A Canadian Diplomat Abroad

The second volume of Chips Channon’s Diaries, edited by Simon Heffer, will be released on Thursday. It covers the period 1938 – 1943, so quite a lot saved up for the third volume.

As it is 1,120 pages it is something to look forward to reading when the nights are longer; more positive than days shorter. Meanwhile I’m starting on a more concise diary covering roughly the same period: 1937 – 1945. So many of the principal actors were so busy writing diaries then, it’s a wonder they had time to fight the war.

In 1938 Charles Ritchie is posted to London as Second Secretary at the Canadian High Commission. He was a successful career diplomat, returning to London in 1967 as Canadian High Commissioner but his fame lies in his diaries, stretching to four volumes; a Canadian Chips, as observant but more modest and detached.

If you wonder how I come across authors like Charles Ritchie and George Clare I have Slightly Foxed to thank. The articles in their quarterly journal have introduced me to many writers I would not otherwise have discovered or read. Each edition is £12.50 well spent.

My paperback copy of The Siren Years, A Canadian Diplomat Abroad, has an abundance of underlining and annotations, mercifully in pencil. It must have belonged to a reviewer and the passages marked are usually worth special attention. Ritchie was born in Nova Scotia and went to university there; ideal preparation to be an insular, inward-looking, isolationist diplomat. He most certainly had none of these traits as he went on to Pembroke College Oxford, Harvard and the Paris Institute of Political Studies, picking up friends, worldliness and urbanity along the boulevard. I enjoyed this entry, when he is at the Canadian Legation, as it was in those days, in Washington. (Michal Vyvyan’s daughter-in-law is Venetia Vyvyan, another good recommender and vendor of books across the river in Barnes.)

“3 November 1937

Michal Vyvyan said on the telephone that he would come around in twenty minutes to show me the draft of the telegram of greetings to Canadian War Veterans. With him came a new man just out from the Foreign Office, a smooth-faced Etonian with an air of sophistication. What happens to them at Eton? However innocent, stupid, or honest they may be they always look as though they had passed the preceding  night in bed with a high-class prostitute and had spent the earlier part of the morning smoothing away the ravages with the aid of creams, oils, and curling tongs. This graceful young man handed me an elegantly worded little draft message typed out on a piece of paper. I said it was very pretty … “

I’m going to enjoy seeing the war, yet again, this time through Ritchie’s penetrating eyes.