97R. Harrod to E. C.
Sackville-West,
4 December 1925
[a]
Harrod reports to
Sackville-West that internal faction within the Railway Club spoilt
the Club's dinner, which "in the last two years has always been for
[him] the event of term".
[1]
- 1. Harrod
later described the Club's meetings as follows: "We put on our
dinner jackets and had a dining car reserved on the train from
Oxford to Leicester. We dined on the journey out; at Leicester we
caught a return train and there followed speeches. Harold
[Acton] dominated the scene. The motion of the train
seemed to inspire him to embroider his utterances even more richly
than usual" (reminiscence printed in M.-J. Lancaster, Brian
Howard. Portrait of a Failure, 1968, p. 214). In commenting in
1973 (circa) on a 1926 picture taken at a meeting of the Club,
Harrod later described as follows some of the members of the club:
Henry Yorke (novelist under the name of Henry Green), Henry
Weymouth (later Lord Bath), David Plunkett-Green (who died young),
Henry Stavordale (later Lord Ilchester), Brian Howard (writer),
Michael Rosse (L. M. H. Parsons, vice-chancellor of Trinity
College Dublin, chairman of the Commission of Provincial Museums
and Galleries, and tireless worker in similar causes), John Sutro
(wit, founder of the Club), Hugh Lygon (who died young), Harold
Acton (writer, author of histories of Bourbons and Medicis), Bryan
Guinness (later Lord Moyne, poet and novelist), Patrick Balfour
(later Lord Kinross; voluminous author, including Life of
Ataturk), Mark Ogilvie Grant (who has lived many years in Athens),
Johnnie Drury-Lowe (of Christ Church), Evelyn Waugh, Robert Byron
and Richard Pares (historian) (HPBL Add. 72768/152). Most of these
people belonged to the Oxford group of aesthetes (on which see
note 3 to letter
80 R). Harrod described
another meeting of the club in his letter
82 R to Douglas Woodruff of 28 November 1924.
- a. From
Christ Church, Oxford # , ALS, two pages, in SWP
68905/34.
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