Читать книгу The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World they Made - Simon Ball - Страница 9

The end of the war came as a shock to many young men. As Lyttelton told his mother, ‘with youth the war is tolerable even enjoyable’.¹ Peace did not appear at all enticing. All the plans and hopes entertained in 1914 had had to be put to one side. Now, quite suddenly it seemed to them, they needed to take stock of their situation.

Macmillan, confined to a hospital bed in Belgrave Square, had the most time to think. His prospects seemed bleak. One operation had removed half the bullet lodged in his back but he needed another. He had little to do except read and look forward to visitors. With the most exciting event in his life being a trip to see Thomas Beecham conduct Mendelssohn, he envied Cranborne his sojourn in France. ‘France’ was, in his imagination, ‘wonderful’. England, in contrast, seemed suburban, bourgeois and corrupt. Macmillan responded enthusiastically to Cranborne’s tongue-in-cheek idea that ‘after the war, we really must start a League of Individuals’. ‘We will refuse to do things…and all go to Italy,’ Macmillan enthused, ‘and live in a villa in Fiesole, with Cypresses…and dear Italian wines with their ravishing names. How wonderful it would be! Let George and Beaverbrook and the rest of them reconstruct to their hearts’ content, as long as we are not obliged to live in their monstrous edifice.’²

Many men of a poetic temperament – one thinks of Robert Graves and his retreat to Majorca – put these principles into practice. Pragmatists like the Guardsmen did not let this reverie last for long. Before the war they had been committed to seeking conventional worldly success. Within weeks of the end of the war they were again embracing this goal. Even Macmillan found, once he was released from hospital, that maudlin thoughts of inaction or exile dissipated. ‘To a young man of twenty-four, scarred but not disfigured,’ he recalled, ‘with all the quick mental and moral recovery of which youth is capable, life at the end of 1918 seemed to offer an attractive, not to say exciting prospect.’³

The door that the war had opened to the military career unconsidered by any of them in 1914 was rapidly closed. The fact that none of them remained a soldier was not of their own choosing. As early as 1916 Lyttelton had applied for a permanent commission in the Grenadier Guards.⁴ Crookshank too explored the possibility at the end of the war. In 1918 they both applied to remain in the regiment. They were both men in good odour with dominant figures in the Guards. But the Guards traditionalists were determined to get back to normal, purge their ranks of ‘patriots’ and guarantee the careers of regular officers.⁵ By the time they reconsidered this policy, it was too late. Lyttelton and Crookshank were launched on other careers. Even Ma Jeffreys couldn’t get them back.⁶

The war also ended Lyttelton’s ambition to enter the law – his contacts, so good at the time his father died, had gone stale. Not that this altered the central fact that he had to do something that made plenty of money. Even if his father’s experience of politics had not soured him on Parliament, his father’s example had shown the necessity of securing financial security before considering other avenues. In the months after the Armistice he courted Lady Moira Osborne, the daughter of the Duke of Leeds. His Grace disapproved of his daughter’s suitor on grounds of his poverty. Their engagement was made possible by Didi Lyttelton making ‘a kind of financial hara-kiri’ to provide her son with a respectable establishment. Retreating to visit Cranborne, he considered his good fortune: ‘Perfect Hatfield though baddish morning with the thermometer at 90 degrees in the shade. Phew but happy.’⁷ Oliver and Moira Osborne were married a few months later at St Margaret’s, Westminster.⁸

For a young man in need of cash the City was the obvious place to be. Many of Lyttelton’s Etonian contemporaries had already gravitated towards it. At least his army career exempted him from the jibe of his friend Geoffrey Madan, ‘Attractive Etonians who go straight on to the Stock Exchange…the raw material of the great bores.’⁹ In 1919 Lyttelton joined the firm of Brown, Shipley & Co. ‘The change,’ he remembered wryly, ‘from being a guardsman and a brigade major, under whose eye every knee stiffened, to being a clerk in the postal department was marked.’

Within a few months of his marriage Lyttelton’s career prospects looked up: he was recruited to work for a new concern, the British Metal Corporation run by Sir Cecil Budd, one of the leading figures in the metals trade.¹⁰ When Lyttelton first crossed the threshold of BMC’s new offices in Abchurch Yard he was, however, taking a risk. It was not at all clear that BMC would have a secure future. In 1920 the metals market suffered a ‘universal collapse’. Out of the blue a relatively stable market was affected by a massive drop in prices: a ton of tin fell from £423 to £195. ‘The trade has, in fact,’ BMC’s chairman lamented, ‘passed through a succession of crises of great magnitude.’ The future looked shaky.¹¹ Fortunately for Lyttelton, the very newness of BMC acted as a hedge against these problems. Most of its assets were still liquid.

Lyttelton soon mastered the mechanics of dealing under the guidance of Budd’s principal dealer, Henry Arthur Buck, whose methods some in the City regarded as hovering on the edges of sharp practice.¹² Just as significantly, Budd himself was exhausted by the efforts he had had to put into dealing with the crisis of 1920. He decided that he needed help in the form of a joint managing director and one of the existing directors was appointed to this position. Lyttelton himself moved up to the post of general manager.¹³

As a result of his rapid promotion, Lyttelton soon got his first real taste of being a ‘tycoon’. Having weathered the storms of the immediate post-war period, the corporation adopted an aggressive programme of acquisitions. Among them was the National Smelting Company.¹⁴ National Smelting was a group mainly concerned with zinc put together during the war by a flamboyant company promoter named Richard Tilden Smith, financed by the British government and Lloyds Bank.¹⁵ In 1916 Tilden Smith had persuaded the government that he should build facilities to process zinc concentrates formerly shipped to Germany. He signally failed to live up to his promises: not one ounce of zinc had been processed before the end of the war and in 1922 the government wrote off its loans and refused any further subsidy.¹⁶ The jewel in the crown of National Smelting was, however, not its zinc-processing business but its controlling interest in the Burma Corporation, ‘the great zinc-lead mine east of Mandalay’. Burma Corporation was of great strategic importance, but it was also undercapitalized and unprofitable. BMC believed they could turn the business around. As one of the company’s negotiators, Lyttelton was given his first chance to shine. This, his first big deal, was ‘stamped for ever on my memory’. He was thirty: facing him across the table was Sir Robert Horne, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer. ‘We had,’ Lyttelton remembered, ‘rivals; their offer was on the point of being accepted; we had put in a counter bid…We waited tensely. After some pregnant minutes Sir Robert said our terms were reasonable…I had been sitting with both hands on the table and, when I got up, I could see their damp imprint on the shiny mahogany. It is quite wrong to suppose that business is not sometimes very exciting.’¹⁷

Lyttelton’s career choice had been dictated by his need to earn serious money if he was not to find himself living off his mother’s rapidly diminishing capital. Marrying the daughter of a duke brought social obligations. By contrast, his friends, untrammelled by the prick of financial necessity, could afford to abjure remunerative employment, at least for a time. Macmillan, as he hobbled out of hospital at the beginning of 1919, ‘was not anxious to go immediately into business, although my father and his partners had invited me to do so’. ‘I fully expected,’ he later recalled, ‘to spend the rest of my life at an office desk, and shrank from starting unnecessarily soon.’ He, Crookshank and Cranborne were more concerned with seeing the world.

Cranborne and Crookshank made a conventional career choice in deciding to become diplomats in a Foreign Office dominated by Etonians.¹⁸ At the beginning of 1919 they presented themselves on the same day to sit the diplomatic services entrance examination. In a reflection of the Foreign Office’s changing culture, however, the selection board accepted Crookshank, the Etonian scholar, the son of a surgeon, and rejected the grandson of the great Lord Salisbury. The decision was made purely on merit. Although Cranborne had prepared hard for the exam, his utter lack of academic distinction at Eton and Oxford did not stand him in good stead. In addition, though good French was traditionally an aristocratic accomplishment, Crookshank’s childhood in Francophone Egypt and his service in France, Belgium and Serbia had given him excellent spoken French, whereas Cranborne’s was mediocre.^*

Cranborne’s diplomatic career was nevertheless rapidly resurrected by his family. Lord Salisbury crossed over to Paris to see his brother Robert, who was acting as one of Britain’s principal negotiators at the Peace Conference. They agreed that Cranborne would come to Paris to act as his uncle’s secretary. The current incumbent was unceremoniously sacked and within three weeks of failing the Foreign Office exam Cranborne was at Lord Robert Cecil’s side in Paris – a literal case of ‘Bob’s your Uncle’.¹⁹ He was thus able to observe the conduct of high policy at close quarters while Crookshank and the other successful entrants remained back in London learning how to write a proper minute.²⁰

There was drudgery in London and in Paris the high life. The British delegation housed in the Hôtel Majestic on the Avenue Kléber

was always busy and exciting. ‘All the world is here,’ wrote the editor of The Times. ‘It’s like a gigantic cinema-show of eminent persons.’ ‘A vast caravanserai,’ thought Lord Milner, ‘not uncomfortable, but much too full of all and sundry, too much of a “circus” for my taste.’²¹ For all the people that there were milling around, very few seemed to be doing any useful work.²² Betty Cranborne joined her husband. Bobbety’s sister was already there with her husband, Eddie Hartington, who was working for Lord Derby, the British ambassador in Paris. Paris may have been a jamboree, but Cranborne saw some serious work and some serious high politics. His uncle was at the pinnacle of his influence. ‘President Wilson says,’ recorded James Headlam-Morley in January 1919, ‘that Lord Robert Cecil is the greatest man in Europe – the greatest man he has ever met.’²³ Indeed on the very evening that Jim and Robert Cecil agreed that Cranborne should come out to Paris, Lloyd George was telling his dinner companions that Cecil was one of his most formidable rivals.²⁴

When Cranborne arrived in Paris the conference was entering its second phase.²⁵ Most of the work on the creation of the League of Nations, which made Cecil’s name as its architect, was finished. Considering his main work done the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, had sailed for America. The fact that his and Cecil’s handiwork would be rejected by the US Congress was still not apparent to those left behind in Paris.²⁶ The great issue to them was whether the Allies should impose a ‘Carthaginian peace’ on Germany. As chairman of the Supreme Economic Council, Cecil was immediately swept up into the bitter arguments about whether to feed Germany. With the threat of revolution in Germany and actual revolution in Hungary the situation seemed bleak.²⁷ Unlike many of his colleagues in 1919, Cecil saw that it was Britain’s relationship with the United States rather than its relationship to its European allies that was the key factor.²⁸ Lord Robert believed that if the Americans were to be involved in an overall settlement, the Europeans had to be lenient to the Germans. In the run-up to the crucial meetings of the British Empire delegation at the end of May and the beginning of June 1919, Cecil tried hard to persuade Lloyd George to follow the path of moderation. The French were deeply suspicious of his influence. Clemenceau accused Lloyd George of being beguiled by Cecil ‘to open his arms to the Germans’.²⁹

Although Cranborne’s position was in the ante-rooms of the great rather than in the conference hall, Lord Robert’s method of proceeding gave him a particularly close acquaintance with events since Cecil chose to act in those ante-rooms rather than in council. In his efforts to convince Lloyd George to stand up to the French, Cecil relied on the impact of carefully drafted and reasoned written argument. On a range of issues, whether territorial, such as the Saarland or Poland, or financial, above all reparations, he contended that the proposed settlement was ‘out of harmony with the spirit, if not the letter, of the professed war aims’. The terms were not ‘suitable for a lasting pacification of Europe’ and in the inter-allied negotiations that had produced them ‘our moral prestige had greatly suffered’. He even went so far as to point to the ‘moral bankruptcy of the Entente’.³⁰ Cecil was cogent and persuasive, but having made his point he chose not press the issue in public.³¹ ‘You do no good,’ he noted, ‘by jogging a man’s elbow. If you can’t manage a thing in the way you think right, it is better to leave someone else to do it altogether rather than, by making pushes for this or that change, reduce the whole scheme to incoherence, without curing its injustice.’³² It was an early lesson in the possibilities and limitations of indirect influence for Cranborne.

Cecil himself soon came to regret the fact that he had not jogged Lloyd George’s arm more forcefully. Before he left Paris, Cecil had told a meeting that, ‘There is not a single person in this room who is not disappointed with the terms we have drafted…Our disappointment is an excellent symptom; let us perpetuate it.’ Six months later when he had read John Maynard Keynes’s indictment of Versailles, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Cecil no longer thought disappointment an excellent symptom: ‘I am quite clear that we shall have to begin a campaign for the revision of the Treaty as soon as possible,’ he announced. It was Lord Robert’s emergence as a crusader that attracted young men to the Cecil banner.³³ His mixture of ‘the crusading instinct strongly developed’ with ‘an amiable touch of vanity’ appealed to those repelled by Lloyd George’s perceived cynicism. As Macmillan commented in a letter congratulating Cranborne on his role in Paris, ‘I suppose our nasty little Prime Minister is not really popular any more, except with the International Jew.’ Cecil’s League of Nations campaign gave Cranborne the opportunity to cut his teeth on political oratory. As someone who knew the inside story of the Peace Conference as the nephew and confidant of its hero he was in considerable demand as a speaker. Few seemed to mind that he spoke with a pronounced lisp that caused him to pronounce his ‘r’ as ‘w’. Lord Robert was encouraging. He told his friends that his nephew had become a ‘very good speaker’ through all his experience with the League of Nations Union.³⁴ In truth Cranborne was not particularly attracted to Lord Robert’s new revivalist brand of politics. Although it was politic to be associated with his uncle’s liberal conservatism in public, in private he had more sympathy with his father’s die-hard version. The 1919 League of Nations campaign was, however, the start of his apprenticeship.³⁵ Most important was the fact that on his return from Paris not only his uncle but his father began to take him into their political counsels.³⁶

If Cranborne witnessed the first act of the post-war peace settlement at close quarters, then Crookshank saw its final act from an even closer and much more uncomfortable vantage. He had some regrets about his decision to join the Foreign Office and still hankered after the Guards. He was on first-name terms with the Guards generals who had been company commanders in 1915. The Foreign Office seemed in contrast rigidly hierarchical. Its dominant figure, the foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, was capable of great charm and kindness. An old friend of Alfred Lyttelton, he treated Oliver ‘like a nephew, almost like a son’. Junior clerks such as Crookshank, however, encountered him only at the risk of fierce rebuke.³⁷ Nevertheless Crookshank found that the Foreign Office did have some of the same appeal as the Guards, such as an insistence on the ‘proper’ way of doing things, rituals that clearly marked off insiders from outsiders. If the work was tedious, there was at least the prospect of better things to come. Before the war the Foreign Office and the Diplomatic Service had been different entities – men who joined the former spent most of their careers in London, those who entered the latter served mainly in embassies overseas. In the year Crookshank joined, the two services were merged and the more modern system of rotation was introduced: a new group of generalists, of whom he was one, would be expected to split their time between Whitehall and the embassies. Thus, in 1921, Crookshank was posted to the British High Commission in Constantinople. It was a plum appointment.

