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

To Helen

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREFACE

1 Sons

2 Grenadiers

3 Bottle-washers

4 Anti-fascists

5 Glamour Boys

6 Churchillians

7 Tories

8 Ministers

9 Successors

10 Enemies

11 Relics

CONCLUSION

NOTES AND REFERENCES

INDEX

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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

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

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.’¹

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.² 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.³ 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 1915.⁴ 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.⁵

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.’⁶

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’.⁷ 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.⁸

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.’⁹ 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’.¹⁰

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.’¹¹; 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.¹² 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’.¹³

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.¹⁴

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’.¹⁵

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.’¹⁶ Lord Robert and Lord Hugh were on the wilder fringes of the party, locked into spiteful conflict with their constituency parties.¹⁷

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’.¹⁸ 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’.¹⁹ 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?’²⁰

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’.²¹ 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.²²

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.²³ 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.²⁴ 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.²⁵ 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’.²⁶ He was rich and Emma was his only daughter. When Harry Comfort Crookshank was born in 1893, his way of life had already been determined. He would never have to work for a living. Money would continue to flow in from the most ‘blue chip’ stocks and shares imaginable, given to or inherited by his mother.

One of Crookshank Pasha’s enthusiasms had a profound effect on his son’s life. In his annus mirabilis of 1891, Harry Maule Crookshank was installed in the Grecia Lodge in Cairo. The lodge’s best-known member was Kitchener, who became master the year after Crookshank joined.²⁷ Like his father Harry Comfort was to be a passionate Freemason. He joined the Apollo Lodge as soon as he arrived in Oxford in 1912, the earliest possible opportunity. His attachment to Freemasonry thus predated his political ambitions. He would pursue his Masonic career with as much enthusiasm and ambition as he embraced Parliament.

Crookshank spent his early childhood in Cairo, but in 1903 he was sent to school in Lausanne.²⁸ In May 1904 he arrived at Summer Fields, a prep school at Oxford, to find Harold Macmillan already installed. Macmillan’s road to Summer Fields had been much less exotic. His father, Maurice, had after a few years schoolmastering joined the family publishing firm. On a trip to Paris he met a young American widow, Nellie Hill. Nellie was the daughter of a Methodist preacher in Indiana. At the age of eighteen she had married into a well-to-do family in Indianapolis. Her husband survived only five months of marriage. Using the money he left her, Nellie decamped for Europe in the late 1870s. She had no fondness for the American Midwest and was happy to move to England with Maurice when they married in 1884. Unlike his new friend Harry Crookshank, Harold was a late child, born ten years later when his mother was forty. By then the family was firmly established in a tall, narrow house in Cadogan Place, the connecting link ‘between the aristocratic pavements of Belgrave Square and the barbarism of Chelsea’. There was also a substantial if inelegant country house in Sussex, Birch Grove.

In contrast to the Crookshanks, where the mother’s wealth was paramount, it was Maurice Macmillan who financed the family’s lifestyle. Yet there was no doubt that the ‘master of the house’ was the dominant figure of Nellie Macmillan. Mrs Macmillan threw herself with gusto into the public life of her adopted country. Her milieu was the societies of rich and well-connected ladies devoted to some public cause. Her main efforts were expended on the Victoria League, a body of imperial enthusiasts founded in memory of the recently deceased Queen-Empress, of which, for many years, she was honorary treasurer. She became acquainted with her fellow American imperial enthusiast Emma Crookshank.

For both the Macmillans and the Crookshanks to send a son to Summer Fields was a clear declaration of intent. The establishment had been created so that its pupils could compete for scholarships to the major public schools. Between 1897 and 1916 the school averaged more than five Eton scholarships a year. By the time Macmillan and Crookshank reached College, one in three of their fellow scholars had been to Summer Fields.²⁹ As Henry Willink, who scraped into the same election at Eton as Macmillan and Crookshank, recalled: ‘I had not been skilfully prepared for the Scholarship examination as…boys at Summer Fields were prepared.’³⁰ ‘If,’ as the school history puts it, ‘the boys were not force-fed they were certainly stuffed.’ Summer Fields, where Macmillan and Crookshank became close friends, duly delivered on its promises. Both boys were placed on the list of seventeen that made up the Eton election of 1906.

Eton in 1906 was undoubtedly the most famous and prestigious school in England.³¹ It was also in many ways the perfect microcosm of the social universe represented by Macmillan and Crookshank on the one hand and Lyttelton and Cranborne on the other. Eton was divided into two unequal parts. In College there were a total of seventy scholars, ‘Collegers’, or ‘Tugs’. Entrance was by the fiercely competitive examination Macmillan and Crookshank had just sat. As a result College was dominated by boys just like them: from families dedicated to the late Victorian cult of achievement through hard work.

There were a much larger number of boys in School, the Oppidans. The year 1906 was a bumper one for School, with 224 new boys, of whom Cranborne and Lyttelton were two. School was of distinctly mixed ability, entrance being governed by family tradition and contacts. As Oliver Lyttelton observed, the masters ‘were inclined to be slightly snobbish…they conceived their role in the State to be that of training and teaching those who were likely to shape its future [and thus]…wanted to have pupils from the great families. The sons of those families would have a start in the race.’³² Initially the Collegers and Oppidans, further divided into their boarding houses, were kept fairly separate. As they progressed through the school there would be more mixing, particularly as they shared the pupil rooms of the Classical Tutors. Lyttelton and Cranborne were members of Henry Bowlby’s house and mixed with Macmillan and Crookshank in his pupil room. It was exactly this mixing that attracted ambitious families to Eton.

The Eton the four boys attended was, on the surface, in a process of dynamic expansion. The school was nevertheless plagued with troubling undercurrents. In 1905 the long headmastership of Dr Warre came to an end. Warre had instituted an extensive building programme completed while the boys were at Eton: the gymnasium was opened in 1907, the hall in 1908 and the library in 1910. Although the fruit of previous expenditure was in the process of realization, the school was thus in a period of financial retrenchment. Warre’s departure also opened the way for a power struggle between his presumed successor, A. C. Benson, a brilliant but depressive homosexual, and the leader of the younger ‘Classics’, the acerbic A. B. Ramsay, known as ‘the Ram’. The most powerful voice on the selection panel, Lord Cobham, was able to usher in his kinsman, Edward Lyttelton, as a compromise candidate.

Oliver Lyttelton was thus faced with every schoolboy’s nightmare – a close relative as headmaster. He was frequently mortified by his uncle’s tendency to trumpet the moral superiority of the Lytteltons – which he later described as ‘washing clean linen in public’. Lyttelton’s embarrassment was accentuated by Uncle Edward’s undoubted peculiarities. No one doubted that he was a perfect Christian gentleman and a fine sportsman, but he was an indifferent classicist and soon became the butt of Collegers whose grasp of Latin far exceeded his own. He was also a health faddist, following a vegetarian diet and lauding the virtues of outdoor living. His healthy tan earned him the nickname ‘the Brown Man’ in an age that valued alabaster complexions. The headmaster’s attempts to keep in check the tendency of Etonians to lord it over the neighbouring population won him few friends in the school and met with limited success. Lyttelton failed to persuade the Master and Fellows to broaden the curriculum at the expense of an unleavened diet of literary classics. The boys, as so often, were dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries when it came to such matters. Macmillan angrily noted: ‘I am rather annoyed at the nonsense that people are talking and writing about “Education”…we are all to learn, it seems, about stocks and shares. Instead of humanities we are to dissect frogs and make horrible smells in expensive laboratories…I do not see that an ignorance of chemistry is any better than an ignorance of Classics.’³³ Edward Lyttelton’s career at Eton was ended during the war by a brave if – given the temper of the times – unwise speech proposing that Britain should cede Gibraltar to Germany in return for peace.

Each of the boys had a rather different experience of Eton. Of the four Lyttelton’s is by far the best recorded. The main challenge he faced was the long shadow cast by his father’s glittering reputation at Eton. His solid school career was always found wanting when set next to that of Alfred. He worked hard at everything, becoming house captain of Lubbock’s and achieving entrance to the Classical First where the best scholars, whether Colleger or Oppidan, were taught together. Success had its drawbacks: ‘Everything is rather an ordeal at present,’ he reported home, ‘I mean I am always finding myself in solitary positions of responsibility; either I am leading sixth form into chapel or I am making a speech or I am commanding the company in the Corps or I am president of the debate but I am getting used to them all.’³⁴ Of some importance for the future, he did plenty of soldiering.³⁵ His housemaster, Samuel Lubbock, who had taken the house over from Bowlby when the latter left to become headmaster of Lancing, noticed his efforts with pleasure: ‘He deserves the best report I can give him,’ he wrote to Alfred, ‘certainly the house will never have a better captain…His work has improved to a far greater [extent] than a year ago I thought probable and his marks in trials are quite encouraging.’³⁶ Lubbock also made the rather rash prediction that ‘with really hard work he might just be up to a First at Cambridge’: he subsequently had to admit that his enthusiasm for Oliver’s personality had led him to overestimate his scholarly abilities.

Most pleasing of all, Oliver was finally elected to Eton’s self-selecting elite of senior boys, the Eton Society or ‘Pop’, of which, inevitably, his father had been president, in his final half. It had been a struggle to ingratiate himself. His election, Lubbock reported, ‘does credit to Pop: for great and sound as his merits are, he is rather too clever and too old [for] many average boys: as I have said before he jests rather too frequently and they don’t quite understand all his jokes…and boys are very self-conscious creatures. But he is quick at seeing things and I think he has seen this clearly enough.’³⁷ Unfortunately Lubbock was rather too sanguine on the last point. Three years later Raymond Asquith reported from the trenches that ‘his chief defect to my mind is one inherited from Alfred – telling rather long and moderately good stories and laughing hysterically long before he comes to the point’.³⁸ Fifty-two years later, a former Cabinet colleague wrote that Lyttelton’s sense of humour ‘varied from classical to Rabelaisian or even third form…The only difficulty was that an immediate appreciation of the humorous aspects of any question was inclined to limit the expression of the arguments in mundane terms.’³⁹

It was towards the end of their time at Eton that Oliver and Bobbety became close friends. For many Oppidans there was no presumption that they would go on to university; many drifted away to join the army or to travel on the Continent as a means of finishing their education. Lyttelton bemoaned the fact that by 1910 ‘all my particular pals will be gone except Cranborne’.⁴⁰ From then on the two started messing together.⁴¹

Fifty years on Osbert Sitwell reminded Bobbety ‘that you were a studious small boy’.⁴² Yet if his scholarly performance was anything to go by, the school inspectors who visited Eton in 1910 might have been thinking of Cranborne when they wrote in their report: ‘we do not forget that Eton’s highest service to the nation is that she educates boys whose circumstances make it difficult or impossible for the school work to be as important in their eyes as it is in the eyes of less fortunate schoolboys’. The main strength of the Eton education was languages and Cranborne left School in 1911 with no firm grasp of any, whether classical or modern.

In College meanwhile Crookshank made good progress. His main problem was a complete lack of sporting prowess. Even Macmillan, a self-confessed duffer at games, was picked for the College team that played the Oppidans at the uniquely Etonian form of football known as the Wall Game. Crookshank was no more than an ardent admirer of those who could play. The Daily Graphic printed a picture of him among the crowd carrying the Collegers’ wall keeper in triumph after College had defeated the School. ‘It is dreadful,’ he lamented in 1917, while serving in Salonika, ‘this is the first Wall Match I have missed since I first went to Eton in 1906. I suppose it had to come some time, but it is rather a bitter blow.’⁴³ Apart from his deficiency in games he excelled in most other areas. He was good at his work, was a fine debater, edited the school magazine and was elected to Pop with rather more ease than Lyttelton. In their final year these two found themselves thrown together quite regularly. They studied classics together, with Crookshank consistently near the top of the class, Lyttelton consistently near the bottom.⁴⁴ At their final speech day in June 1912, Lyttelton gave a reading from the essay ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ by de Quincey, Crookshank from Lincoln’s second inaugural. They performed together in a sketch adapted from the Pickwick Papers: Crookshank taking the part of Mr Phunky, Lyttelton of Sam Weller.⁴⁵

By the time Cranborne, Lyttelton and Crookshank were forming their mature friendships at school, they were no longer boys but young men. The notable absentee was, of course, Macmillan, who was the only one who crashed at Eton. Macmillan and Crookshank had maintained their Summer Fields friendship. Whereas Crookshank flowered at Eton, Macmillan struggled. He was withdrawn by his mother in 1909. Macmillan was tight-lipped about his failure. He devoted a page in his memoirs to Eton as compared to a full chapter in Lyttelton’s. By his own account: ‘During my first half at Eton I had a serious attack of pneumonia, which I only just survived. Some years later, I suffered from growing too fast, and a bad state of the heart was diagnosed. This led to my leaving Eton prematurely and spending many months in bed or as an invalid.’⁴⁶ Many years later J. B. S. Haldane spread the rumour that Macmillan had, in fact, been expelled for egregious homosexuality. Eton, like all public schools, lived in fear of the nameless vice. One of Edward Lyttelton’s first acts as headmaster was to break a house whose captain had an appetite for buggery. Haldane was certainly in a position to know the cause of Macmillan’s departure. ‘Of course I remember him very well,’ Macmillan acknowledged when he was prime minister. ‘He was in the election above me at College, as well as a pupil of Henry Bowlby. I used to see him after the first war but have not seen him for many years.’⁴⁷ Haldane was, in all likelihood, motivated by malice. Macmillan himself was certainly malicious about Haldane’s family. Enjoying the discomfiture of Gilbert Mitchison in the House of Commons, his mind was thrown back to Eton. ‘He was Captain of Oppidans in my time and was a silly, pompous and conceited ass even then. As a punishment he married Naomi Haldane, and is now more or less insane.’⁴⁸ Whatever the truth about Macmillan’s departure from Eton, it certainly denied him the opportunity to mix with boys of his own age at the very time when he was maturing into manhood. This was to presage an unfortunate pattern. His time at Oxford was also cut short, as was his time in the army. Throughout his life Macmillan was to have difficulties in his relations with male contemporaries. The one relationship in which there was never awkwardness was that with Harry Crookshank. That they had been friends even before they reached Eton was significant.

Macmillan returned home from Eton to an even more pressurized environment. A. B. Ramsay, the fearsome Classic, called regularly to give him lessons. He seemed to Macmillan ‘a man of the world, elegant, refined and a most perfect gentleman’, much superior to Dr Lyttelton.⁴⁹ His mother’s other choices of tutor were somewhat stranger. The first to arrive was a Dilly Knox, friend of Harold’s brother, Daniel. On the face of it, the Knox connection seemed safe enough. Knox père was the fiercely evangelical Bishop of Manchester, known as ‘Hard Knox’ for his no-nonsense approach to educating the young.⁵⁰ Dilly Knox, on the other hand, was one of those young masters who took the lead in ragging Edward Lyttelton. Knox was a formidable classical scholar but was found too ‘austere’ for Harold. He was replaced by his younger brother Ronnie. Dilly was eleven years older than Harold, whereas Ronnie was only six years his senior. Harold was seventeen, Ronnie twenty-two: they were close enough in age to become intimate friends. Too intimate, in the view of Nellie Macmillan. She ordered Ronnie from the house in 1910. They had already argued about his pay, but this was ‘7000 times more important’. Mrs Macmillan had accused Ronnie of infecting Harold with ‘papism’. The situation was fraught with emotion: ‘I am extremely (and not unreturnedly) fond of the boy,’ Ronnie told his sister, ‘and it’s been a horrid wrench to go without saying a word to him of what I wanted to say.’⁵¹ Whatever its dangers, Harold’s high-priced and exceptional tuition did pay off in one sense: he won an Exhibition to Balliol and was thus able to arrive at university at the same time as his Eton contemporaries.

Just as Eton was not just another public school, so the colleges the boys attended at Oxford and Cambridge were notable for their wealth, size and social prestige. Lyttelton and Cranborne could simply follow in family tradition, Lyttelton to Trinity College, Cambridge, Cranborne to Christ Church, Oxford. Family tradition meant nothing to the new men. Crookshank went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, Macmillan followed his brother to the worldly Balliol College, Oxford, rather than his father to the more ascetic Christ’s College, Cambridge.

