Not Behind Lace Curtains: The Hidden World of Evan, Viscount Tredegar

A New book explores the sexual and black mass shenanigans of Evan Frederic Morgan, the last Viscount Tredeger, of Tredegar House, South Wales


A sensational new book ‘Not Behind Lace Curtains’  from author William Cross, FSA Scot, ( the controversial biographer of  Almina, Countess of Carnarvon, and the instigator of lurid tales about other society women ) spills the beans on the toffs once again.

This time  Cross extols on a British Peer of the Realm’s hidden world of illegal homosexual vice; he even sweeps one British Prime Minister with those involved.

The Peer’s favorite sport was chasing  ”rough trade” [ rent boys],  as well as celebrating Black Mass in Welsh churchyards, and near  the Sussex Downs with disciples of The Great Beast 666, the occultist Aleister Crowley. In the end his luck ran out when his ‘right trusty cousin’ Queen Mary discovered compromising photographs of her family in the man’s company.  

1. To mark the one-hundred-and-tenth birthday year of the eccentric Welsh aristocrat, Hon. Evan Frederic Morgan (1893-1949), a sensational new book – ‘Not Behind Lace Curtains : The Hidden World of Evan, Viscount Tredegar’ (Book Midden Publishing, ISBN 97819059142334 (Hardback) ISBN 9781905914210 ( Paperback) is now available.

2. This book is  a sequel by William Cross  to ‘Aspects of Evan, the Last Viscount Tredegar’ ( Book Midden Publishing, ISBN 9781905914159 ) (Paperback), published in December last-year.

The new title runs through more aspects of the incomparable Evan, uplifting threads from his remarkable life and times.

3. Evan was one of the most talked about Peers of his era, a millionaire, a legislator, a twice-married homosexual, a Catholic convert, a Papal Chamberlain, a poet, a great Society host and  a seasoned traveller – a veritable ‘fairy prince of modern life’.    William Cross spares nothing in the new assault:

He comments: “Evan’s untold story still provokes a chill.
You won’t find anything here about him opening garden fetes!!!!!  Instead, the book tackles the man’s foibles and darker personality extremes, including his carnal and occult swings.  

Evan had a fetish for chasing “rough trade” ( in other words, rent boys ) They  satisfied his  bent, sadistic gay proclivities. Society luminaries turned a blind eye to his sexploits which can be summed up as
‘ brandy, sodomy and the lash’…..

I try to unravel something about the puzzle of how Evan got away with constantly breaking the law in the 30 odd years before he died in 1949, remember this was a time of legal clamp down on homosexuals.  Was he protected by his Royal relations and the other knobs of the Establishment, inside the usual old boy’s network? A Savile-like cover-up,  of the high and all mighty closing ranks, laughing off  one of their number’s sordid, vile deeds.    

Time scale wise the narrative is played out with a smattering of  heroes and villains between 1901  and 1949.  The book’s title comes from Evan himself,  he was planning a publication, but of course it never happened nor could happen at this time of homosexual persecution.  What a book that would have been, a book that was sufficiently thought through to have illustrations by Nina Hamnett, designed to raise more than an eyebrow from the women in the lending library.

I especially  wanted to test the extraordinary claims contained in several stories of  Evan’s loyal disciple, [ some would say victim] the late Robin Bryans ( a.k.a. Robert Harbinson) ( a travel writer )  a notable thorn in the Establishment flesh in the 1980s and 1990s.  Evan corrupted Bryans as a youth of sixteen, whilst ( it’s possible) he was sharing Evan’s bed at the same time as that of the Soviet spy Guy Burgess.”   

4. A colossal line-up of odd and alarming deaths amongst Evan’s contemporaries is catalogued by Cross, who explains further: 

“ The death toll of Evan’s chums from the 1920s onwards  makes a  suspicious statistic in itself with nearly a dozen young males killed off  beyond the emasculation suffered by  the British peerage in the Great War.

Among the noble corpses are  Hon. Guy Colebrooke (from a hereditary disease ), Sir Guy ‘Fatty’ Laking ( actress Tallulah Bankhead’s chum, from alcohol poisoning), Lord ‘Ned’ Lathom ( the playwright, from T.B. ),  Hon. James Rodney ( in a curious house fire that took the life also of a young French Duke), Peter Watson ( a gay art collector, whose father’s title was bought in the Lloyd George-Maundy Gregory Honours scandal ) and Sir Johnnie Philipps, a young Welsh baronet, a lover of crazy gaiety. These last two drowned in their bath tubs, or did they?  All these fellows lived short, sordid lives or half-lives buzzing around Evan, fueled by intrigue, money, narcotics, booze and sexual dalliances.  Besides this, Evan’s two closest women friends, Nancy Cunard and Nina Hamnett suffered violent endings to their lives.  Evan’s friendship was a kind of curse for many folk.

