Father Dear Father Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1. Father sings The Red Flag

  2. The heresy of enthusiasm

  3. My father, Caligula

  4. Hungarian rhapsodies

  5. Mother takes elocution lessons

  6. Father and Gandhi

  7. Father and Churchill

  8. Father becomes Lord Bradwell’s lavatory attendant

  9. Father sings the Blues

  10. Father fights a duel over Elizabeth Taylor

  11. Father becomes a butler

  12. Harold Macmillan’s birthday

  13. The stately homes of Cornwall, or Father insults Oliver Cromwell

  14. Father falls in the Grand Canal

  15. Father is ejected from the Uffizi

  16. Father gets married (four times)

  17. Father hangs on

  18. Father and Margaret Thatcher

  19. Father and his friends

  20. Father throws his kippers out of the window

  21. Father is arrested for flashing

  22. The pleasure of your company

  23. Norman Lamont wins the Tour de France

  24. A Peer of the Realm

  25. Father entertains Royalty

  26. Father gets married again (almost)

  27. The way to Heaven

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Petronella Wyatt was educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School and University College, London, where she read History. Her first job was on the Peterborough column of the Daily Telegraph before she became a leader writer and feature writer for that newspaper. She moved to the Sunday Telegraph where she wrote the Mandrake column and wrote a column under her own name. In 1997 she became Deputy Editor of the Spectator. She writes political interviews for the Daily Telegraph and makes regular appearances on television. She lives in London.

  Father, Dear Father

  Life with Woodrow Wyatt

  Petronella Wyatt

  For my Mother

  Introduction

  This is the story of a childhood. It is also the story of a man whose friends called him ‘the last great original’. But above all it is the story of a relationship between a father – mine – and a daughter – myself – that was in turns exhilarating, exasperating and dramatic, and always Wodehousian in its comic potential. Sometimes I was Bertie Wooster and Father was Jeeves; at other times, as Father grew older, it was the other way round. The audience, meanwhile, was the great and the good of England.

  I was born on 6 May, 1968, at 12 Devonshire Street in West London. Father and Mother, a Hungarian widow, had been married for less than two years. It was Father’s fourth and final essay in matrimony.

  Father, having a fondness for classical names, christened me Petronella. As he was an MP at the time, my baptism took place in the crypt in the House of Commons. Shortly afterwards I was enrolled for Norland Place School in Holland Park and Francis Holland, which was changed to St Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith after the high mistress, Mrs Heather Brigstocke, now Baroness Brigstocke, moved to that establishment. It was Father’s dearest wish that I should, when I was eighteen, follow him to his alma mater, Worcester College, Oxford.

  I think Father hoped I would emulate him in many things. It was a sadness to him that he had never been able to draw, because our most successful and illustrious forebears had been the Wyatt architects. Instead Father had to content himself with writing and politics. He began both pursuits at Oxford where he was ducked in the college quad for wearing black silk pyjamas – the beginning of his penchant for sartorial excess. It was there that he made some of his life-long friends, such as Julian Amery, the late Tory Minister, and my godfather, Hugh Fraser of the Scottish family, who was also a Conservative politician and the late husband of Antonia; and also Harold Macmillan’s son, Maurice. While at Oxford, Father embarked on his first marriage, to a fellow undergraduate Susan Cox.

  When the war came, Father joined the Army and was promoted to the rank of Major. At one point he was nearly court-martialled for insubordination, until no less a person than Montgomery decided he had been in the right. In 1945, Father joined the Labour party. When it won its stupendous victory that year, he was swept in as the MP for Aston. Attlee immediately sent him to India as part of his Cabinet Mission to arrange independence. On his return to London he was promoted to junior Minister for War and tipped as a future Prime Minister. A year later he married his second wife, Alix, who was half-Russian. In the early 1950s Father founded Panorama with Richard Dimbleby. The pair became the country’s first nationally known television presenters.

