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

Cranborne’s diplomatic career was nevertheless rapidly resurrected by his family. Lord Salisbury crossed over to Paris to see his brother Robert, who was acting as one of Britain’s principal negotiators at the Peace Conference. They agreed that Cranborne would come to Paris to act as his uncle’s secretary. The current incumbent was unceremoniously sacked and within three weeks of failing the Foreign Office exam Cranborne was at Lord Robert Cecil’s side in Paris – a literal case of ‘Bob’s your Uncle’.19 He was thus able to observe the conduct of high policy at close quarters while Crookshank and the other successful entrants remained back in London learning how to write a proper minute.20

There was drudgery in London and in Paris the high life. The British delegation housed in the Hôtel Majestic on the Avenue Kléber

was always busy and exciting. ‘All the world is here,’ wrote the editor of The Times. ‘It’s like a gigantic cinema-show of eminent persons.’ ‘A vast caravanserai,’ thought Lord Milner, ‘not uncomfortable, but much too full of all and sundry, too much of a “circus” for my taste.’21 For all the people that there were milling around, very few seemed to be doing any useful work.22 Betty Cranborne joined her husband. Bobbety’s sister was already there with her husband, Eddie Hartington, who was working for Lord Derby, the British ambassador in Paris. Paris may have been a jamboree, but Cranborne saw some serious work and some serious high politics. His uncle was at the pinnacle of his influence. ‘President Wilson says,’ recorded James Headlam-Morley in January 1919, ‘that Lord Robert Cecil is the greatest man in Europe – the greatest man he has ever met.’23 Indeed on the very evening that Jim and Robert Cecil agreed that Cranborne should come out to Paris, Lloyd George was telling his dinner companions that Cecil was one of his most formidable rivals.24

When Cranborne arrived in Paris the conference was entering its second phase.25 Most of the work on the creation of the League of Nations, which made Cecil’s name as its architect, was finished. Considering his main work done the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, had sailed for America. The fact that his and Cecil’s handiwork would be rejected by the US Congress was still not apparent to those left behind in Paris.26 The great issue to them was whether the Allies should impose a ‘Carthaginian peace’ on Germany. As chairman of the Supreme Economic Council, Cecil was immediately swept up into the bitter arguments about whether to feed Germany. With the threat of revolution in Germany and actual revolution in Hungary the situation seemed bleak.27 Unlike many of his colleagues in 1919, Cecil saw that it was Britain’s relationship with the United States rather than its relationship to its European allies that was the key factor.28 Lord Robert believed that if the Americans were to be involved in an overall settlement, the Europeans had to be lenient to the Germans. In the run-up to the crucial meetings of the British Empire delegation at the end of May and the beginning of June 1919, Cecil tried hard to persuade Lloyd George to follow the path of moderation. The French were deeply suspicious of his influence. Clemenceau accused Lloyd George of being beguiled by Cecil ‘to open his arms to the Germans’.29

Although Cranborne’s position was in the ante-rooms of the great rather than in the conference hall, Lord Robert’s method of proceeding gave him a particularly close acquaintance with events since Cecil chose to act in those ante-rooms rather than in council. In his efforts to convince Lloyd George to stand up to the French, Cecil relied on the impact of carefully drafted and reasoned written argument. On a range of issues, whether territorial, such as the Saarland or Poland, or financial, above all reparations, he contended that the proposed settlement was ‘out of harmony with the spirit, if not the letter, of the professed war aims’. The terms were not ‘suitable for a lasting pacification of Europe’ and in the inter-allied negotiations that had produced them ‘our moral prestige had greatly suffered’. He even went so far as to point to the ‘moral bankruptcy of the Entente’.30 Cecil was cogent and persuasive, but having made his point he chose not press the issue in public.31 ‘You do no good,’ he noted, ‘by jogging a man’s elbow. If you can’t manage a thing in the way you think right, it is better to leave someone else to do it altogether rather than, by making pushes for this or that change, reduce the whole scheme to incoherence, without curing its injustice.’32 It was an early lesson in the possibilities and limitations of indirect influence for Cranborne.