The traditional patterns established at Eton persisted at university. Lyttelton and Cranborne gravitated to the aristocratic beau monde, giving little thought to their studies. Macmillan and Crookshank were exceptionally serious. Lyttelton quickly discovered the joy of girls. In the Easter vacation of his first year he found himself staying at Lympne Castle, not far from Wittersham, with ‘Dinah’. He regaled his mother with their adventures: ‘Dinah and I…set off to walk to Lympne. After half an hour Dinah fell into a ditch and got wet and being anxious to see me in the same state made a compact with me that we wouldn’t go round any canal. Soon we swam a broad canal having thrown most of our clothes over the other side and we ended up swimming the military canal.’⁵² He drew a discreet veil over the denouement of their unclothed adventures in the Royal Military Canal. He also abjured his parents’ distaste for horse racing. Lyttelton’s passion for gambling led to inevitable conflicts, unconvincing excuses and anguished reconciliations when he had to borrow money from his parents to settle his debts:

I am so terribly sorry that you should have thought I was ungrateful or anything, that I don’t know what to do. But for the last three days I have been ill, I eat [sic] something that has poisoned me, and I have been bad and very sick but am better today. I am clearing up my accounts and will write you tomorrow at the latest. Darling Mother, for God’s sake don’t think me ungrateful for I simply can’t stand it. I have done ill enough without this: but that you should think me ungrateful or callous is too awful. You can’t realize how I feel towards you both or you couldn’t think such a thing for a minute. So please understand, I am sure you do really.⁵³

Bobbety Cranborne had no such money worries. His set at Oxford consisted of aristocrats, both English and foreign, as well as royalty. He roomed with the Russian prince Serge Obolensky, whom Lyttelton found ‘rather nice and very good looking’.⁵⁴ Unlike Obolensky, who was a fanatical polo player, Cranborne was not particularly horsy. This did not prevent him living a ‘hearty’ lifestyle. He was a member of the Loders Club, where a requirement for membership was that one was ‘a gentleman, a sportsman, and a jolly good fellow’. Established in 1814 as a debating club, it had long since degenerated into a group that dedicated each Sunday in term to hard drinking. In a mockery of the Oxford-Cambridge polo match, in which Obolensky was playing ‘at some unearthly inappropriate hour’, Bobbety and Prince Paul of Yugoslavia ‘got bicycles and awakened the echoes by playing polo in the street’. When they were arrested, a drunken Cranborne declared that he needed no lawyer and would defend in person the right of freeborn Englishmen to play bicycle polo. In court he ‘said he did not think they had annoyed any of the residents, but had merely entertained them’. For all his pains, they were fined a crown each and costs.⁵⁵

Cranborne’s academic performance was abject. In his first year he failed in his attempts to avoid his matriculation examination.⁵⁶ In 1913 he failed his Mods completely, drawing ‘sympathy…qualified by remonstrance and admonition’ from his tutor.⁵⁷ He decided that he would not bother to try again. In any case, of much more long-term moment than a failure to grapple with the classical authors was his burgeoning interest in international affairs.⁵⁸ He became close friends with Timothy Eden, ‘a shy, retiring, soft-featured young man’ who was the heir to a baronetcy.⁵⁹ Eden was part of the more ‘worthy’ side of Cranborne’s Oxford life.⁶⁰ He ran a ‘Round Table’ devoted to public affairs. He made contact with serious-minded young men like Frank Walters, who later became an official and champion of the League of Nations.⁶¹ Through his uncles, both outspoken champions of Anglo-Catholicism, Cranborne also got to know Macmillan’s mentor Ronnie Knox whom he invited to his eponymous country seat, Cranborne in Dorset, during the Easter vacation of 1914.

In 1912 Cranborne’s father decided that he should be sent to South Africa with his prospective brother-in-law, a precocious if pompous MP in his twenties, Billy Ormsby-Gore.⁶² The choice was important for the future. Most undergraduates tended to travel to France or Germany in the summers to improve their languages. Macmillan went on a reading party to Austria in 1913, Lyttelton ‘studied French in a small house in Fontainebleau, where the food did not live up to French standards’. Crookshank was in Germany with four friends during the summer of 1914 and barely escaped internment: the certificate of British nationality that enabled him to flee was stamped by the British consul in Hanover as late as 31 July. Indeed, Cranborne had intended to go to Germany himself in 1913 with Jock Balfour, an Eton friend, but cried off because of ill-health.⁶³ It was a lucky escape. Both Jock Balfour and Timothy Eden returned to Germany the following summer and spent the war in internment. By choice as well as chance Cranborne was caught up by the glamour of the Empire. His trip with Ormsby-Gore, including a return journey up the east coast of Africa and through the Suez Canal, imbued him with an abiding interest in the continent and a love of southern Africa.⁶⁴

Crookshank and Macmillan took their time at Oxford much more seriously. Crookshank devoted himself to work and Freemasonry. It was thus ‘simply sickening’ when he ‘only just missed’ his First in Mods.⁶⁵ The problem was fairly plain: he was a good Latinist but much weaker at Greek. Macmillan’s superb tuition enabled him to overtake his friend: he ‘just managed to scrape a First with some difficulty’.⁶⁶ Macmillan had other strings to his bow. His renewed relationship with Ronnie Knox brought with it a friendship with Knox’s other acolyte, the Wykehamist Guy Lawrence, and gave his life emotional intensity. ‘It is hard to give a definition or even a description of them,’ Ronnie wrote of the pair in 1917, ‘except perhaps to say that in a rather varied experience I have never met conversation so brilliant – with the brilliance of humour not wit.’ Macmillan and Lawrence ‘had already adopted what I heard (and shuddered to hear) described as “Ronnie’s religion”’. Indeed, serving Ronnie at Mass was a regular element of Macmillan’s Oxford experience.

Knox is often described as leading Lawrence and Macmillan towards Rome. Although Knox had decided by 1915 that the Church of England was illegitimate, he did not become a Roman Catholic until 1917. In fact it was Guy Lawrence who jumped first. ‘God made it clear to me and I went straight to [the Jesuits at] Farm Street…Come and be happy,’ Lawrence urged Knox. Lawrence believed that ‘Harold will, I think, follow very soon’. Harold did no such thing. He told Knox that he was ‘not going to “Pope” until after the war (if I’m still alive)’. This strange response suggests that Macmillan had little real feeling for the religious issues as Knox and Lawrence felt them. If one came to the realization that Anglican rites and orders, however modified, were a ‘sham jewel’, one risked the immortal soul by dying in error. It seems likely that Macmillan was more excited by the cell’s mixture of incense and intimacy than theology per se. In Trinity term 1914 he was poised between another overseas reading party organized by the don, ‘Sligger’ Urquhart, and Knox and Lawrence’s planned retreat in rural Gloucestershire for the summer vacation. Both promised an intimate atmosphere.

Conversion in any case threatened an irreparable breach with his mother, a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Catholic bigot, exclusion from Macmillan money and thus an end to worldly ambition. Macmillan had the sort of open ambition that is displayed by running for office in the Union. In May 1913 he made ‘the best speech we have heard this year from a Freshman’. Returning at the beginning of the next academic year, he made ‘an exceedingly brilliant speech, witty, powerful and at moments eloquent’. He was elected secretary in 1913 and treasurer in 1914. Having held the two junior posts in the triumvirate at the head of the Union, he would still have had time to run for president before the end of his undergraduate career. It is perhaps revealing that his star-struck younger friend Bimbo Tennant believed he had been president of the Union.⁶⁷

Whereas Macmillan’s second year at university was filled with excitement and expanding horizons, that of Lyttelton and Crookshank was blighted by the deaths of their fathers in July 1913 and March 1914 respectively. While the Crookshanks’ grief was private, the Lytteltons’ was all too public. The golden good fortune that had always followed Alfred Lyttelton was brought to an abrupt end at a time when he seemed to have hit a good seam in politics. At least one knowledgeable observer noted that the kind of business coming before the House in 1913 suited his style. On plans to disestablish the Church of Wales and attempts to hold government ministers to account for their corrupt personal involvement in the ‘Marconi scandal’ ‘he had lately made some good speeches. His extreme moderation gave extra effect to any attack that did come from him.’⁶⁸ As Oliver put it, ‘I feel the political situation is improving for Dada.’⁶⁹

The best gentleman cricketer of his generation was felled by a ball bowled by a professional fast bowler in a charity match. Incompetently treated, he died from acute peritonitis a few days later. The prime minister, Asquith, delivered his encomium in the House of Commons. ‘I hardly trust myself to speak,’ he told the House, ‘for, apart from ties of relationship, there had subsisted between us thirty-three years of close friendship and affection.’ Asquith’s oratory rose to the occasion as he famously memorialized his friend as the one who ‘perhaps of all men of this generation, came nearest to the mould and ideal of manhood, which every English father would like to see his son aspire to, and if possible attain’. Thus another heavy burden was laid on Oliver: to be the son of the man who was the perfect son. Fifty years later he would still feel ‘acutely how far short of the example which I was set’ he had fallen. Even in an age of numberless tragedies, those that struck some individuals most grievously were coeval to the war but entirely unrelated to it.

If the celebrity accorded their fathers differed, so too did the private circumstances of Crookshank and Lyttelton. The removal of Crookshank Pasha made no material difference to his family since it was from his wife that his wealth stemmed. There was now created the ménage that would sustain Crookshank for most of the rest of his life. His sister and his mother ministered to his every need, cared for him physically and sustained him emotionally until their deaths in 1948 and 1954 respectively. The Crookshanks’ initial London base was in Queen Anne’s Mansions, a fourteen-storey apartment block that had just been built, ‘without any external decoration…for real ugliness unsurpassed by any other great building in all London’. In 1937 they moved to 51 Pont Street. Visiting them there just after the outbreak of the Second World War, the politician Cuthbert Headlam found ‘the Crookshanks mère fils et fille exactly the same as ever – the women garrulous, Harry as self centred’.⁷⁰ ‘As you entered through the heavily leaded glass door,’ Harold Macmillan’s brother-in-law remembered, ‘the catacomb like gloom was relieved only by one small weak electric bulb, like the light on the tabernacle “dimly burning”.’ The house was a shrine to the Crookshanks’ life in the 1890s: ‘Eastern objets d’art and uncomfortable Victorian furniture.’⁷¹

For Lyttelton the death of his father changed a great deal in his life. Alfred Lyttelton had been a rich man, but his wealth derived mainly from the income he earned not capital he had accumulated. On his deathbed Alfred Lyttelton had commended Oliver to the care of his friend Arthur Balfour. This was a choice based on sentiment or ignorance given Balfour’s spectacular mismanagement of the fortune that he had inherited. It was quite clear that Oliver would have to make his own way in the world. The most obvious way forward was to follow his father into the law: by 1914 he was eating dinners at the Inns of Court and clerking for judges on the circuit.⁷²

Although by the summer of 1914 the future was beginning to be limned, – Lyttleton would be a lawyer, Cranborne would be a lord, Macmillan would be a gentleman publisher – the four were still little more than interested observers of the scene. Their hopes and interests reflected very accurately their position in society. They did not lack talent but none of them was outstanding. If the example of others, grandfathers, fathers and brothers, brought this home to them they nevertheless had a high opinion of themselves. They had a fund of impressions and sometimes inchoate opinions. They were, in a word, undergraduates, and typical of the breed. As Lyttelton himself later put it: ‘At the University I merely became social and an educated flâneur. It was the camp and the Army that turned me into a case-hardened man.’⁷³ The fact that one in four of those who were at Oxford and Cambridge at the same time as this quartet were to be killed in the Great War should not lead us to over-dramatize their pre-war experience. They had not ‘grown up in a society which was half in love with death’. They would have been surprised to have been told that ‘they were afflicted with the romantic fatalism that characterized that apocalyptic age’.⁷⁴ The picture of a golden but doomed generation is an ex post facto invention.

2 Grenadiers

To serve in the Guards was to have a very specific experience of the war. They were socially élitist, officered by aristocrats or by those who aspired to be like aristocrats. They were also a combat élite. Robert Graves reported the view that the British army in France was divided into three equal parts: units that were always reliable, units that were usually reliable and unreliable units.¹ The Guards were on his ‘always reliable’ list. They were introverted, especially so once an entire Guards division was created in 1915. A junior officer would rarely ever come into contact with a senior officer who was himself not a Guardsman. They had an unshakeable esprit de corps. They were envied by other units. James Stuart, Cranborne and Macmillan’s brother-in-law, who served with the Royal Scots, remembered that ‘the Guards were always regarded by the Regiments of the Line as spoilt darlings’.²

All this mattered. Although the experience of war was one of terrifying loneliness, to succeed one had to be part of a successful team. Seen from a distance, the industrialized slaughter of the Great War seemed to submerge the individual in the mass. Yet this was not the experience of the young officers. The mass was very distant: the platoon, the company, the battalion and especially the battalion officers were the points of reference that mattered. Combatants faced the terror of ‘men against fire’: caught in an artillery barrage or enfiladed by machine-guns, it did not matter whether a man was the best or worst soldier – survival was purely a matter of luck. Yet on other occasions success in close-quarters fighting rested on skill, strength and the will to prevail.

It mattered what one did and with whom. It also mattered when one joined the army. Those undergraduates who volunteered in 1914 reached the front in 1915. Although they were part of the process by which the army transformed itself from a small professional force into a ‘people’s army’, those in the Guards were inoculated against this experience. Many ‘hostilities only’ officers entered the Guards regiments, but ‘dilution’ was strictly limited: the Grenadier Guards had doubled in size from two to four battalions by 1915, but the process went no further for the rest of the war. The new Guards officers were, however, not insulated from the battles of 1915 and 1916. It was in these battles that the army grappled with the problem of how to fight a modern war. It was a bitter experience. Casualties were very high. Nearly 15 per cent of those officers who fought in the battles of 1915 died, nearly one quarter were wounded. Well over one quarter of those who had joined up from Oxford and Cambridge at the start of the war died.³ This cohort’s career as regimental infantry officers was effectively over by the end of the battle of the Somme in 1916.

The horrors of the Western Front were not, as it happened, at the forefront of the minds of four patriotic undergraduates in the first months of the war. Their anxieties were more about their social position in the struggle. Cranborne and Lyttelton had, as usual, a head start because of their connections. Cranborne’s father had a proprietary interest in the 4th Battalion of the Bedfordshire Regiment, which he himself had taken to South Africa to fight in the Boer War. Salisbury had promised Alfred Lyttelton on his deathbed that he would watch out for Oliver’s interests. He promised to fix commissions for his son and his ward as soon as possible. Little over a week after the outbreak of the war, Lyttelton and Cranborne handed in their applications for a commission.⁴ Cranborne invited Lyttelton and another friend, Arthur Penn, to Hatfield to await their call-up.⁵ They whiled away their time with shotguns. The juxtaposition of a shooting party as the preliminary to a war later caused them some grim amusement. Penn, invalided home, having been shot in both legs, wrote up his own game book as, ‘BEAT – Cour de l’Avoué: BAG – Self’.⁶

Despite Lord Salisbury’s patronage, the trio remained fearful that they would become trapped in the wrong part of the military machine. ‘We are having trouble about our commissions,’ Lyttelton wrote anxiously. ‘The War Office, gazetted six officers, all complete outsiders, yesterday to the Regiment and none of us. The Regiment is furious because they loathe having outsiders naturally, we are angry because it seems possible that we may be gazetted to K[itchener]’s army.’ Salisbury made a personal visit to the War Office and ‘raised hell’.⁷ The wait was made even more maddening for Lyttelton and Penn by Cranborne’s new-found enthusiasm for playing the mouth organ.⁸

Salisbury was able to secure commissions for his son and his son’s friends. They joined their regiment at Harwich. It seems the trio had originally intended to stay with the Bedfordshires: Salisbury had hoped that the battalion would be sent overseas as a garrison or to France as a second-echelon formation. This plan was abandoned as soon as it became clear that reserve formations like the Bedfordshire militia would be cannibalized to provide manpower for fighting formations. Cranborne and Lyttelton had ambivalent feelings about not being posted to a line infantry battalion. ‘I am sorry because I must fight,’ Lyttelton wrote, ‘and I am glad…because I should rather dislike going into a regiment – probably a bad one – in which I know no one.’⁹ On 12 November 1914 their chances of going to France as part of a battalion disappeared: ‘it was the most tragic sight,’ in Lyttelton’s view, ‘seeing three hundred of our best men leaving for the front…without a single officer of their own’.¹⁰ Rumours flew around the camp that the battalion would become little more than a training establishment. Lyttelton and Cranborne felt that any obligation they had had to stay with their regiment had been removed. Lord Salisbury had always kept up close links with the Guards, recruiting time-expired NCOs to provide the backbone of his own regiment. With this kind of backing it was relatively easy to effect a transfer. In December 1914 they were commissioned into the Grenadier Guards.

Although they were a little slower off the mark, Crookshank and Macmillan had similar experiences. Crookshank initially obtained a commission with the Hampshire Regiment.¹¹ Then a ‘course of instruction at Chelsea’ gave him ‘furiously to think, and made me decide for a transfer into the Grenadier Guards, in spite of arguments on the part of the 12 Hants and offer of a captaincy’.¹² While Lyttelton and Cranborne were at Harwich, Macmillan was at Southend with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. He too saw that his battalion would be used as a training establishment. His later recollection tallies so closely with Lyttelton’s experience that it has the ring of truth. He hung on, but ‘after Christmas [1914] was over and my twenty-first birthday approaching, I began to lose heart’. As Lyttelton and Cranborne had turned to Lord Salisbury to use his influence, so Macmillan ‘naturally’ turned to his mother: ‘I was sent for and interviewed by…Sir Henry Streatfeild [the officer commanding the Grenadiers’ reserve battalion in London],’ Macmillan recalled. ‘It was all done by influence.’¹³ Sir Henry had become an old hand at dispensing these ‘favours’. It must have seemed that virtually every English family with social influence and a son of military age was beating a path to his door.¹⁴

There were, however, few more decisive ways in which to emerge from the protective carapace of family influence than to join a front-line combat unit on the Western Front. The superior connections of Lyttelton and Cranborne gave them the first crack of the whip. They crossed to France together on 21 February 1915 and joined the 2nd Battalion, Grenadier Guards, on duty as part of the 4th Guards Brigade in northern France. They were immediately thrown into the classic pattern of battalion life: alternations between the trenches and billets behind the front line. The trenches they found themselves in were also typical of a quiet but active sector. Each side was using snipers and grenade throwers to harass the other and artillery shelled the positions intermittently.¹⁵

Beyond the physical dangers of trench warfare the most striking feature of their new world was the regimental ‘characters’. These were the regular officers who had joined the Guards in the late 1890s. Their years of peacetime soldiering had inculcated them with the proper Grenadier ‘attitude’. Promotion in peace had been glacially slow. At the time when the new arrivals encountered them they were still only captains or majors, the war being their chance for advancement. By the end of it those that survived were generals. They were attractive monsters, the ideals to which a new boy must aspire.

