Memoirs
William Rees-Mogg
William Rees-Mogg is one of the pivotal figures of post-war Britain. In this brilliantly entertaining memoir he recounts the story of a colourful life, and reflects on the key figures and events of his time.As editor of The Times (his glory years), journalist, commentator, Chairman of the Arts Council, and, later, Chairman of the Broadcasting Standards Council (when he was accused of censorship), William Rees-Mogg has spent his life at the centre of events in politics and journalism.Often controversial and never dull, he has always had the courage to hold strong, fiercely defended opinions which go to the heart of the problems of the day. From his famous defence of Mick Jagger on a charge of possessing cannabis when he attacked the ‘primitive’ impulse to ‘break a butterfly on a wheel’, to his recent criticism of the morality behind the war in Kosovo and defence of monetarism, his writing has demanded attention, to the point of becoming newsworthy in itself.He knew and knows most of the anybodies who were anybody, from royalty to prime ministers, presidents, business magnates and religious leaders, and uses his unique insider perspective to great effect, with perceptive, sometimes provocative, recollections of people such as Rab Butler, Margaret Thatcher, Anthony Eden, Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins, Robin Day, Rupert Murdoch and many more.From an early age his life was filled with incident – among the many anecdotes are the stories of Noel Coward’s goldfish, his failure to inherit £30,000, his near-shooting at Trinity College, Oxford, an eventful stay at Chequers with Harold Wilson, conspiring with Shirley Williams against the Communists, his doomed attempts to enter politics and dinner with Ronald Reagan and Harold Macmillan.
WILLIAM REES-MOGG
Memoirs
Contents
Cover (#uf2921864-5069-5d8c-83cb-a80aed57a4c8)
Title Page (#u05940f47-0f40-580a-89c1-1ed446e58091)
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Chapter One - The Young Actress
Chapter Two - The Young Officer
Chapter Three - A House Built on a Hill
Chapter Four - A Peak in Darien
Chapter Five - But we’ll do more, Sempronius
Chapter Six - Everyone Wants to Be Attorney General
Chapter Seven - ‘A University Extension Course’
Chapter Eight - Thank you very much for … the Sunday Times
Chapter Nine - Sadat’s Viennese Ideal
Chapter Ten - Rivers of Blood
Chapter Eleven - ‘The future of Europe is not a matter of the price of butter’
Chapter Twelve - Palladio on Mendip
Chapter Thirteen - The Times ’ Lost Year
Chapter Fourteen - My Life as a Quangocrat
Chapter Fifteen - The Best of Business
Chapter Sixteen - My Road to Bibliomania
Chapter Seventeen - R. v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, ex parte Rees-Mogg
Chapter Eighteen - ‘ An Humbler Heaven ’
Index
Acknowledgements
Picture Section
Copyright
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
List of Illustrations
William, c. 1936 (Private Collection)
Cholwell, 1936 (Private Collection)
Fletcher, Beatrice, Aunty Molly, William and Andy, 1936 (Private Collection)
William, c. 1946 (Private Collection)
William as President of the Oxford Union, 1951 (Private Collection)
William reading the Evening Standard (Photograph by Otto Karminski © Times Newspapers)
The Rees-Mogg family at Ston Easton (Photograph by Anne Rees-Mogg)
Iverach McDonald being presented with a salver by William, 1973 (© Times Newspapers)
Roy Jenkins and William, 1978 (Private Collection)
Harold Wilson, William and Marcia Williams, 1963 (Photograph by Kelvin Brodie © Times Newspapers)
William addressing editorial staff, 1980 (Photograph by Bill Warhurst © Times Newspapers)
Press conference in London to announce the sale of the Times Newspapers Ltd to Rupert Murdoch (© Times Newspapers)
William with Margaret Thatcher, 1999 (Private Collection)
Pope John Paul II and William (Private Collection)
William with Alfonoso de Zulueta and Shirley Williams, 1966 (Photograph by Stanley Devon)
William photographed in 1982 (Photograph by Bill Warhurst © Times Newspapers)
William’s eightieth birthday (Private Collection)
Portrait of Alexander Pope (Photograph by Maud Craigie)
The Mogg family, painted by Richard Phelps c. 1731 (Photograph by Magnus Dennis)
Portrait of John Locke (Photograph by Maud Craigie)
Self portrait by Joshua Reynolds (Photograph by Maud Craigie)
William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, by Richard Brompton, 1773 (Photograph by Maud Craigie)
Foreword
In January 1977, my senior editorial colleagues gave a dinner at the Garrick Club to celebrate my tenth anniversary as Editor of The Times. It was a very pleasant evening for me, among people whom I regarded as both colleagues and friends. Charles Douglas-Home, himself due to become a distinguished Editor, had chosen a case of Château Lynch Bages as a present; I have only recently consumed the last bottle. I cannot recall the whole guest list. Louis Heren was in the chair, as Deputy Editor. Naturally we talked about The Times, with a good deal of confidence, despite the recurring problems with the print unions. We had no idea of the militant trade union crisis that was to come. Our proprietor, Roy Thomson, had died a couple of years before, but his son, Ken, had taken his place in an atmosphere of goodwill on both sides. Ken followed Roy’s principle of avoiding interference with the editorial side of the paper.
I remember, at the end of the evening, walking down the front steps of the club; Peter Jay was next to me. When we were about halfway down the steps, a thought passed through my mind. This surely was going to be as good as it would get, at least in personal or career terms. Would it not have been a better conclusion to my editorship if I had taken my colleagues by surprise and announced my intention to resign in my brief speech of thanks at the dinner?
I put the idea out of my mind, even if it was ever wholly present. I could hardly wheel round on the steps of the club and ask everyone to go back to the table, so that I could make a little announcement. In any case, I knew Ken Thomson better than any alternative Editor; I could hardly leave the paper until he was completely settled in. The moment passed before it had even fully formed. Nevertheless, the intention had entered my mind, and if I had had time to think it through I would have seen that there were strong reasons for following the advice of my subconscious mind. The next four years, with the closure and then the sale of The Times, was a difficult period. A contrast to the mood of the dinner I was just leaving.
If I had resigned at that dinner I would have been spared the worst crisis that The Times faced in the twentieth century, the one-year stoppage, and I would have had another four years to develop the next stage of my life.
Ex-Editors do find it difficult to establish a second half to their careers. I remember my first Editor, Gordon Newton, of the Financial Times, saying of his own retirement, ‘there is nothing so dead as a dead lion’. Some Editors have had successful careers in business. There is a phrase for the strategy of moving from a single big job with major executive responsibility, to the non-executive jobs which are more likely to be available. It is said that these personages have gone ‘multiple’. At any rate I went multiple, and have had geological layers of different forms of employment in the period since I made a final retirement from editing The Times in 1982. The only trouble I have found is that the jobs one is offered after the age of seventy tend themselves to be time-limited.
In fact I have found plenty of interesting things to do since 1982, and am still writing columns for The Times and the Mail on Sunday. I am struck by the fact that most of the work I have done in journalism, in business, in helping charities, has been cyclical in character. World politics faced the threat of the Cold War and now faces the growth of terrorism. When I started in journalism in 1951 there was a liberal Conservative Government in power. Sixty years later there is a Liberal/Conservative coalition. I myself have enjoyed writing about the swings and circulating on the roundabout.
Chapter One
The Young Actress
I was born in the Pembroke Nursing Home, Bristol, England, of an American mother and an English father, on 14 July 1928. It was a hot night and a difficult labour. My mother had been determined that I should not be born on Friday the 13th, because she thought it would be unlucky. In consequence I was born at about 4 a.m. on Bastille Day, France’s national holiday, and knew as a child that my birthday was a special day of celebration. I was a large baby, weighing some nine pounds, three ounces. At some point, during or after the delivery, my mother’s heart stopped beating, and had to be restarted with a new drug which had recently been used on King George V. Whether my life was at risk during the delivery I do not know; my mother’s certainly was.
As a young child I had a recurrent dream. I am travelling up a shaft, which has ribs. When I reach the top of the shaft, there is a light, and there are large people, giants. They assist me to emerge from the shaft. I awake, feeling that I have passed through a crisis. I am by no means the only person to record such a dream, which is sometimes explained as recalling the birth trauma, and sometimes as a near-death experience.
My mother, Beatrice Warren, born in Mamaroneck, New York, in 1892, was an Irish-American Roman Catholic and a successful Shakespearian actress. All four of her grandparents had emigrated to the United States from Ireland in the 1850s; both her grandfathers then fought for the North in the Civil War. They came from the Irish Catholic middle class, ‘lace-curtain’ rather than ‘bog-trotting’ Irish. They had experienced the famine but survived it. My mother was the eldest child of her family, and for seven years had been an only child.
I have a very vivid picture of her childhood. In the 1890s she had the regular morning treat of being driven to Mamaroneck station with her father, where he caught the commuter train into Grand Central Station. They were driven in the carriage by Arthur Cuffey, the black coachman and handyman. At that time they lived on Union Avenue, though her father later built Shoreacres, a beautiful early twentieth-century house which looks out over Long Island Sound. Her evening treat was to take the same drive to meet the evening train. They had a good quality carriage horse, called Miss Gedney, whom her father had bought from a man in White Plains.
My mother’s father, Daniel Warren, started his working life as a clerk at Harrison Station, which, as every Westchester commuter knows, is the stop between Mamaroneck and Rye. He had been known as a bright lad. His father, old Mr Warren, had prospered as an immigrant and had risen to be a line manager of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. He got his sixteen-year-old son the job on the railroad.
One morning in 1881, Daniel was standing on the platform where the train to New York was about to arrive. A regular business commuter, Mr Eddy of Coombs, Crosby and Eddy, was standing beside him. Mr Eddy had a fainting fit, and started to totter. As he fell forward, Daniel grabbed him; the locomotive brushed Daniel’s arm as it passed. Mr Eddy thanked Daniel for saving his life, gave him his card and asked him to call on him at his office in Wall Street. When he did so, Daniel was offered a job, rejected a flattering counter-offer by the railroad, and worked for Coombs, Crosby and Eddy, later merged into the American Trading Company, until he retired in the 1920s. He ended his career as the vice-president, which then meant that he was the executive running the business. The American Trading Company, with a strong Japanese connection and branches in many countries, became a powerful international trading house. J. P. Morgan, whom Daniel greatly admired, invited him to join his new club, the Metropolitan. Daniel replied: ‘Mr Morgan, I am flattered by your invitation. I greatly appreciate doing business with you. But I am an Irish Catholic. I do not belong to the same society as you do.’ Nevertheless, the American Trading Company was chosen to advise the Morgan Bank when, in the early 1900s, Morgans wanted to expand into Japanese finance.
In 1888, he made a trip through northern Mexico with eight large trunks of manufacturing samples. At the end of the Mexican National Railroad at Saltillo, he had to hire mules to carry these trunks over the mountains, which were overrun with bandits and outlaws. He remembered hiding behind a wall with a Mexican friend; some shooting was going on. His friend asked him what passport he carried; he replied ‘American’. The Mexican advised him, ‘Do not say “Americano”, say “Ingles”. They shoot Yankees; they do not dare shoot the “Ingles”.’ Such, in the high Victorian period, was the reputation of the British Empire, or perhaps just the Mexican dislike of Yankees. Daniel Warren, though his Irish ancestors had been nationalists, was an Anglophile.
He used to discuss the day-to-day problems of his business with my mother. She particularly remembered the panic of 1907. Wall Street was only saved by the rapid action of J. P. Morgan and a syndicate he formed. Her father acted swiftly and managed to save the American Trading Company, but many other firms went under. The family took their usual summer holiday in the Adirondacks, in upper New York State, and Daniel walked with Beatrice, then fifteen, and talked himself through the stress of the panic.
My mother had been enormously influenced by her relationship with her father whom she very much admired and whom she very well understood; she thereby created for me another role model. Indeed, although I never met him – he died in 1931 and he did not come to England in my lifetime – in some respects I was more influenced by Daniel Warren than by my father. In particular my interest in business and politics comes from my American side.
From a very early age, Beatrice knew that she wanted to be an actress. She could remember, as a child of seven, joining the recitations, which formed part of evening entertainment in the age before radio or television existed. Her party piece was a sentimental poem which ended with the lines:
Thanks to the sunshine, Thanks to the rain, Little white lily is happy again.
While she was at college, Beatrice told her father she wanted to go on the stage. A hundred years ago that was an unusual ambition for a well-brought-up American girl from a family of rising prosperity. Daniel replied that he would support her going on the stage, so long as she earned her own living for a year in some other way. She accepted that, and always regarded it as a sensible condition for him to have set. She taught elocution at Wadleigh High School for a year, commuting from Mamaroneck and getting off at the 116th Street Station. She could remember teaching girls who pronounced ‘th’ as ‘d’ – ‘dis and dat and dese and dose and dem’.
In 1914, Beatrice went on the stage. She was given an introduction, by Granville Barker, to Margaret Anglin, who was casting for a season of Greek plays, translated by Gilbert Murray, in the Greek Theatre at Berkeley, California. Beatrice became a member of the chorus. Alfred Lunt was also a trainee, carrying a spear among the guards. He and his wife, Lynn Fontanne, were to become the leading couple of the American theatre before the Second World War. Beatrice remained with Miss Anglin’s company for a couple of years. In 1916 she was playing the second lead in the Chicago opening of Somerset Maugham’s Caroline, later retitled as Home and Beauty. The author, a friendly but rather shy figure, was sitting in the stalls at the dress rehearsal.
