THE YEARS WHICH FOLLOWED

The 1932–4 World Disarmament Conferences which the League had been planning for six years were a total failure.

Dame Rachel resigned in 1930, after not having been granted full status as Director of her section. Sir Eric retired in 1933.

In 1936, the new Palais des Nations was finished and the League moved in.

Three years later, at the outbreak of the Second World War, some of the League Secretariat went to safe havens in other parts of the world but most of the staff were placed on indefinite suspension.

The Deputy Secretary-General, Sean Lester, an Irishman, and about forty staff wrested control of the League from the defeatist French Secretary-General Avenol, and stayed on in the newly built Palais des Nations, waiting and ready to negotiate the end of the war.

They were never asked.

The League of Nations ceased to exist on 18 April 1946, when the Assembly meeting in Geneva formally dissolved the League of Nations and the Permanent Court of International Justice. Its property was handed over to the United Nations which had been established in San Francisco the year before.