The Hellfire Club

In the early 1950's the local vicar told the Daily Mirror: ‘my tummy wobbles like jelly every time I pass the entrance.' I was just desperate for the toilet. But this is the entrance to the famous Hell Fire Club.

The knights of St Francis of Wycombe (aka Sir Francis Dashwood) better known as the Hell-Fire club started in about 1742. Its members were drawn largely from the friends and circle of Frederick, Prince of Wales. Few records exist, but a full Chapter meeting took place twice a year - autumn and summer. It was attended by the twelve inner members in flowing white robes, the Abbot wearing a crimson gown and hood edged with rabbit skin. Ladies were admitted so long as they were of a ‘cheerful, lively disposition to improve the general hilarity of the company.' They wore masks and a badge: ‘Liberty and Friendship.’ And nobody knows what happened there, though one can make a good guess. 

The club flourished until 1763 when it broke up, partly from political disagreements, partly from the famous ‘baboon incident.’

One of the members, the Radical John Wilkes, dressed up a baboon to look like the devil and hid it in a box in a recess of the Chapel. When released, the frantic animal jumped onto the back of Lord Sandwich who nearly died on the spot. Both he and the terrified baboon ran out, the distraught Lord crying aloud: 'Spare me, gracious devil: thou knowest I was only fooling. I am not half as wicked as I pretend.’ The club finally closed in 1774.

The caves themselves had charitable origins. There had  been a serious of bad harvests, and the poor of the locality were in dire need. A new road was needed between West Wycombe and High Wycombe, and Sir Francis Dashwood devised, in effect, a job creation scheme. Men were paid a shilling a day to excavate and extract chalk from a nearby hill to be used for the new road. They did it to a plan, copied from an ancient underground Greek temple. The resulting caves are a quarter of a mile long and at their deepest 300 feet underground. 

Sir Francis was no dilettante – though he co-founded the Society of Dilettantti.  ­­He studied architecture and antiquities, was widely travelled, and one of the few Englishmen to visit Russia. For twenty years or more, he was an active politician, and was, briefly,  an unsuccessful Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was also an intimate friend of Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin was a regular visitor and a great fan of the Caves. Together, the two men wrote a revised Book of Common Prayer for the Church of England. “…its purpose was to prevent the old and faithful from freezing to death from long sermons in cold churches,  to make the service so short as to attract the young and lively, and to reprieve the well-disposed from the infliction of interminable prayer."

Ignored in England, it provided the basis for the new American prayerbook after the War of Independence—speaking of which the war might have been avoided had the Government accepted The Plan For Reconciliation drawn up by Franklin and Dashwood in 1770 and championed in England by both Dashwood and William Pitt.

Progressive in many respects, it’s likely old Ben Franklin would not have met the approval of our modern Puritans. Advising a younger acquaintance that though marriage was preferrable, an older woman was an acceptable substitute: ‘as in the dark all cats are grey, the pleasures of corporal enjoyment with an older woman is at least equal, and frequently superior . . . and they are so grateful for the attention!’  

So, the caves themselves.

And yes, I wish I'd read this before going this far down

Though of course, they would say that wouldn't they. You're not going to have a TV programme where 'nothing happened.'

Even so

The Banqueting Hall

The Banqueting Hall is a cavern 14 metres in diameter and 130 metres from the entrance. The hall has a compass design with four niches called ‘the monks cells’ and were used by club members for privacy with the ladies (though with twelve or more monks, one imagines a discreet but impatient queue.)

Those waiting could, however, enjoy food and drink. A large refectory table was supposedly  placed in the cavern’s centre attended by liveried footmen who served food and wine in gleaming silverware.

 

The club became so popular it had two orders: the Superior and the Inferior. For Chapter meetings, only the Superior were permitted beyond the Banqueting Hall to perform their 'devilish' rites. As the port was finished at the end of their feast, the Abbot rose and made a toast to the devil. 

Thus fortified, they then made their way to the Inner Temple which included crossing the 'River Styx.' 

And from there through a triangular section, which was said to represent part of the female anatomy, (oh, those naughty, naughty aristocrats!) and finally the Inner Temple. What occurred next remains veiled in secrecy.

This, the  Inner Temple is 100 metres below a church on the top of the 'satanic' chalk hill. 

 

For about two hundred years, the caves were all but forgotten and fell into disrepair. It was a second Sir Francis Dashwood, the 11^th Baronet who, in 1951, reopened the caves as a tourist attraction. A surveyor warned him they weren’t safe and at least £5000 was needed to stabilise them. Sir Francis only had £50 in his pocket. He got no help from his father, who called the whole thing ‘a damned silly idea.’ Undaunted, the second Sir Francis opened them to the public at a shilling a time, free candle included. Publicity did the rest. The local vicar told the Daily Mirror that ‘my tummy wobbles like jelly every time I pass the entrance.’ This was followed by a sermon denouncing the waves of evil emanating from the cave. Publicity to die for; tourists flocked, enjoying a satanic vibe without endangering their souls, and the money rolled in. 

The question lingers: were these a group of talented but libertine aristocrats having a good time, with a touch of ‘Sympathy for the Devil,’ or did something overtly satanic take place in these caves?