The first world war had come too soon for me to be of military age, but not the second. In 1939 I pondered whether, at the age of 33, I should at once volunteer for armed service; but I was already on the tramlines of a civilian job of war service and it seemed right to delay a decision.
Soon after my return to England in 1938, I was enlisted into a small team of unofficial people who worked with assigned civil servants on planning for a Ministry of Information in the event of war. We were unpaid and had no rank or status, and neither press nor public knew about our work, which was centred on a house in Belgrave Square. My patch was what was to become the Empire Division of the Ministry. Looking back, I don’t think we did a bad job. The main tasks of my section, for which of course the men from Whitehall did the main work, were to set up a skeleton service, either administrative or liaison, for information in all the self-governing and dependent countries of the Commonwealth; to provide the latter with necessary equipment, including mobile cinema vans which would take wartime propaganda to illiterate peoples; and to pursue with the BBC plans for a big extension of its short-wave transmissions, then known as the Empire Service. That last piece of planning, involving a crucially important relay station in Singapore, took me to a very secret Whitehall meeting presided over by Sir Samuel Hoare, later Lord Templewood. He must have been a very satisfactory Minister from the civil servants’ point of view. I observed with respect his ability to follow complex presentations by the experts, and the manner, precise to the point of fussiness, with which he summed up discussion.
Among the civil servants with whom I dealt, easily the most impressive was Frank Lee, then an assistant secretary in the Colonial Office. Frank was a total contrast with the stereotype of the Whitehall official, suave, bowler-hatted and umbrellaed, tamed by the Treasury’s financial whip, working patiently to circumvent the objections which official superiors or other departments might raise to any new proposition. He looked a rough diamond and he cut like one. Once he was convinced that something had to be done he dismissed all likely obstacles with: “Leave it to me,” and in an astonishingly short time it was in train. How he managed it, in the peace-time Whitehall I could only guess; doubtless it was mainly by force of personality and determination, but he must also have been highly skilled in the tricks of inter-departmental management. I felt certain that he would come to the top of the civil service pile and I was right: before eventually retiring to become Master of Christ’s College, Cambridge, he had been Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Food, of the Board of Trade and (jointly) of the Treasury.
When the Ministry of Information was mobilised on the eve of war, I was asked to become head of the Empire Division, on terms unstated, but feared by me, correctly, to mean a big drop in my income, because my substantial freelance earnings from writing and broadcasting would end. However, such considerations were not high in our thoughts at that moment.
It was of course a very different war from that of 1914-18, much more a civilian’s war, both in casualties and in war-winning activity. I daresay we ran as many risks to life and limb in London as staff soldiers did in Cairo or Columbo or bases in England, which might have been my lot had I joined the army. Government offices and posts abroad were replete with men who itched to be in uniform, though there were willing embusqués too. It was eventually the relative safety and comfort of my interlude in India in 1941 and 1942 that pricked my patriotic conscience, which indeed helped to cut the interlude short.
During the eight months of the “phoney war” the balance did not swing in favour of the army, which was seeing little action. When there came the Blitzkrieg and the Battle of Britain we were all working so desperately hard at the Ministry of Information that one simply had to stick to one’s post, but I got hold of papers to join the Royal Air Force, for ground duties or better, like other men older than me, including Sir Arnold Wilson, the expert on the Arab world, whom I had known before the war, and who was killed flying as a rear gunner over France. Arnold Wilson was an unusual man, admired for his abilities and drive, but disliked by some for his abrasive tongue and his reputation as a pusher. (On him was pinned the legend of the new member of the Athenaeum who, exuding pride at his election, said to a club servant in the lavatory: “Interesting job you must have, seeing so many eminent men of different sorts,” to which he replied: “No, sir, we only get two sorts down here, those who can’t start, and those who can’t stop.”) But if Arnold was pushing he pushed himself in middle age into a hero’s death. His example I might have sought to follow; but my friends were unanimously against what they saw as quixotic folly, and I was rescued from the dilemma early in 1941 by an invitation to go out to India in a key post. When I think of my contemporaries who served in the armed forces (from which many of them were extracted later for civilian work) I take no particular pride in my war record.
The Ministry was already installed in London University’s Senate House in Bloomsbury when the fatal moment came on 3rd September. We were tense with the effort of getting our department into motion as well as the excitement of entering into unknown dangers and tribulations, and it was quite a relief to chat in the basement during the air-raid alert that followed within minutes of Chamberlain’s broadcast telling us that we were at war. The anti-climax of the All Clear, however, was more in tune with our mood during the months of the “phoney war”. You cannot give information of non-events, nor make propaganda out of inaction. What a lift it gave us to have the Battle of the River Plate to advertise with all our powers! We worked long hours and against many obstacles, and were bitterly hurt by the scornful attacks on the Ministry by an equally frustrated press, who charged it with wasting time and money. The attackers were given a wonderful slogan when Ned Grigg, the Ministry’s Parliamentary Secretary, answering a Commons question, said that the number of its employees was 999. We became overnight the 999 Ministry, the butt of every columnist and leader-writer. The press—not least the Commonwealth newspaper men with whom I had to deal—disliked the M of I on principle because in their view it blocked their accustomed sources of knowledge, or half-knowledge, of government affairs, and, with its censorship division, served more to obstruct than to supply information.
I myself suffered an example of the latter half-truth. I had developed a weekly newsletter for the use of Commonwealth press representatives and others, composed of encouraging or informative items culled from the British and overseas press, from unclassified monitoring reports and other published sources. One day an officer of the censorship division, whose scrutiny this effort had to pass, came to tell me that they could not possibly approve a paragraph I had written about British aircraft. But, I said, it all comes from publications which anyone can buy from a bookstall. He replied: “what you have done is to put two and two together and make four. Never do the enemy’s intelligence service’s work for them.” I suppose he was right, but a struggle between the need for military secrecy, and the need for public information, is inevitable, as the Falklands war again demonstrated. Deliberate misinformation can eventually destroy the credibility of truth itself.
