The Reverend Richard Blake Brown was a most unconventional vicar. Flamboyantly homosexual before it was legal, he once substituted gin for communion wine. He was also a popular chaplain at Horfield Prison. Jonathan Rowe tells his story.
Richard Blake Brown was an eccentric, dandified, openly gay clergyman who served as chaplain of Horfield Prison for 16 years in the 1950s and 60s. He mixed with many prominent gay men of the day, but died after a fire at his Clifton flat and is buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery in Brislington.
Blake Brown was born in 1902 in Melrose, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, moving to England soon after, as his father was developing a system of electric signalling for the London Underground. Blake Brown graduated from Cambridge in 1923 and trained as an actor at the London Old Vic and afterwards joined the Old Vic company as a student actor. Later he gave up acting to train for the ministry and was ordained in 1927.
The same year, aged 26, he openly discussed his homosexuality with his father. Between 1931 and 1959 he published 14 novels. In a review of his first novel in 1931, he was noted for his “exceptional good looks”. He served as a curate in Hampshire before resigning from the priesthood in 1929 due to his feelings on the decline of the church’s influence on people, but returned to the ministry in 1933.
In March 1941 he joined the Royal Naval Reserve and became chaplain of the battlecruiser HMS Renown, taking part in the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck. Blake Brown had a fanatical devotion to Queen Mary and had a portrait of her in his lavatory. During the Second World War he preached at Badminton House when Queen Mary was staying there, but his sermon was so outrageous he was not invited to take a glass of sherry with her afterwards!
From 1947 to 1951 he served as chaplain at a Hampshire college and then a hospital in Windsor before becoming chaplain of Horfield Prison in 1952, where he was well liked amongst staff and inmates, becoming known as “The Prisoner’s Friend”.
Horfield Prison inmates sewing mailbags in 1962. Black Brown was prison chaplain for many years and was said to have been popular with prisoners. He also ministered to the last man to be hanged at the prison in 1963(Image: Bristol Post)
Homosexual acts between consenting adults over 21 were only legalised in the UK in 1967, a year before Blake Brown’s death, but throughout his life he was candidly open about his sexuality.
Camp, erudite and upper-class, he favoured canary yellow gloves and smoked Turkish cigarettes from a long holder. Boyishly good-looking, ostentatious, with a great sense of humour and somewhat quirky religiosity, he was well liked and popular.
In December 1963 he baptised and confirmed 23-year-old murderer Russell Pascoe in the condemned cell; Pascoe was the last man to be hanged in Bristol.
On one occasion at an Oxford garden party, Blake Brown dressed in drag, posing as a diplomat’s wife, and once served gin at a communion service. He was a lifelong friend of fellow homosexual Sir Norman Hartnell, dressmaker to Queen Elizabeth II (and second cousin of actor William Hartnell, the first Dr Who). Other friends included gay writer Rupert Croft-Cooke, who had been at school with Blake Brown, writer Denton Welch (also gay) and novelist Graham Greene.
In the 1950s and 60s, Blake Brown was a regular attendee at the gay parties held at Trewyn House, St Ives, Cornwall, which was the home of gay sculptor John Milne from 1956–1978. Other regular guests included actor and playwright Noël Coward, artist Francis Bacon and his boyfriend/muse, the petty criminal George Dyer. Tony Warren, creator of Coronation Street, and actor Richard Wattis, a familiar face on film and TV from the 1950s to the 70s, were also regulars.
The Rev. Richard Blake Brown, from the cover of one of his novels(Image: Copyright Unknown – Public Domain)
In 1956 Blake Brown, then aged 54, met 21-year-old Julian Nixon, described as a “flamboyant young gay layabout” and “a camp little queen”, who lived in “a delusional world” and survived by living off older gay men and elderly well-to-do ladies. Blake Brown remained devoted to Nixon despite many severe provocations.
In 1954 Nixon was one of 15 men who stood trial for gross indecency at Taunton Assizes. He spent a year in a psychiatric hospital and on his release met and took up with Blake Brown and accompanied him to Milne’s parties in St Ives. They shared a passion for Wagner and Nixon was sometimes referred to as Blake Brown’s “godson”. Nixon broke up with Blake Brown in about 1965, later became a chef and restaurateur, and died in about 2006 aged 71.
In the early 1960s Blake Brown began a relationship with Lesie “Hutch” Hutchinson, the bisexual Grenada-born singer and pianist who had been one of the most popular cabaret stars in the 1920s and 30s and one of the earliest UK Black entertainment celebrities.
Blake Brown’s friend and lover Leslie Hutchinson(Image: Baron/Hulton Archive/Getty)
“Hutch” had affairs with Cole Porter, Ivor Novello, Merle Oberon, Tallulah Bankhead, and Lady Edwina Mountbatten (wife of Lord Louis Mountbatten, third cousin of King Charles). He appeared in cabaret at Arno’s Court Country Club (now Arno’s Manor Hotel), Brislington, in November 1962 and met Blake Brown when he gave a performance for prisoners at Horfield.
The two began a friendship which, as one former inmate later recalled, was “not platonic”.
“Hutch” would return to give more concerts at Horfield, and met up with Blake Brown in Bristol frequently until the latter’s death. They often lunched (and drank heavily) at Arno’s Court Country Club, The Grand Spa Hotel, Clifton (now the Avon Gorge Hotel), and gourmet restaurants in the Bristol area.
In later life Blake Brown suffered from Ménière’s disease and retired as prison chaplain in June 1968. A few months later – on November 3 – he was found unconscious in his smoke-filled flat at Carter’s Buildings, Portland Street, Clifton.
A fire had started in the bedroom after an electric heater had fallen over. He was taken to Bristol Royal Infirmary where he died of asphyxia aged 66. Blake Brown was buried in an unmarked grave at St Mary Redcliffe Cemetery, Bath Road, Brislington, only yards away from Arno’s Court, where he had often lunched with “Hutch”, who died the following year.
St Mary Redcliffe Cemetery, Brislington, where Blake Brown was buried in an unmarked grave(Image: Jonathan Rowe)
The funeral was taken by Right Revd Oliver Tomkins, Bishop of Bristol. The eulogy was read by Bishop of Southwark, Right Revd Mervyn Stockwood, close friend of Blake Brown, former curate and later vicar of St Matthew, Moorfields, Bristol 1936–1955.
Bishop Stockwood spoke about Blake Brown and recalled the incident of his serving gin at communion but said: “It was impossible not to like him. He made me laugh more than anyone in my life.”