Admittedly Montagu Norman and my mother’s family were exceptionally, almost obsessively, public spirited and high principled and therefore potentially a threat to liberty because of their excess of zeal. But the great advantage of the old hereditary upper class was that, being a family association, it included all sorts – including its fair share of dandies and dilettantes – and Montagu Norman’s younger brother, R. C. Norman, who was allowed to live in the big house, was as elegantly and civilizedly relaxed as Montagu was driven and single minded. Ronnie Norman was what Max Weber called a grand rentier, entirely detached from the source of his income, entirely uninvolved in the day-today running of any organization – an agent ran his estate – and therefore able to look at the world from a great distance. By ‘detached’ Weber did not mean impersonal; he meant ‘un-embattled’ and ‘un-embroiled’. Most of us, until we are retired, think about everything with only half our minds, the other half being engaged in worrying about some unfinished business in the office or, if we are a farmer, about the weather or the price of grain. Ronnie Norman was not embattled or embroiled in this way at all. He occupied a more serene sphere. Not that he was idle: he was a great patron of the arts, a great reader, Chairman of the BBC* (then, as now, a part-time job), a devoted father of five, with a wide circle of close friends, including his old Cambridge contemporary, the historian G. M. Trevelyan, who later became Master of Trinity College, and his neighbour, the sculptor Henry Moore; but in all these roles it was his serenity, his detachment, that made him so exceptionally valuable, as it did in his role as brother of Montagu Norman. It was a good sibling combination since at weekends the younger brother’s passion for domestic felicity perfectly complemented the older’s passion for public duty, and vice versa, thereby helping to ensure that in one upper-class family the interest of the State and the interest of the individual were both kept in happy balance. One such miniscule concentration of unofficial power and influence, of course, would count for little; but multiplied into tens of thousands of comparable grandee family concentrations spread across the land, all coming from the same background, with many actually related, certainly did add up to something.
What was that something? I think it was an alternative vision of a good life; a vision beyond the range of the bourgeois or proletarian imagination. In this world, there was no sense of having been frightened into public life by fear of socialism, or driven into it on behalf of the workers. So far as it is humanly possible, ‘interest’ did not come into it. Because the Normans, who had had it ‘made’ from birth, did not have to better their own lot, they felt in duty bound, in their different fashions, to fight for the public good. In no sense did they think this made them superior to those who came from less fortunate circumstances. Comparable public spirit, I was brought up to believe, could be found in all classes; the only difference was that it was easier for some to be active democrats – that is, to participate directly in the nation’s government and law making and to lead a socially responsible life – than it was for others. This was the idea of aristocracy transformed into democratic terms. Far from the existence of a privileged group spared from the strivings and struggles of their fellow citizens being incompatible with democracy, it was in practice, we believed, a necessary condition of democracy. Has this ceased to be true? I rather doubt it. For while Britain is more democratic socially today than it was, I doubt whether it is more democratic politically, in the sense of more people feeling effectively in charge of the State. Then, a class with connections stretching across the whole kingdom felt in charge; today, that feeling would seem to be limited to a succession of small groups of political professionals and political journalists, here today and gone tomorrow, with few connections outside Westminster.
Another lesson from those days also sticks in my mind: the extent to which an hereditary aristocracy, being a civil association made up of families, helped to keep the lines of communication open between the various self-contained and often feuding elites – political, bureaucratic, artistic, religious, sporting, and so on. Again, the extended Norman family (or firm) was a good example of this, since house parties would often include senior members of most of the various elites – one in the Cabinet Office, one in the War Office, one in the City, one in the legal profession, one a racing enthusiast – whose weekday narrowness of vision and exclusive concern with their own separate sections of the governing order would quickly dissolve, allowing the unifying ties of kinship to re-exert their hold. Nowadays, of course, British society is incomparably more compartmentalized than it used to be, and members of the various elites only intermingle at such artificial gatherings as ‘interdisciplinary conferences’, international congresses organized by the great foundations, or in special committees set up for that purpose. But, as T. S. Eliot put it, ‘Men who meet only for definite serious purposes, and on official occasions, do not wholly meet.’ That ease of communication that comes naturally in the drawing room or in the salon or in the club cannot be artificially recreated in the symposium or seminar. Even the language is different. Whereas in the former it tended to be urbane, witty, and free-ranging, in the latter it tends to be boring, technical, and focused. Nietzsche made the point well when he said that the problem with the German language is that it developed not in courts and salons, as did English and French, but in universities and seminaries.
The measure of aristocracy, which in those days was mixed into a democratic soil, also did wonders for keeping down bureaucracy, which is one of the most worryingly invasive weeds in the democratic garden – only slightly less worrying than that other potentially poisonous growth, a standing army. For aristocracy and bureaucracy are natural enemies, as Matthew Arnold explained:
Aristocratic bodies have no taste for a very imposing executive, or for a very active and penetrating domestic administration. They have a sense of equality among themselves, and of constituting in themselves what is greatest and most dignified in the realm, which makes their pride revolt against the overshadowing greatness and dignity of a commanding executive. They have a temper of independence, and a habit of uncontrolled action, which makes them impatient of encountering, in the management of the interior concerns of the country, the machinery and regulations of a superior and peremptory power.
In other words, it is in the nature of aristocrats to want ‘to take jumped-up jacks in office down a peg or two’. In my childhood in the 1930s the grown-ups were always waging a relentless war against ‘faceless bureaucrats’, both religious and secular, either on their own behalf or on behalf of their many dependants. After hunting and shooting, it was their favourite sport. The less privileged classes, therefore, needed to feel no inhibition about turning to aristocrats for help. They were knocking on open palace doors. And in those days grandees were easy to locate and very far from being anonymous. Manifestly it was not an ideal system. But the present more democratic system of writing to newspapers, or of collecting masses of individual signatures for petitions, or of writing to the ombudsman, are not ideal either. For example, the residents of the village in which I now live are always writing to various ‘inspectors’ begging them to turn down some new threat or other – a new motorway service station, for example – seldom receiving more satisfaction than an official acknowledgement with an indecipherable signature. Of course, in theory, democratic numbers should be enough to impress central or local government officials; but in practice, I suspect, nothing will ever again be as effective, in this respect, as was the commanding voice of a member of the English upper class, ideally female.
Unhappy as some of my formative experiences were, all in all, it was a pretty good soil for someone wanting to go into public life to spring from; not altogether unlike those recommended by Burke and Schumpeter as ideal for nurturing future rulers. Right from the start I had felt at home – literally so – with the powerful who, therefore,