AS the Second World War drew to a close, an old man sat in his flat in Hove wishing that posterity would remember him for his poetry.

But only one phrase from hundreds of poems by Lord Alfred Douglas has stood the test of time.

In 1894 he referred to homosexuality as “the love that dares not speak its name” in a poem called Two Loves.

For Douglas has gone down in history as the beautiful boy whose dalliance with Oscar Wilde led to a great scandal in the late Victorian era.

Wilde was convicted of gross indecency with other men and went to prison at the height of his fame. He died soon afterwards in early middle age.

Douglas went into exile and stayed in France until it was safe to return. He too was jailed, although not for homosexuality, and lived a shadowy life for another 40 years. His fate was more lingering than Wilde’s but equally awful.

His father was the 8th Marquess of Queensberry, a man of raging tempers and a mania about homosexuality which was then strictly illegal.

Suspecting correctly that Douglas was gay, the Marquess did everything possible to bring him down and with him Oscar Wilde.

He was enraged when the lovers openly appeared in public with each other, not least in Worthing when Wilde wrote The Importance of Being Earnest.

Wilde made the mistake of suing Queensberry for libel. He lost and his conviction in a subsequent criminal court was almost inevitable.

Douglas surprised everyone by getting married and producing two sons. But the marriage did not last and he soon became involved in a spectacular series of libel cases. Among those he sued was the author Arthur Ransome, then working as a journalist.

He lost more cases than he won and went through an inherited fortune. But his big mistake was to make a series of wild allegations against Winston Churchill, then a Cabinet Minister. Churchill successfully sued for criminal libel and Douglas was sent to jail.

He led a half-life after that and the beautiful boy who has captivated Wilde and many others when at Oxford became a gnarled old man.

In 1927 Douglas moved with his mother into Hove, eventually settling in Nizells Avenue where there is now a plaque to him. She died in 1935 but he lived another ten years in poverty,

Belatedly, leading literary figures came to his aid including Bernard Shaw and Malcolm Muggeridge. Several eminent men and women such as Marie Stopes, John Gielgud, Evelyn Waugh and Virginia Woolf asked the Government to award him a civic pension. But Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, remembering the Wilde scandal, refused.

Towards the end, Douglas settled many of his grievances and even made his peace with Churchill.

By now a Catholic, Douglas was buried next to his mother in the Franciscan Priory in Crawley. His literary reputation rests on a few, largely second rate, sonnets but he was forever to be famous as Wilde’s fatal lover.