The 999 uproar led to an investigation of the Ministry by Lord Camrose, the hard-headed, non-intellectual proprietor and editor-in-chief of The Daily Telegraph. Quizzing me about my division he asked: “Who are all these people under you? Who for instance is this man in charge of your South African section?” I answered that he was a professor of imperial history and an expert on South Africa. Camrose turned to the Minister sitting beside him and said: “When I want a professor for a particular job, I hire him for that and no more.” He would not, perhaps, have taken so scornful a view of academics in government service by the end of the war, when men like Oliver Franks and John Maud had risen to the very top of the tree. The Camrose inquiry made no special criticism of my division, but I am bound to say that we did become more professional as time passed, and a few people unsuited to wartime administration or propaganda faded out.
The first Minister of Information was Lord Macmillan, a scottish lawyer. He was a charming, elderly man, quite unsuited to the task, having little or no experience either of hard politics or of publicity—of what are now called the media, a term unknown in those days. He annoyed us in the senior ranks of the Ministry by counselling us on the dangers of over-work, and advising us to take a day off now and then, this at a time when the sheer necessities of getting a new machine going were keeping us at our desks for 12 hours or more a day. “I haven’t had time to get my hair cut for six weeks,” complained our Permanent Secretary, Sir Findlater Stewart, formerly Permanent Secretary of State for India and an old Whitehall hand. With his wily experience of government departments and his manifold acquaintance among civil servants Stewart was invaluable to so amateur and suspect a new Ministry as ours, and saved us from many a conflict. At the height of the press attacks on the M of I, I felt bound to tell him that the morale of my staff was suffering badly. He sympathised and said: “In my long experience as a civil servant I have been through many such political storms. There’s only one thing to do. Keep your head down and get on with the work, and wait until the storm blows over, as it will.” It did, and when the real fighting war began, with Hitler’s invasion of France and Germany, people had more important things to worry about than the shortcomings of the Ministry of Information.
Our second Minister was Lord Reith, successively general manager, managing director and director-general of the BBC from its inception in 1922 until 1938. At first sight it seemed an excellent choice. Reith was a man of great strength of character, power of leadership and high public reputation, with unparalleled knowledge of the most important of all means of wartime information. He certainly raised morale at the Senate House. But in that job he turned out to have two serious handicaps. The first, strangely, was a total lack of interest in news and its dissemination. He astonished a meeting of heads of division one morning by saying, when someone referred to a report in the press that day, “I never read newspapers. Someone will always tell me what I need to know.” A good attitude, that, for many busy people, but not for a Minister of Information. Reith was a superb organiser, whose talent was never properly used, to his own chagrin, either in the war or in post-war reconstruction. One reason—and this was his second defect at the Ministry of Information—was that he did not get on with Winston Churchill, nor with some others of the Cabinet. For its Minister to have the Prime Minister’s confidence was of huge advantage to any department after Churchill became PM, as I was to learn at the Ministry of Production under Oliver Lyttelton; to lack it had the reverse effect. Winston disliked the austere and the religious—Reith was sternly Church of Scotland. Did not the Prime Minister say of Sir Frank Pick, who had been head of the London Passenger Transport Board and was also a top figure in the Ministry of Information: “Never let me see that impeccable bus-conductor again”? What would he have thought of the following episode? One evening I was working late at the Ministry when there came a knock on my door and in walked none other than the Minister himself. “Sit down,” said Reith; “I am glad to have found you in. I want to tell you that I have come upon a text in the Bible which seems to me to sum up exactly what we are trying to do here. It is in the first Epistle of Saint John. ‘In this world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer for I have overcome the world’.” The text is actually in Saint John’s gospel (chapter sixteen, verse 33) but that is exactly how I recall Reith’s words. All I could answer was: “Yes, Minister.”
Having met Reith first when he paid a visit to Gresham’s School, where he, too, had been a boy, in the same house as myself, I suppose I was inclined from youth to make him a hero, but it was his achievement that I admired. Outstanding as an engineer, a soldier and a business organiser in the steel industry, he had been the creator of public service broadcasting. A man of his dominant personality and peculiar idiosyncrasies was probably needed to do that. People laughed at his conventionality, typified by his insistence that BBC news-readers must wear dinner jackets in the evening, when no one saw them but their colleagues in Broadcasting House. It seems absurd now, but it was not quite so entirely absurd in those more formal days, and I still feel a certain repulsion when television compères appear without ties; it was a sign of rigour in upholding the high standards which Reith imposed on broadcasting, and which extended into much more important realms than dress. It is easy to relax standards, hard to raise or re-assert them, and it was well for the BBC and for its emulators all over the world that its first guiding spirit—indeed dictator—was a severe puritan, even to the point of nuttiness. The achievement, however, to which I felt we owed John Reith most, because it was so peculiarly his own, was his creation of the BBC’s short-wave Empire Service, the forerunner of all its overseas broadcasting. It seems, from far off, an obvious thing to do, but Reith and his aides met daunting obstacles: there was no money, it was held wrong to spend British listeners’ licence fees on broadcasting to people in other countries, their governments were indifferent or hostile. Reith pressed on. Without the experience and equipment of the overseas service in 1939, and the habit and means of listening to it in the Commonwealth overseas, and some foreign countries, our wartime information and propaganda effort would have been gravely enfeebled.
