The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World they Made

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Simon Ball. The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World they Made

The Guardsmen. Harold Macmillan, Three Friends, and the World They Made. Simon Ball

Table of Contents

SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREFACE

1 Sons

2 Grenadiers

3 Bottle-washers

4 Anti-fascists

5 Glamour Boys

6 Churchillians

7 Tories

8 Ministers

9 Successors

10 Enemies

11 Relics

CONCLUSION

NOTES AND REFERENCES. Chapter 1: Sons

Chapter 2: Grenadiers

Chapter 3: Bottle-washers

Chapter 4: Anti-fascists

Chapter 5: Glamour Boys

Chapter 6: Churchillians

Chapter 7: Tories

Chapter 8: Ministers

Chapter 9: Successors

Chapter 10: Enemies

Chapter 11: Relics

INDEX

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Отрывок из книги

To Helen

Title Page

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The best gentleman cricketer of his generation was felled by a ball bowled by a professional fast bowler in a charity match. Incompetently treated, he died from acute peritonitis a few days later. The prime minister, Asquith, delivered his encomium in the House of Commons. ‘I hardly trust myself to speak,’ he told the House, ‘for, apart from ties of relationship, there had subsisted between us thirty-three years of close friendship and affection.’ Asquith’s oratory rose to the occasion as he famously memorialized his friend as the one who ‘perhaps of all men of this generation, came nearest to the mould and ideal of manhood, which every English father would like to see his son aspire to, and if possible attain’. Thus another heavy burden was laid on Oliver: to be the son of the man who was the perfect son. Fifty years later he would still feel ‘acutely how far short of the example which I was set’ he had fallen. Even in an age of numberless tragedies, those that struck some individuals most grievously were coeval to the war but entirely unrelated to it.

If the celebrity accorded their fathers differed, so too did the private circumstances of Crookshank and Lyttelton. The removal of Crookshank Pasha made no material difference to his family since it was from his wife that his wealth stemmed. There was now created the ménage that would sustain Crookshank for most of the rest of his life. His sister and his mother ministered to his every need, cared for him physically and sustained him emotionally until their deaths in 1948 and 1954 respectively. The Crookshanks’ initial London base was in Queen Anne’s Mansions, a fourteen-storey apartment block that had just been built, ‘without any external decoration…for real ugliness unsurpassed by any other great building in all London’. In 1937 they moved to 51 Pont Street. Visiting them there just after the outbreak of the Second World War, the politician Cuthbert Headlam found ‘the Crookshanks mère fils et fille exactly the same as ever – the women garrulous, Harry as self centred’.70 ‘As you entered through the heavily leaded glass door,’ Harold Macmillan’s brother-in-law remembered, ‘the catacomb like gloom was relieved only by one small weak electric bulb, like the light on the tabernacle “dimly burning”.’ The house was a shrine to the Crookshanks’ life in the 1890s: ‘Eastern objets d’art and uncomfortable Victorian furniture.’71

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