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

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There is a settembrile feeling in the air – going is the summer, going, indeed, is almost everything. 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. 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.

Channon's parents were Henry Channon II and his wife Vesta ( née Westover), [3] known as Harry. [4] After graduating from Francis W. Parker School and taking classes at the University of Chicago, [5] Channon travelled to France with the American Red Cross in October 1917 and became an honorary attaché at the American embassy in Paris the next year. [3] Channon associated with the artistic elite of Paris, having dinners with the writer Marcel Proust and poet Jean Cocteau. [6] 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. Colville, John. The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries, Volume 1. London, Sceptre, 1986, ISBN 0-340-40269-5 After George VI's accession Channon's standing in royal circles went from high to low and, as an appeaser, so did his standing in the Conservative party after the failure of appeasement and the appointment of the anti-appeaser Winston Churchill as prime minister. Channon remained loyal to the supplanted Neville Chamberlain, toasting him after his fall as "the King over the Water", and sharing Butler's denigration of Churchill as "a half-breed American". [21] Channon remained a friend of Chamberlain’s widow. Channon's interest in politics waned after this, and he took an increasing interest in the Guinness family brewing interests, though remaining a conscientious and popular constituency MP. [4] Hardly anyone one knows or meets has not had some bombing experience to tell. ‘Bomb-bores’ infect the body social.

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Harris, Robert (6 June 1993). "A party animal". The Independent on Sunday . Retrieved 3 November 2019. This third and final volume of the unexpurgated diaries of Sir Henry 'Chips' Channon begins as the Second World War is turning in the Allies' favour. It ends with Chips descending into poor health but still able to turn a pointed phrase about the political events that swirl around him and the great and the good with whom he mingles. Carreño, Richard (2011). Lord of Hosts: The Life of Sir Henry 'Chips' Channon. Philadelphia, PA: WritersClearinghousPress. ISBN 978-1-257-02549-7. 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.

Chips Channon’s judgment was abysmal, but the diaries are a great work of literature | The Spectator 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”. 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. But he hasn’t answered my question. What about companies that are struggling to trade? What about the fishermen, and the daffodil farmers? “Look, I don’t want anyone’s business to go down the crapper,” he says. “But only a small number are affected.” Quoting a favourite Vote Leave figure, he suggests only 6% of UK businesses export to Europe (unfortunately, while this number may not be inaccurate, it’s also misleading, because it translates to an estimated 340,000 businesses). After this, having gone on for a bit about how much he loves his annual holiday in Brittany and how “infantile” it was of Emmanuel Macron to diss the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, he finally winds up by saying: “In the end, everyone will calm down, and it will all be sorted out.” 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]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.) 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] 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 ]

Chris Mullin Chips Channon’s judgment was abysmal, but the diaries are a great work of literature Delights of the second volume, edited by Simon Heffer, include a bomb dropping on Channon’s dinner party and an Austrian archduke arriving to clear the debris The Labour MP Chris Bryant has recently published The Glamour Boys, about the important role gay men played in the anti-appeasement movement. Channon’s diaries reveal that gay connections were just as important on the other side. When Channon visits Berlin in April 1928, he is as enthralled as Bryant’s protagonists – intellectuals and politicians such as Cooper, Harold Nicolson, Maurice Bowra and Bob Boothby – by the sexual freedom of the city: “later we went to two ordinary dancing places and we saw men actually kissing each other… I never expected it to be so open.”

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He wrote two more books: a second novel, Paradise City (1931) about the disastrous effects of American capitalism, [3] and a non-fiction work, The Ludwigs of Bavaria (1933). The latter, a study of the last generations of the ruling Wittelsbach dynasty of Bavarian kings, received excellent notices, and was in print twenty years later. Some critical reservations reflected Channon's adulation of minor European royalty: The Manchester Guardian said of his account of the 1918 revolution, "he seems to have depended almost exclusively on aristocratic sources, which are most clearly insufficient." [11] Despite this, the book was described on its reissue in 1952 as "a fascinating study... excellently written". [12]

He says some silly things. But I felt the same indulgence I have for my sons. I would love to have met him, though I’m sure he’d have been a pain in the arse, always looking over your shoulder to see the next most interesting person coming into the room. His great redeeming feature is that he knows how ghastly he can be.” Reviewing the published diaries in The Observer in November 1967, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, "Grovellingly sycophantic and snobbish as only a well-heeled American nesting among the English upper classes can be, with a commonness that positively hurts at times. And yet – how sharp an eye! What neat malice! How, in their own fashion, well written and truthful and honest they are! … What a relief to turn to him after Sir Winston's windy rhetoric, and all those leaden narratives by field-marshals, air-marshals and admirals!" [34] Letter from Peter from Cairo: he says that Anthony Eden’s visit flopped at the end. He also adds that he won’t let me down; so perhaps we shall live together and I shall have the most charming of companions to désennuyer ma tristesse and keep me young. My affairs are improving. 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. Davenport-Hines, Richard (5 March 2021). "Living, loving, partygoing". The Times Literary Supplement . Retrieved 4 March 2021.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. That same frankness tells on Channon’s politics, though. He’s an intolerable, pro-appeasement bore on the subject of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, and his political views are frequently inexcusable (as late as March 1938 Channon wrote, “I hate society at the moment: it is too fanatically anti-Hitler”). Despite—or perhaps because of—all that, his entries remain vivid and propulsive. His energy appears to have been unflagging, because almost every day finds him recounting some party or another and who said what to whom—and what they really wanted to say instead. The greatest British diarist of the 20th century . A feast of weapons-grade above-stairs gossip. Now, finally, we are getting the full text, in all its bitchy, scintillating detail, thanks to the journalist and historian Simon Heffer, whose editing of this vast trove of material represents an astonishing achievement. Channon is a delightful guide, by turns frivolous and profound. Ben Macintyre, The Times

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