A Christmas miscellany: stocking-filler stories
Some passing thoughts and stories to sustain readers through the haze of Christmas, whether it brings sybaritic over-indulgence or the grating of family nerves
I hate portmanteau words.
Well, that’s not entirely true: I hate bad or unnecessary portmanteau words, one which don’t really fit together or where the new coinage adds no linguistic novelty of shade or meaning. “Chillax” is a particular bête noire, as “chill out” and “relax” mean the same thing, so combining the two adds no nuance, makes no expansion to the armour of our language. I also dislike the way we have come to use “staycation” to mean taking a holiday in the UK rather than going abroad; the whole point of the word’s invention was that it referred to “staying” at home during a “vacation”.
Some portmanteaus hide in plain sight, challenging people not to notice that they have been formed by the combination of two existing words. Amtrak was formed from “America” and “trak”, vitamin (originally vitamine) was created in 1912 to describe a “vital” “amine”. Multinational tech company Lenovo grew out of a company called Legend, the name of which was combined with “novo” (for new) when it was restructured.
I am, however, already demonstrating what I was about to explain. One portmanteau I do like, even though I see it in myself, is “anecdotage”, the tendency with increasing age to enjoy the telling of stories. I know I do it, I know I enjoy it, I know the thrill of saying to someone “You must know the story about…” and hearing them reply with what seems like genuine interest and enthusiasm “No…?” And I know that it leads me astray in these essays from time to time, pads out an argument with another 200 words while I relate a tale I can’t bear not to. For what it’s worth, I take the view at the moment that here is where I am not subject to the benevolent dictatorship of editors, no-one questions whether something needs to be 1,100 words rather than 800, or fails to see how an amusing sidebar is strictly relevant.
So here we are. As it is Christmas, I thought I would offer a few amusing or interesting stories, insights or facts, of varying length, to save them from having to be the cuckoo in the nest of a different essay. You may enjoy them or you may not; please do re-tell them if you like. We should all always be evangelical for information.
The first two professional heads of both the Indian and Pakistan armies after independence in 1947 were still British. The first commander-in-chief of the Indian Army was General Sir Rob Lockhart, brother of the great diplomatist and writer Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart (yes, calling one child Robert and another Rob lacks a degree of imagination). Commissioned into the (British) Indian Army in 1913, he was military attaché to Afghanistan in the 1930s and spent most of the Second World War in staff jobs at the India Office. Lockhart became head of the army of newly independent India in August 1947 and served until October 1948. After a few years in retirement, he was recalled to be director of operations during the Malayan Emergency.
Lockhart was succeeded by another Scot, General Sir Roy Bucher, commissioned into the Indian Army in 1914. He served in the Third Anglo-Afghan War and spent the later 1930s and early 1940s in training and administrative roles in India, and was made General Officer Commanding Eastern Command after independence, headquartered in Ranchi. He was Commander in Chief of the Indian Army for a year, from January 1948 to January 1949, and it was revealed earlier this year that Bucher had advised the Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to agree a ceasefire with Pakistan in Kashmir in December 1948. Modern Hindu nationalist mythology regards this decision by Nehru as a major mistake in relations with Pakistan.
The third commander in chief, appointed in January 1949, was General Kodandera Madappa Cariappa, born to a farming family in Mysore in south-west India. So the Indian Army only had “foreign” commanders for 18 months after independence. In Pakistan, it took a little longer.
The first commander in chief of the Pakistan Army was General Sir Frank Messervy, having been in charge of Northern Command from 1946 to 1947. He was a cavalry officer of the Indian Army who commanded a number of combat units during the Second World War, serving in East Africa, northern Africa and Burma. During 1942, he commanded the 1st Armoured Division then the 7th Armoured Division, becoming then only Indian Army officer to command a British division during the war.
Messervy retired in early 1948 and was succeeded by General Sir Douglas Gracey, previously chief of staff at GHQ Pakistan. He joined the Indian Army in 1914 and spent the 1930s in staff jobs before taking on operational commands during the Second World War. He then moved to service in Burma where he impressed Field Marshal Sir William Slim, before leading Indian Army units in French Indochina. Replacing Messervy at the top, he served for just under three years before handing over to General Muhammad Ayub Khan, the first native head of the army and later president of Pakistan from 1958 to 1969.
