Queer Places:
University of Cambridge, 4 Mill Ln, Cambridge CB2 1RZ
Bell Court, 5 The Grn, Aldbourne, Marlborough SN8 2BW, UK

Charles John Hope-Johnstone (January 8, 1883 - 1970) was born on January 8, 1883, to William James Hope Johnstone and Emily Mary Baillie. Raised in a respectable British family, he pursued higher education at King’s College, Cambridge. Before the outbreak of global conflict, Hope-Johnstone was drawn to bohemian travel and intellectual wanderlust, famously walking to Bosnia alongside his close friend Gerald Brenan.

During the First World War, he served as a Lieutenant in the Norfolk Regiment and spent time in British Intelligence in Greece. It was in Greece that he formed a deep, lasting friendship with author Compton Mackenzie. Following the war, Hope-Johnstone acted as a key bridging figure in British modernist circles. In 1919, he introduced Gerald Brenan to the Bloomsbury Group. While author Anthony Powell noted that Hope-Johnstone was not "of Bloomsbury" in the strictest sense, he was accepted as a complete social and intellectual equal by its inner circle. His editorial talents led him to serve as editor of The Burlington Magazine from 1919 to 1920 until his dismissal by Roger Fry, and he later co-edited The Gramophone alongside Compton Mackenzie.

Hope-Johnstone spent the winter of 1922 at Brenan's house in southern Spain, arriving with hundreds of pounds of photographic equipment to master photography. His portraits of Brenan as well as artist Augustus John and his family became notable visual records of the era; he also briefly worked as a tutor to Augustus John's children. Throughout his middle years, his academic and intellectual career took him abroad, serving as a lecturer in Peking, China, in 1939, and subsequently teaching at Istanbul University in Turkey from 1943 to 1948. He eventually returned to England and spent his final years living in a tiny cottage attached to Gerald Brenan's home in Aldbourne, Wiltshire, where he resided until his death in 1970.

Hope-Johnstone's primary connections to LGBTQ history flow through his intimate presence within the fluid, non-normative social networks of early 20th-century Britain. The Bloomsbury Group, in which he moved freely, was famous for challenging Victorian moral paradigms and fostering open homosexual, bisexual, and polyamorous relationships among figures like Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, and Virginia Woolf. Furthermore, his close bond with Compton Mackenzie—whose literary works frequently engaged with queer themes, subtexts, and homosocial camaraderie—and his lifelong cohabitation with Gerald Brenan highlight his centrality within a network of artists and writers who cultivated queer-adjacent, unconventional domestic arrangements outside traditional heteronormative structures.

References:

• Compton Mackenzie, My Life and Times: Octave Five, 1915–1923 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966) – Details their service together in British Intelligence in Greece during WWI, their friendship, and their later work together on The Gramophone.
• Anthony Powell, To Keep the Ball Rolling: The Memoirs of Anthony Powell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, p. 140) – Recounts Hope-Johnstone’s standing and reputation in Bloomsbury social circles.
• Gerald Brenan, South from Granada (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957) – Describes Hope-Johnstone’s visit to Yegen in Andalusia during the winter of 1922 with his photographic equipment, as well as their earlier walking trip to Bosnia and shared residence in Wiltshire.
• Alan Warwick Palmer and Veronica Palmer, Who's Who in Bloomsbury (Harvester Press, 1987, p. 23) – Provides biographical coverage of his associate status within the Bloomsbury Group, his editor role at The Burlington Magazine, and his relationship with Gerald Brenan.
• Robert Cumming (ed.), My Dear BB...: The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark, 1925–1959 (Yale University Press, 2015, p. 529) – Includes editorial notes and correspondence references concerning his roles in art publications and art circles.
• Augustus John, Chiaroscuro: Fragments of an Autobiography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952) – References Hope-Johnstone’s time spent tutoring John's children and photographing the family.

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