HISTORY: Intellectuals and leadership
Walter Elliot, 1888-1958
“He talks too much”. Such was Sir Winston Churchill’s less than generous summary of Walter Elliot, Scots Tory Member of Parliament, cabinet minister, coming man of the 1920s and 30s and widely imagined, at least by his many friends, as a certainty for the premiership.
It is ironic, therefore, that a man marked down by the hero of the last century as having too much to say is, less than fifty years after his death, now virtually unheard of. Ironic but hardly surprising. Except for a rather sugary account by his lifelong friend and posthumous champion Sir Colin Coote, published nearly forty years ago, there is no modern biography of Walter Elliot. And as Coote’s work is long out of print , now only to be got on the musty shelves of second hand bookstores in Hay-on-Wye, his subject seems destined to languish, increasingly discarded by history, as just another index reference in other people’s stories.
And yet, but for the indecision of a single night, it is arguable that things might have been very different. The stars in their courses are apt to be capricious but for the first twenty years of Walter Elliot’s political life, they seemed set firm in their ascent and he along with them. A Baldwin Boy though, unlike Eden, never a “glamour boy”, a successful cabinet minister with the common touch, warmly regarded, at least until he was Prime Minister, by Neville Chamberlain, the gaming chips of political preferment seemed his for the cashing. Munich changed all that.
Born Walter Elliot Elliot (he was Elliot twice over) in the warm Autumn of 1888, the son of William Elliot, a self made and hard nosed Lanarkshire farmer and auctioneer, his prospects did not seem at first so bright. His mother died in childbirth in 1892 whereupon William dealt with his loss by off-loading his four children onto his mother-in-law, a Mrs. Shiels of Glasgow. This fanatical Kirk-goer kept young Walter and his siblings in perpetual mourning for their mother, each child decked from head to toe in deepest black. With their grandmother, lived also their uncle, a maniacal doctor and pseudo-scientist, convinced he could turn base metals into gold. The offspring of his alchemy was a company christened “Kosmoids” into which he persuaded an alarming number of dupes to invest their savings. No gold was produced and his ensuing bankruptcy resulted in the entire family, including the colourful doctor (who kept a secret wife and family in Glasgow) being reunited under William Elliot’s roof.
Despite his rather uncommon childhood and mildly eccentric family, Elliot’s rise up the greasy political pole followed the classic pattern of the time: two solid degrees in science and medicine from Glasgow University, the editor’s chair of the university magazine, a happy spell in the OTC, then a brief sojourn into the world of work (as a houseman at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary) before being commissioned as medical officer to the Scots Greys when the old world stepped out blithely to its destruction in 1914.
Four years later and with much mud on his boots, Walter Elliot emerged from the ruins of war with a Military Cross and a seat in the House of Commons. Along with contemporaries, Anthony Eden and Duff Cooper, he had fought gallantly beside his comrades and was profoundly affected by the experience, an experience that drove his political thinking and, later, some of his political judgements. He lost his brother, Dan, at Gallipoli and as a medical officer, was witness to the terrible tragedy of the trenches. Like other young MPs, this was more than enough to make Elliot shudder at the prospect of another war. And like them, he was determined to pursue a moderate path of Tory paternalism, improving the lot of the men with whom he had fought, and treated, as they lay injured. His primary interest was the home front. He believed in Lloyd George’s famous call for homes “fit for heroes to live in” and took practical steps to realize that high ambition. Whilst Eden and Cooper pondered upon post Locarno foreign policy and the army estimates, Walter Elliot inaugurated the National Housing Company to build prefabricated “Weir houses” in the slums of Clydeside, introduced the first free school milk for children and passed the Agricultural Marketing Act, designed to help protect food producers from bankruptcy at a time of massive over-supply and rapidly falling prices. Between 1932, when he entered the cabinet, and 1940 Elliot was Agriculture Minister, Scotland Secretary, Health Minister and a leading light of his generation. Upon his shoulders rested the hopes of many liberal minded Conservatives — and some outside the party — who wished for a continuation of Baldwinism by other means in domestic politics. As early as 1921 The Times had included him as one of its “Pillars of the State” and for the next twenty years Elliot was destined to dwell in the marble halls of party expectation.
