by Roy Jenkins
Reginald McKENNA (1863-1943). MP for North Monmouthshire (1895-1918). Financial Secretary to the Treasury (1905-7), President of the Board of Education (1907-8), First Lord of the Admiralty (1908-11), Home Secretary (1911-15), Chancellor of the Exchequer (1915-16), chairman of Midland Bank (1919-43). I find him one of the most insubstantial figures of the first half of the twentieth century. He sat in Parliament for twenty-three years for the constituency (in 1918 renamed Pontypool, now foolishly re-renamed Torfaen) in which I was brought up and which my father subsequently represented; he held two great offices of state (Home Secretary and Chancellor) which I was subsequently to occupy; he was one of the three or four closest governmental friends of Asquith, about whom I have written at length; yet for me he has no more solidity than the powdered wings of a butterfly. McKenna, however, was never crushed. He was always successful, sought after, but without substance. The 1948 biography of hirn by his nephew Stephen McKenna, successful and prolific novelist, lacks shape, style, photographs and an index. It is no good on his provenance (surely a nepotic biography should have managed that), his beliefs, his wife or why as an ex-senior minister and chairman of a major bank for twenty-four years he never became a peer. Perhaps he always wished to be available to be offered the Chancellorship, even if not to accept.
Sir Walter MONCKTON, KC (1891-1965), cr. 1st Viscount Monckton of Brenchley 1957. He was a highly agreeable and talented lawyer who believed in accommodation rather than confrontation, and was appropriately Minister of Labour in the second Churchill Government. Less appropriately he was Minister of Defence in the subsequent Eden Government. He disapproved of the Suez adventure, but, true to his desire for accommodation, allowed himself to be moved sideways (and a little downward) to the Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster, rather than resigning. He left politics three months later, and like a number of other politicians found the Midland Bank eager to welcome him as chairman. In the thirties, he waxed rich by advising the Nizam of Hyderabad and famous by advising King Edward VIII, to whom, as Prince of Wales, he had become Attorney-General in 1932.
J. T. C. MOORE-BRABAZON (1884-1964), cr. 1st Lord Brabazon 1942, was a racing driver and pioneer aviator who held the first British pilot’s licence and was five times decorated in 1914-18. He was a Cresta Run tobogganist and a golfer of note. He was MP for Chatham (1918-29) and, in spite of his dodging of St George’s, for Wallasey (1931-42). He was Minister of Transport (1940-1) and Minister of Aircraft Production (1941-2). In 1946 he had an enormous but ineffective aeroplane, a sort of whale of the air, named after him. He was altogether a man of parts. His unwillingness to stand at St George’s could not easily be put down to cowardice.
Sir Oswald MOSLEY (1896-1981), succeeded as 6th baronet in 1928. He was married to a daughter of Lord Curzon from 1920 to 1933 when she died, and then to Diana Mitford. He was MP for Harrow, first as a Conservative and then as an independent (1918-23), and Labour MP for Smethwick (1926-31). He was Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (outside the Cabinet) in 1929-30. He then resigned and founded the New Party, which had respectable adherents until in 1932 it became the British Union of Fascists. He was a charismatic vulgarian, a visionary who organized thugs, an improbable Wykehamist, who was imprisoned for three and a half years during the Second World War as a danger to the state.
Sir Harold NICOLSON (1886-1968) was the younger son of the 1 st Lord Carnock (Ambassador to St Petersburg and permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office) and the husband of Vita Sackville-West. He was himself a diplomat until the age of forty-three, but then resigned and devoted himself to literature, broadcasting, social life and politics. For all of these, except the last, he had a high talent. Unfortunately it was the exception which most excited his interest. After a brief spell in Oswald Mosley’s New Party he joined MacDonald’s National Labour Party, was MP for Leicester West (1935-45) and rose to be an ill-regarded parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Information (1940-1). After his defeat in 1945 he tried hard to get back to Parliament. He could not bear to see the light shining above Big Ben and indicating that the House from which he was excluded was still sitting. He was however fairly open-minded about which Chamber he joined. He fought an unsuccessful by-election for the Labour Party in 1948, and then greatly hoped for a peerage which never came. He was knighted for writing an authorized but elegant life of King George V. His three volumes of Diaries and Letters, although they were not his best work, made him a noted chronicler of the thirties, forties and fifties.
