Of Those Alone – From Hampton Lea to NYC – The Forbes Cheston Story

It is always hugely gratifying to us here at the archive when we receive comments about the content we post on the blog, if for no other reason than to know we are not shouting into the void! Every once in a while, someone will make contact with a story that makes us stop and re-assess something we have published previously; something which perhaps we had overlooked or forgotten.

Today’s post is an example of just such a message. Professor John Crowley, latterly of the University of Alabama, emailed us recently, referencing a piece written by volunteer Kathy Nichols, first published back in May 2017. John is a retired Professor of American Literature, and his interest in the blog was sparked by a search for the name of a writer; Charles Forbes Cheston.

As is so often the case with the Knights-Whittome portrait collection, our original remit ‘to simply identify and establish a connection for each sitter to the local area’, quickly goes by the wayside as soon as the stories and adventures of their wider families pique our interest. In this case, Professor Crowley’s research had led him to us via a photograph of his subject’s brother John Alford Cheston, a person whose story by no means overshadowed the short but remarkable life of our original subject, but which had also piqued our volunteer researcher Kathy’s interest for the different perspective it offered of the impact of war on ordinary people. John expands:

‘I recently published a brief article on Robert Hutton’s ‘Of Those Alone’. I was intending to expand it, and I went looking for additional data. I found a copy of the first edition with a handwritten note inside. It identified “Hutton” as Forbes Cheston and included other information. So I went searching for Cheston and found a little more, including your project. ‘

J A Cheston, Esq. (Brother of Charles Forbes Cheston) Photographed by Knights-Whittome, 9 Mar 1915

Over the last few weeks, John has kindly kept us abreast of his research, which is absolutely fascinating. ‘Of Those Alone’ is an important text in the history of alcoholism and homosexuality, and is referenced in Matt Houlbrook’s important volume ‘Queer London’, kindly introduced to us by June’s archive speaker, Dr Clifford Williams. We had hoped to publish Professor Crowley’s piece during June to coincide with PRIDE month, but events overtook. Nonetheless today, we are thrilled to publish his essay on Forbes Cheston, in full, here on the blog. This story was intended to be serialised, but its sits better as a whole, and I hope you will forgive the longer length of today’s post. The story not only adds another layer to the fascinating Hampton Lea story but has a far wider cultural significance for anyone interested in the history of either alcoholism or LGBTQ history. With thanks to John for his kindness in sharing this work with us.

John W. Crowley taught American literature for forty two years. He has written or edited sixteen books and published more than a hundred articles, essays, notes, and reviews. His special interests lie in the life and work of William Dean Howells (1837-1920), erstwhile “Dean of American Letters,” and the presence of alcohol in American literature and culture. 

A Message in a Book:

Gay and Alcoholic: A Lost Autobiography

John W. Crowley

“Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it.” Pericles

Robert Hutton’s Of Those Alone was published in 1958, a year after the Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution — familiarly known as the Wolfenden Report. Its stunning recommendation was that such acts, conducted in private between consulting adults, should no longer be proscribed or prosecuted. The Committee took its cue from The Problem of Homosexuality, a pamphlet issued by the Church of England Welfare Council, which asserted that although homosexual acts are immoral, they are not necessarily criminal. There was an uproar of resistance to these findings, and none took effect for a decade. Robert Hutton’s book, published during the interim, excoriated the ignorance and intolerance of the British public. “The average individual is baffled by something which appears to him to be both unnatural and vicious, and the tendency is for society to ostracize the offender.”

Of Those Alone poses the fundamental question about Hutton himself: how much was he a victim of “an outmoded and unimaginative legal ethical system, and how much was he himself to blame for the disasters which came upon him?” Hutton then addresses the prior question: whence homosexuality? Congenital or acquired? Destined by Nature or created by Nurture? Or both? 

Invented by sexologists, homosexual came into general usage in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Alcoholic was coined during the same period. The terms became entangled in an influential 1908 paper by Karl Abraham, one of Freud’s minions. Abraham asserted that alcohol loosened the inhibitions of same-sex libido and allowed repressed homosexual desire to be enacted, however vicariously. In short: scratch an alcoholic and find a homosexual; all alcoholics are latent homosexuals.  

