Participants (left to right): Declan, Darren, Anna, Ken, Liz, Mark, Ian, Jean, Ken, Rose, Nat, Mary, Jonathan, Charles Click on the image to enlarge

The sixteenth Dennis Wheatley Convention took place on 20th-22nd October at Dartington Hall, near Totnes in Devon. The venue was chosen because it was the inspiration for ‘Weylands School’, the setting for DW’s occult classic ‘The Haunting of Toby Jugg’.

The advance guard arrived on the Thursday to have more time to settle in...

...and to allow them to do some sightseeing on Friday

Because of logistics at the venue, Ken and Mary’s traditional cocktail party was moved to the first evening rather than the second evening of the proceedings.

For similar reasons, our gala dinner was moved to the Friday night, and held in the Solar Room.

Before the toasts, someone brought out some bottles of Hungarian Tokay for people to sample. Once described by DW’s daughter-in-law as ‘liquid sunshine’, it was too sweet for some tastes, but not mine!

As the plates were cleared, the toasts began. First was Jonathan, who gave the traditional toast to Dennis Wheatley. He was followed by Darren, who toasted absent friends. Here we particularly thought of Ken C, who was about to have a heart operation. Finally, Declan proposed the toast to the health of the entire company.

Before the proceedings got underway the next morning, we all posed (or in Ken’s case, lay under) Ken’s Convention banner.

Darren then treated us to an audio-visual prelude, starting with DW’s birth in 1897, charting us through the key events of his life and then going right up to up to the start of the sixteenth Convention. It was well done, and hilariously done. It was amazing how both the Goat of Mendes (if you were sharp-eyed) and the party-going DW had even managed to inveigle their way into some of our recent Conventions without payment!

After that, Charles brought in the programmes for the day, as usual in DW’s briefcase.

Darren began the day’s proceedings by giving a Dartington Update ‘III’.

Darren began by talking about Aleister Crowley (see the disturbingly animated picture above), the occultist whom DW met through MP Tom Driberg and who provided him with much of the information he used in ‘The Devil Rides Out’, outlining his various careers - he was, for example, a distinguished mountaineer, as well as a notorious occultist.

As well as knowing DW, Crowley also had a possible connection with Dartington Hall - it being rumoured that Leonard Elmhirst, the man who ran the ultra-progressive Dartington School on which DW based Weylands School in The Haunting of Toby Jugg, had reportedly been seen together with Aleister Crowley at an occult ceremony at a house in South Kensington. Maybe it was a co-incidence (or maybe it wasn’t) that Tom Driberg lived in South Kensington, although Crowley never did.

As Darren had detailed in a previous talk, MI5 had been charged with investigating Dartington, and the file, HO 144/21511/1, is largely available to the public in the National Archives. The final 24 pages have, however, been redacted. The final pages had been due to be released in 2023, but it not having happened, Darren had submitted a Freedom of Information Request, and just before the Convention, Darren had been advised that he would receive a reply by 26th October. Then, as he was coming down, he was advised that the missing pages will be available to view from 31st October. We can therefore look forward to a further update next year!

While we await that, Darren pointed out that ‘The Beast’ had a connection with nearby Torquay. Crowley had lost his virginity there at the age of fifteen, and had returned to live there for six months in 1940. After an initial stay at a hotel (where he did not pay his bill), he stayed at two residential addresses. The first had long been known, but the second had not been identified. Darren and his wife had now rectified that.

By its nature, this review can hardly do justice to Darren’s talk - it was extremely wide ranging and full of his customary detail. Among a host of interesting snippets, Darren pointed out that the name ‘Crowley’ is pronounced crow-ley like the name of the bird, rather than ‘crow-ley’ as if someone said the ‘cr’, and then an ‘ow’ as if they had been hurt; he also led us through the maze of possible influences, and people he has influenced, in the modern world. It has, for example, been suggested that AC has been reincarnated as the singer ‘Madonna’; now who would have imagined that? All-in-all, it was a wonderful - and wonderfully entertaining - talk, and we now look forward to ‘Update IV’.

After the coffee break, there was a group book review of ‘Julie’s Lovers’, DW’s first novel, partly written in 1917 while he was at the Front at Ypres, and partly when he was invalided home towards the end of the war.

Some people rated it higher than others, and Darren put things nicely - he said he had been slightly dreading it, and it was much better than he expected.

The general feeling was that while DW was writing his other books for money, he was writing this purely because he wanted to, and one saw it as an attempt - at least in parts - at serious literature.

