The Pursuit of Laughter (14 page)

Being a lady in waiting is not all beer and skittles. Somebody I knew was in waiting to Queen Mary in the war and nearly died of cold. Fires in bedrooms were forbidden. She asked if she might collect a few dry twigs and make one in her freezing room, but was told she could not. It speaks volumes for something or other that she did not resign. She helped Queen Mary with her war work, they collected ploughs and harrows left
conveniently
under hedges by the local farmers and dragged them triumphantly to a heap they made of scrap metal. The farmers rescued their tools as soon as the Queen had gone in to her tea.

Anne Somerset’s book is well-written, well-researched and well-produced. The terrible story of Lady Flora Hastings, accused by Queen Victoria and others of bearing an
illegitimate
child when in reality she was mortally ill with cancer of the stomach, is excellently told.

Tittle tattle about Court life inevitably comes from diarists: Pepys, Evelyn, Saint Simon, Lord Hervey, Fanny Burney, some near the events they describe, others relying on
gossip. Perhaps we are too ready to believe everything they say. When one thinks of
modern
diarists, for example Harold Nicolson and the nonsense he wrote, possibly too much credence is accorded to their predecessors.

It is a pity that ladies in waiting do not, like the confidante, wear white linen; how chic it would be! The modern ideal is to fade gracefully and unobtrusively into the bus queue.

Cocktails and Laughter
is a photograph album. For people over sixty it is like the old song ‘Thanks for the memory… How lovely it was!’ As with all snapshots a little imagination must be used if anyone is to be convinced that it really was lovely; they are almost as untrue to life as Cecil Beaton’s cellophane and balloons or modern photographs featuring broken blood vessels and dirty wrinkles. Hugo Vickers is a perfect choice for writer of the preface. He is so kind, so indulgent to OAPs that he makes us out to be positively human. Loelia Duchess of Westminster, Lady Lindsay, is the daughter and granddaughter of courtiers; her father wrote a book about his years at Court which is brilliantly funny.

Proofreading of the captions is very poor. Verda for Verdura, Morosoni for Morosini, Princess Jane di San Faustino, most American of Americans, a ‘smart Italian’ and there is no such person as Lady Venetia Stanley. Not that it greatly matters. The theory that
people
now live almost for ever gets a bashing in
Cocktails and Laughter
, only a handful survive who might grumble at such trifles. Even if the young don’t think it looks as lovely as all that, I notice they are glued to this book, gazing rapt at their grannies and gaffers; it will therefore have a great success.

Ladies in Waiting
, Somerset, A. (1984)

Cocktails and Laughter; Photograph Albums
, Lindsay, L. ed. Vickers, H. (1983)

Since Lord Drogheda is my exact contemporary and we have a number of friends and acquaintances in common, and because he has been so closely associated with two
institutions
from which I have derived immense enjoyment and profit, the
Financial Times
and Covent Garden, it has been a pleasure to read his memoirs. He quite obviously has a
perfect
genius for getting on with people and encouraging them to get on with one another (what is now called public relations). He helped his newspaper and the opera house to run along as smoothly as possible despite all the difficult, spiky and quarrelsome individuals who inhabit Fleet Street and the world of music.

If his memoirs are less than lively it is probably precisely because of this smoothing and soothing quality of his. He says one of his friends described him as waspish, but there is small evidence of waspishness; except for a little dig now and again at some rather unpopular figure there are roses all the way.

When he writes about his mother the book lights up, but there is not nearly enough
about her. After his parents were divorced she married a Mexican polo player, but the marriage did not last and she had a series of friends. During the war her friend was a handsome Albanian who was a marvellous cook. This in itself shows what a
wonderfully
clever woman she was, because marvellous cooks were rare and they were needed when spam and smog or whatever wartime foods were called were on the menu. Chatin Sarachi—we could have done with more about this delightful creature, and perhaps less about some of Lord Drogheda’s colleagues in Bracken House. (There is a photograph of St Paul’s seen from a window at Bracken House. But what about Bracken House from St Paul’s? The post-war business community has a lot to answer for in the way the space made by bombs was used.)

This brings me to my chief complaint: the treatment accorded here to Brendan Bracken. It was through him that Lord Drogheda’s career in Fleet Street was made: they were friends and colleagues for twenty five years. Bracken had bluffed and shoved his way to the top with the most amazing mixture of talent, effrontery and mendacity. In spite of being hideously ugly he was very attractive because of his intelligence, wit and oddity. Almost none of this comes through. Working so closely with Brendan for so long, there must be dozens of hilarious stories hidden in Lord Drogheda’s memory. Loyalty is all very well, but there need have been nothing disloyal. Brendan destroyed his papers at his death, but this did not prevent his biography being written, more than once. To make him just another tycoon with his pockets full of directorships to shower on his favourites is not really doing him a service. At the end of his life he wrote Lord Drogheda a letter from South Africa with sound advice on how to make, and keep, money. On no account must it be held in sterling, said Brendan with commendable foresight.

