34

Lloyd George and the Turks, 1919–1922

THE EXPERIENCE OF San Remo did not increase Curzon’s appetite for conferences. He conceded that private chats over cups of tea between sessions could be useful. But they did not compensate for the tedium and the waste of time, the endless exhibitionist speech-making, the disruption of routines of work and of domestic existence. Moreover, he was always the number two, listening while Lloyd George took the stage, agreeing with him in most European discussions, silently deploring his views on Asian matters. They were an incongruous duo, aptly described as ‘Impudence and Dignity’ when they appeared together at the Spa Conference in 1920.1 Two years later, after Lloyd George had failed to achieve anything at the Genoa Conference, Curzon hoped that there would be no more of ‘these fantastic gatherings which are really only designed as a stage on which he is to perform’.2

The Foreign Secretary was not exactly bored by European issues. Nor did the question of German ‘reparations’ really fill him, as Harold Nicolson alleged, with ‘bewildered distress’.3 But he realized he had no special knowledge of Continental problems and that his views on them did not differ greatly from those of his chief. On the central questions of Europe’s future, he was sensitive to France’s security needs and a believer in the Entente; yet convinced that the health of Europe depended on the recovery of Germany, he opposed France’s ‘policy of revenge’ against their late enemy. These admirable principles were somewhat dented, however, by the experience of dealing with the two countries. The Germans, he thought, were the stupidest and clumsiest of diplomats, and one could never tell whether they were being ‘perfidious or merely perverse’ nor whether they were ‘actually dishonest or merely dull’. He was also astonished by their hostility towards Britain, which he believed had shown them more consideration than any victorious power had ever done to a vanquished one.4

Even if reasonable arrangements could be made between France and Germany, Curzon was pessimistic about the future relationship between the two countries. As early as 1921 he predicted that Germany would recover quicker than the victorious states and create a new problem. ‘I suppose one day,’ he sighed to his wife, though ‘not in our life time – the whole trouble will begin again.’5 Much younger and healthier than her husband, Grace long outlived the replay.

The Foreign Secretary’s difficulties with Germany were minor compared to the trials of dealing on a daily basis with the French. Although he liked and admired Briand, who returned as Prime Minister for a year from January 1921, it often seemed that most other French politicians were trying to do down Britain and himself in particular by leaking confidential documents, negotiating behind his back and inciting the Paris press to abuse him. On going to the Foreign Office in 1919, Curzon believed he had been as keen on the Entente as anyone; two years later he thought it would be ‘difficult to find anyone more disgusted’.6 It was impossible to conduct Allied diplomacy if, whenever the British communicated a suggestion on Greece or Silesia or wherever, the proposal appeared in the Echo de Paris the following morning. The French Government, he told Hardinge, did ‘not know what reticence or discretion or honour means’. Its ministers were ‘simply the slaves and mouthpiece of the Press whom they are bound to feed in order to secure their support’.7 When Poincaré, a former and future premier, visited London in 1921, Curzon refused to give a dinner in his honour because he could not make a speech eulogizing a man who had constantly maligned him and who had neither explained nor apologized for the publication of confidential British documents.8

Curzon’s views on a formal Anglo-French alliance were coloured by his experiences with Poincaré. Dismissing Derby’s espousal of the cause as a gesture for the nice things said about him in Paris, he thought the disadvantages of the proposal were too great. An alliance, he told the Cabinet, might guarantee peace in Europe for a generation, but France’s chauvinistic diplomacy would create additional problems for the empire and the rest of the world. Yet his real objection, he confessed to Hardinge, was that the French could not be trusted. They were ‘always after some gain of their own, sometimes political éclat, sometimes financial gain’. The only test of their diplomacy was the advantage to France, ‘regardless of loyalty or sincerity or candour’. It was ‘inherent in the mentality of the people’.9

Most of Curzon’s problems with France stemmed from the settlements of the Middle and Near East. Purely European questions were mainly handled, usually without objection from the Foreign Secretary, by Lloyd George himself. Curzon did not mind playing little part in a matter such as Upper Silesia, which ‘the little man’ was very possessive about and regarded as ‘his own pet child’.10 But he was worried and resentful when his advice was ignored on the Greek-Turkish question.

Wartime pacts between the Allies had arranged the dismemberment not only of the Ottoman empire but also of Turkey herself. From the Sykes-Picot Agreement France was to receive Cilicia and most of eastern Anatolia, while Russia was given the Armenian provinces and a part of Kurdistan; by other secret treaties the Tsarists were also to gain Istanbul and the Straits, and Smyrna and south-western Anatolia were allotted to Italy. Curzon thought these schemes were neither fair nor feasible. It was right, he belived, for the non-Turkish areas to be detached and placed under foreign mandates before eventually achieving independence. And it was also reasonable to take Istanbul, where the Turkish population was a minority, and turn it under international administration into the ‘cosmopolis’ of the Eastern world; he even hoped that ‘Justinian’s great Byzantine fane of St Sophia, which was for 900 years a Christian church, and [had] only been for little more than half that period a Mohammedan mosque, would naturally revert to its original dedication’.11 But to divide the Turkish heartland itself struck him as a crazy plan that would not only be unacceptable to its inhabitants but also give a dangerous and unnecessary stimulus to ‘Moslem passions’ throughout the Eastern world.

