It must be hard for people brought up in the post-colonial age to imagine a world in which Empire was a proud word, and liberal imperialism was a high moral, as well as political, ideal. That was the world into which I was born and whose ideas I absorbed. It was the world of Rudyard Kipling, but it was also the world of great imperial administrators like Lugard or Hailey, of scholars and writers who voiced the ideas of imperial responsibility, and of countless men who in British possessions overseas served to the best of their power the people in their charge, bringing, they believed, justice and peace, order and good government. In the history of the British Empire it was the Age of Enlightenment, of aspiration and endeavour. The Empire, to such people as I am thinking of, was neither justified nor condemned by its past, but vindicated by its present and by its hopes for the future. They saw the rule of one race by another not as inherently evil, but as a duty and a challenge, created by history and to be judged by its results, in contrast with the conditions that it had replaced. All this was not mere humbug; they truly believed that the Western powers, Britain above all, had been granted by history—whatever motives had inspired the acquisition of dependencies, whatever benefits they afforded to the conquerors—a civilising mission and a dutiful task of good government, domestic order and external peace. Looking around the ex-colonial world of today it does not seem that their dream was less benevolent than the awakening has often proved to be.
To be sure, there was a certain ambivalence in the thinking of those liberal imperialists. They welcomed the creation of new white nations under the British flag and their growing independence, but when their thoughts turned to India its independence seemed a distant aspiration, hedged about by safeguards for minorities and primitive tribes, and vastly complicated by Britain’s pledges of protection to the princely states. Still less did they contemplate independence for the many colonial territories in Africa, the West Indies and the Pacific, except as an ultimate apotheosis long after their own time. In this ambivalence there was undoubtedly a sense of racial superiority, conscious or unconscious. The world of races, like the domestic world, had inherited a class structure. Maybe in either case it was theoretically vindicated by the rough justice of historical evolution, maybe not; but theory was of little importance because racial gradation existed as a fact of life. And in that racial class structure it had fallen to the white races to be the noblesse, with noble obligations as the counterpart of noble dominance. Class structures could change in time, of course, as domestic class structures had changed and were radically changing now, but in the world of races and nations the time for radical change was not yet.
Though I had been brought up in the tradition of service in the Empire overseas, my introduction to the circle of high-thinking imperialists was through All Souls and the remarkable group of men, well represented there, who had founded The Round Table magazine in 1910, especially through that extraordinary man Lionel Curtis. He was the true founder, among several who could share that honour, of The Round Table circle, and the genius of its early days. It sprang, as is common knowledge, from the group of able young men who helped to reconstruct South Africa after the Boer War, and became known as Milner’s Kindergarten. Lionel Curtis was one of them; others were Philip Kerr, later 11th Marquess of Lothian, ambassador to Washington at the start of World War Two; Robert Brand, later Lord Brand, the eminent merchant banker; Lionel Hichens, who became chairman of Cammell Laird, the Birkenhead shipbuilders; John Dove, a man of unalloyed goodness whose ill health, the result of a riding accident, kept him from public affairs in his later years; Richard Feetham, later Chief Justice of South Africa; Patrick Duncan, another lawyer, who, as Sir Patrick, became Governor-General of the South African Union; and Peter Perry, not the least brilliant, who made his career in Canada. Other young men who worked in South Africa at the beginning of the century and who, though not strictly of the Kindergarten, were their close friends and associates included Geoffrey Robinson (Dawson), later editor of The Times, and DO Malcolm (as Sir Dougal, Chairman of the British South Africa Company), who was Private Secretary to Lord Selborne, Lord Milner’s successor as Governor-General in Cape Town. I knew them all, although I met only very occasionally those who made their careers elsewhere than in Britain, and I suppose I must be the last person alive to be able to say so.
Inspired by the construction of the Union of South Africa, during which they had worked initially for federation of the four colonies, those who returned to England banded together to start a movement for the discussion of wider constitutional development of the British Empire, which was just then being called (first, I think, by Alfred Zimmern) the British Commonwealth of Nations. Curtis was the dynamo behind the Round Table movement. His concept for the Commonwealth’s future was frankly federal—what he somewhat ineptly called “organic union”: later this idée fixe made him an apostle of Atlantic federation. His advocacy was fierce and minatory: not for nothing was he known to his friends as The Prophet. But many of his ex-Kindergarten friends were more sceptical, flexible and eclectic in their views of future imperial unity. To the end of their days in the Round Table Moot, as the British inner group called itself, there remained this tension between Curtis’s dogmatic enthusiasm and the more diplomatic and compromising attitudes of others. Lionel was neither reticent nor sparing in his criticism of those (including myself) whom he regarded as having forsaken the true gospel, to have sinned against the light of federal union. “Traitor,” he once called me, and not in jest. But federal union was never the committed faith of The Round Table magazine or of its sponsors corporately. The quarterly review was founded, not as a campaigning weapon, but as a forum for discussion of Imperial (or Commonwealth) problems, especially constitutional issues. Philip Kerr was its first editor and Curtis the peripatetic secretary and organiser. His was the task—precious to him—of setting down ideas and plans on paper and travelling round the Dominions forming and inspiring groups of men who would debate those ideas and participate in the Round Table forum. His writing took shape in documents known to the Moot as the Egg and the Omelette, provisional studies of closer union in the Commonwealth, interleaved with blank pages on which the recipients were invited to write their comments. No authorised Round Table testament emerged from this protracted effort; its product remained personal to Curtis, exposed in his “The Commonwealth of Nations”, “Civitas Dei,” and other works.
For, while the constitutionalists debated, the Empire itself had moved on. In 1910, when the Round Table began, the South African Union had just been founded, the Commonwealth of Australia was a decade old, Canada’s definitive constitution went back only to 1897; the perennial problem of Ireland seemed soluble in terms of Home Rule within a federal or quasi-federal union of the British Isles; self-government for India, though an aspiration for many imperial idealists, was beyond the visible horizon. The time seemed ripe for checking the slow trend towards fragmentation of policy and action which the birth of new nations under the British Crown portended. War clouds were threatening in Europe and the Far East. The United Kingdom assumed overall responsibility for the defence of the whole Empire, but the Dominions, rising in population, wealth and sense of independence, neither contributed much to the common defence in peace nor had any voice in the British foreign policy that would decide its use in war. The need appeared obvious; and did not the unification of separate colonies in Canada, Australia and South Africa, with the United States as the supreme example, point the way to an answer?
