28

Air Board and War Cabinet, 1916

AT THE BEGINNING of 1916 George Curzon received a good number of letters congratulating him on the Garter and expressing the hope that he would soon be Foreign Secretary and in due course Prime Minister. Doubtless it was gratifying to learn what people thought him capable of, and certainly he would have agreed with the correspondent who believed that, as head of the Government, he would ‘bring efficiency into this welter of well-meaning jellyfish’.1 But such opinions also exacerbated his frustration with his current position. Sometimes he wondered why he had been invited to join the Cabinet. As Lord Privy Seal he had neither a department to administer nor a role in the House of Lords. Furthermore, since the demise of the Dardanelles Committee he no longer had any deliberating work. He was not consulted by the Foreign Office, he grumbled, about countries on which he was supposed to be an expert, while he had been excluded from the War Committee which daily dealt with places and issues he had been studying for thirty years.2

Curzon had accepted Asquith’s suggestion that he should represent the Ministry of Munitions in the House of Lords. But as he was not invited inside the ministry, nor apprised of any of its proceedings, nor sent a single item of information about its work, he severed the putative connection. After seven months on the sidelines, he told Crewe, the Leader of the House of Lords, that he saw no justification for remaining in a Government he was not permitted to serve. Twenty years earlier, he pointed out, Lord Salisbury had considered him worthy to represent the Foreign Office singlehandedly in the House of Commons, but now he was apparently unqualified to represent the Government in any debate in the Lords.3 The most he was asked to do was to hold himself ‘in reserve’ in case Crewe or Lansdowne was ill, a somewhat humiliating position which entailed a good deal of reading-up followed by watching a perfectly healthy Crewe deliver a very dull speech on one of Curzon’s pet subjects. ‘I might surely have relieved you’, he protested on one occasion, ‘of stating the government case about Persia.’ Crewe replied with an emollient letter comparing Curzon’s position to a ‘Rolls-Royce car, with a highly competent driver, kept to take an occasional parcel to the station’. But he was trying, he added, to find ways of utilizing Curzon’s powers of speech, ‘so infinitely superior’ to his own.4 He did not succeed.

From time to time Curzon’s colleagues came up with inappropriate ideas for his employment. Following Asquith’s proposal that he should be in charge of war trade problems, Balfour suggested, shortly after the Easter Rising, that he should become Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The idea was regarded as most humorous by the Cabinet, above all by Curzon: it would have been a classic, even by British standards, to appoint the minister with unrivalled knowledge of the rest of the world to the one place he knew less about than his colleagues. A few months earlier, Curzon had accepted the unglamorous but useful post of Chairman of the Shipping Control Board, a committee which allocated shipping resources between the competing demands of the navy, the army and the merchant marine. By its members he was regarded as a chairman of exceptional ability and, more surprisingly, as a generous and considerate chief. The idea that Curzon paid no attention to his staff’s interests, wrote the committee’s secretary many years later, was ‘entirely contrary’ to their experience. ‘To describe him as ungracious towards those who served under him, to say that he was unapproachable when he was in fact more accessible and much less grand than many Cabinet Ministers and City merchants, is untrue and unjust.’5

Curzon laboured dutifully with the problem of shipping tonnage but hankered after more demanding and imaginative work. At the end of March 1916 he wrote the Prime Minister a rather desperate letter, its tone perhaps influenced by the death of his father a few hours before, begging for something more substantial to do when he returned from Derbyshire after the funeral. The important work of the shipping committee had been completed, and he now felt ‘utterly useless’ in a Cabinet where he had nothing to do. He had greater administrative experience than most of his colleagues, he told Asquith, and thought he ‘must still be good for something’. ‘I feel quite ashamed at the position I occupy in the greatest crisis of our history when all my experience and knowledge, such as they are, are thrown away.’6 Asquith answered much in the manner of Crewe, thanking Curzon for the ‘patriotic spirit’ of his letter and claiming to have spent ‘the best part of the last year … trying to discover an ampler and worthier field for your great administrative talents and experience’. He doubted, however, whether his correspondent’s specific proposal was viable.7

