The Great Coup of 1916, 7: The End Of Democracy

Lloyd George immediately accepted the King’s invitation to form a government on 7 December 1916. His own version of events dripped insincerity, giving the impression that the onerous task of leading the government was thrust upon him suddenly, as if by magic. ‘As soon as the King entrusted me with the task of forming an Administration in succession to the Ministry that had disappeared, I had to survey the tasks awaiting me …’ [1] What arrant nonsense. ‘The ministry that had disappeared.’ This was not a Harry Potter. Perhaps he was thinking more in terms of a mafia ‘disappearance’. He would have been at home with the Mafiosa.

One of Lloyd George’s first moves was to summon Maurice Hankey to the War Office to ‘have a long talk about the personnel of the new Govt., the procedure of the select War Ctee., and the future of the war.’ [2] He asked Hankey to write a memo giving his view on the state of the war and as early as 9 December, Hankey spent the whole day with the new War Cabinet. [3] How more central could he have been to all of the discussions which finally approved Lloyd George’s decisions? [4] Unlike many of his contemporaries, Maurice Hankey was not surprised to find that Milner had been appointed directly to the inner-sanctum of Britain’s war planning. Unelected, unknown to many ordinary men and women, Lord Milner appeared as if out of the ether to take his place among the political elite charged with managing the war to ultimate victory. [5] Lloyd George claimed, laughably, that ‘I neither sought nor desired the Premiership’ and explained Milner’s inclusion as representing the ‘Tory intelligentsia and Die-Hards.’ [6] What lies. Lloyd George had always exuded unbridled ambition and had been plotting the coup against Asquith with Milner’s cabal for months. [7] His premiership was conditional on their support. Lord Milner was to have a place by his side.

The myth of Lloyd George’s ‘lightening rapidity’ in assembling around him ‘all that is best in British Life’ was coined by Lord Northcliffe in an article printed by the international press on 10 December. [8] Northcliffe had been highly influential in supporting Lloyd George, largely, but not exclusively through his editor at the Times, Geoffrey Dawson.

Although he thought nothing of telephoning the new prime minister in person, [9] the owner of the Times could not stop other influences obligating Lloyd George to retain what Northcliffe called ‘has-beens’ in cabinet posts. [10] His Daily Mail and Evening News called for the removal of Arthur Balfour and his cousin, Lord Robert Cecil to no avail. Did Northcliffe not know that both men were deeply entrenched inside the Secret Elite?

Let there be no doubt, the coup was devised and executed by members and agents of the Secret Elite. Once Asquith had been replaced, they permeated the new administration with Milner’s acolytes and associates from top to bottom, and on all sides as well. [11] Let Lloyd George be the figurehead, but the Monday Night Cabal and their Secret Elite supporters were absolutely determined to place themselves and their trusted allies in all of the major offices of state. Furthermore, Lloyd George was subtly but securely scrutinised at every turn. He would not be given free rein. Thus their chosen men were placed in key positions, with a smattering of useful Conservative and Labour MPs given office in order to guarantee that the government could survive any parliamentary vote. On his return to London on 10 December, Hankey ‘had to see Lord Milner by appointment’. He noted in his diary ‘I have always hated his [Lord Milner’s] politics but found the man very attractive and possessed of personality and [we] got own like a house on fire’. [12] Of course they did. Hankey would not have survived otherwise. He was well aware of Milner’s power and influence.

Another myth still widely accepted is that Lloyd George’s very special cabinet, which literally took control of every strand in the prosecution of the war, was assembled at break-neck speed by the Welsh genius. It had taken months of deliberation and consultation before appointments and tactics were finally agreed inside the closed ranks of the Monday Night Cabal. The final selection which bore Lloyd George’s alleged stamp reflected the Secret Elite’s approval of men in whom they had faith. The War Committee initially comprised prime minister Lloyd George, who had been in the Secret Elite’s pocket since 1910, [13] Viscount Alfred Milner, the most important influence inside that secret movement [14] George Curzon of All Souls and twice Viceroy of India, [15] Andrew Bonar Law, still the formal leader of the Tories and the Labour MP Arthur Henderson, an outspoken champion of the war effort. [16] This central core took charge. They held daily meetings to better manage the war. Sometimes two and three meetings took place in a single day. These five men alone were supposedly the supreme governors of the State. [17] But they were not in any sense, equals.

The old order of senior Liberal politicians was mercilessly purged. Out went Asquith despite his years of loyal service. Sir Edward Grey had forfeited his right to office when he began to consider possibilities of peace with the Americans. He was put out to pasture. Reginald McKenna, long a thorn in Lloyd George’s side was dismissed. Lord Crewe remained loyal to Asquith and was not considered. To his great disappointment, Winston Churchill was not deemed suitable.  He had many enemies in the Tory  party. One Liberal Party stalwart, Samuel Montagu, who took over at the Ministry of Munitions when Lloyd George moved to the War Office in July 1916, had to go in order to find room for other appointees, but his patience was to be rewarded some short months later when he was made Viceroy of India. [18] This is precisely how the Secret Elite adjusts its favours and looks after its own. It still does.

The Secret Elite stamped their authority over every important level of government. With Sir Edward Carson at the Admiralty and Arthur Balfour at the Foreign Office, Lord Derby became Secretary of State for War and Lord Robert Cecil continued in his position as Minister of Blockade. Home Secretary, Sir George Cave took office barely months after he and FE Smith had successfully prosecuted Sir Roger Casement and refused his right to appeal to the House of Lords. [19] Secret Elite agents, every one.

Milner ensured that his close friends were given positions of influence and authority. Take for example the meteoric rise of Rowland Prothero. He claimed to know only two men ‘prominent in public life’. [20] It transpired that these were Lords Milner and Curzon. In 1914 Prothero was first elected to parliament as one of Oxford University’s MPs. In late 1915 he served on a Committee on Home Production of Food with Alfred Milner. In 1916, Milner’s friend was given the cabinet post of President of the Board of Agriculture. [21] It took him a mere two and a half years to move from new recruit to cabinet minister. In addition, Arthur Lee, who had accommodated many of the secret meetings which foreshadowed the coup, was appointed Director-General of food production. Other known members and supporters of the Secret Elite who shamelessly benefitted from the coup included H.A.L. Fisher, President of the Board of Education, [22] Walter Long as Colonial Secretary and Sir Henry Birchenough at the Board of Trade. [23] They were everywhere … and not just politicians.

Lloyd George had risen to high office through the unseen patronage of the Secret Elite. His performance at the Board of Trade [24] guaranteed him the benevolent approbation of leading figures in shipping and ship-building. As Chancellor he laid claim to saving the City [25], took advice from Lord Rothschild, financiers and insurance brokers, linked the British economy to America through Morgan-Grenfell and met and socialised with the great mine-owners and manufacturers of the time. In December 1916 he revolutionised government control of production by bringing businessmen into political office. Unfortunately the appointment of interested parties to posts from which their companies could reap great profit was not a success.

