| Notes |
- John was a Visiting Fellow,Adelaide, Sth Australia, April 1985.
Article of John Grigg as Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Adelaide
University.
Discusses his research and writing about Lloyd George. Also discusses
his title and disclaiming it in 1963.
He wrote books. Published three books on Lloyd George with two in the
pipeline. Published biography on Nancy Astor , Published on World War
11, " The Victory That Never Was"
John was honored in England, 1955. Became the 2nd Lord Altricham at
the death of his father. (Disclaimed the title in 1963)
He resided in London.England Aug 1957, "John Grigg (Lord Altringham)
writes an article in The National and English Reveiw about the Queen,
accusing her of being eletist. He says the Queen is too closely
associated with the upper class and that particularly dislikes her
presentation parties when debutantes are received in court. He says
Monarchy is " complacent" and "out of touch"
Grigg's planned appearance on the BBC program "Any Questions" is
cancelled. Robin Day of Independent Telivision News interviews, an
angry man approaches Grigg and punches him.
John was elected in London, England, 1985. Chairman of the London
Library, John Edward Poydner Grigg 2nd Baron Altricham; born April 15
1924; succeeded to title in 1955; educated at Eton and New College,
Oxford. Is editor of National and English reviews and Chairman of
Periodical Publications Ltd.
European War 1939-1945 as Lt Grenadier Guard; unsuccessfully contested
W Div of Oldham (C) in October 1951 and May 1955.
John Grigg was born in 1924, he read history at New College, Oxford
winning the Gladstone Memorial Prize.
As a journalist he wrote a column in the Guardian for ten years, and
had also been a political correspondent for the Spectator and a staff
writer for the Times.
He won the Whitbread Award for Lloyd George; 'The Peoples Champion
1902-1911' and the Wolfson Prize for Lloyd George; 'From Peace to War
1912-1916 '. His other books include -' Nancy Astor ; Portrait of a
Pioneer , 1943 '; 'The Victory that Never Was 'and volume six of 'The
History of the Times', covering the period of the Thompson ownership.
He was Chairman of the London Library from 1985-1991, and is now it's
President. He is married with two sons and lives in London.
[BO:Politics obituaries
:BO]
John Grigg
[IT:Political biographer who renounced his peerage and attacked the
Queen's 'complacent entourage:IT]
[BO:Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Wednesday January 2, 2002
The Guardian:BO]
"QUOTE'
A lifetime later, it seems almost unimaginable that the writer and
historian John Grigg, who has died at the age of 77, was once regarded
as a dangerous radical. Denounced more than 40 years ago as a
crypto-republican and subverter of established order, he seemed by the
21 st century - as an Englishman, an Anglican and a Tory - to be a
survival from some remote period, with his courtesy, decency and high
principle.
Maybe he himself recognised that he was an anachronistic figure, and
turned, in his later decades, from public controversy
to history, above all his life of David Lloyd George, which is one of
the finest political biographies of our time.
John was the son of Edward Grigg, a Times journalist associated with
the imperialist circle of Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Milner, a
soldier, Conservative MP, governor of Kenya, and member of Churchill's
wartime government, who was created first Baron Altrincham in 1945.
After Eton, the young man followed his father into the Grenadier
Guards (1944-47), and to New College, Oxford, where he won the
Gladstone Memorial Prize. In paternal footsteps once more, he aspired
to journalism and politics, editing the English And National Review
(1954-60) as his father had done, and standing, unsuccessfully, as
Conservative candidate for Oldham West at the 1951 and 1955 general
elections.
He was a conspicuously liberal Tory at a time when that phrase did not
seem a contradiction in terms, though, even then, his distaste for his
party's hanging and flogging brigade - and for late-imperial
adventures like Suez - made him distrusted by many Conservatives.
In 1955, Grigg's father died, and he succeeded as Lord Altrincham, the
name by which he was known for the next eight years. A resolute critic
of the hereditary House of Lords, who still hoped to become an MP, in
1963 he reverted to John Grigg by following Lord Stansgate, who had
disclaimed his peerage to
become Anthony Wedgwood (subsequently Tony) Benn once more.
He had already acquired national notoriety in 1957 by writing an
article criticising the Queen - he called the court "complacent" and
"out of touch", and deplored the way a monarchy that should have been
truly national and above class divisions was, in practice, intimately
associated with the upper classes. There was an uproar: Altrincham was
dropped by the BBC from Any Questions, the Duke of Argyll said that he
should be hanged, drawn and quartered, and, after he had gently
reiterated his strictures in a television interview with Robin Day, he
was assaulted in the street by an angry royalist.
