Droghedagram
Alastair Forbes
Double Harness Lord Drogheda (Weidenfeld £10.00)
Ruminating, in the very brief interlude between retirement and death, his long years as General Administrator of Covent Garden, that rather rum Scouse-Scot David Webster Confessed in a letter to the third Chairman 14,.tcler whom he had served, 'You were a shock at first. Here was someone who ,wanted to know every detail and to have a 'and in everything. You revelled in detail ' • You have a tremendous flare [sic] for writing letters in which you make clear to teach Of us exactly what you think. In time these letters have become known as rroghedagrams.' Now, there unfolds the °ngest droghedagram ever which, while, i !rlthe words of the author's preference, t 17es not pretend to be in any way an autoI°, graphy still less a self-portrait, or essay in self-analysis', nevertheless succeeds to :eine extent in being all three and certainly Ystains Webster's charge of 'revelling in get*. The book's title correctly indicates the a cuthot's two principal and in large part con,h.utrent careers, and these are chronicled two thirds of the text but the other stircl, starting at the birth in London on George's Day 1919 of this Irish Earl of a''lluellY Scottish blood and wholly English egiance, takes us right up to the brilliant o tganisation of London's celebrations last Year of the Queen's Silver Jubilee. (1,„Y°11ng Garett Moore regarded the ,Ill'°ree of his parents as the most normal thing s the world as he had from the earliest age tetted their fundamental incompatibility. remained a devoted son to both, though aware that his mother, 'apart from father, ,clindifferent taste in men' and suffered a desperate inability to judge the character 'Others'
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fi 'n .1932, when he was struggling in his erst insignificant job in the City, a chance illeounter with Brendan Bracken became k: turning point in the author's life, Braecull.1, almost immediately offering him a job lecreting financial advertising. 'My know ge of finance and advertising was nil, and donut know what Brendan saw in me. He wevier interviewed me at all, which is just as for was very underdeveloped and ar;:yerienced. As with nearly all his actions }ILI' nearly all his appointments, he went by waneh and not by reasoned judgment.' HIS they of operating was to set an example to au.author who confesses that 'instinct always %led me.' The author protests rather too syk`" against the suggestion by Christoper th„e,s,,, in his biography of Evelyn Waugh,
Brendan encouraged the belief that he
was the illegitimate son of Winston', calling it 'unmitigated nonsense'. But the late Lady Churchill distinctly told me that Brendan had, while staying at Chartwell in her absence, removed snapshots from family albums and that these had later been seen framed in his own home, for what other reason than to encourage such a belief it is difficult to guess. It is perhaps surprising that the still strikingly handsome author has not explored the possibility that Bracken actually fell in love with him after his fashion, and that this possibility is by no means excluded by his subsequent elaborate pretence at falling and remaining in love with Penelope Dudley Ward, for whom the younger man's 'passion was intense and for a while she returned it'. Bracken, Drogheda writes rather bizarrely, 'was an enigma in his sexual tastes. If they were in any way fulfilled, it was in complete obscurity.' I doubt though if there was any even residual trace of brisk Bloomsbury buggery amongst the papers it took Brendan's chauffeur a week to burn on his late master's orders. Bracken was clearly able to sublimate his love into sentiments partly paternal and partly fraternal, and the author is quite right, in order to show the warmheartedness of his peculiar patron, to reprint the moving little note handed to him just before his wartime embarkation, as Bracken, prepared to accompany back to London the wife and child of his protege after their tearful farewells. The lonely Irish mountebank was often full of generous impulses and once advised me that 'You should never refuse help, financial or otherwise, if it is offered to you and you should never refuse to give it if it is asked of you.' Whatever may have been his original motives, conscious Of unconscious, in Garett Brendan had picked a winner.
Garrett Drogheda, who very properly salutes in passing the 'peerless style' of his friend Nicholas Davenport, 'the one constant feature throughout the Spectator's confusing changes of ownership and policy', lists a number of the best boys for whom he has found jobs, and an impressive list it makes, incidentally stressing his frequent preference for persons of German-Jewish background, whom he discerningly and likeably praises as 'that rare breed that Britain owes to Hitler'. He obviously thinks more highly of Freddy Fisher than of William Mogg, another of his discoveries.
Drogheda came to Covent Garden almost by accident, though as a young man he had helped Jack Donaldson, today Minister for the Arts, to found the Quarter Society and in 1935 he had had the good fortune to marry the enchanting musician and artist Joan Carr. When the highly musical civil servant Denis Rickett, who had served the post-war opera as Secretary, under both Maynard Keynes and John Anderson, was posted to Washington in 1951, Kenneth Clark the Obsidian Oracle not yet squeezed out of the nation's disinterested counsel by the pushful new growth personified by Lord Goodman, successfully proposed that Garett should succeed him.
There is no space here even to outline the book's lengthy but fascinating chronicle of its splendours and miseries, though it may be the right time and place to re-emphasise the sheer common sense of the house's language policy as reiterated there. As George Harewood had put it, 'the great singers prefer singing in the original which takes them to international houses all over the world,' and as Lionel Robbins added, as a clincher against substituting English for Italian, 'Suppose your Figaro goes sick, where do you immediately find someone equally capable of performing in English rather than from the original language?'
Perhaps his enormous contribution is best summed up by a quotation from a letter he received in mid-term from Isaiah Berlin. 'What is right about Covent Garden is that (a) there are now very few really bad performances, (b) we achieve heights, from time to time, that no other Opera House, on the whole, can outclimb ... The real point is that Covent Garden has become an absolutely central part of London and indeed British culture as much as, and I think, rather more than the National Theatre and that would not have happened without your administration. Long may you flourish.' Drogheda proudly recalls some particular triumphs such as the great Don Carlos, the enchanting Lisa Della Casa — Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau Arabella — and cannot resist quoting the way-off-target comment of Ted Heath, about a splendid performance by Giulini with a star-filled cast in a Visconti production of Verdi's Trovatore, 'indifferent conducting of second-rate singing', almost on a par with Arnold Goodman's comment to me, through a sandwich he was munching in the first interval of a perfect rendering of Pelleas under Boulez's baton, 'A trifle under-rehearsed, I fear'. The book yields a decent crop of backstage ballet and opera gossip and at least a partial recital of Drogheda's more notorious gaffes and gaffes raisonnees. I fear I am unable to conceal that he is a man I both greatly love and greatly admire, alike for his unpredictable eccentricities and for his manifold achievements, which, in the dismal postwar history of his country are of a rare order. 'Covent Garden', he writes, 'is destined to remain in my bloodstream until I die,' and thanks to this 'fearless aristocrat', as one of his enemies grudgingly called him, this is equally true for many of the rest of us, who will continue to hope that so peerless a peer be granted his wish to live to see the completion of the Royal Opera House development scheme of which he remains co-Chairman.
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