HENRY FAIRLIE

George Gale remembers

the journalist, who died this week

IN THE early 1950s the Clachan in Mitre Court off Fleet Street, by the side entrance to El Vino, was a dark and grubby ale and wine house, kept by a fat and uncivil woman whose name I now forget. It was very much the local of the then Manchester Guardian's London office, and most even- ings Gerard Fay, lain Hamilton and myself would find ourselves there. Soon a fourth figure started joining us regularly, fleeing from the confines of Printing House Square and the Times' pub.

He was about six feet tall, with intensely black hair and even in those days his face was pretty red. He was a leader writer on the Times, specialising in domestic politics, and his name was Henry Fairlie. After a brief and unsuccessful stint as a Guardian leader writer in Manchester, I had survived reduction to the reporters' ranks and had just been made deputy Labour correspon- dent to Mark Arnold-Forster. Henry was a couple of years older than I, in his late twenties; he had read history at Oxford, I at Cambridge; we had both missed military service for health reasons; we had both married precipitately and unwisely; he knew more political history than I, I more political philosophy than he. Already he gave the impression of understanding the Tory party, to me a mysterious and, under Churchill, inaccessible organisation, while I, perforce, had the much easier task of giving the impression of understanding Labour. We both drank inordinately and beyond our means. We enjoyed an instant friendship.

One attribute, however, set Henry apart from Fay, Hamilton and most of the rest of us who argued long and noisily over our beers in the Clachan, and that attribute was made flesh in the statuesque shape of the beautiful American Euphemia Halsey, all six-foot-two of her, whom Henry occa- sionally brought along. She towered over us and had the disconcerting habit of constantly smoothing her breasts with her hands as she talked, with amazing unself- consciousness, of such pleasures as Henry urinating over her. Henry would blush a bit at this, then cart her off to dinner at the Ritz, a favourite haunt of his. He turned out to be a great hunter of women, enjoying the chase, the conquest and the subsequent captivity. His taste in women was remarkably good on the whole, and although invariably he ended up treating them appallingly, none of them as far as I know ever held it against him, but would instead affectionately laugh off the experi- ence with 'Oh, well, that was Henry.' I suspect he played the little boy lost a bit, extracting the maternal instinct from the unlikeliest of sources. At all events, Henry was a kind of male Diana, which could not be said of the rest of us.

Henry and I began covering party con- ferences together. At one in 1952 we decided to have a game of table tennis one afternoon while the Labour Party was having its private financial session. The ping-pong table was taken by two Times reporters who, when they saw Henry, promptly downed their bats, giving way to the superior leader writer. Henry blustered a bit but did not insist that they finish their game; he enjoyed such class distinctions. At a subsequent Labour Party conference, this time in Scarborough, he and I were walking along the lower promenade below the Grand Hotel (the party headquarters) when we decided to turn into a café for some fish and chips. In the far corner we saw Tom Driberg, chairman of the party that year, necking with a bit of rough trade. We thought nothing of it. Journal- ism was indeed different then. We had a front-page sensation in front of our very eyes, and all we did was finish our fish and chips.

Henry was building up a considerable reputation with his Times leading articles but outside Fleet Street his name was largely unknown. At the beginning of 1955, however, Ian Gilmour, then owner- editor of The Spectator, prompted by lain Hamilton, who had joined The Spectator from the Guardian, invited him to write the regular Political Commentary at the front of the magazine. He began doing so in February 1955 and continued until June 1956. It was not a long period; but it was enough to make Henry's reputation and improve the Spectator's.

The impression he left was so powerful that it is hard to believe it was made in so short a time. But what a time it was! A boatload of Jamaican immigrants was play- ed ashore by a ship's band in Plymouth, but already doubts were being expressed about the wisdom of such immigration. Khrushchev took over full power in the Soviet Union and denounced Stalin. Chur- chill resigned as Prime Minister and Eden, succeeding him, promptly called a general election, increasing the Tory majority. We had a dock strike and a state of national emergency. Attlee resigned and Hugh Gaitskell became leader of the Labour Party. British reinforcements were sent to Cyprus, and Makarios was deported. Khrushchev, visiting Britain, said he'd vote Tory, and Nasser seized the Suez Canal. Such were the raw materials for Henry's commentaries. We can see now that it was a time of change. The Suez campaign, Macmillan and the swinging Sixties all lay ahead; but there was no shortage of material already to hand for Henry's pecul- iar band of romantic Tory pessimism and moral discrimination to work with.

His great success at The Spectator led to his departure from it; the Daily Mail beckoned and Henry went. But by now he was also contributing regularly to Encoun- ter, where he elaborated his concept of 'the Establishment', making clear what should have been obvious to all but had not been hitherto, that there existed a nexus of people bound together as an unrecognised ruling class, serving always their own class interest and cutting across party allegiances and boundaries. It was an insight on a par with the little boy who saw the emperor had no clothes. Although others had fleetingly glimpsed it, it was Henry who saw it clearly and gave new meaning to the old clerical word. The insight is as relevant now, and as necessary to any understand- ing of British politics, as it was when Henry first popularised it. His intensely serious arid frequently moral journalism — he made remarkably few concessions to the popular press — continued to exist alongside a private life which was pretty rackety. He was given to extravagant gestureS. Although he was always broke, he spent ,a great deal of time and money at the Ritz, where he liked the downstairs bar (long since, alas, closed), with its understanding barman and long line of credit. He also liked taking tea in the Ritz. If he saw an attractive and unattached woman across the room he would get a porter to fetch a bouquet of flowers from Moyses Stevens on the other side of Piccadilly; Henry would present it to her, if necessary going down on his knees to do so. It did not always work, but sometimes it did, and anyway Henry loved the flamboyance of the gesture. He once arranged a complicated elopement with the strikingly beautiful wife of a journalist he knew well. They were to meet at Heathrow airport and fly off together. She left behind a note for her husband on the mantelpiece, but Henry never turned up at the airport. He probably could not afford the fare. Fortunately, the frustrated wife got back home in time to retrieve the note before her husband could read it.

