M ajor Bruce Shand, father of the Duchess of Cornwall, who
died at the weekend, was a man of great charm. He had a very attractive combination of enough confidence to put you at your ease and enough diffidence not to seem arrogant. In old age he had a lovely, interesting, funny face — creased, like a more military, bucolic version of W.H. Auden. Although he did not seem in the least bitter, it hurt him a great deal that the press persecuted his daughter — bringing grief also to his wife — for so long. But he stuck to the old principle, which he referred to as ‘FHB’ (‘Family Hold Back’), and never said anything in public. If you have won medals and nearly been killed fighting for your country (Shand won the MC in France in 1940 and was wounded and captured in North Africa in 1942), it must give you a curious perspective on how people behave in times of peace. Many years after the war, Shand visited Spangenburg Castle, where he had been incarcerated in Germany. It had become a hotel, and Shand joined the guided tour of guests being shown round. There was much talk of great exploits in the Middle Ages, but no mention of the war. ‘Look here,’ Shand called out from the back of the party, ‘I was a prisoner here, you know.’ I used to see him at the Sussex Club, an admirably pointless institution which drinks ‘prosperity to the county of Sussex’. As we parted, he would grin and wave his stick and shout ‘Vive la chasse!’ He wrote to me last November wondering if I could send a copy of the Telegraph for Camilla’s wedding to Prince Charles (‘Sadly, I have mislaid what I squirreled away ... ’). It was the time of the opening meets after the hunting ban: ‘An enormous display of fox-hunting on Saturday,’ wrote the former Master of the Southdown, ‘which was immensely heartening.’ When I sent him the newspapers, he wrote, ‘I can die with a clear conscience, as regards family archives.’ His conscience surely deserved to be clear on every count.
According to Barbara Leaming’s new book, Jack Kennedy: The Making of a President (Weidenfeld), JFK’s formative political experience was his association with young British aristocrats at the end of the 1930s. He came to admire Churchill, though originally an appeaser in his father’s image, through the prism of their changed lives. An interesting sub-point, though, is psychological. Jack was a member of what Andrew Devonshire, who was also a member, called the Second Sons’ Club. A third member was David Ormsby-Gore, who, as Lord Harlech, was British ambassador in Washington when Kennedy was President. All three became the eldest son through the death of their brothers (in Devonshire’s case, his elder brother was married to Kennedy’s sister). Has anyone ever done a study of the effect of second sons on the history of the world?
The Conservative party wants to get rid of its dreary torch, and seeks a new logo. Wouldn’t the boldest thing be to have no logo at all? Logos are so late-20th-century.
An interesting row is brewing in Spain. The Valle de los Caidos there is the main monument to the dead of the Spanish Civil War. A church is hewn in the rock and a huge cross rises above it, dominating the landscape. Dead from both sides are buried in the valley, supposedly in roughly equal numbers. Benedictine monks worship there and tend the site. Now the socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has accepted a suggestion that the place be converted into a theme-park devoted to Peace and Reconciliation. The Left, understandably, has never liked the monument, because it was built by prisoners on the orders of General Franco, and he and Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, leader of the Falange, are buried there. If the proposal goes through, the land involved will be taken away from the Crown and the church will be deconsecrated, which will presumably mean that Franco’s family will want his body removed from it. All this violates the agreement, known as the Transition, by which the King ensured that the hatreds of the Civil War were buried with Franco. So Peace and Reconciliation are now undermining peace and reconciliation.
Iam sure Patrick Marnham’s new biography of the novelist Mary Wesley is excellent, but I do find this self-consciously wicked old lady depressing. As she left the memorial service for her sister in 1985, Mary Wesley was heard to say, ‘I feel so sorry for poor Susan. She never knew the joys of soixante-neuf.’ This is taken as evidence of Wesley’s ‘subversive’ brilliance. But if you think about it, how did Mary Wesley know what joys her sister had or had not experienced in that department? Since she can’t have known, wasn’t her remark stupid, as well as unkind? All the stories about Wesley show her as the unimaginative sort of person who, believing herself liberated, cannot understand that people who show off less can be just as free.
Despite living ‘by the pen’ for more than a quarter of a century, I am unconfident about the difference between ‘may’ and ‘might’. A Mr J.D. Tunnicliffe, from Cambridge, has spotted this and sends me his note on the difference between the two. It runs to a page, contains six points and, though clear, is not simple. Mr Tunnicliffe points out, rightly, the difference in meaning between ‘Napoleon may have had homosexual tendencies’ (i.e., may or may not) and ‘Wellington might have avoided the battle of Waterloo’ (i.e., could have done), but loses me slightly when he observes that ‘This simple rule is however complicated by the sequence of tenses, e.g., John said, “I may have made a clerical error”. “John told me that he might have made a clerical error.”’ I see that the latter sentence is right, but I don’t see why the former should not say: ‘John said, “I might have made a clerical error”’, especially when, as I would maintain, that is quite likely what John would, in reality, say. Might it be (that ‘might’ surely is correct) that the rules here are not quite settled?
It has been touch-and-go for many farmers because of the lateness of the Single Farm Payment owed to them by the Rural Payments Agency in Newcastle. Now it is revealed that employees of the agency have been jumping naked off the filing cabinets, taking drugs at work and so on. Their special pleasure has been to vomit into what disaffected staff call ‘official cups’ and then leave them in cupboards to fester until discovered by their smell. That seems an exact metaphor for the way government policy is now conducted.
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