Cecil himself soon came to regret the fact that he had not jogged Lloyd George’s arm more forcefully. Before he left Paris, Cecil had told a meeting that, ‘There is not a single person in this room who is not disappointed with the terms we have drafted…Our disappointment is an excellent symptom; let us perpetuate it.’ Six months later when he had read John Maynard Keynes’s indictment of Versailles, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Cecil no longer thought disappointment an excellent symptom: ‘I am quite clear that we shall have to begin a campaign for the revision of the Treaty as soon as possible,’ he announced. It was Lord Robert’s emergence as a crusader that attracted young men to the Cecil banner.33 His mixture of ‘the crusading instinct strongly developed’ with ‘an amiable touch of vanity’ appealed to those repelled by Lloyd George’s perceived cynicism. As Macmillan commented in a letter congratulating Cranborne on his role in Paris, ‘I suppose our nasty little Prime Minister is not really popular any more, except with the International Jew.’ Cecil’s League of Nations campaign gave Cranborne the opportunity to cut his teeth on political oratory. As someone who knew the inside story of the Peace Conference as the nephew and confidant of its hero he was in considerable demand as a speaker. Few seemed to mind that he spoke with a pronounced lisp that caused him to pronounce his ‘r’ as ‘w’. Lord Robert was encouraging. He told his friends that his nephew had become a ‘very good speaker’ through all his experience with the League of Nations Union.34 In truth Cranborne was not particularly attracted to Lord Robert’s new revivalist brand of politics. Although it was politic to be associated with his uncle’s liberal conservatism in public, in private he had more sympathy with his father’s die-hard version. The 1919 League of Nations campaign was, however, the start of his apprenticeship.35 Most important was the fact that on his return from Paris not only his uncle but his father began to take him into their political counsels.36

If Cranborne witnessed the first act of the post-war peace settlement at close quarters, then Crookshank saw its final act from an even closer and much more uncomfortable vantage. He had some regrets about his decision to join the Foreign Office and still hankered after the Guards. He was on first-name terms with the Guards generals who had been company commanders in 1915. The Foreign Office seemed in contrast rigidly hierarchical. Its dominant figure, the foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, was capable of great charm and kindness. An old friend of Alfred Lyttelton, he treated Oliver ‘like a nephew, almost like a son’. Junior clerks such as Crookshank, however, encountered him only at the risk of fierce rebuke.37 Nevertheless Crookshank found that the Foreign Office did have some of the same appeal as the Guards, such as an insistence on the ‘proper’ way of doing things, rituals that clearly marked off insiders from outsiders. If the work was tedious, there was at least the prospect of better things to come. Before the war the Foreign Office and the Diplomatic Service had been different entities – men who joined the former spent most of their careers in London, those who entered the latter served mainly in embassies overseas. In the year Crookshank joined, the two services were merged and the more modern system of rotation was introduced: a new group of generalists, of whom he was one, would be expected to split their time between Whitehall and the embassies. Thus, in 1921, Crookshank was posted to the British High Commission in Constantinople. It was a plum appointment.

Not only was Constantinople one of the great embassies of the ‘old diplomacy’, but when Crookshank arrived it was overseeing one of the most important tests of the new world order. As a result of his experiences in 1917 and 1918, Crookshank himself did not think much of the Greek contribution to Allied victory in the Great War. ‘In ancient times the Greeks at Thermopylae fought to the death and one man came back to tell the story; now one man is killed and they all come back to Salonika to tell the story,’ he was fond of saying.38 The Greek government did nevertheless expect to profit from its titular alliance with the victorious powers at the expense of the Turks. As part of the Versailles process, the Allies had forced the Ottoman government to cede territory to the Greeks under the terms of the treaty of Sèvres, signed in August 1920. By that time the Sultan’s government was little more than a cipher. The Turkish war hero Mustapha Kemal had set up in Ankara a rival regime committed to the indivisibility of Anatolia and eastern Turkey. In March 1920, Britain, France and Italy had responded by occupying Constantinople. The High Commission that Crookshank joined thus had, as well as its diplomatic duties, executive responsibility for the administration of the city. The British were, however, in a precarious position. In March 1921 the Greek army attacked the Kemalists and were soundly beaten. Britain’s French and Italian allies, to say nothing of the Russian Bolsheviks, were keen to cut a deal with the martial nationalists.

