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

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

From the playing fields of Eton via the horrors of the Western Front to the pinnacle of political power in 20th-century Britain – a brilliant collective biography of Harold Macmillan, Lord Salisbury, Oliver Lyttleton and Harry Crookshank.Harold Macmillan, Oliver Lyttleton, Bobbety Cranbourne and Harry Crookshank all arrived at Eton in 1906, all served on the Western Front in the same battalion of the Grenadier Guards and all served in Cabinet under Winston Churchill during World War II. They helped Churchill regain Downing Street in 1951 and once more joined his Cabinet as senior figures. These four men who were lifelong friends (and sometimes enemies), argued and fought their way up the political ladder for over forty years.The theme of Simon Ball's brilliant book is a race, willingly entered into by these four men, for power and glory. ‘Politics is not a flat race, it's a steeplechase,’ as Churchill once told Macmillan. And through the collective biography, Ball presents an extraordinary portrait of political ambition and intrigue from World War II until Macmillan’s resignation as Prime Minister in 1963, tracing the lives of his four protagonists through the trauma of the trenches, the Treaty of Versailles and the rebuilding of Europe after the Great War.Ball has based the book on years of original research in many archives and has had exclusive access to the Salisbury papers, closed to the public until 2022. The Guardsmen is a work of significant scholarship that presents a gripping account of British politics in the 20th-century.

The Guardsmen

Harold Macmillan, Three Friends, and the World They Made

Simon Ball

To Helen

Table of Contents

Cover Page (#u55e343e6-2b33-59b1-809f-8dc5e6bb6226)

Title Page (#u58bb6302-a47e-5559-9a3a-0ee0da8c5c72)

SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#u331f4dfb-8134-5ac4-a202-01ad9df5aea5)

PREFACE (#u6f6ddc34-fa99-51d7-a07b-1cafe7ffb11f)

1 Sons (#u676f7d71-6dfb-565c-b7a5-5e099c27d8d2)

2 Grenadiers (#u2cefae3f-3225-581b-b748-6e60aa82d89f)

3 Bottle-washers (#uf2adee19-9284-5c3d-b145-2c3274c23c08)

4 Anti-fascists (#litres_trial_promo)

5 Glamour Boys (#litres_trial_promo)

6 Churchillians (#litres_trial_promo)

7 Tories (#litres_trial_promo)

8 Ministers (#litres_trial_promo)

9 Successors (#litres_trial_promo)

10 Enemies (#litres_trial_promo)

11 Relics (#litres_trial_promo)

CONCLUSION (#litres_trial_promo)

NOTES AND REFERENCES (#litres_trial_promo)

INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#ulink_0e44c848-d551-5927-aa32-523deebc4646)

Until recently, a book of this kind could not have been written. It is only in the past decade that the archival materials to make it possible have entered the public domain. We now have a critical mass of papers, produced by the four principals of this story, allowing us to understand their thoughts and actions in detail.

Harold Macmillan wrote prolifically on his own life. He also inspired a number of biographies, culminating in Alistair Horne’s official two-volume life completed in 1989. Underlying both Macmillan’s autobiography and Horne’s biography were Macmillan’s voluminous diaries. These diaries are now open for inspection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. There are two versions of the diary: the original hand-written volumes and an edited and typed copy Macmillan subsequently had made up. Both versions are used in this book. Also in the Bodleian is a collection of letters Macmillan wrote to his friend Ava Waverley, which, in some cases, served as first drafts for his memoirs. The diaries are a magnificent historical source. Indeed they will, when published, endure as Macmillan’s best and most important contribution to literature. They must nevertheless be treated with some caution. Macmillan did not keep a diary simply for his own amusement. His diaries were always meant to be read by others. In the first instance he wrote diary letters to his mother and later to his wife. These diaries were shown around the family and the Macmillan circle, including political acquaintances. By the time Macmillan started his continuous ‘political diary’ in 1951, he was a very self-aware recorder of events. The later diaries were kept with the sensibility of memoirist. Macmillan’s explanation of events, and in particular of his own motivations, was thus both an immediate reaction and a footnote for the future. Such self-conscious writing loses nothing in value yet needs to be read for what it is – self-justification rather than justification of the self. Horne’s fine biography, which I have used extensively, can be criticized for taking Macmillan a little too much at his own valuation.

