The real founder of the Institute was Lionel Curtis, although this fact was concealed
for many years and he was presented to the public as merely one among a number of
founders. In more recent years, however, the fact that Curtis was the real founder of the
Institute has been publicly stated by members of the Institute and by the Institute itself on
many occasions, and never denied. One example will suffice. In the Annual Report of the
Institute for 1942-1943 we read the following sentence: "When the Institute was founded
through the inspiration of Mr. Lionel Curtis during the Peace Conference of Paris in
1919, those associated with him in laying the foundations were a group of comparatively
young men and women."
The Institute was organized at a joint conference of British and American experts at
the Hotel Majestic on 30 May 1919. At the suggestion of Lord Robert Cecil, the chair
was given to General Tasker Bliss of the American delegation. We have already indicated
that the experts of the British delegation at the Peace Conference were almost exclusively
from the Milner Group and Cecil Bloc. The American group of experts, "the Inquiry,"
was manned almost as completely by persons from institutions (including universities)
dominated by J. P. Morgan and Company. This was not an accident. Moreover, the
Milner Group has always had very close relationships with the associates of J. P. Morgan
and with the various branches of the Carnegie Trust. These relationships, which are
merely examples of the closely knit ramifications of international financial capitalism,
were probably based on the financial holdings controlled by the Milner Group through
the Rhodes Trust. The term "international financier" can be applied with full justice to
several members of the Milner Group inner circle, such as Brand, Hichens, and above all,
Milner himself.
At the meeting at the Hotel Majestic, the British group included Lionel Curtis, Philip
Kerr, Lord Robert Cecil, Lord Eustace Percy, Sir Eyre Crowe, Sir Cecil Hurst, J. W.
Headlam-Morley, Geoffrey Dawson, Harold Temperley, and G. M. Gathorne-Hardy. It
was decided to found a permanent organization for the study of international affairs and
to begin by writing a history of the Peace Conference. A committee was set up to
supervise the writing of this work. It had Lord Meston as chairman, Lionel Curtis as
secretary, and was financed by a gift of £2000 from Thomas W. Lamont of J. P. Morgan
and Company. This group picked Harold Temperley as editor of the work. It appeared in
six large volumes in the years 1920-1924, under the auspices of the RIIA.
The British organization was set up by a committee of which Lord Robert Cecil was
chairman, Lionel Curtis was honorary secretary and the following were members: Lord
Eustace Percy, J. A. C. (later Sir John) Tilley, Philip Noel-Baker, Clement Jones, Harold
Temperley, A. L. Smith (classmate of Milner and Master of Balliol), George W.
Prothero, and Geoffrey Dawson. This group drew up a constitution and made a list of
prospective members. Lionel Curtis and Gathorne Hardy drew up the by-laws.
The above description is based on the official history of the RIIA published by the
Institute itself in 1937 and written by Stephen King Hall. It does not agree in its details
(committees and names) with information from other sources, equally authoritative, such
as the journal of the Institute or the preface to Temperley's History of the Peace
Conference. The latter, for example, says that the members were chosen by a committee
consisting of Lord Robert Cecil, Sir Valentine Chirol, and Sir Cecil Hurst. As a matter of
fact, all of these differing accounts are correct, for the Institute was formed in such an
informal fashion, as among friends, that membership on committees and lines of
authority between committees were not very important. As an example, Mr. King-Hall
says that he was invited to join the Institute in 1919 by Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian),
although this name is not to be found on any membership committee. At any rate, one
thing is clear: The Institute was formed by the Cecil Bloc and the Milner Group, acting
together, and the real decisions were being made by members of the latter.
As organized, the Institute consisted of a council with a chairman and two honorary
secretaries, and a small group of paid employees. Among these latter, A. J. Toynbee,
nephew of Milner's old friend at Balliol, was the most important. There were about 300
members in 1920, 714 in 1922, 17D7 in 1929, and 2414 in 1936. There have been three
chairmen of the counciclass="underline" Lord Meston in 1920-1926, Major-General Sir Neill Malcolm in
1926-1935, and Lord Astor from 1935 to the present. All of these are members of the
Milner Group, although General Malcolm is not yet familiar to us.
General Malcolm, from Eton and Sandhurst, married the sister of Dougal Malcolm of
Milner's Kindergarten in 1907, when he was a captain in the British Army. By 1916 he
was a lieutenant colonel and two years later a major general. He was with the British
Military Mission in Berlin in 1919-1921 and General Officer Commanding in Malaya in
1921-1924, retiring in 1924. He was High Commissioner for German Refugees (a project
in which the Milner Group was deeply involved) in 1936-1938 and has been associated
with a number of industrial and commercial firms, including the British North Borneo
Company, of which he is president and Dougal Malcolm is vice-president. It must not be
assumed that General Malcolm won advancement in the world because of his connections
with the Milner Group, for his older brother, Sir Ian Malcolm was an important member
of the Cecil Bloc long before Sir Neill joined the Milner Group. Sir Ian, who went to
Eton and New College, was assistant private secretary to Lord Salisbury in 1895-1900,
was parliamentary private secretary to the Chief Secretary for Ireland (George
Wyndham) in 1901-1903, and was private secretary to Balfour in the United States in
1917 and at the Peace Conference in 1919. He wrote the sketch of Walter Long of the
Cecil Bloc (Lord Long of Wraxall) in the Dictionary of National Biography.
From the beginning, the two honorary secretaries of the Institute were Lionel Curtis
and G. M. Gathorne-Hardy. These two, especially the latter, did much of the active work
of running the organization. In 1926 the Report of the Council of the RIIA said: "It is not too much to say that the very existence of the Institute is due to those who have served as
Honorary Officers." The burden of work was so great on Curtis and Gathorne-Hardy by
1926 that Sir Otto Beit, of the Rhodes Trust, Milner Group, and British South Africa
Company, gave £1000 for 1926 and 1927 for secretarial assistance. F. B. Bourdillon
assumed the task of providing this assistance in March 1926. He had been secretary to
Feetham on the Irish Boundary Commission in 1924-1925 and a member of the British
delegation to the Peace Conference in 1919. He has been in the Research Department of
the Foreign Office since 1943.
The active governing body of the Institute is the council, originally called the
executive committee. Under the more recent name, it generally had twenty-five to thirty
members, of whom slightly less than half were usually of the Milner Group. In 1923, five
members were elected, including Lord Meston, Headlam-Morley, and Mrs. Alfred
Lyttelton. The following year, seven were elected, including Wilson Harris, Philip Kerr,
and Sir Neill Malcolm. And so it went. In 1936, at least eleven out of twenty-six