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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