Portraits and Miniatures (35 page)

He, in return, seemed to have been told that my main private occupation was playing croquet, and with immense politeness had absorbed a good deal about the game. Ms Nicky Smith's current work was not available to him, although he, or his Court Chamberlain, had become as well informed as if they had followed closely her regular contributions to
Country Life
under the appropriate pseudonym of Arthur Mallet. The only trouble was that he appeared to think that I was a world-class croquet player. I could not tell him that I employed professionals to win championships, and I felt it would have been an anti-climax to say that my experience was mostly confined to post-prandial foursomes, often on roughish ground, which was best compensated for by making the hoops a little wider than regulation, after weekend country lunch parties. So both our subjects were founded on elements of misapprehension.

Nevertheless, I did spend a considerable amount of time in the 1960s and 1970s - more so than I do now - on the croquet lawn. This was partly because I often played on my own, having
discovered that it was a good form of patience. These solitary sessions could take the form of seeing in how few strokes one could get round the long course of ten hoops and the stick, and sometimes, if everything went right, achieving it in under twenty. This was quite good practice discipline, although I always disliked being made to play with others the bastard game of golf croquet with its one stroke a go as opposed to the full game of roquets, croquets and the possibility of long breaks.

More frequently, however, I made my patience take the form of the full game but playing all four balls myself, which at least avoided the tedium of waiting for others. The disadvantages were the difficulty of remembering what point in the course they had each reached, the curious fact that one's loyalties became attached to red and yellow, or less frequently to black and blue, which made it difficult to try equally hard with the unfavoured pair of balls, and at the end of the session the very limited satisfaction to be gained from victory over oneself. However, I suppose it provided good practice as well as fresh air, and improved one's performance for more competitive but still strictly informal encounters.

At least since the ‘foot on one's own ball and opponent into the bushes' form of play went out
circa
1890, I have never been able to understand the theory of croquet being a peculiarly vicious and bad-temper-producing game, as compared with, say, tennis. It is not exhausting, it has a certain gentle rhythm, and its billiards in the open-air aspect, with the verdure of country lawns substituted for the smoke-filled saloon bar traditions of billiards itself, ought surely to produce calm and benignity. Yet in practice I do recall the most epoch-making row with Anthony Crosland at Ann Fleming's on what was an otherwise perfect spring day. I also recall that his wife urged him on with loyalty whereas mine merely commented on the ludicrousness of two allegedly grownup Cabinet Ministers quarrelling over the position of a ball. I also recall a disputatious game, played in a summer twilight, with Teddy Kennedy who was partnered by Senator Tunney, the son of the old boxer. But I think that was entirely due to my irritation as the prospect of victory over a Kennedy, always a good thing
to achieve, slipped needlessly away under the incompetence of my partner (who was Kennedy's brother-in-law so perhaps there was collusion). Happily my games with the literary editor of the
Spectator,
mostly on that same lawn which produced the eruption with Crosland, have never ended quarrelsomely. Otherwise I might not be writing this piece today.

Nicky Smith is very informative about the history and current state of the game, and mostly writes clearly and tautly. She is, however, muddling about dates. Having convinced me that croquet, imported from Ireland, had first become a serious ‘garden game' in England in the 1860s, she then announces that it was exported to Australia by settlers of the 1850s, ‘whose personal baggage often contained a boxed set of croquet equipment - a standard part of the paraphernalia of the Victorian middle-class family'.

Nor can I decide, fluctuating one way and the other, whether or not she has a sense of humour about her game. At times she assumes a sort of Jennifer's Diary inconsequential glossiness. Thus of the World Singles Champion of 1989: ‘He is a cheerful character whose most singular characteristic is his relentless control of his game. A trained carpenter who also studied for a career in the priesthood, Joe Hogan is a great exponent of adopting the “right psychology”. Like most of the New Zealand players, this seems to consist of an undemonstrative but unyielding determination to win.'

