Dan Snow's History Hit - Gossip, Scandal and High Society

Episode Date: April 26, 2022

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Henry ‘Chips’ Channon documented British high society in eye-watering detail. His diaries are gossipy, sometimes vile and rude but always honest. Even after his death, his diaries struck fear into the British upper classes and it is only recently that they have been able to be published in all their glory. Chips' friendships with figures such as Neville Chamberlain and Edward VIII mean that his diaries provide an unparalleled window into the lives of the powerful. Journalist and author Simon Heffer took on the mammoth task of bringing the diaries to life and sorting through the 1.8 million words that make up the diaries. Simon joins Dan to discuss the life of Chips Channon, how his diaries puncture some of our national myths and why it was 60 years before the diaries could be published. If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. It's a book that has surprisingly become one of the hottest tickets of 2021, 2022. It's a gigantic project. It is the Diaries of Henry Channon, aka Chips Channon, an American-born British conservative politician. He moved to the UK in 1920, became very anti-American and sort of became more British than the Brits. He was very close to Neville Chamberlain, he hated Winston Churchill, and sort of became more British than the Brits. He was very close to Neville Chamberlain. He hated Winston Churchill. And as a result, his diaries are an amazing antidote to some of the national myths that tell themselves about Churchill and 1940. He is gossipy. He is vile. He is rude. He is honest. These diaries are a goldmine for historians. They are wonderful.

And they've been brought alive by Simon Heffer. He's a journalist, author, a political commentator. He's a writer. He's been on the podcast talking about the Victorians before. Now he's back talking about his gigantic editing job on these diaries. What did he leave out? Did he leave anything out? Turns out he left one little thing out, but you'll hear me asking that. Don't worry. If you want to watch documentaries about that crisis of 1940, about the Second World War, any of that stuff, we've got them at History Hit TV. It's the world's best history channel. It's like Netflix for history. You simply follow the link in the description of this podcast,

and it takes you over to History Hit TV, and you can sign up, and you get two weeks free when you sign up today. But in the meantime, folks, this has been my favourite thing this year, just sitting back and just dipping into these diaries at random. Unbelievable. So here, everyone, is Simon Heffer talking about the diaries of Chips Channon. Enjoy. Simon, thank you very much for coming back on the pod. Thank you for having me. Lots of people will never have heard of Chips Channon, and yet he's on his way now to becoming

the kind of Samuel Pepys of the 1930s and 40s. Tell me about Chips Channon first, and he's on his way now to becoming the kind of Samuel Pepys of the 1930s and 40s. Tell me about Chips Channon first, and then we'll measure up the diary. Well, I suppose the best way of describing Chips was that he was a self-hating American who wanted to be British. He came to Europe for the first time for any length in 1918, when he volunteered for the American Red Cross in Paris. And at the end of that year, when the war had ended, he decided to come to England, liked England hugely, and persuaded his parents to let him study at Christchurch, Oxford. He was from quite a well-to-do American family. They were in shipping. They weren't in transatlantic or transcontinental shipping,

anything like that. His father ran a business that moved goods and people around the Great Lakes. They were from Chicago. So they had the money to have him properly educated over here. And he fell in love with Europe. He fell in love with the antiquity of Europe in particular. He loved the art, the literature, the buildings. He particularly loved the upper middle classes and the upper classes and the aristocracy. And he loved being around royalties, not just kings and queens, but all those sort of minor German royalties that proliferated after the end of the Second Reich. I think because to him, it wasn't just that he was a snob, although I think he was a bit of a snob. They incarnated something to him about the European past that he found fascinating. And it was a snob, although I think he was a bit of a snob, they incarnated something to him about the