This psychoanalytic doctrine, however absurd, held sway into the 1940s, when it was challenged by Marty Mann, founder of the National Council on Alcoholism. Her influential books and lectures advanced the “disease concept” of alcoholism as a clinical entity rather than a moral  defect or biological abnormality. 

“I am a member of that large section of people who believe that Alcoholism is a disease which attacks certain individuals,” Hutton wrote. “The key symptom is the incapacity to moderate drinking or otherwise to accept abstinence as the only way out.”

Hutton adds in the epilogue that he has “discussed the question of homosexuality and alcoholism with many eminent psychiatrists and there is little doubt there is a link.” One doctor opined that the incidence of alcoholism among homosexuals is 50% higher than it is among normal people. “One does not have to look far to see the reason,” Hutton retorts. Alcohol serves as an anodyne, an escape for tormented homosexuals. They are accountable for their drinking, but the drinking is accountable to the stigma of homosexuality. 

From the moment that a person realizes that he is homosexual, the conflict between instinct and conventional thinking begins. Certain things, which he has been brought up to believe are normal, are impossible for him. Other things, which he has been taught to think wrong, are for him inevitably right. It is not a question of behaviour but of feelings, and feelings are something which we can control, but which we cannot change.

If the legal ban were removed from the practice of homosexual acts between adult men, there would also be removed the burden of fear, of blackmail, of prison and of disgrace under which the homosexual is now condemned to live. And there would be removed that burden of shame which is both unjust and unmerited. Neither alcoholics nor homosexuals are as they are from choice. They are made that way and there is nothing they can do about it. That is not to say, though, that they are, either of them, monsters. They are human beings, with all the frailties and faults of human beings, and with an added disability to cope with, which is not the lot of the average person. 

* * *

Some time ago, I serendipitously discovered Of Those Alone while  browsing the Marty Mann Papers at Syracuse University. I came across a letter to Mann from an old friend about his autobiography. She was in it, he told her, under the pseudonym Temeraire (an anagram for “Mart,” Mann’s nickname). I tracked down the book, read it with interest, and put it aside, thinking I might return to it someday. Someday arrived recently and I began to gather information about this forgotten book and its obscure author. 

Of Those Alone is rare. When I first searched for a copy online, only a few were available. When I checked again recently, only two remained. My eyes popped when I saw that one of them was unique. Taped inside the front cover was a handwritten note on both sides of a narrow slip of paper. I snapped up the book of course. 

This was a message in a book, not a bottle, but it was cast away for the same purpose: to defy the astronomically long odds against its ever coming ashore anywhere: to share an inside story with an outsider, to divulge secrets to a curious reader. What are the odds that this note would have survived and then have fallen into the hands of the only person likely to recognize its significance? 

“OF THOSE ALONE” WRITTEN by R. Hutton
alias FORBES CHESTON Who died about 1974
he was a homosexual he knew everyone of intelligence in that world & became an alcoholic & antique dealer

FRANCES to whom the book is dedicated was a rich investor
in the antique business & was also an alcoholic
She joined All Hallows Ditchingham became a nun & with her money built a house there for the order of nuns so she could work with them & die there she was [buried] on the side of the hospital 

OTHER SIDE [NO IMAGE]

She was delightful & worldly to meet & was good to Forbes who as he got older went into the hospital for spells. My Mother died there  1973 —

“Perry” (did not know)
Mary an American highly educated & delightful woman “married” Forbes 
She was considerably older than he was
He led her a hell of a life as an alcoholic & They were on their beam ends. Suddenly he found AA was unable to hurt her anymore & They lived in a nice Norwich flat till Mary died. The Borough housed Forbes. He was generous, intelligent & a great friend –

Who wrote the note? And when? Given the reference to Cheston’s death “about 1974” (it was 1975), it must have been done after that. The writer’s authoritative tone and knowledge of intimate matters point to someone very close to Forbes Cheston, likely a member of his family. 

At first glance, the most plausible candidate is “Julian Mase,” whom young Cheston encountered during World War 1.

