Alistair Lexden
History and Sex
Historic Affairs: The Muses of Sir Arthur Bryant, W. Sydney Robinson, Zuleika Books & Publishing, 2021, £25.00 (hardcover)
During the Second World War, and for the ensuing forty years, no historian in Britain was read more widely or avidly than Sir Arthur Bryant(1899-1985), a master of absorbing narrative. His work covered the entire span of British history in vivid, compelling prose.
He published over forty books, whose total sales topped two million, and provided further sustenance for his large following as the star columnist of the then influential Illustrated London News for nearly fifty years. Churchill and Attlee both named him as their favourite historian; so did Macmillan and Wilson. Mrs Thatcher was no less enthusiastic. Churchill got him his knighthood; Wilson made him a Companion of Honour.
Everything that he wrote had one overriding objective: to instil a sense of pride in the achievements of his country over the centuries. Typically, he proclaimed that in its struggle against Hitler Britain fought ‘a war of redemption, not only for Europe but for her own soul’. Late in life he declared that he wanted to safeguard ‘the dear, brave, honourable spirit of England for future and happier generation’. Patriotism was his watchword.
Nine years after his death in 1985, Bryant’s numerous admirers had a great shock. Another popular historian, Andrew Roberts, then at the outset of his career, claimed, with much supporting evidence set out in his book Eminent Churchillians (1994), that Bryant had been ‘a Nazi sympathiser and fascist fellow-traveller’ in the 1930s, a time when he was closely associated with the Conservative Party through the Bonar Law College at Ashridge in Hertfordshire, then the busy and successful centre of Tory political education, where he was a brilliant teacher and writer. Both Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain made use of his talents.
No one supported Chamberlain’s search for a settlement with Hitler more vigorously. He was responsible for an English edition of Mein Kampf, adding a foreword in which he compared Hitler with Disraeli (of all unlikely people). He got on friendly terms with prominent Nazis whom he visited in July 1939 in a desperate bid to avert war, and narrowly escaped internment, along with Mosley and others, in 1940 after publishing a book entitled Unfinished Victory in which he speculated that the Nazis, with whom Britain was now at war, might yet create ‘a newer and happier Germany’.
Though he had condemned the persecution of Jews as ‘revolting and sickening’, Roberts’s revelations, which lost nothing in the telling by the provocative young historian, could not but seem wildly at odds with the fervent patriotism of Bryant’s best-selling publications after 1940. A dark shadow fell on his reputation at a time when interest in his work was waning fast.
The shadow is lightened, at least to some extent, by this fascinating study of the famous historian in old age by Sydney Robinson, a rising star among today’s biographers. It depicts Bryant’s extraordinary private life during his last fifteen years. Sex and romance, both indispensable to his well-being, were provided by a coterie of intelligent, good-looking, middle-aged women who doted on him (the exact number is unclear).
His charm and passion held them all in thrall. One even wrote a biography of him, a rather good one, to mark his eightieth birthday in 1979, a lavishly celebrated occasion at which former prime ministers and other eminent figures queued up to sing his praises. Despite their formal separation in 1971, his wife’s devotion to him never slackened. After a visit from him, she wrote: ‘All that is dynamic & exciting left with you at 10.24 this morning. And I’m certain that all your lady friends feel the same way as I do as you flit from one to another of us.’
At the age of eighty-one, he added one more to his circle, the recently widowed Laura, Duchess of Marlborough, an experienced and rather shameless woman of sixty-five who had had four husbands in all. Bryant aspired to be the fifth after they met at the launch of her tawdry book of memoirs. Their engagement was announced in June 1980. His ardour, poured out in long telephone calls and letters written at all hours, had an embarrassing intensity: ‘without you I should no longer want to live, little princess of love and compassion and courage that you are.’ The Duchess replied: ‘Nothing can shake my love for you’, though she complained about his excessive preoccupation with sex. Alas, on this occasion he did not come up to scratch in the bedroom – an unprecedented setback – and the wedding, which gossip columnists had eagerly anticipated, was abandoned.
Drawing on the unpublished autobiography of one mistress and reams of correspondence with all of them (Bryant slept little and rarely stopped writing when awake), Robinson shows with great skill how the historian’s other muses met his voracious sexual appetite, and organised his everyday life, which he was incapable of doing for himself. Why did they put up with the incessant demands of this elderly man? One of them made it clear to him. ‘You are absolutely wonderful when it comes to two things: writing books and going to bed.’ She would have been very surprised if she had known about his failure with the Duchess.
Alistair Lexden is a Conservative peer and a Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords, who writes and lectures on British political history. His short film about Bonar Law, Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister, is now being shown on the BBC’s Parliament Channel. The subjects of his recent published articles include Lloyd George and Ireland, the 1945 election and a mystery painting of Margaret Thatcher addressing the House of Commons. Full details of his historical and political work can be found on his website, www.alistairlexden.org.uk.
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