The Adventure of Living : a Subjective Autobiography

by John St. Loe Strachey

But all the dreadful lapses of the British censorship and all its inequalities can be avoided by the United States. The mistakes which required months to correct are signposts for us. Its printed rules reveal its slow growth. Our censorship can develop equal efficiency in a month, if it notes the charted pitfalls in Whitehall.

I think my tea-parties would have run to the end of the war if it had not been that my health temporarily gave way. Owing to my illness I had to be a great deal away from London, and in any case was not equal to the extra strain they imposed. If I remember rightly, the last meeting was held at The Spectator office, for 14 Queen Anne's Gate was let at the time, i.e. in April or May, 1917.

I hope I shall not be thought indiscreet if I take note of an incident which occurred in the last six months of the Strachey teas, for it marked the extreme kindness, consideration, and true-hearted friendship shown me by my guests. For some reason, I daresay a good one, though I have forgotten it, the Foreign Office suddenly took it into their heads that they might improve upon my tea-parties by making them more official. Accordingly they asked me whether I should mind handing over the conduct of them to a gentleman whom they named. He had lived, they pointed out, for over twenty years in the United States and was therefore likely to be a better host than I was. Indeed, it was suggested, of course most politely and considerately, that on general grounds he would be more acceptable to the correspondents than I should be and would understand them better.

We were at war, and we did not in those days waste time upon compliments, but spoke our minds freely—and quite rightly. I was not in the least hurt. Though I loved the parties, which had given me such good friends and such good talk, I was very busy, and indeed very much overworked, and was in a sense relieved at the idea of getting a couple of hours of much needed leisure in the week. Accordingly, it was arranged that I should retire gracefully and recommend my official successor to my American friends in a short speech. This I did with perfect good-will. But the Foreign Office, though they did not reckon without their host, had reckoned without his guests. When the concrete proposal (well-meant, I am sure) was made in all its glorious naïveté in a little speech by the new host, it was received with something like annoyance—a fact which worried me not a little, for I had, rather unwisely perhaps, assured my official mentors that there would be no objection.

Things, however, went further than the grim silence with which the initial proposal was met at what was designed to be "the positively last appearance of Mr. Strachey." After a few days I heard that three or four of the correspondents, representing the whole body (with their usual tact they had kept this from me), had gone to one of the officials at the Foreign Office and told him plainly that if the scheme was not abandoned and I was not continued as host, they would none of them put in an appearance at the weekly gatherings. The result was that the official scheme was abandoned and that my Conversaziones continued as before.

Many people may think this action somewhat strange. I do not think so. Noting that I had only spent three weeks in America, it was most natural that the officials concerned should consider that I must be ignorant of American minds and ways and that my ignorance might be liable to become offensive. But this view, to borrow Gibbon's immortal phrase, "though probable is certainly false." It is logical, no doubt, but it is not consistent with the inconsistency of human nature.

I ought, perhaps, at the same time to record that earlier in the war, when, owing to the amount of work I had on hand, I offered to retire from the office of host and let it be carried on by others, I was sternly rebuked by the Prime Minister's Private Secretary, and told peremptorily that it was my duty to go on exactly as before—a mandate which I naturally regarded as a compliment as well as an order.

The incident was indeed a pleasant one, and I have reason to believe that what I did was regarded with satisfaction and with gratitude by the Prime Minister and his colleagues in the Cabinet. In any case, the whole episode was characteristically English. I suggested it myself, I carried it out myself, and though my little organisation had no regular official sanction or recognition, it was regarded as I have just recorded as war- work from which I could not retire, without leave. It was valued as a useful method of keeping touch between the men who were directing the war and the journalists of America. Without frightening anyone by making official inquiries, it was easy to find out the temper of the men who kept America informed. Those concerned had only to drop in at the next Strachey tea and sound the correspondents.

Is it to be wondered at, then, that I am intensely proud of what I was able to do? and proud in three capacities: as a man who wanted to help his country during the war, as a working journalist who wanted to help his colleagues, and last, but not least, as one whose life's object has been to improve the relations between this country and America.

To this account of my tea-parties I will further add as a postscript some proofs of what was the opinion of the correspondents as to these gatherings.