Easygoing and aristocratic historian and author who had a vibrant and textured private life
John Julius Norwich at his London home in 2008. The historian was scrupulously congenial and self-deprecating
The omens were favourable from the start. He was the only child of the society beauty Lady Diana Cooper and the highly accomplished diplomat, politician and philanderer Alfred Duff Cooper — good looks, brains and roguish charm were his by inheritance.
For a youthful John Julius Cooper (who would go on to be known as John Julius Norwich) this inheritance extended to exposure to a quite extraordinary line-up of the good and the great. When he met the diminutive, effeminate-voiced HG Wells — whose Russian mistress was on his arm — he wondered what women saw in him, and decided that it must be the honey smell of his breath.
He also had an encounter with Hilaire Belloc, helping him on with his cloak, only to discover that its pockets were full of flasks of alcohol. And as a 16-year-old in 1946 he watched Charles de Gaulle drop cigarette ash on to his half-eaten apple pie and, assuming that the general had had his fill, asked if he could finish it. “I said that it would be an honour for me to eat his cigarette ash — an appalling piece of over-the-top flattery, which I blush to recall.”
Born in 1929 with some difficulty (the “Julius” of his name denoted a caesarean delivery), he was cherished in childhood and much was expected of him — as the child of the woman who inspired Evelyn Waugh’s “Mrs Stitch” it could not have been otherwise. Lord Beaverbrook and the Aga Khan were among his godparents. It was given to few schoolboys, even in Eton Cadet Corps uniform, to assist their ambassadress mother in inspecting the General de Lattre de Tassigny’s troops.
His parents doted on him. When he was nearly seven years old in 1936 his mother, Lady Diana Cooper (née Manners), took him for a fortnight to Aix-les-Bains, largely in an attempt to wean him off his English nanny. “I can still feel, as if it were yesterday,” he wrote later, “the excitement of the Channel crossing; the regiment of porters, smelling asphyxiatingly of garlic in their blue-green blousons; the raucous sound all around me of spoken French (which I already understood quite well, having had twice-weekly French lessons since the age of five); the immense fields of Normandy, strangely devoid of hedges; then the Gare du Nord at twilight, the policemen with their képis and their little snow-white batons; and my first sight of the Eiffel Tower.”
His childhood was further cushioned by the luxuries of life at Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire. In his 2010 memoir Trying to Please he described “the sense of amplitude — the sheer scale of that aristocratic life”. Even his mother’s illegitimacy could not dampen it. Although she was brought up as a daughter of the Duke of Rutland, she was actually fathered by the Hon Harry Cust of the neighbouring Belton estate.
As Cust is also thought to have slept with Margaret Thatcher’s maternal grandmother, one of his servants, this suggested that JJ, as he was nicknamed, and Lady Thatcher were first cousins. “A DNA test would only take a couple of minutes,” he said in later life. “But I have never dared suggest it — except once to Carol Thatcher. She seemed moderately amused, but I never heard back.”
In 1944 with his mother, Lady Diana Cooper, who was unashamedly possessive of her sonGETTY IMAGESHaving a mother who was much admired and very much indulged was not necessarily an advantage. John Julius had been ready to go to a preparatory school in Switzerland, but the outbreak of war in 1939 made other arrangements necessary. There was a public outcry when it was discovered that the only child of Duff Cooper, the minister responsible for public morale, had sailed for New York in an American boat.
After a short time at Upper Canada College in Toronto he returned — this time on a cruiser, taking his turn standing watch — to go to Eton. He saw little of his father during and immediately after the war, but followed in his footsteps to New College, Oxford, where he read modern languages and his moral tutor was the celebrated philosopher and historian Isaiah Berlin. Before graduation he fell in love with Anne Clifford and married her in 1952.
As a cabinet minister who was close to Edward VIII and Winston Churchill, Duff Cooper enjoyed high standing, but no great fortune, and at one time he hoped that his son might go to Harvard Business School to set him up for a prosperous life in commerce.
He approved, however, of John Julius’s choice of a diplomatic career. Yet scarcely had he started at the Foreign Office when his father — who had been created Viscount Norwich in recognition of his political career — died at sea on January 1, 1954, during a convalescent cruise.
After her husband’s death Lady Diana was unashamedly possessive of her diplomat son and, in due course, his young wife. The newlyweds began their tour of foreign service assignments in Belgrade, which at first they hated, but came to love, although the agonies of diplomatic dinner parties (“few gatherings are more boring”) never eased.
John Julius, who had inherited his father’s title of Viscount Norwich on his death, was also sent to postings including Beirut, before which a decree had gone out that there were to be no placements “too near his mother”. He was promoted in 1961 and played a role in the Geneva Disarmament Conference. With the stage set for a career of some distinction, he decided nonetheless to resign and earn his living by his pen.
