English aristocrat and socialite Hugh Lygon was BOTD in 1904. Born at Malvern, Worcestershire, the younger son of William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp, he attended Eton College and Oxford University, where he befriended Evelyn Waugh, Robert Byron, and Richard and David Plunket Greene. He and Waugh are believed to have been lovers, and Waugh became obsessed with the Lygon family, becoming a frequent visit to Madresfield Court, the family’s ancestral home. After university, he worked at banks in Paris and London. A bored socialite and rampant alcoholic, he joined the circle of louche young aristocrats known as the Bright Young Things, socialising with Diana, Tom and Nancy Mitford, Brian Guinness, Diana Cooper, Chips Channon, Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel. In 1930, his family was beset by scandal, after his father was outed as homosexual by tabloid newspapers. Lygon’s mother subsequently had a nervous breakdown and sued for divorce, while his father fled to Berlin where he lived in exile. Unusually for the English aristocracy, Hugh and his siblings maintained warm relations with their father, continuing to visit him in Germany, while taking possession of Madresfield Court, the family’s ancestral home. In 1934, he undertook a trip to Spitzbergen in the Arctic Circle, accompanied by his friend (and possible lover) Alexander “Sandy” Glen. Waugh accompanied them on the trip, recording their turbulent adventures, near-death experiences and his own sexual jealousy of Glen in his diaries. Lygon died in 1936, aged 31, after sustaining injuries during a road trip in Bavaria. Waugh later used him as one of the models for the charming but doomed aristocrat Sebastian Flyte in his novel Brideshead Revisited.