These points were argued in three memoranda circulated by Curzon to the Cabinet early in 1919. The first dealt with the question of Istanbul, the second warned that delays would make a settlement impossible, and the third inveighed passionately against landing European troops in Asian Turkey. He was particularly scornful of a new suggestion to install the Greeks in Smyrna. While recognizing that for ethnic and historical reasons they had a much better claim than the Italians, he knew they were too weak for the assignment. If the Greeks were unable to keep order five miles outside Salonika, he wondered how they could be expected to rule a large province of Anatolia. But Curzon’s anguish in London made little impact on Balfour and Lloyd George in Paris. Motivated by loathing for the Turks, partisanship for Greece (especially her Prime Minister Venizelos) and, in Lord D’Abernon’s words, his ‘invincible devotion to what he conceived to be the oppressed’,12 the Prime Minister encouraged the occupation of Smyrna. Landing in the middle of May, Greek forces accomplished the first stage of the new Hellenization with notable brutality.

During the remainder of 1919 Curzon worked hard to overturn this policy. Greece should be rewarded in Thrace, he argued, not Anatolia; Turkey should be punished in Europe not Asia. Before the end of the year he and Philippe Berthelot, a senior French diplomat, devised a scheme along these lines that would retain Turkish sovereignty over Anatolia but not over Istanbul. Clemenceau was convinced by the plan, and so, surprisingly, were Lloyd George and Balfour. But determined opposition to parts of the scheme came from Montagu, who for months had been begging the Prime Minister to leave the Turks in Istanbul. For 500 years, he claimed in June, Sunni Muslims had been praying daily for the health of the Caliph in Istanbul:fn1 if their spiritual leader was now turned out of his city, the Muslims of India would be estranged, probably permanently, form British rule. Three months later, in September, he told Lloyd George that the only ministers who opposed this view were Balfour, who ‘cares nothing and knows nothing about the East loves to be in a minority’, and Curzon, who was ‘making, which has haunted him throughout his career, of forming his policy on what people ought to think, not on what they do think’.13

While there may have been some justice in Montagu’s criticism of his colleagues, he probably exaggerated the extent of Islamic feeling for Istanbul. The city was not Mecca, and India’s Muslims were not greatly roused when the Caliphate was abolished by the Turks themselves in 1924. But his views prevailed in the Cabinet where the Curzon-Berthelot scheme was supported only by Balfour, Lloyd George and its author, an unusual trinity of vanquished. In his ‘earnest and emphatic dissent’ from the decision reached, the Foreign Secretary warned his colleagues that a Turkey largely occupied by foreign powers would cause them ‘some surprise’. As Harold Nicolson observed, the surprise took ‘the highly inconvenient form’ of the Turkish nationalist movement.14

Curzon did not give up. Before San Remo he circulated to his colleagues a despatch from the High Commissioner in Istanbul warning that the Greek occupation of Smyrna would drive the Turks into the arms of the Bolsheviks, set the Middle East and central Asia aflame, and lead to generations of bloodshed.15 When Lloyd George was sailing to San Remo – his sick Foreign Secretary joined him later by rail – Curzon asked him to ‘think seriously’ about Anatolia and the Greeks. While being ‘the last man to wish to do a good turn to the Turks’, Curzon said he wanted to achieve ‘something like peace’ in Asia Minor – an impossible objective if the Greeks were marching about inside it.16

His appeals were of no avail. Among other things, the settlement decided at San Remo – and later embodied in the Treaty of Sèvres – turned the Straits into a neutral zone and gave Greece Eastern Thrace, various islands in the Aegean, and control of the Smyrna area for five years, after which the local population would decide its future. As Curzon had predicted, this solution proved completely unacceptable to Turkish public opinion, which abandoned the Sultan in Istanbul and coalesced behind the rebellion of one of the nation’s war heroes, Mustapha Kemal, the future Atatürk.

During the following year Curzon tried to prevent the impending conflict by persuading the Greeks that the occupation of Smyrna had been a ‘lamentable blunder’ and that a new settlement must be made. He found himself in the uncomfortable position of being accused by Montagu of being pro-Greek, by Lloyd George of being pro-Turk, and of being ‘freely belaboured by both parties’.17 But Montagu’s criticisms, irritating and untrue though they were, did not matter. The problem was Lloyd George and his excitement over the success of a Greek offensive in the spring and summer of 1921. While Curzon was trying to persuade him that the Greeks could not win and that Britain should mediate between the belligerents, Lloyd George was exulting over the march on Ankara and secretly urging the Greeks to carry on.18

Curzon’s attempts at a compromise were undermined by a Franco-Turkish agreement in the autumn of 1921. After military defeats inflicted by the nationalists in Cilicia, the French had decided to withdraw from their Turkish venture and recognize the nationalist regime of Mustapha Kemal. The resulting treaty, known after the diplomat who negotiated it as the Franklin-Bouillon Agreement, weakened the position of the Greeks and raised doubts about the future of the Allied forces in the neutral zone around Istanbul. Curzon was incensed that France should make a pact with an enemy without consulting its allies, especially as Briand had assured him that Franklin-Bouillon had not gone to Turkey to negotiate a treaty. But the worst feature of the deal was its disruption of his negotiations with the Greeks who, since their defeat in September at the Battle of Sakarya, had shown more willingness to compromise. Having persuaded them to agree to a withdrawal from Smyrna and accept an autonomous region under Turkish sovereignty, he found the balance of forces altered and the Allied position shattered by ‘an act of great treachery’.19

A day or two after learning of the treaty, the Foreign Secretary reluctantly attended a dinner in Poincaré’s honour at the French embassy. When Crawford asked him the next day how he had enjoyed the evening, Curzon replied that the food had been bad and the wine indifferent, but his main grievance was that for the first twenty-six minutes of the banquet he had been unable to utter a single remark. His hostess had been talking to the guest of honour, while on his left Madame Poincaré had been rivetted by the attentions of the Spanish ambassador, a man, Curzon drily observed, who thought himself ‘capable of every gallantry’. The chagrin had been immense. To think, Crawford noted even more drily in his diary, of ‘twenty-six minutes of silence inflicted on so bold and so eloquent a conversationist!’20

The year 1921 was a demoralizing one for Curzon, who in the course of it achieved nothing much more substantial than a marquessate from Lloyd George. His Persian policy collapsed, his Egyptian negotiations went nowhere, his attempts to reach a compromise between Greece and Turkey were unsuccessful; and all the time relations with France and Germany were deteriorating. Although these developments were not really his fault, he was widely blamed for them, particularly by the press, and above all by The Times, which attacked him so vehemently for his ‘business incapacity’ in July that one of its journalists resigned in protest and another went on strike.21 In April of the following year Crawford noted that the Foreign Secretary seemed ‘generally looked upon as a failure’.22

Curzon himself was puzzled by his treatment. Apologizing for his ‘vain reflections’, he wrote a plaintive letter to Grace in September 1921.