If those who argued thus had foreseen the inexorable rise of nationalism in the Dominions, setting a separatist example to the non-white constituents of the Empire, they might have been still more urgent in their warnings and appeals; or they might have gradually realised, as the Round Table Moot members as a group did, that their objectives were unobtainable, being contrary to the natural flow of human history, and have substituted less ambitious, more pragmatic palliatives for imperial dissolution. The seers of 1910 perceived the advancing spectre of European war, and when war came were heartened by the response from the self-governing Dominions; they did not foresee a five-year conflict which would change the map of men’s minds more than it changed the map of Europe, and would leave the Dominions determined, in the light of their experience, to decide for themselves in future the issues of peace and war, spurning with profound suspicion any project which qualified their sovereignty or diluted their freedom of action in foreign policy and defence. But Lionel Curtis, like a true prophet of old, never wavered in his call to first principles in the organisation of world peace and security through union of the like-minded. He saw this not only as a political objective but as the fulfilment of destiny in the progress of human civilisation.
When I first knew him, Lionel already had the shock of white hair and the grave look which you see in Kennington’s portrait. He was a Research Fellow of All Souls, a role viewed with some dubiety by the academically austere. His “research” was indistinguishable from his polemical study of Commonwealth development. Research he once defined, quite in earnest, as the discovery of facts to support your arguments and conclusions. He was no great scholar. But he was the friend and animator of scholars. If brilliant All Souls contemporaries like Dougie Malcolm and Bob Brand could laugh at his eccentricities and his unscientific method, they loved and admired him, and more often than not did his bidding. All Souls made an ideal base for a man who spent his life influencing others to carry out ideas which he framed and propagated without ambition for himself, or fear of criticism by the great and powerful.
It is extraordinary that a man whose name was unknown to the general public, who never had a title (though late in life he was made a Companion of Honour) nor held a responsible public office after he was Town Clerk of Johannesburg, should have left indelible marks of his vision and energy in so many fields: the Round Table, dyarchy in India’s constitution, the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (and indirectly its sister institution the Council on Foreign Relations in New York and daughter institutes in the overseas Commonwealth), the banning of sky-writing and the attack on “ribbon development”, a pernicious form of urban sprawl. Politics have always had their concealed manipulators, like Tom Jones or JCC Davidson, but Lionel Curtis was no politician, no office-holder in the shadows of the Cabinet, nor a trusted confidant or go-between of men of power. Nor was he a subtle intriguer. His methods were direct; when he perceived a goal he went to men who could help to achieve it and tried without remission to get them to do as he wanted. They usually succumbed.
Deliberately or by instinct, he employed a persuasive device of great psychological potency. He would begin with an anecdote which pointed the moral of what he had to say—the appeal to past experience. Then would come exposure of the grand objective—the appeal to idealism. Next, the appeal by flattery, saying, in effect: “You are the man to do this thing, because you combine high motives with practical ability and judgment.” And then would come a subtle change of tense in his verbal picture of the fate for which he was wooing you. An implicit, “Would you?” became an explicit, “You would”, and then, imperceptibly, “You will”, until you found yourself identifying imaginatively with fulfilment of the Curtis plan.
Thus did Lionel persuade me to throw in my lot with The Round Table Magazine and its sponsors, as assistant editor with the opportunity of educating myself in international and Commonwealth affairs by travel round the world, and with the promise of the editorship in succession to John Dove, who wished to retire soon. I greatly admired those of the Round Table circle whom I already knew, and to be associated with them would be distinction for me. Lionel won without a struggle.
His single-minded drive was reflected in his penetrating eyes, his strong voice, his direct manner. Common-room gossip was not his taste, time ought not to be wasted, conversation at meals, too, should be purposive. At the same time Lionel had a child-like simplicity, and a great capacity for affection given and received. Cleverer men than he loved him and followed his lead. His usual garb was a well-worn grey tweed suit. After a serious fire at his Kidlington home he recounted that he had lost some clothes but that they were insured. “Who would insure the Prophet’s clothes?” exclaimed Bob Brand. Lionel was also reported to have said of that event: “Fortunately I was in All Souls at the time and only Pat was in the house,” Pat being his calm, devoted wife. This may be a legend, but the naïvété was typical. It was sad that in his late years Lionel became gloomier and, unknown to most, solaced his disappointments with alcoholic escape. No doubt he saw a world that increasingly derided such idealism as his.
He was the oldest of the original Moot. The youngest was Philip Kerr. In middle life Kerr succeeded a cousin as Marquess of Lothian and inheritor of great estates, including the historic Blickling Hall, once the home of the Boleyns, later of the Earls of Buckingham, from whom he was descended; but until then he was a man of moderate means who had served as a junior civil servant in South Africa (where his chief monument was a penetrating report on the problem of the poor whites), as working editor of The Round Table, as a member of Lloyd George’s Cabinet secretariat, and as secretary of the Rhodes Trust. He was one of the most fluent talkers and writers on international affairs I have ever known. Words poured from his pen like tap-water. When I edited The Round Table—then entirely anonymous—he often wrote the major article in each quarterly issue. The spate of words, sometimes diffuse, could not conceal a comprehensive and penetrating mind. His thought was not always original, and was apt to shift with changing outer circumstances, but it was addressed to the heart of the problem in hand.
