Chips... served with wit, scandal and a front row seat to history in the making
Uncensored at last, the diaries of Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, Nazi admirer, friend to royals and passionate gossip... whose judgment was often gloriously awry
HISTORY is often at its most vivid when it is related by a diarist with a gift for observation and a savage honesty. Samuel Pepys, an official at the Admiralty, brought 17th century London to life like no other writer. Similarly the most memorable account of Margaret Thatcher’s reign came from the pen of her waspish Minister Alan Clark. Now these renowned names are joined by that of another brilliant chronicler: the fabulously rich, American-born Tory MP Sir Henry Channon, universally known as “Chips” because in his Oxford days he was said to have shared lodgings with a young man called “Fish”.
Channon was not a particularly distinguished politician, never rising to Ministerial rank despite representing the Essex constituency of Southend for more than 20 years from 1935. But the diaries that he kept throughout his career are unsurpassed as a guide to the social and political history of the mid-20th century.
In all, they amount to more than two million words, but their length does nothing to diminish their scintillating wit, memorable descriptions and compelling gossip.
Charming and ambitious, “Chips” knew everyone in the top rank of British society, even being on intimate terms with royalty. His extensive social connections were lubricated by his colossal wealth, which stemmed partly from his Chicagoan family’s shipping business and more significantly through his marriage in 1933 to an heiress to the brewing fortune, Honor Guinness.
Though he had a son, Paul, who, unlike his father, went on to become a senior Cabinet minister, his marriage was an unhappy one, as a result of both his wife’s infidelity and his bisexuality. It was partly due to his unorthodox private life, as well as the danger of libel writs from people still living and the potential damage to his son’s political career, that these explosive diaries have never been published in full before.
A heavily censored, shortened edition came out posthumously in 1967, and, even with most of the juiciest material cut out, still caused a scandal.
But now, more than 60 years after the death of Sir Henry, his family have given their approval for the gloriously unexpurgated version to be issued, with the first volume – covering the momentous years from
1918 to 1938 – released this month.
The gargantuan task of editing the diaries fell to the distinguished historian and journalist Professor Simon Heffer, who has done a magnificent job. The work is an epic of precision and diligence. Even the explanatory footnotes are a joy to read. The book abounds in wonderful penportraits, like this 1925 description of Sir Oswald Mosley, later the fascist leader, who had “a sadistic trait in his character. He is a little mad in his brilliance and life bores him because he has had it so easy”.
To Channon, Labour’s “evasive, subtle, eellike and uncanny” Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald “trusted no one and was trusted by nobody”.
The Daily Express proprietor Lord Beaverbrook struck him as “loquacious, knowledgeable and gallant” but also “small and wizened,” while Rudyard Kipling was portrayed as “a tiny simian little man with incredible eyebrows of great bushiness and deep endless brown eyes. He is brown and a little dirty, and clumps of hair protrude from his ears”.
Channon had a ringside seat at so many of the great events of his time, like the Abdication crisis and the rise of Hitler, but he was not a man of sound judgment.
“A fat, unbalanced, illogical porcine orator,” and “the most dangerous man in
England,” he wrote of Winston Churchill, whose fierce anti-Nazism he despised, not least because of his own admiration for the Third Reich.
“One felt one was in the presence of some semi-divine creature,” he said of Hitler during a visit to Germany for the Olympic Games in 1936, while he found Goering a “lovably disarming man”.
TAKEN on a trip to the Reich’s labour camps, he described them as “tidy, even gay”, leading him to reflect that “England could learn a lesson from Nazi Germany”. In this pro-German mood, he even declared that “democracy is absurd”.
A decade earlier, on the eve of the General Strike, he recorded melodramatically and wrongly, “we are in for civil war”.
He could also be an appalling snob. “I came to the House of Commons early and found the library full of chattering, rude and slightly smelly socialists. Of course they have no clubs to go to,” he recorded.
Of the novelist H.G.Wells, Channon wrote that “he is difficult and petulant,” and “betrays his servant origins”. The great Russian composer Igor Stravinsky is dismissed as “unimpressive and uninteresting, looking like a German dentist”, and J.M.Barrie, author of Peter Pan, was said to be “hopelessly undistinguished”.
But it is precisely Channon’s foibles and prejudices that make his account so interesting.
“What is more dull than a discreet diary?” he asked at one stage. There is nothing remotely discreet about Channon on these pages, whose hallmark is raw candour.
Typical was his description of an encounter with the actress Tallulah Bankhead in 1926.Visiting her flat, he found “a friend of hers there and we played a game of ‘Stripping Words’. We had to spell out words and anyone finishing one was forced to remove an article of clothing.Tallulah was soon naked, I next, the friend last. She left and darling Tallulah lay in my arms.”
He was honest enough to record his failures, like the time he “tried unsuccessfully to ravish” a society lady, Mary Baker.
Nor is Channon afraid to confess his crushes on other men, including the aristocrat Viscount Gage. At one point he is captivated by the sight of Geoffrey Lloyd, the Under Secretary at the Home Office, bathing