At other times she adopts the moral uplift tone of an old-style preparatory school headmaster whose school is not quite worthy of him. ‘Five years later they [the United States] have already made great strides towards this goal [of “strength in depth”] and in the meantime have invested croquet with an enthusiasm which has been sadly lacking in the British game.' My reaction to this is to paraphrase King George V's response to H. G. Wells's 1917 complaint about an alien and uninspiring court. ‘I may be uninspiring,' he said, ‘but I'll be damned if I am an alien.' I feel that I may lack ‘strength in depth', but I'll be damned if I am unenthusiastic. I once played in three inches of snow when grooves had to be constructed between the hoops. Once made, the balls ran in them remarkably truly.

The Amery Diaries 1929-45
(Hutchinson) were reviewed in the
Observer
in 1988.
In the Name of God, Go!
by W. R. Louis, was published by W. W. Norton in 1992.

Leo Amery was born in India in 1873, the son of a member of the Indian Forest Department, and died in 1955. He was educated at Harrow, where he was a year senior to Churchill, who none the less exploited Amery's smallness to push him fully clothed into the swimming pool, and at Balliol, where he got a fine first in Greats before becoming a prize fellow of All Souls. He was very clever, perhaps in a slightly pedantic way. He had a varying degree of command over German, French, Italian, Russian, Turkish, Magyar, Serbo-Croat and Bulgarian, as well as Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. He wished his life to be dedicated to public service in the cause of British imperialism. He was also very short, never more than 5 feet and 4 inches. It was said that he might have been Prime Minister had he been half a head taller and his speeches half an hour shorter.

He published three volumes of moderately interesting autobiography in the last years of his life, and two volumes of his diaries have since been edited and published. In the second of these, dealing with 1929-45, the prolix editors got totally out of hand and wrote the equivalent of a four-hundred-page book of their own under the guise of explaining the context of the relatively sparse diary entries, which were in consequence buried under a mass of other people's verbiage.

It is therefore just as well as desirable that Amery should have been rescued, like a man retrieved from underneath the rubble after a bomb attack, by a significantly taut and penetrating little book by William Roger Louis, Professor of English History and Culture at the University of Texas, and the pre-eminent living
historian of the British Empire, certainly on the other side of the Atlantic, and maybe on this side too.

Amery thoroughly deserves the attentions of a rescue expedition, for he was an unusual and interesting man, as high in courage as in erudition. He was an effective Colonial Secretary from 1924 to 1929 but was left out of the National Government in 1931 and of all subsequent Baldwin/Chamberlain reconstructions. He half minded and he half did not. Whenever a reshuffle became imminent he began to quiver with anticipation, but then some mixture of integrity and over-excitement made him constantly blot his copybook with some unfortunately timed piece of over-vigorous criticism. So he went away half sorrowing and half enjoying his hair-shirt. In May 1940 he more than had his revenge, although I do not think this was his motive for he was singularly honest, when he made what was probably the decisive speech in the Norway Debate which brought about the fall of Chamberlain.

The quotation from Cromwell with which he concluded and which has since rumbled down the decades was alighted upon in a way that well illustrates the element of haphazardness in nearly all memorable speeches: ‘Some correspondence and spent the rest of the morning on my speech for the Norway Debate … I looked up my favourite quotation of Cromwell's about his selection of the Ironsides and then remembered his other quotation when he dismissed the Long Parliament. [“You have sat too long here for any good that you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”] I doubted whether this was not too strong meat and only kept it by me in case the spirit should move me to use it as the climax to my speech, otherwise preparing a somewhat milder finish.'

Churchill then made him Secretary of State for India, which was in a sense generous for although he had lately been a determined opponent of appeasement he had been an equally determined and very effective opponent of Churchill's obscurantism on India and had generally slightly patronized his future chief from the superiority of one year in age and a confidence in his own better judgement. Amery then served at the India Office
until he was swept out of the House of Commons in 1945 at the age of seventy-two. In his last decade he endured the appalling personal tragedy of the hanging of his elder son as a traitor, but rallied to meld his British imperialism with enthusiasm for a united Europe in a vision of a Euro-Commonwealth bloc.

