he exceeded six feet and weighed more than thirteen stone. Julian Huxley, who was to evolve into a distinguished biologist, was among his intellectual friends. According to him, Denys was “without doubt the handsomest boy in the school.” His hair, no longer greased, rolled away from its parting in waves that broke over the tops of his ears. “I remember seeing him on my return from a before-breakfast Sunday run, standing on top of College Wall in a red silk dressing-gown—an unforgettable Antinous,” Huxley wrote. *5 Another contemporary described him “in full sunshine crossing the street…with his peculiar, slouching, rolling gait, half gamin and half seraph. His hat is tilted back, forehead quizzically wrinkled, eyebrows raised, eyes dancing with amusement, and his queer, wide, flexible mouth curling at the corners in that enchanting smile!” Denys’s vitality and restlessness pulled people to him like a centripetal force. Physically, he fitted the hero mold; in the last years of the Edwardian era, the time was ripe for unconventional heroes. In an age that was becoming increasingly mechanized, Denys’s free spirit leaped out from the crowd like a flame. His admission to the Olympian heights of Pop was a foregone conclusion. Although the Eton Society (its proper name) was originally devoted to debating, by the start of the twentieth century it was simply a self-elected club of two dozen senior boys voted in on grounds of popularity, sporting prowess, elegance, vitality, and charm. Denys embodied the Pop ideal of wit, urbanity, and physical favor, and for his last two years he was elected president of this influential social oligarchy.
In this period, Denys consolidated his friendship with a group of fabled young men who came to represent the gilded, gifted best of the generation swallowed by the trenches. They formed, in retrospect, a magic circle that epitomized the values and rebellions of Edwardian society. One was Julian Grenfell, the son of an Olympic fencer who was raised to the peerage as Lord Desborough in Julian’s penultimate year at Eton. Grenfell was a Byronic figure who rebelled against the socialite lifestyle of his mother, the beautiful Ettie, and wrote a book excoriating it. When she used her influence to prevent publication, he lay on a sofa for six months with a shotgun by his side. Another was Patrick Shaw Stewart, an odd, freckly creature with marmalade hair and a long nose who went on to have an affair with Grenfell’s mother. At Eton he, Julian, and Denys were close to Lord Ribblesdale’s son, Charles Lister. Tall and bony, with a pear-shaped face framed by curling molasses hair, Charles caused a sensation when he joined the Independent Labour Party while he was still at school. (His parents, mildly curious, consulted the prime minister about this aberrant behavior. Arthur Balfour, philosopher king of the glamorous and aristocratic Ribblesdale circle, calmly announced that it was preferable to keeping an actress.) Lister went on to organize a trade union among the shop assistants on High Street. But in general there was little social awareness. “Keir Hardie in his cloth cap was a joke,” wrote Denys’s contemporary L. E. Jones. Pupils were taught to feel sorry for the poor, and trooped in dutiful batches to the school Mission at Hackney Wick, “but it could never have entered our heads that some of the boys we met there might well, in our lifetime, be among her Majesty’s Ministers.” Despite the shift in labor relations and the debacle in South Africa, there was no tremor of the social earthquake to come. “We rode on the backs of the workers,” Jones continued, “with the insouciance of the man who sat on the back of a whale, believing it to be an island.”
Denys’s peers were not the only ones who judged him someone special (although that was striking enough, since, as children, they were not an impressionable group and they lived lives of unimaginable privilege). The
In this period, Denys consolidated his friendship with a group of fabled young men who came to represent the gilded, gifted best of the generation swallowed by the trenches. They formed, in retrospect, a magic circle that epitomized the values and rebellions of Edwardian society. One was Julian Grenfell, the son of an Olympic fencer who was raised to the peerage as Lord Desborough in Julian’s penultimate year at Eton. Grenfell was a Byronic figure who rebelled against the socialite lifestyle of his mother, the beautiful Ettie, and wrote a book excoriating it. When she used her influence to prevent publication, he lay on a sofa for six months with a shotgun by his side. Another was Patrick Shaw Stewart, an odd, freckly creature with marmalade hair and a long nose who went on to have an affair with Grenfell’s mother. At Eton he, Julian, and Denys were close to Lord Ribblesdale’s son, Charles Lister. Tall and bony, with a pear-shaped face framed by curling molasses hair, Charles caused a sensation when he joined the Independent Labour Party while he was still at school. (His parents, mildly curious, consulted the prime minister about this aberrant behavior. Arthur Balfour, philosopher king of the glamorous and aristocratic Ribblesdale circle, calmly announced that it was preferable to keeping an actress.) Lister went on to organize a trade union among the shop assistants on High Street. But in general there was little social awareness. “Keir Hardie in his cloth cap was a joke,” wrote Denys’s contemporary L. E. Jones. Pupils were taught to feel sorry for the poor, and trooped in dutiful batches to the school Mission at Hackney Wick, “but it could never have entered our heads that some of the boys we met there might well, in our lifetime, be among her Majesty’s Ministers.” Despite the shift in labor relations and the debacle in South Africa, there was no tremor of the social earthquake to come. “We rode on the backs of the workers,” Jones continued, “with the insouciance of the man who sat on the back of a whale, believing it to be an island.”
Denys’s peers were not the only ones who judged him someone special (although that was striking enough, since, as children, they were not an impressionable group and they lived lives of unimaginable privilege). The
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