Springcleaning – Book 9 “The Crichel Boys” by Simon Fenwick

When getting to grips with a pile of books to be read I often find that I get stuck on one or two. It’s not that I hate them particularly but that they don’t engage me enough and so my attention wanders to other reading material. For my Springcleaning Challenge I am attempting to read 25 books which have lingered on my to-be-read pile for far too long. The Crichel Boys by Simon Fenwick was bought new some years ago and yet has never been read. I have finally tackled it and it’s a book that took me far too long to finish because I got a bit stuck.

This is a non-fiction book about the friends and connections of three men who purchased an old rectory in the village of Crichel in Dorset and set it up as a home and also as a place where other people involved in the arts, music, critical writing, painting literature and culture could meet each other and share ideas and experiences. The rectory was bought just after WW2 and used almost to the end of the twentieth century. The people who were invited and whose stories are told in this book were minor aristocrats, early employees of the National Trust, painters, architects, historians, surgeons, writers and early employees of the BBC. They were at the cutting edge of culture and society and mostly knew each other, were related to each other or were in a sexual relationship with each other. Many of them were eccentric and they weren’t all very nice.

The rectory was also a haven for those whose sexuality was not publically acceptable at the time. The men who owned the rectory were gay or bisexual and so were many of their visitors. Their relationships were complicated and usually within the larger group so people fell in and out of love with each other or slept with each other – I lost track quite early on and couldn’t remember who was with whom or who anybody had been in a relationship with in the past.

The people in this book are mostly known to me by name because of other books I have read about sets such as the Bloomsbury Group and biographies of writers at the time which was, I think, why I had bought it in the first place. Virtually all of them were privileged people. Many lived off inherited income or got jobs because of who they knew. Most of them had more than one home and although many claimed some sort of poverty it wasn’t poverty that would have been recognised by the dwellers of inner city slums at the time. When the “lower” classes are mentioned they are criticised or dismissed as a nuisance or an irrelevance.

I wanted to enjoy this book and learn about these people who have very much shaped our modern culture but the book was just one anecdote after another and I wasn’t always sure how people connected. I got no sense of how the house operated as a haven for the intelligentsia or of how significant it was in the world of these people. It was a book that was more easily put down than picked up, at least for me, although I did find some of it interesting. I don’t think that this is a book I would reread so it is going to be gifted to Oxfam in the hope that it will find a reader who will enjoy it more than I did.