Six Minutes in May

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Salisbury and his son Lord Cranborne had recently formed ‘a small Committee of influential Members of both Houses … to watch the conduct of the War’ and to give expression to growing dissatisfaction with the government, which presented, Salisbury complained to Halifax, ‘an appearance of doing nothing’.22, 23 On 27 March, Salisbury had distributed a memorandum to the twenty members of his group, which included several ex-Cabinet Ministers. ‘The question which all the world is asking is: Have H.M.G. got a plan? Presumably yes, but if so what is it?’ Cranborne summarised their chief gripe: ‘The economic war is a very slow process & in the meantime Hitler continues to register spectacular successes elsewhere.’24, 25 With his father, Cranborne had argued since September for a smaller War Cabinet and retaliatory action. They both shared the view of the architect of the RAF, Lord Trenchard, who had joined their informal discussions, ‘of the necessity of hitting at Germany by air in Germany’.26 They had named their group the Watching Committee.

  Father and son had held the first meeting on 4 April at Salisbury’s London home in Arlington Street. The decision was taken to organise ‘very respectable Conservatives’ – in other words, not Churchill nor anyone from his disreputable circle of ‘inefficient and talkative people’ – and ‘keep the Government up to the scratch’ – in other words, agitate for Chamberlain to be replaced by a more aggressive Conservative leader.27, 28, 29 Salisbury dismissed Chamberlain’s approach to international disasters as ‘Birmingham politics’.30 ‘Personally I was no longer in favour of Neville.’31

  The Watching Committee did not reconvene in full force until 16 April owing to a mix-up over addresses. Invitations sent by Salisbury failed to reach either its new Honorary Secretary, Conservative MP Paul Emrys-Evans (‘as my house, 2 Lowndes Street, is now occupied by the Red Cross’) or Lord Trenchard (‘Your last letter telling me of a meeting was sent to Dancers Hill House, Barnet, which I left two months ago’).32, 33 Thereafter, Salisbury encouraged members to call at 21 Arlington Street ‘at 9.30 any morning that they felt so disposed’.34

  Initially, the Salisburys thought to champion Anthony Eden: Cranborne had worked as Under-Secretary to the ‘glamour boy’ Eden, and hoped to be rewarded with the Foreign Secretaryship. But Eden had returned to government, and Emrys-Evans had started to look elsewhere. His preferred candidate was Halifax. Emrys-Evans explained to Cranborne: ‘An interim Government under Halifax would allow a possible leader to come to the surface … The war could not be won by him, but he may find the man.’35 The fact that Halifax was in the Lords was not considered an impediment. Salisbury’s father had been a Prime Minister peer.

  Halifax could scarcely refuse the seventy-eight-year-old Salisbury’s request for an audience; besides having been his chief in the Lords, ‘Jem’ was one of very few men whom the Foreign Secretary addressed by his Christian name. But Halifax was irritated when, on 24 April, Salisbury limped into the Foreign Office in a top hat and billowing frock coat and gave Halifax his frank opinion that the neutrals would take as ‘a sign of softness and funk’ the government’s lack of retaliation against Germany.36 Halifax ‘told him very politely that I wished he was sitting where I was: that my experience was that in a war everybody who was not running it thought that they could run it better than the people who were.’37

  Even so, Halifax grudgingly agreed to be ‘cross-examined’ by Salisbury’s committee. Among the group of nineteen who came to see him on 29 April were Leo Amery, who thought Halifax ‘diffuse and unimpressive’, and Harold Macmillan, who was reminded of ‘a dinner at All Souls’.38, 39 In the judgement of the All Souls historian S. J. D. Green: ‘In effect they were offering him the Premiership.40 The meeting was a disaster.’

  Salisbury sent a summary of their discussion to his son, who was too ill to attend: ‘It is not encouraging.’41 Halifax had blamed the French (for being ‘the great difficulty’) and the Norwegians (for their ‘profound apathy’), but he had himself no solution to offer. ‘Upon the general question he was not able to throw any light upon the final method of winning the War.’42 Salisbury had concluded the meeting by saying, ‘Lord Halifax, we are not satisfied.’43 Emrys-Evans, who had championed the Foreign Secretary, felt let down. ‘Halifax had a most depressing effect on me.’44

  For his part, Halifax found this garrulous group of senior Conservative politicians ‘in thoroughly critical mood, and nothing I said had the least effect upon them’.45 To crown it all, his punctilious Private Secretary Valentine Lawford had then ordered tea for Salisbury’s deputation, which detained them for a further half-hour. ‘I told him that if he ever did it again he would be murdered!’

