by Roy Jenkins
Despite his provenance he had no real roots in Birmingham, even though he represented it or its suburbs in Parliament for forty-five years, and divided his time between South Kensington and a small house in Sussex with a rock garden and the unfortunate name of Twitt’s Ghyll. He was however a man of exceptional loyalty, decency, and, towards the end, experience. He was a junior minister (1895-1902), Postmaster-General (1902-3), Chancellor of the Exchequer (1903-5), Secretary of State for India (1915-17), Chancellor of the Exchequer (1919-21), Lord Privy Seal (1921-2), Foreign Secretary (1924-9), and First Lord of the Admiralty (August-October 1931). He was twice on the route to the Prime Ministership but did not press his own claims. In the memorable words of F. E. Smith, ‘He always played the game and he always lost it.’ An even more vivid portrait of him is conjured up by a mid-1920s incident at Polesdon Lacey, Mrs Ronald Greville’s indulgent house in the Surrey hills. Displeased by the performance of her inebriated butler at dinner, she scribbled, ‘You are very drunk; leave the room immediately’ on a piece of paper and handed it to the miscreant servant, who mistily surveyed the room, decided without difficulty where the message would make most impact, and placed it first on a silver salver and then before Sir Austen Chamberlain.
Arthur James COOK (1885-1931) was born at Wookey in Somerset, the son of a regular soldier, but emigrated early to the Rhondda where he worked underground for twenty-one years. In 1918 he became a full-time union official and in 1924, succeeding the oversupple Frank Hodges, he became General Secretary of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, then the largest trade union in the world. Cook, not dissimilar in appearance (but only appearance) from Mr Neil Kinnock, incited vast audiences, preferred oratory to negotiation, presided over a reduction of nearly 40 per cent in the membership of the MFGB, and drove himself into an early death at the age of forty-six.
Alfred Duff COOPER (1890-1954), cr. 1st Viscount Norwich 1952, began and ended his career as a diplomat, in the latter phase Ambassador to the French Committee of National Liberation (1943-4) and then to France (1944-7). In the interval he married Lady Diana Manners, was MP for Oldham (1924-9) and for St George’s (1931-45). He was an irascible, high-living flâneur, who was much-loved by his coteries, a talented historical writer and a politician of courage, although an indifferent minister. He was Secretary of State for War (1935-7) and First Lord of Admiralty, (1937-8). Nothing became his occupancy of these service ministeries so much as his leaving; he resigned over Munich. He was no more successful as Minister of Information in 1940-1, or in Singapore before the invasion.
George Nathaniel CURZON (1859-1925), son and heir of the 4th Lord Scarsdale (to which title he succeeded in 1916), was created Baron Curzon in the peerage of Ireland 1896 (and sat in the House of Lords as an Irish Representative peer from 1908), Earl Curzon of Kedleston 1911, and Marquess Curzon of Kedleston 1921. He was Conservative MP for Southport from 1886 to 1898, when at the age of thirty-nine he was made Viceroy of India, in which great office he experienced both success and chagrin before returning home in some disorder in 1905. He led the ‘hedgers’ against the ‘ditchers’ in the Conservative split over the degree of House of Lords resistance to the Parliament Bill in 1911, preferring retreat to the danger of massive dilution of the peerage. He was Lord Privy Seal (1915-16), Lord President and a member of the small War Cabinet (1916-19), Foreign Secretary (1919-24), and Lord President again from November 1924 until his death. He married two rich Americans, one in 1895 and the second in 1917, and used their wealth to sustain the great titles and the second and third country estates (at Hackwood and Montacute) which he added to the Scarsdale inheritance at Kedleston, but which all fell away with his death. He was a highly intelligent but occasionally ridiculous grandee, a richly anecdotal figure, devoted to public service, whose strength of character did not match his imposing manners and appearance.
Ronald McNeill (1861-1936) was a Kent MP from 1911 until he was created Lord CUSHENDUN in 1927 and entered the Cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Previously he had been Financial Secretary to the Treasury under Churchill, which was interesting, for McNeill’s most famous parliamentary activity had been to throw a copy of the Standing Orders at Churchill during an Irish Home Rule scene in November 1912, cutting his face quite badly.
J. C. C. DAVIDSON (1889-1970), cr. 1st Viscount Davidson 1937. Unpaid private secretary at the Colonial Office to Lord Crewe (1910) and Lewis Harcourt (1910-15); and to Bonar Law (1915-20) in successive offices. Conservative MP for Hemel Hempstead (1921-3 and 1924-37). Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster for most of Baldwin’s periods of office. Chairman of the Conservative Party (1927-30). Married, 1919, to Joan (Mimi) Dickinson (died 1985), who succeeded him as MP for Hemel Hempstead (1937-59; herself a life peer as Baroness Northchurch from 1963), whom he had met through Baldwin, and to whom Baldwin remained devoted, as to Davidson, throughout his life.
