Gardiner describes Ralph as “poorly educated”. But if you didn’t know who Monty was, these letters from Ralph could easily be read as letters from a soldier to his wife. Some of the details are touching: Ralph sent Monty telegrams rather than letters on special occasions Monty sent Ralph cakes to share with his mates. Įach worried about the other’s habits - Monty that Ralph drank too much, Ralph that Monty continued to smoke - and Monty (as we can tell from Ralph’s letters) feared for Ralph’s safety (Monty had served in World War I). Darling I can see me and you on the bed now you old darling. You are the only one that ever gave me a frill and you still do. What a time we had in them days and I am sorry to say I am crying I cannot hold it back no more my Darling. I went back all over it again last night. So it was with Ralph and Monty.Įxcerpts from Ralph’s letters, beginning with one from 10 November 1940:ĭo you remember the old days when we first started darling. Two people who are deeply attached to each other tend to write similar things to one another when they are separated, regardless of their sexes, sexualities, or their roles in sex: they talk about the daily events of their lives, they reminisce about their times together, they say how much they desperately miss each other. And they became entwined with each other’s families, though in general other people (like Ralph’s “lads”, his mates in the army) seem not to have discerned the nature of their relationship, or chose not to see it. They certainly became a couple, sharing among other things a love for the garden and orchard they created together and a pleasure in taking long rambles through the countryside together.
#RALPH MONITY FULL#
So I read Ralph Hall’s letters to Monty Glover - fervent, full of endearments and emotional attachment - and wonder about the texture of their lives together, in particular their sexual lives. He saw me as a Dream Lover I saw him as a Great Trick. I don’t think he ever appreciated that I didn’t share these views, that what made him attractive to me was his affectionateness, physical hotness, and intense sexuality, and that I put up with his attitudes (repugnant to me) in order to enjoy these qualities for a brief period (it’s a trade-off). This view went along with his identification of the working class with toughness and masculinity and the upper classes with effeteness and femininity, and with his attraction to men of the upper classes because he saw them as sexually complementary to him. Norman was 100% gay, affectionate, and a romantic (he fell passionately in love with me), but absolutely rigid in his view of who did what to whom in sexual encounters. I come at this with some personal interest, having stumbled into a brief but intense relationship with a younger working-class English man - a hod-carrier from Nottingham - decades ago in Brighton, England see the fictobiographical account of my time with Norman here, with comments on the attitudes of working-class men towards the upper classes and on the division of roles in sexual encounters, in a world where gay men tended to be sorted into the serviced and the servicers, or, as Norman put it, bluntly but without contempt, men and women. It’s a great shame that Monty’s letters were lost.) (It’s an accident that the photos and Ralph’s letters were saved. These have some linguistic interest, but even more interest as a record of an inter-class relationship between British men in the period. (Gardiner chronicled the history in his 1996 book Who’s a Pretty Boy Then? One Hundred and Fifty Years of Gay Life in Pictures.)Īlong with the photos is a trove of Ralph’s letters to Monty during the four years Ralph served in the army during World War II. 50 or so years ago, when same-sex relationships were illegal and sometimes savagely prosecuted. The text and photographs give a window into gay male life in the U.K. I’ve posted a few of the photos from James Gardiner’s 1992 book A Class Apart: The Private Pictures of Montague Glover, much of which is taken up with the story of the long (53-year) relationship between the working-class Cockney Ralph Hall and the upper-middle-class (and significantly older) Montague Glover.
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