“Brother Benjamin of Cookham” Surfaces

In 1958 a British journalist named Donald McCormick published a book titled The Hell-Fire Club: The Story of the Amorous Knights of Wycombe. (It’s been reprinted in various forms since, including the eye-catching paperback edition shown here.)

McCormick described documents which, he said, hinted at how Benjamin Franklin was intimately acquainted with the activity of the notorious “Monks of Medmenham Abbey,” founded by his friend Baron le Despencer (formerly Sir Francis Dashwood, baronet).

For example, McCormick wrote:

A letter from Benjamin Franklin to a Mr. Acourt, of Philadelphia, mentioned “the exquisite sense of classical design, charmingly reproduced by the Lord le Despencer at West Wycombe, whimsical and puzzling as it may sometimes be in its imagery, is as evident below the earth as above it.”

That looked like a clear allusion to the caves that Despencer had decorated for his club.

And here was another hint:

It is also claimed that Franklin was a visitor to Borgnis’ caves at Marlow—apparently he was a keen speleologist—and on a visit to an inn at Marlow that landlord once asked: ‘Is not that Master Franklin?’ ‘No,’ he was told, ‘it is Brother Benjamin of Cookham.’ There was much mirth at this reply.

In the wine books of the [Medmenham] society there are references to “Brother Francis of Cookham” and “Brother Thomas of Cookham,” but none to “Brother Benjamin”. It would almost seem that “Brothers of Cookham” was used as an alias in certain circumstances…

McCormick’s book became a source for Daniel P. Mannix’s similar The Hellfire Club, published in the U.S. of A. a year later. [Incidentally, I met Mannix when I was a boy, brought together by mutual interests.] Many subsequent authors have quoted one book or the other rather than the original sources McCormick described.

More revelations were offered in two books by Richard Deacon, A History of the British Secret Service (1969) and The Silent War: A History of Western Naval Intelligence (1978), both reprinted over the years.

I’ll quote from a 1970 Argosy magazine article based on the first book:

An entry in the [Medmenham] society’s wine books reads: “On the 7th of July, 1773, Brother Benjamin of Cookham: 1 bottle of claret, 1 of port and 1 of calcavello.”

So, on closer examination, “Brother Benjamin” appeared in that source after all?

In that article Deacon provided another story about “Brother Benjamin,” with implications about Franklin’s activities during the war:

Toward the middle of the nineteenth century Lord le Despencer’s illegitimate daughter, Rachel Antonina Lee, told historian Thomas deQuincey that her father, in his last years, would often raise a toast to “Brother Benjamin of Cookham, who remained our friend and secret ally all the time he was in the enemy camp.”

She stated flatly that “Brother Benjamin” was Franklin, and that he “sent intelligence to London by devious routes, through Ireland, by courier from France and through a number of noble personages in various country houses.”

But wait! Deacon had another revelation:

John Norris, of Hughenden Manor,…had built a hundred-foot tower on a hill at Camberley, in Surrey, from the top of which he used to signal with a heliograph’s flashing mirror to Lord le Despencer at West Wycombe, to place bets. In those papers, this enigmatic note appears: “3 June, 1778. Did this day Heliograph Intelligence from Dr. Franklin in Paris to Wycombe.”

All that looks like a chain of evidence linking Franklin to Despencer’s club—and Despencer to Franklin’s wartime espionage.

We can find the quotations printed the McCormick and Deacon books repeated in other titles over the years since, and of course on the internet.

But the chain isn’t as strong as it might seem.

TOMORROW: The weakest links.