What seems astonishing now is how much rage Grigg's reflections
provoked, and how mild they were. As he said in the programme The Real
Queen, shown last night on Channel 4, by the 1950s the idea had
somehow crept in "that you couldn't say a word against the royal
family, let alone the Queen". And yet, he had quite obviously spoken
not as a revolutionist but as an enlightened Tory, and as a strong
believer in constitutional monarchy. He had no wish to be disloyal,
still less unchivalrous; and much of what he suggested later came to
pass.
Even so, Grigg contined to lament 20 years ago, at the 30th
anniversary of the Queen's accession, the way that her entourage
"should still be unrepresentative not only of the Comonwealth, but
even of the United Kingdom. To put it bluntly, there are no black or
brown faces in prominent places at court, and this contradicts what
the monarchy ostensibly stands for".
The Commonwealth was another of the causes to which Grigg gave his
heart. He hated any form of racism, and advocated a strenuous
multiracial policy for the Commonwealth, even if it meant (as it did)
the departure of apartheid South Africa. He knew and loved India, and
suggested that Gandhi was a more appropriate patron saint for the
Commonwealth than St George.
From 1960-70, Grigg wrote a column in the Guardian, as he did in
1986-93 for the Times, and he was, for a time, political columnist of
the Spectator. But he was, in truth, not a particularly exciting
newspaper writer, and his fastidiousness and modesty meant that
workaday journalism was never quite his metier.
In any case, he was increasingly disillusioned by politics, or at
least by the Conservatives. Throughout the 1970s, he continued to
oppose attempts to reintroduce the death penalty, but, in the end,
gave up hopes of entering parliament, and, in 1982, left the Tories
for the SDP. Apart from a little volume, Two Anglican Essays (1958),
he was in his 40s before he published a book. When he did so, he soon
emerged as one of the best historians of his time.
There was a 1980 biography of the formidable, and not very lovable,
Nancy Astor, the first woman to sit in parliament, and 1943: The
Victory That Never Was (also 1980), a fascinating exercise in
counter-factual history, which argued - convincingly that Churchill
had held back too long from the invasion of northern Europe, which
should have taken place a year earlier than 1944, and ended the war
sooner.
Grigg also held that the first of the two world wars had been "the
nobler war". In defiance of the prevailing liberal view of the
interwar years - that Germany had been more sinned against than
sinning - he argued that Wilhelmine Germany had been aggressive,
militaristic, anti-democratic and bent on the domination of Europe,
and had indeed been responsible for the war that began in 1914. This
is now something like the accepted view among historians of the
period.
As for the senseless slaughter of the trenches, those who died were,
at any rate, soldiers. Whereas in the "people's war"' of 1939/45, it
was the people who suffered; what made that war so distinctive was not
the millions of combatants who died, but the tens of millions of
civilians. Grigg abhorred the waging of war on women and childen,
notably in the British terror-bombing campaign of Germany.
The masterpiece for which he will be remembered, however, is his life
of the man whom AJP Taylor called the greatest prime minister of the
20th century. Three volumes have been published: The Young Lloyd
George (1973), Lloyd George: The People's Champion (1978, when it won
the Whitbread Award for biography), and Lloyd George, From Peace To
War 1912-1916 (1983, winning the Wolfson prize).
Biographer and subject might have seemed an unlikely pairing. Grigg
was the antithesis of the fiery, word-intoxicated radical who stormed
across the political stage and then became a great war leader. But he
showed a remarkable sympathy, and even affinity, for the Welsh wizard,
despite the fact that their domestic personalities were very
different.
Grigg, who had once skittishly said that "autobigraphy is now as
common as adultery and scarcely less reprehensible", was, in public
and private life, a truly virtuous man, whose virtue was occasionally
just this side of priggishness. While recognising Lloyd George's
political stature, he might easily have been shocked by his ceaseless
lechery; in fact, he was relaxed and uncensorious on the subject, only
- and justly - deploring the unconscious cruelty of the male
philanderer who doesn't recognise that sexual attachments may mean
more to the women he seduces than to himself.
He was more sharply critical - and with reason - of Lloyd George's
financial adventures, reckless, unscrupulous and, on occasion, plain
dishonest. Even then, he could not help warming to the man's humour,
and leonine vitality.
In later years, Grigg was stricken by cancer, and went through the
usual cycle of treatment, remission, and recurrence. Sadly, this
affected his work, but, before his death, he had nevertheless returned
to Lloyd George and the years of his premiership in 1916/22. It is to
be hoped that some further volume of this grand work may yet appear.
In 1958, Grigg married Patricia Campbell, who survives him with their
two sons.
John Edward Poynder Grigg, writer and historian, born April 15 1924;
died December 31 2001.
"(unquote)"
John Grigg
[BO:(Filed: 02/01/2002) (That's January 2nd to us colonials):BO]
JOHN GRIGG, who has died aged 77, was a journalist, author and
biographer;
his three-volume life of David Lloyd George was widely acclaimed as
one of
the most brilliant biographies of recent times.
