It is generally believed, and stated as a fact by many writers, that Milner hoped for some new political appointment after his return from Africa and was deprived of this by the election of 1906, which swept the Conservatives from office and brought in the Liberals. It is perfectly true that Milner was out of political life for ten years, but there is, so far as I know, no evidence that this was contrary to his own wish. In his farewell speech of March 1905, delivered long before the Liberal victory at the polls, Milner stated in reference "to the great idea of Imperial Unity": "I shall always be steadfast in that faith, though I should prefer to work quietly and in the background, in the formation of opinion rather than in the exercise of power." This is exactly what Milner did. Even after he returned to positions of power in 1915-1921, he worked as quietly as possible and attracted public attention at an absolute minimum. (1)
Milner had nothing to gain from public office after 1905, until the great crisis of 1915- 1918 made it imperative for all able men to take a hand in active affairs. If he wanted to speak his own mind, he always had his seat in the House of Lords, and speaking engagements elsewhere were easy — indeed, too easy — to get. In South Africa his union program after 1905 was going forward at a rate that exceeded his most optimistic hopes. And nowhere else did it seem, in 1905, that he could, in actual administration, accomplish more than he could in quietly building up a combination propaganda and patronage machine at home. This machine was constructed about Rhodes and his associates, New College, and All Souls.
Milner was not of any political party himself and regarded party politics with disgust long before 1905. As his friend Edmund Garrett wrote in 1905: "Rhodes and Milner both number themselves of that great unformed party which is neither the ins nor the outs, which touches here the foreign politics of the one, here the home politics of the other; a party to which Imperialism and Carlyle's Condition of the People Question are one and the same business of fitly rearing, housing, distributing, coordinating, and training for war and peace the people of this commonwealth; a party which seems to have no name, no official leader, no paper even, but which I believe, when it comes by a soul and a voice, will prove to include a majority of the British in Britain and a still greater majority of the British overseas." (2) There can be no doubt that these were Milner's sentiments. He hoped to give that unformed party "a soul and a voice," and he intended to do this apart from party politics. When he was offered the position of president of the imperial federalist organization he refused it, but wrote to the secretary, Mr. F. H. Congdon, as follows:
"Personally I have no political interest worth mentioning, except the maintenance of the Imperial connection, and I look upon the future with alarm. The party system at home and in the Colonies seems to me to work for the severance of ties, and that contrary to the desire of our people on both sides. It is a melancholy instance of the manner in which bad political arrangements, lauded to the skies from year s end to year's end as the best in the world, may not only injure the interests, but actually frustrate the desires of the people. I can see no remedy or protection, under the present circumstances, except a powerful body of men — and it would have to be very powerful — determined at all times and under all circumstances to vote and work, regardless of every other circumstance, against the man or party who played fast and loose with the cause of National Unity. You can be sure that for my own part I shall always do that.... " (3)
Milner, in his distaste for party politics and for the parliamentary system, and in his emphasis on administration for social welfare, national unity, and imperial federation, was an early example of what James Burnham has called the "managerial revolution" — that is, the growth of a group of managers, behind the scenes and beyond the control of public opinion, who seek efficiently to obtain what they regard as good for the people. To a considerable extent this point of view became part of the ideology of the Milner Group, although not of its most articulate members, like Lionel Curtis, who continued to regard democracy as a good in itself.
Milner's own antipathy to democracy as practiced in the existing party and parliamentary system is obvious. Writing to his old friend Sir Clinton Dawkins, who had been, with Milner, a member of the Toynbee group in 1879-1884, he said in 1902: "Two things constantly strike me. One is the soundness of the British nation as a whole, contrasted with the rottenness of party politics." About the same time he wrote to another old Balliol associate, George Parkin: "I am strongly impressed by two things: one that the heart of the nation is sound, — and secondly that our constitution and methods are antiquated and bad, and the real sound feeling of the nation does not get a chance of making itself effective." Two years later he wrote to a friend of Rhodes, Sir Lewis Michell: "Representative government has its merits, no doubt, but the influence of representative assemblies, organized on the party system, upon administration — 'government' in the true sense of the word — is almost uniformly bad. "(4)
With sentiments such as these, Milner laid down the duties of public office with relief and devoted himself, not to private affairs, but to the secret public matters associated with his "Association of Helpers." To support himself during this period, Milner acted as confidential adviser to certain international financiers in London's financial district. His entree to this lucrative occupation may have been obtained through Lord Esher, who had just retired from a similar well-remunerated collaboration with Sir Ernest Cassel.
Milner's most important work in this period was concerned with the administration of the Rhodes Trust and the contacts with Oxford University which arose out of this and from his own position as a Fellow of New College.
