New Biography of Lady Pamela Berry

–A new biography of Waugh’s friend Pamela Berry has recently been announced. This is entitled Lady Pamela Berry: Passion, Politics and Power. It was reviewed in The Sunday Times by Max Hastings in an article entitled “The grand dame of Fleet Street”. Here is an extract:

…I approached this biography cautiously because it is written by [Pamela’s] daughter Harriet Cullen, whom I feared might skip the naughty bits. How wrong I was! She omits nothing and shows how ghastly it was to be a child of a grande dame.

…[Berry] stormed through the 1930s, becoming a famous figure at parties, courted by Brendan Bracken and Isaiah Berlin and feuding with her family in a fashion worthy of the Mitfords. “I wish she were dead,” she said of her elder sibling Eleanor. “I wish she’d never been born. On God, I hate her so. Why is she my sister, the bloody swine?”

Her judgments on lovers were no more charitable. She found Victor Rothschild “extraordinarily attractive and loveable, but he doesn’t look so good in the daytime”. In 1936 she married the diligent, decent, taciturn, rich but monumentally dull Michael Berry, younger son of Lord Camrose.

When Camrose died in 1954 and his elder son, Seymour, proved uninterested in running the Telegraph, Michael took over, with his wife front-seat driving. Anybody wondering about their marriage, although it produced four children, need know only that when a friend asked if Michael liked the monogrammed silk underwear she had given Pam for the honeymoon, the bride said laconically that he never noticed it.

It was a reflection of a passion for brains even greater than her enthusiasm for wealth that for a decade she conducted an affair with [Malcolm] Muggeridge, a serial adulterer. Only when “St Mugg’s” sexual powers were exhausted did he become a conspicuous Christian and repent, perhaps even of Berry.

She was for a time friendly with Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford and Debo Devonshire, but eventually fell out with all three. One of her less appealing characteristics was a willingness to toady to people even richer than herself, for instance the billionairess Jayne Wrightsman and The Washington Post’s owner Katherine Graham. But she also cherished such poorer folk as Arthur Schlesinger and the brilliant, albeit bonkers, polemicists Paul Johnson and Peregrine Worsthorne, together with the serpentine publisher George Weidenfeld.

Is there a serious theme underlying the astonishing roll-call of once-famous names in this book? Not really. Berry surfed a life rather than living it, as was probably inevitable for a clever, rich woman in the mid-20th century.

The story Cullen tells will delight the sort of people who read Henry “Chips” Channon’s diaries, myself included,  for I devoured the book. She makes no bones about her mother’s heroic lack of interest in her children, who were dumped in the country while Berry got on with the London whirl. But in those days, as the author says, that was what many mothers did, including my own. We loved our nannies, and did not care a straw for Mummy, even if we could recognise her in an identity parade.

[Paul] Johnson wrote after Berry’s sudden death from cancer in 1982 that he admired her as a “superlative hater”, and for her “deep and glorious passion for friendship” and her genius as a hostess: “a Valkyrie of the festive table, a Brunhilde of the fête”.

When the Berry family lost control of the Telegraph in 1986, it was widely said that this would never have happened had Lady Pam still been around. I disagree. She was too busy firing the ship’s guns, or partying in the wardroom, to notice that her husband was steering for the rocks. But she was by any measure a fascinating figure of her time, and her daughter’s book does her full justice.

It makes me relieved, though, that I did not know her better.

Charles Moore has also reviewed the book in the Daily Telegraph (18 Feb 2025): “A Secret History of Poetry and Politics at the Telegraph“.   Here’s an excerpt from his review:

…The most important period of Pam’s politics began in 1956. Early in that year, The Telegraph, though Tory-supporting, accused Anthony Eden’s administration of lacking “the smack of firm government”. The article caused a great stir, though by modern standards the words were mild. It was known that Pam Berry disliked Eden. There were complaints and cartoons in the press about her “petticoat power”.

As the year continued, Eden steered into crisis. Britain and France tried and, thanks to US disapproval, failed to regain control of the Suez Canal from Egypt’s firebrand leader, General Nasser, who had seized it. Suez is seen as the point at which the British Empire truly ended.