When Crookshank arrived, Constantinople was in turmoil. The two most important Britons in the city, charged with navigating through the crisis, were his boss, the High Commissioner, Sir Horace Rumbold, and the commander of British troops, General Tim Harington. As late as March 1921 Crookshank had been continuing his efforts to leave the Foreign Office for the Grenadier Guards.39 Constantinople confirmed his view about the relative merits of soldiers and diplomats. ‘Tim Harington…is quite excellent and a tower of strength whereas Horace is only a mountain of flesh.’ He consistently found himself agreeing with Harington’s HQ rather than his own High Commission. He came to believe that Rumbold was a buffoon and that his number two, Nevile Henderson, was a snake. The diplomats did not compare well with the army officers in Turkey, such as ‘Alex’ Alexander, who had been part of Oliver Lyttelton’s party at the Somme and was now commanding a battalion of Irish Guards. Crookshank laid three main charges at Rumbold’s door. First, he seemed more interested in going on leave than doing his job; secondly, he was unnecessarily anti-French; and thirdly he was a yes-man who told London only what it wanted to hear. In Crookshank’s view he was entirely culpable when the Chanak crisis broke around the High Commission’s heads in September 1922.

It was certainly true that Rumbold liked his leave. In May 1921, when the capital was rife with rumours of a nationalist attack, he asked the Foreign Office for two months off. Even Rumbold was aware that his superiors would find it rather odd that he wanted to leave his post at such a critical juncture. He pleaded sleeplessness, high blood pressure and general tiredness and argued, ‘I should work better after I had a bit of a rest.’ In the summer of 1922 he was at it again. He knew a crisis was brewing and agreed to take a holiday on the Turkish coast so that he could immediately return to the capital, but in the end he could not resist leaving for London. In his absence the Greeks threatened to attack Constantinople and had to be faced down by Harington and Henderson. Rumbold only arrived back for the denouement of the crisis at the end of July 1922. Having returned, however, he then impressed everyone with his sang-froid. ‘Horace groans and wishes he had stopped for a week in Switzerland!’ his wife wrote. ‘He remains most annoyingly calm! I believe if the last trump sounded he would gaze unperturbed through his eye glass and wish there were not so many damned foreigners about.’40 Even Crookshank had to concede that it was an impressive display. ‘ “Horatio” returned with great gusto on the very day that the excitement was boiling up about the proposed Greek advance on Constantinople,’ he wrote in an account to his friend Paul Evans, ‘when asked to call a special meeting at once on arrival his only remark was that he must have lunch and a bath first.’41

Rumbold did engage in constant disputes with the French. He distrusted his French opposite number, General Pellé, profoundly and considered, rightly, that he would always conspire with the Kemalists behind his back whenever the opportunity arose. The French were in his words ‘dreadful Allies’ and might well force Britain to ‘have to eat dirt to an unlimited extent’. They were ‘always “playing the dirty” on us’. Henderson seconded his chief’s views in spades: the French were ‘cads and apes’, ‘in the grip of the international financier or Jew who cares for French financial interests and nothing else’.42 When Rumbold returned from leave, he clashed with Harington over the latter’s attempt to cooperate with the French in taking a more hostile line to the Greeks and recognizing that the Ankara regime formed the true government of Turkey. On 8 August 1922 he vetoed plans to act against Greek shipping, deprecating ‘the interesting spectacle of Pellé…slobbering over Harington, telling him what a fine fellow he was’. Rumbold was very aware that Lloyd George had publicly expressed pro-Greek views. Although intellectually he acknowledged that it was ‘useless to regard Mustapha Kemal any longer as a brigand chief’, and that the treaty of Sèvres was a dead letter, he could not rid himself of a visceral dislike of the Turks. ‘I have never dealt with people who have so little political sagacity,’ he noted, and did not mind ‘confessing privately that I should be rather glad to see the Greeks give the Nationalists one big knock before hostilities come to an end’.43 Once more his boss’s echo, Henderson, called the Turks ‘misguided barbarians’.44

Any hopes that Rumbold may have had of a stalemate in the Graeco-Turkish War were soon dashed. At the end of August 1922 the Kemalists opened their major offensive and routed the Greeks. By the second week in September they had captured the port of Smyrna. Not only did this pave the way to horrific ethnic cleansing, it also meant that nationalist forces directly threatened the straits zone held by the Allies. True to form, Pellé slipped out of Constantinople to negotiate directly with Kemal; on 20 September the French and Italians abandoned the British garrisoning Chanak on the Dardanelles. Three days later British and Turkish troops came into contact for the first time.