Curzon’s aim was to persuade Asquith to set up an air ministry headed preferably by himself or, failing that, by another minister of Cabinet rank. He had long recognized the importance of air power in the war, and his first paper for the Cabinet had dealt with the problem of defending London from the threat of Zeppelins. On a visit to the Front he had persuaded Sir John French to let him go up in an aeroplane and had felt exhilaration but no sense of alarm as the machine swooped and lunged through the clouds, ‘very much like a boat tossing in a heavy sea’.8 But his admiration for the pilots was not extended to the organizations which controlled them. The aeroplanes were divided between the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service, respectively under the War Office and the Admiralty, which jealously protected their own spheres of aerial activity. A Cabinet committee headed by Lord Derby was supposed to co-ordinate questions of supply and design for the two air services but it had neither the authority to make them co-operate nor the power to determine policy. As Curzon told Asquith, the committee merely sat and listened to its three naval representatives disagreeing with its three army officers while the chairman, who knew little about the subject, tried to keep the peace.9 At the end of March Derby resigned, citing the impotence of the committee and the obstructiveness of the Admiralty as his reasons, and advocated the unification of the two services.

Curzon had identified the inherent defects of the committee at its inception and had argued in mid-February for the creation of an air ministry which would initiate policy itself as well as end the sparring between the War Office and the Admiralty. The proposal found little support in the Cabinet and in April, after Derby’s resignation, Curzon issued a second paper with the less ambitious aim of establishing an air board along the lines of his shipping committee. As he had already told Asquith, air power was going to be a major factor in the war and needed the foresight and initiative which could not be generated by a committee absorbed in trying to prevent the Admiralty and the War Office from ‘flying at each other’s throats’. Above all a sense of urgency was required. ‘When some great attack is made and Birmingham or some other place is laid in ashes, Co-ordinating Committees will be swept away in a blast of public wrath and the Government will very likely fall.’10

Asquith initially believed that the creation of an air ministry would increase friction between the two fighting departments, but by the end of April opinion within the Government had come to favour the less far-reaching of Curzon’s proposals. The Army Council accepted it at the beginning of May, and on the 11th the War Committee recommended the establishment of an air board with a president and a parliamentary spokesman, positions subsequently filled by Curzon and Major J.L. Baird. Only the Admiralty under Balfour remained unconvinced. The First Lord was considered to lack drive and enterprise in his post – certainly in comparison with his predecessor Churchill – but he managed to display these qualities in his duel with Curzon over the Air Board. In a Cabinet paper of 6 May he agreed to accept the body if it was confined to a co-ordinating role between the army and the navy – that is, if it remained as powerless as Derby’s committee – but not if it became ‘a third fighting department controlling all aerial operations’.11 Hankey observed that the Admiralty, having wrecked the Co-ordination Committee, was determined to be hostile to the Air Board but evidently did not appreciate that ‘Curzon was a far more redoubtable antagonist than Derby’.12 Although he was not disturbed by Balfour’s fear that the Board might be too powerful, Curzon was greatly annoyed by Churchill’s prediction that it would be too weak to achieve anything worthwhile. Proud of the Board, which he referred to as ‘my own creation’, the President overreacted to the criticism by publicly observing that Churchill’s disappearance from the Government at least removed ‘one chance of disturbance’ from his new job.13 Churchill, who was an aviation enthusiast longing to head an air ministry himself, thought the remark unkind and uncalled for, and pointed out that there had been nothing personal in his criticism.14