The Rhodes Trust was already in operation when Milner returned from Africa in 1905, with the actual management of the scholarships in the hands of George Parkin, who had been brought from his position as Principal of Upper Canada College by Milner. He held the post for eighteen years (1902-1920). The year following his appointment, an Oxford secretary to the trustees was appointed to handle the local work during Parkin's extended absences. This appointment went to Francis Wylie (Sir Francis since 1929), Fellow and tutor of Brasenose, who was named by the influence of Lord Rosebery, whose sons he had tutored. (5) The real control of the trust has rested with the Milner Group from 1902 to the present. Milner was the only really active trustee and he controlled the bureaucracy which handled the trust. As secretary to the trustees before 1929, we find, for example, George Parkin (1902-1920), Geoffrey Dawson (1921-1922), Edward Grigg (1922-1925), and Lord Lothian (1925-1940) — all of them clearly Milner's nominees. On the Board of Trustees itself, in the same period, we find Lord Rosebery, Lord Milner, Lord Grey, Dr. Jameson, Alfred Beit, Lewis Michell, B. F. Hawksley, Otto Beit, Rudyard Kipling, Leopold Amery, Stanley Baldwin, Geoffrey Dawson, H. A. L. Fisher, Sothern Holland, and Sir Edward Peacock. Peacock had been teacher of English and housemaster at Upper Canada College during the seven years in which Parkin was principal of that institution (1895-1902) and became an international financier as soon as Parkin became secretary of the Rhodes Trust. Apparently he did not represent the Rhodes Trust but rather the interests of that powerful and enigmatic figure Edward Rogers Wood of Toronto. Wood and Peacock were very close to the Canadian branch of the Milner Group, that is to say, to A. J. Glazebrook, Parkin, and the Massey family, but it is not clear that either represented the interests of the Milner Group. Peacock was associated at first with the Dominion Securities Corporation of London (1902-1915) and later with Baring Brothers as a specialist in utility enterprises in Mexico, Spain, and Brazil (1915-1924). He was made Receiver-General of the Duchy of Cornwall in 1929 and was knighted in 1934. He was a director of the Bank of England from 1921-1946, managing director of Baring Brothers from 1926, a director of Vickers-Armstrong from 1929, and in addition a director of many world-famous corporations, such as the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Hudson Bay Company, and the Sun Life Assurance Society. He was an expert at the Genoa Conference in 1922 and acted as the British Treasury's representative in Washington during the Second World War.
If we look at the list of Rhodes Trustees, we see that the Milner Group always had complete control. Omitting the five original trustees, we see that five of the new additions were from the Milner Group, three were from the Rhodes clique, and three represented the outside world. In the 1930s the Board was stabilized for a long period as Amery, Baldwin, Dawson, Fisher, Holland, and Peacock, with Lothian as secretary. Six of these seven were of the Milner Group, four from the inner core.
A somewhat similar situation existed in respect to the Beit Railway Fund. Although of German birth, Alfred Beit became a British subject and embraced completely the ideas on the future role of the British Empire shared by Rhodes and Milner. An intimate friend of these and of Lord Rosebery, he was especially concerned with the necessity to link the British possessions in Africa together by improved transportation (including the Cape to Cairo Railway). Accordingly, he left £1,200,000 as the Beit Railway Trust, to be used for transportation and other improvements in Africa. The year before his death (1906), he was persuaded by the Milner Group to establish a Beit Professorship and a Beit Lecturership in Colonial History at Oxford. The money provided yielded an income far in excess of the needs of these two chairs, and the surplus has been used for other "imperialist" purposes. In addition, Beit gave money to the Bodleian Library at Oxford for books on colonial history. In 1929, when Rhodes House was opened, these and other books on the subject were moved from the Bodleian to Rhodes House, and the Beit Professor was given an office and lecture hall in Rhodes House. There have been only two incumbents of the Beit Professorship since 1905: Hugh Edward Egerton in 1905- 1920, and Reginald (Sir Reginald since 1944) Coupland since 1920. Egerton, a member of the Cecil Bloc and the Round Table Group, was a contemporary of Milner's at Oxford whose father was a member of the House of Commons and Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs. He was originally private secretary to his cousin Edward Stanhope, Colonial Secretary and Secretary of War in Lord Salisbury's first government. In 1886, Egerton became a member of the managing committee of the newly created Emigrants Information Office. He held this job for twenty years, during which time he came into the sphere of the Milner Group, partly because of the efforts of South Africa, and especially the British South Africa Company, to encourage emigration to their territories, but also because of his Short History of British Colonial Policy, published in 1897. On the basis of this contact and this book, he was given the new Beit Chair in 1905 and with it a fellowship at All Souls. In his professional work he constantly supported the aims of the Milner Group, including the publication of Federations and Unions within the British Empire (1911) and British Colonial Policy in the Twentieth Century (1922). His book Canadian Constitutional Development, along with Sir Charles Lucas's edition of Lord Durham's reports, was the chief source of information for the process by which Canada was federated used by the Milner Group. He wrote the biography of Joseph Chamberlain in the Dictionary of National Biography, while his own biography in the same collection was written by Reginald Coupland. He remained a Fellow of All Souls and a member of the Milner Group until his death in 1927, although he yielded his academic post to Reginald Coupland in 1920. Coupland, who was a member of the Milner Group from his undergraduate days at New College (1903-1907), and who became one of the inner circle of the Milner Group as early as 1914, will be discussed later. He has been, since 1917, one of the most important persons in Britain in the formation of British imperial policy.
