by John Buchan
It is easy to see that he could never have been a popular leader. He profoundly distrusted rhetoric. He had no means of getting his personality across to masses of people, and, even if he had had the means, that personality could never have attracted the multitude; it was insufficiently coloured, too austere, too subtle. Gold must have some alloy in it before it can become coinage in circulation. But as an administrator he had no equal. In South Africa in a year or two he had rebuilt the land from its foundations and given it the apparatus of civilisation. The impress of his strong hand is still on its institutions. In the Great War, from 1916 to 1918, he was the executant of the War Cabinet who separated the sense from the nonsense in the deliberations of that body, and was responsible for its chief practical achievements. To him were largely due the fruitful things which emerged from the struggle, the new status of the Dominions and the notable advances in British social policy. Sometimes he was overruled, and he has been credited with schemes to which he was strongly opposed. In South Africa, for example, he differed about some of the more contentious measures dictated by military policy. In 1918 he advocated a liberal attitude towards the conquered Powers and protested in vain against certain extravagances of Versailles.
In what precisely lay his administrative genius? I can only give the impressions of a humble fellow-worker. In the first place he had in a high degree what Cavour called the tact des choses possibles. The drawback to a completely rational mind is that it is apt to assume that what is flawless in logic is therefore practicable. Milner never made that mistake; he knew too well the stubborn illogicality of facts. But he seemed to have an instinct for what was possible, an extra sense which must have been due to nature and not to experience, for he had not direct knowledge of very many walks in life. How often he would study a scheme of mine with, knitted brows, and lay it down with a smile. “Very pretty; but it won’t work!”
Next I should put the orderliness of his mind and his capacious memory. He could control any number of wires at once, for he had all the terminals in his hand. Things, too, were kept in their proper perspective; recollection did not amplify some and lessen others, for his mind did not make pictures, but did what Napoleon recommended, and saw facts in their true proportions as if through a telescope. Hence it was not necessary for him to concentrate on one matter rather than on another; he could keep a score steadily moving under his hand For finance he had a peculiar genius. Figures to him were real counters of thought, and a balance sheet as lucid as a page of print. A good accountant no doubt has this gift, but Milner supplemented it with a rarer endowment, the power of divining the item on which everything hung. He could do what the lumberman does in a log jam, and pick out the key log which, once moved, sets the rest going. He was thorough, too, scamping no detail, and not easily satisfied. I have gone over with him trivial contracts in connection with land settlement to which he gave all the diligence of a conveyancing counsel.
But his greatest administrative gift was his courage. He had what the French know as courage de tête, the boldness to trust his reason. When he had satisfied himself about a particular course — and he took long to satisfy — his mind seemed to lock down on it, and after that there was no going back. Doubts were done with, faced and resolved; he moved with the confident freedom of a force of nature. It was a dangerous gift for a statesman in a democracy where policy to the end must often be kept fluid, but, for the maker of a new country or the restorer of a broken one, it was an endowment beyond price.
For the better part of three years I had the privilege of watching this strong mind at work. But a higher privilege was that I was brought into close touch with a great character. Milner was the most selfless man I have ever known. He thought of his work and his cause, much of his colleagues, never of himself. He simply was not interested in what attracts common ambition. He could not be bribed, for there was nothing on the globe wherewith to bribe him; or deterred by personal criticism, for he cared not at all for fame; and it would have been as easy to bully the solar system, since he did not know the meaning of fear. He was a solitary man; but his loneliness never made him aloof and chilly, and in his manner there was always a gentle, considerate courtesy. I have worked with him often when he was desperately tired, but I never remember an impatient or querulous word. He was a stern judge of himself, but lenient to other people. Once I was involved in an unpleasant and rather dangerous business, for which I was not to blame, but the burden of which I was compelled to shoulder. I consulted Milner and he gave me the advice which he would have given himself, to go through with it whatever happened; it was the highest compliment I have ever been paid. For the humble and unfortunate he had infinite charity, and out of small resources he was always helping lame dogs. Often he got little gratitude, and when I would remonstrate he had the same answer: “The man’s miserable, and misery has no manners.”
II
Milner’s friends were his own college contemporaries and the young men whom he gathered round him. In those days we were a very young company, which Johannesburg, not unkindly, labelled the “Kindergarten.” Our doyen was Patrick Duncan, who had been brought out from Somerset House to take charge of the Transvaal’s finances. Milner himself and his personal staff lived in a red-brick villa, called Sunnyside, in the suburbs. His military secretary was Major William Lambton of the Coldstream Guards, and his aides-de-camp were Lord Brooke (afterwards Lord Warwick) and Lord Henry Seymour. Among the secretaries were Geoffrey Dawson, Lord Basil Blackwood, Hugh Wyndham and Gerard Craig Sellar. There was also a group who had special tasks assigned to them; it included Lionel Curtis, R. H. Brand, Lionel Hichens and Philip Kerr. Hugh Wyndham and I shared a staff cottage at the gate of Sunnyside, but most of my time was spent ranging the country from the Cape to the Limpopo.
It was a pleasant and most varied company, wonderfully well agreed, for, having a great deal to do, we did not get in each other’s way. Loyalty to Milner and his creed was a strong cement which endured long after our South African service ended, since the Round Table coterie in England continued the Kindergarten. When I look back upon that companionship my feelings are like those in Thackeray’s Bouillabaisse ballad and Praed’s poem on his Eton contemporaries, for since those days “the world hath wagged apace.” Lionel Curtis, having arranged the affairs of South Africa, India, China and Ireland, is a philosopher on the banks of the Cherwell; Lionel Hichens is head of a great shipbuilding firm, and Robert Brand an illustrious London banker; Philip Kerr is Lord Lothian, a political thinker of international repute, and now British Ambassador at Washington; Patrick Duncan is the present Governor-General of South Africa; Geoffrey Dawson has for many years controlled the Times.
Most are dead. Billy Lambton (whom I held in affectionate awe, for he used to take me riding before breakfast and expound my shortcomings) commanded the 4th Division at the battle of the Somme and shortly afterwards had a riding accident which made him a cripple for life. Henry Seymour had a distinguished War record, finishing as a brigadier-general, commanded his own regiment, the Grenadier Guards, and died in 1939. Guy Brooke, after adventures in many parts of the globe, had a Canadian brigade in the War and died in the first decade of peace. Gerard Sellar succeeded to great wealth, and his Highland home, Ardtornish, was the meeting place for all of us till his sudden death in 1929. With him something very rare and fine, generosity without limit and the kindliest, most whimsical humour, was lost to the world.
Of Basil Blackwood I had heard much at Oxford, but he was so often out of England on hunting trips and other ventures that I had never met him until I found him in South Africa. He was precisely such a figure as I had expected from his reputation. I remember him as he first appeared in that ugly office in Johannesburg, where we occupied adjacent rooms. Slight in build, with a beautifully shaped head and soft, dark, sleepy eyes, everything about him — voice, manner, frame — was fine and delicate. His air was full of a quiet cheerfulness, with a suggestion of devilment in the background as if he were only playing at de
corum. I can see him with his dog Gyp, walking with his light foot on the dusty red roads; or cantering among the blue gums, for he was never long out of the saddle. With his pointed face and neat black moustache he had the air of a Spanish hidalgo, and there was always about him a certain silken foreign grace. Once I saw the hidalgo capering down the road on an elegant mule; but a mule’s shoulders are precarious things, and the next I knew was that rider and saddle had gone over the beast’s head into the dust.
It was Basil who introduced the fantastic element that kept us from the usual ennui of a staff. His serene good temper was unshakable, and I do not think he was ever bored in his life. He had the expectant mood and was always waiting for adventure to turn up. In his official work he had some difficulty in restraining his propensity to make fun of things. He drafted despatches for Milner to sign, and I remember one which began: “With reference to my able despatch of such and such a date,” — an opening which, had it been sent in that form, would have startled the Colonial Office.
He was always drawing in that brilliant manner he had discovered for himself, for he had never been taught by anybody. I recollect hundreds of sketches, some of which I possess, admirable in wit and bold draftsmanship. He used to illustrate despatches for our private edification. One contained the information that “The Land Board is empowered to make advances to settlers.” Basil drew a picture of a gross and sentimental Land Board making advances to a coy settler. He and I projected a Child’s History of South Africa, for which he was to do the drawings and I the verses. The work had perforce to stop, having become too scandalous. My rhymes were bad enough, but Basil’s pictures of Dingaan’s Day and of some of the semitic kings of the Rand were an outrage.
Most of us returned from South Africa to our different professions, but Basil scorned his proper trade of the law, and preferred a life of interest to a career of success. The truth is he was not the kind of man who falls easily into a groove. He was too versatile, too much in love with the coloured aspects of life, and too careless of worldly wisdom. For one calling, indeed, he had the highest talent. Not for nothing was he the son of Lord Dufferin, Viceroy and Ambassador. He had an hereditary instinct for administration and diplomacy, and his gift of winning popularity, his charm of manner, his fine sense of atmosphere, his imagination and his very real love of his fellow-creatures would have made him the perfect colonial governor. He should have begun at the top, for he was better fitted for that than for any intermediate stage.