On 26 September Harington cabled Lord Cavan, now Chief of the Imperial General Staff, ‘Losing a lot of lives in hanging on is what I want to guard against. Why not start at once and give Turkey Constantinople and [Eastern Thrace]…Remember Turks are within sight of their goal and are naturally elated.’ On the same day Crookshank wrote his private appreciation of the situation: ‘We have got into a nice mess here haven’t we!’ He placed the blame for his predicament squarely on the shoulders of his senior colleagues.

I consider [Rumbold] a good deal to blame for the situation having arisen. He often I fancy sends telegrams which he thinks will please [Curzon] or [Lloyd George] rather than containing his own views. The last four or five months can be summed up as a world wide wrangle (short sighted) with France everywhere, owing to this very wicked anti-French feeling that has been brewing everywhere in the FO: as far as this part of the world is concerned it consisted in endless verbal quibbles in answering each others’ notes – if HR had any views of his own, he should have pushed them forward and gone on arguing for an immediate Conference. Instead precious months were wasted, whose bad fruit we are now beginning to taste. You can hardly believe [he concluded maliciously] what an atmosphere of gloom surrounds [Rumbold] and Henderson. My lighthearted flippancy, I can assure you, is far from appreciated.45

It was at this point that Crookshank had, to his delight, his first brush with high policy. He and the military attaché, Colonel Baird, ‘wrote an interesting and logical joint memorandum which was dished out with one of their meetings to Rumbold [and] the General…The General thought it wise and telegraphed the suggestions to the War Office…The suggestion was that in order to keep ourselves out of the war we should act with complete neutrality and allow the Turks to go to Thrace if they could. At present we are controlling the Marmora against them and so acting as a rearguard to the Greeks.’46 In London Lloyd George’s government was puffing itself up with righteous indignation to face down the Turks.47 When the Cabinet met at 4 p.m. on 28 September they had before them Harington’s dispatch of the Crookshank-Baird memorandum, which had arrived via the War Office. Rumbold had been too slow off the mark to register his dissent. His telegram did not reach London until 8.15 p.m. As a result the Cabinet believed that he in some way concurred with Harington. Curzon signalled a rebuke to them both. According to London the proposal

would involved [sic] consequences which Harington has not fully foreseen…The liberty accorded to Kemal could not in logic or fairness be unilateral. If he were permitted to cross into Europe to fight the Greeks and anticipate the decision of peace conference establishing his rule in Eastern Thrace, Greek ships could not be prevented from using non-neutral waters of Marmora at same time, in order to resist his passage…In this way proposed plan might have consequence of not only re-opening war between Turkey and Greece but of transferring theatre of war to Europe with consequences that cannot be foreseen.48

Crookshank cared not one whit that his plan had been shot down in flames. He was simply delighted that ‘Rumbold…got his fingers smacked for not having sent his comments at once’ and that ‘little Harry…[had] caused a Cabinet discussion and a slight flutter’.49 In fact his memorandum was the high point of the crisis as far as Crookshank was concerned. Harington and Rumbold put aside their differences to thwart London’s desire to provoke a shooting war with the Kemalists. As Crookshank was writing up his part in the proceedings, Harington left Constantinople to open direct negotiations with the Kemalists. Early on the morning of 11 October he signed the Mudania Convention: the British, French and Italians would remove Eastern Thrace from Greek control and in return the Turks would retire fifteen kilometres from the coast at Chanak.

