Moving in with mum

A boring blip but a fascinating story.

Walking to my GP's surgery I decided to go a different way and came across this unprepossessing block of flats. The blue plaque reads 'Lord Alfred Douglas, 'Bosie', 1870 - 1945, lived here 1935 - 1944'.

Bosie of course was Oscar Wilde's lover. It was Wilde's misjudged attempt to have Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, prosecuted for libel that lead to his own conviction and imprisonment for gross indecency.

I knew there was a connection with Hove, but I'd never realised it was so close to where I live. After Wilde's death, Bosie denounced their relationship and 'renounced' his own homosexuality. He married Olive Custance, a poet who had had lesbian 'flirtations' in the past, and they had a child. Not surprisingly the marriage failed and in 1925 he moved to Hove to live with his mother, moving to this particular block of flats in 1935.

He and Olive never divorced and in later life they became close friends. She too moved to Hove and they saw each other every day until she died in 1944. He died a year later.

It's a fascinating story with an ending so suburban and domestic it's hard to imagine him ever being the person at the centre of such a public scandal.