Given the acrimony which descended into bloodshed over independence, and the frantic haste in which Mountbatten, as final viceroy, had to complete the hand-over process, it may seem that the two new countries were willing to accept British commanders in chief for even weeks or months. It’s worth remembering, however, that all four of these men, Lockhart, Bucher, Messervy and Gracey, had been commissioned into the Indian Army. This had grown out of the presidency armies of the heyday of the East India Company, but from 1903 the new commander in chief in India, General Viscount Kitchener, centralised and reformed the forces based in India, created a general staff and established a staff college.
Although the Indian Army would always lag a little behind the British Army in terms of equipment and prestige, by the second decade of the 20th century it was a formidable and professional military force. In 1918, a small number of places were reserved at Sandhurst for Indian officer candidates who would become Kings’s commissioned Indian officers, with the same powers and authority as their British counterparts. The Indian Army numbered 175,000 personnel just before the outbreak of the First World War, and these men, the men at the top of the organisation when independence was declared, had been in the army for 30 years. The military of India and Pakistan did not appear from nowhere. Its men and its units were the men and units with the British generals had been serving and commanding.
Perhaps it is less surprising, then, that a short transition period was achieved, only for a few years. It must have seemed an odd kind of independence for ordinary Indians and Pakistanis that old white man were still at the top of their organisations. But the time was passing.
I love political biographies. Partly it’s a sign of a slight intellectual laziness: the story arc of a biography gives a familiar and predictable shape to the partial history of a certain period in politics which might be lacking in a general study of, say, appeasement, or the development of the welfare state, or the Corn Laws. And human interest always reels us in, because we want to know who these towering—or sometimes not-so-towering—figures were, what they were like and how they thought.
As an art, it can also be very revealing. Anyone who has read some of the accounts of Boris Johnson’s childhood and education will see the striking foreshadowing of Johnson the man: impatient, indolent, ambitious, selfish, insecure, overbearing, relentlessly upbeat. “Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man,” said Aristotle, or possibly St Ignatius Loyola; we can extend it beyond the age of seven but it has fundamental truth in it.
Some biographies are landmarks, of course. The most famous, perhaps, is Robert Caro’s epic four-volume life of President Lyndon Johnson, though the fifth volume, covering Johnson’s actual presidency, is still being written (and Caro is 88!). Charles Moore’s three-part official biography of Margaret Thatcher immediately became the standard work on the Iron Lady, a brilliant fit of subject and admiring but not uncritical author, and certainly won’t be matched until Thatcher is fully a figure of history in 50 or 100 years’ time. Two of my favourites, tackling figures not quite of the first rank but who nonetheless burst from the page, are Sir David Gilmour’s Curzon: Imperial Statesman and John Campbell’s F.E. Smith, First Earl of Birkenhead; Campbell excels at figures from the top of the second tier, having also written lives of Roy Jenkins, Aneurin Bevan, Edward Heath and R.B. Haldane. And a triumphant assessment of a controversial figure is Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell by Simon Heffer, which I read in one sitting overnight and into the next, all 969 pages, when I was an undergraduate.
There are, though, lacunae in the biographer’s art. Over the years since my political obsession blossomed, I have thought of a figure of whom I would love to read a modern, critical, well-referenced biography, but have found nowhere to turn. In my more grandiose moments I think I might try to plug some of these gaps some day. The door is not yet closed… But here are four people who need a good treatment.
1) Maurice Hankey: probably the most significant figure in the history of the British civil service, Hankey was the first secretary to the cabinet, serving from 1916 to 1938 and did more than anyone else to create the institutions at the centre of government which are now coming under acute scrutiny in the public inquiry into Covid-19. There is John Naylor’s 1984 A Man and an Institution: Sir Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretariat and the Custodian of Cabinet Secrecy, but it is essentially an academic treatise with an organisational focus. Hankey had been an artillery officer in the Royal Marines before working for the Committee of Imperial Defence, of which he was appointed secretary in 1912.
From there he went on to transfer the military model of organisation and administration to the civilian side of Whitehall and his longevity made him a towering figure; he also served as clerk of the Privy Council 1923-38 and acted as the chief administrative figure at a number of conferences and summits. Hankey was drafted back into government as a minister when war broke out in 1939, as minister without portfolio, then chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and finally paymaster general. After the Second World War, he was a leading critic of the trial of German and Japanese war criminals, arguing that the Allies had no legal right to bring the indictments and had in part caused the Axis powers to take ever more desperate measures to prolong the war. He set out these arguments in 1950 in Politics, Trials and Errors.
