The Oldie Podcast

PROFESSOR SIMON HEFFER ON CHIPS CHANNON Our first speaker was Professor Simon Heffer, who has written biographies on, amongst others, Thomas Carlisle, Vaughan Williams, Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and as "most of us spent lockdown staring at the ceiling and avoiding people on walks", Simon achieved an extraordinary historical feat of a mammoth 3 volume collection of the political diaries of Chips Channon. Simon told us "Yes, it was my lockdown project". Simon summarised with Proust who Chips had tried to get into bed in 1918. This wasn't brought up in the diaries until 1947, as though it had taken Chips 30 years to remember, which annoyed Professor Simon Heffer. Chips's mother had befriended various French people in the war as she worked on trying to raise money for the library in Paris. That's how they got to know Proust. When war broke out, she was nervous about her "little Chips" getting killed by the Germans, that she got him a job working for the American Red Cross in Paris. This meant that Chips