35

Resurgence: Lausanne, 1922–1923

COALITION GOVERNMENT HAD been a wartime expedient, accepted by the two main parties with great reluctance. Yet by the time of the Chanak crisis it had lasted for nearly four years of peace, a longer period than it had required to win the war. The Coalition survived despite its unpopularity with the party that had dominated it since 1916, an unpopularity that grew as the domination increased. By October 1922 there was widespread feeling inside the Conservative Partyfn1 that the Coalition had outlived its purpose, that Conservative electors were being prevented from voting for Conservative policies, and that a great political party had become the accomplice to such evils as the ‘Honours Scandal’ and the Irish treaty. These views were not confined to the party branches, the Diehard peers and the squires of the backbenches. They had permeated the junior ranks of the Government and had reached a couple of ministers who backed Curzon over Chanak.

The Coalition survived largely because some of its Conservative leaders had come to see themselves as figures above party politics. Birkenhead thought the country simply required an oligarchy consisting of the two most charismatic Liberals, Churchill and Lloyd George, allied to Chamberlain, Balfour and himself; anyone who disagreed he abused or lectured for lack of loyalty. A similar, though much less typical, arrogance was displayed by Chamberlain, who deluded himself into thinking that the party needed its leaders more than they needed the party. The Conservatives were thus divided horizontally over the future of one man. The party wanted to shed Lloyd George; its leaders – with the exception of Curzon and the retired Bonar Law – were determined to keep him.

Realizing that the Coalition would be strongly criticized at the November meeting of the National Union – the precursor of the Conservative Party conference – the Cabinet planned to pre-empt the problem by holding a general election beforehand. The operation was delayed by the Chanak crisis, but on 10 October Chamberlain summoned the Conservative ministers to a meeting to reaffirm their decision to campaign under Lloyd George’s leadership. After Balfour had backed an early election as a means of thwarting an adverse vote from the National Union, Curzon declared that such a transparent trick would have perilous consequences. But his principal reason for opposing the move was the dislocation of foreign policy it would entail on the eve of a crucial conference planned to settle the outstanding questions of the Near East. Griffith-Boscawen was also hostile to an election, but the strongest line was taken by Baldwin, the President of the Board of Trade, who considered Lloyd George an albatross around the party’s neck and said that he would not serve under him again. At a further meeting two days later, Baldwin told his wife, Griffith-Boscawen supported him while Curzon was ‘sympathetic’. But as the others were determined to follow Lloyd George, he thought he had no option but to ‘drop out of politics altogether’, to spend the winter abroad, and give up his seat at the next election.1 The possibility that he might be Prime Minister within a few months must have seemed as remote to him as to everyone else.

Curzon, by contrast, had no thought of dropping out of politics and merely wished to be allowed to carry on with his job. As with the last days of Asquith in December 1916, his role in the manoeuvres that ended with the displacement of Lloyd George has been viewed with a cynicism sharpened by a confusion of dates. The main charge against him – that he told Churchill at a dinner in the middle of the crisis that he would support the Coalition’s decision to fight an early election – is untrue.fn2 And even if he did make the remark earlier on, it hardly turns him into the intriguer and turncoat depicted by the Beaverbrook historians.fn3 Curzon had been a member of the Coalition for nearly six years without showing the slightest conspiratorial tendencies. Frustration with the Prime Minister’s meddling in foreign affairs had sometimes led him to contemplate his own resignation. It had never led him to plot for the overthrow of Lloyd George.

Yet his subservience to the Prime Minister, which had long surprised others, became in the course of 1922 increasingly unacceptable to himself. Outraged by the alleged plot during his illness, he returned to his desk in August to find Lloyd George’s interference in foreign policy more objectionable than ever. Not only had the Prime Minister become more outspoken in public – as he demonstrated in an anti-Turkish speech in the Commons at the beginning of August – but his attempts to conduct diplomacy behind the FO’s back had become still more blatant.

Encouraged perhaps by his ‘Homeric encounters’ over Chanak, Curzon decided to confront Lloyd George. After complaining on 2 October of confidential talks between the Prime Minister and the Romanian envoy, he drafted a further protest three days later about a series of secret meetings with the Greek representative. The second letter also criticized the whole system of dual diplomacy and contained a strong hint that he would resign unless he received a ‘definite assurance’ that the constitutional relations between his department and Downing Street would be re-established, thereby allowing the Foreign Office to ‘resume its proper functions in the State’.3 The letter was made redundant by developments. Before sending it, Curzon had planned to discuss the contents with both Chamberlain and Balfour. But he was delayed by his second visit to Poincaré and, by the time Chamberlain had seen it, the Coalition crisis was in full swing.

