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Memoirs
William Rees-Mogg
William Rees-Mogg is one of the pivotal figures of post-war Britain. In this brilliantly entertaining memoir he recounts the story of a colourful life, and reflects on the key figures and events of his time.As editor of The Times (his glory years), journalist, commentator, Chairman of the Arts Council, and, later, Chairman of the Broadcasting Standards Council (when he was accused of censorship), William Rees-Mogg has spent his life at the centre of events in politics and journalism.Often controversial and never dull, he has always had the courage to hold strong, fiercely defended opinions which go to the heart of the problems of the day. From his famous defence of Mick Jagger on a charge of possessing cannabis when he attacked the ‘primitive’ impulse to ‘break a butterfly on a wheel’, to his recent criticism of the morality behind the war in Kosovo and defence of monetarism, his writing has demanded attention, to the point of becoming newsworthy in itself.He knew and knows most of the anybodies who were anybody, from royalty to prime ministers, presidents, business magnates and religious leaders, and uses his unique insider perspective to great effect, with perceptive, sometimes provocative, recollections of people such as Rab Butler, Margaret Thatcher, Anthony Eden, Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins, Robin Day, Rupert Murdoch and many more.From an early age his life was filled with incident – among the many anecdotes are the stories of Noel Coward’s goldfish, his failure to inherit £30,000, his near-shooting at Trinity College, Oxford, an eventful stay at Chequers with Harold Wilson, conspiring with Shirley Williams against the Communists, his doomed attempts to enter politics and dinner with Ronald Reagan and Harold Macmillan.
WILLIAM REES-MOGG
Memoirs
Contents
Cover (#uf2921864-5069-5d8c-83cb-a80aed57a4c8)
Title Page (#u05940f47-0f40-580a-89c1-1ed446e58091)
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Chapter One - The Young Actress
Chapter Two - The Young Officer
Chapter Three - A House Built on a Hill
Chapter Four - A Peak in Darien
Chapter Five - But we’ll do more, Sempronius
Chapter Six - Everyone Wants to Be Attorney General
Chapter Seven - ‘A University Extension Course’
Chapter Eight - Thank you very much for … the Sunday Times
Chapter Nine - Sadat’s Viennese Ideal
Chapter Ten - Rivers of Blood
Chapter Eleven - ‘The future of Europe is not a matter of the price of butter’
Chapter Twelve - Palladio on Mendip
Chapter Thirteen - The Times ’ Lost Year
Chapter Fourteen - My Life as a Quangocrat
Chapter Fifteen - The Best of Business
Chapter Sixteen - My Road to Bibliomania
Chapter Seventeen - R. v Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, ex parte Rees-Mogg
Chapter Eighteen - ‘ An Humbler Heaven ’
Index
Acknowledgements
Picture Section
Copyright
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
List of Illustrations
William, c. 1936 (Private Collection)
Cholwell, 1936 (Private Collection)
Fletcher, Beatrice, Aunty Molly, William and Andy, 1936 (Private Collection)
William, c. 1946 (Private Collection)
William as President of the Oxford Union, 1951 (Private Collection)
William reading the Evening Standard (Photograph by Otto Karminski © Times Newspapers)
The Rees-Mogg family at Ston Easton (Photograph by Anne Rees-Mogg)
Iverach McDonald being presented with a salver by William, 1973 (© Times Newspapers)
Roy Jenkins and William, 1978 (Private Collection)
Harold Wilson, William and Marcia Williams, 1963 (Photograph by Kelvin Brodie © Times Newspapers)
William addressing editorial staff, 1980 (Photograph by Bill Warhurst © Times Newspapers)
Press conference in London to announce the sale of the Times Newspapers Ltd to Rupert Murdoch (© Times Newspapers)
William with Margaret Thatcher, 1999 (Private Collection)
Pope John Paul II and William (Private Collection)
William with Alfonoso de Zulueta and Shirley Williams, 1966 (Photograph by Stanley Devon)
William photographed in 1982 (Photograph by Bill Warhurst © Times Newspapers)
William’s eightieth birthday (Private Collection)
Portrait of Alexander Pope (Photograph by Maud Craigie)
The Mogg family, painted by Richard Phelps c. 1731 (Photograph by Magnus Dennis)
Portrait of John Locke (Photograph by Maud Craigie)
Self portrait by Joshua Reynolds (Photograph by Maud Craigie)
William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, by Richard Brompton, 1773 (Photograph by Maud Craigie)
Foreword
In January 1977, my senior editorial colleagues gave a dinner at the Garrick Club to celebrate my tenth anniversary as Editor of The Times. It was a very pleasant evening for me, among people whom I regarded as both colleagues and friends. Charles Douglas-Home, himself due to become a distinguished Editor, had chosen a case of Château Lynch Bages as a present; I have only recently consumed the last bottle. I cannot recall the whole guest list. Louis Heren was in the chair, as Deputy Editor. Naturally we talked about The Times, with a good deal of confidence, despite the recurring problems with the print unions. We had no idea of the militant trade union crisis that was to come. Our proprietor, Roy Thomson, had died a couple of years before, but his son, Ken, had taken his place in an atmosphere of goodwill on both sides. Ken followed Roy’s principle of avoiding interference with the editorial side of the paper.
