Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 1): 1918-38

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From the window before we landed I saw Peter, brown, amber, alert, handsome, distinguished, stupendous, waiting for me. I rushed out: he seemed enchanted: I was exhilarated, almost delirious with excitement... Peter had arranged a suite, he whispered, at Shepheard’s… We had a rapturous reunion. 1941 The first anniversary of the war, if anniversary it can be called. I spent it by the swimming pool, naked, reading Lord Hervey’s absorbing memoirs. A difficult, discouraging day, really. After Questions I rushed home to receive Honor who was as mad as a hatter: she was polite, readily agreed to surrendering Kelvedon... I am to have Paul; I am to have Belgrave Square; I am to be rich; I shall have the world’s sympathy . . . Channon was a snobbish, sexually voracious Tory who revered Hitler – and a new edition of his journals shines a startling light on interwar Britain. If I have any advice for aspirant diarists it would be this: diarists are not creatures of the crowd; they must live among it yet remain detached from it, like spies. They should take things they have discovered and report upon them and be considerably cautious when doing so. And like the spy, their best work should mostly be done alone and without fanfare. When they finally come in from the cold, wearing a tin hat is advisable. Otherwise, they should wait, like Chips did, until they and everyone else are six feet under.

In spite of all, I am pro-German: I find myself mysteriously drawn towards the Teutonic race. Is it a reaction against my mother’s violent Francomania which poisoned my childhood?” When he read that Adolf Hitler had the same breed of Hungarian dog as him, “my heart warmed to him in spite of all those military operations which must, sooner or later, lead to war.” Sometimes I think I have an unusual character – able but trivial; I have flair, intuition, great good taste but only second rate ambition: I am far too susceptible to flattery; I hate and am uninterested in all the things most men like such as sports, business, statistics, debates, speeches, war, and the weather; but I am riveted by lust, furniture, glamour and society and jewels. I am an excellent organiser and have a will of iron; I can only be appealed to through my vanity. Occasionally I must have solitude: my soul craves for it. All thought is done in solitude; only then am I partly happy. [33]Henry "Chips" Channon and Lady Honor Guiness leaving St. Margaret’s Westminster after a rehearsal for their 1933 wedding. Keystone The blow, long foreseen, has fallen. Honor looking sheepish, soon bolted out the truth. She wants me to divorce her so that she may marry Mr Woodman. Apparently his wife is about to sue him, naming Honor. Heffer, Simon (20 February 2021). "Exclusive: Inside the uncensored diaries of Britain's most scandalous MP". The Telegraph . Retrieved 23 February 2021.

At last, after a three hours’ conversation I promised to let her know my decision in January. Of course I shall give in – but it is the end of Southend, of a peerage, of my political aspirations, of vast wealth and great names and position – all gone, or going. Somehow I didn’t care as I ought. Will I marry again? Or shall I live with Peter? Once it became clear that he would not achieve ministerial office, Channon focused on his other goal of elevation to the peerage, but in this, too, he was unsuccessful. The highest honour he achieved was a knighthood in 1957. [3] His friend Princess Marthe Bibesco sent him a telegram, "Goodbye Mr. Chips" (referencing the 1934 novella of that name by James Hilton). [22] Channon, who smoked and drank heavily, died from a stroke at a hospital in London on 7 October 1958, at the age of 61. [23] [24] Legacy [ edit ] Diaries [ edit ] The best diarists are flawed individuals who exist on the fringe of events and are natural observers and acerbic wits. Snobbery helps too. Think Samuel Pepys, James Boswell, Alan Clark. Henry “Chips” Channon (1897-1958) has long been seen as one of these too. But it is only with the publication of these unexpurgated diaries, superbly edited by Simon Heffer, that we can truly recognise quite how perfectly he fits the type.Channon’s mesmerized obsession with titles and rank has its counterpart in a fatuous horror of the “middle-class” and the “common,” and a twittish disregard for the “gaping proletariat.” His daily existence was sustained and made possible by a large body of servants, but they’re next to invisible here. His life appears to float on a cloud of blind entitlement. One rare evening he finds himself alone at home, “this vast house, and only me—and thirteen servants” (though might there be something very slightly common in knowing the exact number?). The rare mentions of staff come when they do something wrong—fail to fill an inkwell or don’t know their way to the Ritz. No one can have been more important to the grandiose social life at Belgrave Square than the cook, who is never once referred to; if cooks are mentioned at all it’s as a type of commonness—Lady Cambridge “looks and talks like a cook”; the New York hostess Mrs. Goelet is “an amiable cook-like person.”

