Portraits and Miniatures(96)
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.
Leopold Amery
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.