Potentially as important a part of the Macmillan collection at the Bodleian is his political correspondence. This book draws on the Stockton constituency correspondence written between 1924 and 1945. Much of this correspondence is ephemera. There are, however, letters which reflect on wider political events. Those letters dealing with the minutiae of politics are much less self-conscious than the diaries and have the value of immediacy. Of value for the same reason are the diaries of Cuthbert Headlam, which have been published in an expertly edited two-volume edition by Stuart Ball. Headlam’s diary is a goldmine, for he not only knew Macmillan well, but also Crookshank and Lyttelton. In 1915 Headlam and Lyttelton served together as aides-de-camp to Lord Cavan. After the First World War Headlam entered Parliament at the same election as Macmillan and Crookshank in 1924. Headlam’s seat, Barnard Castle, abutted Macmillan’s in Stockton. They were political allies in the 1920s. Along with the constituency letters, Headlam’s diary allows one to reconstruct Macmillan’s early political trajectory from contemporary sources rather than relying solely on his own memoirs.

Oliver Lyttelton ranks second to Macmillan as a memoirist in volume of output. He published volumes of autobiography in 1962 and 1968. During the same period he was involved with the foundation of Churchill College, Cambridge, as a memorial to his leader and friend, Winston Churchill. He left his papers, and those of his mother and father, to the college as the Chandos Papers. The collection is thus particularly rich for Lyttelton’s early life – to the point when he left the army in 1918. These early letters formed the basis for his own 1968 volume, From Peace to War. He published most of the letters he wrote to his mother during the First World War, lightly edited, in that volume. When Lyttelton decided to remain in public life after 1945, he started a collection of political papers. The papers relating to the intervening period are exiguous. This gap has had to be filled using papers from other sources. Most obviously, Lyttelton’s official papers relating to his ministerial offices – President of the Board of Trade, Minister Resident in Cairo, Minister of Production and colonial secretary – are to be found in the Public Record Office, Kew. In the inter-war years, however, Lyttelton was businessman rather than public servant. With the indispensable help of Mr Andrew Green, company secretary of the Amalgamated Metal Corporation, the company Lyttelton founded in 1929, I tracked down Lyttleton’s business archive. Now part of AMC’s non-current archive, the papers were housed in a storage warehouse in Docklands. As a result of Mr Green’s kindness I was able to extract these papers and examine them. As Lyttelton became a prominent business leader in the 1930s, he starts to appear also in the official papers of the Board of Trade. There are also papers relating to Lyttelton’s post-war business career in the archives of GEC, the company that took over Lyttelton’s AEI in 1967.

In contrast to Lyttelton and Macmillan, Harry Crookshank published no memoirs and next to nothing has been written about his life. The only extended appreciation in print was published by Lyttelton in the Dictionary of National Biography. In fact Crookshank, like Macmillan, was a formidable diarist. By the time the Macmillan papers arrived at the Bodleian, the library had long since bought Crookshank’s diaries, covering the years 1934 to 1961, at auction. These diaries have over the years been read by a small number of historians interested in the political events upon which they touch. They receive only passing references in most secondary literature. There is a very good reason for this. Unlike his closest friend, Macmillan, Crookshank was a true diarist. He kept his diaries for himself rather than for posterity. They are thus concerned largely with the mundane and the quotidian. If one wished to understand Lincolnshire weather patterns in the age of appeasement, Crookshank’s diaries are the place to look. The diaries have thus proved a grave disappointment to political historians. This may be one of the reasons why so few have a good word for their author. They are even so a treasure trove of information for anyone interested in Harry Crookshank himself.

Indeed, Crookshank’s concern for recording the events of his life went even further than his diaries. He, his mother and his sister maintained massive scrapbooks of cuttings regarding his life and career, starting with items pertaining to the Crookshank family going back into the nineteenth century. These books have found their way into Lincolnshire Record Office. The coverage of Crookshank’s life in these two sources is fairly complete. A search of the archives of the Grenadier Guards, greatly assisted by the staff of Royal Headquarters, Wellington Barracks, then yielded a missing segment of the Crookshank diary. As well as the later political and personal diary, Crookshank kept a very full war diary covering his military service on the Western Front and in the Balkans between 1915 and 1917. In contravention to all regulations, he wrote up regular entries in his pocketbook when he was on active service. Whenever he returned to London he wrote out these pocketbook diaries, adding detail, into desk diaries. At some later stage, probably in the 1920s, he inter-polated typed recollections into the desk diaries. Crookshank also wrote an account of his diplomatic career in long letters to his friend and fellow diplomat Paul Emrys-Evans, whose papers are held by the British Library.