One member of the New York artistic set was Putzi Hanfstaengl, an ardent young German nationalist. He was a son of the family of Munich art dealers, and had been sent to New York to set up a local branch of the firm. They already had a branch in Pall Mall, in London. Putzi gave Beatrice a couple of the firm’s celebrated reproductions, Dürer’s rabbit and Holbein’s drawing of Sir Thomas More, which is now hanging on our drawing-room wall. He argued heatedly in favour of Germany’s historic role as the dominant power in Europe. This would have been in 1915. Beatrice did not like Putzi, though she found his intellectual range interesting. During the Second World War she remembered these conversations, and believed that German imperialism was deeply rooted, that there was a continuity between the imperialism of Kaiser’s Germany and that of Hitler’s. Beatrice’s unfavourable view of Hanfstaengl’s personality was shared by Adolf Hitler, who had employed him in the 1920s and early 1930s as his foreign press secretary. Whereas Beatrice found Hanfstaengl’s German imperialism particularly offensive, Hitler was offended by his greedy habit of taking food off other people’s plates when eating in restaurants.
In 1916, Sarah Bernhardt, the great French actress, came for the last time to play Hamlet in New York. She had already lost a leg, and spoke Hamlet’s lines seated on a couch. Beatrice had to play all the other parts in dumb show, and was Horatio, Ophelia, Gertrude, and, for all I know, the Ghost in mute dialogue. The producer had the commercial idea of selling equally mute chorus parts to society girls from New York. In addition to responding to Bernhardt, Beatrice had to ensure that those fashionable young ladies remained in line and did not fall off the stage. She obtained a free place on one night for her beautiful younger sister, Adrienne Warren.
She remembered Sarah Bernhardt’s elocution and her professionalism. She also remembered her temperament. On one occasion, Bernhardt thought the curtain had been brought down too quickly, cutting short her applause. She turned on the stage manager and addressed him in the tones of a French Queen and the language of a French fishwife. The man operating the curtain understood the drift of her remarks, if not the precise words, and retorted by whisking up the curtain. With absolute fluency, the divine Sarah switched from her tirade to gracious acceptance of the applause of her audience. When the curtain came down, she resumed the tirade.
It was in Chicago that Beatrice first met the novelist Edna Ferber. Ferber introduced her to the Algonquin round table, and used her as copy. There is a great deal of Beatrice’s character and experience in Kim Ravenal, the youngest of the three generations of actresses in Showboat. Kim even does the elocution exercises Beatrice had taught at Wadleigh.
In 1917 a strange incident had occurred. Beatrice was at a party with some other young women of the theatre; Edna Ferber was there. One of the girls produced a Ouija board; Beatrice had a healthy Catholic distrust of the occult, had never used a Ouija board before and never touched one again. For a while the board seemed to be pointing to random letters; the young women were asking it to say whom they were going to marry. Finally the board did start to spell out recognizable words. It pointed to the letters: GOG MOG MAGOG. None of the young women knew what these words might mean, except for Edna Ferber, who said that Gog and Magog were two wooden statues of giants, to be seen at the Guildhall in London. The word ‘MOG’ remained unexplained.
On the recommendation of English actors, Beatrice decided to broaden her experience with a Shakespearian season at the Old Vic, London. She sailed for England in April 1920. There was still a post-war shortage of shipping. She booked her passage on a German liner, the old Imperator, which had been confiscated by the Allies at the end of the war. The ship had not been perfectly converted from wartime use as a troopship, and there were still German notices forbidding Other Ranks to enter the Officers’ quarters. Beatrice had to share a cabin with a young French woman who had been establishing some New York contacts for her dressmaking business. They found each other agreeable company for the voyage, and the dressmaker gave Beatrice a silk slip, which I remember seeing as a child in the 1930s. The young dressmaker was Miss Chanel.
Beatrice landed in England and went to stay with an old friend, Rosamund, who was living at Parkstone, near Bournemouth. Rosamund said she was giving a small dinner party, which would include Fletcher Rees-Mogg. She told Beatrice that Fletcher was an excellent golfer – he had a handicap of two at the Parkstone Golf Club – and a stickler for punctuality.
I have some fifty volumes of my English grandmother’s diary. It records the progress of my parents’ courtship:
10 MAY: E. F. [Edmund Fletcher Rees-Mogg] and Ed and Rosamund and Miss Warren dance. [This was either their first or second meeting.]
11 MAY: Rosamund and Miss W. (charming American) dine here. F. to works 9 to 10.30 – she and I chat, pianola.
15 MAY: F. takes Rosamund and Miss W. and me to Stonehenge. Much wind! Tea under stones!
19 MAY: v. lovely. Rosamund and B. Warren dine.
20 MAY: F. takes B. Warren to town lunch Lyndhurst, tea Sonning
26 MAY: Bea Warren comes
29 MAY: Sat 1 p.m. Fletcher and Beatrice announce their engagement.
‘Sonning’ is almost certainly a euphemism for ‘Maidenhead’. My father gave Beatrice Warren dinner on 20 May at Skindles road-house on the Thames, where he proposed. Beatrice always thought that it was slightly embarrassing to have become engaged in Maidenhead. They might well have thought that Sonning, a few miles away on the Thames, would sound less embarrassing to my grandmother’s Victorian ears. At all events, the time from their first meeting to the engagement was about a fortnight. She was twenty-eight; he was thirty.
They were to be happily married for forty-two years, and to have three children, two girls and a boy. They had, so far as I know, no fundamental disagreements. In their early letters they express surprise that such a gift of love and mutual understanding should have come to them.
They were married on 11 November 1920, by the Catholic priest, in the drawing room at Shoreacres, the Warrens’ home in Mamaroneck. They returned to England after an American honeymoon. Beatrice was not to see the United States again until after the Second World War.
Chapter Two
The Young Officer
My father was one of the young officers who survived the First World War. In the spring of 1914, he had caught pneumonia while working as a schoolmaster at a school in Lancashire, where he taught Latin, Greek and French. He was left with a strained heart. When, that August, he volunteered for the army, the doctors listened to his heart and rejected him as unfit. This, in all probability, saved his life.
Instead he went out to France by volunteering to drive the Charterhouse ambulance, which had been subscribed for by boys and parents at his old school. He was already a first-class amateur engineer and mechanic. He spent some months working at a French hospital at Arc-en-Barrois, but was subsequently commissioned in the Royal Army Service Corps, where he ran a mobile transport unit.
This was neither safe nor non-combatant. A fellow officer wrote that he woke every morning uncertain whether he would be called by his batman or St Peter. However, it was obviously less inevitably lethal than service in the infantry. It was also surprisingly modern. Apart from ambulance work, Fletcher’s unit was the first to take mobile X-rays into the front line. His experience of X-rays proved valuable when I was X-rayed in utero at the Clifton Nursing Home. The matron scrutinized the X-ray and told my parents that I had two heads. My father had seen many more X-rays than she had, and commented briskly: ‘Nonsense, woman, you don’t know how to read it.’
His unit was also attached to the earliest tanks, which, on average, broke down every 60 yards or so. Their job was to mend the tanks while under fire. My father considered that he had had an easy war. He shared the infantry’s resentment of the inadequacy of the staff officers who did not visit the front line.
Like many young officers from the landowning class – one finds the same attitudes in Anthony Eden’s memoirs – his war experience left him with a strong feeling that he ought to try to repay the privileges he had enjoyed. Some of his friends after the war were men who had been wounded, or suffered from shell shock, or had taken to drink as a result of their war experiences. For them he felt great compassion. His first cousin, Colonel Robert Rees-Mogg, a good professional soldier, had been an aide-de-camp to Field Marshal Allenby and ridden into Jerusalem in his entourage in 1917. Robert was torpedoed on his way back from Palestine, suffered from shell shock and amnesia, and never recovered. I can remember him visiting us at Cholwell, our home in Somerset, in the middle 1930s, a friendly, tall man who had lost the thread of life. Two other cousins were killed, out of a group of five, one at Gallipoli, the other in the last German advance in 1918.
I now think that I underrated the whole question of what my father had been through in the First World War. He felt, as many of those who survived did, a considerable guilt for being a survivor. The war made him feel that he should not compete in the world against people who needed the jobs. He felt that, as he had a reasonable sized estate and a reasonable income, he was in a position to lead the life of a quiet country gentleman without seeking employment and that is what he did. It was a life in which there was a lot of voluntary work and he made jobs for himself in farming which gave him an instinctive pleasure: he liked growing things; he liked having pigs; he liked having hens and he liked growing daffodils. It just about paid the wages of people who might not otherwise have had jobs during the slump.
My father inherited the long, solid, Somerset tradition of the Moggs, who had been local businessmen and landowners since at least the thirteenth century. They earned their livings as merchants, lawyers, estate agents, coal owners, bankers, clergymen, doctors, or whatever came to hand. They were involved in local government, but seem to have had little ambition to enter national politics, nor the connections to be able to do so.
In his early twenties my father inherited the family estate in Somerset, which then consisted of roughly 1200 acres and perhaps a dozen cottages, which still rented for about five shillings a week each in the 1930s and 1940s. The estate was encumbered with the death duties on his father and grandfather, and with substantial incomes payable to his sister, aunts and uncles. In capital terms he was a wealthy man, but the income that he was free to spend was not proportionate to his capital. This was the normal situation of landowners at that time, and still is today. Before the war, my father had worked briefly as a schoolmaster after spending four years at Charterhouse, four at University College, Oxford, and a further year at the Sorbonne.
By the age of twelve he had introduced me to classical Latin and Greek and even Old French. I had also been introduced to the comparative study of language. I had learned how words changed their form, so that ‘W’ in English would be the equivalent of ‘Gu’ in French, with ‘William’ matching ‘Guillaume’. I was taught the distinction between the English words which came from Germanic roots, from Norman French, from Latin and from Greek. I have never lost this interest in words. One of our own children, when little, observed that we ought to set a place for the Oxford English Dictionary at the dining table, since one or other volume was so often brought out at family lunch to look up the meaning and derivation of a particular word.
When he returned from the Sorbonne, Fletcher had had difficulty in choosing a career. His father, by then suffering from depression, had gloomy visions of Fletcher going to the bad. There had been scapegraces in the family: my great-great uncle, John Rees-Mogg, in one generation and the much-loved Charles in the next. My father was never remotely likely to become a third. Nevertheless, my grandfather, William Wooldridge Rees-Mogg, would not allow my father to become a solicitor, on the grounds that half the solicitors with whom he had trained had ended in jail for dipping into their clients’ funds. That was a pity, as my father would have made a first-class solicitor, highly intelligent, punctilious in detail, practical and exceptionally honest.
A friend of Wooldridge suggested that Fletcher might join the Chinese Consular Service, an absurd suggestion. Fletcher refused. Father and son negotiated at arm’s length, Wooldridge in the library at Cholwell, Fletcher in the morning room, passing notes to each other. One must have some sympathy with Wooldridge, who was depressed, going blind and proved to be dying. To my great benefit, Fletcher gave me the time and love which Wooldridge had not been able to give him.
Difficult father–son relationships had been common in the Mogg family, going back to the seventeenth century: they made nasty remarks about each other in their wills. My father was absolutely determined not to repeat in his relationship with me the relationship he had had with his father. And he was completely successful. On both sides our relationship was a very affectionate one of comfort and respect.
After my father was demobilized in 1919 he went to live in Parkstone, near Bournemouth. In the last months of the war he had been serving with another young officer who was in the motor business, and was a member of the Vandeleur family. Vandeleur had decided to produce a sports car for the British market. My father set up a manufacturing business to make the chassis; the engines were substantial lorry engines from the United States. Like several other ventures by young officers selling luxury cars, this looked promising for a time, but the post-war recession knocked out the market. However, my father designed the chassis and about twenty cars were constructed. In 1921, my mother’s sisters crossed the Atlantic to spend an English holiday with her. There is a picture of my American aunts and my English grandmother sitting in a Vandy, as the cars were called. It is a splendid looking car, but it does not look very economic.
In 1925 my father had the opportunity to return to Cholwell and manage his estate. He liked to grow things himself, though the farms continued to be tenanted. He kept pigs and hens and grew a large quantity of wild blackberries.
Chapter Three
A House Built on a Hill
I am standing at the top of a little hill overlooking the back of Cholwell House. No one is there except me. It is my third birthday, and is therefore 14 July 1931. I am conscious that my birthday makes me a special person in the family for that day. Much more than that, I feel that I am very much myself, am William Rees-Mogg, and that this is a good thing to be. On a good day, after a glass of champagne, I can still feel the echo of this childish triumphalism. I am certain that the William Rees-Mogg of 1931 is the same consciousness as the William Rees-Mogg I now am.
As a boy I was much surrounded by women, in a family of two elder sisters, a mother, a maiden aunt in England, two aunts in America, an American and an English grandmother, and two maiden great-aunts who lived in St James’s Square in Bath. There were also the maids and the cook, Mabel Sage. My father, myself and very distantly my clergyman great-uncle Henry Rees-Mogg were the only representatives of the male sex. I was the sole male Rees-Mogg of my generation. I did not, at the age of three or four, ask what the universe was for, what my role might be in it, or ‘what is man with regard to this infinity about him’. I knew, with the certainty of infancy, which is even more implacable than the certainty of childhood, that I was myself, that I was in my proper station. I enjoyed being me.
Many children start to ask metaphysical questions at an early age. My eldest daughter, Emma, entertained the Platonic idea of the pre-existence of souls at the age of four. The early Christian father, Origen, also held that theory, as did the English poet William Wordsworth. Emma and I were walking on the lawn at Ston Easton, when she said to me, ‘I understand what happens when we die but I don’t understand where we are before we’re born.’ Her daughter, Maud, was equally interested in questions that had interested the ancient Greek philosophers when she was four. She followed the theory, which I think was first framed by Empedocles, and since popularized by Stephen Hawking, of the plurality of worlds. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘that worlds disappear and new worlds start, but do all the other worlds have Father Christmas?’