Sir Joseph Maclay was appointed in charge of shipping. As a Scottish ship-owner and manager, Maclay had been critical of the government’s concessions to trade unions and he opposed the nationalization of shipping. The Admiralty treated Maclay with deep hostility, and opposed his idea of convoys after the onset of Germany’s unrestricted submarine offensive in February 1917. Maclay was proved right [26] though shipowners still reaped unconscionable fortunes.

The new prime minister made Lord Devonport food controller. Chairman of the Port of London Authority (1909-25), he broke the dockers’ strike in 1912, causing great distress and hardship in East London. Imagining that his hard-man image equated to strength of character, Lloyd George appointed Minister of Food Control. [27] Not so. Devonport protected his own grocery interests and resisted the introduction of rationing until May 1917. 

Lord Rhondda, the Welsh coal magnate and industrialist was entrusted with the Local Government Board and his popularity grew when he was asked to take over the role of the incompetent Devonport as minister of food control. He grasped the nettle, by fixing food prices and ensuring government purchases of basic supplies. [28] Compared to the others, he was a shining light.

Westman Pearson, later Viscount Cowdrey, was placed in charge of the Air Board. Pearson had acquired oil concessions in Mexico through his questionable relationship with the Mexican dictator, Diaz. [29] His ownership of the Mexican Eagle Petroleum Company (which became part of Royal Dutch Shell in 1919) guaranteed Pearson vast profits throughout the war.

Sir Alfred Mond, elevated by Lloyd George in 1916 to Commissioner of Works was the managing director of the Mond Nickel Company and a director of the International Nickel Company of Canada. Nickel hardens armour and special steels. Basically it is a strategic material which came to the fore in the so-called naval race prior to 1914. [30]

The Mond companies made great profits during the prolonged war. In 1915 Britain sent twelve times the amount of nickel to Sweden that it had in 1913. [31] There, it was either manufactured into war materials and sold to Germany, or re-exported in its raw state. Incredibly, the Chairman of one of the Empire’s most important metal processing and exporting businesses, which was directly and indirectly supplying Germany, was created Commissioner of Works. Questionable deals were subsequently negotiated between the British government and the British-American Nickel Corporation which were strongly criticised in parliament [32] but Alfred Mond ended his career as Lord Melchett of Landforth. You couldn’t make this up.

In addition, Milner and his Secret Elite associates literally took over Lloyd George’s private office. As early as 10 December Hankey realised that he was not to be the only member of the new prime minister’s secretariat. At Milner’s request, Leo Amery, his loyal lieutenant in South Africa, was unaccountably placed on the staff of the War Cabinet, but not as joint Secretary. Hankey remained secure in Lloyd George’s trust in charge of the War Cabinet organisation. [33]

A curious new chapter in Downing Street’s history was created outside the prime minister’s residence. Literally. Temporary offices were constructed in the Downing Street garden to accommodate a select group of trusted administrators who monitored and directed all contact between Lloyd George and departments of government. [34] The man in charge throughout its existence was Professor W.G. S. Adams, an Oxford Professor and member of Milner’s entourage [35] who later became editor of War Cabinet Reports and Warden of All Souls in Oxford. [36] This appointment was swiftly followed by that of two former members of Milner’s famous Kindergarten; [37] Philip Kerr became Lloyd George’s private secretary and Lionel Curtis, another of Milner’s loyal acolytes, was also drafted into service. It did not stop there. Waldorf Astor and Lord Northcliffe’s younger brother, Cecil Harmsworth followed shortly afterwards.

To complete the pack, Milner insisted that Lloyd George reconsider appointing John Buchan to his staff after Haig’s apologist had been turned down for a post. In a private letter which has survived because it comes from the Lloyd George archives, rather than Milner’s much culled and carefully shredded papers, he wrote:
‘My Dear Prime Minister, Don’t think me too insistent! I wish you would not turn down John Buchan, without seeing him yourself…. I am not satisfied to have him rejected on hear-say, & ill informed hear-say at that.’ [38]
Buchan was appointed to the prime minister’s staff as Director of Information. And historians would have us believe that these were Lloyd George’s appointments.

It was as if the Monday Night Cabal had kidnapped the prime minister. Just as Alfred Milner had captured, then captivated, the nascent talent of young imperialists from Oxford University at the turn of the century and taken them to South Africa to help him govern and renovate the post Boer-War Transvaal and Cape colonies, so now, the very same men ‘guided’ Lloyd George and filtered the information which flowed to Downing Street. They were not Lloyd Georg’s men … they were Lord Milner’s. He was in charge.

To the anguish of Asquith’s political allies, this new bureaucracy had metamorphosed into an undemocratic monster fashioned by Alfred Milner. They could see it and railed against it. What we need to know is, why has this wholesale coup d’etat been studiously ignored by mainstream historians? Why do they continually write about Lloyd George’s government and Lloyd George’s secretariat when his very position was bound and controlled by Milner and his Garden Suburb minders? The radical journalist, H W Massingham published a vitriolic attack on Milner’s organisation in early 1917:

‘… A new double screen of bureaucrats is interposed between the War Directorate and the heads of [government] Departments, whose responsibility to Parliament has hitherto been direct … The first is the Cabinet Secretariat … the second is a little body of illuminati, whose residence is in the Prime Minister’s garden …These gentlemen stand in no sense for a Civil Service Cabinet. They are rather a class of travelling empirics in Empire, who came in with Lord Milner … The governing ideas are not those of Mr. Lloyd George … but of Lord Milner … Mr George has used Toryism to destroy Liberal ideas; but he has created a Monster which, for the moment, dominates both. This is the New Bureaucracy which threatens to master England …’ [39]

It was indeed. This was the Secret Elite’s most successful coup so far, accomplished by the critical silence and complicity of a compliant press. Elected parliamentary government had been purged. The Secret Elite spurned democracy because they ordained that democracy did not work. Their dictatorship was masked by Lloyd George, happy to pose and strut as the man who would win the war. Perhaps you were taught that he did? It is a self-serving myth. He operated inside a political straitjacket and fronted an undemocratic government.

And the sacrifice of youth continued.  And the profits of war grew ever larger.