I never seem to get any credit for anything nowadays. No one accuses me of any definite errors or blunders of statesmanship. But there seems to be a general tendency to run me down, or completely to ignore what I am doing or have done.

If we look at the record of this in any book of reference it is very substantial, as varied and in a way as successful as that of any statesman of my age living. And yet it does not seem to count for much, and I am treated as rather a back number.

Well perhaps I am. I suppose one gets what one deserves and I daresay the fault lies somewhere in me. Yet, girlie, how I have worked and toiled and never spared myself, while I see others treating work as a jest and life as a holiday.23

He was also dispirited by the behaviour of his colleagues, especially Churchill, who disagreed with him on almost every issue, and Montagu, who wrote unpleasant letters even when he was in broad agreement with the Foreign Secretary. Upon receiving one such missive from Montagu about Egyptian nationalism, Curzon replied that he could not write a despatch or draft a telegram without expecting him to find some cause for complaint. On several occasions he asked him how he could reconcile his repeated requests for Curzon’s advice on India with ‘great asperity of tone and pronounced hostility in Cabinet’. His correspondent sometimes admitted the justice of the grievance, apologized for his loss of temper and shortly afterwards repeated the offence. Montagu’s letters, Curzon told their author at New Year 1922, always gave him the impression that everything he did was wrong in his eyes, and he felt ‘considerably disheartened’ in consequence.24

Yet the colleague who caused Curzon most trouble was the Prime Minister. During Balfour’s time at the FO, Lloyd George had become accustomed to running his own foreign policies in his own way. Although a statesman and a patriot, he remained at heart an adventurer, fond of intrigue and surreptitious methods, who conducted his diplomacy through a secretariat of clever young men working under his supervision from temporary huts in the garden at Downing Street. Disparaging the Foreign Office and its conventional ways, he tried, as far as possible, to ignore it. Sometimes this was done blatantly, for instance by announcing to the Cabinet, without consulting the Foreign Secretary, that he proposed to send an ambassador to Poland.25 More often he used intermediaries to negotiate with foreign ambassadors and their governments behind the back of the Foreign Office. Curzon discovered this was going on from intercepted telegrams, from information Poincaré gave the British ambassador in Paris, and even from one of Lloyd George’s own aides. But when challenged on a particular incident, the Prime Minister would simply deny that it had taken place and dismiss whoever suggested otherwise as a notorious liar.26

Although pleasant to Curzon in private, Lloyd George was frequently offensive to him in Cabinet. The Foreign Secretary was not the only target – Churchill was a fellow sufferer – but he was the most conspicuous and regular. Chamberlain found these attacks shocking and painful to witness and much admired Curzon’s self-control under provocation; had he himself been the victim, he told Law, he would have marched out of the room.27 Wounded and humiliated by these incidents, Curzon occasionally expostulated by letter and received a friendly apology in reply. But the Prime Minister’s contrition was generally short-lived. In April 1921 Curzon told Grace that he was ‘getting very tired of working or trying to work with that man’: Lloyd George wanted his Foreign Secretary to be a valet or a drudge and had ‘no regard for the convenances or civilities of official life’.28

Dining alone with Curzon some weeks earlier, Chamberlain had found his companion very depressed, doubtful of his usefulness and influence, and wondering whether there was any point in remaining in the Government. Chamberlain ascribed some of the depression to the impending retirement of Milner, Curzon’s closest friend in the Cabinet, but more to the behaviour of Lloyd George, who treated him rudely, criticized his department and paid little attention to his opinions even on foreign affairs. Believing that the Coalition could not survive the resignation of Curzon, Law or himself, Chamberlain tried to combat the depression by assuring the Foreign Secretary of the respect of his colleagues and by telling him it was his duty to stay in office. Chamberlain then sent a report of the dinner to Bonar Law, asking him to show it to the Prime Minister and ‘put things right’.29 The success of this initiative was minimal.

Many people shared Lansdowne’s view that there should be ‘rather more FO and rather less PM in the salad’.30 They wanted to see those areas of foreign policy which had been run in recent years from Downing Street removed and restored to their rightful place in the Foreign Office. In March 1921 Vansittart had the temerity to urge his chief to end a state of affairs whereby diplomacy was spasmodically conducted behind the back (as with Greece) or over the head (as with Russia) of the Foreign Office. Yet Curzon failed not only to assert the position of the FO but even to make a serious attempt to do so. The man who could display the most vehement indignation over trivial matters to almost everybody else, only recorded what he termed ‘a gentle protest’ when Lloyd George made a major announcement about the diplomatic corps without consulting the Foreign Secretary.31 No doubt many strong characters come up against someone some time to whom they have to defer, but Curzon’s subordination to Lloyd George – unparalleled in his relations with every other Prime Minister from Balfour to Baldwin – is bewildering.