European past that he found fascinating. And it was a past he didn't think America had, and a culture he didn't think America had, which is why he disliked America so much, while loving Europe, particularly Britain, so much. But he wanted to make himself into an English toff, and he did this, not least with the help of Lord Curzon, whose stepson he had befriended at Oxford. And eventually, he had modelled himself on Curzon. People who knew him, and there's still three or four people left who knew him quite well, say he sounded like an upper class Englishman. He dressed like one, he acted like one, he tried to copy all their prejudices, some of which are pretty unpleasant, like anti-Semitism. He turned himself into an

Englishman and that's what he wanted to do. And he crowned this in two ways. First of all, by marrying an Earl's daughter. He married Lord Ivor's daughter, so married into the Guinness family, married into an enormous amount of money. And he became a British subject, and having done that, became the Conservative MP for Southend in 1935, inheriting the seat from his mother-in-law, Lady Ivor, who got bored with it. And he sat for Southend until he died in 1958. You wouldn't guess any of that from the way he writes

about us and we and the British Empire and the centrality of this international system at which Britain and its empire sits, like a bedrock. That seems to be his lodestar. Yes, I mean, he completely self-identifies as an Englishman, which is quite remarkable. The only other person I could think of who ever did it in quite that way was a fellow American and near contemporary of his, T.S. Eliot. And like T.S. Eliot, Chips had English roots. There's a moment in 1935 when he goes down to Ottery St. Mary in Devon and says in his diary, I've come here because this is where all the Channons came from originally. And he sees an old man, I think, in the churchyard and starts rhapsodising to himself,

saying, that man could be my cousin. We could be related to each other. Isn't this wonderful? And it's always as if he really despises the challenge of five or six generations earlier who'd left England and gone to this ghastly country across the Atlantic. But of course, what he doesn't understand is it was by going to that ghastly country across the Atlantic that they made their fortune. They never have made it being sons of the soil in Devon.

And so he was enabled to come back in glory and triumph in the 20th century and set up as a British aristocrat. Let's talk about the diaries now. There are other diaries in the period. Alan Brooks' diaries are obviously extraordinary and very interesting if you're kind of trying to slightly dissect the Churchill myth and things. But I think these diaries are as significant as some of the great diaries of British history. They are at a pivotal point in our history. They are detailed. They're brutally, he hasn't got an eye to posterity, has he? This

is, in a way, he's not likeable. It's always probably the sign of a good diary because he didn't try and make himself likeable for posterity. Yes, I mean, I think the two diarists in history I would compare him with are obviously Pepys, although Pepys was much more concentrated just over those 10 years in the 1660s. And the Greville diaries of the early 19th century are done by the courtier. Nothing else, I think, comes close.

And he did, I think, treat his diary almost as a sewer. By that, I mean everything that was unpleasant in him that he wanted to pour out, he poured it into the diaries. Things he couldn't even say to his wife, couldn't even say to his closest friends. He couldn't write in letters those thoughts that he harboured. He just had to unload somewhere. And he unloaded them in his diary. And that's why they are so unpleasant. And, you know, I've been going around the country talking about them.

People put their hands up and say, wasn't he a really vile man? And I say, well, actually, I think he probably wasn't a really vile man. I think he just had the honesty to put down in handwriting on pieces of paper thoughts that probably we all have and are somewhat ashamed of having. And then we compartmentalise them and pretend we've never had them. He had to pour everything out.

He had, as a later generation of Americans said, he had to externalise everything. But he did it by putting it in his diary. And I suspect not least that was because he wasn't always being honest about the person that he was he was certainly bisexual he may have been predominantly homosexual at a time when it was illegal to do any such thing and he was living some great pretense you know he got married he'd had a child he was maintaining appearances and I think having a diary was a way of allowing the true

chips to be expressed even if no one was going to see it until long after he was dead well thank goodness to chips he did that i mean you're right the one bit that springs to mind is when he's talking about the death of someone who was basically a friend of his dying in north africa and northeast africa i think it wasn't in some heroic way, dying in battle. And he's appallingly rude about him, basically. I mean, it's extraordinary. Oh, yes. I mean, the old line about demortuus nil, this in Bogan, does not apply to Chips.