Montagu NORMAN (1871-1950), cr. Lord Norman of St Clere 1944, was Governor of the Bank of England from 1920 to 1944, an unprecedented span. He was educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, as, twelve years behind him, was his frequent adversary, Maynard Keynes. Norman was in no way a Blimp, his intellect was almost as supple (although not as innovative) as Keynes’s. He was unfortunately mostly wrong. Mr Peregrine Worsthorne, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, is his stepson.
Ronald Munro-Ferguson (1860-1934), cr. 1st and only Viscount NOVAR 1920, had been a Liberal MP for thirty years until he went to Australia as Governor-General in 1914. Sometime after his return in 1920 he slipped over to the Conservatives. He was Secretary for Scotland (the Secretaryship of State was not created until 1927) in the first Baldwin Government.
Sir Arthur PUGH (1870-1955), General Secretary of the British Iron and Steel and Kindred Trades Association (1917-36), was in 1935 (together with Sir Walter [later Lord] Citrine), one of the first trade union leaders to be knighted. He began a current of fashion which flowed with mounting strength for forty years and then dried up. He was the epitome in substance and manner of a moderate union leader, and as great a contrast with Cook or Smith as it is possible to imagine.
Sir John REITH (1889-1971), cr. 1st Lord Reith 1940, was Manager and later Director-General of the BBC from 1922 to 1938. Then he became chairman of Imperial Airways and its successor BOAC. Between 1940 and 1942 he was an MP (for Southampton) for a few months, then a peer, and successively Minister of Information, Minister of Transport, Minister of Works and Buildings and Minister of Works and Planning. Churchill was unimpressed by his towering appearance and self-righteous confidence. ‘Keep that wuthering height away from me,’ he said. But it took him two years to get Reith, who then became a Lieutenant-Commander RNVR, out of his Government. Reith’s diaries, published posthumously, showed distinct signs of paranoia. He was so eager to become Ambassador to Washington in 1940 that he records how he spent a journey home to the Chilterns trying, in an almost telephonic sense, to arrange for divine intervention: ‘Keep trying to be in touch with God about the USA business’ (The Reith Diaries, p. 270).
Harold Sidney Harmsworth (1868-1940), cr. 1st Lord ROTHERMERE 1914, and 1st Viscount 1919, after a year as Lloyd George’s Air Minister. The brother of Lord Northcliffe, the uncle of Cecil King, thus at the core of the new press purple of the first two-thirds of this century. His principal organ was the Daily Mail, although he had many subsidiary ones. In the twenties, he became involved with the cause of the (right-wing) regime in Hungary, to such an extent that the Admiral Horthy offered him the throne. In the thirties he and the Daily Mail flirted with Mussolini and Mosley.
James Cecil 4th Marquess of SALISBURY (1861 -1947). MP for Darwen and then Rochester (1885-1903). Holder of various Cabinet offices, mostly without portfolio, between 1905 and 1929. Leader of the House of Lords (1925-9). He was the son of the Prime Minister, and the eldest brother of Lord Hugh Cecil (Lord Quickswood), Lord Robert Cecil (Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, q.v.), and Lord William Cecil, Bishop of Exeter, 1916-36.
HerbertSAMUEL(1870-1963), GCB1926, cr. 1st Viscount 1937, OM 1958, was MP for Cleveland (1902-18) and for Darwen (1929-35). He held various minor Cabinet offices before being briefly Home Secretary in 1916, and again in 1931-2. He was leader of the Liberal Party from 1931 to 1935. He was British High Commissioner in Palestine (1920-5) which together with his Liverpool birth accounted for the fact that he somewhat incongruously became Lord Samuel of Mount
Carmel and Toxteth. He was stronger on gravitas and intellect than on flair. With, most notably, Haldane, Halifax and Waverley, he has been one of eight non-Prime Ministerial politicians to receive the Order of Merit (the order was created in 1902 and of Prime Ministers since that date five out of seventeen have had it bestowed upon them).
