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West Wycombe, a village in the Chiltern Hills, was where the Dashwood family owned its landed estate. West Wycombe Park is a typical Palladian building. Above West Wycombe is a steep hill at the top of which is St. Lawrence’s church, built by the Dashwoods and next to it is the huge flint mausoleum of the Dashwood family. Sir Francis Dashwood founded the "Order of the Knights of St. Francis of Wycombe": it is better known as the Hellfire Club.

Below the mausoleum is the entrance to the West Wycombe caves, carved to look like the entrance to a Gothic church. The caves were enlarged by Sir Francis Dashwood in the 1750s in order to create work for the local men who were unemployed because of a succession of harvest failures. The chalk from the caves was used for building part of the road to London but Sir Francis also had the caves cut in intricate patterns. The caves crossed a stream of water known as the 'River Styx', a reference to the Greek mythological river of Hades, over which the souls of the dead were ferried by Charon.

The Hell Fire Club initially was based at Medmenham Abbey which Sir Francis bought and converted into an erotic garden. The members of the Hell-Fire club took part in mock religious ceremonies and used masks and costumes to allow them to indulge in varying degrees of debauchery. Medmenham gained some notoriety so the Hell Fire club moved to a more secluded site at West Wycombe caves. Members of the club included Sir Francis Dashwood, the Earl of Sandwich, Thomas Potter (the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury), John Wilkes, William Hogarth, the Earl of Bute, the Marquis of Granby, the Prince of Wales and possibly Benjamin Franklin and Horace Walpole.

It was alleged that the 'monks' took prostitutes down the Thames from London in barges to act as masked 'nuns'. The members of the Club also were accused of celebrating the Black Mass over the naked bodies of aristocratic ladies, one of whom was Lady Mary Montagu Wortley, the mother-in-law of the Earl of Bute.



EVEN MORE INTERESTING..........

NO SMOKE WITHOUT FIRE
Overlooking Dublin city from the south west, at an altitude of 383m (1264ft), is a foreboding ruined hunting lodge, marked on Ordnance Survey maps as the 'Hell-Fire Club'. Current urban lore insists on telling us that it was - and still is - a site commonly used for the practice of 'Satanism' and other occult activities, and that the Devil himself made a brief appearance there at some unspecified time in the past. In a story similar to the one attached to Loftus Hall (a haunted house on the Hook Peninsula), a mysterious stranger seeks shelter on a stormy night, and a card game ensues. A member of the household drops a card, and sees that below the table, the otherwise affable and charming visitor has a cloven hoof. His or her screams made the Devil 'aware of her discovery, and he at once vanished in a thunder-clap leaving a brimstone smell behind him' (Seymour and Neligan).

The elusive and rather ambiguous exploits of the Irish *Hell-Fire Club* have intrigued Blather for some time. While for most people the name denotes a ruined hunting lodge in the forested Dublin mountains, visited on Sundays by hordes of escaping suburbanites, it originally refers to an organisation alleged to have devoted to their time to the practice of unbridled hedonism.

The Club, also referred to as the *Medmenham Club* was formed in 1741 by Sir Francis Dashwood (1708 - 1781) at West Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, and became notorious for its rumoured sexual orgies and 'occult' activities. Much has been written about Dashwood and his friends, with varying levels of luridness... but our interest lies with the Irish Hell-Fire Club, founded in 1735 by the 1st Earl of Rosse, Richard Parsons, known to be a 'sorcerer, dabbler in black magic... and a man of "humour and frolic"' (Somerville-Large). It was apparently disbanded following his death in 1741.

Weston St. John Joyce mentions Mount Pelier on page 123 of his *The Neighbourhood of Dublin*, published in 1912:

'Making our way over the gorse and heather up the slopes of the hill from Mount Pelier House, we at length come into view of the old ruin on the top - an interesting and conspicuous object from afar, but proving a most unprepossessing structure on closer acquaintance. It is variously known to the Dublin folk as the Hell-Fire Club House, the Haunted House, and the Shooting Lodge, although it really possesses no valid claim to any of these designations, it having been built, apparently as a mere freak, for use as an occasional summer residence, by the Right Honourable William Conolly of Castletown, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, about the year 1725, shortly after he purchased the Duke of Wharton's estate in this neighbourhood.'

St. John Joyce mentions another Satanic appearance, due to the use of part of a local megalithic standing stone in the construction of the lodge:

'Shortly after the house was built, the slated roof was blown off one night in a tremendous storm - by the agency of the devil it was popularly believed, on account of the sacrilegious conduct of the builder in desecrating the old carn. But Squire Conolly was not a man to be easily beaten, and so he set to work and built a massive arched roof of stones keyed together as in a bridge, and of such impregnable strength that it has effectually withstood the efforts of wind or devil - whichever it was - from that day to this.'

