My History: A Memoir of Growing Up

by Antonia Fraser

  “Dada,” we cried in vain, “everyone knows who you are!”

  Still worse was the moment when one of us tried to explain: “You see, Dada, you look different from everyone else.” Elizabeth was extremely cross at this, while for her part frequently rushing at her husband in an attempt to remedy his general eccentricity of dress. What we children said was true. With his height, his noble head with the dome increasingly visible through the decreasing rows of curls, his spectacles and, yes, his untidiness, Frank Pakenham must have been a conspicuous figure in North Oxford, long before his election posters went up. The best of the posters was headed: “A Non-Stop Drive for Housing” and it showed Frank apparently driving a pony trap which contained as passengers the younger children and Elizabeth. It was admitted later that the pony had adopted a different attitude to the subject, and had in fact come to a firm stop at the traffic lights, refusing to proceed. But then fun with posters was part of the philosophy of an election.

  Frank’s opponent—the sitting MP—was his contemporary and old friend Quintin Hogg, who had won the seat in 1938 during that famous by-election in which the issue of appeasement was prominent, with Hogg backing Chamberlain and Sandie Lindsay standing against him. Then Quintin’s posters were defaced as follows: “A Vote for Hogg is a vote for Hitler.” In 1945, huge posters of Mr. Churchill dominated the Conservative campaign throughout the country, the war leader being conceived to be the greatest Tory asset. In Oxford, wags occupied themselves scrawling across these posters: “Love me, love my Hogg.”

  For myself, aged twelve, it was quite possible to gaze at these vast portraits of their benevolent subject with affection and admiration, while passionately wanting Labour to win—like the majority of the electors, as it turned out. But there was a gentlemanly relationship between Quintin and Frank, emphasized by the fact that my parents asked him to tea at 8 Chad during the election period. After that, things did not go quite so well, since Paddy aged eight blithely refused to fetch a teacup for Quintin on the grounds that he was the enemy; general embarrassment prevailed until Quintin gallantly pretended that he would have done the same as a boy. Compared to this storm over a teacup, the rumour spread in Oxford that some of us six children had been adopted was rather more thrilling. Naturally I was privately inclined to toy with the idea of secret royal ancestry…

  The actual timing of this General Election was peculiar. The war in Europe had ended in May 1945, but the war in the Far East continued. Labour nevertheless decided to end that wartime policy of coalition as a result of which there had not been an election for ten years. The Beveridge Report for example, that exciting War on Want on which my father had worked, had been published in 1942; yet its provisions had never been tested with the electorate. Under the circumstances everyone of all opinions was agreed on the importance of this particular election. At the same time, many of the armed forces, a vital part of the electorate, were serving abroad. A Labour poster of three servicemen actually bore the legend: Help them finish their Job! And the line underneath ran: Give them houses and work! Vote Labour. Yet it was by no means clear—how could it be?—how these three courageous war-weary figures would actually vote. The solution was found: Polling Day was to be on 5 July but the declaration of the poll would be held back until 26 July so that the votes of all the serving men and women abroad could be counted.

  This three-week delay lent a kind of mystery to the whole process. For me at school, it was like following an exciting story in a newspaper serial, and having to wait on tenterhooks for the next episode. Not that I was in any doubt about the key result. Frank Pakenham would win the seat at Oxford—I knew that for sure. It was the shape of the results countrywide which were unknowable. In the case of Oxford, my joyful expectation sprang from the confidence of the party workers who in all our chats were certain, quite certain that their man would beat Quintin Hogg. This was the first instance I came across of the optimism which enables party workers to carry out their fairly thankless task with energy and humour. Nor do I exaggerate their point of view. An illuminated address had already been prepared and even framed, congratulating Frank on his electoral success, ready to be presented immediately after the announcement of the poll.