The second-in-command of the 2nd Battalion was ‘Ma’ Jeffreys, named for a popular madam of his subaltern days. A huge corvine presence, Jeffreys was known for his utter dedication to doing things the Grenadier way. He was a reactionary who regretted that the parvenu Irish and Welsh Guards were allowed to be members of the Brigade of Guards. It should be Star, Thistle and Grenade only in his view.¹⁶ E. R. M. Fryer, another Old Etonian, described by Lyttelton as the ‘imperturbable Fryer’, who joined the 2nd Battalion in May 1915, regretted that ‘Guardsmen aren’t made in a day and I was one of a very small number who joined the Regiment in France direct from another regiment without passing through the very necessary moulding process at Chelsea barracks’. He found himself being given special, and not particularly enjoyable, lessons by Jeffreys on how to be a Grenadier.’¹⁷ Jeffreys was considered to be ‘one of the greatest regimental soldiers’.¹⁸

Many years after the fact, Lyttelton admired Jeffreys as an example of insouciant courage. A runner was missing and Jeffreys, accompanied by his orderly ‘in full view of the enemy and in broad daylight, strode out to find him, and did find him. By some chance, or probably because the enemy had started to cook their breakfasts, he was not shot at. Such actions are not readily forgotten by officers or men, and the very same second-in-command, who had without any question risked his life…would have of course damned a young officer into heaps for halting his platoon on the wrong foot on the parade ground.’¹⁹ While he was serving with him, however, he admired him as a courageous realist: ‘He is exceedingly careful of his own safety,’ he noted in June 1915, ‘where precautions are possible, but where they are not courageous. Any risk where necessary, none where not.’ When his commanding officer was killed at Festubert, he showed no emotion: ‘after seven months in the closest intimacy with a man whom he liked, you might have thought that that man’s death by a bullet which passed through his own coat would have shaken him. Not at all.’²⁰

‘Boy’ Brooke, who was brigade-major of the 4th Guards Brigade and later CO of the 3rd Battalion Grenadier Guards, never spoke before luncheon. He treated his subordinates to ‘intimidating silences, when the most that could be expected was a curt order delivered between clenched teeth, derived from a slow acting digestion, which clothed the world in a bilious haze until the first glass of port brought a ray of sunshine’. After luncheon he was ‘charming, helpful and humorous’.²¹ Boy could take a dislike to a junior officer. One such, who was ‘rather over-refined and a fearful snob’, ‘should not’, he believed, ‘have found his way into the regiment’. Arriving at the end of a five-hour march, Brooke could not find his billeting party. Eventually the officer ‘emerged from an estaminet, and gave some impression of wiping drops of beer from his moustache. He came up and saluted, and not a Grenadier salute at that. His jacket was flecked with white at the back’ from sitting against the wall of the pub, ‘“Ay regret to inform you, Sir, that the accommodation in this village is quite inadequate”.’ To which Brooke replied, ‘“Is that any reason you should be covered with bird-shit?”’ and had him transferred.²²

Lord Henry ‘Copper’ (he was red-haired and blue-eyed) Seymour and ‘Crawley’ de Crespigny, a family friend of the Cecils, were 2nd Battalion company commanders in 1915. Lord Henry had had to take leave of absence from the regiment because of his gambling debts. As a result he had been wounded early in the war while leading ‘native levies’ in Africa. He evaded a medical board and found his way to France. His wounds had not healed and needed to be dressed regularly by his subalterns. He was a notorious disciplinarian.

De Crespigny was also a fierce disciplinarian on duty but notoriously lax off duty with those he liked. He had been a well-known gentleman jockey, feared for having horse-whipped a punter who suggested he had thrown a race. Since his best friend was Lord Henry, he was known to treat officers with gambling debts lightly while damning anyone who reported any of them as a bounder. He suffered greatly with his stomach as a result of the alcoholic excess of his early years.²³ ‘Hunting, steeplechasing, gambling and fighting were “Crawley’s” chief if not only interests’, remembered Harold Macmillan. Macmillan ‘never saw him read a book, or even refer to one. To all intents and purposes, he was illiterate.’ Even when ordered to desist, because they made him too visible, ‘Crawley’ always wore gold spurs.²⁴

Whatever private thoughts Lyttelton and Cranborne had about their new life, they kept up a joking façade for their families back in England: ‘The worst of it is that the hotel is very bad,’ Lyttelton reported to Cranborne’s mother, ‘if (as Bobbety and I have hoped) we come to explore the fields of battle after the war with our respective families en masse we shall have to look elsewhere for lodging. By Jove how we shall “old soldier” you.’²⁵ A ten-day stay in Béthune, punctuated by light-hearted ‘regimentals’, boxing matches and concert parties, was merely a prelude to more serious business.

On 10 March 1915 the 4th Guards Brigade marched north to take part in an attack around Neuve Chapelle. The attack proved to be a bloody disaster. Luckily for the new officers they did not take part. Twice the battalion prepared to go over the top but twice was ordered to stand down. Within their first three weeks at the front, Cranborne and Lyttelton experienced manning the front line, the off-duty regimental routine and the nightmarish possibilities of the offensive. The horrors of war were all too apparent. The battalion returned to trenches near Givenchy that were neither deep enough nor bulletproof. The experience was nerve-jangling. German artillery and mortar fire was effective against these trenches. On one occasion such fire was induced for frivolous reasons: the Prince of Wales visited the battalion and ‘tried his hand at sniping, and…there was an immediate retaliation’. The threat of mines was constant: ‘everyone was always listening for any sound’. In May the first reports of German gas attacks further north at Ypres arrived and there were desperate attempts to rig up makeshift respirators. The visible landscape was grim. ‘The village was a complete ruin, the farms were burnt, the remains of wagons and farm implements were scattered on each side of the road. This part of the country had been taken and re-taken several times, and many hundreds of British, Indian, French and German troops were buried here.’²⁶

Givenchy was also their first sight of ‘war crimes’ or ‘Hun beastliness’. Anyone wounded in trench raids was hard to recover. The Germans fired at the stretcher bearers who tried to reach them. Cases occurred ‘of men being left out wounded and without food or drink four or five days, conscious all the time that if they moved the Germans would shoot or throw bombs at them. At night the German raiding parties would be sent out to bayonet any of the wounded still living.’ It is unclear whether the ‘beastliness’ was solely on the German side. Certainly by 1916 there were clear instances of the British refusing to take prisoners on the grounds that ‘a live Boche is no use to us or to the world in general’.²⁷ Indeed, a memoir written by a private in the Scots Guards about his experiences later in the war was at the centre of German counter-charges in the 1920s about British ‘war crimes’. The private, Stephen Graham, reported that the ‘opinion cultivated in the army regarding the Germans was that they were a sort of vermin like plague-rats and had to be exterminated’. He provided an anecdote set near Festubert, where both Lyttelton and Cranborne fought: ‘the idea of taking prisoners had become very unpopular. A good soldier was one who would not take a prisoner.’²⁸ Even leaving aside ‘war crimes’, the fighting was desperate and personal. Armar Corry, an Eton contemporary of Lyttleton and Cranborne, led a wire-cutting party that ran into a German patrol. Corry shot one of the Germans, as did his sergeant. His private threw a grenade. The German officer leading the patrol drew his pistol and shot Corry’s sergeant, corporal and private. With his entire party dead, Corry fled for his life.²⁹

Whatever the extent of the brutalization Lyttelton and Cranborne were undergoing, they were certainly becoming cynical about their senior commanders. In March a printed order of the day arrived over the name of Sir Douglas Haig, who was immediately pronounced an ‘infernal bounder’. There was ‘much angry comment’ from the junior officers about Haig’s ‘bombastic nonsense’. Looking out from his trench, Lyttelton commented: ‘the attacks on Givenchy had failed…I know the position from which these attempts were launched and a more criminal piece of generalship you cannot imagine.’³⁰ Five days after the launch of the Festubert offensive in May, Lyttelton wrote: ‘There is some depression among the officers at the great offensive…We are rather asking ourselves: if we can’t advance after that cannonade how are we to get through?’³¹

Their anger at and fear of the incompetence of the army commander was mitigated, however, by a continued belief in the superiority of the Guards. The Indian troops and the Camerons alongside whom they fought may have ‘showed the utmost gallantry in the attack, but their ways are not ours at other times. When it comes to bayonet work they are as courageous as we are, but they haven’t got the method, the care or the discipline to make good their gains, or show the same steadiness as the Brigade.’³² Lyttelton and Cranborne were also buoyed up by each other’s company. ‘I had a very amusing talk with Bobbety yesterday,’ Oliver wrote in April, ‘we nearly always have a good crack now and great fun it is. The more I see of him the more I like him.’ The two young men found themselves convulsed by laughter at the thought that the pictures on the date boxes they received in their food parcels looked exactly like the paintings of an ‘artistic’ acquaintance of theirs, Lady Wenlock.³³

Although the Guards Brigade had seen plenty of action since Lyttelton and Cranborne joined their unit in February, it had been used as a support formation rather than an assault unit. The 2nd Battalion Grenadier Guards was finally committed to lead an attack on 17 May 1915, eight days after the beginning of the battle of Festubert. Lyttelton and Cranborne had the chance of a brief conversation before the battle began. They were, Lyttelton wrote, ‘pretty cheerful as it was clear that we were in the course of wiping the eye of the rest of the army and justifying the German name of “the Iron Division”’.³⁴ They began moving up at 3.30 in the morning in extremely difficult conditions. The Germans were shelling all the roads leading towards the trenches so the battalion had to move at snail’s pace in dispersed ‘artillery formation’ over open ground. Confusion reigned. ‘When it reached the supports of the front line, it was by no means easy to ascertain precisely what line the Battalion was expected to occupy. Units had become mixed as the…result of the previous attack, and it was impossible to say for certain what battalion occupied a trench, or to locate the exact front.’

It was not until late afternoon that the battalion started to move towards the actual front line. The route was clogged in mud and it was dark before they reached the front trenches. ‘The men had stumbled over obstacles of every sort, wrecked trenches and shell holes, and had finally wriggled themselves into the front line.’ The German trenches captured on the previous day which they passed over ‘were a mass of dead men, both German and British, with heads, legs and other gruesome objects lying about amid bits of wire obstacles and remains of accoutrements’.³⁵ ‘It was a night,’ Lyttelton recalled a week later, ‘I shall never forget.’ The encounter with such carnage sickened him but ‘only turned me up for about ten minutes. After that,’ he admitted, ‘you cease to feel that you are dealing with what were once men…We were trying to drag a body out – it had no head – and I found by flashing a light that one of my fellows was standing on its legs. So I said, “Get off. How can we get it out if you stand on it, show some sense.” Then I flashed my light behind me and I found I had both feet on a German’s chest who had [been] nearly trodden right in.’³⁶

The advance had been so difficult that the commanding officer, Wilfred Smith, decided that he could not launch his attack on the position known as ‘La Quinque Rue’ as he had been ordered. He decided instead to wait until dawn. Ma Jeffreys was put in charge of the front line, commanding 2 and 3 Companies. Cranborne was commanding a platoon in 2 Company with Percy Clive, a Conservative MP serving as a ‘hostilities only’ officer, as his company commander. Held in reserve were 1 and 4 Companies. Lyttelton was thus further back with his platoon in 4 Company, commanded by ‘Crawley’ de Crespigny.

The 18th of May dawned misty and wet. Visibility was so bad that the attack was postponed once more. They lay in their waterlogged scrapes all day. Suddenly at 3.45 in the afternoon a peremptory order arrived to attack at 4.30 p.m. Jeffreys had to make hurried preparations. He decided to launch the assault using 3 Company, with one platoon of 2 Company under Cranborne in support. Haste proved fatal. The attacking force was decimated. A short artillery bombardment failed to knock out the German machine-guns. As a result ‘the men never had any real chance of reaching the German trenches…the first platoon was mown down before it had covered a hundred yards, the second melted before it reached even as far, and the third shared the same fate’. Armar Corry was the only officer in the company to survive.³⁷

Cranborne, however, cheated death. He did not lead his platoon forward into this maelstrom. Indeed, he was rendered unfit to do anything by the noise of the battle. Accounts differ about what rendered him hors de combat. The regimental history records that he was ‘completely deafened by the shells which burst incessantly round his platoon during the attack’.³⁸ His own medical report, based on a doctor’s examination on 26 May, states: ‘Near Festubert on 18 May 1915, he became deaf from the noise of rifle fire close to his left ear. He also had “ringing” noises in that ear.’³⁹ Near the stunned Cranborne a fierce argument raged between the remaining officers of the battalion. Percy Clive, Cranborne’s company commander, had realized that the attack was a senseless massacre. When Ma Jeffreys ordered him to lead 2 Company forward once more, Clive refused to obey on the grounds that to advance was plainly suicidal. As a result the battalion stayed put. As the casualties, including Cranborne, were evacuated, the brigade major, ‘Fat Boy’ Gort, came up to investigate. Gort, ‘the bravest of the brave’, who finished the war bedecked with medals including the Victoria Cross, agreed with Clive. Lord Cavan, the Grenadier commander of the 4th Guards Brigade, ordered the battalion to dig in where it lay – they had advanced about 300 yards and come up short of their objective by about 200 yards.⁴⁰

That night Lyttelton moved up with 4 Company to relieve the shattered remnants of 3 Company: ‘it was pitch dark, raining and cold’. He and another officer went out to try and recover some of the wounded. ‘It was a bad job. Some of these fellows had crawled into shell-holes about twenty feet deep and getting them out was a critical business.’ ‘The whole place,’ wrote Lyttelton as he tried to piece together his experiences afterwards, ‘was a sea of mud, and the scene still remains incoherent in my memory, plunging about for overworked stretcher bearers, falling into shell-holes, losing our way, wet and tired, we felt all the time rather impotent.’⁴¹ Opinion among the surviving battalion officers was that the whole affair had been mismanaged. The generals had bungled in ordering them to attack on the afternoon of the 18th with so little warning.⁴²

The battle of Festubert convinced the relatives who had been instrumental in getting men into the Guards that service with a combat infantry battalion on the Western Front was not necessarily a good idea. When Cranborne was shipped home, it was discovered that his injuries were not serious and that he would soon be able to rejoin his regiment. ‘The ear,’ his medical board was told, ‘has been examined by a specialist and has been diagnosed as a course of labyrinthine deafness; prognosis good.’⁴³ He was granted three weeks’ leave. While he was on leave the Cecils’ family doctor diagnosed him with appendicitis. His friends regarded this as an amazing stroke of luck,⁴⁴ as was clear from the letters of commiseration he received. It must be sore having a bad ear and a bad gut: ‘But,’ one friend serving with a line infantry regiment in France, added, ‘I wonder if you are sorry. For goodness’ sake don’t come out here again.’⁴⁵ Lyttelton cheerfully chipped in, ‘There is a great deal of satisfaction in hearing from someone whom you have just seen in Flanders, at Park Lane.’⁴⁶ Another friend, also recuperating from wounds, wrote, ‘I think we are both well out of it for a bit, Bobbety, don’t you agree with me. It was the most unpleasant two months I’ve ever spent and I don’t think you cared for it much – did you?’⁴⁷

Cranborne attended regular medical boards. On each occasion his leave was extended. There seemed to be enough time to attend to his own affairs. He proposed marriage to Betty Cavendish, the daughter of Lord Richard Cavendish, the younger brother of the Duke of Devonshire. It was an entirely suitable match between two of the great aristocratic families of England, though Bobbety’s father wryly noted that his son’s choice had let him in for some difficult dowry negotiations: Dick Cavendish was notorious for pleading poverty.⁴⁸ Lord Richard, however, did his new son-in-law a good turn by intervening with the War Office to have his leave of absence extended to the end of the year.⁴⁹

Families were caught between a desire to see their sons removed from danger and their sons’ desire not to be seen pulling strings to escape the front line. Another junior officer in the Grenadier Guards, Raymond Asquith, son of the prime minister, angrily told his wife that: ‘The PM in disregard of a perfectly explicit order from me to take no steps in that direction without my express permission has tipped the wink to Haig…no one will believe that this [staff] job has been arranged without my knowledge…So in mere self-defence I shall have to try to get back to the Regiment when the fighting season starts.’⁵⁰ He was right to suspect that people were keeping a spiteful eye on these things. When Asquith himself was killed, one of his father’s Cabinet colleagues wrote to a newspaper editor, ‘As for Lloyd George himself, he risks very little. His sons are well sheltered.’⁵¹

Someone was looking out for Oliver Lyttelton. Soon after meeting his mother in Brussels, he was offered a post as ADC to Lord Cavan. Cavan needed an ADC because he was to give up the 4th Guards Brigade and take command of a line division. ‘I feel very weepy reading of your meeting with Oliver and the news of Cavan’s offer,’ wrote Lyttelton’s uncle to his mother. ‘I do hope to heavens there will not be a hitch in Oliver’s appointment and that nobody will put any obstacles in the way or, which is just as important, [he] feel[s] that he oughtn’t to take it.’ If strings had been pulled, that was no cause for shame. ‘After all the boy has had his grilling in the trenches, gone out…and done the brave thing and if some general does choose to pick him out one can only be thankful…Of course there are plenty of risks still but it must be much safer than a platoon leader.’⁵² His friends agreed that his removal from the front line was a matter for celebration.⁵³

In fact intervention by figures considerably more eminent even than the Lyttelton clan was to change the pattern of the war for both Lyttelton and Macmillan. As Lyttelton took up his post, Lord Cavan was preparing himself to meet King George at Windsor. Cavan had gone home to visit his wife, who was sick with diphtheria. Calling in at Chelsea barracks, he was shocked when Streatfeild told him that not only would a fourth battalion of Grenadiers be formed, but that it would be sent to France as part of a Guards division. Two days later His Majesty graciously informed Cavan that he would command the new formation. As far as Cavan could tell, the idea had been put to the king by Lord Kitchener. It seemed that his lordship was keen to curry favour by giving the Prince of Wales, who was attached to the Grenadiers, a bigger stage on which to perform. Cavan did not believe that the division had any military logic. He was horrified to discover that the four battalions of Grenadiers were to be formed into a single Grenadier brigade within the division. This, no doubt, seemed a glorious idea in Windsor and Whitehall, but it struck the Grenadier Cavan as disastrous. As he explained to Kitchener, ‘if they went into action we might lose at one blow more officers than we could replace all belonging to one Regiment’. Although Cavan could do little about the fait accompli of a Guards division, he at least averted the potential destruction of the Grenadier Guards by insisting that all brigades contain a mixture of battalions from each Guards regiment.⁵⁴

Because of the creation of the Guards Division Lyttelton did not leave the Guards for a line division: he became a junior staff officer in the Guards Division. As Lyttelton left the 2nd Battalion, Crookshank joined it, having missed Festubert cooling his heels in a base camp near Le Havre. They were eventually able to meet up for tea and bridge when Lyttelton came back to visit his old unit.⁵⁵ Macmillan was also affected by the reorganization. Gazetted into the Grenadiers in March, he was assigned to the new 4th Battalion in July 1915. It was almost as if the old Eton pattern remained in place. The two Oppidans had used their influence to be first in and first out. Now the scholars had arrived. If Festubert was the baptism of fire for Cranborne and Lyttelton, Loos was to be Crookshank and Macmillan’s battle.

