Raoul Loveday

Born:   3 July 1900 in Rangoon, Burma.

Died: 16 February 1923 at the Abbey of Thelema, Cefalù, Sicily.

Born Charles Frederick Loveday—he would adopt the name “Raoul” while a student at Oxford—he was a frail youth with an unhealthy pallor. Born in Rangoon on 3 July 1900, he was one of two children to Royal Navy officer George Loveday (born c. 1859) and his wife, Amelia Ann Lewendon (b. 1859). Sickly since birth, malaria struck Raoul as a child while still living in Rangoon. They later moved to South London, raising their family at 112 Barry Road in East Dulwich.

On 2 August 1918, at age eighteen, he enlisted in the Inns of Court Officers Training Corps. Nicknamed “The Devil’s Own,” the Inns of Court were a volunteer battalion, part of the London Territorial Force based in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, from September 1914 to June 1919. From there, Loveday attended St. John’s College, Oxford, where he studied history, played football (Raymond Greene said “he was very good”), wrote poetry, and became interested in the occult. Betty May reported that his poetry had attracted critical attention, but Greene deemed it “remarkably bad.”

One example appears in the journal Oxford Poetry:

Sing now of London

At fall of dusk;

A summer dragonfly—

Crept from the husk.

Dragonfly, on whose wing

Run golden wires;

So, down a street pavement,

Lamps throw their fires.

Dragonfly, whose wing is pricked

By many a spark;

Electric eyes of taxis

Bright through the dark.

Dragonfly, whose life is

Cold and brief as dew,

Drone now for London dusk,

Soon dead too.

Loveday was also an early member of Oxford’s Hypocrites Club, whose later members included writers Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966), Anthony Powell (1905–2000), and Terence Lucy Greenidge (1902–1970). Originally the least fashionable of Oxford’s clubs—devoted to the discussion of philosophy—it soon developed a raucous reputation. According to Evelyn Waugh, it was “notorious not only for drunkenness but for flamboyance of dress and manner which was in some cases patently homosexual.” Loveday was in fact the club’s secretary; after one late night of drinking, he returned to Oxford after hours and tried to climb back into the college, managing only to impale himself on the gate railing, where he hung upside down by his thigh and nearly bled to death before help arrived. His extracurricular activities distracted the youth from his studies so much that he was nearly sent down from St. John’s; to everyone’s surprise, he managed a first class in history, graduating in 1922.

Loveday had discovered Crowley through reading The Oxford Book of Mystical Verse and struck up a correspondence with the poet. That fall, in 1922, he met Betty Sheridan-Bickers, wife of Horace Sheridan-Bickers, at the Harlequin. When she learned that Raoul had been studying The Equinox for two years, she told him Crowley was staying with her at 31 Wellington Square, teaching her magick and giving lectures on Thelema. To Raoul’s delight, she arranged a meeting. Betty May, who had been unimpressed with Crowley when she met him at the Café Royal in 1914, refused to accompany Raoul on the visit. Raoul became devoted to mysticism and, even though he had a £1,000 a year job lined up, lost his ambition for anything but magick.

Betty May and Raoul were married at the Registry Office in Oxford on 3 September 1922. Raoul was 22 years old and he gave his profession as ‘author’; he was living at 50 Walton Crescent, Oxford and his father, George Loveday is described as a ‘civil servant’. Betty May Golding was 25 years old and living at the Golden Cross Hotel, Cornmarket Street, Oxford; her father George Golding (deceased) is stated as an ‘artist’ under father’s profession.

Raoul requested special leave from Oxford University for the weekend which was granted and Betty May says of the momentous day in her autobiography Tiger Woman published in 1929:

"‘We were married, in Oxford, shortly before the end of the summer term. Once again I stood in front of the registrar—this time, however, in my own shoes. Raoul, less experienced than I, was extremely nervous, and at the crisis of the ceremony dropped the ring, which rolled into a corner of the room. One of the witnesses crawled after it and stood dusting his trousers for the rest of the time. Raoul’s hand trembled as he slipped the ring onto my finger at the second attempt. I left the office feeling slightly uneasy. Had the dropping of the ring anything to do with the Princess Amen Ra? I knew it was an evil omen. Was my marriage again going to be a failure?

On the day of our marriage a thing happened which although even at the time it filled me with a certain foreboding, I never imagined would return to me in such circumstances of horror. We were walking through the gardens of St. John’s and someone suggested taking a photograph of us both. We stood beneath one of the trees there and he took a snap. When this photograph was printed there was the ghostly form of a slim young man lying just over my husband’s head. It was as though the form was asleep or dead, and the arms were raised slightly behind the head, while the head drooped gently to one side. At the time I remember we were amused by this “spook” photograph, but I felt an indescribable feeling of anxiety, even though I laughed at it. Later on in my story you will learn how my fears were justified and how amazing a warning this was of what was to come.

That evening a party of us went to one of the dance halls forbidden to undergraduates. It was rather a sordid place, with a bad floor and a worse band, whose chief allurement must have been the fact that it was forbidden. Rather drunken undergraduates were dancing with cheap-scented girls of the town. Some of them greeted Raoul noisily. However, he was not in the slightest degree embarrassed, and treated them with his usual easy insolence of manner.