Observers wondered why, after failing to assert himself, the Foreign Secretary did not resign. On several occasions, he later claimed, he was on the verge of doing so but desisted after appeals for him to stay. It is true that various people, including Balfour and Chamberlain, urged him to continue, and that the latter indicated that he too would resign if Curzon departed.32 And it is true that ambassadors and Foreign Office officials also wanted him to remain in order to prevent Lloyd George from gaining further influence over foreign affairs. Moreover, he had no desire to see future policy conducted by either of his likely successors, Churchill or Birkenhead, both of whom he distrusted profoundly. Humiliating though his position may have been, he believed that, in those areas where the Prime Minister’s ‘peculiar passions’ and ‘devious methods were not involved’, he could still do useful work and recover some of the authority of the Foreign Office.33 As it happened he did, but not until Lloyd George’s time was nearly up.

Yet there was a third factor which Curzon did not admit to anyone: he knew that resignation would be the end of him. A long time ago he had resigned with such catastrophic results that his career had never fully recovered. After sacrificing his position as Balfour’s natural successor, he had just scraped in ten years later to a minor place in Asquith’s Coalition. And now, in 1921, he was a far less popular figure than he had been in 1905. Had he resigned, neither press nor public opinion would have demanded his reinstatement. Chamberlain might have gone too and broken the Coalition, but there was no guarantee that the Foreign Secretary would ever get back into government.

Vansittart thought Curzon’s fatal mistake was to have once threatened resignation without carrying it out,34 an omission which enabled the Prime Minister to persecute him afterwards in the belief that he would never go voluntarily. Of course it would have been more admirable to behave like Milner who, when provoked, threatened to resign and would have done so had Lloyd George not climbed down. But Milner was a Cincinnatus, happy to serve his country when it needed him but equally happy to renounce or refuse office in less urgent times. Whatever his other qualities, Curzon was no Cincinnatus.

In the autumn of 1921 the Foreign Secretary found some solace at Kedleston, where he spent a short holiday and a few subsequent weekends. That year enjoyed an Indian summer, producing ‘the most wonderfully pearly air and mellow sunlight – nature resting in a still trance and parading her exquisite beauties before she sinks into decay’. It was lovely to walk around the estate in this weather, stopping to chat with farmers and cottagers, and to drink a cup of fresh milk. Certain human irritations had disappeared since his previous sojourns. A kitchen maid provided far better meals than his expensive London chef, who ‘almost drowned’ him in ‘elaborate and costly slushes with incomprehensible names’. And he was spared his daughters’ silence, knitting and novel-reading, although Cimmie assailed him with ‘extraordinarily offensive’ letters about money.35

But there was little change in the deficiencies of most of his employees. Inside the house he avoided ‘ructions’ with the servants by doing many things himself, including shutting windows and drawing curtains; it meant one was ‘a servant to one’s servants’, but at least there were no rows. Outside he tried to solve another problem by giving the parson a list of 150 good hymns to ‘prevent him choosing the hideous ones he habitually’ selected. Forceful intervention was also required to bring the park keeper into line. As he would not take the weed off the lake, nor keep the boat-house clean, nor cut the grass in front of it, Curzon drove into Derby to buy him a scythe, a broom, a rake and a pair of clippers.

The problem with the gardener, however, was not one of idleness but of misdirected fervour. On arrival Curzon was appalled to find the herbaceous borders filled ‘exclusively with the most monstrous asters’, one square of colour after another, ‘thousands of blooms of the most hideous flower in creation’. Forestry was another activity that could not be left safely to his employees: the Foreign Secretary felt compelled to supervise to ensure that the right trees were cut down. And one exercise in altruism proved a melancholy failure. Some unemployed men from Derby, who were given work on the estate, turned out to be ‘perfectly useless’ and provided him with evidence that the ‘so-called working classes [were] rotting at the core’: the ‘older generation of working men’, he thought, ‘alone set the tone’.36

As usual when he was at Kedleston, Grace was absent, undergoing a cure on the Continent followed by a lengthy holiday in Paris. Her husband sent her the best Muscat grapes from his greenhouses and hoped she would return to spend a few days of his leave in Derbyshire. Unhappy that she showed no interest in the improvements he was making, he became even more upset when she began making excuses for delaying her return. He had agreed that she should take things easy in Paris after her cure – ‘dress trying on is most exhausting’ – but, when she had done so, complained that it was time his ‘sweet wife came back’ and relieved him of his ‘eternal solitude’. Pleading illness, however, Grace managed to extend her absence from three to nine weeks.37

On his return to London Curzon was again immersed in the Greek-Turkish imbroglio, from which he did not escape, except during an illness, for the next year and a half. His objective was to bring about an armistice between the two sides, followed by a Greek withdrawal from Anatolia and a revision of the Sèvres Treaty which had been made redundant by events. In December he opposed the holding of Near East discussions at the forthcoming conference at Cannes because he feared Lloyd George would ‘barge in with disastrous results for he [was] still as mad for Greece as ever’.38 But his hopes for a conference on the question soon afterwards were ruined by the resignation of Briand, who was replaced by the intractable Poincaré, and by the fall of Bonomi’s Government in Rome. A date was finally arranged for the end of March 1922.

At the beginning of that month Montagu received a telegram from Lord Reading, the Viceroy in India, stating that the Delhi Government regarded as essential requirements of a Near East peace a Greek withdrawal from Smyrna, an Allied evacuation of Istanbul, and the restoration of Adrianople and the rest of Eastern Thrace to Turkey. As Reading was about to make himself unpopular by arresting Gandhi, he thought such a statement might appease India’s Muslims and asked permission to publish it. On Friday, 3 March, Montagu circulated the telegram to his colleagues and over the weekend, without consulting them, cabled permission. He did not bring the matter up at a Cabinet meeting on Monday, but Curzon said privately that he supposed Montagu would not authorize publication of the telegram without the consent of his colleagues. When the Indian Secretary replied that he had already done so, two days earlier, Curzon returned dumbfounded to the table.

