Something a little different, today: an excerpt from Harriet Cullen‘s Lady Pamela Berry. As someone with a professional interest in the Cold War, the mention of the Suez crisis in the synopsis for this book caught my attention.

The publisher was kind enough to let me share an excerpt related to that event, from the chapter “Muggeridge and Suez”. Berry was married to the owner of the Daily Telegraph in the United Kingdom, and was able to wield a considerable amount of influence over British politics and high society. During Anthony Eden’s premiership, Berry developed a feud with the PM’s wife, Clarissa.

Before we get to the excerpt, here’s the synopsis:

This is a biography lightened with the intimate tone of a social memoir, about a woman who was both a bystander and protagonist through some fifty years of twentieth-century British history. Pamela Berry was the daughter of the buccaneering and brilliant politician and lawyer, FE Smith, the first Earl of Birkenhead, and married the son of another self-made man, William Berry from South Wales, who became Viscount Camrose and the owner of a group of national newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph.

She had an unusually glamorous and precocious childhood, spoiled by her adoring father, and much photographed by Cecil Beaton. In her prime she used her position as a newspaper proprietor’s wife to become the most famous political and press hostess of her generation, harnessing her beauty and wit to influence successive governments, and was accused of wielding ‘petticoat power’ during the Suez crisis. She had a decade-long affair with Malcolm Muggeridge, became a vigorous promoter of British fashion, dragging it out of the dowdy fifties, and in later life was active in the museum world. Harriet Cullen has opened a window back into the remarkable story of her mother’s life from a rich cache of family diaries and letters, interweaving them with many other unpublished sources. It is revealing, in turns scathing and admiring, but always entertaining.

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So, when the Telegraph editorial on Eden came out in January 1956, it unleashed the press pack hungry for more on petticoats and their power, not just in Britain. In Washington, the Evening Star had a frontpage story with pictures of the two women: ‘Could it be that a petticoat feud underlies PM Eden’s troubles …? Two young and attractive women among others have been mentioned in the gossip. They are Lady Eden, 35-year-old wife of the Prime Minister, and Lady Pamela Berry …’. ‘Whispering in Mayfair …’ Pam’s old friend Ali Forbes was quoted in his column, solemnly, ‘it is not so lightweight an affair as to be easily ascribable to petticoat influence.’ More damning, Francis Williams in the New Statesman commented that ‘it was from the normally sedate and friendly Daily Telegraph that the most dangerous onslaught came …’ For some time, he said, the newspaper had been receiving despondent letters about Eden from readers and Conservative voters, and the editorial was a response to that.14

But other columnists were intent on pursuing Pam. Her friend Michael Foot, under his pseudonym John Marullus in the left-wing Tribune, wrote, ‘Who are the Tory rebels? … the real snake in the grass is Lady Pamela Berry … . Since the death of the first Lord Camrose a strong personality in helping to mould Telegraph policy has been Lady PB … the most sensational arrival in Fleet St … She doubtless recalls the flaming attack which [FE] once made on a previous Tory administration – “cabin-boys at the helm” … Any day now, the phrase may be recalled … Alternatively, she may decide to play the game slow … But rest assured that when the moment comes for the kill Lady P will not be far away. She runs a salon in true eighteenth-century style and cultivates the disgruntled among the Tories.’

Her reputation spread across to the Telegraph satirical column, Way of the World signed by Peter Simple – ‘through which’, said one joker, ‘Lady PB expresses her views when she is not actually dictating the leading article in the same journal.’ In Tribune John Marullus was still after her: ‘The Anna Magnani of Fleet Street – who is Peter Simple? The mystery remains … My suggestion a few weeks ago that he was not a gentleman at all but Lady Pamela Berry … did not win the universal acceptance which I had expected. A day or two later a pleasant voice on my telephone repudiated the honour with all the casual satisfaction of a Caesar refusing the crown.’

Next, in a cellar underneath the Houses of Parliament, a cartoon in Truth magazine showed her as a slitty-eyed, hook-nosed ogress, accompanied by two goblins and hovering over a fuse she was about to light under the hapless Eden, who was sitting in a corner composing Notes for a Meeting with Ike [Eisenhower]. This was before his trip to Washington in late January with his new Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, to discuss Egypt’s ominous arms deals with Russia, and Israel’s borders – which Eden, controversially, thought should be revised to conciliate their Arab neighbours. It was a flop. ‘They agreed about nothing; and every journalist there knew it’, wrote Bob Boothby soon afterwards.15

To add to Eden’s woes, soon after his return, a withering profile came from Muggeridge in the New Statesman: ‘An almost extinct ruling class seeks to protract itself a little longer. His somehow slightly seedy good looks and attire, his ingratiating smile and gestures, the utter nothingness of what he had to say …’ It would appear from one of Pam’s letters that she and her lover often discussed together the writing of his pieces (perhaps with input from Kitty separately? Pam was much agitated about that). This may have been one of them. In March, there was a Commons debate on the Middle East, in which Eden clearly was showing the strain, and even Clarissa admitted privately that his winding-up speech was a shambles.

