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

Автор: Simon Ball

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары

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isbn: 9780007332359

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СКАЧАТЬ 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’.СКАЧАТЬ