Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 1): 1918-38

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Chris Mullin Chips Channon’s judgment was abysmal, but the diaries are a great work of literature Delights of the second volume, edited by Simon Heffer, include a bomb dropping on Channon’s dinner party and an Austrian archduke arriving to clear the debris

I drove in the afternoon with Honor to her farm: the crater caused by the bomb – it must have been a 1,000-pounder – is really immense. All my suspicions and distrust of Honor’s bailiff, a Mr Woodman were revived. He is insolent, swaggers about, and treats her with scant respect. She allows herself to be so familiar with that sort of people. I think I am wise in saying nothing; usually she tires of them. But I foresee trouble with that man; serious trouble, probably financial. There is a settembrile feeling in the air – going is the summer, going, indeed, is almost everything. In the highly abridged first version of Channon’s diaries, prepared by his partner Peter Coats and published in 1967, the end of his marriage is presented as a vague matter of fact, with an almost complete absence of detail. Coats went to pains to conceal the truth about its demise and his own relationship with him, for two very good reasons. First, his ex-wife, Lady Honor Svejdar (as she had become after her second marriage) was still alive, and indeed was sent the proofs to read and to amend where she felt necessary; second, Coats, who hardly features in the first edition despite having been central to Channon’s life for its last 19 years, appears not to have desired the recognition he was due. The blow, long foreseen, has fallen. Honor looking sheepish, soon bolted out the truth. She wants me to divorce her so that she may marry Mr Woodman. Apparently his wife is about to sue him, naming Honor. Davenport-Hines, Richard (5 March 2021). "Living, loving, partygoing". The Times Literary Supplement . Retrieved 4 March 2021.In the following diary entries (the bold text indicates redacted information that has never been seen before) the realities are laid bare, amid the fear of invasion and the Blitz.

When the diaries of an obscure politician called Sir Henry “Chips” Channon were first published in 1967, they caused a sensation, and not only among those whose names appeared in their index (“vile & spiteful & silly,” announced the novelist Nancy Mitford, speaking for the walking wounded). Channon, an upstart Chicagoan who’d unaccountably managed to marry the daughter of an exceedingly rich Anglo-Irish Earl, moved in vertiginously high circles. As a friend of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, he had enjoyed a ringside seat during the abdication crisis; as the Conservative MP for Southend he had looked on with fawning admiration as Neville Chamberlain negotiated with Hitler, and abject horror as Winston Churchill succeeded him as prime minister (Channon was in favour of appeasement). Most eye-popping of all, during a visit to Berlin for the Olympics in 1936, he and various other of his smart English friends had partied wildly with leading Nazis, among them Hermann Göring, whose floodlit garden had been made over to look like a cross between a Coney Island funfair and the Petit Trianon in Versailles – a theatrical coup that seemingly drove both Joseph Goebbels and Joachim von Ribbentrop half mad with jealousy. He wrote two more books: a second novel, Paradise City (1931) about the disastrous effects of American capitalism, [3] and a non-fiction work, The Ludwigs of Bavaria (1933). The latter, a study of the last generations of the ruling Wittelsbach dynasty of Bavarian kings, received excellent notices, and was in print twenty years later. Some critical reservations reflected Channon's adulation of minor European royalty: The Manchester Guardian said of his account of the 1918 revolution, "he seems to have depended almost exclusively on aristocratic sources, which are most clearly insufficient." [11] Despite this, the book was described on its reissue in 1952 as "a fascinating study... excellently written". [12] Apart from the pleasure my divorce will give to my enemies, I am looking forward to it now: I am not sure that it will come off, although Honor seems greatly determined. She is like a woman possessed by a poltergeist. But it is, of course, political Channon for whom we really turn to the diary. He was at the epicentre of the pro-appeasement wing of the Tory party and high society, and at the heart of the abdication crisis. The earlier version of the diary disguised just how enthusiastic he was for the fascists, as were many of those around him. For much of this period, Channon was a fashionable anti-Semite, who feared above all a socialist revolution and the murder of the aristocracy, perhaps by guillotine.There are one or two people at court, around the royal family, who Channon really takes against and who he feels are conspiring to get rid of Edward VIII. And that didn’t come out in the original version.” A gay relationship with “a very prominent friend” was also censored and will be revealed for the first time. Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection.