Feliz Bennett
"Henry did change my life in many ways, but mainly in deciding to make advertising my career. When people ask me (now an august Professor of Communications ? perlease!) about how I started off I tell them about accidentally meeting Bernard Gutteridge on a slow Sunday train but also about debouching from a viewing theatre into a miserable grey Soho dawn after watching 78 versions, over and over, of a spoon going into a mug of Horlicks. I recount how the man I was with grasped my arm and said, "Do you realise they're PAYING us for this?" and me thinking: "I guess I want to be in a job where at a moment like this I can still feel like that..."
That man was Henry."


Liz Francke
"Out location hunting with Henry and Jenny: Sussex farmland on an evening in late November; the leaves gone, the light fading, the rooks flying home to roost and the autumn chill beginning to bite. I asked: "What`s your favourite season Henry?"
He looked round the wide, dim landscape and answered 'I love all seasons, Liz'."


Monika Palmer von Maltzahn
Few can have the strange blessing of meeting their absolute opposite in life. Henry and I were such opposites.

We met in the summer of 1955 - a very bright and sunny summer. Julian Slade's 'Salad Days', Sandy Wilson's 'Boyfriend', and 'Kismet' by Wright & Forest - with melodies by Borodin - were all on at the same time. After a lunch party in my cousin's house, returning from the Davies' School of English, I found Henry with a little note book in his hand, into which he wrote what people said. He explained that he was writing a novel.

Both shocked and damaged by the war, our experiences were so different, that we talked all afternoon. Henry had been a conscientious objector, been sent a white feather, become an ensign in a guards regiment, been wounded and taken prisoner, and had now returned with his wife and children from Tasmania - I had spent the war as a child in the deepest countryside of north Germany, driving to school with two black Shetland ponies, and war only became a reality for me when it was over. On the other hand I had been a refugee at 10 and spent five days on a trek, which was bombed, ending up in Schleswig-Holstein, which became the British zone.
Ten years at least before Adorno et al. published "The Authoritarian Personality" Henry thought that Hitler could happen in any country in the world, not just Germany. (But this could not comfort a German).

Henry was working for the BBC and invited me to Langham Place for a discussion amongst young Europeans on their respective countries' customs.
Much later he wrote: "Did you know I was a member of a society called 'Federal Union' in 1938. I have grown more insular with age - emotionally - not intellectually. I argue that Federal Europe is the only safe way to guarantee national idiosyncrasies."

At the BBC venture was a very talkative German girl who described a way of life I had never come across as typically German - there was nothing I could contribute and so I was quiet.
Afterwards Henry took me for a drink and told me that if I disagreed, I should have said so. I said it would have achieved nothing but 2 Germans arguing on a British radio station. I think that was already, when he started on Wagner, claiming that all Germans loved his music. I don't like it at all and over the years I realised that it was Henry who loved Wagner: he is still the only person I know who sat through the entire Ring and to him, thinking in pictures so much, Wagner's music would have a special significance.

We found always lots of things to argue over - once we argued the entire length of the embankment, then all the way back, which impressed Henry so much, he never forgot it! Nor did I, for he accused me of speaking in platitudes when, in fact, as a non-English-speaker, I invented every platitude myself and this only showed that it was the best way to express whatever one was trying to say - and that is how unfairly it might have become a platitude but not for me, and so on!

Even in 1955 he was beginning a novel which later had the working title "The Dragon's Tooth" (to receive the Golden Fleece, Jason of the Argonauts had to plough a field and plant a dragon's teeth. But from each tooth an armed man sprang up to pursue Jason, who threw a stone into their midst, which caused them to fight and slay each other, and Jason es-caped).
The opening scene of the novel was a dogfight between a Spitfire and a Messerschmitt in and out of the clouds with the 'Dance of the Valkyries' as musical background. (The German gets shot down and later walks into a Sussex country house where the story begins.)

Henry and I sometimes did not see each other for years but it was always easy to pick up where we left off. In the '60s we both worked in advertising, Henry at J.W.T. as a director of commercials, I at Y&R as a writer of commercials - both are now united under the name of WPP, as I recently heard. Also, as far as Henry's illegible handwriting allowed, we corresponded, for instance about the German element in "The Dragon's Tooth". Once he apologised for not having replied: "I did in fact write a long letter explaining all - about 120 pages in my book […] - you can read it there with more pleasure."
But then he wrote: "…the old guru in me has forced me to write a book about life being a sum we are doing wrong etc. and if I started I might never stop." So it seems that perhaps the anti-war book was abandoned for the sake of the anti-destruction of the world book. Henry always said that he would not finish the book on "The Sum" because it would kill him.

