Old boys

Alastair Forbes

Friends, Enemies and Sovereigns John Wheeler-Bennett £4.95) (Macmillan Footprints in Time John Colville (Collins £4.95) Of Generals and Gardens Peter Coats (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £6.95)

Here are three elegant and highly readable books out of the very top drawer, their authors all handsome, sociable men who have made the most of their advantages and talents and led happy and useful lives. Sir

• Jack' Wheeler-Bennett, the eminent historian, died last year soon after completing this thIrd and last volume of his recollections, in Which he characteristically takes for a text words Wellington let fall on the field of Waterloo as he raised his hat to a gallant enemy: 'I salute the courage and devotion of art age that is no longer ours.' If few of the fascinating footnotes to history in Friends, Enemies and Sovereigns are of the kind to catch the fancy of Fleet Street serialisation editors, nearly all deserve study beyond the confines of Clio's acadeulic clique, particularly his sidelights on the Nuremberg Trials and the in-gathering of the Nazi archives. He was not scandalised hY the presence of Soviet judges at Nuremberg (though Mr Crosland might Drofitably mug up what he has to write of I(.atYn). only by Moscow's open interference With them. His excessive discretion prevents huh throwing much fresh light on the postwar troubles of that confused anti-totalitarian, poor Otto John, to whom he re.mained wholly loyal, as has our mutual friend, Prince Louis Ferdinand, the HeirAPParent to the Hohenzollern throne and thC choice of the July '44 plotters for a new German Head of State. It was almost inevit4ble. too, that the inept Colonel who innocently moved Claus von Stauffenberg's bomb a, way from Hitler should turn out to be 4ri old riding companion' of the author. I When Wheeler-Bennett was persuaded by :an:1h Berlin to teach at Oxford, one of his rst Pupils was Antony Wedgwood Benn, in whom no signs, alas, have yet emerged of the exemplary, worldlywise anschauung of

this Founding Fellow of St Anthony's.

The Founding Father, indeed 'onlie °egetter,' of Churchill College, Cambridge °I1 the other hand was not so much its dugust eponym himself but Jack Colville u. nkindly reckoned 'England's greatest snob' ,°Y the Daily Express, the Civil Servant who '14.d been one of the wartime Premier's ,l3r.te secretaries before becoming his trye ivand and, after his retirement, the fund (user for the scientific and technological nstilution that is the splendid memorial to a politician who was barely numerate and relied on a dubious Oxford statistician to be an extra lobe to his brain. Colville first wrote about Churchill, and very well too, in Action This Day, the excellent Festschrift in aid of Churchill College which Sir John Wheeler-Bennett edited some eight years ago. Now his Mandragora-Mandarin prose, an art form he has mastered from A to Z-Z-Z over a lifetime of minutes, memoranda and letters to the Times has been polished and sharpened and his range of reminiscence widened, bringing the style up to the level of top Foreign Office belle-lettrist Sir Charles Johnston.

Colville was brought up in a privileged Cadogan Place nursery which overlooked the late Mr Horace Smith's awesome Livery Stables and Manege. He carried Queen Mary's train at Buckingham Palace Presentation Courts, his remarkable liberal mother combining her duties as a Juvenile Magistrate and co-opted member of the Public Health Committee of the Labour Borough Council of Shoreditch with that of a lifetime Lady-in-Waiting. Her son himself did a stint as a courtier when he was secretary to the present monarch before her accession and he chose a Lady-in-Waiting to be his own wife. With his eye on diplomacy, he was packed off, between Harrow and Trinity, Cambridge to Germany where he rather primly (elsewhere he blames Roy Jenkins and Bishop Robinson for the Permissive Society) hints that he was depucelle by a 'personable' Karlsruhe tart called Mitzi recommended by his crammer, Herr Professor Nohe, who was to provide Terry Rattigan with a transposable model for French Without Tears. He found it 'impossible not to be infected by' Nazi enthusiasms and on his return, after shooting his pheasants, drinking his champagne and smoking his cigars even had the sheer goyish chutzpah to tell his host, Mr Lionel de Rothschild, that there was a lot to be said for Hitler. Only on a return visit to the Black Forest four years later did he notice alarming increases in Strength and diminutions in Joy. But, though sure, in 1938, that Austria and Czechoslovakia were 'aligned in the Fiihrer's sights' he complacently felt with most of his countrymen that 'we were not in the mood to confront a united Germany' and thought 'the best bet' seemed f o be 'luck and the belief that God is an Englishman,'

Such views made him

persona gratissima in 10 Downing Street where he was sent. as an Assistant Private Secretary to Neville Chamberlain after a short initiation at the Foreign Office, where he had been one of the very few to join in the cheering that went so disastrously to Chamberlains head on his return from Munich. He received a ' pertinent rebuke from that remarkable diplomatist Sir Orme ('Moley.) Sargent, incidentally a great Wheeler-Bennett hero and crony, in appearance like a Spy cartoon of himself, who drily observed. 'You might think we had won a major victory instead of betraying a minor country.' Wheeler

Bennett looks back on Munich as 'inescapable' but remarks that the Czechs saved us by putting their heads so quietly on the block.

Colville was only one of very many in the upper echelons of administration who were totally horrified by the advent to supreme power of Churchill whom he regarded as an 'ambitious adventurer,' a view confirmed by the monumental balls-up the First Lord had just made of the Norwegian Campaign, which by an irony was to result not in his disgrace but Chamberlain's.