  On that brilliant Saturday, as his motor-car curved around St Denys’s church and passed through her gates, Halifax looked forward to discussing this and other matters with Baba, as he talked to her about everything else.

  The person who stepped out of the car was six foot five, a tall, gaunt figure dressed in a black office coat, with a long vent up the back that shone with a greenish tinge in the strong sunlight. Up the short drive his hostess came to welcome him, leading her twin daughters and two dogs, Rex the labrador and Tim the corgi.

  In a photograph taken of that weekend, a small girl approaches Halifax.

  ‘That’s me!’ Davina says. ‘We had ghastly middle partings, like Mummy. You remember everything when you’re a child. I can remember as if today.’

  Their guest stood to his full lanky height to greet them.

  When Halifax moved, Lawford wrote in his unpublished memoir, he could be graceful and shy simultaneously, like a waterbird wading in the shallows. ‘Architecturally, the upper half of Halifax’s head resembled a dome, which, since it rested on rather more than usually jutting ears, appeared illusively to taper towards the apex.46 It was a fine head, though. When he walked it fell very slightly forwards; and as he sat reading at his desk he would cup the weight of it in the palm of his right hand … Yet his was by no means the neglected body of a dreamer. His back and legs were magnificently straight and he looked his best astride a horse.’

  Lawford used to ride with him in the early mornings on Wimbledon Common, after which Halifax walked through St James’s Park to the Foreign Office. One morning, Halifax arrived in rubber boots ‘almost three foot six high’ which had to be pulled off by an office keeper.47 ‘He had bare feet underneath.’

  Not all that he was togged up to be? A minority always thought so.

  Christened Edward Frederick Lindley Wood, and known from 1924 to 1935 as Lord Irwin, and since then as Viscount Halifax, he had been born in 1881 with a withered left hand which he covered with a black leather glove, but he never referred to his deformity in his memoirs, or in public; nor was it mentioned in Stuart Hodgson’s 1941 biography. ‘One couldn’t say anything to him, he would have minded beyond all belief,’ says his daughter-in-law, Diana Holderness.48 ‘I did see it once. There was almost nothing there but a little thumb. I went into his room by mistake, and he put his other hand over it. He used his other hand tremendously.’

  Once in America, Halifax went out sea-fishing with his Private Secretary Charles Peake, and he caught four big barracuda. ‘He had landed the lot single-handed, managing both his rod & reel with his one arm, a feat which the boatman said he could not have believed if he had not seen it.’49 But Halifax’s agility and economy of movement could not protect him every time. When an American photographer ‘tried to get hold of his left hand and “arrange” it,’ Peake glanced at Halifax’s face ‘which remained immobile, but I knew he had been touched to the raw … he was still quivering inside like a nerve.’50

  That quivering nerve remained gloved from the world, which was how Halifax preferred it, quoting Dryden: ‘Anything, though ever so little, which a man speaks of himself – in my opinion is still too much.51’ Naturally reticent and discreet, Halifax confessed to Charles Peake: ‘It is so terribly difficult to talk of oneself.’52 In 1931, Gandhi had sought an interview with Halifax to meet ‘not so much the Viceroy as t
he man in you’.53 Yet the man within Halifax, who by a whisker did not become our wartime Prime Minister, was elusive to a remarkable degree.

  ‘Queer bird, Halifax,’ said Clement Attlee, ‘very humorous, all hunting and Holy Communion.’54 David Dilks found Halifax ‘singularly inscrutable’ when, as a twenty-one-year-old, he interviewed him in December 1959, three weeks before he died.55 ‘He had a grave, measured style of speech. There was nothing gushing about him. He didn’t use two words if one would do.’ In part, this may have been due to a speech impediment; rather as Curzon pronounced his ‘a’s short (so that colleagues called him Alabasster), and Churchill had trouble with his ‘s’s, so Halifax had difficulty in saying his ‘r’s.

