister Crowley, Gaby Deslys, Tallulah Bankhead, Christopher Millard and Robert Ross, Lord Alfred Douglas – the Pope – the list goes on. But he did know a lot of them and meet others, and although he moved in rather more louche and aristocratic circles than Gregory did, he had evidently heard gossip that Gregory owed a great deal to some newspaper magnate at the start of his career.12 Gerald Macmillan, also, wrote about the mystery surrounding ‘services [Gregory] claimed to have rendered to some press magnate, which released him from his previously persistent impecuniosity, and were the initial step in his rise to wealth.’13

Bottomley knew Newton very well, and he also knew the Keen-Hargreaves brothers – they had actress-chasing in common. He published some derisive copy about them in John Bull, pointing out that the Barony was a fake. But that is not to say that he hadn’t backed them, and Gregory too, at some point. Maundy was making money somehow by the summer of 1910, and Mayfair did not commence publication until October of that year. He could have been contributing articles to John Bull, or – more likely, since his work shows no sign of journalistic discipline – he was running other errands for Bottomley, or Bottomley’s friend F.E. Smith, after Dorothy and before Mayfair.

As to Baron Jack and suave Harry, they never had enough spare cash to make an enduring and reliable investment in anything. They were later said to be ‘art dealers’ but they ran a press agency. When they were in the money, they spent it, flashily and enjoyably. Mundanities such as rent were dealt with as an afterthought if at all. Inspector Herbert Fitch, investigating Mayfair in 1917, found that they had moved their United Press Agency, and Mayfair magazine, to 7 Albemarle Street in 1912. The landlords there told him they had little to do with the brothers or Gregory, ‘and looked upon their mode of doing business with considerable suspicion, owing to the number of process servers and collectors calling for money.’14

The new address represented social progress. Gregory was now based half a mile west of his old theatrical stomping ground, but a world away in aspiration. Albemarle Street was on the dignified Mayfair side of Piccadilly Circus, close to the Royal Academy, the learned societies, the grand hotels and the antiquarian booksellers. It had cachet, which no-one would claim for Oxford Street or the Charing Cross Road.

Before the First War, the socially supreme were drawn from a more restricted pool than they are now; it was a time when journalists called people ‘The richest man in London,’ or ‘The most beautiful woman in London’ meaning the richest or most beautiful from a selection of about 1,000, most of whom were aristocrats. By 1912 and the move to Albemarle Street, Maundy Gregory had a passing acquaintance with many influential people, but he seems to have made very few enduring friendships with anyone who wouldn’t be of use. He had always set himself apart in some way, as a big fish in a small pond: the manager of a theatre company, a producer, an editor. He was not, we would say, a team player. He operated best as a highwayman on life’s road. He was good at spotting victims who would willingly hand over a bag of gold to clear the way to their destination.

As an annual routine, lists of honours to be awarded by the King or Queen are published at New Year and on the sovereign’s official birthday in June. But this is part of the courtly myth, for in the past few hundred years almost everyone on the list has been recommended to the sovereign by the Prime Minister, who in turn is putting forward names recommended by Government aides and the leaders of the opposition.

In a different society an honour would not matter, but this was the last gasp of Edwardian England. Economic power shifted with changes in land ownership after the Great War, but the shift was socially imperceptible until long afterwards. In cash-for-honours theory, therefore, if a self-made man had the country house and the yacht, the only things lacking were education, style, respect and social connections. He could buy the style and education for his children; he could earn respect by good works; but an honour – a title – was a short-cut to a position in society. In return for a generous financial donation, a man could become a knight. ‘Sir John Smith’ would not be able to pass the title on to his son, but as a baronet ‘Sir John Smith, Bart.’ would hand it down through the male line in perpetuity. And in a cash-for-honours transaction, a baronetcy naturally cost more than a knighthood.