Partner George Hayim
Queer Places:
12 Beauchamp Pl, Knightsbridge, London SW3 1NQ, UK
Anthony Heckstall-Smith (1904-1983) was an English author. Among his books are: Tobruk, The story of a siege, Eighteen Months, The consort, A Romantic Fantasy, Sacred Cowes or the Cream of Yachting Society, Greek Tragedy, 1941, Come Cruising, The Man with Yellow Shoes, Where There Are Voltures, Crime Without Punishment, Murder on the Brain, Company of Strangers, The Fleet That Faced Both Ways. The Consort is a satire, suppressed before publication in England, due to its perceived anti-Royal subject matter. It was subsequently published in the U.S.A. in 1965 with two dustwrappers - one showing the queen dressed and one showing her nude.
When WWII interrupeted the run of his play, Juggernaut, at the Saville Theatre, Heckstall-Smith joined the minesweepers of the RNVR.
It was in Hyde Park that George Hayim met his principal wartime lover, Lieutenant Commander Anthony Heckstall-Smith, who had joined the Cleopatra after Hayim had left. Stationed at the naval barracks in Southend, he informed Hayim that his father had been in charge of George V’s yacht, Britannia. Hayim quite liked the idea of being with ‘royalty’ and Heckstall-Smith’s royal connection endeared him to Hayim’s mother, who treated her son’s lover as: any Society woman might treat a gentleman who had shown a romantic interest in her marriageable offspring. George and his mother tried to get Heckstall-Smith to tell them why he had received the Distinguished Service Cross (DSC), one of the highest honours that can be awarded in the Navy: ‘He was very British about it all: he said it all had something to do with torpedo-boats in Crete.’
After WWII, Heckstall-Smith ghosted many titles (most of the list it seemed) for Allan Wingate. A typical Wingate book of those days was the memoirs of Puttlitz, a high-born Prussian diplomat who had defected to East Berlin, in whose queer bars, Heckstall-Smith and his publisher, Charles Fry, had a lovely romp. In London Heckstall-Smith shared a office in the piano nobile of 12 Beauchamp Place with Fry. But after Tony Gibbs decided to go into liquidation, Heckstall-Smith was left without a publisher. Anthony Blond had just started up in the back room of his house in Chester Row, so Heckstall-Smith became one of his regulars, along with Simon Raven, Isabel Colegate and Burgo Partridge.
Anthony Heckstall-Smith died in poverty of emphysema in Brighton.
My published books:
