Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  To celebrate, Roy took Jennifer out to dinner at one of his favourite restaurants, Boulestin in the Strand, before going home to Pontypool, where Jennifer wrote to him the next day:

  Yesterday was lovely Darling and it was v. sweet of you to let me share your First . . . As I said before a First is an achievement anyhow but it’s a great achievement when you’ve managed to do so much else as well and haven’t had to retire to a metaphoric cell and live a solitary devoted life. I feel most honoured to be allowed to say to myself that you’ve got a First and that you actually love me (unless of course you are already beginning to experience a reaction!). I can’t think of anything else to say except that as you know I’m as glad as if I’d got a First myself and I love you like hell.53

  Roy had been afraid that he might be called up immediately; but he was not, and they were able to spend most of the rest of the summer together, mainly in Oxford, Henley and London. Although not uninterrupted – Roy spent at least two weekends with Tony – this was the longest period they would spend together before they were married; ‘just the most marvellous and most perfect and most exciting time I’ve ever had,’ Jennifer called it:54 a golden four months to which they both looked back longingly during the separations and hardships of the next three years. They still analysed their love endlessly, as is clear from a letter Jennifer wrote one weekend in July when Roy was at Pontypool with Tony. She was sorry if her honesty had hurt him:

  But it may help you not to idealise me and therefore prevent equal or more severe shocks in the future. For one thing in spite of your remarks about self-sacrifice I am definitely extremely selfish – probably more so than you. I love you more than I can ever say for saying all you did – you gave me more in that short time than any vague idea of virginity you think you have caused me to lose. I don’t suppose I can ever give you half as much.55

  Among other things, they made a return pilgrimage to Dartington in August, as Jennifer recalled in another letter in September. (For some time Roy had been calling her his ‘darling giraffe’; she called him her ‘jaguar’.)

  That was an awful moment leaving Dartington wasn’t it? I felt quite sentimental about it. It will always be very, very much bound up with you my Darling and very, very sacred. If we were really middle class and settled down in a nice little villa I’m sure we should call it ‘Dartington’ or if that were impossible we’d call our unfortunate eldest giraffe it instead . . . Whenever I think of giraffes I think of you saying ‘You look bloody giraffe-like’ and I think God how I love you. There is now an added longing to get the war over in addition to all its beastliness and it is the chief longing of all – to finish it so that we can be together for ages and ages. We must love each other like hell if we’ve been together all this summer and thought it was a long time, but in fact it’s gone so quickly . . . After all this time I think there’s a damn good chance that we’ll go on loving each other so much that we’ll want to live together – as long as we can avoid too many scenes – tho’ in a way they prove how very, very much we love each other.56

  In the autumn Jennifer went back to Girton, while Roy got what he called ‘an easy-going job’ at the American Embassy in London (the Ambassador, John Winant, was a friend of his father), going back to Oxford twice a week for some very light military training57 and spending most weekends in Cambridge, as he characteristically recalled a year later:

  The weekends in Cambridge during that autumn really were frightfully good. Coming down from L’pool St for the first one was frightfully exciting. I still hardly knew Cambridge at all and, to me, it was still a place where the pre-Dartington Jennifer, which still intrigued me, had spent a lot of time . . . Also, to one so used to the G.W. [Great Western] line from Paddington it was a rather mysterious journey through very odd country in a train with ridiculously steamed up windows . . . Do you remember Ely the next afternoon?58

  She did. ‘I too remember last autumn incredibly well – Ely, St Edmundbury [Bury St Edmunds] and the journeys in the train there and back. The Lion [where Roy stayed] and Girton and the Arts [where they saw The Cherry Orchard]. And your reading nothing but Trollope.’59