  Labour MPs dubbed him Lord Dullard, Conservative MPs ‘the Master of Garrowby’. But to Harold Nicolson, writing to Baba on Halifax’s death, Halifax was a man ‘who possessed both grandeur and simplicity.56 I know what a close friend he was of yours and what a gap he will leave …’

  When Baba attempted to pin down Halifax’s character, she considered that he was above all things a statesman, not a politician. ‘His strong point is his balanced detachment, with no pettiness or personal ambition rearing its head.’57 Diffident, modest, unpompous, Halifax was, in Lawford’s view, a man who led ‘a life of unselfish public service’ and was ‘an impressive survival from England’s more decorous past: the sort of statesman to whom it was in no way inhibiting to begin a letter: “Lord Halifax with his humble duty to Your Majesty.”’58 In fact, he was a friend both of the King (who ‘liked Halifax’s telegrams’) and the Queen (Dorothy was one of her ladies-in-waiting).59 Halifax would invite them to dine in his London house at 88 Eaton Square. The King had given him a key to the gardens at Buckingham Palace, through which Halifax walked with his dachshund on his way to the Foreign Office. He wrote in his diary: ‘The Queen has repeatedly exhorted me to use their garden-house, where are chairs and a telephone! I have never been able to yet.60 One of these days, if I am kept in London for the week-end, I might settle in there on Sunday.’

  It was impossible to imagine Halifax misbehaving. To the vast majority, he was a man of immense prestige and probity, above politics, a type of ‘statesman that only this country can produce’, wrote Geoffrey Shakespeare.61 At the same time he was capable of the unexpected, suddenly breaking ‘into broad Yorkshire’.62 He once took his daughter-in-law Diana to an all-in wrestling match, dressed in striped trousers, bowler hat, stiff collar and watch-chain. She says: ‘He spat on the pavement while waiting for a bus. “That’s revolting,” I said. He replied, “My father’s generation did it.”’

  Allegedly a saint, he was considered by a small group to be hard as nails, and not one hundred per cent truthful. His religious faith was offputting to the Soviet Ambassador who viewed him as a ‘pious old fool’.63 Maisky nicknamed Halifax ‘the Bishop’ who ‘retires to pray and comes out a worse hypocrite than before’, after saying to Rab Butler at the beginning of each working day: ‘Mind, Butler, we mustn’t sacrifice a single principle today!’ Amused at the great interest which Halifax took in Rasputin, Maisky believed that beneath the Foreign Secretary’s appeal to exalted feelings and noble principles, he had ‘a landlord’s heart’ and was ‘always mindful of his own interests’.64, 65 Chips Channon was another diarist suspicious of the way that Halifax ‘fascinates and bamboozles everyone’.66 In observing Halifax’s ‘extraordinary character, his high principles, his engaging charm and grand manner’, Channon could not help noticing as well ‘his power to frighten people into fits … his snobbishness … his eel-like qualities and, above all, his sublime treachery which is never deliberate and, always to him, a necessity dictated by a situation.67 Means are nothing to him, only ends.’

  Halifax’s real end, whatever it was, remained an enigma to almost everyone.

  ‘How mistaken one can be about people.’68 Over the course of a single year, Charles Peake wrote an unpublished diary, recently rediscovered, in which he set out to describe Halifax’s character, ‘which has constantly eluded his other friends’.69

  Peake considered that ‘if greatness means anything, he probably has it; but I wish he wouldn’t be so sensitive … With all his tiresomeness, his wings cleave the upper air, and are strong enough to bear one up with him, and strong too to keep one there …’70, 71

  At the same time, Peake’s master could easily be yanked back to earth by, for example, his dachshund. Halifax talked ‘the most appalling dog drivel I have ever heard in my life,’ Peake wrote, after watching him cuddle the dog in the course of a discussion about death, judgement, hell and heaven.72 ‘Oh look at that little waggetty, waggetty tail oh let daddy kiss his popsy little nose again – Dowothea! your dog’s gone and wee-weed again.’

  As for Halifax’s flaws, Peake felt that ‘his attitude is too inhuman (but then he is a little inhuman)’. Talking one night about the use of Christian names, Halifax shocked Peake by saying that they should be confined to the smallest possible circle of a man’s friends. ‘I always make Ruth, my daughter-in-law, address me as “Lord Halifax”.73 I am certainly not going to become “Popsy” or anything like that, and as I have often to speak to her for her good it would be highly inconvenient to let her call me Edward.’

  Like Chamberlain, Halifax had only a few intimate friends with whom he found it possible to relax his guard. One of a minuscule number who called him Edward, or ‘Edouard’ as she pronounced it, was Baba. What would have astonished those for whom Halifax stood as a pillar of unimpeachable detachment is that in his letters to this married woman, marked ‘Very Private’, he called Baba ‘my beloved’.

