Encounter at the National Liberal Club
In 1968 the National Liberal Club organised a dinner to mark the centenary of the formation of Mr Gladstone’s first administration. The speakers were Roger Fulford, who placed Gladstone in historical perspective; the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, who spoke on his theological beliefs and the appointment of bishops; Violet Asquith, who had actually called on Gladstone at No. 10 Downing Street for tea, aged six, and described this; and I myself, who spoke of him qua his role as a politician. It was a glittering occasion.
Lady Violet told an engaging story about Mr Gladstone and his liability in seasickness. On one occasion prior to his crossing the Channel he consulted his physician who advised him that he should concentrate his mind totally on some great issue. In Mr Gladstone’s case this involved finding a suitable book to occupy his mind. He repaired to his library and took down a slim volume entitled Pickering on Adult Baptism, I had already arranged to take Lady Olwen Carey Evans, Lloyd George’s elder daughter, back to where she was staying and found no provision had been made for taking Lady Violet home – she accepted my invitation that I should do so. I realised at this point that I was about to transport Lloyd George’s and Asquith’s daughters whose families had been engaged in a feud since 1916, when Asquith was deposed as Prime Minister and was succeeded by Lloyd George, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer. I said to Violet: ‘I believe you know my Aunt Olwen’. ‘Yes’, came the reply, ‘slightly’. It was a decidedly chilly beginning. After we had dropped Violet, Olwen turned to me and said: ‘I cannot think why Violet is always beastly to me. We were, after all, neighbours once.’ ‘Yes’, I replied. ‘But the addresses involved were No. 11 and No. 10 Downing Street, and the tenants of No. 11 evicted the tenants of No. 10 and moved in themselves. For that they have never been forgiven.’
Churchill
In the autumn of 1961 I was with an I TV camera crew in Jamaica. We were addressing the likely economic effects of the new United Kingdom immigration laws on Jamaica. In the course of our enquiries we visited the Royal Jamaican cigar factory and there we saw the largest cigars I had ever seen – nearly eight inches long, taking approximately one hour forty-five minutes to smoke. It was decided that if he would accept them, we would give Churchill a box of these tobacco zeppelins. On returning home I asked Christopher Soames (Churchill’s son-in-law and himself a minister) whether he could make the necessary arrangements for a presentation. I could call on Churchill in his room in the House of Commons, his London home or Chartwell, where my mother lived a few miles away. Christopher suggested Hyde Park Gate, and on arrival at the appointed hour, before I could ring the doorbell, the door swung open and I was ushered into the hall. There, laid out, were what I could only describe as the great man’s props: the ebony cane with its silver top, the round/square bowler and the overcoat with its fur collar. Looking through the doorway I saw the old man sitting, brooding by the fire. He warmly welcomed me and gestured for me to sit in the chair next to him. He accepted the cigars and even he expressed surprise at their size. ‘They are vast’, he said and proceeded to offer me one of his cigars to smoke. I politely declined as I did not want him to feel under any obligation. ‘Very well’ he said, ‘You must take one of your own cigars as a souvenir.’ This I gladly agreed to do, and the cigar and a charming letter from him are both framed and hang in my study.
The second occasion on which I spoke to him was in the smoking room at the House of Commons. I had previously called in at Agnews, the picture dealers in Bond Street. Geoffrey Agnew asked me whether I was interested in Max Beerbohm’s work. He had a cartoon of the Liberal front bench in 1910, which included Asquith as Prime Minister, Lloyd George as Chancellor and Churchill as Home Secretary. Geoffrey expected that each of the three daughters of these men might want to buy the cartoon, thereby arousing the anger of the two unsuccessful ones. What should he do? I replied that he should sell it to me. It would be rather like the Peace of Amiens, of which no one was proud but everyone was relieved.
