As soon as I knew I would shortly be leaving The Sunday Times I started to look around for fresh gainful employment, seeking advice from friends like Harold Macmillan, Walter Monckton, Billy Collins, Arthur Salter and others. One imagined oneself, after a varied career with many facets, capable of anything; but the world does not necessarily take the same view of a retired editor of 55. While various irons were in the fire Lord Sherfield, who had been the first chairman of council of the Ditchley Foundation, asked me if I could suggest someone to become its chief executive as it was about to go into operation after spending several years and a lot of money on refurbishing its lovely Oxfordshire house, Ditchley Park, and otherwise preparing for action. I began to think that I might put my own name forward. When I talked with Roger Sherfield, David Wills, the Foundation’s creator, and Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, its actual chairman, it became apparent that if I did so they would not look further. The salary offered was less than half that which I had drawn as editor of The Sunday Times, but I thought—wrongly as it turned out—that I could make up much of the difference by going on with writing and broadcasting, which Jack W-B encouraged me to do. I was attracted by the challenge of launching a splendid enterprise in a cause which appealed to me. The Foundation had been established for ‘study and education in matters of common concern to the British and American peoples’—in fact, to use David Wills’s gift of the great house, as he wished, for conferences and other such activities, primarily Anglo-American in their membership and interest, with the ultimate ideal of strengthening mutual understanding between the two great English-speaking peoples, together with their neighbours and friends. I must say I was also seduced by the charms of Ditchley itself, which would become my home.
Built in 1722 by James Gibbs, architect of Saint Martin’s-in-the-Fields, Oxford’s Radcliffe Camera, the Cambridge Senate House and other famous buildings, Ditchley Park stands in lovely rolling countryside, the last falling wave of the Cotswolds, out of sight of every habitation save its own dependencies. Externally unaltered, internally reconstructed only in respect of its minor rooms and within the twin pavilions, or wings, that flank the main house, its only lapse from Gibbs’s concept is lack of the shallow pediment that he intended to crown the front façade. “Forget the central heating and build the pediment,” said Robert Harling, the typographer and architectural critic, when he learnt where I was going. Needless to say his counsel has not been followed. He thought it perhaps the most beautiful country house in England; it was certainly one of the most amenable to live in and manage. Houses of the Queen Anne and early Georgian period have an invaluable merit besides their elegant and balanced proportions. Their simple floor-plans, eliminating dark corners, back passages, changing levels, turrets, embrasures, inglenooks and other such gothic embellishments, make them easy to run, in relation to their scale. Their thick walls make them comparatively economical to keep warm in winter and cool in summer, despite their big expanses of window. Their fire grates are a very efficient way of consuming solid fuel. Their kitchens and other domestic quarters are ample and usually well placed, especially where a raised piano nobile affords a domestic ground floor or semi-basement, as at Ditchley. These advantages, which we also enjoyed when we owned Bourton House in Gloucestershire, built a few years before Ditchley, were due not only to the taste and good sense of the times but also to the fact that it was an era, like our own of the late twentieth century, of expensive fuel and scarce domestic manpower.
After that architectural digression let me get back to the Ditchley Foundation. To raise from the ground the inspired initiative of David Wills and his friends and colleagues, to cause the machine to move and fulfil its purpose, seemed to me a worthy ambition, and after long negotiations I accepted the Provostship of Ditchley. This meant a sacrifice not only of income but also of the metropolitan way of life which my wife and I had enjoyed. We loved the English country but were not country people, and Ditchley meant separation from our friends who lived in London or came there from other parts of Britain or from overseas. It was a heavy decision to take.
There were other reasons against it. It defied two sound maxims for success and comfort in working life: never be employed by a charity, and never have business dealings with friends whom you want to keep. Those warnings need little elaboration. If you are employed by a business, a government or a public authority, you reasonably expect your salary and benefits to keep pace with the cost of living, your success or promotion, your long service and seniority. Charitable bodies do not always plan for such increments, and are apt to regard them as resistable inroads into their limited funds, an attitude amounting to expecting their employees to contribute on a progressive scale to their charitable causes. The Ditchley Foundation was not unreceptive to the claims of its servants, but my own remuneration, after ten successful years as Provost, was less in real terms than when I started. The second maxim is a generalisation of a more particular one: never sell a house or a secondhand car to a friend. Between strangers, business is business; anyone who makes a bargain that turns out ill, unless he has been deliberately deceived, has only himself to blame, and any remedy is a matter for the law. Between friends, much is taken on trust on either side, and if the trust appears in any way to be misplaced there is a wound to friendship. The Council of the Ditchley Foundation included a number of my friends, and there were times when a proper pursuit of interest on either side threatened injury to friendship between us. That we remained friends is perhaps a tribute to our mutual forbearance. I continue to commend the two maxims.
The Ditchley property had been owned by the Lee family and their descendants the Dillons for 350 years. When Ronald and Nancy Tree bought it in 1933 from the 17th Viscount Dillon’s executors, the house had been almost undisturbed for over two centuries bar the adhesion of an ugly Victorian greenhouse. Kenneth Clark told my wife that to be a guest in it was “like walking into the eighteenth century.” It had only one bathroom, though the legend went that the butler had surreptitiously fixed himself up another; Lord Dillon had in any case preferred to bath in a tub in front of the dining-room fire, rather than use the official bathroom. He used to tell guests that a big log fire in the Great Hall “warmed the whole house.” He said he could not afford to modernise the arrangement. A millionaire in English and Irish property, he was a notorious example of the land-rich, money-poor, wearing old clothes, and travelling third-class on the railway. The Trees had modernised the plumbing, torn down the greenhouse, redesigned the garden and elegantly beautified the interior decoration. David Wills, who bought the estate in 1953 from Lord Wilton, after the latter had owned it for four years, did not want to live at Ditchley Park, having already a charming smaller house of the same period only a few miles away. He always intended that Ditchley should be used for some high public purpose. After various ideas had come to nothing, including a secret inspection on behalf of the Queen, David himself prescribed the purpose. As soon as he and his associates had set up the Ditchley Foundation, it received from him the gift of the house and gardens, to which he soon afterwards added 150 acres of park, lake and woodland, protecting the house and its outlook for all time. He also gave the Foundation a munificent cash endowment, large enough to launch it firmly on its way, but deliberately calling for more money from other sources when it became fully operative.
The Foundation’s first task had been to revive the house and grounds and to adapt it as a home for meetings of people holding high responsibility or eminent in their professions. Almost all the old furniture and pictures had been removed and had to be replaced. Staff bedrooms had to be converted, more bathrooms fitted out, the west wing or pavilion, which had once housed a private chapel, the chaplain’s apartments and an orangery, entirely reconstructed internally. By 1961 all this had been accomplished. Bar some items of furniture, china, bed-linen and so on, the house was ready for use. But the Foundation’s council had sagely refrained from framing specific plans for operation until they should have appointed an executive head, the Provost, who must himself work out a practicable programme which with their sanction he would put into action.
Why “Provost”? The Council held that the status of Ditchley’s resident chief should approximate to that of a Head of an Oxford or Cambridge College. This gave them a range of choice. “Warden”, though hallowed as the title of the Head of All Souls or New College, had been debased by common use, as for traffic wardens. “Principal” seemed too high-schoolish, “Master” too squire-archical, “Dean” too ecclesiastic. They paused over “President”, which had the merit of conveying to Americans the status of head of a university or college, but they concluded that in the Ditchley context it implied too supreme a post. They were left with “Provost”, so Provost of Ditchley I became. I must say I rather enjoyed the title, and was warmed when that great Oxford figure, Sir John (JC to all) Masterman, Provost of Worcester College, addressed me, “as one Provost to another.” But it often needed some explaining. Letters would come addressed (no doubt after reference to some manual of titles and forms of address) to: “The Very Reverend the Provost”. My successor, Sir Michael Stewart, felt the appelation misplaced and awkward, and it was changed to “Director”, which is a right and proper description.
My first year or so at Ditchley was far from happy. There was trouble over the Provost’s quarters. For some reason the Foundation’s Council had initially supposed that the incumbent would be a man with neither a family nor country pursuits, and had provided only a pleasant flat in the west pavilion. Later they realised that a new house was needed, and commissioned an architect to design it. This was what I had been promised, with every detail of the plan specified, down to the dimensions of all the rooms, garages and so on. However, neither could a design be settled upon, which would please everyone both aesthetically and domestically, nor could the Council face the cost when this was professionally calculated. They asked me to accept a much smaller house, but I protested that the promise of a very good house had been part of the terms of my engagement, and their proposal was like asking me, after I had taken up the post, to suffer a cut in the agreed salary. Eventually the knot was cut by the Council’s agreeing to my own suggestion that the whole west pavilion be re-adapted as the Provost’s house, including some guest bedrooms which could be used for conference members, at relatively small expense—for which decision, after six months of friction, I was specially grateful to the good sense of Lord Inchyra.
More painful was the experience of being quite unable to get on with the only member of the administrative staff whom I took over, the bursar. Apart from his peculiar personality, I felt undermined by his ability to report direct to Council members, with whom he had worked long before I came on the scene. Although the incidents of conflict were mostly over minor matters, distrust, which was probably mutual, grew so pervasive that it became clear that one or other of us must go. I was not unwilling, despite the wound to my self-esteem, but in the event the bursar resigned, and the Council accepted my proper management plan, defining the various officers’ functions, and concentrating in the hands of the Provost responsibility to the Council for the whole conduct of the Foundation’s affairs on the spot. After that, everything went much more happily.