The Elizabethan philosopher Lord Herbert of Cherbury gives a similar account of his own early development: ‘It was so long before I began to speak, that many thought I should be for ever dumb; when I came to talk, one of the furthest enquiries I made was how I came into this world? I told my nurse, keeper, and others, I found myself here indeed, but from what cause or beginning, or by what means I could not imagine, but for this I was laughed at by nurse.’
I do not remember these metaphysical problems being important to me at that age, but they have fascinated me in subsequent years. If I came into the world ‘trailing clouds of glory’, I cannot remember them.
William is a strong name; I never liked being called Bill. The association of the name with William the Conqueror helped as soon as I was reading history. I found myself a natural supporter of the Normans. I was also impressed by stories of my great-grandfather William Rees-Mogg. He was a good man of business, a local solicitor, specializing in the development of the coal industry. He built the family fortune and died a wealthy man. He had built Cholwell, where we lived. He was the dominant Victorian father figure in my family and Cholwell was his monument. The original house had been bought by the Moggs in the 1720s. It then consisted of a small Elizabethan manor house and a home farm of about a hundred acres. In 1850, William Rees-Mogg demolished the old house, which the family has subsequently regretted, and built a large Victorian country house on the hillside opposite, with a walled garden, glass houses, a conservatory and a Top and Bottom Lodge. In 1925, when my father and mother moved into Cholwell, they put in electricity and central heating. The new house was built in the Jacobean style, designed by a Bath architect who had also been responsible for the much larger Victorian pile at Westonbirt in Gloucestershire.
* * *
My first strongly political or social memory can be dated to three months after my third birthday; it relates to the General Election of 1931. The Conservative candidate is Lord Weymouth, the heir to the Marquis of Bath, supporting the National Government of Ramsay MacDonald. I am told that Lord Weymouth will be spending the day canvassing in the villages of Temple Cloud and Clutton, and that he will be bringing his daughter with him who will be left to play with me in the nursery at Cholwell.
At the age of three, I believed that all peers wore a uniform which I envisaged as being a blue velvet suit with gilt buttons. I am waiting at the front door and am disappointed when Lord Weymouth appears wearing an elegantly cut grey lounge suit with rather flared trousers, what were then called ‘Oxford bags’. He has, however, brought his daughter with him. She is of much the same age as I am. We enjoy our afternoon together, and I vaguely hope that I shall see her again. It is the first time that I am conscious of feeling the attraction of the opposite sex.
The next time I meet her it is the early 1970s and she is Lady Caroline Somerset, and we are having dinner with Arnold and Netta Weinstock in Wiltshire. At another later meeting James Lees-Milne, who thinks I am rather a prig, notes in his diary how exceptionally at ease we are together. The last time I see her she has become the Duchess of Beaufort. Like me, she has memories of having tea at Fortt’s in Bath; that is where she told her younger brother, now himself Lord Bath, that fairies do not really exist. He claims that this moment of disillusionment ruined his life.
My next political memory came in July 1934. Mabel Sage, our much-loved cook, is giving me breakfast in the dining room at Cholwell, which looks out across the terrace towards Mendip. I have eaten my boiled egg with soldiers of toast. The BBC is broadcasting a news bulletin. Hitler has just carried out his Night of the Long Knives, in which Ernst Röhm and many others are murdered. I take in this information and comment to Mabel, ‘Does this mean there will be another war?’ She replies: ‘Oh no, Hitler’s not a wicked man like the Kaiser.’
I remember the German reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936, but only as a headline in the Daily Mail. Our family view was that it was unavoidable, that Germany was only taking back what was German territory. We did not see it as a cause for war. The Italian invasion of Abyssinia and the Spanish Civil War had more personal impact.
I do remember the shock of Mussolini’s invasion, and our sympathy with the Abyssinians. After the defeat, the Emperor of Abyssinia, Haile Selassie, went into exile in Bath, bringing members of his family with him. I was being taught to swim at the old Royal Baths in Bath by Captain Olsen, who also instructed us in climbing horizontal bars and other aspects of Swedish Drill, as physical training was then called. As I splashed around in my inflated water wings, with two princesses, Haile Selassie’s granddaughters, in the water beside me, the small but benign figure of the Lion of Judah would look down on us from the edge of the pool. He is now regarded as God by the Rastafarians. There have been many worse gods.
Spain was a matter of more passionate debate, though not inside our family. As Roman Catholics, we regarded the communists, and therefore the Spanish Republican Government, as hostile to religion; they murdered priests and raped nuns. As democrats, we disliked the Fascist Franco, but also distrusted Stalinist influence on the Republicans. We did not support either side, though I think my parents may have felt that Franco would prove to be the lesser of the two evils. From the British point of view that turned out to be correct. Franco kept Spain out of the Second World War, which a communist government might not have been able to do.
However, the young men who came to our tennis parties at Cholwell saw things differently. They correctly expected the war in Spain to be merely a prelude to the war that was coming against Hitler. I heard their arguments from afar, as an eight- or nine-year-old child listening to twenty-year-old men. I do not remember if any of our friends actually fought in Spain; some of them may have felt guilty for failing to volunteer.
In the summer of 1937, our eyes were opened to what the enemy would be like. My elder sister, Elizabeth, has a gift for languages, which she may have inherited from my father, or indeed from his mother who for some of her early years kept her diary in German, and as a young woman taught in Paris. As Elizabeth was studying German, it was proposed that she make an exchange with a German girl whose aunt had made an exchange with one of our neighbours in 1900. Jutta Lorey was to come to us; the following year, in May 1938, Elizabeth was to go to the Loreys.
We did not foresee that this would be a political question. We did not realize that the political attitudes of the Lorey family were somewhat complicated. Frau Lorey was married to a Nazi judge, who disappeared at the end of the war, thought to have been killed by the Russians. Frau Lorey’s sister Hildegarde, who, a generation earlier, had been the girl of the original exchange, was an anti-Nazi, but Frau Lorey herself kept quiet. Jutta was a member of the Bund Deutschen Madel, a fanatical sixteen-year-old Nazi child, for which she can hardly be blamed. When she made the return visit, Elizabeth spent most of her time alone or with the family’s maid, Grete. Jutta was either at college or BDM meetings, Frau Lorey was out a lot and Judge Lorey had been seconded to the east. She was aware of tensions in the family, particularly during the one weekend when the judge returned home, but these seemed more personal than political. Grete was engaged to a soldier and used to take Elizabeth to the town barracks where the soldiers were very impressed by her being English. She learned excellent German which she used later when she worked as a translator at the prisoner-of-war camp in Latimer House during the war.
Jutta’s visit to Cholwell was another matter. She brought with her all her adolescent fanaticism. She showed us her BDM dagger with its flamboyant inscription of ‘Blood and Iron’ and its swastika. She lay on her bed in the sewing room, listening on short-wave radio to Hitler’s speeches. When the door was open, I remember standing outside for a minute or two and listening to one of them. He sounded hysterical to me, a shrieking lunatic raving in a foreign tongue, but to storms of applause. I associate the crises of the 1930s with the rooms in Cholwell in which I heard different broadcasts – the dining room with the Night of the Long Knives, the sewing room with Adolf Hitler, the nursery itself with King Edward VIII’s announcement of his abdication and with Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of war on Germany.
We did not treat Jutta well. We suspected her of spying, probably rightly. The Hitler Youth who visited Britain were instructed to take photographs of local landmarks; German information packs, prepared for the 1940 invasion which never happened, included some of these snapshots. Jutta was a great photographer of landmarks. We could not stop her photographing Cholwell, which is indeed a prominent landmark, but we tried to prevent her photographing the tower of Downside Abbey. Whether we succeeded or not, I do not know.
We did not like Jutta, and she did not like us. The most spiteful thing I remember doing was cheating at Monopoly to make sure that she did not win. I have heard occasional distant accounts of her since the war, that she had been widowed, that she had become a hippy, that she was living in the Mediterranean. Among the evil things the Nazis did, the perversion of her adolescent enthusiasm is only a tiny mark. We knew, through her, that the Hitler regime was hysterical, evil and dangerous. It helped prepare us for what was to happen next.
When the war came Elizabeth joined the WAAF and worked as a translator. At the end of the war she worked on the repatriation of German prisoners of war and married a young German officer, Peter Bruegger, who had been classified as ‘White’, because he was anti-Nazi. He farmed our home farm. Though the marriage did not last, he became a popular local figure and was much loved by our children.
* * *
Until I was nine, I was educated at home. My father taught me which didn’t work terribly well when I was little because he was tall and impressive and could have a short fuse. It worked extremely well when I was a bit older. I also had lessons with Miss Farr, a young woman from Bristol, who was my sister Anne (Andy)’s excellent governess. Anne was educated at home until she was sixteen because she suffered from acute migraines. Miss Farr eventually left to marry a Mr Farr and become a Mrs Farr. If I did my lesson correctly, she would stick a coloured paper star in the exercise book; if I got five stars, she would stick in a paper duck. I was easily motivated by such rewards. Between lessons I would play with Anne in the garden. My sisters, with their long legs, climbed trees which were too difficult for me. Besides I was something of a coward and they were both bold and debonair.
In 1937, the summer of my ninth birthday, I went to board at the preparatory school of Clifton College. On the night of the Munich agreement we were supposed to be asleep in the dormitory of Matthew’s House, the Junior House, just opposite Clifton Zoo. There were twenty boys in my dormitory. We were excited by the prospect of war, not because we wanted war – we were too sensible for that – but because it would be so great an event. Mr Jones, our house tutor, was listening to the news on his radio, in the room below. Infuriatingly, we could barely hear it. However, we heard enough to know that, for the present, Munich meant peace, not war. I remember my feeling of disappointment as the adrenalin rush slowed.
I remember my own eleventh birthday on 14 July 1939, as the last carefree day of that pre-war summer. A special cake was baked at Cholwell. It had a cricket field, in green icing, two sets of stumps, a bat and a ball, all edible and made from marzipan. It was the custom at Clifton Preparatory School for the boy whose birthday it was to distribute his cake, so it had to be quite a large one, enough for thirty boys. The mood was cheerful, our exams were over, and we had prospect of the long summer holidays and I also had the August cricket festival at Weston-super-Mare to look forward to.
But only a few weeks later, on my sister Elizabeth’s birthday, 23 August, hope was extinguished by the announcement of the Nazi–Soviet pact. With Stalin as Hitler’s ally, war had become inevitable; we all knew it, in Temple Cloud just as surely as in Westminster.
On 1 September, I went down as usual to the library in Cholwell to have my morning lesson with my father. Frank Cooper, who took orders for the local grain merchant, was discussing how many bags of mixed feed my father would need for the pigs. Fletcher interrupted him to turn on the nine o’clock news on the BBC. Germany had invaded Poland. Frank Cooper left, after a few sad words. He, too, had fought in the Great War, as it was still called. My father telephoned his next contact in the network of Air Raid Precautions. He used a First World War phrase, ‘The balloon’s gone up.’
Two days later, we listened on the nursery wireless to Neville Chamberlain’s broadcast, as we had listened only less than three years before, to King Edward VIII’s abdication broadcast. Both broadcasts spoke of failure; in both there was a displeasing note of self-pity. I did not feel hostile to Neville Chamberlain, but I did not feel sorry for him either. I thought then, as I think now, that he had tried a policy of appeasement in all good faith; it had not succeeded because Hitler had always intended war. It was an honourable failure, but Neville Chamberlain’s personal disappointment was a petty thing beside the disaster which had fallen on the world. Chamberlain did not sound like a war leader.
I was still of an age when I was given supper in bed. I slept in the pink room on the south-west corner of Cholwell, with windows on one side looking down the drive and on the other looking out over Paul Wood. My supper consisted of bread and honey, a banana and a glass of milk. Later in that September, I remember listening to the evening news bulletin from my bed.
The Government was concerned that in 1914 there had been undue optimism about the length of the war, and talk of ‘the boys being home for Christmas’. They were anxious that this should not happen again, and put out an official forecast that this war would last for three years. I did not doubt that Britain would eventually win it. I assumed that the pattern of the First World War would be repeated, that eventually the United States would be drawn in, and that American industrial capacity would be decisive. I was, however, very interested in the question of how long the war would last, since I would have to plan my own life in terms of that expectation.
I remember doing a simple sum. Governments, I thought, are always wrong. If the Government thinks the war will last three years, it will be longer than that. It will probably last twice as long. I should, therefore, base my own planning on the war lasting for six years. I was now eleven years old. In six years’ time I should be seventeen. I should not be old enough to fight before the war was over.
This judgement proved to be correct – the war in Europe ended shortly before my seventeenth birthday and the war in Japan shortly thereafter. I had to do two years’ National Service, but that was in the peacetime RAF and I never regarded it as anything other than an interruption, somewhat unwelcome, in ordinary life. I do not think this attitude was unpatriotic. I was entirely prepared to join the forces. But I did decide I should concentrate on getting ahead with my school life, without thinking that I must prepare myself to be a soldier.
In fact, for the first six months, hardly anyone was doing any fighting, apart from the German invasion of Poland and the disastrous Russian invasion of Finland. At Clifton we made model aircraft out of balsa wood; the wings usually fell off mine. I remember being cold at Clifton, so cold that I used to go to bed with a torch battery in my pyjama breast pocket. I would short-circuit the battery, so that it would spread a little warmth over the area of my heart. There was also a certain amount of bullying.
One boy, in particular, was being bullied. He was a gentle, rather plump boy who came, I think, from Wales. I rather liked him. I remember discussing this with Bishop, another friend who was later killed, perhaps while still at school, in a cycling accident. I asked Bishop whether he did not think that we ought to do something about it. He gave me a political reply, based on the then unknown theory of the pecking order.
