In Defence of Aristocracy. Peregrine Worsthorne

read like the ravings of madmen. In any case, if the 1930s really were such a ‘low and dishonest decade’, one question has to be asked. How did it come to pass that of all the countries that lived through those years, Britain, alone among the great European powers, escaped relatively unscathed from the corrosions of fascism and communism and went into the war against Hitler so relatively united and with such relatively high national morale? While Churchill’s courageous oratory was certainly part of the answer, the Baldwin balm was also a blessing beyond price.

      The support of the ruling classes for the Chamberlain policy of appeasement is much more difficult to cast in a good light. But here again, from my particular viewpoint, it did not strike me then, and it does not strike me now, as in the least ‘low’ or ‘dishonest’ in the ordinary sense of those words. My stepfather, who had a won a DSO in the Boer War, stood foursquare behind Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, not out of weak unwillingness to face up to the reality of war – his long talks in Berlin and London with Dr Schacht, Hitler’s economic adviser, had dissolved all illusions on that score – but rather out of an equally strong determination to be realistic about the consequences for Britain of going to war with Hitler. His charge against Churchill was that while he was telling the British people the truth about the gravity of the former reality, he was grossly deceiving them about the gravity of the second, which could not fail, he believed, to be the end of Britain as a great and independent power, win or lose the war. Going to war could well be Churchill’s ‘finest hour’, Norman used to say, but for Britain it would be the beginning of the end. Like Robert Fossett, the fictional hero of Christopher Hollis’s book, The Death of a Gentleman – which came out in 1943 – Norman always ‘shuddered at the folly of those who talked as if a war would be merely a matter of beating Hitler, and that then, that evil removed, the world would go on its comfortable way of progress, like a man who has had an aggravating tooth removed at the dentist. Starting a war was much more like starting a glacier. The world was full of disruptive, nihilistic forces, and, once the ice began to move, none could say how far it would travel, nor what at the last would survive its catastrophe.’ In Norman’s view, therefore, the appeasers were not a lot of unpatriotic poltroons, as against the Churchillians who were patriotic statesman willing to grasp nettles. Rather the opposite. It was the appeasers who were grasping the most frightening nettle of all, which was that the only way for Britain to survive as a great power, and the only way for the old conservative Europe to survive, was to avoid a war with Hitler, even if this did involve paying the horribly high price of abandoning Eastern Europe and the Jews to a terrible fate. Of course in the light of Churchill’s victory in 1945, appeasement did come to seem shamefully defeatist. But surely, in the light of what we know of the decline and disintegration of Britain in the last half of the twentieth century, and its likely disappearance to all great effects and noble purposes, except as foot soldiers in an American army, in the first half of the twenty-first century; and in the light, moreover, of what, in spite of Churchill’s war, did happen to the Jews and to the East Europeans, one can now see that the appeasers were not acting out of cowardice but out of a kind of sober courage, by comparison with which Churchill’s eagerness to embrace war begins to seem almost irresponsibly vainglorious.*

      Another difficulty for the reputation of the appeasers is that, because they were in power in the 1930s, they are still associated in the public mind with the decadence of high society in that decade. In fact, however, the leading appeasers – Baldwin, Chamberlain, Norman, and others – much less deserved to be tarred with that brush than many of the anti-appeasers, like the financially greedy Churchill, the unashamedly lecherous Duff Cooper, and the almost brazenly dishonest Robert Boothby. The difficulty here is that the true muscle of the 1930s ruling class did not frequent high society, did not go to grand balls or Belgrave Square parties. Hence the erroneous impression that the space at the top of the tree in the 1930s was entirely filled by social butterflies. If Norman had kept a diary, however, it would have given a very different and more impressive picture, as my brother and I have good cause to remember. For his public service standards, and those of his whole world, were Spartan to a fault, or to what my brother and I judged to be a fault. No luxuries were tolerated, and strict economies enforced. So when I became keen on riding at my preparatory school, and wrote asking for riding boots, my mother sent me a pair of her own – far too pointed at the toe for my comfort – with the raised heels sawn off. And such was the importance placed on not disturbing the Governor’s concentration on his public duties that we were kept out of his way during school holidays in a country cottage of our own, with our own butler and cook – more fun in theory than in practice, since our mother, who shared her second husband’s priorities, was seldom present. In fact, domestic felicity and family life seldom got a look-in.

      Born into an upper-middle-class banking family of long standing and educated at Eton – which, unlike my father, he hated – and at King’s College Cambridge, Norman dedicated all his waking hours to the City of London, living austerely, almost ascetically, and eschewing wine, women (until he met my mother) and song so as to be able to give his all to his work. He was, at all times, a pillar of rectitude, imposing on the City the highest standards of integrity. The idle-rich, Chips Channon kind of society appalled him and he deplored the loving attention given by the media to this debauched minority, rightly regarding their antics as obscenely objectionable at a time of mass unemployment brought about very largely, of course, by his own tight fiscal policies, harshly imposed, he always believed, in the long term ‘public interest’.

      His own life, as I say, was exemplary in this regard. Whereas most bankers went to the City in chauffeur-driven Rolls Royces, he travelled by tube from Notting Hill Gate to the Bank, causing quite a sensation by so doing. Indeed the spectacle of this tall figure with a Charles I beard, season ticket tucked into the ribbon of his silk hat worn at a jaunty angle, descending into the underground at 8.30 a.m. sharp and ascending thirty minutes later at the Bank – where the buses were held up to allow the Governor to cross Threadneedle Street – became almost as much of a tourist attraction as the Changing of the Guard outside Buckingham Palace. His hobby was to design and build furniture in the Art Deco style, and although he inherited two country houses, he occupied only a garden cottage in one, where he made a point of coming down to dinner in slippers and bare feet and eating simple fare. When the Second World War came, almost nothing had to change. Even in peacetime, we were already living, by choice, on a war footing.

      As for hobbies, his favourite one was snubbing newspaper proprietors because they exaggerated – in search of circulation-building copy – the importance of the decadent elements in high society, thereby irresponsibly dissolving the bonds of mutual sympathy and respect that should naturally exist between rich and poor, governors and governed. He was fond of saying that they had a vested interest in barbarism because civilization did not sell newspapers. Lord Beaverbrook, for example, was never allowed to cross the threshold. Norman’s secretary was instructed to refuse all his importuning. Naturally that was not the picture – as insecure interlopers desperate for recognition – the newspapers chose to give of where their proprietors stood in the social pecking order, but this was how they were looked down on from our particular pinnacle. When Lord and Lady Kemsley, then the owners of the Sunday Times, wrote to say that they were looking forward to being fellow passengers on a transatlantic liner my mother and Norman were planning to take to New York, my mother immediately arranged to cancel their own booking. Nobody today would dare to give the Murdochs or even the discredited Blacks the same kind of brush-off. Whereas today the media chiefs are the lords of all they survey, with none – not even the Prime Minister – daring to say them nay, then, thanks to the class system, there were still a few who would tell the cheeky urchins ‘to keep off the grass’.

      Nor was Norman in any way unique. All his closest friends, Sir Warren Fisher and Sir Richard Hopkins, both in their time Head of the Treasury, and Sir John Reith, Director General of the BBC, were equally driven by the same classical republican ideals, which insisted that the highest purpose of man was to sacrifice himself, and his family, on the altar of the common weal – clearly far too lofty an ideal for the common man and only to be expected of the very uncommon man: the active citizen brought up to meet these exacting standards, either from birth or at least after five Spartan years at an English public school. Aristocracy, in this tradition, was much more a burden to be taken up than a privilege to