Grigg's father, Sir Edward Grigg (created Lord Altrincham in 1945),
had been
Lloyd George's Private Secretary in 1921-22, and John Grigg was given
access
to some 2,000 letters from Lloyd George, mostly to his wife.
Grigg cast a critical eye at the stock assumptions about Lloyd George,
never
losing sight of the man behind the politician, nor forgetting that
politics
was the dominating passion of his life. Despite the financial and
sexual
scandals that dogged his career, Lloyd George emerged with his
reputation
enhanced.
Of the three volumes in the series - The Young Lloyd George (1973),
Lloyd
George: the People's Champion (1978) and Lloyd George: From Peace to
War
(1985) - the second won the Whitbread award and the third the Wolfson
literary prize. The historian Norman Stone described Grigg's biography
as
"worth reading from cover to cover".
Among the general public, however, Grigg was less well known as a
biographer
than as a polemicist. A Tory for most of his life, he combined a
belief in
the enduring value of historic institutions with a radical temperament
that
led him to argue that such institutions needed to adapt themselves to
changing realities in order to retain their vitality.
Claiming to be a reformer rather than a rebel, during the 1950s Grigg
made a
series of proposals for institutional and constitutional change.
During the 1950s, as editor of the National and English Review, Grigg
caused
a series of minor sensations with articles critical of the English
Establishment. Then in August 1957 he excited outrage with an issue
devoted
to "constructive" criticism of the monarchy, suggesting in his own
article
that the Queen was cut off from the majority of her subjects by her
"tweedy"
courtiers.
The Queen, Grigg went on, was obliged to read from texts carefully
prepared
by others, giving her a speaking style that was "a pain in the neck",
and
the personality of "a priggish school girl".
Grigg claimed that his article was offered with "no intention other
than to
serve the monarchy, to strengthen it and to enable it to survive"
adding:
"It is too precious an institution to be neglected. And I regard
servile
acceptance of its faults as a form of neglect."
His critics, however, saw his article as a personal attack on the
Queen, and
Grigg soon found himself being pilloried as a heretic in the press,
challenged to a boxing match with Henry Cooper, struck in the face by
a
member of the League of Empire Loyalists, subjected to all sorts of
bloodcurdling threats from fellow members of the aristocracy and
described
as "very silly" by Dr Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
In the face of this onslaught, Grigg repeated what he had actually
said and
refused to withdraw his remarks; the letters he received began to
change
until they were three to one in his favour. Much later, Lord Charteris
of
Amisfield, Private Secretary to the Queen in the 1970s, declared that
Grigg
had done the monarchy a great service with his article.
By the 1990s Grigg's views on the monarchy were widely respected.
During the
public orgy of grief and recrimination that followed the death of
Diana,
Princess of Wales, Grigg leapt to the Queen's defence, describing her
subsequent broadcast to the nation as "the best I have ever heard from
her".
He condemned the vengeful tone of the press in its coverage of the
Royal
Family on the grounds that it was unfair and would cause further
suffering,
while hazarding the suggestion that the experience might encourage the
monarchy in future to try to anticipate rather than follow changes in
public
mood.
John Edward Poynder Grigg was born in London on April 15 1924, the
eldest
son of Sir Edward Grigg, who had been Military Secretary to the Prince
of
Wales during his tours of Canada, Australia and New Zealand in 1919-21
before becoming Private Secretary to the Prime Minister David Lloyd
George.
Sir Edward was National Liberal MP for Oldham at the time of his son's
birth
and the next year was appointed Governor of Kenya Colony. From 1933 to
1945
he was Conservative MP for Altrincham and would be created a peer as
Lord
Altrincham in 1945. Lady Grigg (nee Dickson-Poynder) was the only
child of
the first and last Lord Islington.
>From Eton, where he was Captain of Oppidans, John Grigg went straight
into
the Army. Commissioned in the Grenadier Guards in 1943, he found
himself an
officer of the Guard at St James's Palace and Windsor Castle.
In 1944 his dislike of corporate worship saved his life when a flying
bomb
hit the chapel at Wellington Barracks, where most of his fellow
officers and
their families had gone for morning service. Later that year, as a
platoon
commander, he was involved in holding the German offensive in the
Ardennes.
He became an intelligence officer and ended the war in Hamburg.
After his release from the Army in 1945, Grigg went up as a scholar to
New
College, Oxford, to read Modern History. He gained a reputation as
both a
brilliant academic and an iconoclast. In 1948, he won the University
Gladstone Memorial Prize with an essay on The Social and Political
Ideals
and Influence of Frederick Denison Maurice (the founder of Christian
Socialism); a few months later he was fined £5 for knocking off a
policeman's helmet on Guy Fawkes Night.
After Oxford, Grigg became associate editor of the National Review,
the
journal of Conservative thought and opinion which his father had
recently
bought. Lord Altrincham was nominally editor, but as he grew frail,
Grigg
took on most of the administrative and editorial duties.
