In January 1948, George Lucas, an unremarkable 21-year-old Roman Catholic who had just been demobbed from the Pay Corps, was living unhappily in Romford with his ill-matched parents, who relentlessly taunted him about his homosexuality. He would shortly get a job at the War Office and so embark on a lifetime’s career as a civil servant, commuting to central London every day to work at his desk and spend his evenings in search of sex and companionship, largely among the servicemen who hung around Marble Arch. In later life Lucas would trawl the pubs, streets and urinals of central London, more often than not paying for sex, and always keeping a detailed account of his exploits and expenses in his diaries.
When Lucas died in 2014 he left the diaries to Hugo Greenhalgh, who had first met him while working on a documentary about rent boys and their clients. The 56 volumes that survive cover the years 1948 to 2009, providing a daily record of Lucas’s life and opinions, amounting to some ten million words set down in his small, neat handwriting. These bulging notebooks are additionally stuffed with photos, newspaper clippings and other ephemera, and provide an extra-ordinary account of gay life during these years. If, as Greenhalgh observes, the diaries sometimes seem more Mr Pooter than Joe Orton, they will nevertheless be an invaluable source for future historians.
Selecting excerpts for publication from such a wealth of material presents a considerable challenge, and the volume Greenhalgh has assembled is largely devoted to the 1960s, though generously supplemented with diary entries from other decades. Around these Greenhalgh weaves a narrative that provides an overview of Lucas’s life, an analysis of his elusive and not always admirable character, and an account of the changing nature of gay life over half a century. Greenhalgh also tells the blackly comic story of his own relationship with Mr Lucas (as he always refers to him), and adds in related material about his experiences as a gay man himself. The result is an absorbing, illuminating, highly entertaining and often very funny book.
Although Lucas led what by any standards was a highly promiscuous life, his true goal was love. In February 1948, he wrote:
Unquestionably, my great desideratum has always been sympathy and affection. Not friendship, or even passion, so much as affection. Friendship is a good plodding drudge, that will not be overdriven; passion is a fine highmettled thoroughbred: but affection will carry one to the world’s end and back – or beyond, if need be.
He sought this in many unlikely places, tending to look for gold in coalmines, as E.M. Forster once put it. During the 1960s, for example, he fell for a violent rent boy and fence who became an associate of the Krays and for a long period made the diarist fear for his life and even contemplate murder. At other times, Lucas was threatened, beaten up and robbed by those he picked up, and in addition to being a lively if disenchanted record of the social life of queer men in London over several decades, these diaries provide vivid evidence of the kind of dangers to which these men were exposed as a direct result of homosexuality being a criminal offence.
A social conservative, Lucas observed the Swinging Sixties with considerable distaste, deploring the new generation’s lack of manners and decorum. Although he often lived in fear of the police and of exposure, he was essentially one of those men a friend dubbed ‘the pre-Wolfendens’, people who felt more at home in the necessarily furtive and secretive world of homosexuality before it was partially decriminalised in 1967. In an elegiac passage written in 1969 he compares himself to a man who had for a long time been locked out of a beautiful orchard:
But, at last, after years of squabble and contention, the orchard is thrown open and he passes through the gates to find the trees dying, strangled in mistletoe and ivy, the fruits few, crabbed and sour, or else succulent enough, ripe and exuding juice, but almost tasteless, all the old remembered tang and sweetness gone.
In a chapter rather uneasily devoted to the morality of paying for sex and the question of whether or not Lucas could be described as a ‘predator’, Greehalgh concludes that although much of what the diarist says and does is by modern standards deplorable, he admires ‘his resilience, his tenacity, and – to be frank – his ability to turn a good sentence’. One sometimes feels Lucas is deceiving himself, particularly when he wishes to square his devout Catholicism with his sexual activities, but it is indeed hard not to admire his staying power and feel gratitude for his determination and ability to record the not always pretty facts of queer life as it was for many men in the post-war decades.
More Mr Pooter than Joe Orton / George Lucas’s gay life in London
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17.05.2024
In January 1948, George Lucas, an unremarkable 21-year-old Roman Catholic who had just been demobbed from the Pay Corps, was living unhappily in Romford with his ill-matched parents, who relentlessly taunted him about his homosexuality. He would shortly get a job at the War Office and so embark on a lifetime’s career as a civil servant, commuting to central London every day to work at his desk and spend his evenings in search of sex and companionship, largely among the servicemen who hung around Marble Arch. In later life Lucas would trawl the pubs, streets and urinals of central London, more often than not paying for sex, and always keeping a detailed account of his exploits and expenses in his diaries.
When Lucas died in 2014 he left the diaries to Hugo Greenhalgh, who had first met him while working on a documentary about rent boys and their clients. The 56 volumes that survive cover the years 1948 to 2009, providing a daily record of Lucas’s life and opinions, amounting to some ten million words set down in his small, neat handwriting. These bulging notebooks are additionally stuffed with photos, newspaper clippings and other ephemera, and provide an extra-ordinary account of gay life........
© The Spectator
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