The picture was duly delivered to me at the Liberal Whips’ Room. As luck would have it, Willie Whitelaw was passing the door and I showed him the cartoon. I said that I had just seen Churchill making for the smoking room and I wondered whether he would be amused by the cartoon of himself and his colleagues. ‘He would be fascinated’, said Willie. ‘That is, if we got through to him.’ Churchill was seated surrounded by half a dozen MPs, who were acting as his acolytes. We propped the picture up in front of him and at first there was no reaction from him. Then suddenly he lit up and pointed to the first figure, and said: ‘It’s David’. ‘Yes sir. It is Lloyd George in 1910.’ And it is HH.’ ‘Yes sir, Asquith. And that’s you, sir.’ Churchill looked up and said: ‘Fine team, great team, none finer – ever’. Needless to say, I agreed, but I doubt whether his Tory entourage approved of these views! I felt that it was a pity that Campbell Bannerman had died before the cartoon was drawn, since the 1906 Cabinet had produced four Prime Ministers, of whom he was one. As luck would have it, Beerbohm had previously drawn a cartoon of Campbell Bannerman, which I discovered and bought a week later.
Lying in state: Gladstone and Churchill
After the tributes were paid in the House of Commons to Winston Churchill on 25 January 1965, I returned to my flat and went down for dinner in the restaurant. In the corner was a distinguished elderly man. I asked him whether I was right in thinking that he was Sir Albert Gladstone, to which he assented. I told him I had just returned from the House of Commons from the Churchill tributes and that the lying-in-state plans for Churchill were based on those for his grandfather, who was the last commoner to lie in state. Did he have a picture from his parents describing the scene? ‘Oh’, he said, ‘I was there as a very young child’. I asked him if he had been to Churchill’s lying-in-state and he said he thought he was too old to queue. I told him that with great respect he should be there since he was a living link with history; MPs’ guests could reach Westminster Hall by a side door and that I would like to escort him there tomorrow. He could be in and out in fifteen minutes. I remember noting the shape of his head was like Gladstone’s! We duly arrived at Westminster Hall and he appeared wrapped in thought. I asked him how different Churchill’s lying-in-state was from that of his grandfather. He said that the atmosphere was the same but there were virtually no children, fewer women and for the most part the men were wearing frock coats or morning coats and took off their top hats as they went past the catafalque. He said: ‘There is something different. Yes, it’s the coffin. Mr Churchill is draped with the Union Jack. My grandfather’s coffin was draped with a grey silk pall given to the family by the Armenian community. It was a token of their gratitude to him for the way in which he had denounced the atrocities perpetrated by the Turks against the Armenian people. We still use the pall for family funerals.’
I had with me my nephew, then aged ten, and thought what an amazing link he will be in later years, having been to Churchill’s lying-in-state with Gladstone’s grandson, who in his turn had been to Gladstone’s lying-in-state.
Isaac Foot
One of the most dramatic occasions that I have experienced at a political meeting was provided by Isaac Foot, former Liberal MP for SE Cornwall and the venerable father of Dingle, Michael, John, Hugh and Christopher. Isaac was to be the main supporting speaker at a 1955 election meeting in the town hall in Liskeard. A leaflet had been given out by some freelance Tories in which the Sixth Earl of Rosebery advised Liberals in Devon and Cornwall to vote Conservative in the general election. This advice followed the pattern in which Conservative candidates called themselves Liberal Conservatives, Conservative Liberals, National Liberal and Conservatives and every other possible variant.
‘Leave Lord Rosebery to me’, said Isaac before the meeting. ‘I understand’, he told a packed meeting, ‘that Lord Rosebery has ventured to give advice to Liberals in Devon and Cornwall. I thought he was only a specialist of the Turf, but possibly he claims autho
rity from the fact that his father was a minister in one of Mr Gladstone’s administrations.’ ‘Silence’, said Isaac, ‘I hear voices coming from over here’. He advanced towards an upright piano at the back of the platform, lifted the lid and the top of his head disappeared into the piano. ‘Yes, it’s Isaac Foot, good evening, sir, I am very well, thank you. I hope you are too. It is difficult to hear you, since there is background noise. Hush’, said Isaac, waving his hand towards the audience. Total silence ensued. ‘Yes, that’s very clear, thank you very much. I’ll certainly tell them that. Good day to you, sir.’