I am distressed to hear that Neville Chamberlain has cancer and can only live another fourteen months or so. He gets almost every political forecast wrong. He predicts a decline in socialism in early 1926, and a huge revival of Roman Catholicism. He wildly misreads the 1926 general strike, suggesting it was a “real revolt skilfully engineered by Moscow” which would end in civil war. The king, he says, “is supposed to be white with terror and apprehension”. a b c d McSmith, A, "Original Westminster hellraiser: The secret world of Chips Channon", The Independent, 13 April 2007 The English society that Chips was a part of is done with Belgrave Square. Today, the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska occupies Chips’s old house at No 5. The neighbours mostly have foreign names. And the son of a former KGB operative and, one is tempted to assume, crony of President Putin has entered the House of Lords as a British parliamentarian, a man who throws Gatsby-like parties. Every person mentioned, intimation given and allusion made is thoroughly investigated and explained. This is only the first volume of three, which together will form an essential part of the library of anyone interested in 20th century politics.Channon was born in Chicago to an Anglo-American family. In adult life he took to giving 1899 as his year of birth, and was embarrassed when a British newspaper revealed that the true year was 1897. [3] His grandfather had immigrated to the US in the mid-nineteenth century and established a profitable fleet of vessels on the Great Lakes, which formed the basis of the family's wealth. [4] Channon's paternal grandmother was descended from eighteenth-century English settlers. [4]

I wrote a long letter to Peter in Egypt: I mustn’t expect too much of him, as he is only 30 – eleven months younger than Honor. Still I want and need and crave him now. I have no future, a bombed house probably in Belgrave Square, the loss of all my possessions, Kelvedon gone, my wife alienated, my child far away and perhaps forgetting me. All is bleak and dour indeed. Peter] advised divorce, said that obviously neither H[onor] nor I would be happier until we were rid of each other. He agreed to live with me after the war, and to share my house, houses, or flat: we should travel together and be happy. I think he is right and I long for the day. In the following diary entries (the bold text indicates redacted information that has never been seen before) the realities are laid bare, amid the fear of invasion and the Blitz. There are exceptions. Channon idolised Lord Curzon, the former governor-general of India and cabinet minister, and his portrait of this deeply strange and complex man is gripping. When the people he is describing are particularly fruity, the diary comes alive again, as with a visit to the Duke of Argyll in 1925: “They are an odd brace, this brother and sister both past 50 and still unmarried. Lady Elspeth is the manlier of the two. Her dirty hair and unkempt appearance and appalling figure cannot hide her great beauty and distinction. She wore a knitted dressing gown that very nearly wreaked havoc with my appetite. Argyll talks in a high falsetto voice about Celtic legends and folklore and ritualism and bells – bells are his hobby…”Robert Rhodes James quotes in his introduction to the diaries a self-portrait written by Channon on 19 July 1935: Channon’s tendency to extreme fandom of the powerful is no doubt an expression of his own ambition, and is by turns engaging and troubling. The lineup of heroes worshiped in this volume starts with Lord Curzon. Channon had a way of charming grand and unapproachable old men, and in his earlier English life Curzon, who’d been viceroy of India for six years and foreign secretary for five, was a very grand example indeed, “the last of the patricians, the great political Olympians.” Curzon’s stepson, Hubert Duggan, “beautiful, strong and nectar-like,” was a friend and crush of Channon’s, and Curzon, you feel, was the sort of father Channon himself might have liked to have. Curzon’s last illness, death, and funeral in 1925 give the diary the first of those elegiac sequences in which Channon is an intimate witness to state affairs—the more so as Curzon’s second wife, Grace, an immensely wealthy widow from Decatur, Alabama, was one of several titled American women who became close friends of his.