Herbert Charles Pollitt

Herbert Charles Pollitt (July 20, 1871 – 1942), also known as Jerome Pollitt, was a female impersonator who performed as Diane de Rougy (an homage to Liane de Pougy). He became notorious as a Cambridge undergraduate due to his taste for Decadent art and literature, and was immortalised as the eponymous hero of an E. F. Benson novel (The Babe B.A.) in 1896. He became a very close friend of the artist Aubrey Beardsley, and had a brief but significant relationship with the occultist Aleister Crowley. Following his time at Cambridge, Pollitt moved to London and saw service in the First World War as a lance-corporal. He died in 1942.

Early life and education Pollitt was the son of Charles Pollitt, the proprietor of The Westmorland Gazette and his wife, Jane. He attended Heversham school, then went on to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1889.

At Cambridge, he became president of Footlights, the Cambridge University Dramatic Club. He was described as one of the most notorious and talked-about undergraduates of his tenure, his rooms furnished with pictures by Beardsley, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and Félicien Rops, and his bookshelves stocked with Decadent works. In late 1897, he decided to be known as Jerome Pollitt.

As the Footlights were largely a masculine establishment, female impersonation was not uncommon, but de Rougy became particularly renowned for her performances and as much a local Cambridge celebrity as Pollitt himself. She danced in two plays by Arthur Pilkington Shaw for Footlights, and it was claimed that her performances made women jealous.

Personal life In October 1897, following his return to Footlights to perform as Diane de Rougy, Pollitt met Aleister Crowley, and the two swiftly entered into a relationship. Finally, in his autobiography The Confessions of Aleister Crowley, he recalled the end of the relationship as a "lifelong regret." and that graceful young lady might have practised before him, as before a mirror...

The furniture of his rooms was as various and as diverse as his accomplishments. Several of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations from the Yellow Book, clustering round a large photograph of Botticelli's Primavera, which the Babe had never seen, hung above one of the broken sofas, and in his bookcase several numbers of The Yellow Book, which the Babe declared bitterly had turned grey in a single night, since the former artist had ceased to draw for it, were ranged side by side with Butler's Analogies, Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour, and Miss Marie Corelli's Barabbas.