With that he extracted himself from the piano, closed the lid and advanced to the front of the platform. ‘I’ve just been talking to Mr Gladstone’, said Isaac, ‘and his advice is that all Liberals in Devon and Cornwall should vote Liberal. So much for Lord Rosebery.’
The audience was captivated. My reckoning was that 80 per cent regarded this intervention as a tour de force, 10 per cent thought it might possibly have happened, the other 10 per cent weren’t sure what to think.
Isaac Foot was a West Country institution. His house, Pencrebar in Callington, was bursting at the seams with books. He was unquestionably the best-read man I’ve ever known. The distillation of his reading was to be found in Commonplace Books: on the spine of each was the name of a statesman, historian, poet or author whose works or writings about them he had absorbed. Thus, for example, the Commonplace Book on Edmund Burke represented the cullings of twenty books or more. He took particular delight in getting telephone calls from his sons: Dingle, checking a quote for an article in The Observer, or a similar enquiry from Michael for Tribune or from John and Hugh, checking a historical allusion for a future speech. When his wife protested that there was no further space in the house for more books, he had some of his future purchases delivered to the gardener’s cottage, and smuggled them into the house in a wheelbarrow, covered in logs. He was almost always discovered.
A passionate orator and local preacher, he was a formidable campaigner for Liberalism and Methodism, which were the driving forces of his life.
Viscount Samuel
By the time I Joined the Liberal Party in 1948, Lord Samuel was already the elder statesman of the party and sole surviving member of the Asquith government. As he got older, his quips become crisper and more effective. Seeking to maintain an equidistant position as between the Conservative and Labour Parties, he told the story of a bathing beauty competition at Brighton. The judges were unable to decide between two finalists and happened to see a Chinaman who had just got off the train. Here was a guarantee of an impartial judge! The Chinaman looked from one to the other, shook his head and said: ‘Both are worse!’
In the same context Lord Samuel said that when he was asked to vote Conservative in order to dislodge the Socialists, he was being asked ‘to jump out of the frying pan into the refrigerator!’
Liberals always regarded the National Liberals (previously known as Liberal Nationals) as anathema. They were formed to fight the 1931 general election, having broken away from the Liberal Party on the issue of tariff reform, pledging their total support to the Conservative Party, from whom they become indistinguishable. They thereby confused the electorate, until they were ultimately wound up as a party. It was not before the Conservative Party had postured as Liberal Nationals and Conservative Liberals, and every other variation, that the hybrid party ceased to exist in 1966.
As Sir Archibald Sinclair said: ‘The National Liberals are like a mule, in that they have no pride of ancestry and no hope of posterity’. Lord Samuel was to deal with them in a different way, but one that was equally devastating. When speaking in the House of Lords, he commended a measure which had the support of the three major parties. Listening intently, Lord Teviot, who had signed the post-war Teviot-Woolton agreement formalising the relationship between the National Liberals and the Conservative Party, rose to interrupt and said: ‘Surely the noble Viscount means that there are four major parties involved – the Conservatives, the Socialists, the Liberals and the National Liberals?’ Samuel eyed him quizzically and then replied: ‘I am grateful to the noble Lord for his interesting and useful observation, of which no doubt the House will take note. For my part, I shall endeavour to tie a knot in my handkerchief.’
On the eve of parliament in 1960, the Liberals in the Commons had a Joint dinner with the Lords for the first time. There was some doubt as to who should read out the Queen’s Speech – Jo Grimond as Leader of the Parliamentary Party, or Lord Rea, the Liberal leader in the Lords. With considerable finesse, Lord Samuel, who had been Liberal leader in both houses, was asked to read the speech. At the discussions which followed the dinner, Lord Samuel said that whilst he was flattered to read the Queen’s Speech, and with the Suez fiasco (which I deal with later) clearly in mind, he said: ‘When I was reading the gracious speech I was tempted to interpolate comment, and then thought it might be disrespectful to the monarch. When I came across the claim that: “My government will continue to support the United Nations”, I was tempted to say: “says you!”’