His personal qualities and interest exceeded the range of his middle-rank political career. He was a very small man of wide vision. He was probably the most authentic political heir to Alfred Milner: intellectual, imperialist, a votary of the temple of public service, agreeably vain yet never besotted by his own self-interest, either material or careerist, a little over-serious. He was thought of as right-wing, but he was affronted by Neville Chamberlain's narrow partisanship, he cared deeply for social reform and little for business values except in so far as he could harness them to his imperial cause, and he had more Labour Party contacts than did most Conservatives of that deeply divided decade of the 1930s. He was a rather Bismarckian figure, but unlike that prince of the German Empire he was untouched by aristocratic connections or aspirations. He occupied an impressive London house -112 Eaton Square - in which undivided vastness his younger son Julian, now Lord Amery, still lives, but he never sought a country estate. There was more of Buddenbrooks than of Bismarck about this. He was a man not so much of government as of ideas and public concern. He would be ill at ease in any party today and he was altogether rather admirable.

Newspaper Anniversaries are tricky events. Even the celebrations of personal birthdays can have their problems, although there can be reasonable assurance that the person concerned has lived for the seventy or eighty years or whatever is being celebrated under a single continuous identity. Most old newspapers on the other hand have been changelings in infancy. This was true of the
Glasgow Herald
(the
Glasgow
has since been dropped), which celebrated its 200th birthday eight years ago, but which had to get over the fact that it began by appearing on Mondays and Fridays and was called the
Glasgow Advertiser and Evening Intelligencer
for its first twenty years. And
The Times,
the
Observer's
other rival in venerability, spent its first three years from 1785 under the even more unrecognizable guise of the
Daily Universal Register,
and only settled down into its ‘Thunderer' role when Thomas Barnes became editor in 1817.

The
Observer,
however, has always been the
Observer
and has throughout been a Sunday newspaper, although it would be difficult to deny that it has experienced several changes of role and style amounting almost to a change of identity even if not of title, during the past two hundred years. It has, however, had a remarkable stability of editorship: only eight since the first decade of the nineteenth century. And the twentieth century has been memorably marked by the long and disparate reigns of J. L. Garvin from 1908 to 1942 and of David Astor from 1948 to 1975. Astor was the proprietor as well, but it was his editorial role that was in my view the more important, although the confluence gave a stability of purpose and prospect of continuity. I wrote for the paper a lot from the middle of his period onwards and also at about this time, from, say, 1955 to 1975, first came to know well the upper reaches of Fleet Street in general. There were then three other interesting editorial and/or proprietorial combinations. There was the Newton/Drogheda
Financial Times,
there was the King/Cudlipp
Mirror,
and there was the Hamilton/Evans
Sunday Times.

Each of them, as did the David Astor
Observer,
produced higher quality journalism than is to be easily found today, although they did so through utterly different methods and personalities. Cecil King eventually succumbed to the megalomania that he may have inherited from his uncle Northcliffe, but in his heyday he made a wonderful partnership with Hugh Cudlipp, who had the rare quality of being a popularizer of genius and a responsible and civilized man. At the
Financial Times
Garrett Drogheda as manager was feline and Gordon Newton as editor seemed an uninspiring individual, although he had some touch of talent which enabled him to preside over the widening of the paper from a stockbroker's sheet to more or less its present form.

Denis Hamilton revitalized the
Sunday Times
with the quiet efficiency of a staff officer, using to do it the serialized memoirs of some of the generals and air marshals he might have served so well, but also the agency of Harold Evans, who was half a crusader against scandals and half a radical liberal who liked sophisticated politics. Evans had in him something of a young Cudlipp, who happened to be operating at the other end of the market.