An equally high  toll of suicides can be found in Evan’s circle of social and sexual contacts including  Christopher ( Kit ) Wood ( the 1920s artist ), Peter Warlock ( the composer, like Evan a follower of the Great Beast,  Crowley ), Brian Howard ( Evan’s constant teaser ); these folk were all in close range of Evan’s allure. A couple of the suicides  are of people not  well-known, Richard Rumbold ( a writer/ diarist,  a favourite of Harold Nicolson ) and Hon. Gerard Sturt, elder brother of the dilettante, arch-bugger, Lord Naps Alington, Gerald and Naps were brothers of Evan’s first wife, the glamorous actress Hon. Lois Sturt.”

5. Cross traces Evan’s sexual abuse at the hands of predators, followed by his expulsion, from Eton College “under a cloud” . A compelling proposition arises of a homosexual triangle around Evan, implicating another boy who later went on  to become Prime Minister of Britain with their mutual friend who was afterwards a distinguished Catholic priest and Oxford don.

6. The adventures in the lives of another group  of Evan’s Eton nocturnal and occult pals are outlined over several decades  through their subsequent ( often shared ) experiences of socializing with Evan in London clubs and restaurants and the sin dens of Oxford, North Africa, Paris, Rome and Berlin, before and during the two Wars, leading to spectacular exile for  some of them after being caught up in skullduggery. The list of characters includes  Hon. Peter Spencer (one of the famous Churchill family, later 2nd Viscount Churchill), James Lonsdale Bryans (whose mission for Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax in the Second World War could have completely changed the outcome of history) and a Peer descendant of the gallant Admiral Rodney, whose claim to fame is being the World’s first-ever boy scout, an association that provoked Robin Bryans to charge Evan and others, including some high placed friends as pederasts, citing those who arranged boys for sex and bath house frolics in  London’s  East End with Royalty.  A 1000 acre pig farm in wild Alberta, Canada, became a sanctuary for Evan, Royal Princes, Society rejects, crooks and perverts.

7. The book’s coverage includes a unique insight by Cross into Evan’s relationships with a galaxy of his contemporaries, and participation in black mass rituals in country churchyards, and an in-depth look at the strange relationship between Evan and the Great Beast 666, Aleister Crowley, who visited Evan in South Wales, in 1943.

8. These aforementioned figures in Evan’s timeline were a big part of  Evan lifespan, they clung to his memory even after he was dead;  but these figures are amongst the hidden people displaced by a series of  conspiracies. All birds of a feather whose lives were crushed,  doomed to banishment, death, suicide, penury and gagging-writs their true testimonies are completely erased.  Yet, as Cross points out “ .. an uneasiness still lies upon certain heads in Establishment and in Royal circles at the prospect of any leakage emerging from the suppressed autobiographies of Evan- linked- figures.”  It was Queen Mary who eventually called time on Evan’s rascality, especially when naked photographs of members of her own family were paraded in front of her eyes.

9. As with Evan’s own mysterious black box of documents and papers that made up his life’s secrets and contacts, whose contents were expunged by Evan’s branch of the same Royal family,  whilst those whom Evan knew that were caught up in his or their own illegal and bizarre sexual and political games had their residences visited and searched by Men from the Ministry,  papers seized, shredded and torched on a scale to equal the bonfires by the Nazis’ at Berlin’s Opernplatz.

10. William Cross is available for interview. He can be contacted directly at williecross@aol.com

If you have any questions regarding information in this Press Release please contact William Cross, as above.

‘Not Behind Lace Curtains : The Hidden World of Evan, Viscount Tredegar’  is available directly from the author, or via  Amazon, Alibris, and other internet sites.   

The book is 376 pages in length, with over 100 photographs.

Copies of ‘Aspects of Evan: The Last Viscount Tredegar : With a transcript of his Court Martial for Offences Against the Official Secrets Acts’ is also still available.

A very limited number of books will be published. This book is bound to become a collectible.

Contact William Cross  by e-mail  williecross@aol.com

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