Not only was Constantinople one of the great embassies of the ‘old diplomacy’, but when Crookshank arrived it was overseeing one of the most important tests of the new world order. As a result of his experiences in 1917 and 1918, Crookshank himself did not think much of the Greek contribution to Allied victory in the Great War. ‘In ancient times the Greeks at Thermopylae fought to the death and one man came back to tell the story; now one man is killed and they all come back to Salonika to tell the story,’ he was fond of saying.³⁸ The Greek government did nevertheless expect to profit from its titular alliance with the victorious powers at the expense of the Turks. As part of the Versailles process, the Allies had forced the Ottoman government to cede territory to the Greeks under the terms of the treaty of Sèvres, signed in August 1920. By that time the Sultan’s government was little more than a cipher. The Turkish war hero Mustapha Kemal had set up in Ankara a rival regime committed to the indivisibility of Anatolia and eastern Turkey. In March 1920, Britain, France and Italy had responded by occupying Constantinople. The High Commission that Crookshank joined thus had, as well as its diplomatic duties, executive responsibility for the administration of the city. The British were, however, in a precarious position. In March 1921 the Greek army attacked the Kemalists and were soundly beaten. Britain’s French and Italian allies, to say nothing of the Russian Bolsheviks, were keen to cut a deal with the martial nationalists.

When Crookshank arrived, Constantinople was in turmoil. The two most important Britons in the city, charged with navigating through the crisis, were his boss, the High Commissioner, Sir Horace Rumbold, and the commander of British troops, General Tim Harington. As late as March 1921 Crookshank had been continuing his efforts to leave the Foreign Office for the Grenadier Guards.³⁹ Constantinople confirmed his view about the relative merits of soldiers and diplomats. ‘Tim Harington…is quite excellent and a tower of strength whereas Horace is only a mountain of flesh.’ He consistently found himself agreeing with Harington’s HQ rather than his own High Commission. He came to believe that Rumbold was a buffoon and that his number two, Nevile Henderson, was a snake. The diplomats did not compare well with the army officers in Turkey, such as ‘Alex’ Alexander, who had been part of Oliver Lyttelton’s party at the Somme and was now commanding a battalion of Irish Guards. Crookshank laid three main charges at Rumbold’s door. First, he seemed more interested in going on leave than doing his job; secondly, he was unnecessarily anti-French; and thirdly he was a yes-man who told London only what it wanted to hear. In Crookshank’s view he was entirely culpable when the Chanak crisis broke around the High Commission’s heads in September 1922.

It was certainly true that Rumbold liked his leave. In May 1921, when the capital was rife with rumours of a nationalist attack, he asked the Foreign Office for two months off. Even Rumbold was aware that his superiors would find it rather odd that he wanted to leave his post at such a critical juncture. He pleaded sleeplessness, high blood pressure and general tiredness and argued, ‘I should work better after I had a bit of a rest.’ In the summer of 1922 he was at it again. He knew a crisis was brewing and agreed to take a holiday on the Turkish coast so that he could immediately return to the capital, but in the end he could not resist leaving for London. In his absence the Greeks threatened to attack Constantinople and had to be faced down by Harington and Henderson. Rumbold only arrived back for the denouement of the crisis at the end of July 1922. Having returned, however, he then impressed everyone with his sang-froid. ‘Horace groans and wishes he had stopped for a week in Switzerland!’ his wife wrote. ‘He remains most annoyingly calm! I believe if the last trump sounded he would gaze unperturbed through his eye glass and wish there were not so many damned foreigners about.’⁴⁰ Even Crookshank had to concede that it was an impressive display. ‘ “Horatio” returned with great gusto on the very day that the excitement was boiling up about the proposed Greek advance on Constantinople,’ he wrote in an account to his friend Paul Evans, ‘when asked to call a special meeting at once on arrival his only remark was that he must have lunch and a bath first.’⁴¹

Rumbold did engage in constant disputes with the French. He distrusted his French opposite number, General Pellé, profoundly and considered, rightly, that he would always conspire with the Kemalists behind his back whenever the opportunity arose. The French were in his words ‘dreadful Allies’ and might well force Britain to ‘have to eat dirt to an unlimited extent’. They were ‘always “playing the dirty” on us’. Henderson seconded his chief’s views in spades: the French were ‘cads and apes’, ‘in the grip of the international financier or Jew who cares for French financial interests and nothing else’.⁴² When Rumbold returned from leave, he clashed with Harington over the latter’s attempt to cooperate with the French in taking a more hostile line to the Greeks and recognizing that the Ankara regime formed the true government of Turkey. On 8 August 1922 he vetoed plans to act against Greek shipping, deprecating ‘the interesting spectacle of Pellé…slobbering over Harington, telling him what a fine fellow he was’. Rumbold was very aware that Lloyd George had publicly expressed pro-Greek views. Although intellectually he acknowledged that it was ‘useless to regard Mustapha Kemal any longer as a brigand chief’, and that the treaty of Sèvres was a dead letter, he could not rid himself of a visceral dislike of the Turks. ‘I have never dealt with people who have so little political sagacity,’ he noted, and did not mind ‘confessing privately that I should be rather glad to see the Greeks give the Nationalists one big knock before hostilities come to an end’.⁴³ Once more his boss’s echo, Henderson, called the Turks ‘misguided barbarians’.⁴⁴

Any hopes that Rumbold may have had of a stalemate in the Graeco-Turkish War were soon dashed. At the end of August 1922 the Kemalists opened their major offensive and routed the Greeks. By the second week in September they had captured the port of Smyrna. Not only did this pave the way to horrific ethnic cleansing, it also meant that nationalist forces directly threatened the straits zone held by the Allies. True to form, Pellé slipped out of Constantinople to negotiate directly with Kemal; on 20 September the French and Italians abandoned the British garrisoning Chanak on the Dardanelles. Three days later British and Turkish troops came into contact for the first time.

On 26 September Harington cabled Lord Cavan, now Chief of the Imperial General Staff, ‘Losing a lot of lives in hanging on is what I want to guard against. Why not start at once and give Turkey Constantinople and [Eastern Thrace]…Remember Turks are within sight of their goal and are naturally elated.’ On the same day Crookshank wrote his private appreciation of the situation: ‘We have got into a nice mess here haven’t we!’ He placed the blame for his predicament squarely on the shoulders of his senior colleagues.

I consider [Rumbold] a good deal to blame for the situation having arisen. He often I fancy sends telegrams which he thinks will please [Curzon] or [Lloyd George] rather than containing his own views. The last four or five months can be summed up as a world wide wrangle (short sighted) with France everywhere, owing to this very wicked anti-French feeling that has been brewing everywhere in the FO: as far as this part of the world is concerned it consisted in endless verbal quibbles in answering each others’ notes – if HR had any views of his own, he should have pushed them forward and gone on arguing for an immediate Conference. Instead precious months were wasted, whose bad fruit we are now beginning to taste. You can hardly believe [he concluded maliciously] what an atmosphere of gloom surrounds [Rumbold] and Henderson. My lighthearted flippancy, I can assure you, is far from appreciated.⁴⁵

It was at this point that Crookshank had, to his delight, his first brush with high policy. He and the military attaché, Colonel Baird, ‘wrote an interesting and logical joint memorandum which was dished out with one of their meetings to Rumbold [and] the General…The General thought it wise and telegraphed the suggestions to the War Office…The suggestion was that in order to keep ourselves out of the war we should act with complete neutrality and allow the Turks to go to Thrace if they could. At present we are controlling the Marmora against them and so acting as a rearguard to the Greeks.’⁴⁶ In London Lloyd George’s government was puffing itself up with righteous indignation to face down the Turks.⁴⁷ When the Cabinet met at 4 p.m. on 28 September they had before them Harington’s dispatch of the Crookshank-Baird memorandum, which had arrived via the War Office. Rumbold had been too slow off the mark to register his dissent. His telegram did not reach London until 8.15 p.m. As a result the Cabinet believed that he in some way concurred with Harington. Curzon signalled a rebuke to them both. According to London the proposal

would involved [sic] consequences which Harington has not fully foreseen…The liberty accorded to Kemal could not in logic or fairness be unilateral. If he were permitted to cross into Europe to fight the Greeks and anticipate the decision of peace conference establishing his rule in Eastern Thrace, Greek ships could not be prevented from using non-neutral waters of Marmora at same time, in order to resist his passage…In this way proposed plan might have consequence of not only re-opening war between Turkey and Greece but of transferring theatre of war to Europe with consequences that cannot be foreseen.⁴⁸