After Dunkirk, when invasion of Britain seemed imminent, word was sent round to heads of division that work should be concentrated on the most immediate tasks of information and propaganda, and suspended on policies for a more distant future, which was so darkly clouded. To Sir Percy Waterfield, Findlater Stewart’s successor, I protested that this injunction was wrong way up. What happened in the immediate future would be determined not by the efforts of the Ministry of Information, but by our soldiers, sailors and airmen in the battle for Britain’s survival. Their failure was unthinkable, and if the unthinkable happened nothing else would matter. What we should do, therefore, was to assume their success and consequently the likelihood of a long uphill war, and prepare far-seeing policies for years of hardship, danger and global defence until the tide should turn. I don’t know whether I convinced him, though he seemed to agree; but the incident showed well the confusion of thought that is often induced by a frightening emergency.
Keith was succeeded by Duff Cooper, later Viscount Norwich. This appointment gave a boost to the Ministry. He at least had Winston’s ear, and he was an experienced politician and a man of courage, not to be put upon by his Ministerial colleagues. Under him the Ministry worked well and effectively. But at heart Duff Cooper was too literary, too cultivated, too romantic a man for the hard-boiled, cynical world of news and censorship, press and radio. I liked him, but I wish I had served under his successor, Brendan Bracken, the M of I’s most successful Minister, whom I had known from his appearance in the Fleet Street world as a henchman of Sir Henry Strakosch, the financial power behind The Economist. His life was a sequence of sudden appearances, like Beelzebub in some medieval morality play, at public school, as a financier, in politics and as a newspaper tycoon. Too much has been written about this enigmatic figure for me to add anything to the tale. He came to the Ministry soon after I had left it for another world in India.
Among the many outstandingly able men with whom I worked in the M of I, two in particular became my good friends for the rest of their lives, Sir Kenneth Lee and Sir Walter Monckton, later Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. Walter graduated from the chief censorship to become director-general, and he gave me warm encouragement in difficult days. He was a man in whom you could confide without reserve, knowing that you would meet both understanding and balanced judgment as well as assurance of privacy. These were qualities that must have contributed a great deal to his high reputation at the Bar. Such characters have a complementary side. Walter was too sympathetic to be stern, too warm-hearted not to be susceptible, too understanding not to see both sides of any question, too practised a barrister to pursue a cause beyond the point of settlement or judgment. When, in 1947, he was advising the Nizam of Hyderabad, an obtuse old miser, he appeared, in his dealings with Lord Mountbatten and the Indian Ministry of States, rather in the role of a diplomat with the task of reconciling hostile policies as favourably as possible to his own side, than that of a partisan with the task of defending a strong point come what may. When he was Minister of Labour in Anthony Eden’s Government he acted essentially as a moderator of conflicts between the unions and management, and set a pattern of halfway compromises which proved an evil legacy in later wage-inflationary years. In all this he reflected not only his own character but also a national trait of Englishmen. But he was no mere seeker of the easy way out. If he saw his duty plain as adviser or advocate, he held to it firmly. His role as counsel to King Edward the Eighth before and after his abdication is well-known: the Commonwealth owes it as much to Walter Monckton as to Stanley Baldwin that the trauma of a king’s departure did so little harm to the prestige of the monarchy, the stability of the state or the unity of the British peoples.
Wisdom of a different kind belonged to Kenneth Lee, head of the Broadcasting Division of the Ministry. He had won remarkable business success, in a Lancashire beset by the bankrupting depression of its once world-dominant cotton industry, by forming the vertical combine from spinning mill to the shop shelf—of Tootal Broadhurst Lee. As to that, I knew only his reputation, but I could guess how his shrewdness, his common sense, his capacity for cutting through complications to a simple issue, had overcome the short sight and conservatism of so many of his contemporaries in an industry fragmented into numerous small firms. His solid good sense was emphasised by the deliberation of his speech, which was saved from being ponderous by the shortness of his sentences and the spareness of his words. The reader, to savour the character of the man, must imagine his utterances spoken very slowly but without hesitation. He and I, having some joint business to conduct with the BBC, were riding in a taxi to Broadcasting House when he asked me: “Do you ever listen in?” (That was how we spoke of listening to “the wireless” in days when broadcasting still seemed like a mysterious emanation on which one was able to eavesdrop.) “Yes, sometimes,” I replied, “but not as a habit.” “I never listen in,” he said; “it leads to a condition of vacuity. You start by listening in, and end by spitting over bridges.” Long after the war, Sir Kenneth and Lady Lee, and my wife and I, were crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary. He said to my wife in those deliberate accents: “Forgive my asking you a leading question. I always ask leading questions. You get some very interesting answers.” This piece of wisdom, like the phrase “spitting over bridges” for happy idleness, has become part of our family folklore.
There were other outstanding men and women at the Ministry of Information—Kenneth Clark, Cyril Radcliffe, Mollie Hamilton among them—but I want only to recall one other episode. An early duty of mine had been to advise on the appointment of a press attaché to the High Commission in the Irish Free State. I had the brilliant idea of sending John Betjeman, an ideal companion for the gossips and wits of Dublin’s political society. On the night on which he was to be flown over, he came to my office to receive any last-minute instructions. Some papers which I gave him he put into a small suitcase, his only hand luggage. It appeared to contain nothing more than an overcoat and a bicycle pump. “The overcoat I understand, John,” I said, “but why the bicycle pump?” “Oh, I saw it in the hall when I was leaving the house, and I thought it might come in useful.”
In August 1940, after the fall of France, at the pressing invitation of my wife’s family she and our two little boys sailed for Australia. We had given up our London home and put most of our furniture into store—where it was totally destroyed in a fire-bomb attack, whereas the house in which we had occupied a three-floor maisonette survives to this day. When we returned to London in far more dangerous times later in the war, these evacuations and separations seemed to have been foolish; but one can judge risks only as one sees them at the time. How would insurance otherwise serve and prosper?
I stayed in London with Ivison Macadam, whose American wife Caroline and their children had also been sent to her homeland, so we were grass widowers together in the flat in Chesham Place. There, in the first blitz of 1940-41, bombs fell all round us, and when they did we would sally forth in the pitch-dark streets to see what help we could give. A bomb totally destroyed a tall terrace house just across the square, leaving nothing but a mass of rubble spilling over on the pavement. But from below came the faint sound of a human voice. Dashing round to the back, Ivison and I rushed through a mews house without a by-your-leave and found that by leaping a three-foot gap, swinging on gas pipes that hung like vines from the walls, and slithering down screes of rubble we could reach a still intact basement passage. Its front end was blocked by débris, but buried somewhere were people alive. I tore at a half shattered partition wall and to my amazement found behind it two small boys, completely unhurt. It turned out that they had been put for safety in a big wooden cupboard or dresser against the wall, which had miraculously sheltered them. Their mother and another woman were pinned down by fallen beams and masonry, but were brought out later by emergency firemen and air-raid wardens who soon replaced us amateurs in the task of rescue. The bodies of an elderly man and woman who owned the house and had been sleeping upstairs were eventually dug out of the rubble. That was the most exciting of our blitz adventures, worth recalling for another reason. The vanished house, victim of German terror bombing, and its terrace neighbours which were pulled down later, are the site of a new modern annexe of the German Embassy, representative home of a friendly European partner. So foes become friends, and the folly of war is made manifest.
Ivison Macadam I had known from my undergraduate days, when he, a veteran of World War One, was working for the National Union of Students, of which he was one of the founders, and which was then a benevolent institution, neither militant not political, and for the International Students’ Federation. From 1929 he had been secretary, then director, and finally director-general, of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House), which I had joined soon after I graduated at Oxford; and we had worked together on two unofficial Commonwealth conferences. So he was already a close friend, and he became my closest and best. An engineer by training, and no intellectual, he was an organiser rather than a thinker. His mind had wide horizons but his opinions were usually conventional. He knew how to use men and women more brilliant than himself. In the address that I gave at his memorial service I likened Chatham House to a glittering chandelier, whose crystal drops would be nothing but a heap of glassy trinkets without the metal frame that held them together, and that was Ivison Macadam. But a man who could bring the RIIA from infancy to a secure maturity of unique international repute, steering it through the trauma and metamorphoses of war, who could reorganise the 200-year-old Annual Register as a comprehensive chronicle of contemporary world events, could so work for King’s College, London, his alma mater, that they gratefully named a new building after him, and could play a dynamic role in many other public activities, was more than an able administrator, fund-raiser and manipulator; he was a creator. Ivison had many of the traditional qualities of the canny Scot. My wife told him of a frightening occasion when our two-year-old child pulled his playpen to the electric fire and set light to a rug and nearly to himself; Ivison’s instant exclamation was: “And were ye not insured?” What he disliked he hated, especially humbug and sloppy reformism. But to his country, to the institutions he served, and to his friends, he was intensely loyal.
A heroine of those times was Rachel Dagg. Rachel had been our cook before war broke out, and for a few days she had joined my wife with the Hichens household at North Aston. But, though Irish-born, she hated being anywhere but in London, blitz or no blitz, so she became the Macadams’ cook, and she stayed with them until she became too old and ill to work, nearly forty years later. Occasionally, when the night bombing was particularly heavy and started early, she would consent to take refuge in the strengthened basement at Chesham Place, but she preferred to sleep in her own vulnerable lodging in Pimlico. In her old age Rachel suffered from an incurable internal ailment, presumably cancer, and had to go into hospital from time to time. There, she never allowed her sickness and pain to overcome her cheerfulness and her concern for others. When she was dying at Saint Francis hospice in South London, she brushed aside enquiries about herself to ask: “How are you? How are the boys?” She was loved by every soul in the families she served, and was an inspiration to the nurses and patients in hospital and hospice. She must be one of the very few domestic servants for whom a very well-attended memorial service could be held at Saint Peter’s, Eaton Square, but she was much more than the servant that she was totally content to be; she was a dear friend.
When I resigned from the Ministry of Information in February 1941, Duff Cooper wrote me a pleasant letter expressing his regret that I had to leave and congratulating me on the success that I had achieved. But I valued more, because it was more intimate and from a personal friend, a letter from Walter Monckton. He wrote:
”...But the main purpose of this letter is to tell you how valuable has been your service to this Ministry and how much we shall all—and not least I—deplore your departure. It is not only that you have brought to bear upon our publicity problems in the Empire your knowledge and experience in Empire affairs but that you have successfully undertaken the much harder job of preserving an even temper and a constant enthusiasm in often adverse circumstances. I frequently think to myself that the motto of this Ministry should be ‘Aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem,’ but, as frequently, I find myself falling short. I have never observed that failing in you.”
The generosity and modesty of that letter were typical of Walter Monckton. He must have had more friends and fewer enemies than any other man as high in contemporary public life.
Another letter that I cherish was addressed to Corporal HV Hodson, Ministry of Information Home Guard, and signed by Captain Donald Anderson. It read:
“I am very sorry indeed to hear that it is necessary for you to resign from the Home Guard. May I say that your services have been very valuable? The manner in which you have carried them out, in spite of your other heavy responsibilities, has been a splendid example to the whole company.”
This was an over-generous exaggeration. The only service I had rendered beyond the call of duty—which meant getting into uniform and standing sentry at certain hours—was to take on one or two other men’s turns at times like Christmas which meant much more to them than to me, my family being far away. I have always rather fancied myself as a soldier. At school I had been company sergeant-major in the Officers’ Training Corps and had passed “Certificate A”, which gave some bonus marks to candidates for Woolwich or Sandhurst. In India, I was quick to join the Auxiliary Force, in which I saw the nearest approach to action that most of its rankers ever experienced. In my seventies, it pleased me to be occasionally saluted by the dismounted trooper at the Horse Guards as I passed, a tribute extracted less, I fear, by my military bearing than by my bowler hat, recognised gear of a retired officer.
