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

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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? 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 ] In Andrew Holleran’s novels, the inescapable narrowness of his world is transcended and given poetic resonance by his close and steady attention to pain and loneliness. Nor is he exactly faultless on the detail. He gets it wrong on some titles and flags. He constantly gives people’s ages and is wildly out, sometimes by as much as a decade: Heffer’s wryly corrective footnotes are themselves a minor pleasure.

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.Details of his 1936 trip to Germany for the Berlin Olympics and parties with Göring, Himmler and Goebbels are published for the first time. “You see these Nazi monsters all competing with each other to give the grandest balls and there’s loads of politicians from England, from all over Europe, who go there to be entertained,” said Heffer. Channon finds the Nazis vulgar, “not the sort of people he’d want to have to dinner” – but he is impressed by certain things they have done in Germany, and fears what they will do to Britain in the second world war. “He sees the Germans as a potentially really nasty threat. He’s an appeaser.” In the highly abridged first version of Channon’s diaries, prepared by his partner Peter Coats and published in 1967, the end of his marriage is presented as a vague matter of fact, with an almost complete absence of detail. Coats went to pains to conceal the truth about its demise and his own relationship with him, for two very good reasons. First, his ex-wife, Lady Honor Svejdar (as she had become after her second marriage) was still alive, and indeed was sent the proofs to read and to amend where she felt necessary; second, Coats, who hardly features in the first edition despite having been central to Channon’s life for its last 19 years, appears not to have desired the recognition he was due. 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.

Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? It’s not that Channon doesn’t penetrate these inner sanctums. He’s like a deathwatch beetle on Benzedrine. He drills his way into balls, dinners and country house weekends, squeezing his elegant form between European heads of state and English grandees, exchanging catty remarks with dowager duchesses or King George’s solemn children. As soon as he has married a member of the fabulously wealthy Guinness family, he has the King (by now Edward VIII) round to dinner. And the American celebrities who amused the aristos are in the diary jostle too – Tallulah Bankhead, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Cole Porter, Fred Astaire.

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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. Poor darling, she has no moral or common sense, no noblesse oblige and doesn’t realise what she is doing – social suicide. He is a penniless, tough adventurer after her money. I tried to move her without success and I saw that he has carefully trained her, schooled her in what to say. She will regret it to her dying day. She offered to make any adequate financial arrangements for Paul and me; swore that she would never have children by this fellow, declared that she didn’t care what happened; was indifferent to the world’s opinion and disdain. She were better dead . . . Disgracefully, none of this appeared in Rhodes James, who seems to have been working from a bowdlerized, often redacted, and sometimes rewritten version given him by Channon’s last lover, Peter Coats. To have agreed to work under those circumstances was profoundly unprofessional. Abbott, James Arthur; Abbott, James A. (April 2006). Owens, Mitchell (ed.). Jansen. New York, NY: Acanthus Press. ISBN 978-0-926494-33-6.

Carley, Michael Jabara (1999). 1939 The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. ISBN 9781461699385. Only two months more – avant le deluge! – avant le divorce . I am reconciled to the idea now. I shall be free, but shall be a long time recovering from Honor’s selfishness; her treachery, her harlotry; her boredom with the war and with me and her complete indifference – cruel indifference – to her child

If I have any advice for aspirant diarists it would be this: diarists are not creatures of the crowd; they must live among it yet remain detached from it, like spies. They should take things they have discovered and report upon them and be considerably cautious when doing so. And like the spy, their best work should mostly be done alone and without fanfare. When they finally come in from the cold, wearing a tin hat is advisable. Otherwise, they should wait, like Chips did, until they and everyone else are six feet under. In spite of all, I am pro-German: I find myself mysteriously drawn towards the Teutonic race. Is it a reaction against my mother’s violent Francomania which poisoned my childhood?” When he read that Adolf Hitler had the same breed of Hungarian dog as him, “my heart warmed to him in spite of all those military operations which must, sooner or later, lead to war.” 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. It was of course a supreme instance of the American assimilation into British society that Chips had devoted his life to—or could have been, if only the king had played his cards more adroitly, had his coronation, and then married the love of his life. Here Channon’s American common sense fails to get the measure of the powerful reasons of state and church preventing such a plan. The insight he has into the case is more psychological. He notes how Mrs. Simpson “enormously improved” the prince, and thinks her good, kindly, and clever; he sees how Edward, who was marvelous at being Prince of Wales, “will mind so terribly being King. His loneliness, his seclusion, his isolation will be almost more than his highly strung and not imaginative nature can bear.” Also, if the king abdicates Chips will no longer be in favor with the royal family, and this adds to his gloom at the prospect of the new king, George VI, who is “completely uninteresting, undistinguished and a godawful bore!”