The Beit Railway Trust and the Beit chairs at Oxford have been controlled by the Milner Group from the beginning, through the board of trustees of the former and through the board of electors of the latter. Both of these have interlocking membership with the Rhodes Trust and the College of All Souls. For example, the board of electors of the Beit chair in 1910 consisted of the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, the Regius Professor of Modern History, the Chichele Professor of Modern History, the Secretary of State for Colonies, Viscount Milner, H. A. L. Fisher, and Leopold Amery. By controlling All Souls and the two professorships (both ex-officio fellowships of All Souls), the Milner Group could control five out of seven electors to the Beit professorship. In recent years the board of electors has consistently had a majority of members of All Souls and/or the Milner Group. In 1940, for example, the board had, besides three ax-officio members, two members of All Souls, a Rhodes Trustee, and H. A. L. Fisher.
The Beit Lectureship in Colonial History was similarly controlled. In 1910 its board of electors had seven members, four ex-officio (The Vice-Chancellor, the Regius Professor of History, the Chichele Professor of History, the Beit Professor) and three others (A. L. Smith, H, A. L. Fisher, and Leopold Amery). In 1930 the board consisted of the Vice- Chancellor, the Beit Professor, H. A. L. Fisher, F. M. Powicke, and three fellows of All Souls. As a result, the lectureship has generally been held by persons close to the Milner Group, as can be seen from the following list of incumbents:
W. L. Grant, 1906-1910
J. Munro, 1910-1912
L. Curtis, 1912-1913
R. Coupland, 1913-1918
E. M. Wrong, 1919-1924
K. N. Bell, 1924-1927
W. P. Morrell, 1927-1930
V. T. Harlow, 1930-1935
K. C. Wheare, 1935-1940
Without attempting to identify all of these completely, it should be pointed out that four were Fellows of All Souls, while, of the others, one was the son-in-law of George Parkin, another was the son-in-law of A. L. Smith, and a third was librarian of Rhodes House and later acting editor of The Round Table.
During this period after 1905, the Milner Group was steadily strengthening its relationships with New College, All Souls, and to some extent with Balliol. Through Fisher and Milner there came into the Group two tutors and a scholar of New College. These were Alfred Zimmern, Robert S. Rait (1874-1936), and Reginald Coupland.
Alfred Zimmern (Sir Alfred since 1936) was an undergraduate at New College with Kerr, Grigg, Brand, Curtis, Malcolm, and Waldorf Astor (later Lord Astor) in 1898-1902. As lecturer, fellow, and tutor there in the period 1903-1909, he taught a number of future members of the Milner Group, of whom the chief was Reginald Coupland. His teaching and his book The Greek Commonwealth (1911) had a profound effect on the thinking of the inner circle of the Milner Group, as can be seen, for example, in the writings of Lionel Curtis. In the period up to 1921 he was close to this inner core and in fact can be considered as a member of it. After 1921 he disagreed with the policy of the inner core toward the League of Nations and Germany, since the core wanted to weaken the one and strengthen the other, an opinion exactly opposite to that of Zimmern. He remained, however, a member of the Group and was, indeed, its most able member and one of its most courageous members. Since his activities will be mentioned frequently in the course of this study, we need do no more than point out his various positions here. He was a staff inspector of the Board of Education in 1912-1915; the chief assistant to Lord Robert Cecil in the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office in 1918-1919; Wilson Professor of International Politics at University College of Wales, Abersytwyth, in 1919-1921; Professor of Political Science at Cornell in 1922-1923; deputy director and chief administrator of the League of Nations Institute of Intellectual Cooperation in 1926- 1930; Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford in 1930-1944; deputy director of the Research Department of the Foreign Office in 1943-1945; adviser to the Ministry of Education in 1945; director of the Geneva School of International Studies in 1925-1939; adviser and chief organizer of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization in 1946; and Visiting Professor at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, from 1947.
