Hesketh Pearson
Born in Hawford, near Worcester, England in 1887, Hesketh Pearson began working life as a clerk with the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company. After two and a half years there he spent most of a £1,000 inheritance from his aunt in travelling round North and South America and Canada before returning to England in 1908. In 1911, after two years as a car salesman in Brighton, he became an actor with Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s theatrical company, where he met, and subsequently married, Gladys Gardner. After service in the Great War, during which he won the Military Cross, he returned to England in 1919 suffering from dysentery and malaria.
Adelphi Magazine
Pearson’s first book was Modern Men and Mummers (1921), and then in 1923 he wrote for the Adelphi magazine a wholly imaginary account of a conversation between G.K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw. Many readers thought it was an authentic report, and it was even published in The Book of Great Conversations (1948) by Louis Biancolli, who evidently believed it to be true. This piece of deception, however, was the starter before the main course.
The Whispering Gallery
In 1925 he wrote The Whispering Gallery: Leaves from A Diplomat’s Diary, in which the ‘diplomat’ described his conversational encounters with the great and the good of his day: from Mussolini and Churchill to H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Tsar Nicholas II. It was published the following year by John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd. The publisher, however, took the wise precaution of sending along a young company representative, Allen Lane (who would later found Penguin Books) to secure from Pearson the name of the ‘diplomat’. Pearson simply lied, claiming that it was a former ambassador to Rome, Sir Rennell Rodd.
Northcliffe
The headlines in the Daily Mail of 19 November 1926 included: ‘A scandalous fake exposed’ and ‘Monstrous attack on public men’. Perhaps the Daily Mail was so outraged because one of Pearson’s targets was the newspaper’s former proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, who featured in the opening chapter headed ‘The Napoleon of Fleet Street’. Other public figures mentioned in the book were quick to express their disapproval. For example, Winston Churchill described the ‘diplomat’s’ purported accounts as ‘peurile in their ignorance.’ The author was also condemned for poor spelling and grammar. However, with all the attendant publicity, the book was a sell out.
Prosecution
With the Daily Mail now refusing to accept advertising from the publishers, and with a rising clamour for their own prosecution, John Lane began proceedings against Pearson, and on 25 November he was arrested and charged with attempting to obtain money by false pretences. Urged by friends and colleagues to plead guilty, Pearson took the surprising option of pleading not guilty. When the case opened at the London Sessions on 26 January 1927, Pearson’s barrister, Sir Patrick Hastings, began aggressively by attacking John Lane as profiteers who were responsible for having published obscene material such as Ovid’s Loves and Balzac’s Contes Drolatiques. When Pearson was called to testify he admitted everything, and when asked why he had given Sir Rennel Rodd’s name as that of the diplomat, replied: ‘I think it was because I could not think of anyone less likely to have written the book.’ Perhaps it was because of his disarming frankness in the witness box that the jury found him not guilty.
Hesketh Pearson died of cancer on 9 April 1964.
