Alec Waugh’s book about 1931, A Year to Remember, gives a detailed account of the scandal and its impact on his brother. He explicitly states that the events of that summer inspired Brideshead Revisited. Refusing to name the peer, even in 1975, the year of the memoir’s publication, Alec decided to call him Lord Marchmain:
In real life Lady Marchmain was the sister of a prominent Duke, and the case was being brought because of a quarrel between her husband and her brother, at her brother’s instigation. A groom for whom Marchmain had formed an attachment many years before was to be cited. The case was never brought because the King intervened. He could not allow a man who had been his own representative to be exposed to scandal. But the case was only dropped on the condition that Marchmain left the country.
Of Hugh, also not named, he writes: ‘His younger son was very good looking, very charming. He was also a very heavy drinker.’ Alec remembered that the wealthy and distinguished bisexual expatriate writer Somerset Maugham, who knew the family well, made the connection between Hugh Lygon and Sebastian Flyte in New York in 1945: ‘We all know, of course, who Sebastian was. A charming boy. He drank himself to death.’ Hugh had stayed with Maugham in the south of France.
Before recounting the story of the Beauchamp affair, Alec Waugh told of another encounter that took place in the summer of 1931. It involved W. Somerset Maugham and a young playwright called Keith Winter, who was a friend of Evelyn’s and Balfour’s. Winter was taken to the Villa Mauresque, where Maugham resided. Various other guests came and went, but Winter spent the night with Willie Maugham, teaching him a new sexual trick with his fingertips. Maugham was reminded of the boys he had enjoyed in Bangkok. Winter hoped to be taken up as Maugham’s new paramour, but Maugham dropped him unceremoniously. And the moral of the story? Winter (also unnamed in Alec’s memoir) went on to become a well-known writer, married with three children, a presenter for the BBC, a member of the Savile Club, a lecturer in American universities. Alec Waugh’s message is clear: promiscuous homosexuality is not in itself an impediment to success in life. As with Alec’s own disgrace at Sherborne, it was the discovery and not the act that did the damage. Boom’s big mistake was to get busted.
