A TALE OF TWO FATHERS

Chapter 5 of my memoir Shifting Classes takes the family story forward to the end of the war in 1945. I quote Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon’, who reportedly looked around a grand champagne celebration of victory by London’s upper crust and said: “After all, this is what we have been fighting for”. This was rather rich coming from an American expatriate who had married into the wealthy Guinness family, and was notorious before the war for pro-Nazi sentiments and support for appeasement of Hitler. He and his connections provide a telling portrait of the ways in which the British social and political elite felt themselves entitled to the privileges they had done little to deserve, and continued to enjoy those privileges despite the stunning post-war Labour victory.  Class war no more brought them defeat than the real war had done.

The story of these two fathers and their sons illuminates the nature of social and political relationships after 1945. On the one hand we have Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, establishment grandee and his son Paul Channon, later Lord Kelvedon; on the other hand, my own father, a Yorkshire farm labourer, and his son. Astonishingly, given the enormous social gulf between them, the career trajectories of these two sons would bring them together in the mid-1960s, working in the same place (the Foreign Office), and meeting in the same Downing Street office to discuss government policy towards Southern Rhodesia.

Paul Channon had progressed from Eton to Oxford, then (leaving without a degree) into Parliament as an elected MP. At the age of 23, he was the youngest member of the House of Commons. He owed this precocious achievement entirely to the almost feudal grip his wealthy, well-connected family had on the constituency of Southend West (prior to that Southend-on-Sea). As four members of the Guinness family represented the constituency between 1918 and 1997, it became known as Guinness-on-Sea. His grandmother, who had retired from the seat, complimented the Southend electors for ‘backing a colt when you know the stable he was trained in’.

As my farm labourer father unaccountably had no parliamentary seat to hand on to me, I had to make my own way to Whitehall and Westminster, via Cambridge (which I did leave with a degree) and the fiercely competitive Civil Service ‘fast stream’ examinations. Paul Channon was in the same room as me because from 1961-64 he was Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Foreign Secretary, a position his father had also held. I was in the room because from 1963-64 I was Assistant Private Secretary to Duncan Sandys, Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, responsible for Rhodesian policy.

It’s important to emphasise the difference in these two trajectories which brought together a wealthy son of the aristocracy, and a son of one of the poorest sections of the working class. Mine was a story of post war careers open to the talents; Channon’s was a story of success and position owed overwhelmingly to birth and wealth. This is not to say he was a dunce; indeed, he had a quite respectable if challenging career, ending as a Cabinet Minister under Margaret Thatcher. Through the Guinness Trust, an investment vehicle, he became even wealthier, recorded in 1990 to be worth £164 millions, some of that money flowing from rents from more than 3,000 working class homes in London. In 1996 my father, who had remained a lowly paid labourer all his life, left savings of £3000 to be divided among his three children (to our astonishment and near disbelief, given his small earnings and pension). These were indeed two different worlds, and it was a small miracle that they ever collided, however briefly. But as Dad might have said: ‘After all, this is what we were fighting for’.