Gerald Haxton

Frederick Gerald Haxton (1892 – November 7, 1944), a native of San Francisco, was the long term secretary and lover of novelist and playwright W. Somerset Maugham.

He and Maugham met at the outbreak of World War I when they both began serving as part of a Red Cross ambulance unit in French Flanders.

Deportation Haxton left England shortly thereafter.

After touring the South Pacific islands, Haxton was aboard the Hitachi Maru en route to South Africa when the ship was captured by the German raider SMS Wolf in September 1917. Haxton was a prisoner aboard the Wolf until February 1918 when the Wolf returned to Germany and he was transferred to a German prison camp. He was reunited with Maugham in 1919.

On attempting to return in February 1919, he was deported from Britain as an undesirable alien and was never allowed to enter the country again.

Because Maugham and Haxton traveled abroad and chose to live on the French Riviera in the "Villa La Mauresque", they were able to carry on their relationship despite Haxton's deportation. They lived in Villa La Mauresque at Cap Ferrat almost exclusively until they were forced to flee the advancing Germans at the commencement of World War II.

It is thought that Haxton's flamboyant nature, said to be portrayed in the character Rowley Flint in Up at the Villa, was the key to Maugham's popularity with members of society wherever the pair traveled. on November 7, 1944 at Doctors Hospital in New York. Maugham later placed the following dedication in his 1949 compilation, A Writer's Notebook: "In Loving Memory of My Friend Frederick Gerald Haxton, 1892–1944".