Baldwin (26 page)
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.
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.