Travel and a keenly developed aesthetic response to his surroundings informed much of his work. His first book, written with his fellow traveller Reresby Sitwell, was Mount Athos (1966). It was followed by The Normans in the South. Browsing at the London Library (an institution that he held in great reverence) had revealed to him how little the Norman presence in Sicily had been recorded in English historical writing. He made good the deficiency in a lively narrative that disavowed any original scholarship, but succeeded in an approach that was as much cultural as it was military and political. A second volume, The Kingdom in the Sun, brought the tale of Norman rule to its end in 1194.
His aesthetic and historical response to foreign travel showed itself throughout his career, not least in the many television documentaries he narrated. In his programmes he avoided the condescension of Kenneth Clark, but infused his approach to historic buildings and events with something akin to David Attenborough’s enthusiasm for natural history.
The disorder of the great Venetian flood in 1966 gave him not only a new subject, but also a great cause. He had fallen in love with Venice at the age of 16 and knew the city well. He became a leader of the Venice in Peril movement, and was the chairman of the fund from 1970. Two volumes on Venice, The Rise to Empire and The Greatness and the Fall followed, which stand well in the tradition of British historical writing on the Venetian Republic.
Byzantium presented a much greater challenge, not least because of the historical scholarship that had been lavished on it. However much Norwich claimed to have eschewed “original scholarship”, his historical empathy and literary accomplishment made him the envy of many professional Byzantinists, whose specialised studies had different intentions — and a very different readership.
His three-volume history The Early Centuries, The Apogee and The Decline and Fall, is a considerable achievement, not least because it is founded on extensive and well-informed travels in the eastern empire. Sometimes, however, he misjudged the advance of scholarship. A later work, Shakespeare’s Kings, failed to take account of a key revision in the whole historiography of the late medieval English monarchy.
His television experience and easy microphone manner made him a fine choice to be the first announcer for Classic FM, the new radio station that for a while seemed to become “Radio Norwich”. His clear, well-modulated voice and accurate pronunciation in several languages were a credit to the station in its early days, and the disc jockeys who followed him showed an irreversible decline.
With his second wife, Mollie, in 2002. They met at his beloved London LibraryREX FEATURESFrom 1970 he began to send his friends not just Christmas cards, but also Christmas Crackers, pamphlets compiled from a commonplace book started 20 years previously. The miscellany included letters, diaries, gravestones, boastful Who’s Who entries, indexes from biographies, and word games.
“Exiguous stocks” of these diverting anthologies became available in the carriage-trade bookshops and the series gained a certain following. When gathered into decennial volumes in 1980 and 1990 they were a commercial success. Year by year the annual Crackers increased not only Norwich’s literary popularity, but also his wide range of friends.
His sociability was displayed at cultivated dining clubs such as the Society of Dilettanti or the Literary Society as well as larger gatherings such as the annual party for the Duff Cooper memorial prize, the literary award for the best work of history, biography, political science or, occasionally, poetry, published in English or in French, set up in his father’s memory. Norwich had been an energetic organiser from its earliest days and invitations to the prizegivings were valued. Every year a Mayfair ballroom was filled with the cream of social and literary circles, most of whom were personal friends of the chairman of the judges.
His wife, Anne, was the daughter of the colonial governor Sir Bede Clifford. They had two children: Artemis, an author who is married to the historian Antony Beevor; and Jason, an architect who succeeds him as Viscount Norwich. Feathers were ruffled when Anne discovered that her husband had for several years been having an affair with Ricki, the estranged wife of the film director John Huston, and that they had a daughter, Allegra.
Upon hearing the news, poor Anne had a nervous breakdown, but when Ricki died in a car crash she gamely offered to look after Allegra, then aged three. Norwich declared this “an act of generosity I shall never forget”. As it turned out, Huston, who desperately wanted another child, raised her instead, at least for the most part.
“From one point of view it was a relief,” Norwich reflected, “but was it a dereliction of duty? I was in such turmoil that I didn’t know what I thought or felt. There was never any secret that Allegra was my daughter.”
Norwich and Anne were divorced in 1985 and four years later he married the Hon Mollie Philipps, the daughter of Sir Roger Makins, Lord Sherfield, and formerly the wife of the Hon Hugo Philipps (later Lord Milford). They had met in his beloved London Library and went on to live fairly modestly in Little Venice, travelling everywhere by Tube. “I’ve always been fairly skint,” he said. “My father was a terrific spendthrift. Mother much the same. I inherited virtually nothing.”
It was the reason he carried on working into old age, lecturing, making documentaries and writing more than 20 books on popular history. Indeed, nothing delighted him more than when, earlier this year, his last book, France — A History: from Gaul to de Gaulle, featured in the list of Sunday Times bestsellers, a first for any of his books.