The journal's name was changed in 1950 to the National and English
Review,
and when his father retired in 1954, Grigg became editor. By then, he
had
already stood unsuccessfully as the Conservative candidate for Oldham
West,
Lancashire, in 1951; he did so again, without success, in 1955.
His succession to the Altrincham peerage on his father's death in
October
1955 seemed to end his hopes of entering the Commons, as at the time
there
was no mechanism for renouncing a peerage. Nevertheless, by refusing
to
apply for a writ of summons, he abjured his right to take his seat in
the
Lords.
Meanwhile, his father's death gave him a freer hand as editor of the
Review,
and he began to turn the magazine into an organ of a more radical
brand of
Conservatism. In 1956, he launched a scathing attack on the
Conservative
government over its handling of the Suez crisis, accusing it of doing
immense damage to the country and calling for an immediate withdrawal
of
British troops from Port Said.
Later the same year, he predicted that if the House of Lords was not
reformed, it would have to be abolished. He suggested that hereditary
peers
should have no automatic right to sit in the Lords but that a few
should be
chosen to sit either by election among their fellow peers or through
direct
nomination.
The following year, in an article in Crossbow, a new Tory ginger group
magazine which he helped to found, he urged other hereditary peers to
follow
his lead and boycott the House of Lords: "a little more voluntary
absenteeism, and attendance would sink to a point at which the House
would
be unable to function".
In 1957, he launched into the Church of England with a call for the
introduction of women priests, arguing that "those who say that women
are
unfit to be priests belong in spirit to the vanishing world of tribal
superstition and taboo".
In 1958 he published Two Anglican Essays, a book in which he called
for a
radical change in the form and spirit of Anglicanism, including the
ending
of doctrinal tests, the substitution of dialogues for sermons, the
appointment of bishops on a septennial basis as well as the ordination
of
women. Among other things he likened Confirmation to a "kind of
spiritual
sheep dip - a brief interlude of priggishness and religiosity in a
lifetime
of indifference".
During the furore that followed, Grigg protested that he would "die
for the
Christian faith" and said that it was only because he cared about it
so
passionately that he had written the book.
By 1960, the National and English Review was in financial difficulties
and
it ceased publication in June that year. An unsigned account of his
editorship, probably written by Grigg himself in the magazine's final
edition, spoke of a man who had "suffered even more than his
predecessors
from the tension between a radical temperament and the conventional
spirit
of Toryism".
Grigg went on to become a regular columnist for the Guardian, and
later
wrote for the Times and The Spectator.
He continued to ruffle Tory feathers: in 1960, he accepted an
invitation to
become chairman of the London Boycott Committee, campaigning for a
boycott
on goods imported from South Africa. In 1962, in an article apparently
designed to be helpful to the Conservatives, he described Harold
Macmillan
as "a consummate actor" who had "exploited the blind loyalty and petty
ambition of men whom he must secretly despise".
When in 1963, following a campaign by Viscount Stansgate (then, and
subsequently, Anthony Wedgwood Benn), Parliament passed the Peerage
Act
enabling peers to disclaim titles, Grigg became the second peer to
take
advantage of the new law.
But he never achieved his ambition of entering the House of Commons.
Having
slaughtered whole herds of Tory sacred cows over the previous decade,
he
found constituency associations less than enthusiastic to endorse his
candidature. In 1975, his name was removed from the Party's central
candidates' list and it caused no surprise when, in 1982, he announced
he
was joining the new SDP.
He followed his first two volumes of his biography of Lloyd George
with
1943, the Victory that Never Was (1980), a polemical work in which he
argued
that the Mediterranean strategy adopted by the Allies in 1943 had been
a
tactical mistake and that they should have concentrated instead on
invading
north-west Europe.
In Nancy Astor: Portrait of a Pioneer (1980), Grigg painted a vivid,
sympathetic picture of the brilliant but unpredictable, and frequently
impossible, woman who became Britain's first female MP.
During the 1980s, Grigg became a regular columnist on the Times and
worked
on the paper's obituaries page. He was acting obituaries editor in
1986
during the public outcry over the obituary of the ballet dancer and
choreographer Sir Robert Helpmann, in which Helpmann was described as
having
been a "proselytising homosexual".
The Times commissioned Grigg to write the sixth volume of the paper's
official history, The Thomson Years, 1966-1981 (1993). The book was a
candid
record of the period, documenting both lapses in editorial judgment
and the
strategic errors that had led the paper to close for a year in 1979.
John Grigg was chairman of the London Library from 1985 to 1991, then
president from 1996. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature.
He married, in 1958, Patricia ("Patsy") Campbell; they had two adopted
sons.
|
Grigg Family Tree
1924 - 2001 (77 years)
