Brian Howard
(March 13, 1905 - January 15, 1958) U.K.
Public figure
Howard, born Brian Christian de Claiborne Howard at Winkworth, Hascombe, Surrey, was an openly homosexual, flamboyant "queen" and personality of the 1920s. In the autumn of 1913 he was sent as a boarder to a preparatory school where, he later alleged, he was seduced by one of the masters. As a precious aesthete at Eton in the early 1920s, Howard founded in 1922 the Eton Society of Arts, a discussion and exhibition group. The Society published an anthology of writing titled Eton Candle (1922).
Howard spent the 1930s drifting around Europe, where he had affairs with various young men before settling on Toni, a young blond German bisexual who he had met in Munich. In September 1935 he and Toni were staying at the same pension as Christopher Isherwood and Klaus Mann in Amsterdam. Returning to Britain at the outbreak of WWII, he held position in the M15 and in the Royal Air Force during the war.
In the autumn of 1942 Brian Howard started a relationship with the twenty-year-old bisexual Ian, but within a year Ian ended the relationship, although they continued to meet and exchange letters for a while. In the autumn of 1943 Brian Howard started a relationship with Sam who was a nineteen-year-old Irishman, born in Tralee, and in command of an Air-Sea Rescue Launch.
After the war he resumed his wandering on the continent with his boyfriend, Sam. In the morning of 11th. January 1958 Sam went to have a bath but workmen had removed an exhaust pipe from the bathroom and Sam died accidentally of asphyxiation from fumes from a gas heater. He was 32. Four days later Brian Howard killed himself by taking an overdose of sedatives. He was 52. After a double funeral they were buried together at the Caucade de Nice cemetery.
Excerpts from: Aldrich R. & Wotherspoon G., Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History, from Antiquity to WWII, Routledge, London, 2001
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