Gerald Hamilton

Gerald Bernard Francis Hamilton (1 November 1890 – 1970) was a British memoirist, critic and internationalist known as "the wickedest man in Europe".

Born Gerald Frank Hamilton Souter in Shanghai on 1 November 1890, but educated at Lambrook preparatory and Rugby School in England, he counted among his friends Winston Churchill, Robin Maugham, Tallulah Bankhead and Christopher Isherwood, who wrote of Hamilton's remarkable personality and frequently shady dealings in his literary memoir Christopher and His Kind.

Hamilton father was a businessman of Scottish descent with commercial interests in China, his mother was English. Hamilton converted to Roman Catholicism. He hinted that his lineage was "faintly ducal", but it is unknown if he was directly related to anyone with a title. According to Anthony Powell all that had to be done to disprove that claim was to look it up … when the father and grandfather named by him would not be found He was interned in the United Kingdom during the First World War because, he claimed, of his association with Roger Casement, the Irish nationalist later executed for treason. Hamilton's own homosexuality was only a thinly veiled secret. Churchill had the Communist-sympathising Hamilton temporarily interned during the Second World War because of his vocal opposition to the war.

He was employed at various times by The Times as its German sales representative; as a fixer for Willi Münzenberg, "the notorious communist, who presides in Berlin on behalf of Moscow over the doings of the League Against Imperialism and Friends of Soviet Russia" (as British Intelligence described him); and as a go-between or informer by various agencies, including Sinn Féin, Special Branch, and the British Military Mission in Berlin. At one time he shared accommodation with "the Great Beast", Aleister Crowley.

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