Macmillan

John Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780582553866
• eBook ISBN: 9781317869085
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Harold Macmillan presided over the dissolution of the British Empire and the first stages of irreversible economic decline. It was an unlucky end to a political career which had seen Britain's steady extinction as a Great Power, and his reputation will depend on how posterity judges his understanding of these changes, and his skill in adapting himself and his country to meet them. This short but trenchant study of his aims, abilities and achievements concentrates on the premiership, against the background of his political education and rise to power.

Chapter 1
The Last Edwardian

Harold Macmillan was, of course, a Victorian by birth, not an Edwardian, and the carefully cultivated persona of his years of power scarcely acknowledged the influences which formed his childhood and early youth. He was born in 1894, the son of Maurice Macmillan, a partner in Macmillan's publishers, and Helen (Nellie) Tarleton Belles, the daughter of an Indiana doctor. As a background for a future politician the Macmillan family had advantages and drawbacks. Harold Macmillan's own account of it is coloured by a strong sense that family tradition created expectations which he had to discharge. His grandfather, Daniel Macmillan, the son of a crofter on the Isle of Arran, set up in business as a bookseller and in 1843 as a publisher, with his brother Alexander. He died in 1857. His son Maurice, Harold's father, was educated at Uppingham and Christ's College Cambridge, and became a schoolmaster before marrying Nellie Belles and entering the family business. Family mythology was constructed around Daniel Macmillan's self-improvement and instinctive self-reliance. Despite the very adequate comfort in which the family lived, the emphasis on striving and seriousness discouraged any temptation to enjoy the fruits of affluence. Macmillans went to the best available schools and universities, but this was expected to be only the beginning of lives of solid achievement. Daniel Macmillan took his religion seriously and by the end of his life had become an admirer of Cardinal Newman; when Maurice was born he was keen on the Christian Socialists, and the boy's godfathers were F.D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley. Nellie Macmillan, who dominated her household, was fiercely ambitious for all her offspring and brought her own doctrines of self-reliance to complement the Macmillan doctrines she had married. She was also rigidly Protestant, and a firm believer in the importance of education.¹

Macmillan's childhood, by his own description, was understandably austere. The family house was in solidly affluent Cadogan Place, in London. He went to school at Summer-fields in Oxford, thence as a Scholar to Eton, thus beginning an academic career which was distinguished, but not as distinguished as that of his elder brother Daniel. He remained at Eton for three years, but in 1909 became extremely ill. When a heart condition was diagnosed his formidable mother decided to keep him at home, where he was to have private tuition to prepare him for entrance to Oxford.

Macmillan was evidently a rather precious adolescent, not perhaps as physically frail as a domineering mother would have him believe, now thrust back into a family life marked by intense emotional stress. His departure from Eton was associated with a period of despondency and self-doubt. It was his duty now to succeed, and he had a number of tutors, amongst whom the most important was Ronald Knox, an Eton contemporary of his brother. Knox was already moving towards the spiritual metamorphosis which was to make him, as the University Catholic Chaplain from 1926 to 1939, an influence over many generations of clever Oxford undergraduates.² For the moment he was an Anglo-Catholic, passionate in his conviction and eager to proselytise. A deep affection sprang up between the two young men: Knox was twenty-two and Macmillan was ready to be instructed. Discovering this, Nellie ordered Knox not to discuss religion with her son. When he refused, he was put on the next train sans bicycle or laundry.³ Apart from its effect on Knox,⁴ this episode seems to have confirmed the contradictions in Macmillan's relations with his mother. He later told a friend that 'I admired her, but never really liked her.... She dominated me and she still [in the 1960s] dominates me.' It was with acknowledged relief that he escaped to Oxford, taking a Classical Exhibition at Balliol.

Macmillan's biographer, perhaps predictably, has likened the world which he entered in 1912 to the Oxford of Zuleika Dobson. It was certainly a comfortable existence, with all the trappings of privilege and, for the first time in Macmillan's experience, a wealth of agreeable friendships. It was also a period in his life when he applied himself conscientiously to self-advancement. He was Secretary of the Oxford Union in his fourth term and Treasurer in his fifth, and a member of many political societies. These activities established connections which he could revive later, such as a link with Walter Monckton, later a colleague in government. On the other hand, his spiritual preoccupations were intensified by the presence next door of Ronald Knox, still an Anglican and Chaplain of Trinity College, and by his close friendship with Guy Lawrence, who formed the third apex of a triangular relationship with Knox and Macmillan. Knox's pressure on his young friends was intense, though it cannot be established that this contributed very much to an apparent recurrence of Macmillan's nervous difficulties in the spring of 1914 which nearly brought him to withdraw from the university. Macmillan considered seriously whether he should become a Roman Catholic, and his eventual decision in 1915 that he was 'not going to "Pope" until after the war (if I'm alive)' was a mortal blow to his intimate relationship with Knox, who had by then joined the Roman Catholic church. This relationship, together with enough academic work to get him a First in Classical Moderations, evidently occupied much of his time as an undergraduate. He was no more aware than anyone else of his generation that their world was about to be obliterated by the Great War.

