It clearly suited Roy; but it also suited Jennifer. Apart from the fact that he was hopelessly impractical – he could not hang a picture, let alone boil an egg – she would not have consulted him on the choice of curtains and he had little interest in looking at alternative schools. This was not unusual: fathers in that generation did not generally change nappies, nor did husbands do the shopping. The demarcation was quite clear: not having to ask him about every domestic decision left Jennifer more time for her own career. Roy confessed some slight guilt at the imbalance. ‘I think I get more out of it than my wife does. She helps with my problems more than I help with hers’; but this, he explained, was ‘because I respect her judgment so much’.44 Jennifer always insisted that she was happy with the separation of functions. When asked if she did not have political ambitions of her own, she replied that one politician in the family was enough. But she was never a very hands-on mother. When the children were young they had a succession of au pairs to get them off to school in the mornings: two of the favourite ones with whom the family stayed in touch were German. Jennifer always tried to be home in the afternoons to give them their tea; but then she and Roy went out so much in the evenings that Cynthia once asked her why they had children at all. The strain of combining a young family, an exacting husband and her own career left Jennifer in those years often exhausted.
As the children grew up, Roy was a fairly distant father. In his very last book he wrote that Franklin Roosevelt, ‘partly by nature, partly by geography, remained aloof from most of the adolescent problems of his children’;45 he might have been describing himself. Like other ambitious politicians, he was simply not there much of the time; when he was, he was often preoccupied, or just not interested in the concerns of children. When he did give them his full attention, however, he could be great fun. He would take them, individually or with a friend, on outings – to Battersea funfair, Hampton Court maze or the viewing terrace at Heathrow to watch the planes – and embellish their adventures outrageously to Jennifer when they got home. In many ways, Cynthia reflected, he was more like a favourite uncle than a father. As they got older he would treat them as adults and listen seriously to their views, so that the conversation at meals – as Charles recalled at his funeral – was more likely to be about capital punishment or divorce than football or pop music. For family holidays they usually took a large house not too far from London – Sussex or Kent – and invited friends with children the same age to come and stay; they hit on the clever idea of renting a prep school with excellent facilities that they could use: a swimming pool, tennis courts and cricket nets. Roy enjoyed playing games with his children, but he gave no quarter; he was always intensely competitive.fn4 On the other hand, even on holiday he always worked for a good part of the day: he usually had a book in hand – he thought ‘a holiday without any work is as barren as a working day without a conversational meal’47 – and all his life treated holidays as a time to get on with his writing. He would emerge for lunch and perhaps play games for a couple of hours, but then go back to work. He never really relaxed for very long.
The three children grew up very different: Charles shy, quiet and intense; Cynthia prickly, with an often embattled relationship with her father; Edward more easy-going than the other two. Charles suffered the most from having a famous father: at thirteen he was sent to Winchester and found it an ordeal. As a reward for surviving his first term Roy took him to Berlin, rather as Arthur had taken him to Paris at a similar age. It was just after the building of the Wall, and the sight of goose-stepping communist soldiers at Checkpoint Charlie inoculated Charles for life against the appeal of the far left. ‘That in itself,’ Roy wrote years later, ‘made the journey well worth while.’48 He was doubtless comparing Charles with Cynthia, who as an Oxford student at the height of campus radicalism in the early 1970s reacted angrily against his establishment politics, marched against the Vietnam War and threw herself into community activism and the women’s movement. Most of the time Roy was quite tolerant of this youthful rebellion and enjoyed winding her up; but it was often difficult for Jennifer, caught in the middle. Charles meanwhile had left Winchester – for purely personal reasons, unconnected with criticism of Labour ministers sending their children to private schools – to go instead to Holland Park comprehensive in Kensington (one of the flagship comprehensives in the country), where he was much happier and met his future wife. It is fair to say, however, that both the elder children found growing up in their father’s shadow hard.fn5
