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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