I finally got around to reading: Night Terrors: The Ghost stories of E F Benson, better known perhaps as the author of the Mapp and Lucia books. For me, the stories evoked interest, rather than horror. If I was to generalise, you’d have to call them ‘comfortable terror’ or perhaps ‘cosy terror,’ set in a world of gentlemen’s clubs, old country houses and Constable landscapes of meadows and woods, Turneresque coasts. His writing is lyrical when he describes landscapes and, translated into TV suggest Morse, Lewis, or Midsomer Murders’ production values.
The stories as horror, however, too often fail to hit the spot. This is not altogether Benson’s fault; he set many of the templates others have followed for almost a century, and so the originals seem at times stale. Where he is at fault is in his endings. Too many of them are neatly glib or worse, damp squibs. Unease is generated, the story builds, you turn the last page and then meh.
There is one story that stood out: Sanctuary. This is a story rich in menace and genuinely creepy with shades of Dennis Wheatley, and it has an almost complete conclusion, with just two dangling threads: the equally villainous mother and daughter. What happens to them? We’ll never know; perhaps because they are women, or Benson simply lost interest.
There is though, another reason for my interest in Sanctuary. Its male villains, Horace Elton and Owen Barton, resonate with two historical characters that E F Benson might well have known via gossip and mutual acquaintances. Benson was discreetly homosexual and so part of a necessarily secretive but intimate world. Benson’s brother, Robert Hugh Benson for example, knew Evan Morgan in a biblical sense when both boys were at Eton.
It seems likely that the villain of Sanctuary, Horace Elton, physically at least was based upon Aleister Crowley although there could also an argument for the occultist, Montague Summers. It is also more than possible that the other villain, Owen Barton, was based upon the infamous Evan Morgan – Lord Tredegar after 1934.
Evan Morgan
Aleister Crowley
Other than the physical descriptions: Horace Elton – ‘a grey-haired man of middle age, large and extremely stout with a cushion of jowl overlapping his collar.’ Owen Barton: ‘a young fellow, perhaps twenty-five years old, clean shaven and slim . . . there was something queer about him, something sinister.’ the parallels are obvious. In the book there is a country house with a secret ‘magic room’ where depraved ceremonies take place. Evan Morgan, too, had a secret ‘Magic Room’ in Tredegar House, and like the story’s villains, Elton and Barton, a predatory homosexual with a preference for young boys. Evan also, like Benson’s protagonists, had a penchant for clerical garb being not only a practising satanist but a Papal knight to boot.
If the hidden story of Evan Morgan interests you—marketing hat on—read the ‘Gift’ Trilogy, an occult ‘Downton Abbey’ involving Satanists, aristocrats, and Nazis. It initially adopts the form of a traditional family saga before subverting it as elements of the supernatural slip in.
The Gift follows the rise of a Liverpool orphan, Lizzy McBride, and the degradation but ultimate redemption of one of the richest heiresses in Edwardian England, Lady Gwyneth Ericka Morgan. Though there are elements of the fantastic, the novel is grounded in historical fact. It involves real people and historical events as it explores the occult underbelly of the English aristocracy and its links with the emergent Nazi movement.
It is, however, the first book of a trilogy, beginning in 1912 and ending in 1941. The three books trace the magical rivalry between two sisters, Elizabeth and Elsie McBride and interweaves between historical events involving such figures as Aleister Crowley, Churchill, Brendan Bracken, Litvinov, Shaw and Guy Burgess among other leading lights of interwar society.
For those who enjoy delving into aristocratic rabbit holes—the footnotes are a joy—check out William Cross
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