Meanwhile the move to Ladbroke Square enabled Roy and Jennifer to live in the style he thought appropriate to a rising young Member of Parliament. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, as he was then known – who already lived just around the corner in an equally large house in Holland Park Avenue – described Jenkins in 1957 as ‘a caricature of an up-and-coming young politician in a Victorian novel’;49 and there is no doubt that Roy was almost consciously playing the part. Another future colleague who had the same impression was Bill Rodgers. Oxford-educated, but still close to his Liverpool roots, Rodgers was rather shocked by his first experience of lunch at Ladbroke Square on Christmas Eve 1956:
I like Roy, who improves on acquaintance: and also Jeniffer [sic], who seems very English, in the nicest way . . . Roy is working on Edwardian England . . . I think he fancies himself living with some of the elegance of those days. His children have turn-of-the-century names – Charles, Cynthia, Edward: his house is roughly that period (interior – it is rather older in structure): he has slightly studied personal manners – and a furry coat which goes well with a cigar: there was sherry before lunch, wine with and brandy after. All this is perhaps summarised by good living and liberal ideas – in the best sense; both worth a lot . . . But it is so different from the envirement [sic] of most Labour supporters (as also 99% of the population).50
Jenkins had developed a taste for wine while still at Oxford, but he could not afford to drink it regularly until after the war. Ladbroke Square, however, boasted a wine cellar under the pavement, next to the coal cellar, ‘so damp and dirty that bringing out a bottle was rather like fetching a sack of damp potatoes’. In a magazine interview in the 1990s he pinpointed a key moment in his life:
Sometime between 1950 and 1955, wine changed from a drink you were pleased to find at a meal, but didn’t expect, to something you almost began to expect. And, at that time, I changed from buying it at the local off-licence on the day of the dinner party, to buying wine in advance.51
From the beginning he concentrated on claret, calculating that by restricting himself to one region he could build up a serious expertise in a way that he could not if he tried to cover the whole field. Of course the field was relatively limited in the 1950s, before New World or even Spanish wines began to be widely sold in Britain, and the choice of good wine lay pretty much between Bordeaux and Burgundy.
Lunch and dinner parties played a central part in his mock-Edwardian lifestyle. Roy and Jennifer made a point of entertaining a wide circle of political, literary and diplomatic acquaintances: a shrewd mix of old university friends, political colleagues like the Gaitskells and the Jays, and interesting people they wanted to know better, many of whom quickly became friends. One of the latter was Nicholas (‘Nicko’) Henderson, who was surprised the first time he was invited, since he had known Jenkins only slightly at Oxford, but rapidly became one of his best friends. Another was a dashing young French diplomat, Jacques de Beaumarchais (a descendant of the creator of Figaro), then serving in London, who with his elegant wife Marie-Alice also became lifelong friends. The ground floor dining room could seat ten or twelve, and they held about a dozen dinner parties a year: so even allowing for repeat invitations they must have entertained over a hundred guests a year. Jennifer had help in the kitchen, but even so the food was unpretentious; the wine, the company and the conversation – by no means confined to politics – made up for it. In his memoirs Roy listed those present on what he claimed were two typical evenings in 1955. The first
, on 8 February, comprised Jacques and Marie-Alice de Beaumarchais; the zoologist and government scientific adviser Solly Zuckerman with his wife Joan; Thomas Balogh; Woodrow Wyatt; Thea Elliott (wife of Roy’s Oxford friend, now in the Foreign Office, Anthony Elliott); and Barley Alison, an unmarried young publisher then with Weidenfeld & Nicolson. The second on 5 October threw together J.K. Galbraith, visiting from the States; the Labour MP Kenneth Younger and the editor of the London Evening Standard, Charles Wintour, with their wives; and (on her own) Caroline Wedgwood Benn.52 Of course such invitations were often reciprocated, so it was an excellent way for a young MP to widen his circle of contacts. Roy also made a point of lunching with someone interesting nearly every day.