At the start of this project it appeared that the most difficult of its subjects in archival terms would be Bobbety Cranborne – or Lord Salisbury, as he became in 1947. Papers related to his leadership and shadow leadership of the House of Lords between 1941 and 1957 are held by the House of Lords Record Office. The papers of his uncle and early mentor, Lord Cecil of Chelwood, were deposited in the British Library. Lord Salisbury was a prominent member of Anthony Eden’s circle. His correspondence thus appears frequently in the papers of Anthony Eden himself, deposited by Lady Avon in the archives of Birmingham University Library. He carried on a regular correspondence with Jim Thomas, and Thomas, by then Lord Cilcennin, left his papers in Carmarthenshire Record Office. There was also a correspondence with Paul Emrys-Evans, who, having become an MP, had become a prominent Edenite backbencher. Emrys-Evans was also secretary of James, 4th Marquess of Salisbury’s Watching Committee and Bobbety Cranborne’s under-secretary at the Dominions Office. Their long association continued after the war. When Emrys-Evans lost his seat in 1945, he went into business, rising to be chairman of Cecil Rhodes’s chartered British South Africa Company. The chartered company was much involved in the politics of southern Africa in the late 1950s and Lord Salisbury joined its board on his resignation from the Cabinet in 1957.

It was my great good fortune to use an even better source. Lord Salisbury had left an extensive collection of political and other papers in his archive at Hatfield, but these were not open to the public. They had been reorganized by his former secretary in the early 1980s, but were not formally catalogued. Through the good offices of the Tudor historian Professor A. G. R. Smith and Hatfield House’s librarian, Robin Harcourt Williams, the late Lord Salisbury was made aware of my project. Not only did he grant me access to his father’s hitherto closed papers, but he also talked to me about his father and his circle. Lord Salisbury’s generosity was of immeasurable assistance.

In addition to those mentioned above, I have received assistance from many other individuals and institutions. For their consent to quote from papers to which they hold copyright, I wish to thank the Amalgamated Metal Corporation plc, Lady Avon, the Carmarthenshire Archives Service, Lord Chandos, the Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement, the Grenadier Guards, Mrs Rachel Fraser, Lincolnshire Archives, the Trustees of the Harold Macmillan Book Trust, Lord Salisbury, the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, Sir Charles Willink. If I have infringed upon the copyright of any persons or institutions I hope they will forgive the oversight and inform me, so that the error may be corrected in any future edition of this book.

The University of Glasgow gave me leave from my teaching duties in order to research and write this book. That leave was extended by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board. The British Academy awarded me a grant to defray the costs of travelling to archives. All Souls College provided me with rooms in Oxford. The John Robertson Bequest gave me a grant towards the cost of photographs from the Imperial War Museum. I am most grateful to the trustees and administrators of these bodies for showing such confidence in my work when this book was little more than an idea. For similar confidence on a more personal level I would like to thank Hew Strachan, formerly Professor of Modern History at the University of Glasgow, and David Bates, formerly Edwards Professor of Medieval History at the University of Glasgow. Without their encouragement writing this book would have been a more difficult and less enjoyable task. The book would not have been written at all if Tony Morris had not suggested that it had commercial potential, if Robyn Airlie had not introduced me to the late Giles Gordon and if Giles had not been enthused enough to place me in the capable hands of Arabella Pike. I am extremely thankful to them all for their help, advice and support.

During the course of the research for this book I visited many archives and libraries around Britain. I was met with unfailing courtesy and helpfulness. Without these institutions historical research would be impossible; with them it is most pleasant. I would like to thank the staff of the Modern Papers Reading Room, Bodleian Library, Oxford; Rhodes House Library, Oxford; the British Library; the Public Record Office, Kew; the House of Lords Record Office; the Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge; Carmarthen Record Office; Lincoln Record Office; Lincoln Cathedral; Royal Headquarters, Grenadier Guards, Wellington Barracks; the Imperial War Museum; Rio Tinto Zinc plc Archives, London; GEC-Marconi plc Archives, Chelmsford; AMC; Hatfield House; Chatsworth Archives; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh and the London Library.

