Portraits and Miniatures(99)

O’Donovan was buttressed by striking pieces from John Gale, William Millinship (on de Gaulle), Cyril Dunn and Kenneth Tynan, while Edward Crankshaw’s farewell piece (1968) on the future of the Soviet Empire was of the same quality of writing with more of a message. Anthony Sampson and Colin Legum were two of the knights of the de-colonization crusade, in which the Observer played as notable a role as L’Express did in France.

The regular Observer contributor of this period who is somewhat under-represented in the collection is Hugh Massingham. He was not taut enough to be a great stylist, but he did invent a new form of political journalism. While his opposite number on the Sunday Times, shrewd and respected though he was, was still playing out the last act of the old forelock-touching, hat metaphorically on the back of his head, cigarette-in-mouth, pencil-poised-above-notebook style of deferential relations with politicians, Massingham was developing the funny iconoclastic style, which no quality paper would now dream of being without. The Observer owes much to him for innovation just as it does to Patrick O’Donovan for style and to David Astor for direction and inspiration.





Beaverbrook



This is based on a 1992 Observer review of Beaverbrook: A Life by Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie (Hutchinson).





William Maxwell Aitken, First Lord Beaverbrook from the age of thirty-seven to his death at eighty-five in 1964, was a figure of wealth, glamour and would-be influence (the wish occasionally turning into reality) over five decades. As a multiple newspaper proprietor he was never on the scale of Rothermere or Kemsley, let alone Murdoch, but the three horses (the two Expresses and the Evening Standard) to which he confined his stable, were to an unparalleled extent his personal creatures, reflecting his whims from social gossip to political causes.

He was a spider at the centre of a somewhat rackety web, who held his insects in place by a mixture of charm (which could be dazzling, particularly as it was mostly accompanied by great courtesy), bribery and ruthlessness. His primary purpose in life was probably to combat boredom and to still the mounting fear of his own extinction. As a result, there was a rootlessness about him which irresistibly recalled Keynes’s immortal description of Lloyd George: ‘One catches in his company that flavour of final purposelessness, inner irresponsibility, existence outside or away from our Saxon good or evil.’

Nevertheless, he was a serious Minister of Aircraft Production at a crucial time in Britain’s history; he was a fluctuating but often sought-after friend of the two most exciting Prime Ministers of this century (Lloyd George and Churchill); he was the subject of Graham Sutherland’s best portrait, and provided the central character for novels by Arnold Bennett and William Gerhardie, as well as being a somewhat more peripheral model in books by H. G. Wells and Evelyn Waugh. He employed a galaxy of disparate journalistic talent such as has rarely been assembled.

In addition, through five books of his own, particularly the two written in his late seventies and early eighties, he showed himself to be a narrative historian of compelling power even if of somewhat partial interpretation. On top of this he had a string of lady friends ranging from Diana Cooper and Barbara Cartland (to me a new and amusing revelation) to Tallulah Bankhead, Rebecca West and the pianist Harriet Cohen, which would have kept any modern gossip columnist in copy for months at a time. Needless to say, these friendships did not appear in the columns of his own papers. But nor did those of other people, for he was not prurient in print and respected the privacy of private lives in a way that is unimaginable today.

He liked to convey the impression of great manipulative power, but was saved from the megalomania of a Citizen Kane by the fact that he had genuine wit, and was a considerable provoker of laughter, both intentionally and unintentionally. It was well summed up by the claim of a mutual friend (probably apocryphal) that when after his death she had sent condolences to his second wife (of only a year’s standing, and known as Christofor), she had received in reply a cable transmitted through a possibly slapdash West Indian telegraph office, which said ‘Your sympathy is much appreciated. (Signed) Christ for Beaverbrook’.

It was thus not surprising that he attracted a number of books about him (as well as by him) in his later years. The most troublesome was a 1956 biography by Tom Driberg, who was deeply indebted to Beaverbrook for journalistic opportunities, legal protection and direct subventions when in financial trouble, but was a good biter of the hand that fed him. The most hagiographic was a posthumous one by A. J. P. Taylor, which for that reason, as well as for some others, could not be accused of being calculatingly sycophantic. Taylor became spontaneously besotted in the last five years or so of Beaverbrook’s life, although he had written of him with dismissive disapproval in a review of Driberg’s book. (And, to round the circle of paradox, Taylor is on record as having thought Driberg one of the few really good men he had known, which is, to say the least, an unusual judgement.)