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The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World they Made
Simon Ball
From the playing fields of Eton via the horrors of the Western Front to the pinnacle of political power in 20th-century Britain – a brilliant collective biography of Harold Macmillan, Lord Salisbury, Oliver Lyttleton and Harry Crookshank.Harold Macmillan, Oliver Lyttleton, Bobbety Cranbourne and Harry Crookshank all arrived at Eton in 1906, all served on the Western Front in the same battalion of the Grenadier Guards and all served in Cabinet under Winston Churchill during World War II. They helped Churchill regain Downing Street in 1951 and once more joined his Cabinet as senior figures. These four men who were lifelong friends (and sometimes enemies), argued and fought their way up the political ladder for over forty years.The theme of Simon Ball's brilliant book is a race, willingly entered into by these four men, for power and glory. ‘Politics is not a flat race, it's a steeplechase,’ as Churchill once told Macmillan. And through the collective biography, Ball presents an extraordinary portrait of political ambition and intrigue from World War II until Macmillan’s resignation as Prime Minister in 1963, tracing the lives of his four protagonists through the trauma of the trenches, the Treaty of Versailles and the rebuilding of Europe after the Great War.Ball has based the book on years of original research in many archives and has had exclusive access to the Salisbury papers, closed to the public until 2022. The Guardsmen is a work of significant scholarship that presents a gripping account of British politics in the 20th-century.
The Guardsmen
Harold Macmillan, Three Friends, and the World They Made
Simon Ball
To Helen
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u55e343e6-2b33-59b1-809f-8dc5e6bb6226)
Title Page (#u58bb6302-a47e-5559-9a3a-0ee0da8c5c72)
SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#u331f4dfb-8134-5ac4-a202-01ad9df5aea5)
PREFACE (#u6f6ddc34-fa99-51d7-a07b-1cafe7ffb11f)
1 Sons (#u676f7d71-6dfb-565c-b7a5-5e099c27d8d2)
2 Grenadiers (#u2cefae3f-3225-581b-b748-6e60aa82d89f)
3 Bottle-washers (#uf2adee19-9284-5c3d-b145-2c3274c23c08)
4 Anti-fascists (#litres_trial_promo)
5 Glamour Boys (#litres_trial_promo)
6 Churchillians (#litres_trial_promo)
7 Tories (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Ministers (#litres_trial_promo)
9 Successors (#litres_trial_promo)
10 Enemies (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Relics (#litres_trial_promo)
CONCLUSION (#litres_trial_promo)
NOTES AND REFERENCES (#litres_trial_promo)
INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#ulink_0e44c848-d551-5927-aa32-523deebc4646)
Until recently, a book of this kind could not have been written. It is only in the past decade that the archival materials to make it possible have entered the public domain. We now have a critical mass of papers, produced by the four principals of this story, allowing us to understand their thoughts and actions in detail.
Harold Macmillan wrote prolifically on his own life. He also inspired a number of biographies, culminating in Alistair Horne’s official two-volume life completed in 1989. Underlying both Macmillan’s autobiography and Horne’s biography were Macmillan’s voluminous diaries. These diaries are now open for inspection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. There are two versions of the diary: the original hand-written volumes and an edited and typed copy Macmillan subsequently had made up. Both versions are used in this book. Also in the Bodleian is a collection of letters Macmillan wrote to his friend Ava Waverley, which, in some cases, served as first drafts for his memoirs. The diaries are a magnificent historical source. Indeed they will, when published, endure as Macmillan’s best and most important contribution to literature. They must nevertheless be treated with some caution. Macmillan did not keep a diary simply for his own amusement. His diaries were always meant to be read by others. In the first instance he wrote diary letters to his mother and later to his wife. These diaries were shown around the family and the Macmillan circle, including political acquaintances. By the time Macmillan started his continuous ‘political diary’ in 1951, he was a very self-aware recorder of events. The later diaries were kept with the sensibility of memoirist. Macmillan’s explanation of events, and in particular of his own motivations, was thus both an immediate reaction and a footnote for the future. Such self-conscious writing loses nothing in value yet needs to be read for what it is – self-justification rather than justification of the self. Horne’s fine biography, which I have used extensively, can be criticized for taking Macmillan a little too much at his own valuation.
Potentially as important a part of the Macmillan collection at the Bodleian is his political correspondence. This book draws on the Stockton constituency correspondence written between 1924 and 1945. Much of this correspondence is ephemera. There are, however, letters which reflect on wider political events. Those letters dealing with the minutiae of politics are much less self-conscious than the diaries and have the value of immediacy. Of value for the same reason are the diaries of Cuthbert Headlam, which have been published in an expertly edited two-volume edition by Stuart Ball. Headlam’s diary is a goldmine, for he not only knew Macmillan well, but also Crookshank and Lyttelton. In 1915 Headlam and Lyttelton served together as aides-de-camp to Lord Cavan. After the First World War Headlam entered Parliament at the same election as Macmillan and Crookshank in 1924. Headlam’s seat, Barnard Castle, abutted Macmillan’s in Stockton. They were political allies in the 1920s. Along with the constituency letters, Headlam’s diary allows one to reconstruct Macmillan’s early political trajectory from contemporary sources rather than relying solely on his own memoirs.