[1] David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 620.
[2] Hankey, Diary 10 December 1916.
[3] War Cabinet 1, CAB 23/1/1 discussed the cost of loans from America which were running at $60 million per week. Messrs. Morgan, Grenfell and Co. continued as the conduit for all American payments. Hankey also recorded in these minutes that the Press had been informed that the War cabinet would meet every weekday.
[4] Lord Vansittart recorded that Hankey ‘progressively became secretary of everything that mattered. He grew into a repository of secrets, a chief Inspector of Mines of information.’ Robert Gilbert Vansittart, The Mist Procession, p. 164.
[5] While Lloyd George spends many pages expressing his opinion on most of his colleagues, he curiously omits a pen-picture on Lord Milner. Possibly the Censor removed it. Either way it is interesting to note how carefully Milner’s contribution to Lloyd George’s ascent to the premiership has been airbrushed.
[6] Lloyd George, Memoirs, p. 596.
[7] See blog, The Great Coup of 1916: 4 The Monday Night Cabal, 3 August 2016.
[8] The Times estimated that Lord Northcliffe’s lengthy article in praise of Lloyd George had been carried in one thousand American, Australian, Canadian, South African, French, Italian and other journals. [Times 11 December, 1916]
[9] A M Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 329.
[10] The Times, 11 December 1916, p. 4.
[11] Gollin, Proconsul, p. 376.
[12] Ibid., p. 329.
[13] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, pp. 164-5.
[14] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp. 6-9 and pp. 140- 47.
[15] The place of All Souls college at Oxford as the centre of the Secret Elite intelligentsia in Britain was identified by Professor Quigley. See The Anglo-American Establishment pp. 20-26.
[16] In August 1914 Arthur Henderson had been outspoken in his objection to war, but he changed his position absolutely within weeks.
[17] Gollin, Proconsul, p. 391.
[18] E.S. Montagu was both a friend of Asquith’s and respected colleague of Lloyd George. To most observers his omission from Asquith’s cabinet in 1916 spelled the end of his political career. But this is not how the Secret Elite work. In stepping down temporarily, Montagu earned the right to be promoted to the prestigious position of Viceroy of India in 1917.
[19] Thomas S. Legg, Marie-Louise Legg, ‘Cave, George, Viscount Cave (1856–1928)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[20] Lord Ernle, Whippingham to Westminster, p. 248.
[21] Quigley, Anglo-American Establishment, p. 27.
[22] Ibid., p. 312.
[23] Ibid.
[24] President of the Board of Trade was Lloyd George’s first cabinet post in 1906. During his tenure there he became popular with the business class whose interests he often championed.
[25] Lloyd George, Memoirs, p. 61.
[26] Ibid., pp. 688-95.
[27] Richard Davenport-Hines, ‘Kearley, Hudson Ewbanke, first Viscount Devonport (1856–1934)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[28] John Williams, ‘Thomas, David Alfred, first Viscount Rhondda (1856–1918)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[29] Geoffrey Jones, Westman Pearson, 1st Viscount Cowdrey, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[30] Gordon H. Boyce, Co-operative Structures in Global Business, pp. 84-5.
[31] Rear Admiral MWWC Consett, The Triumph of Unarmed Forces, p. 201.
[32] Hansard House of Commons Debate, 14 January 1918 vol. 101 cc5-6.
[33] Maurice Hankey, Supreme Command, vol. II, p. 590.
[34] John Turner, Lloyd George’s Secretariat, p. 1.
[35] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 313.
[36] Ibid., pp. 91-93. All Souls College in Oxford has been closely associated with the Rhodes/Milner group so integral to the Secret Elite in England.
[37] The title Milner’s Kindergarten was given to the group of young Oxford University graduates whom Milner attracted to help him rebuild South Africa after the Boer War. They subsequently enjoyed stellar careers in journalism, politics, banking and finance every area of Secret Elite influence. Further reading – Walter Nimocks, Milner’s Young Men.
[38] Milner to Lloyd George 17 January 1917, in the Lloyd George Papers.
[39] H.W. Massingham, The Nation 24 February, 1917.

Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener 10: The Final Reckoning

The previous nine blogs have presented the reasons why the men of secret power wanted rid of Herbert Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War from 1914-1916 … but were unable to manoeuvre him from office. He had threatened the smooth running of Trans-Atlantic finance, had interfered with, and apparently delayed, the enormous growth in armaments and munitions, and did not agree that the war would be won by the nation which fired most shells across the barren pot-holes of the Western Front. His phenomenal contribution to voluntary recruitment could not go on forever. Its initial success in the early months of the war was unsustainable. Conscription had to be introduced in March 1916 when the Military Service Act came into force [1] just as the parliamentarians had wanted, and Kitchener did not trust politicians. He was justified in his mistrust of gossiping Cabinet colleagues. Prime Minister Asquith, for example, shared secret confidential information with his paramour [2] Venetia Stanley on a daily basis. [3] He famously stated that he would give Cabinet ministers all they information they sought ‘if they would only divorce their wives.’ [4] In this, as in many of his other beliefs, Kitchener was absolutely right. London society was a hotbed of unbridled war-gossip especially in the first two years of the conflict.

What Kitchener failed to understand was that neither he, nor the British Cabinet, called the tune. The elite Bankers and financiers, the owners of the military-industrial complex, the manipulators of power and influence, the newspaper moguls and the academic guardians of historical record, the establishment on both sides of the Atlantic had ordained the war to crush Germany and amass even greater fortunes in the process. The Secret Elite whom we have identified by name in Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, [5] and further expanded in previous blogs, [6] held this as their sole objective.

An early end to the war was not to be contemplated. Nor was the notion of a just and fair peace about which Kitchener had been talking. What use was a compromise which would have allowed German commerce and industry to remain intact with all of the advantages through which modern business practice thrived? It was inconceivable that they would allow the war to end before the American government joined the conflict. The United States had to be drawn into the war in order to offload the enormous private loans and debts accrued by the Morgan/Rothschild/Rockefeller empires through their monopolies on arms, munitions and international loans. Had Kitchener influenced a move for peace in 1916, the burden of debt would not have been shouldered by US taxpayers, and likewise, British and French tax-payers, but by the financial institutions. An honourable peace would have left Germany strong and independent. Germany had to be made to pay for a war they had never wanted. Lord Kitchener’s threatened intervention imperilled every aspect of the Secret Elite’s aim.

He knew he had enemies, clearly.

Though he himself was a very loyal servant to King and Country, Herbert Kitchener had to struggle against professional jealousy and disloyalty from his senior staff. Sir Henry Wilson, the Principal Liaison Officer between the allied forces in France, was a regular correspondent with Lord Alfred Milner, the acknowledged leader of the Secret Elite, and acted as a high level informant behind the backs of Kitchener and Asquith. The Prime Minister wrote that both he and Kitchener considered Wilson a constantly intriguing serpent [7] so there was little love lost on either side.

The Secretary of State’s enemies amongst the press included editors of the Morning Post and the National Review, but his loudest critic was Lord Northcliffe at The Times and The Mail. Ever close to the Secret Elite, The Times, through their privileged correspondent Charles Repington, had tried to bring Kitchener into public disrepute by fanning the flames of the so-called munitions crisis in 1915. [8] Far from weakening Lord Kitchener, their accusations against him damaged their reputation and underlined the strength of public support he continued to enjoy. [9] Thus Horatio Kitchener was a man with many enemies, not in the trenches, the workplace or the ordinary home, but inside the core of the Establishment. That he understood. What he could not grasp was the grand plan which had been constructed above the realm of public politics.

