Chips channon biography
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Sir Henry &#;Chips&#; Channon
Socialite Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon () was a Chicago-born, Anglophile Conservative MP most famed for his caustic diaries kept daglig between and his death. As he said of his lifetime of skarp observations, ‘what is more dull than a diskret diary? One might as well have a diskret soul’. Henry Channon could eviscerate even his closest friends and family as this övervakning about his father demonstrates: ‘he was a dull, charming, uneducated, unexciting, unhappy, untidy little man … a cipher really. But I always liked him, and he doted on me’.
Channon was privately educated and, in , was made an honorary attaché to the American Embassy in Paris. In he went up to Christ Church college, Oxford, where he befriended Prince Paul of Yugoslavia; a man he described as ‘the person inom have loved most’. It was at Oxford that he was given the nickname ‘Chips’. Independently wealthy and unabashed about displaying his exquisite taste for beautiful objects and people, C
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Henry &#;Chips&#; Channon: The Diaries (Volume 1) : by Chips Channon (Paperback)
ISBN:
Born in Chicago in , &#;Chips&#; Channon settled in England after the Great War, married into the immensely wealthy Guinness family, and served as Conservative MP for Southend-on-Sea from until his death in His career was unremarkable. His diaries are quite the opposite.
Elegant, gossipy and bitchy by turns, they are the unfettered observations of a man who went everywhere and who knew everybody. Whether describing the antics of London society in the interwar years, or the growing scandal surrounding his close friends Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson during the abdication crisis, or the mood in the House of Commons in the lead up to the Munich crisis, his sense of drama and his eye for the telling detail are unmatched. These are diaries that bring a whole epoch vividly to life.
A heavily abridged and censored edition of the diaries was published in Only now, sixty years after Chips&#;s
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Spartacus Educational
Primary Sources
(1) Henry 'Chips' Channon,diary entry (5th April, )
A full, exhausting day. We had a luncheon party here, and the plot was to do a 'politesse' to Mrs Simpson. She is a jolly, plain, intelligent, quiet, unpretentious and unprepossessing little woman, but as I wrote to Paul of Yugoslavia today, she has already the air of a personage who walks into a room as though she almost expected to be curtsied to. At least, she wouldn't be too surprised. She has complete power over the Prince of Wales, who is trying to launch her socially.
(2) Henry 'Chips' Channon, diary entry (30th July, )
I am bored by this Italian-Abyssinian dispute, and really I fail to see why we should interfere. Though, of course, the League of Nations will stand or fall by it. But I am a little uneasy that the destinies of countless of millions should be in the exquisite hands of Anthony Eden, for whom I have affection, even admiration - but not bl