With uncle Harold at Petworth

Robert Rhodes James recalls dinner with a former prime minister who awaited a call which never came

IT WAS one of the great sadnesses of my life that just as I had got to know John Wyndham - by then Lord Egremont reasonably well in the late 1960s he was stricken with the cancer that ended his life in 1972. I had hugely enjoyed and admired his family reminiscences in The Spectator, and thought it a pity that he was later persuaded by George Hutchinson to expand them into an autobiography that had little of the infectious sparkle of the originals. He had read my books, and the friendship began when Pamela Egremont invited my wife and me to lunch at Petworth House when we were living nearby in west Sussex.

It is very difficult to draw John's portrait with any adequacy. He could be outrageously funny, but also caustic, and even quite offensive about people he disliked. `If he wasn't blind one would call him a shit,' he remarked to me of the blind MP Sir Ian Fraser, which rather startled me. He was totally devoted to Harold Macmillan, with whom he had a long relationship as unpaid private secretary since Macmillan's North Africa wartime period, later resumed at 10 Downing Street, but this did not inhibit him from speaking his mind. He was one of the cleverest people I have ever met, but the results appeared not to be commensurate with his quality. We are left with his wonderful vignettes of the dotty Wyndhams of his childhood and later, and the glories of Petworth, which he loved and cherished.

He also had an exceptionally beautiful and intelligent wife and delightful children with perfect manners. When I first got to know him he was drinking rather a lot, but as politicians in those days were a harddrinking bunch - I had, after all, been a clerk in the House of Commons for ten years -- there was nothing exceptional in this. Sober or tiddly, he was the best company in England.

In mid-November 1967 Pamela rang to invite us for dinner on Saturday the 17th. I had been due to fly to Paris that morning for a Nato assignment, but when she added that Harold Macmillan was a house guest I postponed my flight. It was to prove one of the best decisions of my life. The hapless chancellor of the Exchequer, Jim Callaghan, had announced the devaluation of the pound on Friday. The political world was in turmoil. The prime minister, Harold Wilson, had made matters even worse by a television broadcast in which he said that `the pound in your pocket has not been devalued'. The Saturday newspapers hurled themselves upon him with frenzied savagery. Callaghan insisted upon resigning as chancellor, although Wilson persuaded him to become home secretary; would Wilson go as well? This was the context in which we arrived at Petworth.

John rushed up to us as soon as we entered. `Uncle Harold', it appeared, had half-convinced himself that at this desperate juncture in the nation's history the Queen would turn to a wise and experienced former prime minister to form a Churchill-type coalition government. John had first thought that the old boy was joking, but was now not so sure.

Uncle Harold was certainly in spiffing form. Judy Montagu was another of the house guests, as was Diana Cooper, and Macmillan had spent the afternoon reading the typescript of the amorous letters of Asquith to Judy's mother, Venetia Stanley. He came down into the great drawingroom professing horror at what he had read. What shocked him was the very idea that the intimate private letters of elderly prime ministers to young ladies should be published at all, which made some of us think naughty thoughts, and he declared that the House of Macmillan would never publish them. Judy derided him for his prudery. He retorted that even prime ministers were entitled to their privacy. This was a good start.

Diana Cooper was also in spiffing form, and, as usual, took centre stage. At dinner she hogged Harold, and he could hardly get a word in. Nor could anyone else at our end of the table, so I chatted quietly to Pamela. Then the door opened and the butler, rather melodramatically, said loudly and grandly, `Telephone call for Mr Macmillan!' A great hush fell upon the company. The Grand Old Man was rising from his chair when John shouted at the butler, `Tell her he's drunk!' It turned out that The Call was not from the Palace but from the political editor of the News of the World, which was hardly the same thing. Macmillan subsided, rather sadly.

But this dramatic intervention had interrupted the flow of Diana Cooper's monologue, and Macmillan seized his opportunity by remarking, `Did I ever tell you of the time I lost the Duke of Devonshire?' He had his audience transfixed. The story as told by Macmillan was as follows.

His father-in-law, the Duke of Devonshire, had died and been cremated in London, and it was the task of the new Duke and Harold to convey the casket containing the ashes to Chatsworth. The grieving son and son-in-law lunched well on the train, but when it approached their destination, where the platform was filled with blacksuited local dignitaries, a band playing the Dead March from Saul and all flags were at half-mast, they realised they had lost the casket. Thus they had to alight before the expectant throng empty-handed. `What did you do?' we gasped. 'I raised my briefcase!' he replied. He then added, mournfully, `As far as I know, the Duke of Devonshire is still travelling on the London and NorthWestern Railway.'

After that saga he was in full flow about the kindness shown to him in the 1930s, when he was a political outcast, by Lady Londonderry, the less attractive side of Churchill's character and other reminiscences. After the ladies had retired and the gentlemen were grouped round him with their ports and brandies, amid heavy cigar smoke, he expanded further. All of us were rather doubtful about the Duke of Devonshire story, but did not care whether it was true or a splendid invention.

Macmillan had - and has - his enemies; what they could not deny, had they known him, was the fact that he was the most arresting political conversationalist and raconteur since Churchill. They could also not contest the fact that he was a consummate actor, with many parts to play. That evening he was the retired statesman - although making it plain that he was not quite so retired as all that.

When we eventually joined the ladies Diana Cooper, deeply huffed, had retired to her room. John took me aside to tell me the story of how Bob Boothby had written to Macmillan after Boothby's heart attack in 1957 to ask for a peerage. John had opened the letter, was amazed by Boothby's gall in seeking this favour, and kept it in his pocket for several days, waiting for a suitable moment to put it before the then prime minister. To his astonishment, Macmillan had said, `Of course he must have it,' remembering not the man who had been his wife's lover for over 30 years but the brave politician who had stood by him and Churchill in the terrible 1930s and who had shared his strong pro-European views in the late 1940s.

By this point Diana Cooper, hearing the happy chatter downstairs, had rejoined the party in a different dress, and resumed her dominance over Harold who, rather wearily, succumbed. But everyone else was talking away, and especially our by now very genial host.

Although this was not the last time I saw John Egremont, by the time we had returned from California a year later it was obvious that something was wrong. He was writing his autobiography, but it was all rather an effort and a chore, and I noticed with surprise that although he offered me wine at lunch he was drinking beer. Fred Warner said that this was a good sign. I was not so sure that it was. It was the first indication I had that John was ill, but how ill I did not realise until some time later.

I was in Stockholm, a consultant to the first - and best - United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in the summer of 1972 when I received the news of John's death. He was only 52. It was one of those occasions when long-expected bad news still comes as a shock. I had anticipated many more years of laughter and cheerful reminiscence. And then I remembered dinner at Petworth on 17 November 1967, and smiled again.

The author was Conservative MP for Cambridge, 1976-1992.

Copyright Spectator Jan 17, 1998
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