This seems naive on all sides
Pamela Hansford Johnson herself (at least in later life, I will give her a pass as a 1930s teenager), her mother, and her biographer.
According to Deirdre David in 1933 PHJ won a Sunday Referee prize for a poem. The 'Poets' Corner' editor of the Referee, Victor Benjamin Neuberg, held a 'creative arts circle' on Sunday afternoons at his home in St Johns Wood.
Pamela's mother was reassured that he was respectable: David parenthetically remarks that he was the subject of a good deal of sexual gossip, but that it was of a homosexual nature, so she had little cause for worry: or, with her theatrical family background, considered it a safe thing for a young girl. Wikipedia indicates that he married three times, which seems a little excessive if it was just an exercise in camouflage?).
HOWEVER
Had I been the mother of a young girl at the period I would have had serious doubts about letting her associate with somebody who had been that close to Aleister Crowley, known as 'the wickedest man in the world', although by that time they had long since parted ways.
That history is not mentioned at all by David except for a dismissive allusion to 'something to do with a camel' and PHJ complaining to his biographer about people telling 'foul stories' about him and asserting that the gatherings at his house were entirely decorous and never brought a blush to the cheek of the young person.
As the Jean Overton Fuller biography is cited the connection can't have been unknown to David. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2763936.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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