During his last days in power the Prime Minister declined to alter his ways. In the second week of October his Private Secretary, Sir Edward Grigg, was instructed to discuss secret Italian proposals for the forthcoming conference with an emissary, Signor Giannini. This proved to be too much even for a loyal Private Secretary. Realizing that no coherent policy could emerge from such deceptions, Grigg sent his notes of the meeting to the Foreign Office with a request not to make them official.4

On 14 October, the day Curzon learnt of the intrigue with Giannini, the Prime Minister made a violent speech in Manchester denouncing the barbarity of the Turks and the treachery of the French. At a casual meeting with colleagues on the previous day, he had given a brief outline of what he intended to say. When he mentioned Turkish massacres, Curzon asked him to avoid the subject because since the Great War the Greeks had behaved as badly as the Turks.5 The request was not heeded. On the morning of the 15th, a few weeks before Curzon was expected to conjure a peace treaty with the French and the Turks, the world learned of the Prime Minister’s opinions of these peoples from the newspapers.

That evening Churchill gave a dinner for most of the Coalition ministers. A few days before he had called on Curzon at the Foreign Office to tell him that Lloyd George had virtually decided on an immediate election, that this had been accepted by himself, Balfour and various colleagues, and that the date and other details would be decided at the dinner. In an attempt to overcome Curzon’s doubts about an election, Churchill told him it would be over before the start of the peace conference.6

During the five days before the dinner the Foreign Secretary had been upset both by Lloyd George’s fresh incursions into foreign affairs and by his colleagues’ attempt to ignore the views of the National Union. The combination induced him to refuse Churchill’s invitation. Believing that an election would be disastrous both for the Conservatives and for the peace conference, he decided to appeal to his party leader. Accordingly, he telephoned Chamberlain at his country home and asked him to drop in at Carlton House Terrace before going on to Churchill’s dinner. During a two-hour talk Curzon asked him to explain his absence to the assembled diners and declared that he would resign if the Cabinet insisted on an immediate election. Later that evening, in an anxious but defiant mood, he reported the conversation to Crawford. In case Churchill and his guests decided on a dissolution, he also drafted a letter of resignation stating that his principal reasons for going were the Prime Minister’s constant interference in foreign policy and his own opposition to an election before the peace conference.7

Curzon’s absence from the Churchill dinner gave rise to gossip the next day about him sitting on the fence until he could see which side was going to win.8 As one of his friends later told D’Abernon, ‘George wobbled up to the last minute’.9 In fact there was no wobbling. Curzon did not take an intransigent position like Baldwin; for someone who had spent so many years in the Coalition it would have been ridiculous to do so. But he made it perfectly clear to his colleagues what he thought of the proposed election. He was obsessed by the forthcoming conference and believed, with reason as it turned out, that he was the man to direct it. Had the Coalition carried on as before – before the election talk, before the Chanak hysteria, before Manchester, before Giannini – the Foreign Secretary would have dutifully attended the conference on behalf of the Coalition Government. It was not Curzon who changed the rules; he had had no anterior intention of deserting his colleagues.

On the morning after Churchill’s dinner Curzon called in at 11 Downing Street to find out from Chamberlain what had happened. The diners, it turned out, had not been unanimous about an election. After strong opposition to a dissolution from Sir Leslie Wilson, the Chief Whip, the Tory leader had offered to compromise by leaving the decision to a meeting of Conservative MPs and ministers at the Carlton Club on 19 October. While Curzon was talking to Chamberlain, Lloyd George telephoned to ask him to drop in next door when he had finished. Doubtless feeling unprepared for so critical an interview, Curzon suggested they meet in the afternoon. The Prime Minister wanted to go to the country, however, and arranged an appointment for noon on the following day. In the meantime Curzon attended a further gathering of Conservative ministers at which they all repeated their views, and went on to a meeting with the party’s under-secretaries where Balfour expressed his ‘philosophic inability to understand what it was [they] were all disputing about’.10 According to Curzon, Chamberlain’s remarks at the second meeting were ‘needlessly stiff and uncompromising’ – adjectives which with the addition of ‘wooden’ and ‘unbending’ were universally used to describe the Tory leader at this crisis in his career and which go far to explain his quite unnecessary eclipse.