Asquith was obliged to shake-up his Cabinet in May 1915 and the net impact of the reorganisation was to bring more members of the Secret Elite into public office. Professor Carroll Quigley [10] identified eleven members of Asquith’s ‘coalition’ Cabinet as members of this cabal including Lords Lansdowne and Curzon, Andrew Bonar Law, the Conservative Party leader, Sir Edward Carson, F.E. Smith, Walter Long, the Earl of Selborne, Robert Cecil and most importantly, Arthur J. Balfour, former Prime Minister, as First Lord of the Admiralty. The man whom they dearly wanted removed, Lord Kitchener, stood firm. Though in private they all wanted rid of him, in public he could not be criticised.

For as long as they could find reason to tolerate him, especially once his powers over munitions had been shifted wholesale into Lloyd Geoge’s court, Kitchener remained an asset both as the international figure-head for the British military and as a buffer between the Prime Minister and his detractors. However, once he began to speak privately about his role as a peace-maker at the end of the war, and share his ideals with leading figures in both the military and the government, [11] Kitchener’s days were numbered. The asset had become a liability. But how could they get rid of him? You might construct a long list of possibilities – ‘heart-attack’, ‘suicide’, a full range of ‘natural causes’ might have been actioned. Any public suggestion of his alleged homosexuality would certainly have ruined him but what possible good would have come from trashing the name and reputation of the hero of the Empire? None. Though the military and political agents of the Secret Elite schemed behind his back, it was in the interests of all to protect Kitchener’s public reputation. He had to be removed with a subtlety which brooked no backlash. What were the odds against Herbert Kitchener dying in a naval tragedy, lost at sea? No-one could have anticipated such a scenario or possibly suspect unlawful practice. Surely?

Before anyone rushes to close the account with the dismissive and entirely unfair claim that this is simply another conspiracy, re-read the volume of evidence, actual and circumstantial, which we have already presented. [12]

We have clearly established that there was no immediate need for Herbert Kitchener to visit Russia. Knowing that the Somme offensive would begin in July, he threatened to pull out of the venture as late as 2 June 1916 rather than have it postponed. [13] The central Secret Elite place-man at the Czar’s court in Petrograd (St Petersburg) was Sir John Hanbury-Williams, a close friend and associate of Alfred Milner. [14] Williams’s position as Chief of the British Military Mission to Russia from 1914-1917 was consolidated by ancestral diplomatic connections with the Empress Catherine the Great, which granted him a special place in the Czar’s more intimate circles. [15]

The Secret Elite network spun a spider’s web of influence across the globe. Hanbury-Williams had conjured the Grand Duke’s supposed appeal to the British to attack the Dardanelles [16] in 1915, and it was he who co-ordinated Kitchener’s visit to Russia in 1916. His diary shows that the Czar ‘talked over the proposed visit of Lord Kitchener with the greatest keenest and interest’ before Hanbury-Williams organised the details with the British Ambassador and the military attache, Sir Alfred Knox. [17] The plan to send Kitchener to Russia emanated from Britain, not Russia. Indeed Hanbury-Williams’s published record omitted detailed reference to the background preparations for what was transformed into ‘Kitchener’s’ visit. Allegedly, when Lord Kitchener insisted that any postponement of his visit would result in its cancellation, Hanbury-Williams took immediate steps to stress Czar Nicholas’s personal wish that the visit go ahead. [18] The plans devised by Hanbury-Williams were transposed into the Czar’s wishes. So ran the web of deceit.

Everyone personally connected with the Secret Elite whose name had been associated with the ‘mission’ to Russian withdrew. To add to this co-incidence, their reaction to the news of Kitchener’s death on HMS Hampshire was in its own right, suspicious. Lloyd George claimed that he heard the ‘startling’ news on his way to a War Council in Downing Street on 6 June. When he entered the Cabinet Room he described ‘the Prime Minister, Sir Edward Grey, Mr Balfour and Sir Maurice Hankey sitting at a table all looking stunned’. This was indeed an inner circle of powerful men who understood what had happened, yet they were unable to talk about the consequences? Remarkably, given the enormity of what had just taken place, ‘Sir Maurice and I quite forgot for the moment that had it not been for the Irish negotiations, we would have shared the same fate.’ [19] That is untrue. From the outset Hankey said he would not go, and Lloyd George’s refusal had nothing to do with Ireland. [20] How many people would have reacted with such sang-froid? He and Hankey ‘quite forgot’ that they should have been on that same ill fated ship? [21] It defied human nature.

Indeed, without breaking step or pausing for a moment to contemplate the many contributions of the now deceased Secretary of State for War, Lloyd George knew that ‘the passing of Lord Kitchener left an empty place at the War Office. I realised that this place might be offered to me.’ [22] This man of many plots, of endless carping behind the backs of others, who briefed the press, especially Northcliffe, against Kitchener, displayed an almost callous cynicism. Lloyd George did indeed accept that office on 4 July, but not before ensuring that all the powers that had been systematically stripped from Kitchener were reinvested in the new Secretary of State for War.

On hearing of Kitchener’s death, Northcliffe is reported to have burst into his sister’s drawing room declaring, ‘Providence is on the side of the British Empire’ [23] Fawning tributes dripped from the mouths of the guilty. Admiral Jellicoe solemnly declared that the navy’s grief for ‘a soldier’ whose loss ‘we deplore so deeply. It was our privilege to see him last; he died with many of our comrades’. [24] No mention was made of Admiralty culpability or unswept channels.

Look again at the depth of that culpability. HMS Hampshire was barely fit for service and its loss added little to the Navy’s post-Jutland woes. Jellicoe and his masters at the Admiralty approved the ship’s route into a known minefield. Naval intelligence at Room 40 had carefully monitored all U-Boat activity. References to the minefield and the sinking of the trawler, Laurel Rose were removed or altered to suit the cover-up ‘explanation’ when difficult questions were raised about the fate of the Hampshire. The official report was kept secret. Key documents have still never seen the light of day.

Kitchener’s murder was covered with dripping platitudes and cynically penned obituaries. In the House of Lords, Lansdowne proclaimed that Kitchener’s death ‘was a great and dignified exit from the stage upon which he had played so prominent a part during the long years of his life.’ [25] The two-faced Asquith lamented ‘his career has been cut short while still in the full tide of unexhausted powers and possibilities.’ [26] The Secret Elite’s John Buchan ordained that ‘in a sense his work was finished’ and ‘his death was a fitting conclusion to the drama of his life.’ [27] ‘Bollocks’ may not be a recognised historical assessment, but ‘bollocks’ it remains. They peddled lies as fraudsters do.

The full panoply of State and Church gathered at St Paul’s Cathedral on 13 June to hold a service of remembrance for Lord Kitchener and his staff. The King and Queen accompanied by Queen Alexandra, the Lord Mayor in his black and gold robes, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, and assorted Aldermen and Sheriffs all gathered to pay their final respects to the former Secretary of State for War and champion of the Empire. They sang ‘Abide with me’, recited the ‘De Profundis’, read from the liturgy, said Prayers for the Country at War and thanked God for a brave and courageous life. The service ended with all three verses of God Save the King. [28] Thus with a great sense of theatre, Kitchener’s memory was consigned to the annals of received history. How quintessentially British.

