Minister of Production (1942-1945).
Almost as ramified as the Lyttelton clan were the Wyndhams, descendants of the first
Baron Leconfield. The Baron had three sons. Of these, the oldest married Constance
Primrose, sister of Lord Rosebery, daughter of Lord Dalmeny and his wife, Dorothy
Grosvenor (later Lady Brassey), and granddaughter of Lord Henry Grosvenor and his
wife, Dora Wemyss. They had four children. Of these, one, Hugh A. Wyndham, married
Maud Lyttelton and was a member of Milner's Kindergarten. His sister Mary married
General Sir Ivor Maxse and was thus the sister-in-law of Lady Edward Cecil (later Lady
Milner). Another son of Baron Leconfield, Percy Scawen Wyndham, was the father of
Pamela (Lady Glenconner and later Lady Grey), of George Wyndham (already
mentioned), who married Countess Grosvenor, and of Mary Wyndham, who married the
eleventh Earl of Wemyss. It should perhaps be mentioned that Countess Grosvenor's
daughter Lettice Grosvenor married the seventh Earl of Beauchamp, brother-in-law of
Samuel Hoare. Countess Grosvenor (Mrs. George Wyndham) had two nephews who
must be mentioned. One, Lawrence John Lumley Dundas (Earl of Ronaldshay and
Marquess of Zetland), was sent as military aide to Curzon, Viceroy of India, in 1900. He
was an M.P. (1907-1916), a member of the Royal Commission on Public Services in
India (1912-1914), Governor of Bengal (1917-1922), a member of the Indian Round
Table Conference of 1930-1931 and of the Parliamentary Joint Select Committee on
India in 1933. He was Secretary of State for India (1935-1940) and for Burma (1937-
1940), as well as the official biographer of Lord Curzon and Lord Cromer.
The other nephew of Countess Grosvenor, Laurence Roger Lumley (Earl of
Scarbrough since 1945), a cousin of the Marquess of Zetland, was an M.P. as soon as he
graduated from Magdalen (1922-1929, 1931-1937), and later Governor of Bombay
(1937-1943) and Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for India and Burma (1945).
Countess Grosvenor's sister-in-law Mary Wyndham (who married the Earl of
Wemyss) had three children. The younger son, Guy Charteris, married a Tennant of the
same family as the first Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton, the second Mrs. Herbert Asquith, and
Baron Glenconner. His sister, Cynthia Charteris, married Herbert Asquith's son Herbert.
In an earlier generation, Francis Charteris, tenth Earl of Wemyss, married Anne Anson,
while his sister Lady Hilda Charteris married St. John Brodrick, eighth Viscount
Midleton of first Earl Midleton. Lord Midleton's sister Edith married Philip Lyttelton
Gell.
This complicated interrelationship of family connections by no means exhausts the
links between the families that made up the Cecil Bloc as it existed in the period 1886-
1900, when Milner was brought into it by Goschen. Nor would any picture of this Bloc
be complete without some mention of the persons without family connections who were
brought into the Bloc by Lord Salisbury. Most of these persons were recruited from All
Souls and, like Arthur Balfour, Lord Robert Cecil, Baron Quickswood, Sir Evelyn Cecil,
and others, frequently served an apprenticeship in a secretarial capacity to Lord
Salisbury. Many of these persons later married into the Cecil Bloc. In recruiting his
proteges from All Souls, Salisbury created a precedent that was followed later by the
Milner Group, although the latter went much further than the former in the degree of its
influence on All Souls.
All Souls is the most peculiar of Oxford Colleges. It has no undergraduates, and its
postgraduate members are not generally in pursuit of a higher degree. Essentially, it
consists of a substantial endowment originally set up in 1437 by Henry Chichele,
sometime Fellow of New College and later Archbishop of Canterbury, from revenues of
suppressed priories. From this foundation incomes were established originally for a
warden, forty fellows, and two chaplains. This has been modified at various times, until
at present twenty-one fellowships worth £300 a year for seven years are filled from
candidates who have passed a qualifying examination. This group usually join within a
year or two of receiving the bachelor's degree. In addition, there are eleven fellowships
without emolument, to be held by the incumbents of various professorial chairs at
Oxford. These include the Chichele Chairs of International Law, of Modern History, of
Economic History, of Social and Political Theory, and of the History of War; the
Drummond Chair of Political Economy; the Gladstone Chair of Government; the Regius
Chair of Civil Law; the Vinerian Chair of English Law; the Marshal Foch Professorship
of French Literature; and the Chair of Social Anthropology. There are ten Distinguished
Persons fellowships without emolument, to be held for seven years by persons who have
attained fame in law, humanities, science, or public affairs. These are usually held by past
Fellows. There are a varying number of research fellowships and teaching fellowships,
good for five to seven years, with annual emoluments of £300 to £600. There are also
twelve seven-year fellowships with annual emoluments of £50 for past Fellows. And
lastly, there are six fellowships to be held by incumbents of certain college or university
offices.
The total number of Fellows at any one time is generally no more than fifty and
frequently considerably fewer. Until 1910 there were usually fewer than thirty-five, but
the number has slowly increased in the twentieth century, until by 1947 there were fifty-
one. In the whole period of the twentieth century from 1900 to 1947, there was a total of
149 Fellows. This number, although small, was illustrious and influential. It includes
such names as Lord Acton, Leopold Amery, Sir William Anson, Sir Harold Butler, G. N.
Clark, G. D. H. Cole, H. W. C. Davis, A. V. Dicey, Geoffrey Faber, Keith Feiling, Lord
Chelmsford, Sir Maurice Gwyer, Lord Halifax, W. K. Hancock, Sir Arthur Hardinge, Sir
William Holdsworth, T. E. Lawrence, C. A. Macartney, Friedrich Max Muller, Viscount
Morley of Blackburn, Sir Charles Oman, A. F. Pollard, Sir Charles Grant Robertson, Sir
James Arthur Salter, Viscount Simon, Sir Donald Somervell, Sir Arthur Ramsay Steel-
Maitland, Sir Ernest Swinton, K. C. Wheare, E. L. Woodward, Francis de Zulueta, etc. In
addition, there were to be numbered among those who were fellows before 1900 such
illustrious persons as Lord Curzon, Lord Ernle, Sir Robert Herbert, Sir Edmund Monson,
Lord Phillimore, Viscount Ridley, and Lord Salisbury. Most of these persons were
elected to fellowships in All Souls at the age of twenty-two or twenty-three years, at a
time when their great exploits were yet in the future. There is some question whether this
ability of the Fellows of All Souls to elect as their younger colleagues men with brilliant
futures is to be explained by their ability to discern greatness at an early age or by the fact
that election to the fellowship opens the door to achievement in public affairs. There is
some reason to believe that the second of these two alternatives is of greater weight. As
the biographer of Viscount Halifax has put it, "It is safe to assert that the Fellow of All
Souls is a man marked out for a position of authority in public life, and there is no
surprise if he reaches the summit of power, but only disappointment if he falls short of
the opportunities that are set out before him. (1)
One Fellow of All Souls has confessed in a published work that his career was based
on his membership in this college. The Right Reverend Herbert Hensley Henson, who