The Round Table group, like All Souls, has been identified by some people with “appeasement” in the 1930s. This is unwarranted, as its printed pages prove, though Geoffrey Dawson was certainly an appeaser, and so, too, in a different way, was Philip Kerr. His idea was that a resurgent Germany might be turned from menacing aggression if the penalty of her defeat in 1918, which not only broke her economically but also humiliated her as a great power, was redressed by restoring her imperial status through a redistribution of mandated territories, especially in Africa. It was a wrong-headed idea, never approved by his Round Table colleagues. It was inspired, I believe, by the determined optimism of the Christian Scientist, that same ever-hopeful trait which made him say, as he waved goodbye from the boat-train on his way to take up his embassy in Washington in 1938, in response to my farewell words: “We’ll be seeing you again when war breaks out.” “There ain’t going to be no war.”
Brought up in a devout Roman Catholic family, Philip Kerr had suffered a devastating loss of faith in his twenties. Into that spiritual house swept and garnished, entered Christian Science, a faith equally rigorous in its way but at the opposite extreme of religiosity. It came through the agency of Nancy Astor. Probably Philip fell in love with her: he remained her devoted admirer and intimate friend to the end of his life. Perhaps as a consequence, he never married. Many people blamed Christian Science for his untimely death; for when he fell ill in Washington of an infection which prompt medical treatment could almost certainly have cured he refused to see a doctor until it was too late. It happened that both his second-in-command in the embassy, Neville Butler, and his English chauffeur-valet, either of whom might have insisted on his taking medical advice, were also both Christian Scientists. No one can say for sure. Adopting that faith certainly restored his inner self-confidence and left him cheerful, hospitable, enthusiastic and energetic, one of the most popular and successful ambassadors Britain has ever sent to the United States. His noble title no doubt pleased many Americans with whom he talked in his easy way, but he had no side, was just the same as Marquess of Lothian as he had been as Mr Kerr, and he treated everyone alike.
After his death in 1941 I edited for the Oxford University Press a paper-back volume of his American speeches. Reading the scripts of dozens of addresses to different audiences across the States in that crucial period between the collapse of Munich hopes and America’s entry into the war, I was struck by two things. One was the directness with which he spoke of the global strategic situation facing Americans as well as ourselves, yet without any overt appeal or propaganda for their active help. The other was the economy with which he used the same theme and the same material for speech after speech, so that my major editorial task was cutting out repetitious passages from later texts. Much of his message derived from the teaching of the famous American geopolitical strategist, Captain (later Admiral) AT Mahan. Philip’s almost complete set of Mahan’s works, chief among them, “The Influence of Sea Power upon History”, is now in the Codrington Library at All Souls. The rise of air power did not destroy their main message, that the proper perimeter of the defence of America lay not on its coasts and frontiers, but as far off as possible across the oceans, but on the contrary added another dimension to it. Inter-continental nuclear power has qualified that doctrine, but it still holds much of truth for sub-nuclear strategy and even for superpower confrontation.
Quite unlike the rather droopy, solemn figure portrayed in the television series “Nancy” about Lady Astor, Philip was tall, athletic and handsome in a strong-nosed way. While as a Christian Scientist he neither smoked nor drank, he enjoyed other good things of life, ate heartily, and generously entertained his less abstemious friends. During dinner at Blickling one evening Bob Brand gazed at his host and then said to me in his characteristically amused way: “I’ve seen many people throw their food into their mouths, but you have to be a Marquess to throw it at the back of your throat.”
Among the older members of the Moot my closest friend was Dougie Malcolm—who became Sir Dougal, KCMG, long after his distinction in business and public affairs had earned, his colleagues thought, a title of honour. As chairman (later president) of Rhodes’s British South Africa Company (“the Chartered Company”) he had been in the thick of the negotiations for transfer of its governmental powers to the self-governing colony of Southern Rhodesia (destined to become Zimbabwe) in 1925, for the use of the port of Beira and the Beira railway in Mozambique as Rhodesia’s main outlet to the sea (for which service the Portuguese Government gave him, to his amusement, the Order of the Holy Ghost), and more distantly for the creation of the short-lived Central African Federation in 1950. On the last issue, much debated by the Round Table Moot, Dougie took a strongly critical line. A careful thinker, he intensely disliked a hodge-podge of a constitution, as he thought it to be, which tried to bring into one system a self-governing colony, a subordinate Crown territory and a protectorate. Besides offending his sense of order, the plan also affronted his sense of practical administration. He saw in it no clear line of responsibility for handling the great problems of the area, especially the relations between the whites and the Africans. He was no champion of black majority rule, and he scorned as unsound the principle of one-man-one-vote, but he saw the rise of African democracy as inevitable, and the Federation as a clumsy entanglement in dealing with the problems it raised. He was proved right.
The Round Table’s attitude to the race problem was equivocal. Its roots having lain in South Africa, Moot members had a close and permanent interest in it. But they inherited the typical british South African view that if extreme Afrikaner “Baaskap” were resisted, and African, Asian and Coloured rights in South Africa were allowed to develop gradually, starting from the existing laws and franchises, the problem would solve itself for a long time to come. For them, in the early years of the century, the important racial problem in that country was the relations between the English-speaking and Afrikaans-speaking whites. The balance which they believed had been established between the two traditions, together with the entrenched clauses of the Union constitution, was the best guarantee of a fair deal for the native.
It was not an illiberal view, short-sighted though it was. And one should observe that it was pretty universal at that time among British people concerned with South Africa, as well as enlightened Afrikaners like Jan Christian Smuts, with his complacent motto: “Alle Sall Recht Kom.” Liberal imperialism, which accepted as an axiom that the advanced and privileged peoples (whites) had a duty to govern the backward and poor (blacks) in the latter’s own interest, while gradually raising them in ability control their own affairs, was received doctrine across the political spectrum. Even in the 1940s, the substitution of African self-government for European colonial rule over most of tropical and sub-tropical Africa seemed still to be a long way off. Only a few idealists and revolutionaries perceived race relations as an urgent issue of world-wide moment. In 1950, when I began my effort to found the Institute of Race Relations, mine was a lonely voice in establishment circles prophesying that race was at least as dangerous and durable a cause of division in the world as communism versus capitalism. In that effort, significantly, Dougie Malcolm was by far my most effective helper.