The first to arrive, Crookshank, had a hot welcome. Three days after he reached the 2nd Battalion they were sent into a set of notorious trenches known as the ‘Valley of Death’. Ten days later they moved to better trenches only to face the threat of a new, and lethally effective, German trench mortar – the Minenwerfer. Even when they retired to billets in Béthune, their luck did not improve. The Germans shelled the town, rendering their rest period ‘a farce’.⁵⁶ It was in the trenches near Givenchy, however, that Crookshank made his name in the regiment. The battle of Festubert had proved to the satisfaction of both British and Germans that charging enemy machine-gun emplacements was suicidal. The obvious alternative was to approach the enemy underground. Both sides had initiated a large number of tunnelling operations to set mines. The Germans in the Givenchy sector were particularly keen on these operations and had seized the upper hand: they made the Guards’ life both dangerous and miserable through a combination of mines and mortar bombs lobbed into the craters they created. ‘The casualties from mining and bombing in addition to those from rifle fire and shells were very heavy,’ noted the regimental history.

Digging deeper trenches and counter-mines became an unpleasant necessity for the Guards. Percy Clive and Crookshank were leading a digging party into an orchard near the trenches when they were caught in a German mine explosion. By the greatest good fortune they were just short of the mine when it went off. The whole ground moved up in one great convulsion, and when it settled down several men were completely buried. Clive was shot straight up in the air by the blast and came down so doubled up that he nearly knocked his teeth out with his knees. Crookshank, on the other hand, was buried by the earth thrown up in the explosion. It was a perilous situation. He was trapped in an earthen tomb, quite unable to move. No one on the surface could see where he was. If no one came to his rescue he would suffocate. If Clive had rescued Cranborne’s platoon from certain death by disobeying Jeffreys’s order to advance, his quick thinking saved Crookshank also. Although cut, bruised and groggy himself, he had enough presence of mind to work out where Crookshank had been standing just before the mine went off. Clive directed his men to dig hard.⁵⁷ A brother officer estimated that Crookshank had been buried for twenty minutes before the rescue party dug him out. He was in a state of shock but otherwise unhurt. He ‘won his name’ by his insouciant reaction to his experience. By evening he had returned to duty with the company. ‘He didn’t seem to worry at all at his misfortune,’ in the recollection of an officer in 3 Company, ‘and carried on duty as soon as he had been disinterred, minus, however, his cap, and the one he borrowed from a private soldier didn’t fit, and this was his only trouble!’⁵⁸ Crookshank’s own account of the incident was suitably laconic: ‘I was…buried for a long time, but rescued in the end.’⁵⁹

Of any of the quartet Macmillan adapted least well to army life. In his memoirs he famously drew the distinctions between ‘gownsmen’ and ‘swordsmen’, characterizing himself as one of the former who had by force of circumstances become one of the latter.⁶⁰ Lyttelton and Crookshank threw themselves into the role of regimental officer with enthusiasm, whereas Macmillan tried to re-create an intimate bookish coterie in the trenches. ‘My library is indeed very wide and Liberal,’ he noted with satisfaction, already thinking of posterity. ‘I shall try to send back some which I have read and should like to preserve. I have written inside “France Sept. 1915.”’ ‘I have a friend who was said to have read the Iliad “to make him fierce”,’ he told his mother. ‘I confess that I prefer to do so to keep myself civilized. For the more I live in these warlike surroundings, the more thankful I am for all the traditions of the classic culture compared to which these which journalists would have us call “the realities of life” are little but extravagant visions of a fleeting nightmare, lacking true value or permanency.’⁶¹ Macmillan and his friend Bimbo Tennant were delighted, for instance, when they rode over for dinner with a friend at the 1st Battalion to find most of the officers, ‘snorting Generals and Majors’, absent. ‘We had,’ Tennant told his mother, ‘a delightful evening à trois and had one good laugh after another, being all blessed with the same sense of humour, and unhampered by any shadow of militarism.’⁶² Lyttelton’s letters too were full of pleas for books, but he wanted ‘shockers’ rather than Homer or Theocritus. He even enjoyed Greenmantle by his mother’s friend John Buchan, despite the fact that ‘he hasn’t been within a hundred yards of the truth yet’.⁶³

It was with heartfelt relief that the Guards left Givenchy and marched south. Now that the Guards Division had assembled, Lyttelton, Crookshank and Macmillan were all present. Lyttelton was mounted at Cavan’s side, Crookshank was marching with the 2nd Battalion, Macmillan with the newly arrived 4th Battalion. They all met up at the end of August. To mark the combination of all four Grenadier battalions in one Guards formation, the regiment held a formal dinner to celebrate the occasion. It was, as Macmillan reported, ‘a most unique dinner party. All the officers of the Regiment who are in France – (that) is in the four battalions or on the Staff…There were 96 of us in all.’⁶⁴ Even the newest and most temporary Grenadier officer was made to feel part of an exclusive club as well as a great and glorious enterprise. ‘I saw many old friends,’ wrote Harold’s fellow 4th Battalion new boy, Bimbo Tennant, ‘and was very happy.’⁶⁵ Just as important as the élan of the Guards Division was a sense of a more scientific approach to the new warfare. The battalions carried out practice attacks on mock-ups of trenches under the watchful eyes of Jeffreys and Seymour. The army had realized that rifle and bayonet were not necessarily the most effective tools for trench warfare. Weapons that could give infantry more ‘bang for their shilling’, such as grenades, machine-guns and mortars, were coming into vogue. Macmillan was nominated as a bombing officer and spent his time training troops in his battalion in grenade techniques.⁶⁶

The esprit de corps of the young officers did little to avert disaster at their next engagement, the battle of Loos. It is doubtful whether the Guards Division’s attack at Loos ever had a chance: ‘it had to start from old German trenches, the range of which the German artillery knew to an inch, while the effect of our own original bombardment had died away’.⁶⁷ Crookshank and the 2nd Battalion arrived on the battlefield on 26 September 1915. During the 27th they slowly worked their way into the old German trenches, Crookshank in the rearguard. Despite their proximity to the battle, however, the order never came to attack.⁶⁸ The 4th Battalion, however, bore the brunt of it. It was Macmillan who was to experience the full force of the battle.

Owing to incompetent staff work, the 4th Battalion had spent the 26th uncomfortably sitting on a muddy road while a cavalry corps passed by.⁶⁹ Next day the battalion officers were gathered together by their commanding officer, Claud Hamilton, and told they were to attack Hill 70 just to the east of Loos. Macmillan’s company commander, Aubrey Fletcher, was sent forward to discover the best route into Loos.⁷⁰ Macmillan himself did ‘not feel frightened yet, only rather bewildered’.⁷¹ At 2.30 p.m. on the 27th the battalion advanced down the road into Loos in dispersed formation. They were immediately and heavily shelled by German artillery. To make matters worse, they were enfiladed from the right by a German machine-gun. As they approached Loos, Aubrey Fletcher led them running down a slope into an old German communications trench. Unfortunately he had taken them the wrong way. The brigade commander came galloping down the road and ordered the battalion not to enter the trench but follow him in an entirely different direction. The result was chaos, with the battalion split in half. In the confusion, neither half of the battalion could find the other. The main body of the Grenadiers attacked Hill 70 with the Welsh Guards. Macmillan was lucky to miss this assault. The Guards swept forward taking heavy casualties, but reached the crest of Hill 70. In the heat of battle, however, the Grenadiers advanced too far over the crest and exposed themselves to fire from the next German line. All who took part in this attack were killed.⁷²

Meanwhile the remainder of the battalion, including Macmillan, under the leadership of Captain Jummie Morrison, had no orders whatsoever. They decided to attach themselves to the 2nd Guards Brigade and attack Puits 14, a German strongpoint to the north. This attack too was a disaster. Unbeknown to the Grenadiers, the 2nd Guards Brigade had withdrawn without them: they thus ‘found themselves completely isolated’.⁷³ They had to try and escape by crawling away from the German line. Jummie Morrison was too fat to be a good crawler. As he and Macmillan tried to take their turn, Macmillan was shot in the head. He was incredibly lucky – it was a glancing blow. He was, however, concussed and no longer capable of taking an active part in proceedings.⁷⁴ As the small, lost and bewildered force tried to make themselves safer by digging in, Macmillan was shot again, this time in the right hand. The bullet fractured his third metacarpus bone. With his right arm crippled and in excruciating pain, he was ordered by Morrison to go back and find a clearing station. The hand wound proved to be much more serious than the head wound: Macmillan was troubled by his right arm for the rest of his life. Within a few days he found himself in hospital at Rouen, ‘more frightened than hurt’.

The Guards Division’s attack on Loos was hardly a triumph of the military art, the 4th Battalion Grenadier Guards alone having lost eleven officers and 342 men – ‘it has been’, Macmillan recorded, ‘rather awful – most of our officers are hit’. Nevertheless the Guards exculpated themselves from all blame. ‘The Guards Division,’ Macmillan proudly proclaimed, ‘has won undying glory, and I was long enough there to see the lost Hill 70 recaptured.’⁷⁵ Indeed Jummie Morrison’s sad remnant had been sent to dig in on the hill that night, although in truth the Guards had only captured the western slopes, leaving the Germans in possession of the redoubt. From both Macmillan’s perspective as a platoon officer and from Lyttelton’s rather more elevated position at divisional HQ, it seemed that the Guards elite had been let down by Kitchener’s army. ‘Some of the New Army Divisions are rather shaky,’ Macmillan wrote the day before the Guards went into action, ‘my chief feeling at present is one of thankfulness that I am in the Brigade of Guards. All the way up on the road we were greeted with delight by the wounded and all other troops. And it is so much easier to command men who seem to obey orders with engrained [sic] and well disciplined alacrity as soon as they are given.’

‘That the 21st and the 24th divisions,’ Lyttelton confirmed, ‘completely spoilt the show is I fear true.’ Like Macmillan he felt that, as a Guards officer, he was in a position to patronize the line infantry. ‘I’m afraid,’ he observed with all the assurance of a man of twenty-two, ‘that the New Army is trained too much with the idea: Oh we don’t need discipline. These are not recruits driven into the ranks by hunger, they are patriots, it’s ridiculous to ask a well-educated man of forty to salute an officer of twenty, and so on. The alpha and omega of soldiering and training is discipline and drill.’ ‘However,’ he charitably conceded, ‘those divisions of the New Army who have been blooded did quite creditably, the ninth and the fifteenth. The Territorials, who have some tradition if no discipline, attacked with great gallantry if not very efficiently.’ Alternative accounts circulating in London drew his derision: ‘As to the Guards Division being three hours late it is simply pour rire and goes to prove how very little people know of the war.’⁷⁶

It was not only the Guards that used the ‘Kitchener’ divisions as scapegoats for the failure of the Loos offensive. Haig also laid the blame at the door of their tactical inadequacies. GHQ’s post-mortem on Loos called for an increase in offensive raids and enhanced training for and use of grenades.⁷⁷ Thus the Guards found themselves thrust back into low-level but high-intensity warfare in the trenches just north of Loos. The post-Loos battle lines meant that in some places the British and German trenches were only thirty yards apart. There were continuous bombing and sniping duels. For the first time 2nd Battalion snipers were issued with telescopic sights, making the duels even more deadly. Crookshank was an early victim.⁷⁸ On 23 October his company commander took advantage of visionobscuring mist to send him out at the head of a wiring party. He led his men out and back safely. As they gathered more wire to go out again, a German sniper shot him in the left leg. The bullet seems to have been a ricochet, for although it ended the 1915 campaigning season for him, it did no permanent damage. The next day he was safely ensconced on a hospital train heading back to the coast, ‘very comfortable and everything to eat and drink that we wanted’.⁷⁹ Comfort levels improved even further when he reached England: he was sent to the officers’ nursing home housed in Arlington Street, next door to Cranborne’s London home.

Crookshank’s wound meant that he missed the arrival of a national celebrity to serve with the 2nd Battalion. Winston Churchill, ejected from the Cabinet in disgrace after the failure of the Dardanelles expedition, was assigned to a reluctant Jeffreys to ‘learn the ropes’ before taking command of his own unit. Lyttelton, visiting the battalion dugout of his old unit, was surprised when the ‘well-known domed head and stocky figure’ emerged out of the darkness. It was their first proper meeting: Churchill, following his defection from the Tory party to the Liberals in 1904, had been persona non grata in the Lyttelton circle during Oliver’s school and university days. That night at dinner Churchill held the floor. ‘We listened – we had to,’ Lyttelton remembered, as Churchill expounded his idea that the ‘land battleship’ or ‘tank’ would break the deadlock on the Western Front.⁸⁰ Churchill went on to describe to his sceptical audience the first trials of the new weapon that had taken place at Hatfield House. Later he was to present Lord Salisbury with the first tank as a memento to stand in the grounds.

In his letters home Churchill gave a vivid picture of the brutal war fought by the Grenadiers in the winter of 1915. ‘Ten grenadiers under a kid went across by night to the German Trench which they found largely deserted or waterlogged,’ he informed his wife, instructing her for obvious reasons to keep this account to herself.

They fell upon a picket of Germans, beat the brains out of two of them with clubs & dragged a third home triumphantly as a prisoner. The young officer by accident let off his pistol & shot one of his own Grenadiers dead: but the others kept this secret and pretended it was done by the enemy – do likewise. The scene in the little dugout when the prisoner was brought in surrounded by these terrific warriors, in jerkins and steel helmets with their bloody clubs in hand – looking pictures of ruthless war – was one to stay in the memory. C’est tres bon.⁸¹

So many regular Guards officers were killed at Loos that ‘even old-fashioned Guardsmen became convinced’ that the ‘patriots’ would have to be used to fill junior command positions: ‘from this time onwards’, noted the official history, ‘the battalions of the Guards Division were officered to a large extent by officers of the Special Reserve with very short training behind them’.⁸² Lyttelton was one of the first ‘beneficiaries’ of this policy.⁸³ He had never really become comfortable as Cavan’s ADC. Cavan’s other ADC was his brother-in-law, Cuthbert Headlam, who was a good deal older than Lyttelton. Lyttelton was thus very much the youngest and most junior member of the divisional team.⁸⁴ There was ‘nothing very much to do but fuss about horses and motor cars’. He was thus sanguine when it became clear that his position on the staff was untenable. When the adjutant of the 3rd Battalion went sick with varicose veins in the middle of the battle for Loos, Lyttelton was offered the chance to take his place. ‘It was,’ he admitted, ‘rather unpleasant leaving our comfortable chateau especially as I knew that we were for the trenches and probably for a push…it was certainly not cheering.’⁸⁵ The offer was, however, too good an opportunity to miss, since he ‘should anyway [have] had to return to duty with the Grenadiers as their losses have been so severe as to amount almost to irreparable’. He consoled his mother with the thought that ‘an Adjutant is far safer than a company officer’.⁸⁶

To become adjutant of a Guards battalion was quite a promotion. The adjutant was the senior captain in the battalion and in charge of its day-to-day organization. He acted as the staff officer to the commanding officer and was third-in-command in battle. The opportunities for promotion opened up both by casualties and the winnowing out of less forceful officers piqued the ambition of the army’s ‘thrusters’. Although this was really a game for regulars who could aspire to higher command positions, Lyttelton caught the bug. From late 1915 onwards his letters are as much about his ambitions and disappointments concerning further promotion as they are about the routine of trench warfare. He was turning into a first-class ‘thruster’.