2) The 5th Marquess of Salisbury was always going to be cast in the political shade by his grandfather, the 3rd Marquess, that bearded Victorian titan who was three times prime minister (1885-86, 1886-92, 1892-1902) and was the dominant figure in the Conservative Party after Disraeli’s death in 1881. Bobbety, known as Viscount Cranborne until he succeeded to the title in 1947, never held any of the greatest offices of state, although he had hoped that his close friend Anthony Eden might make him foreign secretary in 1955. But he was a key figure in Tory politics throughout the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Initially he was a leading anti-appeasement campaigner, before becoming a tireless minister in Churchill’s wartime coalition, as colonial secretary in 1942 and dominions secretary from 1943 to 1945. As leader of the opposition in the House of Lords during the Labour government of Clement Attlee, he played a crucial role in the management of the upper house, where Labour was virtually unrepresented and there was a huge Conservative majority. Working with the government’s leader of the House, Viscount Addison, he engineered the Salisbury Convention, whereby the Lords would not defeat a government bill which represented a manifesto commitment.
He served again under Churchill and Eden, becoming the figurehead of the imperialist right wing of the Conservative Party, and walked out of Macmillan’s government in 1957 after two-and-a-half months over the release of the Greek Cypriot leader Archbishop Makarios. In 1962, he became the first president of the Conservative Monday Club, founded to oppose what it saw as the dominance within the party of the liberal wing which supported decolonisation, and it sympathised with the white minority government of Southern Rhodesia led by Ian Smith. He died in 1972, and there is still no significant biography. He is one of four subjects of The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World They Made by Simon Ball, a study of Macmillan, Salisbury, Oliver Lyttelton and Harry Crookshank, who all served in the Grenadier Guards in the First World War and would all be cabinet ministers in the 1950s. But Bobbety represents more than enough material for a dedicated life.
3) Sir John Anderson would be remembered as a major figure in civil service history if he had retired at in 1937 when he stepped down as governor of Bengal. A brilliant scientist and mathematician from Edinburgh’s lower middle classes, he excelled at George Watson’s College, one of the city’s first-rate independent schools, read mathematics and natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh then went to the University of Leipzig to study physical chemistry, specialising in uranium. Rather than remain in academia, however, he sat the civil service entrance examination in 1905 and recorded the highest score of his year and the second-highest ever. Anderson began in the Colonial Office, was appointed a notably young secretary of the National Insurance Commission in 1913 and set up the Ministry of Shipping in 1917. In rapid succession he was secretary to the Local Government Board, second permanent secretary to the Ministry of Health and chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue. Then, in 1920, he became joint permanent secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, essentially the civil service chief of the British government in Dublin, at the height of the struggle for independence. He did not thrive in the violent milieu, but in 1922, not yet 40, he became permanent secretary to the Home Office, where he remained for nine years. It began to seem that he had peaked too soon, but in 1931 he was offered the post of governor of Bengal, based in Calcutta. He managed a tense security situation and widespread economic depression skilfully and returned to Britain with his reputation sky high.
What was next for the 55-year-old? He turned down the post of high commissioner for Palestine, but the death of the former prime minister Ramsay MacDonald created a vacancy as MP for the Combined Scottish Universities, and Anderson agreed to stand on behalf of the National government but without a party label. It was the beginning of a second career. In October 1938, Neville Chamberlain brought him into the cabinet as lord privy seal and put him in charge of civil defence, where he oversaw the development of a rudimentary air raid shelter for the gardens of homes, the Anderson shelter. When war broke out in September 1939, he became home secretary, the first (but not the last) man to head a department as a civil servant then as a minister. In 1940, he became lord president of the Council, and effectively ran most of the domestic policy of the government while Churchill focused on the conduct of the war; he also had oversight of the early stages of British atomic research. When Sir Kingsley Wood died unexpectedly in 1943, Anderson became chancellor of the Exchequer, where his greatest achievement was the introduction of the pay-as-you-earn system of taxation. He left the House of Commons in 1950 and ran almost every quango available, but declined the offer to join Churchill’s second government in 1951. Sir John Wheeler-Bennett wrote a life of Anderson, John Anderson, Viscount Waverley in 1962, a few years after his death, but a man whose career runs from the colonial administration of the Edwardian empire to the foundations of post-war British state deserves a fresh look.