‘It would be no good,’ he said. ‘There are twelve boys in our dormitory. Each has a position in the order. “Y” – the boy who was being bullied – is twelfth. You and I are about eight and nine. We do not have the strength to intervene. If we do, we shall join “Y” in being bullied; it will do him no good and we shall then be bullied ourselves.’ I recognized the truth in Bishop’s logic and, I regret to say, accepted the realities of our political situation.
The winter passed. The spring of 1940 came and with it the German invasion of Norway, the attack on Belgium and the Netherlands, the battle for France, the fall of the Chamberlain Government, the appointment of Winston Churchill as Prime Minister. While these great events were happening, one of the boys in our house had gone down with polio; it was a mild case and he survived with little or no disability. But we were all put in quarantine, and encouraged to stay outdoors. So I heard of most of these events, and Churchill’s early speeches as Prime Minister, sitting in the bright sunshine on Clifton’s Under Green, listening to a junior master’s portable radio.
In the West Country, life went on surprisingly normally during what we all knew was an ultimate struggle for survival. There was a German daylight raid on the docks at Avonmouth. A detachment of the Coldstream Guards, having just been taken off the beaches of Dunkirk, spent a few weeks at Midsomer Norton. We felt the safer for their presence. We all followed the daily scores of German aircraft shot down in the Battle of Britain. We now know that they were exaggerated. The fear of German invasion gradually receded. Throughout this time my basic expectation did not change. I thought we would win the Battle of Britain, I believed in Winston Churchill, I did not expect an invasion to succeed, I looked to the United States as ‘the arsenal of democracy’. I felt confident that we would win in the end, as we had in 1918 and 1815.
My American aunts sent a Western Union cable in June inviting me to go to America; it even, touchingly, promised that I would be able to continue with the classics. I was rather excited by the idea, which might well have changed my life. I would, in any case, have been at greater risk from torpedoes crossing the Atlantic, than from bombs if I stayed at home. My parents took the view that they were not entitled to send me, or my sisters, if the other people of Temple Cloud could not send their children. In any case they believed in keeping the family together. I am sure that they were right, but I have always felt grateful for the invitation.
We went back to Clifton for the autumn term of 1940. A new brick and concrete shelter had been built for us at the end of Under Green; it looked like an oversized public lavatory. Thirty boys from Poole’s House slept there every night, in bunks. I did not find it disagreeable; it was certainly warmer than the dormitory.
The German night attacks on the larger cities outside London started in November. Coventry was the first to be hit. Bristol came next. We were bombed in two raids, with a week between them. On the first occasion the bombs did not come very close to our shelter, though it was a noisy night and there were large fires in the central area. My parents, in Cholwell, could see the glow of the fires, and heard the bombers passing overhead. The Heinkel bombers had a particularly penetrating, intermittent drone.
The second night was more frightening. As the sirens sounded, the matron suggested that we should all say a prayer. I suggested that we should say our normal grace, ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful’!
The Luftwaffe used at that time to drop their bombs in sticks of four or five. In the middle of the raid, we heard a stick of bombs moving towards our shelter, which would certainly not stand a direct hit. The first bomb was loud enough, the second louder, the third louder still. The fourth was loudest of all, in fact about 50 yards away, and threw stones and earth on top of the shelter. It was apparent that the stick of bombs was falling in a straight line. If there was a fifth, it would land on top of us. We waited for it. It did not come. Although I was to be bombed again later in the war, in Somerset and London, that was the nearest I came to being killed.
After the previous night of the Bristol Blitz, my parents had thought of taking me away from Clifton. There was no question about that the second time, for them or for the school. I was driven out to Cholwell by one of the housemasters, Mr Hope Simpson, on his motorbike. We passed the burnt-out churches and the broken glass. My father had driven in but missed us on the way. The school evacuated itself to Cholwell House, sleeping on mattresses. The boys ate us out of the drums of Canadian honey which my mother, ever mindful of the Irish famine, had laid up in the cellar. After a few days most of them dispersed to their homes, and remain only as names in the Cholwell visitors’ book. My last two terms at Clifton Preparatory School were spent at Butcombe Court, a pleasant country house about ten miles from Cholwell, within bicycling distance on Sundays.
In late May 1941 I was in my last term at Clifton Preparatory School when the German battleship Bismarck sunk the Hood in the mid-Atlantic. Only three of the Hood’s crew of 1421 survived. My mother and I were taken into Temple Meads Station in Bristol by my father; we went by train to Windsor where I was about to sit the Entrance Scholarship for Eton. Most public schools were by that time sending their scholarship papers to be taken at the preparatory schools, but Eton’s only concession to the problems of wartime travel was to put up the scholarship candidates in the boys’ houses. My mother stayed at the White Lion in the High Street; I was sent to Lyttelton’s House.
The three days of the scholarship examination were interwoven with reports of the pursuit of the Bismarck by the Royal Navy. On the last evening, the Bismarck was torpedoed from the air and sank the following day. The Hood had been avenged. I found the exam papers rather too difficult for me. My Latin, thanks to my father, was tolerable, though hardly up to scholarship standards; my Greek was negligible; my French was of Common Entrance standard; my mathematics was scarcely up to that. However, I enjoyed the history paper and romped away with the essay, which was set on Satan’s fall from Heaven as described in Milton’s Paradise Lost. It was just my subject:
Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition.
I did not need to be asked twice to describe the fires of Hell. Lyttelton later told my mother that my essay was the best of them all.
Before we went back he had a long conversation with her, which she recounted to me on the train. He did not know whether I would get the scholarship; no Eton scholarship had ever been given to a candidate as weak in the classics. In any case, he thought that I would find the atmosphere of College too tough. He said he would be very pleased to take me into his house, whether I got the scholarship or not.
We discussed this with my father when we got home. I was also entered for the Charterhouse scholarship. My father suggested that I should go to Eton if I got the Eton scholarship, go to Charterhouse if I got the Charterhouse scholarship, and go to Lyttelton’s House if I got neither. I was happy with that proposal. The Charterhouse scholarship would pay half my school fees, and I liked the idea of being a scholar. On the other hand, I much liked the atmosphere of Eton, and had been impressed by Lyttelton himself. I had even been measured for my top hat.
A few days later we received a sympathetic letter from Lyttelton saying that I had not been awarded a scholarship. Everything therefore depended on the Charterhouse exam. Fifty years later my son, Jacob, who had himself gone to Eton, heard a somewhat different story from a visiting Eton master in Hong Kong.
By this account, the 1941 examination was the last time the Provost of Eton played a part in deciding who was to receive a scholarship. The provost was Lord Quickswood, earlier Lord Hugh Cecil, son of the Lord Salisbury who was Queen Victoria’s last Prime Minister. The provost, it is said, objected on quite other grounds. He did not take his stand on the fact that I knew little Latin and less Greek, true though that was. He argued that I should not have an Eton scholarship because I was a Roman Catholic. The examiners wanted to award a scholarship; the provost prevailed; no provost was ever again invited to join in the scholarship proceedings. No Roman Catholic was ever barred again.
In the meantime, my papers were written at Butcombe Court and sent to Charterhouse. They followed the same pattern; an excellent essay, good on history, weak in Latin and French, negligible in Greek and Mathematics. Indeed, in one mathematics paper I got three marks out of a hundred. I do not know why I was so bad at elementary mathematics since in my adult life I have used them more than most people do.
Robert Birley was the Headmaster of Charterhouse. The examiners spent the Friday discussing the various papers. They found it easy to award the first scholarship, which went to Simon Raven. They awarded ten others. They came to mine, and the weight of feeling was that my classics and maths were simply not up to scholarship standard. Birley, who was himself a historian, wanted to get a potential historian into the list. On Friday evening, he was not getting his own way. If they had decided then, I would not have got the scholarship.
Robert Birley was, however, a skilled chairman of a committee. He used a device which I remember using later on a critical occasion as Chairman of the Arts Council. Because he realized that he couldn’t get the decision he wanted, he postponed it. On the following day, the examiners met again. I was nodded through for the twelfth scholarship. When the telegram arrived I was delighted.
There is no doubt that Lord Quickswood’s intervention and Birley’s persuasiveness changed my life. I know that I would have enjoyed Eton, and would have been happy in Lyttelton’s House, possibly happier than I was at Charterhouse. Indeed, I might well have been too happy, too much of an Etonian; Charterhouse presented me with greater challenges. The difference extends beyond the schools themselves, to my Oxford life, to my career. If I had gone to Eton, I doubt if I would have gone on to Balliol; I might have opted for a more sympathetic political environment at Oxford. I would probably have found my political progress easier; there were plenty of Old Etonian chairmen of safe Conservative seats in the 1950s, though few are left now.
I am grateful to Charterhouse for many things. But I felt more at home at Eton, both in 1941 and later when my son Jacob was enjoying his time there. Perhaps the real advantage of going to Charterhouse was that it did not have the same dangerous charm for someone of my interests and personality. If I had entered the world of Eton, the world of Luxmore’s garden and the College Library, of the cricket fields, of Thomas Gray and Horace Walpole, I might well have found it too much of a lifelong lotus land. Cyril Connolly, with whom I was later to work on the Sunday Times, regarded nostalgia for Eton as one of ‘The Enemies of Promise’. It was so for him, it might well have been so for me. Jacob has become a loyal Old Etonian, and Eton suited him extremely well, but he did not become addicted to its ancient charm. For myself, I think Charterhouse was probably for the best, but there were aspects of Eton, including the personality of Lyttelton himself, a remarkable and scholarly housemaster, which I would clearly have enjoyed very greatly. In the words that Senator Bill Bradley used of basketball, Charterhouse did ‘teach me to use my elbows’.
Chapter Four
A Peak in Darien
As soon as I knew how to read, I delighted in reading. I still have the copy of H. G. Wells’ Outline of History which Anne bound in a canvas jacket in 1934. It is a chunky book, of some six hundred pages. I may never have finished it, but I waded through several hundred pages. My first fascination was with the dinosaurs, but I was also interested in history as such. Before reading Wells, I had read Our Island Story, which was very imperialist, and Dickens’ Child’s History of England, which was very Protestant. I responded to his account of the Reformation by becoming equally partisan on the Catholic side. It was the Catholic martyrs I cared about; Bloody Mary became Good Queen Mary. King Henry VIII I abominated, as I still do. For Queen Elizabeth I, I had mixed feelings.
Literature forms the architecture of the mind. Shakespeare came first, even before I could read. In the winter of 1931, my mother was reading Macbeth with my sisters. We were in the nursery at Cholwell, with a fire in the little Victorian stove. I was three and a half years old, and had not yet learned how to read.
To my sisters’ irritation, my mother insisted that I should join in the reading. She would read a line, and I would repeat it after her. My sisters felt that this procedure caused undue delay, and that Lady Macbeth was too substantial a part to be given to a three-year-old; they would then have been nine and ten years old.
I can remember moments of the reading. Most vividly, I remember the scene in Macduff’s castle, when Macbeth sends his murderers to kill Lady Macduff and their son. I was young enough to identify with the son. When the murderer calls his father a traitor, the boy has the splendid line: ‘Thou ly’st, thou shag-hair’d villain’. I liked that, and I admired the courage of his last words: ‘He has kill’d me, mother; run away, I pray you’.
However, most of the lines I remember from that first reading come from my own part, that is from Lady Macbeth herself. My sisters thought it comic when I repeated the lines:
I have given suck; and know
How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,
And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn, as you
Have done in this.
I had to ask what the words ‘I have given suck’ meant, and remember my mother explaining to me about breastfeeding, a practice I had only abandoned some three years before.
In this speech, Lady Macbeth is spurring her husband on to the murder of the old King, Duncan. Macbeth interjects ‘If we should fail’ and receives the reply:
We fail.
But screw your courage to the sticking-place,
And we’ll not fail.
This led to a discussion of Lady Macbeth’s response. How did she say ‘We fail’? Was it scornfully, as though failure was impossible, or was it fatalistically, as a consequence to be faced? In 1915 as a young actress in Margaret Anglin’s company, my mother had discussed this point with old English actors in the cast. Beatrice herself was still a junior; Margaret Anglin was playing Lady Macbeth; Tyrone Power Senior was playing Macbeth; Tyrone Power Junior was being dandled on Beatrice’s knee, as his father learned his lines. Tyrone Power Senior always found it difficult to remember his lines, but, like his son, he was a fine figure of a man, in the old Irish style.
The English actors in the cast opted for the fatalistic reading ‘We fail’, which should be said with a falling tone in a matter-of-fact way. That, they had been told by old actors of their youth, was how Sarah Siddons had pronounced it, and she was the greatest Lady Macbeth the English stage could remember. So I played the line in the Sarah Siddons tradition. My sisters were much better than I was in the role of the witches, and danced gleefully around the nursery table.
I was particularly close to my mother because when the slump came, in 1930, my parents decided that they couldn’t afford a nanny, so my mother completely took over looking after me. I was two. I spent a great deal of time with her, the two of us mostly just conversing with each other. It fell to my sisters – Elizabeth was seven years older than me and Anne six years older – to get me up and dress me which was a chore they got very bored with. I had one lovely month when my American granny, Granny Warren, came over and stayed. She was in fact dying of cancer – although she kept her illness from us all. She took over the job of dressing me in the morning and I would rush along to her bedroom and she would talk to me about her childhood in the America of the 1860s.
My mother was a hugely entertaining person to be with. She had a perfect voice, a sense of timing and a sense of occasion. She had the temperament of a star, but not of a star who made excessive claims for herself. She had wit and intelligence and energy and I remember her saying she couldn’t understand people being bored because she’d never been bored in her life.
