In his final volume of diaries, the MP really lets rip – and falls for Terence Rattigan and a dashing major. By Nicky Haslam
Ever since I met Chips Channon when I was still a teenager, I’ve thought there was an uncanny visual likeness between him and Frederick the Great.
The similarity is evident in photographs of the middle-aged Sir Henry Channon (1897-1958) in this third, final and most graphic record of his vivid life. There’s the same stocky figure, quizzing eyes, veiled smile and faint sneer, evident in portraits of the Prussian king.
And Channon shared many of Frederick’s traits: a thirst for power, politics, international intrigue and gossip, a passion for rococo palaces and pretty bibelots, a charm-laden pugnaciousness, haphazard generosity, and a fancy for tall, good-looking young men.
In all these respects, Chips was an 18th-century figure, with sentiment for the douceur de vivre, the leisured-but-ruling classes, the presumed power and political influence intrinsic to that not-so-far-off time.
It surely must have given Chips a delighted frisson when that stern yet ‘carefree’ king’s five-times-great-grandson, Prince Friedrich von Preussen, became his brother-in-law. It was the kind of link with anciens régimes that he relished.
When they were first published, in 1967, the editor, Robert Rhodes James, censored the diaries, perhaps with good reason, for fear of wounding many of those mentioned.
But now there can be very few participants left who were involved in the politics and parties of the time, let alone the infidelities, illegitimacies, same-sex liaisons, illicit affairs and messy divorces merely hinted at.
The first two volumes of the diaries, also edited by Simon Heffer, were weighted towards a parliamentary career that, with Chips’s canny aptness, prospered largely owing to his admiration of the ‘appeasing’ Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.
But his meteoric social rise is more discreet, his rampant sexual urge cloaked as young man’s fancy. In this third, he lets rip.
Chips writes with such vividness that one feels one is living each day in his exalted – there’s no other word – company. His opinions on those he liked, grandees and royalties and the stylish are acute; on those he disliked, they are searingly succinct. But there is a notable absence of spitefulness. An infectious joie de vivre permeates descriptions of people, ceremonies, rooms, gardens, fashions and friends.
It’s too facile to brand Channon with the snob label. He was obsessed with such people not for who they were, but for what they were. You and I may prefer the company of members of White’s, left- wing intellectuals or multimillionaires (surely preference is not snobbism?), whereas he revelled in that of the living relicts of a fast-fading past. Parliamentary discipline and social activity ruled his life. The level of gregariousness and hospitality normal to most people is heightened in him. Chips revelled in the parties of prestigious friends, if he wasn’t giving them.
And what friends! Having purposefully created a salon, its apogee the blue-and-silver dining room in Belgrave Square, he peopled it with those who were beautiful, clever, funny and influential; politicos, lovers, the throned, the de-throned and re-throned, the princelings and pretenders who had swarmed to England in the interwar period, and spellbound them with mischievous charm and bygone elegance. It’s a rich dish – Chips With Everyone.
No reader could not be absorbed by his unorthodox depiction of 1940s London and the following decade.
At the height of the Blitz, people swanned to theatres, parties and nightclubs, the men in tails, the women swathed in diamonds. The food in fashionable restaurants sounds ambrosial in its infinite variety – not the identical plodding menus of today.
In the following years, there seems to have been a ball or reception or gala almost nightly, tails de rigueur, the ladies dining in tiaras even if they weren’t going to the party afterwards.
This was surely part bravura and part stiff-upper-lipsticked tradition. Both had been given a kick in the pants by the addition of two tireless hostesses, both rich and both from middling America: the malapropping Laura Corrigan and the rapier-witted Emerald Cunard (‘Margaret Sweeny [later the Duchess of Argyll] is the sort of woman one meets in a lift’).
Though he dined with them almost nightly, Chips exasperatingly records very few of the former’s fabled gaffes: ‘Such a relief to be on terra cotta again.’ Or the other’s astute social observances: at one dazzling wedding ball, among the young white-tied and rock-laden, Chips says to Lady Cunard, ‘Look, Emerald, this is what we went to war for.’ ‘What?’ she replies. ‘Are they all Poles?’
The entries starring these two have a certain sameness, perhaps even for Chips, who seems almost relieved at their deaths. Similarly there are repetitive references to the brilliance and beauty of Lady Diana Cooper, and the loveliness and chic of Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, Chips’s ne plus ultra. But it’s delightful to see that the duchess was not the grieving widow of general assumption. She attended every lighted candle, often slipping away to less well-lit night spots. And Lady Diana is often, by your leave, arseholed.
During his marriage to – and hard-won divorce from – the troubled and troubling Honor Guinness (which gave him his adored son, Paul), Chips met Peter Coats, a handsome and level-headed army major.
Peter was to become his lifelong companion. Together they created the florid luxe and lush gardens of Kelvedon Hall, Chips’s house in Essex.
But soon there were to be three of them in this liaison. Chips fell ecstatically in love with Terence Rattigan, theatre god of the moment. With Coats handily away in Delhi, Viceroy’s-House-training the somewhat lumpen Wavells, Channon, despite some hissy fits from the subcontinent, manages to keep both irons in his fire.
Even this doesn’t dim his roving eye – one gets the impression he rarely went to bed alone, often sleeping ‘rough’. Ruby studs and sapphire cufflinks, watches and Fabergé boxes whizz between Belgrave Square and various stage doors.
First-nighting with Rattigan introduces Chips to an until-now despised galère – showbusiness. Stars of scrim and celluloid … Douglas Fairbanks! Larry! Vivien! Marlene, darling! They all now mingle in the silver-blue candlelight with queens of Greece and Spain, a brace of Romanian queens, no fewer than three of Yugoslavia (and one of Greece, whose husband, while ‘persuading his fox terrier to pleasure his pet monkey’, was fatally bitten), reshuffling their thrones.
Just as it’s unfair to tar Channon with the snob brush, it’s too easy to put him down as a mere lightweight. He took politics extremely seriously, the more so when he realised his former views were reprehensible. In his social life, he loved both to get pleasure from – and to give it to – those he admired, his rivals, his friends young and old, no doubt abetted by the Benzedrine he’d slip into their cocktails. He brought unparalleled light and gaiety to a depressed era.
And if anyone thinks of Channon as merely frivolous, ask them to read his summary of King George VI after his death. It’s as discerning as the Duc de Saint-Simon.
Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 3) 1943-57 (Penguin, £31.99) is edited by Simon Heffer