Lord Beveridge
I was privileged to come into contact with Lord Beveridge as a result of the founding of a charity, with one or two colleagues in 1957, known as the National Benevolent Fund for the Aged. The purpose of the charity is to provide holidays for elderly people from inner cities who have never been away on holiday, or have not been away for decades. The charity started in a small bottom drawer of my desk in my chambers, when the holidays cost £7 per person. Lord Beveridge was invited to become the first president. Beveridge had always maintained that however advanced the welfare state, there would always be a role for voluntary action. This was one reason why he was disappointed at the minor role which was envisaged for Friendly Societies. He would have been delighted at the way in which this charity has developed. Thirty-seven thousand elderly people have been provided with a week’s holiday in a number of seaside resorts. The cost today is £100 per head, or £200 if special care is needed. The financial turnover is on average a quarter of a million pounds per annum. The charity also provides tens machines which relieve pain, to over 300 individuals and 400 hospitals.
Lord Beveridge had some very distinguished successors as presidents: Lady Spencer Churchill, Mary Soames (as Patron), the former Speaker of the House of Commons, Lord Tonypandy, and the current Speaker, Betty Boothroyd.
Working breakfasts are my idea of purgatory, but there are always exceptions. One of these was breakfasting with Lord Beveridge at the Reform Club, where we not infrequently stayed.
He was at the time heavily involved in writing a history of prices. He would, for example, refer to the terms and conditions of employment of a mason in the fourteenth century, or a cabinet-maker in the fifteenth century, and he would then draw fascinating conclusions as to their social status and economic significance.
He came into active party politics late in life, but as a senior civil servant he drafted the Labour Exchange Act in 1909. He also helped draft part of the National Insurance Act of 1911 in support of Asquith and Lloyd George. Beveridge then became, in 1919, the director of the London School of Economics, and thereafter Vice Chancellor of London University. But he will be most remembered for the Beveridge Report, which was adopted by Attlee and the post-war Labour government and earned Beveridge the title of Father of the Welfare State.
In 1944, he was adopted as Liberal candidate for the Berwick-upon-Tweed by-election. The constituency had been represented by the young George Grey (son of the late General W. H. Grey, one-time Liberal party treasurer). George Grey was killed in the Second World War and under the terms of the party truce during the war, any by-election would permit the party holding the seat to provide the replacement MP. Under these circumstances Beveridge became the MP for Berwick. The supreme irony of the 1945 election was that the campaign was fought by all parties on the basis of the Beveridge Report, and yet he himself was defeated at the polls. Thereafter he was created a peer. In the 1959 election h
e came to speak in support of my candidature in North Devon and drew large crowds.
Beveridge had a formidable wife. On one occasion Donald Wade (Liberal MP for Huddersfield West) arranged for the mayor to receive Beveridge. Beveridge had barely arrived in the mayor’s parlour when the telephone rang. It was Lady Beveridge wishing to speak to the mayor. Having established that she was talking to the mayor she said: ‘I want you to be personally responsible for seeing that my husband has a hot water bottle in his bed tonight!’
Aneurin Bevan at his most sparkling
I only met Bevan when he, Megan Lloyd George and myself had tea on the terrace of the House of Commons. The two Celts sparked each other off and it wasn’t long before Bevan switched to a subject which always seemed to fascinate politicians, namely rubbishing some of their parliamentary colleagues. For some reason I cannot recall, the discussion involved Chuter Ede, the Home Secretary. ‘Chuter is a frightful bore’, said Nye. ‘He is suburban, which accounts for it. His speeches are a series of generalisations. They are rather like branches of a tree in that they sprout from a wizened trunk, spread in all directions and very seldom touch ground.’
On Morrison: ‘Herbert has a way of taking over other people’s brilliant plans, storing them up in perpetuity in case they should ever become useful’.
In My Own Time Page 8