  By this time, Father had fallen in love with Lady Moorea Hastings, the Earl of Huntingdon’s bright and pretty daughter. Another marriage was in the offing. But Father’s happiness was dashed by the sudden death of Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the Labour party and a close friend. Harold Wilson took an instant dislike to Father. There followed a period of hostilities daily in the press, when Father tried to block the nationalisation of British Steel. He lost his seat in the 1970 election and, deciding that Labour was too left-wing, he abandoned politics, picking up instead a hugely influential newspaper column in the Sunday Mirror, which was later transferred to the News of the World as The Voice of Reason.

  After Father’s third marriage disintegrated, he wed my mother, a Hungarian refugee from communism and recently widowed. In 1976 he was appointed Chairman of the Tote, a post which he maintained to the fury of his enemies for twenty-one years. A little later Father was introduced to Margaret Thatcher, and after an awkward start they became inseparable. During much of her premiership Mrs Thatcher telephoned Father every morning before breakfast. A similar confidence was displayed by John Major and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, making his twilight years remarkable for their access to royalty and the seats of power.

  In the Autumn of 1997 Father was diagnosed with cancer of the throat. He died on the 7th December. In March the following year Mother and I held a memorial service for him at St Margaret’s Westminster. Robert Runcie delivered the prayers; Rupert Murdoch read the Parable of the Talents; and the address was given by Roy Jenkins. Both Lady Thatcher and John Major were in the congregation.

  Father did not believe in the old maxim about children being seen and not heard, and from an early age I was thrown into this sophisticated world of wits, politicians, peers and business magnificoes. Like the young Josephine Stitch in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, it was a question of ‘stand on your head . . . sing him your Neapolitan song . . . show him your imitation of the Prime Minister.’ Frequently it was indeed the Prime Minister. Even though I was a child, I was encouraged to put questions to Kingsley Amis, Tom Stoppard, Robin Day, Harold Macmillan – for whom I had to compose a birthday song – Rupert Murdoch, and even Margaret Thatcher. From the age of fourteen I attended nearly all of Father’s dinner parties, including those he gave for Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

  In the process I imbibed information unusual for a child. Father’s two great passions, after women and politics, were cigars and good claret. He had seven hundred cigars at any one period, and four thousand bottles of wine. At the age of thirteen I was instructed in the great vintages. At the age of fifteen I was taught how to smoke Havana cigars. His other great love, which I was spared practising myself, was huge and garish bow ties. Often when Father and I went out, a passer-by would shout, ‘There goes that lunatic Woodrow Wyatt!’

  If not lunatic, Father was indeed extraordinary. He lived to his own rules, answering to nothing but his private conscience. He was without inhibitions. Although he had no voice, he sang loudly in public places. He said whatever cam
e into his head – to the eventual detriment of his political career. Generally he regarded those who contradicted him as fools. But this belied another side to his nature. He was generous to a fault, hospitable, humorous, imaginative and often very wise. At one stage in her premiership Mrs Thatcher was dependent on his advice. Without Father’s having persuaded electrical union members to work secretly during the night laying cables, Rupert Murdoch would not have been able to move to Wapping – an event which transformed the British newspaper industry.

  Sometimes I wished Father had been more circumspect and a little less imaginative. During the reading of his will, Mother and I discovered the existence of Project X. This sounded like something from Agatha Christie or Conan Doyle, but it turned out to be a secret diary, which Father had been keeping for years. A clause stated that Father had already arranged for its publication but that neither Mother nor I would be allowed to see the manuscript. When we did finally read his Diary, it was in the newspapers. Father had been rude about practically everyone he knew. All the women he described had legs like tree trunks and all the men were imbeciles. It was with mortification that I fielded friends’ plaintive comments: ‘I don’t really mind, but your father said every time he sees me I get uglier and uglier.’ Yet I couldn’t be angry with Father in perpetuity. People said they could kill him. I replied there was no point. He was already dead.