Described as an anecdote-packed trot through 2,000 years of Gallic history, the book was popular with critics too. According to Nick Rennison, writing in The Times, there was “certainly a need for a concise history of France in English and, in many ways, John Julius Norwich is the ideal man to write it. It is not every historian of the country who can reminisce about an adolescence spent in the British Embassy in Paris, where his father was ambassador, and the young John Julius mixed martinis for Jean Cocteau. Norwich has a love for France that stretches back to his childhood and it is evident throughout this readable, entertaining book.
“He is an unashamedly old-fashioned historian. He has little time for social history and even less for economics. His interest is in the deeds of kings and queens. History becomes a series of vivid vignettes strung together by his strong sense of narrative. Since his avowed aim is to write for the general reader, this is no bad thing.”
Cheerfully indifferent to the opinions of purists, Norwich admitted that he “had not discovered a single new historical fact” in his life. “I like infecting other people with my own enthusiasm, but I am not interested in pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. Deep down, I’m shallow. I really am.”
Shallow he may have been, but he remained enthusiastic about life, even though his last weeks were spoilt by injury and illness. He was waiting for heart surgery, but had also ruptured a tendon in his knee while walking up the steps to the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, where he was going to a concert. He walked again for the first time the day before he died.
He will be remembered for being convivial to a fault, scrupulously congenial and self-deprecating to a heroic degree — not to mention the happy possessor of two tattoos, one on each arm. He delighted in telling people how his memoirs had been rejected by every publishing house in London because he’d had it “too bloody easy” all his life.
This wasn’t quite true — his parents, whose long shadows he lived in, were a handful. He claimed to take his father’s infidelities in his stride, and attributed his failure to see what was going on to his being “a stolid, unimaginative child’’. One of his favourite visitors to his family home was Louise de Vilmorin, for example, who — it turned out — was having a passionate affair with his father. His mother knew, he said, and “didn’t mind a bit. They had an incredibly happy marriage, but my father wasn’t faithful to her for a single second.”
In 2005, in contradiction of his father’s hope that he would never read them, Norwich published his father’s diaries, which documented his woman-chasing. He considered editing out the rakish aspects, but decided that sexual conquest was “so much part of his character” that they had to be left in. It wasn’t quite a case of like father, like son, but in terms of living a vibrant and textured life, the second Viscount Norwich did the first proud. John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich, historical writer and cultural expert, was born on September 15, 1929. He died of heart failure on June 1, 2018, aged 88
John Julius Norwich, writer and television personality – obituary
John Julius Norwich at home in Little Venice (2013); the portrait above the mantlepiece is of his mother Lord Norwich, the 2nd Viscount Norwich, who has died aged 88, was an aristocratic man of letters and, as a historian, travel writer and television personality, was better known as John Julius Norwich.The only son of the Conservative politician, diplomat and writer Duff Cooper (who would be created Viscount Norwich in 1952) and the society beauty Lady Diana Cooper, Norwich became one of the best-known cultural pundits of his generation. The author of numerous monumental and often multi-volume books on subjects ranging from Sicily, Venice and Byzantium to Shakespeare’s history plays and the papacy, he founded the Venice in Peril Fund and was a popular lecturer on opera and the arts.
His wit and self-deprecating good manners made him a star of the London drawing-room circuit and his facility with quips and quotations made him a favourite with broadcasters in the days when an upper-class accent was seen as no impediment to a career on the airwaves.
Norwich hosted the popular BBC radio panel game My Word! for four years. But his most successful television venture was a series on English Country Houses, which was exported to the United States. He also wrote and presented some 30 television documentaries on subjects including the Fall of Constantinople, Napoleon’s Hundred Days, Cortés and Montezuma, the antiquities of Turkey, Maximilian of Mexico, Toussaint l’Ouverture of Haiti, the Knights of Malta and the death of the Prince Imperial in the Zulu War.
The Popes was published in 2011
Norwich never set out to break new ground. Indeed he was sometimes criticised for putting forward theories that had been discredited by professional historians; harsher critics suggested that his books were clichéd – even trivial. His mother Lady Diana Cooper was said to have remarked: “I don’t think I want to pick up this book of John Julius’s, as I expect I shall want to put it down almost immediately.”
He, too, was disarmingly modest about his talents. “I have not discovered a single new historical fact in my life,” he conceded. “I like infecting other people with my own enthusiasm, but I am not interested in pushing back the frontiers of knowledge. Deep down, I’m shallow. I really am.”
Yet he was adept at synthesising material from scholarly sources into an appealing narrative, and at plucking comic quotes into prominence. His books were popular because they were glossy, lucid and readable, and the sheer scale and scope of his enterprise was extraordinary.
Norwich, as Noel Malcolm observed in a review of his three-volume history of Byzantium, helped to open up epochs of human history to the general reader “much in the way that Gibbon did for the educated public of his day”.
