The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World they Made

In contrast to the Crookshanks, where the mother’s wealth was paramount, it was Maurice Macmillan who financed the family’s lifestyle. Yet there was no doubt that the ‘master of the house’ was the dominant figure of Nellie Macmillan. Mrs Macmillan threw herself with gusto into the public life of her adopted country. Her milieu was the societies of rich and well-connected ladies devoted to some public cause. Her main efforts were expended on the Victoria League, a body of imperial enthusiasts founded in memory of the recently deceased Queen-Empress, of which, for many years, she was honorary treasurer. She became acquainted with her fellow American imperial enthusiast Emma Crookshank.

For both the Macmillans and the Crookshanks to send a son to Summer Fields was a clear declaration of intent. The establishment had been created so that its pupils could compete for scholarships to the major public schools. Between 1897 and 1916 the school averaged more than five Eton scholarships a year. By the time Macmillan and Crookshank reached College, one in three of their fellow scholars had been to Summer Fields.29 As Henry Willink, who scraped into the same election at Eton as Macmillan and Crookshank, recalled: ‘I had not been skilfully prepared for the Scholarship examination as…boys at Summer Fields were prepared.’30 ‘If,’ as the school history puts it, ‘the boys were not force-fed they were certainly stuffed.’ Summer Fields, where Macmillan and Crookshank became close friends, duly delivered on its promises. Both boys were placed on the list of seventeen that made up the Eton election of 1906.

Eton in 1906 was undoubtedly the most famous and prestigious school in England.31 It was also in many ways the perfect microcosm of the social universe represented by Macmillan and Crookshank on the one hand and Lyttelton and Cranborne on the other. Eton was divided into two unequal parts. In College there were a total of seventy scholars, ‘Collegers’, or ‘Tugs’. Entrance was by the fiercely competitive examination Macmillan and Crookshank had just sat. As a result College was dominated by boys just like them: from families dedicated to the late Victorian cult of achievement through hard work.

There were a much larger number of boys in School, the Oppidans. The year 1906 was a bumper one for School, with 224 new boys, of whom Cranborne and Lyttelton were two. School was of distinctly mixed ability, entrance being governed by family tradition and contacts. As Oliver Lyttelton observed, the masters ‘were inclined to be slightly snobbish…they conceived their role in the State to be that of training and teaching those who were likely to shape its future [and thus]…wanted to have pupils from the great families. The sons of those families would have a start in the race.’32 Initially the Collegers and Oppidans, further divided into their boarding houses, were kept fairly separate. As they progressed through the school there would be more mixing, particularly as they shared the pupil rooms of the Classical Tutors. Lyttelton and Cranborne were members of Henry Bowlby’s house and mixed with Macmillan and Crookshank in his pupil room. It was exactly this mixing that attracted ambitious families to Eton.

The Eton the four boys attended was, on the surface, in a process of dynamic expansion. The school was nevertheless plagued with troubling undercurrents. In 1905 the long headmastership of Dr Warre came to an end. Warre had instituted an extensive building programme completed while the boys were at Eton: the gymnasium was opened in 1907, the hall in 1908 and the library in 1910. Although the fruit of previous expenditure was in the process of realization, the school was thus in a period of financial retrenchment. Warre’s departure also opened the way for a power struggle between his presumed successor, A. C. Benson, a brilliant but depressive homosexual, and the leader of the younger ‘Classics’, the acerbic A. B. Ramsay, known as ‘the Ram’. The most powerful voice on the selection panel, Lord Cobham, was able to usher in his kinsman, Edward Lyttelton, as a compromise candidate.

Oliver Lyttelton was thus faced with every schoolboy’s nightmare – a close relative as headmaster. He was frequently mortified by his uncle’s tendency to trumpet the moral superiority of the Lytteltons – which he later described as ‘washing clean linen in public’. Lyttelton’s embarrassment was accentuated by Uncle Edward’s undoubted peculiarities. No one doubted that he was a perfect Christian gentleman and a fine sportsman, but he was an indifferent classicist and soon became the butt of Collegers whose grasp of Latin far exceeded his own. He was also a health faddist, following a vegetarian diet and lauding the virtues of outdoor living. His healthy tan earned him the nickname ‘the Brown Man’ in an age that valued alabaster complexions. The headmaster’s attempts to keep in check the tendency of Etonians to lord it over the neighbouring population won him few friends in the school and met with limited success. Lyttelton failed to persuade the Master and Fellows to broaden the curriculum at the expense of an unleavened diet of literary classics. The boys, as so often, were dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries when it came to such matters. Macmillan angrily noted: ‘I am rather annoyed at the nonsense that people are talking and writing about “Education”…we are all to learn, it seems, about stocks and shares. Instead of humanities we are to dissect frogs and make horrible smells in expensive laboratories…I do not see that an ignorance of chemistry is any better than an ignorance of Classics.’33 Edward Lyttelton’s career at Eton was ended during the war by a brave if – given the temper of the times – unwise speech proposing that Britain should cede Gibraltar to Germany in return for peace.

