In The Crown Season 6 episode 8, the depiction of a basement nightclub in the Ritz Hotel in London seems highly inaccurate.
In Matthew Sweet's West End Front the bar beneath the Ritz is described as a drinking den frequented by upper class homosexual men. The Crown depicts the entrance with a neon sign "The Pink Sink" which would have been too blatant for the time when male homosexuality was illegal in England, and vigorously prosecuted by the civilian courts and Army courts-martial as "indecency". Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd and David Watkin in Ritz: a Social and Architectural History says the bar beneath the Ritz was known, with the Guards regiment banning its officers from visiting, but became 'too popular and too queer' for the authorities, with the War Office eventually having it shut down.
Would it be correct to infer from these accounts of the bar not being immediately closed down, that there was some tolerance by the authorities of homosexuality among the upper-class "Brideshead" set, as long as it wasn't well known? But the general public attitude would have been deeply homophobic?
The Crown depicts the basement bar of the Ritz as a nightclub playing jazz with a racially mixed clientele including American servicemen dancing the jitterbug with the future Queen of England, quite at odds with what I imagine were the social divisions and class hierarchy of the snooty upper class white British (and royal/aristocratic European) milieu of the five-star Ritz Hotel at the time. Would it be accurate to say that such jazz clubs with racially mixed dancing existed in London in the 1940s, but would have been very rare because British attitudes were generally racist?