Colville proved a slow convert. When I first met him in October 1940 he surprised and even shocked me by singing Chamberlain's praises all the way from No. 10 to Chequers in terms so pompous that 1 thought, as the French say, that he had swallowed an umbrella, in this case Chamberlain's. It reminded me of Godfrey Winn who saw 'no sacrilege in coupling God's name with Chamberlain's.' However, as he recently explained of Churchill on TV, 'I think one became attached to him' though adding 'I doubt if he really had the gift of leadership.' Yet against the disorderliness of his working methods could be balanced his absence of Chamberlainian aloofness and his utter lack of vanity, together with a disarming and affectionate humour to sponge clean traces of his occasional tendency to be 'perfectly beastly.' This book makes available to thousands anecdotes that have long circulated to hundreds, few ever having had for long a high security classification. Sometimes the author leaves the beans only half spilled as when he describes his guilt when he failed to stay the Samaritan course beyond 4 a.m. when former U.S. Ambassador Gil Winant, of whom he draws a sympathetic picture, begged him 'Don't leave me, please don't leave me' shortly before his suicide, not revealing that the final pressure that triggered it was his desperate, unrequited passion for one of Churchill's daughters. Colville's special niche as the PM's favourite was made secure when, having fixed himself up with some very costly contact lenses. he learned to fly for the RAF, later spending three lucky and happy months in Mustangs over Normandy in the invasion summer of '44. The younger man returned the elder's affection. It was to lead to a curious episode in the nation's history when Colville, with assistance from Christopher Soames, virtually took over the government of the country. This was in June 1953 when Churchill suffered the most severe of his strokes, one which others besides his indiscreet and pessimistic GP doubted he could survive.

His successor-designate, Eden, was in Boston, Mass, recovering from delicate surgery. Colville's former boss, the Queen, was advised to make do from day to day with a sort of cross between political regency and council of state. for which the only precedent seemed to be in Mrs Woodrow Wilson's handling of a somewhat similar situation in the American Executive. 'The Press was squared' (Colville having alerted Beaverbrook, Camrose and Bracken at the same time as the Palace, while the ever stalwart Rab and Bobbety were made charges d'alfaires). As for the Edens in America, they were only very sketchily informed (I heard from Boston that my own confidential account was the first full one they had had, though the newspaper I was then writing for would not allow any discussion of the issue). It was a most peculiar affair. Churchill's recovery was entirely due to the response of his formidable and admirable character to the challenge, but it was not complete. The now indulgent Colville failed to detect in him what Charles de Gaulle had seen in another once heroic national figure: 'raj vu apparaitre chez Petain deux phenomenes contradictoires: le desinteret senile de tout et l'ambit ion senile de tout.' The first was to make him miss the European bus, the second to allow his remaining energy and fame to waste away from infantile 'summititis; the virus of which is perhaps endemic in the Downing Street woodwork.

Somewhere in his entertaining book Colville mentions that 'All military commanders, even those who failed' were respected by Churchill 'with the solitary exception of Wavell.' Of Churchill, early in the war Lloyd George had said, 'He has at least one great general—Wavell. I was not so fortunate. But, mark my words, he will get rid of Wavell.'

For Peter Coats, who recently had the somewhat unnerving experience, while they were both weekend guests in a ci-devant courtier's country house, of watching Col ville impassively studying his autobiography as if it were another incoming telegram.

Wavell is the personage who played a role in his life more central and important perhaps even than that of Churchill in Col ville's. This very good-looking, sunnynatured, well-educated blond younger son of a large Scottish family reduced from being very rich to being just rich, possessed a love of pleasure and capacity for unlimited work that were to make him turn out to be an inspired choice for ADC and PA, later Viceroy's Comptroller, to the shy, often taciturn military genius so shabbily treated by both Fate and 'Frocks.' Coats's is by far the most enjoyable of these three books and interspersed with the frivolous are a great number of important historical footnotes. No more than his contemporary Colville does he resemble that Peter de Vries character who thought he could 'say my childhood was as unhappy as the next braggart's' but his is better described and one finds oneself more quickly drawn to him and his likes and enthusiasms. (There seems something downright kinky about Colville's expressions of weakness for those repulsive creatures Lord Cherwell and the gone-togroundnuts-in-Ghana Geoffrey Bing, QC.) Coats's portrait of Wavell against changing backgrounds all strikingly described, is must reading to be set alongside the official biography and documents, particularly so perhaps being his references to the origins of the Greek Campaign which was to be the beginning of the end for Wavell in Churchill's eyes and esteem.

In youth Coats was something of a Cherubino, with a libidinous readiness for all available gallantry and dalliance that was to commend him to, amongst other ladies, the great Pola Negri. But just before the war he met Chips Channon, whose champagne Colville had drunk to the health of the 'King over the Water' (Chamberlain) in May 1940. It was a coup de fintdre on both sides. His book is largely based on the letters that passed between them, evidently very good letters indeed. After the war they lived together in perfect harmony and concord until Channon's death, sharing all interests save politics, perhaps the most dignified and happy homosexual menage it has been my privilege to know. Today Coats is a great garden designer and editor, greyer but as gregarious as ever. He is a splendid raconteur (he even has a funny Churchill anecdote to trump Colville's best) and is obviously one of those lucky life-enhancers who succeeds at all he attempts. And if he has picked publishers notorious for their poor proof-reading, he and they can perhaps take comfort in the much more unusual number of misspellings and mistakes Collins and Macmillan have allowed to creep into the texts of Colville and Wheeler-Bennett. As for Indexes, n'en parlons pas! They suffer from the English disease.