Each of the boys had a rather different experience of Eton. Of the four Lyttelton’s is by far the best recorded. The main challenge he faced was the long shadow cast by his father’s glittering reputation at Eton. His solid school career was always found wanting when set next to that of Alfred. He worked hard at everything, becoming house captain of Lubbock’s and achieving entrance to the Classical First where the best scholars, whether Colleger or Oppidan, were taught together. Success had its drawbacks: ‘Everything is rather an ordeal at present,’ he reported home, ‘I mean I am always finding myself in solitary positions of responsibility; either I am leading sixth form into chapel or I am making a speech or I am commanding the company in the Corps or I am president of the debate but I am getting used to them all.’34 Of some importance for the future, he did plenty of soldiering.35 His housemaster, Samuel Lubbock, who had taken the house over from Bowlby when the latter left to become headmaster of Lancing, noticed his efforts with pleasure: ‘He deserves the best report I can give him,’ he wrote to Alfred, ‘certainly the house will never have a better captain…His work has improved to a far greater [extent] than a year ago I thought probable and his marks in trials are quite encouraging.’36 Lubbock also made the rather rash prediction that ‘with really hard work he might just be up to a First at Cambridge’: he subsequently had to admit that his enthusiasm for Oliver’s personality had led him to overestimate his scholarly abilities.

Most pleasing of all, Oliver was finally elected to Eton’s self-selecting elite of senior boys, the Eton Society or ‘Pop’, of which, inevitably, his father had been president, in his final half. It had been a struggle to ingratiate himself. His election, Lubbock reported, ‘does credit to Pop: for great and sound as his merits are, he is rather too clever and too old [for] many average boys: as I have said before he jests rather too frequently and they don’t quite understand all his jokes…and boys are very self-conscious creatures. But he is quick at seeing things and I think he has seen this clearly enough.’37 Unfortunately Lubbock was rather too sanguine on the last point. Three years later Raymond Asquith reported from the trenches that ‘his chief defect to my mind is one inherited from Alfred – telling rather long and moderately good stories and laughing hysterically long before he comes to the point’.38 Fifty-two years later, a former Cabinet colleague wrote that Lyttelton’s sense of humour ‘varied from classical to Rabelaisian or even third form…The only difficulty was that an immediate appreciation of the humorous aspects of any question was inclined to limit the expression of the arguments in mundane terms.’39

It was towards the end of their time at Eton that Oliver and Bobbety became close friends. For many Oppidans there was no presumption that they would go on to university; many drifted away to join the army or to travel on the Continent as a means of finishing their education. Lyttelton bemoaned the fact that by 1910 ‘all my particular pals will be gone except Cranborne’.40 From then on the two started messing together.41

Fifty years on Osbert Sitwell reminded Bobbety ‘that you were a studious small boy’.42 Yet if his scholarly performance was anything to go by, the school inspectors who visited Eton in 1910 might have been thinking of Cranborne when they wrote in their report: ‘we do not forget that Eton’s highest service to the nation is that she educates boys whose circumstances make it difficult or impossible for the school work to be as important in their eyes as it is in the eyes of less fortunate schoolboys’. The main strength of the Eton education was languages and Cranborne left School in 1911 with no firm grasp of any, whether classical or modern.

