English writer Beverley Nichols was BOTD in 1899. Born in Bristol, he was educated at Oxford University, where he was President of the Oxford Union and editor of college magazine Isis. He served in the British Army during World War One, returning to Oxford after the war to complete his studies. He published his first novel Prelude when he was 20, and found success with Twenty Five, praised for its depiction of the feckless spirit of the 1920s. He made a brief appearance in the 1930 silent film Glamour, before settling into a career as a writer. He is best known for his popular gardening trilogy Down the Garden Path, based on his Tudor thatched cottage in Cambridgeshire. A later series, Green Grows the City about his house and garden near Hampstead Heath, introduced the character of Gaskin, Nichols’ manservant, who featured in many later books. He also wrote novels, a biography of opera singer Nellie Melba and a study of modern spiritualism. His 1966 book A Case of Human Bondage, a hatchet job about the sham marriage of his frenemy W. Somerset Maugham, lost him several close friends. He caused a minor scandal with his 1972 memoir Father Figure, in which he described trying to murder his alcoholic and abusive father, prompting calls for his prosecution for attempted murder. Relatively openly gay for his time, his friendship circle included celebrity homosexuals Noël Coward, Hugh Walpole and Lord Berners. He was in a relationship with actor-director Cyril Butcher and had a brief affair with Siegfried Sassoon. Like many men of his class, he also enjoyed sex with working-class men and was an enthusiastic masochist. He died in 1983, aged 85.