Oliver Lyttelton ranks second to Macmillan as a memoirist in volume of output. He published volumes of autobiography in 1962 and 1968. During the same period he was involved with the foundation of Churchill College, Cambridge, as a memorial to his leader and friend, Winston Churchill. He left his papers, and those of his mother and father, to the college as the Chandos Papers. The collection is thus particularly rich for Lyttelton’s early life – to the point when he left the army in 1918. These early letters formed the basis for his own 1968 volume, From Peace to War. He published most of the letters he wrote to his mother during the First World War, lightly edited, in that volume. When Lyttelton decided to remain in public life after 1945, he started a collection of political papers. The papers relating to the intervening period are exiguous. This gap has had to be filled using papers from other sources. Most obviously, Lyttelton’s official papers relating to his ministerial offices – President of the Board of Trade, Minister Resident in Cairo, Minister of Production and colonial secretary – are to be found in the Public Record Office, Kew. In the inter-war years, however, Lyttelton was businessman rather than public servant. With the indispensable help of Mr Andrew Green, company secretary of the Amalgamated Metal Corporation, the company Lyttelton founded in 1929, I tracked down Lyttleton’s business archive. Now part of AMC’s non-current archive, the papers were housed in a storage warehouse in Docklands. As a result of Mr Green’s kindness I was able to extract these papers and examine them. As Lyttelton became a prominent business leader in the 1930s, he starts to appear also in the official papers of the Board of Trade. There are also papers relating to Lyttelton’s post-war business career in the archives of GEC, the company that took over Lyttelton’s AEI in 1967.
In contrast to Lyttelton and Macmillan, Harry Crookshank published no memoirs and next to nothing has been written about his life. The only extended appreciation in print was published by Lyttelton in the Dictionary of National Biography. In fact Crookshank, like Macmillan, was a formidable diarist. By the time the Macmillan papers arrived at the Bodleian, the library had long since bought Crookshank’s diaries, covering the years 1934 to 1961, at auction. These diaries have over the years been read by a small number of historians interested in the political events upon which they touch. They receive only passing references in most secondary literature. There is a very good reason for this. Unlike his closest friend, Macmillan, Crookshank was a true diarist. He kept his diaries for himself rather than for posterity. They are thus concerned largely with the mundane and the quotidian. If one wished to understand Lincolnshire weather patterns in the age of appeasement, Crookshank’s diaries are the place to look. The diaries have thus proved a grave disappointment to political historians. This may be one of the reasons why so few have a good word for their author. They are even so a treasure trove of information for anyone interested in Harry Crookshank himself.
Indeed, Crookshank’s concern for recording the events of his life went even further than his diaries. He, his mother and his sister maintained massive scrapbooks of cuttings regarding his life and career, starting with items pertaining to the Crookshank family going back into the nineteenth century. These books have found their way into Lincolnshire Record Office. The coverage of Crookshank’s life in these two sources is fairly complete. A search of the archives of the Grenadier Guards, greatly assisted by the staff of Royal Headquarters, Wellington Barracks, then yielded a missing segment of the Crookshank diary. As well as the later political and personal diary, Crookshank kept a very full war diary covering his military service on the Western Front and in the Balkans between 1915 and 1917. In contravention to all regulations, he wrote up regular entries in his pocketbook when he was on active service. Whenever he returned to London he wrote out these pocketbook diaries, adding detail, into desk diaries. At some later stage, probably in the 1920s, he inter-polated typed recollections into the desk diaries. Crookshank also wrote an account of his diplomatic career in long letters to his friend and fellow diplomat Paul Emrys-Evans, whose papers are held by the British Library.
At the start of this project it appeared that the most difficult of its subjects in archival terms would be Bobbety Cranborne – or Lord Salisbury, as he became in 1947. Papers related to his leadership and shadow leadership of the House of Lords between 1941 and 1957 are held by the House of Lords Record Office. The papers of his uncle and early mentor, Lord Cecil of Chelwood, were deposited in the British Library. Lord Salisbury was a prominent member of Anthony Eden’s circle. His correspondence thus appears frequently in the papers of Anthony Eden himself, deposited by Lady Avon in the archives of Birmingham University Library. He carried on a regular correspondence with Jim Thomas, and Thomas, by then Lord Cilcennin, left his papers in Carmarthenshire Record Office. There was also a correspondence with Paul Emrys-Evans, who, having become an MP, had become a prominent Edenite backbencher. Emrys-Evans was also secretary of James, 4th Marquess of Salisbury’s Watching Committee and Bobbety Cranborne’s under-secretary at the Dominions Office. Their long association continued after the war. When Emrys-Evans lost his seat in 1945, he went into business, rising to be chairman of Cecil Rhodes’s chartered British South Africa Company. The chartered company was much involved in the politics of southern Africa in the late 1950s and Lord Salisbury joined its board on his resignation from the Cabinet in 1957.