In College meanwhile Crookshank made good progress. His main problem was a complete lack of sporting prowess. Even Macmillan, a self-confessed duffer at games, was picked for the College team that played the Oppidans at the uniquely Etonian form of football known as the Wall Game. Crookshank was no more than an ardent admirer of those who could play. The Daily Graphic printed a picture of him among the crowd carrying the Collegers’ wall keeper in triumph after College had defeated the School. ‘It is dreadful,’ he lamented in 1917, while serving in Salonika, ‘this is the first Wall Match I have missed since I first went to Eton in 1906. I suppose it had to come some time, but it is rather a bitter blow.’43 Apart from his deficiency in games he excelled in most other areas. He was good at his work, was a fine debater, edited the school magazine and was elected to Pop with rather more ease than Lyttelton. In their final year these two found themselves thrown together quite regularly. They studied classics together, with Crookshank consistently near the top of the class, Lyttelton consistently near the bottom.44 At their final speech day in June 1912, Lyttelton gave a reading from the essay ‘On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ by de Quincey, Crookshank from Lincoln’s second inaugural. They performed together in a sketch adapted from the Pickwick Papers: Crookshank taking the part of Mr Phunky, Lyttelton of Sam Weller.45

By the time Cranborne, Lyttelton and Crookshank were forming their mature friendships at school, they were no longer boys but young men. The notable absentee was, of course, Macmillan, who was the only one who crashed at Eton. Macmillan and Crookshank had maintained their Summer Fields friendship. Whereas Crookshank flowered at Eton, Macmillan struggled. He was withdrawn by his mother in 1909. Macmillan was tight-lipped about his failure. He devoted a page in his memoirs to Eton as compared to a full chapter in Lyttelton’s. By his own account: ‘During my first half at Eton I had a serious attack of pneumonia, which I only just survived. Some years later, I suffered from growing too fast, and a bad state of the heart was diagnosed. This led to my leaving Eton prematurely and spending many months in bed or as an invalid.’46 Many years later J. B. S. Haldane spread the rumour that Macmillan had, in fact, been expelled for egregious homosexuality. Eton, like all public schools, lived in fear of the nameless vice. One of Edward Lyttelton’s first acts as headmaster was to break a house whose captain had an appetite for buggery. Haldane was certainly in a position to know the cause of Macmillan’s departure. ‘Of course I remember him very well,’ Macmillan acknowledged when he was prime minister. ‘He was in the election above me at College, as well as a pupil of Henry Bowlby. I used to see him after the first war but have not seen him for many years.’47 Haldane was, in all likelihood, motivated by malice. Macmillan himself was certainly malicious about Haldane’s family. Enjoying the discomfiture of Gilbert Mitchison in the House of Commons, his mind was thrown back to Eton. ‘He was Captain of Oppidans in my time and was a silly, pompous and conceited ass even then. As a punishment he married Naomi Haldane, and is now more or less insane.’48 Whatever the truth about Macmillan’s departure from Eton, it certainly denied him the opportunity to mix with boys of his own age at the very time when he was maturing into manhood. This was to presage an unfortunate pattern. His time at Oxford was also cut short, as was his time in the army. Throughout his life Macmillan was to have difficulties in his relations with male contemporaries. The one relationship in which there was never awkwardness was that with Harry Crookshank. That they had been friends even before they reached Eton was significant.

Macmillan returned home from Eton to an even more pressurized environment. A. B. Ramsay, the fearsome Classic, called regularly to give him lessons. He seemed to Macmillan ‘a man of the world, elegant, refined and a most perfect gentleman’, much superior to Dr Lyttelton.49 His mother’s other choices of tutor were somewhat stranger. The first to arrive was a Dilly Knox, friend of Harold’s brother, Daniel. On the face of it, the Knox connection seemed safe enough. Knox père was the fiercely evangelical Bishop of Manchester, known as ‘Hard Knox’ for his no-nonsense approach to educating the young.50 Dilly Knox, on the other hand, was one of those young masters who took the lead in ragging Edward Lyttelton. Knox was a formidable classical scholar but was found too ‘austere’ for Harold. He was replaced by his younger brother Ronnie. Dilly was eleven years older than Harold, whereas Ronnie was only six years his senior. Harold was seventeen, Ronnie twenty-two: they were close enough in age to become intimate friends. Too intimate, in the view of Nellie Macmillan. She ordered Ronnie from the house in 1910. They had already argued about his pay, but this was ‘7000 times more important’. Mrs Macmillan had accused Ronnie of infecting Harold with ‘papism’. The situation was fraught with emotion: ‘I am extremely (and not unreturnedly) fond of the boy,’ Ronnie told his sister, ‘and it’s been a horrid wrench to go without saying a word to him of what I wanted to say.’51 Whatever its dangers, Harold’s high-priced and exceptional tuition did pay off in one sense: he won an Exhibition to Balliol and was thus able to arrive at university at the same time as his Eton contemporaries.

