"A notorious spendthrift 'who charged everything to Fortnums', when he was sent down from Balliol College, Oxford he left with little rancour. He had spent most of his time trying to dance the Charleston with rugby blues of varying levels of obligingness and passing time in the company of 'lesbian tarts and joyboys,' as Evelyn Waugh peevishly called them, after his conversion to Roman Catholicism, itself precipitated by a falling out with his own wife and his falling in love with someone else’s.
In possession of a fortune and in search of a purpose, he took the advice of his friend Edward Molyneux and opened a dress-making shop on Great Newport Street in 1937. It was done out in Regency Gothic. He soon had a devoted clientele by means of a simple wheeze – he sent invitations to his shows to everyone in the current issue of Tatler, with the hand-written addendum, 'Mary asked me to send you this'. Everyone knew a Mary. The Duchess of Kent and Ms Vivien Leigh were fast friends.
That particular party was disturbed by Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Though Roger even managed to perk up the Second World War. His fearlessness was unbridled and manifold. He enthusiastically joined the Rifle Brigade and saw service as an officer in North Africa and Italy where he led his company into battle while heavily rouged and wearing a mauve scarf.
He lived in no man’s shadow and to no one’s expectation, so when meeting a London acquaintance, also in uniform in the bloodied ruins of Monte Casino, and being asked, 'Bun! What are you doing here?'. He replied acidily, 'oh, shopping'. His bravery was famed amongst his men; he once entered a burning building to rescue an injured comrade. Describing the Italian Campaign, he wrote: 'There were pieces of people flying past my nose and I thought, 'this is perfectly awful but not as bad as being at school'."
~ Sam Muston
"Bunny Roger by Sam Muston"
https://www.queerbible.com/queerbible/2017/11/15/bunny-roger-by-sam-muston
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