Chapter 4: Milner's Kindergarten, 1897-1910
The appointment as High Commissioner of South Africa was the turning point in Milner's life. It was obtained, apparently, through his membership in Rhodes's secret society, through the influence of Stead, Brett, and Rhodes. Stead, in his book on Rhodes's wills, claims the chief credit for the nomination, while Brett was with Milner at Windsor when he received the appointment and returned with him to London. Sir Harry Johnston, who had already been offered the appointment for himself by a Foreign Office official, felt that it was Rhodes's influence which gave it to Milner. In his autobiography he wrote: "At last the decision was made — Sir Alfred Milner. I suspect very much on the personal pleadings of Cecil Rhodes, who professed himself delighted with the choice.... The non-selection of myself for a work that would have greatly interested me, was a disappointment, and I felt it was due to Rhodes' enmity more than to any other cause."
As High Commissioner, Milner was subordinate to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, a post held at that time by Joseph Chamberlain, who was already acquainted with Milner. They had fought Home Rule together in the election of 1886 and had both been in Egypt in 1889. They already agreed on most of the important issues of the day, combining, like other members of the Milner Group, advocacy of social welfare and imperialism. Moreover, both were strong believers in union with Ireland and a new tariff policy based on imperial preference. When Chamberlain joined Lord Salisbury's government as Secretary of State for the Colonies (1895-1903), he was eager to accept the suggestion that Milner be sent to South Africa. As Colonial Secretary, Chamberlain did a number of things that won the complete support of Milner. Among these we might mention the new constitution for Jamaica (1899), the federation of the Malay States (1895), and the creation of the Commonwealth of Australia (1900). When Chamberlain resigned from the Colonial Office in 1903 on the issue of tariff reform, the post was offered by Balfour to Milner. The latter refused in order to complete the work he had started in South Africa. When he was ready to retire from his post, he recommended that his successor be either Alfred Lyttelton or Lord Selborne. The latter obtained the appointment and not only carried Milner's work to completion but did it with Milner's picked personnel. That personnel regarded Selborne as second leader to Milner in the Group. (1)
As High Commissioner, Milner built up a body of assistants known in history as "Milner's Kindergarten." The following list gives the chief members of the Kindergarten, their dates of birth and death (where possible), their undergraduate colleges (with dates), and the dates in which they were Fellows of All Souls.
Name / Dates / College / All Souls
Patrick Duncan (later Sir Patrick) / 1870-1946 / Balliol 1890-1894 / Never
Philip Kerr (later Lord Lothian) / 1882-1940 / New 1897-1901 / Never
Robert Henry Brand (later Lord Brand) / 1878-1963 / New 1897-1901 / 1901-
Lionel Curtis / 1872-1955 / New 1891-1905 / 1921-
Geoffrey Dawson (until 1917 Robinson) / 1874-1944 / Magdalen 1893-1897 / 1898-1905; 1915-1944
John Buchan (later Lord Tweedsmuir) / 1875-1940 / Brasenose 1895-1899 / Never
Dougal Orme Malcolm (later Sir Dougal) / 1877-1955 / New 1895-1899 / 1899-1955
William Lionel Hichens / 1874-1941 / New 1894-1898 / Never
Richard Feetham / 1874-1965 / New 1893-1898 / Never
John Dove / 1872-1934 / New 1891-1895 / Never
Basil Williams / 1867-1950 / New 1886-1891 / 1924-1925
Lord Basil Blackwood / 1870-1917 / Balliol 1891- / Never
Hugh A. Wyndham / 1877- / New 1896-1900 / Never
George V. Fiddes (later Sir George) / 1858-1925 / Brasenose 1880-1884 / Never
John Hanbury-Williams (later Sir John) / 1859-1946 / Wellington, N. Z. / Never
Main S. O. Walrond / 1870- / Balliol / Never
Fabian Ware (later Sir Fabian) / 1869-1949 / Univ. of Paris / Never
William Flavelle Monypenny / 1866-1912 / Balliol (1888-1890) / Never
To these eighteen names should be added five others who were present in South Africa between the Boer War and the creation of the Union and were members of the Milner Group but cannot be listed under the Kindergarten because they were not members of Milner's civil service. (2) These five are:
Name / Dates / College / All Souls
Leopold Amery / 1873-1955 / Balliol 1892-1896 / 1897-1911, 1938 -
Edward Grigg (later Lord Altrincham) / 1879-1955 / New 1898-1902 / Never
H. A. L. Fisher / 1865-1940 / New 1884-1888 / Never
Edward F. L. Wood (later Lord Irwin and Lord Halifax) / 1881-1959 / Christ Church 1899-1903 / 1903-1910
Basil K. Long / 1878-1944 / Brasenose 1897-1901 / Never
Of these twenty-three names, eleven were from New College. Seven were members of All Souls, six as Fellows. These six had held their fellowships by 1947 an aggregate of one hundred and sixty-nine years, or an average of over twenty-eight years each. Of the twenty-three, nine were in the group which founded, edited, and wrote The Round Table in the period after 1910, five were in close personal contact with Lloyd George (two in succession as private secretaries) in the period 1916-1922, and seven were in the group which controlled and edited The Times after 1912.
Eleven of these twenty-three men, plus others whom we have mentioned, formed the central core of the Milner Group as it has existed from 1910 to the present. These others will be discussed in their proper place. At this point we should take a rapid glance at the biographies of some of the others.
Two members of the Kindergarten, Patrick Duncan and Richard Feetham, stayed in South Africa after the achievement of the Union in 1910. Both remained important members of the Milner Group and, as a result of this membership, rose to high positions in their adopted country. Patrick Duncan had been Milner's assistant on the Board of Internal Revenue from 1894 to 1897 and was taken with him to South Africa as private secretary. He was Treasurer of the Transvaal in 1901, Colonial Secretary of the Transvaal in 1903-1906, and Acting Lieutenant Governor in 1906. He remained in South Africa as a lieutenant to Jan Smuts, becoming an advocate of the Supreme Court there, a member of the South African Parliament, Minister of Interior, Public Health, and Education (1921-1924), Minister of Mines (1933-1936), and finally Governor-General of South Africa (1936-1946). He frequently returned to England to confer with the Group (in September 1932, for example, at Lord Lothian's country house, Blickling).
Richard Feetham was made Deputy Town Clerk and later Town Clerk of Johannesburg (1902-1905). He was legal adviser to Lord Selborne, the High Commissioner, in 1907 and a member of the Legislative Council of the Transvaal later (1907-1910). He was chairman of the Committee on Decentralization of Powers in India in 1918-1919; a King's Counsel in Transvaal (1919-1923); a judge of the Supreme Court of South Africa (1923-1930); chairman of the Irish Boundary Commission (1924-1925); chairman of the Local Government Commission in Kenya Colony (of which Edward Grigg was Governor) in 1926; adviser to the Shanghai Municipal Council (1930-1931); chairman of the Transvaal Asiatic Land Tenure Commission (1930-1935); Vice-Chancellor of the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (1938); and has been a judge of the Supreme Court of South Africa since 1939. Most of these positions, as we shall see, came to him as a member of the Milner Group.
Hugh A. Wyndham also remained in South Africa after 1910 and was a member of the Union Parliament for ten years (1910-1920). He had previously been secretary to Milner. In spite of the prominence of his family and his own position as heir presumptive to the third Baron Leconfield, it is difficult to obtain any adequate information about him. His biography in Who's Who does not mention his experiences in South Africa or his other connections with the Milner Group. This is obviously the result of a deliberate policy, since editions of Who's Who of thirty-five years ago do mention the South African connection. Wyndham wrote Problems of Imperial Trusteeship (1933); Britain and the World; and the chapter on "The Formation of the Union of South Africa, 1901-1910" in volume VIII of the Cambridge History of the British Empire (1936). He was, like all the members of the Milner Group, a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, wrote many book reviews for its Journal, and at the outbreak of war in 1939 became the usual presiding officer at its meetings (in the absence of Lord Astor). When publication of the Journal was resumed after the war, he became chairman of its editorial board, a position he still holds. Married to Maude Lyttelton, daughter of Viscount Cobham, he is also a brother-in-law of Sir Ivor Maxse (the brother of Lady Milner) and a nephew of Lord Rosebery.
Dougal Malcolm (Sir Dougal since 1938), a grandson of Lord Charles Wellesley, joined the Colonial Office in 1900 and served there under Chamberlain and Alfred Lyttelton for several years. In 1905 he went to South Africa as private secretary to Lord Selborne and remained there until Union was achieved. He was secretary to Lord Grey, Governor-General of Canada, during the last year of his tenure (1910-1911); an official of the British Treasury for a year; and, in 1913, became a director of the British South Africa Company (president since 1938). He is also vice-president of the British North Borneo Company, of which his brother-in-law, General Sir Neill Malcolm, is president.(3) Sir Dougal wrote the biographies of Otto Beit, of Dr. Jameson, and of J. Rochford Maguire for the Dictionary of National Biography.