  Frank always said that he enjoyed the campaign, although he admitted to being taken back when Sir William Beveridge, the man for whom he had worked, made a speech for the Liberals in Oxford. It was not personal: simply a mismanagement of the Liberal Beveridge’s schedule by party bosses. They had always had a very friendly relationship and he was my brother Michael’s godfather. But Frank was evidently not able to show the same insouciance as my first husband, a Tory MP. Elizabeth, victim of a party schedule for a West Midlands tour which included Hugh’s constituency of Stafford and Stone, found herself speaking out against him at the General Election in 1964. I was appalled. Hugh was mischievous: “Don’t you see the jokes I am now able to make? My mother-in-law has spoken out against me! Every married man will vote for me.”

  Finally 26 July dawned. A landslide being unexpected, the total victory of Labour over the Conservatives was dazzling. In statistical terms, there was an eleven per cent swing to Labour, who won nearly four hundred seats to the Conservatives’ just below two hundred. The Liberals hardly seemed to feature at all, with twelve seats where they had previously held twenty-one. The Communists had only two seats (which was satisfying to the type of Labour Party to which my parents belonged). The waiting period had only added to the deliciousness of the triumph, the first significant indication of the way Britain was to go after the war.

  As for myself, I was actually spending the day in the various trains needed to convey me from Salisbury to Oxford. When I reached Oxford station, for once I did not deposit my school trunk there, leaving a carrier service to take it to 8 Chad days later, as was the standing instruction; I would then proceed on to my home by bus and on foot. No! Or as Eliza Doolittle put it so succinctly: “Not bloody likely!” I would take a taxi, swirl round by the town hall, salute my father’s victory which I knew would be signalled by a banner with details of the respective figures; then I would swirl on to 8 Chad, trusting to the atmosphere of rejoicing to gloss over this unparalleled extravagance. We reached the town hall. I bounced out of the taxi in order to get a better view of the result which would be hanging outside.

  I can still remember the disbelief with which I looked at the figures:

  HOGG 14,314

  PAKENHAM 11,451

  After that came the Liberal with just over five thousand votes.

  My first thought, to be honest, was about the taxi. How on earth would I explain to my mother? Of course when I arrived, a taxi, unlawful or not, was the last thing on anybody’s mind. The illuminated address from the local Labour Party, already prepared, seemed to sum it all up. The elaborate phrases of congratulatory enthusiasm over my father’s performance—all these remained. Inserted after the event was this sad caveat: “although success was elusive.” It was to become a family catchphrase for any splendid effort which deserved to succeed—but didn’t.

  I can only imagine the very human disappointment my father must have felt at his failure at a time of general triumph and rejoicing all around him. I learnt from his autobiography that Frank did not actually know a single other candidate who lost. Hugh Gaitskell, Evan Durbin, that great cricketer Aidan Crawley—these his friends were to go forward in the splendid government which was to bring about a new and more perfect world. Frank was not. Soon afterwards, however, there came a suggestion as to a way he could after all partake in the experiment.

  The arcane rules of the United Kingdom hereditary peerage—in an age before life peerages existed—came to his assistance. My father’s elder brother Edward Longford and his wife Christine, now in their forties, had no children; as we shall see, this was no great sorrow to them, in their engrossing Irish lives. It did mean that when Edward died, Frank would succeed to the hereditary Irish English Longford title, as well as a lesser barony bringing with it a seat i
n the House of Lords. It was now suggested to Frank that he should accept a peerage of his own, in advance, so to speak, of the one inevitably coming his way which would scupper his House of Commons ambitions sooner or later. This was the theoretical situation which fifteen years later actually happened when Anthony Wedgwood Benn inherited his father’s Stansgate title against his wishes—and succeeded by righteous energy in changing the law so that eventually he regained the Commons.

  Labour was pitifully weak in the House of Lords—under the hereditary system how could it not be? Hereditary peers of Socialist inclination were always liable to be thin on the ground. Nevertheless a Labour government had to have its efficient representatives in the Upper House. When it came to creating new peers, newly elected Labour MPs were understandably reluctant to blight their political careers by going to the Upper House. But here was Frank Pakenham, young and active (he was forty in December 1945), one who had been a Labour Councillor and confirmed his credentials by fighting a seat at the General Election; as an heir to a peerage, he was destined for the Upper House sooner or later, so why not sooner, and direct his political career via a different route? Vitally, Frank would now be able to play an active part in the great Labour experiment which was about to begin.

