English aristocrat, composer and novelist Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson, the 14th Baron Berners, also known as Lord Berners, was BOTD in 1883. Raised in Apley Hall, Shropshire, he had a typically aristocratic childhood of parental neglect, governesses and boarding school. He attended Eton College, then studied in France and Germany, twice failing the examination to join the civil service. He served as an honorary attaché for the Foreign Office in Constantinople and Rome. In 1918, he inherited the baroncy from his uncle, and was styled as Lord Berners. He became a noted eccentric, living lavishly at his country estate Faringdon Hall, dyeing pigeons at his house in vibrant colours, entertaining horses and giraffes at afternoon tea, installing a clavichord in his Rolls-Royce and occasionally wearing a pig’s head mask to scare his tenants. A prominent socialite, his friendship circle included Evelyn Waugh, Beverley Nichols, Victor Cunard, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dalí, W. H. Auden, John Betjeman, Elsa Schiaparelli, H. G. Wells, Brian Guinness, Tom Mitford and the Mitford sisters. In his spare time he wrote music, occasionally collaborating with the composer William Walton and choreographer Frederick Ashton. He wrote and privately published the satirical novel The Girls of Radcliff Hall, in which he depicted himself and fellow queers Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel as students in a girls’ school. (Beaton is thought to have hunted down and destroyed most copies after Berner’s death, though it was republished in 2000). In 1932, Berners fell in love with the 20 year-old Robert Heber-Percy, installing him at Faringdon Hall, gifting him a custom-built 100-foot tower for his 21st birthday. Berners lived with Heber-Percy for the rest of his life, looking the other way politely as Heber-Percy married family friend Jennifer Fry in 1942, and even allowed Fry and her illegitimate daughter Victoria to move into Faringdon Hall. Their unsuccessful ménage-à-trois lasted two years, and was recorded in an extremely strange family portrait by Beaton. Berners died in 1950, aged 66. He left Faringdon Hall to Heber-Percy, who in turn left it to Victoria’s daughter Sofka Zinovieff. He was immortalised as the eccentric Lord Merlin in Nancy Mitford‘s comic novel The Pursuit of Love.