On a late winter day in 1941, I sailed from Liverpool for Bombay in an elderly Blue Funnel passenger ship. She set off towards the north of Scotland, passed not far from Greenland, then turned southward to the west of the Azores, and in the South Atlantic made a rendezvous with an armed merchant cruiser, the first ship we had seen since leaving the coast of Britain. She sailed alone through enemy-infested waters. The able-bodied passengers, at the captain’s request, formed a rota to stand watch on the after-deck, looking out for submarines. Gazing over the Atlantic on a murky night, I wondered how on earth I could spot a periscope amid those tumbled waves, and what would happen if I did. The risks of bombs in London were far preferable to those of being sunk at sea and cast into an open boat, with mere survival one’s highest hope.
In compensation for such qualms and the boredom of weeks at sea, it was a pleasant chance to eat unlimited good food after the rationing and scarcities of Britain. Still more contrasting were, eventually, the bright lights of Cape Town after the defensive darkness of England and of the ship itself. In the tropics the heavy blackout became very oppressive. Sleeping on deck was a relief from airless cabins. Playing bridge in the saloon—all its doors closed and hung with heavy black curtains—one was soaked in sweat and hardly able to handle the damp cards. I have memories of mornings on deck trying to learn Urdu from an Indian Army major whose only text in that language was an army newspaper that had been issued to the 4th Indian Division in East Africa; and of a ship’s doctor so shaky in hand and spirit that he declined to give me the last inoculation dose I needed until we had passed the Cape, and then consented to inject it only with the aid of a young Bengali doctor returning to the Indian Army medical corps.
Before the Cape there had been one unexpected break in the voyage. It turned out that we were transporting a half-company of infantry to relieve the garrison on Saint Helena, a place I never thought I would see. The island had no harbour, and we went ashore in small boats from a sheltered anchorage. In the course of a motor tour round the beautifully wooded, hilly island, taking in the sights of a steep little town like a Devon fishing village, the handsome 18th century Government House and the oldest tortoise in the world, we made the pilgrimage to Longwood, where Napoleon lived and died in exile. In this group of single-storey buildings around a courtyard, the ex-Emperor made for himself a miniature palace, with a throne room and an antechamber for courtiers and supplicants. I found it sadder than a soldier’s grave, but I reflected on the humanity that allowed a hated foe to end his days in modest state, even if it were as a prisoner seven thousand miles from his homeland.
So to Bombay, the gateway to India and to a new life. But that life was not to last long. A year and a half later I was back in England to take up another post in the wartime civil service, as Principal Assistant Secretary (a grade since abolished, then next below Under-Secretary) in the Ministry of Production. The voyage home had been more exciting, and probably more dangerous, than the voyage out. From Bombay to Cape Town we sailed alone and unmolested, calling at Karachi, Mombasa and Durban. It has always seemed to me that the Japanese made their worst error of the war in not turning west instead of south after the fall of Singapore, and after clearing the southern flank of the Straits of Malacca. While the United States Navy slowly recovered from Pearl Harbour, the Indian Ocean lay wide open. To invade and subdue India was unimportant, to attempt it costly and wasteful; what was important, and comparatively easy, was to cut its sea communications. The immense expanse of the Indian Ocean had advantages as well as disadvantages for Japanese naval strategy; for the aggressor could conceal his movements and catch the defender unawares and with his forces scattered—such as they were, which was precious little. Ceylon with its port of Colombo and naval base of Trincomalee, was the initial key, and the Japanese should have been able to take it quickly. Their submarine and surface forces could then have harassed Allied sea movements from India to the Red Sea and Africa and from Europe and America round the Cape. As it was, we sailed alone and unafraid through waters which by this time could have been as dangerous as the Western Approaches.
Not that our vessel was itself any great prize, save as a unit of tonnage. The cargo was nondescript, the passengers mostly invalided or retired servicemen, widows, wives and children going home from India, and, in the steerage, a surprising contingent of refugees from the war in Eastern Europe, Poles who were reputed to have walked from Poland to the eastern Mediterranean shore, or maybe through Turkey to Iraq, had been shipped to India (minus their able-bodied, who were drafted into war service) and were now being dumped, for want of any better repository, in East Africa. Weary, destitute, with no apparent means of livelihood, these women, children and old men were put ashore at Mombasa, the only money in their pockets a few shillings each from a collection among the more fortunate passengers. What, I wonder, was their fate?
My wife and I and our two sons, aged eight and five, were lucky to share a small deck cabin. Life jackets were carried at all times. Margaret and I made a rule that without fail one of us would always be with the children when at sea. Since children’s meals were served separately, this meant that for the seven weeks of the voyage, bar a few days in ports, we never had a meal together, one going early to lunch or dinner, the other coming late, a procedure which often cost us a course on the menu, the service being scanty. Most parents were not so careful, and one day, while Margaret was below having lunch, I found myself in charge of sixteen small children on the promenade deck, entrusted to me by their lunching mothers. From Cape Town onwards we sailed in convoy with a naval escort. There was one exciting morning off north-west Africa when the alarms sounded, all passengers mustered on the boat deck, and our two escorting destroyers dashed about throwing depth charges while the convoy broke formation; but that was the nearest we came to being attacked. Our luck was in; for I learnt afterwards that October 1942, when we were in the Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic, was the worst month of the war for sinkings in that area, and November, when we were in mid-Atlantic and the Western Approaches, was nearly if not quite the worst month for sinkings there. No wonder! Quite unknown to us, the North African landings were taking place, and one of our naval escort, the supply ship Hector, which left us to sail for Gibraltar in support of that action, was lost before she reached her destination.
