Henry Hector Bolitho was a New Zealand born writer, novelist and biographer. He travelled widely through the South Sea islands, Africa, Canada, America and Germany before settling in England, where he worked as a freelance journalist.
Bolitho lived for eight years in the cloisters of Windsor Castle, where he had access to the Royal Archives and wrote a number of royal biographies. In 1934, he and John Simpson, his ‘secretary’ (at the time this was a common euphemism for gay partner) set up home in Boytons. In Combat Report, his loving tribute to John, Bolitho described their first year together in Hempstead.
We made a garden and we collected furniture. His mother stayed with us and supervised my clumsy experiments at furnishing a kitchen…..We set about making vegetable and flower beds from the neglected farmyard…the joy of that first summer was incomparable. I made my first home in England and I spread myself into the luxuries of a little lord of the manor.
Bolitho’s biography of John, Finest of the Few, describes waiting with Norman Myhill (who farmed at Wincelow Hall) for the arrival of a pilot friend, Batchy.
My neighbour in Essex was Norman Myhill, a farmer who had made the first gestures of friendship when we arrived with our vanload of furniture. He had walked across the fields to greet me, with vegetables, eggs and milk. I can best describe him as kindness itself….. Batchy was to land his aircraft in one of Norman Myhill’s stubble fields. We had lighted a fire – scavenging in the ditches for dry sticks and pulling up damp grass roots – so that there would be a thread of smoke to guide Batchy after he had passed the stunted tower of Hempstead church.
It was still exciting in those days for a guest to arrive by air. So we stood in the field, Norman, John and myself, searching the sky.
The boys from the village ran up the lane in young delight when the aircraft landed in the stubble. Batchy brought the aircraft to rest within the shelter of the hedge and we made our way to the house, after fortifying ourself for the walk with some of Norman’s sloe gin.
In those pre-war years, the playwright Terence Rattigan might have been seen in Hempstead’s Crown Inn (now the Bluebell). An amusing and rather catty anecdote in Geoffrey Wansell’s biography explains that Rattigan and Bolitho had been introduced by John Perry, who was sharing a house in Finchingfield with John Gielgud.
A middle-aged writer of travel books and royal biographies, and distinctly old-womanish in manner, Bolitho had already written two novels and now wanted to adapt his third, Grey Farm, for the stage. If Rattigan would come and stay with him at Hempstead they could work on the adaptation together. The outcome was disastrous. Rattigan rapidly came to despise both Bolitho and his novel, and took refuge in a local pub or, when possible, in John Gielgud’s house eight miles away. But he needed the money, so he struggled on, gritting his teeth, and being rude about Bolitho to John Perry whenever he saw him. No one could have saved Grey Farm, which was never to be produced in England.
At the start of WW2, Bolitho enlisted in the RAF Volunteer Reserve as an intelligence officer, with the rank of squadron leader. John Simpson, also in the RAF, fought in the Battle of Britain and was awarded the DFC: Bolitho attended the presentation ceremony at Buckingham Palace with John’s mother and sister. But their relationship did not survive the war. John was posted to Gibraltar and North Africa, reaching the rank of Group Captain: he married in 1945 but tragically committed suicide four years later at the age of 36, shooting himself in the head in St James’s Park. At about this time Bolitho began a long and happy relationship with Derek Peel and they remained together until Bolitho’s death in 1974.
Bolitho was in Boytons from 1934 to 1945. In his autobiography My Restless Years , he devotes a chapter, Experiment in Escape, to these years of his life. This chapter is worth reproducing in full, as it paints a vivid picture of life in Hempstead before and during the Second World War. The vicar referred to would have been Thomas Conyers Barker and Bolitho’s description of him accords with the way that Margaret Drane described him in his later years.
The final few paragraphs, in which Bolitho describes taking care of the ashes of of another pilot friend, John Nesbitt Sellers, are particularly poignant. Sellers was another New Zealander who arrived in England in 1938 with a letter of introduction to Lord Astor, owner of The Times. Rather than deploying this straightaway, he walked into the office of the naval officer, writer and MP Stephen King-Hall and insisted that he had come all the way from New Zealand to work for him. King-Hall reluctantly sent him to Lancashire as his constituency representative, saying that he ‘wouldn’t last a week’. A year later, having charmed his way to great success, Sellers took his letter to Lord Astor and was offered a staff post on The Times, as well as broadcasting a weekly newsletter to New Zealanders for the BBC. Sellers joined the RAF in September 1940, qualified as a pilot but was judged unfit for combat duty and posted as an instructor. On 20 November 1941, his plane came in too low and, in an accident eerily reminiscent of the one in Hempstead a year later, crashed into a tree near Maidenhead. The pilot under instruction survived but Sellers did not.
