Former King's Counsellor's Revealing Diaries

Former King's Counsellor's Revealing Diaries

A week before the 1944 D-Day landing, Winston Churchill dropped a bomb of his own. During lunch with King George VI, the British PM revealed he planned to watch the Normandy invasion from the deck of the Royal Navy flagship. The king, too, became fired with the Horatio Nelson spirit, an alarming development for his private secretary, Alan "Tommy" Lascelles. It took considerable shrewdness for Lascelles to change his boss's mind; what did the trick was asking George "whether he was prepared...to advise [then 18-year-old] Princess Elizabeth on the choice of her first prime minister, in the event of her father and Winston being sent to the bottom of the English Channel." Eventually, Churchill, too, conceded defeat, telling Lascelles, "I suppose that if that poor ship should go to the bottom, you will all say, 'I told you so.' "

It's that sort of detail - and the circles in which Lascelles moved - that make his journals, recently published as King's Counsellor: Abdication and War, the Diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles, both historically valuable and entrancing. An educated and hard-working aristocrat - his cousin, the Earl of Harewood, was married to the king's sister, Princess Mary - Lascelles had a good sense of humour, knew everyone in London society and much of the Empire, and saw every important Allied war plan cross his desk. And since he knew the diaries wouldn't be made public for decades - the journals of Queen Victoria's private secretary weren't published until 1942 - his elegantly written commentary was truthful to the point of bluntness.

On the mercurial British field marshal Bernard Montgomery, Lascelles wrote, "sometimes I wonder whether Monty's undoubted genius does not occasionally bring him to the verge of mental unstability." Struck by how much the prickly Charles de Gaulle resembled a potato, he lamented that "the potato is, of course, the more malleable of the two." Axis spies would have loved Lascelles's diaries: months before the D-Day landing, he noted how military intelligence needed the king to help in their elaborate cover scheme to "bamboozle the German intelligence regarding the time and place for Overlord"; six months before the Hiroshima A-bomb, Lascelles wrote cryptically about a "hush-hush" operation involving "harnessing the atom."

Some names take on significance only after reading the footnotes. On Oct. 9, 1940, Lascelles recounts an evening at his club: "there was a crackle in the street like little boys letting off fireworks on Guy Fawkes' day, which proved to be the arrival of a bouquet of incendiary bombs. I had just sat down to a very good soft-roed herring, so stayed where I was; but E. Devonshire, attended by his son Bill and H. Macmillan dashed up into St. James's Street and spent an enjoyable quarter of an hour putting them out." E. Devonshire was the 10th Duke of Devonshire; H. Macmillan's first name was Harold - in 1957 he became prime minister.

Canada was a constant in Lascelles's world. He had served under governor general Lord Bessborough in the '30s and retained strong links to the Empire's most important dominion. Generous in his praise of Canada and Canadians, he had the measure of William Lyon Mackenzie KING, sometimes shortened to just "Billy King." After the British ambassador to the U.S. gave a speech on the future of the Empire, Lascelles reported that the PM got into "one of his more temperamental frenzies" and was only mollified when the bits favourable to him were pointed out - "a little flattery always acts on him like cream on a cat."

In his role as servant to the Crown, Lascelles wasn't blind to the royal family's flaws, lamenting their tendency to go "ostrich" in the face of adversity. After reading an advance obit of the former Edward VIII, he scathingly recorded his own feelings. Lascelles had begun his royal career working for Edward when he was Prince of Wales, but quickly soured. Lascelles was so disenchanted that, during a 1927 tour of Canada, he secretly visited prime minister Stanley Baldwin and revealed that, thanks to Edward's "unbridled pursuit of wine and women, and of whatever selfish whim occupied him at the moment," the prince was "going rapidly to the devil." Lascelles recalled telling Baldwin that, " 'sometimes when I sit waiting to get the result of some point-to-point [horse race] in which he is riding, I can't help thinking that the best thing that could happen to him, and to the country, would be for him to break his neck.' 'God forgive me,' said S.B. 'I have often thought the same.' "

Lascelles's last entry was in 1946 - he was just too tired to continue - and he retired in 1953 as Queen Elizabeth II's private secretary, having served four monarchs. Though he often helped historians before his death in 1981 at the age of 94, he offered only tantalizing glimpses of his raw diaries, carefully locked away in a chest. In 1965, he called them "the private, day-to-day ramblings of a hardened egotistical scribbler." Perhaps, but the description he gave to his successor as private secretary is also true: "a vivid, lighthearted picture of an entirely extinct period."

Maclean's February 19, 2007