At midday on the 17th Curzon had ‘one of the most curious’ conversations of his life. For an hour and twenty minutes the Prime Minister tried to defend himself with charm and ingenuity against the Foreign Secretary’s litany of grievances. To every charge of interference he had an explanation. Secret talks were depicted as unplanned encounters, a dinner party where so-and-so was an unexpected guest, Giannini dropping in for a casual chat with his old friend Grigg. If confronted with evidence of intrigue between foreign emissaries and his secretaries, he declared that the former must have invented it because his secretaries were men of honour. When presented with telegrams of March 1921, which showed he had advised the Greeks in private to reject the terms he had publicly offered them in conference, he ‘expressed horror at this crowning demonstration of Greek mendacity’.11

Denials were followed by an apology for any injustice he may have committed against the Foreign Office and an appeal to sentiment. In a voice ‘charged with emotion’, recalled Curzon, Lloyd George asked him not to forget the great scenes in which they had participated and the common comradeship of the war. He also thanked the Foreign Secretary for his consistent loyalty. Curzon did not question the sincerity of these remarks and thereby enabled them to part on friendly terms. Before leaving he said his resignation was in the Prime Minister’s hands and that he left it for him to act upon when he chose. Lloyd George replied that the matter could be left until Thursday, the 19th, when he himself would probably be resigning.12

The fate of the Coalition depended largely on one of its former leaders. A year and a half after his retirement, Bonar Law had re-emerged during the Chanak crisis to warn the British that they could not ‘alone act as the policemen of the world’. Now the anti-coalitionists of his party urged him to return to front-line politics and overthrow Lloyd George. On the morning of the 18th, however, Law told Curzon he had neither the inclination nor the moral resilience for the task. Although he knew he could defeat Chamberlain at the Carlton Club meeting, he did not want to form a Government and was thinking of resigning his seat and retiring from public life. But constant appeals during the day persuaded him to change his mind, and Curzon found him in a very different mood that evening. After announcing what he intended to say next day at the Carlton Club, Law asked him to stay at the Foreign Office if he formed a government. Curzon said that he would not address or even attend the meeting out of loyalty to Chamberlain, although in public he described his absence as a protest against the exclusion of Tory peers who were not ministers.

A further display of rigidity by Chamberlain ensured his overwhelming defeat at the Carlton. More than two-thirds of the MPs present followed the lead of Law and Baldwin and voted to fight the next election as an independent party. Lloyd George resigned that afternoon, but Law refused to take office until he had formally been chosen as Conservative leader. Proposed by Curzon and seconded by Baldwin, he was unanimously elected at a party meeting on the 23rd. On the following day Law announced his Cabinet which, besides Curzon and Baldwin, consisted largely of landed magnates and promoted under-secretaries. Parliament was dissolved on the 26th and an election called for 15 November.

The sulky giants of the Coalition flung derisive epithets at Law’s grey and modest-looking team, dismissing as ‘second-class brains’ and a ‘Government of the second eleven’ a Cabinet most of whose members had far higher academic qualifications than themselves.fn4 But the chief source of bitterness and the main object of scorn was the least ‘grey’ of all their new opponents. Outraged though he was by Curzon’s lack of solidarity, Birkenhead desisted from attacking him in the campaign and waited until the Foreign Secretary was at Lausanne – embroiled in the peace conference and unable to answer – before attempting his revenge. Churchill, however, went straight on to the offensive against the man who had become his ‘pet aversion’. After telling Lloyd George he was going to ‘let Curzon have it’, he wrote to the Morning Post criticizing him over the Chanak crisis and disparaging his ‘sudden and nimble’ change over the Coalition.13

Curzon replied that the Chanak statement was characterized by ‘copious inaccuracy and no small malevolence’, and that his change had been neither sudden nor nimble ‘but slow and perhaps even belated’.14 He refused to admit that he had deserted the Coalition. ‘Good Lord!’ he exclaimed on reading in the press about his alleged disloyalty to Lloyd George, ‘I have been too loyal to him to my own detriment for over three years.’15

On 15 November the Conservatives won a comfortable overall majority, Labour nearly doubled its representation and emerged as the second party, and Lloyd George’s following was halved; in the new Parliament the 117 Liberal MPs were divided almost equally between those who supported the recent Prime Minister and those who were loyal to his predecessor Asquith. Two days after the poll the Foreign Secretary arrived at Victoria Station en route for the Continent. He was accompanied by a distinguished team from the Foreign Office, including Sir William Tyrrell, Harold Nicolson and Allen Leeper, and by a very drunk and incompetent valet called Tivendale.

The Near East was the area of the world where the Allies had been least successful in obtaining a post-war settlement. San Remo and Sèvres had comprehensively failed to find solutions, and most of the disputes with Turkey, especially those concerning her borders and the future of the Straits, remained unresolved. A conference to redeem the earlier failure and procure a settlement of the outstanding differences had long been Curzon’s principal diplomatic objective. And one of his chief personal objectives had been his own participation. Yet he knew the odds were piled against success, far more heavily now than when he had first suggested a feasible solution four years before. Gone was the chance to make a peace with a beaten foe; instead he had to deal with a resurgent country, buoyed by success, confident in its nationalism and now bolstered by the friendship of three of its former enemies, Russia, France and Italy. ‘Hitherto we have dictated our peace treaties,’ Curzon told D’Abernon, the British ambassador in Berlin. ‘Now we are negotiating one with the enemy who has an army in being while we have none, an unheard of position.’16

The Foreign Secretary realized that the essential precondition of success was a common front with Italy and France. He therefore refused Poincare’s request to proceed to Lausanne without previous conversations or an understanding between the Allies. Such a plan, he believed, was designed to put him in a position where, ‘deserted as usual by France and Italy’, he would be ‘beaten on every point and forced either to conclude a humiliating peace or to break up the conference’.17 Only after receiving the promise of a ‘warm and enthusiastic accord’ with France did he agree to leave England.