  Much was made in the newspapers, among other things, of my stay at Oxford University. As I was saying, Father had been anxious that I should attend Worcester College. I did, but for a matter of weeks. Various theories have been posited as to why I left. Father liked to claim it was because I couldn’t sleep at night as the couple in the next room had noisy sex. A. N. Wilson thought it was because they offered me coffee in a chipped mug.

  I wish both were true, but neither is the case. When I arrived at Oxford it could not have been less like the tolerant arcadia described by Father. Instead of the free thinking I had been brought up to espouse, there was narrow-mindedness and prejudice. The dons were snobbish without being amusing, slovenly rather than elegantly effete and incorrigibly misogynistic to boot. They were complacent, arrogant and contemptuous of real industry and the world outside Oxford. Being of a decided and precipitate nature, I packed my bags and left. Father was devastated. I don’t think he ever really understood.

  This book is not an attempt to set any records straight, however. It is simply an account of an extraordinary upbringing of the sort which today rarely exists. It is also, as I have remarked, a portrait of a man who was born in the Edwardian-tinged reign of George V, when women still wore skirts to their ankles and Dukes employed four hundred domestic servants, and who died in the era of the Spice Girls and Sushi bars. During all this time I don’t think Father’s essence ever changed. He used to remark, ‘When I am dead you might be able to write an amusing book about me.’ This is, I hope, what I have done.

  My deepest thanks go to my friend Simon Sebag Montefiore for his help and encouragement to me in realising Father, Dear Father.

  1

  Father sings The Red Flag

  ‘HAVE YOU KILLED your father yet?’ Osbert Sitwell asked Father as they had dinner together at the House of Commons during the glorious dawn of the first postwar Labour government. ‘It’s very important to get it done,’ he added. Father thought that Osbert, who talked extensively of his half-mad father Sir George, succeeded in removing his oppressive shadow. But he was not sure how to proceed with his own parent.

  Grandfather, who was fifty-one when Father was born, owned and was the headmaster of a preparatory school. He did not relish his lot in life. Continually he bemoaned the Wyatt family’s decline from fame and riches. The decline had been steep indeed. John Wyatt, the first properly documented member of the family, had been a wealthy Staffordshire farmer in the seventeenth century. His younger son Benjamin was the founder of the Wyatt architectural dynasty whose members were to rival Adam and Nash. Benjamin’s eldest son William was an architect who in the 1750s helped his father build the first important Wyatt houses, Eggington Hall in Derbyshire and Swinfen Hall near Weeford. William married his first cousin Sarah. Sarah’s third son was called Robert Harvey. He in turn married his first cousin Harriet.

  This Wyatt habit of marrying first cousins (thirteen did) or cousins (twenty-one did) kept the architectural, painting and sculpting genes going for nearly two hundred years. Another John (b. 1700) invented the Spinning Jenny and spun the first thread of cotton yarn ever produced by mechanical means twenty-five years before Arkwright, but had neither the money nor the business sense to develop it. Among other devices he did perfect was a compound-lever weighing machine and the first design for a suspension bridge. When imprisoned for debt in 1740 and 1744, he occupied himself by making gadgets to ease the work-load of the warders, who reciprocated by allowing him special privileges.

  Charles Wyatt (b. 1750) was responsible for a new type of common cement, stucco, of the kind now found on many houses in London and elsewhere. Wyatts stretched their tentacles until they built factories and canals across England, transforming southern Britain into a testament to their extraordinary endeavours. Wyatts developed slate quarries and built great estates; they were there at the start of the Industrial Revolution and were prime movers in its development, becoming rich or going bankrupt because of it.