He was a scion of a notable Scottish line, the Malcolms of Poltalloch. Like younger sons everywhere, he had to make his own way in the world, and after a brilliant career at Eton and Oxford he became a clerk (as administrative juniors were called) in the Colonial Office; there, he was appointed private secretary to Joseph Chamberlain, and faithful to his trust he bore to his grave the secret of the Colonial Secretary’s involvement in the Jameson Raid, which has never been wholly revealed. By upbringing, however, he belonged to that section of society which had taken for granted that the year was punctuated by the times for shooting, fishing and hunting, by the London season, Ascot, Goodwood and Cowes, and that a gentleman remained in town after the Twelfth of August only through urgent necessity. There was a streak of the sybarite in Dougie too; he loved good food, good wine, good theatre, good company. Dining with the Malcolms on one occasion after World War Two, when they lived in a small house on Campden Hill, and the host himself fetched and served the dishes from a hatch in the dining-room, I recalled to mind the bygone dinner parties of a dozen guests or more, when the service was presided over by their impeccable parlourmaid, Amiss, who also acted as Dougie’s valet, and I commiserated with him on the change that the war had brought in the ways of life of people like himself, who had earned instead some comfort in their later years. He brushed the idea aside; he was quite content, indeed in some ways he preferred the new regime, and he added: “The first World War made a far greater change. Before 1914 we had thought that life would go on as it always had done. The vital change was not that after the war well-off people were poorer, or that Edwardian ways of living, with lots of servants and ample leisure, were gone for good, but that everything had become unsettled, open to threat, the old certainties had been lost, as if there had been an earthquake and the ground was still shaking under our feet. Yes, the first war altered life in England much more than the second.”
Dougie was a scholar whom one so unlearned in the classics as myself held in envious awe. If a lapidary inscription had to be devised, or a telegram in Latin sent to some absent colleague, it was always Dougie who was enlisted to write it, in faultless measure and with academic wit. Not only had he the apt Latin or Greek verse or epigram swiftly on his tongue, he could recite long passages which he had learnt at school, not only in Latin and Greek but from English poetry too, from Chaucer to Rudyard Kipling, whom he rightly thought under-rated as a poet. This astonishing memory must have been an important asset to him in the City, where to his own initial surprise he made his main career; he was no tycoon by nature, though his brains, his industry and his sense of the practical made him a first-class administrator and business diplomat. Known in his early days as “the Beaver”, for his capacity for hard work, in his older age his Round Table friends affectionately called him “the Dormouse”; for he had a remarkable and sometimes embarrassing facility for falling asleep—during an after-dinner conversation, at the theatre or at a Chatham House lecture. He could sleep at will in a train or a motor car heedless of noise or motion—a valuable gift. It was said of him in the City that, on waking from an apparently deep slumber at a board meeting, he would know instantly not only where he was, among the many companies of which he was a director, but even what was the business in hand, and be prepared to give his opinion on it as smartly as if he had heard every word. But that is legend. Despite his geniality and calm, he could be testy, especially if impeded by an ill-informed argument, when he would turn his head as he checked his annoyance and framed a soft but decisive answer. Edward Halifax perfectly described him in a memorial address in All Souls chapel: “courteous, tolerant, urbane, giving much to and getting much from friends, never anxious to see any argument pressed so far as to endanger temper, holding himself to principles that in his own practice were well defined, but concerned to make the wheels go round smoothly for others as for himself.” Could there be a finer epitaph?
His wife, Lady Evelyn, a daughter of Lord Donoughmore, had a character as Irish as Dougie’s was Scots. She cared much less than he for the creature comforts of life, and would go off on arduous expeditions to countries like Yugoslavia, from which she would return with her pockets stuffed with seed, roots and cuttings for her garden. On such trips she would be accompanied by her maid, French, another inseparable member of the Malcolm household, enjoying like Amiss an intimacy which in no way qualified mutual respect. (When domestic service was an honourable and extensive occupation, ladies’ maids, like butlers, were called by their surnames, footmen and housemaids by their first names, while cooks were always known as Mrs, whatever their marital status—our own pre-war cook, in a modest home, was Mrs Gilbey, a middle-aged spinster.) A character just as vividly etched on my memory was the Malcolms’ chauffeur, Mr Eggs. (I never saw his name in writing, but that is how it was pronounced.) A former naval petty officer, he was the worst professional driver behind whom I have ever sat, (rivalled only by my Aunt Mary’s ex-coachman, whose gestures at the wheel were those of driving horses, and who when taking a left turn would swing the car well over to the right, as he would have done with a carriage and pair). Dougie, who knew nothing about motor cars and had never learnt to drive, paid no heed, despite a succession of minor accidents, counting mutual loyalty above risk to persons or property. His old-fashioned Rolls-Royce, of the kind you could step into without removing your top-hat, had an oversprung, swaying motion which made me carsick; when we were to be driven in it I would offer to allow the others more room by sitting in front with the chauffeur, which meant a stable ride amidships, so I had a close-up view of Eggs’s driving. Once, crawling along a narrow road in a queue of cars, we were overtaken by a dashing little sports car which nipped in and out of the traffic: Eggs, hardly able to contain his fury, hissed between gritted teeth: “If I was on me own I’d show ’im a bit of cutting up.”
If you asked me who was the best man I had ever known, the man whom I most admired for himself, I think I should answer “Bob Brand”. His public services were great, and fairly recognised, but he cared little or nothing for public fame. Though he had been a scholar of high ability, and knew the complexities of international banking as well as any professional consultant, he was genuinely modest about his brains and always said he had learnt banking by having to do it. Drawn into the City on a chance recommendation, when he started work there he had no idea what it was all about, so he told me. He had the best kind of modesty, the kind you do not notice; calculated humility can be a sort of inverted pride, and just as tiresome. Much more than that, Bob Brand was wise, and his quiet sense of humour never left him, despite two shattering blows that fell upon him, the death from pneumonia of his beautiful wife Phyllis (Nancy Astor’s sister), whom he adored, and the loss of his only son Jim in World War Two. Eydon Hall, the Brands’ home in Northamptonshire, was one of the most delightful houses in which to stay, not only because it was a lovely house filled with beautiful things but still more because it breathed an air of warmth and affection. Phyllis Brand loved flowers and her house was always bright with them: I remember especially a pair of small laburnum trees in tubs, weeping glorious pale yellow cascades on either side of the fireplace in the drawing room.
