All good friends and jolly good company: life with the Crichel Boys

In the spring of 1945 three men pooled their resources in order to buy Long Crichel House, a former rectory built during the reign of Queen Anne in a secluded Dorset village. Desmond Shawe-Taylor and Edward Sackville-West were highly influential music critics, while Eardley Knollys, a former gallery owner, was now assistant secretary to the National Trust and a painter. The idea was for the three friends to live communally but each have their own parts of the house where they could work undisturbed and enjoy some privacy. The house was in fact large enough to accommodate not only a live-in butler and cook-housekeeper but, from 1949, a fourth partner, Raymond Mortimer, the leading literary and art critic of the day. All four men were gay, with a wide circle of friends in the worlds of writing, art and music, and Long Crichel swiftly became a popular retreat for many of the leading figures in these fields.

For Patrick Leigh Fermor the house was ‘a sort of Mecca’, its owners ‘all working hard, as in a lay monastery, except for the delicious food and funny conversation’. Inevitably, the atmosphere was not always as harmonious as this suggests, and over the years some of the personnel changed. The melancholy Sackville-West acquired a house in Ireland and moved there more or less permanently, dying in 1965. The following year, a disillusioned Knollys relinquished his share in the house, which was taken over by the distinguished ophthalmologist Pat Trevor-Roper, and when Mortimer died in 1980 the painter Derek Hill came to live at Crichel as a lodger.

There are obvious parallels here with the Bloomsbury Group, who conducted similar experiments in communal living. The principal difference is that none of the Crichel Boys slept with each other, though their complicated and contrasting sex lives provide Simon Fenwick with some of his liveliest material.