Chipps with everything
Christopher Fraser
SEAHORSE! BETWEEN THE SEA AND THE SADDLE by Chipps Selby Bennett Halsgrove, £16.99, pp. 400, ISBN 1841144819 Commander Chipps Selby Bennett was a traditional officer and a gentleman; a Dorset dandy with a monocle, tartan trews and size 12 shoes. He’s a man whose life experience encompasses the navy, hunting and the Conservative party. His autobiography, Seahorse! Between the Sea and the Saddle, reflects with characteristic eloquence his surprisingly wide-ranging life, and chronicles the highs and lows of a man who has navigated his way through all levels of society.
The memoirs start with an unusual upbringing and the Spanish Civil War and continue with adventurous travels in the wartime and peacetime navy. One moment Chipps is nearly drowned as a midshipman in Scapa Flow and again in the Clyde; the next, aged 18, he is in love with the daughter of an Egyptian bey. He finds himself in a motorlaunch running arms at midnight to the guerrillas in Crete, only to discover that their precious crates contain whisky and women’s frilly underclothes instead of machine-guns.
In the British Pacific fleet, he experiences the dramatic change of role of the Royal Navy from mainly escorting convoys to operating for months at sea as Fast-Carrier Strike Groups. His little sloop is the first ship into a Japanese port, even before the official surrender, and he has to march a party of unarmed sailors through the still-hostile streets of Yokohama before rushing down to retain Hong Kong — as Roosevelt has secretly promised it to the Chinese.
Romance as a student naval linguist in Madrid results in his being seriously offered, at the age of 24, the post of Commander of the Dominican Republic’s navy — ‘out to dominate the Caribbean’.
He travels all over India and stays up country with an Indian rajah, who, he discovers, hires his impressive golden plate and the arms for his guards from the Army and Navy Stores in Calcutta. He learns to use chopsticks 600 miles up the Yangtze, and makes his way into Peking when it is still under siege by the Communists.
He falls in love with ‘the most beautiful blonde in Hong Kong’ and another in France, who, despite being the niece of the head of the Jesuits in north China, sends him erotic nude paintings of herself. He marries a wartime heroine, the highly cosmopolitan and then well-known Labour politician, Dodo Lees. She gives it all up to follow him, often to the considerable concern of his admirals, as he travels all over the world in every size of ship, from minesweepers to giant aircraftcarriers, while she encourages tourism to Malta as an unofficial member of Dom Mintoff’s Labour cabinet.
Chipps devised the command-andcommunications structure that was in on the birth of the Eurodollar and of Liffe, the Future Forwards market, as well as going dangerously debt-collecting in Central America and elsewhere. And meanwhile he was, astonishingly, also an official amateur whipper-in for 40 seasons for his local hunt in Dorset.
Bitterly opposed by his wife, he was also elected a county councillor, where he was renowned for riding to meetings on his steed, directly from the hunt. For five years he was the successful chairman of his hard-pressed and newly formed Conservative Association. How on earth did he fit it all in? After Dodo’s death, he married Mairi, a keen hunting Scotswoman — and, for once, a Conservative. These, then, are the fascinating and absorbing memoirs of a man who, despite being pretty impecunious, has led an extraordinarily varied life. If a film was made of his life, who would they find to play him?
His book is a tour de force — a splendid read. I found it hard to put down.
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