It was my great good fortune to use an even better source. Lord Salisbury had left an extensive collection of political and other papers in his archive at Hatfield, but these were not open to the public. They had been reorganized by his former secretary in the early 1980s, but were not formally catalogued. Through the good offices of the Tudor historian Professor A. G. R. Smith and Hatfield House’s librarian, Robin Harcourt Williams, the late Lord Salisbury was made aware of my project. Not only did he grant me access to his father’s hitherto closed papers, but he also talked to me about his father and his circle. Lord Salisbury’s generosity was of immeasurable assistance.
In addition to those mentioned above, I have received assistance from many other individuals and institutions. For their consent to quote from papers to which they hold copyright, I wish to thank the Amalgamated Metal Corporation plc, Lady Avon, the Carmarthenshire Archives Service, Lord Chandos, the Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement, the Grenadier Guards, Mrs Rachel Fraser, Lincolnshire Archives, the Trustees of the Harold Macmillan Book Trust, Lord Salisbury, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, Sir Charles Willink. If I have infringed upon the copyright of any persons or institutions I hope they will forgive the oversight and inform me, so that the error may be corrected in any future edition of this book.
The University of Glasgow gave me leave from my teaching duties in order to research and write this book. That leave was extended by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board. The British Academy awarded me a grant to defray the costs of travelling to archives. All Souls College provided me with rooms in Oxford. The John Robertson Bequest gave me a grant towards the cost of photographs from the Imperial War Museum. I am most grateful to the trustees and administrators of these bodies for showing such confidence in my work when this book was little more than an idea. For similar confidence on a more personal level I would like to thank Hew Strachan, formerly Professor of Modern History at the University of Glasgow, and David Bates, formerly Edwards Professor of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow. Without their encouragement writing this book would have been a more difficult and less enjoyable task. The book would not have been written at all if Tony Morris had not suggested that it had commercial potential, if Robyn Airlie had not introduced me to the late Giles Gordon and if Giles had not been enthused enough to place me in the capable hands of Arabella Pike. I am extremely thankful to them all for their help, advice and support.
During the course of the research for this book I visited many archives and libraries around Britain. I was met with unfailing courtesy and helpfulness. Without these institutions historical research would be impossible; with them it is most pleasant. I would like to thank the staff of the Modern Papers Reading Room, Bodleian Library, Oxford; Rhodes House Library, Oxford; the British Library; the Public Record Office, Kew; the House of Lords Record Office; the Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge; Carmarthen Record Office; Lincoln Record Office; Lincoln Cathedral; Royal Headquarters, Grenadier Guards, Wellington Barracks; the Imperial War Museum; Rio Tinto Zinc plc Archives, London; GEC-Marconi plc Archives, Chelmsford; AMC; Hatfield House; Chatsworth Archives; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh and the London Library.
I have benefited enormously from the help of a number of scholars of British history. I would like to thank, in particular, Dr Stuart Ball of the University of Leicester for discussing his work on Cuthbert Headlam and claryifying details of the Headlam-Lyttelton relationship, Dr Philip Murphy of the University of Reading for discussing his work on Lyttelton, Alan Lennox-Boyd and Sir Roy Welensky, Dr Nicholas Crowson of the University of Birmingham for sharing his ideas about the anti-appeasers; and Dr Ronald Hyam of Magdalene College, Cambridge for acting as my mentor in imperial history. Each took time away from their own scholarly research to guide me in fields in which they are expert and I was not. Professor David Reynolds of Christ’s College, Cambridge, Dr Richard Aldous of University College, Dublin and Robin Harcourt Williams, Librarian to the Marquess of Salisbury, undertook the lengthy task of reading my manuscript in full and providing a detailed commentary on what I had written. The improvements in style and content they introduced were many and various. I thank them for taking such care with my work. Since Richard Aldous and I have talked endlessly about our books since we were at Cambridge together, some of the work he was correcting was probably originally his in any case.
One of the chief joys of writing a book is sharing it with one’s family. I count myself fortunate that my family are bibliophiles. My parents, Eric and Sheila, have encouraged me to write from an early age. My father read the manuscript of this book as he has those of my previous books. I have incorporated many of his suggestions and dropped those passages that did not meet paternal approval. My wife, Helen, has read every draft of this book as it left my pen. If I had listened to her advice more often I would have finished quicker and written better. I dedicate this book to her, with love.
PREFACE (#ulink_46b78501-cb82-5b90-9cd0-f392d9131950)
Harold Macmillan, Oliver Lyttelton, Bobbety Cranborne and Harry Crookshank all arrived at Eton in 1906, all served in the Great War in the same battalion of the Grenadier Guards and all entered the Cabinet under Winston Churchill during the Second World War. They helped Churchill to seize back power from the socialists in 1951 and once more joined his Cabinet, now as senior figures. Macmillan rose to be prime minister in 1957. This quartet thus socialized with each other, argued with each other, fought together and climbed the political ladder together for over forty years. ‘From the playing fields of Eton, to the horrors of the Western Front, to the pinnacle of political power,’ was not the blurb of a Jeffrey Archer novel but the reality of these men’s lives.
