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

In the carefully cadenced world of Edwardian society, the four had started out not as a quartet but as two distinct pairs. Cranborne and Lyttelton were patricians, Macmillan and Crookshank ‘new men’. Eton was the clasp, a link sought quite consciously by the Macmillan and Crookshank families, that bound patrician and plebeian together. In the event this link was annealed by the Grenadier Guards.

The Lytteltons and the Cecils were aristocratic families who enjoyed a warm friendship. Not only was Oliver Lyttelton’s father, Alfred, close to Bobbety’s father, Jim Salisbury, but Oliver’s mother, Didi Lyttelton, and Bobbety’s mother, Alice Salisbury, were firm friends.

(#litres_trial_promo) In 1875 Jim Salisbury’s cousin, the future prime minister Arthur Balfour, fancied himself in love with Alfred’s sister, May. AJB was disconsolate at her early death from diphtheria, placing an emerald ring in her coffin. Naturally his friends rallied round. They rallied round once more in 1886 to console Alfred in his grief after the death of his wife, Laura, in childbirth just eleven months after their marriage. Alfred Lyttelton subsequently found solace in the love of a young beauty they had adopted into their circle, Didi Balfour. Her physical similarity to Laura was, some of his friends and relations thought, unnerving. Alfred and Didi married in 1892: Oliver was born within eleven months.

Oliver ‘had a hero worship of my father but stood in some awe of him’. It was hardly surprising. Alfred Lyttelton was the beau ideal of the muscular Christian. He was strikingly handsome, clever and well-liked. Beyond that, he was a true sporting celebrity, a natural at any game to which he turned his hand. These included both ‘aristocratic’ and ‘popular’ pursuits. He was a dominant figure at Eton fives, racquets and real tennis. He played football for England. He was best known as a ‘gentleman’ cricketer, second only to W. G. Grace in the England team, in which he played as a hard-charging batsman and as wicket-keeper. In middle age he took up golf with a passion that dominated Oliver’s childhood landscape. In 1899 he bought land near Muirfield and called in Edwin Lutyens to build him a splendid golfing lodge, High Walls at Gullane.

(#litres_trial_promo) It was a burden Oliver had to carry as he grew into manhood that, although he was big and tall, he could never approach his father in sporting prowess.

Oliver was, however, doted on by his beautiful but highly strung mother. She was much given to ‘premonitions’. She later became, somewhat to his embarrassment, one of the leading figures in the British spiritualist movement. She forced Alfred to give up High Walls because she could not bear the separations his golfing forays involved. Instead she found a new country home at Wittersham near Rye, where Alfred and Oliver could golf under her watchful eye. At an early age Mrs Lyttelton’s worries affected Oliver’s schooling. He was not sent to prep school as a boarder but instead attended Mr Bull’s in Baker Street with his cousin Gil Talbot, later a close Oxford friend of Harold Macmillan who was killed fighting on the Western Front in 1915.

(#litres_trial_promo) At one stage Alfred Lyttelton even wavered in his intention to send Oliver to Eton, where his family had been outstanding figures for generations, considering instead the merits of Westminster, where he would be a day-boy within easy walking distance of home.

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Alfred Lyttelton entered politics in his late thirties soon after his second marriage and the birth of his son. Like his Cecil friends Arthur Balfour and Jim Salisbury, he was a staunch Tory. After a relatively brief apprenticeship he was catapulted straight into the Cabinet by Balfour, who had himself succeeded his uncle, Lord Salisbury, as prime minister the previous year. Although many would feel jealous about such rapid advancement on the ‘Bob’s your uncle’ principle, Alfred in fact entered high office at a difficult moment. The Conservative government was on the ebb tide that would lead to its crushing defeat in the 1906 election. Lyttelton himself, as colonial secretary, was soon embroiled in the unedifying aftermath of the Boer War and in particular the issue of ‘Chinese Slavery’ in South Africa. Lyttelton was excoriated by sections of the press on the issue. He was used to adulation rather than criticism and reacted badly. After hearing him speak in the Commons, Lord Balcarres, a Conservative whip, observed that his speech was ‘able in its way but marred by a certain asperity of voice which is not borne out by his smiling countenance. The result is that the newspaper men think his remarks virulent and acrimonious, whereas members in the House itself (to whom he addresses himself exclusively), see by his face that he does not mean to be disagreeable. Hence the divergence of criticism between MPs and journalists.’