Another Fellow of New College who joined the Milner Group was R. S. Rait (1874- 1936). Of much less significance than Zimmern, he worked with the Group in the Trade Intelligence Department of the War Office in 1915-1918. He is the chief reason why the Milner Group, especially in the writings of Lionel Curtis, emphasized the union with Scotland as a model for the treatment of Ireland. A close friend of A. V. Dicey, Fellow of All Souls, he wrote with him Thoughts on the Union between England and Scotland (1920), and, with C. H. Firth, another Fellow of All Souls, he wrote Acts and Ordonnances of the Interregnum, 1642-1660 (1911). He left New College in 1913 to become Professor of Scottish History at the University of Glasgow (1913-1929) and five years later was made Royal Historiographer of Scotland (1919-1929). Originally intimate with the inner circle of the Milner Group, he drifted away after 1913.
Reginald Coupland (Sir Reginald since 1944) came into the Milner Group's inner circle shortly before Rait moved out, and has been there ever since. A student of Zimmern's at New College in 1903-1907, he became a Fellow and lecturer in ancient history at Trinity College, Oxford, immediately upon graduation and stayed there for seven years. Since then his academic career has carried him to the following positions: Beit Lecturer in Colonial History (1913-1918), Beit Professor of Colonial History (since 1920), Fellow of All Souls (since 1920), and Fellow of Nuffield College (since 1939). He was also editor of The Round Table after Lord Lothian left (1917-1919) and again at the beginning of the Second World War (1939-1941). His most important activities, however, have been behind the scenes: as member of the Royal Commission on Superior Civil Services in India (1923), as adviser to the Burma Round Table Conference of 1931, as a member of the Peel Commission to Palestine (1936-1937), and as a member of Sir Stafford Cripps's Mission to India (1942). He is reputed to have been the chief author of the Peel Report of 1937, which recommended partition of Palestine and restriction of Jewish immigration into the area — two principles which remained at the basis of British policy until 1949. In fact, the pattern of partition contained in the Peel Report, which would have given Transjordan an outlet to the Mediterranean Sea across the southern portion of Palestine, was a subject of violent controversy in 1948.
Coupland has been a prolific writer. Besides his many historical works, he has written many books that reflect the chief subjects of discussion in the inmost circle of the Milner Group. Among these, we might mention Freedom and Unity, his lecture at Patna College, India, in 1924; The American Revolution and the British Empire (1930); The Empire in These Days (1935); The Cripps Mission (1942); and Report on the Constitutional Problem in India (3 parts, 1942-1943).
The Milner Group's relationships with All Souls were also strengthened after Milner returned to England in 1905, and especially after the Kindergarten returned to England in 1909-1911. The Milner Group's strength in All Souls, however, was apparently not sufficiently strong for them to elect a member of the Milner Group as Warden when Anson died in 1914, for his successor, Francis W. Pember, onetime assistant legal adviser to the Foreign Office, and a Fellow of All Souls since 1884, was of the Cecil Bloc rather than of the Milner Group. Pember did not, however, resist the penetration of the Milner Group into All Souls, and as a result both of his successors as Warden, W. G. S. Adams (1933-1945) and B. H. Sumner (1945- ), were members of the Milner Group.
In general, the movement of persons was not from the Milner Group to All Souls but in the reverse direction. All Souls, in fact, became the chief recruiting agency for the Milner Group, as it had been before 1903 for the Cecil Bloc. The inner circle of this Group, because of its close contact with Oxford and with All Souls, was in a position to notice able young undergraduates at Oxford. These were admitted to All Souls and at once given opportunities in public life and in writing or teaching, to test their abilities and loyalty to the ideals of the Milner Group. If they passed both of these tests, they were gradually admitted to the Milner Group's great fiefs such as the Royal Institute of International Affairs, The Times, The Round Table, or, on the larger scene, to the ranks of the Foreign or Colonial Offices. So far as I know, none of these persons recruited through All Souls ever reached the inner circle of the Milner Group, at least before 1939. This inner circle continued to be largely monopolized by the group that had been in South Africa in the period before 1909. The only persons who were not in South Africa, yet reached the inner circle of the Milner Group, would appear to be Coupland, Lord Astor, Lady Astor, Arnold Toynbee, and H. V. Hodson. There may be others, for it is difficult for an outsider to be sure in regard to such a secret matter.