The importance of being a ‘thruster’ was brought home to Lyttelton when he arrived at the 3rd Battalion. This was a world away from Jeffreys’s élite 2nd Battalion in which Lyttelton had been schooled. ‘I never realized till that day,’ he wrote after a month with his new unit, ‘how good the 2nd Battalion were.’⁸⁷ Like the 4th Battalion, the 3rd had been badly mauled at Loos. Only six officers had survived the battle and Lyttelton did not find them an impressive group: ‘I knew some of them but was not writing home about them.’ ‘They were all in a state of “Isn’t it awful” and doing very little to make it less so.’⁸⁸ As one of those officers later confirmed, ‘I think we felt a bit dazed and were glad enough when we were relieved [in the front line].’ The situation was no better among the other ranks. The battalion had been severely weakened in the summer of 1915 when it had been ‘skinned’ of some of its best NCOs to create the 4th Battalion. After Loos most of the remaining experienced NCOs and nearly 400 men were dead and had been replaced by new drafts.⁸⁹

The worst problem by far, it so happened, was the commanding officer. Lieutenant-Colonel Noel ‘Porkie’ Corry was the senior battalion commander in the brigade. He had specifically requested Lyttelton’s assignment to his battalion. Corry’s son, Armar, had not only been at Eton with Lyttelton but had also served with him in the 2nd Battalion, where he gained the reputation of an audacious trench raider, finally falling victim to a severe face wound during the pre-Loos skirmishing of August 1915. He was to lose his life at the Somme in 1916. Corry père was another matter entirely. Behind the lines he cut quite a dash.⁹⁰ The trenches, however, had broken his nerve. He was an incompetent, a coward and a drunkard.⁹¹ Even worse for Lyttelton, he was desperately trying to deny his inadequacies both to himself and to his superiors by blaming others for the shortcomings of his unit. The situation was excruciatingly dangerous. Like the 2nd Battalion, the 3rd was expected to undertake aggressive skirmishing. Such operations were potentially deadly enough when carried out by brilliant young ‘thrusters’ under the command of equally brilliant officers like Jeffreys; they were doubly so when run by incompetents. Just before Lyttelton arrived, the battalion had been surprised by a German attack as they ham-fistedly tried to change over forward companies. ‘The Germans had got possession of the whole battalion’s front’ and had to be ejected by the Coldstream Guards.⁹²

As the 3rd Battalion moved back into the trenches near Loos Lyttelton’s heart sank. The manoeuvre was carried out in a farcical manner. Porkie was ‘rather like a monkey on hot bricks and one could see he was no good’. He didn’t seem to know what his battalion was doing and blamed everybody else for the confusion. He fastened on to the problem of sandbags. ‘It was so simple,’ noted a frustrated Lyttelton, ‘send a party for sandbags with an officer and let them follow us up the trench. Meanwhile let us go on. But he would have it that the whole battalion should go off and get the sandbags…come back and go on.’ Lyttelton was forced to stand in a trench arguing with his commanding officer. His arguments prevailed but they wasted precious time, moving neither forwards nor backwards, until the Germans started to shell their communications trench. As Lyttelton noted viciously: ‘this bit of shelling put the wind up Porkie’ and all talk of sandbags was abandoned in the rush to a safer position.⁹³

Things became even worse when the battalion was given the chance to ‘recover its name’ by carrying out a bombing attack on ‘Little Willie’, on one of the flanks of the formidable German strongpoint known as the Hohenzollern Redoubt. Before the attack could go in, the battalion was ordered to dig a trench over to the Coldstreams to ensure that grenades could be moved up quickly and safely enough to keep the attack going. Lyttelton soon realized that Corry was in no hurry to push on with work on the trench since once it was completed the battalion would have to go ‘over the top’ on its raid. Lyttelton decided that ‘if anything was to be done I should have to command the Battalion’. Although he was ‘enjoying myself beyond measure’ at the taste of command, he could not persuade his fellow officers to speed up the sapping by taking the risk of climbing out of the trench and digging over ground at night. ‘This was awful,’ he realized, ‘because Porkie has got a poorish reputation for ability and is supposed to be likely to cart you.’ He had taken responsibility and now risked being made a scapegoat for failure. Since the trench was not finished in time the Coldstreams had to step in once more and carry out the operation for the Grenadiers. Lyttelton ‘could have cried with chagrin and disappointment’. He had never been ‘so bitterly despondent as I was that morning’. It was more ‘loss of name to the battalion’.⁹⁴ The post-mortem was equally depressing. The captain who had been digging the trench had in fact ‘carted’ Corry to John Ponsonby, the commander of the 2nd Guards Brigade, before Corry could blame anyone else. Corry ‘looked grey and hopelessly rattled and walked up and down swearing, accusing, excusing, asking me questions no-one could answer like a child. “Do you think the Brigadier thinks”…“It’s all the fault of the Coldstreams, they didn’t help”.’ Then the word came down the line that the brigadier was not particularly worried by the trench-digging fiasco, ‘which restored Porkie’s morale at once’.⁹⁵ At the next opportunity he got ‘very tight, and began to talk the most awful rot’.⁹⁶

The wake-up call of the failed bombing operation did nothing to make Corry change his ways. He always seemed to find routes to avoid action. All he did was waste time by looking through a periscope, claiming ‘he can see Germans everywhere’. His boasting was incessant: ‘if he goes up alone, which is rare’, Lyttelton complained, ‘he always comes back having had the narrowest shave and having behaved with the utmost coolness’. The drinking continued to get worse, often leaving him incapable by the afternoon. He claimed credit for work done by his subordinate officers. To add insult to injury, Lyttelton noticed with the eye of an experienced gambler, he even cheated at poker.⁹⁷

The commanding officer and adjutant of an infantry battalion perforce had an intimate relationship. Pressed daily into close contact with Corry, Lyttelton came to loathe him. While enjoying the increased responsibility thrust on his shoulders, he was placed in a dilemma. ‘I wish to heaven he would be sent home but all the time I have to work to keep him on the job and not let him flout.’ He began to despair that his superiors had not noticed Corry’s incompetence clearly enough to relieve him of his command. By December he had made up his mind that he would ‘cart’ Corry as soon as he made a mistake that was clear and important enough to be laid at his door.⁹⁸ He rightly suspected that Corry was not the only one being blamed for the battalion’s plight. Many of the other junior officers in the battalion thought he himself was ‘too casual and conceited’.⁹⁹ He was, they charged, a ‘bully and a toady’.¹⁰⁰ What he thought of as a difficult balancing act they saw as sucking up. A badly run unit was corrosive of relationships on all levels.

Fortunately for Lyttelton’s reputation, the standards of the Brigade of Guards had not in fact slipped as much as he was coming to believe. Even without his dropping his commanding officer in the soup, senior officers had noticed that Corry was not up to the job. He was an old comrade of many of them, but he had to go. At the turn of the year, as Lyttelton was settling in to bear the same yoke he had carried through the autumn and winter of 1915, suddenly Corry was gone and Lyttelton found himself in temporary command of the battalion. Within days Ma Jeffreys arrived in a black temper. He had been confidently expecting promotion and command of a Guards brigade.¹⁰¹ ‘I hate,’ he confided to his diary, ‘going to yet another temporary job, but I am told that it is in the best interests of the Regiment and I am expected to “pull the battalion through”.’¹⁰² A brisk tour of inspection suggested that the situation was not as black as had been thought. Corry really had been the main problem. After parading each company and talking to every officer, Jeffreys came to the conclusion that ‘there is nothing much wrong except inexperience and that they are a bit “down on their luck”’. He was particularly complimentary about Lyttelton. His former subaltern had, he noted, ‘the qualities to make a good’ adjutant. In particular he had ensured that ‘the system of the Regiment is being carried out and all want to do their best’.¹⁰³ The warmth was reciprocated. ‘Ma was wonderful,’ wrote a relieved and delighted Lyttelton. ‘As soon as he found there was nothing very wrong he cheered up enormously.’¹⁰⁴ In fact Jeffreys found that after his initial pep-up the battalion did not need the special attention of a senior officer and he turned the unit over to Boy Brooke. After some difficult months, Lyttelton now found himself once more in an élite formation.

Lyttelton was becoming a valuable asset to the army. All too few of those volunteer officers who had gained experience in 1915 were still at their posts at the beginning of 1916. As the 1916 campaigning season approached, the army therefore started to comb through its sick lists to identify officers fit enough to be sent back to France. Cranborne, Crookshank and Macmillan were each examined by medical boards, though with somewhat different results. While Macmillan, with his hand wound, and Crookshank, with his leg wound, were declared fit for service on the Western Front, Cranborne was passed as fit only for light duties.¹⁰⁵ His services as an ADC had already been requested by the commander of the reserve centre in Southern Command.¹⁰⁶ Although he was refused this dignity by a tetchy personnel officer in the War Office, he was allowed to join the general as an unpaid orderly.¹⁰⁷ Thus Cranborne departed for Swanage while Macmillan and Crookshank headed back to the 2nd Battalion in the Ypres salient.

Crookshank was delayed at Le Havre. Like Macmillan the year before, he was caught up in the growing technological sophistication of the British Army. Whereas Macmillan was a bombing officer, Crookshank now became a Lewis gun officer. The Lewis gun was a relatively portable machine-gun designed by an American for the Belgians and brought from there to Birmingham in 1914. By the start of 1916 large numbers were being issued to infantry companies.¹⁰⁸ The Lewis gun went some way to compensating for the decline in musketry standards which affected the whole army as long-service professionals were replaced by volunteers and finally by conscripts.¹⁰⁹ Crookshank was even so less than delighted with his new role. After his Lewis gun course he ‘knew as little at the end as at the beginning’.¹¹⁰ He found it hard to drop into the role of the ‘old soldier’. He was ‘getting rather bored with some of our more stupid brother officers’.¹¹¹ Giving a series of lectures on the trench attack to new arrivals, he felt a complete fraud, ‘knowing nothing about it’.¹¹² He even managed to miss duties with badly blistered feet caused by wearing natty but insubstantial pure silk socks.¹¹³

Macmillan would have been glad to stay on the coast with Crookshank. He looked forward to their new posting with dread.¹¹⁴ Indeed, Macmillan’s rebaptism of fire was brutal. Under the command of Crawley de Crespigny, Macmillan’s new battalion was still taking a robust view of its aggressive role in the trenches. On Good Friday 1916 he found himself in charge of a platoon, in an exposed trench near Ypres, completely cut off from other British forces. He could reach neither the unit on his left nor right. The communications trench to his rear was too dangerous to use in daylight, so he could not even contact the rest of his company. His only solace was reading the Passion in Luke’s Gospel. He was cold, lonely and frightened and ‘already calculating the days till my first leave’.¹¹⁵

By early 1916 Lyttelton had sloughed off any hint of boyishness. He was an experienced soldier who had had responsibility beyond his years thrust upon him. His letters home were detailed, hard-edged and often cynically funny. Macmillan, on the other hand, retained a certain pompous innocence: he didn’t ‘know why I write such solemn stuff’ but write it he did. The army possessed that ‘indomitable and patient determination, which has saved England over and over again’. It was ‘prepared to fight for another 50 years if necessary until the final object is attained’. The war was not just a war, it was ‘a Crusade’: ‘I never see a man killed but think of him as a martyr.’¹¹⁶ He found the words of the French high command at Verdun – resist to the last man, no retreat, sacrifice is the key to victory – so stirring that he copied them into his field pocketbook. Whereas Lyttelton had felt the prick of ambition, Macmillan had to deflect his mother’s demands that he should get on. His ambition was to survive and ‘get command of a company some day’, though he disparaged his mother’s wish that he should get out of the front line to ‘join the much abused staff’.¹¹⁷

Macmillan and Crookshank were finally united in mid June near Ypres. Crookshank had slowly made his way to the battalion in an ‘odd kind of procession’, braving the danger of inadequate messing facilities, ‘perfectly abominable…a disgrace to the Brigade’.¹¹⁸ Each was delighted to see the other. If they had to be in this awful place, it was at least some solace to tackle the task ahead with your closest friend. They immediately became tent-mates.¹¹⁹ Crookshank was assigned to his old platoon: ‘rather like going to school after the holidays seeing so many of the old faces after the long absence’.¹²⁰ Crookshank believed he had done rather well in the battalion the previous year and was much less self-deprecating than Macmillan about his chances of promotion. He was thus ‘very annoyed and disappointed’ when both of them were transferred into 3 Company under the command of another subaltern, Nils Beaumont-Nesbitt.¹²¹ In early July they went into the ‘Irish Farm’, ‘one of the worst positions [the battalion] had been in’. It offered 1,300 yards of ‘trenches’ that were ‘mainly shell holes full of water with no connecting saps, constant casualties and back-breaking work.’¹²² Raymond Asquith described it as ‘the most accursed, unholy and abominable place I have ever seen, the ugliest, filthiest most fetid and most desolate – craters swimming in blood, dirt, rotting and swelling bodies and rats like shadows…limbs…resting in the hedges’. The aspect that disturbed him most was ‘the supernaturally shocking scent of death and corruption [so] that the place simply stank of sin and all Floris could not have made it sweet’.¹²³

Crookshank escaped the worst by being sent on a Lewis gun course at Étaples, ‘mechanism cleaning and stripping (I did but very slowly)’, although he encountered another mess that was the ‘absolute limit – had some words with the CO on the subject of servants, went to dine at the Continental’.¹²⁴ Crookshank was a fusspot. He liked things just so. His doting mother made sure that he was never short of funds to make himself comfortable. As a result his girth was beginning to swell. He was lucky to have in such close attendance Macmillan, who always appreciated the waspish humour with which he leavened his perpetual moaning. Although Crookshank’s undoubted bravery won him friends, he could be an irritating companion in those trying circumstances.

Macmillan himself, on the other hand, having had little opportunity to shine during his last spell at the front, ‘made his name’ from the battalion’s unpromising position. On 19 July he led two men on a scouting patrol in no man’s land. They managed to get quite near the German line, but then ran into some German soldiers digging a sap. A German threw a grenade, the explosion from which wounded Macmillan in the face. One of his men was also wounded and they struggled back to the British lines.¹²⁵ Macmillan’s wound was serious enough for him to have left the battalion, but he refused to do so out of a mixture of bravado and opportunism piqued by Crookshank’s more militant attitude to promotion. ‘My first duty is to the Regiment which I have the honour to serve,’ he decided, ‘and not only are we very short of officers of any experience just now…but I was told confidentially by the Adjutant the other day that the commanding officer would probably give me command of the next company vacant, when I had had a little more experience of trench work.’ Macmillan was mentioned in dispatches for his bravery, but more immediately he basked in the good opinion of de Crespigny, who ‘was pleased with me for staying’.¹²⁶

They all nevertheless knew that these skirmishes in Flanders were a mere sideshow, overshadowed by ‘der Tag – the first day of the great Fourth Army and French push’ on the Somme, leagues away to the south.¹²⁷ As far as they could tell, ‘the Somme seems to be progressing favourably, if slowly and methodically’. They were all too aware that ‘the casualties have been very heavy’.¹²⁸ In fact the first and indeed subsequent days of the Somme offensive were a bloody disaster. As the Guards Division was sent marching south, GHQ acknowledged that the loss of men was unsustainable. The Fourth Army would revert to a ‘wearing out’ battle until the ‘last reserves’, of which the Guards were part, could be thrown into a renewed ‘decisive’ attack in mid September.¹²⁹ News of these disasters soon filtered down to the junior officers and undermined their initial optimism.¹³⁰ One subaltern in their company was court-martialled for sending an ‘indiscreet’ letter, opened by the censors, criticizing the staff. It was rumoured that this letter was the reason why King George had not inspected the battalion when he visited the Guards at the beginning of August. It was noted that the Prince of Wales, so obvious a presence the previous year, was no longer anywhere to be seen near the battalion.¹³¹

On the road Crookshank and Macmillan ‘were having very amusing conversations’. The northern part of the Somme battlefield was even ‘quite a nice change after Ypres’. There was a ‘wonderful view all round especially of the Thiepval plateau’, which they observed for hours. The trenches were very good. Crookshank and Macmillan were even allocated their own dugout, although it proved to be less than a blessing, located at ‘the end of a communications trench junction and well shelled’. They abandoned it after only one night.¹³² Indeed, it was at night that they had time to mull over the grimness of their situation. Sitting in their shared tent, they were ‘frightfully depressed’ by the fact that their ‘most intimate circle [had been] killed in the push, it’s enough to make anybody feel very sad’. Crookshank was particularly upset by the death of his ‘great friend’ at Magdalen, Pat Harding. Harding, a ‘great Oxford friend’ of Macmillan as well, had already risen to rank of major in a Scottish regiment before he was killed. Not only was the war cruel, it was insidious. Arthur Mackworth, for instance, a young classics tutor who had taught Crookshank at Magdalen, and who escaped the front after being transferred from the Rifle Brigade to the War Office Intelligence Department because of a heart condition, was so tormented by insomnia that he shot himself dead.

They had little time to dwell on these tragedies: they were soon in the midst of a major training programme that continued throughout August and into September to prepare the Fourth Army for its second great push on the Somme. Something of the kind had been tried before Loos, but this was on a much bigger scale. The Fourth Army tried to learn the lessons of the first phase of the offensive and inculcate its troops with the best ways of carrying out trench attacks and of using their equipment.¹³³ One change of doctrine in the summer of 1916 affected Macmillan. Initial operations on the Somme led to a reversal of Haig’s post-Loos enthusiasm for the grenade and a return to the doctrine that ‘the rifle and the bayonet is the main infantry weapon’. Supposedly, ‘when attacking troops are reduced to bombing down a trench, the attack is as good as over’.¹³⁴ The Guards nevertheless still put considerable emphasis on grenade training, and as their attack at Ginchy was to show, front-line troops would remain deeply attached to their grenades whatever the official prognostications. Macmillan, however, was not called on to resume the role of bombing officer, which he had managed to abandon just before the beginning of the march south. Crookshank’s Lewis guns remained in vogue. Ma Jeffreys descended on a tour of inspection and told him in no uncertain terms that the machine-guns would play an important role and he would be leading the gun team.¹³⁵

At the beginning of September the whole tempo of preparations stepped up.¹³⁶ Crookshank’s impression, after he and Macmillan had walked the ground together, was that the Loos battle they had taken part in during the previous September ‘didn’t start to be compared with this’.¹³⁷ They were in ‘a glorified camp and depot for every kind of stores’, he recorded in an unsent letter. ‘One can hardly see a square yard of grass, it is absolutely thick and swarming with men, tents and horses…as for the guns they are past counting battery after battery of big ones…with mountains of ammunition and a light railway to supply it. It certainly was a revelation,’ he concluded, ‘and shows that we really have begun fighting now.’¹³⁸

The Guards Division was deployed as part of Cavan’s XIV Corps on the south of the Somme front. Its mission was to move forward from the village of Ginchy, just to the south of Delville Wood, which still contained Germans, to the village of Lesboeufs to the north-east. On 11 September the detailed attack orders arrived.¹³⁹ Crookshank held a Lewis gun parade ‘to tell off the different teams’. His own team consisted of a sergeant, four corporals and twenty-four men servicing four Lewis guns.¹⁴⁰ On 12 September the 3rd Battalion moved up into the line, so that Lyttelton was posted only a few hundred yards to the right of Macmillan and Crookshank.¹⁴¹

It was Macmillan who went into action first. German machinegunners were positioned in an orchard on the northern edge of Ginchy. It was clear the moment the Guards started to advance they would be machine-gunned in the flank. On the night of 13 September de Crespigny ordered 4 Company, supported by two platoons of 3 Company, commanded by Macmillan, to clear the Germans out of the orchard.¹⁴² The attack took place in bright moonlight and in the face of heavy German fire; ‘it was very expensive, as they found better trenches and more Germans than expected’.