William Lionel Hichens (1874-1940), on graduating from New College, served briefly as a cyclist messenger in the Boer War and then joined the Egyptian Ministry of Finance (1900). After only nine months' service, he was shifted by Milner to South Africa to join the Kindergarten as Treasurer of Johannesburg. He at once went to England to float a loan, and on his return (in 1902) was made Colonial Treasurer of the Transvaal and Treasurer of the Inter-colonial Council. Later he added to his responsibilities the role of Acting Commissioner of Railways. In 1907 he went to India as a member of the Royal Commission on Decentralization, following this with a stint as chairman of the Board of Inquiry into Public Service in Southern Rhodesia (1909). In 1910 he went into private business, becoming chairman of the board of a great steel firm, Cammell Laird and Company, but continued as a member of the Milner Group. In 1915, Lloyd George sent Hichens and Brand to organize the munitions industry of Canada. They set up the Imperial Munitions Board of Canada, on which Joseph Flavelle (Sir Joseph after 1917) was made chairman, Charles B. Gordon (Sir Charles after 1917) vice-chairman, and Brand a member. In later years Hichens was a prominent businessman, one of the great steel masters of England, director of the Commonwealth Trust Company (which sent John Dove to India in 1918), of the London Northwestern Railway and its successor, the London, Midlands and Scottish. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust for over twenty years (1919-1940), which may help to explain the extraordinary generosity of the Carnegie Foundation toward the Royal Institute of International Affairs (of which Hichens was a member). He was an enthusiastic supporter of adult education programs and spent years of effort on Birkbeck College, the graduate evening school of the University of London. He was chairman of the board of governors of this institution from 1927 until his death, by a German bomb, in December of 1940. From 1929 onwards, like most of the inner circle of the Milner Group, he lived close to Oxford (at North Aston). He married Hermione Lyttelton, daughter of Sir Neville Lyttelton, niece of Viscount Cobham, and cousin of the present Oliver Lyttelton.
George Vandeleur Fiddes (Sir George after 1912) had been private secretary to the Earl of Onslow, father of Lady Halifax, before he was secretary to Milner in South Africa (1897-1900). Later he was political secretary to the Commander-in-Chief in South Africa (1900), secretary to the Transvaal administration (1900-1902), Assistant Under Secretary of State for the Colonies (1909-1916), and Permanent Under Secretary for the Colonies (1916-1921).
John Hanbury-Williams (Sir John after 1908) had been in the regular army for nineteen years, chiefly as aide to various colonial administrators, when he was assigned to Milner as military secretary in 1897. After three years of that, he went to London as secretary to the Secretary of State for War (St. John Brodrick, 1900-1903), and to Canada as secretary and military secretary to the Governor-General, Earl Grey (1904-1909). Then he was brigadier general in charge of administration in Scotland (1909-1914) and on the General Staff (1914), Chief of the British Military Mission to Russia (1914-1917), in charge of the British Prisoners of War Department at The Hague (1917-1918) and in Switzerland (1918), and ended his career in a blaze of glory as a major general, marshal of the diplomatic corps (1920-1934), and extra equerry to three Kings of England (1934-1946).
John Buchan was not a member of the inner core of the Milner Group, but was close to it and was rewarded in 1935 by being raised to a barony as Lord Tweedsmuir and sent to Canada as Governor-General. He is important because he is (with Lionel Curtis) one of the few members of the inner circles of the Milner Group who have written about it in published work. In his autobiography, Pilgrim's Way (Boston, 1940), he gives a brief outline of the personnel of the Kindergarten and their subsequent achievements, and a brilliant analysis of Milner himself. He wrote:
"He (Milner) had received — chiefly from Arnold Toynbee — an inspiration which centered all his interests on the service of the state. He had the instincts of a radical reformer joined to a close-textured intellect which reformers rarely possess. He had a vision of the Good Life spread in a wide commonalty; and when his imagination apprehended the Empire, his field of vision was marvelously enlarged. So at the outset of his career he dedicated himself to a cause, putting things like leisure, domestic happiness, and money-making behind him. In Bacon's phrase he espoused the State. On the intellectual side he found that which wholly satisfied him in the problems of administration, when he confronted them as Goschen's secretary, and in Egypt, and at Somerset House. He had a mind remarkable both for its scope and its mastery over details — the most powerful administrative intelligence, I think, which Britain has produced in our day. If I may compare him with others, he was as infallible as Cromer in detecting the center of gravity in a situation, as brilliant as Alfred Beit in bringing order out of tangled finances, and he had Curzon's power of keeping a big organization steadily at work. He was no fanatic — his intelligence was too supreme for that — but in the noblest sense of the word, he was an enthusiast. He narrowed his interests of set purpose, and this absorption meant a certain rigidity. He had cut himself off from some of the emollients of life. Consequently, the perfect administrator was a less perfect diplomatist. . . [Later, Buchan adds,] I was brought into close touch with a great character. Milner was the most selfless man I have ever known. He thought of his work and his cause, much of his colleagues, never of himself. He simply was not interested in what attracts common ambition. He could not be bribed, for there was nothing on the globe wherewith to bribe him; or deterred by personal criticism, for he cared not at all for fame; and it would have been as easy to bully the solar system, since he did not know the meaning of fear."