I was most fortunate in the men and women who served with me, especially Patrick Grant, chief administrative officer, George Docker and Bernard Mallinson, successive bursars, and the domestic and outside staff. Among those, it would be hard to express adequately how much Ditchley and its governors and guests, as well as my wife and myself, owe to Mr and Mrs Burden, the butler and housekeeper whom we appointed shortly before the conferences began, and who remained at Ditchley for fifteen years. Will Burden (his Christian name comes unreadily to mind, for even his wife always referred to him as Burden) had started life as a hall-boy at Ditchley in Lord Dillon’s time, and had mounted the ladder of domestic service to become second butler to Lord and Lady Derby. Meanwhile he had married a very able Scots girl, Carrie, who rose to be head housemaid in a large household. When we first met them Burden was most incongruously working, after war service in the military police, at the Pressed Steel works at Cowley. At that moment in their lives, Ditchley was the perfect answer for them, and they were perfect for Ditchley. Tall, upright both in carriage and in character, Burden looked every inch the family butler, combining deference with authority, and was completely to be trusted in his heavy responsibilities for silver, china, wine and the dining-room and pantry staff. If he had a professional fault it was that of over-filling wine glasses, a trait that I link with his own near-teetotal habits; for a wine-lover would never have sloshed out the precious fluid as he did. His wife had the brains of the pair. She was the ideal housekeeper, caring most devotedly, from her nature as well as her experience in great houses, for the linen and furnishings in her charge, extracting the most from the domestic staff and treating recalcitrant conference visitors as awkward children. Of all the friendships we made or enlarged at Ditchley, none meant more to us than that of the Burdens. In our different roles, their life was ours, and ours theirs.
They were the pivot of the practical management of the house. People used to say: “You must have a very large domestic staff to run a place like this,” but it was far from true. Financial considerations apart, I saw from the start that nothing but intrigue and mischief could come of having a lot of domestic employees with not enough to do between the efforts of serving long-weekend parties of thirty or forty guests. So we engaged the minimum of permanent staff—butler, housekeeper, driver, two maintenance men, a man and a boy in the garden. Even the cook, Mrs Woodhams, wife of the estate’s chief forester, who could fell twenty tall trees (alas!) in an afternoon single-handed, worked part-time. Waitresses, housemaids and kitchen assistants we engaged by the day, collecting them in a minibus from neighbouring villages and providing bedrooms over the old stable block for waitresses at conference weekends. Consequently everyone knew his or her job and got on with it, there was no time for gossip or backbiting, and a great country house offering hospitality as large and as frequent as any nobleman could wish was run at a total cost which even a private owner in a top income-bracket could have afforded. We remember with thankful affection all who contributed to making the place such a “happy ship”. We tried to manage Ditchley not as a mere efficient conference centre but as a welcoming great house, and this requires, besides the daily attention to detail that ensures smooth running, and the elimination of unnecessary formality or bureaucracy, an esprit de corps which animates everyone from squire to scullion, and the administrative and secretarial staff as well. We depended domestically, no doubt, upon living in a certain phase of English country life, when in the villages and on farms the husbands were well paid and had motor cars but wives had very little money to call their own, could not drive a car and enjoyed the social contact of part-time work as much as its monetary reward. That we retained the loyal service of so many excellent North Oxfordshire women can be attributed, I believe, largely to their feeling pride and pleasure in belonging to Ditchley and sharing in its work and its rich connection with the wide world.
If such were the secrets of Ditchley’s success as a noble house, what was the secret of the great reputation it acquired as the scene and organiser of high-level international conferences? Apart from things that have already been suggested—the care for detail which is the clue to good organisation, and a light administrative touch—that secret, to my mind, lies in the precept: “always go for the best.” When I became Provost, no programme had been drafted, no plan of operations laid down. There were some on the Council who thought we should have “Ditchley Fellows”, resident scholars who would do research on some Anglo-American theme and publish work under Ditchley auspices. I pointed out, first, that the house had been altered and furnished as a home for short-term conferences, not for residents who would pre-empt its rooms and have to be fed and looked after for seven days a week, and secondly that such scholars needed libraries and other academic facilities and the company of their peers, which they would find in a college or university, but not in an isolated country house half an hour’s drive from Oxford. Let us concentrate on the conferences, I said and then see whether we should branch out in that or any other way. This made sense to the Council, and in fact the branching-out has been minimal, except for the publication of a Ditchley Journal, itself mainly a record of conferences. My own effort at running week-long courses, in American affairs for British people needing insight into the constitution, politics, economics and social structure of the United States, and on British affairs for Americans, likewise, though persisted in for two or three years, proved administratively cost-ineffective, and was abandoned.