We stayed there a bit. It was not very amusing, but there did not seem to be anything else to do in Oxford at this time of night. I was dancing with Raoul, I remember, when at about eleven o’clock the alarm went round that the proctors were coming. There was a rush for the door, and I was left alone. Two undergraduates only had not fled, and they were hiding under a seat in the ladies’ cloak-room, protected by the skirts of their partners. The proctors, well up to the trick, and untroubled by modesty, searched that apartment as a matter of course. It was an exciting moment. They were just going when one of the idiotic girls laughed, and the proctors returned and dragged the fugitives ignominiously by the ankles from their concealment.

At last the proctors went away and some of our party returned, but Raoul was not among them.

I was very sick with myself for having suggested coming to the dance. Raoul, with whom I was quite unjustly angry for leaving me, had been against it, because, having got leave to go away for the week-end so as to be able to stay with me on our wedding night, it would have been fatal for him to be discovered in Oxford.

By now the place was closing down. What was I to do? Would Raoul come back for me, or would he expect me to follow him? I was undecided until my hesitation was overcome for me by a certain famous boxer, who had been with us, and now offered to take me back to the hotel where Raoul and I were staying."

Betty goes on to say that she was about to ring the night bell at the hotel but she decided to go for a walk to the Trout Inn to look at the water meadows and the Thames by moonlight, and also to punish Raoul for abandoning her at the dance hall. She stood leaning over the bridge by the Trout Inn; after a while she crosses the bridge and walked along the river, singing songs in her head. The river bank was sloping and slippery and she fell head-first into the river. Luckily it was quite shallow. Betty returned to the hotel covered in mud:

For a moment Raoul could not recognize the miry apparition that met his eyes. Water dripped from me as I stood there. He asked me what on earth had happened and how I had managed to get like this. Had someone thrown me into the river?

'I thought I’d go for a walk,' I explained, 'and I fell into the river.'

'Good God,' he asked, 'is this what I’ve got to get used to?'

I was not going to be reprimanded at this early stage of our relationship, so I said, 'And why did you leave me at the dance hall to find my way home alone?'

'The proctors—'

'I suppose you care more about the proctors than about me.'

But it was not really a very serious sort of quarrel!"

The next day, Monday, 4 September, Raoul had invited a friend of his to dinner and to meet his new wife, Betty; the un-named friend, a well-known psychic and clairvoyant, in Betty’s autobiography was tall and gaunt and she took an instant dislike to him although he was an entertaining speaker and he and Raoul talked about poetry; Raoul was making a stand for the poets Ernest Dowson (1867-1900) and Lionel Johnson (1867-1902) whom his friend said were ‘sentimental and decadent’. Raoul defensively said that he hated the Georgian poets and declared himself a romantic and when asked which living poets he admires, mentioned the name of some professor and a poet of the occult whom Betty had met in 1914 at the Café Royal—Aleister Crowley.

“What’s he doing now?” the other asked.

“Haven’t you heard?”

“No.”

“He’s started an Abbey in Sicily.”

Then the curious young fellow suggested he knew what Betty was in a previous incarnation. In comparing their notes on the subject Raoul and his friend had reached the same conclusion, that she was a witch-doctor and Raoul was the chieftain of the village who loved her but she refused to yield her love to him; the chieftain, deciding to kill the witch-doctor set her adrift in a boat which capsized in a storm and she drowned.

Betty and Raoul stayed in Oxford for a few days after the Oxford University Commemoration Ball and then went to London, taking a room at the Harlequin Club at 55 Beak Street, off Regent Street, where she had first met Raoul. They were poor and Raoul had accumulated large debts with tailors and booksellers in Oxford. Betty took to being an artist’s model again; earning a pound a day to keep them both while Raoul studied Egyptology at the British Museum or at various libraries.

While dining at the Harlequin, Betty’s friend Betty Bickers came over, Bickers was interested in the occult and when Crowley came up in conversation Raoul said he would like to meet him and Bickers informed him that Crowley was staying at her house. Raoul became infatuated with magick and Crowley and did not return home for two days and nights. ‘On the night of the third day I was awakened by the sound of someone trying to open my bedroom window. It was Raoul. We were on the third floor in one of those tall houses in Beak Street, just off Regent Street, and he had climbed from the street. He was covered with dust and soot, and his breath reeked of ether. I put him to bed, where he lay in a doped sleep until the middle of the following day.’

After the same thing happened again and Raoul was away for three days, Betty attempted to foil Crowley and they left the room in Beak Street and took another, but after a while Crowley turned up at the door wearing his Highland kilt and holding a magical wand.

In mid October 1922 Crowley departed for Cefalù, stopping off in Rome where he wrote to Raoul: 'I hope you will come p.d.q. and bring Betty. I honestly tell you that the best hope for your married life is to get out of the sordid atmosphere of 'Bohemian London...' By 4th November Crowley was at his Abbey.

