English aristocrat, socialite, soldier and translator Hamish St-Clair Erskine was BOTD in 1909. Born in Maidenhead, the son of the 5th Earl of Rosslyn, he was educated at Eton College, where he had an affair with fellow student Tom Mitford. He studied at Oxford University, where he befriended Evelyn Waugh, Robert Byron, John Betjeman, and James Lees-Milne, who later described him as “slight of build, well dressed, gay as gay, always snobbish however, and terribly conscious of his nobility… the toast of the university.” In the 1920s, he was a leading member of the louche aristocratic social circle known as the Bright Young Things, with friends including Stephen Tennant, Harold Acton, Cecil Beaton, L. P. Hartley, Gavin Henderson, Brian Howard, Anthony Powell and Edith and Osbert Sitwell. He became the subject of Home Office investigation when he and his friends were rumoured to have held an orgy with the actress Tallulah Bankhead at a hotel at Bray. Despite his obvious homosexuality, Erskine spent five years engaged to Tom’s sister Nancy Mitford, until he broke things off, falsely claiming to be in love with another woman. A heartbroken Mitford married on the rebound three weeks later, though used her relationship with Erskine as the basis for her debut novel Highland Fling. To everyone’s surprise, Erskine joined the Coldstream Guards in World War Two, reaching the rank of major. Captured and imprisoned by enemy forces in 1943, he managed to escape, walking through Italy to rejoin the Allied forces, earning him the Military Cross for bravery. Little is known about his life after the war, other than working on a translation of Italian art historian Mercedes Viale Ferrero’s book on medieval tapestries. He died in 1973, aged 64. In a posthumous tribute, his friend Alan Pryce- Jones described him as a “bright apparition who once upon a time swept past them like a kingfisher: all colour and sparkle and courage’ but lamenting that he had found ‘small place in a world which turned away from an unambitious charmer whose only enduring gift was his charm.”