Astonishment soon turned to indignation, and later that day the Foreign Secretary sent Montagu a letter of protest. It was intolerable, he said, that shortly before a crucial conference ‘a subordinate branch of the British Government 6,000 miles away’ should dictate what line he ought to pursue on Thrace.39 In bed with a painful attack of phlebitis, Curzon soon became even angrier, complaining to Chamberlain on the 9th that this ‘really outrageous’ incident had doomed his mission to ‘certain and inevitable failure’. If he tried to argue with Poincaré or the Turks about Adrianople or the Straits, they would merely ‘brandish … this fatal and suicidal declaration’. In the circumstances he had ‘no desire to go to Paris at all’.40

Curzon also complained to the Prime Minister, who had missed the Cabinet meeting on the 6th because of illness. As he subsequently informed Hardinge, Curzon told Lloyd George that ‘unless Montagu were publicly repudiated in both Houses of Parliament, I should decline to go to Paris and some other For. Sec. had better take my place’.41 That such an unusually firm note had the effect, as Curzon believed, of forcing Montagu’s resignation seems unlikely. Lloyd George appears to have jumped at the opportunity to get rid of a colleague so critical of his Greek policy and so unpopular with the Conservatives. He therefore assumed an extremely tough stance on the incident, lectured the Indian Secretary on his irresponsibility, and told him they could no longer ‘usefully co-operate in the same Cabinet’. On the day of Montagu’s resignation Curzon observed, unkindly and unfairly, that it was ‘a fortunate riddance for he [had] pretty well ruined India’. If Reading followed, he added, no one would regret it, for ‘a more lamentably weak and irresolute’ man had never sat upon the viceregal throne.42

On the following Saturday the fallen minister attacked Lloyd George and Curzon in a speech in his Cambridge constituency. During a rehearsal the day before in front of a journalist from the Evening Standard, he was reported to have drunk a great deal of whisky.43 Possibly he was under a similar influence on the platform when he abused Curzon for sending him after the Monday Cabinet meeting ‘one of those plaintive, hectoring, bullying, complaining letters which are so familiar to his colleagues and his friends’.44 As he had not kept a copy of the letter, Curzon asked Montagu to return it. To Chamberlain he deplored the fact that a former colleague should cite a private letter on a public platform ‘with the manifest desire to injure’ and ‘thereby compel its publication’.45

Instead of returning the missive, Montagu would have been wise to pretend he had thrown it away. Curzon was quite capable of writing letters of the type described – as indeed was his correspondent – but this was not one of them. The gods must have driven Montagu mad, Chamberlain told Lloyd George, before he so misquoted a letter that could be produced. On 14 March Curzon made a statement on the whole episode to the House of Lords. Peers crowded the benches, and many MPs deserted a Commons debate to watch from the steps of the throne. The House was on ‘the qui vive for trouble’, reported one of Lloyd George’s aides, and listened in complete silence before coming down unanimously on Curzon’s side. It was an impressive speech, commented the Scotsman, ‘like a passage of Burke read by a master of oratory’. After hearing the text of the letter, Crawford noted that it was one of the best and most moderate epistles Curzon had ever written; its author could not be criticized for it, ‘whatever his exploits in other envelopes’. Chamberlain thought the Foreign Secretary’s statement was ‘so complete and crushing’ that afterwards there ‘was not another word to be said, but Crewe said it at considerable length!’46 The next day Montagu made a meandering and unconvincing attempt to defend himself in the Commons; but the career of one of the most abrasive, vigorous and talented politicians of the period was over.

In spite of his illness, Curzon went to Paris the following week for the conference. Before leaving, the Cabinet discussed its prospects ‘in terms of unrelieved despondency’, and the Foreign Secretary himself regarded his mission as hopeless.47 Yet he managed to secure the agreement of France and Italy to a plan which included both the evacuation of Smyrna and the reversion of Constantinople to Turkey. The Greek Government of Demetrios Gounaris, financially stretched and tardily aware of its military weakness, accepted the terms for an armistice. But Kemal’s Turkish nationalists, confident of their growing strength and fortified by French weaponry, refused to accept a solution which fell short of their demands for total independence in Turkey and Eastern Thrace.

Ill health prevented Curzon from further active involvement in the problem until August. In great pain from his leg and suffering from a combination of phlebitis, thrombosis and lymphangitis, in April he was taken on a stretcher to recuperate for a few days at his house at Broadstairs. Lying there in bed and looking out of the window, he remarked in a letter to Lloyd George that in bad times the sea was as great a consoler as mountains. And in his depressed and exhausted mood, he reflected on the iniquities of foreign politicians, especially Poincaré and ‘those pestilential ruffians from Moscow’. ‘My dear Charlie,’ he sighed to Hardinge, ‘I often think that the world of international diplomacy is the dirtiest thing alive and that a statesman is a synonym for a knave.’48

Returning to London for treatment, he was afflicted, in addition to his other ailments, with insomnia and backache. After a fortnight’s sleeplessness, he summoned a hypnotist who informed him about ‘the conscious self, the sub-conscious self and Heaven knows what’, and then stood at the end of the bed, chattering on about having a tranquil night and a restful sleep and allowing the subconscious to fulfil itself. Told that he could not open his eyes and would soon be asleep, Curzon lay still with ‘his eyes closed, thought of nothing, gave full chance to the sub-conscious self, and after one and a half hours was as wide awake as at noonday – nay more so’. Two nights later he tried another remedy requiring him to puff into a mouthpiece attached to some bag. It was equally unsuccessful. Even drugs, which he disliked taking, seldom gave him more than a couple of hours’ light sleep.49