As an actress my mother had considerable dress sense and awareness. She dressed in the smart, understated American style of the 1930s which was made fashionable in Britain by Mrs Simpson. She didn’t spend a great deal of money on her clothes. When she got married she’d been given an allowance for her clothes, by her father, in American Trading Company preference shares. But, about a year later, the American Trading Company – under a callow new proprietor – lost most of its money and stopped paying even preference dividends. My mother felt that she had had money to buy clothes in the past but that she didn’t any more. She was well dressed but thrifty.
My mother still went out on the English countryside routine of ‘making calls’. The rules still really came from the carriage days: you knew the people living in the big house of their village within a seven-mile radius and you called on them – you called on houses rather than people. Therefore you had a secondary acquaintance with people who weren’t in a seven-mile radius of your house but were in a seven-mile radius of a house on which you called. The calls were made in the afternoon and occasionally I was taken as a child with my mother to call. My mother had been fascinated by and had mastered the whole etiquette of calls and how Somerset ladies spoke to each other. She observed, as an actress, how old Lady Waldegrave used to talk. If you were visiting Lady Waldegrave, she would say, as the hostess, ‘How kind of you to come.’ And you would reply, ‘How kind of you to ask me.’ Beatrice discovered that she could play the Somerset ladies role better than the Somerset ladies themselves.
We were to read Shakespeare again as a family during the war. I remember that we read the English history plays, which seemed to have most to say about the dire circumstances of 1940 and 1941. Shakespeare always teaches the Churchillian doctrine: ‘In victory magnanimity, in defeat, defiance’. We read Richard II, which contains the great patriotic speech ‘This Sceptered Isle’ of old John of Gaunt, ‘time honoured Lancaster’. We also read King John, a much underrated play. I read the part of the Bastard, which also has a great patriotic speech, well suited to the worst days of the Second World War:
This England never did, nor never shall
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.
Now these her princes are come home again,
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them: Nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.
In 1943 and 1944, my mother took me to see John Gielgud, first in Macbeth and then in Hamlet. London was covered by the blackout, and the plays started early, so that the audiences could get home in safety. Gielgud was not, by his own high standards, a particularly memorable Macbeth; he lacked the physical characteristics for the part.
Gielgud’s Hamlet was another matter. No single actor can capture all the aspects of Hamlet’s personality. No doubt Gielgud overemphasized the intellectual and sensitive Hamlet, at the expense of the active young Prince, but his was the most moving Hamlet I have seen.
It was Shakespeare who framed my mind, in terms of my vision of the world, before my experience of adult life had set in. He gave me a sense of the drama of life, and its poetry; he gave me a sense of the variety of personality and of the range from good to evil. I was fond of the wise old men, of Cardinal Wolsey, of Polonius. Indeed, my critics might think that I have made a living out of playing Polonius on the public stage; I am particularly aware of his inability to see what a comic character he was making of himself.
I did not see Hamlet as a role model, or Julius Caesar, or any of the English kings. I knew already that I was not destined to play Romeo. It was, rather, the great speeches which gave me my picture of the world. The ancient Greeks were brought up in the same way on Homer. I do not suppose many of them thought they would grow up to be a second Achilles; it was the total effect of the poetry that gave them access to a Homeric consciousness.
In wartime, one needs to turn to great literature. Shakespeare gave that, and he also gave expression to a patriotism which makes other patriotic verse sound like a penny whistle. In peacetime, one needs to understand the world as Shakespeare sees it with affection but without illusion, with caution but without timidity, with realism as well as idealism, with humility as well as ambition, with a certain melancholy. I certainly took my politics from Shakespeare. I have never doubted that he was the leading genius of the English nation. He taught me to think, to feel, to understand and to place myself as appropriately as I might in the drama of life. Like him my politics have been rooted in the human need for order and harmony. Like him I hope for the best but fear the worst. Like him I have a Catholic nostalgia for a lost past: ‘Bare ruin’d choirs where once the sweet birds sang’.
It was in the first winter of the war, in January 1939, that I came across the next book which changed my life. I had caught a bad dose of influenza. The local doctor prescribed the new sulfa drug, M & B 693, which was later to be replaced by penicillin. I had to stay in my bedroom for two or three weeks. We still had a young housemaid, though she soon vanished, and I remember her coming in early in the morning to lay and light the bedroom fire, a luxury which lasted in English country houses down to – but seldom beyond – the outbreak of the Second World War.
As I was recovering, I wanted to find a book to read, so I went down to the Cholwell library. There I found a set of James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, which had been published by the Oxford University Press in the 1820s. I could only find the first three out of the four volumes.
I lay in bed for the next ten days, entranced and delighted by Boswell. Here the romantic lines of Keats really come close to it; Boswell’s Life of Johnson had on me the effect that Chapman’s Homer had on him:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
There were many things I found attractive about Boswell’s Life. I immediately came to share his hero-worship of Samuel Johnson:
To write the life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others, and who, whether we consider his extraordinary endorsements, or his various works, has been equalled by few in any age, is an arduous, and may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task.
I slipped easily into the notion that I was reading the life of a congenial, great man.
Johnson is also a moralist; which is a dangerous thing to be, because it is hard to make moral judgements without becoming something of a prig and a hypocrite. To Boswell, himself constantly in a state of moral torment and doubt, it was the confidence of Johnson’s morality which was most attractive. I do not think that was so in my case; no doubt I have myself been too self-confident in making moral judgements. I felt that Johnson was right to consider moral issues as essential to life. At ten I wanted to learn how to make sound moral judgements, and I wanted to know how to write good English prose. I thought Johnson could help me to learn both those things.
I respected but did not really share Johnson’s Toryism. Decades later, as I was told, Michael Hartwell, then the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, was discussing with Bill Deedes his possible successor as Editor. I had recently given up the editor-ship of The Times, and my name was mentioned. ‘He’s not our kind of Tory,’ said Michael, and that closed the issue. I never have been a Daily Telegraph Tory, and I did not find myself a Samuel Johnson Tory either. He was a near Jacobite, King and Country, traditional Tory, although he was liberal in his views of the great social issues of race and poverty, and not an imperialist. I have always been a John Locke, Declaration of Independence, Peelite, even Pittite, type of Tory, and Johnson would have sniffed me out as a closet Whig.
It was not only Johnson’s mind and personality which attracted me, but the book itself, and above all the eighteenth century. I do not believe in reincarnation, but that is the best way to describe the impact that Boswell’s Life of Johnson had on me. I felt that I was re-entering a world to which I belonged, a world which was more real to me, and certainly more attractive, than the mid twentieth century. I felt that what had happened since Johnson’s death in 1784 was a prolonged decline of civilization, the industrial revolution, ugly architecture, the slums, the heavy Victorian age, the great European wars of Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler. I yearned for the age of harmony before the fall. It took me half a lifetime to get used to the modern age, and I have never become particularly fond of it.
In reading Boswell, I was able to slip into the garden of the eighteenth century and regain a lost paradise. I enjoyed everything about that century, the houses, the furniture, the landscape, the paintings, the music, the literature, the letters, the politics, the people. Although this perception of the eighteenth century as a golden age has gradually eroded, it still remains quite vivid. In the years when our own family was growing up, Gillian and I lived in two fine eighteenth-century houses, Ston Easton Park in Somerset – a beautiful extravagance – and Smith Square in London. Now we live in an early twentieth-century flat in London and a late fifteenth-century house in Somerset. I delight in both of them; the eighteenth-century nostalgia has eased. But it is still the period from 1714, the death of Queen Anne, to 1789, the year of the French Revolution, which is my true homeland in history and literature.
I never suffered from Johnson’s extreme fear of death, but I did feel sympathetic to his congenital melancholy. I also admired the energy he put into friendship. The passage I best remember from my first reading of Boswell’s Life is the one in which he helped a nearly destitute Oliver Goldsmith; this account is in Johnson’s own words:
I received one morning a message from poor Goldsmith, that he was in great distress, and as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was dressed, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion. I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had got a bottle of Madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by which he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked into it, and saw its merit, told the landlady I should soon return, and having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill.
The novel was The Vicar of Wakefield; £60 would probably have had the purchasing power of £5000 in modern money.
That summer I was in the senior form of the junior section of the Clifton Preparatory School, a form taught by Captain Read. With war imminent, it was a time of heightened emotional tension, a time when everyone’s imagination was stretched. Read was a quiet man, a good schoolmaster, who was a veteran of the First World War. I now suspect that he may have been one of those good officers who never wholly recovered from their war experience; he did not speak of it to us.
Captain Read set us an essay on ‘a building we had visited during the holidays’. I wrote about the little Catholic church at East Harptree, and described, in rather sentimental terms, how it had been built by poor Irish labourers in the nineteenth century. Captain Read recognized that this was an unusual piece of writing for a ten-year-old boy, gave it a top mark, perhaps even ten out of ten, and praised it to the class as exceptionally well written.
This encouragement was very important to me. Before that I had no idea I had any special talent for writing. I knew that I was reasonably bright by the standard of the school; I usually came third in class placings, behind my contemporaries Pym and Foster, who contended for the top position. Captain Read told me I had a special talent for writing essays, and I believed him. I have been writing them ever since.
It was through my fascination with Johnson that I came to read the poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. My favourite book, one of the favourite books of my lifetime, became Johnson’s Lives of the Poets. My mother bought for me a calf-bound set of the 1779 first edition of Johnson’s Poets, with the works of the poets from Cowley to Lyttleton in fifty-six volumes, two volumes of index, and twelve volumes of the Lives. This was a fourteenth-birthday present, bought from George’s of Bristol; it still has their price marked in it, of £6 15s. The first owner had been an eighteenth-century clergyman, Francis Mills, who was born in 1759. He may have bought the first volumes when he was twenty, and lived through to die in 1851 in his ninety-second year. I hope these little books gave him the lifetime’s happiness they have given me.
Johnson’s Poets covers the period from the 1620s to the 1760s. The minor poets of this period include Rochester, the libidinous Earl; Addison, one of the most delightful of English essayists; Gay, who wrote The Beggar’s Opera; the saintly Isaac Watts, one of the best English hymn writers, and Gray, who wrote the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. When I suffered from adolescent depression at Charterhouse, I found Gray’s Elegy, the mirror of my mood, a great comfort.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The Ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
In Johnson’s collection, there are four major literary voices, those of Milton, Dryden, Swift and Pope; of those Swift is a great satirist rather than a great poet. Dryden is indeed a great poet, free-flowing with fire and energy, but I never found him a particularly interesting writer despite the intellectual quality of his criticism. The two great poets whom I have come back to again and again, who, after Shakespeare, have done most to shape my mind, are Milton and Pope. Milton came rather the earlier of the two; I can remember first hearing Lycidas read in a form room at Clifton.
Lycidas was written in memory of Edward King, a young Cambridge poet who shared Milton’s idealism and died in 1637. One can imagine a young Cambridge poet of the 1930s writing such an elegy about one of his contemporaries, who might have died fighting Franco. It is a poem of the left, which foreshadows a dark future; I was reading it in just such an historic context:
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread;
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace and nothing said;
But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.
These lines from Lycidas gave me the true thrill of great poetry then, and they still do now. When written, they were indeed prophetic of the civil war that was about to break upon England. The executions they prefigure, which may already have been foreshadowed in Milton’s mind, were those of the men, such as Laud and Strafford, whom he regarded as having failed to feed ‘the hungry sheep’; the young poets in the 1930s regarded Neville Chamberlain and the appeasers in much the same way. King Charles I himself, on 30 January 1649, was executed by the axe, that ‘two-handed engine at the door’.
I enjoyed the poetry of public affairs; I was already storing up phrases and the rhythm of sentences which I felt I could use. If I sought to learn the use of irony and antithesis from Johnson, a line like ‘Daily devours apace and nothing said’, with its dying fall, became part of the inner rhythm of my early attempts at English prose.
No doubt John Milton is a greater poet than Alexander Pope; he is indeed second only to Shakespeare in the canon of English poets. But in learning how to read, which I was doing with the definite intention of learning how to write, ‘elective affinities’, to use Goethe’s congenial phrase, go for as much as poetic merit. I learned most from the poets whose personalities I liked best. I admire Milton; I love Pope.
Although our ability to classify poets by political temperament has often been denied, it seems to me that it is sometimes quite obvious. Alexander Pope loved Horace, a natural conservative among Roman poets. Pope took the view ‘whate’er is best administered is best’ – not a radical view of politics, he admired the Augustan ideal and detested what he saw as the contagious vulgarity of Grub Street. Milton was a man of the left, a radical progressive, a supporter of Cromwell, a hardline servant of the revolutionary government. Had he been a young Frenchman in the early 1790s, he would have been a Jacobin; if a young Russian in 1917, he would have been a Bolshevik.
I knew perfectly well at the age of ten that my own political temperament belonged to the conservative type, that I had no political sympathy at all with Milton’s radical progressive point of view. I had read about Cromwell in my early history books and saw him as an enemy. The poet who was to have the strongest influence on me was bound to be one who shared the temperament of rational conservatism. I found such a poet in Alexander Pope. He has been the friendly guide to my literary life.
His critics have said that Pope is not a poet at all, but, in effect, a brilliant prose writer, using verse as his medium for expressing what they would regard as merely prosaic thoughts. He is indeed an unusual poet; he was a cripple, marked by the effects of a tubercular disease of the spine in childhood. He was some inches short of five foot in height. Such an experience has its impact on the development of personality. As with blindness, certain aspects of life are cut off, but other aspects are intensified. Language, and the control of language, became his resource, into which he focused an astonishing energy.
In no poet does one feel to the same degree that each line has been packed with an intensity of meaning, so that phrase after phrase comes to the reader primed to explode, not as a sparkler or grenade, but with a nuclear energy. I do not know if I appreciated this when I first read Pope; Shakespeare and Blake are great poets who are highly accessible to children; Pope is a poet of argument, and the arguments are often mature in character. Later I was to realize that Pope’s arguments compress whole books into a couplet or two. Take these opening lines in the second book of The Essay on Man:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is Man.
