About 10 years ago, not long after my first volume of diaries saw the light of day, I received an invitation to lunch with Henry Channon, grandson of the late Henry “Chips” Channon, at the family estate in Essex. He was considering publishing an unexpurgated version of his grandfather’s famous diaries—a heavily redacted version which came out in 1967 had caused a sensation—and wanted my advice. There was disagreement in the family over the wisdom of making the full version public. Henry was in favour. His sister, Georgia, was not.
That disagreement seems to have been resolved. “Chips” died in 1958, and just about everyone who features in his diaries is long dead and buried. (The Queen Mother was among the last to go in 2002; even his son Paul, who was in the Thatcher Cabinet, died in 2007). Henry asked who I would suggest as an editor. I put him in touch with Ion Trewin, who edited Alan Clark’s hugely successful and similarly scandalous diaries. Nothing came of this. Trewin died in 2015 and the task has fallen to journalist and historian Simon Heffer.
He has done a superb job. This first volume, which intermittently covers the years between 1918 and 1938, is a doorstopper of 350,000 words plus voluminous footnotes. It is best dipped into rather than read cover to cover. Two more volumes will be published in due course, taking us up to 1958.
There are large gaps in the timeline. After 1918, the diaries lapse and do not resume until 1923. There is another hiatus between early January 1929 and February 1934. Whether Channon simply dried up or the diaries for those years are lost is unclear. A large chunk of the later diaries covering the years 1954 and 1958 turned up at a car boot sale and were returned to the family in 1991, so more might be waiting to be found.
The value of these diaries is the light they shed on a vanished era. Channon was the spoiled son of a wealthy American who had made a fortune in banking and shipping. Young, handsome and charming, he spent the last year of the First World War in Paris attached in some unspecified—but junior and unpaid—capacity in the Red Cross. Later he was made an honorary attaché at the US embassy. An assiduous social climber, Channon seems to have spent most of the year being wined and dined in the salons of the French aristocracy. For the first six months of 1918, the Germans were within shelling range of Paris. Nevertheless, for the upper classes, life seemed to go on pretty much as normal. Channon spent the year comfortably billeted at the Ritz, courtesy of a generous allowance from his father. On a rare visit to the front, he travelled (I kid you not) by Rolls-Royce in the company of a British general’s son. Goodness knows what the lads in the trenches would have made of this. It is enough to turn even the mildest social democrat into a Bolshevik.
For those who once thought—as I did—that the great upper-class party came to an end with the outbreak of war in 1914, the Channon diaries are conclusive evidence that the champagne kept on flowing. Life in the stratosphere carried on much as before throughout Britain’s less-than-roaring twenties and the hungry thirties. Entering this world will not be everyone’s cup of tea. Much of the author’s life seems to have involved a perambulation around the great country houses. In London, his world was bounded by Mayfair, Belgravia and Westminster. The cast list is a veritable Burke’s peerage. This is Brideshead on stilts (and, yes, Castle Howard was among his conquests). Evelyn Waugh (“his ideals are measured by publishers’ royalties”) lurks somewhere on the periphery. Without the helpful footnotes, many of those whose company he keeps would be unfamiliar to today’s readers, though some names still ring bells—the Duke and Duchess of York (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother), the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII), Lord Curzon and Winston Churchill. Rudyard Kipling and John Buchan make cameo appearances. Mrs Kipling expresses regret that power is no longer in the hands of what she calls “the forty families,” but to judge by this account many of them were still pretty powerful then.
The approach of the first minority Labour government after the 1923 election triggers an uncomfortable frisson among the champagne and canapés. (“Is this the beginning of the end… the prelude to the tumbrils?”) It isn’t, of course, but there are clues to the mindset of those in his
circle. “Should the Labour Party be returned with a working majority,” he writes in the run-up to the 1924 election, “I see nothing for it but civil war.” He needn’t have worried: the Tories were returned with a huge majority. “England has returned to her senses… The era of privilege and douceur de vivre has come back to us,” noted the diarist.
Come the 1926 general strike, there is another brief panic. Channon signs up as a special constable and finds himself in unfamiliar territory—places like Hackney, Shoreditch and Whitechapel feature for the first (and only) time. He is unimpressed by his first close-up view of the working classes: “One’s sympathy with the down-trodden vanishes when one sees them and how they live. The squalor is much exaggerated.” Between shifts he lunches with the Curzons.
Channon, an inveterate snob, loathed most things American, despite the flow of subsidy from his father in Chicago keeping him in the style to which he became accustomed. His entire life seems to have relied on other people’s money. In the early 1930s, he became a British citizen and married Honor Guinness, daughter of the Earl of Iveagh. His fabulously wealthy father-in-law duly set up the happy couple with an estate in Essex and a townhouse in Belgravia. As the editor remarks, there is no evidence that Channon ever had a proper job until in 1935, aged 37, he was elected to parliament as Conservative MP for Southend. “Elected” is probably putting it too strongly. Southend was a hereditary Guinness seat, which had been occupied previously by each of his in-laws and would in due course be inherited by his son, Paul. Southend, too, was well outside his normal milieu: “One must be so careful with these middle-class people for their standards are so different from one’s own.”
