‘The Boys’
The Sussex Beacon is a charity which helps people living with HIV. In 2018, in the Sussex Beacon’s gorgeously chaotic charity shop, on London Road in Brighton, I found a hardback book in the gay bit. It was called The Boys. This book, The Boys, by Christopher Fitz-Simon, is a history — “a double biography” — of Irish actors and theatre entrepreneurs Micheál Mac Liammóir and Hilton Edwards, who together founded The Gate Theatre in Dublin: not only very significant figures in the history of Irish theatre, but also an acknowledged and accepted gay couple in extremely hostile times. Éibhear Walshe called them “Ireland’s only visible gay couple”. Just the previous week, my boyfriend and I had watched The Trial of Oscar Wilde, a Granada TV production starring Micheál Mac Liammóir as Wilde. We hadn’t noticed the name and didn’t make the connection until much later. There is much which is fascinating about Mac Liammóir, and about Edwards, both of whom exaggerated aspects of their lives to seem more Irish — Mac Liammóir in particular.
They sound fascinating, but they were completely new names to me. What grabbed me, the reason I bought the book immediately: it was absolutely covered in writing. In fact — I called my boyfriend over, convinced I had found treasure, and we asked the lovely man working at the shop to hold the book for us while we sloped back home up Hanover Hill to get cash enough to buy it. Which we did. It was a sunny day; we bought lunch from the beautiful man in the bakery in the market, and sat down on The Level, to see just what it was we’d got hold of. Starting on the inside front cover of The Boys, and across about fifteen of the following pages, all available white-space was covered in a long list: a glittering roster or catalogue of famous names from another era.
The handwriting was often unsteady, likely that of an elderly person. Mostly black ink, sometimes blue. This list included several subtitles (places, dates) but the overall title, a few pages in, seemed to be “These I Have Known”. In the index of The Boys, the name Brock, Patrick, was marked with an asterisk, and so was the appearance of that name in the acknowledgements, and its appearance (just once) in the actual text. In the inside back cover was a list of places, beginning in the UK and then globally, of which seven were underlined: Paris, Cairo, Petra, The Bridge, New York, Empire State, Statue Of Liberty. From Cairo onward, unlike the lists of people, these places were all in capital letters — except for the letter ‘i’, always lowercase.
Playing Egosmith
Patrick Brock was an Irish actor. He had been strongly involved with the Gate Theatre from the 1930s onwards. We found only one text about him online, an obituary by David Godolphin, who seemed to have been a friend of Brock’s. This obituary told us that Brock’s last stage appearance had been in 1959, and his last TV appearance in 1983. His actor’s card was slipped inside The Boys (the image below is not this, but is a similar document I found online, and it uses one of the photos on the card). From the card, we learned this about Patrick Brock:
Height: 6’
Chest: 38"
Waist: 32"
Inside leg: 33½"
Collar 15½"
Suit size: 38
Shoes: 8
Gloves: 8
Hair: silver
Eyes: blue-grey
Member of Equity: also see Spotlight
Yet it was very difficult to find out anything else about him, to the extent that this copy of The Boys, which we had to assume several decades ago had belonged to him, seemed like a primary source. In 2019 I’d been commissioned to do something, anything, for an American arts radio station. My boyfriend and I decided to split the hour into two half-hours of spoken word, and to dedicate one of them to a sketchy account of this figure, Patrick Brock, and of how this book had led us to him. We did discover that Brock had written a column for the cinema magazine Classic Images, called “These I Have Known”, in which he recounted celebrity anecdotes. When this finished, he wrote a similar column in Hollywood Studio Magazine, well into the 1990s, called “I Once Knew Them”. My boyfriend and I discovered that he had kept up long correspondences with some people, including Gloria Swanson and Joan Crawford. We imagined that one day we would go to Dublin, to find the archive which held those letters.
Patrick Brock seemed to enjoy moving in circles extremely close to many famous people, yet never became a celebrity himself. These days, there is a little more about him online, but not much. He now has an IMDB page, and it looks like quite a few of his many small TV roles were uncredited. (I remember we were both a touch disappointed that he’d never shown up in Doctor Who — surely everyone did that?) The list of names in The Boys, “These I Have Known”, which I began transcribing in 2019 but did not finish, ran to hundreds of people.
On page 86, where Brock had asterisked his name, it was because he was cited attesting to the fact that James Mason and Micheál Mac Liammóir did not get on, during a 1936 production of Lady Precious Stream:
In 1992 the actor Patrick Brock, who joined the company for the same production and in whose home Mason stayed for a short time, said ‘the two men were not sympathetic’.