No-one has ever been held to account for the murder of Lord Herbert Horatio Kitchener and over 700 other men.

[1] Conscription: the First World War – UK Parliament
http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private…/conscription/
[2] Asquith’s complex relationship with the much younger Venetia Stanley has intrigued commentators over the century. Whether or not they were lovers remains unproven.
[3] Michael Brock and Eleanor Brock, H.H. Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, Oxford University Press, 1982.
[4] Viscount Hankey, The Supreme Command, Vol. 1, p. 221.
[5] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, Mainstream, 2013 pp. 12-16 onwards, Appendix 1, p. 362 and Appendix 2, pp. 363-9.
[6] Secret Elite, Blogs 1-3, posted June 15-17, 2014.
[7] Brock and Brock, H.H. Asquith, Letters, p. 342, (Asquith to Venetia Stanley 28 Dec 1914.)
[8] see blog; Munitions 6: Crisis, What Crisis? posted 8 July 2015.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Professor Carroll Quigley, author of The Anglo-American Establishment, initially identified and named the secret cabal who controlled British foreign policy from the early years of the twentieth century.
[11] Randolph Churchill, Lord Derby, King of Lancashire, pp. 209-10.
[12] previous blogs posted from 4 May, 2016 – 29 June 2016.
[13] George Arthur, Life of Lord Kitchener, Volume 3, pp. 350-1.
[14] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 56.
[15] John Hanbury-Williams, The Emperor Nicholas II, as I knew him, p. 1.
[16] See blog, Gallipoli 9, posted 20 March 2015.
[17] Hanbury-Williams, The Emperor Nicholas II, p. 94.
[18] Ibid., pp. 98-9.
[19] David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, vol.1, p. 456.
[20] Stephen Roskill, Hankey, Vol. I, p. 269.
[21] Hankey Diary 6 June 1916, quoted in Roskill, Hankey Vol 1, pp. 279-80.
[22] Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 456.
[23] J Lee Thomson, Politicians, the Press and Propaganda, Lord Northcliffe & The Great War, 1914-1919, p. 101.
[24] The Times, 14 June 1914.
[25] Lord Lansdowne , Hansard, House of Lords Debate, 20 June 1916 vol 22 cc315-22.
[26] House of Commons Debate, 21 June 1916 vol 83 cc145-51.
[27] John Buchan, Episodes of the Great War, pp. 246-7.
[28] The Times 14 June 1914.

John Buchan 3: Lies and Propaganda

John Buchan had known many of the prominent generals who held key commands during the First World War since his days in South Africa; Kitchener in particular. The Secretary of State for War had been ushered into post in August 1914, but was neither a team player nor a man to bow to the will of politicians. Many influential powerbrokers including Lord Northcliffe at The Times wanted him removed from office. Kitchener died onboard HMS Hampshire, an outdated pre-war battleship which had been selected to carry him on a mission to Russia in June 1916. Buchan noted that by 1916, how uncomfortable the minister for war was around politicians, and added ‘his friends were beginning to dread that a great career might close to an anti-climax, until in that June night when the Orkney seas put an end to such forebodings.’ [1]

What an odd choice of words. Why the need for a metaphor? It wasn’t the Orkney seas that killed Kitchener; it was either a submarine or a mine or sabotage. But the Secretary of State for War was no more, to the relief of a great many men of power. Kitchener had served his purpose. Buchan wrote that ‘in a sense his work was finished, for more than any other man he had the credit of building up that vast British force which was destined to be the determining factor in the war.’ [2] That sentiment ended with what sounded like an epitaph: ‘His death was a fitting conclusion to the drama of his life’. [3] Such ready acceptance, such calm unemotional, carefully crafted words ring hollow. Kitchener had become more than an irritation to the same men who had, in 1914, urged him into power at the War Office.

They feared that he was losing his commitment. Kitchener, however, remained untouchably popular. He retained the complete confidence of the British public and the soldier in the trenches. The propaganda machine managed Kitchener’s death with sublime professionalism, framing his loss like the passing of an elderly sage whose days simply ran out. No beating of breasts or wailing and lamenting. When propaganda makes so great an effort to bury the dead quickly and quietly, the suspicion must remain that something more sinister lurks in the shadows. We will examine this further in future blogs.

Although Buchan’s autobiography is empty of meaningful reference to his intelligence or foreign office work, other sources help fill in some of the blanks. Clearly the official censor cleansed his memoirs as rigorously as he did Lloyd George’s and Sir Edward Grey’s. What we know for certain is that John Buchan moved in and out of all the centres of power; his own department, Downing Street, The Admiralty, the War Office, and even on occasion, Buckingham Palace. [4] He knew exactly what was happening. He had access to all of the first hand reports and evidence of spectacular failures. He was literally the insider’s insider. And herein lies the problem. He knew the truth and covered it up. John Buchan was the author, the historian, the propagandist, the intelligence officer, the Milner acolyte and the Secret Elite go-to man. It would be ridiculous to believe that he did not know what he was doing; that he confused his writing of history with his writing of novels about the war. He earned his money by peddling lies.

Buchan met every foreigner of note who visited London during the crucial 1916-18 period. He knew that the Secret Elite’s inner-circle was operating and influencing events behind the scenes. He hinted of his privileged access to the real decision-makers, stating: ‘ I saw something of the veiled prophets who are behind the scenes in a crisis – Colonel House [5] and Lord Esher, [6] and especially Northcliffe’. [7] His conclusions were startling:

‘I saw at close quarters the intricate mechanisms which directed the War at home, one of the strangest mixtures of amateur and professional, talent and charlatanry, the patriot and the arriviste, which history has known, and behind it the dynamic figure of the Prime Minister, generating heat and somehow turning it into power.’ [8]

Tantalisingly he left it there. Or the censor did.

Furthermore there is an additional problem. John Buchan wrote his memoirs as if he was the observer of people and events, and not personally involved. The director of information did not meet and greet international visitors from America, the Dominions and indeed Russia, without judging their usefulness and their susceptibility to British influence or forwarding reports and making value judgements on how best they could be manipulated. In his reminiscences, Buchan is able to vaguely remember a dinner in the Spring of 1916 with guests such as the Secret Elite’s Arthur Balfour and representatives from the Russian Duma including Professor Pavel Milyukov, the Russian Foreign Minister in the provisional government of 1917. It was he who promised that ‘Russia would continue the crusade for annihilation of German militarism…. to prevent all possibility of war in the future.’ He failed. [9] His other Russian dinner guest was Alexander Protopopov, [10] the Minister of the Interior from 1916-17, whose friendship with Rasputin earned him imprisonment and a Bolshevik bullet. Not a word about their discussions, or indeed their subsequent fate. He had plenty of time to reflect on these events because his autobiography was not published until 1940. [11] Like many within the Secret Elite, Buchan had tales to tell that were buried with him.