In one thing he was wholly successful. He was the most cherished and welcome of friends. Whenever he appeared he brought warmth and colour into the air. It is difficult to describe the fascination of his company because it depended on so many subtle things — a peculiar grace and gentleness of manner; a perpetual expectation, as if the world were enormously bigger and more interesting than people thought; a spice, too, of devil-may-careness, which made havoc of weary partition walls. He was an incomparable letter- writer, the best I have ever known save Raymond Asquith and T. E. Lawrence, and he had the extra advantage of being able to illustrate his epistles.
To him the first hint of war was like the first waft of scent to a pack of hounds. He was off like an arrow on the old search for adventure. He began by being attached to the 9th Lancers, and in October 1914 was badly wounded at Messines. After some time in Ireland he received a commission in the Grenadiers, and went to France early in 1917. In July of that year the British armies were beginning to get into position for the Third Battle of Ypres, and all along the front there was a succession of raids on the enemy lines. On the night of the 3rd Basil led one of these forays and did not return. It was of a piece with the anomalies of the War that a man of such varied powers and rich experience should fall at the age of forty-six as a second-lieutenant.
The phrase “Elizabethan,” too casually applied, can be used with truth of Basil. He was of the same breed as the slender gallants who singed the beard of the King of Spain and, like Essex, tossed their plumed hats into the sea in joy of the enterprise, or who sold their swords to whatever cause had daylight and honour in it. His like had left their bones in farther spaces than any race on earth, and from their unchartered wanderings our empire was born. He did not seek to do things so much as to see them, to be among them and to live in the atmosphere of wonder and gay achievement. He was not like Bron Lucas, a gipsy, for he was a creature of civilisation, but of another civilisation than ours. If spirits return into human shape perhaps his once belonged to a young grandee of the Lisbon court who stormed with Albuquerque the citadels of the Indies and died in the quest for Prester John. He had the streak of Ariel in him, and his fancy had always wings. “For to admire and for to see” was his motto. In a pedestrian world he held to the old cavalier grace, and wherever romance called he followed with careless gallantry.
III
My nominal post was that of assistant private secretary, but, apart from drafting a certain number of despatches, I had none of the ordinary secretarial duties. In that strenuous time it was a case of all hands to the pump, and I was given a series of emergency tasks which were intended to prepare the ground for a normal administration. Since the War had smashed the old machine it meant starting at the beginning and dealing in bold improvisations. Not many young men with an academic past are given such a chance of grappling with the raw facts of life. Mistakes were many, for the road was largely unmapped and we had to proceed by trial and error. But the worst blunder would have been supineness, and we were not supine.
My first job was to take over on behalf of the civilian government the concentration camps for women and children established by the army. These at the start, in spite of the best intentions, were no better than lazar-houses, for to bring into close contact people accustomed to living far apart was to invite epidemics. When we took charge the worst was over, and in our period of administration we turned them into health resorts, with the assistance of officers seconded from the Indian Medical service and a committee of English ladies under Dame Millicent Fawcett. The camps gave us a chance, too, of laying the foundations of a new system of elementary education. It was a queer job for a young man, whose notions of hygiene to begin with were of the sketchiest, and to whom infantile diseases were as much a mystery as hyper-space. The word of a bachelor carried no weight with the Boer mothers, so, in order to speak with authority, I had to invent a wife and a numerous progeny.
Next, with the end of the war in sight, we had to prepare for the repatriation of the Boer inhabitants from the commandos, the concentration camps, and the prisoner-of-war camps overseas. This was a heavy business, and it had to be done at racing speed. Since so much of the land was devastated, huts and tents and building material had to be provided in vast quantities; transport, too; horses and mules and cattle; seeds and every kind of agricultural implement; as well as rations for many months. We had the help of people with an intimate knowledge of the country, and the task was duly accomplished, though at a high cost owing to the necessity for speed. I have always considered repatriation a really creditable achievement. We had no luck, for the first year of peace saw a serious drought. Nevertheless, within a year from the treaty of Vereeniging burgher families to the extent of nearly a quarter of a million souls had been settled on their farms and equipped with the means of livelihood.
Simultaneously with this work I was instructed to prepare schemes of land settlement for newcomers, and the nucleus of a department of scientific agriculture. The hope of breaking down the racial barrier between town and country was always very near to Milner’s heart. He wanted to see the Dutch share in the urban industries, and men of British stock farming beside the Boers on the veld. For settlement we had a considerable amount of crown land, and we bought more in places where new farming methods could be tried. We looked forward to an era of mining prosperity, when the overspill from the cities would go to the land, and we also hoped to place in farms many soldiers from Britain and the Dominions who had fallen under the spell of South Africa. As
for agriculture, it was clear that we must have the best advice that science could offer. The existing quality of stock was poor, and the whole country was plagued by pests and honeycombed with disease. We needed first-class experts to advise us in every branch of husbandry.