4) Leo Amery was in some ways an unlikely imperialist. He was born in India, his mother a Jewish convert to Protestantism, and was a contemporary of Winston Churchill at Harrow (unlike the future prime minister, he performed well academically). He won a first in Literae Humaniores at Balliol College, Oxford, then became a fellow of All Souls, and was a hugely gifted linguist. Amery became a journalist, covering the Second Boer War and delivering stinging criticisms of the army, and he could have been editor of The Observer or The Times (he was offered both positions) but chose instead to go into politics. In 1911, he became Liberal Unionist MP for Birmingham South; despite his status as a parliamentarian, he served as a military intelligence officer in the Balkans during the early years of the First World War, then became assistant secretary to the war cabinet under Hankey, produced the final draft of the Balfour Declaration and was part of the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference. From 1919 to 1921, he was personal secretary to Lord Milner, the colonial secretary.
Amery’s career resumed a more conventional shape under Bonar Law in 1922. He was first lord of the Admiralty until 1924, then colonial secretary during Baldwin’s second government 1924-29. He was not invited to join the National government in 1931, and over the decade became a leading critic of appeasement. In the Norway Debate in April 1940, which sealed the fate of Neville Chamberlain, Amery spoke passionately against the prime minister. For his peroration, which electrified the House, he quoted Oliver Cromwell: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” In Churchill’s government he was made secretary of state for India but, to his disappointment, not included in the war cabinet. He was defeated at the 1945 general election; the same year his elder son John, a Nazi sympathiser who founded a British unit in the Waffen-SS, was hanged for treason. His younger son Julian was a Conservative MP from 1950 to 1966 and 1969 to 1992: he served as a middle-ranking minister under Macmillan, Home and Heath, and became one of the last elements of the imperial wing of the Conservative Party.
There are two works on Amery but neither is really a full biography. In 1992, the American historian William Roger Louis published In the Name of God, Go!: Amery and the British Empire in the Age of Churchill, while former Conservative MP (and nephew of Julian Amery) David Faber wrote Speaking for England: Leo, Julian and John Amery (2007), which dealt with Amery and his sons. Amery himself wrote a three-volume autobiography and his diaries have been published in two parts. Last year, a student submitted a doctoral thesis at the University of Exeter entitled “An Intellectual and Political Biography of Leo Amery (1873 - 1955)”. But a mainstream study awaits.
A word on anniversaries: 2024 is a significant one in the UK, as it marks a century since the appointment of the first Labour government. Stanley Baldwin, who had replaced the dying Andrew Bonar Law as prime minister in May, went to the country in December 1923. It was wholly unnecessary: the Conservatives had won a majority of 74 at the previous year’s election, which had also seen the Labour Party finish second for the first time ever, and so another poll wasn’t due until 1927 at the latest. Baldwin, however, wanted to abandon his party’s commitment to free trade and move instead towards protectionism and imperial preference. Honourably, he wanted a fresh mandate from the electorate, but it was a miscalculation.
The results were complicated. The Conservatives remained the largest party but fell to 258 seats (out of 615), well short of a majority. Labour, in second place again, won 191 seats, while the Liberal Party, reunited for the time being under H.H. Asquith, now in his 70s, won 158. A Conservative-Liberal coalition was impossible, as the previous one had broken up acrimoniously a year before and Lloyd George and his followers would not contemplate a deal. He decided instead to lend his party’s support to Labour on an issue-by-issue basis, beginning with an alliance to vote down the King’s Speech.
Accordingly, the new parliament met in January 1924. After three days for Members to be sworn in and the speaker, J.H. Whitley, to be re-elected, George V delivered the Gracious Speech on 15 January. It dwelt initially on foreign affairs, with many international agreements which had arisen from the end of the First World War still being concluded, then touched on the economy and employment, as well as housing. The content of the speech was debated as usual, and on 21 January, at 11.03 pm, the House voted on a Labour amendment, to add to the motion thanking the King for his speech the words “but it is our duty respectfully to submit to your Majesty that Your Majesty’s present advisers have not the confidence of this House”. The amendment was agreed to 328 to 256.