The next day, the 14th, ‘was terrible’. The 2nd Battalion’s trenches suffered a direct hit from a twenty-eight inch bomb. Many were buried alive and a company commander had to be relieved because of shell shock.¹⁴³ ‘That day,’ wrote Lyttelton, ‘dawdled away.’ Towards evening the word came down that H-hour was 6.20 a.m. the next day. ‘Action,’ Lyttelton recorded. ‘Changed into thick clothes, filled everything with cigarettes. Put on webbing equipment. Drank a good whack of port. Looked to the revolver ammunition.’ They moved into position that night. It was bitterly cold. They looked ‘out into the moonlight beyond into the most extraordinary desolation you can imagine’. ‘The ground,’ Lyttelton wrote, ‘is like a rough sea, there is not a blade of grass, not a feature left on that diseased face. Just the rubble of two villages and the black smoke of shells to show that the enemy did not like losing them…the steely light of the dawn is just beginning to show at 5.30.’

This moonscape, devoid of landmarks, was to prove a terrible problem. Officers had their objectives clearly and neatly drawn in on the maps: first the Green Line, then the Brown Line, on to the Blue Line and finally crossing the Red Line to victory. Yet it was impossible to tell where these map lines fell on the real terrain. This sense of dislocation was made worse for the 3rd Battalion because of a tactical manoeuvre. Boy Brooke deployed his men too far to the right, intending that the Germans, expecting an attack in a straight line, would miss with their initial artillery strike. At 6 a.m. the British artillery opened up, the German guns replying within seconds. To the great satisfaction of Brooke and Lyttelton, the shells rained down on their former position, missing their new position completely. The disadvantage of the move, however, was that the 3rd Battalion had to make a dog-leg to the left once the attack had started. At 6.20 a.m. they went over the top.¹⁴⁴

The advance was chaotic. Because the front was so narrow, both the 2nd Battalion and their next-door neighbours, the 3rd Battalion, were supposed to follow battalions of the Coldstream Guards into the attack. Within yards they had both lost all sense of direction. The three battalions of Coldstream Guards lurched off to the left. It was thus very difficult for the Grenadiers to fix their own position. They then discovered that the Germans had created an undetected forward skirmish line that, although it was completely outnumbered, ‘fought with the utmost bravery’. The 2nd Battalion found themselves caught in a ‘German barrage of huge shells bursting at the appalling rate of one a second, [they] were shooting up showers of mud in every direction and the noise was deafening. All this in addition to fierce rifle fire, which came from the right rear.’¹⁴⁵ The German skirmishers succeeded in slowing down and breaking up the British formation before they were overwhelmed. Lyttelton and Brooke ‘flushed two or three Huns from a shell hole, who ran back. They did not get far.’ ‘I have,’ wrote Lyttelton after the battle, ‘only a blurred image of slaughter. I saw about ten Germans writhing like trout in a creel at the bottom of a shell hole and our fellows firing at them from the hip. One or two red bayonets.’

Macmillan was wounded in the knee as they tried to clear these lines. He kept going. Although the battalion passed through the barrage, it immediately ‘came under machine-gun fire from the left front and rifle fire from the right rear. Instead of finding itself…in rear of Coldstream, it was suddenly confronted by a trench full of enemy. This was the first objective, which the men naturally imagined had been taken by the Coldstream.’ They were deployed in artillery formation instead of in line, marching forward under the impression that two battalions of Coldstream Guards were in front of them. To approach the trench with any prospect of success, ‘it was necessary to deploy into line, and in doing this they lost very heavily’. During this manoeuvre Macmillan was shot in the left buttock.¹⁴⁶ It was a severe wound: he rolled into a shell hole and dosed himself with morphine.

Crookshank was equally unlucky. His Lewis guns were doing good work.¹⁴⁷ At about 7 a.m. he was just getting up to push forward once more when a high-explosive shell burst about eight yards in front of him. ‘I felt,’ he later remembered, ‘a great knock in the stomach and saw a stream of blood and gently subsided into a shell hole.’ He was in a perilous position: the shallow shell hole did not provide good cover. If any more shells landed near by he would be sure to be killed. He was saved by his orderly, who crawled to another shell hole and found a corporal, wounded in the head but fit enough to help. Between them the orderly and the corporal managed to carry Crookshank to a better hole, ‘where there were rather fewer shells dropping’. Like Macmillan Crookshank dosed himself with morphine and he and the corporal lay in their waterproof sheets. His orderly went back towards the British lines for help. They lay there for about an hour before the stretcher bearers arrived to evacuate them. Crookshank was conscious but mutilated: the shell had castrated him. Eventually he was taken back towards Ginchy. It was a nightmarish journey.¹⁴⁸ Macmillan’s evacuation had been equally nightmarish. He crawled until he was rescued and had no medical attention for hours. Even when he was picked up by medical orderlies, heavy shelling forced him to abandon his stretcher and scuttle back towards safety.¹⁴⁹ Although they had each escaped death by a fraction and reached field hospitals without being hit again, both were horribly wounded.

Although it was no longer of much interest to either Macmillan or Crookshank, the whole Guards Division was also in deep trouble. On its right the 6th Division had made no progress whatsoever. The tanks over which Churchill had rhapsodized to a sceptical Lyttelton a year before made no impression on their first day of battle. As a result the Guards’ right flank was exposed to a German strongpoint called ‘the Quadrilateral’ that poured fire into it. Their own formation was breaking up under a combination of German fire and the lack of any clear features in the terrain. There were no longer Grenadiers, Coldstreamers, Scots or Irish; they were mixed up together. Small units of men led by charismatic leaders were engaged increasingly in freelance actions. Lyttelton was one such freelancer. Spotting that a gap was opening up between the Coldstream Guards, who were veering to the left, and the Grenadiers, who were trying to shore up the right, he led about a hundred men forward to try and plug their front. His party of Grenadiers caught up with the Coldstreamers, but instead of repairing the front they were simply dragged along by the Scottish regiment, losing contact with their own battalion.

Then Lyttelton ‘heard behind me the unmistakable sound of a hunting horn’. It was the commanding officer of the Coldstream Guards, Colonel John Campbell whose use of the horn to urge on his men was remembered by most participants in the battle. By the time he came across Lyttelton, Campbell was in a frenzy. He was ‘yelling “Stop!” and using some pretty expressive language to give it “tone”’.

So we stopped, [Lyttelton reported], and I went back to talk to him. ‘This is great fun I must say,’ was all the report I could give. ‘Fun be damned,’ Campbell shouted. ‘We have taken everything in sight but, you blasted idiot, if you go on you will be in to your own barrage. Don’t you know this is the second objective? Dig! Where’s my map? Where’s my adjutant? Damn, he’s been killed…where are those pigeons? Oliver, give me your map.’ I expressed the opinion [Lyttelton recalled] that it was the first objective, owing to the contours.

Campbell laughed at this, pointing at Ginchy, ‘which did’, Lyttelton conceded, ‘certainly look the hell of a way off’. Lyttelton’s navigation was, in fact, superior. They had reached the first line of German trenches, the Green Line rather than the Brown. Wherever they were, it was clear that plenty of Germans were there too. Campbell ordered Lyttelton to take his Grenadiers and some Irish Guards and clear the trench using grenades. Lyttelton set off but had hardly begun when a mass of Germans, pursued by another group of Grenadiers, came running down the trench, holding up their hands in surrender.¹⁵⁰

This jumble of small units was untrammelled by the usual chains of command. It was clear to the divisional commander, provided with the results of aerial intelligence, that the Guards could not go on. To do so would be to invite a devastating counter-attack on their exposed right flank. This was in no way clear to the young bloods in the middle of the line. After hours of confused and bloody fighting they had secured the German front line. They could finally see something. Ahead of them they could discern the village of Lesboeufs, which represented, in their minds’ eyes, a blue pencil line on their maps, the third objective. Lyttelton ran into Sir Ian Colquhoun, already leading his twenty Scots Guards forward. Colquhoun was a fearsome trench fighter, ‘credited with having killed a large number of Germans in personal combat’ and known as ‘Luss of the Bloody Club’. Colquhoun and Lyttelton decided to pool their tiny forces and advance towards Lesboeufs. Before doing so they managed to find three Irish Guards officers willing to join them, including Harold Alexander, the future field marshal.

They had no orders: an officer could, with perfect honour, wait in the trench for the brigades to re-form or he could make a personal decision to go on. The five officers advanced with about 115 men. After travelling for 800 yards or so without opposition they dropped into an unoccupied trench running along the bottom of a little gully. To the front their vision was obscured by a line of tall crops. They were alone. There was no sign of any other British troops advancing. The Germans were out there somewhere, but were not to be seen. All realized the precariousness of their position. If any German force appeared it could attack them in the flank or cut them off from the rest of the British army with ease. After a hurried conference they decided to send back about twenty men to look for the Brigade HQ and ask for support. The messengers were to ask each officer they met on the way to come and reinforce them. Meanwhile the remaining men settled down in the trench to wait. They posted a Lewis gun at each end to give themselves some chance should Germans appear from the left or the right. It was 1 p.m. They sat in the trench and waited: 2 p.m., 3 p.m., 4 p.m. passed with no sign of any other British troops joining them. Just after 5 p.m., they realized they were no longer alone – they could see a whole battalion of German infantry advancing towards them. To their distress it soon became clear that the Germans knew they were there. Methodically the German troops worked round to the right and left of their position. Neither side fired, but the men in the trench could see they would soon be surrounded. Nervously looking to their flanks and rear, they took their eyes off the front. At 6 p.m. 250 Germans burst out of the standing crops and into the trench. The British party were in a hopeless position. Their shelter was now a death trap, but instead of surrendering they tried to fight their way out. The very violence of their response bought them a few seconds. Lyttelton fired off the six shots in his revolver, but rifle-armed German soldiers surrounded him. In utter desperation he hurled the empty pistol at them. Thinking it was a grenade, they shied away and he scrambled out of the back of the trench and ran.

Lyttelton and the others should have been dead men. If the Germans had simply used their rifles to pick off the fleeing British it would have been a massacre. But, with adrenaline pumping, they continued their charge. Eight hundred yards was twice the distance a man can sprint. To run the distance over rough ground was lungbursting. Their salvation was the lack of artillery fire. Vision was not obscured, as it usually was, by smoke. As the remnant of Colquhoun and Lyttelton’s forlorn hope fled towards the British line, the Guards in the front trenches could see their plight: they opened up concerted fire on the pursuing Germans, who either died or fled. Even so over forty of the sally were either killed or wounded – although observers considered these casualties ‘astonishingly low’ given the circumstances.¹⁵¹

If it is possible to talk of a day changing men’s lives then 15 September 1916 was that day for Lyttelton, Macmillan and Crookshank. As night fell, Macmillan and Crookshank were cripples, Lyttelton was a hero.¹⁵² In retrospect, to dare such things and survive appeared to him the very acme of pleasure. ‘The 15th was the most wonderful day of my life,’ he wrote. ‘I drank every emotion to the dregs and was drunk. It was superbly exhilarating.’ ‘About 2 a.m.’ on 16 September ‘I was sent for by Brigade HQ to report on the situation. Unfortunately the orderly lost his way – very naturally, it being as black as your hat – and did not get there until about 4.30 or 5. I was given a whisky and soda and went to sleep on my feet. The brigadier kept me at his HQ until the relief so I do not know much more.’ He could bask in his ‘name’ – he was awarded the DSO for his conduct in the battle. It had been a ‘wonderful show’.¹⁵³

These, however, were the sentiments of one who had miraculously emerged unscathed. Macmillan, by contrast, would never recover sufficiently to play an active role in the army. During his brief military career, he had been shot in the head, the face, the hand, the knee and in the back. He barely survived the last wound. His right arm and left leg never worked properly again. Over the same short period, Crookshank had been buried alive, shot in the leg and blown up. It was horrifyingly apparent that he would never father children; it took him a year to recuperate, and even then he had to wear a surgical truss for the rest of his life. As in 1915, therefore, Lyttelton alone was left at the front.

Lyttelton had experienced an intense emotional high at the Somme, though in reality the life of discomfort and danger was beginning to pall for all the officers in the division. When during the spring of 1917 Lyttelton revisited the trench he and his band had reached on 15 September, he was much less sanguine: ‘this country stinks of corruption’, he noted in disgust. ‘As far as the eye can reach is that brown and torn sea of desolation and every yard there is a grave, some marked with rifles, others with crosses, some with white skulls, some with beckoning hands. But everything is dead: the trees, the fields, the corn, the church, even the prayers of those that went there in their Sunday clothes with their sweaty pennies for the plate: it is all dead and God has forsaken it.’¹⁵⁴

The 3rd Battalion was not used again at the Somme because it had lost over three quarters of its officers and had ceased to function as a serious fighting force. The survivors were sent back to Paris to enjoy the high life. The Parisian hoteliers were doing their bit for the war effort while maintaining the social exclusivity of their clientele. ‘At present I am wallowing in the luxury of this place,’ Lyttelton wrote from the Ritz. ‘Everything is done wonderfully well…all for 10 francs because we are officers in the Brigade.’ After the Ritz the life of the front-line infantry officer held few attractions.¹⁵⁵ ‘I think I should quite like a change,’ Lyttelton, back at the front, told his mother, ‘when I wake up in the morning and see a vignette of the Somme battlefield communications through the bellying flaps of my tent and mud, mud, mud.’¹⁵⁶ His former boss and current corps commander, Lord Cavan, agreed with him. At the beginning of November 1916 he ‘mutinied’ and refused to send his men into the attack once more. ‘No one who has not visited the trenches,’ Cavan said in a swipe against chateaux-bound staff officers, ‘can really know the state of exhaustion to which the men are reduced. The conditions are far worse than the first battle of Ypres, all my General officers and staff officers agree that they are the worse they have seen, owing to the enormous distance of the carry of all munitions – such as food, water and ammunition.’¹⁵⁷ At the same time as the Somme offensive ground to a stop in the winter mud of northern France, Oliver Lyttelton was applying for a job as a staff captain.

For much of their lives Lyttelton, Crookshank, Macmillan and Cranborne had marched in close step. At Christmas 1916, however, they were operating on entirely different time-scales. Crookshank and Macmillan, lying in London hospital beds under the watchful eyes of their mothers, could barely think about more than one day at a time. For them survival was victory. Crookshank’s wound was horrible, but Macmillan’s was more life threatening. He had received inadequate initial treatment: the wound became infected and the bullet was still lodged in his body. Crookshank was declared fit for ‘very light duty’ six months after the Somme at a time when Macmillan’s recovery was still in doubt.¹⁵⁸

Cranborne, on the other hand, was looking forward to the bright horizon. His wife had just given birth to a son, thus securing the Cecil succession for another generation.¹⁵⁹ Acquaintances urged him to take up his rightful position in national life. ‘God knows,’ one star-struck admirer wrote, ‘there will be need of all straight men who have no axe to grind after this war is over…the country has need of you and your obligation to its service did not begin and will not end with the War.’¹⁶⁰ He was starting to put out feelers about opportunities in the two civilian careers he was eventually to follow – the City and politics.¹⁶¹

Lyttelton was looking ahead a few months. He knew ‘the one job I really would like, which is staff captain of one of the three Guards brigades’ and was manoeuvring to achieve it.¹⁶² To get a good post outside the regiment, one had to attract the attention of a senior officer, either through connections or by personal conduct. When Lyttelton stumbled into the headquarters of 2nd Guards Brigade to report on the events of 15 September he was taken under the wing of Brigadier John Ponsonby, an officer who ‘broke most of the rules and refused to take life too seriously’.¹⁶³ Although Ponsonby was a Coldstreamer he was another character like the Grenadiers Jeffreys, Brooke and de Crespigny. He had a very bad speech impediment that set for his staff a challenging task of translation, and he refused to wear any head protection, favouring a pith helmet instead. Ponsonby and Lyttelton were to become firm friends. Both had a taste for the high life in the Ritz and the casinos of Paris.¹⁶⁴ Ponsonby certainly had no objection to Lyttelton parading his new mistress – ‘a French lady married to an American officer in the flying corps…[who] belonged to the substantial (and I don’t mean fat) type’ – in either venue.¹⁶⁵

Lyttelton returned to Flanders in April 1917 to prepare for the battle of Passchendaele as a fully fledged brigade staff officer. His duties were mainly involved with the organization of logistics. The work was important but routine. His most exciting moment came when he had to take a mule train up to resupply the 3rd Battalion Grenadiers under heavy shell fire. His former comrades subjected him to much ribbing about a member of the ‘gilded staff’ being reduced to a humble muleteer.¹⁶⁶ Once again the experience of the Guards differed from other parts of the army. Used as an assault force, the Guards Division achieved a brilliant tactical success in crossing the Yser canal and seizing most of its objectives east of Boesinghe at the beginning of the battle on 31 July 1917. Their attempts to learn from the Somme through intensive training on mock attacks thus paid off before Passchendaele degenerated into ‘an almost impassable quagmire’ and ‘pursued its dreary and exhausting course’ to eventual failure. Before the offensive, Lyttelton had dared to hope that the Germans were cracking – it was ‘not all we take in the way of ground or even of prisoners, but it is they allow them to be taken…if in two months the submarine campaign is no better for them, they will chuck it’.¹⁶⁷ The vision of endless mud and seemingly endless war was a crushing disappointment even for those like Lyttelton who believed in the ‘battle of attrition’ – ‘the Hun when we have a few young Somme offensives going in the spring hasn’t an earthly’.¹⁶⁸ Yet although Lyttelton’s hopes of victory were dashed, his interest in soldiering was sustained by his continued hopes for promotion.