A friend of Crookshank and Cranborne’s, Paul Emrys-Evans defined their generation as those, born between Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1888 and the turn of the century, who fought in the Great War. Subsequent studies have confirmed that this was indeed the group that bore the brunt of the front-line fighting and thus the heaviest casualties. Few Englishmen, on the other hand, have ever defined themselves solely as ‘old soldiers’. In any subsequent career, including politics, individuals cooperated with those both older and younger than themselves. In political life they might well have been drawn to those with similar life experiences, but this attraction seldom provided the main explanation for political action. It is hard to understand later events without a knowledge of generations, but unwise to expect an understanding of relationships within a generation to explain everything. Bearing this in mind, the present work is only in part a collective biography of four contemporaries. It certainly tries to evoke what living and working cheek by jowl with the acquaintances of childhood and the friends of wartime was like for Conservative politicians in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. This evocation, however, merely sets the scene for the action.
As much as a collective biography this book is a comparative biography. It is concerned with those moments when its subjects interacted with each other but also with those situations where their actions might be contrasted. From early childhood Macmillan, Lyttelton, Cranborne and Crookshank were brought up with the notion that they were in competition with their contemporaries for the glittering prizes, the marks of honour accorded to men in public life. Although they were each under pressure to surpass the achievements of earlier generations of their own families, the main competition had to be against their own cohort. To use a sporting simile, an athlete can only race on the same track with those who reach their peak at the same age as himself. These four men came to the starting-line at the same time, and thus their performances can legitimately be measured against one another. The theme of this book is a race, a competition, willingly entered into, for power and glory. It seeks to explain why some men fell by the wayside while others prospered. ‘It’s not a flat race, it’s a steeplechase,’ as Winston Churchill once told Harold Macmillan.
1 Sons (#ulink_4a38bbe1-7b4f-5466-94da-3ca771b23839)
Harold Macmillan, Bobbety Cranborne, Oliver Lyttelton and Harry Crookshank were members of a remarkable group. The four were born within a year of one another, Bobbety Cranborne, Oliver Lyttelton and Harry Crookshank in 1893, Harold Macmillan, the youngest of the quartet, in February 1894. As Lyttelton himself wrote, ‘Harold Macmillan went to Eton as a Scholar at the beginning of the school year of 1906. Strangely amongst his exact contemporaries at Eton were three boys, Cranborne, Crookshank and Lyttelton, all – like he – destined to be officers in the Grenadier Guards, all destined to survive…and all to be members of Mr Churchill’s governments in war and peace.’
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In the carefully cadenced world of Edwardian society, the four had started out not as a quartet but as two distinct pairs. Cranborne and Lyttelton were patricians, Macmillan and Crookshank ‘new men’. Eton was the clasp, a link sought quite consciously by the Macmillan and Crookshank families, that bound patrician and plebeian together. In the event this link was annealed by the Grenadier Guards.
The Lytteltons and the Cecils were aristocratic families who enjoyed a warm friendship. Not only was Oliver Lyttelton’s father, Alfred, close to Bobbety’s father, Jim Salisbury, but Oliver’s mother, Didi Lyttelton, and Bobbety’s mother, Alice Salisbury, were firm friends.
(#litres_trial_promo) In 1875 Jim Salisbury’s cousin, the future prime minister Arthur Balfour, fancied himself in love with Alfred’s sister, May. AJB was disconsolate at her early death from diphtheria, placing an emerald ring in her coffin. Naturally his friends rallied round. They rallied round once more in 1886 to console Alfred in his grief after the death of his wife, Laura, in childbirth just eleven months after their marriage. Alfred Lyttelton subsequently found solace in the love of a young beauty they had adopted into their circle, Didi Balfour. Her physical similarity to Laura was, some of his friends and relations thought, unnerving. Alfred and Didi married in 1892: Oliver was born within eleven months.
Oliver ‘had a hero worship of my father but stood in some awe of him’. It was hardly surprising. Alfred Lyttelton was the beau ideal of the muscular Christian. He was strikingly handsome, clever and well-liked. Beyond that, he was a true sporting celebrity, a natural at any game to which he turned his hand. These included both ‘aristocratic’ and ‘popular’ pursuits. He was a dominant figure at Eton fives, racquets and real tennis. He played football for England. He was best known as a ‘gentleman’ cricketer, second only to W. G. Grace in the England team, in which he played as a hard-charging batsman and as wicket-keeper. In middle age he took up golf with a passion that dominated Oliver’s childhood landscape. In 1899 he bought land near Muirfield and called in Edwin Lutyens to build him a splendid golfing lodge, High Walls at Gullane.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was a burden Oliver had to carry as he grew into manhood that, although he was big and tall, he could never approach his father in sporting prowess.
Oliver was, however, doted on by his beautiful but highly strung mother. She was much given to ‘premonitions’. She later became, somewhat to his embarrassment, one of the leading figures in the British spiritualist movement. She forced Alfred to give up High Walls because she could not bear the separations his golfing forays involved. Instead she found a new country home at Wittersham near Rye, where Alfred and Oliver could golf under her watchful eye. At an early age Mrs Lyttelton’s worries affected Oliver’s schooling. He was not sent to prep school as a boarder but instead attended Mr Bull’s in Baker Street with his cousin Gil Talbot, later a close Oxford friend of Harold Macmillan who was killed fighting on the Western Front in 1915.