The effect Milner had on Buchan was shared by the other members of the Kindergarten and provided that spiritual bond which animated the Milner Group. This spirit, found in Toynbee, in Goschen, in Milner, and later in Lionel Curtis, was the motivating force of the Milner Group until after 1922. Indeed, much of what Buchan says here about Milner could be applied with slight change to Lionel Curtis, and Curtis, as we shall see, was the motivating force of the Milner Group from 1910 to 1922. After 1922, as the influence of Lord Lothian, Lord Astor, and Lord Brand increased and that of Milner declined, the spirit of the Group became somewhat tarnished but not completely lost.
Buchan went to Brasenose College, but, as he says himself, "I lived a good deal at Balliol and my closest friends were of that college." He mentions as his closest friends Hilaire Belloc, F. E. Smith (the future Lord Birkenhead), John Simon, Leo Amery, T. A. Nelson, Arthur Salter, Bron Lucas, Edward Wood (the future Lord Halifax), and Raymond Asquith. Of this list, five were future Fellows of All Souls, and four of these were important members of the Milner Group.
Buchan went to South Africa in 1901, on Milner's personal invitation, to be his private secretary, but stayed only two years. Placed in charge of resettlement of displaced Boers and agricultural reform (both close to Milner's heart), he left in 1903 to take an important position in the administration of Egypt. This appointment was mysteriously canceled after his return to England because, according to Buchan, he was too young for the task. It is more than likely that Milner, who had obtained the appointment for him, changed his mind because of Buchan's rapidly declining enthusiasm for imperial federation. This was a subject on which Milner and other members of his Group were adamant for many years. By 1915 most members of the Group began to believe that federation was impossible, and, as a compromise, took what we know now as the Commonwealth of Nations — that is, a group of nations joined together by common ideals and allegiances rather than by fixed political organization. Lionel Curtis remains to this day a fanatical believer in federation, and some of the decline in his influence after 1922 may be attributed to inability to obtain federation in the face of world — and above all Dominion — opposition. The present Commonwealth is in reality the compromises worked out when the details of the Milner Group clashed with the reality of political facts.
As a result of Buchan's failure to obtain the appointment of Egypt, he continued to practice law in London for three years, finally abandoning it to become a partner in the publishing firm of his old classmate Thomas A. Nelson (1906-1916). In 1907 he married Susan Grosvenor, whose family (Dukes of Westminister) was allied, as we have seen, to the Wyndhams, Cavendishes, Lytteltons, and Primroses (Earls of Rosebery and Lords Dalmeny). As a result of this family connection, Buchan wrote a memoir on Lord Rosebery for Proceedings of the British Academy in 1930 and a book on the Grosvenor twins, who were killed in the war.
During the war, Buchan was a correspondent for The Times, wrote Nelson's History of the Great War in twenty-four volumes (1915-1919), was the military intelligence in France (1916-1917), and finally was Director of Information for the War Office (1917-1918). During this period and later, he was a prolific writer of travel, historical, and adventure stories, becoming eventually, by such works as Greenmantle, The Three Hostages, and The Thirty-nine Steps, the most famous writer of adventure stories in Britain. His connection with South Africa gained him the post of official historian of the South African forces in France. He was a close friend of Lord Haldane and Lord Rosebery, both of whom can be regarded as members of the Milner Group. Of Haldane, Buchan wrote: "What chiefly attracted me to him was his loyalty to Milner. Milner thought him the ablest man in public life, abler even than Arthur Balfour, and alone of his former Liberal allies Haldane stood by him on every count." Haldane, with Rosebery, Asquith, and Edward Grey, had formed the Liberal League to support liberal imperialism, with which Milner was closely associated.
Buchan was representative of the Scottish universities in the House of Commons for eight years (1927-1935), Lord High Commissioner for the Church of Scotland in 1933-1934, president of the Scottish Historical Society (1929-1933), and Chancellor of Edinburgh University, before he obtained his last post, Governor-General of Canada (1935-1940).
Basil Williams graduated from New College in 1891 and almost immediately became clerk in the House of Commons, holding this post for nine years before he went soldiering in the Boer War. He became Secretary of the Transvaal Education Department, wrote Volume IV of The Times History of the South African War, and was The Times special correspondent at the South African Convention of 1908-1919, which made the Union. A major on the General Staff in 1918-1909, he was later Ford Lecturer at Oxford (in 1921), Professor of History at McGill (1921-1925), and Professor of History at Edinburgh (1925-1937). He wrote the very revealing article on Milner in the Dictionary of National Biography and numerous other works, including Cecil Rhodes (1921), The British Empire (for the Home University Library, 1928), Volume XI of the Oxford History of England (The Whig Supremacy, 1714-1760), Botha, Smuts, and South Africa (1946), and edited The Makers of the Nineteenth Century (1915-1928).
