Lady Pamela Berry (1914–82), also known as Lady Hartwell after her husband, Michael Berry, the owner of The Daily Telegraph and the founder of the newspaper’s Sunday version, who became Baron Hartwell, claimed she came from “the people,” as her daughter Harriet Cullen details in Lady Pamela Berry: Passion, Politics and Power.
Pam’s father, F. E. Smith, the first Earl of Birkenhead (1872–1930), was a self-made man; his great-grandfather had been a miner who became Northern England’s champion bare-knuckled boxer. Smith enjoyed an impressive rise from a scholarship at Oxford, where he changed his accent and built a dazzling career as a lawyer, becoming lord chancellor before dying from alcohol abuse at fifty-six. Her mother’s father, Henry Furneaux, was an Oxford classicist known for his edition of Tacitus. Cullen illuminates how Pam’s childhood was so dazzling that by the time she came of age, she had lived more fully than most people have at forty. Nor did she ever slow down until breast cancer got the better of her. She used her husband’s position and her own feistiness to wield “petticoat power,” notably in helping bring down Anthony Eden as prime minister in 1956 and to boost the creepy Edward Heath in 1970. She made enduring friendships with the feline Oxford don Isaiah Berlin and the historian Paul Johnson, who listed her and her father, along with Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Winston Churchill, and Charles de Gaulle, in his book Heroes. Although she was always fond of her husband, her true passion for ten years was Malcolm Muggeridge, whom she called the “old codger who is my true love.”
The photographer Cecil Beaton named her, when she was only aged sixteen, and her older sister, Eleanor Smith (1902–45), as Bright Young Things in his Book of Beauty (1930), describing the sisters as “woodland creatures, elfin, and puckish” who seemed to have “emerged from a garishly colored caravan.” With their dark looks, both resembled gypsies, taking after a paternal grandmother who had indeed lived in a caravan. In her teens, Pam, who read widely, was sent to a school that she sneered at, but it gave her a solid grounding in English and French. She was spared from “coming out” as a debutante since she had been in the public’s eye for most of her life. Her early suitors were the brash redheaded Brendan Bracken and the circumspect Christopher Tennant, Baron Glenconner, who, at only fifteen, had seen action at Gallipoli and had led twelve marines to shore. A married man, Glenconner wrote daily, sensitive love letters to Pam. He later divorced his wife, but Pam’s family did not care for him, and in January 1936, Pam married Michael Berry, the son of Lord Camrose, who was, at the time, the owner of The Daily Telegraph.
The writer Nancy Mitford based the character of Lady Sophia on Pam in her comic novel Pigeon Pie (1941), written several years before she had even met Pam. Cullen measures the point, however, writing that “Lady Sophia is a real aristocrat, unlike Pam. Like her, she moves in sophisticated circles and is keen on politics. Her character is amiable and goofy, and quite modest, unlike Pam. But more like her, she loves drama and intrigue.”
Malcolm Muggeridge, who had been The Daily Telegraph’s Washington correspondent, and then its deputy editor, was enlivening Punch when Pam met him in 1953. Calling Muggeridge a left-wing journalist puts him into too narrow a pigeonhole. His origins in Croydon were modest, but he polished his accent at Cambridge, just as Pam’s father had his at Oxford. A sojourn in the Soviet Union and a visit to Nazi Germany in the 1930s made him see through both. He was hardly more convinced by the liberal West, which permitted him to flourish as a jester in print and on television. The book mentions his sideline in the movies but omits his appearance as the Gryphon to John Gielgud’s Mock Turtle in Jonathan Miller’s Alice in Wonderland (1966). Despite “his bulging, bright blue eyes, red cheeks, large knobbly nose, and scant wiry hair,” he was “enormously attractive to many women.” He made it clear to Pam that his wife Kitty (who had plenty of extramarital affairs of her own) was his “rock,” whom he would never leave. Pam suffered great jealousy and pressed her daughter to read Rosamund Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets for its portrayal of the other woman’s plight.
Pam was taken for Mrs. Muggeridge when she traveled with him on a lecture tour in the United States. Pam often discussed Muggeridge’s articles with him and hated the thought that Kitty probably did the same. A late moment in their relationship was during a stuffy Labour Party Conference in Brighton in 1964. Pam suggested they go for a stroll. When they returned, they were covered in leaves and hay.
Pam’s love of America makes a fascinating chapter. It is surprising to discover that as early as 1952, she heard Eddie Warburg, the philanthropist and art patron, moan that a Democrat defeat would open the gates to fascism (nothing new about that “wolf” cry). She witnessed different political viewpoints ending friendships. Having equated the Democrats with the Labour Party, she was amazed by the flowing champagne and exquisite food at Democrat events, radical chic at work almost twenty years before Tom Wolfe diagnosed it. Pam’s confusion makes sense, but Duff Cooper chided her for her naivete, telling her that most fashionable Americans were Democrats and that most intelligent people in England, including himself, had hoped that Adlai Stevenson would win over the Republican Dwight Eisenhower. Stevenson was a much more urbane and polished politician than recent Democrat offerings, but the first half of the observation remains valid. Pam soon got on the Democrat boat in future elections. Her greatest American friends included The Washington Post’s Kay Graham, Dean Acheson, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., all Democrat stalwarts. She joined Kay Graham and Lally Weymouth in jeering at Barry Goldwater supporters at the Republican Convention of 1964. Pam’s daughter remarks “how furious” her mother would be to know “that she was missing Trump.”
Pam’s husband was shattered after her death and seems never to have recovered. Her ghost has been seen to walk the family grounds. Cullen’s book is unfailingly entertaining and often illuminating. There are a few mistakes. Hugo Vickers errs in his introduction to describe David Cecil, the biographer, man of letters, and Oxford don of English literature, as a philosopher. William Scranton was the governor of Pennsylvania rather than of California. Robert F. Kennedy Sr. was assassinated in June 1968 rather than in July.