During this miserable period Curzon received little consolation from his wife who, in spite of his illness, decided to extend her current Continental jaunt. His ‘sole joy’, he told Grace, were the visits of his step-daughter Marcella, whom he thought delightful in every way. Almost no one else came to see him except ‘two old peers’ who called to enquire after he had been ill for ten days. He ‘must be entirely forgotten’, he reflected pathetically, ‘or have no friends left’. Not one of the people he used to entertain year after year at Hackwood had written a line or even left a card. “Well, such is the world. It does not wait even till you are dead to forget you.’50

The one compensation for his illness was the excuse it gave him not to accompany Lloyd George to the Genoa Conference in April. Churchill was furious because he had banked on Curzon’s presence to block any chance of the Prime Minister recognizing the Bolshevik regime. Although he was in dispute with Churchill on most other issues, Curzon agreed with him on this one and feared that an unescorted premier might impulsively make a deal. But in the event the conference was a failure for Lloyd George, its principal outcome being an unexpected and unwelcome treaty between Russia and Germany.

Curzon’s illness gave him no immunity from newspaper attacks. He often wondered why Balfour, who stood in for him at the Foreign Office, had such a good press in spite of his lack of achievement. It seemed strange and unfair that a man of such ‘moderate genius’ was so popular while he had to suffer the ‘relentless persecution’ of the Daily Mirror, the ‘ceaseless vendetta’ of The Times and the Daily Mail, and a persistent clamour from the Daily Express for his resignation.51

But he realized that it was not only the newspapers which wanted him to resign. Press statements about his forthcoming retirement prompted him to complain to Downing Street which, he suspected rightly, had inspired them. It was a ‘distressing and even humiliating’ experience, he told Lloyd George’s Private Secretary, to read them ‘constantly and categorically repeated even in an unfriendly press’.52 Later he received information which convinced him there had been ‘a deep-laid plot’ to get rid of him during his illness. He was unable to identify his potential supplanter but thought the most likely candidates were Churchill, who had ‘suddenly evinced the most affectionate interest’ in his welfare, and Birkenhead. Later Derby told Grace he had been offered the Foreign Office several times during the summer – a remarkable revelation, if true, for Lloyd George had removed him from the War Office in 1918 and had told Curzon that he was quite unfitted for the post. The Foreign Secretary probably did not know that Hardinge was also angling for the job or that Bonar Law – who had left the Government for health reasons in May 1921 – had apparently been offered it on more than one occasion.53

The interesting point about these manoeuvres is not the existence of ‘a deep-laid plot’ but the failure to carry it out. Why didn’t Lloyd George simply dismiss his Foreign Secretary instead of intriguing against him? It is not difficult to get rid of a minister who is out of action for four months – even one still conducting the business of his department from his bed. The Prime Minister cannot have feared that the disappearance of an ill and unpopular minister would have jeopardized the survival of his Government. Even Chamberlain, who had succeeded Law as leader of the party, would not have felt obliged to resign if a sick colleague had been persuaded to surrender his office.

The ambivalence of Lloyd George’s attitude towards his Foreign Secretary perhaps provides a partial explanation. Although he was rude to him in Cabinet and enjoyed mimicking him to friends, he appreciated Curzon’s knowledge and ability. In January 1922 he had even told C.P. Scott, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, that if the Coalition broke up, the three Tory ministers he would like to take with him were Chamberlain, Birkenhead ‘and even Curzon – yes even old Curzon who has been quite decent of late’.54 Neither this remark nor his later support over the Montagu affair help explain Lloyd George’s intrigues over the following summer. But they do suggest that the Prime Minister was not consistently determined to remove a Foreign Secretary who after all posed no threat to himself.

In July doctors persuaded Curzon to go to France for a three-week course of treatment. The sojourn produced a characteristic crop of complaints. His destination, Orléans, was ‘a most damnable place’ – ‘much more pretentious than Derby but not one whit better’ – where sleep was impossible because a tram line passed outside his hotel window, someone clumped about in the room above, and after these nuisances ceased, he had to get up and hunt for a mouse scratching away behind the cupboard.55 In spite of these disturbances, however, his phlebitis was temporarily cured.

Curzon returned in August just in time for the long-predicted débâcle in Asia Minor. At the end of the month the Turkish nationalists overwhelmed the Greek army and a fortnight later sacked Smyrna. After despatching the Greeks, they moved northwards to threaten Allied forces occupying Chanak in the neutral zone on the Asiatic shore of the Straits. At a meeting of the Cabinet on Friday, 15 September, Curzon warned against trying to stop the Turkish advance by military means. But Lloyd George and Churchill convinced the other ministers that the Straits must be defended and the Turks kept out of Europe; troops from Serbia, Greece and Romania, they argued, and later from the Dominions as well, could reinforce the Allied troops and help halt the Turks. The following day they drafted a press communiqué about the ‘deadly consequences’ if the ‘violent and hostile Turkish aggression’ succeeded in seizing control of the Straits. Curzon, who had gone to Hackwood, was furious to read what he called this ‘flamboyant manifesto’ in the newspapers. Churchill maintained, however, that a statesman who went to his country seat in a crisis should not complain if he was not consulted.56

Impulsive and bellicose, the communiqué had a disastrous effect: Australia and Canada refused to send troops, while France and Italy announced the withdrawal of theirs from the threatened areas of the neutral zone. The following week Curzon decided to go to Paris in an effort to repair the damage with Poincaré and restore a united Allied position. The Prime Minister tried to persuade him to take Birkenhead, who was as belligerent as Churchill and himself, and then arraigned the Foreign Secretary for his refusal in front of the Cabinet. Later Curzon heard that Lloyd George greatly regretted his failure to force the issue, because Birkenhead had been primed to obstruct an agreement with France and thus pave the way for war with Turkey and a victory for the Coalition in a khaki election.57

