Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon

"Sir Henry Chips’ Channon was a Tory MP for Southend – an American who married into the Guinness family and was therefore at home in high society. He never rose in rank above being parliamentary private secretary to the deputy foreign secretary, RAB Butler. His secret was that he entertained on a lavish scale; I mean a truly awesome scale. The king comes to dinner during the middle of the abdication crisis. Churchill comes to dinner, both in opposition and as prime minister. During the war, Field Marshall Lord Wavell – General Wavell as he was then – came back from the Middle East and stayed with Chips for three months. Everybody passes through his salon. No, his wife doesn’t feature a lot: there are references to her arranging the flowers and how beautifully she did it, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, he says, We’re getting divorced. We’ve separated.’ It doesn’t say why or go into any of the details. He keeps his personal life out of it – I don’t know whether he was gay or what, but anyway she barely features and then she disappears."

"I chose him because he gives one of the most wonderful day-to-day accounts of the abdication. He was very keen on royalty. But not only that: I discovered in it the person I wrote my first biography of. That was someone called Gladys Deacon who was the Duchess of Marlborough and there is an amazing description of her in that book which set me on the quest to find her, and I did. She was in a geriatric hospital and I went to see her during a couple of years and wrote my first book about her, which was then read by Cecil Beaton, who then asked me to do his biography, and off I went! Yes. And what I particularly liked were his extraordinary descriptions of royal dinners. At one point he said: “My own big dinner. As usual the house played up and looked very grand and glittering. It was lit up and full of yellow chrysanthemums from Kelvedon. I laced the cocktails with Benzedrine, which I find always makes a party go. Noel Coward arrived first … then the Queen of Spain arrived punctually and I was on the doorstep to meet her. Five minutes later, the Queen of Romania drove up so there was just time to make the presentations to Spain before Romania arrived,” et cetera. And people don’t do those sorts of things anymore. This was a very rich man who was married to a [member of the wealthy] Guinness [family] and he was a very good observer of the party scene so those diaries are really enjoyable. Because I take slightly the Mae West line about diaries, which is, you keep a diary and one day it will keep you! And also because when I first started writing biographies I met so many interesting people who told me lots of very interesting things that were not strictly relevant to the book I was writing but I felt those things ought to be written down. Actually, with Behind Closed Doors , this new book I have written, I transcribed about 60,000 or 70,000 words about the Windsors from my own diaries. Because as Lady Diana Cooper said after the Duchess of Windsor died, “No man ever gave up so much for one woman”. Men don’t give things up for women, so why did he do it? That is what is so interesting about it. To give up reigning over two-thirds of the world at that time on account of this rather strange, not particularly good looking and perhaps not particularly interesting woman. Ithink psychologically he wanted to escape and she was a way of escaping. I think she was horrified when it happened because I don’t think that was what she had in mind at all. Yes she was, and I seem to be leading a sort of one-man crusade to ask people to think about it in a slightly different way. Every time something happened, like when the Duke of Windsor died, somebody like James Pope-Hennessy or Kenneth Rose would write a very well reasoned article saying it was not the great love story of the 20th century and everyone would say that is really interesting, and then they would go back to saying, oh, but it is the great love story. They do want that. I remember the Duke’s private secretary saying that when they were at the Mill, which is a house they had outside Paris, if they didn’t have guests, after dinner they would go through to the drawing room. They had nothing to say to each other, but they weren’t tired enough to go to bed. The decanter of whisky would come out and it would just go down, down, down."