Lord Basil Blackwood, son and heir of Lord Dufferin, went to Balliol in 1891 but never graduated, being an adventurer of the first order. Taken to South Africa by Milner, he was employed in the Judge Advocate's Department for a year (1900-1901), then was Assistant Colonial Secretary of Orange River Colony for six years (1901-1907). He became Colonial Secretary of Barbados in 1907 and Assistant Secretary of the Land Development Commission in England in 1910. He would have been an important member of the Milner Group but was killed in France in 1917.
Of the major members of the Kindergarten, Robert H. Brand (since 1946 Baron Brand) stands close to the top. His father was second Viscount Brand, twenty-fourth Baron Dacre (created 1307), son of a Speaker of the House of Commons (1872-1884), while his mother was Susan Cavendish, daughter of Lord George Cavendish, and niece of the seventh Duke of Devonshire. His father, as Governor of New South Wales in 1895-1899, was one of the original instigators of the federation of the Australian Colonies, which came into effect in 1900. His older brother, the third Viscount Hampden, was a lord-in-waiting to the King (1924-1936), while another brother, Admiral Sir Hubert Brand, was extra equerry to the King (1922) and principal naval aide to the King (1931-1932). His nephew, Freeman Freeman-Thomas (Baron Willingdon after 1910; Marquess of Willingdon after 1936), in 1892 married the daughter of Lord Brassey, and became Governor-General of Canada (1926-1931) and Viceroy of India (1931-1936).
Brand, who has been a Fellow of All Souls since 1901, is chiefly responsible for the Astor influence in the Milner Group. He went to South Africa in 1902 and was made secretary of the Inter-colonial Council of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony and secretary of the Railway Committee of the Central South African Railways, with Philip Kerr (the future Lord Lothian) as assistant secretary on both organizations. He was secretary to the Transvaal Delegation at the South African National Convention (1908-1909) and at once wrote a deliberately naive work published by Oxford University Press in 1909 with the title The Union of South Africa. In this work there is no mention of the Kindergarten, and where it is necessary to speak of its work, this is done as if it were performed by persons unknown to the writer. He says, for example (page 40): "The Transvaal Delegation alone was assisted throughout the convention by a staff of legal advisers and experts," and thus dismisses the Kindergarten's essential work. His own work is passed over in silence, and at the front of the volume is placed a quotation in Dutch from President Sir John Brand of the Orange River Colony, possibly to mislead the ordinary reader into believing that there was a family connection between the South African politician and the author of the book.
Brand's role in the Milner Group after 1910 is too great to be covered adequately here. Suffice it to say that he was regarded as the economist of the Round Table Group and became a partner and managing director of Lazard Brothers and Company, a director of Lloyd's Bank, and a director of The Times, retiring from these positions in 1944 and 1945. During the First World War, he was a member of the Imperial Munitions Board of Canada (1915-1918) and deputy chairman of the British Mission in Washington (1917-1918). While in Washington, he married Nancy Astor's sister, daughter of Chiswell Dabney Langhorne of Virginia. It was this connection which gave him his entree to Cliveden in the period when that name became notorious.
Brand was one of the important figures in international finance in the period after 1918. At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 he was financial adviser to Lord Robert Cecil, chairman of the Supreme Economic Council. He was later vice-president of the Brussels Conference (1920) and financial representative for South Africa at the Genoa Conference (1922). He was a member of the committee of experts on stabilization of the German mark in 1923, the committee which paved the way for the Dawes Plan. After an extended period in private business, he was head of the British Food Mission to Washington (1941-1944), chairman of the British Supply Council in North America (1942-1945, 1946), and His Majesty's Treasury Representative in Washington (1944-1946). In this last capacity he had much to do with negotiating the enormous American loan to Britain for postwar reconstruction. During the years 1942-1944, Brand put in his own place as managing director of Lazard Brothers his nephew, Thomas Henry Brand, son of Viscount Hampden, and, when Brand left Lazard in 1944, he brought the same nephew to Washington as chief executive officer on the British side of the Combined Production and Resources Board, and later (1945) as chairman of the official Committee on Supplies for Liberated Areas. In all of his activities Brand has remained one of the most central figures in the core of the Milner Group.
Just as important as Brand was his intimate friend Philip Kerr (later Lord Lothian), whom we have already seen as Brand's assistant in South Africa. Kerr, grandson, through his mother, of the fourteenth Duke of-Norfolk, originally went to South Africa as private secretary to a friend of his father's, Sir Arthur Lawley, Lieutenant Governor of the Transvaal (1902). Kerr was Brand's assistant on the Inter-colonial Council and on the Committee of the Central South African Railways (1905-1908). Later, as secretary to the Transvaal Indigency Commission (1907-1908), he wrote a report on the position of poor white laborers in a colored country which was so valuable that it was republished by the Union government twenty years later.
