A newly discovered album contains intimate, joyful glimpses of the playwright drinking, partying and holidaying with his famous friends and lovers. The result is an astonishing insight into gay life in the interwar years

In 1931, Noël Coward was the highest-earning author in the western world, celebrated for his scintillating comedies and sensational dramas of hidden love such as The Vortex, Private Lives and Easy Virtue. As well as writing hit songs, musicals, novels and short stories, he painted and, not least, performed. But perhaps the most astounding thing of all is the fact that – at a time when homosexuality was illegal and would remain so for some time – he lived an openly gay life.

It is this that makes a newly discovered photograph album so extraordinary. It shows intimate glimpses from the private life of this towering cultural figure. Apparently compiled in the 1930s by Coward’s closest female friend, Joyce Carey, the album is a remarkable insight into gay lives of the interwar years, lived in plain sight. Carey died in 1993. It is because of her long-held loyalty to the man she and other intimates only half-ironically called the Master that the album has only now come to light, due to be sold at a London sale room later this month.

Many of the shots were taken at Goldenhurst, Coward’s country retreat in Kent, an extended redbrick farmhouse he bought in 1926. Here, and at more exotic sites, we see the artist and his famous friends at play. They bask in the ancient, faded sunlight, these people whose lives were bookended by two world wars. There’s Lord Mountbatten, fishing – Coward was later to play him in the wartime film In Which We Serve. And here’s Alec Guinness, in smart sunglasses, with his seraphic smile that gave little of his personal life away.