The Air Board immediately became both active and useful, meeting several times a week and relieving the War Committee of much of its work. Curzon’s behaviour in his new post did not, however, enhance his popularity with his colleagues. Hankey, who admired the Board’s work, found him ‘an intolerable person to do business with – pompous, dictatorial and outrageously conceited’, though ‘an able, strong man with it all’. This outburst in the Cabinet Secretary’s diary was provoked by constant telephone calls from Curzon asking him to help on various matters concerning the Board. ‘Thank Goodness,’ noted the overworked Hankey, ‘I shall not have much to do with it.’15

Now that Curzon had got his own department to talk about, his Cabinet colleagues suffered from his verbosity. He was inclined, noted Crawford, to give discourses on aeroplane exploits and at one meeting described at length the destruction of a Zeppelin. No such criticism could be made of Balfour who, as Selborne observed, rarely spoke and ‘when he did it was critically and destructively’. At the Cabinet meeting after Jutland, fought on the last day of May, the First Lord of the Admiralty decided not to say anything about the event. Curzon passed him a note suggesting it would be rather strange if the greatest naval battle since Trafalgar was not mentioned, to which Balfour replied that he knew no more about it than anyone else.16 Nothing better illustrates the difference between the two men unless it is Balfour’s surprise twenty-seven years before that Curzon should prefer to ride round Persia rather than spend a sporting vacation with his friends in Scotland. The puzzle is not why they opposed each other so consistently during this period but how they had been such close friends earlier. And yet even at their most antagonistic they retained the outward forms of friendship, writing to each other as ‘my dear George’ and ‘my dear Arthur’. In December 1916, after their most extended bout of hostilities since India, Balfour assured Curzon he was one of his ‘oldest and most devoted friends’.17

After five months at the Air Board, Curzon decided that the body could achieve none of the objectives for which it had been set up unless the Admiralty ceased its obstructiveness. Together with his civilian colleagues, Baird and Lord Sydenham, he composed a lengthy report which criticized the uncooperative attitude of the Admiralty, recommended the reorganization of its relations with its air service, and proposed the amalgamation of the existing supply departments, as far as aerial material was concerned, under the direction of the Air Board.18 As Curzon admitted to Bonar Law, it was a very strong indictment of the Admiralty, whose administration of its air service was ‘little short of a scandal’, but he did not think it violent or impatient.19 So convinced was he of the importance of his proposals, which envisaged the eventual creation of an air ministry, that he and his colleagues threatened to resign if they were rejected.

Military and public opinion were on Curzon’s side, and on 24 October The Times came out with a strong leading article in his support. But he was anxious about the attitude of the Cabinet. Advised by Churchill that the backing of Lloyd George was crucial, Curzon asked Bonar Law to intercede on his behalf because the Welsh MP was ‘never very courteous’ to him and he did not like to ask for favours. The Unionist leader was not helpful, stating inaccurately that he had ‘no influence whatever’ with Lloyd George and suggesting that Curzon should thrash the matter out with Balfour before it reached the Cabinet.20

Curzon duly sent an advance copy of the report to his old friend who, in thanking him, observed that ‘as it seems to contain 30 solid pages of abuse of the Admiralty you will not expect me to agree with it’. Few of Balfour’s dialectical exercises can have given him so much pleasure as the composition of his polished, feline and quite inadequate response to the criticism. Claiming that he had ‘little time and no inclination’ for controversy, he then devoted five pages of witty, deflating and insubstantial sarcasm to the pretensions of the Air Board and its ‘consciousness of superior abilities’, an ill-disguised crack at its President.21 The performance entertained some of his colleagues and disgusted others. Derby, who had himself come to grief at the hands of the Admiralty, said he agreed ‘absolutely’ with Curzon, but he disliked him personally so much that he exulted at his discomfiture. ‘Have you read Balfour’s answer?’ he asked Lloyd George, who was an unenthusiastic student of memoranda. ‘If not do – it is not very convincing – but it is the most amusing production I have read for a long time. It will make George C furious.’22 Crawford was more censorious. Never slow to criticize Curzon when necessary, he found that on this occasion the President of the Air Board had been ‘staid in tone and weighty in substance’ while Balfour’s reply had been ‘petulant, flippant and at times personal’: had it been published, he thought, it would have caused so much indignation that the First Lord would have had to resign.23 From outside the Cabinet, Churchill expressed the view that Balfour’s was ‘an astonishing performance’ considering the loyalty Curzon had showed him and the times in which they all lived.24

