Reginald McKenna

Financier among Statesmen, 1863–1916

Martin Farr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135776596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Reginald McKenna has never been the subject of scholarly attention. This was partly due to his own preference for appearing at the periphery of events even when ostensibly at the centre, and the absence of a significant collection of private papers.

This new book redresses theneglect of this major statesmen and financier partly through the natural advance of historical research, and partly by thediscoveries of missing archival material. McKenna's role is now illuminated by his own reflections, and by the correspondence of friends and colleagues, including Asquith, Churchill, Keynes, Baldwin, Bonar Law, MacDonald, and Chamberlain. McKenna's presence at the hub of political life in the first half of the century is now clear: in the radical Liberal governments of 1905–16, where he acted as a lightning conductor for the party; during the war, where he served as the Prime Minister's deputy and the principal voice for restraint in the conduct of the war; and as chairman of the world's largest bank, where until his death in office aged eighty, he prompted progressive policies to deal with the issues of war debt, trade, mass unemployment, and the return to gold.

1 Beginnings, July 1863 to July 1895

What assurance have I that I shall ever have opportunity to use this politically much instructed but inferior wit of mine? At four and twenty, without a penny, I study Burke to learn the art of statesmanship. Ye Gods, what assurance!

—McKenna, diary 1887¹

ANCESTORS

Reginald McKenna was born in Bayswater, London, on 6 July 1863, of an Irish family. The Clann Mhic Chionaoith was descended from Colla da Chrioch.² Tradition suggested they originated from the southern Uí Neill, who moved to Meath and the east midlands of Ireland, but belonged to the territory of Truagh, in south Ulster, northern County Monaghan. The Clann may have been descended from Brian Ború, or Ollam Fodlah,³ or from the fearsome ‘MacKenna of Truagh’ whose deer-hunting expedition led them from Meath into Monaghan, or perhaps from the Firbolgs, the native Neolithic race driven into the mountains by the Gaels.⁴ Another story had it that the MacKennas had a feud with the O’Donnells, lured them into a hunting expedition, and then massacred them. The MacKennas ran home yelling ‘Faustina Venatio’,⁵ which subsequently became the family motto. From the eighth century the clann settled and lived in Truagh, in the words of another descendant, ‘more or less turbulently ever afterwards’.¹

Those fables did not take account of migration, perhaps the Clann’s dominant narrative. As one member put it, ‘Clann Mackenna in its dispersal carried the best of its blood into foreign lands up to the twentieth century’;² they were ‘a dispersed people sent in slavery to Barbados, in chains to Australia, in famine to America’.³ They also prospered. John McKenna became General Juan McKenna in the Chilean Army before perishing in a duel at Buenos Aires in 1814, but not before, as Vicũna McKenna, he was hailed, with Bernardo O’Higgins, as father of the country in its struggle against the Spanish. There was even a Don Juan McKenna, about whose exploits unfortunately little is known.⁴ The clann ancestry remained a source of fascination for those so fascinated, though Stephen McKenna thought that any Irishman who may ‘want to take his lineage back to the year of Bosworth Field, had better—like other men—invent it: nobody will be any the wiser.’⁵ He was at one with his uncle Reggie, who remained resolutely unconcerned with the more arcane aspects of his genealogy; he was a man who appeared to regard all aspects of genealogy as arcane.⁶ It enabled him to be sanguine in the face of profiles claiming that he was Irish, his mother French, or his father Governor of Santiago.⁷

No McKenna rose to a position of power between the first half of the seventeenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, though several McKennas redressed that thereafter. In addition to the success of Reggie and his brothers Theodore and Ernest, three Stephens became noted writers; a Patrick was an active associate of the revolutionary republicans Wolfe Tone and Napper Tandy, while Reggie’s own grandmother, Mary Plunkett Gregan, was a collateral descendant of Oliver Plunkett, the last Roman Catholic martyr to die in England, being hung, drawn and quartered in 1861, and canonized a hundred and fourteen years later.⁸ Virginia McKenna later proved that while some were sent in chains, others were born free.

Notwithstanding his lack of interest in his own heritage, there were some portents for Reggie from within the clann. Through the patronage of Daniel O’Connell, ‘The Liberator’, his uncle Joseph was placed in charge of the National Bank of Ireland; so pervasive was O’Connell’s patronage that his grandson Daniel married one of Sir Joseph’s daughters, Helen, and Reggie retained O’Connell cousins throughout his life. After serving as Chairman of the National Bank, and receiving a knighthood in 1867, Sir Joseph stood for Parliament, being returned in 1873 first for Youghal, defeating O’Connell’s opponent, the Home Ruler Isaac Butt, and then for South Monaghan from 1885 to 1892. As an MP, Sir Joseph was something of a nuisance to his parliamentary allies, the Liberal Party, and was a supporter of Butt’s eventual successor as leader of the Home Rule League, Charles Stewart Parnell. Sir Joseph made his special interest greater equality for Irish taxpayers, lobbying the Prime Minister William Gladstone to that end.¹ The tardiness with which Sir Joseph felt British governments treated the issue became a source of regular and indignant public statements and, towards the end of his career, he condemned Gladstone, the act of Union, and the general financial oppression of the Irish people.² Such straitened circumstances were not always apparent. At Ardoginna House, County Waterford, which had been part of the Plan of Campaign for rent reductions in the aftermath of the Irish Land League’s Boycott, Sir Joseph and Lady McKenna hosted great parties, with the avenue of fir trees lit by five hundred torches.³

