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BOOKS & ARTSBOOKSBOOKSHELF

The Diaries of Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: Snob’s

Progress
In hundreds of diary entries, the Chicago-boy-turned-wealthy-English politician
dropped names, recalled slights and congratulated himself.

Henry Channon (standing at right) with guests in his home.

PHOTO: PAT ENGLISH/LIFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

By Joseph Epstein
Jan. 20, 2023 12:26 pm ET
A hundred or so pages into the diaries of Henry “Chips” Channon one realizes that this
scribbling member of Parliament is a snob, a bigot, vain, self-deceived, entranced by the
trivial, a bore and a boor both. And that in the three thick volumes into which Channon’s
diaries, kept from 1918 through 1957, have now been published, there are a mere 2,900 or so
pages left to read.

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

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20/1/23, 16:37 The Diaries of Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: Snob’s Progress - WSJ

By Simon Heffer,
Editor

Hutchinson

1024 pages

Unlike Miss Otis, Henry “Chips” Channon rarely regretted or refused an invitation, at least not
if the company was, by his social gauge, elevated. Snobs come in many varieties; two chief
divisions among them are upward- and downward-looking. The former is happiest when
accepted by people above him, the latter content to evoke a strong feeling of inferiority in
those he thinks beneath him. Channon was both kinds of snob: salivating round royalty, ever
ready to put down anyone who, unlike himself, has never known the exquisite pleasure of
sitting down to dinner between two Queens.

Henry “Chips” Channon was born in 1897 and grew up outside Chicago in the predominantly
WASP suburb of Lake Forest. He had all the weaknesses of the turn-of-the-century WASP
(narrow-mindedness, prejudice, want of imagination) and none of his strengths (good
character, honorable intentions, financial solidity). As a young man he went off to Europe
never to return, harboring a contempt for all things American, including his parents. In his
diary he writes of his father: “He was dull; he was dreary; he was bad-tempered and brooding;
he had occasional fits of good nature, but his humour was even more boring than his
tempers.” He is even harder on his mother.

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Henry 'Chips' Channon: The Diaries (Volume 2) 1938-43

By Simon Heffer,
Editor

Hutchinson

1120 pages

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How he acquired the name “Chips” we are never told. I think of him as the Chipster, and will
refer to him thus for the remainder of this review. He never wanted a regular job—“all routine
is to me odious,” he writes in his diaries—and never really had one. He served briefly as a
volunteer in the Red Cross ambulance corps in France in 1917, and later as an honorary (that
is, unpaid) attaché in the American embassy in Paris. The father whom he condemned
covered his expenses until he married, in 1933, one of the daughters of the Guinness brewing
fortune. Two years later he became a naturalized British citizen. The same year he took over
the seat in Parliament representing Southend in Essex, a so-called rotten borough, handed
over to him by his Guinness mother-in-law. He served in the Commons for 22 years, and for a
while was private secretary to Rab Butler, the Tory foreign minister.

An earlier edition of these diaries, with the title “Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon,”
appeared in 1967. This was heavily expurgated by a Chipster intimate, Peter Coats, and ran to
a mere 607 pages, roughly a fifth the size of the current three-volume, unexpurgated version.
The Chipster didn’t want his full diaries published until 50 years after his death, a timeline
that has now been met. More in this case, however, is not better. As David Pryce-Jones,
reviewing the second volume of these diaries, rightly noted, “the more you read of Chips, the
less likable he becomes.”

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Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries (Volume 3): 1943-57

By Simon Heffer,
Editor

Hutchinson Heinemann

1168 pages

Simon Heffer, an English social historian and conservative columnist, has edited the
Chipster’s diaries with impressive thoroughness. The three volumes together must contain no
fewer than 5,000 of his footnotes, some correcting errors, some offering translations of the
diarist’s pretentious French, the vast majority identifying the hordes of names the Chipster, a
name-dropper of A-bomb intensity, relentlessly drops throughout. Mr. Heffer believes that
“the extraordinary value and appeal of these diaries . . . resides in their absolute

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transparency.” He also believes that, “thanks to his social and political connections, his
diaries are of outstanding significance.”

Is ignorance transparency? Is being socially vicious and politically obtuse significant? Before
World War II the Chipster was a resolute appeaser. He was an unstinting admirer of Neville
Chamberlain and an often harshly detracting observer of Winston Churchill. In his diaries he
goes easy on Hitler, and thinks Mussolini in defeat was mistreated by his own people. While
visiting Salazar’s authoritarian Portugal he wishes England “had a Salazar at home.”

Apart from his beloved royals, not many pass the Chipster’s social muster. He has no tolerance
for the “hoi polloi.” He doesn’t care for the Irish. He doesn’t like Canada. He finds the Spanish
treacherous. The term “middle-class” for him is a pure pejorative. After England goes to war
with the Nazis, he writes: “Jewry the world over triumphs.” He sees film of dead Holocaust
victims and writes that “the rows of dead emaciated bodies” looked like Emma Tennant
Asquith naked.