Bob was wise, as I have said, that is, much more than clever. In the Round Table Moot his cautious good sense was an invaluable offset to Philip Kerr’s loquacious enthusiasm or Lionel Curtis’s apocalyptic sermons. A frequent visitor to Germany in the 1930s, in connection with the Dawes and Young loans which refloated the German economy after its shipwreck upon harsh reparation demands, he saw beyond the glitter of Nazi successes and the apparent economic prosperity financed by the Reichsbank’s creditors, and he constantly warned his friends of the menacing militarism and revanchism that he saw building up behind the façade. Close friend and companion of some of the most prominent “appeasers”, he was their insistent critic. But he never laid down the law. He was sceptical but tolerant, clear-headed but undogmatic.
An incident at Eydon when I nearly committed an awful howler comes back to me. At dinner on Saturday evening I was placed next to a middle-aged American lady whose name I had not caught. Groping for a lead to conversation, I opened my mouth to ask: “Are you going to see Ruth Draper while she is in London?” At that moment Bob himself, on her other side, said, “We have booked to see you on Wednesday, Ruth—what are you going to give us?” The great diseuse was as charming off the stage as on. After dinner we repaired to the schoolroom upstairs, where Miss Draper gave a delicious performance for the benefit of the night-gowned Brand daughters, Virginia and Dinah.
The Brands had a butler called Bligh who was an old friend of the family, especially of the children, and was treated with a tolerance like that of a medieval monarch for his fool. He would sometimes enter the conversation at table as he handed the plates or the wine. Bob was quietly amused by his way of brushing the crumbs off the table when it was cleared for dessert, holding the tray well away and whisking most of the débris to the floor. One day I had been asked to dine with Bob alone at his London house in New Cavendish Street, which was under dust-sheets and in which he was camping with Bligh to look after him. It was pouring with rain and there was no porch for shelter. I rang three times before, at last, Bligh opened the door. “’Ave you been waiting long, sir?” “Yes, Bligh, I have.” “I thought I ’eard you.” Wet and cross as I was, I could only laugh.
The Moot, though in strict title the editorial committee of The Round Table, was not a formal body but a gathering of friends with an unwritten agenda for conversation. Minutes were kept but never circulated. There was often as much difference as agreement, and the editor was left to distil in his own fashion such consensus as he could perceive. The Moot met in its senior members’ houses, either for weekends at Eydon, North Aston or Blickling, or for dinner in London, the host taking the chair; for in the spirit of a round table at which all were equal there was no permanent chairman. We who have succeeded the Kindergarten in the Moot have done our best to keep to the old traditions, though times have so changed that private hospitality for a group of a dozen or more people (not counting wives) is out of the question and the Moot now meets for dinner at a London club on a subscription basis, and has of necessity a permanent chairman: the wind of circumstance blew me into that office for five crucial years, during which publication of the journal was suspended for twelve months when on the brink of bankruptcy. At least we still meet as a circle of friends, who differ but never quarrel, pursue a common goal but never expect unanimity, and are bound by an interest and a cause larger than ourselves.
Among London houses the Moot dined sometimes, in the old days, at Geoffrey Dawson’s. Dawson—always called Robin by his old friends who had known him before he changed his name from Robinson upon inheriting a Yorkshire estate—had been Editor of The Times since 1912, and was one of the most influential backstage men in England. Though industriously devoted to his charge he took his editorial cares unstrenuously and sought to live, so far as daily duty allowed, the life of a gentleman. On Moot evenings certainly, and probably many others, he would dine at home in Hanover Terrace (in a dinner jacket, of course) at seven thirty for eight o’clock, then excuse himself at about 10 when he was driven to Printing House Square to look over the first edition. He did not conceive it to be the editor’s role to write frequent leading articles; he should keep his own fire for exceptional occasions—as when Dawson’s leader headed, “A Corridor for Camels,” devastated the Hoare-Laval plan for Ethiopia during the Italian invasion. On Ireland, he told me he thought the less said the better; publicity for the problems and divisions of that country only made them worse—in this age of television certainly, that is undoubtedly true. Dawson also believed—how rightly—that the most important thing in a newspaper was the news; some of his successors at Printing House Square did not appear to give news the same priority, to the paper’s loss.
Geoffrey Dawson was closely identified in the public eye with the Baldwin-Chamberlain policy of appeasement of Germany. He belonged to the generation that had suffered the shock of the 1914-18 war at the prime of their lives, and had lost countless friends and relatives in a conflict which decimated the potential leaders of the nation. He had a son, Michael, whom he felt he might be sacrificing, like Isaac with Jacob before Jehovah’s reprieve, if he failed to do all he could to avoid an even more destructive repetition of so terrible a calamity. And as a strong believer in the value of the British Commonwealth he saw in the possibility of a war for which the self-governing Dominions were even less well prepared materially and morally than Britain a grave threat to its unity, even to its survival. He was a realist, though his realism faltered in his judgment of Nazi Germany’s aims and ambitions. As things turned out, he was proved wrong, but at the time a great many people thought him right who, not having committed their views to the printed record, as he had, were able to be wise after the event.