Geoffrey DAWSON (1874-1944), editor of The Times (1912-19 and 1923-41), was born Geoffrey Robinson but changed his name by Royal Licence in 1917 (a fashionable year for name changes: King George V moved from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor) in order to inherit a substantial landed property in Yorkshire. He occupied the gap of 1919-23 as Estates Bursar of All Souls College, Oxford. The Times under Dawson was almost a great department of state rather than a mere newspaper and its editor almost an honorary member of the Cabinet. He gave lifelong adherence to his chosen heroes, Milner, Baldwin, Neville Chamberlain and Halifax. In his first editorship he wrote the leader which precipitated the fall of Asquith. Towards the close of his second he wrote the one which presaged the Munich agreement and the fall of Czechoslovakia.
Edward Stanley, 17th Earl of DERBY (1865-1948), Secretary of State for War, (1916-18 and 1922-4), Ambassador to Paris (1918-20). As a tribute to his great estates, personal popularity and regional political influence, he was sometimes called ‘the King of Lancashire’. Lloyd George, who used him a lot, found him more like a cushion which always bore the imprint of the last man who sat upon him. (This remark, however, is sometimes given other attributions both as to subject and to speaker.)
Victor Cavendish, 9th Duke of DEVONSHIRE (1868-1938), succeeded his uncle, the Marquess of Hartington of Liberal Unionism, in 1908. A junior minister (1903-5 and 1915-16), Governor-General of Canada (1916-21), where his ADC, Harold Macmillan, became engaged to his daughter, Lady Dorothy Cavendish, Secretary of State for the Colonies (1922-4). He occupied high office, but had less brio than most Dukes of Devonshire of the past hundred years.
Bolton EYRES-MONSELL (1880-1969), cr. 1st Viscount Monsell 1935, was a fellow Worcestershire MP with Baldwin for twenty-five of the latter’s twenty-nine years in the House of Commons, sitting for the South or Evesham division from 1910 to 1935. He was a former naval officer who after twelve years in the Conservative Whips’ Office, eight of them as Chief Whip, became First Lord of the Admiralty (1931-6).
Lord Edmund FITZALAN-Howard (1855-1947), younger son of the 14th Duke of Norfolk, changed his surname to Talbot in 1876 to comply with a will and then changed it back again in 1921 when he was created 1st Viscount FitzAlan of Derwent. He was MP for Chichester from 1894 to 1921 and Conservative Chief Whip for six years from 1915.
Sir Auckland Campbell GEDDES (1879-1954), cr. 1st Lord Geddes 1942. A former Professor of Anatomy at Edinburgh, Dublin, and McGill University, Montreal. He was a Lloyd George minister (President of the Board of Trade for the last year) before he went to Worthington for four years in 1920. His elder brother, Sir Eric Geddes, a railway engineer, was also a minister from 1917 to 1921, before becoming chairman of the Dunlop Rubber Company and of Imperial Airways. It was he, not Sir Auckland, who in 1918 promised to ‘squeeze the German lemon until the pips squeak’ and in 1922 wielded the ‘Geddes axe’. The Geddes brothers were Lloyd George discoveries rather in the way that the Young brothers were Mrs Thatcher’s.
Edward (Paddy) GOULDING (1862-1936), cr. Lord Wargrave 1922, was a rich businessman, later chairman of Rolls-Royce, MP for Devizes
(1896-1906) and for Worcester City (1906-22). He was the owner of a luxurious Thames-side residence at Shiplake, where he became a backbench dispenser of hospitality and manipulator of politics of sufficient note to be made successively a baronet, a privy councillor and a peer by the Coalition Government. (He was lucky to achieve his honours before Baldwin became leader of the Conservative Party.) His father had been an Irish landowner.
Douglas McGarel Hogg (1872-1950), cr. 1st Viscount HAIL-SHAM 1928. Attorney-General (1922-4 [January] and 1924 [November]—1928). Lord Chancellor (1928-9 and 1935-8). Secretary of State for War and Leader of the House of the Lords (1931-5). The son of Quintin Hogg the founder of the Regent Street Polytechnic and the father of Quintin Hogg (2nd Viscount Hailsham 1950-63, Mr Hogg again 1963-70 and Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone 1970; Lord Chancellor 1970-4 and 1979-).