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Neither did Alfred Lyttelton have much taste for opposition. Party managers found the tendency of ex-ministers, of whom Lyttelton was one, to follow the example of Balfour, who lost Manchester and was returned for City of London, to gravitate towards town in search of safe seats comfortably near their homes ‘indefensible’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Lyttelton had bought 16 Great College Street, Westminster, in 1895 when he had become an MP; now he bought No. 18 next door and had Lutyens create a substantial house. Defeated at Warwick and Leamington, he was found the excellent seat of St George’s, Hanover Square. This ‘selfishness’ as far as the party in the country was concerned was compounded by ‘indolence’ in the House itself. He was accounted ‘tame and ineffectual’ in the Commons.

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British politics were moving into an exceptionally bitter phase as the Liberals, or ‘Radicals’ as the Conservatives preferred to call them, attempted to push through their ambitious social, financial and constitutional programme. It seemed to some Conservatives that they were engaged in a class war with enemies such as the Welsh Liberal politician Lloyd George and the socialists of the Independent Labour Party. Yet in the Lyttelton household the political creed of the latter was a suitable subject for humour: ‘I went to the Mission [in the East End of London],’ Oliver told his mother in 1908, ‘but I am still not yet a socialist. The “staff” are particularly nice as is only natural considering they are Old Etonians.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Alfred seemed ‘opposed to any actions except quiescence’ and was not in favour of the House of Lords wrecking Liberal legislation. He and his friends, ‘comfortable in rich metropolitan seats’, did not seem to register the depth of the crisis: if the Tories did not resist with all their might and main ‘we should look upon ourselves as a dejected indeed a defeated party’.

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The unpleasantness of politics communicated itself to Oliver: ‘I hope,’ he wrote to his mother from Eton in 1909, the year of Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’, ‘we are very full for Christmas, I don’t mind sleeping on the floor, even if everybody is over thirty. I do hope there won’t be any ghastly election or any other political absurdity this time.’

(#litres_trial_promo); Unfortunately the political absurdity was unstoppable. In November Lloyd George described the peers as a useless group randomly chosen from among the unemployed and the House of Lords threw out his budget. That Christmas was ruined by an election in January 1910. The next Christmas was ruined by an election in December 1910. The elections solved nothing. The Liberals were weakened, indeed reliant on Irish nationalists for their parliamentary majority, but still in power. In front stretched the crisis of the 1911 Parliament Act, which was designed to cripple the power of the peers. Electoral failure in 1910 also brought about the fall of Balfour and the advent of the Scottish ‘hard man’ Andrew Bonar Law as Conservative leader. Alfred had tried to persuade his party to avoid conflict. Although he had supported Law for the leadership, once it was clear that Balfour had no stomach for the fight, politics could no longer be an adventure shared by friends.

If the political crisis of 1909 onwards dispirited the Lyttelton family, it reinvigorated the Cecils. Bobbety – ‘a ridiculous name but the one by which I am known to my friends’ – Cranborne grew up in a house full of ‘die-hards’ fighting the good fight for their family and class.

(#litres_trial_promo) The dominating figure of his early years was his grandfather, the 3rd Marquess. By his exertions Lord Salisbury had lifted the Cecils of Hatfield from centuries spent as political ciphers back to the heights of power they had enjoyed at the turn of the sixteenth century. He was in all ways an awe-inspiring figure, luxuriantly bearded, of huge stature, lapidary judgement and, in the outside world, prime minister until his retirement in 1902, when Bobbety was nine years old. The Cecils were by then the nearest Britain possessed to an imperial family.