Crookshank cared not one whit that his plan had been shot down in flames. He was simply delighted that ‘Rumbold…got his fingers smacked for not having sent his comments at once’ and that ‘little Harry…[had] caused a Cabinet discussion and a slight flutter’.⁴⁹ In fact his memorandum was the high point of the crisis as far as Crookshank was concerned. Harington and Rumbold put aside their differences to thwart London’s desire to provoke a shooting war with the Kemalists. As Crookshank was writing up his part in the proceedings, Harington left Constantinople to open direct negotiations with the Kemalists. Early on the morning of 11 October he signed the Mudania Convention: the British, French and Italians would remove Eastern Thrace from Greek control and in return the Turks would retire fifteen kilometres from the coast at Chanak.

The Chanak crisis was an exciting time for Crookshank at its epicentre. It also had profound reverberations for British politics. Indeed, the crisis did much to create the political arena which he and Macmillan subsequently entered. The Dominions had refused to support Britain in its potential war with the Turkish nationalists. The majority of Conservative MPs became convinced that they could no longer support a coalition led by Lloyd George. On 7 October the Conservative leader, Bonar Law, publicly criticized government policy in a letter to The Times. If the French were not willing to support Britain, the government had ‘no alternative except to imitate the Government of the United States and to restrict our attention to the safeguarding of the more immediate interests of the Empire’.⁵⁰ No one stationed in Constantinople in the autumn of 1922 could hope for a sudden collapse of the British position – Crookshank feared ‘an internal pro-Kemal and anti-foreign outbreak in [Constantinople] itself…we have very little strength to cope with that, and one day we may find ourselves like the Legation did at Peking in Boxer times…how ignominious it would be to be killed by a riotous mob, after all the battles one has been through.’ Once the immediate threat of anarchy was averted at Mudania, however, Crookshank could not have agreed with Bonar Law more: ‘I am quite convinced,’ he wrote at the beginning of November, ‘that having made a stand in October, having refused to be browbeaten and having been vindicated we should now wash our hands of the whole thing.’⁵¹

Chanak convinced Crookshank that politics rather than diplomacy was the career to be in. Junior diplomats did not get the opportunity to fight for great causes. One incident further finally soured him on a diplomatic career. He despised Nevile Henderson, who was left in charge of the Commission when Rumbold departed to act as Curzon’s adviser at the conference convened at Lausanne to draw up a new peace treaty with Turkey. ‘Henderson goes on, with his temper fraying more and his long-winded words in dispatches misapplied more than ever! Lately he talked about Zenophobic and also mentioned the “opaque chaos” of the country. He will not hear of corrections and I can’t help thinking the Department must laugh a bit.’ It was not so much Henderson’s bad English that he found truly offensive as the fact that he was an egregious crawler. Any ambitious man in a hierarchical structure like the Foreign Office had to try and make a good impression on his superiors. What really stuck in Crookshank’s throat was Henderson’s willingness to chum up with any potentially powerful figure, however unacceptable.

In the autumn of 1922 the Labour politician Ramsay MacDonald visited Constantinople. He did not have nice things to say about the Allies in Constantinople. ‘Away from the Galata Bridge,’ he wrote in The Nation, ‘the tunnel tramway leads up to the European quarter where the West, infected by the sensuous luxuriousness of the East, is iridescent with putrefaction, where the bookshops are piled with carnal filth, and where troops of coloured men in khaki can be seen in open daylight marching with officers at their head to where the brothels are.’⁵² MacDonald’s most famous moral stand was, however, not against pornography and prostitution but against war. He had been the most outspoken critic of the Great War from a pacifist standpoint. In February 1921 he tried to win the Woolwich by-election for the Labour party. It was a vicious campaign, his opponent being a former soldier who had won the VC at Cambrai. Placards on local trams asked, ‘A Traitor for Parliament?’ ‘The Woolwich exserviceman,’ MacDonald had retorted, ‘knows that military decorations are no indication of political wisdom, and that a Parliament of gallant officers will be a Prussian Diet not a British House of Commons.’⁵³ In Constantinople Crookshank was certainly one gallant officer who agreed that MacDonald was a traitor. To Crookshank’s fury, Henderson, ‘with as always an eye on the main chance asked him to dine in the Mess which I was running at the time’. Crookshank kicked up a stink: ‘I point blank refused to be there and went out to an hotel.’ His valet, Page, a former guardsman, ‘like master like man…refused to wait at table on the “traitor”’. The spat, although minor, was hardly private: one of Crookshank’s friends heard about it while serving in the Sudan.⁵⁴ Within two years MacDonald was prime minister, within nine years he was a prime minister at the head of the Conservative administration. Crookshank had made a dangerous enemy.

By November 1922 he was ‘fed up to the teeth’ with Constantinople ‘and everyone else and the preposterous Rumbold’.⁵⁵ By the next summer Crookshank was ‘beginning to feel very desperate about this place’. The Turks having had their demands met by the great powers at Lausanne were cocky and unpleasant, ‘constant instances of rough handling, maltreatment etc. happen’.⁵⁶ Even his hero Harington was beginning to irritate him: ‘The Army went off, as Harington told us about forty million times, with “flag flying high” – but the Turks let themselves go at once in scurrilous abuse. You never read such filth as they wrote. They had a final ceremony, entirely inspired by Harington – three Allied guards of honour and one Turkish and everyone saluting each others flags and then the Allies marching off leaving the Turks in situ. This resulted in a lot of stuff about “the Allies have bowed themselves before our glorious flag” and have “proved the victory of Eastern over Western Civilisation”. Ugh!’⁵⁷ Those left when the troops marched away knew that this was not peace with honour but a bloody nose.

Crookshank believed that the British Empire should dish out punishment rather than receive it. He thus found a political hero in the South African prime minister, Jan Christian Smuts, who visited London in October 1923. Smuts charmed his hosts by heaping obloquy on the French for their arrogance, failures, unreliability and stupidity. More importantly, the former Boer leader propounded a noble vision of empire: ‘Here in a tumbling, falling world, here in a world where all the foundations are quaking,’ he declared in an address at the Savoy, ‘you have something solid and enduring. The greatest thing on earth, the greatest political [organization] of all times, it has passed through the awful blizzard and has emerged stronger than before…It is because in this Empire we sincerely believe in and practise certain fundamental principles of human government, such as peace, freedom, self-development, self-government.’ According to Smuts Irish independence, self-government in India, the end of the Protectorate in Egypt – which could all be read, like Chanak, as examples of British power buckling in the face of violent nationalism – in fact bore ‘testimony to the political faith which holds us together and will continue to hold us together while the kingdoms and empires founded on force and constraint pass away’.⁵⁸ The sentiments were hardly original, but that they should be expressed so eloquently at that moment by a former enemy gave them huge impact. The Times reproduced the speech as a pamphlet. More immediately Smuts’s words hummed down the wires to British missions around the world. Here was a political leader and a political creed worthy of admiration. Having read Smuts with ‘daily increasing imagination’, Crookshank concluded, ‘there is a lure about politics, especially in their present Imperial aspect.’⁵⁹

At exactly the same time as Crookshank’s mind was turning to politics and Empire so was Harold Macmillan’s. Macmillan, like Crookshank and Cranborne, was attracted to the idea of foreign climes.⁶⁰ Macmillan’s contacts were perhaps not as highly placed as Cranborne’s, but he was not without resources. His first port of call was George Lloyd, a former Conservative MP whom he had met through his Oxford Union activities. Lloyd was about to depart for India as Governor of Bombay and offered Macmillan a post as his ADC. It was not to be, since the Bombay climate was, as his doctors pointed out, hardly ideal for a man with still suppurating wounds. Macmillan wanted to be an ADC, however, and an imperial governor operating in a colder climate was desperate for his services.