One politician who was not impressed by John Buchan was David Lloyd George, who as prime minister, found himself hemmed in by Secret Elite personnel. Lloyd George took great exception to an account in Buchan’s  A History of the Great War which depicted a meeting between the prime minister and the French Commander-in-chief, General Nivelle in 1916. Buchan claimed that the prime minister ‘heard of Nivelle’s plan – limitless objectives, the end of trench fighting, victory within two days – and naturally fell in love with it.’ [12] Even in describing Buchan’s account, Lloyd George felt he had to rewrite it, accusing him of ‘lapsing into his fictional mood, giving a fanciful picture of my meeting with General Nivelle at the Gare Du Nord’ where, having heard of the Frenchman’s plans for the forthcoming offensive in 1917, ‘I instantly caught fire.’ [13] In fact John Buchan neither identified the Paris station nor used such florid language, but facts did not stop the Welshman putting Buchan in his place:

‘when a brilliant novelist assumes the unaccustomed role of a historian it is inevitable that he should now and again forget that he is no longer writing fiction, but that he is engaged on a literary enterprise where the narration is limited in its scope by the rigid bounds of fact. Had he taken the trouble to read the documents which were in the possession of the War Office, and therefore available to him, he would have known … that the Nivelle plan had been revealed to me by 25 December … that at the Rome Conference I had expressed my doubt about an offensive in France … and at the Paris station I had refused to discuss the plan … in the absence of Sir Douglas Haig. Three fundamental inaccuracies in a single sentence are not a bad achievement even for a writer who has won fame by inventing his facts. The real explanation is that Mr Buchan found it so much less troublesome to repeat War Office gossip than to read War Office documents.’ [14]

Fact or fiction? Lloyd George’s own Memoirs fall into the same confusion at times. Truth to tell, Lloyd George had backed the wrong plan. The Nivelle Offensive failed miserably and the shattered French army was consequently riven by mutiny later that summer. [15] Clearly he had his own  personal axe to grind for he considered Buchan to be little more than Haig’s mouthpiece. [16] His unqualified attack on John Buchan’s professionalism and integrity was exceptional by any standards. The difference between the two as writers of ‘history’ was that Buchan was not attempting to glorify himself. He was attempting to protect his friends and acquaintances. If it was as Lloyd George claimed, ‘War Office gossip’, it  suited John Buchan and the Secret Elite to paint the prime minister  as the villain.

Simply put, Lloyd George didn’t much care for John Buchan and snubbed him at the end of the war by omitting his name from the honour’s list. Not that that in itself caused Buchan any disquiet. He had friends in high places who would deal with such matters in due course.

Propaganda was the work for which John Buchan should be remembered, not his novels and histories. A week after the Armistice in 1918, one of his departing colleagues summed up the importance of their labours: ‘Public opinion was undoubtedly influenced, we have proof upon proof of that. And public opinion just meant everything to the Allied cause. [17] A euphemism of course, for lying about those  who were sacrificed and to those who, having survived these terrible years, had to pay the cost of war.

After the war, Buchan was swiftly ensconced at Elsfield Manor some four miles from Oxford, and appointed to a minor post as Curator of the University Chest by Lord Curzon, Chancellor of Oxford University. From this vantage point, he was in a position to recognise and groom future Oxford luminaries who would be welcomed into the society of the elite. In 1927, Buchan accepted the Conservative nomination for a seat in Parliament representing the Scottish Universities, and the Church of Scotland appointed him to the the position of  High Commissioner in 1933 and 1934. Pleasant though this was, the post had no political importance, though as the King’s representative, Buchan was treated in royal style, living at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, holding garden parties and being addressed as ‘Your Grace’. [18] He clearly enjoyed this role, and took pride in being the first son of a Free Church minister to become High Commissioner of the Church of Scotland.

What made John Buchan’s next elevation to great office so remarkable was its unprecedented nature. No-one in the history of the British Empire had been raised from ordinary member of parliament and former High Commissioner to the Church of Scotland to Governor-General of the Dominion of Canada. Yet, astoundingly, this commoner, the first of his kind, was appointed by King George V to one of the truly significant imperial  positions in the British Empire. This was not the usual order of promotion. It was stellar and owed nothing to Buchan’s prowess as a writer.

The prime minister of Canada, W L Mackenzie-King, a man who greatly admired Alfred Milner, [19] advised the King on this pinnacle of Crown appointments, and John Buchan one of the Secret Elite’s most valued members joined the nobility as Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor-General and Commander-in-Chief of the Militia and Naval and Air Forces of Canada. Honours dripped on his head in honied reward. In quick succession Buchan was made a Knight Grand Cross of St Michael and St George, Privy Counsellor, Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, Honorary Fellow of Oxford University and awarded nine honorary degrees from Oxford, Canada, America and his native Scotland. Eat your heart out, David Lloyd George.

These honours had nothing to do with writing novels. John Buchan had proved his worth to the Secret Elite with his loyalty to their aims, had won their trust and gratitude, and was placed at the heart of the Empire because of this. The propagandist was well paid. He still is.

[1] John Buchan, Memory Hold the Door, p. 173.
[2] John Buchan, Episodes of the Great War, pp. 246-7.
[3] Ibid., p. 247.
[4] Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan and his world, p. 65.
[5] Colonel Edward Mandell House was one of the most important powers behind the scenes in President Woodrow Wilson’s government. Mandel House was his appointed advisor on just about everything. Linked to the J.P. Morgan organisation in New York, House was an Anglophile American. He regularly visited London and was close to Sir Edward Grey, Arthur Balfour and the senior ranks of the Secret Elite.
[6] Lord Esher was a founder member of the secret cabal organised by Cecil Rhodes in 1891. He remained at the heart of the Secret Elite all of his life. As close advisor to the monarchy, including Queen Victoria, King Edward VII and King George V, he held a unique status. His permanent appointments included membership of the Committee of Imperial Defence.
[7] Buchan, Memory Hold the Door, p. 169.
[8] Ibid., p. 170.
[9] New York Times, 20 April, 1917.
[10] Buchan, Memory Hold the Door, p. 171.
[11] Memory Hold The Door was first published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1940. It might better have been entitled: selective-memory, hold the door.
[12] John Buchan, A History of the Great War, vol III, p. 436.
[13] David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, vol.1 pp. 886-7.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Kate MacDonald, Reassessing John Buchan chapter by Hew Strachan, John Buchan and The First World War: Fact Into Fiction, p. 77.
[16] Ibid. p. 83.
[17] Smith, John Buchan and his world, p. 68.
[18] Ibid., p.87.
[19] A.M. Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 145.

 

John Buchan 1: Proving his Worth to the Secret Elite

The next four blogs will concentrate on the Scottish novelist John Buchan.  Both of us knew of him in different ways. Like Jim, Buchan was an alumnus of Glasgow University. Gerry has recently directed an adaptation of his most famous works, The Thirty-Nine Steps and had read all of the Richard Hannay novels as a youngster. Neither of us knew of his links to the Secret Elite. Any background information accompanying his novels omits his propaganda work and even in the twenty-first century, a veil has been drawn over his role as a writer of falsified history. That he became a member and agent of the Secret Elite offers the perfect example of how young men of talent were groomed and richly rewarded by the secret cabal.

