Hon. Lois Ina Sturt 1900-1937 Hon Mrs Evan Morgan and later Viscountess Tredegar : Mistress of Reggie 15th Earl of Pembroke
An album of sexually explicit verses and jokes
From the Collection Of
Lois Ina Sturt and Reggie Pembroke
Compiled by William Cross, FSA Scot
The material comes from the collection of Lois Sturt and Reggie Pembroke, two minor aristocrats and sometime lovers. The ditties are what these two central characters laughed and sniggered about before, during and after making love.
The lovers read them out to each other in bed whilst they drew breath, enjoying an accompanying cigarette and a glass of bubbly before returning to love-making.
Transcribed from the records in the National Library of Wales, the originals are in handwritten form but some pieces are typed up. They are housed in tatty exercise books, maintained by Lois, with some contributions from Reggie, usually appended to one of his many love letters to his “Darling Lois”. [i]
When the affair started in 1919-20 Lois was aged 19, not ‘under age’, the age of consent for heterosexuals at the time was 16. [ii] Reggie was a 39- year-old married man.
The relationship lasted several years. It staggered along after the open-secret lovers were reported by informants to Reggie’s wife and Lois’s mother.
There were several long gaps in the romance, sometimes of months at a time during the years it lasted. It was finally fizzling out by 1925 and was over by the end of 1926. [iii]
To add a whimsical interpretation to this quaint and curious legacy of Lois and Reggie there’s an array of adjoining cartoons, photographs and drawings with the verses. These images are mostly taken from contemporary sources of the same time.
Lois and Reggie in 1926
Reggie Pembroke was a Peer of the Realm, an Earl, a landowner, a soldier and politician. He was one of several men Lois favoured for having sex. Lois was the daughter of a Baron (an English Lord); her mother was an Earl’s daughter.
Neither Lois nor Reggie maintained exclusivity or fidelity during their affair. Reggie was handsome, self-centred, vain, a womaniser and a chronic gambler. Although Lois was still a teenager and unmarried, described as “more attractive than beautiful” [iv], she was an experienced lover and adored seducing older men. Mature men were more grateful than her clumsy male contemporaries, especially the 1920s crop of ‘Hooray Henrys’.
The time setting for the smutty material is the period c.1919-1925, after the horrors of the Great War. That was the age of the vulgar limerick and the saucy French postcards that were both humorous and rude. Lois and Reggie’s crop of poems etc celebrates British smut.
Women’s rights were won in part in 1918 with an extension of the franchise and the war between the sexes was played out in all kinds of spheres. In the verses etc. both sexes are equally lampooned.
Contact the compiler William Cross, by e-mail for further details. The book is available on Amazon and e bay.
williecross@aol.com
[i] Reggie was forever inventing new ways of addressing Lois.
[ii] The Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 raised the age of consent for heterosexuals to 16.
[iii] There is a photograph in this book of Lois and Reggie taken together at a racecourse in November 1926 indicating they were still happy to be seen together. Reproduced above.
[iv] Attributed. Daily Mirror Review of one of Lois’s films.