Queer Places:
Tidcombe Manor, Tidcombe, Marlborough SN8 3SL, UK
Socknersh Manor, Fontridge Ln, Burwash, Etchingham TN19 7DE, UK
40 South Eaton Place London S.W.

Paul Odo Cross (July 2, 1898 – February 1, 1963) was an a-ballet dancer and painter born in London, son of a surgeon in the Life Guards, Horatio Robert Odo Cross (1846–1915), and an American mother, Florence Temple Griswold (1867–1937), daughter of John Noble Alsop Griswold, American China trade merchant, industrialist, and diplomat. In 1911, they lived on Eaton Square and their home consisted of 21 rooms and they had eleven servants. His brother, Robert Odo St.Croix Cross (1906-1927), and sister, Dorothy Temple Cross (1895-1927), died within two days of each other in 1927, which made him sole heir. Cross lived in Mayfair in the 1920s and 1930s and was a friend and occasional lover of the artist and teacher Cedric Morris, for whom he purchased Benton End in 1939. Paul Odo Cross' longterm partner was Angus Wilson, a year or so younger than Cross, born in New Zealand, and an orchid grower and plant photographer (not the novelist of the same name with whom he is easily confused). Cross and Wilson lived in Tidcombe, Wiltshire, just over the border near Andover and the Tate catalogue links Cross with a house in Fordingbridge on the edge of the New Forest. They also had a house in Jamaica where one of them is said often to have worn his mother's pearls, especially when visiting Ian Fleming at his house Goldeneye. The pearls certainly belonged to Odo's mother, Mrs Florence Griswold Cross from Newport, Rhode Island. Odo Cross was the author of a delightful book for children, The Snail that Climbed the Eiffel Tower and Other Stories, illustrated by John Minton and published by John Lehmann in 1947. Cross and Wilson later became clients of Arthur Jeffress's gallery.

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• Arthur Jeffress: A Life in Art, Gill Hedley, Bloomsbury Publishing, Apr 2, 2020