Of the members of All Souls who got into at least the second circle of the Milner Group, we should mention the names of the following:
Name / Birth Date / College / All Souls Fellow
W. G. S. Adams / 1874 / Balliol, 1896-1900 / 1910- (Warden 1933-1945)
K. N. Bell / 1884 / Balliol, 1903-1906 / 1907-1914
I. Berlin / 1909 / Corpus Christi, 1928-1932 / 1932-1939
H. B. Butler / 1883 / Balliol, 1902-1905 / 1905-1912
R. D'O. Butler / - / Balliol, 1935-1938 / 1938-
F. Clarke / -- / Balliol, 1905-1908 / 1908-1915
P. E. Corbett / 1892 / Balliol, 1919-1920 / 1920-1928
C. R. M. F. Cruttwell / -- / Queen's, 1906-1910 / 1911-1918
H. W. C. Davis / 1874 / Balliol, 1891-1895 / 1895-1902
G. C. Faber / 1889 / Christ Church, 1908-1913 / 1919-
J. G. Foster / -- / New College, 1922-1925 / 1924-
M. L. Gwyer / 1878 / Christ Church, 1897-1901 / 1902-1916
W. K. Hancock / 1898 / Balliol, 1922-1923 / 1924-1930, 1944-
C. R. S. Harris / 1896 / Corpus Christi, 1918-1923 / 1921-1936
H. V. Hodson / 1906 / Balliol, 1925-1928 / 1928-1935
C. S. Macartney / 1896 / Trinity College, Cambridge / 1936-
R. M. Makins / 1904 / Christ Church, 1922-1925 / 1925-1932
J. Morley / 1938 / Lincoln, 1856-1859 / 1904-1911
C. J. Radcliffe / 1899 / New College, 1919-1922 / 1922-1937
J. A. Salter / 1881 / Brasenose, 1899-1904 / 1932-
D. B. Somervell / 1889 / Magdalen 1907-1911 / 1912-
A. H. D. R. Steel-Maitland / 1876 / Balliol, 1896-1900 / 1900-1907
B. H. Sumner / 1893 / Balliol, 1912-1916 / 1919-1926, Warden 1945-
L. F. R. Williams / 1890 / University 1909-1912 / 1914-1921
E. L. Woodward / 1890 / Corpus Christi, 1908-1911 / 1911-1944
Of these twenty-five names, four were Fellows of Balliol during the periods in which they were not Fellows of All Souls (Bell, David, Sumner, and Woodward). It is not necessary to say much about these various men at this time, but certain of them should be identified. The others will be mentioned later.
William George Stewart Adams was lecturer in Economics at Chicago and Manchester universities and Superintendent of Statistics and Intelligence in the Department of Agriculture before he was elected to All Souls in 1910. Then he was Gladstone Professor of Political Theory and Institutions (1912-1933), a member of the committee to advise the Irish Cabinet (191 1), in the Ministry of Munitions (1915), Secretary to Lloyd George (1916-1919), editor of the War Cabinet Reports (1917-1918), and a member of the Committee on Civil Service Examinations (1918).
The Reverend Kenneth Norman Bell was lecturer in history at Toronto University during his fellowship in All Souls (1907-1914); a director of G. Bell and Sons, Publishers; a tutor and Fellow of Balliol (1919-1941); Beit Lecturer in Colonial History (1924-1927); and a member of the committee for supervision of the selection of candidates for the Colonial Administrative Service. He edited, with W. P. Morrell, Select Documents in British Colonial History, 1830-1860 (1928).
Harold Beresford Butler (Sir Harold since 1946) was a civil servant, chiefly in the Home Office, and secretary to the British delegation to the International Conference on Aerial Navigation in Paris during his Fellowship at All Souls. He was subsequently in the Foreign Trade Department of the Foreign Office (1914-1917) and in the Ministry of Labour (1917-1919). On the Labour Commission of the Paris Peace Conference and at the International Labor Conference in Washington (1919), he later became deputy director (1920-1932) and director (1932-1938) of the International Labour Office of the League of Nations. Since 1939, he has been Warden of Nuffield College (1939-1943) and minister in charge of publicity in the British Embassy in Washington (1942-1946). He has written a number of books, including a history of the inter-war period called The Lost Peace (1941).
H. W. C. Davis, the famous medieval historian, became a Fellow of All Souls immediately after graduating from Balliol in 1895, and was a Fellow of Balliol for nineteen years after that, resigning from the latter to become Professor of History at Manchester University (1921-1925). During this period he was a lecturer at New College (1897-1899), Chichele Lecturer in Foreign History (1913), editor of the Oxford Pamphlets on the war (1914-1915), one of the organizers of the War Trade Intelligence Department of the Ministry of Blockade in the Foreign Office (1915), acting director of the Department of Overseas Trade under Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland (1917-1919), an expert at the Paris Peace Conference (1918-1919), and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography (1920-1928). In 1925 he returned from Manchester to Oxford as Regius Professor of Modern History in succession to Sir Charles Firth, became a Fellow of Oriel College, Curator of the Bodleian, and was named by the International Labour Office (that is, by Harold Butler) as the British representative on the Blanesburgh Committee on Factory Legislation in Europe. He edited the report of this committee. In addition to his very valuable studies in medieval history, Davis also wrote The History of the Blockade (1920) and sections of the famous History of the Peace Conference, edited by Harold Temperley (also a member of the Group).