  Yet all the time they were still agonising – Roy particularly – about whether their relationship might be cooling down. ‘We once talked about the possibility of us coming to love each other rather differently,’ he wrote in November, ‘I’m horribly sure that that would be quite impossible. If one once began to suspect that there was a tendency for things to fall off, one should become so acutely miserable that it would be quite impossible to go on. I’m rather frightened that quite soon, I may begin to feel that . . . I really am quite worried about this, although I am sure that you think it all very foolish, my darling.’60

  The same day Jennifer was writing cheerfully about what pictures they might have in their future house together – something Dutch in the Queen Anne dining room in Cowley Street, or Douanier Rousseau in their first flat ‘in a modern block on Highgate Hill’ – though she felt it necessary to explain who Rousseau was, ‘your knowledge of modern French art being rather slight’.61 More seriously, a few days later on the train back to Cambridge after a miserable parting on Oxford station, Jennifer wrote an important letter warning of possible conflict between Roy’s political ambitions and her desire for a career of her own. She would subordinate herself, but only to a certain extent:

  Oh my Darling I do hope terribly that we go on loving each other as intensely as we do now and have done since the beginning. I think that it’s essential that we should for the next few years even if our love changes and becomes calmer later on. I do hope you won’t find this waiting period and the army so dull that you will need a new and ipso facto more absorbing emotional experience. I do hope that the combination of Labour Club and work won’t erect a barrier between us by pulling me in the opposite direction or making me v. tired, but if it does I will give up the Labour Club. You do, and always have, come first. You always must come first and I therefore agree that an independent career is a danger, because I’m not and never will be one of those people who will be satisfied with looking after the house and later on the small giraffes. People who are satisfied with that kind of life, or even before the small giraffes appear, with a job that is quite uninteresting and unimportant, can put their husbands etc. first easily. I’m not and there’s no doubt it makes things more difficult.

  Comparing their relationship with those of a number of her girlfriends, she was sure that their love was fiercer and more absorbing than any of her friends’. ‘Therefore we must reach more perfect peaks than they do, but at the same time it makes our love more delicate than theirs and it makes us more likely to have petty scenes.’ But that only made it more imperative that they should stick together:

  We’ve got such a lot of things to do together and life seems quite pointless without you. I think I’d have to go v. religious or something if we did have the BB. Although the independent career is a danger it is less so in our case than it would be in most because we work together at the same things. One thing I’m certain of – I think my Darling that we’ll have at least to be officially engaged at your first election or the Conservatives will make up some slander . . . It will be as much fun fighting our first election as going on our Grand Tour.62

  In December they had a typical lovers’ spat. ‘We had been having a quarrel (I cannot remember what about),’ Roy wrote much later, ‘and I spent nearly 3 hours trying to phone you at Girton from the call-box in the corner [at the Oxford Union]. I had some idea of coming over to Cambridge that evening but it became too late for that and so instead, we met in London the next morning and had a wonderful reconciliation scene behind a telephone box at Liverpool St. We then had coffee at F. & M. [Fortnum & Mason] & went back to Oxford for the weekend.’63

  Before Christmas Jennifer stayed at Pontypool again, where they seem to have played some form of hockey in the garden (‘They were bloody good those games weren’t they?’) and she came away with a memorable men
tal picture of Roy ‘in that white sweater and with your socks over your trousers and a cigarette hanging out of your mouth – looking lean and lithe and tough’.64 In January 1942 they managed a couple more weekends in Cambridge – he went up for her birthday on the 18th, when they tried to be economical by having dinner in a Lyons Corner House – but Roy spent most of the month kicking his heels in Pontypool while waiting for his call-up, unable to find a job in London and unable to afford to live there without one, wallowing in the misery of being apart:

  Oh my darling, darling Jennifer I love you much more than I have ever done before & it’s a terrible shock not to have my giraffe bobbing up & down at my side – which means more to me than anything else in the world. The only comfort is that this time I have no doubts & no fears about you – I can remember your tears so vividly that they are impossible.

  I can’t think of an ending that wouldn’t be pure bathos.

  I just love you.

