ABSTRACT
Francis Bacon was well prepared for a world about to plunge into disaster. Although Bacon liked to explain it as the natural outcome of specific experiences, this attitude was also clearly the product of his unusual cast of mind and temperament; it was in fact dictated by his particular genius. Yet Bacon's experience as a homosexual and the agility with which he negotiated the homosexual world also stood him in good stead as war approached. Bacon's own father was living at this time in the last of his big houses, the Old Rectory at Bradford Peverell, near Dorchester; and it was there, on 1 June 1940, that he died, aged seventy, of 'splenic anaemia'. The misfortunes of the Bacon family extended to the youngest child, Winnie, who, although named after her mother and grandmother, inherited conspicuously little of their fun-loving vitality.