(#litres_trial_promo) At one stage Alfred Lyttelton even wavered in his intention to send Oliver to Eton, where his family had been outstanding figures for generations, considering instead the merits of Westminster, where he would be a day-boy within easy walking distance of home.
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Alfred Lyttelton entered politics in his late thirties soon after his second marriage and the birth of his son. Like his Cecil friends Arthur Balfour and Jim Salisbury, he was a staunch Tory. After a relatively brief apprenticeship he was catapulted straight into the Cabinet by Balfour, who had himself succeeded his uncle, Lord Salisbury, as prime minister the previous year. Although many would feel jealous about such rapid advancement on the ‘Bob’s your uncle’ principle, Alfred in fact entered high office at a difficult moment. The Conservative government was on the ebb tide that would lead to its crushing defeat in the 1906 election. Lyttelton himself, as colonial secretary, was soon embroiled in the unedifying aftermath of the Boer War and in particular the issue of ‘Chinese Slavery’ in South Africa. Lyttelton was excoriated by sections of the press on the issue. He was used to adulation rather than criticism and reacted badly. After hearing him speak in the Commons, Lord Balcarres, a Conservative whip, observed that his speech was ‘able in its way but marred by a certain asperity of voice which is not borne out by his smiling countenance. The result is that the newspaper men think his remarks virulent and acrimonious, whereas members in the House itself (to whom he addresses himself exclusively), see by his face that he does not mean to be disagreeable. Hence the divergence of criticism between MPs and journalists.’
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Neither did Alfred Lyttelton have much taste for opposition. Party managers found the tendency of ex-ministers, of whom Lyttelton was one, to follow the example of Balfour, who lost Manchester and was returned for City of London, to gravitate towards town in search of safe seats comfortably near their homes ‘indefensible’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Lyttelton had bought 16 Great College Street, Westminster, in 1895 when he had become an MP; now he bought No. 18 next door and had Lutyens create a substantial house. Defeated at Warwick and Leamington, he was found the excellent seat of St George’s, Hanover Square. This ‘selfishness’ as far as the party in the country was concerned was compounded by ‘indolence’ in the House itself. He was accounted ‘tame and ineffectual’ in the Commons.
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British politics were moving into an exceptionally bitter phase as the Liberals, or ‘Radicals’ as the Conservatives preferred to call them, attempted to push through their ambitious social, financial and constitutional programme. It seemed to some Conservatives that they were engaged in a class war with enemies such as the Welsh Liberal politician Lloyd George and the socialists of the Independent Labour Party. Yet in the Lyttelton household the political creed of the latter was a suitable subject for humour: ‘I went to the Mission [in the East End of London],’ Oliver told his mother in 1908, ‘but I am still not yet a socialist. The “staff” are particularly nice as is only natural considering they are Old Etonians.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Alfred seemed ‘opposed to any actions except quiescence’ and was not in favour of the House of Lords wrecking Liberal legislation. He and his friends, ‘comfortable in rich metropolitan seats’, did not seem to register the depth of the crisis: if the Tories did not resist with all their might and main ‘we should look upon ourselves as a dejected indeed a defeated party’.
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The unpleasantness of politics communicated itself to Oliver: ‘I hope,’ he wrote to his mother from Eton in 1909, the year of Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’, ‘we are very full for Christmas, I don’t mind sleeping on the floor, even if everybody is over thirty. I do hope there won’t be any ghastly election or any other political absurdity this time.’
(#litres_trial_promo); Unfortunately the political absurdity was unstoppable. In November Lloyd George described the peers as a useless group randomly chosen from among the unemployed and the House of Lords threw out his budget. That Christmas was ruined by an election in January 1910. The next Christmas was ruined by an election in December 1910. The elections solved nothing. The Liberals were weakened, indeed reliant on Irish nationalists for their parliamentary majority, but still in power. In front stretched the crisis of the 1911 Parliament Act, which was designed to cripple the power of the peers. Electoral failure in 1910 also brought about the fall of Balfour and the advent of the Scottish ‘hard man’ Andrew Bonar Law as Conservative leader. Alfred had tried to persuade his party to avoid conflict. Although he had supported Law for the leadership, once it was clear that Balfour had no stomach for the fight, politics could no longer be an adventure shared by friends.
If the political crisis of 1909 onwards dispirited the Lyttelton family, it reinvigorated the Cecils. Bobbety – ‘a ridiculous name but the one by which I am known to my friends’ – Cranborne grew up in a house full of ‘die-hards’ fighting the good fight for their family and class.
(#litres_trial_promo) The dominating figure of his early years was his grandfather, the 3rd Marquess. By his exertions Lord Salisbury had lifted the Cecils of Hatfield from centuries spent as political ciphers back to the heights of power they had enjoyed at the turn of the sixteenth century. He was in all ways an awe-inspiring figure, luxuriantly bearded, of huge stature, lapidary judgement and, in the outside world, prime minister until his retirement in 1902, when Bobbety was nine years old. The Cecils were by then the nearest Britain possessed to an imperial family.