When I was working in Munich, Henry came to look for locations over which to float loaves of 'Nimble' and, with some local friends, we showed him quite a lot of Bavaria, including the Baroque Churches - the sun was shining on the mountains all around, and these churches are so delightful, so filled with light and beauty and music! Henry loved every minute and even was in tears at one stage, so overcome was he by a vision.
In return, some time later, Henry took me on a grey flat English day across grey flat English countryside to show me Canterbury Cathedral which was a truly great contrast: black, cold, damp, the killing place of Archbishop Thomas Becket all pointed out. When we came out a great gale had blown up and we went to a Lifeboat station - I freezing cold and a water phobic - even in memory the waves on the Channel that day make me feel ill, though it all delighted Henry enormously: "You have to love every weather!" he said.

I first heard from him the idea that we are made of the same atoms and molecules as our surroundings, be they animal, plant, mineral, whatever - recently I found an old letter he wrote sometime in the '80s: "I think its true that all people in all eras at some point in their lives are certain that there is 'something more besides', something more than the material explicable world. They have called this something 'God' and claimed that it is infinite, eternal, omnipotent and omniscient. And they have done this basically because they just had the 'feeling' that there was something 'just around the corner of the mind'.
"Now the ecology of the earth has maintained itself for 3 1/2 thousand million years. That is so much of eternity as I could ever feel. It has sustained in balance a variety of life so huge that it feels to me as though it were infinite. Such a feat feels to me like omniscience and omnipotence.
"Thus my belief is that the actual presence, all around me, of Gaia, the living 'eternal' earth from whose atoms I have evolved and which resonate in me and it - between whom, at the subnuclear level, the boundaries are completely tenuous - to whom I am linked through the collective unconscious of mankind and the palpable unconscious of the flora and fauna and ecology of the world - this immanent presence that we feel when we say 'there is something more besides' is what we mean by God. We need look no further. "The important thing about this idea (which is not new - only a bit more modern!) is that it does not require that God is external and reality - an outside chap who tells everybody what's what - or a universal spirit - or a divine ground of all being spreading through the universe like a quantum field. All such ideas are in the divisive - dualistic - or so gigantic and impossible to launch oneself onto that they leave one where one was - lonely - separate etc.
"I feel that I am part of this earth, which, in the person of the English countryside, I adore. And I hate the farmers and agro businessmen for wanting to destroy it so as to be able to have noisier motorbikes and more caviar. G.K.Chesterton, a great Catholic, argues against those who said that religious wars were a contradiction in ethical terms, adding that to him the only possibly jus-tifyable reason for going to war would be a religious one. Which means I am allowed to shoot the farmer who is getting my God hooked on drugs.
"Imagine the scale of the crime which in Christian terms is like injecting Jesus with heroin or being a 'pusher' at the Pearly Gates."

Later he sent me "The Tao of Physics" by Fritjof Capra, who calls this feeling part of the rhythm of all cosmic energy around and within himself 'The Dance of Shiva'. But I could not find my way there, instead I converted to the Catholic Church.

In younger years Henry used to mock dreadfully, for instance that aristocracy represented nothing but "500 years of ignorance and inbreeding" (800 in my case!) and so I was delighted, and having my own back, when he asked me to help him find his German ancestors' documents in order to reclaim his title. I found the German papers (but he found the crucial one for "drowned off Malta") and so became the Earl of Portland. He began to attend the House of Lords and was incredibly impressed with the many interests and great expertise he found there.

On 17th February 1993 I was invited to lunch there by "E of Portland", I had salsifies, Henry explained the exact meaning of the word 'copious', then showed me around.
When I left he waved, framed in the little doorway from which one calls taxis, and I thought how I would always remember him exactly like this: standing there smiling with his smart silvery hair and his gentle and delightful charm.

We talked on the telephone several times after this - once he told me a marvellous quote from one of Churchill's speeches: "When Mr.Schickelgruber dared to tweak the British Lion's tail, I felt honoured to be called upon to roar!" Another time I told him how a healer, who could see people's aura, had described this to me as masses of colourful Catherine wheels buzzing all around a person - without a moment's hesitation Henry said: "That makes the greatest sense! If you think of a DNA spiral and then look at it from above, that would be exactly what you saw!"

Having fought so passionately against the self-destructive urge of mankind, the day of his death was also the 25th anniversary of "Bloody Sunday", the day when 14 unarmed civil rights marchers in Londonderry were shot by British soldiers.
At his memorial service the Londonderry Air was sung.
His friendship was a great gift.



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