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

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Ferguson, Donna (3 November 2019). "Revealed: uncensored diaries of the Tory MP who partied with Nazis and the idle rich". The Observer . Retrieved 3 November 2019. Peter drove me home and we made a detour and parked the car for a little in the moonlight by the Nile and he made a curious confession. If only this glorious sunlit love life could go on forever . . . If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. 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.) In some ways, the landscape is very familiar. This was already a modern, car-based economy, vomiting up the ribbon developments and standardised housing where so many of us still live. It was a society enjoying mass, American-produced entertainment. It was a culture inflected with modernism; hedonistic, and increasingly open to sexual experiment. But the Britain of the 1920s and 1930s was also much more stratified, industrially regimented and fiercely class-divided in an almost Victorian way. Its politics were class politics.

Colville, John. The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries, Volume 1. London, Sceptre, 1986, ISBN 0-340-40269-5 Channon, Henry (1967). Rhodes James, Robert (ed.). Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 978-1-85799-493-3. 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. The diaries, even in their bowdlerised form, provoked a writ for libel from one of Channon's fellow MPs, though the case did not come to court, being settled privately in the decade after Channon's death. [35] Historian Alan Clark, a Conservative MP from February 1974, refers on multiple occasions to Channon's diaries in his own diaries. [36]He dined with Marcel Proust and Jean Cocteau as a young man in Paris in 1918, was a close friend during the abdication crisis to Edward VIII, and partied with Nazis in 1930s Berlin. 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 Channon is never explicit about his relationship with Coats but it is highly probable that it was at times an actively homosexual one – stigmatised by its illegality, which ended only in the year of the diaries’ original publication. Coats, a fastidious man, was certainly not ready to reveal that relationship to a wider world, even had Channon’s family wanted him to.

Heffer, Simon (4 September 2022). "Secretive sex, political spats and the end of WW2: Chips Channon's final scandalous diary". The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 27 February 2023.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 drove in the afternoon with Honor to her farm: the crater caused by the bomb – it must have been a 1,000-pounder – is really immense. All my suspicions and distrust of Honor’s bailiff, a Mr Woodman were revived. He is insolent, swaggers about, and treats her with scant respect. She allows herself to be so familiar with that sort of people. I think I am wise in saying nothing; usually she tires of them. But I foresee trouble with that man; serious trouble, probably financial. The short answer is, a lot. But first it should be admitted that, when Channon is up against other writers giving an account of the aristocracy in the last days of its pomp, he is only quite good. 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?”Duchesses float in and out, there are excursions to Versailles and notes-to-self – 'I long for an affair in the grand manner' The most gripping arc in the diary, though, concerns the abdication, pressing so close that you can smell its feverish breath. Channon is a fan of Wallis Simpson – surprising given that she is another provincial American on the make. But he genuinely admires her as “a good kindly woman who has had an excellent influence on the young monarch”. She has, he is sure, no particular plan to marry the king and certainly no desire to upset the country. By contrast the Duchess of York, whom we know better as the Queen Mother, is a frisky little sexpot with whom half of Clubland is in love, including Channon himself: “Darling Elizabeth, I could die for her.” She won’t make a decent queen, though, because, unlike disciplined Wallis, she can’t get up on time, is prone to making catty remarks and, absolutely worst of all, has started putting on weight. Anyway, Channon asks, who cares which one of them gets to be queen since neither of them is actually royal? For his money, Princess Marina of Greece, the luscious, promiscuous well-dressed wife of his lover the Duke of Kent, would have done the job better than either. To make things sadder still, it looks as though the British royal family is going the same way. The general strike of 1926 and the increasing influence of Labour MPs at Westminster – “Bolshies” snorts Channon, who was returned as Conservative member for Southend in 1935 – suggests that George V’s reign could be the last. Not least because the next generation is so unsuited to the job. The four boys – the Prince of Wales and the Dukes of York, Kent and Gloucester – all seem nervy, epicene, mummy-damaged (although Queen Mary herself, all chilly sparkle, is naturally divine). Not that this stops Chips becoming friends with all of them, and allegedly sleeping with at least one. Things have got really bad when he notices that the Duke of Kent, who has popped round to dinner from next door, has taken to wearing trousers that have a zip instead of a button fly. It is like hearing the tumbrels rumble in the street.