Pam attacked Eden partly because she had taken against her former friend, the clever and beautiful Clarissa Churchill, niece of Winston, who had become Eden’s second wife two years earlier. At 35, Clarissa was seven years younger than Pam. Winston’s son Randolph stirred things up against his cousin, writing of Pam having “a tongue and pen which are both fluent and vivacious”.

Michael Foot, the future Labour leader, got involved: “The real snake in the grass is Lady Pamela Berry … She runs a salon in true 18th-century style.” She would be there “when the moment comes for the kill”.

In the New Statesman, Malcolm Muggeridge, the great Left-wing polemicist and later – but very much not yet – a Christian of saintly asceticism, attacked Eden, writing of “his ingratiating smile and gestures, the utter nothingness of what he has to say”. In private, Pam’s ex-friend, Evelyn Waugh, called her “a prize booby”, though describing her mischief-making as “the nicest side of her character”.

As Harriet Cullen points out, the Muggeridge intervention was significant because he was, at that time, Pam’s lover. Previously deputy editor of the Telegraph, he now edited Punch.

Eden resigned, formally on grounds of ill health, in January 1957. Was her mother Lady Macbeth, asks Harriet Cullen. Clarissa Eden certainly thought so, and Isaiah Berlin described Pam as “the greatest single opposing factor in the anti-Eden campaign”. Had her “petticoat power” also enlisted Muggeridge?

The author sidesteps slightly, and says, “My mother was not a ‘political’ hostess in the old Tory tradition of brokering compromises … She was a press hostess, who used her tongue and position to mix press and politicians …and her first loyalty … was to the newspaper she had married into.” So perhaps this respectable organ has much to thank her for. Today, the whole thing would play out in furious tweets – much less enjoyably.

According to Michael Davie, editor of Waugh’s Diaries (p. 795), “Waugh relied on [Pamela] to keep him in touch with London gossip…One of the last London hostesses to maintain a salon.” The editor of the Mitford-Waugh letters , Charlotte Mosley, wrote (p. 507):

…[Pamela Berry’s] friendship with Nancy and Evelyn was meteoric. In 1949 Nancy described her as ‘blissful Pam Berry’, and over a period of six years they exchanged hundreds of letters and met regularly. By 1954, when Michael Berry succeeded his father as editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph, their friendship had withered and their correspondence had dried up. A sharp letter from Nancy to the Telegraph in January 1955, making fun of Lady Pamela’s forays into the fashion world, marked the end of their intimacy. [See note below] Evelyn admired Lady Pamela greatly at first but by 1955 was writing to Maurice Bowra, ‘Lady Pamela has faded from my life like a little pat of melting butter.'”

Based on reader comments, it is clear that Waugh’s friendship with Pamela continued until about 1962 and that of Nancy, until about 1968.  “Pam took her friend Nancy’s teasing about London fashions in good heart. They remained in constant touch until the mid 60s, and wrote friendly letters less regularly till 1968, as I can attest from Nancy’s letters in my possession and copies of Pam’s to her also, now held in the Chatsworth Archives. I can also vouch, from letters in my possession and in the British Library, for the fact that Pam’s relationship with Evelyn Waugh was sometimes stormy, but they didn’t fall out finally until July 1962.”  With respect to Waugh, this dating is also consistent with his published diaries and letters. The book will be released in the UK on 2 April and in the US on 18 July 2025. It is issued by Unicorn Publishing.

NOTE (27 March 2025): The final paragraph of the above post was amended  consistent with an email from the book’s publisher.

COMMENTS (26 March 2025): Mark McGinness posted the following comment about the book mentioned above:

“I don’t recall the event or cause of the breach between EW and Lady Pamela – it couldn’t have been her enmity for Clarissa Eden whom EW had already fallen out with on her marriage to Anthony Eden.
Sir Max Hastings’ review of the biography is brilliant. One can’t help but feel how similarly un-maternal his own mother, Anne Scott-James, was. And interestingly, his step-father; Anne’s second husband was Osbert Lancaster, the master of the pocket cartoon and EW’s old friend).”