If you like a cup of milky tea with a slab of moist banana bread this is the reading list for you.
I haven’t read anything by these authors but I can imagine … It is a genre I turn to less often these days; comfort reading: Mrs Miniver (Jan Struther), Diary of a Provincial Lady (EM Delafield), Beverley Nichols, Elizabeth von Arnim and now Mrs Harris Goes to … (Paul Gallico). To digress, I mistakenly thought Mrs ‘Arris to be a charlady residing in the East End. In fact Paul Gallico puts her in a street in Battersea within a bus journey of her employers in Eaton and Belgrave Squares.
I only started to read history for pleasure after I left school, no doubt partly explaining my undistinguished D grade at A Level. Arthur Bryant seemed a safe guide for an overview in the style of the last history book I had read for pleasure, about twenty years previously, An Island Story: a Child’s History of England.
A safe pair of hands I thought; CH, CBE, a knighthood, an Establishment historian. Now the revisionists are at work.
“The historian Sir Arthur Bryant was another notable foreigner whose benign view of the Nazis lasted longer than was decent. In his case, determination to see the best in Hitler’s Germany was fuelled by his innate suspicion of left-wing intellectuals and their politics.” (Travellers in the Third Reich, Julia Boyd)
Historian, Andrew Roberts, is more forthright: “Bryant was in fact a Nazi sympathiser and fascist fellow-traveller, who only narrowly escaped internment as a potential traitor in 1940. He was also, incidentally, a supreme toady, fraudulent scholar and humbug.”
For a prurient peek into his private life read Historic Affairs: The Muses of Sir Arthur Bryant, W Sydney Robinson, 2021.
Who could possibly read a book by such a man? I have just ordered his King Charles the Second, published 1946. I wonder if it will reveal a glimpse of his opinion of Hitler the Last only five years before?
A recent book on the Charteris Sisters mentions him.Apparently when entertaining,he would fetch the silver from the attic and afterwards put it back.This was thought to be very provincial.Also he had a reputation for being mean.
Mean as in mingy rations or being a bad hat?
Mingy rations,I expect
Paul Gallico is a very fine and not entirely sentimental writer. Snow Goose is about a spurned man who shows heroism. Mrs Harris turns the tables on the snobby flibbertigibbets for whom she chars. The Coronation is a very good portrait of post-War Britain. Yes, Gallico is a feelgood writer but there’s a properly severe realism underlying his stories. Rather like Noel Cowerd’s This Happy Breed, these are works which make a decent case for their society. They may even do something more difficult. Don’t they make a decently conservative case?