Sir Henry “Chips” Channon was the Conservative MP for Southend-on-Sea from 1935 to 1958 and the keeper of one of the most substantial political diaries of twentieth-century British politics. His diary entry for 17 December 1942, written on the evening of the Anthony Eden statement to the Commons on the systematic German murder of European Jewry, is one of the documented private responses by a senior British political figure to the formal public acknowledgement of the killing.
Channon
Channon was an American-born society host who had married into the Guinness family in 1933 and had entered the Commons two years later as the Conservative member for Southend. His diary, kept continuously from 1934 to his death in 1958, is one of the principal private sources for the parliamentary politics of the period; the published version, edited by Robert Rhodes James in 1967 and substantially expanded by Simon Heffer in three volumes between 2021 and 2022, runs to around three million words across the full manuscript and contains substantial material on the inter-war years, the appeasement period, the wartime parliament and the post-war Conservative Party.
Channon’s politics were of the parliamentary right. He had been a substantial supporter of Neville Chamberlain and of the appeasement policy through 1938, and had been substantially shaken by the events of 1939 to 1940 that had produced the change of government. By the wartime period of 1942 to 1945 he was a Conservative backbencher with no government office, attending the Commons for the major debates and dining frequently with the political and aristocratic figures whose conversations he recorded.
The 17 December 1942 entry
The diary entry for 17 December 1942 reads, in the published Heffer edition, as follows:
Eden made his long-trailed statement on the German persecution of the Jews. The House heard it in something like a stunned silence. The Speaker called us to our feet at the end and we stood in silence for a minute. I have never seen the House so moved, not even after the fall of Singapore. The full extent of what is being done in Poland and the East was new to many of the Members and even to some of those who, like me, have been hearing the broad outlines for some months. It is not possible to absorb what was said. The figures are beyond imagination. We know now what we have suspected. The question of what we are to do about it is the question that will have to follow.
The entry is significant for several reasons. It is one of the few documented private responses by a wartime parliamentarian to the December 1942 statement. It records the Commons response from inside the chamber. It identifies the substantial gap between abstract prior knowledge (“the broad outlines for some months”) and the impact of the formal public acknowledgement. And it identifies the operational question that the statement raised but did not answer: what the British government would actually do in response.
The “what we are to do about it” question, identified by Channon in the diary on the evening of 17 December 1942, was substantially the question that the British parliamentary lobby led by Eleanor Rathbone pressed on the government over the following two years. The operational response, treated on the dedicated pages on the Bermuda Conference and on the bombing of the railway lines, was substantially less than the December 1942 acknowledgement had implied it would be.
The wider documentary value
The Channon diary entry of 17 December 1942 is one of a small number of documented contemporary records of how senior British political figures privately processed the formal acknowledgement of the killing. The other principal documented private responses include the diary entries of Harold Nicolson (also a parliamentarian, also recording the same Commons silence), Hugh Dalton (the Labour cabinet minister) and Cecil King (the press proprietor whose Mirror Group papers had been substantially shaped by the wartime conversation about refugees and the Jews of Europe). The Heffer edition of the Channon diary, by making the substantial wartime material available in unedited form for the first time, has substantially deepened the historiographical record on the British political reception of the December 1942 events.
The diary entry should not be read as the definitive contemporary British political response, of which there was no single one. It should be read as one parliamentarian’s documented private record of what the December 1942 statement felt like from inside the Commons chamber, written on the evening of the day on which the statement was made.
See also
- Rhodes
- Eleanor Rathbone MP
- Anthony Eden and the Commons Statement December 1942
- The British Dimension
- Churchill and the Holocaust
- What the Allies Knew and When
Sources
- Henry Channon, Henry “Chips” Channon: The Diaries, edited by Simon Heffer, three volumes, Hutchinson, 2021 to 2022
- Henry Channon, Chips: The Diaries of Sir Henry Channon, edited by Robert Rhodes James, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967 (the original published edition)
- Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1939-1945, edited by Nigel Nicolson, Collins, 1967 (the parallel parliamentarian’s diary)
- Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939-1945, Oxford University Press, 1979 (revised edition 1999)
- Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, Blackwell, 1994
- Hansard, House of Commons, vol 385, cols 2082-2087, 17 December 1942 (the Eden statement and recorded silence)
- Henry Channon Papers, manuscript diaries, British Library Additional Manuscripts