Tommy this and Tommy that
Philip Ziegler
END OF AN ERA: LE 1 1ERS AND JOURNALS OF SIR ALAN LASCELLES FROM 1887 TO 1920 edited by Duff Hart-Davis.
Hamish Hamilton, f15.00
The Tommy Lascelles most people knew was the royal Private Secretary: aloof; austere; jealous guardian of the prerogative; a man who had the reputation of not only not suffering fools gladly, but of barely enduring their presence in the same room. It was he, above all, who crushed Peter Townsend's pretensions to the hand of Princess Margaret with a firmness so inflexible as to seem callous to the victims.
He was not an easy man to know. He saw nothing wrong in maintaining total silence on even the most convivial occa- sions: 'In ordinary intercourse, I believe we should all like each other better if we only said something when we had some- thing to say.' It was good sense, no doubt, but hardly calculated to make a party go with a swing. 'I prefer books to men', was another of his slightly daunting pronounce- ments, and an impression of his distaste for humanity was often left with those who encountered him only casually.
Then there was Tommy Lascelles, a splendidly bearded minor prophet, still formidable but mellowed by time, a reposi- tory of infinite knowledge and wisdom. To visit him at his home in Kensington Palace was to drink the waters of history at their purest source. From time to time he would tantalise his guests by extracting a volume of his diaries from their hiding-place and reading a few lines, invariably elegantly Phrased, witty and to the point. 'You won't hear any more of that till long after I'm dead,' he would conclude triumphantly. Now one can read the earlier chapters of his supremely well told story, and follow his career to the moment that he entered the service of the Prince of Wales in 1921.
Two more Tommy Lascelleses emerge. The first was member of the golden gen- eration. Here they all are again: Asquith and Horner, Grenfell and Shaw-Stewart, Diana Cooper and Cynthia Charteris. However much one takes account of the mores of the times, the portrait is not an attractive one. Lascelles was arrogant even by the standards of his generation. 'There's no denying that the bulk of the college at present are smug, respectable, dim and unoriginal', he wrote of his fellow under- graduates at Trinity. 'They do nothing; they aren't clever, they aren't particularly good, and they're damned tedious to meet.'
He was equally dismissive about his contemporaries at Marlborough, where he found that there 'was not a soul brought up to the same social traditions as myself. (I am not more of a snob than other people; it was not merely that they knew none of the people I knew or knew of; but their grandfathers had been county cricketers, and mine, masters of the Bramham Moor).'
His judgments of those he met in society were sharp and often caustic. Of Elizabeth Asquith, later Princess Bibesco, he re- marked after he had endured a taxing dinner party at which she had relentlessly aired her acquaintanceships among the mighty: 'How are poor dilettante bluffers like myself to keep up our ends in the face of a vivacious parrot refuting one with autographed opinions of the world's mas- ters?'
And yet he was intelligent, intellectually curious, high-spirited and never compla- cent. He sensed that there was something missing in his life. At the age of 17 he read Howard Annesley Vachell's The Hill, a somewhat emotional novel about life at Harrow, and commented: 'A good book, but it made me v. sad. It describes a real friendship, such as I have never seen outside a book, but have always dreamt of. I wonder if such friends do exist.' At Oxford he found many friends, yet when he was 24 he could still write that he had one end which had never changed appreci- ably: 'to find one individual to whom I can devote just all I am.'
Then came Tommy Lascelles the soldier. He had already done service with the Yeomanry, and hastened to join his regim- ent as soon as war came. As a cavalryman he was spared the worst carnage of the trenches, but he lost most of his closest friends and saw more than his fair share of action. In 1917 he won the Military Cross (`Typically,' writes Duff Hart-Davis who has edited these letters and journals with a dedication worthy of that prince among editors, his father, Sir Rupert, `Tommy nowhere described the action for which he won the medal').
His attitude at first was not unlike that of his great friend, Julian Grenfell. 'But it's something, isn't it,' he wrote just before leaving for France, 'to be able to say at last "Thank God I'm an Englishman", without any stupid cynicism or self conscious fear of jingoism?' The horrors of war never wholly obliterated this first fine careless rapture. 'I am quite certain the war has done me good and that nine out of ten men I know are better and jollier than they were before . . . I think the world would have been intolerable without the war, though with it, it will only just be toler- able.' The story ends in India, where Lascelles went after the war as A.D.C. to his brother- in-law, George Lloyd, Governor of Bom- bay. There are marvellous descriptions of tiger shoots and fishing in Kashmir; cau- tious approval of Mahatma Gandhi — 'a gentle, fluttering little man . . . Misguided but not a miscreant; he wouldn't hurt a fly'; scornful dismissal of the ability of the Indians to 'govern themselves as an en- lightened democracy'. And there is the wooing of his future wife, Joan Thesiger, daughter of the Viceroy: 'You belong so much to my life that I can't think of you as another human being; you're just the incarnation of all I want and all I love and long for.' At last he had found the indi- vidual to whom he could totally devote himself.
And so to the last entry in 1920: 'To St. James's Palace, where I made my bow to H.R.H. He won me competely — he is the most attractive man I've ever met.' But that is another story, and only if further instalments of these diaries are published will it ever be told in full.
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