It was generally agreed that many of the features that we now associate with a typical Wheatley novel were present even when he wrote this at the age of twenty/twenty one. There was a picnic, there was a car chase, and there was even an early reference to DW’s belief in reincarnation.

What struck one reader however was the way in which DW was able - and quite convincingly - to talk about grand strategy and about the decision making of the German High Command.

DW was showing his penchant for such things - and his ability to think about such things quite deeply - long before he became a strategist on Churchill’s staff in World War Two.

While there were no ‘info dumps’ in this early novel, it was also not lacking in an ability to make fictional mileage out of factual detail; as, for example, where Von Stolke boasts that the Germans have assassinated the one member of the British High Command who might have posed a serious threat to them, and who had been a former military attache in Berlin. This was a reference to General James Grierson, who had been military attache in Berlin in 1896, who decisively beat Douglas Haig in the Army Manoeuvres in 1912, and who died (in reality as far as we know of natural causes) shortly after his arrival in France.

All in all, it was considered well worth reading, and there was some surprise that DW had never revisited it and published it given that he had published one of the short stories he had written when he was a schoolboy, which was much less accomplished than this.

Lunch followed and the traditional group photo (see the top of the report), and then there was a group discussion of the Field Trip to Traben-Trarbach in Germany, which ten of the group had undertaken in July, and which followed on from a trip which Steve and Jean had made in 2013; one hundred years after a young DW’s stay there to learn about the wine trade, and on which they had reported at that year’s Convention.

For a full account of the visit, see the Field Trip Report.

Following the tea break, Charles gave a talk on ‘The search for Dennis Wheatley’s Possessions’.

Referring to DW as ‘The man who never threw anything away’, Charles gave an example by displaying (see above) the map that DW had used while on active service in World War One, which DW had kept and had framed. DW had also put stickers on the back in later life showing that he originally intended it to be illustrated in his autobiography, and that he wanted his son Anthony to have it when he died.

Charles went through the various (there were not many) sales that DW made during his life, and what had happened to what remained after his death. This included the famous sale by Blackwell’s of DW’s Library (where some extremely valuable items never even made it as far as the catalogue) and the curious sale of fifteen boxes of his possessions, including family portraits, made at an obscure auction house a few years after DW’s death, where Charles was not the only person to wonder if these personal effects had in effect been stolen.

Charles finished by summarising what had been missing and has now been found, what is still missing, and by talking about what has been found and is as yet unpublished. He sought to rectify the latter by circulating at the end of his talk a second volume of ‘Unpublished Wheatley’, this one entitled ‘Dennis Wheatley: An Unpublished Miscellany’, which with his thanks again to Dominic Wheatley for his permission, Charles was making available to the group as a numbered limited edition on the same basis as its predecessor, ‘Julie’s Lover’s’.

Charles’s talk was followed by something completely different - a ‘practical’ talk by Ken and Declan on ‘mixology’, or more accurately, mixology with a practical and a DW perspective.

Cocktails feature prominently in DW’s works (note Rex van Ryn’s advice on the subject: ‘Cocktails were made to be swallowed, not tasted. Never give a guy a large cocktail - but plenty of ’em - make ’em dry, and drink ’em quick. Come on boys, it takes a fourth to make an appetite! Here’s to crime.’)

Ken and Declan gave us a practical talk on three cocktails - the ‘Dry Martini’ (apparently invented by a bartender named Jerry Thomas living in the town of Martinez in the 1880s), the Vodka Martini, and the ‘Champagne cocktail’.

In each case, they grounded it in literature, discussed how it was made, and then - handing out the ingredients and mini-shakers to their audience - got them to make them for themselves, and try them.

Among their many throwaways was DW’s advice that clear cocktails were to be stirred and not shaken. Contrast this with Ian Flaming/ James Bond’s ‘shaken and not stirred’ maxim. Was this IF seeking to differentiate himself from DW?

What an event Ken and Declan gave us!

I suspect they may have been going to extend on to other cocktails, but our enthusiasm for the tasting prevented them.

The Convention then closed with a brief discussion about next year’s Convention, and what might appear in it. Anna is going to step down as head organiser and everyone thanked her for her marvellous organisation of this and previous Conventions. Ken G very kindly offered to take over as head organiser. The dates for the next Convention were provisionally set for October 25-27, and the venue as Dartington, but both of these are subject to confirmation.

...and with next year’s Convention in prospect, thus ended our sixteenth Convention.

C.T.H.B
December 2023

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