Gerald Hamilton

Life

Born Gerald Frank Hamilton Souter in Shanghai on 1 November 1890, but educated at Lambrook preparatory and Rugby School in England, he counted among his friends Winston Churchill, Robin Maugham, Tallulah Bankhead and Christopher Isherwood, who wrote of Hamilton's remarkable personality and frequently shady dealings in his literary memoir Christopher and His Kind.

Hamilton father was a businessman of Scottish descent with commercial interests in China, his mother was English. Hamilton converted to Roman Catholicism. He hinted that his lineage was "faintly ducal", but it is unknown if he was directly related to anyone with a title. According to Anthony Powell all that had to be done to disprove that claim was to look it up … when the father and grandfather named by him would not be found He was interned in the United Kingdom during the First World War because, he claimed, of his association with Roger Casement, the Irish nationalist later executed for treason. Hamilton's own homosexuality was only a thinly veiled secret. Churchill had the Communist-sympathising Hamilton temporarily interned during the Second World War because of his vocal opposition to the war.

He was employed at various times by The Times as its German sales representative; as a fixer for Willi Münzenberg, "the notorious communist, who presides in Berlin on behalf of Moscow over the doings of the League Against Imperialism and Friends of Soviet Russia" (as British Intelligence described him); and as a go-between or informer by various agencies, including Sinn Féin, Special Branch, and the British Military Mission in Berlin. At one time he shared accommodation with "the Great Beast", Aleister Crowley.

He served prison sentences for bankruptcy, theft, gross indecency and being a threat to national security

Hamilton served as the model for Isherwood's character Arthur Norris in his novel Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) (published in the U.S. as The Last of Mr. Norris). Hamilton derived from this the title for his own memoir, Mr. Norris and I, which was published in 1956. An earlier memoir by Hamilton, As Young as Sophocles, was published in 1937, while a third memoir, The Way it Was With Me, was published in 1969 — all three books giving wholly different versions of even the most basic biographical information. Other accounts of Hamilton's life provide further obfuscation: Robin Maugham’s five-part "exposé" in the The People was in fact concocted in collusion with Hamilton, while John Symonds's Conversations with Gerald (1974) allowed Hamilton to spin yet more yarns.

Apart from Hamilton's works of autobiography, his books include Jacaranda, an account of a trip to South-Africa; Emma in Blue, about Lady Emma Hamilton and particularly her friendship with Marie Caroline of Austria while in Naples; and Blood Royal, a history of Queen Victoria's immediate descendants and relatives in Europe, and the haemophilia that afflicted the family. Hamilton died in 1970.

In popular culture

Later in his life Hamilton became friends with John Symonds, author and editor, who wrote Conversations with Gerald about their acquaintance. There is a classic account of Hamilton in later life in Robin Maugham's second volume of autobiography, Search for Nirvana (1979). Hamilton was portrayed by Toby Jones in the BBC production Christopher and His Kind (2011).

Works