His last book, France: A History from Gaul to de Gaulle, published in April this year, was an entertaining romp through 2,000 years of French history. Its Telegraph reviewer, Lewis Jones, particularly enjoyed the footnotes, “their flavour established by one recalling the author’s teenage visits to the postage stamp market on the Champs-Elysées: ‘I used to be an avid collector myself, until a Chinese friend pointed out that philately would get me nowhere’. ”
Duff and John Julius Cooper
John Julius Cooper was born on September 15 1929. It was with some prescience that his nanny remarked to his mother: “That baby aims to please.” (Trying to Please would be the title of his autobiography published in 2008.)
From an early age young John Julius was encouraged to perform for his parents’ friends. In Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, a friend of Mrs Algernon Stitch, the character based on Lady Diana, finds the eight-year-old Stitch prodigy sitting on her bed construing Virgil. “Show him your imitation of the Prime Minister,” implores Mrs Stitch. “Sing him your Neapolitan song, stand on your head.”
The Coopers lavished huge affection on their only son, and protected him from any unpleasantness arising from Diana’s flirtations and Duff’s infidelities. Some accounts suggest that her husband’s affairs frequently reduced Lady Diana to tears and may even have driven her to drink, but that was not her son’s perception.
Lady Diana Cooper with her son John Julius Credit: Keystone/Getty Images
“She worshipped the ground he walked on,” he said, “but she wasn’t highly sexed – she was quite glad that other women were taking the weight off her, as it were. I once asked her if she minded. She said: ‘They were the flowers, but I was the tree’. ” Duff Cooper wrote that he hoped his son would never read his diaries, but Norwich published them anyway in 2005. He explained that he had considered editing out the rakish aspects, but decided that sexual conquest was “so much part of” his father’s character that it had to be left in.
Norwich published Duff Cooper's rakish diaries in 2005
The Coopers’ weekend guests included H G Wells (Russian mistress in tow), the Churchills, and Hilaire Belloc, who sang ancient French songs in a quavery voice. John Julius helped Belloc with his cloak, almost collapsing under its weight because every pocket contained a flask of spirits.
When war broke out, the 11-year-old John Julius was spirited away to prep school in Toronto. Eventually he returned to Eton, where he did not distinguish himself academically, though he won a place at New College, Oxford.
His parents moved to the British embassy in Paris in 1944. John Julius recalled watching Maurice Chevalier, who had performed in Paris all through the Occupation, rehabilitate himself in an Ensa production of The Merry Widow, in which he had been given a small role in the cabaret scene. The audience received him warily yet, after a few songs and a wave of the boater, he had them at his feet.
John Julius Norwich
He also remembered an encounter with General de Gaulle at a dinner marking the second anniversary of D-Day in 1946. The 16-year-old boy had arrived late and hungry and asked if he could have the French leader’s untouched apple pie.
De Gaulle agreed, but pointed out that it was covered in his cigarette ash. “I said that it would be an honour for me to eat his cigarette ash – an appalling piece of over-the-top flattery which I blush to recall.”
After graduating from Oxford with a Second in Modern Languages, in 1952, following in his father’s footsteps, Cooper, as he then was, joined the Foreign Office as Third Secretary to the British Embassy in Belgrade, then as Second Secretary in Beirut. On his father’s death in 1954 he inherited the viscountcy. Ten years later he left the Diplomatic Service to become a writer and broadcaster.
In 1952 he had married Anne Clifford, daughter of Sir Bede Clifford, one-time governor of the Bahamas, with whom he had a daughter, the historian Artemis Cooper, and a son, Jason, an architect. Later, it became an open secret that he had had an illegitimate daughter with Ricki Huston, wife of the film director John Huston. When Anne discovered her husband’s infidelity, she is said to have had a breakdown, though John Julius insisted that she got over it quite quickly.
After divorcing Anne in 1983 (Allegra, his daughter by Ricki Huston, was adopted by John Huston after her mother’s death in a car accident), he married, secondly, in 1989, Mollie Philipps (née Makins), daughter of the 1st Baron Sherfield, GCB, GCMG.
The Prince of Wales with John Julius Norwich at Spencer House, London, to launch the World Monuments Fund (1995)Credit: Tim Graham/Getty
As well as serving as chairman of the Venice in Peril Fund, Norwich, who listed his recreations in Who’s Who as “sightseeing, nightclub piano”, was co-chairman of the World Monuments Fund, and a vice-president of the National Association of Decorative and Fine Art Societies. A member of the Executive Committee of the National Trust, he also served on the board of the English National Opera.
He was appointed CVO in 1992 after curating an exhibition at the V & A marking the 40th anniversary of the Queen’s accession to the throne.
Lord Norwich is survived by his wife and by the son and daughter of his first marriage.
He is succeeded in the viscountcy by his son, Jason, born in 1959. 2nd Viscount Norwich, born September 15 1929, died June 1 2018
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