Although Lord Salisbury himself had had to struggle hard and rise through his talents, once he reached the pinnacle he buttressed his rule by employing members of his own family. Although he had to look to his sister’s son Balfour as a political lieutenant and eventual successor, three of Salisbury’s five sons also entered politics: the eldest and his heir, Jim (or Jem), Bobbety’s father, and two younger brothers, Lord Robert and Lord Hugh, known as Linkie. It was said of the Cecil boys that ‘their ability varies inversely with their age’. Jim was thus regarded as the least talented, Hugh as the most. By the time Bobbety was old enough to take an interest in the public lives of his father and uncles, the rolling political salons that were Hatfield and Salisbury House in Arlington Street had become his homes. Yet the memory of the great 3rd Marquess still cast a long shadow. Not only did outsiders persistently compare him to his sons, to their perpetual disadvantage, but they themselves were prey to deep feelings of inadequacy. Since 1883 Jim Salisbury had suffered from periodic bouts of depression brought on by ‘these festering feelings of failure’.

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If Oliver Lyttelton grew up in awe of his father, Bobbety grew up in a household of men in awe of his grandfather’s dominating presence. This perhaps contributed to the family traits of fierce pride in the gens, intractability and odd diffidence. On the other hand, the dominant figure in his early life was not his father but his mother, Alice, the daughter of an Irish peer, whom James Cranborne had married in 1887. Although not a public figure as her friend Didi Lyttelton became after her husband’s death, Alice Salisbury was the undisputed chatelaine of Hatfield. She had no compunction about dabbling in politics: she made herself instrumental in the downfall of the Viceroy of India, George Curzon, by acting as the ‘back channel’ between his enemies and Balfour. More than her secret interest in political affairs, however, she provided the social flair and taste for entertaining on a magnificent scale from which her husband shied. She was to prove, behind the scenes, the mainstay of both her husband and her son.

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Lack of appreciable talent did not stop Lord Salisbury raising his son to ministerial rank as under-secretary of state for foreign affairs in 1900. Quips about Cecil nepotism struck and stuck because they were so obviously true. To nobody’s surprise, least of all his own one suspects, Jim Cranborne was not a success in his performance as a Foreign Office minister. He was not impressive in the House of Commons, never having got over his nervousness at speaking. He was thus ‘forbidden to give answers to supplementary questions’ in case he said something damaging. Unfortunately, since he did not have the parliamentary skill of avoiding a question by saying nothing at length, he simply refused to respond to any inquiry that had not been properly notified in advance and for which he had no clear brief. This procedure caused ire and mirth in the House in equal measure. There was soon in existence ‘a universal belief in Jim Cranborne’s complete and invincible incompetence’.

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In the short term, matters did not seem set to improve. In 1903 Lord Salisbury died and Jim Cranborne succeeded him, becoming the 4th Marquess. His translation to the Upper House was a blessed relief. He felt more at home among men who were literally his peers; he was accorded the respect to which his position in society entitled him, with none of the rowdyism of the demotic Commons. His cousin Balfour brought him into the Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal at the same time as Alfred Lyttelton became colonial secretary in October 1903.

As Jim Salisbury was entering into his inheritance, the Conservative party started to tear itself to pieces over the issue of Tariff Reform, the campaign launched by Joseph Chamberlain in May 1903 to convert the party from laissez-faire to protectionism. Chamberlain hit on a sore point. The party had nearly destroyed itself over the issue of Free Trade in the 1840s, had condemned itself to a generation of political impotence and had only fully re-established itself as the natural party of government under Jim’s father. The Cecils were avowed Free Traders, yet the manner in which they prosecuted their campaign did not initially enhance their reputation.