John SANKEY (1866-1948), High Court Judge from 1914, cr. Lord Sankey 1929, and Viscount 1932, Lord Chancellor, 1929-35, appears to have been a remarkably dull man. A High Anglican bachelor from Lancing College (and Jesus College, Oxford), he showed no sign of the feline wit which such a provenance might have been expected to produce. He made no recorded memorable remark or memorable judgment, except for his extracurricular report on the Coal Industry in 1919. He was a broad-cloth lawyer who achieved limited authority through silence. By comparison his successors as Labour Lord Chancellors, still more his only predecessor, appear scintillating.
Herbert SMITH (1861-1938) was President of the Miners’ Federation (1922-9). In an age when many miners’ leaders (but not A. J. Cook) looked and dressed more like senior divines or Southern American senators than like Mr Arthur Scargill, he stuck firmly to a flat-cap unflamboyant image. He was the no-nonsense man who growled while Cook spouted, whose word was trusted and not only because he spoke so few. He resigned abruptly from the presidency in 1929 and was succeeded by the Right Honourable Thomas Richards, a former MP and Lloyd George Privy Councillor, who was much more in the patriarchal tradition.
Sir Donald SOMERVELL (1889-1960), cr. Lord Somervell of Harrow (Life Peer) 1954, when he became a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, Solicitor-General (1933-6), Attorney-General (1936-45), Home Secretary, briefly and almost secretly in the ‘Caretaker’ Government of the summer of 1945. He held all his offices unobtrusively, although not all briefly. He was Attorney-General for a longer period than any man for 150 years past. He was the son of a Harrow master whom Churchill claimed taught him to write good English (Colville, Fringes of Power, page 483n.). This did not however cause Churchill to write much of it about the son, whose Attorney-Generalship brought him only eight cursory references in the six volumes of The Second World War.
Arthur John Bigge (1849-1931), cr. 1st and only Lord STAMFORDHAM 1911, was born the fourth son of a country vicar and became a quintessential courtier. He was still serving King George V fifty-one years after he had been appointed assistant private secretary to Queen Victoria. He was a clever, devoted, peppery man of whom Mr Kenneth Rose wrote that ‘[his] letters were cast in a formal language which lent itself more to rebuke than to encouragement’ (King George V, page 371).
Sir Arthur STEEL-MAITLAND, Bart (1876-1935) had indeed had a remarkable Oxford career. He got a First in Mods, a First in Greats, followed by a First in Law. He was President of the Union, a rowing blue, and a Fellow of All Souls. His political career was less remarkable. He became the fourth Member from a Birmingham constituency in the Cabinet, for what was then the Erdington division.
James Henry (Jimmy) THOMAS (1874-1949) was as typically Georgian a figure as Elgar was an Edwardian and Tennyson a Victorian. But he was closer to his sovereign than was either the composer or the poet. King George V was long thought to have cleared up a 1929 chest abcess by excessive laughter at one of Thomas’s jokes. Thomas, like Baldwin, was a man of the Great Western Railway. He was born in Newport and lived his early adult life in Swindon. In 1910 he celebrated King George’s accession by becoming both Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants (later the National Union of Railwaymen) and Member of Parliament for Derby (an ecumenical gesture towards the Midland Railway). A year after the end of the King’s reign (in 1937) Thomas suffered the humiliation of being forced to resign both as minister and MP as a result of the betrayal of a budget secret for commercial gain. In the interval he held three Cabinet offices, followed MacDonald without hesitation into the National Government of 1931, and, somewhat incongruously and almost uniquely amongst British politicians, was given honorary degrees by both Oxford and Cambridge. He was the author of one of the most impudently successful replies to a heckler ever recorded. ‘You’ve sold us,’ an affronted delegate called out at an NUR Conference. ‘I tried to, but I couldn’t get a bid,’ he replied.
Sir Robert TOPPING (1877-1952), a Dublin Unionist who after twenty-four years as a peripatetic Conservative agent became the chief official of the party in 1928 and remained in the job until 1945. Knighted in 1934.