We met in the most casual way and having made sure that that we thought alike in certain manners, decided to get better acquainted . . . and for the next three months, Julian and I spent every available moment in one another’s pockets . . . Julian filled a very definite need in my life. He was a lover, it is true, but far more than that, he was a friend and counsellor, wise, witty and understanding. We enjoyed the same things; laughed at the same jokes and read the same books. It was important to both of us that we should be together.

I do not know to this day if Julian Mase was homosexual, or if, in some odd way, by some gimmick of war, he had failed to outgrow his adolescent feelings. I only know that for years he was a good friend to me and that I had a great affection for him.

The two remained close “long after the original motivation had ceased to exist.” In fact, they became brothers-in-law after “Julian” wed Forbes’s sister in 1921 – much to the horror of their mother because of what she suspected about Julian and her son. But she could not halt the marriage, which gave forth a daughter in 1923. Not surprisingly, “a certain awkwardness had sprung up between Julian and myself . . . . We both affected to ignore it, but we both knew it was there.” 

“Julian Mase” was Colonel Philip Ashley Hall, a war hero, born in 1892, two years before Forbes Cheston. Hall, however, must be excluded as author of the note because he died ten weeks before Of Those Alone was published on 1 January 1958. He could not have written about it.

Who among Cheston’s contemporaries, indeed, would have been alive to tell the tale after his death in 1975? It’s more likely that the note was written by someone of the following generation: someone who “did not know” Perry (who died in 1937) but who did know the other principals and the family secrets too. 

No one fits this description better than Barbara Ashley Hall, Philip and Dorothy Hall’s daughter and Forbes Cheston’s niece. An only child, Barbara was evidently never married. Only her maiden name appears on the family gravestone, which replaced the original to include Barbara after her death in 2018, aged ninety-five. 

Mystery solved? Not quite: there’s a dating problem to be resolved. On the replacement gravestone, Dorothy Cheston Hall’s date of death is 2 April 1968, aged seventy-two. The note says that the author’s mother died in 1973. The earlier date is verified by public records. What might account for the five-year discrepancy? A slip of the chisel? Not really possible, since the date on the new gravestone would have been very carefully copied from the original one. Far more likely a memory slip of an ageing woman. Case closed. 

In the “Author’s Note” to Of Those Alone, Robert Hutton cautions that nothing in the book is entirely straight-forward: 

Had I been writing the story of, say, Harpo Marx or Helen of Troy, it would be obligatory to set down the facts as they happened; in this case I have felt at liberty to transpose, embroider or disguise things, as I have thought them relevant to the story I am trying to tell, and even to suppress certain things, when I thought it might be advisable. This is particularly true in such incidents as might affect other people. Despite this, the story is true; it is an autobiography, because I could have written it of no one except myself and because no one but I could have written this particular story. 

Transpose, embroider, disguise, suppress? This “explanation,” which explains nothing, is a sly joke. After all, Harpo Marx was a comic persona and Helen of Troy a legend. There were, in fact, no “facts” about either to be set down. 

Pseudonyms abound in Of Those Alone, but only a few have been decoded: Julian Mase for Philip Hall; Alicia Cheston for Ida Hall. “Frances” is a composite portrait of Frances Currie (antique dealer) and Sister Frances Kirk. (The names are slant rhymes). Cheston’s own pseudonym may have derived from the Hollywood actor, Robert Hutton, who was a matinée idol during the 1930s and 1940s. 

* * *

Horace Charles Forbes Cheston was born into an affluent family in May 1898. His mother was Alice Edith Cheston. His father was John Allford Cheston, a wealthy and distinguished architect, as his own father Horace and uncle Chester had been. Forbes’s brother, John, a decorated  veteran, also became an architect. Forbes did not. Any such ambition was squashed by his waywardness, sexual and otherwise. He was deemed a disgusting disgrace to the family. 

Sales particular for Hampton Lea, dated 1928

J A Chector, Esq. Photographed by Knights-Whittome, 9 Mar 1915

Forbes became an alcoholic early on. If drinking counts as an occupation, then Cheston never had another. As he knocked about and scraped by and drained his cups for more than a quarter-century, he nonetheless did honor family tradition in his fashion, by exhibiting a sporadic flair for structural and interior design.