Sir Maurice Linford Gwyer was a Fellow of All Souls for fourteen years after graduating from Christ Church (1902-1916). During this time he was admitted to the bar, practiced law, was lecturer in Private International Law at Oxford (1912-1915) and solicitor to the Insurance Commissioners (1902-1916). He was then legal adviser to the Ministry of Shipping (1917-1919) and to the Ministry of Health (1919-1926), then Procurator-General and Solicitor to the Treasury (1926-1933), First Parliamentary Counsel to the Treasury (1934-1937), and Chief Justice of India (1937-1943). He was first British delegate to The Hague Conference on Codification of International Law (1930) and a member of the Indian States Inquiry Committee (1932). He edited the later editions of Anson's Law of Contract and Law and Custom of the Constitution.
William Keith Hancock, of Australia and Balliol, was a member of All Souls from 1924. He was Professor of History at Adelaide in 1924-1933, Professor of Modern History at Birmingham in 1934-1944, and is now Chichele Professor of Economic History at Oxford. He wrote the three-volume work Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, published by Chatham House in 1937-1942.
John Morley (Lord Morley of Blackburn) was a member of the Cecil Bloc rather than of the Milner Group, but in one respect, his insistence on the inadvisability of using force and coercion within the Empire, a difference which appeared most sharply in regard to Ireland, he was more akin to the Group than to the Bloc. He was a close friend of Lord Salisbury, Lord Esher, and Joseph Chamberlain and was also a friend of Milner's, since they worked together on the Pall Mall Gazette in 1882-1883. He had close personal and family connections with H. A. L. Fisher, the former going back to a vacation together in 1 892 and the latter based on Morley's lifelong friendship with Fisher's uncle, Leslie Stephen. It was probably through Fisher's influence that Morley was elected a Fellow of All Souls in 1904. He had shown that his heart was in the right place, so far as the Milner Group was concerned, in 1894, when Gladstone retired from the leadership of the Liberal Party and Morley used his influence to give the vacant position to Lord Rosebery. Morley was Secretary of State for India in the period 1905-1910, putting through the famous Morley-Minto reforms in this period. In this he made use of a number of members of the Milner and All Souls groups. The bill itself was put through the House of Commons by a member of All Souls, Thomas R. Buchanan (1846-1911), who was shifted from Financial Secretary in the War Office under Haldane to Under Secretary in the India Office for the purpose (1908-1909).(6)
James Arthur Salter (Sir Arthur since 1922) was born in Oxford and lived there until he graduated from Brasenose in 1904. He went to work for the Shipping Department of the Admiralty in the same year and worked in this field for most of the next fourteen years. In 1917 he was Director of Ship Requisitioning and later secretary and chairman of the Allied Maritime Transport Executive. He was on the Supreme Economic Council in 1919 and became general secretary to the Reparations Commission for almost three years (1920- 1922). He was Director of the Economic and Finance Section of the League of Nations in 1919-1922 and again in 1922-1931. In the early 1930s he went on several missions to India and China and served on various committees concerned with railroad matters. He was Gladstone Professor of Political Theory and Institutions in 1934-1944, Member of Parliament from Oxford University after 1937, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Shipping in 1939-1941, head of the British Merchant Shipping Mission in America in 1941-1943, Senior Deputy Director General of UNRRA in 1944, and Chancellor to the Duchy of Lancaster in 1945.
Donald B. Somervell (Sir Donald since 1933) has been a Fellow of All Souls since he graduated from Magdalen in 1911, although he took his degree in natural science. He entered Parliament as a Unionist in 1931 and almost at once began a governmental career. He was Solicitor General (1933-1936), Attorney General (1936-1945), and Home Secretary (1945), before becoming a Lord Justice of Appeal in 1946. His brother, D. C. Somervell, edited the one-volume edition of Toynbee's A Study of History for Chatham House.
Sir Arthur Ramsay Steel-Maitland was a Fellow of All Souls for the seven years following his graduation from Balliol in 1900. He was unsuccessful as a candidate for Parliament in 1906, but was elected as a Conservative from Birmingham four years later. He was Parliamentary Under Secretary for Colonies (1915-1917), Joint Parliamentary Under Secretary in the Foreign Office and Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade in the capacity of head of the Department of Overseas Trade (1917-1919), and Minister of Labour (1924-1929).
