DIARY
RICHARD COBB Public events have been in the habit of brushing against me every now and then over the years. In 1935, rushing to get the last metro, Rond-Point-des-Champs- Elysees, I ran straight into M. Pierre Laval as he was coming up the steps. I remember his white tie and his rather Asiatic appear- ance. I apologised most profusely to Mon- sieur le President. He accepted my apolo- gies: de rien, he said. Many years later, while waiting on the platform of Oxford station for a train to London, the train carrying the coffin of Winston Churchill came through on the central track. It was a strange cream and brown train, with Brighton Belle cars; the coffin was in the middle; there was a black steam engine called Sir Winston Churchill. As the train came through, there was an awed hush, you could almost hear it. Some time before that I was introduced to Kerensky in a Paris café and found him full of complaints and rather boring. Still, he did tell me that he had slept in the Tsar's pyjamas — they had been ordered from Harrods — while living in the Winter Palace.
In October 1959, I was living in the rue de Tournon, at the top end of that hand- some street where it begins to fan out. It was about one in the morning and there was no one about, even the tabac le Tournon had its lights out. I was ringing the bell beside the massive green doors of No. 12, calling at the same time: cordon svp. The red-haired Breton concierge had fallen asleep again. It was a very cold night. I went on ringing for some time. After about ten minutes, two cars came racing up the street at break-neck speed from the direction of the rue de Seine, their tyres screaming; as the one in the rear came level with my solitary figure exposed on the pavement, its lights picked me out as if I had been caught in a projector. The two cars took the corner into the rue de Vaugirard, at the level of the big PTT as if they had been on the race track at Mont- !Wry. I could hear them turn a second time in the direction of the rue Guynemer. The concierge finally released the switch, the green door opened, I went in, shouting Cobb, and ran up the five floors of the stone staircase. I had had a bad fright. I had little doubt that the second car had been out to get whoever was in the one in fr. °M. On the evening of the following day, it was all in Le Monde. There had been an attempt on the life of M. Mitterrand. He had been spotted at Lipp, had tried to reach his flat in the rue Guynemer, his car had been riddled with bullets at the top end of the Luxembourg. He had managed to escape, kneeling behind a privet hedge. Later, it turned out that the whole thing had been stage-managed and that it had been only a pseudo-attentat. Even so, it had come uncomfortably close to me, I could almost have felt the hot breath of History, or, perhaps, of la petite histoire. I had been, unknowingly at the time, one of the rare witnesses of what became known as l'affaire du jardin de l'Observatoire.
If anyone should ever consider writing the history of the Randolph Hotel here in Oxford, I could supply them with one or two items of information. Some time in late June 1940, coming from my digs in St John's Street, I reached the corner of Beaumont Street opposite the entrance to the hotel. My eye was caught by a sudden flash of gold or silver braid under the matchless sun of that terrible month. Two French admirals, in full dress uniform, accompanied by two lieutenants de vais- seau, who I think were carrying swords, came out from beneath the canopy, turning right into the Cornmarket. Later I was told that the admirals — with or without their escort — had been going to have lunch in All Souls, telling the Fellows there that it was all up for Britain and that we should sue for peace. One of the admirals was apparently Platon; I never found out the identity of his companion. During the Vichy period, Platon became known as the most anglophobe of all the French admir- als. He was murdered some time in the autumn of 1944 and his house was burnt down. Apart from anglophobia, a pretty common property among French admirals of that period, Platon was in two respects unusual: he was a Protestant, and he wore a monocle. I have only once seen a naval officer wearing a monocle, that was just before an investiture at Buckingham Palace: he was reading off a list of CBEs through his monocle. Nearly all the elderly Polish colonels, who had been Pilsudski Legionnaires in 1917 and 1918, and who were living in the same hotel as I on the South Shore in Blackpool the winter of 1940, wore monocles. But they were caval- ry officers, not officers in a navy.
In the autumn of 1940, a New Zealand friend of mine and I used to go to the lounge bar of the Randolph to get drinks after closing time, thanks to the goodwill of the head waiter and to my friend's New Zealand Division hat. We met there a rather good-looking man — too good- looking to be quite true — dressed in the uniform of the South African Air Force. I don't think in fact he was in the South African Air Force. We saw him every night for a fortnight; then he left, without paying his hotel bill. He always insisted on paying for our drinks in cash; the head waiter thought that was suspicious. The Flight- Lieutenant, or pseudo one, upbraided me for 'being a bundle of nerves', because I had spilt some whisky when my hand had trembled: 'Take a hold on yourself, Cobb,' he had said. He was a bit of a bully, and was very full of himself. Later, just after the war, he achieved a measure of fame. His name was Neville Heath. He was hanged some time in 1945, I think.
Ihave never kept a diary, I would not know what to put in it. I am not interested in the weather, provided it is not hot and sunny. I am not acutely interested in the state of my soul, not being given much to self-analysis, and I know nothing about flowers, when they come up, or what their names are. Of course I have to keep a University diary so as to know the dates of degree days and mark in each week the days and times of tutorials and lectures, for, though retired, I still give tutorials and lectures. I don't get paid for them but I like having pupils and an audience: vanity, I suppose. I do much the same things each week, spend quite a lot of time ironing, read in the Snug of my local every evening from 7.45 to 9, go to France two or three times a year, to Brussels once a year, to the United States every now and then, and to Whitby for the first fortnight of every September. I like writing long, gossipy, frivolous letters to a small group of friends, most of them fellow-historians. I also write books about people I have known and liked. Why keep a diary?
Richard Cobb was Professor of Modern History at Oxford University until 1984.
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