So, with a blank sheet to write on, we had to make a start. I distinguished between “guest conferences”, which would be organised and paid for by some other institution, though following our practices and treated as our guests while at Ditchley, and the Foundation’s own conferences which we would initiate, plan and pay for ourselves. As it happened, the first conference held at Ditchley was a guest conference, organised by the Royal African Society with American and other overseas participants, in which my old friend Lord Hailey took a vigorous part at the age of 90. But our own conferences were the nub of the matter. “Go for the best,” I determined, not without advice from that old hand at organising international meetings, Ivison Macadam. If you invite from Washington, say, an Assistant Under-Secretary of State, I argued, he may recommend one of his subordinates; invite the Secretary of State himself, and he will send an Under-Secretary. Consider, or find out, who is the top man in any category you want—civil servant, diplomat, politician, business leader, academic expert or whatever it may be—and go all out for him. The worst he can do is decline the invitation, and if he does he will probably put you on to someone pretty nearly as good. So that is what I did, and it worked. Ditchley was quite unknown in those days; all we had to recommend us was the eminence of our sponsoring Council members and Governors and an illustrated brochure about the house (with its American connections through the Lee family of Ditchley and Virginia, and through Winston Churchill’s use of it for talks with United States leaders and others during the war) and about the Foundation itself. What counted was our own estimate of ourselves as second to none, as a place and a purpose quite unique, and our determination to be so regarded. The trick was turned.
We annually held, in my time, between 20 and 25 conferences, the majority of them our own. This meant that we entertained, for a weekend or occasionally longer, between 700 and 800 guests each year. That figure, multiplied by 10 for the period of my office, must be reduced somewhat to reach the total number of different guests, since some people came to more than one conference, but the net figure must have been over 5,000. They included ambassadors and foreign service officers not only from Britain and the United States, but from many other countries too, government ministers, high civil servants, many Peers and MPs, Senators and Congressmen, top figures from the United Nations, the World Bank and other international agencies, leading business men, trade union leaders, economists and experts of all kinds. They ranged from young American students attending our courses, to the Duke of Edinburgh, who presided over a conference, inspired by that life-changer his former headmaster Kurt Hahn, on rescue, relief and service. When thanking HRH at the conference table I said he was one of the best chairmen we had ever had; he laughed—“I bet you say that to everyone.”—I certainly did not, nor was I flattering a royal guest. Prince Philip works hard when he takes on a job like that, keeping long-winded speakers in order, directing the discussion to a purposeful end, and summarising the previous debate at the start of each session. O si sic omnes!
It would be invidious to select a few among the five thousand for mention here. Instead, I want to record something about four particular groups of conferences which we started in my time. Trade union affairs seemed to me a field calling for frank Anglo-American interchanges in the relaxed and private Ditchley atmosphere. When I began to organise the first such conference I found that, while American and Canadian union leaders had no inhibitions about talking with anyone, their British counterparts insisted that no one should be present but trade unionists, except for a chairman who might be an academic expert. That was a sad illustration of the bellicose “we and they” attitude endemic in British trade unionism, one of the basic reasons for Britain’s economic decline. While the three trade union conferences that I organised undoubtedly had great value, they suffered two serious handicaps. The first was the contrast between labour relations law and practice, in the United States and Britain respectively. It is hard to get constructive converse between people who take it as axiomatic that management-union contracts should be legally binding, that they should last for a term of years, and that disputes over their interpretation should be settled by professional arbitrators, and those to whom all these things are not only foreign but anathema. On one occasion a British participant asked: “What do you do about manning disputes?” The American trade unionist whom he addressed quickly consulted a couple of colleagues and then answered: “We regard manning as a matter for management.”
Another contrast, to the advantage of the Americans, is the predominance of single industrial unions (as against multiple craft and general unions) in major United States industries like automobiles and steel. On a visit to a steelworks in Pittsburgh I had great difficulty in explaining to our guide, a blue-collared junior manager, who in England would have been rated as a foreman, how it was that the whole Port Talbot steel complex was closed at that time by a strike of furnace bricklayers belonging to the Transport and General Workers Union. “Why don’t they belong to the steel union?” he asked, and I am sure the answer I gave him seemed to him nonsense. There was a personal contrast too. British union leaders regard themselves as essentially spokesmen for the workers, from whom they cannot distance themselves too far. American union leaders regard themselves as executives of industry on the labour side, meeting the top managers of great companies on level terms of status, expertise and technical advice. They have large cars, large salaries and large staffs. It is all part of the same complex of attitudes, bred not only of different history and labour relations laws but also of difference in socio-economic mobility. The typical American skilled or semi-skilled worker, even if he himself has no aspirations to be a manager, hopes that his children will rise in the socio-economic scale to become managers, or professionals, or otherwise to employ or command the labour of others. This is real “industrial democracy.” Democracy implies and requires, not that the rulers should comply with the ruled, but that the ruled should be able to become the rulers. The ladder of opportunity, from shop floor to boardroom has largely been missing from British industry, to its great disadvantage; maybe things are changing now.
