Tobacco Company; the British South Africa Company; Central Mining and Investment
Corporation; Erlangers, Ltd; the Ford Motor Company; Hambros' Bank; Imperial
Chemical Industries; Lazard Brothers; Lever Brothers; Lloyd's; Lloyd's Bank; the
Mercantile and General Insurance Company; the Midland Bank; Reuters; Rothschild and
Sons; Stern Brothers; Vickers-Armstrong; the Westminster Bank; and Whitehall
Securities Corporation.
Since 1939 the chief benefactors of the Institute have been the Astor family and Sir
Henry Price. In 1942 the latter gave £50,000 to buy the house next door to Chatham
House for an expansion of the library (of which E. L. Woodward was supervisor). In the
same year Lord Astor, who had been giving £2000 a year since 1937, promised £3000 a
year for seven years to form a Lord Lothian Memorial Fund to promote good relations
between the United States and Britain. At the same time, each of Lord Astor's four sons
promised £1000 a year for seven years to the general fund of the Institute.
Chatham House had close institutional relations with a number of other similar
organizations, especially in the Dominions. It also has a parallel organization, which was
regarded as a branch, in New York. This latter, the Council on Foreign Relations, was not
founded by the American group that attended the meeting at the Hotel Majestic in 1919,
but was taken over almost entirely by that group immediately after its founding in 1919.
This group was made up of the experts on the American delegation to the Peace
Conference who were most closely associated with J. P. Morgan and Company. The
Morgan bank has never made any real effort to conceal its position in regard to the
Council on Foreign Relations. The list of officers and board of directors are printed in
every issue of Foreign Affairs and have always been loaded with partners, associates, and
employees of J. P. Morgan and Company. According to Stephen King-Hall, the RIIA
agreed to regard the Council on Foreign Relations as its American branch. The
relationship between the two has always been very close. For example, the publications
of one are available at reduced prices to the members of the other; they frequently sent
gifts of books to each other (the Council, for example, giving the Institute a seventy-five-
volume set of the Foreign Relations of the United States in 1933); and there is
considerable personal contact between the officers of the two (Toynbee, for example, left
the manuscript of Volumes 7-9 of A Study of History in the Council's vault during the
recent war).
Chatham House established branch institutes in the various Dominions, but it was a
slow process. In each case the Dominion Institute was formed about a core consisting of
the Round Table Group's members in that Dominion. The earliest were set up in Canada
and Australia in 1927. The problem was discussed in 1933 at the first unofficial British
Commonwealth relations conference (Toronto), and the decision made to extend the
system to New Zealand, South Africa, India, and Newfoundland. The last-named was
established by Zimmern on a visit there the same year. The others were set up in 1934-
1936.
As we have said, the members of the Dominion Institutes of International Affairs were
the members of the Milner Group and their close associates. In Canada, for example,
Robert L. Borden was the first president (1927-1931); N. W. Rowell was the second
president; Sir Joseph Flavelle and Vincent Massey were vice-presidents; Glazebrook was
honorary secretary; and Percy Corbett was one of the most important members. Of these,
the first three were close associates of the Milner Group (especially of Brand) in the
period of the First World War; the last four were members of the Group itself. When the
Indian Institute was set up in 1936, it was done at the Viceroy's house at a meeting
convened by Lord Willingdon (Brand's cousin). Robert Cecil sent a message, which was
read by Stephen King-Hall. Sir Maurice Gwyer of All Souls became a member of the
council. In South Africa, B. K. Long of the Kindergarten was one of the most important
members. In the Australian Institute, Sir Thomas Bavin was president in 1934-1941,
while F. W. Eggleston was one of its principal founders and vice-president for many
years. In New Zealand, W. Downie Stewart was president of the Institute of International
Affairs from 1935 on. Naturally, the Milner Group did not monopolize the membership
or the official positions in these new institutes any more than they did in London, for this
would have weakened the chief aim of the Group in setting them up, namely to extend
their influence to wider areas.
Closely associated with the various Institutes of International Affairs were the various
branches of the Institute of Pacific Relations. This was originally founded at Atlantic City
in September 1924 as a private organization to study the problems of the Pacific Basin. It
has representatives from eight countries with interests in the area. The representatives
from the United Kingdom and the three British Dominions were closely associated with
the Milner Group. Originally each country had its national unit, but by 1939, in the four
British areas, the local Institute of Pacific Relations had merged with the local Institute of
International Affairs. Even before this, the two Institutes in each country had practically
interchangeable officers, dominated by the Milner Group. In the United States, the
Institute of Pacific Relations never merged with the Council on Foreign Relations, but the
influence of the associates of J. P. Morgan and other international bankers remained
strong on both. The chief figure in the Institute of Pacific Relations of the United States
was, for many years, Jerome D. Greene, Boston banker close to both Rockefeller and
Morgan and for many years secretary to Harvard University.
The Institutes of Pacific Relations held joint meetings, similar to those of the
unofficial conferences on British Commonwealth relations and with a similar group of
delegates from the British member organizations. These meetings met every two years at
first, beginning at Honolulu in 1925 and then assembling at Honolulu again (1927), at
Kyoto (1929), at Shanghai (1931), at Banff (1933), and at Yosemite Park (1936). F. W.
Eggleston, of Australia and the Milner Group, presided over most of the early meetings.
Between meetings, the central organization, set up in 1927, was the Pacific Council, a
self-perpetuating body. In 1930, at least five of its seven members were from the Milner
Group, as can be seen from the following list:
The Pacific Council, 1930
Jerome D. Greene of the United States
F. W. Eggleston of Australia
N. W. Rowell of Canada
D. Z. T. Yui of China
Lionel Curtis of the United Kingdom
I. Nitobe of Japan
Sir James Allen of New Zealand
The close relationships among all these organizations can be seen from a tour of
inspection which Lionel Curtis and Ivison S. Macadam (secretary of Chatham House, in
succession to F. B. Bourdillon, since 1929) made in 1938. They not only visited the
Institutes of International Affairs of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada but attended the
Princeton meeting of the Pacific Council of the IPR. Then they separated, Curtis going to
New York to address the dinner of the Council on Foreign Relations and visit the
Carnegie Foundation, while Macadam went to Washington to visit the Carnegie
Endowment and the Brookings Institution.
Through the League of Nations, where the influence of the Milner Group was very