Yet he was no political pin-up. His physique, temperament and outward demeanour betokened not leadership cast in the heroic mould, but rather a kindly and reassuring character with just a hint of bucolic eccentricity. His face was large and avuncular with thick-rimmed spectacles that never seemed able to sit quite safely upon his nose. He enjoyed long country walks, but his notorious short-sightedness rendered him a perennial hazard to motorists. Once, having failed to navigate his way to a London dinner party, he hit on the novel device of flagging down a taxi then hiring it to guide him in to his destination. No flashy dresser, his feet were shod in policeman’s boots and, like all old fashioned Bobbies, he had a habit of falling asleep once and wherever comfortably seated. He cared nothing for art, nor sport, or for grand opera. He played no instrument and, although he was always ready to belt out old soldiers’ songs, his voice was best described as “untrained”.
Consciously or unconsciously, Elliot projected the image of a genial village doctor, not the rising star of Baldwin’s Conservative consensus. But what set him apart from many other Tory MPs was the fertility of his mind. He was a voracious reader of almost any material from histories to horticultural manuals and was blessed with a powerfully retentive memory. Ideas sprung forth like water from a well-spring and there were many young politicians eager to listen. At a time when country house weekends still retained an important place near the heart of the British establishment, Elliot was a regular guest of ‘30s political hostesses, not least at Cliveden, home of the redoubtable Lady Astor. Here he would debate with other young turks such as Harold Macmillan, Robert Boothby, Oliver Stanley and David Ormsby-Gore, expound his ideas on a scientific approach to agriculture and the desirability of a healthy workforce and grumble with them about the lethargy of Baldwin and the pyrotechnics of Sir Oswald Moseley. It is one of the tragedies of the time that such grumblings did not fully evolve into clear and firm demands for action as the decade marched on toward its grim conclusion.
And yet, for an intellectual, he was not so dogmatic that he could not change his mind. This ability to bend (some might say to be “original”) is not so unusual in politics. Baldwin somersaulted with the skill of a circus performer, Churchill trimmed and even Thatcher changed course. So Walter Elliot, the confirmed Free Trader of 1918 spared not a single blush as, barely fourteen years later, he imposed Agricultural production quotas and piloted through the Import Duties Act whilst the men of Manchester turned in their graves. He even went as far to praise the courage of Oswald Moseley’s import protection programme in a letter to The Times, a transgression that brought a lambasting from Baldwin and a swift and grovelling retraction from the letter’s author. Despite this stumble, Elliot’s abilities and his loyalty were soon rewarded with a seat in the cabinet and the real prospect of achieving greatness.
Yet perhaps his lack of a definitively anchored ideology was the key to Elliot’s undoing. Upon being asked by Lanark to stand for Parliament, so the story goes, he telegraphed the reply “Yes. Which side?” This may be apocryphal but it runs to the heart of the way some influential men viewed Elliot — a clever and capable man, but without enough bottom. And by 1940, several of these men were very influential indeed. It is certainly true that he disliked the spice and ginger of an election campaign. He was more at home in the lecture theatre than the amphitheatre. Ideas were his meat and drink but as a ruthless political operator he was virtually teetotal. When confronted with a particularly difficult problem, he inclined to argue it out on all sides rather than act to solve it. By the end of the 1930s, as a different kind of consensus was emerging and the need for vigorous action seemed greatest, Elliot’s indecision was fatal.
Home affairs were Elliot’s primary concern, but not his exclusive one. He played an energetic part in the League of Nations Union whose laudable objective was to foster the spirit of peaceful problem solving through regular international meetings and exchanges. His involvement here sparked a further and much longer lasting interest in Zionism as well as a deep dislike of the pro-Arab Malcolm MacDonald. Nearly twenty years later as a cabinet minister, he would lock horns with the resolutely Arabist Foreign office by describing the Arab world as “one of the larger parasites of the camel”. Such intemperate language from so usually and equable character seems incongruous and, indeed, by 1937 he was strongly supporting the Peel Commission’s recommendation to split the Palestine mandate into separate Arab and Jewish homelands, a course he urged on everyone from Sir Alec Cadogan to Chaim Weizmann.