Within a year of his election, Channon was made parliamentary private secretary to Rab Butler, a reforming Conservative who would go on to hold all the great offices of state except prime minister, but at that time was a junior Foreign Office minister. Once again connections counted—the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, was his wife’s uncle. When asked why he had appointed Channon, Butler joked of his need “to attach a first-class restaurant car to his train.”
Many of those in whose circles Channon moved had—principally on account of their fear of Bolshevism and what happened to the Russian aristocracy—developed a soft spot for Hitler. (Both Butler and Halifax were appeasers.) Channon was no exception. “Hitler,” he wrote, “is the greatest diplomat of modern times.” He dismissed Churchill as a “devil” who “must never be trusted,” going on to label him a “fat, brilliant, unbalanced, illogical, porcine orator… [who has] done much to poison relations with Germany.” In 1936, Channon and his wife attended the Berlin Olympics where they were entertained by leading Nazis. Though he only glimpsed Hitler from afar, he was deeply moved: “One felt one was in the presence of some semi-divine creature.”
They even visited a labour camp where they were impressed by the cheerful healthy looking inmates (almost certainly SS or SA men posing as prisoners). “England could learn many a lesson from Nazi Germany,” he writes. Oh dear, oh dear.
The highlight of this volume, and perhaps the main reason why a more detailed version was so long suppressed, is the account of the abdication. Channon was a long-time friend of the Prince of Wales and a witness to his excesses. From the outset, Channon was firmly in the camp of King Edward VIII, who was pro-German and “doesn’t hesitate to betray his Teutonic leanings.” Crisis brewed after it became clear the King wanted to marry the divorced American Wallis Simpson. Channon was on an inside track. “The battle for the throne has begun… not six people in the Kingdom are so informed,” he wrote on 28th November 1936. “The King, who is half-demented, and in a corner, lost all control and threw books and anything he could lay his hands on at the prime minister” (2nd Dec). “The King, like the poor Tsar… will listen to no advice and is marching straight to his doom” (5th Dec). “Will the monarchy survive this blow?” (11th Dec). “I also have always thought that Edward VIII suffers from sexual repression of another nature… he has always surrounded himself with extremely attractive men” (19th Dec). And this, after the drama is over, from a memorandum noted in the diary and marked “Very Secret”: “Ernest Simpson [Wallis’s husband] never wanted a divorce, but the late King followed him about his own house, came to even his bathroom begging, imploring Ernest for his wife’s sake…”
Having so spectacularly backed the wrong horses—appeasement and Edward VIII—in the 1930s, it is unsurprising that come the war Channon’s star quickly waned. But he was destined to remain a minor player in the political and social landscape for a while to come, as the final two volumes will undoubtedly show.
The enduring fascination of these diaries is the insight they offer into a world that has (more or less) passed away. To be a great diarist one does not have to occupy the commanding heights, only a ringside seat. Other successful diaries from the same era—those of Duff Cooper, Harold Nicolson, Jock Colville—were the work of well-connected toffs who apart from Cooper (who became First Lord of the Admiralty) were not especially high in the political pecking order but enjoyed privileged access. As did Lord Moran, Churchill’s doctor, whose controversial diaries were published shortly after Churchill’s death.
“To be a great diarist, one only has to occupy a ringside seat”
The lesson holds good for our own times, too. The best remembered diarists tend to be people who occupied the shadows or foothills yet enjoyed access to the top tables: Gyles Brandreth on the dying days of John Major’s government; Alan Clark on Thatcher; Sasha Swire on David Cameron and his circle; and (if I may be so bold) my own on the rise and fall of New Labour. Somewhere in the bowels of the Johnson administration, a secret scribbler is no doubt already hard at work.
Merely to have occupied a ringside seat is, however, no guarantee of success. An ability to write, an eye for detail, a brutal honesty (about both oneself and others) are also essential ingredients. And this is where Chips Channon scores. He does not hold back. On Churchill: “That… faceur would stir up trouble anywhere… luckily for England and the peace of Europe he has no following whatsoever in the House of C” (his last point was probably true at the time of writing, in July 1938). Nancy Astor was “an interfering termagant”; George VI “a godawful bore.” Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, “lazy and charming… She will never be a great Queen for she will never be up in time.” The composer Igor Stravinsky he describes as “looking like a German dentist… no manners.” He is perhaps most withering on himself: “Oh… why has poison been dropped into my soul? Why do I always prefer what is… corrupt to the wholesome, happy things of the earth?”
One doesn’t have to like Chips Channon—many didn’t at the time, though even his enemies conceded that he had a certain charm—to enjoy reading his diaries. His editor describes him as “vain, snobbish, shallow and profoundly lacking in judgment.” True and yet, despite it all, his diaries are strangely addictive.
Henry “Chips” Channon: The Diaries 1918-38 Edited by Simon Heffer (Hutchinson, £35)
