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Chapter Two

The Young Officer

My father was one of the young officers who survived the First World War. In the spring of 1914, he had caught pneumonia while working as a schoolmaster at a school in Lancashire, where he taught Latin, Greek and French. He was left with a strained heart. When, that August, he volunteered for the army, the doctors listened to his heart and rejected him as unfit. This, in all probability, saved his life.

Instead he went out to France by volunteering to drive the Charterhouse ambulance, which had been subscribed for by boys and parents at his old school. He was already a first-class amateur engineer and mechanic. He spent some months working at a French hospital at Arc-en-Barrois, but was subsequently commissioned in the Royal Army Service Corps, where he ran a mobile transport unit.

This was neither safe nor non-combatant. A fellow officer wrote that he woke every morning uncertain whether he would be called by his batman or St Peter. However, it was obviously less inevitably lethal than service in the infantry. It was also surprisingly modern. Apart from ambulance work, Fletcher’s unit was the first to take mobile X-rays into the front line. His experience of X-rays proved valuable when I was X-rayed in utero at the Clifton Nursing Home. The matron scrutinized the X-ray and told my parents that I had two heads. My father had seen many more X-rays than she had, and commented briskly: ‘Nonsense, woman, you don’t know how to read it.’

His unit was also attached to the earliest tanks, which, on average, broke down every 60 yards or so. Their job was to mend the tanks while under fire. My father considered that he had had an easy war. He shared the infantry’s resentment of the inadequacy of the staff officers who did not visit the front line.

Like many young officers from the landowning class – one finds the same attitudes in Anthony Eden’s memoirs – his war experience left him with a strong feeling that he ought to try to repay the privileges he had enjoyed. Some of his friends after the war were men who had been wounded, or suffered from shell shock, or had taken to drink as a result of their war experiences. For them he felt great compassion. His first cousin, Colonel Robert Rees-Mogg, a good professional soldier, had been an aide-de-camp to Field Marshal Allenby and ridden into Jerusalem in his entourage in 1917. Robert was torpedoed on his way back from Palestine, suffered from shell shock and amnesia, and never recovered. I can remember him visiting us at Cholwell, our home in Somerset, in the middle 1930s, a friendly, tall man who had lost the thread of life. Two other cousins were killed, out of a group of five, one at Gallipoli, the other in the last German advance in 1918.

I now think that I underrated the whole question of what my father had been through in the First World War. He felt, as many of those who survived did, a considerable guilt for being a survivor. The war made him feel that he should not compete in the world against people who needed the jobs. He felt that, as he had a reasonable sized estate and a reasonable income, he was in a position to lead the life of a quiet country gentleman without seeking employment and that is what he did. It was a life in which there was a lot of voluntary work and he made jobs for himself in farming which gave him an instinctive pleasure: he liked growing things; he liked having pigs; he liked having hens and he liked growing daffodils. It just about paid the wages of people who might not otherwise have had jobs during the slump.

My father inherited the long, solid, Somerset tradition of the Moggs, who had been local businessmen and landowners since at least the thirteenth century. They earned their livings as merchants, lawyers, estate agents, coal owners, bankers, clergymen, doctors, or whatever came to hand. They were involved in local government, but seem to have had little ambition to enter national politics, nor the connections to be able to do so.

In his early twenties my father inherited the family estate in Somerset, which then consisted of roughly 1200 acres and perhaps a dozen cottages, which still rented for about five shillings a week each in the 1930s and 1940s. The estate was encumbered with the death duties on his father and grandfather, and with substantial incomes payable to his sister, aunts and uncles. In capital terms he was a wealthy man, but the income that he was free to spend was not proportionate to his capital. This was the normal situation of landowners at that time, and still is today. Before the war, my father had worked briefly as a schoolmaster after spending four years at Charterhouse, four at University College, Oxford, and a further year at the Sorbonne.

By the age of twelve he had introduced me to classical Latin and Greek and even Old French. I had also been introduced to the comparative study of language. I had learned how words changed their form, so that ‘W’ in English would be the equivalent of ‘Gu’ in French, with ‘William’ matching ‘Guillaume’. I was taught the distinction between the English words which came from Germanic roots, from Norman French, from Latin and from Greek. I have never lost this interest in words. One of our own children, when little, observed that we ought to set a place for the Oxford English Dictionary at the dining table, since one or other volume was so often brought out at family lunch to look up the meaning and derivation of a particular word.

When he returned from the Sorbonne, Fletcher had had difficulty in choosing a career. His father, by then suffering from depression, had gloomy visions of Fletcher going to the bad. There had been scapegraces in the family: my great-great uncle, John Rees-Mogg, in one generation and the much-loved Charles in the next. My father was never remotely likely to become a third. Nevertheless, my grandfather, William Wooldridge Rees-Mogg, would not allow my father to become a solicitor, on the grounds that half the solicitors with whom he had trained had ended in jail for dipping into their clients’ funds. That was a pity, as my father would have made a first-class solicitor, highly intelligent, punctilious in detail, practical and exceptionally honest.

A friend of Wooldridge suggested that Fletcher might join the Chinese Consular Service, an absurd suggestion. Fletcher refused. Father and son negotiated at arm’s length, Wooldridge in the library at Cholwell, Fletcher in the morning room, passing notes to each other. One must have some sympathy with Wooldridge, who was depressed, going blind and proved to be dying. To my great benefit, Fletcher gave me the time and love which Wooldridge had not been able to give him.

Difficult father–son relationships had been common in the Mogg family, going back to the seventeenth century: they made nasty remarks about each other in their wills. My father was absolutely determined not to repeat in his relationship with me the relationship he had had with his father. And he was completely successful. On both sides our relationship was a very affectionate one of comfort and respect.

After my father was demobilized in 1919 he went to live in Parkstone, near Bournemouth. In the last months of the war he had been serving with another young officer who was in the motor business, and was a member of the Vandeleur family. Vandeleur had decided to produce a sports car for the British market. My father set up a manufacturing business to make the chassis; the engines were substantial lorry engines from the United States. Like several other ventures by young officers selling luxury cars, this looked promising for a time, but the post-war recession knocked out the market. However, my father designed the chassis and about twenty cars were constructed. In 1921, my mother’s sisters crossed the Atlantic to spend an English holiday with her. There is a picture of my American aunts and my English grandmother sitting in a Vandy, as the cars were called. It is a splendid looking car, but it does not look very economic.

In 1925 my father had the opportunity to return to Cholwell and manage his estate. He liked to grow things himself, though the farms continued to be tenanted. He kept pigs and hens and grew a large quantity of wild blackberries.