The Varnished Culture's Thumbnail Reviews

(1918 – 1938) (Edited by Simon Heffer)

In the elusive search for historical truth, contemporary records such as diaries, even unreliable ones, can be valuable. Private diaries in particular, as they can break free of censorship, even self-censorship to a degree. Furthermore, insider diaries can give great insight into the mores of the times. Classic examples include Pepys, Boswell, Francis Kilvert, Anne Frank and Alan Clark.

Henry “Chips” Channon (the nickname came when he roomed at Christ Church College, Oxford with a friend nicknamed “Fish”) was born in 1897 in Chicago, son of a wealthy family; served with the Red Cross and as a attaché in Paris in the Great War; attended Oxford; soaked his parents for money; ‘anglicised,’ and married Honor, a daughter of the extremely wealthy family owning the Guinness company; obtained British citizenship (he despised his native America) and entered Parliament in 1935, serving as an obscure MP, obscure at least as revealed in this volume, until his death in 1958. He was notably undistinguished in his political career, but he seems to have attended every haut monde lunch, dinner, ball, party, soirée, and royal ceremony going. He knew everyone it seemed and tells us just what he thought of them. He was privy to events like the General Strike, the Abdication crisis, and the rise of international tension. The First Volume creates a vague feeling of dread, a time when Britain drank, danced, caroused and flounced about, careless and sans umbrella in the shadow of the gathering storm.

We except his feckless public service when it comes to his involvement in the Foreign Office, dealing with European difficulties in 1938. However, in relation to Continental affairs, he was wrong as he could be, and he was often wrong (we say this in hindsight). Virulently anti-Communist, slavishly attracted to royalty and the high-born, self-obsessed and obsessed with money, status and access to power, snobbishly admiring of “Strongmen” like Franco, Mussolini and You-Know-Who, he was one of Parliament’s enthusiastic advocates of appeasement, writing very waspish and derisive diary notes about anti-appeasers such as Churchill, Eden, Duff Cooper, etc.

Simon Heffer has done a superb job as editor, the exhaustive footnotes almost outdoing the Burke’s Peerage or the Almanach de Gotha, which is even more impressive when one notes there are two equally massive subsequent volumes (1938-1943 and 1943-1957). Expurgated versions came out in 1967 but are child’s play compared to these. And the footnotes are worth traversing while reading the diary entries, or afterwards: the detail is vivid and sometimes startling. Consider this footnote, for example: “Arthur Eric Rowton Gill (1882-1940) began in the Arts and Crafts movement and became a renowned sculptor and designer of typefaces. He adapted to the style of art deco in which he created three of his best-known works: Ariel, one of several sculptures at Broadcasting House; three sculptures depicting different winds, over the London Transport building at 55 Broadway in London; and seahorses at the Midland Hotel, Morecombe. Devoutly religious, he had incestuous relationships with two of his daughters and his sisters, and committed sex acts with his dog.”

Chips, ices, and Tallulah Bankhead (1926)

Here are some excerpts to get an idea of Channon’s style, wit (he was no Oscar Wilde), and (looking through the ‘high-resolution retrospectoscope‘) misjudgments, as well as times when he was ‘spot on’:

“I am susceptible to flattery, and male good looks; I hate and am uninterested in all the things men like such as sport, business, statistics, debates, speeches, war and the weather; but I am riveted by lust, bibelots, furniture and glamour, society and jewels.”

“He has a collection of some thirty or forty Hogarths as the painter was a protégé of an early Lord Lonsdale. Unfortunately, our host showed us one of ‘Lord Byron’, we did not know where to look.”

“The more I know of American civilisation, the more I realise how I despise it – and what a positive menace it is to the peace and future of the world – if it triumphs, the old civilisation that loved beauty and cruelty and lust and peace and the arts and rank and privileges – will pass from the picture. And we will have Fords, cinemas – ugh!! Give me Leninism in preference.”

“The government has chosen the ‘easiest way’ and at the eleventh hour decided to subsidise the mining industry…But is it wise to drop palliatives to the proletariat, who go on clamouring for more? – always more?”

(George VI): “He is completely uninteresting, undistinguished and a godawful bore!”

“A full, exhausting day. We had a luncheon party here, and the plot was to do a ‘politesse’ to Mrs. Simpson. She is a jolly, plain, intelligent, quiet, unpretentious and unprepossessing little woman, but as I wrote to Paul of Yugoslavia today, she has already the air of a personage who walks into a room as though she almost expected to be curtsied to. At least, she wouldn’t be too surprised. She has complete power over the Prince of Wales, who is trying to launch her socially.”

“Personally I think that they will be back in England in two years’ time living comfortably at the Fort or elsewhere.”

(George Moore): “He tells me over 200 women have written to him begging for rendezvous (mostly Americans). His dodge was always to answer and demand a photograph in the nude. This got rid of all but the most zealous, who complied.”

“I hate society at the moment: it is too fanatically anti-Hitler”.

“The morning was calm, the PM enchanting. I am in and out of his room constantly now. Early on, there were messages announcing mysterious movements of troops in Bavaria with the usual denials from Berlin. Then there was a grand luncheon party at 10 Downing Street at which, the Chamberlains entertained the Ribbentrops, the Halifaxes, Winston Churchills, etc. By then the news had reached the FO that the Germans had invaded Austria, and from 5 to 7 p.m. reports poured in. I was in Halifax’s room at 7.30 when the telephone rang ‘The Germans are in Vienna’, and five minutes later ‘The skies are black with Nazi planes’. We stood breathless in the Secretary of State’s room, wondering what would happen next. All night messages flowed in; by midnight Austria was a German province.”

“Halifax [Honor’s uncle] and Chamberlain are very great men who dwarf their colleagues; they are the greatest Englishmen alive, certainly; aside from them it is a mediocre crew; but I subscribe, I am afraid, to the totalitarian view that England is on the decline. We shall dwindle for a generation or so; we are a tired race and our genius, I believe, is dead. We produce nothing new whereas Germany and Italy are seething with vigour and life; we have only choruses of cranks! Democracy is absurd.”

“Militarism is dead in Germany: instead there is a cult for physical perfection and nakedness – there are even naked clubs. Physical exercise and homosexuality are the great modern German movements: both have taken on the proportions of a crusade.” (Berlin, 1928)

“The dreadful day has dawned coldly, and my limbs are numb and chilled. The telephone began early, Diana (and let me in parenthesis say that Duff Cooper has behaved shabbily. He was intimate with the King, he even flirted, or tried to, with Wallis, and she was eager to be with them at the Fort, at dinner parties, aboard the Nahlin and elsewhere, and now he is a Roundhead and calls Wallis to my face ‘a tenth-rate ugly old strumpet.’)”

“I had a row with that smelly, slimy Duchess of Atholl, who looks like an under-stuffed crocodile and has the manners of a downtrodden governess.”

“Ministers threaten to resign, but never do.”

“My new servant Morhan is an Irish ass, honest, sound…but a fool. Today he didn’t know where the Ritz was.”

“An unbelievable day in which two things occurred: I fell in love with the Prime Minister [Chamberlain], and Hitler took Vienna.”