Although Lord Salisbury himself had had to struggle hard and rise through his talents, once he reached the pinnacle he buttressed his rule by employing members of his own family. Although he had to look to his sister’s son Balfour as a political lieutenant and eventual successor, three of Salisbury’s five sons also entered politics: the eldest and his heir, Jim (or Jem), Bobbety’s father, and two younger brothers, Lord Robert and Lord Hugh, known as Linkie. It was said of the Cecil boys that ‘their ability varies inversely with their age’. Jim was thus regarded as the least talented, Hugh as the most. By the time Bobbety was old enough to take an interest in the public lives of his father and uncles, the rolling political salons that were Hatfield and Salisbury House in Arlington Street had become his homes. Yet the memory of the great 3rd Marquess still cast a long shadow. Not only did outsiders persistently compare him to his sons, to their perpetual disadvantage, but they themselves were prey to deep feelings of inadequacy. Since 1883 Jim Salisbury had suffered from periodic bouts of depression brought on by ‘these festering feelings of failure’.
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If Oliver Lyttelton grew up in awe of his father, Bobbety grew up in a household of men in awe of his grandfather’s dominating presence. This perhaps contributed to the family traits of fierce pride in the gens, intractability and odd diffidence. On the other hand, the dominant figure in his early life was not his father but his mother, Alice, the daughter of an Irish peer, whom James Cranborne had married in 1887. Although not a public figure as her friend Didi Lyttelton became after her husband’s death, Alice Salisbury was the undisputed chatelaine of Hatfield. She had no compunction about dabbling in politics: she made herself instrumental in the downfall of the Viceroy of India, George Curzon, by acting as the ‘back channel’ between his enemies and Balfour. More than her secret interest in political affairs, however, she provided the social flair and taste for entertaining on a magnificent scale from which her husband shied. She was to prove, behind the scenes, the mainstay of both her husband and her son.
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Lack of appreciable talent did not stop Lord Salisbury raising his son to ministerial rank as under-secretary of state for foreign affairs in 1900. Quips about Cecil nepotism struck and stuck because they were so obviously true. To nobody’s surprise, least of all his own one suspects, Jim Cranborne was not a success in his performance as a Foreign Office minister. He was not impressive in the House of Commons, never having got over his nervousness at speaking. He was thus ‘forbidden to give answers to supplementary questions’ in case he said something damaging. Unfortunately, since he did not have the parliamentary skill of avoiding a question by saying nothing at length, he simply refused to respond to any inquiry that had not been properly notified in advance and for which he had no clear brief. This procedure caused ire and mirth in the House in equal measure. There was soon in existence ‘a universal belief in Jim Cranborne’s complete and invincible incompetence’.
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In the short term, matters did not seem set to improve. In 1903 Lord Salisbury died and Jim Cranborne succeeded him, becoming the 4th Marquess. His translation to the Upper House was a blessed relief. He felt more at home among men who were literally his peers; he was accorded the respect to which his position in society entitled him, with none of the rowdyism of the demotic Commons. His cousin Balfour brought him into the Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal at the same time as Alfred Lyttelton became colonial secretary in October 1903.
As Jim Salisbury was entering into his inheritance, the Conservative party started to tear itself to pieces over the issue of Tariff Reform, the campaign launched by Joseph Chamberlain in May 1903 to convert the party from laissez-faire to protectionism. Chamberlain hit on a sore point. The party had nearly destroyed itself over the issue of Free Trade in the 1840s, had condemned itself to a generation of political impotence and had only fully re-established itself as the natural party of government under Jim’s father. The Cecils were avowed Free Traders, yet the manner in which they prosecuted their campaign did not initially enhance their reputation.
Immediately after the crushing election defeat of 1906, Salisbury circularized all Unionist MPs in order to identify them as Free Traders or Tariff Reformers, or ‘food taxers’ as he called them. The move did not receive a warm response. ‘I am bound to say,’ wrote Lord Balcarres, ‘that I resent this catechism from one whose incompetence has been a contributory cause to our disaster. Good fellow as [ Jim] is, his tact is not generally visible: and it would not be unfair to reply that the taxation of food has doubtless injured the Party – though we have suffered largely from nepotism, sacerdotalism, and inefficiency.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Lord Robert and Lord Hugh were on the wilder fringes of the party, locked into spiteful conflict with their constituency parties.
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Like Alfred Lyttelton, Jim Salisbury found the inevitable squabbling in a party forced humiliatingly into opposition after years of rule disheartening. Unlike Lyttelton, he subsequently found a great cause and a method of prosecuting it to call his own. The cause was the House of Lords and the method was obstructionism. The method, it is true, predated the cause. In 1908 one of his colleagues recorded that ‘Jem wanted a guerrilla war with the House of Commons’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Jim Salisbury had little talent for constructive political achievement, but he found himself to have a genius for saying no. In 1910, for the first time, he became one of the most important men in the party. It was he who convened the meeting of party grandees at Hatfield in December that forced on Balfour far-reaching changes to party organization. He found willing allies in his brothers. It was Lord Hugh Cecil who led his ‘Hughligans’, a band of about thirty MPs dedicated to howling down Asquith and the Liberal leaders and disrupting the House of Commons. George Wyndham, Oliver Lyttelton’s favourite among his father’s circle, drew the memorable distinction between ‘Ditchers’, ‘those who would the in the last ditch’, and ‘Hedgers’, who were ‘liable to trimming’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Lord Salisbury found life much more comfortable once he became a committed Ditcher. In 1905, on the grounds that one should not let mere politics interfere with civilized life, he had had Asquith to dine at Hatfield within twenty-four hours of his cousin and chief Balfour’s resignation as prime minister. In July 1911, the same month in which his brother decided to shout Asquith down in the House of Commons, ‘Lord and Lady Salisbury refused the invitation of the Asquiths to dine at the party given to the King and Queen’. Even Salisbury’s fiercest detractors in the party approved: ‘Asquith and his colleagues are out for blood. He has poured insult and contumely on the peers: why break bread or uncork champagne at his table?’