  No other woman in England was better placed to appreciate Edward Halifax’s predicament that weekend than his thirty-six-year-old hostess, Lady Alexandra Naldera ‘Baba’ Metcalfe. Her father, like him, had been Viceroy of India, Prize Fellow of All Souls, Chancellor of Oxford University and Foreign Secretary, and a front runner for the premiership. Unique in having occupied the same offices as Lord Curzon, Halifax was the only survivor of ‘the Curzon Cabinet’ of the 1920s. If there was anyone to whom he could turn in safety for frank advice, then it was to Curzon’s youngest daughter.

  Davina says of her mother: ‘She’s not Curzon’s daughter for nothing. She loved being in the thick of it, oh yes. Mummy always wanted to be part of the action.’

  Socially Halifax’s equal, Baba was someone who had no influence over government and yet knew what was going on and was not a burden to his wife. She had been at the hub a long time, and savoured her position there. As he stretched out in his chair on the lawn at Little Compton, poring over the same red boxes as Baba’s father, and reading the weekend’s ‘excited’ press calling for a reconstruction of the government, Lord Halifax might have been Lord Curzon waiting for the summons at Montacute House on that Whitsun weekend in 1923; and Baba one of those young women like Venetia Stanley, whom Duff Cooper in December 1916 had found seated beside Prime Minister Asquith’s fire, warming herself, ‘while under their feet the fate of the Empire was being decided’.74

  Baba in those days captivated every eye that gazed on her. Her beauty had the power to waken sensations long dormant. Slim, with smooth white hands, in a low-cut grey organza dress, she was exquisite, says her nephew Nicholas Mosley, then sixteen, who stayed at Little Compton that summer, and for whom ‘Aunt Baba’ acted as a surrogate mother. ‘Very chic, but exquisite is the word.’75

  Yet not a cosy mother. Even though possessed of a powerful libido, ‘she never told you the facts of life’, says her daughter, who cannot recall once being kissed or hugged by Baba. ‘She was extremely bossy, a serious put-downer.’

  Every inch a Viceroy’s daughter, Baba was accustomed to positioning herself at the head of any queue. Nancy Astor ticked her off, writing that ‘I never hear from you unless you want something – Never – and I resent it very much.’76 Not even when Baba’s son David had a temperature of 102 did it deter Baba from her evening plans. Her sister Irene was always complaining
about her. ‘Gosh! She is selfish.’77

  Women were frightened of Baba. She might be immaculate, but she scared people, said Halifax’s granddaughter. ‘She was cold and promiscuous, not a woman’s woman.’78 Men, though, responded in droves. Diana Mosley said of Baba that she had the slight touch of the governess which a lot of men find attractive. One of her beaux was Walter Monckton, head of the Press and Censorship Bureau, who complained that ‘you keep me tantalisingly suspended between frying pan & fire,’ leaving him ‘to sizzle – with cool detachment … I do love you.’79

  James Lees-Milne was a friend. ‘I like her, although she is, if not exigent, taxing, in that her presence is demanding of constant attention.80 She is très grande dame … Proffers in that truly womanly way a contribution towards the fare, diffidently, and determinedly, yet knowing all the time that the proffer will be rejected.’ Amused by her ‘deliberate action, her careful loud diction, her proud, self assured manner’, he found Baba handsome, energetic – and terrifying; and saluted how she simply got her way by ‘quietly bulldozing’.81

  Her parents’ wealth enabled Baba to call the shots in her marriage, family, home. Her son David said: ‘She ran the show,’ and he admitted to being ‘extremely careful’ around her.82 ‘She had the money. She was the one who was there. Her personality dominated the whole thing.’

  On this Saturday afternoon that irresistible and seductive force was directed at the tall, bald figure who had come to stay, whom Monckton called ‘my hated rival’.83 Baba’s daughter says: ‘To use old-fashioned words, she was horns in.’

  They had first met in Simla in 1926. Halifax was Viceroy, living in the house where Baba had been conceived twenty-three years before – it was either there, Viceregal Lodge, or under the deodar trees at Naldera, the golf course that Curzon built for himself, just below Simla, and from which Baba took her middle name. Her nickname ‘Baba’ was derived from Curzon’s Punjabi servants who baptised her ‘Baba Sahib’, the Viceroy’s baby. ‘We wanted a boy,’ said Irene, eight years older, who was jealous of Baba and always joking at her own expense about her bosoms, comparing herself to her beautiful slim sister.84 Much more recently, Baba had become maliciously known as ‘Ba-ba-Black-Shirt’, following a liaison with her Fascist brother-in-law, Oswald ‘Tom’ Mosley.