I remember, at the end of the evening, walking down the front steps of the club; Peter Jay was next to me. When we were about halfway down the steps, a thought passed through my mind. This surely was going to be as good as it would get, at least in personal or career terms. Would it not have been a better conclusion to my editorship if I had taken my colleagues by surprise and announced my intention to resign in my brief speech of thanks at the dinner?
I put the idea out of my mind, even if it was ever wholly present. I could hardly wheel round on the steps of the club and ask everyone to go back to the table, so that I could make a little announcement. In any case, I knew Ken Thomson better than any alternative Editor; I could hardly leave the paper until he was completely settled in. The moment passed before it had even fully formed. Nevertheless, the intention had entered my mind, and if I had had time to think it through I would have seen that there were strong reasons for following the advice of my subconscious mind. The next four years, with the closure and then the sale of The Times, was a difficult period. A contrast to the mood of the dinner I was just leaving.
If I had resigned at that dinner I would have been spared the worst crisis that The Times faced in the twentieth century, the one-year stoppage, and I would have had another four years to develop the next stage of my life.
Ex-Editors do find it difficult to establish a second half to their careers. I remember my first Editor, Gordon Newton, of the Financial Times, saying of his own retirement, ‘there is nothing so dead as a dead lion’. Some Editors have had successful careers in business. There is a phrase for the strategy of moving from a single big job with major executive responsibility, to the non-executive jobs which are more likely to be available. It is said that these personages have gone ‘multiple’. At any rate I went multiple, and have had geological layers of different forms of employment in the period since I made a final retirement from editing The Times in 1982. The only trouble I have found is that the jobs one is offered after the age of seventy tend themselves to be time-limited.
In fact I have found plenty of interesting things to do since 1982, and am still writing columns for The Times and the Mail on Sunday. I am struck by the fact that most of the work I have done in journalism, in business, in helping charities, has been cyclical in character. World politics faced the threat of the Cold War and now faces the growth of terrorism. When I started in journalism in 1951 there was a liberal Conservative Government in power. Sixty years later there is a Liberal/Conservative coalition. I myself have enjoyed writing about the swings and circulating on the roundabout.
Chapter One
The Young Actress
I was born in the Pembroke Nursing Home, Bristol, England, of an American mother and an English father, on 14 July 1928. It was a hot night and a difficult labour. My mother had been determined that I should not be born on Friday the 13th, because she thought it would be unlucky. In consequence I was born at about 4 a.m. on Bastille Day, France’s national holiday, and knew as a child that my birthday was a special day of celebration. I was a large baby, weighing some nine pounds, three ounces. At some point, during or after the delivery, my mother’s heart stopped beating, and had to be restarted with a new drug which had recently been used on King George V. Whether my life was at risk during the delivery I do not know; my mother’s certainly was.
As a young child I had a recurrent dream. I am travelling up a shaft, which has ribs. When I reach the top of the shaft, there is a light, and there are large people, giants. They assist me to emerge from the shaft. I awake, feeling that I have passed through a crisis. I am by no means the only person to record such a dream, which is sometimes explained as recalling the birth trauma, and sometimes as a near-death experience.
