The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World they Made. Simon Ball

door that the war had opened to the military career unconsidered by any of them in 1914 was rapidly closed. The fact that none of them remained a soldier was not of their own choosing. As early as 1916 Lyttelton had applied for a permanent commission in the Grenadier Guards.⁴ Crookshank too explored the possibility at the end of the war. In 1918 they both applied to remain in the regiment. They were both men in good odour with dominant figures in the Guards. But the Guards traditionalists were determined to get back to normal, purge their ranks of ‘patriots’ and guarantee the careers of regular officers.⁵ By the time they reconsidered this policy, it was too late. Lyttelton and Crookshank were launched on other careers. Even Ma Jeffreys couldn’t get them back.⁶

      The war also ended Lyttelton’s ambition to enter the law – his contacts, so good at the time his father died, had gone stale. Not that this altered the central fact that he had to do something that made plenty of money. Even if his father’s experience of politics had not soured him on Parliament, his father’s example had shown the necessity of securing financial security before considering other avenues. In the months after the Armistice he courted Lady Moira Osborne, the daughter of the Duke of Leeds. His Grace disapproved of his daughter’s suitor on grounds of his poverty. Their engagement was made possible by Didi Lyttelton making ‘a kind of financial hara-kiri’ to provide her son with a respectable establishment. Retreating to visit Cranborne, he considered his good fortune: ‘Perfect Hatfield though baddish morning with the thermometer at 90 degrees in the shade. Phew but happy.’⁷ Oliver and Moira Osborne were married a few months later at St Margaret’s, Westminster.⁸

      For a young man in need of cash the City was the obvious place to be. Many of Lyttelton’s Etonian contemporaries had already gravitated towards it. At least his army career exempted him from the jibe of his friend Geoffrey Madan, ‘Attractive Etonians who go straight on to the Stock Exchange…the raw material of the great bores.’⁹ In 1919 Lyttelton joined the firm of Brown, Shipley & Co. ‘The change,’ he remembered wryly, ‘from being a guardsman and a brigade major, under whose eye every knee stiffened, to being a clerk in the postal department was marked.’

      Within a few months of his marriage Lyttelton’s career prospects looked up: he was recruited to work for a new concern, the British Metal Corporation run by Sir Cecil Budd, one of the leading figures in the metals trade.¹⁰ When Lyttelton first crossed the threshold of BMC’s new offices in Abchurch Yard he was, however, taking a risk. It was not at all clear that BMC would have a secure future. In 1920 the metals market suffered a ‘universal collapse’. Out of the blue a relatively stable market was affected by a massive drop in prices: a ton of tin fell from £423 to £195. ‘The trade has, in fact,’ BMC’s chairman lamented, ‘passed through a succession of crises of great magnitude.’ The future looked shaky.¹¹ Fortunately for Lyttelton, the very newness of BMC acted as a hedge against these problems. Most of its assets were still liquid.

      Lyttelton soon mastered the mechanics of dealing under the guidance of Budd’s principal dealer, Henry Arthur Buck, whose methods some in the City regarded as hovering on the edges of sharp practice.¹² Just as significantly, Budd himself was exhausted by the efforts he had had to put into dealing with the crisis of 1920. He decided that he needed help in the form of a joint managing director and one of the existing directors was appointed to this position. Lyttelton himself moved up to the post of general manager.¹³

      As a result of his rapid promotion, Lyttelton soon got his first real taste of being a ‘tycoon’. Having weathered the storms of the immediate post-war period, the corporation adopted an aggressive programme of acquisitions. Among them was the National Smelting Company.¹⁴ National Smelting was a group mainly concerned with zinc put together during the war by a flamboyant company promoter named Richard Tilden Smith, financed by the British government and Lloyds Bank.¹⁵ In 1916 Tilden Smith had persuaded the government that he should build facilities to process zinc concentrates formerly shipped to Germany. He signally failed to live up to his promises: not one ounce of zinc had been processed before the end of the war and in 1922 the government wrote off its loans and refused any further subsidy.¹⁶ The jewel in the crown of National Smelting was, however, not its zinc-processing business but its controlling interest in the Burma Corporation, ‘the great zinc-lead mine east of Mandalay’. Burma Corporation was of great strategic importance, but it was also undercapitalized and unprofitable. BMC believed they could turn the business around. As one of the company’s negotiators, Lyttelton was given his first chance to shine. This, his first big deal, was ‘stamped for ever on my memory’. He was thirty: facing him across the table was Sir Robert Horne, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer. ‘We had,’ Lyttelton remembered, ‘rivals; their offer was on the point of being accepted; we had put in a counter bid…We waited tensely. After some pregnant minutes Sir Robert said our terms were reasonable…I had been sitting with both hands on the table and, when I got up, I could see their damp imprint on the shiny mahogany. It is quite wrong to suppose that business is not sometimes very exciting.’¹⁷

      Lyttelton’s career choice had been dictated by his need to earn serious money if he was not to find himself living off his mother’s rapidly diminishing capital. Marrying the daughter of a duke brought social obligations. By contrast, his friends, untrammelled by the prick of financial necessity, could afford to abjure remunerative employment, at least for a time. Macmillan, as he hobbled out of hospital at the beginning of 1919, ‘was not anxious to go immediately into business, although my father and his partners had invited me to do so’. ‘I fully expected,’ he later recalled, ‘to spend the rest of my life at an office desk, and shrank from starting unnecessarily soon.’ He, Crookshank and Cranborne were more concerned with seeing the world.

      Cranborne and Crookshank made a conventional career choice in deciding to become diplomats in a Foreign Office dominated by Etonians.¹⁸ At the beginning of 1919 they presented themselves on the same day to sit the diplomatic services entrance examination. In a reflection of the Foreign Office’s changing culture, however, the selection board accepted Crookshank, the Etonian scholar, the son of a surgeon, and rejected the grandson of the great Lord Salisbury. The decision was made purely on merit. Although Cranborne had prepared hard for the exam, his utter lack of academic distinction at Eton and Oxford did not stand him in good stead. In addition, though good French was traditionally an aristocratic accomplishment, Crookshank’s childhood in Francophone Egypt and his service in France, Belgium and Serbia had given him excellent spoken French, whereas Cranborne’s was mediocre.^*

      Cranborne’s diplomatic career was nevertheless rapidly resurrected by his family. Lord Salisbury crossed over to Paris to see his brother Robert, who was acting as one of Britain’s principal negotiators at the Peace Conference. They agreed that Cranborne would come to Paris to act as his uncle’s secretary. The current incumbent was unceremoniously sacked and within three weeks of failing the Foreign Office exam Cranborne was at Lord Robert Cecil’s side in Paris – a literal case of ‘Bob’s your Uncle’.¹⁹ He was thus able to observe the conduct of high policy at close quarters while Crookshank and the other successful entrants remained back in London learning how to write a proper minute.²⁰

      There was drudgery in London and in Paris the high life. The British