self-governing parts of the Empire; the Colonial Secretary was to be eliminated from the
picture; and a new Dominion Department, under Sir Charles Lucas, was to be set up in
the Colonial Office. As the future Lord Lothian wrote in The Round Table in 1911, the
final result was to destroy the hopes for federation by recognizing the separate existence
of the Dominions.(2)
At the Conference of 1907, at the suggestion of Haldane, there was created a
Committee of Imperial Defence, and a plan was adopted to organize Dominion defense
forces on similar patterns, so that they could be integrated in an emergency. The second
of these proposals, which led to a complete reorganization of the armies of New Zealand,
Australia, and South Africa in 1909-1912, with very beneficial results in the crisis of
1914-1918, is not of immediate concern to us. The Committee of Imperial Defence and
its secretarial staff were creations of Lord Esher, who had been chairman of a special
committee to reform the War Office in 1903 and was permanent member of the
Committee of Imperial Defence from 1905 to his death. As a result of his influence, the
secretariat of this committee became a branch of the Milner Group and later became the
secretariat of the Cabinet itself, when that body first obtained a secretariat in 1917.
From this secretarial staff the Milner Group obtained three recruits in the period after
1918. These were Maurice Hankey, Ernest Swinton, and W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore (now
Lord Harlech). Hankey was assistant secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence
from 1908 to 1912 and was secretary from 1912 to 1938. Swinton was assistant secretary
from 1917 to 1925. Both became members of the Milner Group, Hankey close to the
inner circle, Swinton in one of the less central rings. Ormsby-Gore was an assistant
secretary in 1917-1918 at the same time that he was private secretary to Lord Milner. All
three of these men are of sufficient importance to justify a closer examination of their
careers.
Maurice Pascal Alers Hankey (Sir Maurice after 1916, Baron Hankey since 1939),
whose family was related by marriage to the Wyndhams, was born in 1877 and joined the
Royal Marines when he graduated from Rugby in 1895. He retired from that service in
1918 as a lieutenant colonel and was raised to colonel on the retired list in 1929. He was
attached for duty with the Naval Intelligence Department in 1902 and by this route
reached the staff of the Committee of Imperial Defence six years later. In 1917, when it
was decided to give the Cabinet a secretariat for the first time, and to create the Imperial
War Cabinet by adding overseas representatives to the British War Cabinet (a change in
which Milner played the chief role), the secretariat of the Committee of Imperial Defence
became also the secretariat of the other two bodies. At the same time, as we have seen,
the Prime Minister was given a secretariat consisting of two members of the Milner
Group (Kerr and Adams). In this way Hankey became secretary and Swinton assistant
secretary to the Cabinet, the former holding that post, along with the parallel post in the
Committee of Imperial Defence, until 1938. It was undoubtedly through Hankey and the
Milner Group that Swinton became Chichele Professor of Military History and a Fellow
of All Souls in 1925. As for Hankey himself, he became one of the more significant
figures in the Milner Group, close to the inner circle and one of the most important
(although relatively little-known) figures in British history of recent times. He was clerk
of the Privy Council in 1923-1938; he was secretary to the British delegation at the Peace
Conference of 1919, at the Washington Conference of 1921, at the Genoa Conference of
1922, and at the London Reparations Conference of 1924. He was secretary general of
the Hague Conference of 1929-1930, of the London Naval Conference of 1930, and of
the Lausanne Conference of 1932. He was secretary general of the British Imperial
Conferences of 1921, 1923, 1926, 1930, and 1937. He retired in 1938, but became a
member of the Permanent Mandates Commission (succeeding Lord Hailey) in 1939. He
was British government director of the Suez Canal Company in 1938-1939, Minister
without Portfolio in 1939-1940, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1940-1941,
Paymaster General in 1941-1942, chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee and of
the Engineering Advisory Committee in 1942-1943. At the present time he is a director
of the Suez Canal Company (since 1945), chairman of the Technical Personnel
Committee (since 1941), chairman of the Interdepartmental Committee on Further
Education and Training and of the Committee on Higher Appointments in the Civil
Service (since 1944), and chairman of the Colonial Products Research Committee (since
1942). Hankey, in 1903, married Adeline de Smidt, daughter of a well-known South
African political figure. His oldest son, Robert, is now a First Secretary in the diplomatic
service, while his daughter, Ursula, has been married since 1929 to John A. Benn,
chairman of the board of Benn Brothers, publishers.
Hankey was Lord Esher's chief protege in the Milner Group and in British public life.
They were in constant communication with one another, and Esher gave Hankey a
constant stream of advice about his conduct in his various official positions. The
following scattered examples can be gleaned from the published Journals and Letters of
Reginald, Viscount Esher. On 18 February 1919, Esher wrote Hankey, advising him not
to accept the position as Secretary General of the League of Nations. On 7 December
1919, he gave him detailed advice on how to conduct himself as secretary to the
Conference of Dominion Prime Ministers, telling him to work for "a League of Empire"
based on cooperation and not on any "rigid constitutional plan," to try to get an Imperial
General Staff, and to use the Defence Committee as such a staff in the meantime. In
1929, when Ramsay MacDonald tried to exclude Hankey from a secret Cabinet meeting,
Esher went so far in support of his protege as to write a letter of admonition to the Prime
Minister. This letter, dated 21 July 1929, said: "What is this I see quoted from a London
paper that you are excluding your Secretary from Cabinet meetings? It probably is untrue,
for you are the last person in the world to take a retrograde step toward 'secrecy' whether
in diplomacy or government. The evolution of our Cabinet system from 'Cabal' has been
slow but sure. When the Secretary to the Cabinet became an established factor in
conducting business, almost the last traces of Mumbo Jumbo, cherished from the days
when Bolingbroke was a danger to public peace, disappeared."
Hankey was succeeded as secretary of the Cabinet in 1938 by Edward E. Bridges, who
has been close to the Milner Group since he became a Fellow of All Souls in 1920.
Bridges, son of the late Poet Laureate Robert Bridges, had the advantages of a good
education at Eton and Magdalen. He was a Treasury civil servant from 1919, was
knighted in 1939, and since 1945 has combined with his Cabinet position the exalted post
of Permanent Secretary of the Treasury and head of His Majesty's Civil Service.
The Imperial Conference of 1911 has little concern with our story, although Asquith's
opening speech could have been written in the office of The Round Table. Indeed, it is
quoted with approval by Lionel Curtis in his The Problem of the Commonwealth,
published five years later. Asquith pointed out that the Empire rested on three
foundations: (a) the reign of law, in Dicey's sense, (b) local autonomy, and (c) trusteeship