Plac’d on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast.
Each couplet is a tablet of stone. Although both are great poems, the preference between Lycidas and The Essay on Man is inevitably a temperamental one; it is the choice between the radical’s sense of destiny and a conservatism tempered with scepticism. I was already seeing the world through Pope’s eyes rather than Milton’s. For me Milton might be the greater poet, but Pope was far more sympathetic.
The virtues of the best prose include clarity, energy, rhythm, strength and concentration of meaning. No word should be wasted; words should have colour as well as logical coherence. These are the lessons of Pope; everyone who aspires to write good English prose, and particularly journalists, who have to write too much of it, too fast, should read Pope, not occasionally but regularly. In any case such a habit is a great, and reliable, pleasure. If one has the right temperament for it.
Chapter Five
But we’ll do more, Sempronius
In September 1941, my father drove me for my first term at Charterhouse in his green 1932 open Lagonda, using some saved petrol coupons; I remember our happy feeling of companionship. The setting of the school is beautiful, and even then I appreciated it; the old school buildings, the best Gothic of 1870, look out over the green, where later I was to watch Peter May as a thirteen-year-old batsman; he became one of the finest English batsmen there ever was. The green itself is at the summit of the steep hill which runs up from Godalming; the view stretches out to Haslemere. Around the school there were walks in its extensive grounds, and beyond that the Surrey countryside, though Surrey seemed brown and scrawny compared to the green meadows of Somerset.
In summer the setting was delightful, but in autumn, winter and spring, it was cold, almost as bone-chillingly cold as the Charles River in mid-winter, if one walks back across the bridge from Harvard to Boston. My father had been cold at Charterhouse; I was cold. Nevertheless, I was quite happy in my first year. I was a fag in Verites, which was my house; ‘fag’ was then an innocent word, which meant that I had to perform minor domestic tasks and run errands for the monitors. My own house monitor soon discovered that he would do better to polish his own shoes than have me polish them.
I was in the scholars’ form, and found myself sitting next to Simon Raven, on the alphabetical principle. He was as good a classical scholar as I was a bad one, and was soon moved up a year into the fifth form. The quiet and elderly form master of the Remove, Mr Lake, had taught my father when he was a young man, and shared my enthusiasm for the novels of Anthony Trollope.
My great-grandfather had been to Charterhouse, in the time of Thackeray; my grandfather had been to Charterhouse, less than ten years before the school moved out of London and down to Godalming in Surrey; my father had been to Charterhouse in the years before the First World War. None of them had been happy; all had received a sound classical education and retained a loyalty to their old school. For much of the time I was not happy, or in good physical health, but I too retain an affectionate loyalty for Charterhouse.
Institutions are like people; one has a temperamental affinity with them, or a temperamental unease. I doubt if I have an ‘anima naturaliter Catholica’, a naturally Catholic soul. Left to its own devices, my soul is rather inclined to Protestant liberalism. I do, however, have a naturally Catholic temperament; I enjoy the personality of the Church of Rome, as well as being thankful for its graces. I love the ancient institutions of Somerset. I love the institutions of the United States. In another life I would have liked to have been born in Boston, preferably in the 1860s, studied at Harvard and – if my career flourished – become a Senator for Massachusetts during the Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. I related reasonably well to Clifton College, saw the appeal of an Eton I did not go to, am loyal to Charterhouse, rather disliked Balliol – which returned the compliment – but enjoyed Oxford, and particularly the Oxford Union, had a liberal education at the Financial Times, worked well with the Sunday Times, have had by far my greatest professional loyalty to The Times, seriously disliked the institutional BBC, was happy and useful at the Arts Council and enjoy a peaceful old age in the House of Lords. Balliol and the BBC, out of all those institutions, I did not take to. They were not my cup of tea, and most decidedly I was never theirs.
One story illustrates how Charterhouse sees the world. My daughter Charlotte, who was a sweet rebel as a teenager, had left Cheltenham Ladies College in disfavour; it was, in my view, the College’s fault rather than hers. I remember writing to the Chairman of the Board of Governors a letter which contained the sentence: ‘You make the girls unhappy and then punish them for being so’. We decided that Charlotte should, if possible, take her A levels at Charterhouse. They received a letter from Cheltenham, which, apparently, warned them against Charlotte in strident terms. Their reaction was to decide at once that they ought to take her. I was an Old Carthusian, which constituted a bond; Charlotte’s education was in difficulty; they obviously ought to help. That is how sympathetic grown-ups think. It is not how all schools would have reacted. So Charlotte became the fifth generation of Rees-Moggs to go to the school of Addison, Steele, Blackstone, Wesley, Thackeray, Max Beerbohm and Robert Graves.
At the start of the autumn term of 1941, the war was shuddering towards its tipping point. Germany had invaded Russia, and at first had been having every success. The Russian winter was holding the German army before Moscow. Towards the end of my first term at Charterhouse, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the United States entered the war. After that, there was never any doubt who was going to win. Of course, Pearl Harbor came as a great relief to the British; the Japanese had given us an invincible ally. Despite the loss of Malaya and then of Singapore, the turn happened in the last months of 1941, and every schoolboy knew it.
At Christmas the scholars were promoted to the Special Remove, which was then taught by a charismatic man, Bob Arrowsmith. He would have regarded the word ‘charismatic’ as new-fangled, possibly blasphemous and certainly vulgar. He had three great enthusiasms: Charterhouse, cricket and eighteenth-century literature. He found that I shared all three; having discovered in the nets that I was a hopeless duffer at cricket, he particularly encouraged my interest in the eighteenth century. He received antiquarian booksellers’ catalogues, and left them for me on his desk; he got me to read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall; he let me explore the minor eighteenth-century poets, such as William Shenstone; he introduced me to the great classical scholar Richard Bentley, and to the eighteenth-century letter writers. In those days, when his arthritis only showed in a slight limp, he was a great walker and we went on country walks together and discussed what Gray had written to Mason, or John Wilkes’s reply to Lord Sandwich. ‘You will either die of the pox or by hanging.’ ‘That depends, my Lord, on whether I embrace your Lordship’s mistress or your principles.’
For some boys, probably the majority, Bob Arrowsmith was a great teacher. We used to imitate his drawling vowel sounds. ‘My dear Sir’, he would say, and it was easy to imitate that. With those he did not like, he could be more alarming. Max Hastings, who has edited both the Daily Telegraph and the Evening Standard, was later to have him as a housemaster. I believe that Bob tried to be kind to him at an unhappy period of his life, but I do not think Max has ever forgiven him for his inability to reach a common ground of sympathy.
In February 1942, I asked Bob whether, in addition to my ordinary school work, in which I was rather idle, I could write a weekly essay for him. It never occurred to me, nor, I think, to him, that I was putting him to any trouble. For the next couple of terms, I wrote these essays. I remember one of his comments. I had been reading Bacon’s Essays and was writing in similarly short, staccato sentences. Bob said that my essays reminded him of the Book of Proverbs. None of those essays survives, and I imagine they expressed antiquated prejudices in antiquated language; indeed, Bob would have liked that. But those weekly essays, with their echoes of Bacon, or Addison – I was reading Addison’s Spectator – Johnson or Gibbon, helped to teach me how to write. I tried to imitate Addison’s conversational style, but could not resist a rhetorical antithesis. One should get a big style as a teenager, so that one can tone it down later on.
My first year at Charterhouse was a good one, particularly the summer, when I spent my spare time divided between the cricket field, at least as a keen scorer, and the excellent school library, with its huge patent Victorian stove in the middle.
It was after I had returned to Somerset for my first summer holiday that I fell ill, and for the next couple of years that illness changed my school life, even leading to a suggestion by J. C. Holmes, my housemaster, that I should go on indefinite leave to try to recover my health. I remember the first illness being diagnosed by Dr Brew, the jovial and very old-fashioned Somerset doctor from Chew Magna. He was a farmers’ doctor, and was full of farming stories, such as that of the old farmer who had not been to the end of the garden for six weeks, and commented, ‘you’d better send a ferret up’n’. He listened to my symptoms, felt the area of my liver, and diagnosed the infectious jaundice which had become epidemic in the unsanitary mass feeding of wartime. It would now be diagnosed as Hepatitis A.
I have never felt so horrible; I had less than no energy; my urine was the colour of mahogany; I was struck by the depression which is a symptom of the disease. The illness and convalescence lasted from late July into October, when I did manage to go back to Charterhouse, but I do not think my energy or my spirits fully recovered so long as I was still at school.
I do remember one happy moment when I was at home, but had started to recover from the acute stage. My mother wanted to cheer me up. I had set my heart on a set of the Pickering ‘wreath’ edition of Christopher Marlowe, which I had seen earlier in the summer in George’s Bookshop, at the top of Park Street in Bristol. It was priced at £2 5s. That would now be the equivalent of about £75; if I saw the same set in a bookseller’s catalogue, I would now expect it to be priced at about £350.
I have the books in front of me as I write. They are bound in a Victorian half-green morocco, an excellent, clean copy. I put a regrettable rubber stamp of ‘W. R-M.’ in the end fly leaves, and stuck my great-grandfather’s armorial book plate, which is far more appropriate, in each volume. I also put a red ribbon as a book mark to each volume; two of the three still survive. The title pages read: ‘The Works of Christopher Marlowe. Volume the First (Second, Third) [wreath ornament] ‘Marlowe renown’d for his rare art and wit Could ne’er attain beyond the name of Kit.’ London: William Pickering, Chancery Lane; Talboys and Wheeler, Oxford; J. Combe and Son, Leicester. MDCCCXXVI.’
This birthday present introduced me to Christopher Marlowe, and for a year or more I was drunk on his plays. I read the plays in quite a careful way. In Act II, Scene II, of Tamburlaine the Great, there is a line which Pickering’s edition reads as ‘His arms and fingers long, and snowy-white’. My pencil note, slipped in, reads: ‘Sinewy is now the generally accepted emendation to snowy-white’. It would indeed be surprising if Marlowe had praised Tamburlaine for his lady-like hands.
I found my imagination stirred by all of Marlowe’s plays. I delighted in the bravura poetry of Tamburlaine the Great. I wrote to John Gielgud, asking him to put on a performance of The Jew of Malta, not realizing how anti-Semitic it was, but taken with the beauty of the verse.
I realized, of course, that The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr Faustus was Marlowe’s masterpiece. The closing scene, in which Faustus faces his death and damnation, is of Shakespearian quality.
O lente, lente currite noctis equi!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’d.
Oh I’ll leap up to heav’n!
– who pulls me down? See where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament:
One drop of blood will save me; oh, my Christ!
My imagination was so gorged with Marlowe that, when I went back to Charterhouse, I wrote two full-length tragedies in my version of Elizabethan blank verse. The plots were full of murders, and were placed in sixteenth-century Italy, about which I knew next to nothing. I remember that one of the more sinister characters was called Bagnio. These plays are lost, which I cannot regret.
Unfortunately, jaundice is a disease which produces clinical depression, and I suffered for the next two years from an adolescent depression which, though intermittent, was at times acute. I remember a degree of exhaustion which made it hard to rise from a chair, even when I was sitting in a draught. In such a depression, as many will know only too well, all pleasure, interest and zest disappear from life. At the time I had never seen television, but the effect of depression is to grey the world, as though one was turning the colour control from vivid to black and white.
The school authorities were naturally disturbed, but fortunately they were flexible. I sometimes went to class, and sometimes not. I often stayed in bed until lunchtime, and occasionally did not get up at all. Admittedly I read a lot in bed, so the time was not wholly wasted. Somehow I stumbled through School Certificate with respectable but not scholarly marks. The two matrons at Verites, Mrs Lewis and Mrs Peel-Yates, fluctuated between wondering whether I was malingering or was so seriously ill that they should no longer take responsibility for me. They were, however, very kind.
The school doctor, a healthy-minded man, was convinced that I was a malingerer who ought to be restored to ordinary school discipline. My physical symptoms, which were not extreme, centred on my sinuses. He sent me to a Harley Street ear, nose and throat specialist, Mr Gill Carey, who had the background of an international rugby player, from New Zealand, or perhaps from Australia. He was, in my life, the good physician who may have saved my sanity. He examined the X-rays and shone a torch into the back of my mouth. He saw that my sinuses were in no great disorder. I left the room; he then told my mother that I was reasonably healthy in my sinuses but tired and run down; that I was not a malingerer, but should not have any pressure put on me; that I should be permanently excused from games and the Officers’ Training Corps, but might, if I wished, play an occasional game of cricket in the summer, as I seemed to enjoy that. He wrote a letter to the school doctor to that effect.
That solved the school and the games problem, and thereafter the depression gradually abated, though it was only at Oxford, six or seven years later, that I had the last attack of it which I can remember. During the more acute phase of the depression I had suicidal ideas. I talked about suicide to my friends, including Gerald Priestland, who later became the much-admired religious correspondent of the BBC. Suicide ends the career of Somerset Lloyd Jones in Simon Raven’s Arms for Oblivion novels, a character which is loosely based on the less agreeable aspects of my schoolboy personality.
I argued with Bob Arrowsmith that both Socrates and Jesus Christ had committed suicide, because they could both have avoided their deaths; it was not his sort of argument, and it embarrassed him, though he tried to frame a reply. I never actually made any attempt at suicide, but I can remember looking at my father’s wartime pistol, and wondering how it worked. I can also remember a moment in Charterhouse chapel when I simply wished that I could be removed from an earth which I found so pointless and returned to what seemed to me a lost state of happiness. I could not understand what I was doing in this strange and ugly century, when the eighteenth century had been so much better.