A second handicap, particular to our trade union conferences, was the great difficulty I had in enlisting really representative British union chiefs. This was due not to their ill will but to the overpowering pressure of their other commitments. If they had a weekend free of meetings at one level or another, either of their own union or of related unions and organisations, and free, too, of negotiations with employers or the government, it was too rare and precious a break to be given away to a conference at Ditchley. I wondered how they ever had time to think. The general secretary of a British trade union told me at Ditchley that just as valuable to him as meeting American and Canadian opposite numbers, was the opportunity, which he never otherwise had, of sitting down with other union leaders from his own country to talk about general problems in a relaxed atmosphere, free of bread-and-butter arguments, political manoeuvres or industrial conflicts. Although we did enlist some influential trade unionists and “backroom boys” from union and TUC headquarters, after three conferences I came to the conclusion that for the time being my effort had spent its force.
Much more continuous was the series of so-called “American Legislators’” conferences, to which we invited hand-picked United States Senators and Congressmen to discuss with their parliamentary counterparts, MPs and Peers, and a few British experts, some subject of major common concern. These conferences became a permanent annual feature of the Ditchley programme. Not only was each of them a valuable exercise in itself, but in the course of years it came about that almost all the most influential members of the two Houses of Congress had been welcomed to Ditchley and affected by its genius. Among those who came in my time, whose names are well known on the hither side of the Atlantic, were Robert and Edward Kennedy, Walter Mondale, Henry (Scoop) Jackson, John Lindsay, John Tunney, Ed Muskie, Frank Church, Charles (Chuck) Percy, Daniel (Pat) Moynihan and many others. While we were happy to entertain the younger Kennedy brothers (we had been in the middle of a Ditchley conference when President JF was assassinated, and were all so shocked that it was hard to continue) we had cause to suspect that they were using Ditchley, to some extent, for an ulterior purpose. Robert Kennedy let it be known that he would like to be invited, after our normal complement of American guests was full, stayed for one evening and one morning session, then left for engagements in Oxford and the Vatican; later, rich as he was, he submitted a bill to the American Ditchley Foundation for his two-way transatlantic air fare. Teddy Kennedy took full part in a conference, but he asked us to invite to a private luncheon with him several London-based experts on Africa, where he was about to pay a visit. This we were glad to do, but the incident confirmed one’s belief that the Kennedys are so steeped in politics from the cradle that every action is calculated for its place in a political scheme. I should add in mitigation that Robert and Edward Kennedy gave my wife and me generously of their time and interest when we were in Washington on subsequent visits.
Whenever we visited the United States capital, which was always an early port of call on our annual tours in North America, not only did we enjoy a warm personal welcome but I was also able to meet Senators and Congressmen in their Congressional offices and talk with them about Ditchley and public affairs of mutual interest. How different is their parliamentary life from that of British MPs! Each has a suite of offices, staffed with secretaries and other aides. Each is constantly open to calls by people from his state or district, but because his constituency may be hundreds or even thousands of miles away such arrivals are not intolerably frequent, and are usually motivated either by a desire to shake the Senator’s or Representative’s hand and exchange a few platitudes or to plead some substantial cause. There is obviously much to be said for the British practice of MPs’ “surgeries” in their constituencies, but I have some sympathy with the view of Lord Duncan-Sandys, expressed at a Ditchley conference when he was in the House of Commons: “I was elected to represent the people of Streatham at Westminster, not to represent Westminster to the people of Streatham.”
It seemed obvious to me that if Ditchley was successful in furthering understanding, through mutual education, between people in Britain and North America, who had so much in common, it could be even more useful where misunderstanding, conflict of policy and suspicion of motive marred the relations of either Britain or the United States or both with third countries. In the mid nineteen sixties, such a country was France. President de Gaulle had turned his thumbs down on Britain’s entry to the European Economic Community. He was deeply critical and suspicious of the United States, and Franco-American relations were at an even lower ebb than Franco-British. More than once I put up to the Ditchley Council the idea of holding a Franco-British-American conference on Atlantic relations or any other subject of common concern which would attract the French. For quite a time I was rebuffed. Although Ditchley was entirely independent of Whitehall, Foreign Office views carried weight in the Council, and on this matter the Foreign Office view was that such a ploy would be useless. Where professional diplomacy had failed, how could innocent Ditchley succeed? I was told: “Either you will get Gaullists who will speak with their master’s voice, which will take you no further, or anti-Gaullists who will denounce the President’s attitudes and who count for nothing in actual policy.” However, I persisted, and eventually was given the green light. Warned by the experience of a recent educational gathering in England which a delegation of French teachers had been officially prevented from attending, though its agenda was non-political and apparently harmless, because no prior governmental approval had been sought, I followed my old maxim, “Go for the top,” and wrote to the President himself to seek a blessing for the Ditchley enterprise. I received a cordial reply from his Chef de Cabinet, who assured me, when later I called on him at the Elysée Palace, that the President would have no objection to my inviting whom I would—even a Cabinet Minister. (Monsieur Debré, then Minister of Finance, accepted an invitation but in the end was unable to come.)