As Lyttelton returned to England to further his ambitions with a staff course, Crookshank set out to the wars once more. He too had caught the eye of a Grenadier general, ‘Corky’ Corkran, who had been appointed as the British military liaison officer to the Serb army. In a private arrangement with the War Office Political Department Crookshank was appointed as Corkran’s ADC.¹⁶⁹ Whereas Lyttelton strained at the bit for promotion, however, Crookshank no longer had any such thoughts. Crookshank’s preparatory meetings with the Political Department suggested that they did not view Corkran’s mission as entirely serious.¹⁷⁰ Corkran himself viewed his trip to Greece as little more than a well-deserved jaunt. The Corkran party’s journey to Salonika was a golden opportunity for tourism. They travelled via Paris, Rome and Taranto. Once in Greece there was plenty of time to indulge in classical sightseeing at Delphi and the Vale of Tempe. They arrived in Salonika ten days after they left London. A week later they addressed the main point of their mission – to visit and report on the state of Serb forces. In mid October they set out in a Vauxhall staff car along the Via Ignatia from Greece into Macedonia. At the headquarters of the Serb army they conducted a brief tour of the lines and were able to view the Austrian army at a distance through binoculars. The staff car then whisked them back to the comfort of Salonika. The whole tour of inspection had taken three days.¹⁷¹

With Corkran’s primary mission completed, Crookshank turned to his own primary mission of finding them somewhere elegant and comfortable to live in Salonika. In a city overflowing with troops doing little fighting, accommodation was at a premium. House hunting was considerably more challenging than military liaison – it took three weeks to get them installed in a house.¹⁷² Their main task in Salonika was to try and estimate the actual number of troops the Serbs had under arms – a question to which it proved impossible to get a straight answer. In reality the bulk of Crookshank’s time was taken up with eating, drinking and sightseeing. The general was happily engaged in shooting geese and learning French from a pretty Greek lady.

To Crookshank’s delight, Salonika was full of the flotsam and jetsam of war. He took tea with Flora Sandys, the cross-dressing Englishwoman whose service with the Serbian army had made her a minor celebrity in Britain.¹⁷³ He found Sandys rather dull. More to his taste was the Reverend R. G. D. Laffan, who had left Eton the year Crookshank arrived and was ‘funnily enough’ the chaplain to the Serb First Army and seemed ‘a complete favourite naturally’. At dinner Crookshank and Laffan ‘had a tremendous talk partly Eton shop and partly on religion and High Church both being rather unusual subjects up here I think’.¹⁷⁴ On the other hand, with his Guards trained eye, Crookshank did not think much of the British forces in Salonika and the pretensions they gave themselves. ‘The main marble step entrance of the new GHQ,’ he noted, for example, ‘is reserved entirely for Brigadiers and Generals and upwards: this is a typical order of the British Salonika forces.’

Lyttelton, in contrast, was spending another miserable winter on the Western Front. He also was beginning to take a somewhat jaundiced view of the higher directors of the war in the ‘seats of the mighty at Versailles’. ‘Walter Dalkeith,’ his Eton and Grenadier contemporary, he complained, ‘is in a Louis Quatorze house with five bathrooms and unlimited motor cars. I think if I finish five years continuously out here I must get a job as a [staff officer] there!’¹⁷⁵ In fact his eyes were still firmly fixed on achieving the brigade majorship of a Guards brigade. When he finally achieved his ambition at the beginning of 1918, it was something of a mixed blessing. To make their manpower go further, the army had begun to reduce the number of battalions in each brigade. As a general rule infantry battalions were broken up and used as reinforcements for the remaining battalions of the regiments to which they belonged.¹⁷⁶ The three ‘spare’ Guards battalions, on the other hand, were put together to form a new 4th Guards Brigade under the command of Lord Ardee, a very inexperienced officer, with Lyttelton as his brigade major. But instead of staying with the Guards Division the new brigade ‘departed very sorrowfully to a line division’, the 31st.¹⁷⁷ They did not stray too far, however, the 31st and the Guards Division being deployed next door to each other in the Arras sector of the Third Army. Nevertheless Lyttelton had transferred from one of the best divisions in the British army to what was usually regarded as the poorest, the ‘thirty-worst’.

Lyttelton seems to have had a genius for finding the action. A little over a month after he took up his new job the massive German March offensive hit the British line. In many ways the battles of March and April 1918 showed the British army at its least impressive. Loos, the Somme and Passchendaele had been static battles. The British attacked from a firm line. Now the army was on the back foot, fighting a battle of manoeuvre in which the positions of enemy and Allied troops were unclear, the battle lines confused and lines of command often disrupted. Regrettably, not only did these battles show up a lack of competence, they also revealed a tendency to panic, a ‘funk’ that almost amounted to cowardice in the face of the enemy.

Expelled from the protective cocoon of the Guards Division, the 4th Guards Brigade experienced these problems in full. Even before the Germans attacked there was a worrying feeling of uncertainty. Rumours abounded that while the Fifth Army would retreat if attacked, the Third Army, of which both the Guards Division and Guards Brigade were part, would attempt to stand its ground: ‘everyone to the private soldiers knew the troops on their flank would retire, so that rumours of these divergent policies weakened the junction of the Third and Fifth Armies’. A junior officer in the Gordon Highlanders in the same corps as Lyttelton reported that commanders had the ‘wind up’ from bombing and shelling of back areas. They deluged formations with paperwork about resisting tank and aerial attack and so undermined morale.¹⁷⁸

Lyttelton shared these worries. Within a few days of joining 31st Division he had an ‘unpleasant feeling that the professional standards were different from our own’.¹⁷⁹ He was even less impressed with the command of VI Corps, to which the division was assigned once the German attack began. The commanding officer of the 31st Division bitterly accused the corps staff of running away – they ‘upped it and left us in the soup’.¹⁸⁰ Lyttelton agreed that the commander of VI Corps, Sir Aylmer Haldane, had abandoned his post. Lyttelton accompanied his boss Ardee to see Haldane on 22 March. ‘We were,’ he recalled, ‘neither of us particularly reassured by the atmosphere at Corps HQ, which was busy packing up, and we had the uncomfortable feeling that something near a rout had taken place, and that the General no longer had any control over the battle…the spectacle of a general clearing out in some disorder is never very encouraging.’¹⁸¹

These fears were borne out when the brigade moved into the line. The 40th Division on the left of the 31st Division began to cave in. Rumours buzzed along the line that the Germans had broken through. When the brigade pushed forward a battalion to try and find out what was happening, they discovered that troops of the 40th Division were paralysed with fear and refused to help them. The line infantry had become a ‘rabble’. Lyttelton arrested an officer who tried to flee through the Guards.¹⁸² To make matters worse, the Guards were shelled by British artillery and no one could be found to tell them to stop.¹⁸³ On 24 March the brigade moved back to try and form a new defensive line, but along with their surrounding formations they had to retreat again on each of the next two days.

Lyttelton had already lost all confidence in the chain of command when he found himself a player in the so-called Hébuterne incident of 26 March 1918. When Ardee was gassed Lyttelton rode over to the Guards Division and tried to place the brigade back under its command. He was reassured to find the divisional staff officer, Ned Grigg, who had joined the second battalion with him as a subaltern in 1915, playing badminton. He greeted the re-establishment of communications with 31st Division and the resumption of the proper chain of command with deep regret. This regret was deepened even further when the brigade received a message from the division that the Germans had broken through to the south of their position.¹⁸⁴ Then communications went dead. Lyttelton and many others feared the worst – a complete collapse of the British line. Other units of the division abandoned their positions and tried to retreat. The next day the Guards Brigade found itself defending the whole divisional front against a German attack. Not only had the original signal been false, but it also turned out that the loss of communications was caused by the incompetence of a staff officer who had felled a tree on to the telephone lines while trying to build a defensive position.¹⁸⁵

When Lyttelton’s brigade was withdrawn from the line on 31 March it had lost 14 officers and 372 men. ‘We had,’ Lyttelton wrote, ‘emerged from the battle with little confidence in the command and still less the staff of our new Division.’ As usual, however, the Guards were proud of their own performance. They were soon in ‘good trim’ under a new commanding officer, Brigadier Butler. ‘That’s that,’ was Lyttelton’s feeling.¹⁸⁶ Unfortunately the Germans had merely shifted the attack further north. On 9 April they carefully picked a weak point in the line held by Portuguese troops and drove straight through them deep into the British line.

Instead of being able to lick its wounds, the Guards Brigade was thrown back into the fighting in a desperate defence. In the words of Rudyard Kipling, the Guards were sent to ‘discover and fill the nearest or widest gap…to get in touch with the Divisions on their left and right, whose present whereabouts were rather doubtful’. Lyttelton thus found himself back where he had begun his military career near Festubert. As brigade major, he was supposed to be at the hub of information coming into brigade headquarters and orders being issued from it. But he had little information and that which he did receive was nearly always wrong. On 12 April the brigade was ordered to advance in search of friendly troops. As soon as they moved off they were caught in a vicious crossfire from enemy troops waiting for them with rifles, machine-guns, mortars and field guns operating at close range. At 4.30 p.m. the Germans attacked in force. Desperately, the Guards fought them off. Butler and Lyttelton signalled the division that they could not hold another attack on such a wide front. They believed they had been informed that another division would send troops to take over part of their line. But no troops arrived.

When the Germans came on again at 6.30 the next morning it was war to the knife – German troops masqueraded as Grenadiers so as to get close to the British lines before opening fire. Lyttelton later called this a ‘soldier’s battle,’ but the reality was much grimmer.¹⁸⁷ The Guards were isolated and being wiped out piecemeal. Companies were cut off from each other in their own pockets and fighting the best they could. At 3.30 p.m. the commander of the Grenadier company on the far left flank managed to get a message through that he was surrounded. Brigade HQ ordered the Irish Guards to send a company to try and rescue him: only one NCO and six men survived the ensuing massacre. The Grenadiers fought and died where they stood. Lyttelton later said that when their leader, Captain Pryce, who was awarded a posthumous VC, had less than ten men left he charged the enemy. By the time the Guards were rescued by Australian troops late in the afternoon, the brigade had been shattered. In two days of fighting it had lost 39 officers and 1,244 men. The butcher’s bill was worse than the Somme.¹⁸⁸

It was perhaps ironic that, having survived this maelstrom intact, Lyttelton was gassed a few days later while sitting at his table writing. A shell-burst spattered him with liquid mustard gas. His scrotum, penis and thighs were severely burned, his lungs were damaged and he was blinded.¹⁸⁹ Like Macmillan and Crookshank before him, he returned to his mother and a private hospital.¹⁹⁰ He made, however, a near-miraculous recovery.¹⁹¹ There was no long-term damage and he was even able to return to the Guards Division in time for the final advance and the occupation of Germany.

As Lyttelton was shipped home to England, Cranborne was finally making his way back to France. He went out as ADC to an old comrade-in-arms of his father, General Sir Walter Congreve, who had won a VC in the Boer War.¹⁹² General Congreve had unfortunately not shown up too well in the March débâcle. He was described as ‘absolutely down and out and incapable of any clear thinking’. His chief of staff, another VC, with whom Cranborne was supposed to work, was, in the words of an old friend, ‘a monstrous appointment’ who had ‘failed to pass into the Army through any orthodox channel…with a minimum of intellect…cool and collected, but had not the slightest idea of what was going on’.¹⁹³ Since they were likely to be dégommé, limogé, stellenbosched – the army had any number of loan words for sacked – Cranborne moved rapidly on, ending up as ADC to the GOC XXII Corps, Alix Godley.¹⁹⁴ There had been plenty of other options. Lord Derby was willing to take him to Paris; Douglas Haig wanted him at GHQ.¹⁹⁵ He discovered, as he told Macmillan, that the war could even be ‘pleasant’.¹⁹⁶

Cranborne’s war ended in October 1918 when a bout of sickness forced him to give up his staff job and return to London.¹⁹⁷ Crookshank’s war ended in June 1918, his Balkan mission completed, standing on Victoria station in the rain.¹⁹⁸ At the time of the Armistice Macmillan was still in hospital. Only Lyttelton saw it through to the bitter end. He finished the war in France as Boy Brooke’s brigade major in the 2nd Guards Brigade.¹⁹⁹ Each of the quartet had experienced ‘the pity of war distilled’. The war had not, however, changed either their personalities or their world view. In each the effect of being a combatant was rather to magnify existing personality traits.

The war touched Cranborne least. He saw the least service, he made a conventional marriage, he fathered a son during the war. Two factors were now to play a major role in his future. The first was the family project. This was unaltered by the war. His grandfather had intended to found a dynasty that would add political power to its wealth and social status. His father, though by temperament ill-equipped to further this project, had nevertheless tried his best to do so. His uncles and his mother were even keener that it should continue. Neither before nor after the war did Cranborne show any sign of kicking against the traces. He embraced his destiny as an ineluctable duty, though in this he suffered a severe impediment. He had inherited his father’s weak constitution. The war exacerbated his medical problems. His health first broke down in 1915 after a few weeks’ service on the Western Front. He then spent most of the war on sick leave or light duties. He even had to return home from his staff duties in 1918 because of a renewed bout of illness. Yet these chronic illnesses would have affected him whether or not he had fought. Crookshank and Macmillan had serious health problems for the rest of their lives as a direct result of their war wounds. Cranborne’s most debilitating post-war illness was the polio that struck him some years after the end of the war in the 1920s.²⁰⁰

Despite the handicap of a lack of any sporting prowess, Crookshank had turned himself into a highly professional infantry officer. His rapid return to duty after his entombment in 1915 was regarded by his acquaintances as particularly heroic. Nevertheless he had been humiliated by his loss of manhood. Although his physical wounds had healed surprisingly smoothly, he would never be entirely whole. He had always been a serious young man, working hard at Summer Fields, Eton, Oxford, in the Masons and in the Grenadiers. His early diaries reveal a habit of tart comment on the shortcomings of others. At home he was used to things being organized just as he liked them. Trifles such as badly cooked food or inattentive servants drew from him torrents of complaint. And far from lessening his own fine conceit of himself, his suffering increased it. He now found it even harder to admire the efforts of others. He became even more dismissive of anything that did not meet his own needs. His family had always treated him with adulation. Crookshank’s terrible wound thrust him back even further towards them. Deprived by the war of the normal reason, marriage, to leave home, he never did. At home he was never exposed to any hint of criticism. He always seemed to find it hard to understand why others did not afford him the same unstinting admiration as he received from his family. He returned from the war dissatisfied, embittered and convinced the world was unjustly determined to do him down.

Macmillan too was forced back into the bosom of his family. At Oxford he had been torn between smothering intimacies, whether of Sligger Urquhart or Ronnie Knox, and the wider society of the university. This wider world was beginning to win out by 1914 – he was becoming, albeit slowly, less of a cosseted ‘mummy’s boy’, less pompous, more worldly. His successes in the Union indicated a gift for public speaking and an ability to charm voters. His wounds, on the other hand, drastically retarded the emergence of his maturing personality. He once again became entirely dependent on his mother, immersed in his books and lacking the company of men and women his own age. As a result for the next quarter of a century he was regarded, by both friends and enemies, as impossibly pompous, self-obsessed and utterly lacking in charm. This reputation only began to change during the Second World War, six years after his mother’s death.

The contrast with Lyttelton is striking. He also had a mother to whom he remained exceptionally close. Four years of active service had, however, made Lyttelton entirely his own man. For the first time he had achieved something in a field that his father had not effortlessly dominated before him. His contact with the Guards ‘characters’ had convinced him that he too was a ‘character’. He was, for the rest of his life, self-confident and self-assured. If anything he was too convinced of his own opinion and too proud to conceal it from those he considered his inferiors – a disadvantage in a political system so full of egos that the ability to dissemble the extent of one’s own ego could be vital.

3 Bottle-washers

The end of the war came as a shock to many young men. As Lyttelton told his mother, ‘with youth the war is tolerable even enjoyable’.¹ Peace did not appear at all enticing. All the plans and hopes entertained in 1914 had had to be put to one side. Now, quite suddenly it seemed to them, they needed to take stock of their situation.