Much earlier in his career and much closer to home, during the passage of the 1920 Ireland Act, he moved a number of amendments to devolve powers to Dublin — with the threat of imperial excommunication as a further incentive to acceptance. “Are you afraid of an Irish Republic?” he asked the House of Commons. “I should threaten them with an Irish Republic if they do not behave!” Such sentiments may have made Bonar Law and Sir Edward Carson scowl; but they also demonstrate that Elliot’s interests did not stop at the slum dweller’s door. It is all the more difficult, therefore, to accept his defenders’ claims that a scant understanding of external affairs was one of the reasons for his capitulation to a policy of continued fascist appeasement.
The defining moment in Elliot’s political life came, as it did for several others of his generation, in the autumn of 1938 with Czech crisis. Until that moment, and despite the odd squall, his political barometer had been “set fair”. At that time he had been promoted from the Scotland Office to the Health Ministry and was busily preparing a Cancer bill to buy more radium for use in treatment and research.
Then Hitler’s determination to reclaim the Sudetenland, ceded to the Czechoslovakia under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, and Chamberlain’s desperate attempts to avert war by offering further concessions, exposed fault lines within the government. A number of ministers, including Ormsby-Gore, Oliver Stanley and Elliot, whom Chamberlain dismissed as a “Boy’s Brigade”, expressed disquiet. But only one, Duff Cooper, a much tougher little man than his bon vivant image allowed, gave meaning to his words by resignation. The others had neither the guts nor the gall (depending on your point of view) to resign over Chamberlain’s démarche. In those days of crisis, when men had to take sides and be counted Elliot, like Hamlet, hesitated. His friends urged him to go. At a meeting of the Other Club, he and Duff Cooper, the only ministers present, received a mauling from the other members. Humiliated into silence, Cooper left the dinner without a word and the government the following day. Yet Elliot agonised before deciding he duty was to stay. “The King’s government must be carried on” was his refrain to his tormenters. In the tortured logic of those who can only be truly unhappy, he concluded that because he had not quit in 1936 over the Rhineland or with Eden (whom he admired greatly) over Italy earlier in the year, he now had to stand by Chamberlain and the government, or else face a charge of gross hypocrisy. Elliot’s misgivings, and he seemed to have them, were aired only in private and mostly to his wife Kay and his sister-in-law, “Baffy” Dugdale. Between February and October 1938 he talked variously about the necessity of a “Government of National Safety”, complete emergency powers, and the need to support Chamberlain in the absence of a credible alternative. Such anguish is often modish amongst the “consensus classes” but it also illustrates Elliot’s overwhelming desire to find an accommodation that blinded him to the need to make more of his private opposition to the Munich terms and shake Chamberlain from his conviction that Hitler could be managed if only he were left to do it.
From then on, Elliot’s star began its descent and the fall of Chamberlain in the spring of 1940 marked its final eclipse. With other ministers, he voted with the government on the conduct of Norwegian campaign, but the reduction in the government’s majority forced “the coroner” out. Churchill succeeded and, although he waited, no call to serve came for Walter Elliot.
What followed was a long and pale sunset, filled with committee chairmanships, parliamentary delegations and honorific sinecures. For a brief while, he was resurrected in the shadow cabinet but was not amongst those offered high office when Churchill returned to power in 1951. His disappointment was immense yet dignified. He rejected a more junior post preferring to remain a backbencher telling friends that it was “better to be at the head of the tenants than at the tail of gentry”. His public career ended in Scotland, the place he loved, as Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. He died there too in 1958.
Today Walter Elliot is a forgotten “big beast” from a lost political jungle. For a good while he appeared to be a bright hope but, like others before and since, he ended up on the scrap heap. And yet Elliot was no arch-appeaser of the Sam Hoare variety. Nor did he see the light only after the dawn then attempt to justify himself with memoirs. As early as 1936 he worried about the threat posed by fascism and German rearmament, at least in his private correspondence. Two years later at the height of the Munich crisis he wrote the “terms stick in my throat as much as ever they stuck in Duff’s”. Yet Duff Cooper gagged. Elliot did not, and although he did make a half-hearted offer to go with Duff, Cooper refused it with not a little contempt. Elliot just could not rat on the government and he showed no trace of guile thereafter. So he continued to serve, out of favour in the cabinet and out of step with his friends. In ways he resembled that other Chamberlain — Sir Austen. Both were straight bats. Both played up and played the game. And, ultimately, both lost it.
An abridged version of his article first appeared in the Journal of the Conservative History Society.
Chris Pincher, January 20, 2004 07:32 PM