Obits

From the Telegraph

Father Harry Williams, who has died aged 86, was a member of the Anglican Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield, in West Yorkshire, and before he entered the monastic life in 1969 he spent 18 years as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, serving as Dean of Chapel from 1958.

[...]On another occasion he declared that he had received the Word of God from a Judy Garland film, and he complained that the Church of England's revised services were: "Clumsy constructions in flat, tired English made from assorted pieces of doctrinal Meccano."

His ethical views were no less startling and in his autobiography Some Day I'll Find You, written after he had become a monk, he discussed his own homosexuality and said of his Cambridge years, "I slept with several men, in each case fairly regularly. They were all of them friends.

"Cynics, of course, will smile, but I have seldom felt more like thanking God than when having sex. I used in bed to praise Him there and then for the joy I was receiving and giving."

And thenthis one. I am particularly fond of "ended her days as an alcoholic stroking a Pekinese":

Lady Sibell Rowley, who has died aged 98, was the last surviving daughter of the 7th Earl Beauchamp, KG, and thus a member of the family that inspired Evelyn Waugh to write his celebrated Roman Catholic novel Brideshead Revisited.

Sibell Lygon, the second of the four Lygon daughters, was born on October 10 1907. The eldest girl, Lettice, married Sir Richard Cottrell. The third daughter, Mary (or Maimie) Lygon, a beautiful blonde, married Prince Vselvolde of Russia, and ended her days as an alcoholic stroking a Pekinese; while the youngest daughter, Dorothy (Coote), endured an unfortunate late-life marriage to Robert Heber Percy, known as "Mad Boy", the eccentric squire of Faringdon and former boyfriend of Lord Berners. Of Sibell in childhood, Dorothy recalled: "She was rather a stormy petrel - and a great wielder of the wooden spoon; if mischief was going to be made, she made it."

[...]The daughters, aware of their father's nocturnal prowlings, would sometimes advise their boyfriends to lock their bedroom doors. Lord Beauchamp once complained at breakfast: "He's very nice that friend of yours, but he's damned uncivil!" Unfortunately, the problems proved more serious, concerning incidents with footmen, and as a result of a campaign instigated by his brother-in-law, Bendor, Duke of Westminster, Lord Beauchamp was forced into exile in Europe. The Duke tried to explain the circumstances to his sister, Lady Beauchamp, who failed to grasp the essentials. "Bendor says that Beauchamp is a bugler," she announced.

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