Anne Scott-James (mother of Max Hastings) went to interview Pam at home for the Sunday Express. ‘We thrashed over the problems of British fabrics, whether to wear a tiara to the Portuguese Embassy, women in parliament, the marriages of Her Maj’s ministers [hmm].’ She found it difficult to get any quote out of Pam which was not grossly libellous. When pressed on petticoat power, however, she waved her hand elegantly and said, ‘It would be difficult to pull the strings of Empire from a drawing room this size’ – a nice prequel to Clarissa, who later that year famously said she felt the Suez Canal was flowing through her drawing room. She added demurely, ‘I love running the house, entertaining on a small scale, and seeing the children …’ which would have evoked hollow laughter from us.

Evelyn Waugh had his own take on it all, as he confided (or broadcast) to Diana Cooper, about a weekend party: ‘V cosy and Catholic. … A lot of upper-class ladies said: “Do you actually know Lady PB personally? What is she like? Very clever, is she not?” “No, a prize booby.” “But doesn’t she make a great deal of mischief?” “That is the nicest side of her character.” They couldn’t understand it at all.’16

In April the Daily Herald’s Leslie Hunter wrote, to mark the end of Eden’s first year as premier: ‘Faint, faint is the praise greeting Eden … The Daily Telegraph ignores the anniversary, and Eden may well be thankful that Lady PB’s tongue is, for once, at rest.’

But, that summer, Suez was to break over his head. On 26 July he was hosting a dinner at Downing St for King Faisal of Iraq when the news came in that President Nasser of Egypt had nationalised the Canal, which controlled the right of passage for world shipping and oil supplies. In a triumphalist speech in Alexandria, broadcast live on the Voice of Egypt and laced repeatedly with the password De Lesseps (the French builder of the Canal) for his engineers, he announced that they were already moving as he spoke to seize its key installations.

It had been a crisis long coming for both Britain and France, who were still joint shareholders of the Canal Company, although by 1956 Britain’s empire was already in serial decline. Having moved its troops out from Egypt just weeks earlier, in a phased withdrawal under the Suez Base Agreement, and with the humiliation still fresh in people’s minds of the Foreign Secretary being stoned on a visit to Bahrein, it now suffered a new and brutally symbolic loss of face. Since the building of the Canal in 1869 Suez had given us the direct route to the ‘Jewel’ in our crown, India, although she had long since gained independence. Many in England at the time felt the sting of post-Imperial pride. I remember a few years after Suez my brother Nicky and I were on holiday as teenagers with my mother in Rome, having dinner out in a roof restaurant with magnificent views of the Forum and the Colosseum. My mother looked melancholic. When we asked her what was the matter, she sighed, ‘just looking at another lost empire. … I can’t bear it.’

Above all it was a crisis for European oil supplies, long before North Sea oil. Britain had reserves for just six weeks, and France less. The trigger for Nasser, or his excuse, was the sudden withdrawal that month of British and American finance for the building of the Aswan Dam – Britain had been locked into the loan, and when the US withdrew we had to tag along. It was a double blow for Eden, with his Arabist sympathies and years of diplomatic effort as Foreign Secretary, and his assumption that Britain politically if not economically was an equal partner of the US.

It also came hard for him when he seemed to be slightly unhinged by petticoat stress. Surreally, that very morning, on 26 July, Harold Macmillan, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, had noted in his diary: ‘Before the Cabinet … the PM had asked a few of us to meet to discuss the position of himself and his party. It was a curious discussion, turning almost entirely on the Daily Telegraph, and the vendetta which Pamela Berry and the Editor, Colin Coote, are carrying on against the PM. It’s very unfortunate; Clarissa has tried to make up the blood row which they had some time ago, but the Lady Pamela is obdurate …’.

There was nothing specific from the Telegraph at that date for Eden to complain of, but by coincidence, and on the morning after Nasser’s strike, it published side by side an editorial and a leader page signed this time by Coote. Both were highly critical in general terms. The editorial spoke of ‘deep-seated and voluminous [petticoat?] anxieties’, of Tory ministers ‘caught in a rut’, and the article, of leaders who ‘allow themselves always to be overtaken by events.’ Both pieces had been written and set up in type before news of Nasser’s strike came through. Might Eden have had some advance intelligence of that, rather than of Suez? If so, his priorities were at fault. But he had also received a note from his press officer, William Clark, alleging that Pam was trying to sow dissent among senior members of the Cabinet.

