AND ANOTHER THING
Amazing scenes when bald-pated left-wing lords got steamed up
PAUL JOHNSON
The late Noel Annan was an intellectual grandee. He was a clever man and a skilful writer and, in my view, he should have writ- ten books. Instead he became an academic administrator on a prodigious scale. In fact, at the beginning of his career he did write a book, a life of Leslie Stephen, proto-progeni- tor of the Bloomsbury Group, to whose fee- bly writhing coda Annan belonged. Stephen will go down in history not so much as the father of the gruesome Virginia Woolf as the author of a shrewd saying, sununing up his two decades as editor of the DNB: 'No really good story is ever quite true.' Having had a good war and done Stephen, Annan settled down to a university career, including run- ning King's, Cambridge, and the vast Univer- sity College, London, and all that goes with such splendours: a peerage, membership of top committees, in and out of No. 10, hon- orary degrees, dispensing patronage, getting jobs for friends (he was an Apostle) and other kinds of power-broking. He was a life- long leftie but, far from being an identilcit one, often disconcerted his chums by spout- ing right-wing views, even patriotism. But so did Keynes, of whom Annan was a later, and inferior, version. Then, having taken the aca- demic top spots, Annan produced another book, which turned out to be a retread life of Stephen. It is true that he later wrote two more books, one on his contemporaries, the second on dons: but these were anecdotage.
The most striking thing about Annan was his head: pink, bald and rather nobly struc- tured. He might have been a Roman emperor. Though not capable of apotheo- sis, he did something equally remarkable. On a clear day, when he was suitably roused to righteous anger on behalf of a liberal cause, steam could be distinctly seen rising out of his bald patch. With one exception, whom I will come to later, he was the only person I have known who could do this. I do not mean intentionally; he may have been unaware of the phe- nomenon. It never failed to fill me with admiration. He not only worked for the Left, he steamed for it. You may say I imag- ined it. If so, I was not the only one. Lady Pamela Berry noticed it too. She joked, 'Do you think the clouds coming out of Noel's dome are cumulus or alto-cirrus?' We agreed to provoke him unmercifully the next time he attended one of her lunch par- ties and study the results. There was even an abortive scheme to take a photo, rather as the Society for Psychical Research snapped ectoplasm. But nothing came of it. On the appointed day, Annan was unruf- flable blandness. Despite all our efforts — 'Paul, do you think Nixon will go down as America's greatest president?"No, darling, not quite as great as Coolidge' — Vesuvius proved inactive, or extinct. Annan was a sharp old bird and may have noticed he was being watched by two hostile ornithologists, and refused to perform. Or maybe he had lost the knack. Certainly, he never again 'got up steam' in my presence.
These great pink billiard-ball combustion engines of the Left, as remarkable as any- thing else to emerge from the industrial revolution, were once by no means uncom- mon in the upper echelons of the liberal establishment. Mr Gladstone himself is not recorded as emitting steam, though quite capable of it, even though his bald pate was window-dressed by a few hairs dexterously arranged by Mrs G. His trick was to emit spectral lightning from his terrifying eyes, fierce enough to strike dumb any Commons orator who offended him. I have the origi- nal of a drawing, by Harry Furniss, which shows him in action. Did Lloyd George steam in wrath? Very likely. He performed other magic feats. I believe Hugh Dalton, who was capable of monumental rages, was an occasional steam-engine too, but I never saw it. One pillar of the Left who certainly ought to have steamed — he had all the right equipment — was Sir Jock (later Lord) Campbell, whom I knew well and often saw in anger, or at least intense excitement. This produced cranial sweat, which he mopped vigorously, but never actual vapour.
It was a different matter with Dr Thomas (later Lord) Balogh. In the steam-raising process he was a rival to Lord Annan. I would like to have seen them performing together, by no means a remote possibility, for they belonged to quite different coteries on the Left and (I think) detested each other. So any meeting of the two would have been combustive. Balogh, like Annan, was also a biggish man, pink and hairless except for a glossy white fringe; with noble features too, though more those of a Renaissance pope — a Medici perhaps or a della Rovere, not a Borgia — than of a Fla- vian emperor. His anger was frequent and impressive, not to say explosive, but also comic, since it was usually accompanied by thumping of the table and other sound effects. So Balogh began by alarming those present but ended by provoking gales of irresistible laughter, which merely increased his fury. At such times emitting steam was an escape valve, exactly as on an early Stephenson locomotive, the Rocket, perhaps, or the Mancunian. At a certain point one expected Balogh to sound a piercing whistle to clear the track ahead. But he never did. Rather, with a final slam- bang-bang on the furniture, he left the room in disgust, cursing •the frivolous English.
Steam-emitters were not of course con- fined to the English Left. Nikita Khrushchev could raise steam too, according to some observers, though I never saw it. But I did witness him expressing his rage in two unusual ways. The first was at the Paris Sum- mit which was spoiled — 'or, from our point of view, enlivened — by the U-2 fiasco. Khrushchev affected to take the intrusion of Soviet air-space very seriously and accused America of 'fatting right under Russia's nose'. He worked himself up into a simulat- ed rage, which is probably why no steam was emitted, uncontrolled ire being a precondi- tion of the miracle. Instead, he thumped his rostrum and, when this did not make enough noise, took off his shoe and hammered with the heel. I have never seen this done before or since (though Khrushchev repeated the display at the UN). He gave an even more impressive sign of rage at a notorious press conference he and his sidekick Bulganin held at the Central Hall. On that occasion, questions from the audience had to be put in writing and then filtered through a scowling Soviet ambassador. Suddenly, Isaac Deutscher jumped up and shouted an obvi- ously provocative question in Russian. Before the ambassador had a chance to tell Deutscher to abide by the rules, Khrushchev rose, red with rage, and spat out a threaten- ing reply, at the same time shaking his fist. had never seen a man actually shake his fist before, except in comic drawings. It con- firmed my friend Vicky's view that it was impossible to caricature Khrushchev, as nature had done it already. Vicky produced a beautiful drawing of the heel-thumping and fist-shaking episodes. I wish I had it now, and I wish too that I had persuaded him to sketch left-wing lords with steam up. But perhaps that would have required a Turner, the master of stormy vapours.
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