My mother, Beatrice Warren, born in Mamaroneck, New York, in 1892, was an Irish-American Roman Catholic and a successful Shakespearian actress. All four of her grandparents had emigrated to the United States from Ireland in the 1850s; both her grandfathers then fought for the North in the Civil War. They came from the Irish Catholic middle class, ‘lace-curtain’ rather than ‘bog-trotting’ Irish. They had experienced the famine but survived it. My mother was the eldest child of her family, and for seven years had been an only child.
I have a very vivid picture of her childhood. In the 1890s she had the regular morning treat of being driven to Mamaroneck station with her father, where he caught the commuter train into Grand Central Station. They were driven in the carriage by Arthur Cuffey, the black coachman and handyman. At that time they lived on Union Avenue, though her father later built Shoreacres, a beautiful early twentieth-century house which looks out over Long Island Sound. Her evening treat was to take the same drive to meet the evening train. They had a good quality carriage horse, called Miss Gedney, whom her father had bought from a man in White Plains.
My mother’s father, Daniel Warren, started his working life as a clerk at Harrison Station, which, as every Westchester commuter knows, is the stop between Mamaroneck and Rye. He had been known as a bright lad. His father, old Mr Warren, had prospered as an immigrant and had risen to be a line manager of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. He got his sixteen-year-old son the job on the railroad.
One morning in 1881, Daniel was standing on the platform where the train to New York was about to arrive. A regular business commuter, Mr Eddy of Coombs, Crosby and Eddy, was standing beside him. Mr Eddy had a fainting fit, and started to totter. As he fell forward, Daniel grabbed him; the locomotive brushed Daniel’s arm as it passed. Mr Eddy thanked Daniel for saving his life, gave him his card and asked him to call on him at his office in Wall Street. When he did so, Daniel was offered a job, rejected a flattering counter-offer by the railroad, and worked for Coombs, Crosby and Eddy, later merged into the American Trading Company, until he retired in the 1920s. He ended his career as the vice-president, which then meant that he was the executive running the business. The American Trading Company, with a strong Japanese connection and branches in many countries, became a powerful international trading house. J. P. Morgan, whom Daniel greatly admired, invited him to join his new club, the Metropolitan. Daniel replied: ‘Mr Morgan, I am flattered by your invitation. I greatly appreciate doing business with you. But I am an Irish Catholic. I do not belong to the same society as you do.’ Nevertheless, the American Trading Company was chosen to advise the Morgan Bank when, in the early 1900s, Morgans wanted to expand into Japanese finance.
In 1888, he made a trip through northern Mexico with eight large trunks of manufacturing samples. At the end of the Mexican National Railroad at Saltillo, he had to hire mules to carry these trunks over the mountains, which were overrun with bandits and outlaws. He remembered hiding behind a wall with a Mexican friend; some shooting was going on. His friend asked him what passport he carried; he replied ‘American’. The Mexican advised him, ‘Do not say “Americano”, say “Ingles”. They shoot Yankees; they do not dare shoot the “Ingles”.’ Such, in the high Victorian period, was the reputation of the British Empire, or perhaps just the Mexican dislike of Yankees. Daniel Warren, though his Irish ancestors had been nationalists, was an Anglophile.
He used to discuss the day-to-day problems of his business with my mother. She particularly remembered the panic of 1907. Wall Street was only saved by the rapid action of J. P. Morgan and a syndicate he formed. Her father acted swiftly and managed to save the American Trading Company, but many other firms went under. The family took their usual summer holiday in the Adirondacks, in upper New York State, and Daniel walked with Beatrice, then fifteen, and talked himself through the stress of the panic.
My mother had been enormously influenced by her relationship with her father whom she very much admired and whom she very well understood; she thereby created for me another role model. Indeed, although I never met him – he died in 1931 and he did not come to England in my lifetime – in some respects I was more influenced by Daniel Warren than by my father. In particular my interest in business and politics comes from my American side.
From a very early age, Beatrice knew that she wanted to be an actress. She could remember, as a child of seven, joining the recitations, which formed part of evening entertainment in the age before radio or television existed. Her party piece was a sentimental poem which ended with the lines:
Thanks to the sunshine, Thanks to the rain, Little white lily is happy again.
