Conservative History Journal

In view of my plans to campaign for the publication of the full version of Chips Channon's diaries I have started re-reading them. I have a copy (much used ) of the 1967 version but the 1993 version has no changes, merely a short new introduction by Robert Rhodes James. Though the newly found late diaries are mentioned they are not added as too many people were still alive (actually not that many by 1993 but both Paul Channon and Robert Rhodes James had been scarred by the original reception of the book).

The moment one starts reading those entries one becomes engrossed. The people and events are fascinating and Chips's descriptions are enthralling. Some of the people are little known these days and so one cannot be sure whether he is right or wrong in his judgements (were those peeresses really so dowdy?) but others are historically important figures and then one can weigh up whether one agrees with him or not.

His adoration of Chamberlain is a little surprising not because the man was evil personified as some people would have it - he was not but a very capable and well-meaning politician - but because there is no evidence that he had the personality, which could excite adoration. Even in this case Chips mentions several times that the government had become a one man show, which is not healthy, and enumerates the speeches that are not all that good in his opinion.

More interesting is his dislike for the constantly seething "Glamour Boys", as he calls them, around Eden who plot to no particular end and who sometimes go into a huddle with the Soviet ambassador Maisky,

the Ambassador of torture, murder and every crime in the calendar.,

as Chips wrote on May 3, 1939.

Ah yes, I hear people say, but what of his own lenient attitude to the Nazi regime. Indeed, he was not really harsh enough about them but it is not true that he was always lenient or even pro-Nazi. That is a big subject and I need to write a separate post about it. For the moment I shall keep to the subject of Chips on some of his colleagues in the House of Commons.

 He is particularly interesting on Eden, whom he likes personally and whose charm he freely acknowledges but whose abilities he considers rather mediocre and whom he fears because of his lack of control in his international likes and dislikes. His prediction is that Eden's career will continue to be catastrophic, something that was seen to be completely wrong for a while but was eventually proved to be correct. For this, if no other reason, one would like to read Chips's late diaries, which must cover the Suez fiasco and the final collapse of that career.

Meanwhile, here is a quote that made me laugh out loud. It is from his entry for May 10, 1939, after Hitler had "let Chamberlain down" by marching into Prague and Mussolini reneged on the Anglo-Italian Agreement by marching into Albania. War seems inevitable but Chips, as PPS to RAB Butler, the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, is still a little hopeful. Even he is losing hope of peace for much longer. This is the wonderful entry:

All morning at the FO intriguing and arranging matters, and the hours passed in a confusion of secret telephone calls and conversations. The startling thing about my intrigues is that they always come off. 

On the whole that was probably true though eventually he did not manage to keep his job but then neither did RAB. It does, however, explain why Chips had such a multitude of enemies as well as friends.

It seems about time to start that campaign to have the whole of Channon's diaries becoming available and, indeed, published, as I wrote some time ago. The published diaries are fascinating and often remarkably accurate, despite a comment made by one reader on my posting. Chips may have been shallow (what politician is not?) but his judgements were remarkably accurate and his knowledge of what was going on phenomenal, With all the diaries in the public domain we would see more of that.

I found a newspaper article (or part of it) from 2007 that talks of the diaries being published in full. I assume it was an item in Londoner's Diary, the gossip column of the Evening Standard, not the most reliable sources of information. I can find no trace of such a publication and I am sure I would have noticed. There is a biography of Channon, published in 2011, by Richard Carreño, which will have to be tracked down.

In the meantime, I shall have to re-read the existing diaries (well someone has to do these chores). I wanted to get hold of the later edition with that new introduction by Robert Rhodes James but have experienced some difficulty in that. So, the 1967 edition it will have to be. My one problem is that my copy is falling apart. Indeed, I keep it together, somewhat inelegantly, with a rubber ring. Chips would have been horrified.

A visit to the Charing Cross Road bookshops is indicated. It will all make a very good change from the other book I am reading, Tolstoy and his disciples by Charlotte Alston. In fact, there could not be a greater contrast.

There are many interesting comments in the diaries of Lady Knightley of Fawsley and a longer posting will appear in due course, as well as many more snippets, I have no doubt. This struck me as sadly ironic. Writing on March 8, 1906, almost two months after the catastrophic (for the Conservatives) election that also brought in twenty-nine Labour members (Lady Knightley thought as she heard the results in January that there would be forty to fifty) she mentions that a Resolution in favour of payment of Members brought in by William Hesketh Lever, Liberal MP for Wirral, had been passed in the House the previous evening. She was discussing this with William Ryland Dent Adkins, barrister, who was,  by this time a Liberal MP for Middleton, Lancashire but still active in Northamptonshire politics, as they were waiting to be seen by the Board of Education.

He [Mr A.] one good point when discussing a payment of Members (a resolution in favour of which was passed last night). He siad it would make the Labour members more independent of the trade unions.

Ho-hum thought I, as I read that. It is fair to say that practically none of the effects that payment of Members was supposed to produce came about.