Nearing the end of his long premiership, Asquith showed as much reluctance to adjudicate on this issue as he had on several others since the formation of the Coalition. In early November he put off discussions and a decision by the War Committee and then suggested the matter should be resolved on a day when he and Lloyd George would be absent.25 Meanwhile Curzon responded to Balfour’s paper with what Crawford described as a ‘decorous’ reply which reinforced the general view that the Air Board was in the right.26 The duel consumed a lot of Cabinet time and might have continued indefinitely had not Asquith fallen and the antagonists been elevated in December. In 1918, when they had transferred their rivalry to other spheres, Curzon was vindicated by the establishment of an air ministry.

Long after his death Curzon was described by Lord Beaverbrook as ‘the most active supporter of Asquith in the Tory ranks’27 and therefore the most treacherous of those who joined Lloyd George in 1916. The view is entirely mistaken. Curzon and Asquith had long been friends and admired each other’s intelligence; one of the Prime Minister’s ways of combating boredom in Cabinet was to send Classical quotations down the table to Curzon with enquiries about their authors.28 But they were never political allies. Asquith made negligible use of his friend’s talents until he had been in the Cabinet for a year, while Curzon never respected the premier as a war leader. Not as outspoken as Churchill or Lloyd George, Curzon had nevertheless agreed with them over a year before Asquith’s fall that radical changes had to be made in the running of the war. He was pleased at the decision to replace the Dardanelles Committee by a policy-making committee of three but dismayed by its proposed membership. It would be ‘rather a curious outcome’, he told Selborne at Cabinet in October 1915, ‘if the result of our discussion is to install a triumvirate’ consisting of Asquith, ‘whose power of leadership and decision we all distrust’, Kitchener, ‘whose incompetence is proven’, and Balfour, ‘who does not err on the side of decision’.29 In the end the committee was enlarged to five, and Kitchener was left out.

Curzon’s dissatisfaction with Asquith’s leadership increased during 1916. He was exasperated by the confusion of Cabinet meetings, complaining that there was no agenda, no order, no record of proceedings, that ministers often left the table without knowing what had been decided or even if a decision had been taken.30 In the intimacy of their diaries and private papers, Unionist colleagues were more forthright. Selborne, who resigned over Irish negotiations in July, accused Asquith of lacking vision and initiative, while Crawford found the Prime Minister’s ‘somnolence … heart-rending’. Like Curzon they were appalled by his failure to exercise control at Cabinet meetings. Selborne thought him the worst chairman of any committee he had ever sat on, because ‘the desire on all occasions to avoid a decision was an absolute disease with him’. Curzon, he added, ‘hated the P.M.’s ways’ as much as he did: ‘we simply stumbled on from day to day, and I think it was purgatory to almost all of us’.31