  Roy65

  But all the time Tony was still on the scene. He had now been posted to Dorset, from where he was still able to meet up with Roy quite regularly, either in London or for weekends in Pontypool. Their relations were still difficult. ‘Has Tony recovered from his idea that you played him false?’ Jennifer asked.66 And on another occasion: ‘I hope you will have a good weekend with Tony and find a modus vivendi.’67 In November Roy reported to Jennifer that he had spent a day with Tony in London – just drifting around, having tea and dinner and seeing Citizen Kane – before going back to Hampstead where Roy was staying, where they talked until three in the morning.68 Then in January 1942 Tony wrote what Roy called ‘a wildly introspective letter’ to Hattie, ‘giving all his reactions to you & explaining the change in his attitude towards me – all rather frightening, but it seems to have passed all right, thank God’.69 Part of this letter, describing their relationship before Jennifer came between them, has already been quoted. But the rest is worth quoting in full:

  Dear Mrs Jenkins,

  I am writing at once to clear up once & for all this business of my ‘new relations with the Jenkins family’. I’m very sorry to have made it sound more significant than it is: because in actual fact it has not made the slightest difference to my desire to come down to Pontypool as soon as possible.

  Your guess as to the cause of the change was perfectly right up to 4 months ago, but since then this particular cause has been replaced by another one.

  [Here followed Tony’s account of his ‘exceedingly close & intense friendship’ with Roy between January and July 1940.]

  Well, I went off into the Army, and, as was both natural and inevitable, Roy came under the spell of the first nice girl he met – who, fortunately, will make him an admirable partner: that I genuinely believe. This, of course, was a revolutionary break in our friendship, as Roy obviously realised, since he omitted to mention the matter at all to me, although we were corresponding regularly. As a result I only learned of it quite accidentally from an outside source, and this I was not easily able either to forget or forgive.

  [In fact Tony knew about Jennifer by early October, so Roy did not keep her existence secret very long.]

  It so happened that the exigencies of Army life and my misogynistic principles precluded me from finding a similar solution to the problem. So there followed several months during which the whole balance of our friendship was very unevenly weighted. I was both jealous and bitter, and despite two or three visits to Pontypool during my leaves we were never able to re-introduce any genuine harmony into our relationship. So much for Conflict no. 1, which you diagnosed in your letter.

  Then, to make matters worse, during last August and September, I underwent two or three experiences which have lasted up to the moment of writing. I can’t very well describe them in a letter: suffice it to say that they had the good effect of ridding me of all my bitterness and jealousy, the bad effect of making me very largely forget all about Roy. Almost of a sudden, the whole complicated affair seemed unimportant and irrelevant: and, as a result, on my last leave, Conflict no. 1 was replaced by the fresh difficulty, and the unequal balance toppled right over in the other direction.

  However, I see no reason why the picture should remain so gloomy and melancholy. All that has happened is that from travelling along very fast in top gear we have had to change down to bottom gear: and the gears crashed rather badly on the way. From being David and Jonathan we shall, when the gearing down is completed, become two normal people on conventionally friendly terms. Many of the high hopes are gone, many bold gay plans for the future are dead: and somewhere a spark has been put out. But it may well be that the new state of affairs is more healthy than the old: and, to repeat, nothing has altered my desire to remain an adopted member of the Greenlands household – if they will still have me!

  I have betrayed no confidences in this letter, as I have previously told Roy all that I have written here. I have no objection to his knowing I wrote this letter, and, if you should wish, reading it.

  Always in hopes of moving nearer P’pool.

  Yours affectionately,

  Tony70

  What Hattie made of this we cannot know; but she evidently did show the letter to Roy. Nor do we know what the two or three mysterious ‘experiences’ were that caused Tony to forget about Roy. A girl? Another man? Or something entirely different? Neither of Crosland’s biographers – his second wife, Susan (unsurprisingly), nor Kevin Jefferys – knows much about this crucial period of his life. All we know is that Roy and Tony did eventually settle down to a more normal pattern of friendship (though it could never be entirely easy, given how close they had been) and Tony remained on quasi-filial terms with Arthur and Hattie.