Have you ever wondered how John Buchan, one of Scotland’s most successful novelists, though no literary giant like Sir Walter Scott, ended his life as Governor General of Canada? How a man with no diplomatic background was elevated to one of the top administrative positions in the post-war British Empire? Does it surprise you to learn that this writer of ‘shockers’ was appointed to the War Office Staff at the General Headquarters in France and by 1918 was Deputy Head of the Ministry of Information? [1] Perhaps, like me, you thought he merely wrote fictional stories about spies.

It was John Buchan’s good fortune to gain a scholarship to Oxford and enter Brasenose College in 1895, at the same time as a veritable powerhouse of talent and privilege. A son of the manse, he first won a scholarship to Glasgow University before going on to Oxford. There he befriended such rising stars as FE Smith, John Simon, Leo Amery and Lord Halifax, [2] all of whom played key roles in or for the Secret Elite. Herbert Asquith’s son, Raymond was his close friend, and he came to know the Prime Minister personally.

Buchan played the society game in London in the first year of the twentieth century, joining younger men’s clubs whose membership was confined to Oxbridge graduates. He actively pursued social advancement, seeking invitations to grand dinner parties ‘where there was far too much to eat, but where men sat long at table and there was plenty of good talk.’ [3] He met elder statesmen and politicians, wrote articles for the Spectator and enjoyed week-ends as a guest at ‘great English dwellings’.  This was precisely the route taken by every aspiring member of the elite who was not sufficiently fortunate to be born into a titled household. At which point, according to his autobiography, Buchan was suddenly jolted out of his comfortable rut, like one of the characters in his later novels. [4] In fact his step forward on the rung of privileged access came about through the recommendation of his Oxford friend, Leo Amery.

In 1901, John Buchan was asked by Lord Alfred Milner, then High Commissioner for South Africa to join him there, not as a salaried official, ‘but individually working for me [Milner] and directly under me’. The Lord High Commissioner had been given funds, most likely by his ardent admirer, Cecil Rhodes [5] to bring together an exceptionally talented group of young men to help him reconstruct South Africa after the Boer War. Milner made an independent arrangement with each one, ‘the terms of which I should prefer not to have divulged.’ [6] He offered John Buchan the princely sum of £1,200 per annum. [7] (approximately £116,500 at current prices.) [8]

Alfred Milner’s hand-picked men, Lionel Curtis, Lionel Kitchens, Robert Brand, Philip Kerr, Patrick Duncan and Geoffrey Dawson were John Buchan’s companions. Loyalty to Milner and his ‘Credo’ became a central theme for the remainder of all of their lives. Lionel Curtis held senior posts in South Africa, India, China and Ireland; Lionel Hitchens went on to become head of a great shipbuilding company; Robert Brand to a career in Merchant Banking; Philip Kerr headed up Lloyd George’s Secretariat in 1916 and went on, as Lord Lothian, to be British Ambassador at Washington, and instrumental in the formation of the Round Table. [9] Patrick Duncan was Governor General of South Africa; Geoffrey Dawson for many years was the editor of The Times.

All of his chosen men proved their loyalty to Lord Milner and there was much for which the High Commissioner had reason to be grateful to his acolytes. Bound to his coat-tails, all were included in the ranks of the Secret Elite. It was only fitting that John Buchan too reaped a rich reward for his years of commitment to Milner, the Empire and the Secret Elite’s global ambition. [10]

He shared the deep-rooted philosophy of Milner’s brand of imperialism.

‘I dreamed of a world-wide brotherhood with the background of a common race and creed, consecrated to the service of peace; Britain enriching the rest out of her culture and traditions … Our creed was not based on antagonism to any other people. It was humanitarian and international … we believed that we were laying the basis of a federation of the world. As for the native races under our rule, we had a high conscientiousness; Milner and Rhodes had a far sighted native policy.’ [11]

That common race was to be British-dominated; the creed was the so-called ‘English ruling-class’ values expounded by John Ruskin at Oxford. [12] The sheer hypocrisy of this philosophy is best exemplified by the notion that it was ‘consecrated to the service of peace … that it ‘was not based in antagonism’ while in reality it sought to crush its main economic rival, Germany, through a devastating war.

John Buchan joined the ranks of what would later be called Miler’s Kindergarten and immediately proved his worth to the Secret Elite. The governor-general was in serious political trouble in 1901. Herbert Kitchener’s policy of burning farm after farm in the Veld and transporting all women, children and black servants and workers to make-shift concentration camps resulted in deprivation, starvation, rampant disease, dehydration and appalling mortality rates. When the extent of these atrocities were brought to the attention of the Liberal leader in the House of Commons, Campbell-Bannerman attacked the government over their ‘methods of barbarism.’ [13] It was certainly barbaric.

In the aftermath of the scandalous revelations and international rebuke on the plight of civilian concentration camps run by the army in South Africa, Milner was instructed by the Secretary for the Colonies in London to take charge of the camps and reduce the devastatingly criminal mortality rates. Although even Milner described Kitchener’s system [14] of herding Boer women and children into inadequately sheltered ‘camps’ without sufficient food as ‘a grave error’, [15] he refused to criticise him personally.

A total of 45 concentration camps had been ‘built’ for Boer internees and 64 for native Africans. By October 1901, the numbers interned reached 118,000 ‘white persons’ and 43,000 ‘coloured persons’. [16] At least 20,000 Boer civilians, mostly women and children, died there and 12,000 Africans suffered the same fate. [17] Buchan’s account of his time in South Africa omitted any reference to Emily Hobhouse whose investigation into concentration camps in early 1901 caused outrage in liberal Britain. According to the official line, ‘the truth was that while the concentration system caused far less misery than, and loss than would have been suffered had the families remained on the veld, the way in which it was carried out was open to much criticism. [18] Whitewashed nonsense.

Criticism? It was a crime which outraged opinion in Britain and abroad. Milner called them ‘refugee camps’. What he and the British government lamented was the bad publicity which in their eyes allowed the Boers to make political capital from the condition of the camps. Their rebuttal was that ‘in parts these complaints were insincere, for it is abundantly clear that they [the Boers] were heartily glad to be relieved of the responsibility for the maintenance of their families’. [19] The Secret Elite apologists closed ranks around the debacle. Flora Shaw, (later Lady Lugard) a correspondent for The Times investigated the ‘so-called “concentration camps” which she claimed were ‘an inducement to the Boers to surrender’ and a ‘refuge for women’. [20] She inquired into the ‘sorrowfully high child mortality rate and learned that it was ‘due almost entirely to heat.’ [21] What? It was an act of God rather than lack of drinking water, adequate food, shelter, sanitation and basic hygiene, not to mention a crippling epidemic of measles? These abuses of historic fact are typical of how Secret Elite historians and journalists rewrote history to their own benefit.

