After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  During the Lloyd George-as-Napoleon era, the two major political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives or Unionists, had been dormant, patients etherized upon a table. When they awoke, the Liberal party found itself divided into two. Asquith, still leader of the party, presided over only a few dozen members of Parliament. The Lloyd George Liberals were larger in number but in much greater political disarray. The Labour party, which before the war had been a fledgling, formed the new party of radical opposition to the new-found strength of the Conservatives. This is the story of the swift changes of party leadership and of governments between 1922 and 1924, which saw the resignation of Lloyd George and the formation of Bonar Law’s Conservative government of October 1922; the succession of Baldwin’s Conservative government of May 1923; the first Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald in January 1924; and Baldwin’s second Conservative government in November that year.

  David Lloyd George had come to England as an idealistic young Welshman determined to poke fun at the Establishment and to achieve a measure of justice for Wales and for the disadvantaged. He was at heart a radical, and he had done more than many politicians to help the poor. By introducing the Old Age Pension Act of 1908, and a National Insurance Act in 1911 he began the principle, ever since enshrined in British law, that provision would be made for the sick and the old out of the public purse. As a wartime leader, he had brio, and the gift of the gab. He had taken over the government at a woeful stage of the war, and although the slaughter had continued for another two years, he had some claim to be – as he’d claimed during the 1918 election – The Man Who Won The War. His later antics, ranging from the botched Versailles Treaty to the bloodbath in Ireland, were not made any more dignified by his cynical sale of peerages. It was time for Britain to resume party politics, an imperfect and in some respects farcical ritual, but one which at least allowed for the possibility of the electorate giving the government the sack and replacing it with another. It was a Triumph of the Will that Lloyd George kept his coalition going for as long as he did.

  The coalition itself was maintained entirely by the Conservatives, but timidity had kept them from asserting independent political power. Then, in the summer of 1922, a crisis blew up in Greece. Mustafa Kemal, known to history as Ataturk, Father of the Turks (1881–1938), continued to fight the war against the Greeks. It was to be his ticket to popularity at home, and to enable him to abolish the Sultanate and unite Turkey behind him as a modern secular autocrat. In 1921 he had established a provisional government in Ankara, thus ending over a thousand years in which Constantinople was regarded as the imperial capital of the eastern Mediterranean. The military panache which had made him the hero of the Dardanelles led to a spectacular campaign against the Greeks when they invaded Anatolia. He massacred them by the thousand, took Smyrna, and by the end of the summer had advanced to the Straits and taken Chanak.

  With memories of the Allied disaster in the Dardanelles still green, Lloyd George would have liked to resist Kemal’s advance. Churchill and Birkenhead, his two allies in the coalition cabinet, forgot their earlier hostility to the Greeks and rallied to the cry of war, but they had misread the mood of the Empire and of their world allies. New Zealand, with prodigious heroism considering the numbers they had lost in Gallipoli, pledged support, but France and Italy were anxious to form alliances with Kemal, and most of the British Dominions were furious at not having been consulted about the policy. Australia and Canada were not going to provide Churchill and Lloyd George with more cannon fodder to be mown down by the Turks. Lloyd George decided to put the matter to the electorate. Still the timid Conservatives held back from breaking the coalition. Then there was a by-election in Newport and a candidate stood as a Conservative anti-Lloyd George candidate: that is, he broke away from the coalition, the mainstream Conservative line. He won the seat.

  The leader of the Conservatives in the Commons was Austen Chamberlain (1863–1937), son of Joseph. ‘He always played the game and always lost it,’ as Churchill observed. In 1922, his losing tactic was to commit himself wholeheartedly to coalition with Lloyd George. He summoned a meeting of the Tory MPs at the Carlton Club on 19 October 1922 and they voted overwhelmingly to go it alone and break the coalition. Chamberlain could hardly do other than resign as leader of the Conservatives. They elected as their leader the mortally sick Bonar Law.

  In French history, particular dates acquire a mythic status, so that streets can be named after them – Place du Dix-huit Juin, Rue du Quatre Septembre and so forth. The British have on the whole a less calendric approach to their historical mythologies. An exception is in the Conservative party, where their junta of back-bench members is known as the 1922 Committee in honour of the moment when they sacked one nonentity whom no one remembers, Austen Chamberlain, in favour of another, Bonar Law. The significance of Law, who was in any event dying of cancer, was that he was Beaverbrook’s candidate – Beaverbrook’s glove-puppet, as has been said. Now that he owned the Daily Express, and now that Northcliffe was dead, Beaverbrook’s megalomaniac political fantasies need know no bounds. He could see most of Law’s weaknesses, though he could not foresee quite how soon it would be before Law died. But Law would, for Beaverbrook’s purposes, do. He was an easily malleable figure, who would do what he was told when Beaverbrook summoned him to one of his residences, either the intimate Tudor house the Vineyard, Fulham, where the drawing-room had space for four people at most, or Cherkley in Surrey on larger country weekends.2