  Very soon after this, Roy was finally called up and his life entered a new stage.

  * * *

  fn1 A group photograph taken before the debate shows Jenkins and Bevan together in the front row. Sadly, however, nothing came of this previous meeting when Roy joined Nye in the House of Commons eight years later.

  fn2 Arthur, by contrast, wrote to Tony that Attlee’s speech was ‘pretty sound’. He added that ‘Roy did very well in the chair.’21

  4

  Captain Jenkins

  ROY DID HIS officer training, incongruously, at Alton Towers, in Staffordshire. It was not then the garish theme park it has since become, but a rather genteel pleasure garden, full of ‘elegant little footbridges’ and ‘tearooms disguised as Swiss chalets’, which served poached eggs and cucumber sandwiches’.1 Nevertheless the shock of army life on a hitherto somewhat pampered young man was considerable. His memoirs naturally recall his years of military service with a distanced colouring of wry amusement, even ‘some nostalgia’.2 By then he had read Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy and the three wartime volumes of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time – two of his favourite authors – and could refract his own experience through their satirical depiction of the tedium and absurdity of army life. His letters to Jennifer at the time, however, paint a rather less happy picture:

  I’m still feeling completely dazed and find it quite outside my comprehension to spend six god-forsaken months in this place . . . The great snag is that one seems to have so little time to spare from cleaning, polishing etc. I have spent most of this morning trying to shine a mess tin which has to be presented for an inspection by the Major tomorrow . . . I am quite hungry enough to eat most things that I am given, but a few days ago, eating lunch at Isola for instance, I would never have believed that I could eat liver & messy potatoes ladled out of a bucket affair . . . I now have to go & sew name tabs onto blankets & so I suppose I must finish.3

  Jennifer’s reply to this cri de coeur was sympathetic, but just a touch ironic: ‘I can’t imagine you polishing and sewing Darling . . . but it should make you a v. useful and helpful, practical husband jaguar!’4 (If she really hoped for that, she would be disappointed.) In further letters over the next few weeks Roy described the uncongenial rigours of gun drill, marching
and strenuous map-reading exercises: ‘racing up & down huge hills in the blazing sun [it was now May] pursued by the wretched Colonel with his hunting horn’, which left him in ‘a quite exceptional state of physical exhaustion’.5 The Colonel, he reported, ‘also likes one to beagle! I may be forced to take it up, as the only alternative appears to be rugger.’6 Actually beagling turned out to be more enjoyable than expected; and ‘the Colonel fell in a ditch, which was something’.7 But there was also compulsory boxing, which he did not enjoy. ‘I have discovered that I am incapable of boxing . . . I’m afraid that is very immasculine, darling, and I hope you won’t decide that you have made an awful mistake.’8

  In compensation, he still got leave two weekends out of three, and delighted in working out complicated train timetables by which they could spend the maximum amount of time together, variously in Alton or Cambridge, London or Pontypool. Yet his letters were still full of tortuous self-analysis about their relationship. Roy called Tony introspective, but he was just as bad. For instance, after a day together in London in April:

  Yesterday was an awful parting, but it is ridiculous for you to make yourself feel worse by any doubts as to whether I love you. Yesterday had the one beneficial result that it made me far more certain and, in a sense, a lot happier about our relationship than I have been for quite a long time. The real cause of my doubts at Alton was that I had never quite recovered all the consciousness (sensibility, if one likes to be vain) that I lost during the first few days in the army. The most surprising thing was that I quite lost the ability to be sentimental about you, or about anything else for that matter . . . and I never properly recovered it until last night . . . I accepted the partings a great deal too philosophically for my frame of mind about us . . . Yesterday completely changed all that . . . Last night I felt horribly but reassuringly sentimental.9