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The passing of the 1911 Parliament Act by the Liberals under the threat that the new king, George V, would be obliged to swamp the Lords with new peers, was a crushing blow. ‘Politics are beastly’, was Salisbury’s comment. Yet the Act guaranteed the House very considerable powers of delay while Liberal dependence on the Irish nationalists gave the peers a much greater excuse for using those powers than they had had for wrecking Liberal social legislation. Many peers were demoralized by their defeat, but Jim Salisbury was suffused in a glow of moral righteousness. Thereafter he never entirely lost his reputation as the keeper of the true flame of Conservatism. This made him a powerful man, though he was not always comfortable with the role. After the war he confided to his son that he found continual calls to save the Conservative party tiresome. One should remember, he told Bobbety, that parties came and went: principles and family were much more durable.
Bobbety Cranborne and Oliver Lyttelton were brought up at the apex of English social and political life. Politics was the constant backdrop to their childhood. To have Cabinet ministers, even prime ministers, in the house was a regular occurrence. From an early age they were aware of the fascination of politics, but also became youthfully cynical about it. Harry Crookshank and Harold Macmillan did not have such easy access to the political élite. Whereas Cranborne and Lyttelton could see the casualties of ambition – the burnt-out drunks like George Wyndham – ambition for the Crookshank and Macmillan families was entirely positive. It was also more impersonal and structured than for the aristocrats. From the start the course was clear: a forcing prep school, leading to a scholarship at Eton, leading in turn to the best colleges at Oxford. The perfectly respectable schools and colleges attended by their fathers simply would not do.
Although the Macmillan and Crookshank pères followed quite different professions, they had arrived at a remarkably similar social location by the time their sons were born. Harry Maule Crookshank was a doctor who had taken advantage of the expansion of the Empire in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to become an imperial administrator. He came from an old Ulster Protestant family of some distinction. The Crookshanks had arrived in Ulster as part of the seventeenth-century plantation of Scottish Protestants. The family took great pride in their most famous ancestor, William Crookshank, who had been one of the thirteen men who shut the gates of Derry in 1688. Since then the family could boast a brace of Ulster MPs. By the nineteenth century, however, Harry Maule Crookshank’s father and grandfather were making their way through soldiering. Both served as officers in line infantry regiments. Before the Cardwell reforms of the 1870s, officers in the British army purchased their rank. The Crookshanks thus had some funds behind them but could not rise to great heights. Harry Maule’s grandfather finished his career as a colonel. His father was a captain at the time of his early death while serving in India. While overseas Harry Maule was to send his son, Harry Comfort, for his initial education in Europe. This seems to have been part of a family pattern, for he himself received his early education in Boulogne before proceeding to a minor public school in Cheltenham. He was not destined for the army but instead studied medicine at University College Hospital, London. Although Crookshank had not joined the British army, he maintained his family’s military tradition. At the age of twenty-one he joined a Red Cross ambulance unit serving in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. He repeated the experience later in the decade, joining a similar unit in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8. Crookshank’s contact with the Ottoman Empire brought about a fundamental change in his life. In 1882 British forces invaded Egypt to secure the recently completed Suez Canal. Following in the wake of the troops were British officials dedicated to the reform of the corrupt and ineffectual Egyptian state. Between 1883 and 1914 the real power in Egypt lay with the British, led by Lord Cromer.
Harry Maule Crookshank found himself an important cog in Cromer’s machine as director-general of the Egyptian Prisons Administration. Coming from an undistinguished background he was, at the age of thirty-four, relatively young for his responsibilities. In 1883 Crookshank faced a difficult situation. The British regarded the Egyptian prisons they found as utterly barbarous and in urgent need of reform. ‘No report,’ wrote the author of the initial survey of the system, ‘can convey the feeblest impression of the helpless misery of the prisoners, who live for months like wild beasts, without change of clothing, half-starved, ignorant of the fate of their families and bewailing their own.’ The problem of the prisons was part of a wider malaise in a justice system dominated ‘by venality, tyranny and personal vindictiveness’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Yet British officials were being somewhat disingenuous in their criticism of the existing Egyptian prison system. The first concern for Cromer’s new administration was not reforming the prisons but bringing Egypt under its own firm control. To this end the 1880s were marked by a system akin to martial law. ‘Brigandage commissions’ ensured that as many potential troublemakers as possible were imprisoned. The combination of Egyptian inefficiency and British efficiency meant that there was massive overcrowding in the prisons: the gaols were at four times their nominal capacity.
