Anthony Watson-Gandy

Anthony Blethyn Watson-Gandy (29 June 1919 – 27 June 1952) was a British scholar, translator and socialite, renowned as the last lover of Denham Fouts, bon vivant and companion to a veritable who's who of pre-1950 homosexuals (such as Viscount Tredegar and Crown Prince Paul of Greece). Watson-Gandy lived with Fouts in Rome until his untimely death from a drug overdose in 1948.[1]

Biography

Scion of a gentry family,[2] he was born in 1919, the youngest son of Major William Watson (1872–1947), MC- who assumed his wife's surname of Gandy at their marriage in 1906, becoming "Watson-Gandy"- and Annis Vere (1884–1960), daughter of James Milnes Gandy Gandy, who was born with the surname of Brandreth, but assumed, with his father, his mother's surname of Gandy. They divorced in 1932.[2]

After Westminster School, London from 1933,[3] he then went up to King's College, Cambridge,[4] before pursuing further studies at the Sorbonne in Paris.[2][1] Appointed Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, he was also a Chevalier du Tastevin.

Commissioned in the Royal Air Force, Watson-Gandy served as a Flying Officer during World War II.[2]

After WWII he settled in Rome where he joined the circle of the infamous American socialite, Denny Fouts. Fouts enjoyed a privileged and prosperous upbringing but spent much of his later life dissolute, lying "in bed like a corpse, sheet to his chin, a cigarette between his lips turning to ash. His lover, Anthony Watson-Gandy, a writer and translator, would remove the cigarette just before it burned his lips."[5][6]

After the death of Fouts in 1948, Watson-Gandy travelled to Asia, settling at Macao where he lived with a Chinese boyfriend, smoking opium and studying Mandarin.[7]

Watson-Gandy translated from French The Rise and Splendour of the Chinese Empire (1952) by René Grousset,[1] being elected a Fellow of the Institute of Linguists. Shortly after returning to London, he died on 27 June 1952.[2][3]

See also

References
  1. Isherwood, Christopher (2013). Lost Years. Random House. p. 360. ISBN 9781448162505. Retrieved 31 December 2017.
  2. Mosley, Charles, editor. Burke's Peerage, Baronetage & Knightage, 107th edition, 3 volumes. Wilmington, Delaware, U.S.A.: Burke's Peerage (Genealogical Books) Ltd, 2003
  3. "7 - Westminster School". westminster. Retrieved 31 December 2017.
  4. www.cambridge.org
  5. Leddick, David. Intimate Companions: A Triography of George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, and Their Circle. Pages 206–207. St. Martin's Press, 2000.
  6. Companion's name given on the American Foreign Service form "Report of the Death of an American Citizen," accessed on ancestry.com on 13 September 2011.
  7. Wollheim, Richard. "Jesus Christie". London Review of Books. Retrieved 31 December 2017.
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