His visit to Paris was certainly more agreeable than either of his previous forays. He enjoyed a pleasant interview with President Millerand at the Elysée and an official lunch at the Quai d’Orsay where he sat next to ‘dear old Marshal Foch’, with whom he was always able to ‘colloque on terms of warm friendship and regard’. When the delegates went through the programme afterwards, however, ‘old Foch’s contributions were quite irrelevant’ and showed he did not understand the Eastern Question at all. Fortunately, Poincaré was by his standards amiable and co-operative, and agreement on the agenda was reached. But later Curzon admitted he felt worn down by the ‘eternal necessity of humouring, conciliating and consulting the two allies who neither fought nor won the war against Turkey’.18

Early the next morning the delegations assembled at the Gare de Lyon to catch a special train to Lausanne, a saloon for the British delegation at the front, another for the French at the back, and between them a ‘drawing-room carriage’ and dining car where nearly everybody except the two principals congregated. Curzon spent the journey writing letters in his saloon until he was interrupted in the evening by an irritating demand from the new Italian Prime Minister. Eager to demonstrate his importance and wishing to give the impression that the Allies were coming to see him rather than the other way round, Benito Mussolini had sent a message insisting that their leaders should continue their journey beyond Lausanne to Territet, where he would give them dinner. Curzon and Poincaré reluctantly agreed and after more than twelve hours in the train finally met the Italian leader, surrounded by blackshirts and a band playing the Fascist Party’s anthem ‘Giovinezza’.

At Territet Mussolini said he would not go to the conference unless the Allied leaders made a public declaration of Italy’s equality with Britain and France regarding interests, rights and duties in the East. Mussolini turned out to be the only person in the world capable of uniting Curzon and Poincaré. They refused the demand on the grounds that the equality did not exist and that in any case a declaration of common interests should follow rather than precede agreement on policy. After failing to carry out his threat, the Italian accompanied the Allied statesmen to Lausanne. There in the small hours Curzon reached the Hôtel Beau Rivage and installed himself in a comfortable suite overlooking the lake. It was to be his home for the next eleven weeks.

Although he was staying in the same hotel, Mussolini made another little demonstration the next morning by deliberately arriving late for an Allied meeting in Curzon’s sitting-room. He was ‘a very stagey sort of person’, noted the Foreign Secretary that same day, doing everything simply for effect. Yet he was also plainly ill at ease, rolling his eyes and saying little more than ‘Je suis d’accord’. It was soon obvious, Curzon reported to the Cabinet, that he ‘knew next to nothing of the subjects and his agreement was procured with little difficulty to all’ the points in the Anglo-French programme. In the afternoon the conference was formally opened at the town’s Casino, and on the following day Mussolini left Lausanne. He had done virtually nothing at the conference except strut around with his blackshirts and make eleven statements to the press. Yet Italian newspapers managed to describe this performance as their country’s first diplomatic victory since 1860.19

Poincaré’s departure on the same day left Curzon in a position to dominate the conference. The heads of the French and Italian delegations were diplomats, M. Barrère, whom he respected, and the Marchese Garroni, whom he did not. The Greeks were represented by Venizelos and the Turks by Ismet Pasha who, under the name Inönü, succeeded Atatürk as President in 1938 and remained active in politics until 1972. Delegations from Russia and the Balkans were also present.

Displaying an authority unseen since viceregal days, the Foreign Secretary seized control of the proceedings. Claiming to be the senior Allied representative, he took the chair at the plenary session which determined procedure, appointed himself chairman of the most important committee (on territorial matters), and arranged the agenda. Aware that the success of the conference depended on preserving the isolation of the Turks and the unity of the Allies, Curzon organized a timetable which invited the Turks to isolate themselves. They duly did so. Asked for his demands on Thrace, Ismet claimed not only the eastern half but also the western portion, most of which had been ceded to Bulgaria before the Great War and was now earmarked for Greece. Over four days Ismet and Curzon debated the subject in public, with the result that by the end of the first week not a single country was on Turkey’s side, the Allied position had been consolidated, and the senior British delegatefn5 had established a personal ascendancy over the conference.

