The bad boys of the Hypocrites Club

Members of the Hypocrites Club were Oxford undergraduates, and those with whom David Fleming’s book is chiefly concerned were born between 1903-5. It had originally been a respectable club, founded in 1921, its two most mentioned members being L.P. Hartley, the novelist, and David Cecil, the biographer and historian. But all that changed when Harold Acton arrived, closely followed by many of his fellow Etonians. Acton himself was always fastidiously polite, and spoke in a curiously hesitant way; but his friends were not, and shouted. Soon the club became celebrated for drunkenness and homosexuality, and closed in 1924.

It would be impossible to depict the whole circle, and Fleming does not try. I had hoped to discover more about figures such as Billy Clonmore (later described as a saint), John Sutro, a brilliant mimic, and Peter Quennell, the historian who made the comparison with the 18th-century Hellfire Club – which lends the book its slightly over-dramatic title.

Instead, the author concentrates on a handful of members, with Evelyn Waugh at their centre, and follows their later careers, adding Tom Driberg, who was too young at the time to be a member but seems a suitable inclusion. They were not really a group, but certain characteristics recur: they were often idle and witty; they had rows with their fathers, and were forced into some sort of subsequent literary work by being broke; and they had thoughts of suicide  – but perhaps most young men share some of these traits.

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Acton made an impressive leader of these aesthetes with his umbrella and broad-pleated trousers (he invented ‘Oxford bags’), his Florentine background and his recitations of The Waste Land through a megaphone. His friend Brian Howard, also a poet, wrote: ‘Do you realise, Harold – please pay attention to this – that you and I are going to have rather a famous career at Oxford? We are genuinely gifted people.’