Last week I was invited to the Savile to hear Simon Heffer talk about Chips Channon’s diaries, of which he has edited two volumes with one more due in September.
He was preaching to the converted. Many of us had read the original, rather unsatisfactory, version edited by Robert Rhode James published in 1967; a mere 500 pages. Now we have read about 2,000 pages so there’s not much we don’t know about Chips. He liked to be whipped by his brother-in-law and wished the Abbot at Buckfast Abbey would do likewise when he was on a Retreat; I don’t think the latter obliged.
Heffer was preaching to the unconverted with essentially an account of Chips’s life; all stuff we know. An interesting angle might have been to tell us what other diarists thought of Chips. Many don’t mention him. Although he was close to Diana Cooper, Duff barely mentions him. Charles Ritchie, serving in the American Embassy in London neither. Harold Nicolson is more forthcoming writing to Vita (his wife) from Schloss St Martin, Upper Austria, September 22nd, 1936.
“Chips is not really a snob in an ordinary way. I suppose everyone has some sort of snobbishness somewhere just like everyone has a few keys somewhere. What makes Chips so exceptional is that he collects keys for keys sake. The corridors of his mind are hung with keys which open no doors of his own and no cupboards of his own but are just other people’s keys which he collects. There they hang – French keys, English keys, American keys, Italian keys and now a whole housekeeper’s truss of Central European keys.”
Harold Nicolson is often mentioned by Chips, who dislikes his pro-war pro-Churchill stance. So this entry in Harold Nicolson’s diaries is all the more unexpected, although of course pre-Munich.
“November 25, 1937
Henry (sic) Channon asks my advice about his diaries which he has kept at great length since 1917. He says they are very outspoken and scandalous, but they record the lives of important people for the last twenty years. He has made a Will leaving them to me plus £500. I say that he must make another Will leaving them plus £1,000 to Christ Church Library, with instructions that thirty years after his death the four youngest fellows of the time should consider their publication.”
This is validated in Chips’s diary entry for 25th November, 1937.
”To Harold Nicolson confided what no one except Honor knows, that I keep an intermittent journal. He advised me not to destroy it, but to leave it to Christ Church with £1,000 with several provisions for its future examination and possible publication. I will.”
In the event, he didn’t. The diaries were left to his son, Paul Channon.
Jane Ridley draws quite a lot on Chips in her George V, and is not uncritical of or fully in agreement with him
Heffer is doing the same talk at the Oxford and Cambridge today
Pity about the talk. “Chips in other people’s diaries” would make a fascinating addition to the three volumes.
Actually Chips left his diaries to the Trustees of the British Museum with the stipulation that they should not be read until 60 year after his death nor the tin boxes in which they were kept be opened. However rather soon after his death they appear to be in the possession of his family. How or why this occurred I’m unsure? Perhaps the Trustees of the BM turned them down? Perhaps the family, nervous of what they contained, managed to persuade the BM to relinquish them? It would be interesting to know. Perhaps this would throw some light on the missing years of Chips’s time at Oxford and during the courtship of his wife?
It would have been a good question for Simon Heffer. In my slight experience once the BM gets a bequest they are like Bertie with a bone – won’t give up or share.
The Ritchie mentioned was a Canadian diplomat,Elizabeth Bowen’s Ritchie was he not? External Affairs not State Department his line of country.