While she was at college, Beatrice told her father she wanted to go on the stage. A hundred years ago that was an unusual ambition for a well-brought-up American girl from a family of rising prosperity. Daniel replied that he would support her going on the stage, so long as she earned her own living for a year in some other way. She accepted that, and always regarded it as a sensible condition for him to have set. She taught elocution at Wadleigh High School for a year, commuting from Mamaroneck and getting off at the 116th Street Station. She could remember teaching girls who pronounced ‘th’ as ‘d’ – ‘dis and dat and dese and dose and dem’.
In 1914, Beatrice went on the stage. She was given an introduction, by Granville Barker, to Margaret Anglin, who was casting for a season of Greek plays, translated by Gilbert Murray, in the Greek Theatre at Berkeley, California. Beatrice became a member of the chorus. Alfred Lunt was also a trainee, carrying a spear among the guards. He and his wife, Lynn Fontanne, were to become the leading couple of the American theatre before the Second World War. Beatrice remained with Miss Anglin’s company for a couple of years. In 1916 she was playing the second lead in the Chicago opening of Somerset Maugham’s Caroline, later retitled as Home and Beauty. The author, a friendly but rather shy figure, was sitting in the stalls at the dress rehearsal.
One member of the New York artistic set was Putzi Hanfstaengl, an ardent young German nationalist. He was a son of the family of Munich art dealers, and had been sent to New York to set up a local branch of the firm. They already had a branch in Pall Mall, in London. Putzi gave Beatrice a couple of the firm’s celebrated reproductions, Dürer’s rabbit and Holbein’s drawing of Sir Thomas More, which is now hanging on our drawing-room wall. He argued heatedly in favour of Germany’s historic role as the dominant power in Europe. This would have been in 1915. Beatrice did not like Putzi, though she found his intellectual range interesting. During the Second World War she remembered these conversations, and believed that German imperialism was deeply rooted, that there was a continuity between the imperialism of Kaiser’s Germany and that of Hitler’s. Beatrice’s unfavourable view of Hanfstaengl’s personality was shared by Adolf Hitler, who had employed him in the 1920s and early 1930s as his foreign press secretary. Whereas Beatrice found Hanfstaengl’s German imperialism particularly offensive, Hitler was offended by his greedy habit of taking food off other people’s plates when eating in restaurants.
In 1916, Sarah Bernhardt, the great French actress, came for the last time to play Hamlet in New York. She had already lost a leg, and spoke Hamlet’s lines seated on a couch. Beatrice had to play all the other parts in dumb show, and was Horatio, Ophelia, Gertrude, and, for all I know, the Ghost in mute dialogue. The producer had the commercial idea of selling equally mute chorus parts to society girls from New York. In addition to responding to Bernhardt, Beatrice had to ensure that those fashionable young ladies remained in line and did not fall off the stage. She obtained a free place on one night for her beautiful younger sister, Adrienne Warren.
She remembered Sarah Bernhardt’s elocution and her professionalism. She also remembered her temperament. On one occasion, Bernhardt thought the curtain had been brought down too quickly, cutting short her applause. She turned on the stage manager and addressed him in the tones of a French Queen and the language of a French fishwife. The man operating the curtain understood the drift of her remarks, if not the precise words, and retorted by whisking up the curtain. With absolute fluency, the divine Sarah switched from her tirade to gracious acceptance of the applause of her audience. When the curtain came down, she resumed the tirade.
It was in Chicago that Beatrice first met the novelist Edna Ferber. Ferber introduced her to the Algonquin round table, and used her as copy. There is a great deal of Beatrice’s character and experience in Kim Ravenal, the youngest of the three generations of actresses in Showboat. Kim even does the elocution exercises Beatrice had taught at Wadleigh.
In 1917 a strange incident had occurred. Beatrice was at a party with some other young women of the theatre; Edna Ferber was there. One of the girls produced a Ouija board; Beatrice had a healthy Catholic distrust of the occult, had never used a Ouija board before and never touched one again. For a while the board seemed to be pointing to random letters; the young women were asking it to say whom they were going to marry. Finally the board did start to spell out recognizable words. It pointed to the letters: GOG MOG MAGOG. None of the young women knew what these words might mean, except for Edna Ferber, who said that Gog and Magog were two wooden statues of giants, to be seen at the Guildhall in London. The word ‘MOG’ remained unexplained.