It happened that the British ambassador in Paris was an old friend, like me a quondam Fellow of All Souls, Sir Patrick Riley, so my wife and were guests of Patrick and Rachel Riley in the embassy while, with his help, I made the contacts I needed. A curious episode arose from that stay. Not only was Patrick hauled over the coals by the Secretary of State, George Brown, but I, too, was summoned to the Foreign Office to be rebuked in the latter’s name by the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for conducting those approaches in Paris without the approval of the Foreign Secretary. Both Patrick and I replied, first, that my stay in the embassy had been inspired by personal friendship, not public policy, and secondly that Ditchley was an entirely independent and private charitable organisation which could do what it liked, and always had, though it had received much non-financial help from government departments, without involving their Ministers or committing them officially. Having said that, my unofficial reply to the PUSS, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, whom I knew well, was that I thought it all a lot of nonsense in which I was sure he did not believe, though I would not expect him to say so. Anyway, the conference was held and was such a success that it led to other tripartite Ditchley conferences, and, after Britain joined the Common Market, to a close Ditchley connection with Community and European affairs.
We held one, exceptional, bilateral Anglo-European conference in my time, a very significant one. The Foreign Office, through Sir Eric Berthoud, who had been ambassador in Warsaw, begged us to entertain a group of British and Polish diplomats, journalists, academics and others. A counterpart conference had been held in Poland in a lovely old castle, and the Foreign Office were most anxious that the hospitality should be returned in a like fashion, for which they thought Ditchley the only right place. A conference without any Americans taking part seemed contrary to the Foundation’s terms of reference, but I satisfied the Council in this respect by specifying transatlantic relations as the subject for debate. A distinguished group of Poles arrived, accompanied of course by an official watchdog. At first they appeared cautious and reserved, perhaps because they thought that anything they said out of tune with their government would be reported back to Warsaw, but they warmed somewhat when in my welcoming speech after dinner I said Britain and Poland had a great deal in common—a noble history, a strong nationhood, a lost empire and the present status of a secondary power in the shadow of a greater one; and as the weekend progressed they thawed completely. I never knew what real native vodka was until I tasted the half-dozen bottles of dessert liquor that they presented to my wife and me, quite different from the colourless and tasteless fluid that we mix with tonic water or tomato juice for the sake of its alcoholic lift.
The last set of conferences that I want to recall comprised two or three on legal issues to which we invited judges, practising and academic lawyers and others from both side of the Atlantic. The inspiration for these came from David Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor. He was delighted when I told him that I was contemplating an excursion of Ditchley into the realm of law, because he had been nursing the same idea, and had discussed it with fellow judges at home and in the United States, without finding the right place and sponsorship and the money needed, all of which Ditchley could supply. The participants, who included Lords of Appeal and Justices of the US Supreme Court (Warren Burger, Chief Justice, among them) all declared themselves much pleased and enlightened by the encounter; but, as happened with trade union affairs, the debates brought out as many contrasts as similarities in the practice of law between the two countries, notwithstanding their shared inheritance of the Common Law, trial by jury, adversarial contest and other elements of the British judicial system. Anyone with any knowledge at all of the subject knows that in the United States practitioners of law are not divided into solicitors and barristers, with exclusive zones of action in the higher courts; but my eyes were opened at Ditchley to the manifold complexities and delays arising from the federal system, with different laws in the several states and an extensible ladder of appeals. But the most subtle difference, at the top levels of the courts, emerged as that between, on the one hand, the rule of interpretation by judicial precedent and the letter of the law applied by British High Court and Appeal judges, who hold that if the law so interpreted appears to commit injustice, it is for Parliament, not the judicial bench, to change it, and, on the other, the more creative and flexible approach adopted in the United States, especially in the Supreme Court, which holds that judges should take account of contemporary circumstances and the assumed objective of the law when applying it to fresh cases. The latter view was Lord Denning’s and more than once earned him reversal of his judgments on appeal, but Lord Denning never attended any of our legal conferences at Ditchley.