Curzon treated the Turks with a mixture of courtesy and firmness. Although he managed to establish some private rapport with Ismet, he found him irritating and obstinate in public sessions. After two days he was pessimistic. The chances against success were so great, he told Grace, that he would never become Prime Minister; in any case, he added, he was not fitted for the post. But over the following days his mood lightened, encouraged by tributes to his skilful handling of the proceedings, a talent he ascribed to the fact that he knew his case and had ‘the art of getting on with Orientals’. He was particularly heartened by the ‘absolute novelty’ of praise from the press.21 As he remarked to Grace,

I have suddenly been discovered at the age of 63. I was discovered when I was Viceroy of India from 59 to 46. Then I was forgotten, traduced, buried, ignored. Now I have been dug up and people seem to find life and even merit in the corpse.22

For a brief period the focus of his exasperation shifted from the Turks to Tivendale, the valet later immortalized as Arketall by Harold Nicolson in Some People. In India Curzon had been amused by the effrontery of a valet ‘uncertain about his aspirates’ and, although the breed annoyed him above all others, he had an unexpected tolerance for those who dared to answer back. According to Nicolson, he had a soft spot for Tivendale and was reluctant to dismiss him at Lausanne even though he was habitually drunk. No glimmer of affection is discernible, however, in Curzon’s letters to his wife. The man was ‘perfectly useless’, he complained, forgot everything and was unable to pack; on the fourth night of the conference he was found reeling round the dance floor and was sent home the next day. After he had gone, it was discovered that all Curzon’s trousers had disappeared. Panic spread among the Foreign Office staff until they were found hidden under the valet’s bed beside a large pile of empty bottles. Tivendale had procured the drink, Curzon learnt, by convincing the hotel management that his master, frightened of being poisoned, had ordered him to taste every bottle before serving it.23

In spite of Turkish obstructiveness, the conference continued to go well in early December. Curzon persuaded the Turks to accept a Straits Convention, which simultaneously secured the freedom of the Straits, prevented the Russians from turning the Black Sea into a private lake, and ended any chance of a Russian-Turkish alliance. Later, after a long and painful discussion on minorities, Curzon lectured the Turks on their attitude in an indignant extempore speech. The result was a ‘great triumph’, he told Grace, for the next day they climbed down and agreed to join the League of Nations, an organization at which they had hitherto scoffed.24

One worry, however, was the residual temptation of France and Italy to curry favour with the Turks. While Barrère was loyal to the Allied cause, current differences between Bonar Law and Poincaré over Germany resulted in a less cordial atmosphere at Lausanne; they also led, to Curzon’s disgust, to a resumption of the French trick of leaking documents to the press.25 Although the Foreign Secretary did not blame this on Barrère, who was out of sympathy with Poincaré’s policy and resigned his post in January, he was appalled by the way his partners fawned on Ismet. Left to himself, Curzon believed he could handle the Turk. But it was impossible while Barrère and Garroni toadied to him during their meetings, calling him ‘Excellence’ every other sentence and behaving like ‘old roués courting some youthful courtesan’. Servility, he had long since learnt, was ‘the last way to approach an Oriental’.26

However irritated Curzon was by the French, he always treated France as a serious country and an important ally. Italy in his view was neither. A tiresome and unreliable nation at all times, its faults became even more noticeable under the new regime. After two weeks of watching Garroni obeying Mussolini’s orders, Curzon realized that the Italian premier was not merely the ridiculous figure he had seemed at Lausanne but a ‘thoroughly unscrupulous and dangerous demagogue, plausible in manner, but without scruple in truth or conduct’. From Rome the Fascist leader threatened almost daily ruptures of the alliance, and on 4 December his terrified delegates were forced to tell Curzon they would withdraw from the conference unless promised a slice of the mandated territories of the Middle East. According to Nicolson, the Foreign Secretary completely lost his composure, delivered a look of hatred and disdain towards Garroni, and stalked majestically out of the room. After a fit of violent trembling in the corridor, ‘restoratives were applied’, and he returned to inform the Italians that he would not submit to blackmail of any kind. They could withdraw from the conference if they liked, he said, pointing out that Orlando had done so at Paris without disturbing the progress of the conference there.27

Two days later Mussolini stopped at Lausanne on his way to a conference on reparations in London. Grace was staying at the time and sat next to him at a lunch in his honour given by her husband. Before and after, the Italian leader sent her enormous baskets of flowers and in between displayed a vanity and conceit ‘beyond belief’. No more was said of the Italian threat to leave the conference. But Curzon retained his view that Mussolini’s attitude to Eastern questions was a ‘combination of the sturdy beggar and the ferocious bandit’.28

