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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

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