Gerald Hamilton

Gerald Bernard Francis Hamilton (né Souter; 1 November 1890 – 9 June 1970) was a British memoirist, critic and internationalist known as "the wickedest man in Europe". Hamilton counted among his friends Winston Churchill, Robin Maugham, Tallulah Bankhead and Christopher Isherwood, who wrote of Hamilton's remarkable personality and frequently shady dealings in his literary memoir Christopher and His Kind. he was educated at Lambrook preparatory and Rugby School in England. Hamilton's father, Frank Thomas Edward Souter (1863–1941), was a businessman of Scottish descent with commercial interests in China, and his mother, Edith Minnie, née Holliday (1860–1890), was English. During two years working in China, Souter fell ill with dysentery and was cared for by a Catholic nurse, which he said inspired him to convert to Catholicism.

World Wars Hamilton was interned in the United Kingdom during the First World War because, he claimed, of his association with Roger Casement, the Irish nationalist later executed for treason. Hamilton's own homosexuality was only a thinly veiled secret. Winston Churchill had the Communist-sympathising Hamilton temporarily interned during the Second World War because of his vocal opposition to the conflict.

Sales representative, informer, and prisoner Hamilton was employed at various times by The Times as its German sales representative. He was known as a fixer for Willi Münzenberg, "the notorious communist, who presided in Berlin on behalf of Moscow over the doings of the League Against Imperialism and Friends of Soviet Russia" (as British Intelligence described him), and as a go-between or informer by various agencies, including Sinn Féin, Special Branch, and the British Military Mission in Berlin. At one time, he shared accommodation with "the Great Beast", Aleister Crowley.

Memoirs Hamilton served as the model for Isherwood's character Arthur Norris in his novel Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) (published in the U.S. as The Last of Mr Norris). Hamilton derived from this the title for his own memoir Mr Norris and I (published in 1956). An earlier memoir by Hamilton, As Young as Sophocles, was published in 1937, and a third memoir, The Way It Was with Me was published in 1969, all three books giving wholly different versions of even the most basic biographical information. Other accounts of Hamilton's life provide further obfuscation; Robin Maugham's five-part "exposé" in The People was in fact concocted in collusion with Hamilton, while John Symonds's Conversations with Gerald (1974) allowed Hamilton to spin yet more yarns.

Life in Berkshire

In 1940, Hamilton became the lover of jazz bandleader Ken "Snakehips" Johnson, who was 20 years his junior. They moved in together at 91 Kinnerton Street in Belgravia and later bought a cottage called "Little Basing" in Vicarage Road, Bray, Berkshire, where Johnson could go sailing, which was one of his hobbies.

Hamilton was at that cottage when he received a phone call on 9 March 1941, informing him of Johnson's death in a bombing raid, and asking him to come and identify the body. He later recalled: "Again that awful feeling of nausea which I had felt when France fell, and again that sensation of the ground slipping from beneath my feet." From then on, Hamilton kept a picture of Johnson in a white tuxedo with white satin facings at all times with him, calling him "my husband".

In popular culture Later in his life, Hamilton became friends with John Symonds, author and editor, who wrote Conversations with Gerald about their acquaintance. There is a classic account of Hamilton in later life in Robin Maugham's second volume of autobiography, Search for Nirvana (1979). Hamilton was portrayed by Toby Jones in the BBC production Christopher and His Kind (2011).

Works As Young as Sophocles, Secker & Warburg, 1937 Mr Norris and I, Allan Wingate, 1956 Emma in Blue, Allan Wingate, 1957 Jacaranda, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1961 Blood Royal, Times Publishing/Anthony Gibbs & Phillips, 1964 The Way it Was With Me, London: Leslie Frewin, 1969,