From 1908 on, Kerr was, as we shall see, one of the chief organizers of publicity in favor of the South African Union. He was secretary to the Round Table Group in London and editor of The Round Table from 1910 to 1916, leaving the post to become secretary to Lloyd George (1916-1922), manager of the Daily Chronicle (1921), and secretary to the Rhodes Trust (1925-1939). He obtained several governmental offices after the death of his cousin, the tenth Marquess of Lothian, in 1930, gave him a title, 28,000 acres of land, and a seat in the House of Lords. He was Chancellor to the Duchy of Lancaster (1931), Parliamentary Under Secretary to the India Office (1931-1932), a member of the first and second Round Table Conferences on India, and chairman of the Indian Franchise Committee, before he finished his life as Ambassador to the United States (1939-1940). In 1923 he and Lionel Curtis published a book called The Prevention of War, consisting of lectures which they had previously given at Williams College. After his death, Curtis edited a collection of American Speeches of Lord Lothian, with an introduction by Lord Halifax and a biographical sketch by Edward Grigg (reprinted from The Round Table). This was published, as might be expected, by Chatham House.
On his death, Lord Lothian left his ancestral estate, Newbattle Abbey in Midlothian, as a residential college for adult education in Scotland, and left his Tudor country house, Blickling (frequent assembly place of the Milner Group), as a national monument. He never married and gave up his Roman Catholic faith for Christian Science in the course of an almost fatal illness in 1914.
Geoffrey Dawson (1874-1944), who changed his name from Robinson in 1917, was also one of the innermost members of the Milner Group. A member of the Colonial Office under Chamberlain (1898-1901), he became for five years private secretary to Milner in South Africa (1901-1905) and then was made South African correspondent of The Times and editor of the Johannesburg Star in the critical period of the formation of the Union (1905-1910). Always a member of the Round Table Group and the Milner Group, Dawson added to these the offices of editor of The Times (1912-1919, 1922-1941) and secretary to the Rhodes Trustees (1921-1922). During the period in which Dawson was not editor of The Times, he was well provided for by the Milner Group, being made estates bursar of All Souls, a director of Consolidated Gold Fields, Ltd., and of Trust Houses, Ltd. (both Rhodes concerns), as well as being secretary to the Rhodes Trust. He married in 1919 the daughter of Sir Arthur Lawley (later sixth Baron Wenlock), Kerr's old chief in the Transvaal. Sir Arthur, who had started his career as private secretary to his uncle, the Duke of Westminster, in 1892, ended it as Governor of Madras (1906-1911).
Dawson was probably as close to Milner personally as any member of the Kindergarten, although Amery must be regarded as Milner's political heir. The Times' obituary of Dawson says: "To none was Milner's heart more wholly given than to Dawson; the sympathy between the older and the younger man was almost that of father and son, and it lasted unchanged until Milner's death." As editor of The Times, Dawson was one of the most influential figures in England. He used that influence in the directions decided by the Group. This was to be seen, in later years, in the tremendous role which he played in the affairs of India and, above all, in the appeasement policy. In 1929 he visited his "long-standing friend" Lord Halifax, then Viceroy of India, and subsequently wrote most of The Times editorials on India in the fight which preceded the Government of India Act of 1935. In 1937 he wrote The Times articles which inaugurated the last stage of appeasement, and personally guided The Times support of that policy. After his retirement from the chair of editor of The Times in 1941, he served for the last three years of his life as editor of The Round Table.
William Flavelle Monypenny was assistant editor of The Times (1894-1899) before he went to South Africa to become editor of the Johannesburg Star. He left this position at the outbreak of the Boer War, since the publication of a pro-British paper was not possible during the hostilities. After a short period as a lieutenant in the Imperial Light Horse (1899-1900), Monypenny was made Director of Civil Supplies under Milner (1900-1902) and then resumed his post as editor of the Star. In 1903 he resigned in protest against Milner's policy of importing Chinese laborers and walked across Africa from the Cape to Egypt. Resuming his position on The Times (1903-1908), he became a director of the firm for the last four years of his life (1908-1912). About this time Lord Rowton, who had been Disraeli's private secretary, left his papers to The Times to be used for a Life of Disraeli. The task was begun by Monypenny, but he finished only the first two volumes of the six-volume work. The last four volumes were written by George E. Buckle, editor of The Times (1884-1912), Fellow of All Souls (1877-1885), and a contemporary of Milner's at Oxford (1872-1876).