Yet the Foreign Secretary himself hardly behaved in Paris as if he was on a delicate diplomatic mission. On the 20th, at a meeting with Poincaré and the Italian ambassador, Count Sforza, he catalogued French acts of disloyalty to Britain over the previous two years and complained several times that France had just abandoned her ally at Chanak. After one of these provocations, recorded Hardinge, the French premier suddenly ‘lost his temper and shouted and screamed at Curzon, really in the most insulting manner, pouring out torrents of abuse and making the wildest statements …’ Instead of replying in kind, Curzon trembled, muttered something about an adjournment, and hobbled out. A few minutes later Hardinge found him ‘extended in another room, with tears pouring down his face and a brandy bottle by his side, speaking in maudlin tones’ about going home unless ‘that horrid little man’ apologized.58

The British ambassador told Curzon he would only get an apology if he withdrew his statement that France had ‘abandoned’ her ally at Chanak. At first the Foreign Secretary refused, claiming it was an exact description of what had happened, but eventually he consented. Hardinge then returned to Poincaré, who, after a lengthy bluster, agreed to apologize if the accusation of abandonment was withdrawn in the presence of Sforza. The squat French lawyer then went in search of the outstretched English magnifico – it must have looked like an encounter between Chauvelin and Sir Percy Blakeney – to make his apologies. Curzon said he understood there was some objection to the word ‘abandon’, but he personally attached no importance to the verb and was quite willing to substitute ‘retreat’. After a delay of ten minutes, partly to show his displeasure and partly to regain his composure, the Foreign Secretary returned to the conference chamber.59 Writing a few days later to the King’s Private Secretary, he said it was ‘hard to deal with a man who [was] always a lawyer and sometimes also a lunatic’.60

An hour after this embarrassing incident, the two combatants and Sforza somehow managed to agree on terms to offer Kemal. In a joint Note the Allies now ‘viewed with favour’ Turkey’s claim to Eastern Thrace and agreed to remove their troops from Constantinople after a peace settlement; they also asked the Turks to respect the neutral zone, a request which the Turks, who recognized neither the zone nor the treaty which created it, subsequently ignored. On his return Curzon received the cordial congratulations of the Cabinet which had feared that the defections of France and Italy would result in even worse terms for Greece.

The Foreign Secretary’s success was ephemeral. News of a revolution in Greece, which made Lloyd George’s favourite Greek, Venizelos, once more an influential figure, revived the spirits of the Cabinet’s philhellenes, outraged by Kemal’s refusal to respect the neutral zone. The Prime Minister was particularly annoyed by the insolence of the Turkish troops at Chanak, who ‘walked up to the wire entanglements of the British forces and made grimaces’.61 Since the Turks were violating the neutral zone, Churchill and Lloyd George did not feel bound to renew the offer of Eastern Thrace. Should Kemal invade Europe, they believed he could be stopped by the revolutionaries of Venizelos and cut off by British troops at Chanak.62 Curzon was ‘very much alarmed’ by the prospect of renewing the ‘worthless alliance’ with the Greeks, destroying the Allied unity he had just rebuilt, and in all probability ending up fighting the Turks with Greece alone on Britain’s side.63

At a conference of ministers on the morning of 29 September, the anti-Turk group was in an uncompromising temper. Churchill and Birkenhead, the Foreign Secretary wrote afterwards, ‘excelled themselves in Jingo extravagance’ and gained the support of milder colleagues. On the advice of the three Service chiefs, they decided to instruct General Sir Charles Harington, who commanded British forces in Turkey, to deliver an ultimatum to the Turks. Although Curzon managed to water down the instructions, he much regretted the ‘violent and incendiary’ plan to threaten Kemal that Harington would open fire with all the forces at his disposal unless the Turks left the neutral zone.64

The Foreign Secretary saw the nationalists’ London representative that afternoon and urged him to avoid a collision by persuading Kemal to withdraw. He then requested another gathering of senior ministers late that night at Carlton House Terrace to try to induce them to cancel or at any rate to delay the ultimatum sent earlier in the day. Before going to the country that afternoon Lloyd George had told Chamberlain, the chairman of the meeting, that he was against any delay. So was everybody else except its proponent. Birkenhead professed to be ‘deeply desirous of averting war’ but believed that during a delay of twenty-four hours ‘the spirit of the troops might … be affected by the insolence of the Turks’. Churchill agreed that it was ‘not physically possible to defer action without the gravest risk’ and claimed that the ultimatum would actually lead to a peaceful settlement.65 Lord Lee, Lord Cavan (the CIGS), Sir Robert Horne and Chamberlain himself concurred with them.

Most of the next day, Saturday 30th, was consumed by full Cabinet discussions. At the afternoon session Curzon told his colleagues that the tension at Chanak appeared to have been reduced and said he hoped fighting had not broken out. Lloyd George, however, was in a truculent mood, annoyed by Harington’s failure to reply to the Cabinet’s instructions and complaining that the general was so concerned with the political aspect – which was not his responsibility – that he was ignoring the military situation. Before the last meeting he dined with Churchill and Birkenhead. F.E. arrived at the Cabinet ‘very much flushed and excited’, recorded Crawford, while Churchill was in a ‘nervous condition’. In belligerent tones all three criticized Harington. Lloyd George protested that Britain stretched every point in favour of the Turks, Churchill suggested cancelling a proposed conference with them at Mudania, and Birkenhead tried to censure the British general: ‘in an angry tirade’, recounted Crawford, the Lord Chancellor said he ‘could not conceal his indignation at the conduct of soldiers who act as statesmen’.66 Harington should have been defended by the War Secretary, Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, but since he maintained what Curzon called a ‘discreet but inglorious silence’, the Foreign Secretary assumed the task, expatiating on the advantages of caution and extolling the discretion of the man on the spot. As he told Hardinge the following day, after Harington’s telegram had finally arrived, the general had shown ‘far superior judgement and discretion’ than had the warmongers in the Cabinet; realizing that the situation was not so dangerous as to require ‘hysterics’, Harington had simply and sensibly ignored the ultimatum and delayed his reply.67

