England's bohemian 'Bright Young People'

"... If Driberg's tongue stayed firmly in his cheek, it was because all the hoaxers were personal friends. The house in Buckingham Street was owned by Bryan Guinness, a scion of the great brewing dynasty, and his wife Diana, formerly Mitford. "Bruno Hat" was impersonated by Diana's brother Tom. The paintings had been knocked up in an afternoon by Brian Howard - one of those eternally promising young men of the inter-war era who left nothing behind them but their legend - assisted by the surrealist painter John Banting. "A. R. de T." was the 25-year-old Evelyn Waugh. Together they formed the advance guard of a youth movement that, in the previous four years, had taken up permanent residence in every newspaper gossip column in England: the Bright Young People.

This sextet aside, who were the Bright Young People? Perhaps the best definition was pronounced by Waugh, whose Vile Bodies (1930) is a satirical projection of many of the real events in which they took part. Looking back on his hot youth from the debatable lands of the early 1960s, Waugh declared that "there was between the wars a society, cosmopolitan, sympathetic to the arts, well-mannered, above all ornamental even in rather bizarre ways, which for want of a better description the newspapers called 'High Bohemia'". Characterised in the public imagination by its exuberant parties and riotous practical joking - impersonation parties, circus parties, mock weddings and elaborately staged "Stunts" - it consisted of a number of intermingled social groups.

These included ex-public schoolboys from Oxford such as Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Henry Green and John Betjeman, who would go on to make names for themselves as writers; rackety young society women such as the morphine addict Brenda Dean Paul and Elizabeth Ponsonby, whose father, the Labour leader of the House of Lords, died of drink on the eve of the blitz; but also a hard-core bohemian fringe, including such maverick scene-swellers as the painter Edward Burra and the photographer Barbara Ker-Seymer. Their milieu was a few square miles of central London, ranging from the Gargoyle Club in Dean Street and the celebrated Cavendish Hotel ("Shepheard's Hotel" in Vile Bodies) to private addresses such as the sleazy flat in Maddox Street shared by the Earl of Cranbrook's son Eddie Gathorne-Hardy and Brian Howard, where fungus grew on the disintegrating staircase and Betjeman remembered John Banting "throwing knives when in the mood". ..."

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