Cheston grew up at Hampton Lea, an imposing twelve-room estate in Sutton. In 1911, he departed for prep school and was promptly expelled. When he subsequently signed up with the London Rifles at the start of World War I, Forbes was only seventeen: two years younger than officially allowed. Early in the War, however, underage enlistment was tolerated, if not encouraged. After four years’ service, Cheston was discharged in 1919.

Forbes had recognized his “difference” even as a schoolboy. After his homosexual initiation at sixteen, he began cruising the West End. After the War, he was convicted three times for solicitation. His first sentence was reduced from six months to three. His second conviction was vacated on a technicality. The third case was overseen by a homophobic judge, who sentenced Cheston to ten weeks in Victorian-era prison. He was terrified, but he made the best of the situation by making friends and learning insider ways and means. 

Upon release, Cheston embarked on an American adventure. In San Francisco, he met a wealthy dealer of antiques who was nine years younger than he. This was Frances Currie. The two established a tight “bond of affection,” as Cheston calls it. They were also tightly bonded by their affection for alcohol; Frances too was an alcoholic. Forbes and Frances lived together on and off during the following years as they followed their different trajectories. When he was broke, she would float him financially.

Moving from place to place in Europe and America – London to the Midlands, Paris to the Cote d’Azur, New York, and stops in between — Hutton held a variety of jobs, none of them lucrative and all of them transient. 

In effect, Frances became Forbes’s “wife,” and so she was regarded by those who knew them. In 1936, however, Cheston was legally married “a highly educated and delightful” American from Minnesota: Mary Godley Starr. Forbes was thirty-eight; Mary was fifty-four. Since Cheston was exclusively homosexual, his relationships with Mary and Frances were arranged. 

During the years of hardship from the Depression through World War II, Forbes and Mary were destitute: bombed out of their shabby London flat and only intermittently employed. Mary cooked and cleaned for the rich. Forbes worked as an estate agent for several companies but was fired by all of them for drunkenness. It was the same with his job as a factory worker. As the note attests, he led Mary “a hell of a life as an alcoholic.” Despite this mistreatment, Mary stayed the course. 

Frances did not. In 1962, four years after Of Those Alone appeared, she joined the Sisters of Mercy at the Community of All Hallows, Ditchingham. Under her auspices, a building for visitors was erected. Now sober herself, Sister Frances wanted All Hallows to become a refuge for former alcoholics; but this never came to pass. After twenty-two years of service, she died in 1984, at the age of seventy-seven. 

About “Perry,” the other dedicatee in Of Those Alone, we have no knowledge beyond Cheston’s own account of both love and cruelty towards him. Perry might be seen as Cheston’s disastrous doppelganger. He had been brought up with money, and he expected always to have it. Then he found that he had neither the funds nor the inner resources to make it on his own. In the end, he drank himself to death in a car crash.

Forbes possessed qualities that Perry lacked. He was not physically violent, no matter how self-destructive he was. He had a gift for friendship, as the note observes, along with a sense that people and things had tangible value beyond price. 

Of Those Alone is akin to such contemporaneous books as Peter Wildeblood’s powerful (but also sprightly) Against the Law (1955) and other protests to the social and legal oppression of homosexuals. It also bears a resemblance to the practice of “qualifying” in Alcoholics Anonymous, where individuals, often newcomers, tell their sobriety stories according to a prescribed script: “What We Used To Be Like; What Happened; What We Are Like Now.”  

A.A. is historically grounded in evangelical Protestantism, and “qualifying” at root is a “conversion narrative,” by which a neophyte attains membership in good standing. The forward path to mature sobriety is: Don’t drink, Go to meetings, Do the Twelve Steps. 

Of Those Alone exemplifies A.A.’s Fourth and Fifth Steps: “Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves; Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs.” In short, a rigorous examination of conscience, followed by an unabridged confession. Of Those Alone is certainly unsparing about Creston’s “defects of character,” as the Sixth Step puts it.

Cheston was steeped in A.A. culture, but there is no reason to think he embraced its religious trappings. For one thing, he saw himself as a twice-cursed “misfit,” forced to live under double “disabilities.” There was really no place for him in the homophobic outer circle of A.A. He had no choice but to hide within an secret inner circle of abomination: Homosexuals Anonymous.

