DIARY
The confluence of the 500th anniver- sary of Cabot landing in Nova Scotia, 100th anniversary of the Diamond Jubilee, 50th anniversary of Indian independence and last week's handover of Hong Kong has plunged the media into full British Empire retrospective mode. What we need is some gloriously pukka British understatement to sum up the last five centuries of colonial- ism. Might I suggest the answer the Queen Mother gave when I, rather precociously as I now appreciate, asked her what being Empress of India had felt like: 'It was very nice while it lasted.'
As well as arrant name-dropping, The Spectator Diary should include a nostalgic lament for some long-dead institution Sunday post, say, or bowler hats or the Indian civil service. I am on jury service this week and next, and my favoured doomed anachronism is the barrister's wig. There are all sorts of respectable reasons to do with security and anonimity why it should be retained, although hers didn't help my pregnant wife when she was stabbed by a ball-point pen-wielding client in Oxford Crown & County Court a couple of months ago. No, we should keep them from a pure- ly atavistic sense of opposition to change, progress and modem conformity.
Will the real Alice von Schlieffen please step forward? I was accused of being the celebrated Spectator hoaxess at a party last week, which was flattering as her knowledge of Wilhelmine military strategy is obviously top-notch, whoever she is. A tabloid paper has sent a reporter round to her published address in Cumberland Square to smoke her out, but to no avail. Will she, like the author of Primary Colors, be unmasked through handwritten margina- lia? Or, as with the 18th-century Junius let- ters, perhaps scholars will debate the author's real identity for centuries to come. So as not to narrow the field for prospec- tive sleuths, I didn't categorically deny it.
The Villa Feltrinelli at Gargnano on Lake Garda, where Mussolini spent his final days with his mistress, is to be turned into a hotel. One aspect of his death always strikes me as incongruous. For the parti- sans to have killed Clara Petacci, a pretty young woman with no important political views or influence, seems rather unitalian. Professor Denis Mack Smith claims she insisted' on dying with Musso, which sounds even less Italian. Mistresses fared pretty badly during the second world war. Paul Reynaud's, Comtesse Helene de Pones, died when a trunk, said to be full of ANDREW ROBERTS jewels, broke her neck when it was flung forward during a car crash in June 1940. She had only asked him to drive to keep him from getting depressed about the fall of France. Eva Braun had her famous shot- gun marriage, and Eisenhower's mistress, Kay Summersby, was dumped as soon as the war was over with the stunningly unro- mantic line, 'I shall watch your future with the greatest interest.' At least she got to keep Telek, their black Scottie, although Mrs Ike got the puppies.
Ihave been rather surprised by the dearth of pedantry over the correct date of the new millennium, everyone seeming per- fectly happy to plump for 1 January 2000. The Victorians were much better nit-pick- ers. At the end of the last century the Kaiser decreed that 31 December 1899 would close Germany's 19th century, whilst the Bureau de Longitudes in Paris ordained that France would not enter the 20th until a year later. The French point of view was generally adopted in England, and seemed to be confirmed by higher authority when on the night of 31 December 1900 one of the upright stones supporting a lin- tel of the outer circle of Stonehenge fell in a violent storm, the first time such a thing had happened since 1759.
`Perhaps they should try for "Call my bluff". Researching the life of the 3rd Mar- quess of Salisbury takes me to Hatfield House a great deal, where the archives are presided over by that prince among librari- ans, Robin Harcourt Williams. He has allowed me to work inside its inner sanc- tum, where I sit surrounded by five cen- turies of the Cecil family's memorabilia and archival treasures. Take down a box from one of the huge shelves and it might con- tain Churchill's letters to his best man, Lord Cecil of Chelwood's Nobel Prize or the 2nd Marchioness's diaries of her (pla- tonic) friendship with Wellington. The whole room is a vast paradise for histori- ans, not least because one never has to work with microfilms or facsimiles, but only with the original documents. One morning my eyes alighted on a black box with 'Cas- ket Letters' stamped in gold on the lid. Surely not the ones written by Mary Queen of Scots and produced to blackmail her into abdication? No, said Robin, regretfully, mere copies. But, he added after a pause, copies made by Burghley in 1567 for use at the trial in case she refused. How many other archives are there where even the facsimiles are 430 years old?
Channel 4's recent Secret Lives pro- gramme about Bob Boothby reminded me of an extraordinary tale about Czech assets which I came across in the Public Records Office a few years ago, and have never got round to investigating further. During the Munich crisis in late 1938, a certain Mr Samson of 17 Morden Gardens, N15, alert- ed Special Branch to a Mrs Stern, a Czech refugee, who had asked him to deposit a box in the Stamford Hill branch of Lloyds bank containing £3 million in cash and bank receipts. The money, Mrs Stern had said, belonged to the Czech president Eduard Benes and prime minister Dr Milan Hodza. When the story was checked by MI5, and the permanent under-secretary of the For- eign Office, Sir Alec Cadogan, spoke to the chairman of Lloyds Bank, Lord Warding- ton, it was found to be true 'in almost every particular'. Samson also claimed that simi- lar amounts of Czech money were to be found in other banks around the country. Then Mrs Stern suddenly withdrew the money and disappeared, and the file was sent to the Treasury where it also disap- peared. It did not reappear until October 1948, in the words of one official 'from amongst other old stuff in one of the dustier corners of the Chancellor's private office'. Back in 1938 the British government was considering making large loans to the rump Czech state to console it for the loss of the Sudetenland. So did British taxpayers' money wind up in Lloyds bank, Stamford Hill? And whatever became of Mrs Stern?
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