Portraits and Miniatures(100)

Since Taylor in 1972, however, Beaverbrook has fallen into the crevice of disregard which is an almost invariable fate in the second and third decades after death. He is indeed now lucky to have interest in him revived by such a fair and substantial biography as has been written by Michael Davie and his wife Anne Chisholm. It opens with a brilliant pas seul by Davie. This is a riveting and funny contemporary 4000-word account of Davie (then a member of the Observer staff) being summoned in 1956 to Beaverbrook’s villa in the South of France in order that he might be poached as Evening Standard New York correspondent. For the rest the spousely couple seem to have performed the difficult feat of joint authorship without undue marital strain or it ever being obvious which had written which particular passage. They manage to combine journalists’ eyes for what is interesting with scholars’ respect for what is accurate. They write with geographical sensitivity both about Canada and England, and indeed re-create Beaverbrook’s restlessly changing physical surroundings with great vividness.

This is important in a life of Beaverbrook. In the introduction to his Men and Power he sets the tone by writing: ‘It may be asked “Were you there? I was there!” ‘The authors enable us to feel ‘there’ with him, whether on the deck of the Queen Mary or on the terrace of Cherkley, his ugly house with a fine view in the Surrey hills. But they paint the unfolding landscape of Beaverbrook’s long life somewhat flatter than the landscape looking south from that terrace. The many events are treated too equally.

Yet the authors capture the conflict between his relentless energy and his sense of ultimate futility. When Arnold Bennett died Beaverbrook uttered one of the sadder, most self-deprecating remarks of his life. ‘How I loved my Arnold, and how he loved my champagne.’ (Bennett probably liked him more for himself than he realized.)

He was equally uneasy with the great chunks of twentieth-century history (in the form of private papers) that he had bought. Having bought history, what do you do with it? Exhibit it freely or keep it under wraps? This dilemma he failed to solve. To escape from a dour manse background in a remote part of the Canadian Maritimes into commanding the most brittle aspects of café society of the early and mid-twentieth century is not perhaps the best recipe for philosophical calm or moral certainty. Although these desirable states conspicuously eluded him he compensated with an exceptional vitality and magnetism which persisted throughout his long if unadmirable life.





Richard Crossman



This essay is based on an Observer review of Dick Crossman: A Portrait, by Tam Dalyell (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), and of Crossman: The Pursuit of Power, by Anthony Howard (Jonathan Cape, 1990).





R. H. S. Crossman and C. A. R. Crosland, like multi-initialled amateur cricketers, were two great middle-order batsmen of the last years of Labour in government, and the last years too of amateur cricketers. They were sometimes (but not often) confused with each other, and each of them at least once expressed envy of what they saw as my own more monosyllabic and mnemonic name.

For most of his life Crossman was the better known. Indeed I once heard Field Marshal Montgomery do a put-down of Crosland on this ground. In 1951 a dozen or so MPs, including these two, paid a visit to SHAPE. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander, received us with bland goodwill. Montgomery, who was deputy, treated us like a lot of slack subalterns. ‘Give your names clearly and keep your questions short,’ he commanded. ‘Crosland, not to be confused with Crossman,’ the later author of The Future of Socialism began in an even more disdainful drawl than usual. Montgomery said: ‘I would not dream of confusing you. I have heard of Crossman.’

Nevertheless, Anthony Crosland ended up with more lasting fame for what he himself had done, both as a political theorist and as the (brief) holder of the Foreign Secretaryship, the great office of state which Richard Crossman, then two years dead, had most desired. Crossman’s chief monument was Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, mainly a recording of the words and behaviour of others. It was also what he increasingly came to care most about, even when he was still a minister, and overwhelmingly so between 1970 and his death in early 1974. It was not exactly for the sake of the truth, to which even his most devoted fan could not say he was peculiarly addicted. In argument he regarded ‘facts’ as dialectical weapons to be forged as one needed them rather than as objective entities to be respected for their own validity. Yet his Diaries are in my view remarkably accurate. Harold Wilson, of whom Crossman had been a considerable friend and ally, used to claim that they were all imaginative fiction, stuffed with nonexistent meetings and encounters which never took place. I did not find this so. I often disagreed with Crossman’s judgements and sometimes with his descriptive angle, but I could always recognize the events he was talking about if I had participated in them, and thought that they never diverged more from my version of accuracy than might the accounts of a motor accident seen by two men of different temperaments standing on opposite sides of the road.