At the beginning of December Lord Birkenhead launched an attack which, had it been successful, would have forced Curzon’s resignation and possibly wrecked the conference. After Gounaris, the former Greek Prime Minister, had been executed by the new regime in Athens at the end of November, Birkenhead published a letter that the unfortunate statesman had sent Curzon in February appealing for arms and money to resist the Turks. In the Lords on 7 December he read out the letter with Curzon’s reply, declared that the Cabinet had never seen the correspondence and blamed the entire Greek calamity on the Foreign Secretary. On hearing of the planned assault, former members of the Coalition were gleeful. Chamberlain, Lloyd George, Horne and others were equally certain they had never been shown the pathetic appeal and Curzon’s advice to ‘hold on’. Had they done so, they claimed, a different policy would have been adopted, the Greeks would have been saved, and the threat to Chanak would have been avoided.

The affair was in Lord Ronaldshay’s words ‘a truly remarkable case of collective amnesia’.29 Curzon may have been wrong to urge the Greeks to hold on in Anatolia, although he had done so in the belief that an orderly evacuation after an agreement with the Turks offered them a better chance of escape than a retreat that might easily have become a rout. But in any case it had been Cabinet policy rather than personal diplomacy, as was quickly demonstrated when copies of the letters were unearthed in various departments signed or initialled by the former ministers, including Birkenhead himself.30 As Vansittart observed to his chief, the manoeuvre was ‘a beautifully complete boomerang’.31 On 11 December Birkenhead apologized rather lamely in the Lords, and a week later Grace took great pleasure in cutting him at a ball. But ‘I am afraid’, she remarked to her husband, ‘he was too drunk to notice.’32

Curzon’s daily routine changed little during his eleven Swiss weeks. Meetings and discussions followed one another monotonously until the late evening when he settled down to his papers and his correspondence. He seldom went out except for an occasional afternoon drive with Tyrrell or a brief stroll along the front shadowed by a gloomy detective with a pipe. The main departure from previous practice was his conversations with journalists, whom he invited regularly to lunch; such ‘encounters’, he naïvely told Grace, did nothing but good. How tragic that a politician should reach the age of 63 before recognizing the importance of good press relations.

Although his health stood up relatively well during the conference, Curzon suffered a good deal from his back. Nicolson once heard cries of pain when his chief removed his ‘steel cage’ and allowed his muscles to resume their natural shape. But the main problem at Lausanne was the cage itself, which broke, leaving sharp fragments of steel to cut into him and tear his vests; uncomfortable though this was, he preferred to wear it rather than go without any support until Grace sent his old one out from England.

Christmas was a dismal festival for the Foreign Secretary, spent alone with a bad cold in Lausanne while the rest of the delegation went tobogganing. He was also depressed about the chances of a treaty and suspected that the Turks really wanted a rupture. Yet despondency and self-pity were for once minority moods. Curzon was happier with himself than he had been for a long time, relishing the ample stage, enjoying the general esteem, convinced of the historic importance of his task. He was happier, too, in his relationship with Grace, who visited him twice. She told him she did not ‘deserve so wonderful a husband’ and said that the ‘little disturbances’ in their marriage, which had been ‘all mostly [her] fault’, were over for good. Deeply touched by these sentiments – which alas did not prove enduring – Curzon said he was happy to look back upon their six years together and feel that he would do it a hundred times again.33

A further indication of contentment was his relatively harmonious relationship with his officials. While they did not pretend he was easy to work with, they liked him and enjoyed his company. ‘Poor old man,’ Nicolson noted in his diary, ‘it is extraordinary how with all his petulance and difficulty one gets really fond of him.’34 Their chief was sometimes depressed and frequently indignant, but he was often in excellent form, sitting with a brandy and soda at night and reliving the day’s events with his assistants. He surprised them with a gift for mimicry, rising from his chair to do an imitation of Garroni addressing Ismet Pasha, ‘fondling him, stroking him, cooing endearments as loud as he could’. During the performance, recorded Nicolson, Curzon was half laughing at the memory and half crying at the thought that he would soon have to witness the real act again.35 One day he was persuaded to give his impersonation of Tennyson reciting ‘Tears, idle tears’, which Nicolson thought the most effective imitation he had ever heard. But afterwards a wave of depression descended upon the performer. Remembering the meeting with the poet so many years before in the company of Laura Tennant, he sighed.