Just as Eton was not just another public school, so the colleges the boys attended at Oxford and Cambridge were notable for their wealth, size and social prestige. Lyttelton and Cranborne could simply follow in family tradition, Lyttelton to Trinity College, Cambridge, Cranborne to Christ Church, Oxford. Family tradition meant nothing to the new men. Crookshank went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, Macmillan followed his brother to the worldly Balliol College, Oxford, rather than his father to the more ascetic Christ’s College, Cambridge.

The traditional patterns established at Eton persisted at university. Lyttelton and Cranborne gravitated to the aristocratic beau monde, giving little thought to their studies. Macmillan and Crookshank were exceptionally serious. Lyttelton quickly discovered the joy of girls. In the Easter vacation of his first year he found himself staying at Lympne Castle, not far from Wittersham, with ‘Dinah’. He regaled his mother with their adventures: ‘Dinah and I…set off to walk to Lympne. After half an hour Dinah fell into a ditch and got wet and being anxious to see me in the same state made a compact with me that we wouldn’t go round any canal. Soon we swam a broad canal having thrown most of our clothes over the other side and we ended up swimming the military canal.’52 He drew a discreet veil over the denouement of their unclothed adventures in the Royal Military Canal. He also abjured his parents’ distaste for horse racing. Lyttelton’s passion for gambling led to inevitable conflicts, unconvincing excuses and anguished reconciliations when he had to borrow money from his parents to settle his debts:

I am so terribly sorry that you should have thought I was ungrateful or anything, that I don’t know what to do. But for the last three days I have been ill, I eat [sic] something that has poisoned me, and I have been bad and very sick but am better today. I am clearing up my accounts and will write you tomorrow at the latest. Darling Mother, for God’s sake don’t think me ungrateful for I simply can’t stand it. I have done ill enough without this: but that you should think me ungrateful or callous is too awful. You can’t realize how I feel towards you both or you couldn’t think such a thing for a minute. So please understand, I am sure you do really.53

Bobbety Cranborne had no such money worries. His set at Oxford consisted of aristocrats, both English and foreign, as well as royalty. He roomed with the Russian prince Serge Obolensky, whom Lyttelton found ‘rather nice and very good looking’.54 Unlike Obolensky, who was a fanatical polo player, Cranborne was not particularly horsy. This did not prevent him living a ‘hearty’ lifestyle. He was a member of the Loders Club, where a requirement for membership was that one was ‘a gentleman, a sportsman, and a jolly good fellow’. Established in 1814 as a debating club, it had long since degenerated into a group that dedicated each Sunday in term to hard drinking. In a mockery of the Oxford-Cambridge polo match, in which Obolensky was playing ‘at some unearthly inappropriate hour’, Bobbety and Prince Paul of Yugoslavia ‘got bicycles and awakened the echoes by playing polo in the street’. When they were arrested, a drunken Cranborne declared that he needed no lawyer and would defend in person the right of freeborn Englishmen to play bicycle polo. In court he ‘said he did not think they had annoyed any of the residents, but had merely entertained them’. For all his pains, they were fined a crown each and costs.55

Cranborne’s academic performance was abject. In his first year he failed in his attempts to avoid his matriculation examination.56 In 1913 he failed his Mods completely, drawing ‘sympathy…qualified by remonstrance and admonition’ from his tutor.57 He decided that he would not bother to try again. In any case, of much more long-term moment than a failure to grapple with the classical authors was his burgeoning interest in international affairs.58 He became close friends with Timothy Eden, ‘a shy, retiring, soft-featured young man’ who was the heir to a baronetcy.59 Eden was part of the more ‘worthy’ side of Cranborne’s Oxford life.60 He ran a ‘Round Table’ devoted to public affairs. He made contact with serious-minded young men like Frank Walters, who later became an official and champion of the League of Nations.61 Through his uncles, both outspoken champions of Anglo-Catholicism, Cranborne also got to know Macmillan’s mentor Ronnie Knox whom he invited to his eponymous country seat, Cranborne in Dorset, during the Easter vacation of 1914.