Michael Dawson survived the war, but Bob Brand and Lionel Hichens both lost sons, and Hichens himself was killed by a bomb which fell on Church House in the blitz on London. From South African War days, even before the Kindergarten came together, Lionel Hichens (Nel to his intimates) was the closest friend of the other Lionel, Curtis the Prophet, but in character they were poles apart. Where Curtis was an evangelist, preaching a gospel of kingdom-come on earth, Hichens was concerned with the practical problems of the day, a man who neither preached nor theorised but produced, when called upon, firm and decided opinions—a big cannon, not a machine gun or a sniper’s rifle. He was the only industrialist on the Round Table Moot, and his mind was attuned to the problems of heavy industry and the world of business and labour. At the same time he gave much of himself to public causes, particularly those of church and school, and was a man of stern principle. Though by nature adamantly conservative, he was not afraid of radical change when he thought it necessary. Alter World War One he had advocated a capital levy to pay off the national debt, which he saw as an incubus upon the taxpayers and the economy. He distrusted expansionist economists who, he thought, were seeking to persuade the politicians and public that something could be made out of nothing. He believed that neither individually nor nationally could you, without disaster, spend more than you earned or produce something at a higher cost than the price it would fetch when you sold it.
He was not, in such matters, imaginative. One day in 1939, before the war, I was driving with him from Oxford to his home at North Aston. We spoke of impending war and Lionel said: “There can’t be a long war because there simply isn’t the money to pay for it. The standard of life can’t be screwed down much further.” (Income tax was then at an inter-war peak of six shillings in the pound—thirty pence in decimal currency—with much higher thresholds for steeper rates, in real terms, than today.) In reply I pointed to a row of small houses in Kidlington, the homes probably of skilled working-class or lower middle-class families. “Lionel,” I said, “the people who live there have far smaller incomes than you or even I have, but they manage to live within them and are content. If they can do so, we could too, if we had to.” He said: “I’ve never thought of it like that.” The people who lived in those houses would have said the same about people poorer than themselves. Social revolutions may have proceeded gradually over many decades, but it is wars that have given them their great impetus, and made them irreversible: in war, everything has to be done regardless of cost, whereas in peace the cost of anything seems too much if it means a cut in what we presently enjoy. Lionel’s severe uprightness was apt to put younger people in awe of him. If his severity was called for it could be crushing. When the Ministry of Information was a sitting target for scornful attack by politicians and the press in 1940, Ivison Macadam and I, who served in it and felt the frustration of men working hard against the odds who could not answer back, suggested to Lionel that he should write to The Times in its defence, which he did with irrefutable sternness. We felt like tormented schoolboys seeing the bullies caned by the headmaster.
Though Lionel was hospitable he was not gregarious. The Hichens family always seemed sufficient unto themselves. Save for their immediate neighbours you were unlikely to find the society of North Oxfordshire and the Heythrop Hunt at North Aston. Apart from the Round Table circle the visitors there were most often relations of Lionel’s beautiful wife Hermione. She was a daughter of General Sir Neville Lyttelton, a member of a vast tribe, the Lyttelton connection, with sisters, cousins and aunts proliferating into the Ford, Waldegrave, Grenfell and other numerous families. Hermione was a pre-Raphaelite beauty. As a girl in Edwardian society she must have been a smasher. Harold Macmillan confessed to my wife that as a young man he had been in love with her. Her reminiscences of those days, in her old age, were as vivid as they were scandalous. Perhaps the wisest thing she did in her life was to marry, not one of that gilded society, but the highly able, reserved Lionel Hichens, a man as tall and handsome as herself, who supplied qualities that she lacked—orderliness, even stiffness of character and habit—the perfect complement to her gaiety and inconsequence.
Hermione was a curious mixture of the effective and the harum-scarum. She won the Royal Red Cross as a volunteer nurse in World War One, brought up a happy and well-ordered family of six children, managed her financial affairs with verve after Lionel’s death, and was an excellent, hardworking member of the Oxfordshire County Council and many committees on public affairs. At the same time she was hopelessly untidy and indifferent to appearances and to her physical surroundings. North Aston Hall was notoriously uncomfortable; Hermione’s sister Katie Grenfell called it Bleak House. A plain Georgian pile tacked on to Tudor back premises, it had been turned round in a Victorian reconstruction and never regained its coherence. The draughtiest room of all was the hall, used as an informal living-room; its only windows faced north, and at either end were the front door and the main staircase—open plan with a vengeance. A great log fire in winter only augmented the draughts. The guest bedroom suite also faced north, and had the extra disadvantage of proximity to a peculiarly noisy water-tank system. None of this, to my knowledge, ever deterred friends or relations from accepting invitations to stay at North Aston. Hermione and Lionel, for different reasons, ignored the whole thing.
They equally ignored the eccentricities of their pre-war butler, Seymour, who had a genius for doing things wrongly, like passing the wine from left to right at the dinner table, or—unique accomplishment—so folding one’s evening socks that when put on they must be inside out. Those were the days in which, in a country house, one’s clothes were laid out by a man-servant or, at a pinch, a housemaid, who would also unpack and repack visitors’ suitcases, sometimes very badly. Such customs afforded as much embarrassment as comfort. One dreaded the imagined scorn of a superior footman in a great house at handling one’s cheap underwear or shabby pyjamas. Fear of what the servants might hear, see, think, say or do haunted many employers who became to a great extent their subjects.
In the 1930s John Dove, the last of the Kindergarten whom I knew well, lived in a small house on the Hichens’s property, which after his death we rented as a country cottage at various times. He was a quiet man of great gentleness and humour, who never married but loved his friends, both men and women, and was loved by them. Accident and illness had made his health poor, and he wanted to lay down his editorship of The Round Table, in which he had followed Philip Kerr and Reggie Coupland. It was not, I must say as his successor, a very arduous post. Besides doing the obvious job of producing the magazine, the Editor was the amanuensis of the Moot and also kept up a correspondence with the Round Table groups in the Dominions, then an important part of the organisation; but he had a full-time secretary, Edith Handley, who was also John Dove’s devoted friend. However, it was more than enough for a frail middle-aged man who lived in the country. For more than two years I was his assistant editor, working with him in London, and more than once standing in for him when he was unwell, but spending a great deal of time travelling. (Travelling did take a great deal of time before the age of inter-continental flight.) He was a most conscientious editor, from whom I learnt a standard that I have striven to maintain in later editorial jobs. “Good enough,” he used to say, “is not good enough.”