One friend whom Roy and Jennifer did not invite to dinner was Tony Crosland. ‘Famous for his flounces and his unconcealed disapproval of those he might be asked to meet, he was too hazardous a guest for dinner parties.’53 ‘He used to go on about it,’ Jennifer told Nicko Henderson, ‘as if he had some mission in life to stop us seeing our friends. In the end I told him not to come any more.’54 Tony was going through a bad time in the mid-1950s. Probably in an effort to shake off his youthful homosexuality, he had married in 1952 Hilary Sarson, a pretty girl nowhere near his intellectual level. The marriage did not work out and they were divorced in 1957. He also lost his seat in 1955, which at least allowed him time to finish The Future of Socialism; but he then fell into a wild period – described by his biographer as ‘his Dukes’ Daughters period’55 – when he drank too much while going through a string of glamorous girlfriends. (Woodrow Wyatt wrote that Crosland was successful with girls because he made them laugh; he went to bed with them ‘to convince himself that he had triumphed over his homosexual side, which had been in the ascendant at Oxford’.)56 Wedgwood Benn (whom he had taught at Oxford) attended his divorce party and tutted disapprovingly about the people he met there: ‘a sort of rootless crowd of nondescript men and rather sulky women’;57 and the historian A.J.P. Taylor, then married to Crosland’s sister, wrote him a well-meant but pompous letter (which Crosland furiously resented) warning him that he was in danger of wasting his great ability.58 Throughout this period Tony’s relationship with Roy was strained, but never broken. In the end he pulled himself together, helped by winning a new seat (Grimsby) at the 1959 election and marrying in 1964 a new wife, the American journalist Susan Barnes, who gave him a stability and (with her two young daughters) a family life that he had never previously enjoyed.
Ladbroke Square was the largest communal garden in London, whose assets included a somewhat soggy grass tennis court; so Sunday afternoon tennis parties, followed by tea, became another feature of Roy and Jennifer’s entertaining. Nicko Henderson, in his wry memoir Old Friends and Modern Instances, painted a graphic picture of these occasions, when he and Roy used often to play together against Crosland and Douglas Jay. Crosland could evidently be invited more safely to tennis than to dinner; but Jay had his own method of scoring:
Playing against these two, Roy and I came to realise that many points had to be won twice over. This was so especially following those strokes we thought our best. First we had to get the ball over the net and then, if it was a deep shot to the far baseline, we had to shout ‘in’ before there was any chance of Douglas giving his contrary verdict upon it. Tony feigned not to mind whether it was in or out. Roy liked this aspect of the struggle. He also relished the chance for backchat and quips that tennis provided . . .
Apart from his interest in the game itself and the complicated task of winning, Roy was, I believe, sensitive, as always to his surroundings. On those late afternoons, he liked the sunset flickering through the trees and the row of houses in the square seen intermittently through the branches. Architecture is one of his realms of acute observation.
Though competitive, Jenkins was a vigorous rather than a stylish tennis player (Jennifer, well coached as a schoolgirl at St Mary’s, Calne, was a good deal better):
If one part of his game could be singled out as even less good than the rest it was his serve. It was an elaborate performance which started with him walking back to the rear enclosure of the court, then turning round and advancing fast and purposefully to the service line where he would stop abruptly, swing his left arm fiercely, and, with an audible intake of breath, give the ball an almighty blow – the result of which, whether in pace or direction, rarely did justice to the careful preparation and windmill activity that had gone into it.59
Woodrow Wyatt was another often invited to play tennis; he had a rather different memory of playing with Crosland and ‘one of his ever-changing string of girlfriends, in front of whom he disliked being beaten’.60 In due course, in the early 1960s, Jennifer raised the money to build a hard court in the Square – almost directly opposite no. 33 – where the tennis parties continued for a time even after Labour came to power in 1964.fn6 But soon after this Roy and Jennifer bought their house in the country, with its own court where the Home Secretary could play without the attentions of photographers. So they never played in Ladbroke Square again.