A magician named Robinson Smith, a retired concert agent whom Crowley met at Austin Harrison's house at Seaford, paid the Loveday's fare to Cefalù. After Raoul and Betty visited Nina Hamnett (1890-1956) in Paris, they traveled to the Abbey, arriving on Sunday, 26 November 1922. The next day, Monday, 27 November, Crowley assisted Raoul and Betty as they climbed the Great Rock of Cefalù.

For the next few weeks Raoul studied his magical work performing the Lesser Banishing Ritual daily and some visionary work which he showed great progress in. At the Abbey, Raoul acted as the High Priest during ritual work.

Raoul became a Probationer of Crowley’s Magical Order the A∴A∴ and he took the magical name Frater Aud (Magic Light) at the winter Solstice [Friday 22nd December]. Betty didn’t enjoy life at the Abbey, finding it dirty and she could not get on with Crowley or Ninette Shumway.

One day, Betty and Raoul went for a long walk to visit a nearby monastery and after Crowley told them not to drink the water but Raoul with great thirst drank from a spring. During the beginning of February, Raoul was struck by malaria and was very weak. 'On Saturday morning, 10 February, the Virgin Guardian of the Sangraal [the Scarlet Woman, Leah Hirsig] returned from shopping in the town and found Crowley, Betty, Ninette Shumway, Jane Wolfe, and Raoul assembled in the courtyard. A violent quarrel between Betty and Ninette was in progress. Crowley took Betty's side. Jane listened in silence. Raoul was too ill to say anything. Finally, the row, which had risen out of Betty's calling Ninette a slut, simmered down, and everyone fell in with the Beast's call for greater discipline in the Abbey.'

The next day, the evening of Sunday, 11 February, Betty left the Abbey and asked Raoul to send her passport the following day. Crowley had found her reading a newspaper which was strictly forbidden at the Abbey. Betty went to Palermo. Raoul wrote a letter to Betty to persuade her to return.

Also on the same day, Sunday, 11 February, Raoul wrote a letter to his parents which Betty posted for him, the letter explained that he had been suffering from malaria for 'about ten days now and it has left me as weak as water. As you see I have had to get Betty to write this letter for me. The doctor here is giving me various things but I do not seem to be making much headway. I trust, however, that by the time you get this letter I shall be quite well. Betty, herself has been unable to keep anything in her stomach for the last week but I think she is just on the turn now. I believe that the air or the water or something here, perhaps the place, does not agree with me.'

Jane called on Betty at the Hotel in Cefalù the next day, Monday, 12 February, and a little later at 11 a.m. Leah Hirsig turned up with Raoul's letter and so Betty returned to the Abbey that day sometime after noon to be with her husband, Raoul.

On Tuesday, 13 February Crowley recorded in his diary that he felt 'a current of Magical Force—heavy, black and silent—threatening the Abbey.' But the next day [Wednesday] Raoul became much worse and Dr Maggio was called for and he diagnosed acute enteritis. Crowley sent a telegram to Raoul's parents explaining his condition. Raoul Loveday, ‘Frater Aud’ died of enteritis on Friday, 16 February 1923 at 4 p.m. at the Abbey of Thelema. He was swiftly placed into a coffin, about an hour after his death and that night the coffin was placed in an outhouse while Crowley kept vigil over it all night, uttering prayers for the young Thelemite. He was buried the next day [Saturday 17th February] outside the Catholic cemetery in non consecrated ground. Crowley led the proceedings for Raoul’s ‘Greater Feast’ with Betty, Jane, Ninette, Leah and Leah's son Howard in attendance. Raoul was the first Thelemite to die in the Aeon of Horus. His parents later had his body exhumed and brought back to England for re-burial. Following the funeral, Crowley retired to his bed where he remained for a month suffering sickness and fever.

Betty May left Cefalù on Tuesday, 20 February and returned to England. Her fare was paid by the British Consul at Palermo.

On Friday, 23 February Crowley writes a letter to his friend and follower, Frank Bennett—Frater Progradior, saying that he has 'been quite seriously ill for 6 weeks or more, only on one or two days able to leave my bed. My principle assistant here, Frater AUD, a boy of 22, the most brilliantly promising magician I ever even dreamt of, came here on Nov. 26 and died last Friday. It is an absolute knock-down blow. I had built the greatest hopes on him as a helper. He had just come down from Oxford with First Class honours in History, he understood the Law, the principles of Magick and Yoga almost, as it were, by instinct.'

On Sunday, 22 April 1923 following the arrival of Norman Mudd that day came two Oxford undergraduates named John Pinney, of Christ Church and Claud Bosanquet of New College. They came to investigate the Abbey following the death of their friend and fellow student Raoul Loveday, whom they believed may have died under suspicious circumstances. They stayed for three nights and had a delightful time climbing with Crowley and found no truth in the claims of wickedness at the Abbey. On Wednesday, 25 February 1925 the front page of the Sunday Express had the headline: 'New Sinister Revelations of Aleister Crowley' and Betty May was laying the blame for Raoul's death at Crowley's door!

In 1929 Betty May published her autobiography Tiger-Woman: My Story. Sometime in the nineteen-thirties Betty married again and was Betty May Sedgwick living in Hampstead and in the nineteen-fifties there was a fifth and final marriage to a gentleman named Bailey.