  In spite of these cogent arguments, I believe it must have been a struggle for my father to abandon his ambition to enter the superior arena which was the Lower House. In his autobiography, Frank shrugged it off, on the grounds that he was not the sort of sociable person who would have got on well in the Commons; but one must remember that he was writing in the early Fifties, at a time when he was establishing himself among the peers and would hardly have admitted publicly to a preference for the Commons. He made an amusing story out of his brief encounter with Mr. Attlee, who merely asked him: “Would you care to help us in the Lords?,” to which Frank replied: “Oh yes, yes, I’d help you anywhere.” The result was an appointment as a spokesman for government policy in the Lords, with the technical title of Lord-in-Waiting, the first of a sequence of positions in this Labour administration.

  My mother, in her memoirs thirty years later, gives a different picture. She admits that she was sad to see Frank, her alter ego as she puts it, surrender the supreme ambition only achievable in the Commons. (It was Frank’s friend Evan Durbin who pointed out that as a Roman Catholic he was in any case forbidden by law from becoming Prime Minister.) During the discussions, Elizabeth laughingly spiked the Bible with her finger, asking for divine guidance on the subject—a habit of hers which gently teased my father’s predilection for Bible-reading. On this occasion, the Bible was in its most helpful form. My mother had hit on the opening verse of Psalm 122. She read out: “I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord.” In view of the fact that Frank would subsequently enjoy over fifty-five years of active service in the house of the Lord, including four years as Leader, we must believe that the Bible got it absolutely right.

  Back at Godolphin, my own anxiety focused on the first letter which would be addressed to: The Hon. Antonia Pakenham, this being the so-called courtesy title given by convention to a baron’s daughter. I wanted my mother to write it out very large so that the exciting envelope would not be missed, as it lay on the chest in the hall of St. Margaret’s with the other house letters. The envelope with the weekly letter inside duly arrived. “The Hon.” was writ large. Nobody commented. The letter continued to lie there, I continued to hope. I did not remove the letter until a girl asked me with genuine goodwill: “Did you know that there’s a letter for you on the hall chest which has been sitting there for ages?” She had nothing more to say. Then at last I slunk away with my letter in my hand. All the same, in the privacy of my cubicle in my dorm, I thought “The Hon. Antonia Pakenham” looked pretty wonderful: a touch of Jane Austen there perhaps, the sort of person whose arrival in Bath might be keenly awaited.

  My presence at Frank’s official introduction to the Lords as Lord Pakenham of Cowley was rather more successful. (Since he could choose, I wanted him to take the title Lord Bernhurst, which was so much prettier, but Labour Cowley had to be there.) I wore my Godolphin school uniform, the most respectable form of dress that I could muster. This included a white shirt and an extremely bright red tie. As I sat in the gallery allowed to peers’ unmarried daughters, casing the joint for a single man in possession of a good fortune who must be in need of—well, at least a dancing partner—an aged peer made slow progress into the House. When he saw me, he stopped. Then he leant in my direction. “That is a very suitable tie for your father’s daughter,” he pronounced. Given my father’s strongly anti-Communist feelings, this was not precisely accurate. Nevertheless, thereafter I felt much more warmly towards the Godolphin uniform which had received favourable attention in the Upper House.

  I was now thirteen and a half. I was unaware that there was another impending change in my home situation which would have repercussions on my school career. At Godolphin I was working towards my School Certificate in the summer and the deep unhappiness of the previous year had passed. My results in the exam were no more than adequate: the joy of working had temporarily deserted me, due perhaps to my melancholy.

  For the future, it would prove important that I did have a passionate interest in genealogy which took me into historical byways without seeming to have much connection to the History I was learning. I tried making up imaginary family trees—the Lord of the North Wind married to the Princess of the Sunset with their twelve children etc. etc.—but actually found this much less exciting than tracking the Pakenham family tree, including our descent from King Charles II via a favourite mistress, Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, and one of her sons, Henry FitzRoy, created Duke of Grafton. A Pakenham cousin had been a herald, as a result of which a large illuminated family tree hung up in our North Oxford house which I was inclined to study; it began with a certain Saxon Walter de Pakenham, found in Suffolk before the Norman Conquest. Walter did not really engage my interest quite as much as the words next to his name on the tree: “Married to Lady Unknown.” I was definitely descended from Lady Unknown. Subsequently I brought home a book from the Godolphin school library on how to make genealogical tables, and quickly moved on from the Pakenhams to all the royal houses in Europe.