On the recommendation of English actors, Beatrice decided to broaden her experience with a Shakespearian season at the Old Vic, London. She sailed for England in April 1920. There was still a post-war shortage of shipping. She booked her passage on a German liner, the old Imperator, which had been confiscated by the Allies at the end of the war. The ship had not been perfectly converted from wartime use as a troopship, and there were still German notices forbidding Other Ranks to enter the Officers’ quarters. Beatrice had to share a cabin with a young French woman who had been establishing some New York contacts for her dressmaking business. They found each other agreeable company for the voyage, and the dressmaker gave Beatrice a silk slip, which I remember seeing as a child in the 1930s. The young dressmaker was Miss Chanel.
Beatrice landed in England and went to stay with an old friend, Rosamund, who was living at Parkstone, near Bournemouth. Rosamund said she was giving a small dinner party, which would include Fletcher Rees-Mogg. She told Beatrice that Fletcher was an excellent golfer – he had a handicap of two at the Parkstone Golf Club – and a stickler for punctuality.
I have some fifty volumes of my English grandmother’s diary. It records the progress of my parents’ courtship:
10 MAY: E. F. [Edmund Fletcher Rees-Mogg] and Ed and Rosamund and Miss Warren dance. [This was either their first or second meeting.]
11 MAY: Rosamund and Miss W. (charming American) dine here. F. to works 9 to 10.30 – she and I chat, pianola.
15 MAY: F. takes Rosamund and Miss W. and me to Stonehenge. Much wind! Tea under stones!
19 MAY: v. lovely. Rosamund and B. Warren dine.
20 MAY: F. takes B. Warren to town lunch Lyndhurst, tea Sonning
26 MAY: Bea Warren comes
29 MAY: Sat 1 p.m. Fletcher and Beatrice announce their engagement.
‘Sonning’ is almost certainly a euphemism for ‘Maidenhead’. My father gave Beatrice Warren dinner on 20 May at Skindles road-house on the Thames, where he proposed. Beatrice always thought that it was slightly embarrassing to have become engaged in Maidenhead. They might well have thought that Sonning, a few miles away on the Thames, would sound less embarrassing to my grandmother’s Victorian ears. At all events, the time from their first meeting to the engagement was about a fortnight. She was twenty-eight; he was thirty.
They were to be happily married for forty-two years, and to have three children, two girls and a boy. They had, so far as I know, no fundamental disagreements. In their early letters they express surprise that such a gift of love and mutual understanding should have come to them.
They were married on 11 November 1920, by the Catholic priest, in the drawing room at Shoreacres, the Warrens’ home in Mamaroneck. They returned to England after an American honeymoon. Beatrice was not to see the United States again until after the Second World War.
Chapter Two
The Young Officer
My father was one of the young officers who survived the First World War. In the spring of 1914, he had caught pneumonia while working as a schoolmaster at a school in Lancashire, where he taught Latin, Greek and French. He was left with a strained heart. When, that August, he volunteered for the army, the doctors listened to his heart and rejected him as unfit. This, in all probability, saved his life.
Instead he went out to France by volunteering to drive the Charterhouse ambulance, which had been subscribed for by boys and parents at his old school. He was already a first-class amateur engineer and mechanic. He spent some months working at a French hospital at Arc-en-Barrois, but was subsequently commissioned in the Royal Army Service Corps, where he ran a mobile transport unit.
This was neither safe nor non-combatant. A fellow officer wrote that he woke every morning uncertain whether he would be called by his batman or St Peter. However, it was obviously less inevitably lethal than service in the infantry. It was also surprisingly modern. Apart from ambulance work, Fletcher’s unit was the first to take mobile X-rays into the front line. His experience of X-rays proved valuable when I was X-rayed in utero at the Clifton Nursing Home. The matron scrutinized the X-ray and told my parents that I had two heads. My father had seen many more X-rays than she had, and commented briskly: ‘Nonsense, woman, you don’t know how to read it.’
