The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World they Made

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