Literature continued to be a great consolation. I read Edgar Allan Poe, a sinister though romantic author I cannot now stand. I also read Shakespeare, and when, in 1943, I saw Gielgud’s Hamlet, the Shakespearian melancholy – ‘Oh that this too solid flesh would melt’ – summed up my mood precisely. So did Gray’s Elegy, which I read in a state of acute depression. Gray’s elegiac depression offers a benign and calming alternative; one is still depressed, but in a nostalgic style.
Undoubtedly depression affected, and even dominated, my period at school. Nowadays it would probably have been diagnosed and I would have been put on some mood-altering pill, which might or might not have improved it. I am, however, glad to have experienced it, and even gladder that it has not so far recurred, as I rather expected it to, in later life. It gave me an understanding of the shadowy side of my own nature, and a better sympathy with the tragic condition of human life. I think it gave me somewhat more insight than I might have had into the gusty emotional weather of adolescence in others. Depression – if it is survived – is an exploration as well as a disaster.
In my worst year, from the autumn of 1942 to the summer of 1943, I was taught by a most sympathetic master, V. S. H. Russell, nicknamed ‘Sniffy’. He was not a very good teacher in his class, but he was a brilliant teacher outside the classroom. He was a man of wide learning, and sympathetic to anyone who was going through a bad time. He was the housemaster of Hodgsonites, and I used to drop round to his house after school to talk over school gossip, in which he delighted, and about literature and the progress of the war, where, of course, many of his recent pupils were fighting.
Arrowsmith and Russell were both classicists. They believed that the study of the languages of Latin and Greek provided the only sound basis of education; this belief had dominated public school and grammar school education in England since the time of Erasmus and Linacre. Up to my fifteenth birthday, I received, without the floggings which used to accompany it, the same classical education as John Locke would have had at Westminster under the great Busby, Horace Walpole would have had at Eton, or as my father had under Thomas Ethelbert Page at Charterhouse. It was more limited in scope than modern systems of education, more vigorous in its mental discipline and more intense. I am glad that I belonged to the last generation educated in the culture of ancient Greece and Rome.
The grammar and public school classical teaching retained its imperial purpose when I was at school. Clifton and Charterhouse were a practical training for, among other things, governing nations and fighting wars. This faded away within a few years of the independence of India, which brought the British Empire to an end. Britain no longer needed to train boys to become colonial officials; deference to authority slipped away from the national culture and education.
By the end of my second term in the Classical Under Sixth it became clear to me that I was never going to make a classical scholar, even of the humblest kind. Nevertheless, there had to be a battle if I was to change my specialization. The classical side of Brooke Hall, which is the masters’ common room at Charterhouse, would not easily give up. Arrowsmith advised strongly against a change; Russell, as was his nature, was less dogmatic; Irvine opposed it though with decreasing confidence. My housemaster, Jasper Holmes, was a scientist, but was well aware of the strength of the classical side in Brooke Hall, from which he had sometimes suffered his own reverses in Charterhouse politics.
I wanted to switch to the History Under Sixth, which would lead naturally to Robert Birley’s History Sixth. That in its turn would lead to reading history at Oxford. I was increasingly strongly convinced that that was what I ought to do. However bad I was at the classics, I was good at writing essays, and had always read history.
During the period of this minor, but, to me, crucial, struggle, an incident occurred which nearly led to my changing my house as well as my form. There was a Jewish boy in Verites whose family background was unhappy, and whose conduct was erratic. He was so unhappy that at one time he tried to set fire to the school pillar box. He was nonetheless intelligent, and he was a friend of mine. I remember once going to a meal with his mother. Perhaps she had pressed him to bring a friend home. I knew therefore that his home was not happy, and that he resented about equally the authority of Charterhouse and that of his non-Jewish stepfather who, even to me, lacked charm.
In Verites he was unpopular. No doubt there was anti-Semitism in it. He was accused of being dirty, of not having taken a bath for a long time. This was not all that unusual; hot water was rationed and we only got one bath a week, so we must all have been pretty grubby. A group of sixteen-year-olds dragged him to the bathroom, stripped him and put him in the bath.
I was present, protesting and horrified at what was happening. I was not able to prevent it, though my protests may have helped to shorten the ordeal. I went to Holmes, as the house-master, who took less action against the bullies than I thought appropriate. I wrote to my mother, saying that I could not tolerate staying in a house where this sort of thing could happen. In this there was no doubt some desire to take advantage of the situation for my own ends, as well as a genuine horror and shock at the Jewish boy’s humiliation. I suggested that I should be transferred to Birley’s house, Saunderites.
Strangely, it did not occur to any of us that there was a parallel between the ritual humiliation of my friend, who had come to hate Charterhouse, and Nazi anti-Semitism. The event happened, after all, in 1943. I did raise the issue of bullying and the issue of anti-Semitism. I did not myself raise the parallel of Nazi anti-Semitism. Neither Holmes, Birley, nor, indeed, the bullies saw it in that way. The bullies themselves were not particularly thuggish boys, as I remember. They seemed to be acting out some very primitive role, like chimpanzees setting on a weakened companion in the rainforest.
I am not sure how closely my bid to move house, which failed, and my bid to move from Classics to History, which succeeded, were linked. I do not regret having stayed in Verites; it was not my spiritual home, and Holmes was not a particularly sympathetic housemaster, but we had a mutual respect, and I was certainly more trouble to him than he was to me. Later, when Birley made me Head of the School, Holmes refused to make me Head of Verites, a disjunction of office which had last happened when William Beveridge, later the author of the Beveridge Report, was Head of the School. That, too, suited me perfectly well. I liked the prestige of being Head of the School, but was happy to forgo the chore of running Verites.
The move to studying history was a joy and a turning point, one of the crucial decisions of my life, all the better for having been achieved after a struggle. Robert Birley, later to become the head of education in the British Zone of Germany and Headmaster of Eton, was an inspired teacher of history for a sixth-form student. Even then, I took a Tory view of the world, more so than I do now, and was always willing to argue the Tory case. Disraeli was right; Gladstone was wrong, even about Ireland. Birley found that amusing; he was himself a man of liberal views, later to distinguish himself in the struggle against apartheid in South African education. Some of his liberalism was bound to rub off on me, as it did on James Prior, who was in the same History Sixth, and as it had on Edward Boyle, an earlier Eton pupil of Birley’s, who, as a rising Conservative Minister, resigned over Suez.
The summer of 1944, when I had my sixteenth birthday, was a happier one. The depression was still lurking, but was seldom too unpleasant when the sun was shining and there was good cricket to be watched on the Green. My closest friend at Charterhouse, one of the closest friends I have ever had, was Clive Wigram. Clive was the son of a distinguished Jewish doctor, who had cared for Asquith in his last illness. Because he was Jewish, Clive had been sent to the United States early in the war, but his father fell ill and he came back in 1942, earlier than most of the refugee children. He was more mature than the rest of us, and was a year older than I was; he found it difficult to take schoolboy life seriously, and even Robert Birley misread his character as a result. Birley mistook Clive’s maturity for cynicism.
Clive and I would go for gentle walks in the Charterhouse grounds. On one such walk we were discussing the fact that we had not been invited to join the Literary and Political Society, an ancient Charterhouse society. The reason for our exclusion was that the Lit and Pol was run by Harry Iredale, a senior French master with snowy white hair, who disliked us; he had never been made a housemaster because of his progressive views, which were largely derived from George Bernard Shaw. He saw Clive and myself as sinister and reactionary; we saw him as pretentious and superficial. The poor man had suffered a tragedy, some time in the later 1920s, when he had taken a boy out punting on the River Way. The boy had fallen overboard and been drowned.
As we walked beside Under Green, the idea came to us of setting up our own literary society. I am not sure who had the idea first; it came into our heads together. We thought it should cover much the same subjects as the Lit and Pol, but from a more conservative point of view. We decided that it should be set up so as to capture the high ground of Carthusian prestige. We would match Iredale by two patrons from Brooke Hall; one was to be Russell, always a willing co-conspirator in school politics, the other Mr Thomson, the senior science master. He introduced me to Sung Dynasty Chinese pottery, of which he had a fine collection.
Clive and I discussed an appropriate name, and decided to call it the Thackeray Society. William Makepeace Thackeray, the Victorian novelist, was one of the most eminent of the Carthusian authors; there is a long-standing Thackeray Prize for an English essay, which I was later to win, narrowly beating Simon Raven into second place. We thought that the school would soon accept the Thackeray Society as an established institution.
I remember some of the early meetings the society had, usually in Russell’s drawing room at Hodgsonites. Clive and I had selected the best of the next year’s group of boys, most of them scholars. One of them was Dick Taverne, the brightest of the scholars of the year below mine. We took entrants a year younger than the Lit and Pol, during their summer in the fifth form, so that we could catch the best candidates before the Lit and Pol could get hold of them.
My own contributions were marked by my interest in a classical and even stoical human culture. I persuaded the society to have a play-reading session in which we read Addison’s Cato, on the grounds that Addison had been an Old Carthusian. Cato is a play which justifies suicide in a noble cause, and that may have influenced my choice; I think it was more the stoicism which attracted me.
’Tis not in mortals to command success,
But we’ll do more, Sempronius; we’ll deserve it.
I still feel an attachment to the play, which has many connections for me. It is a link to the Thackeray Society, to Russell and Clive Wigram. It is a link to my youth, and what it was like to be sixteen. It is a link to George Berkeley, my favourite Christian philosopher, and to Alexander Pope. Both Berkeley and Pope were present on the first night the play was performed in April 1713.
On that first night, the part of Marcia, Cato’s daughter, was played by Anne Oldfield, the leading actress of the period from 1710 to 1730. I think Pope fell in love with her and was rebuffed, since he attacked her more than once in barbed verse. She had an illegitimate son, Charles Churchill, who married Maria Walpole, Robert Walpole’s daughter by Mary Skerritt, also born out of wedlock. My son-in-law, David Craigie, is a descendant of that romantic match between an illegitimate Churchill and an illegitimate Walpole. For me, Addison’s Cato is ringed about with the happy coincidences of life. Four of our grandchildren are descendants of Anne Oldfield.
In the early autumn of 1944, I discussed with Robert Birley the prospect of going to university. I knew that I wanted to go to Oxford. I was drawn by its romantic and political character and slightly repelled by the intellectual puritanism of Cambridge. I had no strong family connection with any particular Oxford college; my father had gone to University College, but his uncles had gone to various other colleges, and my ancestor John Rees had gone to Jesus. Birley recommended that I should try for a scholarship at Balliol, his own old college; he had himself won the Brackenbury Scholarship, which had been held by various other well-known figures, such as Cyril Connolly and Hilaire Belloc. In terms of prestige, the Brackenbury was then the best known history scholarship at Oxford.
I was only just over sixteen and had been a history specialist for no more than a term and a half. Birley warned me that I was too young and did not really know enough history to get a scholarship, but suggested I should enter for Balliol, to see what the examination was like. I was delighted with the challenge.
The examination was taken over a couple of days, and the candidates stayed in college. I remember how cold it was, with an early December snow covering the paving stones outside the Sheldonian. I took with me a copy of Richard Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Politie, a first edition which I had bought from George McLeish of Little Russell Street. I imagine that I found an opportunity to work in some quotation from Hooker, intended to show the breadth of my reading. The set essay was a quotation from Shakespeare’s King Henry VIII, in which Cardinal Wolsey says to Cromwell: ‘Fling away ambition, by that sin fell the angels’. At the age of sixteen, I was not at all willing to fling away ambition, which was my ruling passion at the time. I wrote an essay defending ambition; how I got over the problem of the fall of Lucifer I do not now remember.
There was an oral interview, in which my confident assertions were gently probed. Two young Balliol dons, still serving in the army, took part in it: Richard Southern, a serious-minded medieval historian, who later became the President of St John’s, and Christopher Hill, the Marxist historian of the seventeenth century, who later became Master of Balliol. Southern was too ascetic, too serious, too medieval for me, and I was too frivolous, too partisan, too eighteenth-century for him. I was never to find it easy to learn from him, which was my fault; he never found much pleasure in trying to teach me, which was also my fault, since he was both a good historian and a good man.
Christopher Hill was much more my type of historian. As a good Marxist he looked for broad explanations of historic events. He saw, and taught, history as a series of challenges and responses, which could be explained by identifying underlying social and economic forces. He had an ebullient Celtic temperament. Although we were on different sides of the ideological fence, and disapproved of each other quite strongly, we were also quite fond of each other in an adversarial way. I have always been grateful for his Marxist teaching; Marxism is only one of the ways of looking at history, and is only partly true, but it is a form of analysis all historians need to have experienced at some point.
The history dons sat round the fire in the Dean’s room, and made me feel welcome; I knew I had done quite well. I was back in Somerset on my Christmas holiday with my parents when the telegram arrived, telling me that I had won the Brackenbury. I had won it, as I now think, because I had the basic qualities not of a good historian, but of a good journalist. I had trenchant opinions; I wrote with vigour at short notice on any subject; I was manifestly clever, without being particularly consistent, accurate or profound. I showed promise. Indeed, my whole educational career was based on showing promise.
When I received the telegram I was filled with delight; I felt like Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. ‘Is it not passing brave to be a King, And ride in triumph through Persepolis?’ Was it not passing brave to have won the Brackenbury Scholarship at the age of sixteen? I have never felt such an uprush of pleasure at any subsequent success, at becoming President of the Oxford Union or Editor of The Times, agreeable though success always is. It is the moment of success which gives the greatest satisfaction; the life of a Prime Minister must be anxious and exhausting, but the hour of appointment, or of winning a General Election, must feel very good. The hour I got that telegram from Balliol was good in that way. Of course, if one is going to have a success, sixteen is an enjoyable time to have it.