Immediately after the crushing election defeat of 1906, Salisbury circularized all Unionist MPs in order to identify them as Free Traders or Tariff Reformers, or ‘food taxers’ as he called them. The move did not receive a warm response. ‘I am bound to say,’ wrote Lord Balcarres, ‘that I resent this catechism from one whose incompetence has been a contributory cause to our disaster. Good fellow as [ Jim] is, his tact is not generally visible: and it would not be unfair to reply that the taxation of food has doubtless injured the Party – though we have suffered largely from nepotism, sacerdotalism, and inefficiency.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Lord Robert and Lord Hugh were on the wilder fringes of the party, locked into spiteful conflict with their constituency parties.

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Like Alfred Lyttelton, Jim Salisbury found the inevitable squabbling in a party forced humiliatingly into opposition after years of rule disheartening. Unlike Lyttelton, he subsequently found a great cause and a method of prosecuting it to call his own. The cause was the House of Lords and the method was obstructionism. The method, it is true, predated the cause. In 1908 one of his colleagues recorded that ‘Jem wanted a guerrilla war with the House of Commons’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Jim Salisbury had little talent for constructive political achievement, but he found himself to have a genius for saying no. In 1910, for the first time, he became one of the most important men in the party. It was he who convened the meeting of party grandees at Hatfield in December that forced on Balfour far-reaching changes to party organization. He found willing allies in his brothers. It was Lord Hugh Cecil who led his ‘Hughligans’, a band of about thirty MPs dedicated to howling down Asquith and the Liberal leaders and disrupting the House of Commons. George Wyndham, Oliver Lyttelton’s favourite among his father’s circle, drew the memorable distinction between ‘Ditchers’, ‘those who would the in the last ditch’, and ‘Hedgers’, who were ‘liable to trimming’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Lord Salisbury found life much more comfortable once he became a committed Ditcher. In 1905, on the grounds that one should not let mere politics interfere with civilized life, he had had Asquith to dine at Hatfield within twenty-four hours of his cousin and chief Balfour’s resignation as prime minister. In July 1911, the same month in which his brother decided to shout Asquith down in the House of Commons, ‘Lord and Lady Salisbury refused the invitation of the Asquiths to dine at the party given to the King and Queen’. Even Salisbury’s fiercest detractors in the party approved: ‘Asquith and his colleagues are out for blood. He has poured insult and contumely on the peers: why break bread or uncork champagne at his table?’

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The passing of the 1911 Parliament Act by the Liberals under the threat that the new king, George V, would be obliged to swamp the Lords with new peers, was a crushing blow. ‘Politics are beastly’, was Salisbury’s comment. Yet the Act guaranteed the House very considerable powers of delay while Liberal dependence on the Irish nationalists gave the peers a much greater excuse for using those powers than they had had for wrecking Liberal social legislation. Many peers were demoralized by their defeat, but Jim Salisbury was suffused in a glow of moral righteousness. Thereafter he never entirely lost his reputation as the keeper of the true flame of Conservatism. This made him a powerful man, though he was not always comfortable with the role. After the war he confided to his son that he found continual calls to save the Conservative party tiresome. One should remember, he told Bobbety, that parties came and went: principles and family were much more durable.

Bobbety Cranborne and Oliver Lyttelton were brought up at the apex of English social and political life. Politics was the constant backdrop to their childhood. To have Cabinet ministers, even prime ministers, in the house was a regular occurrence. From an early age they were aware of the fascination of politics, but also became youthfully cynical about it. Harry Crookshank and Harold Macmillan did not have such easy access to the political élite. Whereas Cranborne and Lyttelton could see the casualties of ambition – the burnt-out drunks like George Wyndham – ambition for the Crookshank and Macmillan families was entirely positive. It was also more impersonal and structured than for the aristocrats. From the start the course was clear: a forcing prep school, leading to a scholarship at Eton, leading in turn to the best colleges at Oxford. The perfectly respectable schools and colleges attended by their fathers simply would not do.

