Chips : the diaries of Sir Henry Channon

Henry Channon was one of those people in British politics who was everywhere yet did little. Born to an Anglo-American family, a visit to London during the First World Ear awakened a lifelong Anglophilia that he slaked by moving to England and assiduously worked his way up the social ladder. Marriage to the Guinness family gave his entrée into politics via a safe seat in Parliament, where he sat from 1935 until his early death in 1958.

Apart from a three-year period as a Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office Channon spent his career in the House of commons as a back-bencher. Yet his name looms larger today than that of many of his office-holding contemporaries thanks to his diaries. Kept intermittently from 1918 until show more 1954, they are a chronicle of a wealthy and socially-connected politician who dined with royalty and served alongside giants. The text drips with names from the era’s social register and from the highest reaches of British politics, all of which Channon lovingly recorded as evidence of his status both at Westminster and in London society.

What makes his diaries so readable, though, is Channon's eye for the telling detail and his ear for the revealing anecdote. Thanks to them the reader gets a series of glimpses into British politics and high society in the 1930s and 1940s, all of which are amusingly if snobbishly recounted. Through them we also get a sense of Channon himself: an ambitious figure who never reached the heights he thought himself capable of attaining. While he may never have become the political figure he hoped he would be, his diaries are in themselves an achievement which we can treasure. Even in their heavily expurgated form they are among the best eyewitness accounts of the era, and while Simon Heffer's forthcoming edition promises a more comprehensive sampling of entries he will be hard pressed to improve upon Robert Rhodes James's excellent introduction to Channon's life. show less

Intriguing diaries of American turned Englishman Chips Channon, whose social and political life in the 1930s and 1940s is catalogued in these expurgated but still important diaries. Enjoyable to read. Much material on the Abdication and the run-up to WWII. The full diaries will be available in a few years' time, hopefully.

The positives are in the observations, some very close, some detached, of 1930s and 1940s British politics. The fact that the diaries were edited with a heavy hand is a negative, and Channon’s snobbery and social climbing can be hard to take.

Sir Henry was a Member of Parliament before, during, and after WWII. Though he took his responsibilities seriously, "Chips" loved his friends and a good party.

The rating reflects on the diary NOT the person, he was a snob and highly privileged, white, male with no redeeming qualities at all, except for his love of his son. The editing seems to be reasonably well done.