Queer Places:
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
Hon. Philip Charles Thomson Ritchie (May 18, 1899 - September 13,
1927) was born on 18 May 1899, the son of Charles Ritchie, 2nd Baron Ritchie of Dundee and Sarah Ruth Jennings.
He graduated from Trinity College, Oxford, with a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) A
contemporary of Cyril Connolly
at Oxford, Ritchie was a brilliant homosexual with whom both
Maurice Bowra and, later, Molly
MacCarthy had fallen hopelessly in love. Connolly had asked Bowra to make
"good blood" with Ritchie, who had become his "strongest fancy figure", in a
purely intellectual sense.
Ritchie
gained the rank of 2nd Lieutenant in the Suffolk Regiment.
The private letters of Lytton
Strachey reveal that Roger Senhouse
was his last lover, with whom he had a secretly sado-masochistic relationship
in the early 1930s. According to a letter, Lytton "anxiously hovered, blowing
hot and cold over Philip Ritchie, and alternately cold and hot over his
companion, Roger Senhouse." One time in London, Connolly bumped into into
Brian Howard, and together they
"scoured" the Embankment: they had no luck, he told Bowra, though they did
bump into
Eddy Sackville-West and Philip Ritchie - both homosexual, and both
presumably doing a bit of "scouring" themselves.
Raymond Mortimer and Ritchie
were the only Oxonian to be accepted by the Bloomsbury Group.
Philip Ritchie died aged 28 followsing a tonsillectomy on 13 September 1927.
In his diary, Connolly wrote: "Philip's death has given me a nasty jolt — it
is the fist time that someone who has played a serious though slight part in
my own life has actually died, someone whom my greatest friends have loved,
someone I would like to have slept with... though he never read anything and
never wrote he always seemed to me the most complete intellectual and the
quintessence of what was most Oxford. I sympathise with Maurice more than
Molly for the latter had a silly mainly physical love affair and to Maurice he
was a confessor and an ideal and his death must seem a kind of treachery." The
early death of Philip Ritchie at 28 made
Virginia Woolf feel like "an
elderly laggard" with "no right to go on."
Philip Charles Thomson Ritchie
by Ray Strachey
oil on board, 1925-1927
21 in. x 15 1/2 in. (533 mm x 394 mm)
Given by Barbara Strachey (Hultin, later Halpern), 1999
Reference Collection
NPG D221
Philip Charles Thomson Ritchie; Edward ('Eddy') Sackville-West
by Lady Ottoline Morrell
vintage snapshot print, 1926
2 7/8 in. x 3 7/8 in. (74 mm x 100 mm) image size
Purchased with help from the Friends of the National Libraries and the Dame Helen Gardner Bequest, 2003
Photographs Collection
NPG Ax142389
Philip Charles Thomson Ritchie; Lytton Strachey
by Lady Ottoline Morrell
vintage snapshot print, 1924
3 7/8 in. x 2 1/8 in. (97 mm x 54 mm) image size
Purchased with help from the Friends of the National Libraries and the Dame Helen Gardner Bequest, 2003
Photographs Collection
NPG Ax141563
Clifford Henry Benn Kitchin; Richard Jennings; John Kenneth Ritchie, 3rd Baron Ritchie of Dundee; Philip Charles Thomson Ritchie
by Lady Ottoline Morrell
vintage snapshot print, June 1924
2 7/8 in. x 3 7/8 in. (73 mm x 98 mm) image size
Purchased with help from the Friends of the National Libraries and the Dame Helen Gardner Bequest, 2003
Photographs Collection
NPG Ax141600
William David Hogarth; Lytton Strachey; Philip Charles Thomson Ritchie; Julian Vinogradoff (née Morrell)
by Lady Ottoline Morrell
vintage snapshot print, 1924
3 1/8 in. x 2 7/8 in. (78 mm x 74 mm) image size
Purchased with help from the Friends of the National Libraries and the Dame Helen Gardner Bequest, 2003
Photographs Collection
NPG Ax141562a
Dr Marten; Philip Charles Thomson Ritchie
by Lady Ottoline Morrell
vintage snapshot print, 1923
3 7/8 in. x 2 1/8 in. (98 mm x 54 mm) image size
Purchased with help from the Friends of the National Libraries and the Dame Helen Gardner Bequest, 2003
Photographs Collection
NPG Ax141565
Philip Charles Thomson Ritchie; Virginia Woolf
by Lady Ottoline Morrell
vintage snapshot print, June 1923
5 3/8 in. x 3 1/4 in. (135 mm x 83 mm) image size
Purchased with help from the Friends of the National Libraries and the Dame Helen Gardner Bequest, 2003
Photographs Collection
NPG Ax141311
Philip Charles Thomson Ritchie; Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson; Edward ('Eddy') Sackville-West
by Lady Ottoline Morrell
vintage snapshot print, 1922
2 1/8 in. x 3 1/2 in. (55 mm x 90 mm) image size
Purchased with help from the Friends of the National Libraries and the Dame Helen Gardner Bequest, 2003
Photographs Collection
NPG Ax141361
Lady Ottoline Morrell; Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith; Philip Charles Thomson Ritchie
possibly by Philip Edward Morrell
vintage snapshot print, 1922
1 3/4 in. x 2 5/8 in. (45 mm x 68 mm) image size
Purchased with help from the Friends of the National Libraries and the Dame Helen Gardner Bequest, 2003
Photographs Collection
NPG Ax141295
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