Although the Macmillan and Crookshank pères followed quite different professions, they had arrived at a remarkably similar social location by the time their sons were born. Harry Maule Crookshank was a doctor who had taken advantage of the expansion of the Empire in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to become an imperial administrator. He came from an old Ulster Protestant family of some distinction. The Crookshanks had arrived in Ulster as part of the seventeenth-century plantation of Scottish Protestants. The family took great pride in their most famous ancestor, William Crookshank, who had been one of the thirteen men who shut the gates of Derry in 1688. Since then the family could boast a brace of Ulster MPs. By the nineteenth century, however, Harry Maule Crookshank’s father and grandfather were making their way through soldiering. Both served as officers in line infantry regiments. Before the Cardwell reforms of the 1870s, officers in the British army purchased their rank. The Crookshanks thus had some funds behind them but could not rise to great heights. Harry Maule’s grandfather finished his career as a colonel. His father was a captain at the time of his early death while serving in India. While overseas Harry Maule was to send his son, Harry Comfort, for his initial education in Europe. This seems to have been part of a family pattern, for he himself received his early education in Boulogne before proceeding to a minor public school in Cheltenham. He was not destined for the army but instead studied medicine at University College Hospital, London. Although Crookshank had not joined the British army, he maintained his family’s military tradition. At the age of twenty-one he joined a Red Cross ambulance unit serving in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. He repeated the experience later in the decade, joining a similar unit in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8. Crookshank’s contact with the Ottoman Empire brought about a fundamental change in his life. In 1882 British forces invaded Egypt to secure the recently completed Suez Canal. Following in the wake of the troops were British officials dedicated to the reform of the corrupt and ineffectual Egyptian state. Between 1883 and 1914 the real power in Egypt lay with the British, led by Lord Cromer.

Harry Maule Crookshank found himself an important cog in Cromer’s machine as director-general of the Egyptian Prisons Administration. Coming from an undistinguished background he was, at the age of thirty-four, relatively young for his responsibilities. In 1883 Crookshank faced a difficult situation. The British regarded the Egyptian prisons they found as utterly barbarous and in urgent need of reform. ‘No report,’ wrote the author of the initial survey of the system, ‘can convey the feeblest impression of the helpless misery of the prisoners, who live for months like wild beasts, without change of clothing, half-starved, ignorant of the fate of their families and bewailing their own.’ The problem of the prisons was part of a wider malaise in a justice system dominated ‘by venality, tyranny and personal vindictiveness’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Yet British officials were being somewhat disingenuous in their criticism of the existing Egyptian prison system. The first concern for Cromer’s new administration was not reforming the prisons but bringing Egypt under its own firm control. To this end the 1880s were marked by a system akin to martial law. ‘Brigandage commissions’ ensured that as many potential troublemakers as possible were imprisoned. The combination of Egyptian inefficiency and British efficiency meant that there was massive overcrowding in the prisons: the gaols were at four times their nominal capacity.

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Crookshank’s eventual reform programme followed four main lines: old prisons were improved and made sanitary, new prisons were built, prisoners were provided with proper food and clothing and a separate system of reformatories for young offenders was created. The work was long, arduous and not always rewarding. Since the criminal justice system formed the keystone of ‘indirect’ rule, its conduct was the matter of much debate, even conflict, among the British themselves. Crookshank became involved on the side of those pragmatists who believed that as much use as possible should be made of the existing Egyptian system, already reformed on French lines before the occupation. His chief opponent was Sir Benson Maxwell, a naturally disputatious man who served as first procureur-général and believed the system should be purged of any intermediary foreign taint and thoroughly anglicized on the colonial model. Money was always tight. As Lord Cromer recorded in 1907, the year Crookshank left Egypt, ‘These reforms took time: Even now the prison accommodation can scarcely be said to be adequate to meet all the requirements of the country.’ Crookshank’s successor as director-general, Charles Coles, who took over in 1897, had a police rather than a medical background. He implied that his predecessor had been too soft. It was arguable, Coles felt, ‘that prison life is not sufficiently deterrent, and that the swing of the pendulum has carried the Administration too far in the direction of humanity, if not of luxury’.