  And glittering in all their starry glory were the architects, Samuel, James, Sir Jeffry (who changed his name to Wyattville), Benjamin Dean, Lewis, Thomas Henry, Sir Matthew Digby – twenty-eight in all, the last one of any merit dying in 1920. There were at least two remarkable sculptors. Matthew Cotes (b. 1777), James’s third son, was a good painter as well as a sculptor. He was responsible for the bronze equestrian statue of George III at the start of Pall Mall. Richard James (b. 1795) was an assistant of Canova and his Musidora is at Chatsworth, the home of the Dukes of Devonshire. Once, on a visit to Chatsworth, the Queen remarked, slightly puzzled, ‘It so reminds me of Windsor.’ And why not? Sir Jeffry Wyattville, with George IV as his patron, built most of Windsor Castle as it is now, and all that you can see on the skyline. He had designed a great part of the present Chatsworth, including the staterooms.

  The architectural styles of Jeffry and James Wyatt diverged like the politics of the late eighteenth century. James was a friend and protégé of George III, who of course was hated by his son. Sometimes he was a witness to one of his petrifying fits, brought on by a blood disease called porphyria. On other occasions his turns were brought on by James.

  James Wyatt was a rake amongst rakes. Horace Walpole said of Lord Hervey, ‘There are men, women and Herveys.’ With apologies to Walpole, there were women, more women and James Wyatt. His sexual appetite was voracious. Catherine the Great tried to persuade him to leave England to be her personal architect, but it was rumoured that houses were not the only erections the great Empress had in mind for him. His recreations took up almost as much time as his architecture. The Countess of Home sacked him for Robert Adam, complaining of Wyatt’s laziness. Once he arrived two hours late for a morning interview with the King. The King, who was in one of his lucid moods, reproved him. ‘Sleep. Seven hours for a man, eight hours for a woman and ten hours for a fool. Think on it, Wyatt, think on it.’ After James died in a violent carriage accident, it was discovered that three of his housemaids were enceinte by him.

  Astonishingly, grandfather barely referred to these Wyatts. If he did it was to make some glancing, sneering remark. It seemed that in the nineteenth century the family contracted what Father called ‘the Cousin Molly bug’. It was probably Horace Walpole’s fault. He was entranced by the Parthenon in Oxford Street, the first important building of James Wyatt. Walpole thought it the most beautiful edifice in England. He could not believe that its brilliant twenty-five-year-old creator could have leaped so suddenly into such genius from mere farming stock. There must be hereditary artistic talent. So in July 1772 he wrote to James asking whether he was descended from Sir Thomas Wyatt, the
Tudor poet. James very correctly replied, ‘This is a subject with which I am not in the least acquainted. It is faintly possible there may have been a link, but if so it is a distant one.’ But Walpole had started something. Our late Victorian ancestors converted his innocent enquiry into the statement of a fact. Thomas became one of our family names. Drawings and copies of pictures of Sir Thomas Wyatt and of his son Sir Thomas, whose rash rebellion against Queen Mary nearly cost Elizabeth I her head and her throne, appeared in our drawing-rooms and halls.

  One of my great-aunts, Sis, had a storehouse of verses extolling the glories of our imaginary Wyatt ancestors. She would declaim loudly and with enthusiasm, in railway stations and tea-rooms, the younger Sir Thomas’s battle cry,

  ‘No popery. No Spanish match. A Wyatt, a Wyatt.’

  The customers must have been startled. It was all Great-Aunt Sis had to keep up her morale, poor thing, having come down in the world even more than the others. She had married her physical training instructor and lived in a gloomy basement in Brixton. Eventually one of the true Kent Wyatts complained about her boasts. Yet Father always said to me that none of the Kent family did anything of merit after Sir Thomas the elder became the first poet to write sonnets in English. After all, James Wyatt is buried in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, which is more than Sir Thomas is, and Sir Jeffry is the only commoner to be interred at the Chapel Royal, Windsor.

  The Wyatt Question marked the first significant occasion that Father and grandfather were ranged, indignant and intractable, on opposite sides. It was not to be the last. Father had been educated in grandfather’s school. To show there was no favouritism, he was punished more severely than the other boys. Father was hopeless at mathematics and sometimes received help from older pupils. One day grandfather asked him how he had arrived at so many correct answers. Of course he could not explain.