English diplomat and journalist Victor Cunard was BOTD in 1898. Born in Lubenham, Leicestershire to a wealthy aristocratic family, his father was a baronet and his uncle was heir to the Cunard shipping empire. He was educated at Eton College, and enlisted in the Coldstream Guards during World War One, serving in battle and gaining the rank of lieutenant. In 1918, he began an affair with diplomat Harold Nicholson, meeting Nicholson’s wife Vita Sackville-West who described him in letters as “a nice, easy, pleasant ineffectual little thing.” In 1922, he became the Italian correspondent for The Times of London, renting a palazzo in Venice where he socialised with Contessa Alberta Foscaria and a circle of homosexual British expatriates. He was posted to Paris in 1927, where he befriended celebrity lesbians Djuna Barnes and Dolly Wilde, providing them with moral and financial support through various crises. He also helped facilitate the relationship between Lord Berners and Robert Heber-Percy, whose apartment they visited on their first romantic mini-break to the Continent. He co-authored a play Golden Arrow with Sylvia Thompson, which had its West End debut in 1935, directed by and starring Laurence Olivier and featuring the then-unknown Greer Garson. Returning to England at the outbreak of World War Two, he served in the Political Intelligence Department of the British Foreign Office. Little is known of his life after the war. He died, a confirmed bachelor, in 1960, aged 62.