Macmillan, confined to a hospital bed in Belgrave Square, had the most time to think. His prospects seemed bleak. One operation had removed half the bullet lodged in his back but he needed another. He had little to do except read and look forward to visitors. With the most exciting event in his life being a trip to see Thomas Beecham conduct Mendelssohn, he envied Cranborne his sojourn in France. ‘France’ was, in his imagination, ‘wonderful’. England, in contrast, seemed suburban, bourgeois and corrupt. Macmillan responded enthusiastically to Cranborne’s tongue-in-cheek idea that ‘after the war, we really must start a League of Individuals’. ‘We will refuse to do things…and all go to Italy,’ Macmillan enthused, ‘and live in a villa in Fiesole, with Cypresses…and dear Italian wines with their ravishing names. How wonderful it would be! Let George and Beaverbrook and the rest of them reconstruct to their hearts’ content, as long as we are not obliged to live in their monstrous edifice.’²

Many men of a poetic temperament – one thinks of Robert Graves and his retreat to Majorca – put these principles into practice. Pragmatists like the Guardsmen did not let this reverie last for long. Before the war they had been committed to seeking conventional worldly success. Within weeks of the end of the war they were again embracing this goal. Even Macmillan found, once he was released from hospital, that maudlin thoughts of inaction or exile dissipated. ‘To a young man of twenty-four, scarred but not disfigured,’ he recalled, ‘with all the quick mental and moral recovery of which youth is capable, life at the end of 1918 seemed to offer an attractive, not to say exciting prospect.’³

The door that the war had opened to the military career unconsidered by any of them in 1914 was rapidly closed. The fact that none of them remained a soldier was not of their own choosing. As early as 1916 Lyttelton had applied for a permanent commission in the Grenadier Guards.⁴ Crookshank too explored the possibility at the end of the war. In 1918 they both applied to remain in the regiment. They were both men in good odour with dominant figures in the Guards. But the Guards traditionalists were determined to get back to normal, purge their ranks of ‘patriots’ and guarantee the careers of regular officers.⁵ By the time they reconsidered this policy, it was too late. Lyttelton and Crookshank were launched on other careers. Even Ma Jeffreys couldn’t get them back.⁶

The war also ended Lyttelton’s ambition to enter the law – his contacts, so good at the time his father died, had gone stale. Not that this altered the central fact that he had to do something that made plenty of money. Even if his father’s experience of politics had not soured him on Parliament, his father’s example had shown the necessity of securing financial security before considering other avenues. In the months after the Armistice he courted Lady Moira Osborne, the daughter of the Duke of Leeds. His Grace disapproved of his daughter’s suitor on grounds of his poverty. Their engagement was made possible by Didi Lyttelton making ‘a kind of financial hara-kiri’ to provide her son with a respectable establishment. Retreating to visit Cranborne, he considered his good fortune: ‘Perfect Hatfield though baddish morning with the thermometer at 90 degrees in the shade. Phew but happy.’⁷ Oliver and Moira Osborne were married a few months later at St Margaret’s, Westminster.⁸

For a young man in need of cash the City was the obvious place to be. Many of Lyttelton’s Etonian contemporaries had already gravitated towards it. At least his army career exempted him from the jibe of his friend Geoffrey Madan, ‘Attractive Etonians who go straight on to the Stock Exchange…the raw material of the great bores.’⁹ In 1919 Lyttelton joined the firm of Brown, Shipley & Co. ‘The change,’ he remembered wryly, ‘from being a guardsman and a brigade major, under whose eye every knee stiffened, to being a clerk in the postal department was marked.’

Within a few months of his marriage Lyttelton’s career prospects looked up: he was recruited to work for a new concern, the British Metal Corporation run by Sir Cecil Budd, one of the leading figures in the metals trade.¹⁰ When Lyttelton first crossed the threshold of BMC’s new offices in Abchurch Yard he was, however, taking a risk. It was not at all clear that BMC would have a secure future. In 1920 the metals market suffered a ‘universal collapse’. Out of the blue a relatively stable market was affected by a massive drop in prices: a ton of tin fell from £423 to £195. ‘The trade has, in fact,’ BMC’s chairman lamented, ‘passed through a succession of crises of great magnitude.’ The future looked shaky.¹¹ Fortunately for Lyttelton, the very newness of BMC acted as a hedge against these problems. Most of its assets were still liquid.

Lyttelton soon mastered the mechanics of dealing under the guidance of Budd’s principal dealer, Henry Arthur Buck, whose methods some in the City regarded as hovering on the edges of sharp practice.¹² Just as significantly, Budd himself was exhausted by the efforts he had had to put into dealing with the crisis of 1920. He decided that he needed help in the form of a joint managing director and one of the existing directors was appointed to this position. Lyttelton himself moved up to the post of general manager.¹³

As a result of his rapid promotion, Lyttelton soon got his first real taste of being a ‘tycoon’. Having weathered the storms of the immediate post-war period, the corporation adopted an aggressive programme of acquisitions. Among them was the National Smelting Company.¹⁴ National Smelting was a group mainly concerned with zinc put together during the war by a flamboyant company promoter named Richard Tilden Smith, financed by the British government and Lloyds Bank.¹⁵ In 1916 Tilden Smith had persuaded the government that he should build facilities to process zinc concentrates formerly shipped to Germany. He signally failed to live up to his promises: not one ounce of zinc had been processed before the end of the war and in 1922 the government wrote off its loans and refused any further subsidy.¹⁶ The jewel in the crown of National Smelting was, however, not its zinc-processing business but its controlling interest in the Burma Corporation, ‘the great zinc-lead mine east of Mandalay’. Burma Corporation was of great strategic importance, but it was also undercapitalized and unprofitable. BMC believed they could turn the business around. As one of the company’s negotiators, Lyttelton was given his first chance to shine. This, his first big deal, was ‘stamped for ever on my memory’. He was thirty: facing him across the table was Sir Robert Horne, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer. ‘We had,’ Lyttelton remembered, ‘rivals; their offer was on the point of being accepted; we had put in a counter bid…We waited tensely. After some pregnant minutes Sir Robert said our terms were reasonable…I had been sitting with both hands on the table and, when I got up, I could see their damp imprint on the shiny mahogany. It is quite wrong to suppose that business is not sometimes very exciting.’¹⁷

Lyttelton’s career choice had been dictated by his need to earn serious money if he was not to find himself living off his mother’s rapidly diminishing capital. Marrying the daughter of a duke brought social obligations. By contrast, his friends, untrammelled by the prick of financial necessity, could afford to abjure remunerative employment, at least for a time. Macmillan, as he hobbled out of hospital at the beginning of 1919, ‘was not anxious to go immediately into business, although my father and his partners had invited me to do so’. ‘I fully expected,’ he later recalled, ‘to spend the rest of my life at an office desk, and shrank from starting unnecessarily soon.’ He, Crookshank and Cranborne were more concerned with seeing the world.

Cranborne and Crookshank made a conventional career choice in deciding to become diplomats in a Foreign Office dominated by Etonians.¹⁸ At the beginning of 1919 they presented themselves on the same day to sit the diplomatic services entrance examination. In a reflection of the Foreign Office’s changing culture, however, the selection board accepted Crookshank, the Etonian scholar, the son of a surgeon, and rejected the grandson of the great Lord Salisbury. The decision was made purely on merit. Although Cranborne had prepared hard for the exam, his utter lack of academic distinction at Eton and Oxford did not stand him in good stead. In addition, though good French was traditionally an aristocratic accomplishment, Crookshank’s childhood in Francophone Egypt and his service in France, Belgium and Serbia had given him excellent spoken French, whereas Cranborne’s was mediocre.*

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.

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

The lead Cooper established over his contemporaries that night lasted for the rest of the decade. In 1929 William Bridgeman, a senior member of Baldwin’s Cabinet who had been much concerned with party management, noted that after Cooper ‘there did not seem to me anyone so markedly brilliant as to deserve immediate promotion from the back benches’.⁹⁶ Although Crookshank subsequently pursued his interest in eastern affairs, having missed his opportunity in December, it was to little effect. His first parliamentary question two months later on the subject of the ecumenical patriarch was hardly likely to set the heather on fire. His maiden speech was given not in the early evening of a great debate, as was Cooper’s, but late at night to a thin house. It was not a succès d’estime. It did cover foreign policy, but was chiefly noted for the dictum that, ‘The conduct of foreign affairs must be in the hands of the few,’ which, stated in such an unvarnished fashion, led to unflattering comparisons with Jim Salisbury.⁹⁷ Crookshank, who had come into politics knowledgeable about and fascinated by imperial affairs, was never able to take an opportunity to become involved in them.

Crookshank was nevertheless an able and quick-witted parliamentary speaker, in contrast to Macmillan, who tended to the ponderous. But this only seemed to gain him a reputation for idiosyncrasy, one of the last attributes desirable in a ministerial careerist. He was not helped by two aspects of his physical appearance. One he could not help. Early hair loss revealed a large cranium. He looked like nothing other than the spitting image of William Shakespeare. No newspaper seemed able to mention his name without alluding to this resemblance. His dress, on the other hand, was entirely his own choice. Until the outbreak of the Second World War he insisted on wearing a shiny topper to the House. He looked like a shorter version of Sir Austen Chamberlain – which was probably worse than looking like the Bard. No newspaper seemed able to mention his name without alluding to this resemblance either. Physically equipped for quirkiness, he started to make his name as a backbencher rather than as a potential minister. When another well-known House of Commons character, Commander Kenworthy, drew up his list of new MPs to watch, he noted that ‘the outstanding figure amongst the younger members is Mr Duff Cooper’. Crookshank was notable as one ‘who has realized that one of the first essentials of success in Parliament is to be always in his place’.

Instead of Asiatic affairs, Crookshank was increasingly drawn to quixotic affairs. His first great parliamentary set piece came in 1926 when he tried to wreck a government bill obviating the need for MPs to seek re-election when they became ministers. He managed to insult a number of groups: the party’s business managers, liberal Conservatives, Liberals who had become Conservatives. Labelling himself an ‘ultra-conservative’, he mocked, ‘Debates…extraordinarily busy with the question of safeguarding industries,’ and suggested that the Commons should instead ‘follow out the principle of safeguarding the present rights of the electorate’. He also had a dig at turncoats. In a considerable coup for the whips, two former Liberal Cabinet ministers had just defected to the Conservatives. Crookshank expressed the view that if such men, ‘in crossing the floor, were quite sure of office, then I think it is important and absolutely essential that the present safeguard should be maintained’. Not only was Crookshank intemperate, he also got his parliamentary procedure wrong. His amendment to the bill inadvertently implied that a Cabinet minister moving to another post in the Cabinet would have to seek re-election to the House of Commons. ‘It is the first time I have tried my hand at this kind of thing, and I am not a lawyer,’ was Crookshank’s somewhat lame excuse. His friend Charles Waterhouse, another of the 1924 intake, had to come to his aid, amending the amendment to make it coherent. To no one’s surprise this stand for parliamentary precedence over the convenience of the government was defeated by a large margin. Crookshank was also associated with another parliamentary revolt against Baldwin over the Prayer Book. Given his own Irish background and the fact that his Gainsborough seat contained the highest proportion of non-conformists in England,⁹⁸ Crookshank had little choice but to line up behind the home secretary, ‘Jix’ Joynson-Hicks, who believed the Church of England’s proposed new liturgy was papism by the back door. In this case he was part of the majority, but he had been dragged, this time reluctantly, into another quixotic fight.⁹⁹

Macmillan’s strategy for success was quite different from that of Crookshank. In part it derived from the constituency he represented. Stockton was one of the seats won by Baldwin’s abandonment of ‘dear food’. Yet a change of national policy was certainly not enough to secure the seat for any length of time. The MPs for the newly won northern seats had to be seen actively lobbying for the interests of their constituents if they were to stand a chance of keeping their places. So although Macmillan was more interested in foreign than domestic affairs, he could not afford the luxury of following his natural inclination. Support for industrial protection and urban relief was almost inevitable. Yet the manner in which Macmillan chose to prosecute his agenda revealed a sophisticated grasp of tactics. Crookshank’s stance as an independent member was positively Victorian, Macmillan’s was exceptionally modern.

The experience of the previous decade had changed the House of Commons. Of the ten years between 1914 and 1924, seven, 1915 to 1922, saw coalition government. The two years following the fall of Lloyd George had demonstrated a high degree of political instability. Although the Conservatives secured a massive majority in 1924, the clock could not simply be put back to 1900. The lessons learnt by ambitious backbenchers submerged within an overwhelming parliamentary majority were just as applicable to single-party as to coalition rule. The years of coalition had produced new forms of back-bench action. As the veteran political journalist Sir Henry Lucy noted at the beginning of the coalition period: ‘not since the days of Mr Gladstone’s prime as leader of the House of Commons has there been such activity in the creation of what were known as Tea Room Cabals. Now they are called Ginger Committees, their avowed patriotic purpose being to keep the Government on the hop.’¹⁰⁰

Some of these groups, such as the wartime Unionist Business Committee or the 1922 Committee, founded in 1923 as a form of self-help organization for new members, had over 100 members.¹⁰¹ Others, the ‘ginger groups’ proper, were much smaller. They tended to be bound together by some policy positions and a determination to support each other in the House. In effect they were a claque. If one member was speaking in a debate, the others would be sure to attend to give him support. They would cheer him to the echo and shout down anyone who attempted to intervene. Some of these groups were for or contained ideologues. Most, however, were means to an end. Successful parliamentary performance helped by one’s fellows, good publicity, the threat of limited acts of rebellion all helped to draw the attention of party managers to backbenchers. Soon members of the ginger group would find themselves asked to join the government as junior ministers. Careers would be launched and the claque would have served its purpose.

For an ambitious young liberal Conservative like Macmillan, the most notable group of this type was one launched in 1917, ‘to lunch together once a week and try to act together’, by a group of Tories interested in social reform.¹⁰² The political careers of its leading lights certainly prospered. By 1924 Billy Ormsby-Gore, whose successes had so piqued Macmillan’s ambition, was under-secretary at the Colonial Office, Top Wolmer, Bobbety Cranborne’s cousin, was parliamentary secretary to the Board of Trade, Walter Guinness was financial secretary to the Treasury, Eddie Winterton was under-secretary of state for India, Philip Cunliffe-Lister was president of the Board of Trade. Of most interest to Macmillan, however, was the rapid progress of Edward Wood, recently president of the Board of Education and soon to embark on the viceroyalty of India. Wood had publicized the views of the group – support for housing and agricultural subsidies, voting equality for women, regional devolution, support for the League of Nations – in The Great Opportunity, a short book co-written with George Lloyd, whose ADC Macmillan was to have been in 1919.¹⁰³ Macmillan had a great advantage as a member of any ginger group: he was a publisher. He could guarantee a first-class vehicle for any publication – however trite or boring. The ability to give or withhold the right of publication often grated with those not so blessed. One of the first clashes between Macmillan and Rab Butler occurred over Macmillan’s reluctance to publish propaganda for Butler’s campaign on India.¹⁰⁴ From his first day in the House, Macmillan was determined to be part of a ginger group.¹⁰⁵

It was entirely logical for Macmillan to concentrate his activities on ginger groups. What surprised many is how assiduously he stuck to the idea once it had become politically counter-productive. Indeed, until he finally entered the government in 1940 he displayed a positive passion for such cabals. For most of the 1924 to 1929 Parliament, however, the political strategy that had sent him down this road seemed to hold good. Macmillan rapidly became involved with two groups. One was the northern MPs: a regional alliance that was largely one of convenience – they would all sink or swim together. The other ginger group resembled more closely Wood’s successful model. By the middle of 1925 they were already being given names like the EYM (Eager Young Men).¹⁰⁶ Like its predecessor, it was made up of men drawn from the same political generation and at much the same point in their careers. At its core were two young aristocrats, Oliver Stanley and John Loder, two Scottish MPs, Bob Boothby and Noel Skelton, and Macmillan himself.

The aim of a ginger group was to benefit all of its members. It was inevitable, however, that some would be left behind. As the party managers selected the cream of the crop, the group would dissolve. The problem for Macmillan was that most of his new-found allies had more obvious talents than himself. John Loder had charm – he could get away with admitting that he would have joined the Liberal party if it had still been a credible political organization. Noel Skelton flung out interesting ideas with ‘reckless prodigality’. Oliver Stanley had impeccable political connections through his father, Lord Derby. He could afford to sow his political wild oats in the happy knowledge that the party leadership would view him with indulgence. Like Cooper’s, his maiden speech was heavily trailed and widely hailed. It made the right noises about political harmony. Also like Cooper, Stanley used humour well.¹⁰⁷ Some people regarded Stanley as an empty suit. The perceptive Cuthbert Headlam had dinner with Stanley and Macmillan at the end of their first year in Parliament. Of ‘the two rising hopes of the Conservative Party’ he said, ‘The latter strikes me as much the abler of the two, but of course the former has the greater backing’.¹⁰⁸ As a result it was Stanley who came to be regarded as a future liberal Conservative prime minister. Boothby was quite different. He was very young. Born in 1900, his war service had amounted to nothing more than training with the Scots Guards. There was something wild, even a little dangerous about Boothby. Both Macmillan and Boothby were offensive about the opposition in their maiden speeches. Whereas Cooper and Stanley had got their digs in by using humour, and had been well received, many were offended by Boothby and Macmillan. The difference was that Boothby was offensive with brio and panache. Macmillan tried to savage his opponent by reading him an essay.¹⁰⁹

Within two years, the eager young men of 1925 had acquired a more enduring sobriquet, the YMCA. It implied that they were keen but priggish, lecturing their elders on the best way to run things. Like all young, talented and ambitious men they aroused their share of animus. Yet they always kept on the right side of the party managers, claiming as their inspiration Baldwin himself. It suited the prime minister to be seen encouraging voices of progressive Conservatism. Part of his political strategy was to reach out to all non-socialists and form a grand union of the centre and the right.¹¹⁰ The YMCA were a useful tool in pursuit of that goal. Macmillan was convinced that ministerial office was just round the corner.

Like his model, Edward Wood, he intended to make his mark with a short book publicizing the ginger group. His first trial balloon for the book was a letter to The Times

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