At last, on a grey damp day, we thankfully dropped anchor off Liverpool. From dawn to afternoon we lay in the Mersey, the passengers getting more and more tired, frustrated and ill-tempered. When at last we were allowed to go ashore, it was into a large, bleak, crowded shed where more exhausting hours were spent trying to get our baggage dealt with by the few customs officers, probably dug out from retirement. Though I had not smoked for several years, I found my resistance crumbling, begged a cigarette from someone and for over forty years afterwards was unable to give up smoking for more than a few days or weeks at a time. Just as we thought we were through at last, I was stopped by an elderly gentleman acting as Ministry of Information censor, who wanted to check that we were not carrying subversive literature or secret documents. He meticulously went through the contents of my pocket-book, being particularly suspicious for some reason of a small snapshot of my father; I did not tell him that in one of my trunks was a tin box full of confidential Government of India papers. He supposed, I imagine, that he was doing his bit for the war: in fact, the whole operation was sheer waste; for service personnel, who alone were likely to have military secrets about their persons, were not checked, nor were suitcases which might have been full of forbidden documents. Much of the war was like that.
I found the Ministry of Production in 1942 very different from the Ministry of Information in 1939. It became my stock joke to explain that whereas the Ministry of Supply was concerned with production, the Ministry of Production was concerned with supply. Part of its job, indeed, was to oversee the Regional Production Controllers, who were organisers, not producers, and to monitor the flow of vital goods and services in relation to pressing requirements; its other main task was to coordinate the supply of various products, military and civil, between different needs and different sources, at home and overseas. At first I assisted Sir Percy Mills (later Viscount Mills), who had an output-monitoring assignment. Mills was a down-to-earth industrialist, enlisted from Avery’s, makers of weighing-machines and machine tools. Dealing with a difficult file, he would press his lips together and breathe heavily, as if he were considering a fault in a piece of machinery. His outlook and academic style were quite different from anything I had come across in the journalistic, civil service or other professional-class circles in which I had moved. He addressed his subordinates and colleagues in the Ministry as “Mr” so-and-so, whereas the custom in the civil service was to use the surname alone, even if writing to somebody in another department whom one had never met, unless of course one was on first-name terms. In effect, among civil servants there was an assumption of social equality between officials of different rank. By contrast, so the knowing explained to me, in industry social gradation according to posts held was such that if a top manager addressed a subordinate by his surname alone it would be tantamount to giving him the status of a butler, or if by his first name (unless related by family or social connection) that of a bartender. This formal politeness, however, was skin-deep. Mills had brought with him to the Ministry a couple of young men from his firm, whom he painfully bullied while addressing them as Mr This or That, and from whom he would brook no answering back. He tried these imperious tactics on me, who was not even his subordinate but his administrative offsider. I told him I would take none of it: I was not his tool but a civil servant responsible to the Minister, and if he would not respect my right to talk frankly on equal terms when I differed from him, I would go at once to the Permanent Secretary and ask for another post. Mills’s hectoring collapsed at once; after apologising he asked me to lunch at Quaglino’s, and thereafter we worked together as friends.
As time went by, Mills acquired a high reputation among Ministers for shrewd sense, and was dubbed “Wise Old Percy”. I can understand this admiration from intellectuals like Harold Macmillan or Rab Butler, but in my experience his quality was not wisdom—I would have questioned his judgment on any save strictly material problems—but rather the ability to produce a quick practical answer to a complex conundrum. It might not be the whole or the perfect answer, but it would work well enough for the purpose. It is a faculty that is particularly valuable at sea, when a broken piece of rigging or a faulty engine has to be dealt with quickly in any way that does the trick. As an example, we were asked at one point to look into the acute shortage of railway locomotives. Sticking out a mile was the large number that were always in sheds under or awaiting repair. Skilled labour was as scarce for repair as for manufacture, but less of it was needed to get an engine on the rails. Mills saw at once that the key factor was the number of days any locomotive was idle, so the repair shops were instructed that within any broad category of locos priority was to be given to the jobs that involved the least time out of action. It was, of course, a war emergency solution; for it meant breaking continuity of work and hauling engines out of sheds to make way for newcomers that could be put into service more quickly, all of which cost overall efficiency and so money—but money was no object in war.
For a short time I served in a similar staff role with Sir Nigel Campbell, a gentle elderly business man of quite a different stamp, polite and civilised, then succeeded him as head of the Ministry’s Non-Munitions Division. People ask me, in these peaceful days, what were non-munitions. The answer is everything, bar food, essential for civilian and military life that was not armament or service equipment. The Ministry was uniquely concerned if the product called for an allocation of resources among different parts of the world controlled by the Allies; for it served as the British end of the Combined Production and Resources Board (CPRB) in Washington. In practice my division dealt with agricultural machinery and some odd things like fishnets, eventually with railway equipment, but first and foremost with textiles. We kept an eye on other essential non-munitions—medical supplies, for instance—but these did not require the inter-Allied arrangements that were our main business.