The next day, Baldwin told the House that he had offered his resignation to the King, and it had been accepted. He proposed that the House adjourn until 12 February, and announced that ministers would for the time being retain their offices. Lord Curzon repeated the message to the House of Lords. George V invited Ramsay MacDonald to form an administration, which he accepted. It was the UK’s first Labour government; The Guardian recently suggested that it saw the first cabinet ministers from working-class backgrounds; but that overlooks Arthur Henderson, three-time Labour leader, who joined Asquith’s government as president of the Board of Education in 1915, the Glaswegian son of a textile worker and a domestic servant, who began work at the age of 12.
The King was aware of the significance of the day. It was only a few years since the violent shock of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and less than six years since George V’s cousin, Tsar Nicholas II, and his family had been shot and bayoneted to death in Yekaterinburg. Many looked at the Labour Party, and its singing of the socialist anthem The Red Flag, and thought it was not so far from the Communists who had taken power in Russia and staged attempted coups in Germany, Hungary and elsewhere. The King wrote in his diary:
Today 23 years ago dear Grandmama died. I wonder what she would have thought of a Labour Government!
MacDonald made an effort too. To the consternation of his colleagues—who had to be reassured they need only follow suit if they chose—the Labour leader went to the Palace in traditional court dress, strictly civil uniform, to kiss hands.
This first Labour government did not last long. The parliamentary arithmetic was impossible; and Asquith’s decision to give MacDonald his qualified support had not been due to any sense of progressive solidarity. Rather, the Liberal leader believed that Labour had gained ground only because of splits within his own party, and he wanted, essentially, to set them up to fail and demonstrate the socialists’ unsuitability for office. He noted confidently:
If a Labour government is ever to be tried in this country, as it will sooner or later, it could hardly be tried under safer conditions.
Asquith’s opinion of the Labour Party was not high. In his memoirs he described the first MacDonald government as “for the most part a beggarly array”. Indeed, he went on:
The more I survey the situation the more satisfied I am that we have taken the right, and indeed the only sensible and sane line, over the whole business. The difficulty which I foresee will be to get our men to go into the same lobby with Labour in any case of real doubt. I wish them to have a fair run, for a few months at any rate, because there is for the moment no practicable alternative.
Asquith was wrong. When the third election in three years was called in the autumn of 1924, he was defeated in his constituency of Paisley by the Labour candidate, Edward Mitchell, in a two-way fight. The Liberals fell to 40 seats, and their tally of 158 in December 1923 remains their best result to date.
There will be lots of commemorations this coming year. Given the newness of the party, the government contained some able men. MacDonald served as foreign secretary as well as prime minister, and at this stage still had energy and drive. Henderson, although he had been unseated in Newcastle East, was appointed home secretary and returned to the Commons at a by-election at Burnley in February. As chancellor of the Exchequer, MacDoanld chose Philip Snowden, a Yorkshireman with Radical roots who preached socialism but believed it was an essential pre-condition to balance the books and help the economy recover. Viscount Haldane, who had been war secretary 1905-12 and lord chancellor 1912-15, agreed to join the cabinet as lord chancellor and leader of the House of Lords, although in his late 60s.
You should order The Wild Men: The Remarkable Story of Britain’s First Labour Government, which is released on 18 January. It is by my former parliamentary colleague Dr David Torrance, who is hugely knowledgeable on 20th-century politics and a very solid citizen. The man’s written a biography of Noel Skelton, for heaven’s sake. You don’t get commitment greater than that.
One other anniversary is the centenary of Calvin Coolidge’s presidential election victory. He had assumed the office, of course, in August 1923 when President Warren Harding had died, but won in his own right in November 1924. It was a convincing victory, taking 54 per cent of the vote while the rest was split between the Democratic candidate, former US ambassador to the United Kingdom John Davis, who won 29 per cent, and Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, of the Progressive Party, who received 17 per cent. Coolidge’s presidency is not highly rated by modern historiography, and I mention him, and the anniversary, only because the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, recently cited “Silent Cal” as his inspiration as he seeks to be a candidate for the presidency. I recently wrote about the significance of this for The Hill.
So this is Christmas. And what have you done? Well, presumably read the pensées above, for which my thanks. And my more general thanks for reading these essays. There will be more content before the end of the year, but enjoy the festive period.
Fabulous! I've become very interested in political history since I started reading your blog. i enjoyed this one very much. Merry Christmas.