WHAT I DID IN THE WAR
Simon Courtauld was editing The Spectator
when Galtieri invaded the Falklands. Here he describes his role in the destiny of the nation
I REMEMBER quite clearly what I was doing on the day, Friday, 2 April 1982, that General Galtieri invaded the Falkland Islands. It was Grand National weekend, I was driving north for the following day's race at Aintree, and spending the weekend with friends in Cheshire. At dinner that night priorities were respected and the talk was almost entirely of the race, of past races, of hard-luck stories and large sums won and lost. But my attention started to wander a little in the direction of the South Atlantic: earlier that week Alexander Chancellor, editor of The Spectator, had left for two weeks' holiday in Tuscany and, as his deputy, I was in charge. These were going to be exciting times.
Looking back at the cover of the first 'war issue' that I edited, I am slightly embarrassed to reread the supremely confident note which was struck in the headlines.
'Britain's right to dominion', with articles on the islands' history; 'The duty of the government' — a measured political commentary from Ferdinand Mount; and 'Being in the right' by Auberon Waugh, who went on to predict that the enterprise would nevertheless end in 'abject humiliation for Britain', and the return of Prince Andrew to our shores as bully-beef. John Springs did a cover-drawing of Galtieri standing on the islands with a sheep and the Argentinian flag tied to his shepherd's crook.
In those days The Spectator was run, if not quite on a shoestring, with the barest minimum of staff. When the editor was away, there were only two people to put together and produce the magazine each week: Peter Ackroyd — before he became famous as prolific novelist, biographer and historian of London — and myself. It was also then customary for the editor, or in his absence, me, to write the Diary (then called Notebook). It was less personal than it is now, with rather more comment on issues of the day. There was no leader page at the time.
On the Tuesday after the invasion (prepress day and always the busiest of The Spectator's week), I regret to say that, judging my uninterrupted presence at the Doughty Street helm to be indispensable, I never made it to my godfather Rab Butler's memorial service, which was being held that day at Westminster Abbey. With exquisite timing, which Rab would have appreciated, Lord Carrington, whose most honourable resignation had just been announced, read a lesson at the service from the Book of Wisdom: 'Wisdom is glorious and never fadeth away. Yea, she is easily seen of them that love her and found of such as seek her.'
The one who should have resigned, of course, as I wrote in the Notebook, was the defence secretary, John Nott. He it was who took the disastrous decision to scrap HMS Endurance, the one armed Royal Navy vessel in the South Atlantic, giving the clearest indication to Argentina of the extent of our interest in the future of the Falkland Islands. And when, three weeks earlier, a band of Argentinian 'scrap dealers' had raised their country's flag on the island of South Georgia, Endurance was ordered only to steam towards South Geor gia and wait. A landing party of marines, which could have shoved the invaders off the island in a matter of hours, would surely have given Galtieri pause. (Auberon Waugh, in trying to read the mind of the Argentinian dictator, thought that he had been finally driven to invade the Falklands by Mrs Thatcher's perverse and persistent refusal to give Peregrine Worsthorne the knighthood he so richly deserved.) South Georgia, as every schoolboy used to know, is the island on which Sir Ernest Shackleton landed in 1916 after his epic journey to get help in rescuing the remainder of his crew, stranded when his ship, the Endurance, had been crushed by pack ice. These rich memories had led me, a week or so before the Falklands were taken, to the report of the economic survey of the islands conducted by Lord Shackleton, the explorer's son, and published in 1976. The seas around the islands, according to the report, were vastly rich in fish and seaweed, not to mention possibly important reserves of oil and gas. It was also interesting to learn of the very high divorce rate among the islands' population of 1,800. During a recent period of ten years, there had been 207 marriages and 56 divorces.
But what I recall most clearly about the Shackleton report was that it became virtually unobtainable. Thanks to my remarkable foresight and anticipation when South Georgia was invaded in March, I had contacted Lord Shackleton to ask him about his report, and about South Georgia, and he was kind enough to give me his last spare copy. By the first week of April that report had acquired a rarity value, and Lord Shackleton passed on to The Spectator a number of inquiries from journalists anxious for 'background' on the Falklands. Why didn't I make some money out of it?
For the next issue of The Spectator I was pleased to get Captain Stephen Roskill, former official naval historian, to write about the hazards facing the task force in the South Atlantic. He stressed the importance of the weather, which at that time of the year can be at its worst. I went back to South, Shackleton's account of his Antarctic expedition, to discover that his terrifying open-boat journey from Elephant Island to South Georgia had been under
taken at the end of April, when that part of the ocean 'is known to be the most tempestuous storm-swept area of water in the world'. Setting off aboard Canberra for the Evening Standard was Max Hastings, whom I bumped into at El Vino in Fleet Street the day before he left and who agreed also to be The Spectator's man in the South Atlantic. When, on the final day of the conflict, he was the first man into Port Stanley, his report was illustrated by Nicholas Garland with a cover-drawing of our intrepid correspondent riding towards the island capital on the back of a sheep.
When Alexander Chancellor returned from holiday he got hold of John Keegan who wrote, under the pseudonym of Patrick Desmond. because he was then a lecturer at Sandhurst. a perceptive weekly analysis of the conflict. As the task force approached the Falklands without much prospect of a negotiated settlement, a lot of people, including The Spectator, got jittery. But not many readers went along with an article which Chancellor published from James Fenton, calling the government's policy on the eve of hostilities 'frivolous, murderous, wicked'.
I went off to Madrid soon afterwards, to write a piece on the Spaniards' view of the battle for Las Malvinas. On the day that British troops made their first landfall, at San Carlos Bay, I visited Madrid's bestknown Argentinian bar for a lively exchange of opinions, but I recall that my most stimulating conversation there was with an elderly American on some aspect of the Spanish Civil War.
Earlier in the month, The Spectator changed its cover-drawing to call for a ceasefire on the morning that news was received of the sinking of HMS Sheffield, leading some readers later to question whether the magazine had had a good war. Kingsley Amis wrote a letter to the editor, accusing The Spectator of inconsistency during the previous two months and commenting that 'your coverage of the Falklands episode has cleared up one small point: whether you run a fairly responsible journal for the libertarian Right or a fairly entertaining magazine. You run a fairly entertaining magazine.' Well, it was a compliment of a sort.
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