Despite his view of Asquith’s leadership, Curzon played only a late and minor role in the manoeuvres that led to his resignation. He knew nothing of the schemes to set up a small war council, consisting of Lloyd George, Bonar Law and Carson, designed in effect to run the war while Asquith remained in distant supervision as Prime Minister. Informed of these developments by their party leader on the last day of November, the Unionist members of the Cabinet gathered at Law’s house to formulate a response on Sunday, 3 December.fn1 They were annoyed by the secrecy of the intrigue and also by a newspaper report stating that Lloyd George was going to resign if his plan was not accepted. But they did not, as Beaverbrook alleged, decide to resign themselves in order to strengthen the Prime Minister’s hand against Lloyd George. In fact the intentions of the Unionist ministers were completely different. As Crawford noted later that day, they decided to resign because they were convinced that the country needed ‘a more businesslike system’ which could not be achieved under Asquith, whom they regarded as ‘discredited and unpopular thro’ his invincible indecision’. Reconstruction of the present Government was impossible, they concluded, because ‘the country and press don’t want a reshuffling of the cards, they want a new pack’.32 Many years later Chamberlain told Asquith’s biographers that the Unionists realized they could not have held their party together if Bonar Law joined Carson and Lloyd George in opposition; and furthermore, they had ‘all reluctantly come to the conclusion that Asquith was not the man to win the war’.33 It was therefore decided that Bonar Law should see the Prime Minister that afternoon and deliver a resolution urging him to tender the resignation of the Government; if he refused to do so, the Unionist ministers would resign unilaterally. Later that day Curzon reported the concluding view of the meeting to Lansdowne.

Had one felt that reconstitution by and under the present Prime Minister was possible, we should all have preferred to try it. But we know that with him as Chairman, either of the Cabinet or War Committee, it is absolutely impossible to win the War, and it will be for himself and Lloyd George to determine whether he goes out altogether or becomes Lord Chancellor or Chancellor of the Exchequer in a new Government, a nominal Premiership being a pro tem compromisefn2 which, in our view, could have no endurance.34

The papers of Curzon, Crawford and Chamberlain make it clear that at the time they expected to see a Lloyd George administration. But this was not made obvious by the wording of the resolution, nor by Law’s interview with Asquith, during which he failed to hand over the text, and certainly not by a short letter sent by Curzon to the Prime Minister on the following day. The author of this bewildering missive began by assuring Asquith that the Unionist resignations were ‘far from having the sinister purport’ which the premier had apparently ascribed to them. Yet rather than explain what that purport was – and if not sinister it was certainly detrimental to Asquith’s prospects – he wished to ‘strike a note of gaiety in a world of gloom’ by quoting some lines of Matthew Arnold seeming to imply that resignations and their consequences were decreed by the Almighty.fn335 Historians, and Asquith’s biographers in particular, have naturally been astonished by this document, especially when studied in conjunction with what Curzon had written the day before to Lansdowne. Yet perhaps they have read too much into it. Unattractive though it may be, the letter cannot really be construed as a message of support or as an assurance designed ‘to lull the intended victim into a false security’.36 At worst it was a message of friendship calculated to ingratiate its author with the Prime Minister if, against the odds, he pulled through.

On Sunday evening Asquith appeared to have solved the crisis by agreeing to ‘reconstruct’ the Government around a small war council under Lloyd George. But enraged by a leading article in The Times, which disparaged him while praising Lloyd George as ‘the man best fitted to preside over a real War Council’, Asquith began to back-track the following morning. The events of Monday have been confused by Beaverbrook’s claim that Curzon, Cecil and Chamberlain (the ‘Three Cs’ as he called them) went to assure Asquith of their support and were therefore responsible for the Prime Minister’s change of mind.37 In fact they did not see him until Tuesday when they delivered a very different message. On Monday afternoon they and other Unionist ministers met in Chamberlain’s room at the India Office, but so ignorant were they of events that they sent out for an evening paper to see what was happening. Later on they met in Law’s room, where they were told by Lansdowne, who had just seen the Prime Minister, that he thought Asquith would come to terms with Lloyd George.38 By then, in fact, the premier had decided either to resign himself or to force the resignation of his rival by rejecting the scheme he had accepted the night before. After discussing the matter with his closest Liberal associates, he wrote to tell Lloyd George of his revised opinion that the proposed committee could not be made workable and effective unless the Prime Minister was its chairman. The following morning Lloyd George sent in his resignation.