Sir William George TYRRELL (1866-1947), cr. 1st and only Lord Tyrrell of Avon 1929. He was private secretary to Sir Edward Grey (1907-15), permanent under-secretary (1925-8), and Ambassador to Paris (1928-34). His name (and his signature) attained wide public recognition when in the plenitude of the cinema age he was President of the British Board of Film Censors from 1935 to 1947. His relative lack of distinction did not prevent his being very adequately decorated. He was made CB in 1909, KCMG in 1913, KCVO in 1919, GCMG in 1925, KCB in 1927, a Privy Councillor in 1928, a peer in 1929 and GCB in 1934.
Sir Robert VANSITTART (1881-1957), cr. Lord Vansittart 1941, was Foreign Office permanent under-secretary (1930-8), then shunted to be chief diplomatic advisor (1938-41). This was because of his determined anti-German views, which got in the way of Chamberlain’s policy of the appeasement of Hitler. These views, however, were based much more on anti-Teutonic prejudice than on ideology. He was rather favourable to Mussolini’s Italy. He wrote twenty-four books, giving most of them unfortunate titles.
Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Ronald WATERHOUSE (1878-1942) was a regular soldier who found his way into 10 Downing Street with Bonar Law, who however considerably disliked him. He then remained as principal private secretary for six years, serving three Prime Ministers, despite some evidence that he was not much good at the job (see H. Montgomery Hyde’s Baldwin, page 148). When he left government service at the age of fifty, he became a pilot officer in the RAF Volunteer Reserve and married as his second wife Nourah Chard who had been Mrs Baldwin’s secretary and published around the date of his death an account of these 1923 events which was strongly objected to and in effect censored by Buckingham Palace. There remains an impression of something slightly odd about Waterhouse.
Tom WILLIAMS (1888-1967), MP for Don Valley (1922-59), cr. Lord Williams of Barnburgh, 1961. A miner whose contribution to the post-1940 revival of British agriculture made him almost a rival in husbandry to Coke of Norfolk or ‘Turnip’ Townshend. He was parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture throughout the Churchill coalition, and Minister of Agriculture throughout the Attlee Government. His dress indicated neither his origin nor his devotion to the land; he never appeared in public except in wing collar, bow tie and pin-striped suit.
Sir Horace WILSON (1882-1972) entered the Civil Service at the age of eighteen, but rose to be permanent secretary to the Ministry of Labour (1921-30), chief industrial advisor to the Government (1930-9), and was seconded to the Treasury from 1935 to advise Neville Chamberlain, and when the latter became Prime Minister in 1937, became increasingly his chief foreign policy advisor. He was consequently heavily tarred with the appeasement brush. In Hugh Dalton’s War Diaries, for instance, by the time of which he had become joint permanent secretary to the Treasury (1939-42), he was constantly referred to as ‘Sir H. Quisling’.
George Malcolm YOUNG (1882-1959), Oxford historian and Fellow of All Souls. His published works covered an unusually wide range of centuries. With the subject’s encouragement he wrote the first posthumous life of Baldwin. It was not a book which anyone would have wished to have commissioned about himself. It was remarkably short for a semi-official life of a man who was three times Prime Minister. It was also arguably ‘poor, nasty, and brutish’, although ‘solitary’, Hobbes’s fifth adjective about the life of man, was inapplicable. On the only occasion that I met Young, immediately following the publication of his biography in 1952, I conversationally opined that Baldwin must have been a man of great charm. ‘No,’ Young said, ‘I never found him so. I much preferred Neville Chamberlain.’
Sir George YOUNGER (1851-1929), cr. 1st Viscount Younger of Leckie, 1923. MP for Ayr Burghs (1906-22), Chairman of the Conservative Party (1916-23). It was he who primarily occasioned Birkenhead’s jibe about ‘cabin boys’ (see page 52 supra). As a former Liverpool Unionist lawyer MP, Birkenhead ought to have had more respect for such a notable brewer.
Notes
Introduction
1. Hansard, vol. 270, col. 632, 10 Nov. 1932.
2. Hansard, vol. 317, col. 1144, Nov. 1936.
1. A Quiet Beginning
1. The Times, 22 May 1950.
2. Davidson Papers, quoted in Middlemas and Barnes, Baldwin, p. 660.
3. Thomas Jones, Whitehall Diary, vol. l, p.255.
4. Quoted in Middlemas and Barnes, op. cit., p. 41.