In the meantime, let us consider Sir Henry Channon, "Chips" as he was known to all and sundry for reasons that seem lost in the mists of his early life. He was an American born but more British than the British Conservative politician, author of three books, an inveterate socializer and party giver who knew everybody in society, politics and the arts, a man obsessed with design and beauty and, above all, a diarist. Oh yes, he was also bi-sexual.

He kept a diary, on and off, from 1918 until his death in 1958 and tried to deposit the manuscripts in the British Museum with the proviso that they should not even be looked at for fifty years according to the historian Sir Robert Rhodes James, who edited a selection of them in 1967, and for sixty years according to other sources though that seems to be merely an instruction left by his son Paul (a much more successful politician but less interesting person) in his will.

The British Museum refused to keep them as it is not their policy to keep documents that they cannot even look at for a number of years so the diaries (or most of them and thereby hangs a tale) went back to Paul Channon who, together with Chips's close friend and companion, Peter Coats, decided to have an edited version published. George Weidenfeld, coincidentally or not the publisher of Harold Nicolson's diaries, advised them to ask the young historian Robert Rhodes James to edit it and so it happened.

Rhodes James was an odd choice as he was not particularly sympathetic to Chips either personally or politically but he did seem to warm to the diarist as his work progressed. In any case, many of Rhodes James's own assumptions and prejudices date to the mid-sixties and have undergone some changes partly because of elapsing time and partly because of work done by historians on the period. After all, Rhodes James himself published a seminal book on Churchill, which went a long way towards altering perceptions and undermining the mythology that the man himself had so carefully created.

Amusingly enough, Rhodes James's own political career was not dissimilar from Channon's though he does not seem to have known quite so much and so many people. He was a backbencher under a Prime Minister (Margaret Thatcher) with whom he was out of sympathy, became a PPS at the Foreign Office and after his retirement from the House (which Chips did not do) lobbied unsuccessfully for a peerage, ending up with a mere knighthood.

It seems extraordinary to anyone who reads Chips's diaries that on publication they were dismissed as not much more than social gossip with some prurient hints of carefully excised passages and attacked bitterly by the author's enemies, one of whom was Randolph Churchill. The latter, something of a failure, who is brilliantly and not exactly flatteringly described by Chips at various times, wondered angrily why a young historian should jeopardize his career by editing this stuff. The young historian and, even more, the young politician, son of the diarist, wondered that, too, for a while.

Then things changed. As Rhodes James describes in the Preface to the 1993 edition:

So damning were the reviews that serious historians did not bother to read the diaries. One such was A. J. P. Taylor. Years later, with nothing much else to do on a wet afternoon, he began to read them and was so rivetted that he finished them at one sitting. He then publicly applied the adjective "classic" to them, and wrote me a particularly warm letter of congratulations for my editing.

Gradually, many more people came to share Alan Taylor's revised estimate that this was a social and political document of real importance as well as a compulsive read and enormous fun. there was a call for the complete diaries - which begin in early 1918 - to be published.

These calls went unheeded. Instead, the ultra cautious Paul Channon laid down instructions that they should be kept out of the public eye for another ten years, a somewhat ridiculous idea as nobody mentioned in those pages could possibly be alive any more. Their descendants are but if we are to worry about their feelings, nothing much can be written or published in modern history apart from accounts of battles and lists of legislative proposals.

The 1993 edition is a lazy one. It is nothing more than a reprint of the 1967 one with a short new Preface by Rhodes James, in which he gives an explanation for the break-down of Chips's marriage (his meeting with Peter Coats in 1939, who became his close companion till his death and his wife's subsequent affair with and post-divorce marriage to a Czech airman) and also an odd story about the last volumes of the diary.

The 1967 edition ends with an entry in the autumn of 1953 and an editorial note that, although Chips went on with his life as before despite mounting health problems, he ended his diary then. This seemed inherently unlikely as he would have wanted to record the various political events of the mid-fifties, not to mention his own knighthood of 1957. And so it proved to be.

In 1991 the last volumes of the diary that did carry on till almost Chips's death appeared in a car boot sale in Essex (would Chips have been amused?) and the purchaser, realizing their value and importance, sold them on to Paul Channon. The assumption is that these had been stolen from Peter Coats's suite in the Albany though why they were in his possession, what else had been stolen and why Mr Coats did not mention this fact to Robert Rhodes James in the mid-sixties remains unexplained.

Despite the Preface, the original, as it turns out, erroneous last editorial note is still there in the 1993 edition. That is what I mean about it being lazy.

It really is time for an adventurous publisher to think about publishing the diaries in full with good notes by a reliable editor who will not intrude his or her personality. Chips knew everyone, was present at many important events and wrote about them all. It may be that his own estimation of how important his various private conversations, intrigues and parties is completely wrong or, perhaps, he did play an important part behind the scenes, or, as is most likely, the truth lies somewhere between the two.

His acid descriptions will amuse and cannot be feared as the people he wrote about are beyond human reach. (Chips died in 1958.)

In addition, his information about many supposedly secret events and developments was often completely accurate (much to his editor's surprise), his predictions frequently came true and his political understanding not to be dismissed lightly, as I hope to show in my long(er) blog about his and Harold Nicolson's diaries.