Among textiles, cotton was the most important by far. Wool and woollens were a comparatively easy problem; artificial fibres were then little developed, and we treated rayon, the chief man-made fibre in large-scale production, as a cotton substitute. Cotton yarn or cloth was not only the most essential material for clothing and other such domestic uses but also a necessary element in almost every industrial product or process, from cotton waste for engine-cleaning to heavy-duty yarn for tyres or cable insulation. Vital civilian needs therefore had as high priority as many of its equally varied military uses. Scarce supplies from the three principal Allied sources of manufacture—Britain, the USA and India—had to be allocated fairly and with a steady standard of necessity as between different purposes and different countries, Allied or neutral (neutrals got precious little). Final responsibility for the task lay with the CPRB, which was supposed to put together the various claims and proposals put up, primarily by the USA and Britain with its many dependencies and associates like the Free French. But the American counterpart to the Ministry of Production could not do what we did in London by the process of departmental demand, inter-departmental debate and if necessary dictation by the Ministry. On our own responsibility (subject to War Cabinet veto, which in my experience was never sought or applied) we could draw up a complete table of allocations by destination and use and by source of supply, which the claimant departments had to honour. There was always a Whitehall department to bid for any use. (What we actually allocated, incidentally, was not cloth nor any other such manufacture but yarn, the common factor whose actual and prospective output over a given period could be readily computed.)
The whole British inter-departmental mechanism derives from the Cabinet system, whereby every disputed issue in executive government can be settled at the top by a cabinet of constitionally equal Ministers representing every department of state and every governmental interest. Civil servants in Whitehall adopt the unspoken maxim that Ministers cannot be trusted to take as good inter-departmental decisions as can civil servants; for ministerial decisions may be affected by relative personal influence in Cabinet or by political considerations, which distort the merits of the case. Every civil servant knows, too, that failure to secure tolerable inter-departmental settlements at his or her level, forcing unresolved issues up to higher levels far from anxious to cope with them, may be a bad mark for him or her among the top mandarins. So there is a strong urge to accept compromise, at the lowest operative stage, and, if not there, then at the next storey in the Whitehall edifice. Consequently, as a principal assistant secretary I was able, in the chair of a meeting of officers of no higher rank from various departments, to settle, without more than formal reference to higher authority, allocations which might determine the quantum of the clothes ration in Britain or Australia or the output of important industries at home or abroad.
The American governmental system was, and remains, totally different. Executive authority is concentrated in the President of the United States. His Cabinet is largely a fiction; it is certainly not an instrument for settling inter-departmental differences. Secretaries for this and that are answerable not to a Cabinet with collective responsibility but direct to the President himself. Consequently there is no constant and pervading impulse to settle differences inter-departmentally, since the outcome may turn, not on necessary compromise, but on the Secretary’s getting the President’s ear, or that of his staff in the White House, more effectively than a rival. In wartime the difficulty was compounded by President Roosevelt’s propensity to create new agencies, responsible to himself, for every newly-emergent zone of executive government, rather than assign the activity to an existing department with established inter-office links.
The solution adopted in the Ministry of Production for the Washington administrative problem was simple and effective. Advised as necessary by British officials on the CPRB staff, who collected the several claims of United States authorities, we drew up for the Board an allocation plan which included not only all “free world” sources of supply but also, in broad categories, all consumption needs in the American-controlled as well as the British-controlled theatres. I do not recall a single occasion on which the allocation was referred back to us, though some minor adjustments may have been made on the American side.
Other products than cotton caused my division little difficulty. I learned a great deal about the manufacture and merchanting of textiles, farm machinery, fishnets, rubber products and medical drugs which I never expected to know. One of the most largely attended Whitehall meetings I ever was at, was a session of the Supply Committee chaired by Arnold Plant, summoned to consider pharmaceutical rubber goods, in which every department and sub-department from the Admiralty to the Home Office seemed to be vitally interested. When I took over locomotives I found that the conflict between commercial interest (the railways had not yet been nationalised, and there were still two or three smallish private firms making railway locos both for home use and for export) and public priorities set by war necessity was growing sharper as the end of the war came in sight. It was my business to apply the public priorities, but I was well aware of two things; first, that they could be determined only by reference to a very simple overriding objective, to win the war, a test that would disappear in normal times; secondly, that, even so, administrators like myself were liable to be clay in the hands of the producers with their technical knowledge and arguments. If they said: “That cannot be done,” or, “To shove this requirement early in the production line will set back the whole output programme by three months,” we had to believe them. The experience rid me of any lingering fragments of belief that in industrial affairs: “The man from Whitehall knows best.”
When I joined the Ministry Oliver Lyttelton (later Viscount Chandos) was Minister and Sir Henry Self Permanent Secretary. On the surface, the only trait they had in common was commanding height. Oliver Lyttelton was a highly sociable, pleasure-loving business man who, after a brave career in the Guards in World War One, had broken from a family tradition of service as soldiers and schoolmasters to make a name and a fortune in the tough and sometimes shady world of metal marketing. He had a frank tongue and a seemingly inexhaustible fund of spicy or scurrilous stories. He was amusing, friendly, exuding power and confidence, but, I thought, somewhat unscrupulous and not to be relied on to keep every promise to the letter. Henry Self, quiet and austere, had already been a civil servant for 35 years; his interests are well indicated by his future ten-year presidency of the Modern Churchmen’s Union. Yet they seemed to make an ideal combination, perfected when Self went to Washington in 1943 as the Minister’s deputy on the CPRB, and was succeeded in Great George Street by John Henry Woods, a man much more in Lyttelton’s personal mould than Self but with nothing like his authority or Oliver’s brilliance. Both Self and Lyttelton were in fact men of outstanding ability; the Minister had flair and speed of decision, and in Cabinet the indispensable asset of close friendship with Winston Churchill, while Self had a power of imperturbably organising and running an administrative apparatus dealing with vast and vital issues which I have never seen surpassed.
The third figure of the triumvirate at the top of the Ministry was Sir Robert Sinclair (later Lord Sinclair of Cleeve), the chief executive. Like Lyttelton, he had turned to industry after distinguished military service in World War One, and had reached its highest echelon. He was a wise counsellor who had the full confidence of his fellow industrialists, which was invaluable to the Ministry. His shortness of stature was no obstacle to his being a first-class sportsman, and one of the most conspicuous things about him was his robust energy, which seemed to be refreshed by physical exertions that would have exhausted many others. He had great good sense as well as business acumen, and praise from him was valued dearly. Those three were a fine command under which to serve. They were not only masters and colleagues but good and lasting friends.