St. John Joyce also expressed uncertainty with regard to the tenuous occult significance of Mount Pelier:

'With regard to one of the names which seems to have taken the fancy of the public, it is to be observed that while the Hell-Fire Club may have held some of its meetings in this house, it is tolerably certain that it was never one of the regular meeting-places of that mysterious and iniquitous body, the ordinary rendezvous of which was the Eagle Tavern on Cork Hill.'

As with the exploits of other larger than life characters, the stories of the Hell-Fire Club vary, but most mention the Eagle Tavern, once on Cork Hill (by Dublin Castle) as the main centre of operation, where the "Bucks" swigged *Scultheen*, a 'special mixture of whiskey and butter'. "Bucks" were a class of gent '"whose whole enjoyment and the business of whose life seemed to consist of eccentricity and violence"'(Somerville-Large).

Somerville-Large tells us 'popular supposition associates [The Hell-Fire Club] with the gaunt ruin on top of Montpelier Hill, and the odd black mass have taken place in Mr. Conolly's airy shooting lodge. The club is supposed to have set fire to the place to give it a more hellish appearance, while the reputed burning of a lady in a barrel sounds like an outdoor occasion'.

Andrew Behan, who unfortunately seems have been possesed by the dark forces of H.P. Lovecraft and the Necromonicon, reckons that it is *possible* that ;the Hell-Fire Club did indeed carry out black masses and orgies on Montpelier Hill', but 'merely used satanic regalia to spice up their bawdy drinking sessions.' Behan's essay can be found at several locations on the web, which doubtless will lead to the inclusion of various characters from Lovecraft's *Cthulu Mythos* in the future lore of the Irish Hell-Fire Club.

Behan also mentions the story of a priest, who stumbled across the club's fun'n'frolics (there's no mention of what he was doing wandering about Mount Pelier Hill at night), and discovered that the centre of attention was a huge black cat.

'Breaking free from his captors the cleric grabbed the cat and uttered an exorcism which tore the beast apart. A demon shot up from its corpse. Hurtling through the roof it brought down the ceiling and scattered the assembly.'

Behan also mentions that Conolly 'is said to have met the devil in the form of a "black man" in the lodge's dining room, which is probably a variation on the card-game story.

Unfortunately, Behan doesn't provide us with references or basis for his theories (well, discounting the *Cthulhu Mythos* stuff). He also claims that Parsons was also known as Jack St. Ledger - which Blather deems doubtful - *Colonel* Jack St. Ledger seems to have been a real person (who, according to Somerville-Large, was so obsessed with the Duchess of Rutland that he would drink the water in which she had washed her hands).

The website of Killakee House, a restaurant further down Mount Pelier Hill, tells us some more about of the Hell-Fire Club shenanigans, including of the burning, which they believe occurred around 1740, while it was in the hands of Richard Chappell 'Burn-Chapel' Whaley, so called because of his Sunday entertainment, which entailed riding around setting fire to the thatch of Catholic chapels.

Anyway, the folk at Killakee tell of how, following a black mass, a footman spilled a drink on Whaley's coat, after slipping on the mass of drunken bodies on the floor. Whaley poured brandy upon the man, set him alight, and soon had the entire building ablaze. Most were too drunk to escape.

The webpage continues to talk about Whaley's death at the age of 34, in 1800, no mean feat for a man who burned down a building in 1740. I would imagine that they have confused him with his son, Buck Whaley, famous for having travelled to Jerusalem and back for a bet (no mean feat in 1789). "I was born with strong passions" begin Buck Whaley's *Memoirs*, "a lively imaginative disposition and a spirit that could brook no restraint. I possessed a restlessness and activity of mind that directed me to the most extravagant pursuits; and the ardour of my disposition never abated until satiety had weakened the power of my enjoyment". Whaley junior did indeed die in 1800 at the age of 34, following a masochistic squandering of his personal fortune.

Killakee House itself is no stranger to weirdness, with mention of spectral black cats (related to the sacrificed moggie of Hell-Fire Club days?), and the discovery of a dwarf human skeleton below the floor in 1970.

And so the ambiguity surrounding the Dublin Hell-Fire Club abounds. Does the Hellfire Club building really have anything do with the club of the same name? Were the members (of the Irish branch) students of the occult, or students of drunken revelry?

Whatever about the various specifics, it is entirely possible that some meetings of the club took place at the now ruined building on Mount Pelier Hill, even if only briefly. To quote V.S. Pritchett:

'I was brought up on the legend that the sinister little ruin on top of the Dublin Mountains which is called the Hell-Fire Club was the site of the orgies; but historians now say there is no evidence. I incline still to the legend on the general ground that what goes on in cities is nothing to do with what goes on in the country.'

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