Edward Wood (1881-1959), cr. Lord Irwin 1925, succeeded as 3rd Viscount HALIFAX 1934, cr. 1st Earl of Halifax 1944, KG, OM, was a dedicated, dignified and mostly far-sighted intendant of the declining years of British power. As Viceroy (1925-31) he saw the inevitability of Indian self-government. At the Foreign Office (Lord Privy Seal and then Lord President, 1935-8, and Secretary of State, February 1938-December 1940), he supported Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement more out of pessimism than optimism. Nonetheless he was within a hair’s breadth of becoming Prime Minister in May 1940. A lot of people who ought to have known better, from Herbert Morrison to Hugh Dalton, preferred him to Churchill at that stage. Fortunately, Halifax did not share their view. His third great post was as Ambassador to Washington (1941-6), where he played a notable role in getting the new world to redress the balance of the old. Baldwin had a great respect and regard for Halifax (or Wood as he then was) and made the inspired choice of sending him to Delhi. For the rest, however, he kept making him President of the Board of Education (1922-4 and 1932-5), a post which, despite being a Fellow of All Souls and Chancellor of the University of Oxford (1933-59), singularly failed to stir Halifax’s imagination. While holding it he frequently hunted two days a week during the parliamentary session.
Sir Maurice HANKEY (1877-1963), cr. 1st Lord Hankey 1939, was a major of Marines when he became assistant secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence in 1908. In 1912 he became secretary of that body. In 1916 he became the first secretary of the (War) Cabinet. Both these posts he held until he retired in 1938, adding to them the clerkship of the Privy Council in 1923. So indispensable had he become that he was recalled to serve in Chamberlain’s Cabinet in 1939 and continued as a minister under Churchill until 1942. With perfect impartiality he dedicated his memoir of The Supreme Command (in World War I) to Balfour, Asquith and Lloyd George.
Alexander HARDINGE (1894-1960). In 1944 he succeeded his father who had been twice permanent under-secretary of the Foreign Office on either side of being Viceroy of India (1910-1916) as 2nd Lord Hardinge of Penshurst. He was a full-time courtier from 1920 to 1943, and a part-time one for the rest of his life. He served King George V, King Edward VIII, King George VI and the present Queen. He had not been with the King as Prince of Wales, but had sixteen years’ training as assistant private secretary to King George V. They had not been lost upon him.
Sir Samuel HOARE (1880-1959), cr. 1st and only Viscount Templewood 1944. He was MP for Chelsea (1910-44), Secretary of State for Air (1922-4 and 1924-9), Secretary of State for India (1931-5), Foreign Secretary (disastrously) in 1935, First Lord of the Admiralty (1936-7), Home Secretary (1937-9), Lord Privy Seal (1939-40), Secretary of State for Air (again) (1940) and Ambassador to Spain (1940-4). He was never a close friend of Baldwin’s -1 think he was too dapper and quick on his feet (President of the National Skating Federation) for the leader’s ideal taste, but he was a central man of government of the Baldwin era, adaptable and available. He was notably liberal on Indian and on penal questions at the Home Office, but acquired a perhaps unfair reactionary reputation as a result of the ‘Hoare-Laval Pact’ (pages 139-43 supra) and his wartime mission to General Franco.
Sir Robert HORNE (1871-1940) cr. 1st and only Viscount Horne 1937. MP for the Hillhead division of Glasgow, 1918-37. Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1921-2. A son of the manse and educated entirely in Scotland, his only address for the last decades of his life was 69 Arlington House, Piccadilly, London, Wl. A bachelor, he was addicted to nightclubs. Baldwin did not like him, and referred to him as ‘that rare thing—a Scots cad’ (Middlemas and Barnes, Baldwin, page 282).
Sir Thomas INSKIP (1876-1947), cr. 1st Viscount Caldecote 1939, was a notable lawyer, a KC since 1914, and a churchman of firm evangelical persuasion. He was a Law Officer for most of the fourteen years from 1922 to 1936, unusually reverting to being Solicitor after having been Attorney when the National Government was formed in 1931, but becoming Attorney again in 1932. After three years as Minister for the Coordination of Defence (1936-9), which was a non-job with no department and few staff, he was elevated on the outbreak of war to become Lord Chancellor (although to be moved from Defence when a war begins is not perhaps the greatest compliment). In May 1940 he had to be moved again in order to make room for Simon on the Woolsack as Churchill wished to exclude his colleague in pre-1914 Liberal Cabinets from any part in the direction of the war without humiliating him. Happily for Inskip a vacancy was possible on the traditional ‘Attorney-General’s pillow’ of the Lord Chief Justiceship of England, which he occupied for the next six years. He was however the end of the tradition. No subsequent Attorney has become Lord Chief Justice. Nor had anyone before him gone to the Chief Justiceship via the Woolsack.
