Suffice it to say that he was regarded as the economist of the Round Table Group and
became a partner and managing director of Lazard Brothers and Company, a director of
Lloyd's Bank, and a director of The Times, retiring from these positions in 1944 and
1945. During the First World War, he was a member of the Imperial Munitions Board of
Canada (1915-1918) and deputy chairman of the British Mission in Washington (1917-
1918). While in Washington, he married Nancy Astor's sister, daughter of Chiswell
Dabney Langhorne of Virginia. It was this connection which gave him his entree to
Cliveden in the period when that name became notorious.
Brand was one of the important figures in international finance in the period after
1918. At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 he was financial adviser to Lord Robert
Cecil, chairman of the Supreme Economic Council. He was later vice-president of the
Brussels Conference (1920) and financial representative for South Africa at the Genoa
Conference (1922). He was a member of the committee of experts on stabilization of the
German mark in 1923, the committee which paved the way for the Dawes Plan. After an
extended period in private business, he was head of the British Food Mission to
Washington (1941-1944), chairman of the British Supply Council in North America
(1942- 1945, 1946), and His Majesty's Treasury Representative in Washington (1944-
1946). In this last capacity he had much to do with negotiating the enormous American
loan to Britain for postwar reconstruction. During the years 1942-1944, Brand put in his
own place as managing director of Lazard Brothers his nephew, Thomas Henry Brand,
son of Viscount Hampden, and, when Brand left Lazard in 1944, he brought the same
nephew to Washington as chief executive officer on the British side of the Combined
Production and Resources Board, and later (1945) as chairman of the official Committee
on Supplies for Liberated Areas. In all of his activities Brand has remained one of the
most central figures in the core of the Milner Group.
Just as important as Brand was his intimate friend Philip Kerr (later Lord Lothian),
whom we have already seen as Brand's assistant in South Africa. Kerr, grandson, through
his mother, of the fourteenth Duke of-Norfolk, originally went to South Africa as private
secretary to a friend of his father's, Sir Arthur Lawley, Lieutenant Governor of the
Transvaal (1902). Kerr was Brand's assistant on the Inter-colonial Council and on the
Committee of the Central South African Railways (1905-1908). Later, as secretary to the
Transvaal Indigency Commission (1907-1908), he wrote a report on the position of poor
white laborers in a colored country which was so valuable that it was republished by the
Union government twenty years later.
From 1908 on, Kerr was, as we shall see, one of the chief organizers of publicity in
favor of the South African Union. He was secretary to the Round Table Group in London
and editor of The Round Table from 1910 tol916, leaving the post to become secretary to
Lloyd George (1916-1922), manager of the Daily Chronicle (1921), and secretary to the
Rhodes Trust (1925-1939). He obtained several governmental offices after the death of
his cousin, the tenth Marquess of Lothian, in 1930, gave him a title, 28,000 acres of land,
and a seat in the House of Lords. He was Chancellor to the Duchy of Lancaster (1931),
Parliamentary Under Secretary to the India Office (1931-1932), a member of the first and
second Round Table Conferences on India, and chairman of the Indian Franchise
Committee, before he finished his life as Ambassador to the United States (1939-1940).
In 1923 he and Lionel Curtis published a book called The Prevention of War, consisting
of lectures which they had previously given at Williams College. After his death, Curtis
edited a collection of American Speeches of Lord Lothian, with an introduction by Lord
Halifax and a biographical sketch by Edward Grigg (reprinted from The Round Table).
This was published, as might be expected, by Chatham House.
On his death, Lord Lothian left his ancestral estate, Newbattle Abbey in Midlothian,
as a residential college for adult education in Scotland, and left his Tudor country house,
Blickling (frequent assembly place of the Milner Group), as a national monument. He
never married and gave up his Roman Catholic faith for Christian Science in the course
of an almost fatal illness in 1914.
Geoffrey Dawson (1874-1944), who changed his name from Robinson in 1917, was
also one of the innermost members of the Milner Group. A member of the Colonial
Office under Chamberlain (1898-1901), he became for five years private secretary to
Milner in South Africa (1901-1905) and then was made South African correspondent of
The Times and editor of the Johannesburg Star in the critical period of the formation of
the Union (1905-1910). Always a member of the Round Table Group and the Milner
Group, Dawson added to these the offices of editor of The Times (1912-1919, 1922-1941)
and secretary to the Rhodes Trustees (1921-1922). During the period in which Dawson
was not editor of The Times, he was well provided for by the Milner Group, being made
estates bursar of All Souls, a director of Consolidated Gold Fields, Ltd., and of Trust
Houses, Ltd. (both Rhodes concerns), as well as being secretary to the Rhodes Trust. He
married in 1919 the daughter of Sir Arthur Lawley (later sixth Baron Wenlock), Kerr's
old chief in the Transvaal. Sir Arthur, who had started his career as private secretary to
his uncle, the Duke of Westminster, in 1892, ended it as Governor of Madras (1906-
1911).
Dawson was probably as close to Milner personally as any member of the
Kindergarten, although Amery must be regarded as Milner's political heir. The Times'
obituary of Dawson says: "To none was Milner's heart more wholly given than to
Dawson; the sympathy between the older and the younger man was almost that of father
and son, and it lasted unchanged until Milner's death." As editor of The Times, Dawson
was one of the most influential figures in England. He used that influence in the
directions decided by the Group. This was to be seen, in later years, in the tremendous
role which he played in the affairs of India and, above all, in the appeasement policy. In
1929 he visited his "long-standing friend" Lord Halifax, then Viceroy of India, and
subsequently wrote most of The Times editorials on India in the fight which preceded the
Government of India Act of 1935. In 1937 he wrote The Times articles which inaugurated
the last stage of appeasement, and personally guided The Times support of that policy.
After his retirement from the chair of editor of The Times in 1941, he served for the last
three years of his life as editor of The Round Table.
William Flavelle Monypenny was assistant editor of The Times (1894-1899) before he
went to South Africa to become editor of the Johannesburg Star. He left this position at
the outbreak of the Boer War, since the publication of a pro-British paper was not
possible during the hostilities. After a short period as a lieutenant in the Imperial Light
Horse (1899-1900), Monypenny was made Director of Civil Supplies under Milner