Asquith clearly acted in the belief that he could count on the support of all the Unionist ministers with the exception of Bonar Law. For a man of such acute political judgement it was a mysterious miscalculation, based on no more tangible evidence than the confusing interview with Law on Sunday, the ambiguous letter from Curzon on Monday, and a brief conversation with Lansdowne, the minister most opposed to Lloyd George. He made no effort to discover the real state of Unionist opinion. He did not even consult Balfour, still the party’s most prestigious figure, who, although ill in bed in Carlton Gardens, was capable of reading and writing a letter. And even if he had assured himself of the support of Balfour, the ‘Three Cs’ and the other ministers, it was surely a mistake to think he could carry on after Lloyd George and Bonar Law had joined forces with Carson in opposition.

Asquith’s assumptions were blown away the next day by two letters from Balfour, who argued that Lloyd George should be allowed to run a war committee, and by a meeting at his request with the ‘Three Cs’. At the Downing Street gathering the three explained the meaning of their Sunday resolution and told the Prime Minister that they could not continue their support for him without Lloyd George and Bonar Law in the Government. Asked about their attitude towards a Lloyd George administration, they said they would be prepared to support any government that seemed capable of conducting the war successfully. Cecil then suggested to Asquith that the ‘finest and biggest thing’ he could do would be to offer to serve under Lloyd George, but according to Chamberlain the idea was ‘rejected with indignation and even with scorn’.39

Immediately after the meeting, the ‘Three Cs’ told their colleagues that Asquith had misunderstood their decision of Sunday and seemed ‘flabbergasted’ when its meaning was explained to him. Turning to their own predicament, Chamberlain said he was reluctant to join a Lloyd George government in any capacity. Curzon, supported by Cecil and Crawford, disagreed: if invited to serve, he believed they should do so as ‘a public duty’. The group then sent Curzon back to Downing Street with a letter repeating their view that the Government should resign immediately. After asking Curzon some questions, Asquith told him in the presence of Liberal colleagues that he had decided to resign. Curzon replied that it was the right decision and reiterated the view that the Sunday resolution had not been an attack on the Prime Minister but an embodiment of the Unionist view that the Government could not carry on as it was. Asked whom Asquith should recommend as his successor, Curzon advised Lloyd George on the grounds that he had promoted the crisis and the public looked to him for a lead.40 Shortly afterwards Asquith drove to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation.

Curzon had nothing to do with the manoeuvres of the following day over whether Bonar Law or Lloyd George would become Prime Minister, whether Asquith would serve under either, or what would happen to Balfour, who in the event astonished the Liberal leader by accepting the Foreign Office. But a day later he was offered a place in the War Cabinet by Lloyd George, who regarded him as the inevitable Leader of the Lords.41 Curzon has been criticized for agreeing to serve without consulting his colleagues. But since his present and previous leaders had already signed up, it is not clear why he should be blamed. In any case, when he advised the Unionist ministers on Monday that they should join, the one dissentient had been Chamberlain, who had told him three days before that he would only serve under a War Cabinet if Curzon was a member.42

On the afternoon of the 7th the ‘Three Cs’ and Long met Lloyd George to discuss the composition of his administration. In form and membership the War Cabinet emerged rather differently from what the new premier had envisaged. Chamberlain, backed by Curzon, argued that the committee charged with running the war should itself be the Cabinet and not a separate entity: the departmental ministers would therefore forfeit Cabinet status because they could not be responsible for decisions reached by the committee.43 Chamberlain was not prepared to ‘sit in a Cabinet with no power under a War Committee with all the power’, but he was prepared to renounce his Cabinet rank and serve under the committee if its composition was right. Lloyd George had originally wanted a committee consisting of Bonar Law, Carson and himself. Chamberlain, who the previous year had tried to exclude Curzon from the Coalition, had since then ‘learned to appreciate his qualities’ and now insisted that he was added to the committee. He and Curzon also urged Lloyd George to appoint Milner in place of Carson. In the end the committee became very much what Chamberlain wanted, both Curzon and Milner joining Lloyd George and Law, with Arthur Henderson coming in as the Labour Party’s representative. But in arranging the Government in such a form, Chamberlain left himself on the periphery as Secretary of State for India without a seat in the Cabinet. Curzon was very impressed by the dignity and unselfishness of his colleague’s behaviour and said he hoped they would collaborate in future. Admitting that he did not like his position, Chamberlain told him ‘it was clearly my duty to take it, and it is your presence in the small inner circle which alone made that possible’.44