The Boys doesn’t actually mention that the production was in 1936. We know it was because Patrick Brock added the year in pen, in the margin. He added a few things to the margins of this volume, but they were very sparse compared to the density of the lists of names he wrote in the front and back. To this remark from Betty Chancellor, when she was touring in Tangiers in 1936:
The stars, Hilton and Micheál, are being very grand, and staying at the Continental-Savoy!
Brock added:
I stayed here 1946
And to the mention of the character Egosmith, suggested to the playwright Mary Manning by Samuel Beckett, Brock added the annotation:
I played Egosmith in London in 1937
The character of Egosmith seems to me to have been well-cast: he is “a barman who never speaks, but listens to everyone”: it had begun to feel as if Brock was doing something similar, never really emerging, but standing in the wings and listening, to anything and everything. “These I Have Known”, this sprawling list, seemed like an off-the-cuff index to a vast mental archive of overheard stories or anecdotes all witnessed from the periphery.
These marginal moments where Patrick Brock felt the need to add detail were interesting, and became increasingly bittersweet. Outside of The Boys, we found references to “a legend” in which Brock discovered the film star Peggy Cummins; indeed that it was he who introduced her to The Gate Theatre. This report appeared many times, and never cited its source, so we couldn’t but wonder whether that source was Brock himself — especially when we noticed that this anecdote was never once printed without adding, afterwards, that Peggy Cummins herself had described it as “absolutely nonsense”. This “legend”, Brock’s discovery of a film star, was a story only ever told so that it could immediately be rubbished by its subject.
Cecil Brock
Another of this curious man’s curious, glinting appearances in the life of a star is described in footnote number 249 of Beyond Paradise: The Life of Ramon Novarro by Andre Soares:
In a 1991 article for the Hollywood Magazine, Patrick Brock states that in 1967 he found a critically ill Novarro at his London hotel room and rushed him to hospital. Brock also recounted having met Novarro several times during the actor’s trips to England [...]
But what if this too was “absolutely nonsense”, as Cummins would have said? The footnote continues:
Yet, although Novarro wrote letters to a Cecil Brock in England, no correspondence or mention of Patrick Brock could be found in his personal documents. Additionally, there is no indication that Novarro visited England after 1960.
This is so glancing an oddness that Soares’s book doesn’t follow it up, and fair enough. We did, though. In Ramon Novarro’s letters, Cecil Brock seems to have had a more successful career than Patrick: stage (including roles at The Gate Theatre), film, and radio — in particular, in 1956/7, he appeared in Mrs Dale’s Diary for the BBC, notable for being the first significant radio serial, and for including an early example of a sympathetically represented gay man in broadcast drama (though Cecil’s part was far more minor.) There also turned up a tiny letter in Picturegoer magazine, in which Miss M Cassidy, of Hampton, Middlesex, wrote, on November the 5th, 1955:
I should like to see that charming Irish actor Cecil Brock get better parts.
The parts he did get were, of course, Patrick’s too; ‘Cecil’ was a stage name, one which for some reason he had used while on intimate terms with Ramon Novarro. From Godolphin’s obituary we learned that it was, perhaps, slightly more than a stage name. Patrick would sometimes claim that Cecil Brock was his father.
Patrick and Cecil Brock died in April 1999 in Denville Hall, which is a North London retirement home for actors. (For actors! I didn’t know such places existed.) Apparently, his razor-sharp memory for celebrity anecdotes persisted til the end, and he would delight fellow residents by remembering to them their own lives and careers in far more detail than they could themselves.
However The Boys ended up in a Brighton charity shop — and you do have to wonder whether it was the redistribution of a library, following a death — it was a remarkable thing to find, and certainly something I’ve always intended to come back to, even without the book itself. My boyfriend and I broke up in 2020, and he kept our copy of The Boys. (I did take scans of every single page on which Patrick had written, hence some of the detail here.) For all I know, he is working on something about Patrick Brock right now: he did the bulk of the research, and wrote the radio script; and it was on the grounds that he was more likely to continue the project that we decided, between us, he should keep the book. I slightly regret that we made the decision we did, but we made it.
Why not end this brief telling with his own words. This is the only other direct quotation which I still have. In 1958, Patrick Brock worked with Errol Flynn. Twenty seven years later, in a 1985 column, he wrote:
After his death I read his posthumous autobiography, and the later scandalous books picturing him as a spy or worse. But I only remember the sad and disintegrating and very likeable man.