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story of her mother’s life from a rich cache of family diaries and letters, interweaving them with many other unpublished sources.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.
Civilian Reader 