Few assistant private secretaries have ever started their careers as civilian administrator of a host of disease-ridden concentration camps where, in 1901, the death-rate hit a scandalously high 344 per thousand of the population. [22] Buchan took charge at the height of this unqualified disaster, a blight on any civilised nation, but it takes more than a creative mind to claim, as he did, that ‘in our period of administration we turned them [the camps] into health resorts’. [23] Health resorts! Incredibly he was referring to concentration camps.

To his credit Buchan seconded medical personnel from the Indian Army and introduced reforms recommended by the ‘committee of English Ladies under Dame Millicent Fawcett’. [24] According to The Times History of the War in South Africa, the establishment’s officially approved version of the Boer War, written by Lord Milner’s young men, the death rate fell thereafter to 69 per thousand in February 1902 and by May, to 20 per thousand. [25]

Reflecting later, Buchan wrote that ‘the camps gave us a chance of laying the foundation of a new system of elementary education.’ [26] Fact and fiction was regularly intermixed in all of John Buchan’s writings, but this claim is surely as insensitive as it was ridiculous.

Buchan and his ‘kindergarten’ colleagues worked assiduously to repatriate Boers after the war in South Africa had ended, resettle the estranged population and create a scheme of land settlement for newcomers. Here again, John Buchan was Milner’s ‘fixer’. Using tactics which bordered on impropriety, he operated a clandestine scheme whereby his agents posed as private land dealers to buy up land from unsuspecting, and often desperate Boers. Buchan’s men were allowed access to the concentration camp victims to make offers to landowners in dire circumstances and buy up their property at very low prices. The ultimate aim was to provide cheap land for the government’s resettlement programme so that more British emigrants might be attracted to South Africa. [27] So much for ‘cultural enrichment’.

On returning to London in 1903, John Buchan claimed to be disturbed to find that both political parties were blind to the true meaning of Empire. [28] Inspired as he was by Milner’s disdain for politics and convinced that the British Empire had to assert itself or lose its international position, he had ‘an ugly fear that the Empire might decay at the heart.’ [29] Buchan became very close to the Liberal Imperialist politician, Richard Haldane, a fellow Scot, whose loyalty to  Milner was unbending. Clearly Alfred Milner had spoken admiringly of Haldane whom, according to John Buchan, ‘Milner thought the ablest man in public life, abler even than Arthur Balfour’, [30] who was then the prime minister.

Haldane had proved his loyalty to Milner by publicly defending the High Commissioner’s policy of importing Chinese labour to serve in slave-like conditions down the gold mines of the Rand. [31] He was equally prepared to accentuate the positive in Milner’s reconstruction in South Africa by writing numerous reviews anonymously in the Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement. [32] Loyalty to Milner, to the Empire, to a philosophy which understood the essential need for the British way of life to triumph over any alternative power, was utterly essential for those brought into and nurtured inside the Secret Elite.

Buchan was deeply upset by the treatment, as he saw it, of Ulster Unionists and had sufficient clout to bring F.E. Smith, Lord Robert Cecil and Alfred Lyttelton to speak for his campaign to be elected as the Conservative candidate for the Peebles and Selkirk  constituency before war was declared and elections postponed. He was also very close to Lord Rosebery, the former Liberal Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. From his Oxford Days onwards Buchan met him on regular occasions and they would ‘foregather every autumn at his moorland house at Rosebery’. [33] Rosebery, like many others in the Secret Elite, distrusted anything in the nature of a ‘plebiscitary democracy’. According to Buchan, this pre-eminent former statesman confided in him that Britain was on a razor edge internationally, and had lost all its dignity and discipline in domestic affairs.

Such self-indulgent elder-statesman reflection is typical of all epochs and ages desperate to hold and protect what advantages they have. Cato could have sat in their midst moaning about Carthage just as these elites denigrated the Kaiser and Germany. Inside the rarified ranks of the upper echelons of the Secret Elite, John Buchan found a place, though his natural talent for writing fiction was yet to elevate his usefulness to a higher level. Buchan had neither the finance nor breeding nor political position to be placed in the inner circle of the Secret Elite, but he was most certainly intimately associated with them, trusted by them, allocated specific tasks by them and rewarded handsomely for his loyalty and dedication. [34] He was ‘of them’, if not quite in the inner sanctum. [35]

[1] Kate MacDonald, John Buchan and the Idea of Modernity, p. 100.
[2] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p.57.
[3] John Buchan, Memory Hold the Door, p. 93.
[4] Ibid., p. 94.
[5] The multi-millionaire Cecil Rhodes was, in company with Alfred Milner, one of the founding fathers of the secret cabal identified by Professor Carroll Quigley. (The Anglo-American Establishment, pp. 31 – 50.) He admired Milner above all of his colleagues and friends though it should be acknowledged that Milner’s funding could equally have been underwritten by the De Beers millionaire Sir Alfred Beit or Lord Rothschild. Alfred Milner’s plan was backed by some of the richest men in the world.
[6] Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan and his world, p. 34.
[7] Milner to Buchan, 18 August 1901.
[8] https: http://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare/relativevalue.%5D
[9] The Round Table group was part of the plan to influence and control British foreign policy through local same-minded people at home and across the Empire whose opinion they moulded to agitate for imperial and pro-British interests. They helped in the vital task of preparing the Empire for war against Germany. [ Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp. 117-139.]
[10] Buchan, Memory Hold The Door, p. 104.
[11] Ibid p. 125.
[12] Ruskin was the nineteenth century Oxford professor whose philosophy was built on his belief in the superiority and the authority of the English ruling classes acting in the best interests of their inferiors.
[13] Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War, p. 504.
[14] The Times History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902, Vol. V., pp. 86-7.
[15] J. Lee Thompson, Forgotten Patriot, p. 184.
[16] The Times History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902, Vol. V., p. 252.
[17] Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War, p. 517.
[18] The Times History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902, Vol. V. p. 253.
[19] Ibid., p. 252.
[20] E. Moberly Bell, Flora Shaw, p. 237.
[21] Ibid., p. 239.
[22] Smith, John Buchan and his world, p. 37.
[23] Buchan, Memory Hold The Door, p. 108.
[24] There were two ‘investigations’ into the conditions in the concentration camps. The first, unofficial, was carried out by Emily Hobhouse. Her subsequent book, ‘The Brunt of War and Where It Fell’ outraged the Liberals in Parliament and created an embarrassing scandal which damaged the Conservative government. The second report by Dame Millicent Fawcett was much more sympathetic to Lord Milner and the attempts through Buchan to improve conditions.
[25] The Times History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902, Vol. VI. p. 25.
[26] Ibid., p. 108.
[27] Michael Redley, John Buchan And The South African War, in Kate MacDonald, Reassessing John Buchan, pp. 68-9.
[28] Buchan, Memory Hold The Door, p. 127.
[29] Ibid., p. 128.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid., p. 131.
[32] Kate MacDonald, Reassessing John Buchan, chapter by Michael Redley, John Buchan and the South African War, p. 73.
[33] Buchan, Memory Hold The Door, p. 156.
[34] Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 313.
[35] Ibid., p. 56.