Victor Cavendish, ninth Duke of Devonshire, had been shipped off to Canada for the duration in 1916. At times he felt himself sadly neglected – not least in the matter of ADCs. The kind of young men His Grace wanted were not to be had when there was a war on. Those he was sent were ‘worse than useless’.⁶¹ They were as keen to leave him as he was to be rid of them.⁶² His wife, Evie, was dispatched to London on a desperate mission to recruit some new blood. Although Macmillan was not one of the young aristocrats Devonshire had in mind, Nellie Macmillan was an acquaintance of the Duchess of Devonshire from the pre-war charity circuit. Harold was laid in her path and snapped up with gratitude. When he stepped off the boat in Canada, he was greeted by a most eager employer. The bond was sealed by a game of golf. ‘He plays quite well and is much better than I am,’ noted Devonshire, for whom his own lack of prowess on the links was a constant lament. ‘Macmillan is certainly a great acquisition,’ the duke concluded.

On departing for Canada, Macmillan had planned to take a close interest in the North American political scene. The main interest of the Devonshire circle, as it turned out, was romance. The two Cavendish girls had been deprived of suitable male company for nearly three years and were more than a little excited by the arrival of so many eligible young bachelors. Lady Rachel Cavendish whisked the new ADCs straight off the boat to a dance. Within a month of their arrival Macmillan’s fellow ADC, Harry Cator, ‘a most attractive boy’, had to be disentangled from an unsuitable romantic attachment.⁶³ Unlike his friend, Macmillan was no young blade, but within months he had shown an interest in the Devonshires’ other daughter, Lady Dorothy. At the end of July the duke noticed that they had ‘got up early to go to M’ Jacques to see the sun rise’.⁶⁴ Devonshire regarded Macmillan as a perfectly acceptable match for his daughter.⁶⁵ Lady Dorothy herself seemed much less sure. ‘After tea,’ one day at the beginning of December 1919, ‘Harold proposed in a sort of way to Dorothy but although she did not refuse him definitely nothing was settled. She seemed to like him but not enough to accept and says she does not want to marry just yet.’ Her father was glad to see that ‘She seemed in excellent spirits. After dinner they went skating.’⁶⁶ Macmillan broke her down over Christmas. On Boxing Day 1919 ‘Dorothy and Harold settled to call themselves engaged’.⁶⁷ ‘I do hope it is alright,’ noted her father worriedly.⁶⁸ There was certainly something in the air that Canadian New Year which inclined the young to romance: two more of Harold’s fellow ADCs also became engaged.

When Harold Macmillan married Dorothy Cavendish in April 1920 at St Margaret’s, Westminster – the same church Oliver and Moira Lyttelton had used a few weeks previously – he committed himself to making money from publishing. At the same time he gained an entree into high politics. Devonshire was very fond of his new son-in-law. Indeed, he saw something of his young self in him. He himself had been an enthusiastic professional politician, a ‘painstaking’ financial secretary to the Treasury. In many ways his elevation to a great dukedom – which he inherited from his uncle – had deprived him of a career.⁶⁹

Devonshire gladly re-entered politics in October 1922 when the coalition disintegrated over Chanak. Victor Devonshire replaced Winston Churchill in the Cabinet as colonial secretary. While in Canada, Devonshire ‘found’, as Macmillan recalled, ‘that I was interested in political problems, he would discuss them freely with me’.⁷⁰ In London this habit continued – but now with much more interesting issues to mull over.⁷¹ Macmillan remembered calling on the duke during the course of the formation of Bonar Law’s government. ‘I found Lord Derby in conference with him. The Duke…pointed out the extreme weakness of the front bench in the House of Commons…“Ah,” said Lord Derby, “you are too pessimistic. They have found a wonderful little man. One of those attorney fellows, you know. He will do all the work.” “What’s his name?” said the Duke. “Pig,” said Lord Derby. Turning to me, the Duke replied, “Do you know Pig?”…It turned out to be Sir Douglas Hogg!’⁷²

The most pressing policy issue that Victor Devonshire had to face at the Colonial Office was the need for some kind of new relationship with two British colonies in Africa: Rhodesia and Kenya. Both were examples of entrepreneurial colonies – initially exploited by chartered companies. Each had a group of European settlers keen to lay their hands on as much political power as possible. Yet in Kenya and Rhodesia the white settlers were only a small proportion of the total population, the majority being made up of indigenous Africans. The dream of Commonwealth came directly into collision with the duties of trusteeship. The Colonial Office’s official view was that ‘whether therefore we look to natives for whom we hold a trusteeship or [a] white community which is insufficiently strong politically and financially – the obstacles to early responsible government…appear prohibitive’. In each case the solution in the eyes of civil servants in London was to incorporate these small but troublesome outposts of empire into some wider whole. In the case of Rhodesia, union with South Africa seemed to beckon; in the case of Kenya, closer association across the Indian Ocean with India. Whitehall had, however, underestimated the contrary spirit of the settlers. In both countries the settlers spawned rebarbative political leaders quite willing to defy the mother country.

In Southern Rhodesia the opposition was led by Sir Charles Coghlan, an Irish Roman Catholic lawyer from Bulawayo. In London Smuts might be hailed as the great imperial statesman-visionary. In Salisbury he was seen as little more than the frontman for Boer imperialism. When he declared that ‘the Union is going to be for the African continent what the United States has become for the American continent; Rhodesia is but another day’s march on the high road of destiny’, Rhodesian unionists took it as a signal that a republican South Africa might secede from the Empire. In November 1922 the settlers voted by 59.43 per cent to 40.57 per cent against union with South Africa.⁷³ Effectively they forced the British government to buy out the chartered South Africa Company and grant self-government. The negotiations created much ill-will. In July 1923 the Colonial Office gave the company two weeks to accept appropriation. Devonshire’s under-secretary, Cranborne’s brother-in-law and friend, Billy Ormsby-Gore, struck a deal that gave the company three and three-quarter million pounds and half the proceeds on government land sales until 1965.⁷⁴ The deal left a settler community confident in its own power to manipulate Britain and a disgruntled company that, all admitted, still dominated the economic life of its former domain.

