A Good Gossip

I’m reading The Journals of Kenneth Rose in small doses, not because they are heavy going; they are highly readable; there are aperçus on every page and they deserve to be savoured.

There is a lot of political content. To paraphrase Clarissa Eden, I feel as if the Suez Canal is flowing through my study. So today I am going to pick out some of his entries that have no politics – we need a break from that.

11th September 1952
A Rugby master, discussing an essay in 1899 by the young William Temple, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, : ‘Are you not a little out of your depth here?’ ‘Perhaps, sir,’ was the confident reply, ‘but I can swim.’

17th November 1952
A story I heard about Lord Kemsley. When first given a peerage he was asked what title he would like to take. He replied ‘Lord Farnham-Royal’, the name of his estate. The Crown Office informed him that he could not have the title of ‘Lord Farnham-Royal’, but might take that of ‘Lord Farnham-Common’.

8th January 1954
Go straight from office to Covent Garden, where I meet Giles St Aubyn. We hear Madama Butterfly. Flimsy plot & sugary music, though here & there a good theme, especially one reminiscent of Nicolai’s Merry Wives of Windsor. Good seats in Grand Circle. Met an Eton pupil of Giles’s who says to him: ‘Call me any time you want any gin.’

15th August 1955
Read The Longest Journey by EM Forster. Fills me with a deeper revulsion than even Howards End. The style is too contrived and spinsterish, the situations absurd and the characters tiresome beyond belief. Oh, for a little red-hot sex in his books!

20th October 1955
Dine with Jack Wheeler-Bennett. He is immersed in writing biography of George VI. I ask him what the King used to read. He replies: ‘Nothing at all,’ and wonders how he can say so. I suggest he uses method of Sydney Lee in writing of Edward VII’s foibles – when describing his greed he wrote; ‘The King was not a man to toy with his food.’ So with George VI’s lack of literary interest I suggest – ‘His harshest critic could not accuse him of being a bookish pedant.’

30th November 1955
To Eton for St Andrew’s Day. Lunch at Grizel Hartley’s. A nice-mannered Eton boy also there called Nicholas Ullswater. He succeeded his great-grandfather, the Speaker of the House of Commons, as the 2nd Viscount in 1949; must be a unique succession. See a little of the unexciting Wall Game, a word with Giles, a glimpse of photographic exhibition.

30th December 1955
To Covent Garden as Malcolm Sargent’s guest to watch him conducting Walton’s Troilus and Cressida – I heard it for first time a year ago. It does not seem to have improved in the interval – still too many Brittenish discord’s, and no longer such a good Pandarus as Peter Pears. Gossip with Malcolm in his dressing room. He is going to Broadlands to stay with the Mountbattens for New Year. How he loves it all. When someone once taunted him with staying with Mountbattens, he replied: ‘Yes, they are climbers, aren’t they?’

This is me again: if you find Kenneth Rose himself a bit of a snob I’d have to say ‘guilty as charged’. However, he lived in the heart of the Establishment in the latter half of the 20th century; his journal runs to some six million words; it is fascinating to be a voyeur and he often shows good judgement.

20th March 1957
John Altrincham lends me copies of Encounter containing the verbatim texts of the broadcasts given by PG Wodehouse from Berlin when a civilian interned in Germany. He was much attacked for them, and practically tried for treason. In fact, they are most witty and ironical attacks on the Germans, who were too stupid to realise this.