Dr Thomas JONES, CH (1870-1955) was both an important chronicler of Baldwin’s reaction to events and a valued and sympathetic confidant. He was the eldest son of the storekeeper of the mining ‘company shop’ at Rhymney, the only Welsh-speaking part of Monmouthshire. He left school at thirteen but then got himself to the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth, before proceeding to Glasgow University, where he stayed as student and lecturer for fifteen years. Then he became briefly Professor of Economics at Queen’s University, Belfast. He went back to Wales as a protégé of David Davies of Llandinam, almost the only philanthropic Welsh coal-owner, and his sisters, the Misses Davies of Gregynog, who combined spinster-hood with the accumulation of a remarkable collection of French impressionists, which today repose (when not in Japan) in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. Through the Davies family he met Lloyd George, who inducted him to Whitehall in 1916, first as assistant then as deputy secretary of the Cabinet. The creation of a Liberal Prime Minister, Jones cast a gentle Labour vote throughout his life, but got along best with his Conservative masters, first with Bonar Law and then, much more strongly, with Baldwin. On his retirement in 1930 he became secretary and later chairman of the Pilgrim Trust. He founded Coleg Harlech, the adult education college in Merionethshire. Some people would say that, after Lloyd George, he was the greatest Welshman of the first half of this century, others that he was a little Welsh toady. I think that his relationship with Baldwin is perfectly expressed by the photograph reproduced between pages 64 and 65.
Sir William JOYNSON-HICKS (1865-1937), cr. 1st Viscount Brentford 1929. A prosperous solicitor, widely known as Jix, he was very keen on motoring and on police raids to seize the works of such notorious pornographic authors as Radcliffe Hall and D. H. Lawrence.
Cosmo Gordon LANG (1864-1945), Archbishop of Canterbury (1928-42), cr. Lord Lang of Lambeth 1942, had a perfectly shaped ecclesiastical career. Ordained in 1891, he was vicar of the University Church at Oxford (1894-6), then for five years of Portsea (in Portsmouth), which for 100 years bred bishops as Whitstable bred oysters, then suffragan Bishop of Stepney (1901-9). Then (a great step at the age of forty-five) Archbishop of York, then of Canterbury nineteen years later. He also had an almost perfectly shaped ecclesiastical face, the best since Cardinal Manning. Unlike Manning, however, he did not start in the Church of England. His father was a Scots Presbyterian, Principal of Aberdeen University and sometime Minister of
Anderston, Glasgow. Neither these attributes nor his presidency of the Oxford Union and fellowship of All Souls prevented his being widely regarded as an unctuous prelate. After a censorious broadcast at the time of the Abdication (a year later), Gerald Bullett (1893-1958, prolific author and general man of letters) wrote a satirical quatrain which was almost the last example of the bitter political verse which, with differing prejudices and rhythms, Kipling, Belloc and Chesterton had produced a generation before:
My Lord Archbishop what a scold you are!
And when your man is down how bold you are!
Of Christian charity how scant you are!
And auld Lang swine how full of Cantuar!
Sir David LOW (1891-1963), knighted 1962, was a New Zealander who came to London in 1919 and did his most notable work, including the creation of Colonel Blimp, on Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard from 1922 to 1950. He shared little of his proprietor’s outlook except for his irreverence. He was the most notable political cartoonist of his generation.
Captain David MARGESSON (1890-1965), cr. 1st Viscount Margesson 1942, was MP for West Ham (1922-3) and for Rugby (1924-42). He served in the Conservative Whips’ office for sixteen of his eighteen years as member for Rugby and was Chief Whip 1931-40. Churchill in 1940 surprisingly rewarded this organizer of the solid Baldwin and Chamberlain majorities of the ‘years of unpreparedness’ by making him Secretary of State for War (1940-2).
Major-General Sir Frederick MAURICE (1871-1951) was a Cambridge intellectual (the grandson of F. D. Maurice, one of the founders of Christian Socialism, and the father of Joan Robinson, the economist) who as a professional and successful soldier played a significant if inadvertent part in the break-up of the Liberal Party. As Director of Military Operations at the War Office in 1918 he publicly accused the Prime Minister of inaccurate statements about the strength of the army in France. In the House of Commons debate which followed, Asquith voted for the first time against the Lloyd George Government. Those Liberals who voted with him were refused ‘the coupon’ at the general election at the end of that year.