The Chanak crisis was an exciting time for Crookshank at its epicentre. It also had profound reverberations for British politics. Indeed, the crisis did much to create the political arena which he and Macmillan subsequently entered. The Dominions had refused to support Britain in its potential war with the Turkish nationalists. The majority of Conservative MPs became convinced that they could no longer support a coalition led by Lloyd George. On 7 October the Conservative leader, Bonar Law, publicly criticized government policy in a letter to The Times. If the French were not willing to support Britain, the government had ‘no alternative except to imitate the Government of the United States and to restrict our attention to the safeguarding of the more immediate interests of the Empire’.50 No one stationed in Constantinople in the autumn of 1922 could hope for a sudden collapse of the British position – Crookshank feared ‘an internal pro-Kemal and anti-foreign outbreak in [Constantinople] itself…we have very little strength to cope with that, and one day we may find ourselves like the Legation did at Peking in Boxer times…how ignominious it would be to be killed by a riotous mob, after all the battles one has been through.’ Once the immediate threat of anarchy was averted at Mudania, however, Crookshank could not have agreed with Bonar Law more: ‘I am quite convinced,’ he wrote at the beginning of November, ‘that having made a stand in October, having refused to be browbeaten and having been vindicated we should now wash our hands of the whole thing.’51

Chanak convinced Crookshank that politics rather than diplomacy was the career to be in. Junior diplomats did not get the opportunity to fight for great causes. One incident further finally soured him on a diplomatic career. He despised Nevile Henderson, who was left in charge of the Commission when Rumbold departed to act as Curzon’s adviser at the conference convened at Lausanne to draw up a new peace treaty with Turkey. ‘Henderson goes on, with his temper fraying more and his long-winded words in dispatches misapplied more than ever! Lately he talked about Zenophobic and also mentioned the “opaque chaos” of the country. He will not hear of corrections and I can’t help thinking the Department must laugh a bit.’ It was not so much Henderson’s bad English that he found truly offensive as the fact that he was an egregious crawler. Any ambitious man in a hierarchical structure like the Foreign Office had to try and make a good impression on his superiors. What really stuck in Crookshank’s throat was Henderson’s willingness to chum up with any potentially powerful figure, however unacceptable.

In the autumn of 1922 the Labour politician Ramsay MacDonald visited Constantinople. He did not have nice things to say about the Allies in Constantinople. ‘Away from the Galata Bridge,’ he wrote in The Nation, ‘the tunnel tramway leads up to the European quarter where the West, infected by the sensuous luxuriousness of the East, is iridescent with putrefaction, where the bookshops are piled with carnal filth, and where troops of coloured men in khaki can be seen in open daylight marching with officers at their head to where the brothels are.’52 MacDonald’s most famous moral stand was, however, not against pornography and prostitution but against war. He had been the most outspoken critic of the Great War from a pacifist standpoint. In February 1921 he tried to win the Woolwich by-election for the Labour party. It was a vicious campaign, his opponent being a former soldier who had won the VC at Cambrai. Placards on local trams asked, ‘A Traitor for Parliament?’ ‘The Woolwich exserviceman,’ MacDonald had retorted, ‘knows that military decorations are no indication of political wisdom, and that a Parliament of gallant officers will be a Prussian Diet not a British House of Commons.’53 In Constantinople Crookshank was certainly one gallant officer who agreed that MacDonald was a traitor. To Crookshank’s fury, Henderson, ‘with as always an eye on the main chance asked him to dine in the Mess which I was running at the time’. Crookshank kicked up a stink: ‘I point blank refused to be there and went out to an hotel.’ His valet, Page, a former guardsman, ‘like master like man…refused to wait at table on the “traitor”’. The spat, although minor, was hardly private: one of Crookshank’s friends heard about it while serving in the Sudan.54 Within two years MacDonald was prime minister, within nine years he was a prime minister at the head of the Conservative administration. Crookshank had made a dangerous enemy.

By November 1922 he was ‘fed up to the teeth’ with Constantinople ‘and everyone else and the preposterous Rumbold’.55 By the next summer Crookshank was ‘beginning to feel very desperate about this place’. The Turks having had their demands met by the great powers at Lausanne were cocky and unpleasant, ‘constant instances of rough handling, maltreatment etc. happen’.56 Even his hero Harington was beginning to irritate him: ‘The Army went off, as Harington told us about forty million times, with “flag flying high” – but the Turks let themselves go at once in scurrilous abuse. You never read such filth as they wrote. They had a final ceremony, entirely inspired by Harington – three Allied guards of honour and one Turkish and everyone saluting each others flags and then the Allies marching off leaving the Turks in situ. This resulted in a lot of stuff about “the Allies have bowed themselves before our glorious flag” and have “proved the victory of Eastern over Western Civilisation”. Ugh!’57 Those left when the troops marched away knew that this was not peace with honour but a bloody nose.