28.7.46

Leylands Farm
Abinger Common, Surrey

Dear Miss West,

By various accidental delays I have only just seen your review of my Wm Joyce book, for which I thank you. (I don't think I've ever been so flattered as to be called 'sensible and cheerful' - it seems really the utmost that a human being should seek to be; I've no patience with ecstatics!) I can tell you quite shortly why I didn't print the CCA judgment:-

1. It has no legal importance, inasmuch as the House of Lords has spoken;

2. The reader must have been pretty sick of the case by the time he reached the Appeal stage;

3. Caldecote is not the sort of Judge whose words deserve to be reported even though they are, technically, supereeded. (I have no respect for that great man.)

I thought yours a very interesting and (if I may use the word) sensible comment on the whole affair. I learned last night that Joyce did a spot of embezzling when he was a Fascist, but who wouldn't in such circumstances?

Incidentally, the lowest depth of our libel-law situation was reached last month when Mrs Eckersley's solicitors wrote to my publishers and said that I had libelled their client (and caused her much pain!) by stating that she had been sentenced to a year's imprisonment with hard labour and that this was a lenient sentence. In fact, they said, the Judge said nothing about 'hard labour' - (which isn't surprising, because the two sentences are precisely the same) - and what were we going to do about it? The joke is that, for all I know, they might have won their case if they'd brought it; the law is an ass over libels.

Yours sincerely,

30th August, 1946.

Dear Mr. Roberts,

Or might we perhaps drop these surnames after such a
long acquaintance. I am perfectly willing to be called
Rebecca by you whenever you care to start.

Thank you very much for your letter which arrived when
I was having no end of a time in Nuremberg which was a very
grand party indeed. One of the prisoner's lawyers is exactly
like Goebels and I am convinced is Cobels, and this is only
one of the strange things that met the eye at this astounding
performance. I am very busy through September with one thing
and another, and indeed I hope to go out to Nuremberg again to
hear the sentences delivered, but I do hope we can meet for
lunch in October sometime.

I quite see your point about the Court of Criminal Appeal
Judgment, but I do think it was interesting to have it, although
I could not agree with you more that the reader was pretty sure
to be sick of the case by the time he got to the Appeal stage.
During the Appeal at the House of Lords I started an attack of
dysentry which has never completely left me since, and it comes
back again and again. After reading your vigorous letter I
realise this was not only post hoc but also propter hoc.

I do not believe the story about Joyce's embezzlement.
It was a story that started by Moseley after a split, and according
to a friend of mine who was related by marriage to Moseley the
fact was that Moseley was most irregular about money payments and
extremely mean about them, and she alleged that what happened was
that Joyce told Moseley that he must have more money and named a
salary that he was going to take and proceeded to take it from
the funds every month. At last Moseley checked the funds and
realised that Joyce had meant what he said and there was a row
which lead to the split, but she herself does not believe that it
amounted to anything like embezzlement, and said similar things
often arose. It was apparently an astonishing madhouse.

I am most amused to hear of your letter from Dorothy
Eckersley's Solicitors. I wonder if you know the extraordinary
story of Dorothy Eckersley? She was the daughter of a very

beautiful woman who was a cousin of Lord Harewood and who married a member of Sir Leslie Steven's family who was in the Indian Army. When she was about fourteen her father discovered that her mother had been grossly unfaithful to him and he got a quite unfounded suspicion that the daughter Dolly to whom he had always been very devoted was not his child. He then cut her off absolutely and Dorothy laved with her mother who was the mistress of some Edwardian sporting peer in London. She was a student at a dramatic school at which I was also a pupil, and she was extremely beautiful and I thought a very nice child. She was frightfully anxious to get on the stage to get out of the appalling atmosphere of her mother's home, as the sporting peer, when he was drunk, used to attempt to rape her. But the dramatic school we were both at sent her out to play a part in a Company run by an actor manager and she returned in tears because her virtue had been threatened by the Manager of the Company. The head of the school who was a louse reported this complaint to the actor manager but he roused a hornets nest as the said manager was the lover of the actor manager's wife. And the louse then reacted by kicking Dorothy out of the Company from that day the unfortunate child was absolutely doomed. She had one illegitimate child by a son of Hall Caine and another one by just somebody who happened to be staying in the same county at the time, and she was in very low water until she roused the lusts of the heterosexual side of the B.B.C. She was in with Joyce under Moseley and there was no question but that she went to Germany at Joyce's instruction. It is really rather an sad story.

This is a very long letter but I know you have an appetite for hearing about the eccentricities of humanity. I do hope we can lunch together sometime.

Thank you for being so nice to me at the trials.

Yours

C.B.Roberts, Esq.,
Leylands Farm,
Abinger Common, Surrey.