It is perhaps worth noting that when Monypenny resigned from the Johannesburg Star he was replaced as editor by William Basil Worsfold, who held the post for two years, being replaced, as we have said, by Geoffrey Dawson. In the years 1906-1913 Worsfold published a three-volume study of Milner's accomplishments in South Africa. This contains the most valuable account in existence of the work of the Kindergarten. (4)
Fabian Ware (Sir Fabian since 1922), who had been a reporter on The Morning Post (1899-1901), was Assistant Director and Director of Education in the Transvaal (1901-1905) and Director of Education in the Orange River Colony (1903), as well as a member of the Transvaal Legislative Council (1903-1905). He was editor of The Morning Post in 1905-1911 and then became special commissioner to the board of the Rio Tinto Company, on which Milner was director. During the First World War he rose to the rank of major general. Since then he has been permanent vice-chairman of the Imperial War Graves Commission. A book which he wrote in 1937, The Immortal Heritage, The Work of the Imperial War Graves Commission, was made the occasion of an article on this subject in The Round Table. Sir Fabian was a member of the Imperial Committee on Economic Consultation and Cooperation in 1933 and was a director-general in the War Office in 1939-1944.
Main Swete Osmond Walrond was in the Ministry of Finance in Egypt (1894-1897) before he became Milner's private secretary for the whole period of his High Commissionership (1897-1905). He was then appointed District Commissioner in Cyprus but did not take the post. In 1917-1919 he was in the Arab Bureau in Cairo under the High Commissioner and acted as an unofficial, but important, adviser to Milner's mission to Egypt in 1919-1921. This mission led to Egyptian independence from Britain.
Lionel Curtis is one of the most important members of the Milner Group, or, as a member of the Group expressed it to me, he is the fans et origo. It may sound extravagant as a statement, but a powerful defense could be made of the claim that what Curtis thinks should be done to the British Empire is what happens a generation later. I shall give here only two recent examples of this. In 1911 Curtis decided that the name of His Majesty's Dominions must be changed from "British Empire" to "Commonwealth of Nations." This was done officially in 1948. Again, about 1911 Curtis decided that India must be given complete self-government as rapidly as conditions permitted. This was carried out in 1947. As we shall see, these are not merely coincidental events, for Curtis, working behind the scenes, has been one of the chief architects of the present Commonwealth. It is not easy to discern the places where he has passed, and no adequate biographical sketch can be put on paper here. Indeed, much of the rest of this volume will be a contribution to the biography of Lionel Curtis. Burning with an unquenchable ardor, which some might call fanatical, he has devoted his life to his dominant idea, that the finer things of life — liberty, democracy, toleration, etc. — could be preserved only within an integrated world political system, and that this political system could be constructed about Great Britain, but only if Britain adopted toward her Dominions, her colonies, and the rest of the world a policy of generosity, of trust, and of developing freedom. Curtis was both a fanatic and an idealist. But he was not merely "a man in a hurry." He had a fairly clear picture of what he wanted. He did not believe that complete and immediate freedom and democracy could be given to the various parts of the imperial system, but felt that they could only be extended to these parts in accordance with their ability to develop to a level where they were capable of exercising such privileges. When that level was achieved and those privileges were extended, he felt that they would not be used to disrupt the integrated world system of which he dreamed, but to integrate it more fully and in a sounder fashion — a fashion based on common outlook and common patterns of thought rather than on the dangerous unity of political subjection, censorship, or any kind of duress. To Curtis, as to H. G. Wells, man's fate depended on a race between education and disaster. This was similar to the feeling which animated Rhodes when he established the Rhodes Scholarships, although Curtis has a much broader and less nationalistic point of view than Rhodes. Moreover, Curtis believed that people could be educated for freedom and responsibility by giving them always a little more freedom, a little more democracy, and a little more responsibility than they were quite ready to handle. This is a basically Christian attitude — the belief that if men are trusted they will prove trustworthy — but it was an attitude on which Curtis was prepared to risk the existence of the British Empire. It is not yet clear whether Curtis is the creator of the Commonwealth of Nations or merely the destroyer of the British Empire. The answer will be found in the behavior of India in the next few years. The Milner Group knew this. That is why India, since 1913, has been the chief object of their attentions.