Devonshire had even more problems with Kenya. ‘Afraid we shall have a very difficult matter with Kenya. The white settlers really make everything very difficult,’ he lamented.⁷⁵ The Kenyan settlers were led by the largest landowner and larger-than-life figure, Lord Delamere. In the summer of 1922 the Colonial Office and the India Office agreed that Indians should be able to settle freely in Kenya and should enjoy equal political rights to the European settlers. In January 1923 Devonshire ordered preparations to be made for a common voting role. The settlers’ leaders formed a so-called ‘Vigilance Committee’ to organize political and military opposition – an armed militia was embodied and plans drawn up to seize key points and kidnap the governor if need be. The settlers’ military organization was, in the context of East Africa, formidable and they were quite capable of carrying through a coup.⁷⁶ Faced with such extreme action, Devonshire invited both Delamere’s faction and Indian representatives to London for a conference. Delamere acted in considerable style: he took a house in Grosvenor Place that acted as a hub for an intensive lobbying effort. Out of it spewed articles and communiqués; in came journalists and people of influence for lunches, dinners and interviews. When Devonshire met Delamere in April 1923, the race issue was presented to him in unvarnished fashion: ‘If the Duke of Devonshire could see a typical row of Indian dukas in a Kenya township he would understand their feelings better,’ the settlers told Macmillan’s father-in-law. ‘Dirt, smells, flies, disregard of sanitation.’ Once more the key figure in the negotiations was Billy Ormsby-Gore. Gore was one of the champions of trusteeship who saw the settlers as an alien force getting in the way of what he believed would be a friendly and enduring paternal relationship between Britain and its native subjects. To the horror of many Kenyan settlers, the White Paper they received on 25 July 1923 – the same day as the Rhodesian settlement – met many of their political demands but firmly declared, ‘Primarily, Kenya is an African territory…[the] interests of the African natives must be paramount…His Majesty’s Government regard themselves as exercising a trust on behalf of the African population.’ Threats of armed revolt were made. To stave off trouble Devonshire agreed at the eleventh hour to instruct the governor of Kenya to prevent Indian immigration.⁷⁷

Macmillan had therefore seen at close quarters the reality of Britain’s position in Africa. It left him with a healthy distrust of all the parties involved. To his mind the South Africans had demonstrated themselves to be tinpot imperialists. The chartered company was exposed as a rapacious exploiter. Worst of all, the white settlers were revealed as turbulent bigots and potential traitors. All three posed a threat to the good governance of the Empire. Unlike his friend Crookshank, operating on the fringes of British power, Macmillan, sitting at the centre, took Smuts’s heady rhetoric with a large pinch of salt. Nevertheless his interest in politics was piqued quite as much. Billy Gore, a man only a few years older than himself, was very much the figure of the moment.

It was by now quite clear to Macmillan that if he wished to enter politics he would have do so under his own steam. Although Devonshire may have given him an outstanding insight into the workings of high policy, the duke was naturally much more concerned to bring forward his own son, Eddie Hartington, a mere year younger than Macmillan.⁷⁸ He was determined to nurse a seat for Eddie and give him as much exposure to office as possible. Macmillan enjoyed regular conversations, but Hartington accompanied his father to the office each day to gain experience.⁷⁹ Macmillan was never going to be the Cavendishes’ favoured son.

The Conservative party was, however, keen to recruit men like Macmillan. In 1923 he was adopted for the industrial seat of Stockton in north-east England. It was a world away from the kind of seats young aristocrats would be expected to fight. Macmillan faced an uphill struggle to win such a seat as a Conservative. The new leader of the Conservative party, Stanley Baldwin, favoured the introduction of protection – the levying of tariffs on foreign goods imported into Britain. He felt, however, that in order to requite previous promises he must call a general election before enacting such a policy. A year after Bonar Law had led the party to victory, Baldwin led it to defeat. Those contemporaries of Macmillan elected in 1923 tell the story: they were blue bloods in safe seats. Eddie Hartington entered Parliament much to his father’s delight – ‘a really very good, remarkable and satisfactory victory which he thoroughly deserves.’⁸⁰ Two Eton and Grenadier contemporaries also entered Parliament in 1923. One, Dick Briscoe, a particular friend of Crookshank, with whom he had been at Magdalen, was the scion of a wealthy Cambridgeshire gentry family. The other, Walter Dalkeith, a close friend of Cranborne, was the heir of the Duke of Buccleuch – the wealthiest of the great aristocratic landowners. It was a rather different story in marginal constituencies in the north of England. These were the very areas where Baldwin’s embrace of tariff reform seemed like a vote for dear food. Although he made a good job of campaigning, Macmillan’s bid for the Stockton seat was doomed to failure.

It was fortunate for Macmillan, and indeed Crookshank, that the immediate post-war years saw such frequent appeals to the country: there were general elections in 1918, 1922, 1923 and 1924. They would soon have another opportunity of getting elected. Macmillan was determined to give Stockton another try and Crookshank was sure that he wanted to try for Parliament at the next opportunity. This was despite the fact that he had been transferred from Constantinople to a another plum posting in Washington, with all the discomforts of Turkey left far behind. He had a beautiful apartment and, because many of his investments were in American stocks, was flush with dollars. Yet he felt little warmer to diplomacy. Whereas in Constantinople he had seen too much of Rumbold and Henderson, now he rarely saw the ambassador, Sir Esme Howard. To make matters worse, Howard had specifically requested the services of Crookshank’s Eton contemporary Jock Balfour, for which ‘I am sorry for I have no particular passion for JB’. Since Howard was the brother-in-law of Balfour’s aunt and treated him ‘as a member of the family’ the omens did not look good.⁸¹

Although neither Crookshank nor Macmillan were favoured sons, they were exactly the kind of candidate the party was looking for to fight marginal but winnable seats. They were young, energetic, of good family, well-educated with good war records. Although Crookshank was not married, his sister Betty was devoted to him and willing to throw herself into constituency work. Of overriding importance for both Central Office and the local party, moreover, was their independent wealth. Both Macmillan and Crookshank could and did finance their own constituency organizations for both day-to-day running costs and campaigning. Such men needed no links with their constituencies – they could parachute in at short notice. As Crookshank said, ‘I rather hate to think that one would have to be a real carpet-bagger but in these days it is apt to happen and after all [our] training ought to count for something.’⁸² With a minority Labour government in power, both men felt their chance would come soon.

Thus in September 1924, when the prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate for Gainsborough in Lincolnshire fell ill, the party put the constituency in touch with Crookshank as a man who could fill in at very short notice. Within a fortnight of him having been adopted, it became clear that an election was imminent. To considerable irritation in Whitehall, Crookshank resigned from the foreign service with immediate effect. ‘I burnt my boats,’ he wrote a few days before the poll, ‘so far as the FO was concerned “on spec”.’ What made the gamble worthwhile for both Macmillan and Crookshank was the changing nature of British politics. Although the Liberals were a declining force in national politics, they still maintained some of their strength at local level. Both Stockton and Gainsborough were three-way constituencies. The anti-Conservative vote was strong but split. It made 1924 the optimum year to run.⁸³

Apart from this feature of psephological geography, the two constituencies were quite dissimilar. Indeed, the different nature of their constituencies did much to shape Macmillan and Crookshank’s very different conduct in the 1924 Parliament. Stockton was in an industrial ‘rustbelt’, whereas Gainsborough was one of the most rural seats in England – even inhabitants of Lincoln regarded Gainsborough folk as a little yokelish. Neither candidate had much knowledge of local conditions. ‘It is really comic,’ Crookshank wrote soon after his election, ‘when you come to think of it that I represent an agricultural area…I shall never become an agricultural expert: I don’t want to!’⁸⁴ He was lucky in as much as he did not have to. Although he had to face a powerful local farming lobby which was often dissatisfied with the Conservatives, the combination of his support for protectionism and strong constituency work enabled him to convince his constituents that he was doing his best for them.⁸⁵ The most important gains that won the Conservatives the 1924 election, however, had been in industrial areas. These seats had once more become winnable because Baldwin abandoned protection in the wake of the 1923 defeat. Early declarations in the north had foretold the overall result: Salford, Manchester, Wakefield and then Macmillan’s Stockton, ‘a very fine performance’,⁸⁶ were the first seats to be announced, all swinging to the Conservatives.⁸⁷ The volatility of these seats was bound to make their MPs activists.