  Always with an eye, not merely to the present wielder of power, but to the man in the wings, Beaverbrook left an unforgettable image of Bonar Law’s hour of triumph in the Carlton Club: ‘Bonar Law came down the stairs of the Club alone. He was the man of the hour, the victor today, the premier tomorrow. His slight figure, with the deepest eyes and the lined features, held everyone’s gaze. No one among the onlookers paid much attention to the stocky little man, five feet nine inches in height* with the florid, almost bucolic features, the face still unmarked by care, the gait yet unhindered by twinges of gout, who was following his leader.’3 Not one of those present gave a thought to the possibility that in the guise of this unremarkable figure, this ‘typical Englishman’, destiny was stalking forward. Stanley Baldwin took, that morning, an obscure place on the stairway. But just the same he was a man of the future.4

  Bonar Law duly formed his government. Among the coalition Conservatives the only one who consented to serve in the new administration was Lord Curzon. He certainly had not seen the significance of the bucolic figure of Baldwin.

  Law’s cabinet was overwhelmingly aristocratic. This was because the big Conservative guns of Lloyd George’s coalition were still realigning themselves politically. F. E. Smith (Lord Birkenhead) was not ready to return and Churchill was still technically a Liberal. Law therefore assembled the most aristocratic cabinet there had been for a generation, with the Duke of Devonshire as colonial secretary, the Marquess of Salisbury as lord president, the Earl of Derby as secretary of state for War. Curzon continued as Foreign Secretary. The previous year, 1921, his earldom had been upgraded to a marquessate.

  His tragicomic career was about to reach its most painful moment. He must have believed, as he looked around the cabinet table early in 1923, that in many respects the old aristocratic order remained in England, shaken but not fundamentally changed since prewar days. And

  * Beaverbrook’s height was also five foot nine inches in his socks, see A. J. P. Taylor, Beaverbrook, here.

  there were some respects in which this was true. The old order had been given a terrible pounding by the war. Twenty-nine thousand small country estates throughout Britain would come on the market in the decade 1920–30, and one reason for this was that the occupants had lost their sons; the village war-memorials throughout the British Isles, and the memorial plaques in the public schools, the London clubs and the Oxford and Cambridge colleges show the devastation visited upon the old aristocracy and squirearchy. Yet the class which had taken over the
government of Britain in 1689 was remarkably resilient, partly because, unlike its Continental equivalents, it saw nothing wrong with injecting cash and talent from outside its ranks. Curzon himself exemplified this. His first wife was Mary Leiter, the daughter of a Chicago millionaire. When he was left devastated by her loss, he remarried, and to another American. Grace Duggan was a doll-like pretty woman in her thirties when Curzon began to woo her. She was the widow of an immensely wealthy Argentinian–Irish financier. When Curzon was denied the ultimate political prize of becoming the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour remarked that ‘even if he has lost the hope of Glory, he still has the means of Grace’.5 It is a bore to explain jokes, but only a very small number of people now read the Book of Common Prayer, which in 1924 was still very familiar to a majority of the British, or at least to the English. In the General Thanksgiving in that book, Almighty God is thanked ‘above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory’.

  Curzon was indeed to be disappointed. When Bonar Law was told by his doctors, in May 1923, that he had incurable cancer of the oesophagus, he resigned at once. He died on 30 October, and was the first prime minister after Gladstone to be buried in Westminster Abbey. It was a singular honour for so totally undistinguished a figure, but it allowed Asquith to make his joke about the Unknown Prime Minister being buried near the tomb of the Unknown Warrior. To George Nathaniel Curzon, marquess, former viceroy of India, there could have been no doubt about the monarch’s choice for Bonar Law’s successor. Law had hinted to Lord Stamfordham, the King’s Private Secretary, that Curzon should succeed him, but when he heard of his impending death he stood aside from the political struggle and left matters in the hands of his own Parliamentary Private Secretary, a backroom fixer named John Colin (later Viscount) Davidson. He telephoned the king’s secretary before Law announced his resignation to warn him of what was coming, recommending that the King, if he wished to make consultations, should speak to Salisbury or Balfour. Both these grandees disliked Curzon, and their dislike had been intensified by his breaking ranks to serve in Law’s cabinet, rather than staying with the ‘coalition Conservatives’. Salisbury, when asked his view of Curzon, gave the devastating opinion that the Foreign Secretary’s ‘faults were improving’. Balfour had a long meeting with the king in which he stressed that it was no longer easy to have a Prime Minister in the House of Lords. Davidson drafted a memorandum which began with the fateful words: ‘Lord Curzon is regarded in the public eye as representing that section of privileged Conservatism which has its value but in this democratic age …’6