These ideas of Curtis are clearly stated in his numerous published works. The following quotations are taken from The Problem of the Commonwealth drawn up by the Round Table Group and published under Curtis's name in 1916:
"Responsible government can only be realized for any body of citizens in so far as they are fit for the exercise of political power. In the Dependencies the great majority of the citizens are not as yet capable of governing themselves and for them the path to freedom is primarily a problem of education.... The Commonwealth is a typical section of human society including every race and level of civilization organized in one state. In this world commonwealth the function of government is reserved to the European minority, for the unanswerable reason that for the present this portion of its citizens is alone capable of the task — civilized states are obliged to assume control of backward communities to protect them from exploitation by private adventurers from Europe.... The Commonwealth cannot, like despotisms, rest content with establishing order within and between the communities it includes. It must by its nature prepare these communities first to maintain order within themselves. The rule of law must be rooted in the habits and wills of the peoples themselves.... The peoples of India and Egypt, no less than those of the British Isles and Dominions, must be gradually schooled to the management of their national affairs.... It is not enough that free communities should submit their relations to the rule of law. Until all those people control that law the principle by which the commonwealth exists is unfulfilled. The task of preparing for freedom the races which cannot as yet govern themselves is the supreme duty of those races who can. It is the spiritual end for which the Commonwealth exists, and material order is nothing except a means to it.... In India the rule of law is firmly established. Its maintenance is a trust which rests on the government of the Commonwealth until such time as there are Indians enough able to discharge it. India may contain leaders qualified not only to make but also to administer laws, but she will not be ripe for self-government until she contains an electorate qualified to recognize those leaders and place them in office.... For England the change is indeed a great one. Can she face it? Can she bear to lose her life, as she knows it, to find it in a Commonwealth, wide as the world itself, a life greater and nobler than before? Will she fail at this second and last crisis of her fate, as she failed at the first, like Athens and Prussia, forsaking freedom for power, thinking the shadow more real than the light, and esteeming the muckrake more than the crown?"
Four years later, in 1920, Curtis wrote: "The whole effect of the war has been to bring movements long gathering to a sudden head . . . companionship in arms has fanned . . . long smouldering resentment against the prescription that Europeans are destined to dominate the rest of the world. In every part of Asia and Africa it is bursting into flames.... Personally, I regard this challenge to the long unquestioned claim of the white man to dominate the world as inevitable and wholesome especially to ourselves." (5)
Unfortunately for the world, Curtis, and the Milner Group generally, had one grave weakness that may prove fatal. Skilled as they were in political and personal relations, endowed with fortune, education, and family connections, they were all fantastically ignorant of economics — even those, like Brand or Hichens, who were regarded within the Group as its experts on this subject. Brand was a financier, while Hichens was a businessman — in both cases occupations that guarantee nothing in the way of economic knowledge or understanding.
Curtis was registered as an undergraduate at New College for fourteen years (1891-1905) because he was too busy to take time to get his degree. This is undoubtedly also the reason he was admitted to All Souls so belatedly, since an ordinary fellowship requires as a qualification the possession either of a university prize or of a first-class honours degree. By the time Curtis took his degree he had fought in the Boer War, been Town Clerk of Johannesburg, and been assistant secretary for local government in the Transvaal. In 1906 he resigned his official positions to organize "Closer Union Groups" agitating for a federation of South Africa. When this work was well started, he became a member of the Transvaal Legislative Council and wrote the Transvaal draft of a projected constitution for such a federation. In 1910-1912, and at various times subsequently, he traveled about the world, organizing Round Table Groups in the Dominions and India. In 1912 he was chosen Beit Lecturer in Colonial History at Oxford, but gave it up in 1913 to turn his attention for almost six years to the preparatory work for the Government of India Act of 1919. He was secretary to the Irish Conference of 1921 (arranged by General Smuts) and was adviser on Irish affairs to the Colonial Office for the next three years. In 1919 he was one of the chief — if not the chief, — founders of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and during the 1920s divided his attention between this and the League of Nations — in neither case, however, in a fashion to attract public attention. Undoubtedly his influence within the Milner Group declined after 1922, the preponderance falling into the hands of Lothian, Brand, and Dawson. The failure to achieve federation within the Empire was undoubtedly a blow to his personal feeling and possibly to his prestige within the Group. Nonetheless, his influence remained great, and still is. In the 1920s he moved to Kidlington, near Oxford, and thus was available for the Group conferences held at All Souls. His chief published works include The Problem of the Commonwealth (1915), The Commonwealth of Nations (1916), Dyarchy (1920), The Prevention of War (1924), the Capital Question of China (1932), The Commonwealth of God (1932-1938), and The Protectorates of South Africa (1935).
John Dove (1872-1934) was sent to Milner in 1903 by Sir William Anson, Warden of All Souls. He was assistant Town Clerk and later Clerk of Johannesburg (1903-1907) and then chairman of the Transvaal Land Settlement Board (1907-1909). After a trip to Australia and India with Lionel Curtis, for the purpose of organizing Round Table Groups, he returned to London in 1911 and lived with Brand and Kerr in Cumberland Mansions. He went to South Africa with Earl Grey in 1912 to unveil the Rhodes Memorial, and served in the First World War with military intelligence in France. In 1918 he became a kind of traveling representative of financial houses, probably as a result of his relationship with Brand. He began this with an extended trip to India for the Commonwealth Trust Company in 1918 and in the next fifteen years made almost annual trips to Europe. Editor of The Round Table from 1921 to his death in 1934, he displayed an idealistic streak similar to that found in Curtis but without the same driving spirit behind it. After his death, Brand published a volume of his letters (1938). These are chiefly descriptive of foreign scenes, the majority written to Brand himself.