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Crookshank’s eventual reform programme followed four main lines: old prisons were improved and made sanitary, new prisons were built, prisoners were provided with proper food and clothing and a separate system of reformatories for young offenders was created. The work was long, arduous and not always rewarding. Since the criminal justice system formed the keystone of ‘indirect’ rule, its conduct was the matter of much debate, even conflict, among the British themselves. Crookshank became involved on the side of those pragmatists who believed that as much use as possible should be made of the existing Egyptian system, already reformed on French lines before the occupation. His chief opponent was Sir Benson Maxwell, a naturally disputatious man who served as first procureur-général and believed the system should be purged of any intermediary foreign taint and thoroughly anglicized on the colonial model. Money was always tight. As Lord Cromer recorded in 1907, the year Crookshank left Egypt, ‘These reforms took time: Even now the prison accommodation can scarcely be said to be adequate to meet all the requirements of the country.’ Crookshank’s successor as director-general, Charles Coles, who took over in 1897, had a police rather than a medical background. He implied that his predecessor had been too soft. It was arguable, Coles felt, ‘that prison life is not sufficiently deterrent, and that the swing of the pendulum has carried the Administration too far in the direction of humanity, if not of luxury’.
There is no record of how the Crookshanks felt when Cromer gave credit to Coles rather than Harry Maule as the man ‘to whom the credit of reforming this branch of the Public Service is mainly due’. It was not in Harry Maule’s nature to push himself forward. Indeed, Coles felt that Crookshank had been unnecessarily diffident in his dealings with Cromer.
(#litres_trial_promo) It would seem even so that Crookshank’s performance in fourteen years of overseeing the prisons was rated highly enough for him to be given another important and far more agreeable job within the administration. In 1897 he was made controller of the Daira Sanieh Administration. The Daira estates were lands that the former ruler of Egypt, Ismail Pasha, had ‘contrived, generally by illicit and arbitrary methods, to accumulate in his own hands’. By the time the British arrived they amounted to over half a million acres. They were, however, very heavily mortgaged. When the profligate Ismail had got into severe financial difficulties he had borrowed £9.5 million on the security of the properties.
Under the Cromer regime the estates were run in the manner that became standard practice: giving the appearance of authority to Egyptians but severely trammelling their power. The putative administrator of the lands was an Egyptian director-general, but he was joined on a board of directors by two controllers, one British, the post Crookshank took on, and one French. The controllers ‘had ample powers of supervision and inspection. They alone were the legal representatives of the bondholders.’ Cromer regarded Crookshank’s performance as British controller as admirable. The main problem for the board was that the estates were so heavily indebted that expenditure on loan repayments always outran revenue. The first step, taken before Crookshank’s time, was to extract higher revenues from the estates.
From 1892 onwards, the properties started to yield a profit, though there was a brief crisis in 1895 not long before Crookshank’s arrival. By Crookshank’s last years in office, revenue was very healthy indeed, amounting to over £800,000 in 1904–5. Under Crookshank, however, a new policy was instituted. Cromer had close relations with the banker Ernest Cassel. Cassel thought that a great deal of money could be made from the estates. In 1898 the estates were made over to a new company charged with selling them off in lots. By the time Crookshank demitted office, all the lots had been sold, yielding a net profit for the government of over £3.25 million.
(#litres_trial_promo) Crookshank was leaving at a good time. When Cromer retired, the speculation in Egyptian land and shares in which Crookshank had been a pivotal figure rebounded into a financial crisis. Cromer’s successor, Eldon Gorst, concluded that the relationship between financiers and Cromer’s apparat had been rather too close for comfort. Profit had not necessarily walked hand in hand with good governance.
(#litres_trial_promo) Crookshank slipped into comfortable retirement in the wake of his master. He had been a faithful and discreet servant.
In later life Harry Crookshank was proud of and interested in his father’s official career. He too was to serve as an official in what was by then the former Ottoman Empire. He planned to make Egypt and Turkey his areas of particular expertise when he first entered the House of Commons, though these plans went awry. In many ways it was the position that Harry Maule’s achievements gave him in society that shaped Harry Comfort’s world. In 1890, at the mid-point of his term in the prison administration, Harry Crookshank was accorded the honorific ‘Pasha’. It was as Crookshank Pasha that he was known thereafter. Although his job had not changed, the oriental glamour of his new status helped him to woo a young Vassar-educated American visitor to Egypt, Emma Walraven Comfort.
Crookshank’s marriage to Emma Comfort in 1891 was wholly advantageous. Her father, Samuel Comfort, was one of the founders of Standard Oil, the company created by his contemporary John D. Rockefeller in 1870. By the end the 1870s Standard Oil had come to control the entire American oil market. In 1882 its owners created the ‘Trust’: at the time Crookshank met Emma the conflict between Standard and the ‘trustbusters’ was one of the most important struggles in American political life. Samuel Comfort was a ‘robber baron’ of the ‘Gilded Age’.