When someone dies, he will give them an absolutely frank assessment. There's a woman he deeply dislikes called Maureen Stanley, who tragically dies of some terrible disease in her 40s or 50s. And he simply monsters her. He says, well, she was always basically a bitch. I always hated her. And she was narrow, shallow, common, disgusting, everything else. And he just lets it all come out. And what's so remarkable, Dan, about this is that up until 1937, when he goes to, I think it's a Gordie at Christchurch, his college at Oxford, and he meets a contemporary and tells this chap he's keeping a diary. And the man says to him, this is going to be a valuable historical document, very perceptive comment.

And Chip says, yes, actually, I think they are going to be valuable historical documents. I must look after them better and preserve them and keep them for the future. He seems then to make a decision that he is writing for posterity, but nothing changes. He doesn't change his tone. He doesn't suddenly become a public diarist in a way I think that, to an extent, Harold Nicholson was. He lets it all hang out. It's all there. The bit that I turn to first, but certainly not last, because I've been absolutely lapping them up, is those days, those days in London, May, early June, 1940. It's so provocative, even for someone who I think I've read various different accounts of it.

And I've tried to obviously disassociate myself with the kind of this extraordinary patriotic narrative that we have. extraordinary patriotic narrative that we have. It is so provocative to read about Churchill becoming Prime Minister, making the decision to continue the war against Hitler, from the point of view of someone who just thought it was a terrible idea and that Churchill was an absolute charlatan. I mean, the language he used about Churchill is extraordinary. Yes, I mean, there's an awful lot there you just said. And I mean, you as a historian yourself know as well as I do, that the view that Chips had of Churchill in the late 30s, and right up until he becomes prime minister, indeed afterwards, was a view that was held by most of the political class

and many, many people in this country. Churchill was the man who had given us the D'Artagnans, he'd given us the gold standard. He'd been on the wrong side in the abdication, as Chips had, at a time when enlightened people in this country were looking for ways of giving India independence. He was going around calling Gandhi a semi-naked fakir. This was a man who seemed to have been wrong about every major subject.

Of course, he was right about Hitler. And he was right at the most crucial moment in our history in 1940, when he was able to articulate Britain's resistance to the Nazi menace and was able to give the lead to motivate the country to motivate those young men who were fighting in the Battle of Britain. Chips can't see this. I mean, Chips sits through the, you know, we shall fight them on the beaches speech and just says, well, itips sits through the, you know, we shall fight them on the beach, his speech, and just says, well, it was all right. But, you know, the man's just a charlatan and a poltroon.

And he doesn't really adapt his view of Churchill until quite some way into the war. He is very keen on Neville Chamberlain. That's largely for personal reasons, although I think he does recognise, as indeed now more historians are doing, that Chamberlain was not quite the washout on the disaster that Churchill depicted him as being in the gathering storm,

and that many historians have since depicted him as being. And certainly, from my point of view as a historian, reading Chips's assessments of Chamberlain made me think I need to look at him again. And I think that Chamberlain is due for a revision and it will come. Where he's so wrong about Hitler, and there are many ways where he's wrong about Hitler, but the most egregious way in which he's wrong about Hitler is he sees Nazism as a bulwark against Bolshevism. And we must remember, for example,

when he goes to the Berlin Olympics in 1936 and is entertained on successive nights by Ribbentrop, Goebbels and Goering at various deeply vulgar and excessive balls that they give. And all the nasty things that are happening in Germany, the persecution of Jews, the persecution of homosexuals, the persecution of communists, all that is being kept well and truly off the landscape. And this is only 18 years after the Romanovs were machine-gunned

in a cellar in Yekaterinburg, and a lot of people who supported them were hanged from lampposts. And Chips, as I say, sharing the prejudices of the class into which he is integrated in this country, feels that that's what they want to do to England. They want to come to England, they want to machine-gun. They want to come to England. They want to machine gun the House of Windsor. And they want to hang everybody else from a lamppost around Belgrave Square.

