Page 153 - They Also Served

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Alec Waugh 1917.
Alexander Raban Waugh was born in
London on 8th July 1898. He was the son
of author and publisher Arthur Waugh
and elder brother of Brideshead Revisited
author Evelyn Waugh, who was born in
1903. Always known as Alec, Waugh
was educated at Sherborne School and,
upon leaving, published his first novel,
the semi-autobiographical The Loom of
Youth. The book was highly controversial
as it depicted homosexuality amongst
the boys, albeit in the staid prose of the
day, but became an instant bestseller.
However, the school governors took exception and Waugh, and his father for good measure, were expelled from the old boys’ society and not reinstated until 1933. Evelyn Waugh was sent to a different school to avoid the fallout.
In 1917, Waugh was commissioned from Sandhurst into the Dorsetshire Regiment and immediately joined a battalion on the Western Front. Surviving the mud of Passchendaele in late 1917, he was captured near Arras during the March 1918 German offensive. Incarcerated in a variety of POW camps, he was finally repatriated in December 1918.
During the inter-war years, Waugh carved out a career as a novelist, penning 26 books, marrying a rich Australian, and moving to Tangier, after which time his books became more cosmopolitan. Throughout that period, he enjoyed a bohemian lifestyle in the sun and did not seem bothered that his younger brother was becoming a literary giant. Alec Waugh volunteered for service again in the Second World War and was deployed to France with the BEF and later in Syria and Iraq, being finally demobbed as a major. His medals are now held by Sherborne School together with, ironically, the original manuscript for The Loom of Youth.
Waugh’s literary career continued apace. In 1955, he wrote Island in the Sun, which sold almost a million copies and was made into a Hollywood film that secured him the then-largest ever fee for the use of a novel. The theme song, by Harry Belafonte,
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