Giving Crawford a lift home in the small hours, Curzon told him that all the trouble stemmed from the Prime Minister’s hatred of the Turks and infatuation with the Greeks. He was ‘terribly worried’, recorded Crawford, and believed the trio of boisterous diners would drive him to resignation. The Scottish earl told him it was nonsense even to think of resigning in such a crisis. ‘Ill and suffering’ though he was, noted Crawford, the Foreign Secretary had ‘invaluable qualities of coolness shared by few if any of his colleagues’.68

The following day the Cabinet met to discuss Harington’s failure to carry out its instructions. On learning, however, that the situation had improved and that Kemal had agreed to meet the general, it decided that the ultimatum need not be delivered. In a break between meetings Curzon wrote to Grace of his ‘Homeric encounter’ with ‘the fire eaters and war mongers’ the night before, while to Hardinge he recounted how he had ‘fought alone against this Ephesian band’ that reeked of gunpowder.69 Duff Cooper may have been right in observing that Curzon was ‘a master of the art of modestly giving himself the beau rôle in conversations’.70 But during that weekend there can be little doubt that he had earned it. On Saturday afternoon Crawford informed him that other ministers, including Lee (the First Lord of the Admiralty) and Worthington-Evans, were equally anxious to avoid war.71 But since Lee backed the militants on Friday and Worthington-Evans failed to defend Harington on Saturday evening, their taciturn anxiety was not very useful. All the evidence suggests that Churchill, Birkenhead and Lloyd George, backed by other ministers, were really hoping that Kemal would attack Chanak and begin hostilities. That they were stopped from provoking a wholly unnecessary war over the weekend was primarily due to the good sense of Harington and the vigour of the Foreign Secretary.

Once the ‘Homeric encounter’ was over, Curzon did receive assurances of support. The popular press, which had regarded him as passé in the summer, now hailed his revival as a victory for the ‘old diplomacy’; the Sunday Express even thought the notorious rhyme should be amended and that ‘affable’ was a more appropriate adjective than ‘superior’.72 From Paris Hardinge backed his position and described the hardliners in the Cabinet as ‘lunatics who ought to be shut up’.73 And from the quieter end of the Cabinet table he learnt that Lord Peel, Sir Arthur Griffith-Boscawen and Stanley Baldwin (who had been in France until the Sunday) also agreed with him. They asked to meet one evening that week at Carlton House Terrace in order to monitor the situation and discuss how it should be handled. Curzon later regarded that evening as the beginning of the end for the Coalition: ‘When a group of Cabinet Ministers begins to meet separately and to discuss independent action, the death-tick is audible in the rafters’.74

For a couple of days it seemed that the crisis had passed. The Mudania negotiations opened successfully, the Turkish forces withdrew at Chanak, and Kemal’s commander, Ismet Pasha, accepted the Paris Note of 23 September. But on 5 October a new crisis blew up, inspired this time not by the bellicosity of British ministers but by new demands from the Turks and another French ‘abandonment’ of her allies. Among other things the nationalists now insisted on occupying Eastern Thrace immediately, in advance of a peace treaty and without guarantees for the minorities. As far as France was concerned, they were at liberty to do so, and her commander on the spot announced that he was not going to interfere. Curzon was as determined as ever to avoid fighting a war on behalf of the Greeks, but he thought that both Turkish demands and French concessions went beyond the limit. Although ill and depressed, he therefore agreed to cross the Channel on the afternoon of the 6th and spend the weekend with that most ‘repugnant’ of imaginable companions, Raymond Poincaré.

Their first meeting began at 11 p.m. and continued until nearly three in the morning. After stating that the ‘preposterous’ Turkish demands were wholly inconsistent with the Paris Note, the agreed basis of Allied policy, Curzon asked Poincaré to be good enough to explain why the French commander in the zone had been ordered to accede to them. Replying that General Charpy had ‘no orders but only latitude to avoid war’, the premier said French troops would do nothing to halt a Turkish advance and would never under any circumstances fire a shot in the East. When Curzon observed that this seemed ‘a most humiliating position’ for a Great Power to adopt, Poincaré answered heatedly that it was not a question of humiliation. According to the notes of a British diplomat present, he said he ‘needed no lessons from anyone and would take none. He represented France, and France required no lessons. He wished to make it clear once and for all that he would tolerate no criticism of any word or action of his …’ Nor would he tolerate amusement. When Curzon smiled incredulously at the claim that there had been no inconsistency in the conduct of French policy, Poincaré screamed at him, ‘Vous me riez au nez je ne le permets pas’.75

Once again, however, the antagonists reached agreement, and once more Allied unity was restored largely on the basis of the British formula. Curzon returned to a second round of unaccustomed plaudits, and the negotiations at Mudania recommenced. On the 11th the Turks signed the Mudania Convention by which they agreed to withdraw from the neutral zone until after a peace treaty, and accepted the proposal that Eastern Thrace should be administered by the Allies for a month before the Turks returned. Most people recognized that, between them, Curzon, Harington and Sir Horace Rumbold, the High Commissioner in Constantinople, had averted war. It now remained for the Foreign Secretary to negotiate a peace.