Three years passed. Life was hard in wartime under the menace of V-one and V-two rockets, but not intolerable, and was sweetened by victories in the field, at sea and in the air. Rationed food was enough, if monotonous. Social life was minimal and leisure little. I escaped from the War by reading “War and Peace” in short snatches as I travelled to and from work, more than once overrunning a stop on the bus or Underground, so engrossed was I in other battles, Leipzig or Borodino or the retreat from Moscow. Work at the M of P changed its pattern as shipping and some supplies grew more plentiful, while the needs of liberated countries added to the demand. For a short while I was involved in the setting-up and early operation of the organisation for their benefit that became UNRRA. This gave rise to an occasion upon which I look back with regret. I was secretary of inter-departmental committee presided over by a Minister, Viscount Portal (not Lord Portal of Hungerford, but the ex-chairman of the Great Western Railway). It was discussing the supply of sewing needles, which were deemed essential for make-do-and-mend liberated Europe. A deadlock followed between two very strong-minded and powerful characters, Sir George Turner of the Ministry of Supply, who refused to release any needles from other uses, and Sir Guillaume Myrrdin-Evans of the Ministry of Labour, who refused to release any worker to make more needles. At this point Lord Portal excused himself, saying he had another appointment (which may or may not have been an evasive ploy), leaving me, who though junior to all the other officials on the committee was the only representative of the Ministry of Production present, to take the chair. I failed to bridge the gulf and the meeting broke up, thus landing me with the civil service offence of passing an inter-departmental dispute to higher authority. I am sorry that I had not the determination to insist upon a solution on the spot, nor the wit to invent a way of squaring the circle. Another episode that I recall from those days between the ends of the European and the Far Eastern wars was my arbitrarily cutting down the Army’s demand, which earlier would have been sacrosanct, for cotton for supply-dropping parachutes it said it needed for the Burma campaign; I believed that there were quite enough already in the pipeline, and that in any case the Army always asked for much more of such things than it really needed, through a process of progressively scaling up, ostensibly for losses and errors, the requirements notified by regimental units to brigade, by brigade to corps, and eventually to the War Department. There was no reaction, to my surprise; and when, not long afterwards, the war in Burma was won the Army had vast supplies of surplus parachutes.
From three years’ experience of the Whitehall administrative and procurement structure I had learnt much, not least the great value for good government of close cooperation between professional civil servants and men from industry and commerce, and others who brought to public administration fresh minds and different experience. One little thing I had learnt was that women work happily under men, and men under women, but women hate working under other women.
After VE (Victory in Europe) Day my thoughts turned with increasing urgency to what I would do when I left the government service. An immediate impulsion was financial. By a peculiar stroke of Treasury parsimony, temporary civil servants were paid substantially less than permanents of equal rank, though logically they should have been paid more, to compensate for their having neither security of tenure nor pension rights. Many of my fellow temporaries had their incomes made up by the institutions from which they came for war service and to which they could return. I had no such advantage. My pay at the Ministry of Production at the end of the war was almost exactly the same, in money terms, as I had been earning before the war. But the value of money had halved, and I now had three sons, of whom the oldest was already at boarding school. Almost all our domestic possessions having been blitzed while in store, we were striving to furnish a home from scratch. Although there was not much on which one could spend money, and the prices of rationed commodities were controlled, we were very hard pressed financially. Had this not been so, I would have considered seriously staying in the civil service. As I was under 40 and was working at Under-Secretary level at the end of 1945 (in the Board of Trade, to which the residual functions of the Ministry had been transferred), I could see a very good chance of rising to a top post. But I needed to find a much better-paid job as soon as possible. And I confess I was a little tired of the restrictions and routine of civil service life. For the third time in my life I turned away from security of employment, a ladder of promotion and the prospect of a good pension. Though I was nominally joint head of a department of the Board of Trade my main job was continuing such of my previous work as had to be continued, and winding up that which could be ended. My clear intent, as I told Sir Stafford Cripps, my new Minister as President of the Board of Trade, was to get rid of wartime industrial and commercial controls and regulations as quickly as they could be dispensed with, because they could only hamper the return to a free, self-stimulating, efficient economy. Like regulated industry and commerce themselves I felt, perhaps unwisely, that I had had enough of Whitehall.
While I was at the Ministry of Production I had been invited to be a member of the Colonial Social Science Research Council. This was one of the bodies set up to advise the Colonial Office on expenditure from the Colonial Development Fund, part of which had been set aside for research, including research in applied science and agriculture. The remit of the CSSRC covered economics, law, anthropology and other branches of social science (if indeed those subjects are science, which is doubtful if it implies equality with the physical sciences). I served on the Council from its birth to its demise, when these things were ordered otherwise, and for its last four or five years I was chairman of its selection committee, whose duty it was to interview and assess applicants for grants to support their research, for the most part field work. The Council and the committee were a fund of interest and instruction for me, and brought me in touch with some notable people, like dry, witty Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders and eloquent Sir Walter Parry, who were successive chairmen of the Council, or Dame Margery Perham, single-minded and unswerving to the verge of entrenchment in a redoubt of her own past thinking. But I have one plaint. When I was appointed to it, the letter of invitation, couched in pleasing terms, came personally from the Secretary of State himself: the letter announcing that the exercise was at an end and my assistance was no longer needed, was signed by a middle-rank official, and its expression of thanks was in routine phrases. Such help as I had rendered I gave gladly, but after something like fourteen years of service I thought that was bad manners. An excess of thanks is never wasted; a deficit leaves a bad taste.
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