In 1912 Cranborne’s father decided that he should be sent to South Africa with his prospective brother-in-law, a precocious if pompous MP in his twenties, Billy Ormsby-Gore.62 The choice was important for the future. Most undergraduates tended to travel to France or Germany in the summers to improve their languages. Macmillan went on a reading party to Austria in 1913, Lyttelton ‘studied French in a small house in Fontainebleau, where the food did not live up to French standards’. Crookshank was in Germany with four friends during the summer of 1914 and barely escaped internment: the certificate of British nationality that enabled him to flee was stamped by the British consul in Hanover as late as 31 July. Indeed, Cranborne had intended to go to Germany himself in 1913 with Jock Balfour, an Eton friend, but cried off because of ill-health.63 It was a lucky escape. Both Jock Balfour and Timothy Eden returned to Germany the following summer and spent the war in internment. By choice as well as chance Cranborne was caught up by the glamour of the Empire. His trip with Ormsby-Gore, including a return journey up the east coast of Africa and through the Suez Canal, imbued him with an abiding interest in the continent and a love of southern Africa.64

Crookshank and Macmillan took their time at Oxford much more seriously. Crookshank devoted himself to work and Freemasonry. It was thus ‘simply sickening’ when he ‘only just missed’ his First in Mods.65 The problem was fairly plain: he was a good Latinist but much weaker at Greek. Macmillan’s superb tuition enabled him to overtake his friend: he ‘just managed to scrape a First with some difficulty’.66 Macmillan had other strings to his bow. His renewed relationship with Ronnie Knox brought with it a friendship with Knox’s other acolyte, the Wykehamist Guy Lawrence, and gave his life emotional intensity. ‘It is hard to give a definition or even a description of them,’ Ronnie wrote of the pair in 1917, ‘except perhaps to say that in a rather varied experience I have never met conversation so brilliant – with the brilliance of humour not wit.’ Macmillan and Lawrence ‘had already adopted what I heard (and shuddered to hear) described as “Ronnie’s religion”’. Indeed, serving Ronnie at Mass was a regular element of Macmillan’s Oxford experience.

Knox is often described as leading Lawrence and Macmillan towards Rome. Although Knox had decided by 1915 that the Church of England was illegitimate, he did not become a Roman Catholic until 1917. In fact it was Guy Lawrence who jumped first. ‘God made it clear to me and I went straight to [the Jesuits at] Farm Street…Come and be happy,’ Lawrence urged Knox. Lawrence believed that ‘Harold will, I think, follow very soon’. Harold did no such thing. He told Knox that he was ‘not going to “Pope” until after the war (if I’m still alive)’. This strange response suggests that Macmillan had little real feeling for the religious issues as Knox and Lawrence felt them. If one came to the realization that Anglican rites and orders, however modified, were a ‘sham jewel’, one risked the immortal soul by dying in error. It seems likely that Macmillan was more excited by the cell’s mixture of incense and intimacy than theology per se. In Trinity term 1914 he was poised between another overseas reading party organized by the don, ‘Sligger’ Urquhart, and Knox and Lawrence’s planned retreat in rural Gloucestershire for the summer vacation. Both promised an intimate atmosphere.

Conversion in any case threatened an irreparable breach with his mother, a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Catholic bigot, exclusion from Macmillan money and thus an end to worldly ambition. Macmillan had the sort of open ambition that is displayed by running for office in the Union. In May 1913 he made ‘the best speech we have heard this year from a Freshman’. Returning at the beginning of the next academic year, he made ‘an exceedingly brilliant speech, witty, powerful and at moments eloquent’. He was elected secretary in 1913 and treasurer in 1914. Having held the two junior posts in the triumvirate at the head of the Union, he would still have had time to run for president before the end of his undergraduate career. It is perhaps revealing that his star-struck younger friend Bimbo Tennant believed he had been president of the Union.67

Whereas Macmillan’s second year at university was filled with excitement and expanding horizons, that of Lyttelton and Crookshank was blighted by the deaths of their fathers in July 1913 and March 1914 respectively. While the Crookshanks’ grief was private, the Lytteltons’ was all too public. The golden good fortune that had always followed Alfred Lyttelton was brought to an abrupt end at a time when he seemed to have hit a good seam in politics. At least one knowledgeable observer noted that the kind of business coming before the House in 1913 suited his style. On plans to disestablish the Church of Wales and attempts to hold government ministers to account for their corrupt personal involvement in the ‘Marconi scandal’ ‘he had lately made some good speeches. His extreme moderation gave extra effect to any attack that did come from him.’68 As Oliver put it, ‘I feel the political situation is improving for Dada.’69