I am enjoying Kenneth Rose’s Journals. On every page there is some donnish joke worth repeating but, hitherto, I have resisted.
However, this entry I must share.
1 January 1965
Start the New Year with lunch at the General Post Office, where Anthony Trollope once worked, with Anthony Wedgwood Benn, the new Postmaster General. It has a wonderfully Victorian aspect with lots of mahogany, model ships and mail coaches in glass cases, and office messengers in tightly buttoned scarlet frock coats. Benn’s private office obviously find him more revolutionary than they like. One thing annoyed him intensely – a little spy hole between the secrataries’ office and his own. So he screwed down the flap. They promptly unscrewed it. In one of the rooms is a framed proclamation of Charles II, dated 1660. It is entitled “For Quieting the Postmaster General in the execution of his Office.” It was found at Longleat in 1942.
Anthony tells me an amusing story of how, when he was fighting his peerage case, he was asked to debate the Honours System on BBC with Sir George Bellew, who was at that time Garter King of Arms. The producer told Bellew he was to open the discussion, but Bellew refused, saying quite seriously: “Oh no, we must do things according to precedence and Stansgate is a Viscount.” Afterwards Anthony and Bellew had a private discussion on the subject. When Anthony pointed out how absurd it was for a young man like the Duke of Kent to have received the GCVO in 1960, Bellew replied: “Oh well, I suppose you are right. But if one lives so near to the fountain of honour, one can hardly avoid being splashed.”
Anthony is determined to shock his civil servants. When his Private Secretary told him that as a minister he was entitled to a yearly haunch of venison from the Queen’s herd at Windsor, he replied in an offhand way: “Oh, give it to Oxfam.”
He was also, as you probably are aware, a bit bonkers as this entry in Kenneth Rose’s Journal reveals.
1 June 1966
Anthony Wedgwood Benn telephoned to ask if I am free for lunch today. Round to the GPO at 12.30 and he takes me to a pleasant new restaurant in the precinct surrounding St Paul’s. When the Queen came to open the new Post Office Tower in Marylebone the other day, he suggested to her that some State Banquets might in future be held there. There is seating for 120 in the restaurant. The Queen could sit in the stationary part of the Tower, with her guests revolving about her. This would do away with protocol, as everyone would get a chance of exchanging remarks with the Queen every twenty minutes or so.