An influential left-wing lover, inclined to denigrate a Tory administration; access through the filter of a loving husband to a national newspaper; an industrious but weak, over-sensitive prime minister whose destiny it was to stumble in the footsteps of the Grand Old Man; a quarrel with his wife; a post-colonial crisis long brewing: all these might seem like ingredients for Pam’s trajectory in the Suez-Eden affair. Was she a Lady Macbeth? Certainly, her advice to me as a girl was often ‘Be bloody, bold and resolute.’

Since Clarissa’s death Pam’s role has been highlighted again, and Clarissa’s view, mulled over in her long widowhood, was that she set out deliberately to destroy Eden. Like many others, although in a more influential position than most, she certainly thought he was not up to the job and should go; that he couldn’t take the heat in the kitchen. But that was not to destroy him as a man. His own personal tragedy, and no one else’s fault, was that he had been for too many years an heir in waiting, was not a resolute character and had to deal with the worst crisis since the war when he was already physically frail and in decline. And who could deny, anyway, the regicidal instincts of the Tory party, their taste for defenestration, splattering the pavement of Downing Street? Apart from Eden: Baldwin, Chamberlain, Thatcher, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss …

What I found interesting was that Pam did not attack Eden through the pages of the Telegraph, although her opinions aired at home would have indirectly had something to do with ‘the Smack of Firm Government’ piece, before Suez began, and the August editorials. Apart from those and the paper’s occasional comments on his performance in debates – like ‘despondency about Eden’s sense of purpose’ – it was simply Pam’s tongue or voice, ‘so sharp and so wild’ (or to the point) as remembered by Chips in the war, which resonated around the lunch and dinner tables as spring turned to summer, and clearly was behind the crop of left-wing press stories, and also gave ammunition to the hawkish right-wing Suez Group of the Tory party and to the maverick Randolph Churchill, trumpeting from the Evening Standard. She was, you could say, the spicy ham sandwiched between those two extremes.

Amidst all the gleeful comments came one which was surprisingly sympathetic, from the Pendennis column in the Observer – of course, before the Telegraph had become a rival with its own Sunday paper – ‘Lady PB has not denied these unsubstantiated innuendos publicly; she does not deem them worthy. … Fashion experts say Lady PB is extremely knowledgeable on the subject; she works at her task as diligently as if her living depended on it …’.

The point also has to be made that in the 1950s newspaper proprietors and their wives were accustomed to meet ministers socially on a daily basis. The fourth estate, so-called, had to tread a fine line between friendship and collusion with the executive. My parents had to put up with constant complaints from political friends, often to become ex-friends, about the right-wing press’s ‘unhelpful’ or ‘disloyal’ attitude on various issues. The attitude might come out in print, or at the dinner table. On that platform my mother was not a ‘political’ hostess, in the old Tory tradition of brokering compromises and wielding discreet power. She was a press hostess, who used her tongue and her position to mix press and politicians and anyone else she thought provocative or fun, and her first loyalty (co-existing along with the other first loyalty, old codger Muggeridge) was to the newspaper she had married into.

Of course, there were multiple criticisms from the serious left of Eden’s premiership, for instance from the Observer, the News Chronicle or the Manchester Guardian, but only one right-wing paper of record, the Telegraph, maintained its independence to criticise. The Times, the Establishment’s and mandarins’ preferred reading, was another matter. During the crisis Eden met up frequently with Iverach McDonald, its Foreign Editor, and the Editor, William Haley, elsewhere in Fleet Street nicknamed ‘Haylier than thou’, whom he saw almost as regularly as the Queen. They gave him a respectful passage. My mother resented this supposed prestige enjoyed by The Times, which went back to the famous 1930s appeaser editor, Geoffrey Dawson. She used to describe how journalists were admitted for press conferences to Downing St – ‘gentlemen of the press by that door; this way, please Sir, Mr Dawson of The Times’. She also told us we should never read The Times in a public place or leave it around, and always do the opposite with the Telegraph.

Meanwhile, her views were hyped up, or anticipated, by the Old Codger. (An odd nickname, I thought; Kitty’s aunt, the social reformer Beatrice Webb, once said of him: ‘Lust – a word he delights in – and cruelty are the background of Malcolm’s mind.’) He was quoted in July by Bill O’Connor, alias Cassandra, in his Daily Mirror column: ‘Mr Malcolm Muggeridge, with a funereal grin on his face and jovially wiping the mud from his boots from the newly filled grave … described the Prime Minister as “macabre and unreal”.’

Over the long hot summer of the havering there emerged another urgent dimension, the threat to Israel from Egypt, now heavily armed by the Soviets, on its Sinai border. Pam was particularly vocal in the salons on this as well. She was already a committed Zionist, encouraged by her friendships with English Jewry, notably with the Rothschild family, the Pryce-Jones’ and Isaiah Berlin, and with the Labour MP Dick Crossman.

