refugees and stateless persons, as a result of the persecutions of Hitler and the
approaching closing of the Nansen Office of the League of Nations. Sir Neill Malcolm
was made High Commissioner for German Refugees in 1936. The following year the
RIIA began a research program in the problem. This resulted in a massive report, edited
by Sir John Hope Simpson who was not a member of the Group and was notoriously
unsympathetic to Zionism (1939). In 1938 Roger M. Makins was made secretary to the
British delegation to the Evian Conference on Refugees. Mr. Makins' full career will be
examined later. At this point it is merely necessary to note that he was educated at
Winchester School and at Christ Church, Oxford, and was elected to a Fellowship at All
Souls in 1925, when only twenty-one years old. After the Evian Conference (where the
British, for strategic reasons, left all the responsible positions to the Americans), Mr.
Makins was made secretary to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. He was
British Minister in Washington from 1945 to 1947 and is now Assistant Under Secretary
in the Foreign Office.
Before leaving the subject of refugees, we might mention that the chief British agent
for Czechoslovakian refugees in 1938-1939 was R. J. Stopford, an associate of the Milner
Group already mentioned.
At the time of the Czechoslovak crisis in September 1938, the RIIA began to act in an
unofficial fashion as an adviser to the Foreign Office. When war began a year later, this
was made formal, and Chatham House became, for all practical purposes, the research
section of the Foreign Office. A special organization was established in the Institute, in
charge of A. J. Toynbee, with Lionel Curtis as his chief support acting "as the permanent
representative of the chairman of the Council, Lord Astor." The organization consisted of
the press-clipping collection, the information department, and much of the library. These
were moved to Oxford and set up in Balliol, All Souls, and Rhodes House. The project
was financed by the Treasury, All Souls, Balliol, and Chatham House jointly. Within a
brief time, the organization became known as the Foreign Research and Press Service
(FRPS). It answered all questions on international affairs from government departments,
prepared a weekly summary of the foreign press, and prepared special research projects.
When Anthony Eden was asked a question in the House of Commons on 23 July 1941,
regarding the expense of this project, he said that the Foreign Office had given it £53,000
in the fiscal year 1940-1941.
During the winter of 1939-1940 the general meetings of the Institute were held in
Rhodes House, Oxford, with Hugh Wyndham generally presiding. The periodical
International Affairs suspended publication, but the Bulletin of International News
continued, under the care of Hugh Latimer and A. J. Brown. The latter had been an
undergraduate at Oxford in 1933-1936, was elected a Fellow of All Souls in 1938, and
obtained a D.Phil. in 1939. The former may be Alfred Hugh Latimer, who was an
undergraduate at Merton from 1938 to 1946 and was elected to the foundation of the
same college in 1946.
As the work of the FRPS grew too heavy for Curtis to supervise alone, he was given a
committee of four assistants. They were G. N. Clark, H. J. Paton, C. K. Webster, and A.
E. Zimmern. About the same time, the London School of Economics established a
quarterly journal devoted to the subject of postwar reconstruction. It was called Agenda,
and G. N. Clark was editor. Clark had been a member of All Souls since 1912 and was
Chichele Professor of Economic History from 1931 to 1943. Since 1943 he has been
Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Not a member of the Milner Group,
he is close to it and was a member of the council of Chatham House during the recent
war.
At the end of 1942 the Foreign Secretary (Eden) wrote to Lord Astor that the
government wished to take the FRPS over completely. This was done in April 1943. The
existing Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office was merged with it to
make the new Research Department of the Ministry. Of this new department Toynbee
was director and Zimmern deputy director.
This brief sketch of the Royal Institute of International Affairs does not by any means
indicate the very considerable influence which the organization exerts in English-
speaking countries in the sphere to which it is devoted. The extent of that influence must
be obvious. The purpose of this chapter has been something else: to show that the Milner
Group controls the Institute. Once that is established, the picture changes. The influence
of Chatham House appears in its true perspective, not as the influence of an autonomous
body but as merely one of many instruments in the arsenal of another power. When the
influence which the Institute wields is combined with that controlled by the Milner Group
in other fields—in education, in administration, in newspapers and periodicals—a really
terrifying picture begins to emerge. This picture is called terrifying not because the power
of the Milner Group was used for evil ends. It was not. On the contrary, it was generally
used with the best intentions in the world—even if those intentions were so idealistic as
to be almost academic. The picture is terrifying because such power, whatever the goals
at which it may be directed, is too much to be entrusted safely to any group. That it was
too much to be safely entrusted to the Milner Group will appear quite clearly in Chapter
12. No country that values its safety should allow what the Milner Group accomplished
in Britain—that is, that a small number of men should be able to wield such power in
administration and politics, should be given almost complete control over the publication
of the documents relating to their actions, should be able to exercise such influence over
the avenues of information that create public opinion, and should be able to monopolize
so completely the writing and the teaching of the history of their own period.
Chapter 11—India, 1911-1945
India was one of the primary concerns of both the Cecil Bloc and Milner Group. The
latter probably devoted more time and attention to India than to any other subject. This
situation reached its peak in 1919, and the Government of India Act of that year is very
largely a Milner Group measure in conception, formation, and execution. The influence
of the two groups is not readily apparent from the lists of Governors-general (Viceroys)
and Secretaries of State for India in the twentieth century:
Viceroys
Lord Curzon, 1898-1905
Lord Minto, 1905-1910
Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, 1910-1916
Lord Chelmsford, 1916-1921
Lord Reading, 1921-1926
Lord Irwin, 1926-1931
Lord Willingdon, 1931-1936
Lord Linlithgow, 1936-1943
Secretaries of State
Lord George Hamilton, 1895-1903
St. John Brodrick, 1903-1908
John Morley, 1908-1910
Lord Crewe, 1910-1915
Austen Chamberlain, 1915-1917
Edward Montagu, 1917-1922
Lord Peel, 1922-1924
Lord Olivier, 1924
Lord Birkenhead, 1924-1928
Lord Peel, 1928-1929
Wedgwood Benn, 1929-1931
Samuel Hoare, 1931-1935
Lord Zetland, 1935-1940
Leopold Amery, 1940-1945
Of the Viceroys only one (Reading) is clearly of neither the Cecil Bloc nor the Milner
Group; two were members of the Milner Group (Irwin and Willingdon); another was a
member of both groups (Chelmsford); the rest were of the Cecil Bloc, although in two