And this is why Chips, entirely out of self-interest and class interest, thinks, well, you know, Hitler's a good chap because he will stop this happening. It's also why, of course, in August 1939, he cannot compute why Ribbentrop and Molotov have made this pact. He cannot compute why the Germans have said to the Russians, okay, let's carve up Poland between us. He just thinks that's not what the Nazis are there for. And he has woeful political judgment, a judgment that again manifests itself in the second volume of these diaries. In June 1941, when Operation Barbarossa is launched,

he says, how brilliant of Hitler to have done this and take on the Russians. He'll sort them out in no time. It'll be the end of the war. Of course, as we all know, it was the fatal mistake that Hitler made. Listen to Dan Snow's history. Talking about the diaries of Chips Shannon.

It all makes sense. More coming up. Hi, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb. And on my podcast, Not Just the Tudors, we talk about everything from ballads to banqueting, from ghosts to gunpowder plots. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe from History Hit,

wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans.

Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

Can we also talk about empire? Because he's talking obviously about the importance of saving off the socialist threat from within and without. But he correctly identifies that getting involved in an all-out, unbelievably costly total war will bankrupt Britain. It will be the end of 200 years of British hegemony, which turned out to be true. And he finds that idea deeply melancholy. Yes, he does. He's a bit behind the times, of course. I mean, one can find people writing in the late 1930s that that hegemony had effectively ended at Versailles, and that the Americans actually had made it a main foreign policy aim to remove the British Empire from the face of the earth. So Chippips, I think, again, because he's a self-hating American, and because he is capable of deluding himself,

does get to 1938-39 thinking that the empire is at stake. He doesn't understand that the empire is already cracking up. I mean, really, from the moment that the Irish Free State was created, the empire was cracking up. And if he had applied his considerable intelligence, and of course, he was a foreign office PPS, so he had a very close view of international affairs, he should have worked out that India was going to become independent, and that even without a war, the empire was unsustainable. But yes, you're quite right. He knows how much it's going to cost to fight a war.

I mean, he still remembers the economic damage done by the Great War. And for that to be repeated is going to mean the end of the empire. And from the moment the war breaks out, from right through to the end of the diaries, he makes his last entries in 1957, the year before he dies. before he dies. He's increasingly obsessed with British decline. And he doesn't also like the rise of America. The Second World War, of course, is the moment where America becomes the undisputed military and economic power in the world. And that's something that comes up more in the third volume of The Divers, which will be out next year, that Shipps really doesn't reconcile himself to. He dislikes the country of his birth so much he can hardly articulate it. He's very interesting around Munich. I mean, what else have you, as the editor, picked out? Are there parts of the diaries that really change the way that you've come to think about the period or just add particular colour to it? In terms of changing

my views of the period, certainly the way he writes about Chamberlain, the way he describes Chamberlain, and the way he depicts the real anguish of Chamberlain in those last two or three weeks before war breaks out is quite revelatory. someone talking about the rather sour way, I think that was the adjective that he or she used, that Chamberlain delivers that famous broadcast on September the 3rd 1939 from the cabinet room in Downing Street. It's on YouTube, anyone can hear the whole thing. It's not sour, this is a man who's completely crushed, this is a man who has worked and has gone to enormous lengths, even to the point almost of humiliating his country to try and prevent yet another great war as they see it. And he's failed. And I think what makes me do by living it day to day through him is to see just how they saw things in 1939, that the Second World War was such an enormous and apocalyptic event with so much death and bloodshed and genocide

and every other evil that you can think of taking place. And it's so hard for us to put ourselves back in the mindset of the summer of 1939 because we know what happened next. We know about Auschwitz. We know about Hiroshima. We know all of that. And I think that what's so useful about this contemporary record is it reminds us that there were still things at stake. They wanted to prevent all this. So that's

one thing I've got from it. In terms of individual events that have been illuminated, apart from the fall of the Chamberlain government in May 1940, apart from, as I say, the great anguish of the last days of peace, the abdication in 1936, he describes brilliantly. And that was not least because he was a very close friend of the King. He was a very close friend of Mrs Simpson, who, like him, was an American on the make over here, trying to claw her way to the top of society. She had, to an extent, slightly more success than he did.