There is no record of how the Crookshanks felt when Cromer gave credit to Coles rather than Harry Maule as the man ‘to whom the credit of reforming this branch of the Public Service is mainly due’. It was not in Harry Maule’s nature to push himself forward. Indeed, Coles felt that Crookshank had been unnecessarily diffident in his dealings with Cromer.

(#litres_trial_promo) It would seem even so that Crookshank’s performance in fourteen years of overseeing the prisons was rated highly enough for him to be given another important and far more agreeable job within the administration. In 1897 he was made controller of the Daira Sanieh Administration. The Daira estates were lands that the former ruler of Egypt, Ismail Pasha, had ‘contrived, generally by illicit and arbitrary methods, to accumulate in his own hands’. By the time the British arrived they amounted to over half a million acres. They were, however, very heavily mortgaged. When the profligate Ismail had got into severe financial difficulties he had borrowed £9.5 million on the security of the properties.

Under the Cromer regime the estates were run in the manner that became standard practice: giving the appearance of authority to Egyptians but severely trammelling their power. The putative administrator of the lands was an Egyptian director-general, but he was joined on a board of directors by two controllers, one British, the post Crookshank took on, and one French. The controllers ‘had ample powers of supervision and inspection. They alone were the legal representatives of the bondholders.’ Cromer regarded Crookshank’s performance as British controller as admirable. The main problem for the board was that the estates were so heavily indebted that expenditure on loan repayments always outran revenue. The first step, taken before Crookshank’s time, was to extract higher revenues from the estates.

From 1892 onwards, the properties started to yield a profit, though there was a brief crisis in 1895 not long before Crookshank’s arrival. By Crookshank’s last years in office, revenue was very healthy indeed, amounting to over £800,000 in 1904–5. Under Crookshank, however, a new policy was instituted. Cromer had close relations with the banker Ernest Cassel. Cassel thought that a great deal of money could be made from the estates. In 1898 the estates were made over to a new company charged with selling them off in lots. By the time Crookshank demitted office, all the lots had been sold, yielding a net profit for the government of over £3.25 million.

(#litres_trial_promo) Crookshank was leaving at a good time. When Cromer retired, the speculation in Egyptian land and shares in which Crookshank had been a pivotal figure rebounded into a financial crisis. Cromer’s successor, Eldon Gorst, concluded that the relationship between financiers and Cromer’s apparat had been rather too close for comfort. Profit had not necessarily walked hand in hand with good governance.

(#litres_trial_promo) Crookshank slipped into comfortable retirement in the wake of his master. He had been a faithful and discreet servant.

In later life Harry Crookshank was proud of and interested in his father’s official career. He too was to serve as an official in what was by then the former Ottoman Empire. He planned to make Egypt and Turkey his areas of particular expertise when he first entered the House of Commons, though these plans went awry. In many ways it was the position that Harry Maule’s achievements gave him in society that shaped Harry Comfort’s world. In 1890, at the mid-point of his term in the prison administration, Harry Crookshank was accorded the honorific ‘Pasha’. It was as Crookshank Pasha that he was known thereafter. Although his job had not changed, the oriental glamour of his new status helped him to woo a young Vassar-educated American visitor to Egypt, Emma Walraven Comfort.

Crookshank’s marriage to Emma Comfort in 1891 was wholly advantageous. Her father, Samuel Comfort, was one of the founders of Standard Oil, the company created by his contemporary John D. Rockefeller in 1870. By the end the 1870s Standard Oil had come to control the entire American oil market. In 1882 its owners created the ‘Trust’: at the time Crookshank met Emma the conflict between Standard and the ‘trustbusters’ was one of the most important struggles in American political life. Samuel Comfort was a ‘robber baron’ of the ‘Gilded Age’.