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

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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] Carreño, Richard (2011). Lord of Hosts: The Life of Sir Henry 'Chips' Channon. Philadelphia, PA: WritersClearinghousPress. ISBN 978-1-257-02549-7. 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] Good-looking, charming, and possessed with social grace enough to warrant invitations everywhere, Channon set about recording his life with such diligence that one understands that he saw it, and not politics, as his real career. After all, this was a man who blandly recounted burying his diaries alongside Fabergé eggs to protect them during the war. It’s just that Chips is, certainly in his younger years, a bit of a ninny. He is so desperate to “make it” in society, and so hypnotised when he gets there, that it’s far too much who and not enough what. He lists who sat next to whom, who was excluded and who is feuding with whom this week rather than the pungent verbal detail. On the rare occasions when he does relate the actual exchanges, there is little detail or colour. For instance, “Lady Scarbrough is very angry with the Astor clan” – American, by origin, of course – “‘What did they do in the War of the Roses?’ she demanded.”

Cooke, Rachel (28 February 2021). "Gossip, sex and social climbing: the uncensored Chips Channon diaries". The Guardian . Retrieved 4 July 2021. There are one or two people at court, around the royal family, who Channon really takes against and who he feels are conspiring to get rid of Edward VIII. And that didn’t come out in the original version.” A gay relationship with “a very prominent friend” was also censored and will be revealed for the first time. At the Berlin Olympics Channon had been a ready dupe for Nazi propaganda and was entirely taken in by a visit to a labor camp, repeopled for the purpose with “smiling and clean” eighteen-year-olds, “fair, healthy and sunburned.” But the diaries make horribly clear that his excitement at Nazism also fed on his own anti-Semitism, expressed in a casual, lurking contempt for Jewish friends such as Philip Sassoon and the Liberal MP and war minister Leslie Hore-Belisha: a semi-sedated prejudice easily reawakened. He records grotesque fantasies of shouting “Heil Hitler!,” on one occasion at a Jewish businessmen’s dinner in his own constituency. To a reader amused by the social whirl of the diaries, such things make disturbing reading, but Heffer was right to leave these and other even more offensive things in, not only for the fullness of the portrait but because they help explain the widespread British reluctance to take Hitler’s genocidal program seriously.London looked a mess today . . . . in the night four Treasury officials were killed when a bomb fell for the second time on that bit of the building immediately adjacent to No. 10 Downing Street. The Germans evidently think that Winston sleeps there. Actually he sleeps in the War Room.

Channon, Henry (1967). Rhodes James, Robert (ed.). Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. ISBN 978-1-85799-493-3.

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 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.”