In its transition from the Kindergarten in South Africa to The Round Table editorial committee in London, the original group of friends had lost some members and gained others. Herbert Baker, older than any of them, who had been Rhodes’s architect, appears in the photograph of the group in Johannesburg and was a close friend of the Kindergarten. That fact had a regrettable consequence; for their status and influence were important in his getting some splendid public commissions in England, which left as his legacy a number of monumental but second class buildings like South Africa House in Trafalgar Square, the Royal Commonwealth Society’s headquarters nearby, and Rhodes House and the New Bodleian Library in Oxford. He was a delightful, unassertive man, but in my view his talents were unequal to his opportunities. However, I am not among those who decry his Parliament building in New Delhi (known from its circular shape as well as its function as “the gasworks”), which, given its humbler location, stands up well to Lutyens’s great complex. (Lutyens himself, whom I met only once, was a great charmer of a different sort entirely, full of vitality, constantly scribbling drawings on envelopes, menus or other scraps of paper.)
Others in that historic photograph whom I knew but slightly were Dick Feetham, Patrick Duncan and Peter Perry. Duncan I recall from his occasional visits to the Moot as a warm-hearted man in the best tradition of liberal South Africans, Perry as a sharp-brained man of pungent wit who could have been a Jacobean essayist. Hugh Wyndham (who in his last years succeeded as Lord Leconfield), also in the photograph, stayed in South Africa like Feetham and Duncan when others returned, in his case to farm, and his connection with the Moot was thus broken. He came into my life, not through The Round Table, but through his part in the studies of Commonwealth affairs by Chatham House and its daughter institutes in the Dominions. He was a most amusing man, with a detached intelligence and a dry wit, a fin de siècle character with his drooping moustache and aristocratic manners. When at one of those unofficial Commonwealth conferences someone had praised the improvements in life since Victoria’s day, Hugh rose protesting and exclaimed: “I regret the ‘nineties’.”
Two members of the Moot when I joined it in 1931 had been recruited since its foundation. One was Percy Horsfall, a partner in Lazards like Brand, whom someone (John Maud, I think) described as, “a square peg in a Round Table.” He was indeed different from the founders, not a social figure, nor belonging to the public-school and country-gentleman tradition. But he was greatly respected by his colleagues, for he had an acute mind, was immensely well-read and knowledgeable of the world, and expressed opinion with corrosive vigour. So he was an invaluable member of the Moot and was usually drafted to write for the magazine on economic and financial subjects.
The other long-standing member who had not been one of the Kindergarten or shared the South African experience was Ned Grigg (Sir Edward Grigg, later the first Lord Altrincham). He was a widely different kind of person from Horsfall, essentially a politician, a talker and writer. It was as Imperial Affairs editor of The Times that he had originally been drawn into the Round Table circle. While he was Governor of Kenya the Moot saw little of him, though he came occasionally when on leave, and wrote letters to his Round Table friends, distinctly colouring their views on colonial and particularly East African issues. On his return he became Conservative MP for Altrincham, the only direct personal link the Moot had with the House of Commons until a third generation of members took over in the 1960s. Like other politicians, having adopted a definite opinion on any matter Ned Grigg voiced it emphatically and without much respect for the opposite view. Though usually genial he was somewhat irascible, and at one Moot he exploded. Lionel Curtis, in his habitual fashion, had been berating him among others for not doing something that the Curtisian plan required. Ned banged the table in fury. “Lionel,” he burst out, “you have never had to take responsibility in your life. You have never had to face an electorate or carry a policy into effect. Your views on practical politics are worthless.” The silence that followed this un-Mootlike detonation was broken by the flat voice of a guest, Sir Godfrey Huggins (later Lord Malvern), Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, using his deafness to happy effect by pretending not to have heard, and tactfully changing the subject. As soon as Ned’s wrath had cooled he apologised to Lionel. But of course he was expressing vehemently what many others in the Moot thought but did not say out of affection for the Prophet.
The Round Table group, compact and restricted as it was, was not a cabal, not a circle closed to influence by others. In its earliest days it had comprised an outer as well as an inner Moot, including such men as Leo Amery, Alfred Zimmern and Reggie Coupland. Its members had their own innumerable and varied contacts with the worlds of finance, business, politics and journalism.
Among those marginal relationships one of the most conspicuous in the 1920s and 1930s was that between the Round Tablers and the Waldorf Astors. Nancy Astor was Brand’s sister-in-law, Kerr her devotee, Curtis an old friend of both Waldorf and Nancy. Waldorf, Viscount Astor, had been one of the munificent founders of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, of which Curtis had been the most energetic and persuasive progenitor. The Moot itself met sometimes at Cliveden, the Astors’ country seat, in the 1920s and earlier, though that was before my time. It was through the Round Table connection that I, too, was drawn into the Astor orbit.
Nancy Astor was for me, as she surely was for almost everyone who knew her, that journalistic cliché, “the most remarkable woman I have ever met.” She was a comedian as well as an eccentric. She housed a spring of energy that nothing could quench. As a young woman, with her beauty blooming at its natural prime and her gaiety unimpaired by public and private cares, she must have been devastating. Bob Brand, who eventually married her sister Phyllis, confessed that he fell in love with her. Having won that secret from him she said: “But it’s no use, Bob; I’m married to Waldorf.” In fact he chose the better part. Phyllis Brand was not only beautiful and full of humour but also had a sweetness which in Nancy Astor was buried under a masterful personality and a frequent indifference to the effect of her words on others that must have been difficult for a husband to live with.
