A treasure, a trouper and a tartar

Yoked together here are three notable English eccentrics whose lives and careers have nothing in common beyond their homosexuality, and the affection of the writer Paul Bailey. The first and briefest of these three queer lives concerns the splendidly named early 20th century music-hall star Frederick Jester Barnes. Handsome and charming and unstinting with the mascara, Barnes was born in 1885, the son of a Birmingham butcher.

Stage-struck from an early age, by 1908 he was appearing at the London Coliseum and his career prospered in the early years of the century, before drink and extravagant living got the better of him. The rest is a sad tale of spiralling decline and illness, until he eventually gassed himself in Southsea in 1938.

Barnes's most successful song was the self-penned The Black Sheep Of The Family with its memorable refrain: "It's a queer, queer world we live in / And Dame Nature plays a funny game - / Some get all the sunshine, / Others get the shame." If Barnes got the shame, the lesbian writer Naomi Jacob (Micky to her friends) certainly came to enjoy the sunshine. Born in Yorkshire in 1884 of a disastrous marriage, she was a butch, bookish child, later given to inventing many different versions of her unhappy past.

Micky had several careers, beginning as a teacher, before becoming the secretary (and lover) of an older married singer-actress Marguerite Broadfoote, with whom she travelled on tour for seven years, until Mr Broadfoote intervened in 1913. Ugly, domineering, and remorselessly self-confident, she appeared manfully on the stage throughout the 1920s. She was also a prolific writer, and "at the peak of her activity in the 1930s, she was churning out at least six books a year".

She eventually settled in Italy in a long-running lesbian menage a trois, returning to England in 1939 in response to the rising tide of anti-Semitism. She died a queer legend in 1964, a gloriously absurd monstre-sacre from an earlier age, who had insisted on teaching a succession of Italian cooks how to prepare Yorkshire pudding, and assured her readers that spaghetti should be boiled for half an hour. I was delighted to make her acquaintance at this safe distance.

Anyone fearing scandalous revelations concerning the private life of the still much lamented Arthur Marshall may relax. Born in 1910, he was for much of his life a popular teacher at Oundle, of which he marvellously remarked: "The boys are quite safe with me. It's their fathers I'm interested in." He subsequently settled comfortably into the well-deserved media celebrity of his later years, becoming something of a national treasure.

His television success, however, tended rather to obscure his gifts as a writer. In a century which greatly overvalued the novel, he was the greatest comic essayist of his day, the light book review being his preferred form. From 1935 until 1984 he wrote regularly for the New Statesman, until he was summarily and disgracefully fired by the odious, humourless prophet of political correctness, Bruce Page. True to the man, his final essay, Out Goes Me, was a typical gem of generous, wryly observed humane intelligence. I was glad to learn that he had a generally happy life. Paul Bailey concludes: "Fred Barnes and Naomi Jacob were famous for a time but are now forgotten, and Arthur Marshall's books are unlikely to endure." I hope he is wrong, and that Marshall's place here in this admirably well-judged book reflects the beginnings of the wider, lasting recognition his work deserves.