Benedict H. Sumner was a Fellow of All Souls for six years (1919-1928) and a Fellow of Balliol for twenty (1925-1944), before he became Warden of All Souls (1945). During the First World War, he was with Military Intelligence and afterwards with the British delegation at the Peace Conference. During the Second World War, he was attached to the Foreign Office (1939-1942). He is an authority on Russian affairs, and this probably played an important part in his selection as Warden of All Souls in 1945.
Laurence F. R. Williams went to Canada as lecturer in medieval history at Queen's University after leaving Balliol (1913-1914). Immediately on becoming a Fellow of All Souls in 1914, he went to India as Professor of Indian History at the University of Allahabad. In 1918 and in 1919 he was busy on constitutional reforms associated with the Government of India Act of 1919, working closely with Sir William Marris. He then became director of the Central Bureau of Information for six years (1920-1926) and secretary to the Chancellor of the Chamber of Princes for four (1926-1930). He was, in this period, also secretary to the Indian Delegation at the Imperial Conference of 1923, political secretary to the Maharaja of Patiala, substitute delegate to the Assembly of the League of Nations (1925), member of the Legislative Assembly (1924-1925), joint director of the Indian Princes' Special Organization (1929-1931), adviser to the Indian States delegation at the Round Table Conference of 1930-1931, and delegate to the Round Table Conference of 1932. In the 1930s he was Eastern Service director of the BBC (under H. A. L. Fisher), and in the early days of the Second World War was adviser on Middle East Affairs to the Ministry of Information. Since 1944 he has been in the editorial department of The Times. His written output is considerable, much of it having been published as official documents or parliamentary papers. Among these are the Moral and Material Progress Reports of India for 1917-1925, the official Report on Lord Chelmsford's Administration, and the official History of the Tour of the Prince of Wales. He also wrote Lectures on the Handling of Historical Material (1917), a History of the Abbey of St. Alban (1917), and a half dozen books and pamphlets on India.
Ernest Llewellyn Woodward, the last Fellow of All Souls whom we shall mention here, is of great significance. After studying at Oxford for seven years (1908-1915) he went into the British Expeditionary Force for three, and then was elected a Fellow of All Souls, an appointment he held until he became a Fellow of Balliol in the middle of the 1940s. He was also a tutor and lecturer at New College, a Rhodes Traveling Fellow (1931), and in 1944 succeeded Sir Alfred Zimmern as Montague Burton Professor of International Relations. When the decision was made after the Second World War to publish an extensive selection of Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919-1939, Woodward was made general editor of the series and at once associated with himself Rohan D'Olier Butler, who has been a Fellow of All Souls since leaving Balliol in 1938.
Woodward was a member of the council of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in the middle 1930s, and domestic bursar of All Souls a little later. He has written a number of historical works, of which the best known are Volume XIII of the Oxford History of England ("The Age of Reform," 1938), Three Studies in European Conservatism (1929), and Great Britain and the German Navy (1935).
These twenty-five names give the chief members of All Souls, in the period before 1939, who became links with the Milner Group and who have not previously been discussed. In the same period the links with New College and Balliol were also strengthened. The process by which this was done for the former, through men like H. A. L. Fisher, has already been indicated. Somewhat similar but less intimate relationships were established with Balliol, especially after A. L. Smith became Master of that college in 1916. Smith, as we have indicated, was a contemporary and old friend of Milner at Balliol and shared his (and Toynbee's) ideas regarding the necessity of uplifting the working classes and preserving the Empire. His connections with Fisher and with All Souls were intimate. He was a close friend of Lord Brassey, whose marital relationships with the Rosebery and Brand families and with the Cecil Bloc have been mentioned already. Through A. L. Smith, Brassey reorganized the financial structure of the Balliol foundation in 1904. He was, as we have shown, a close collaborator of Milner in his secret plans, by intimate personal relationships before 1897 and by frequent correspondence after that date. There can be no doubt that A. L. Smith shared in this confidence. He was a collaborator with the Round Table Group after 1910, being especially useful, by his Oxford position, in providing an Oxford background for Milner Group propaganda among the working classes. This will be mentioned later. A. L. Smith's daughter Mary married a Fellow of All Souls, F. T. Barrington-Ward, whose older brother, R. M. Barrington-Ward, was assistant editor of The Times in 1927-1941 and succeeded Dawson as editor in 1941. Smith's son, A. L. F. Smith, was elected to All Souls in 1904, was director, and later adviser, of education to the Government of Iraq in 1920-1931, and was Rector of Edinburgh Academy from 1931 to 1945.
A. L. Smith remained as Master of Balliol from 1916 to his death in 1924. His biographical sketch in The Dictionary of National Biography was written by K. N. Bell of All Souls.