All that was years ago, when I was young and could still laugh at my elders. But all young men are remorseless. You will go upstairs this evening and chaff me behind my back. You will give imitations in after life of the old buffer imitating Tennyson. And so it continues.36

On the last day of 1922 Curzon was summoned to Paris to meet Bonar Law, who had arrived with a compromise scheme on German reparations which Poincaré did not accept and which quickly led to a rupture with France. Curzon was unimpressed by the Prime Minister’s unsubtle approach to diplomacy and even more so by his views on the Near East conference. Depressed by the impending break with the French, Law wanted to avoid any chance of a conflict with Turkey. He was in a ‘great funk’, Curzon wrote home, ‘longing to clear out of Mosul, the Straits and Constantinople, wishing to give up anything or everything sooner than have a row’. ‘Staggered at his flabbiness and want of grip’, the Foreign Secretary ‘endeavoured to give him some spirit and courage’.37 Unsuccessful in the attempt, Curzon returned disheartened to Lausanne on 2 January. ‘The feet of the Prime Minister’, he told Nicolson, ‘were glacial. Positively glacial.’38

Law believed that the achievement of a Near East settlement was being obstructed by the question of Mosul, the mainly Kurdish area of northern Iraq which had been under Ottoman rule and now formed part of the British mandate. He therefore wrote to his Foreign Secretary a week after their meeting to restate his view that Britain could not go to war over the area. Curzon was infuriated. He had no intention of provoking a conflict on the issue. But he was equally determined, in spite of strong press support for Law’s views in England, not to allow Turkey to regain a region which had very few Turkish inhabitants and for which Britain had received a League of Nations mandate to administer. Fed up with successive exhortations from the Prime Minister, Curzon grumbled to Grace of his constant warnings on matters of which he was ‘wholly ignorant’. Unfortunately he did not confine this grievance to his wife. In a letter which cannot have improved his career prospects, he told Law he was ‘a little hurt’ not to have received ‘a word of encouragement’ for his labours, while being constantly warned to beware of situations of which he was ‘just as conscious as anyone at home and … perhaps able to appraise more accurately’.39

It would have been cruel to deny Curzon his dialectical triumph over Mosul, a performance which Harold Nicolson described as ‘perhaps the most brilliant, the most erudite, the most lucid exposition which even he had ever achieved’.40 Yet he had first tried to solve the question through direct negotiations between the British and Turkish delegations. It was only when these had failed that on 23 January, in full conference, he asked Ismet Pasha to explain his Government’s reasons for placing the Vilayet of Mosul within the borders of the Turkish state. The Pasha did so, stating a bad case badly, and making the mistake of asking what Lord Curzon could know about the populations of Sulimanyeh and of southern Kurdistan. He soon found out.

Curzon began by explaining that Britain could not surrender Mosul without breaking her pledges to the inhabitants, to King Feisal and to the League of Nations. Then he turned to Ismet’s ethnic arguments and demonstrated that they were not only absurd in themselves but also based on inaccurate statistics. Just one-twelfth of the population, he pointed out, were Turks, and even these were not Ottoman Turks but descendants of an earlier Turanian invasion who spoke a dialect of their own. Only by counting the Kurds, who formed 60 per cent of the inhabitants, could a case be based on population statistics. ‘It was reserved for the Turkish delegation’, remarked Curzon, ‘to discover for the first time in history that the Kurds were Turks.’ More expert authorities believed that they were people of an Iranian race speaking an Iranian language. He himself had stayed with Kurds in Kurdistan and, although he did not pretend to be an authority, he could ‘pick out a Kurd from a Turk any day of the week’.41 In any case, as he observed later on, the Kurds did not want to be part of Turkey.

Further arguments were piled up. Curzon did not see by what logic Mosul itself, an Arab city built by Arabs, should be handed back to Turkey. And if it was, the Arab kingdom of Iraq would become ‘well-nigh impossible’ because a Turkish army in Mosul would have Baghdad at its mercy. Finally, having demolished Ismet’s case, Curzon said that Britain was prepared to submit the question to the arbitration of the League of Nations. The Turks protested but their position was destroyed; they could no longer threaten to disrupt the conference over an issue which had effectively been removed from the agenda.fn6

The day after his triumph Curzon summoned his French and Italian colleagues to discuss the ending of the conference. A treaty, he suggested, should be presented in a week’s time to the Turks, who would then be given four days to decide whether to accept it; whatever they did, he himself would leave Lausanne at the end of that period, on the night of 4 February. Garroni and M. Bompard, who had succeeded Barrère, were disconcerted by the schedule. Curzon’s committee had gained nearly all its aims on territorial matters – with which the British were most concerned – but theirs, dealing mainly with judicial and economic questions of particular interest to themselves, had not achieved very much. Bompard’s reports on the current position prompted the French Government to try to sabotage the outcome by stating publicly on 30 January that the treaty to be given to the Turks on the following day was not a final document but ‘a basis of future discussion’. Realizing that this intervention would merely encourage Turkey to make a separate treaty with Britain, Bompard hastily persuaded Poincaré to declare that the statement had been unauthorized.