In addition to his membership of the War Cabinet, regarded as a full-time post dealing with daily developments of the war, Curzon was given the job of Leader of the House of Lords with the title of Lord President of the Council. Denied useful work by a friend, he was now given excessive though welcome duties by a man whom he never got on with, who frequently mocked and mimicked him, and yet who kept him at his side in the highest posts for the duration of his premiership. Lloyd George never liked Curzon and had enjoyed baiting him in his election speeches six years earlier. But he had seen his drive in Cabinet and, even before the crisis, had thought of him as a member of a small war committee. Curzon was valuable, he told Lord Riddell on various occasions, because of the ‘great knowledge’ he had acquired from his travels and his reading, ‘information of a sort which is uncommon amongst British politicians’ and which made him ‘useful in council’. His ‘great defect’, however, was that he always felt he was ‘sitting on a golden throne and must speak accordingly’.45

Curzon’s behaviour during the political crisis did not differ substantially from that of his Unionist colleagues. None of them noticed anything dishonourable in his actions. If there was something faintly distasteful and faux bonhomme about his letter to Asquith, the fastidious might also have reservations about Bonar Law’s performance in his interview on the Sunday and the alacrity with which Balfour accepted the Foreign Office. But Curzon has gone down in history as the ‘deserter’ and ‘turncoat’ because of Beaverbrook’s claim that on the Monday he had given Asquith ‘an absolute pledge’ not to take office under Lloyd George.46 After Beaverbrook’s account of the crisis was published in the early 1930s, Chamberlain questioned the author about the claim and corrected his assertion that the ‘Three Cs’ had met Asquith on Monday; to Cecil, Chamberlain declared that ‘the tendency to suspect Curzon of ulterior motives’ was ‘quite unfounded’. When Beaverbrook repeated the claim without providing evidence, Chamberlain replied that such a promise would have been incompatible with the letter he had written Lansdowne on the Sunday.47 But the newspaper tycoon paid no attention to the views of this most scrupulous of politicians and for the rest of his life maintained his line on the Monday meeting that took place on the Tuesday and the pledge to Asquith that was never given.

Beaverbrook’s vendetta against Curzon’s memory would have mattered less had it not been continued by later historians. It was to be expected that Leonard Mosley, commissioned by Beaverbrook to demolish Curzon’s reputation in the late 1950s, should exalt the ‘classic study’ and ‘masterly account’ of his boss and even repeat his falsehood that Curzon gave the alleged assurance at the mythical Monday meeting.48 But it is surprising to find real historians endorsing these views. A.J.P. Taylor, Beaverbrook’s employee and biographer, admitted that his subject had been wrong about the Monday and revealed that he once told Arnold Bennett of an attack Curzon had made on him in the Lords which turned out to be pure invention. Yet awareness of his employer’s unreliability did not deter Taylor from stating without additional evidence that Curzon ‘promised to stand by Asquith and then abandoned him’ or from accusing him of being ‘one of nature’s rats’.49 It is not necessary to dwell on those other historians who have repeated and embellished Beaverbrook’s remark, even in one case alleging that Curzon had said he ‘would rather die than serve under Lloyd George’.50 As Professor Fraser has pointed out in an essay on the ‘fabrications’ of Beaverbrook’s history of the period, the tycoon’s ‘falsifications’ have been ‘sustained because later historians have chosen to waive the prime rules of historical verification under the magnetism of a great personality’.51