Composer | Lord Berners
Gerald Tyrwhitt, 14th Baron Berners (1883-1950), immortalized as Lord Merlin in Nancy Mitford’s novels and appropriately dubbed “The Last Eccentric” by his biographer Mark Amory, was a cultured, multi-talented British aristocrat, novelist, painter, aesthete and composer. He attended Eton College, studied in Paris, Dresden and Weimar, and served as an attaché at the British Embassy in Constantinople and then Rome, before inheriting his title and estate in 1919, by which time he had met Diaghilev’s circle and started composing.
Three of Berners’ compositions have retained significance, all of them ballet commissioned: The Triumph of Neptune (1926) for Diaghilev, Luna Park (1930) for Balanchine and A Wedding Bouquet (1937). He also scored the 1947 film Nicholas Nickleby.
Between 1936 and 1945, Berners published three autobiographical volumes and six whimsically satirical works of fiction, including his 1937 The Girls of Radcliff Hall, which spoofed his homosexual social circle as characters in a girls’ school, ruffling many feathers: Cecil Beaton apparently bought and destroyed all the copies he could find.
Among many eccentricities, Berners dyed pigeons and built a 100-foot folly tower at Faringdon, his beautiful Cotswold home. His Rolls Royce was equipped with a clavichord and cocktail cabinet. In 1950, Berners died, bequeathing Faringdon to his lifetime companion Robert Heber Percy.