It would not have surprised their friends in the 1930s when Peter Watson had a fling with my grandfather, Robert ‘the Mad Boy’ Heber-Percy. Both gorgeous young men were known for their risky sexual escapades. What did ruffle feathers, however, was when Watson subsequently gave the Mad Boy a car. Cecil Beaton was so jealous that he demanded one too. And it was forthcoming: ‘Do please select any roadster which catches your fancy,’ replied the exceedingly wealthy Watson, who inspired lifelong unrequited love in poor Beaton. The Mad Boy’s long-term partner was Lord Berners, the famously eccentric composer, painter and writer, who retaliated by pinning Watson to the page of his wickedly satirical novel, The Girls of Radcliff Hall. The young men of his circle (including Beaton and the Mad Boy) were transmogrified, with little disguise, into schoolgirls cavorting in lesbian trysts. Berners himself appeared as the love-struck headmistress.
Lankily elegant, dressed in exquisitely cut double-breasted suits, and with the face ‘of a frog just as he is turning into a prince’, Watson wafts in and out of other people’s stories, never staying long enough to provide the full picture.
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