There appeared another contrast, on its face just a talking-point but in its implications carrying a certain significance. When we were discussing legal education, to the surprise of our American guests several eminent British judges, among them, if my memory serves, Lord Diplock and Lord Scarman, observed that they had never taken a degree in law, an almost impossible state of affairs in the United States, where the road to legal practice lies through the law schools of the universities. Of course our Bar and Law Society examinations and courses take the place of American university schools of law, but I suspect that behind British practice lies the traditional belief that universities are not professional training-grounds, and that: “a man with a First in Greats can do anything.”
Conferences on processes and enforcement of law brought to Ditchley not only lawyers but also top policemen from both sides of the Atlantic. Contrasts in the problems they faced were illumined by a conversation over drinks one evening between the Police Commissioner of Chicago and the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police. “What,” asked the former, “would be the average number of your men killed on duty in a year?” “It’s hard to say,” the London police chief replied; “this year there haven’t been any so far; last year was bad, we lost three men.” “That would be about our monthly average.” The Chicago commissioner agreed that carrying guns was no defence for his police, but his men demanded them, feeling otherwise as vulnerable as unarmed troops in face of an enemy loaded with weapons. He was surprised that in the United Kingdom policemen not only did not ordinarily carry guns but indeed did not want to do so, even in a Northern Ireland beset with paramilitary violence. He thought our policy the better, but was unable to change his own.
Another, hidden, difference between attitudes towards the police was revealed later through the friendships my wife and I made with some of the police guests—because we liked them, not merely because you never know, when travelling in a foreign land, when being the friend of a police chief may not be your salvation from trouble. One of them, the Police Commissioner of New York City, was particularly hospitable, sending a detective officer and a car to show us round New York from a policeman’s point of view, personally escorting my wife to the docks for the farewell party at the last sailing of the QE2, and taking us to dinner at a rather garish, noisy and expensive restaurant, where he was obviously a familiar and favoured guest. While we were dining, several people, manifestly his friends, came over from another table, among them a lady of rather too obvious charms and uncertain age, somewhat flown with wine, who began to make amorous advances to me. Behaving, I hoped, with the polite reserve expected of a middle-aged Englishman, I said: “You seem to be having a lively party over there.” “It’s for me,” the lady replied; “he,”—pointing to a gentleman heavily engaged with our host, and looking the sort of man to whom connection with the police might be useful—“he and I were married today.” We enjoyed all this, as much because it was foreign to our normal social experience (though nearer to that of my young days in New York) as for its actual pleasures, which were nonetheless real, but when we told the story to our respectable Manhattan friends they were rather shocked. Policemen, however eminent, were not among their acquaintance. A city police commissioner was for them, she felt, just a superior Irish cop, not at all like the head of the Metropolitan Police or the Chief Constable of a shire is in English society. This was but one instance of a social stratification in America which, though less notorious than the English class structure, transcends the country’s proclaimed, and in many respects actual, egalitarianism.
It was one of my obligations as Provost of Ditchley to pay a visit every year to the United States, for which we usually set aside the best part of a month. I would not have accepted the condition if the Foundation had not agreed that my wife should be included; in fact as Ditchley’s hostess and a vital element in its atmosphere of friendly informal relations with everyone her presence on our American tours was of the greatest value. I conceived that besides their obvious purposes of strengthening the connection with our daughter institution, the American Ditchley Foundation, making contacts for the future with leading Americans in politics, business, universities and other walks of life, approaching foundations and other possible sources of financial help to Ditchley, and educating ourselves in current issues and thought in the United States, an important object of those trips was to reinforce the corporate spirit of Ditchley, which we had so ardently nourished at home, by renewing personal contacts with previous conference members, through whom in turn we would widen as well as strengthen our American acquaintance. So wherever we went—and in the course of ten years we visited at least half the states of the Union—we looked up former conferees, who often entertained us, and whom we often invited, in main centres like Washington, Chicago or Los Angeles, to drink parties at which all present could feel themselves, as Ditchley alumni, to be sharers in a common enterprise and in a “special relationship.” I suspect that some members of the Council thought we were thus treating ourselves to social pleasures at the two foundations’ expense; but, money apart, such occasions cost a great deal of trouble to organise and exhausting effort to host, which we counted thoroughly worthwhile. When the time came to leave Ditchley, amid many regrets my wife and I could feel relief at no longer having to make those arduous visits. Nevertheless we enormously valued our Ditchley-bred American friendships, the hospitality we received, and the opportunity those trips gave us of seeing so much of the United States and meeting so many more of its people than even the Ditchley conferences brought directly into our ken. It was notable that after we left the Foundation it was Americans rather than British people, whom we had met or worked with through Ditchley, who kept those friendships warm and bright.
