Information's American branch but stayed for no more than a year. In 1942 he became
First Secretary in the Embassy in Washington, a position but recently vacated by Adam
Marris. After the war he went for a brief period of four months to a similar post in the
British Embassy in Moscow. In 1949 he came to Harvard University as visiting lecturer
on Russia.
John Galway Foster is another recent recruit to the Milner Group and, like Berlin, won
his entry by way of All Souls (1924). He is also a graduate of New College and from
1935 to 1939 was lecturer in Private International Law at Oxford. In 1939 he went to the
Embassy in Washington as First Secretary and stayed for almost five years. In 1944 he
was commissioned a brigadier on special service and the following year gained
considerable prestige by winning a Conservative seat in Parliament in the face of the
Labour tidal wave. He is still a Fellow of All Souls, after twenty-five years, and this fact
alone would indicate he has a position as an important member of the Group.
Roger Mellor Makins, son of a Conservative M.P., was elected a Fellow of All Souls
immediately after graduation from Christ Church in 1925. He joined the diplomatic
service in 1928 and spent time in London, Washington, and (briefly) Oslo in the next
nine years. In 1937 he became assistant adviser on League of Nations affairs to the
Foreign Office. He was secretary to the British delegation to the Evian Conference on
Refugees from Germany in 1938 and became secretary to the Intergovernmental
Committee on Refugees set up at that meeting. In 1939 he returned to the Foreign Office
as adviser on League of Nations Affairs but soon became a First Secretary; he was
adviser to the British delegation at the New York meeting of the International Labour
Conference in 1941 and the following year joined the staff of the Resident Minister in
West Africa. When the Allied Headquarters in the Mediterranean area was set up in 1943,
he joined the staff of the Resident British Minister with that unit. At the end of the war, in
1945, he went to the Embassy in Washington with the rank of Minister. In this post he
had the inestimable advantage that his wife, whom he married in 1934, was the daughter
of the late Dwight F. Davis, Secretary of War in the Hoover Administration. During this
period Makins played an important role at various international organizations. He was the
United Kingdom representative on the Interim Commission for Food and Agriculture of
the United Nations in 1945; he was adviser to the United Kingdom delegation to the first
FAO Conference at Quebec the same year; he was a delegate to the Atlantic City meeting
of UNRRA in the following year. In 1947 he left Washington to become Assistant Under
Secretary of State in the Foreign Office in London.
Another important member of All Souls who appeared briefly in Washington during
the war was John H. A. Sparrow. Graduated from Winchester School and New College
by 1927, he became an Eldon Law Scholar and a Fellow of All Souls in 1929. He is still a
Fellow of the latter after twenty years. Commissioned in the Coldstream Guards in 1940,
he was in Washington on a confidential military mission during most of 1940 and was
attached to the War Office from 1942 to the end of the war.
Certain other members of the Group were to be found in the United States during the
period under discussion. We have already mentioned the services rendered to the
Ministry of Information by J. W. Wheeler-Bennett in New York from 1939 to 1944.
Robert J. Stopford was Financial Counselor to the British Embassy in 1940-1943. We
should also mention that F. W. Eggleston, chief Australian member of the Group, was
Australian Minister in Washington from 1944 to 1946. And the story of the Milner
Group's activities in Washington would not be complete without at least mentioning
Percy E. Corbett
Percy Corbett of Prince Edward Island, Canada, took a M.A. degree at McGill
University in 1915 and went to Balliol as a Rhodes Scholar. He was a Fellow of All Souls
in 1920-1928 and a member of the staff of the League of Nations in 1920-1924. He was
Professor of Roman Law at McGill University from 1924 to 1937 and had been Professor
of Government and Jurisprudence and chairman of the Department of Political Science at
Yale since 1944. He has always been close to the Milner Group, participating in many of
their Canadian activities, such as the Canadian Royal Institute of International Affairs,
the unofficial British Commonwealth relations conferences, and the Institute of Pacific
Relations. He was chairman of the Pacific Council of the last organization in 1942.
During the war he spent much of his time in the United States, especially in Washington,
engaged in lobbying activities for the British Embassy, chiefly in Rhodes Scholarship and
academic circles but also in government agencies. Since the war ended, he has obtained,
by his position at Yale, a place of considerable influence, especially since Yale began, in
1948, to publish its new quarterly review called World Politics. On this review, Professor
Corbett is one of the more influential members. At present he must be numbered among
the three most important Canadian members of the Milner Group, the other two being
Vincent Massey and George Parkin Glazebrook.
In view of the emphasis which the Milner Group has always placed on publicity and
the need to control the chief avenues by which the general public obtains information on
public affairs, it is not surprising to find that the Ministry of Information was one of the
fiefs of the Group from its establishment in 1939.
At the outbreak of war, H. A. L. Fisher had been Governor of the BBC for four years.
It was probably as a result of this connection that L. F. Rushbrook Williams, whom we
have already mentioned in connection with Indian affairs and as a member of All Souls
since 1914, became Eastern Service Director of the BBC. He was later adviser on Middle
East affairs to the Ministry of Information but left this, in 1944, to become an editor of
The Times. Edward Griggs, now Lord Altrincham, was Parliamentary Secretary to the
Ministry of Information from its creation to the Cabinet revision of 1940, when he shifted
to the War Office. J. W. Wheeler-Bennett and Isaiah Berlin were with the New York
office of the Ministry of Information, as we have seen, the former throughout the war and
the latter in 1941-1942. H. V. Hodson, Fellow of All Souls and probably the most
important of the newer recruits to the Milner Group, was Director of the Empire Division
of the Ministry of Information from its creation in 1939 until he went to India as Reforms
Commissioner in 1941-1942. And finally, Cyril John Radcliffe (Sir Cyril after 1944), a
graduate of New College in 1922 and a Fellow of All Souls for fifteen years (1922-1937),
son-in-law of Lord Charnwood since 1939, was in the Ministry of Information for the
whole period of the war, more than four years of it as Director General of the whole
organization.(1)
In addition to these three great fiefs (the Research and Intelligence Department of the
Foreign Office, the Embassy in Washington, and the Ministry of Information), the Milner
Group exercised considerable influence in those branches of the administration concerned
with emergency economic regulations, although here the highest positions were reserved
to those members of the Cecil Bloc closest to the Milner Group. Oliver Lyttelton, whose
mother was a member of the Group, was Controller of Non-Ferrous Metals in 1939-1940,
was President of the Board of Trade in 1940-1941, and was Minister of Production in