I paid for it, in a way I have not had to pay for any subsequent success. I went back to Charterhouse in the January, having achieved a Balliol scholarship and having at least a couple of terms of relaxation ahead of me. The old depression came back, more severely than it was ever to come again. I sat in my study at Verites, unable to concentrate, unable to take pleasure in anything, wholly lacking in energy, let alone zest. I had not expected to react so badly to something which had given me so much delight. The black mood passed as spring came, but for a couple of months I felt lower than I had felt high on receiving the telegram.
That year I edited The Carthusian, which was a senior position in the school. I spent a good deal of my leisure time with Clive Wigram, on whose judgement I greatly relied. I remember a walk with him when we discussed the relative evils of the Hitler and Stalin regimes. I said that Stalin’s was the more totalitarian of the two, and that a private individual had a better chance of preserving some normality in Germany rather than Russia. Clive agreed, but pointed out that such an option would not be open to him, because he was a Jew, and Hitler would kill him. At that time, early in 1945, we still had no real knowledge of the Holocaust, but Jews knew that Hitler was a Jew killer. It was only when British troops liberated Belsen in May of 1945, and the first photographs of the starving or the dead appeared, that we began in Britain to realize that the evil that had happened was even worse than the war itself.
In the summer, the war in Europe came to an end. Rather to my surprise, Birley asked me to stay on for an extra term and be Head of School. I had not been considered a likely candidate for the job, and, in any case, everyone assumed I was leaving. I was conspicuously unathletic. I was a thorn in the side of my house-master, who was opposed to the whole idea. I was seen in the school as a weedy intellectual, and there were doubts as to whether I could maintain discipline. Few headmasters other than Birley would have considered it. I think that part of his motivation was the desire to show that an intellectual could be Head of School.
I do not think that I made a particularly good one. I compensated for my apparent lack of authority by being too decisive in some cases. The benefit of my being Head of School was not to Charterhouse but to me. I would previously have thought of myself as the sort of person who edits the school magazine but does not become the Head of School. My self-image came to include the idea of exercising authority. I have never subsequently found it worrying to handle the political relationships in such positions of authority as I have held. As Editor of The Times or as Chairman of the Arts Council, I have found the simple leadership skills which I first learned at Charterhouse were useful, and if I made some of the mistakes of the learning process while I was still at school, that is as it should be.
Chapter Six
Everyone Wants to Be Attorney General
I went up to Balliol in January 1946, just after the war. Balliol, a left-wing college, was then full of Labour triumphalism, following the General Election in the summer of 1945. The mood lasted about a year to the summer of 1946. It was quite unlike the political mood at any other time in my life. The Labour majority was a large one, people believed that this was a revolutionary event; they believed that the old ways of doing things had been thrown out. It was widely felt that the conservatism of the pre-war era had been not only morally repugnant, but also intellectually contemptible; it was a more complete ideological rejection than that of 1997. It was further held that figures like William Beveridge and J. Maynard Keynes had shown how it was possible to run society in a much more scientific and effective way. Conservatism was dead, and disreputable; the future lay with Attlee socialism, Keynesianism and the Beveridge Report. I did not agree.
Ideologically I was swimming against the tide in post-war Balliol. I took the view, best set out in Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom, that universal state controls, including substantial state ownership and very high taxation, involved a serious loss of liberty. I held the connected belief that liberty was the key to economic and social development and that, by restricting liberty, Britain was putting shackles on its future performance. Margaret Thatcher, an Oxford contemporary and acquaintance, was taking the same view at the same time and in the same environment, but in 1946 we were a small minority, either among students or in Britain as a whole.
Balliol itself possessed a set of values which was distinct from the other Oxford colleges. It was a strange mixture. There is an extremely attractive feeling that Balliol is a special place, that there is a friendship throughout Balliol which crosses the boundaries of opinion. On the other hand, there was a self-congratulatory side to some Balliol men, which must have seemed rather ridiculous to the outside world. Balliol was, indeed, attracting and producing the best undergraduates. It was regarded as the academic college and merited this reputation. The Norrington Table had not yet been brought into existence, but Balliol was getting, fairly effortlessly, a high quota of Firsts. The many brilliant undergraduates included George Steiner, the literary critic, Bernard Williams, the philosopher and future Provost of King’s, and, among distinguished lawyers, George Carman, Lord Hutton and Lord Mayhew.
Among my first actions after I arrived at Oxford was to join the Oxford Union and the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA). The Union was the key institution in my life at Oxford. When I arrived it was dominated by people who had come back from the war. Being only seventeen, I was a schoolboy among people who were ex-officers and had been in battle. It was quite difficult to get myself into, and succeed, in a society which was dominated by people with much greater experience. I countered this by being very active indeed, not only managing to get myself elected, after only my first term, to the Committee of the Conservative Association, but also, at the end of my second term, to the Library Committee at the Union. I was an eager beaver, running round, working on university politics and getting to know people.
Ever since I had been at Charterhouse, where I founded a Conservative Society, I had sought out senior politicians as part of a learning process; they were almost a continuation of my school teachers, and were often generous with their time. I wrote to Leslie Hore-Belisha after the Conservative defeat in 1945, when he had lost his seat. Before the war, he had been, briefly, the great modernizer of British politics. In the National Governments of the later 1930s he modernized the transport system, introducing driving tests, the Highway Code and pedestrian crossings, marked by lights which were known for many years as Belisha beacons. Next, he was appointed to, and modernized, the War Office. He retired some twenty of the senior officers of the army, appointed Lord Gort as a new broom, and prepared the British Army for war in 1939. Without Belisha’s reforms the army could scarcely have formed the British Expeditionary Force in 1939, or, indeed, had the resilience to escape from Dunkirk.
These reforms were a material achievement, for which he was not much thanked. The old guard almost always wins in the end. Anti-Jewish prejudice was used to destroy Hore-Belisha. Early in 1940, he went as Minister for War to review the defences in France. He observed, and reported to the Cabinet, that there was a gap at the end of the Maginot Line. The French complained. Neville Chamberlain, with relief, took the opportunity to dismiss Belisha. Those who called him ‘Horeb-Elisha’ and ‘the Jew Boy’ had won.
I think Leslie Hore-Belisha saw himself as a second Disraeli. He was a brilliant speaker, a very modern publicist and a Minister capable of radical reorganization of his department. I cannot remember just how I first met him, but when I was at Oxford I attached myself with enthusiasm to his unfortunately waning star. I canvassed for him in Coventry South, a seat he failed to win back for the Conservatives in 1950. I exchanged lunches with him, going to his Lutyens house behind Buckingham Palace; we corresponded when I was in the RAF. He, too, had been President of the Oxford Union when he was at Oxford. By the 1950s he had very few disciples, and I think he was pleased to have a supporter. I learned a good deal from him.
I must have started the correspondence about the same time as I won the Brackenbury Scholarship, and presumably made some expression of my own political ambitions. At any rate, I remember one striking sentence in his reply which reflected both his own adolescent ambitions and what he saw as mine. ‘At the age of sixteen,’ he wrote, ‘everyone wants to be Attorney General.’ I remember a few other of his remarks. He told me that the perfect length for a speech in the House of Commons was no more than eight minutes; after that one would lose the attention of the House. His old seat had been Devonport, which in 1945 was won by Labour. He decided to move to the marginal seat of Coventry South, and commented of Devonport, ‘if they don’t want me, they shan’t have me’.
My political ambitions were already well formed. I believed I would become a political lawyer. I planned to read for the bar (I actually joined Gray’s Inn in 1948 or 1949), and to stand for Parliament. My imagination was fixed on a career as a Member of Parliament. I have always enjoyed politics, political company, debate, argument, even committee meetings. To me it is a stimulating and natural environment.
Shirley Williams once described me, in a flattering phrase, as ‘a young sage’ at Oxford, someone whom people would seek out for advice on matters relating to their own careers. Robin Day was the guru of younger Oxford politicians, advising them when to stand and for what office, but I studied the game of Oxford careerism with almost as much fascination as he did. I used to lunch with Robin Day at the Committee table in the Oxford Union. Later in life we lunched together at the Garrick Club. When Robin died I made a calculation that I had lunched with him more often than with anyone else outside my family. We always talked politics.
I got off to an early start in seeking political office at Oxford, as did our son Jacob in the late 1980s. He became President of OUCA and Librarian, though not President, at the Oxford Union. At the end of my first term I was elected to the Committee of OUCA. One of the senior members of the Committee was Margaret Thatcher and in the summer term she stood for the office of President. There were eleven members of the Committee with the right to elect the President. I voted for Margaret Roberts, as she then was, and she was elected by – as I remember it – seven votes to four.
She invited me to be the Meetings Secretary for the following term and I accepted with some glee. It would have meant greeting the outside speakers, who ranged between retired Cabinet Ministers and the rising young stars of the party, such as Reggie Maudling. I also looked forward to working for Margaret, who seemed in the immediate future to be the leading figure in Oxford Conservative politics and whom I liked.
This agreeable prospect was taken away from me when Sandy Lindsay, the Master of Balliol, who was made a Labour peer in 1947, decided to give my place in the college to a demo-bilized ex-serviceman. This meant that I only had two terms at Balliol in 1946, and I had to do my own National Service in the middle of my time at Oxford, which I resented. It was indeed contrary to the commitment the college had made when I came up. I was not able to take up my post as Meetings Secretary and had to go round to Somerville College to apologize to Margaret for my inability to accept her offer. In retrospect, I naturally regret not having worked more closely with her. When I returned to Oxford, two years later, she was in the hierarchy of ex-Presidents. By the time I became President of OUCA myself she had gone down from the university. Nevertheless, we retained a friendly acquaintance, which always gave me access after she became Leader of the Opposition and Prime Minister. I was not a member of the inner team of friends and advisers, but I think I was regarded, if rather remotely, as ‘one of us’. We never imagined at that time that Margaret was to become the first woman Prime Minister, though we knew how disciplined she was and how determined to achieve her objectives.
In 1946–8, I served two years in the RAF. The first winter was that of the 1947 fuel crisis. For most of those who lived through it, 1947 was one of the most unpleasant years of their lives. It started with an exceptionally cold winter in which supplies of coal ran out. These were fuelless days, electric fires burned only a dull red, and crowds suddenly discovered the fascination of tropical plants at Kew Gardens and tropical birds at various zoos around the country.
The fuel crisis broke the reputation of the Attlee Government for administrative competence. For years afterwards the Conservative Party speaker’s handbook carried a much-loved quotation from Emmanuel Shinwell: ‘There will be no fuel crisis, I am the Minister for Fuel and Power and I ought to know.’
I spent that winter as a National Service clerk in a Nissen hut at Flying Training Command Headquarters in Reading, Berkshire. We burned anything we could lay our hands on, except the snooker table, in an effort to keep the hut warm; we failed.
In the spring of 1948, I was sent on a course to Wellesbourne Mountford in Warwickshire to be turned into an acting sergeant in the RAF Education Corps. That I enjoyed.
Wellesbourne Mountford is situated close to Stratford-upon-Avon where I went to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre; and I managed to stay with my cousins who then lived in the beautiful village of Clifford Chambers. Their house was said to have a rather sad association with Shakespeare. In 1616 he went there for a drinking party, returned home flushed with mulled wine, caught a chill which turned to pneumonia, and died. I do not know whether the story is true.
We had a splendidly crazy wing commander who was in charge of the course. He was concerned that we should have brightly polished boots, something I was still no good at. He told us a long and rambling story about a Canadian Mountie who was sent into the wilderness to capture an outlaw. It took him three years to find his man and three years to bring him back. Nevertheless, when he returned with his prisoner, he walked into his station with his Mountie uniform impeccably pressed and his boots shining like the sun.
As the education sergeant when I returned to the Reading headquarters I was not exactly fully employed. Consequently, I arranged to have tutorials on seventeenth-century history at Reading University, for which my tutor was paid three guineas a time.
I tried, and failed, to teach an illiterate WAAF recruit to read. I taught young officers general knowledge for their officer’s promotion exam. I remember telling them, with all the authority of a nineteen-year-old, that they would acquire an excellent grasp of current affairs if they read The Times every morning over breakfast.
I drafted a general knowledge quiz to find out what, if anything, they did know. That project had to be dropped when I put the quiz in front of my education officer, who was a squadron leader. One of my multiple-part questions required the candidate to sort biblical characters into the Old and New Testaments. Unfortunately, the squadron leader had not read his Bible. He thought Moses was a figure in the New Testament, and scolded me for setting a quiz which he regarded as unreasonably difficult.
In the sergeants’ mess we drank our beer and the occasional whisky and soda. I was the only teenager in a group of middle-aged men. They saw my life as quite divorced from their concerns, but we wished each other well.
The following year, I left the RAF and returned to Oxford University. As a sergeant I fear that I had failed to impress my Commanding Officer. He wrote a reference in my leaving book: ‘Sergeant Rees-Mogg is capable of performing routine tasks under close supervision.’ I only wish that were true.
It was the autumn of 1948 when I returned to Oxford. I was now twenty. I had had the advantage of two years in the RAF, which had transformed me from a callow recruit to a sergeant in Education. I had kept in touch with Oxford life through my friendship with Clive Wigram, who was himself elected as President of the Union. In the spring of 1948, I came up to Oxford for the last time wearing my RAF uniform with its largely unpolished boots. Clive and I went to watch some college races on the river. We met two delightful girls, both of whom were acquaintances of Clive. The dark-haired one was Val Mitchison, daughter of Naomi Mitchison, the novelist, later to become Val Arnold-Foster; the blonde was Shirley Williams, the daughter of another novelist, Vera Brittain. I remember thinking what a delightful place Oxford was, if one could stroll the towpath and meet such delightful young women. I did not realize that Val and Shirley had already become stars of Oxford society.
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