We also travelled for the Foundation to Canada and, in our last year, to Australia, with the prime object of organising means of raising money to bring Canadians and Australians to Ditchley conferences, at which of course they were the Foundation’s guests but for which they had to find their travel expenses. To do that on behalf of participants from the United States had been the main reason for setting up the American Ditchley Foundation. A similar course appealed neither to the Canadians nor to the Australians whom I consulted, but in each country I was able to establish a less formal, more personal arrangement, whereby the money could be found when necessary.
Many British people regard Canadians and Americans as very much the same, hardly distinguishable in manner of speech or in outlook, on Britain and the world, talking and thinking in a North American way. This is palpably not true. The Canadian “accent” is quite distinctive, and Canada’s viewpoint is generally far different from that of the United States. Furthermore, the whole political (and in a derivative way social) atmosphere of the country contrasts sharply with that of its neighbour, because, like Britain it has the system of Cabinet government, responsible to Parliament. In no way could Lester Pearson, for instance, the foremost Canadian politician of his generation, have become executive head of government under a presidential system like that of the United States. I knew Mike, as he was always known to his friends, from his days as an official of the Canadian High Commission in London in the 1920s to those of his Prime Ministership and recognition as an outstanding world statesman. In half a century he never changed; in high office he remained as he had been in his twenties, lighthearted, sport-loving, almost boyish, friendly without reserve, a man who won personal affection more widely than political admiration, who rode the wave of Canadian Liberal politics as a born surfer rides the foamy breakers. He had the gift of perennial youth, though anyone less like Peter Pan it is hard to imagine. When my wife and I visited Canada for Ditchley, we stayed in Ottawa with another old friend, Walt Butterworth, then United States ambassador, and his wife Virginia. They gave a splendid dinner party for us at which the other principal guests were the Prime Minister and his wife Mary; and that was the last time I talked with Mike Pearson.
What I most sharply remember of that dinner was my narrow escape from dropping a heavy social brick. As house guests in whose honour the party was being given my wife and I sat next to our host and hostess respectively at opposite ends of the long table. I was served first at my end, our hostess on my right last. After waiting politely for a minute or so, I took up my knife and fork to start eating, as is the English social custom, when I caught my wife’s fearful frown far away at the other end, and remembered, just in time, that in Canada, as in the United States, to eat before one’s hostess does is a solecism of the worst order, signifying not only bad manners but also greed. Let this be a warning to others: when in Rome do socially as the Romans do. However, I cannot extend this maxim to embrace the clumsy American practice of cutting one’s meat, then putting the knife on the side of the plate, switching implements and eating with a fork alone. I suspect that this tiresome custom began in pioneer days when the knife would have been an all-purpose tool usually kept in the belt.
An unhappy note was struck at the end of my time at Ditchley. On the evening of the annual Foundation Lecture in July 1970, when the house was full of guests and there was no chance of having a quiet discussion with anyone, the chairman of the Council, Lord Caccia, told me that he intended to announce the name of my successor the next morning, and that Sir Michael Stewart would take over from me in the summer of 1971. This was the first time I had heard that my replacement had been discussed. The formal position was that the Council, so I had been told in writing before my appointment, had not determined a retiring age for the Provost; and that I was entitled, under terms negotiated on the expiry of my first five years in post, to a year’s notice of termination, with the explicit understanding that save in the event of illness or other impediment, notice would not be given to expire before the end of the year in which I became 65, that is, 1971. I had been turning over in my own mind how long thereafter I would want to go on, possibly until I was 70, the retiring age for Heads of Oxford Colleges, with whom the Provost of Ditchley had been likened. In the circumstances in which I was told of my replacement I had no option but to comply with the chairman’s plan, but I felt bitterly that this abrupt dismissal, with no opportunity to explain my reaction or discuss terms, was poor reward for ten years of service which everyone assured me had been successful. I asked one of my oldest friends on the Council, who had of course been privy to the negotiation with my successor-elect, how such a happening had come about. He was astonished to hear my account of the facts. He told me that he, and he had no doubt other members of the Council, had assumed that I had been kept informed of what was afoot; and that they had been told that 65, or the expiry of my second five-year term in November 1971, was the contractual retiring age. Neither of those assumptions was founded in truth. It all goes to show how unreliable a committee is as an employer, compared with a single proprietor or business concern, and how necessary it is to have every detail in black and white, even among friends; perhaps particularly among friends. The pain of the injury subsided, good personal relations were restored (in which process I owed a lot to David Perth, the previous chairman of Ditchley), terms were agreed, and I bear no grudges.
The happiest of all memories that my wife and I took away from our last days at Ditchley, however, was of the wonderfully generous and touching farewell given us by the staff, both administrative and domestic. They one and all combined to give us a splendid champagne party and a present of silver spoons which daily remind us of them. The warmth of their loyalty and affection is our most treasured memento of ten strenuous but, in retrospect, happy and creative years.
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