The Archduke Franz-Ferdinand was assassinated at the beginning of the Long Vacation, and Macmillan did not return to Balliol to read Greats. He first enlisted in the King's Royal Rifle Corps, but was transferred to the 4th Battalion, Grenadier Guards, after his mother pulled the appropriate strings. Here, especially after his posting to the Western Front in August 1915, he confronted death and the working classes with an almost equal sense of novelty. His physical and moral courage as a young officer responsible for thirty men in action stands out even from the detached and ironical record in his memoirs. He was wounded in the hand in his first action, at the Battle of Loos, hospitalised and then sent back to ceremonial duties in London until he had fully recovered. In April 1916 he was sent out again, to the 2nd Battalion of Grenadiers. After a period in a quiet sector of trenches near Ypres, his battalion took part in the second wave of the Somme battle, and on 15 September he was wounded again while attacking a machine-gun post near Ginchy, in an engagement where Haig's premature and incompetent use of tanks had left the advancing infantry vulnerable to machine-gun fire from entrenched positions. Macmillan was hit in the pelvis at close range and spent most of the battle in a shell-hole, feigning death to discourage any passing Germans from despatching him, while, according to his own account, reading Aeschylus's Prometheus in the original when times were quiet. After some hours he was found by guardsmen from his company and eventually reached a field hospital in Abbeville. From there he was returned to England. His mother rescued him from the blundering ministrations of military surgeons, and he spent the rest of the war in a private hospital in Belgrave Square, suffering a series of unpleasant operations which left him with a slight limp and a lifetime of recurrent pain.

These were not experiences to leave a man unchanged. In May 1916 he had written to his mother that 'I never see a man killed but I think of him as a martyr', and his letters home are full of crusading imagery and an outspoken patriotism.⁵ By the end of the war he had begun to show the sense of separateness which afflicted many who had seen action in that war. His irritation at the civilians who had stayed at home was not diminished, but his sense of loyalty to his comrades now took the form of a deep resentment against the incompetence of the generals and an almost romantic admiration for the personal qualities of ordinary soldiers as well as for his officer friends who had died. He never found it easy to like Germans, or men who had spent the war behind the lines or out of uniform; he did find it easy to like the common soldier, or people who might become soldiers, especially when they were his constituents in industrial Stockton.

After the Armistice, Macmillan, though secure in the offer of a job in the family firm, looked for employment abroad 'to be on my own'.⁶ The state of his health prohibited a move to Bombay, where he had hoped to join his acquaintance George Lloyd, who had just been appointed Governor. Nellie once more intervened, arranging with her friend Lady Edward Cavendish that Captain Macmillan should go to Ottawa as ADC to the Duke of Devonshire, Lady Edward's son, who was the Governor-General of Canada. He travelled to Canada in March 1919 to embark on ten months of 'almost unalloyed enjoyment'.⁷ His own description is of a long house-party, and indeed the functions of the Governor-General included a great deal of entertaining, both formal and informal, which occupied much of the ADC's time. Moreover, Macmillan's greatest single achievement during his period of duty in Ottawa was to become engaged to the Duke's daughter, Lady Dorothy Cavendish, whom he married in April 1920. This rather unexpected match, which later broke down in substance if not in form, marked Macmillan's adoption into an intensely political dynasty, as well as a striking forward move in his personal development. Into a life which had previously been spent between a sequestered home and a number of masculine institutions, with a heavy and rather precious overlay of religion and self-conscious morality, came an energetic, ill-educated, earthy young woman who immediately captured his affections. Rumour and biographers would have it that she was anxious to escape from a particularly domineering mother – Evie, Duchess of Devonshire – and had not reckoned on Nellie Macmillan,⁸ and the basis of his attraction for her is still a matter of debate.

