Another difficulty for the reputation of the appeasers is that, because they were in power in the 1930s, they are still associated in the public mind with the decadence of high society in that decade. In fact, however, the leading appeasers – Baldwin, Chamberlain, Norman, and others – much less deserved to be tarred with that brush than many of the anti-appeasers, like the financially greedy Churchill, the unashamedly lecherous Duff Cooper, and the almost brazenly dishonest Robert Boothby. The difficulty here is that the true muscle of the 1930s ruling class did not frequent high society, did not go to grand balls or Belgrave Square parties. Hence the erroneous impression that the space at the top of the tree in the 1930s was entirely filled by social butterflies. If Norman had kept a diary, however, it would have given a very different and more impressive picture, as my brother and I have good cause to remember. For his public service standards, and those of his whole world, were Spartan to a fault, or to what my brother and I judged to be a fault. No luxuries were tolerated, and strict economies enforced. So when I became keen on riding at my preparatory school, and wrote asking for riding boots, my mother sent me a pair of her own – far too pointed at the toe for my comfort – with the raised heels sawn off. And such was the importance placed on not disturbing the Governor’s concentration on his public duties that we were kept out of his way during school holidays in a country cottage of our own, with our own butler and cook – more fun in theory than in practice, since our mother, who shared her second husband’s priorities, was seldom present. In fact, domestic felicity and family life seldom got a look-in.
Born into an upper-middle-class banking family of long standing and educated at Eton – which, unlike my father, he hated – and at King’s College Cambridge, Norman dedicated all his waking hours to the City of London, living austerely, almost ascetically, and eschewing wine, women (until he met my mother) and song so as to be able to give his all to his work. He was, at all times, a pillar of rectitude, imposing on the City the highest standards of integrity. The idle-rich, Chips Channon kind of society appalled him and he deplored the loving attention given by the media to this debauched minority, rightly regarding their antics as obscenely objectionable at a time of mass unemployment brought about very largely, of course, by his own tight fiscal policies, harshly imposed, he always believed, in the long term ‘public interest’.
His own life, as I say, was exemplary in this regard. Whereas most bankers went to the City in chauffeur-driven Rolls Royces, he travelled by tube from Notting Hill Gate to the Bank, causing quite a sensation by so doing. Indeed the spectacle of this tall figure with a Charles I beard, season ticket tucked into the ribbon of his silk hat worn at a jaunty angle, descending into the underground at 8.30 a.m. sharp and ascending thirty minutes later at the Bank – where the buses were held up to allow the Governor to cross Threadneedle Street – became almost as much of a tourist attraction as the Changing of the Guard outside Buckingham Palace. His hobby was to design and build furniture in the Art Deco style, and although he inherited two country houses, he occupied only a garden cottage in one, where he made a point of coming down to dinner in slippers and bare feet and eating simple fare. When the Second World War came, almost nothing had to change. Even in peacetime, we were already living, by choice, on a war footing.
As for hobbies, his favourite one was snubbing newspaper proprietors because they exaggerated – in search of circulation-building copy – the importance of the decadent elements in high society, thereby irresponsibly dissolving the bonds of mutual sympathy and respect that should naturally exist between rich and poor, governors and governed. He was fond of saying that they had a vested interest in barbarism because civilization did not sell newspapers. Lord Beaverbrook, for example, was never allowed to cross the threshold. Norman’s secretary was instructed to refuse all his importuning. Naturally that was not the picture – as insecure interlopers desperate for recognition – the newspapers chose to give of where their proprietors stood in the social pecking order, but this was how they were looked down on from our particular pinnacle. When Lord and Lady Kemsley, then the owners of the Sunday Times, wrote to say that they were looking forward to being fellow passengers on a transatlantic liner my mother and Norman were planning to take to New York, my mother immediately arranged to cancel their own booking. Nobody today would dare to give the Murdochs or even the discredited Blacks the same kind of brush-off. Whereas today the media chiefs are the lords of all they survey, with none – not even the Prime Minister – daring to say them nay, then, thanks to the class system, there were still a few who would tell the cheeky urchins ‘to keep off the grass’.
Nor was Norman in any way unique. All his closest friends, Sir Warren Fisher and Sir Richard Hopkins, both in their time Head of the Treasury, and Sir John Reith, Director General of the BBC, were equally driven by the same classical republican ideals, which insisted that the highest purpose of man was to sacrifice himself, and his family, on the altar of the common weal – clearly far too lofty an ideal for the common man and only to be expected of the very uncommon man: the active citizen brought up to meet these exacting standards, either from birth or at least after five Spartan years at an English public school. Aristocracy, in this tradition, was much more a burden to be taken up than a privilege to be enjoyed, much more a sacrifice than an indulgence, Being born with a silver spoon in your mouth meant keeping your nose to the grindstone for life.
My mother completely shared Norman’s values. Not only was she a member of the London County Council, calling her racing greyhound Hammersmith (Hammy for short) after her constituency, but also a JP and social worker and, when the war began, a founder, under Lady Reading, of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS), which is still going strong as the WRVS. I remember as a teenager, in the absence of any suitable female, having to model various possible uniforms for my mother to choose from – and hats too. After the war, she also became president of the Mental Health Association, forcing James the butler, a Great War veteran, much to his embarrassment, to shake the Association’s collection box in all the local pubs for what, at the time, was a most unpopular cause. Like Norman himself, she looked down from a great height on high society, quoting the great Lord Salisbury’s description of its members – which she thought her mother, Lady Alice, might have actually heard – as ‘dwarfed, languid, nerveless, emasculated dilettantes’. No efforts were spared to deter her sons from sinking so low.
Lady Alice was another formative influence, and in the same league. Widowed in her early age by the death of her second husband, Major Robert Reyntiens, a dashing Belgian soldier who had been ADC (some said pimp) to King Leopold of the Belgians, she inherited shortly thereafter what remains of the great recusant Towneley property, stretching from Burnley in Lancashire to the Yorkshire border town of Todmorden at the other end of the wild Cliviger Gorge, which figures so romantically in Harrison Ainsworth’s novel The Lancashire Witches. The house itself, Towneley Hall, a massive fortress dating back to the fifteenth century, had been bought by the Burnley Corporation and turned into a museum, which meant that the only available house on the estate for my grandmother to live in was the agent’s hideous late-Victorian villa, Dyneley, overlooking the gorge. Although the country was still rugged, much of its beauty had been tarnished by coal mining and the smoke-belching chimneys of the cotton mills – one of the reasons why so many of the old Lancashire families had moved south to less grimy climes. Strongly disapproving of absentee landlords, my grandmother decided to reverse the shameless exodus. It was a brave decision. Towneley estate was an oasis of old agricultural Lancashire in a great desert of industrial blight. Cliviger village, above which Dyneley perched, served the local mill and at the break of a summer’s day the sound of clogs could be heard in the distance. My grandmother’s smart friends could not understand why she wanted to go and live in such an outlandish place where there was no hunting and no social