  Privately I was industrious, but publicly not noticeably so. The results of my School Certificate might indeed have been better if I had not cut papers short in order to get back to reading Gone with the Wind, Scarlett O’Hara’s troubles seeming more important at the time than Geography—or even school History. In terms of History, it was more important that a crush on Prince Rupert of the Rhine in Margaret Irwin’s The Stranger Prince impelled me to commit a crime. I stole the frontispiece of the book, which I remember as a romantic portrait by Van Dyck, from the school library. I recall the incident with shame, but not exactly regret. Harold stole a copy of Beckett’s novel Murphy from Hackney Public Library at about the same age. Apart from illustrating the difference in our mental development, he too felt no regret; as to shame, he pointed out that no one else had ever taken the book out…

  At the same time, the childhood lure of historical fiction was gradually beginning to diminish in favour of the real thing—so much more interesting in the long run. After The Stranger Prince I never enjoyed another Margaret Irwin quite so much and soon abandoned reading historical fiction altogether. It is a taste which has never returned: somehow my attention wanders fatally in the first few pages as I begin to allow myself tiresome speculations about the actual facts which entirely miss the point of the whole colourful enterprise.

  In contrast to Margaret Irwin who marvellously transmitted romance, a great deal of proper education continued to take place when I read “real” History for myself during the holidays. Staying with Henrietta Lamb at our aunt Mary Clive’s wartime cottage in Herefordshire was a particular pleasure because we enjoyed unfettered access to every kind of book that had ever caught her fancy—which was many; Mary, like her si
ster Pansy, Henrietta’s mother, gave the impression of having done nothing all her life but read books. Thus I discovered for myself Marjorie Villiers’ recently published The Grand Whiggery and conceived a lifelong passion for the Whigs, those racy aristocrats obsessed in equal measure with sex and politics. Finally, I managed to satisfy it sixty years later, with my book about the Great Reform Bill of 1832. Affectionately I traced the lineaments of Charles Grey, once the young lover of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, in those of his older self, the heroic liberal reformer Lord Grey, who emerged as the hero of my book.

  My parents’ library was, generally speaking, more serious and less up to date. It was in this way that in a fit of teenage lethargy in the Oxford drawing room, too lazy to cross the room, I picked up the nearest book at hand, and it happened to be Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was leather-bound and gold-tooled, a wedding present to my parents, but given the wartime restrictions on paper and printing, I read all the classics in this sort of unfriendly form. After a moment, the starchiness of the edition was quite forgotten. I was hooked.

  At first it was the language: I struggled briefly with the magnificence of the style, and then allowed myself to be swept forward. As Winston Churchill, the most distinguished apostle of Gibbon’s style, put it in My Early Life: “I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all.” My admiration for Gibbon’s precepts for historians came later. “Diligence and accuracy are the only merits which an historical writer may ascribe to himself,” he wrote, followed by the waspish reflection: “If any merit, indeed, can be assumed from the performance of an indispensable duty.”

  As a teenager, after the language, I was interested in Gibbon’s attitude to hereditary monarchy, since royalties (and lords and ladies) were what currently took my fancy. He begins by dismissing it, in terms that would appeal to any modern republican, as something which it is impossible to describe “without an indignant smile.” “Of the various forms of government which have prevailed in the world, an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule.” But he then proceeds to demolish to his own satisfaction all other possible sources of power, including the army, and above all: “we shall cheerfully acquiesce in any expedient which deprives the multitude of the dangerous, and indeed the ideal, power of giving themselves a master.” So Gibbon triumphantly concludes: “The superior prerogative of birth, when it has obtained the sanction of time and popular opinion, is the plainest and least invidious of all distinctions among mankind.”