Nevertheless, the life of a Governor-General's ADC was not all play and flirtation, and it is significant that Macmillan's first practical experience of politics was at the very top. Canadian politics were in a state of flux. The ruling Conservative Party, which under Sir Robert Borden had staunchly supported the British war effort, was under pressure in the reconstruction period from social unrest in industrial areas and from the perennial discontent of the francophone majority in Quebec. It was also recognised that even if these problems were solved, Canada's relations with the British Empire and with the United States were bound to change. Simultaneously Borden and his chief lieutenant, Arthur Meighen, were trying to construct a peacetime coalition with some of their Liberal opponents to preserve the wartime governmental arrangements, rather as Lloyd George had done in Britain. This involved the Governor-General in a good deal of cross-party negotiation. It was his habit to discuss progress with his young ADC and although (perhaps because) nothing came of the various schemes proposed, the intricacies of policy at national and international level fascinated the young Macmillan.

Marriage seems to have dictated a return to England, and Macmillan finally entered the family business in 1920. His opportunity to make a mark was not great, since his uncles were still in firm control of editorial decisions and most aspects of the business, but he began to investigate the technicalities of book-production, which later and unexpectedly brought him an early brush with high politics. For a year or two his life seemed to settle into a steady pattern of business which had no intrinsic reason to change. But for an able young man with a well-connected wife and an intensely ambitious mother, this state of affairs could not long survive.

Notes and References

1. A powerful but uneven discussion of the Macmillan family can be found in Richard Davenport-Hines, The Macmillans (London: William Heinemann. 1992).

2. One of them, Evelyn Waugh, wrote the official biography, Ronald Knox (2nd edn, London: Cassell, 1988).

3. Alistair Home, Macmillan, 1894–1956 (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 20.

4. Waugh, Ronald Knox p. 107.

5. Home, Macmillan 1894–1956, p. 40

6. Ibid., p. 52.

7.Harold Macmillan, Winds of Change (London: Macmillan, 1966), p. 115.

8. Home, Macmillan 1894–1956, pp. 56–8, citing Lord Sefton, another of the Duke's ADCs.

Chapter 2
Launching a Career 1922–40

Macmillan decided to 'try for Parliament' at some time before the election of 1922, though the date of this decision is unknown.¹ The Duke of Devonshire, who had returned from Canada in 1921, was Colonial Secretary in Andrew Bonar Law's government and kept the office under Stanley Baldwin until the Conservatives were defeated in 1923. With a father-in-law in the Cabinet, it was difficult for Macmillan to avoid some thought of political career, and when Baldwin decided at the end of 1923 to call an election on the single issue of Tariff Reform, he applied to Conservative Central Office for a seat. He was offered Stockton-on-Tees, a borough seat in a declining shipbuilding area which was generally reckoned unwinnable, and within days the local association had nominated him. Being rich enough to meet his election expenses he was glad to accept, and he remained loyal to this rather unlikely political base until after the Second World War, with the exception of some flirtations with southern seats in the early 1930s.

Macmillan's first campaign at Stockton was a fair success, about which he has written amusingly in his memoirs.² With his wife he canvassed energetically, toured the steelworks, and made the usual round of formal election speeches. He observed the Conservative Party's standard protectionist line with positive enthusiasm, and laid about the Labour opponents he was already learning to call 'socialists', as well as the Liberals who had held the seat since 1910. As a stranger to industrial England he was appalled by the level of poverty caused by unemployment in heavy industrial areas, and made this clear in his campaign. Although he was generally recognised to be a bad speaker and a shy man who found it difficult to talk to the voters personally, he was reinforced by Lady Dorothy's complementary enthusiasm and willingness to go anywhere and canvass anyone. The final result gave the Libera...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Supermac 1894–1986
• CHAPTER 1 The Last Edwardian
• CHAPTER 2 Launching a Career 1922–40
• CHAPTER 3 The Second World War 1938–45
• CHAPTER 4 The Greasy Pole 1944–55
• CHAPTER 5 The Opportunity 1955–56
• CHAPTER 6 From Suez to the Paris Summit
• CHAPTER 7 From the Paris Summit to the Test-Ban Treaty
• CHAPTER 8 Imperial Retreat
• CHAPTER 9 Towards Europe
• CHAPTER 10 'Is it too good to last?' Policy and Politics at Home 1957–63
• CHAPTER 11 Macmillan in Perspective
• Chronology
• Further Reading
• Index