1. Getting closer…
Despite the recent publicity about Bill Clinton, the impact made on him by Carroll Quigley, and the Rhodes Scholars’ network (see Lobster 27 p. 19, for examples), the academic world remains almost wholly unaware of Quigley’s work. In their essay ‘The Limits of Influence: foreign policy think tanks in Britain and the USA’ in Review of International Studies (1994) 20, pp. 15-35, Richard Higgott and Diane Stone actually do discuss the Round Table. It was ‘something of a forerunner to the modern think tank’, they say. ‘Membership was restricted to ensure secrecy. Affairs were thrashed out in private and lobbying was confined to people of recognised influence.’ However, they conclude that, ‘From the 1920s, the Round Table ceased to be of much relevance as some members developed international interests wider than imperial matters…’
2. How did Ernest Bevin become British Foreign Secretary in 1945?
The thing about Bevin which always rang alarm bells with me was the universal praise he has received from the British foreign policy establishment. If they thought he was so good, I always assumed in my simple-minded fashion, he must have been doing what they wanted. Other people on the Left have thought this but, as far as I know, John Saville is the first person to actually look at the details. His ‘Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary’ is a chapter in his recent book The Politics of Continuity (Verso, London, 1993), and the evidence is there to confirm the suspicion that Bevin was the captive of the Foreign Office.
This raises the question of how Bevin, the semi-literate trade union leader, ended up with the job? Saville (pp. 85 and 6) considers the extant knowledge – from diaries and memoirs – on the appointment of Bevin in 1945. He notes that initially Hugh Dalton was going to be Foreign Secretary and how, at the last moment, Prime Minister Attlee rang Dalton and told him that the job was going to Bevin. On Dalton’s account, Attlee told him that one objective was to keep apart Bevin and Herbert Morrison. Saville comments (p. 86), ‘The most convincing story was given by Douglas Jay…… who had been told by Joe Burke, then second Private Secretary at No. 10, that it was Edward Bridges – Secretary to the Cabinet and head of the Civil Service – who persuaded Attlee that to put Bevin on the domestic front would mean continuous conflict with Morrison.’
Saville notes (p. 95) the impact on Bevin of his experience in the thirties as a delegate to an ‘unofficial Commonwealth conference in Australia, convened by Chatham House of London and the Australian Institute of International Affairs.’ Among the British delegates, notes Saville, were Lionel Curtis, Lord Lothian, Keith Hancock and Sir Alfred Zimmern. This party, with Bevin and his wife, spent three weeks crossing the Pacific by ship. Saville notes that Lothian was ‘a vigorous supporter of appeasement’ and that Curtis was ‘the most intellectually woolly-minded of all the “high-minded imperialists” associated with the Round Table’.
In Carroll Quigley’s parallel foreign policy universe, Chatham House, the Australian IIA, as well as messers Hancock, Zimmern, Lothian and Curtis, are all parts of the elaborated Round Table network of the 1930s. I went to Quigley’s The Anglo-American Establishment (Books in Focus, New York, 1981) in search of further information on this conference. Quigley told me (p. 163) ‘the [conference] expenses were met by grants from the Carnegie Corporation and the Rhodes Trustee …..at least five of the fifteen British delegates were of the Milner group…… (and) Milner group personnel act[ed] as chairs of the three most important delegations, the conference secretary and recorder.’
In the accounts of Saville and Bulloch, Bevin’s thinking was greatly influenced by meeting these grandees. Bulloch notes that ‘with the rise of the dictators in Europe, Bevin had been more and more attracted by the idea of the British Commonwealth as the nucleus of a group of nations which could work out common policies.’ (p. 628)
And what of Edward Bridges, the Cabinet Secretary, whose intervention with Attlee seems to have ensured that Bevin got the job? Bridges, says Quigley, (ibid. p. 155) ‘had been close to the Milner Group since he became a Fellow of All Souls in 1920’ – All Souls being one of the centres, according to Quigley, of the Milner Group.
In summary then: Labour MP and TGWU leader, Ernest Bevin, becomes a Commonwealth enthusiast and is rewarded with a tour of the dominions, climaxing with a long boat trip and conference under the auspices of the Round Table (via its front bodies). In 1945, faced with the crisis of a Labour government, the Cabinet Secretary and head of the Civil Service, whom we might call a Round Table fellow traveller, manages to head off the appointment of well known Foreign Office critic, Hugh Dalton, and slips in the ‘sound’ Ernest Bevin. Bevin duly rewards his sponsors by ‘going native’.
Thus ‘a great Foreign Secretary’.