Infuriated by this display of French ‘perfidy’, Curzon nevertheless refused to abandon the Allies and make a deal with Ismet on the basis of the decisions reached in the territorial committee. The next day he duly presented the entire treaty to the Turks and denied their request, which was backed by Bompard and Garroni, for eight days in which to consider it. Whatever happened, he was leaving in four days’ time. Although he himself remained uncertain of the outcome, there was euphoria in the British delegation. Britannia had won, Nicolson told his wife, ‘against the Turks, against treacherous allies, against a weak-kneed cabinet, against a rotten public opinion’. And it had been entirely due to Curzon: ‘I am so proud of him. So awfully proud. He is a great man and one day England will know it.’42

During the final days the French asked Curzon to make concessions on points he had already won in order to induce Ismet to compromise on the economic and other questions. He duly obliged by agreeing to defer his appeal to the League of Nations on Mosul. Turkey’s official reply to the draft treaty, delivered on the last day, accepted political and territorial questions such as the Straits Convention and the Thracian border and offered to sign a treaty on these issues while leaving economic and legal matters open for future negotiations. The way was thus clear for a separate peace. Asked by a Turkish delegate why Britain did not make one, Nicolson found himself assailed by the ‘public school spirit’ and replied that the empire did not do that sort of thing.43 Nor did Lord Curzon. Tempting though it must have been to abandon them, he stood by his ungrateful allies. Many years later, Sforza admitted he had been ‘very loyal’.44

In the course of the last afternoon the negotiations became more frantic. After finalizing their points, the Allied delegates summoned Ismet, who appeared looking unhappy and nervous for what Nicolson described as an ‘emotional and confused’ scene. In his biography of Atatürk, Lord Kinross criticized Curzon for thinking ‘in terms of the old Ottoman Turk’, believing that ‘Ismet was holding out until the last moment, bargaining like a carpet merchant to get the best deal he could, but would yield in the end’.45 Yet neither Nicolson’s account nor the Foreign Office minutes suggest that Curzon took such a view. Instead he appealed to Ismet’s sense of statesmanship and to feelings of sentiment. The world was looking to them for a solution, he told him, and they must find one before they left the room.

While the talking went on, suitcases and packing cases were accumulating in the corridors. After retiring for a few moments to reflect, the Turkish delegates resolved to accept the British conditions but not the economic paragraphs. Garroni and Bompard begged Ismet to reconsider and told him his ‘responsibility was great and terrible’. Then Curzon made his final appeal for peace. According to the minutes, he observed that ‘this might be the last time he would ever meet Ismet Pasha. He wished to carry back to London a memory of friendship and he would like to sign a common pact of peace and friendship with Ismet Pasha before he left’.46 Mopping his forehead and dabbing his lips, Ismet longed to sign; yet although he was empowered to do so without reference to Ankara, he dared not take the responsibility. The British delayed the Orient Express for half an hour at Lausanne Station in case he changed his mind. Then they steamed towards Paris.

The failure to sign a treaty blinded only the popular press to the fact that Lausanne had been a great triumph. Political opinion in Europe as well as at home recognized that a settlement was now inevitable and that Britain had regained her prestige in the Near East. Ismet returned to Ankara and persuaded the National Assembly to vote for the draft treaty with minor modifications. In late March these were examined by Curzon during a London reunion with Bompard and Garroni, and a month later Rumbold represented Britain in a second and less contentious conference at Lausanne. The subsequent agreement contained some economic concessions to Turkey but did not dent Curzon’s political settlement of the previous winter. The Treaty of Lausanne secured the freedom of the Straits, achieved a relatively high level of regional stability and, by restoring Turkish sovereignty to the Turkish heartland, enabled the new country to make the transition from enfeebled empire to nation state. It was the most successful and the most lasting of all the post-war treaties.

As Remembrance Day disturbs the traditional view of Curzon as a master of ceremonies, so Lausanne shows him in an altered light as a diplomatist. Amery, normally a hostile critic, believed that ‘by sheer force of knowledge, debating ability and personality he secured a far better peace than could have been expected’.47 Yet even these well-known qualities would not have been sufficient without the tact and patience which the almost incredulous FO officials observed.48 As the Archbishop of Canterbury remarked, it was the ‘combination of dignity and conciliatoriness, of firmness and resource’ which had earned Curzon ‘the plaudits of a grateful people’.49

But the greatest tributes, which Curzon never heard, came from the Turks. Not only did Ismet convince his countrymen to accept Curzon’s treaty; he also spoke to many of the ‘very highest admiration and respect’ he felt for the Englishman and his conduct at Lausanne. The respect outlived even Ismet. On the seventieth anniversary of the conference the Turkish Government invited Curzon’s grandson, Lord Ravensdale, to a commemorative celebration at which, together with Ismet’s son, he laid a wreath on Atatürk’s grave.50