Novelist, raconteur, recluse, devout Jehovah’s Witness, Baugh observed the human race with a jaundiced eye from his bed in the London Clinic, where he spent many years as a chronic victim of alcoholism, syphilis, paederastic compulsions and incontinence.
Every night, after his customary six bottles of vintage methylated spirits, Baugh would attempt to scrawl down some of his blurred impressions of the day. Often indecipherable, always illiterate, these diaries are nevertheless the very stuff of which immortal literature is made. ...
After his relatively uneventful schooldays, Baugh went up to Oxford. Here in the glittering world of the Gay Young Things — including Arnold Prout, Basil “Florrie” Meab and E.F. Bumme — many of whom were later to die so tragically in the backstreets of Algeciras — Baugh was in his element. He was enchanted by the wit, the elegance, the insouciant sophistication of post-war Oxford. It was the time of the famous ‘aesthetes’, including the legendary Hon. Sid Beloff, who kept a peacock in his rooms at Christchurch, and once astonished a group of passing rowing men by chanting at them through a megaphone Verlaine’s poem “Bonjour matelots”. ...
WHOUGH’S WHOUGH IN THE WHACKY WHORLD OF WHAUGH
HAROLD ACNE. Famous aesthete. A seminal influence on many of the brilliant Oxford generation of the 20’s. Retired at the age of 21 to famous Villa Puovi near Florence. Interested in Ming vases, Balinese temple sculptures and sailors. Books include Some Problems in Quattrocento Byzantine Iconography and Icon Give You Anything But Love, Sailor.