The influence of the Milner Group and the Cecil Bloc on Balliol in the twentieth century can be seen from the following list of persons who were Fellows or Honorary Fellows of Balliol:
Archbishop Lang
K. N. Bell Lord Asquith
H. W. C. Davis Lord Brassey
J. H. Hofmeyr Lord Curzon
Vincent Massey Lord Ernie
F. W. Pember Lord Grey of Fallodon
A. L. Smith Lord Lansdowne
B. H. Sumner Lord Milner
A. J. Toynbee Leopold Amery
E. L. Woodward
Of these eighteen names, nine were Fellows of All Souls, and seven were clearly of the Milner Group.
There was also a close relationship between the Milner Group and New College. The following list gives the names of eight members of the Milner Group who were also Fellows or Honorary Fellows of New College in the years 1900-1947:
Lothian
Lord Milner
Isaiah Berlin
H. A. L. Fisher
Sir Samuel Hoare (Lord Templewood)
Gilbert Murray
W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore (Lord Harlech)
Sir Alfred Zimmern
If we wished to add names to the Cecil Bloc, we would add those of Lord David Cecil, Lord Quickswood (Lord Hugh Cecil), and Bishop A. C. Headlam.
It is clear from these lists that almost every important member of the Milner Group was a fellow of one of the three colleges — Balliol, New College, or All Souls. Indeed, these three formed a close relationship, the first two on the undergraduate level and the last in its own unique position. The three were largely dominated by the Milner Group, and they, in turn, largely dominated the intellectual life of Oxford in the fields of law, history, and public affairs. They came close to dominating the university itself in administrative matters. The relationships among the three can be demonstrated by the proportions of All Souls Fellows who came from these two colleges, in relation to the numbers which came from the other eighteen colleges at Oxford or from the outside world. Of the one hundred forty-nine Fellows at All Souls in the twentieth century, forty- eight came from Balliol and thirty from New College, in spite of the fact that Christ Church was larger than these and Trinity, Magdalen, Brasenose, St. John's, and University colleges were almost as large. Only thirty-two came from these other five large colleges, while at least fifteen were educated outside Oxford.
The power of the Cecil Bloc and the Milner Group in Oxford in the twentieth century can be seen by glancing at the list of Chancellors of the University during the century: (7)
Salisbury, 1869-1903
Lord Goschen, 1903-1907
Lord Curzon, 1907-1925
Lord Milner, 1925
Lord George Cave, 1925-1928
Lord Grey of Fallodon, 1928-1933
Lord Halifax, 1933-
The influence of the Milner Group at Oxford was sufficient to enable it to get control of the Dictionary of National Biography after this work was given to the university in 1917. This control was exercised by H. W. C. Davis and his protege J. R. H. Weaver during the period before 1938. The former had been brought into the gifted circle because he was a Fellow of All Souls and later a Fellow of Balliol (1895-1921). In this connection he was naturally acquainted with Weaver (who was a Fellow of Trinity from 1913 to 1938) and brought him into the War Trade Intelligence Department when Davis organized this under Cecil-Milner auspices in 1915. Davis became editor of the Dictionary of National Biography under the same auspices in 1921 and soon asked Weaver to join him. They jointly produced the Dictionary supplement for 1912-1921. After Davis's death in 1928, Weaver became editor and brought out the supplement for 1922-1930. (8) He continued as editor until shortly before he was made President of Trinity College in 1938. Weaver wrote the sketch of Davis in the Dictionary and also a larger work called Henry William Carless Davis, a Memoir and a Selection of His Historical Papers, published in 1933.
This control of the Dictionary of National Biography will explain how the Milner Group controlled the writing of the biographies of its own members so completely in that valuable work. This fact will already have been observed in the present work. The only instance, apparently, where a member of the Milner Group or the Cecil Bloc did not have his biographical sketch written by another member of these groups is to be found in the case of Lord Phillimore, whose sketch was written by Lord Sankey, who was not a member of the groups in question. Phillimore is also the only member of these groups whose sketch is not wholeheartedly adulatory.
The influence of the Milner Group in academic circles is by no means exhausted by the brief examination just made of Oxford. At Oxford itself, the Group has been increasingly influential in Nuffield College, while outside of Oxford it apparently controls (or greatly influences) the Stevenson Professorship of International Relations at London; the Rhodes Professorship of Imperial History at London; Birkbeck College at London; the George V Professorship of History in Cape Town University; and the Wilson Professorship of International Politics at University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. Some of these are controlled completely, while others are influenced in varying degrees. In Canada the influence of the Group is substantial, if not decisive, at the University of Toronto and at Upper Canada College. At Toronto the Glazebrook- Massey influence is very considerable, while at present the Principal of Upper Canada College is W. L. Grant, son-in-law of George Parkin and former Beit Lecturer at Oxford. Vincent Massey is a governor of the institution.