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John Grigg 1943.
The son of a politician and newspaper
journalist at The Times, John Edward
Poynder Grigg was born in Westminster
on 25th April 1924. Educated at Eton,
he was commissioned into the Grenadier
Guards in 1943 and served with the 1st
Battalion, part of the Guards Armoured
Division during the campaign in Europe.
After the war, he went up to Oxford to
read modern history and joined the staff
of his father’s magazine, National Review, a pro-Conservative party publication. He also stood unsuccessfully as a Conservative candidate for Oldham in the 1952 and 1955 general elections. As his father’s health declined, he took over the editorship in 1954 and, a year later, inherited the title of Baron Altrincham, of Tormarton in the County of Gloucester. This effectively ended his political ambitions as members of the House of Lords could not be elected to parliament.
A Liberal-Conservative, Altrincham moulded the retitled The National and English Review around his own views, opposing the apartheid movement in South Africa and attacking the government’s handling of the Suez crisis of 1956. However, his most famous moment came in August 1957 in an episode immortalised in the Netflix series The Crown. Altrincham used his magazine to attack the royal court as being too upper-class and British and personally attacked the Queen for her ‘priggish schoolgirl’ style of speaking. The article caused a furore, and he was vilified in the press and condemned by the archbishop of Canterbury.
Outside Television House, where he had just made a broadcast defending the article, he was slapped in the face by Philip Burbidge, a member of the far-right League of Empire Loyalists, who said: ‘Due to his scurrilous attack on Her Majesty, I thought it was up to a decent Briton to show resentment’. After being fined 20 shillings for the attack, Burbidge stated it was ‘the best investment I have ever made’. However, once the backlash had subsided, more journalists sided with Altrincham, resulting in a meeting with fellow Sandhurst alumnus Martin Charteris, the Queen’s assistant private secretary. This led to a gradual reforming of both court and the Christmas
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