FAMILY

A few months after the birth of Joseph, his first son, in 1819, Michael McKenna, Reggie’s grandfather, left for the United States with his family. En route, another son was born, and so was baptised William Columban, though his birthplace was registered as Pennsylvania. On their return to Dublin, the father continued his seed business, while, in 1838, Columban moved to England, where such London patronage as O’Connell could command provided for another member of the clan.⁴ Columban was appointed as a surveyor of taxes in 1845, and though the Board of Stamps and Taxes was one of the first departments to select by competitive examination, it still required nomination.¹ With the reinstatement of income tax in 1842, his position was a significant one, as there were only 140 surveyors in England and Wales. Promotion was steady: by 1845, Columban had qualified as assistant surveyor, and by 1848 became district surveyor in King’s Lynn, followed, in 1852, by Bristol, Stoke upon Trent, and, in 1859, Sheffield. Around 1850, he married Emma Hanby, from Broughton, Lancashire, a descendant of John Foxe, author of the sixteenth-century Book of Martyrs.²

William Columban had done well for himself, and the couple lived with Emma’s mother, Sarah, two servants and five children, at Carleton Place, Eccesall, Sheffield.³ But, for an apparently impulsive man, the pairing with bureaucracy was unlikely to last very long. While in Sheffield, in 1859, he discovered significant tax arrears in the accounts of the South Yorkshire Railway Company and, in attempting to pursue the monies, found arrayed against him local landowners and industrialists who had flourished through the laxity of the earlier surveying regime.⁴ The links between the interests of the Railway Company in Sheffield and the elected representatives of the area in Westminster were such that Columban was encouraged not to pursue the matter, which he summarily did by the principled act of resigning. The immediate effect was the jeopardising of his family’s station and standard of living.

When his first born had died in infancy, William Columban had taken ‘revenge on Omnipotence’ by renouncing Catholicism.⁵ On 10 May 1866, omnipotence struck again, and with greater effect. The family had moved to London, where William had found work on the stock exchange with the London clearing house Overend Gurney. The firm, described by Walter Bagehot as ‘the model instance of all evil in business’,⁶ collapsed, and left the family without savings or investments, and brought a dramatic change to its standard of living. Without a covenanted term at the Inland Revenue and a civil service pension, Columban was forced to forage for employment, but still managed to help raise a fighting fund for the impecunious radical atheist MP Charles Bradlaugh, and, on reading of the Turkish massacre of Bulgars in 1876, had to be restrained from leaving on a mission to the Balkans.⁷

The size of the family accentuated the effect of Columban’s misfortunes. There were nine children, of whom Reggie was the youngest; two died in infancy, and the survivors were Alice, Leopold, Mary, Theodore, Gerald, Ernest, and Reggie. The number and age range ensured that few of the children had anything more than their parentage in common, and with the exception of the two youngest, Reggie and Ernest, none stayed particularly close.¹ Their birthplaces marking their father’s peripatetic existence, Alice and Leopold were born in King’s Lynn, Theo was born in Bristol, Gerald, and Mary were born in Stoke, Ernest in Sheffield, with Reggie finally in London. Leopold became an accountant, and had four children, one of whom was Stephen, the future memoirist of Poldy’s youngest brother. Gerald, who was close to Reggie in childhood, died relatively young. By some recollections the brightest of all the children, Gerald had conducted a spectacularly successful career on the Stock Exchange, until his sudden death.

Much closer was brother Theo. Theodore became a solicitor in 1882, specialising in patents and trademarks. He set up his own practice three years later as McKenna and Co., which was based in London and went on to span three centuries, latterly as Cameron McKenna. Other than conspicuous professional success, the most obvious connection between Reggie and Theo was physical: despite the difference in age, they appeared to be identical twins. Such was their similarity that Reggie occasionally impersonated his brother on business during high summer when Theo was off on one of his long holidays. They had little else in common. Theo married twice, and he and his much younger second wife Ethel were noted ‘first nighters’ around town, their evenings beginning at Portland Place—subsequently Bryanston Square—and ending at their table at the Ivy. Ethel was the daughter of the eminent surgeon Morell Mackenzie, who, infamously, failed to operate on the throat cancer of the Kaiser’s father, Frederick III, in 1887,² which meant, among other things, that a twenty-seven year wait resulted in a ninety-nine day reign. Mackenzie responded to subsequent accusations of professional indiscretion by writing a book about the episode, for which he was censured by the Royal College of Surgeons. In the years before his political career would do so, Ethel helped introduce Reggie into the ambit of court politics and international affairs. Theo’s most striking achievement was fictional: as the inspiration for Cosmo Forsyte, in John Galsworthy’s saga. Another lurid achievement was quite real, and also made it into print. Dining with Theo at Bryanston Square one evening, the novelist and family friend Arnold Bennett noticed of his host that ‘one or two skins had burnt off. He could scarcely talk, or eat. His tongue shrivelled and hard. He was all black’.³ Theo had fallen asleep under his violet-ray lamp, could not leave his house for a month, and appeared...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Selective Family Trees
• Chronology
• Introduction
• 1 Beginnings, July 1863 to July 1895
• 2 Opposition Backbencher, August 1895 to December 1905
• 3 Financial Secretary to the Treasury; President of the Board of Education, December 1905 to April 1908
• 4 First Lord of the Admiralty, April 1908 to October 1911
• 5 Home Secretary, October 1911 to May 1915
• 6 Chancellor of the Exchequer, May 1915 to December 1916
• Bibliography
• Index