Henry had married early. Lisette, his wife, had been a nurse. They had three children, Simon, Charlotte and Emma, of whom Henry was very fond in his way. They lived for a considerable time in a rented house on the outskirts of Lewes, near to Malcolm and Kitty Muggeridge, with whom Henry was particularly close. Peter Utley once described Fairlie as Mug- geridge's disciple — an unfair and, I think, jealous remark. But that Henry admired Muggeridge greatly, and felt an affinity towards the old sinner turned apocalyptic moralist, is beyond doubt; Muggeridge, for his part, liked and admired Henry in return, and was one of those to whom Henry, and subsequently Lisette, would turn for support when need arose. So, too, was the great Daily Mail and Punch cartoonist Leslie Illingworth. The family next moved to Maidenhead, to another rented house, by the river. It was here that Lisette received a telephone call to the effect that Henry had been arrested for debt at the conclusion of an Any Questions Programme on which he had appeared and been taken to Brixton where he would he kept overnight.

She bore his behaviour with many com- plaints, and eventually introduced her mother into the Maidenhead household, Which helped its finances but not its attrac- tions so far as Henry was concerned. By this time he had left the Mail, and was freelancing, working for the Express as Well as for magazines. He had accompa- nied Macmillan on his winds of change trip to .Africa and tended to find in the British Prime Minister something of a political hero. But he became increasingly con- vinced that for the kind of journalism he wanted to write the United States was the only place to be. He grew irritated and disillusioned by what seemed to him to be the parochial nature of British politics. This irritation was no doubt compounded by his domestic and financial situations. He had made some offensive remarks about Lady Antonia Fraser on the Rediffusion Three After Six programme, questioning her fitness to pronounce upon the moral behaviour of the young, arid when she sued the BBC and him for libel he made no response to the BBC lawyers' requests for assistance. Without a case, the BBC settled for itself, but not for Henry, who was left with a judgment hanging over him. On top of this and his more mundane debts, there was yet another reason for him to look longingly towards the States. He had be- gun an affair with Polly Kraft, the wealthy and attractive wife of the American politic- al columnist Joseph Kraft.

In 1966 he went around El Vino paying off his personal debts, said a temporary farewell to his wife and children, and flew off to Washington and the Krafts' hospit- able and most comfortable Georgetown house. Although he remained married to Lisette, he never returned to England, and she was never allowed to live with him in America. For a while he wrote a column for John Junor's Sunday Express, having arranged for the weekly £100 fee to be paid to Lisette. But eventually he stopped filing. He began a new career, largely based on the New Republic, in Washing- ton. At the same time, his politics veered sharply leftwards. His welcome in the Kraft household having eventually ex- pired, he vas thereafter on his own. But he became a cult figure to young American visionaries and liberals, and was by no means averse to holding regular court for them. They, in return, did his laundry, made his meals, brought him drinks, washed up the dishes and, if they were female and attractive enough and willing, were invited to join him in bed. Sometimes he had a flat, sometimes not; when not, the New Republic's Washington offices served as a place in which to doss down.

He lived constantly on the brink of indigence, but whenever he had money he splashed it around. His hair remained as black as ever, his face got redder, and he never acquired any trace of American accent or vocabulary. He remained very attractive to women; when he was nudging 60, he arranged to travel throughout the States in one of those large Winnebago mobile caravans, chauffered by a pretty young 20-year-old Washington waitress he had encountered in a restaurant he fre- quented by Dupont Circle and where, thanks to her, he enjoyed complimentary food.

A book was arranged, together with regu- lar reports in one of the New York papers, but the enterprises were never completed. He could not, would not, or at any rate did not, make the trip. He became more and more reluctant to see old friends and acquaintances from England who passed through Washington and although he con- stantly talked of coming back, and had standing and lucrative invitations from papers such as the Sunday Times to do so, he never got round to it, and I do not think he ever intended to either. His debts here had long since become time-expired; Anto- nia Fraser had always made it clear she had no intention of pursuing him for her libel damages; he would have been much better off here, where his reputation continued to flourish among younger people who had never known him, than there; but he was a stubborn man, he had a mulish streak, and I think he took the view that to return would be an acknowledgment of defeat.

Defeated he never was. He had enor- mous resilience and stamina. He survived largely self-inflicted batterings that would have overwhelmed most men. He was unsinkable. He remained to the end of his life absolutely unscathed by his living of it. He was enormous fun. He was right in the middle of a group of us who included Perry and Claudie Worsthorne, Kingsley and Hilly Amis, Paul and Marigold Johnson, and such late friends as John Raymond and Maurice Richardson (who once laid him out from a sitting position in' a taxi with a right hand to the jaw).

He was noisy and pugnacious in argu- ment but without rancour. He laughed at himself as readily as at others. He would slip into dark despair, a Scottish black dog on his back; but then, with what under his usually terrible circumstances was almost superhuman strength, he would pull him- self out of his slough of despond. He had a residual Christian faith. But he also had an irresponsibility that at times made him the despair of his family and friends. He was skilled at biting the hand that fed him. He hated being under an obligation to anyone. He was a tormented man, we got on like a house on fire, and I loved him dearly.