Harry Daley (1901-1971):
”My life has been delightful and given a chance by God or somebody of another life at the end of this then I’d say without hesitation, Same Again, please!”
Because I am a geezer, I was late to appreciate the considerable talents of Harry Styles. Now that I see the appeal, I listened to his music, and like a teenage girl or gay, I was trembling with excitement to watch film My Policeman, directed by celebrated gay theatre director Michael Grandage. Based on the novel of the same name by Bethan Roberts, and starring Styles, nonbinary actor Emma Corrin, and gay actor Rupert Everett, the movie is a bit of a mess, but still of interest to queer fans. Set in the 1950s, it’s about a gay English policeman named Tom marries a schoolteacher named Marion while being in a relationship with Patrick, a museum curator. The secret they share threatens to ruin them all.
Considering My Policeman, I go to the tale of Mae Buckingham, wife of gay writer E.M Forster‘s lover of 40 years, the policeman Bob Buckingham. I knew from my research that despite the struggles that they had in sorting out how a three-way relationship might work, particularly in an era when being a queer could land you in prison, it is a gripping and sexy story.
Besides being the lover of Forster, Daley had an affair with gay Edwardian writer J.R. Ackerley. It was Daley who introduced fellow policeman Buckingham to Forster in 1930, and their love affair continued, perhaps even intensified, after Buckingham got married. The Buckinghams accommodated Forster in their relationship, with the wife enjoying his company before handing off the writer to her husband for the weekends. Only someone with Forster’s skill and imagination could have maintained such a daring, yet sweet, relationship over so many years. When Forster died of a stroke in 1970 at 91 years old, at the Buckingham home, it was Mae who was with him, holding his hand as he left this world. Forster’s ashes, mingled with those of Buckingham, are scattered in the rose garden of the town’s crematorium.
Daley was on the periphery of the Bloomsbury Group also, and enjoyed assignations with several of it’s members, including Duncan Grant, who painted his portrait. The Bloomsbury Group were an English bunch that spent a lot of time drinking, taking drugs and speaking to each other about aesthetics, criticism, feminism, pacifism, sexuality, and apparently, economics. I have done plenty of posts about their little club. In 1905 this group of writers, artists and intellectuals began to meet at the London home of the artist Vanessa Bell and her writer sister Virginia Woolf. The meetings continued for the next 30 years.
Daley’s father drowned in a shipping disaster of 1911. and Daley moved in with relatives in 1916, enjoying his boyhood in the peaceful days of the Edwardian era, brought to an abrupt end with the outbreak of World War I.
In his posthumously published, delicious memoir, This Small Cloud (1987), Daley writes that his lack of ambition led him to take the first real job that came along, a delivery boy for a grocery store. He had lots of customers that he kept very happy, if you get what I mean.
Daley understood that he was queer at an early age. He writes that he always felt different from other children. Lonely, he immersed himself in books, the theatre and art galleries. When his well-meaning guardians and neighbors tried to set him up with some girl, he knew this was not what he wanted:
”Throughout my life I have had a recurrent nightmare in which, having just been married, I lead my beautiful bride to the church door. At this point I cry out in despair ‘Oh what a bloody fool I am’ and I wake sweating gradually realizing that I have not really ruined two lives.”
He saw nothing wrong in being gay or in enjoying close relationships with other men. In 1914, he met a young sailor with the perfect name, Nobby Clark. Very soon rumors were spreading. Threatened with punishment and prison, Daley could not believe love and affection were things to be ashamed of. He viewed his relationships as only having done him good and certainly no harm.
He joined the police force in 1925 and was soon aware that his gayness was widely known both among his fellow officers and his superiors. Although he took the jokes and comments stoically, he still felt the same prejudice that he felt as a boy. His policy was always not to deny his being gay nor to allow them to have power over him.
Here’s what he had to say about male vanity on joining the Metropolitan Police in 1925:
“The instructors were hand-picked and first-rate. Some were rather vain and all the better for it; vanity is tiresome only when the person pretends to be modest. Some of my best friends have been kept permanently happy and good-natured by the attractive pictures constantly reflected from their looking-glass; and it must be everyone’s experience that attractive people are always ready and willing to jump into bed to give pleasure, whereas one has only to ask the right time of a person with bad teeth and pebble glasses, for them to rush off to the telephone and dial 999.”
He met Ackerley, after being stationed in Hammersmith as a constable. He writes that they met casually on the street early one morning and by pleasant chance it turned out in conversation that Daley, who was an avid theatergoer, had seen a production of Ackerley’s pioneering gay-themed play The Prisoners Of War. This was the start of a long, indeed a lifelong, friendship, and through Ackerley, Daley became friendly with Ackerley’s literary and artistic acquaintances, among them Grant and Forster.
Daley was persuaded by Ackerley, who was then working for the BBC, to make some radio broadcasts on the Home Service, talking about his experiences ‘on the beat’ and the criminal activity on London’s streets. Reluctantly Daley agreed and the broadcasts were later published in The Listener, a weekly magazine established by the BBC in 1929 which ceased publication in 1991. Daley’s pieces were first published in January 1929. Later, in the 1940s, he wrote some of short stories and submitted them to Ackerley, now literary editor of The Listener but none were ever published. However, Ackerley encouraged Daley to write his memoirs after his retirement from the police.
In 1926, Daley, as part of the Bloomsbury Group, began his relationship with Forster, who found him worryingly indiscreet. Forster was convinced that Daley’s behavior was going to get them all arrested. The Bloomsbury Group were known for their unconventional personalities and lifestyles more than for their art. They came from wealthy backgrounds, which had given them social advantages and self-confidence. They were all linked by a spirit of rebellion against what they saw as the unnecessary conventions, restraints and double standards of the generation before. They wanted freedom to develop their own ideas and lifestyles. They were politically liberal. They also had liberal ideas about sex, which meant there were often complicated relationships and affairs between the various members of the Bloomsbury circle.
Daley took up with Grant, who painted a portrait of him in uniform. In this circle he also had affairs with Edward Sackville-West and other figures in their literary, artistic and musical world.
His social life in the late 1920s and early 1930s was certainly gay, gay, gay and all-embracing. There were all sorts of parties where men fell in love with him. but Daley was always attracted to what he described as normal men, older, rougher and stronger than himself.
Just short of retirement from the police, Daley became Master-At-Arms in the British Merchant Navy. He faced the prospect of coming out to new friends, superiors and colleagues. And again, he had to deal with the whispering, the sniggering, and the insults. Once again, he would bear all those things.
The last part of his life was quieter. He retired from the Merchant Navy and moved back to Surrey where he gardened at his cottage where his only companion was his Siamese cat. He died in 1971 and his ashes were scattered on Box Hill, the highest point in Surrey.
Living at a time when any and all sexual contact between males was a criminal offence that could lead to a prison sentence and a life ruined, he was both way ahead of his time and a reminder that the past isn’t really the place we always think it is.