The Chipster is keen on shopping, buying for himself and for others Fabergé cigarette cases,
snuffboxes and other such items. He congratulates himself on his clothes. “I am only happy in
velvet really,” he writes. He calls Rupert Brabner “next to me the second-best dressed man in
the Commons.” House-proud, he goes to great lengths to describe the way he has furnished
his home at 5 Belgrave Square, where he has entertained “so many kings and queens,” as well
as his country estate at Kelvedon. He preens over his green Rolls-Royce. At one point he asks,
“Am I really so material and mercenary?” The answer, Chipster, is yep, you are.

Women, he recounts in his diaries, regularly fall in love with him. He reports that a Vanderbilt
daughter, Rosemary Warburton, wants to marry him. The scandalous novelist Elinor Glyn,
celebrator of the “It Girl,” “was in love with me in 1918.” One Mme. Wellington Koo “lusts for
my person and made me rather obvious advances.” He believes Princess Cecilie of Prussia
“wants to marry me.” When young, the Chipster was handsome enough for some of this to be
possible, but by the time he turned 40 he had acquired the face he deserved: that of a rather
squinty-eyed banker who is certain to deny your request for a crucial loan.

Most of these diary entries are accounts of lunches, dinners, dances and parties, in which the
Chipster records the names of all present. The names extend from politics to show biz to
literature. A standard entry runs: “I was [seated] between Margaret Leighton, the film
actress, and Princess Marthe Bibesco . . .” A vast cast of characters turns up, including
Somerset Maugham, Marlene Dietrich, Danny Kaye, Princess Margaret, the Lunts, Tennessee
Williams, Mae West, Cole Porter, Mary Pickford, Noël Coward, Ginger Rogers and Evelyn
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Waugh. The egocentric Chipster is not especially interesting on any of these people. Of Igor
Stravinsky, for example, he writes: “He is a small little man unimpressive and uninteresting
looking like a German dentist. He has no manners.” How much more interesting Stravinsky
would have been on the Chipster!

The Chipster’s marriage to Honor Guinness lasted 12 years, producing a son. She cuckolded
him, though it isn’t clear whether he didn’t first do the same to her. (The language is inept: a
distaff equivalent for the word “cuckold” is needed, denoting the pain of the woman
betrayed.) The Chipster was bisexual, but as with most men who consider themselves so, he
was more passionate about sex with men than with women. In passing he recounts various
casual sexual encounters with various “Ganymedes,” his code word for catamites. He reports
on his health, on the quality of his sleep, on having his hair arranged, but for the most part
spares us accounts of his sexual bouts. In a rare exception he writes: “Twice I allowed him
[Rob Bernays, the Liberal MP]—after long persuasion—to whip me, which is his vice.” One
does not long for more of such details.

Two lengthy male love affairs dominate these pages: one with the gardening designer Peter
Coats, the other with the playwright Terrence Rattigan—“the eternal and fatal triangle,” as
the Chipster calls it. Throughout the diaries we get scores of brief reports on the
psychological states of Coats and Rattigan, their ups and downs, dark moods and merriments,
and the effects of these on him. One awaits a dramatic climax to end this threesome, but it
never arrives. Instead Rattigan slowly fades away, leaving Coats the last love of the Chipster’s
life.

The Chipster was, in Samuel Johnson’s phrase, a good hater. He tends to divide the world
between those people who have helped him along his upward way and those who have slowed
him. He lists people—among them Lord and Lady Salisbury, Sir Arthur Penn and Nancy Astor
—whom he hopes “hell’s chariots” may one day “crunch.” He has no kind words for Anthony
Eden. He notes that one of the terrors of dying is the possibility of meeting Duff Cooper in the
afterlife. He singles out Nigel Nicolson, “whom I hate so much . . . that I feel ill when I see
him.” He has a particular loathing for Randolph Churchill, for whom obloquy follows his every
mention of his name in the diaries. The most vitriolic, the most relentless hatred, though, the
Chipster showers upon his wife, whom he divorced in 1945. Honor Guinness remained his pet
bête noire until his death, in 1958, at the age of 61.

Dear me, I seem to have written 1,600 words about the diaries of Henry “Chips” Channon and
none of them kind. Were he alive to read them, he would doubtless condemn me, too, to being

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crunched under one of hell’s chariots. Yet I like to think that he would also realize I had no
choice, recognizing, if any shred of the Chicago boy remained in him, that there are few things
more comical or more worthy of contempt than an American fraudulently playing at being an
English aristocrat, which he, the Chipster, did all his adult life.

—Mr. Epstein’s latest book is “Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits.”

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