I have benefited enormously from the help of a number of scholars of British history. I would like to thank, in particular, Dr Stuart Ball of the University of Leicester for discussing his work on Cuthbert Headlam and claryifying details of the Headlam-Lyttelton relationship, Dr Philip Murphy of the University of Reading for discussing his work on Lyttelton, Alan Lennox-Boyd and Sir Roy Welensky, Dr Nicholas Crowson of the University of Birmingham for sharing his ideas about the anti-appeasers; and Dr Ronald Hyam of Magdalene College, Cambridge for acting as my mentor in imperial history. Each took time away from their own scholarly research to guide me in fields in which they are expert and I was not. Professor David Reynolds of Christ’s College, Cambridge, Dr Richard Aldous of University College, Dublin and Robin Harcourt Williams, Librarian to the Marquess of Salisbury, undertook the lengthy task of reading my manuscript in full and providing a detailed commentary on what I had written. The improvements in style and content they introduced were many and various. I thank them for taking such care with my work. Since Richard Aldous and I have talked endlessly about our books since we were at Cambridge together, some of the work he was correcting was probably originally his in any case.

One of the chief joys of writing a book is sharing it with one’s family. I count myself fortunate that my family are bibliophiles. My parents, Eric and Sheila, have encouraged me to write from an early age. My father read the manuscript of this book as he has those of my previous books. I have incorporated many of his suggestions and dropped those passages that did not meet paternal approval. My wife, Helen, has read every draft of this book as it left my pen. If I had listened to her advice more often I would have finished quicker and written better. I dedicate this book to her, with love.

PREFACE (#ulink_46b78501-cb82-5b90-9cd0-f392d9131950)

Harold Macmillan, Oliver Lyttelton, Bobbety Cranborne and Harry Crookshank all arrived at Eton in 1906, all served in the Great War in the same battalion of the Grenadier Guards and all entered the Cabinet under Winston Churchill during the Second World War. They helped Churchill to seize back power from the socialists in 1951 and once more joined his Cabinet, now as senior figures. Macmillan rose to be prime minister in 1957. This quartet thus socialized with each other, argued with each other, fought together and climbed the political ladder together for over forty years. ‘From the playing fields of Eton, to the horrors of the Western Front, to the pinnacle of political power,’ was not the blurb of a Jeffrey Archer novel but the reality of these men’s lives.

A friend of Crookshank and Cranborne’s, Paul Emrys-Evans defined their generation as those, born between Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1888 and the turn of the century, who fought in the Great War. Subsequent studies have confirmed that this was indeed the group that bore the brunt of the front-line fighting and thus the heaviest casualties. Few Englishmen, on the other hand, have ever defined themselves solely as ‘old soldiers’. In any subsequent career, including politics, individuals cooperated with those both older and younger than themselves. In political life they might well have been drawn to those with similar life experiences, but this attraction seldom provided the main explanation for political action. It is hard to understand later events without a knowledge of generations, but unwise to expect an understanding of relationships within a generation to explain everything. Bearing this in mind, the present work is only in part a collective biography of four contemporaries. It certainly tries to evoke what living and working cheek by jowl with the acquaintances of childhood and the friends of wartime was like for Conservative politicians in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. This evocation, however, merely sets the scene for the action.

As much as a collective biography this book is a comparative biography. It is concerned with those moments when its subjects interacted with each other but also with those situations where their actions might be contrasted. From early childhood Macmillan, Lyttelton, Cranborne and Crookshank were brought up with the notion that they were in competition with their contemporaries for the glittering prizes, the marks of honour accorded to men in public life. Although they were each under pressure to surpass the achievements of earlier generations of their own families, the main competition had to be against their own cohort. To use a sporting simile, an athlete can only race on the same track with those who reach their peak at the same age as himself. These four men came to the starting-line at the same time, and thus their performances can legitimately be measured against one another. The theme of this book is a race, a competition, willingly entered into, for power and glory. It seeks to explain why some men fell by the wayside while others prospered. ‘It’s not a flat race, it’s a steeplechase,’ as Winston Churchill once told Harold Macmillan.

1 Sons (#ulink_4a38bbe1-7b4f-5466-94da-3ca771b23839)

Harold Macmillan, Bobbety Cranborne, Oliver Lyttelton and Harry Crookshank were members of a remarkable group. The four were born within a year of one another, Bobbety Cranborne, Oliver Lyttelton and Harry Crookshank in 1893, Harold Macmillan, the youngest of the quartet, in February 1894. As Lyttelton himself wrote, ‘Harold Macmillan went to Eton as a Scholar at the beginning of the school year of 1906. Strangely amongst his exact contemporaries at Eton were three boys, Cranborne, Crookshank and Lyttelton, all – like he – destined to be officers in the Grenadier Guards, all destined to survive…and all to be members of Mr Churchill’s governments in war and peace.’

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