So, Clarissa apart, Pam felt an instinctive antipathy to Eden’s Arabism, which she felt was at the root of his hesitation. She would have had no idea though of the irony of the plan to be hatched between Britain, France and Israel, known afterwards as the ‘Collusion’: Israel would attack the Egyptian army in Sinai and Britain and France would then intervene, ostensibly to separate the two warring sides, in order to recover the Canal. But her curiosity was piqued by the confidential trips overseas made by Selwyn Lloyd, Eden’s Foreign Secretary. ‘Mackintosh, mackintosh, where have you been?’ she teased her old friend as he arrived for dinner from the airport, on a cold rainy night that October. She would have given her eye teeth to know that the mackintosh had been in the Parisian suburb of S.vres, plotting invasion with Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan.

The ensuing ceasefire and demand for unconditional withdrawal by both the US and Russia were national humiliations. The Telegraph weighed in rather ponderously on 7 November: ‘armed intervention could be justified in principle but had been hopelessly bungled in practice.’ Both the attacks and the ceasefire caused bitter divisions throughout the country, with excoriating letters in the press from people as diverse as Muggeridge and Lady Violet Bonham Carter, and provoked stormy and violent debate in Parliament, although Eden survived a vote of no confidence. Somehow Pam got some of the stick for it all. But in the middle of the furore, also somehow, she had popped over the Atlantic to follow the Adlai Stevenson presidential campaign, in the company of Arthur Schlesinger, and returned just in time to give ‘an anti-Eden drinks party’ on 27 November, according to Chips. This story may have been conflated with a dinner she was supposed to have given, at which a placard on the table proclaimed, ‘One More Heave!’ – much to Michael’s annoyance.

‘London is a battlefield!’ wrote Nancy Mitford that December to her lover, Colonel Gaston Palewski. The exhausted Edens had been packed off for a break to Jamaica, in Ian Fleming’s uncomfortable villa Goldeneye, leaving the faithful Rab Butler in charge. (He became known as ‘always the Bridesmaid, never the Bride’.) ‘Randolph has been kicked down the steps of Whites by Andrew [Devonshire, Nancy’s brotherin- law] & is in the London Clinic, cries of traitor fly to and fro & most people aren’t speaking to Pam. I count as a foreigner. Susan Mary [Patten] was kicked downstairs by Ld Salisbury and is said to have sat up in bed at the American Embassy writing memoranda. … Pam has got such a beautiful picture – all in tones of brown and said to be by Nattier …’. Isaiah, the dexterous social lizard, found an opportunity at this time to write a letter of sympathy to Clarissa, whilst acknowledging in another, to Arthur Schlesinger, that ‘Lady Pamela must be a lonely gallant figure.’

Some people were still speaking to her. On 17 December, after the Edens’ return from Jamaica – ‘Prime Minister Visits Britain!’ yelled one tabloid – Pam attended the debate in the Commons to discuss the aftermath of the botched invasion. For once it was a quite muted and depressed occasion, with lacklustre speeches on both sides. Probably to avoid sitting anywhere near Clarissa, who would have been in the Distinguished Strangers or the Ladies Gallery, Pam was reported as ‘roughing it’ in the Press Gallery. Who with? An unholy duo. ‘Aloft in the gallery, godlike in their power to influence the masses, sat Lady Pamela Berry, Mr Randolph Churchill, and Mr Muggeridge.’ Pam’s presence here, according to Forward’s political correspondent, was ‘too much for Mr Randolph Churchill, who regards the Telegraph as a Johnny-cumlately in the matter of seeing through the PM. As she was leaving, he said audibly to his next-door neighbour, “I suppose she is going down to have tea with Anthony.” What happened next is obscure: according to Mr Churchill’s account, he had to move his right foot sharply to one side to avoid having it stamped on by the heel of a high-heeled shoe.’ Randolph afterwards boasted that he had successfully tripped her up and she had fallen with a ‘sickening crash’.’

The Canal flowed on through Clarissa’s drawing room till mid-January, when Eden resigned on grounds of ill-health. ‘Such a relief to feel the poor mad thing is removed from the direction of our affairs,’ wrote Pam to Nancy. ‘Now one can sink back into a charitable mood and feel very sorry for them both. Apparently, although there was a keen and bustling cabal in the Cabinet which was intriguing vigorously to get him out, his departure was actually not caused by them. … What did it was solely the doctors. He had violent abdominal pains the night before, was told by the doctors to resign or die in a month – and it was all over in a few minutes. … The last two cabinets had been frightening beyond words – and they all say now they couldn’t have stood it another minute. Poor Clarissa, I do feel terribly sorry for her now. Her future seems appalling whichever way you look at it.’ Anyway, she concluded, back to Fashion Week: ‘I have to spend next week piloting Sir David Eccles through a sea of mannequins …’

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Harriet Cullen’s Lady Pamela Berry is due to be published by Unicorn Publishing, on April 2nd.

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