Jenkins made a point of cultivating a wide acquaintance beyond the narrow world of politics; and it was noted early on – with amusement by his friends, more critically by many in the Labour party – that he had a weakness for aristocracy, which led to accusations that he was a social climber, or a snob. There was undoubtedly some truth in this: he did take visible pleasure in moving in socially exalted circles a long way from his upbringing in Pontypool. But he had no respect for aristocrats as such: he was quickly bored by people he thought stupid, or merely privileged, while politically he was still committed to promoting greater equality.fn7 He liked the company of clever people of any class; but he especially enjoyed the social ease and sophistication that the well-born and well-connected tended to possess. In addition he enjoyed their society because it connected him to the late-Victorian/Edwardian political world he wrote about in his books and which he liked to imagine himself inhabiting, a world in which great magnates like the Salisburys and Derbys still held enormous sway but the bearers of old names could still be Liberal as easily as Conservative. For the same reason he was irresistibly drawn to the Asquith/Bonham Carter dynasty. Though not strictly aristocrats, Asquith’s descendants were political royalty, and by mixing with them he could feel close to his political model. As early as 1951 Hugh Dalton noted him taking ‘an Asquith’ to dinner after his speech on Gaitskell’s budget.62
As a historian Jenkins was fascinated by class, and the subtlety of class gradations. As he grew grander himself, this fascination could become faintly ridiculous. In his 1998 book The Chancellors, for instance, he wrote of Sir John Anderson, a man of middle-class background who was much invited to grand houses in the 1930s: ‘The Abercorns, the Athlones, the Willingdons were typical hosts, although there was also a leavening of Lady Cunard and Lady Colefax.’63 Not one in a thousand of his readers would have appreciated the difference; but Jenkins loved these fine distinctions. He was equally precise in calibrating middle-class distinctions too, describing Hugh Dalton and Harold Macmillan, for example, as ‘fellow-inhabitant[s] of the no-man’s land between the upper and the upper-middle class’;64 and for one who had so recently sought to abolish the public schools, he was curiously fascinated by the supposedly different character of Etonians and Wykehamists, or the pecking order of Old Carthusians and Old Haileyburians. As the son of a sometime miner who had raised himself into the middle class by the time he was born, Jenkins was both acutely aware of class origins and determined to transcend them. He was an observer as well as a participant, like Charles Ryder in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, or Nicholas Jenkins in Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, which he lapped up as they came out between 1951 and 1975. It was coincidence that Powell’s hero was called Nicholas Jenkins, but there is no doubt that Roy Jenkins closely identified with his namesake’s journey through mid-century English society.
His enjoyment of contemporary ficti
on was genuine; but he also relished the sense of straddling the worlds of politics and literature. By 1958 Mr Balfour’s Poodle and Dilke had gained him unimpeachable credentials in an age when history was a more literary genre than it is today. In 1960 he was delighted to be elected a member of the Literary Society, a select dining club founded by Wordsworth and others in 1807 which still met monthly at the Garrick: its membership comprised precisely that social-literary pantheon to which he aspired, from T.S. Eliot and John Betjeman to Harold Nicolson and Kenneth Clark. The last three members elected before him were Anthony Powell, Osbert Lancaster and the Duke of Devonshire; and over the following years most of the leading (male) novelists and playwrights, historians and philosophers, critics and publishers of the day were elected – Kingsley Amis and V.S. Pritchett, Isaiah Berlin and Robert Blake, Raymond Mortimer and Michael Holroyd – but very few politicians, and those distinctly well-connected: Harold Macmillan, Jo Grimond and (not an obviously literary figure) Alec Home.65 Jenkins felt as much at home in this company as he did among politicians, and rather more so than he did in the Labour party. Nicholas Davenport, a rare Labour-supporting banker and leading member of the Gaitskellite dining club XYZ, used to entertain weekend guests at his house near Oxford in the mid-1950s:
Roy Jenkins Page 21