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

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Hardly anyone one knows or meets has not had some bombing experience to tell. ‘Bomb-bores’ infect the body social. The dishonesty, deviousness and occasional depravities of the upper classes are laid bare: “He will talk about people’s personal lives, their sexual behaviour, their treatment of other people. All human life is there.” Robert Rhodes James quotes in his introduction to the diaries a self-portrait written by Channon on 19 July 1935: So who will emerge next from the small, secretive caste where society and politics mingle? Who will be brave enough to spill the beans like Chips and I did? Are they scribbling away now? This first volume of his diaries ends two decades later in September 1938. By then Chips was parliamentary private secretary to Rab Butler, undersecretary at the Foreign Office. (The Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, was Lady Honor’s uncle.)

What is more dull than a discreet diary? One might as well have a dull soul,” wrote Henry “Chips” Channon in his journal for 25 July 1935. The question was rhetorical at this point, but it’s clear that he already had his future readers in mind. Channon knew he was as good as Pepys, and he had an inkling that it was his diary – rather than his not-very-good novels and his not-very-stellar Westminster career – that would be the key to the enduring fame he craved. A year later he reflects that it is never the goody two-shoes reformer-types whose names go down in history, but the “beaux”. And it is among the “beaux” – the sparkly, charming, lovely ones – that Channon is sure that he and his diary belong.Channon was first elected as a Member of Parliament (MP) in 1935. In his political career he served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Rab Butler at the Foreign Office from 1938 in the Chamberlain administration and though he retained that position under Winston Churchill he did not subsequently achieve ministerial office, partly as a result of his close association with the Chamberlain faction. He is remembered as one of the most famous political and social diarists of the 20th century. His diaries were first published in an expurgated edition in 1967. They were later released in full, edited by Simon Heffer and published by Hutchinson in three volumes, between 2021 and 2022. [1] [2] Biography [ edit ] Early years [ edit ] On the same visit he was entranced by Hermann Goering (“his merry eyes twinkled… a lovably disarming man”), impressed by Joseph Goebbels, who he thought looked like Clement Attlee, and was easily fooled by a Potemkin concentration camp (“tidy, even gay, and the boys, all about 18, looked like the ordinary German peasant boy, fair, healthy and sunburned”). He concludes, after a conversation about the left-wing outrages in Spain, that Germany is not communist only thanks to Hitler: “Oh! England wake up. You in your sloth and conceit are ignorant of the Soviet dangers and will not realise that… Germany is fighting our battles.” There was not a word of any of this in Rhodes James, nor Channon’s dread of Churchill: “Winston as Prime Minister would be worse than a war, the two together would mean the destruction of civilization.” For all that, Channon’s reputation is of course due for a fundamental reappraisal. Sir Robert Rhodes James’s cannot survive the publication of these explosive, unexpurgated diaries.

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. When it comes to the great cultural figures he meets, Channon seems incurious to the point of philistinism. André Gide is “a dreadful, unkempt poet-looking person”. Stravinsky? “A small little man, unimpressive and uninteresting looking like a German dentist. He has no manners.” Proust – with whom Channon may have had a liaison – gets off a little better, but has bad manners, grubby linen and pours out “ceaseless spite and venom about the great”. HG Wells is “common” and “betrays his servant origin”. TE Lawrence is “not a gentleman”. Somerset Maugham? “Of course, not a gentleman”.

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The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, contemporaries of Channon’s, are written about at length in his diaries. At one point, he notes, "I don’t think Wallis would be content as the consort of an ex-King: the situation would be untenable." Bettmann // Getty Images If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection. The Diary enquiry, Sunday 24 October, 17:00-18:00, Andrew Roberts (chair), Dominic Sandbrook, Simon Heffer, Sasha Swire, Emma Soames and Michael Gove discuss the power of the political journal, from Chips Channon to today, via Thatcher’s BritainIn his comments accompanying the published selection, Rhodes James stated that "Peter Coats edited the original MS of the Diaries." [30] He also stated that Coats arranged the preparation of a complete typescript of the Diaries as Channon's handwriting was often difficult to read. [31] Coats also carried out an initial expurgation before the editorial discretion exercised by Rhodes James. [32] His uncensored and vivid observations about the powerful men and women he socialised with and the antics of London society during the interwar years are certain to fascinate his existing fans and will introduce a new generation of readers to his “elegant, gossipy and bitchy” writings. You might think this made him an unlikely candidate as MP for Southend, a large seaside resort popular with working-class Londoners. His attitude toward it was at first frankly careerist—“about five or ten years here and then a peerage” (which is something he repeatedly craves; a knighthood, the year before he died, was as far as he was to get). It’s mainly a question of what the “frumps and snobs” of Southend can do for him: Will they “help or hate me?” You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.

Channon, who then gives the reader a ringside seat at the abdication crisis, is delighted that Edward VIII is also rumoured to be a Nazi-sympathiser, and constantly ridicules doddering old Winston Churchill, Duff Cooper and others who could see what was coming. He is honest enough to accept that he is a coward, who desperately hopes he will be too old to fight in any coming war. Carreño, Richard (2011). Lord of Hosts: The Life of Sir Henry 'Chips' Channon. Philadelphia, PA: WritersClearinghousPress. ISBN 978-1-257-02549-7.A heavily abridged and censored edition of the diaries was published in 1967. Only now, sixty years after Chips's death, can an extensive text be shared. Lexden, Lord (23 March 2021). "Sex and politics in inter-war Britain" (PDF). The House . Retrieved 24 March 2021– via Lord Lexden. In July 1939, Channon met the landscape designer Peter Daniel Coats (1910–1990), with whom he began an affair that may have contributed to Channon's separation from his wife the following year. His wife, who had conducted extra-marital affairs from at least 1937, asked Channon for a divorce in 1941 as a result of her affair with Frank Woodsman, a farmer and horse dealer who was based close to their Kelvedon Hall estate. Their marriage was finally dissolved in 1945. [3] Channon formally sued for divorce and his wife did not contest the suit. [16] Among others with whom Channon had a relationship was the playwright Terence Rattigan. Channon was on close terms with Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and the Duke of Kent, although whether those relationships extended beyond the platonic is not known. [3] Politics [ edit ]