In 1947, Cheston noticed an ad for Alcoholics Anonymous in a London newspaper. Founded in 1935 in Akron, Ohio. A.A. gradually spread abroad. The first London meeting occurred on 31 March 1947, at the swank Dorchester Hotel. It was organized by Grace O., who had been tasked by A.A.’s General Service Office in New York to assemble those in London who had made inquiries. 

Including Grace O. and the self-styled “Canadian” Bob B., five of the eight persons present were North Americans. Another was Irish. Of the two Englishmen there, one was still drinking and soon disappeared.  “Canadian” Bob was elected Group Secretary, and he took commanding control. Meetings were moved to his house in Kew Gardens, although some were still held in cafes. When Cheston joined in February 1948, there were twenty members. By 1949, there were a hundred.

In March 1951, Cheston published an article, titled “Education on Alcoholism,” in the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet. He was becoming a public, though nameless, face of A.A. The Lancet paper was followed by Cheston’s anonymous participation in a panel, sponsored by the General Practice Section of the Royal Society of Medicine. Identified only as a “speaker,” he provided a precis of what A.A. “does and does not do, both for the alcoholic and for the assistance of the doctor.” Cheston “referred to his own social position and to drinking forays among the titled rich, in various more or less gilded halls.” 

In response, Dr. J. A. Hobson – a prosecutor at the notorious trial that imprisoned Lord Montagu and three others for homosexual solicitation — opined that “the association had been more successful among the upper income and social strata than among the lower. . . because the limited intelligence of the lower class did not allow them to grasp the A.A. programme.” 

Cheston vigorously riposted: “I have been a member of the A.A. [sic] for some considerable time and while agreeing with my fellow member on the facts, I differ radically as to the reasons.”

In the early days of A.A., he explained, “only the small London group existed, and meetings rotated among the members’ houses and flats. It so happened that these places “belonged, almost entirely, to members of the upper income and social classes, who had not, through their drinking, lost everything and who had, therefore, a home to offer.” The majority came from these classes, but one or two did not. “These members did not long continue to attend meetings. Whether they continued to practice the concept of A.A. I do not know.” 

This description highlights the class difference between the earliest English and American meetings. The one in Akron was composed entirely of white, middle-class, professional men. The meeting convened at first in the modest home of Dr. Bob Smith, a proctologist and one of the founders. When it outgrew the space, members gathered in the spacious living room of a non-alcoholic supporter. 

The New York meetings were held at 182 Clinton Street, Brooklyn: the cramped house rented by Bill Wilson, a stock-scout and the other founder. Although it was less homogenous than the one in Akron, the New York group comprised the same sort of men. 

The first woman to attain enduring sobriety in A.A. was Marty Mann, Cheston’s erstwhile drinking buddy. (She nicknamed him “Chesty.”) In 1948, She made a proselytizing tour of Europe. During her stop in London, Mann reunited with many old friends, including Cheston, with whom she reminisced about the bad old days. “It was the first time ever when both of us were sober,” he deadpanned as he introduced Mann to a huge A.A. meeting, “or, at any rate when neither of us had a hangover. We hardly recognized each other.” 

# # #

In writing this essay, I have greatly benefitted from the  collaboration of David Bergman, Sister Rachel Beckett CAH, Emily Dufton, and — most of all — Abby Matthews and her able team of researchers at the Archive and Family History Centre, Sutton.

Sources:

Forbes Cheston. “Comments on a Recent Discussion on Alcoholism, The British Journal of Addiction, 51 (July 1954), 51-53.

Kathy Nichols, “The Story of  Hampton Lea: Uncovering Hidden Stories,” in Abby Mathews, editor, The Past on Glass & Other Stories: tales from the Archives at London Borough of Sutton, May 2017.

The Community of All Hallows, “Our History,” 2020.

Alcoholics Anonymous Great Britain and English Speaking Continental Europe. “Historical Data,” n.d. 

Sally Brown and David R. Brown, Mrs. Mary Mann: The First Lady of Alcoholics (Center City, MN), 2001.