The Naughty Fruit Set

‘She may well, indeed had had all the bananas a woman of her social standing could desire, but her disdain for the pomegranate led to her being shunned by the rest of London society at that time.’ So, says an exciting new biography of Ermintrude Watermelon, the woman who became synonymous with the infamous Naughty Fruit Set that came to prominence in the inter-war years through their flagrant use of fruit – and sometimes even vegetables – in a way which shocked the more straight-laced of the upper classes, especially when it was revealed just what the Set were doing with all those pineapples.

Many contemporary commentators, and most subsequent historians, have put the Set’s use of fruit for erotic purposes down to some sort of after-effect of the Great War, which had not only robbed the young ladies of the period nearly a whole generation of men, it had – on the Home Front – led to a lack of fresh vegetables (although not on the scale of the Second World War and its aftermath where one upper-class lady complained she had been unable to enjoy a good firm cucumber until well into the 1950s).

However, like most of the fads and fashions of that period the antics of the Naughty Fruit Set were brought to a sudden end by the stock market crash which led to the Great Depression, where anyone consorting in a overly-erotic way with even a mandarin orange was regarded as decadent and beyond the pale. Even though it was rumoured that the Prime Minister and the Cabinet of the time got up to all sorts of activities with a bunch of grapes and certain members of the 10 Downing Street typing pool, all the official records of that period are still covered by the Official Secrets Act until at least 2032, despite several attempts to have the official minutes released under Freedom of Information rules.

So, until that time what really happened then will – unlike the antics of the Naughty Fruit Set remain in the realm of speculation and rumour.