  Poor George Nathaniel remained, aloof and unaware that any of this was going on, at Montacute, a great Elizabethan country house in Somerset whose lease he had taken while he waited, first for his father Lord Scarsdale to die, which he had done in 1916, and secondly to have the time and money to renovate his most beautiful house, Kedleston in Derbyshire, designed by Robert Adam. (He had also bought Bodiam Castle in Sussex and its estate in 1917.) Curzon’s favourite great house was Hatfield, the Elizabethan stronghold of the Cecils, a powerhouse of the greatest political dynasty in Conservative history. Montacute was a house which allowed Curzon to imagine himself a Cecil, especially when it had been done up by his mistress, the novelist Elinor Glyn. (She had spent much time and energy on the task and referred to George Nathaniel as ‘an ungrateful sneaking cad’ when he dumped her for Grace.)7 It was at Montacute that he awaited his sovereign’s call – Montacute, that Elizabethan pile where he could imagine himself as a worthy successor to the greatest Victorian Tory Prime Minister, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury. When one writes that Curzon awaited the call, he did not await anything so newfangled or so vulgar as a telephone. He regarded this as ‘a disastrous invention’. It was on Whit Monday, as the Foreign Secretary was cutting the lawn at Montacute in his shirt sleeves, that he saw what he had been awaiting for several days, the uniformed figure of the village policeman cycling up the drive bearing a telegram from His Majesty’s secretary. Curzon sent back his message that he would receive Lord Stamfordham the following afternoon at Carlton House Terrace.

  On their way back to London, the Marquess and his American Marchioness sketched out their future together. They would not move into the poky Number 10 Downing Street, but would continue to reside at Carlton House Terrace. He would remain as Foreign Secretary as well as Prime Minister. What of ecclesiastical appointments? These too had their interest, and he spoke of them, as the train bore him towards the capital.

  When they arrived at the front door Curzon was informed by his valet that Lord Stamfordham had been delayed. This was Curzon’s first inkling that all was not well. At half-past three, Stamfordham arrived, stammering and embarrassed. He tried to tell him that the king had considered the merits of another candidate. Curzon expostulated. He had made no secret of the fact that he considered Baldwin ‘a man of the utmost insignificance’.8 If Baldwin were chosen, it would be necessary, said the former viceroy, for Curzon to withdraw from public life. Stamfordham was too cowardly to tell the marquess that the pipe-smoking ironmaster from the West Midlands had kissed his sovereign’s hands and become the Prime Minister several hours earlier. It was a shattering blow to Curzon, and when he died, aged sixty-six, on 19 March 1925 it could be said that he died of a broken heart. Had he been less arrogant, perhaps Curzon might have stood a chance. But it is hard to doubt that it was not merely his aristocratic hauteur which was held against him; it was his cleverness. The Conservative party, with its horribly accurate political ‘nose’, could see that the country wanted ‘a man of the utmost insignificance’.

  Baldwin, who had persuaded his colleagues to see him as a safe pair of hands, almost immediately plunged his party into a self-destructive quarrel about the old question of tariff reform. It had been the issue which sundered the party under Arthur Balfour’s premiership. Rather like British membership of the European Union in the post-1975 era, the matter of tariff reform called forth in Tory ranks all manner of deep doctrinal and atavistic divisions.

  Law had fought the 1922 election with the pledge that he would not introduce tariffs without consulting the electorate, so Baldwin could claim he was duty-bound to call an election when he hitched the Conservative party to protectionism. It seemed a necessary measure at the time to fight rising unemployment. But Baldwin was before everything else a politician. He was watching his own party, and the Liberals, always edgy that they might outmanoeuvre him. This matter of Free Trade versus Tariff had divided the Tories since the beginning of the century. Lloyd George had gone to America, on a successful speaking-tour, and rumour reached Baldwin that ‘the Goat’ was about to announce the Liberal party’s conversion to protection. If he did so, where would that leave the Tories?

  If he needed to keep an eye on the Liberals, Baldwin was even more nervous about his enemies within his own party. There were grumbles from the moment of his selection. Some would have preferred to replace him with F. E. Smith (Lord Birkenhead), and they probably would have done so if Smith’s private life had not been scandalous. He was clever – ‘the cleverest man in the kingdom’, Beaverbrook believed. He made a brilliant career at the Bar, and he was one of the best speakers in the House of Commons. His obsession with one of his friend’s schoolgirl daughters was really what appalled the stuffier of his parliamentary colleagues. He seduced Mona Dunn when she was still in her teens. She was a great beauty, painted by Orpen. She would dance on the tables till dawn in the Criterion Restaurant. When she died, aged twenty-six, of peritonitis, Birkenhead wrote her a sonnet which he asked Beaverbrook to publish in the Sunday Express, but the request was refused. Such abandon did not suit the mood of the Conservative party. Although politicians could rely on the Press in those days not to print stories of their emotional lives – else, how would Lloyd George, or Asquith, or Curzon, have survived? – the new mood was for a party which espoused middle-class respectabilities. Baldwin, with his family b
usiness as an ironmaster, his pipe, his homely values, and his somewhat lugubrious mustachioed health minister, Neville Chamberlain, Austen’s half-brother, made much more suitable images to present to the electorate at large. There was not yet television to reveal or distort the appearance and behaviour of politicians for the voters, but there was ‘image’, projected in part by the newspapers, in part by the number of public meetings which politicians underwent during electioneering campaigns.