Both Macmillan and Crookshank knew that any institution had rules for getting on in life. As at school and university, there would always be competition from similarly equipped rivals. ‘Four recent Foreign Office people all got in,’ Crookshank noted, ‘Bob Hudson, Duff Cooper, John Loder and I – I am also one of the twelve Magdalen men and one of the twelve Old Grenadiers!’⁸⁸ The trick was to find a good approach and stick to it. Both arrived at Westminster with well-thought-out strategies for advancement. Both had every chance of success.

Crookshank’s plan was fairly conventional. He would establish himself as a noted speaker and expert. His impact would be such that the front bench would take notice and promotion would follow. As someone inspired by Smuts’s rhetoric, it was natural that he should be drawn towards foreign affairs. Given his family background and his own more recent diplomatic experience, he believed that he was splendidly equipped to make a big impression. He felt he would be marching to the same tune as the party hierarchy. ‘I have every confidence in Baldwin,’ he told a friend, ‘and I’m sure he is out for a big Imperial policy which is what we want.’⁸⁹ Even international events seemed to be moving in his favour. On 19 November 1924 Sir Lee Stack, the sirdar, or governor, of the Sudan had been murdered by an Egyptian nationalist in Cairo. As the new House of Commons assembled, the political world was abuzz with a new crisis in Anglo-Egyptian relations. Crookshank planned to use the opportunity of the debate on the address to make his maiden speech, creating what he hoped would be maximum exposure. Unfortunately for him, another Etonian, Grenadier diplomat had exactly the same idea. As Crookshank was working on his speech, Duff Cooper was at Hatfield working on a similar speech with the help of his friend Bobbety Cranborne.⁹⁰

Three years senior to the quartet, Cooper had established himself in London before the outbreak of the war. He had caused a stir by obtaining an appointment to the Foreign Office: the son of a successful surgeon, Cooper was one of the first non-aristocrats to be recruited to the administrative grade. He had ostentatiously not volunteered for the army but had been conscripted into the Guards and won a DSO towards the end of the war. Cooper’s greatest coup, however, was to marry Diana Manners, daughter of the Duke of Rutland and reputedly the most beautiful woman in England. The Rutland connection further enhanced Cooper’s standing. The Rutlands’ London home was next door to that of the Salisburys, for instance, and the two families were close. Cooper assiduously worked his connections – the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, the whips, the Speaker, the press lord Max Beaverbrook – to make sure he was called.⁹¹ His hard work was not in vain. Crookshank and other new MPs had to watch, consumed with jealousy, as Cooper was put on at a ‘wonderfully fortunate moment’.

He rose at seven o’clock in the evening. ‘Ministers and ex-Ministers hadn’t left the House – Lloyd George was there throughout and so was Baldwin.’ Austen Chamberlain came in and was heard to say to Baldwin, ‘I hear he’s very good.’ Cooper began by twitting the recently defeated government about the Zinoviev letter, a document published by the Daily Mail which purported to show that the Soviet Union was trying to stir up revolution in Britain, which many Labour MPs believed had lost them the election. It did not matter whether or not the letter was a forgery, Cooper claimed, the Labour party and the electorate knew ‘that Bolshevist propaganda was taking place in this country’. Moving on to the Egyptian situation, he mocked any suggestion that the League of Nations should become involved. ‘When,’ he asked, ‘you have appointed this commission of broad-minded, broad-browed, learned Scandinavian professors, what are you going to do?’ He lauded British rule to the skies. ‘We restored an independence which Egypt had not enjoyed since some time before Alexander the Great.’ He excoriated the idol of the Egyptian nationalists, Sa’ad Zaghloul, for having ‘indirectly inspired the hand that held the revolver and threw the bomb’.⁹²

The speech was a tour de force, as even his rivals had to admit. Crookshank could not contain his envy. ‘Duff Cooper made a very good speech for his maiden effort on Egypt. Subject matter good and a fair delivery, though rather too like a saying lesson at school. It was frightfully advertised – he lives (like or because of his wife) in a press atmosphere.’⁹³ ‘Duff Cooper,’ noted Cuthbert Headlam, Lyttelton’s fellow ADC in 1915, himself a new Tory MP in 1924, ‘is now a marked man.’⁹⁴ Headlam was quite right. One well-timed and well-delivered speech could make a political career. The plaudits poured in on Cooper. ‘I had,’ he wrote to his wife the next day, ‘a letter of congratulation from the Speaker which I gather is a rather unusual honour – and also one from Winston – all the evening people whom I didn’t know were coming up to me and congratulating me. In other words, baby, it was a triumph.’⁹⁵

The lead Cooper established over his contemporaries that night lasted for the rest of the decade. In 1929 William Bridgeman, a senior member of Baldwin’s Cabinet who had been much concerned with party management, noted that after Cooper ‘there did not seem to me anyone so markedly brilliant as to deserve immediate promotion from the back benches’.⁹⁶ Although Crookshank subsequently pursued his interest in eastern affairs, having missed his opportunity in December, it was to little effect. His first parliamentary question two months later on the subject of the ecumenical patriarch was hardly likely to set the heather on fire. His maiden speech was given not in the early evening of a great debate, as was Cooper’s, but late at night to a thin house. It was not a succès d’estime. It did cover foreign policy, but was chiefly noted for the dictum that, ‘The conduct of foreign affairs must be in the hands of the few,’ which, stated in such an unvarnished fashion, led to unflattering comparisons with Jim Salisbury.⁹⁷ Crookshank, who had come into politics knowledgeable about and fascinated by imperial affairs, was never able to take an opportunity to become involved in them.

Crookshank was nevertheless an able and quick-witted parliamentary speaker, in contrast to Macmillan, who tended to the ponderous. But this only seemed to gain him a reputation for idiosyncrasy, one of the last attributes desirable in a ministerial careerist. He was not helped by two aspects of his physical appearance. One he could not help. Early hair loss revealed a large cranium. He looked like nothing other than the spitting image of William Shakespeare. No newspaper seemed able to mention his name without alluding to this resemblance. His dress, on the other hand, was entirely his own choice. Until the outbreak of the Second World War he insisted on wearing a shiny topper to the House. He looked like a shorter version of Sir Austen Chamberlain – which was probably worse than looking like the Bard. No newspaper seemed able to mention his name without alluding to this resemblance either. Physically equipped for quirkiness, he started to make his name as a backbencher rather than as a potential minister. When another well-known House of Commons character, Commander Kenworthy, drew up his list of new MPs to watch, he noted that ‘the outstanding figure amongst the younger members is Mr Duff Cooper’. Crookshank was notable as one ‘who has realized that one of the first essentials of success in Parliament is to be always in his place’.