And also because the Duke of Kent, the King's brother, was his neighbour in Belgrave Square and would come round and Chips describes him coming round sitting on the sofa of an evening weeping at what's happening to his brother. And Chips is so dismissive of the man who becomes George VI and the woman who becomes Queen Elizabeth, of the man who becomes George VI and the woman who becomes Queen Elizabeth, whom he regards as rather common and middle class. He can't see them elevating the monarchy to the sort of glamour that Edward VIII brought to it. But again, that's all about Chips being rather superficial.

Chips doesn't understand that, yes, Edward VIII was glamorous, but he was also going to be a pretty shocking king. He was very good at turning on the soundbite when necessary. Indeed, on the day that he goes to South Wales and says something must be done, he goes and has dinner with Chips and Mrs. Simpson in Bulgrave Square that evening. It's the last time the two of them go out together before she goes to France and stays there for the abdication. And Chips can't see that his dedication as a monarch is very part-time. It's quite unlike George VI and quite unlike the present Queen.

And again, Chips is very affected by the glamour and the radiance, almost, that comes off the monarchy at that stage. But the way he describes it, the detail in which he goes to describe the abdication, and also in two memos that the family had, which I reproduced at the abdication and also in two memos that the family had which I reproduced at the end of volume one about the events themselves and about the dramatist persona I don't think anybody now will ever be able to write a book about the abdication not that they need to there are so many of them but I don't think anybody will be able to write a book about

it without consulting these diaries because they give such a close eyewitness account of what really went on. Did you discover them? What's the story behind them? Have they been used by scholars before? Well, they came out in an extremely bowdlerised and heavily redacted version in 1967. Sir Robert Rhodes James, who himself later became a Conservative MP, was enlisted by Chips's partner, a man called Peter Coates, to whom the diaries, I think, were left, to make an edition of them. The diaries were 1.8 million words of manuscript. And when I was dealing with them, I had, I think, about 70 or 80 blue A4 folders of photocopies of the original manuscript. Rhodes James never saw the original manuscript. He wasn't allowed to. Coates spent several years

with the secretary creating his own version of it, and he took one and a half million words out, more or less. Some of it was boring that he took out, but most of it was stuff about people's sex lives, about their financial arrangements, about their marital infidelities, about their charlatanry, their crookery. And many of them were alive in the 60s and would have sued. The British edition came out in 1967. Also, Coates censored a lot of Chips's misjudgments. There's none of the raving about what a great man Hitler was. There's very little of the insult of Winston Churchill, because Churchill had already been dead a couple of years in 1967, and it would have played

extremely badly with the market for the book. So it's highly sanitised. The final sanitisation, by the way, when a proof was made of the diaries, Chipset's ex-wife, Lady Honour Channon, was allowed to see them. And although every reference to the breakup of their marriage had been removed for reasons of taste, and also to protect her, she removed large quantities of what she read in the proofs, because she thought that it would harm the political career of Paul Chan and their son who became a cabinet minister under Mrs Thatcher. So poor old Rose James was left with a very slim volume indeed. It's about 230,000 words. It's half the size of one of the three volumes of the diaries that we're bringing out now. So they've been used as a limited

source material by historians and journalists over the last 50 years. But this is the first time they've been anything like complete. And I attempted in my editing of them to leave absolutely everything in that I deemed to be of historical significance, all that showed crucial aspects of the characters of the main people involved. And indeed, just by cutting out endless lists of people that Chips had to lunch or dinner, because he entertained on an imperial scale, it was quite easy to cut several hundred thousand words out of it. But we're publishing about 1.4 of the 1.8 million words that he wrote. Who knew that all this gorgeous stuff was there? I mean, was it always said these are terribly balderized,