Waldorf and Nancy were born on the same day, and their friends said God had made them for each other. She adored him, and I remember so well the sadness in her face and voice when she spoke of him during his last illness. And he adored her. As a hostess she always made the running, led the conversation, dominated the party, commanded the staff and teased the guests: other husbands as gifted and distinguished as he might well have been piqued, or competitive. Waldorf sat back, laughed at her jokes, and quietly enjoyed her behaviour, outrageous as it sometimes was. She was a grand, eclectic hostess, filling her houses at Saint James’s Square, Cliveden and Sandwich with guests of all sorts and conditions, while Waldorf was a perfect host, as courteous and kind to the young as to their elders, to the humble as to the famous. Tall and good-looking, at evening parties wearing an old-fashioned white tie tucked under his collar and a square-cut, high white waistcoat, he seemed to belong to a departed, statelier world.
I met Nancy Astor when I was about 23. She took a liking to me, and I was often invited for weekends at Cliveden or dinner parties in London, where more than once, without the least chagrin, I counted myself the 14th at table, obviously the useful unattached young man who could be called upon at short notice to avoid the fatal thirteen or to partner a single lady. There was, however, more to it than that mutual convenience. Nancy Astor loved the admiration of young men whom she drew under her spell, and objected to their owing superior allegiance to any other woman. “I don’t want to know you,” were her first words to my 20-year-old wife when we were invited to a party shortly after our marriage: “you’ve stolen this young man.” It was said half in earnest, half in jest, and fortunately my wife took the jesting half and forgave what was otherwise a very disagreeable greeting to an inexperienced girl from another country. But that was nothing to what she was reputed to have said to Alfred Zimmern when he became involved in the divorce of the brilliant French lady whom he was about to marry: “Zim, you’ve been had!” He never spoke to her again. Frankness can be cruelty. But she had a kind heart under the brass. When we were all much older she wrote me a note—a typical scrawled postcard—saying: “I thought you looked tired when I last saw you. Why don’t you have my house at Sandwich for a week?”
While Nancy loved having interesting people around her, their rank meant little to her. At Cliveden one would meet in succession a Cabinet Minister and an undergraduate, a London grande dame and a schoolmistress from Plymouth. One lady of the latter sort was there for a weekend when our hostess, in one of her naughty moods, introduced everybody, over the afternoon teacups, by wrong appellations. Lords became Misters, Mrs Blank became Countess Blank, knighthoods were scattered among peers and commoners. I was introduced as Commander Hodson. All this without a wink or a moment’s hesitation. At dinner I found myself next to the lady from Plymouth, who, in an atmosphere that obviously awed her, strove to make a fit conversation by talking with me about the sea, and was more and more bewildered by my responses until, realising that she had been taken in, I disabused her. That was typical of Nancy’s dislike of form and pomposity. At a dinner party, when she thought the conversation was becoming too serious, she would slip a ghastly set of protruding celluloid teeth into her mouth (or perhaps make them out of orange peel) and convulse the table with her absurdity. A complete teetotaller, who would energetically recommend a glass of hot water when the grog tray came round, she could be as cheerfully off-beat as if she were flown with wine.
Although she had a sharp, if disordered, mind, and her views were often unorthodox, not to say inconsistent, she never escaped the prejudices of her upbringing in the American South, disliking Jews and Catholics, and regarding blacks as born to be either devoted servants or brash upstarts. “The only coloured man I ever liked,” she once said to me, “was the Maharajah of Alwar—and he kills off wives like a nigger kills fleas.”
George Bernard Shaw was among her close friends. Without raising his voice he could bring a whole dinner party of twenty or more at Saint James’s Square to silent attention. Conversation between twos and threes would gradually dwindle, as half an ear and then a whole ear was bent to hear what the great man was saying. On one occasion when GBS was a guest the others included the Begum Shah Nawaz and her talented daughter, Mumtaz Nawaz. This lovely girl, who died young, was a poet, and after dinner Nancy Astor begged her to recite one of her poems. This she did, in English, standing in front of the fireplace. As she finished, everyone waited to hear what comment the famous sage would make. He said: “I suppose it sounds still better in Urdu,”—a marvellous combination of politeness and equivocation.
The Astor weekend parties of the 1930s gave rise to the legend of the “Cliveden set”, a supposed clique who favoured appeasement of Hitler’s Germany, and by their influence and intrigue turned the course of British policy for the worse. There is a morsel of truth in this myth, but not much. Among those who stayed at Cliveden there was no common ground. Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian), certainly an “appeaser”, was a frequent visitor, but so also was Bob Brand, who never ceased to warn his friends of the truth about German militarism and the need to strengthen our own defences. I never saw Winston Churchill, or Sir Robert Vansittart, in the Astor houses, but neither did I see Neville Chamberlain, or Sir Horace Wilson, or even Lord Halifax. Geoffrey Dawson and Tom Jones were often Astor guests, but they and others came as friends, not as members of a conspiracy or proselytes of a cause. The idea of a Cliveden set united for appeasement never occurred to me at the time and still seems unreal.
We also need to remember—and those of a younger generation need to be told—that to cling to the hope and intention of peace in Europe was not only an honest and honourable policy, at least up to 1938, but also the attitude of the nation as a whole. Rarely has there been a more widely, even hysterically, applauded stroke of British foreign policy than the Munich settlement. Rarely has there been a stroke so unanimously endorsed by the independent nations of the Commonwealth. At a luncheon in London, after the war, given by Walter Nash, then Labour Prime Minister of New Zealand, formerly Minister of External Affairs, I remarked to my neighbour, his chief civil servant, that if ever there was a united Commonwealth policy after 1918 it was Munich. “Listen to what Harry Hodson says,” he called across the table to our host, and repeated my remark. Reluctantly, Nash was obliged to agree. The Commonwealth, up to 1933, was totally unready, not merely for war, but for the very idea of another war in Europe, like that which had drained the best of their manpower a generation earlier. British public opinion was more aware of the danger, but almost equally unwilling to face it. Looking back with the eye of history, one might well conclude that the last European war—the last civil war of the ex-Roman Empire—of necessity had to be fought. The war of 1914-18 had only divided Europe further, sowing the seeds of its own successor. Another bout of devastation, disillusionment and exhaustion was needed before Western Europe could unite. But we could hardly be expected to realise this in the 1930s and to bow our necks to the sacrifice.
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