Now with paint peeling from its walls and shutters, and loose plaster and threadbare curtains, Old Monks Farmhouse in Lancing, West Sussex, must once have been a charming building. Grade-II listed, it was registered as a chapel in 1954 and extended for a larger congregation in 1959. It later became the presbytery when the neighbouring red-brick Church of the Holy Family was consecrated in 1972. Its former lives will be deeply disguised due to its impending likely conversion into seven flats.
One of them is an important literary association that dates to the days of the farmhouse, for here, in the early hours of March 20, 1945, died the 74-year-old Lord Alfred Douglas, best known as “Bosie”, the one-time lover of Oscar Wilde.
The last nine years of Douglas’s life were spent in reduced circumstances, mostly two miles away in Hove. The town would have evoked memories of better days in nearby Brighton and Worthing, both of which he and Wilde had known.
In 1894, when Wilde and his family were holidaying in Worthing, Douglas came to stay. (The turreted house has now gone and the commemorative plaque is on the wrong replacement building.) While there, Wilde wrote The Importance of Being Earnest, but he and Douglas also spent time consorting with boys in the town. One of them, Alphonso Conway, would be named in Wilde’s disastrous libel action against Douglas’s father in 1895, which saw Wilde’s criminal trial that same year and consequent disgrace with two years hard labour in Pentonville, Wandsworth and Reading prisons. This was followed by Wilde’s self-imposed exile in France and Italy, where he and Bosie again met.
Wilde’s shadow lay across the rest of Douglas’s life. What came after Wilde’s death in 1900 was largely a long, sad coda. Douglas was received into the Catholic Church in 1911. It was, he reflected, the best thing he ever did, and one which sustained him. The man he had been and the society and age in which he had flourished were long past – the first nights, dinner parties, soirées at the Cafe Royal, first-class hotels, continental forays and amusing company, in which Wilde shone as the brightest star.
As well as being a prolific writer, Douglas shot off letters to the press. In 1920 he founded and edited the short-lived and anti-Semitic Plain English. He published two books about Wilde: Oscar Wilde and Myself (1914), a vicious attack which he later repudiated, and Oscar Wilde: A Summing Up (1940), a more generous assessment. A high point came in 1935 when he was approached by publishers wanting to republish his sonnets in two volumes (he was 26 when his first volume had appeared).
Douglas today is hardly remembered, if at all, for his poetry, save for his penning the continuingly resonant “I am the love that dare not speak its name”. But in his day he was much praised, and as well as sonnets he also wrote nonsense verse, rhymes, satires, lyrics and even a scenario for a ballet – but his poetry trailed off comparatively early. The volumes were successful, leading the publishers to suggest another book of memoirs. The book failed to appear due to legal advice about potential libel actions but when Without Apology came out in 1938 there were no legal repercussions.
Douglas was a curious mixture. Those who knew him, like the writers Rupert Croft-Cooke and H Montgomery Hyde (future author of a book on the Wilde trial), found him charming, generous (even when hard up) and humorous. But he was also egocentric, self-centred and given to violent disagreements, and could be abusive and quarrelsome. Ironically, he developed one of his father’s most unattractive traits (of which there were many) with tirades in vicious letters which served only to alienate many.
He was bankrupted by a failed libel suit in 1913 against Arthur Ransome over the latter’s biography of Wilde. That year, too, he was charged with libelling his father, and in 1923 he was jailed for six months for libelling Winston Churchill. (In 1944 he would write the prime minister a congratulatory letter and urge him not to desert the Poles. Churchill assured him he would not, and added: “Time ends all things.”) In that last period of his life, Douglas seems to have found some inner peace and his old resentments and querulousness fell away.
Towards the end, Douglas was often ill and tired; he suffered from sleeplessness and depression; and whatever good looks he may have had were gone. He told his friend Sheila Colman that he longed for death and was not afraid of it.
But even those last years in Hove brought new friendships with the young Donald Sinden, John Betjeman, Malcolm Muggeridge and Terence Rattigan.
Among others, two of the most unlikely were those with Marie Stopes, the controversial pioneer of birth control, who sent him money; and Bernard Shaw, in all things – social standing, religion and politics – his opposite, but with whom Douglas engaged in an affectionate epistolatory duelling match.
His final and most rewarding friendship was with Sheila and Edward (Teddy) Colman, whom Douglas met in 1943 through a mutual friend; from their farm they supplied him with eggs and foodstuffs then in short supply in wartime.
Between 1942 and 1945 his health and financial situation further deteriorated. He loved visiting the Colmans’ farmhouse and in December 1944 he moved in permanently.
With the Colmans’ care, his health and spirits improved and he found peace, calm, support and stability. He would play Bach, Mozart and Chopin on the piano, while a royalty cheque was an occasion to take his benefactors to lunch. “The Colmans have been angelic to me, dear people,” he told a friend.
The last favour he sought of Sheila was when, three days before he died, he asked that she place a bet for him. The horse lost.
Bosie remained a Mass-goer when well enough and a Fr Corley regularly visited the farm and heard his last confession; Sheila Colman later related how she and Edward held Bosie’s hands as he gazed at a crucifix. In 1981 royalties from his works enabled the Colmans to pay off all of Douglas’s debts and discharge his 1913 bankruptcy. In 1999, Sheila Colman endowed the still-existing annual Lord Alfred Douglas Memorial Prize for poetry “in strict rhyming metre” at Oxford.
Although not themselves Catholics, when the Colmans moved from Old Monks Farm in the early 1950s to another farm at nearby Stompting, they sold the land to the Church. “Bosie would have been pleased,” she told John Stratford, her successor as Douglas’s literary executor.
Twenty people attended Bosie’s burial in the Franciscan churchyard of St Francis and St Anthony at Crawley in Sussex, where he rests with his mother. The grave of this briefly glittering star of the fin de siècle now faces the new town’s vast shopping centre.
Terry Philpot’s “111 Literary Places in London That You Shouldn’t Miss” is out now.
This article first appeared in the February 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald magazine. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, go here.
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