these are terribly sort of edit-censored? Yeah, word got round. The diaries were not quite as big in 1967 in physical size as they were when I got to them, because the years from 1952 to 1957, the diaries, the Reg James edition ends in 1952, were found at a car boot sale in Essex in the late 1980s. And a man turned up at Paul Shannon's house in Essex

with a carrier bag saying, I think these belong to you. And they were Chips's diaries. So we suddenly had complete diaries. The family knew they were there. Word got round when these original diaries came out that an awful lot had been cut for legal reasons and even then they made people very nervous i mean selena hastings who i'm sure you know is one of our great biographers told me that she at the time was working in hatchyards

while a student and she said that when the diaries came out, when the clubs in St James's threw out after lunch, old men would come in and stand and look in the index of the diaries to see whether they were named. And some of them very sheepishly bought copies. Some of them went out looking very crestfallen and others went out looking highly relieved. So even in their sanitised form, they caused a certain amount of offence and shock. But in Chips's will, he said that ideally, one day they would all be published. But he understood that there were certain legal and other restraints that would prevent them from being published immediately. But he said, it would be good to do it in 60 years. And indeed, that's when I started the process, 60 years after he died.

Did you leave anything out that still, because there's living people or libelists or something? I mean, did you have to use that same, a little bit of that same caution that the previous editor would have done? Well, if you look in volume one, for example, in terms of conventions of today's taste, Chips occasionally, as people did in the 1920s and 30s, uses the N word to describe black people. And I didn't take it out, but I put N dash dash dash dash, just to make the point that I didn't approve of the word and nor did the publishers and nor did the family. So that was a very mild form of censorship. People know what the word is, but we didn't go to the offensive extent of pointing it out. I cut two things out, one from

each volume, and it was my own decision to do both of them. There was an act of violence against a woman, a prostitute, described in volume one when Chips and a friend go to visit a brothel. I must stress it was not by Chips, it was by the friend he went with, which was so revolting that I and the trustees agreed it shouldn't be in the diaries. I don't think any of us wants to encourage that sort of thing against women. And in Volume 2, one of Chips's friends dies. He's killed in action. And there's a quite horrible description of his death,

which because he has family living, we felt it would be very insensitive to put that in, so we took it out. But no, otherwise, it would be very insensitive to put that in, so we took it out. But no, otherwise, it's absolutely as it was. And the candour with which he wrote them is reflected in the way that they've been published. Well, I received them, and I thought, what the hell am I going to do with these enormous books of someone's diaries? And I cannot put them down. I keep going back to them. It is a triumph. So obviously thanks to Chips,

but thanks to you for all the hard work that has gone into them and making them so accessible and understandable. You're very learned and brilliant footnotes as well. So thank you. Dan, thank you very much and thank you for having me on your podcast. Remind everyone what they're called. They are the diaries of Henry Chips Channon.

There are two volumes so far, one covering 1918 to 38, the other covering 38 to 43, and the third volume covering 43 to 57 will be out in September next year. Simon Heffert, do you keep an unbelievably candid diary of all the gossip and things that you see and hear on the mean streets? I wish I had time. No, I don't. Oh, come on. I don't. I'm too busy. And I now lead the life of a scholar, really. When I was a full-time journalist, it might have been fun. But I'm now a university professor and I teach history and my life is very sedate in scholarly, so I don't come across all the gossip and dirt that I used

to. They'd be very boring diaries now. The high point of my year is being interviewed by Dan Snow for a podcast. There you go. God, that's so boring. I'm sure that's not true. Thank you very much indeed, sir. Thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs,

this part of the history of our episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project. If you did feel like doing me a favour, if you go to wherever you get

your podcasts and give it a review, give a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic and feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people finding out about it, depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you.