The diaries are candid. “There’s an awful lot of drinking and drug-taking – not necessarily by him – but it’s a very decadent society he moves in,” said Heffer. Most of his friends don’t work for a living. “They are the idle rich. And he looks at it and he’s not censorious, but he describes it in great detail.” For a passionate royalist like Channon, the heir to the throne is naturally a great prize, his boringness as a man overlaid by imperial-scale glamour. At Lady Curzon’s ball in February 1926, “the Prince of Wales was charming and we had a long talk about our American friends. Everyone noticed…” But this enhanced mood is far from constant. He can find the prince “surly and ill at ease,” and repeatedly “looking rather vulgar.” On one occasion he looks “like a racing tout”; he has a “dentist smile.” Yet as Edward VIII he inspires Chips’s loftiest gush: he is the “adored Apollo,” the “world’s idol,” the “beautiful boy King” (he was forty-two at the time, two years older than Chips himself). His affair with Wallis Simpson is “one of the greatest romances in all history.” What a “temptation for a Baltimore girl! To espouse the Emperor of the earth.” Four previously unknown volumes turned up at a car boot sale in 1991. [37] It was reported after Paul Channon's death that his heir, the diarist's grandson, was considering authorising the publication of the uncensored texts. [9] An unexpurgated three-volume edition, edited by journalist and historian Simon Heffer has now been published; the first volume was published in March 2021. [38] While the 1967 edition began in 1934, the complete version begins in 1918, and runs to 1938. [39] However, diaries Channon wrote between 1929 and 1933 remain missing. The second volume, running from 1938 to 1943, was published on 9 September 2021; [40] the third volume, covering years from 1943 to 1957, was published on 8 September 2022. [6] [41] 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? In March 1938, the rising Conservative minister Rab Butler, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office appointed Channon his Parliamentary Private Secretary. [4] Butler was associated with the appeasement wing of the Conservative party, and Channon, as with the abdication, found himself on the losing side. In the words of the ODNB: "Always ferociously anti-communist, he was an early dupe of the Nazis because his attractive German princelings hoped that Hitler might be preparing for a Hohenzollern restoration." At the invitation of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Channon attended the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics, where he was very impressed. [18]

Are there revelations to come in future volumes? “Oh, yes,” says Heffer, delightedly. “He has an affair with someone very famous in volume three.” To what degree was Channon open about his sexuality? He and his longtime companion, a landscape designer called Peter Coats, lived together, didn’t they? “You are jumping ahead, Miss Cooke, if I may say so. But no, they weren’t an out couple. Their friends knew, but there was a conspiracy of silence. After the war, attitudes became much stricter. During this period, don’t forget, Lord Montagu was sent to prison.” (In 1954, the peer was convicted for inciting homosexual acts.) Carreño, Richard (2011). Lord of Hosts: The Life of Sir Henry 'Chips' Channon. Philadelphia, PA: WritersClearinghousPress. ISBN 978-1-257-02549-7. 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.” At various points in his life Channon kept a series of diaries. Under his will, he left his diaries and other material to the British Museum "on condition that the said diaries shall not be read ... until 60years from my death." [25] An expurgated selection from the diaries was published in 1967. [26] The necessity for expurgation is illustrated by the reaction of an Oxford contemporary who, when told that no diaries from that period existed, said, "Thank God!" [27] The editor of the original edition, Robert Rhodes James, said he saw well-connected people go white when they heard that Channon had kept a journal. [9] Heffer, Simon (20 February 2021). "Exclusive: Inside the uncensored diaries of Britain's most scandalous MP". The Telegraph . Retrieved 23 February 2021.