The Crichel Boys review: This remains a rich, luscious account of a postwar Britain

The Crichel Boys

Simon Fenwick                                                                                        Constable £25

Rating:

Just as the Second World War ground to its exhausting close, three young men – upper-class, book- ish and gay – bought a tumble-down rectory in deepest Dorset. This was the age of austerity, and Long Crichel had no electricity and only a patchy water supply. 

Nonetheless, over the next few decades ‘the Crichel Boys’ created a ‘happy, brilliant, charming’ atmosphere, according to one of their many famous weekend guests. Luring the artistic great, if not always the good, down from London with drink, good food (there was an excellent cook) and clever chat, the boys welcomed everyone who was anyone, including Nancy Mitford, Vita Sackville-West, Benjamin Britten, Peggy Ashcroft, E. M. Forster, Vanessa Bell and Cecil Beaton.

In this gossipy but scholarly book, Simon Fenwick has produced a funny-sad account of a way of life that was already starting to seem old-fashioned by the time the boys signed the lease. 

Posh, British bohemians had always held salons – just think of the Bloomsbury group before the war – but by the 1940s and 1950s it no longer seemed possible to live that kind of chummy, leisured life, full of croquet, bed-hopping and chat about the latest novels. 

But the trio – aristocratic Eddy Sackville-West, artist Eardley Knollys and music critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor – had enough money, contacts and charm to ensure that life at Long Crichel retained a wistful magic.

At times the criss-crossing of love affairs between hosts, guests and each other can become a bit complicated. Eddy loves Benjamin Britten, who dedicates some of his finest music to him but then goes off in a series of huffs. 

Eardley loves the Bulgarian picture-framer Mattei Radev, who is actually deeply devoted to E. M. Forster, who is old enough to be his grandfather. There are plenty of women passing through, but they seem to have endlessly complicated lives too. 

The writers Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamond Lehmann fall out because they both want to sleep with the same man, and Alvilde Lees-Milne, who is married to another Crichel stalwart, James, spends a lot of time snooping through his post trying to work out the identity of his latest boyfriend.

As this suggests, not all these affairs happened literally under the eves of Long Crichel. One of the challenges for Fenwick is that, while his enormous cast of characters fleetingly met up in Dorset, they had known each other for decades and in other places entirely. 

There is, in other words, a lot of ‘baggage’, which Fenwick explains in great detail, so that the action zigzags from Ireland to New York and then back to London. Time, too, is elastic since many of these people met each other at university or in the Army or even, in the case of E. M. Forster and Frances Partridge, in Bloomsbury.

Fenwick is determined, too, to place Crichel and its expanding cast of characters at the centre of national affairs. Several of the principal players were involved with the National Trust’s work of saving country houses from demolition. 

Then there’s the fact that the nearby landowner Lord Montagu of Beaulieu is sent to prison for homosexual acts in 1957, a scandal that sends a shiver of worry through the habitués of Long Crichel.

Sometimes it all feels a bit strained, but this remains a rich, luscious account of a postwar Britain that often gets lost amid all the more familiar stories about new towns, motorways and the dawning of the permissive society. 

 

Thou Shall Not Pass

Leo Moynihan                                                                  Bloomsbury Sport £16.99

Rating:

Before the days of multi-camera angles and VAR, the centre half was football’s quintessential hard man, determined to stifle creativity by any means possible, somewhat in the manner of Leeds United’s Norman ‘Bites Yer Legs’ Hunter, say, or Goikoetxea, the so-called ‘Butcher of Bilbao’. 

Since those ‘good old days’, the tackle from behind has been outlawed and agricultural defending has largely given way to playing out stylishly from the back, epitomised in the modern game by the sleek, purring elegance of Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk.

Of course this is only part of the story and the centre half, claims Leo Moynihan in this mildly entertaining overview of the position, is a much misunderstood figure, whose role has gradually evolved over the years: think Moore, think Beckenbauer, think – forgive me! – Alan Hansen.

This is a great idea, but somehow Moynihan, a football writer, doesn’t give this rich subject the treatment it deserves. There are chapters on the great partnerships at the back, on why centre halves make great leaders, on the critical relationship with the goalie, as well as on the dark art of defending and the role of the header in their armoury.

However, there’s little sustained analysis, no coherent narrative and many of his insights are blindingly obvious – centre halves hate giving away goals: who knew? It all feels slightly superficial and anecdotal.

On the plus side, it is packed with interviews with footballers past and present who lend colour and humour, though the solitary contribution from a female footballer, Steph Houghton, seems like glaring tokenism.

This is not so much an ‘anatomy’ as an impassioned, impressionistic and slightly flimsy celebration of the art of defending: a decent magazine article padded out to book length.

Simon Humphreys