One episode in connection with Covent Garden remains unexplained. Why, after the war, was one of the very few authentic musical geniuses these islands have produced
carefully
excluded? Sir Thomas Beecham would have been a giant among pygmies, is
probably
the answer. It would not have been comfortable for the pygmies. In 1956 Beecham wrote a sensible letter to
The Times
, suggesting ‘a full and enlightened inquiry into every branch of its activities… undertaken by an independent body’. Lord Drogheda describes this letter as ‘disgraceful’. He adds that an article in the
New Statesman
by Desmond Shawe-Taylor put Sir Thomas in his place. Desmond Shawe-Taylor is an excellent critic, but
surely
Sir Thomas’s ‘place’ was at Covent Garden.

Another small complaint: Lord Drogheda’s predecessor as chairman there was Sir John Anderson, with whom he worked for a long time, and who with his wife Ava was a source of endless amusement to friends. You would never guess it from this book; they are taken at their own, very high, valuation. (Imagine for one moment what Malcolm Muggeridge would have made of the Andersons, had he been harnessed to Sir John.)

The number of committees Lord Drogheda served on makes you dizzy; plenty of praise and bouquets all round are bestowed.

Well, it is perfectly easy to see what is meant.

Lord Drogheda has had an eminently useful life and he has enjoyed himself, which is admirable and disarming. His book could have been a bit shorter, and a bit cheaper, and jokes might not have been quite so strictly rationed; but it is not nearly as dull as the Edwardian lady’s country diary* which heads the best-seller list.

*
The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady
(1978)

Double Harness: Memoirs of Lord Drogheda
, Earl of Drogheda,
Books and Bookmen
(1978)

To see ourselves as others see us—is it a gift? Or is it the very opposite, something we should on no account wish for anyone we care about? In his memoirs, Lord Norwich
portrays
himself, presumably, quite truthfully as he imagines himself to be—statesman, author, man of the world—and, as he writes well and almost succeeds in giving an
impression
of calm and balance, his book may be read in the future, and he taken at his own
valuation
, by those who seek to discover from contemporary sources why England finds
herself
in her present reduced circumstances.

This book is, of course, not only by, but also about, Mr Duff Cooper, who tells of his childhood, school, Oxford; of the years when he worked as a clerk in the Foreign Office, and the six months at the end of the First World War when he was in the army. He tells of his entry into politics, and the various ministerial offices he occupied; then his
resignation
after the Munich crisis, and how, on September 1st, 1939, when he heard that ‘the
second
World War had begun my heart felt lighter than it had felt for a year’. He describes his indignation and worry next day—‘we went to the Savoy Grill. I felt I could eat
nothing
, but dealt very successfully with a cold grouse’—lest, after all, the Allies should fail to declare war on Germany, and his relief when finally they did so.

His praise of his own talents he reinforces with numerous quotations from his
fan-mail
: ‘I had a talent for public speaking’, he tells us. The present reviewer never heard him in the House of Commons, so cannot judge his parliamentary performances which are said to have been on a high level; on the public platform he was very poor, delivering not a speech but a rather dull lecture, and losing his temper with interrupters. That is the key to much of his character. ‘I am apt to become heated in argument,’ he says. At how many of the pleasant dinner parties and luncheons to which he refers did the veins on his
forehead
start out, as he seemed to approach apoplexy, as the result of some trivial difference
of opinion? The interesting part about this performance was its effect on those present. Let no one imagine that the sight of a middle-aged Cabinet Minister raging in fury at a
fellow
-guest in a private house was alarming, for, unless an actual burst was feared, it was not. Any stranger present must have been rather amazed; but it was such an everyday
occurrence
that it aroused no more than a feeling of mildest irritation, embarrassment, or amusement, according to the temperament of the onlookers. ‘Little Duff did a veiners last night’ his companions would relate, and no one was in the least surprised to hear it. He tells much about his private, as a background to his public, life, so it is as well to get it in perspective; it is in the light of this rather excitable personality that the events described in his book should be read and judged.

It is worth while to take a careful look at the photographs he has chosen to illustrate it—the neat little boy; the vulgar youth with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth; the cocky MP standing beside his beautiful wife, wearing her famous ‘Madonna’ expression but minus the decorative bandages; the ambassador in his library, looking very weary, as if he had just calmed down after a particularly violent veiners.

Mr Duff Cooper first entered Parliament as Tory member for Oldham. He lost his seat in 1929, and was nursing the Winchester constituency when St George’s Westminster fell vacant and the Press lords put up an anti-Baldwin Conservative candidate of their own in the resulting bye-election. He decided to fight as official candidate. This was an election which tested the power of the popular press: the
Daily Mail, Daily Express, Evening News
and
Evening Standard
—‘every issue of each of them was devoted to damaging my cause’—had a good case. ‘Discontent with Baldwin’s leadership was not confined to those who doubted the wisdom of his Indian policy,’ writes the author. Lord Beaverbrook, who ‘fought hard and spoke daily’, sought to dissuade him from standing. ‘He felt sure I should lose.’ But ‘I won by more than five thousand votes’—and as to Baldwin ‘the Press lords by their attack had strengthened his position’.