Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries: 1918-38 edited by Simon Heffer Jane Ridley
JANE RIDLEY
Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries: 1918-38 Edited by Simon Heffer Hutchinson £35
Chips Channon (1897-1958) was a socialite, a Tory MP and a prolific diarist.
Until now, his diaries were available only in a heavily redacted, single volume, edited by Robert Rhodes James in 1967. Simon Heffer has edited the unexpurgated version of the diaries, and it is a revelation.
The book runs to a thousand pages, but do not let the length deter you. At £35, it is very good value. Channon penned an estimated two million words of diary between 1918 and his death in 1958. The present volume covers only the years 1918-38, and there are two more volumes to come.
The diaries give a compelling account of the extraordinary times of interwar Britain. But they are written by a man whose views on the great questions of his day often seem to us now to be either morally distasteful or just wrong.
Like other great diarists such as Pepys, Chips was an outsider on the make. He was born in Chicago in 1897, and his father, whom he described as a ‘dull nonentity’, owned a small shipping fleet which tootled round the Great Lakes.
Chips loathed America and was desperate to escape. In 1933, he married Lady Honor Guinness, daughter of the fabulously rich Earl of Iveagh, and became an MP two years later.
In one bound, this American social climber and snob reached the dizzy heights of smart society, provided by his father-in-law with a generous income and a house in Belgrave Square.
Chips adored royals, jewels, bibelots and Fabergé, all of which he collected. He was best friends with Diana Cooper and Emerald Cunard. He admired his fellow American Wallis Simpson, whom he thought a clever woman with her ‘high-pitched voice, chic clothes, moles and sense of humour’.
How he enjoyed entertaining Edward VIII at dinner in his grand house with its Amalienburg dining room, where the tiaras nodded, the diamonds sparkled and the room swayed with jewels.
Over the Abdication, Chips backed the losing side, but he found himself in a ringside seat. He was slow to realise that Edward couldn’t marry Wallis while remaining King, but the crisis has never been better described than it is here.
From talking to his many friends in the know, ranging from the Duke of Kent to Lord Beaverbrook, Chips composed an extraordinarily detailed and vivid narrative – an account that is in another league from the daily paragraphs of gossip he was accustomed to writing in his diary.
He was fiercely pro-german. At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Chips lapped up the fabulous bling and hospitality. He thought Goering was a master of the art of party-giving – and as for Hitler, he was a ‘semi-divine creature’.
Taken to see a boys’ labour camp, he was full of praise. ‘I cannot understand the English dislike and suspicion of the Nazi regime,’ he wrote. Little did he know – or care – that the boys, whom he thought healthy specimens of German youth, were SS men substituted for the usual prisoners.
His political career was undistinguished – he served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Rab Butler, who was Under-secretary at the Foreign Office. Over Appeasement, Chips was badly wrong. He hero-worshipped Neville Chamberlain, of whom he writes (as Heffer tells us) ‘like a gushing schoolgirl’.
He totally misread Hitler. ‘He is always right, always the greatest diplomatist of modern times,’ said Chips.
Over Munich, he was dangerously naïve, and he considered that Chamberlain really had succeeded in bringing peace in our time. He thought that ‘Winston as PM would be worse than a war; the two together would mean the destruction of civilisation’. The reader is left wondering how on earth he managed to salvage his political career, but for this we will have to wait for the next instalment.
Chips’s pro-nazi opinions were redacted by Rhodes James in the 1960s edition of the diaries. Simon Heffer has made the editorial decision to publish the complete text.
That is surely the right thing to do. These events took place almost a century ago, and Appeasement can no longer be hidden like a guilty secret. It is a historical fact that Chips and others in the Conservative party expressed pro-hitler views in the 1930s, and the evidence needs to be laid out to enable a proper assessment.
Reading Chips is like eating rich cream. The diary is full of plums. He has an insatiable appetite for gossip and a vast acquaintance. In spite of his appalling political opinions, his diary of the 1930s is almost impossible to put down.
Simon Heffer has edited this vast text with great skill, never intruding with excessive footnotes, always letting Chips speak for himself, and providing an exemplary index.
He has produced a superb edition of an indispensable chronicle.
Jane Ridley is author of Bertie: A Life of Edward VII