Instead of Asiatic affairs, Crookshank was increasingly drawn to quixotic affairs. His first great parliamentary set piece came in 1926 when he tried to wreck a government bill obviating the need for MPs to seek re-election when they became ministers. He managed to insult a number of groups: the party’s business managers, liberal Conservatives, Liberals who had become Conservatives. Labelling himself an ‘ultra-conservative’, he mocked, ‘Debates…extraordinarily busy with the question of safeguarding industries,’ and suggested that the Commons should instead ‘follow out the principle of safeguarding the present rights of the electorate’. He also had a dig at turncoats. In a considerable coup for the whips, two former Liberal Cabinet ministers had just defected to the Conservatives. Crookshank expressed the view that if such men, ‘in crossing the floor, were quite sure of office, then I think it is important and absolutely essential that the present safeguard should be maintained’. Not only was Crookshank intemperate, he also got his parliamentary procedure wrong. His amendment to the bill inadvertently implied that a Cabinet minister moving to another post in the Cabinet would have to seek re-election to the House of Commons. ‘It is the first time I have tried my hand at this kind of thing, and I am not a lawyer,’ was Crookshank’s somewhat lame excuse. His friend Charles Waterhouse, another of the 1924 intake, had to come to his aid, amending the amendment to make it coherent. To no one’s surprise this stand for parliamentary precedence over the convenience of the government was defeated by a large margin. Crookshank was also associated with another parliamentary revolt against Baldwin over the Prayer Book. Given his own Irish background and the fact that his Gainsborough seat contained the highest proportion of non-conformists in England,⁹⁸ Crookshank had little choice but to line up behind the home secretary, ‘Jix’ Joynson-Hicks, who believed the Church of England’s proposed new liturgy was papism by the back door. In this case he was part of the majority, but he had been dragged, this time reluctantly, into another quixotic fight.⁹⁹

Macmillan’s strategy for success was quite different from that of Crookshank. In part it derived from the constituency he represented. Stockton was one of the seats won by Baldwin’s abandonment of ‘dear food’. Yet a change of national policy was certainly not enough to secure the seat for any length of time. The MPs for the newly won northern seats had to be seen actively lobbying for the interests of their constituents if they were to stand a chance of keeping their places. So although Macmillan was more interested in foreign than domestic affairs, he could not afford the luxury of following his natural inclination. Support for industrial protection and urban relief was almost inevitable. Yet the manner in which Macmillan chose to prosecute his agenda revealed a sophisticated grasp of tactics. Crookshank’s stance as an independent member was positively Victorian, Macmillan’s was exceptionally modern.

The experience of the previous decade had changed the House of Commons. Of the ten years between 1914 and 1924, seven, 1915 to 1922, saw coalition government. The two years following the fall of Lloyd George had demonstrated a high degree of political instability. Although the Conservatives secured a massive majority in 1924, the clock could not simply be put back to 1900. The lessons learnt by ambitious backbenchers submerged within an overwhelming parliamentary majority were just as applicable to single-party as to coalition rule. The years of coalition had produced new forms of back-bench action. As the veteran political journalist Sir Henry Lucy noted at the beginning of the coalition period: ‘not since the days of Mr Gladstone’s prime as leader of the House of Commons has there been such activity in the creation of what were known as Tea Room Cabals. Now they are called Ginger Committees, their avowed patriotic purpose being to keep the Government on the hop.’¹⁰⁰

Some of these groups, such as the wartime Unionist Business Committee or the 1922 Committee, founded in 1923 as a form of self-help organization for new members, had over 100 members.¹⁰¹ Others, the ‘ginger groups’ proper, were much smaller. They tended to be bound together by some policy positions and a determination to support each other in the House. In effect they were a claque. If one member was speaking in a debate, the others would be sure to attend to give him support. They would cheer him to the echo and shout down anyone who attempted to intervene. Some of these groups were for or contained ideologues. Most, however, were means to an end. Successful parliamentary performance helped by one’s fellows, good publicity, the threat of limited acts of rebellion all helped to draw the attention of party managers to backbenchers. Soon members of the ginger group would find themselves asked to join the government as junior ministers. Careers would be launched and the claque would have served its purpose.

For an ambitious young liberal Conservative like Macmillan, the most notable group of this type was one launched in 1917, ‘to lunch together once a week and try to act together’, by a group of Tories interested in social reform.¹⁰² The political careers of its leading lights certainly prospered. By 1924 Billy Ormsby-Gore, whose successes had so piqued Macmillan’s ambition, was under-secretary at the Colonial Office, Top Wolmer, Bobbety Cranborne’s cousin, was parliamentary secretary to the Board of Trade, Walter Guinness was financial secretary to the Treasury, Eddie Winterton was under-secretary of state for India, Philip Cunliffe-Lister was president of the Board of Trade. Of most interest to Macmillan, however, was the rapid progress of Edward Wood, recently president of the Board of Education and soon to embark on the viceroyalty of India. Wood had publicized the views of the group – support for housing and agricultural subsidies, voting equality for women, regional devolution, support for the League of Nations – in The Great Opportunity, a short book co-written with George Lloyd, whose ADC Macmillan was to have been in 1919.¹⁰³ Macmillan had a great advantage as a member of any ginger group: he was a publisher. He could guarantee a first-class vehicle for any publication – however trite or boring. The ability to give or withhold the right of publication often grated with those not so blessed. One of the first clashes between Macmillan and Rab Butler occurred over Macmillan’s reluctance to publish propaganda for Butler’s campaign on India.¹⁰⁴ From his first day in the House, Macmillan was determined to be part of a ginger group.¹⁰⁵

It was entirely logical for Macmillan to concentrate his activities on ginger groups. What surprised many is how assiduously he stuck to the idea once it had become politically counter-productive. Indeed, until he finally entered the government in 1940 he displayed a positive passion for such cabals. For most of the 1924 to 1929 Parliament, however, the political strategy that had sent him down this road seemed to hold good. Macmillan rapidly became involved with two groups. One was the northern MPs: a regional alliance that was largely one of convenience – they would all sink or swim together. The other ginger group resembled more closely Wood’s successful model. By the middle of 1925 they were already being given names like the EYM (Eager Young Men).¹⁰⁶ Like its predecessor, it was made up of men drawn from the same political generation and at much the same point in their careers. At its core were two young aristocrats, Oliver Stanley and John Loder, two Scottish MPs, Bob Boothby and Noel Skelton, and Macmillan himself.

The aim of a ginger group was to benefit all of its members. It was inevitable, however, that some would be left behind. As the party managers selected the cream of the crop, the group would dissolve. The problem for Macmillan was that most of his new-found allies had more obvious talents than himself. John Loder had charm – he could get away with admitting that he would have joined the Liberal party if it had still been a credible political organization. Noel Skelton flung out interesting ideas with ‘reckless prodigality’. Oliver Stanley had impeccable political connections through his father, Lord Derby. He could afford to sow his political wild oats in the happy knowledge that the party leadership would view him with indulgence. Like Cooper’s, his maiden speech was heavily trailed and widely hailed. It made the right noises about political harmony. Also like Cooper, Stanley used humour well.¹⁰⁷ Some people regarded Stanley as an empty suit. The perceptive Cuthbert Headlam had dinner with Stanley and Macmillan at the end of their first year in Parliament. Of ‘the two rising hopes of the Conservative Party’ he said, ‘The latter strikes me as much the abler of the two, but of course the former has the greater backing’.¹⁰⁸ As a result it was Stanley who came to be regarded as a future liberal Conservative prime minister. Boothby was quite different. He was very young. Born in 1900, his war service had amounted to nothing more than training with the Scots Guards. There was something wild, even a little dangerous about Boothby. Both Macmillan and Boothby were offensive about the opposition in their maiden speeches. Whereas Cooper and Stanley had got their digs in by using humour, and had been well received, many were offended by Boothby and Macmillan. The difference was that Boothby was offensive with brio and panache. Macmillan tried to savage his opponent by reading him an essay.¹⁰⁹

Within two years, the eager young men of 1925 had acquired a more enduring sobriquet, the YMCA. It implied that they were keen but priggish, lecturing their elders on the best way to run things. Like all young, talented and ambitious men they aroused their share of animus. Yet they always kept on the right side of the party managers, claiming as their inspiration Baldwin himself. It suited the prime minister to be seen encouraging voices of progressive Conservatism. Part of his political strategy was to reach out to all non-socialists and form a grand union of the centre and the right.¹¹⁰ The YMCA were a useful tool in pursuit of that goal. Macmillan was convinced that ministerial office was just round the corner.

Like his model, Edward Wood, he intended to make his mark with a short book publicizing the ginger group. His first trial balloon for the book was a letter to The Times